ePalestine

[ePalestine] Bitterlemons: The writing has always been on the wall (by Sam Bahour)

2012-01-24T02:04:00.000-08:00

Bitterlemons.org

A PALESTINIAN VIEW

The writing has always been on the wall

Sam Bahour

The human body is an amazing creation. It's not only the most complex system known to mankind, but it embodies within it signals that tell its owner that something has gone wrong. A similar signaling system exists in political bodies. Those tasked with reading the signals--be they individuals, physicians or politicians--can choose to consciously ignore the warning signs. The Middle East peace process between Palestinians and Israelis has been emitting SOS signals for decades, but only recently are those signals being received and analyzed for what they are transmitting- -a clear and irreversible message that the entire paradigm of "two states for two peoples" has collapsed.

Like doctors who peddle medications instead of practicing medicine, many politicians are under the influence of their narrow political interests and prefer not to call situations by their name. After so many years of failure--political, legal, diplomatic and economic--those who are paid to diagnose and treat reality are being replaced with voices from all corners of the world, voices convincingly making the case that the entire premise undertaken by the Palestine Liberation Organization, starting as far back as 1974, is no longer feasible.

Some will say that the PLO was tricked by the West into a path that was never intended to succeed. Others may claim that the PLO had no option but to acquiesce to the pressures placed upon it to enter, more recently, the Oslo peace process, in hopes that the West (mainly the US) would then pull its weight in bringing Israel in line with international law and UN resolutions. Regardless of the analysis of the past, very few people on the ground who are intimately involved in the attempt to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli "conflict" would venture to spend any additional political credit on the notion that two independent states, Israel and Palestine, remain a way out of this man-made tragedy.

The measures were many, each of them a warning signal that sounded over and over again, but largely fell on deaf ears. The ignoring of a refugee population. A prolonged military occupation, unaccountable to the Fourth Geneva Convention. The launching of the illegal Israeli settlement project. The continued use of military force against Palestinians wherever they reside: Jordan, Lebanon, inside Israel, or the occupied territory. Assassinations and mass murder of Palestinians, from Lebanon to Tunis to every Palestinian city, in broad daylight for all to see. Seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians arrested and detained, many without charge and many tortured. A lopsided peace agreement (Oslo) that merely institutionalized the reality of military occupation. The election of Israeli prime ministers who, one after another, represented political programs that explicitly forbade the emergence of another state between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. The list goes on and on. Each one of these signals emitted a deafening sound that was heard by all, and ignored by all who could change the course of events.

One of Israel's founding ministers of education and culture, Professor Ben-Zion Dinur, said it most sharply, according to the book "History of the Haganah": "In our country there is room only for the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get out! If they don't agree, if they resist, we shall drive them out by force." With this theme as its explicit backdrop, it is no wonder that newly-established Israel had little chance of being a normal state among the community of nations. These words rang out long before the creation of the PLO and long before the unacceptable phenomenon of suicide bombings entered the scene.

Israel was founded on the infamous fallacy that it was built on a "land with no people, for a people with no land." Instead of acknowledging that this fallacy is a form of outright racism, Israel is legislating it into its laws. Since its inception, Israel has arrogantly refused to address the most crucial prerequisite of its establishment as a conventional state: accepting the Palestinians, those people that just happened to be living in that "empty" land that Israel was created on.

After over six decades of conflict and dispossession of the Palestinians, and after two decades of Palestinian political recognition of Israel on part of their lands, the Israeli people choose to sustain the conflict. They are bent not only on keeping their boot of occupation on the necks of Palestinians living under it, but on embarking on an accelerated path to disenfranchise, yet again, Palestinians who remained in Israel and assumed Israeli citizenship.

Today, Israel seems determined, more than ever, to forcefully prove the original premise of its statehood--an Israel with moveable borders and a Jewish-only population. Twelve Israeli prime ministers before Binyamin Netanyahu, six of them after the signing of Oslo, have failed at this nonsensical endeavor. He, too, will fail. If Israel cannot produce a leader to move the country from being a pariah to being a member of the Middle East, only Israel's Jewish population will be to blame.

This should not come as a surprise for Israelis who have studied their own history. Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, understood it well when he said, "Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we came here and stole their country. Why should they accept that?" The fact of the matter is: Palestinians even accepted "that" and are still being rejected and punished.

It is clear that Israel has no plans to reach any form of lasting peace with Palestinians or concede to a two-state solution. Its spread of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory has created new facts on the ground that make it impossible to form a contiguous Palestinian state, even on the 22 percent of historic Palestine that Palestinians have been reduced to and agreed upon.

In light of this continuing Israeli policy of outright aggression and negation of Palestinian rights, Israelis should prepare themselves for the next generation of Palestinians, a much more savvy generation interlinked with a global world and a region that values rights over an artificial border. Soon, if the current trajectory continues, Palestinians will tell Israelis: "You win! You get it all--the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, the Jordan Valley, the settlements, all the water, and guess what? You get us too! Now, where do we sign up for our health care cards?" -Published 23/1/2012 © bitterlemons.org

Sam Bahour is a Ramallah-based management consultant.

Source: http://bit.ly/x6VNcN

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[ePalestine] A Testing Ground (by Little Girl Behind a Big Wall BLOG)

2012-01-23T03:28:00.000-08:00

TO READ ONLINE: bit.ly/zKrNBy

Little Girl Behind a Big Wall

A Testing Ground

Posted on January 2, 2012

I grumble as I wait in the line of cars at the checkpoint. At least, there are only a few cars in front of me and the soldiers are moving quickly. As I approach the checkpoint, I roll down my window and flash my passport.

In Hebrew, I am told to go straight and up the hill- not the usual left to exit the checkpoint. It is amazing what can all be communicated with a single point of a finger and a grunt. It seems that the mere presence of an M16 can help in understanding foreign languages.

As I drive to the designated area, there are soldiers pointing myself and 5 other cars (all Palestinian) towards selected parking spots. Every spot has an apparatus next to it, which looks like a giant IV that you would find in a hospital. I am told to get out of my vehicle with all my windows shut, except the driver window, which should be 5 cm open.

I get out of my vehicle and stand next to the Palestinians who have also had to abandon their cars. Soldiers wander around the cars, one with a stopwatch. It is obviously a drill of some kind. With complete disregard for our schedules or impending meetings, the soldiers are taking the opportunity to practice and test Practice on a population without any kind of consent, but that does not seem to matter. Consent is never asked or required from a people under occupation. They are the occupied and at the whims of their occupiers.

From the IV apparatus next to our parked cars, soldiers put a hose into our driver side window. It reminds of movies where the someone tries to commit suicide by filling their car with exhaust. Some of the people ask the soldiers what they are doing. Their response is, that it is for security and that it is fine. There is no comment as to what or why they are spraying some sort of chemical into our vehicles.

After 10 minutes the soldier with the stopwatch stops his clock. The hoses are removed from our cars and we are allowed to continue onwards to Jerusalem. We are permitted to go on with our day. We are permitted to go on living.

Yet the smell from the gas still lingering in my car is assaulting. Even though it is cold outside, I drive with my windows down. Unfortunately nothing will stop my impending headache. For the next four days, whenever I drive my car I have a headache. Yet, my whining and complaints are futile.

An occupied population is a crucial experimental ground for the occupier. Israel views the Palestinian people as a dispensable people- a testing ground for ‘security’ apparatuses and weapons that are later exported globally. Tear gas technology, stink spray, rubber bullets, and gassing cars are all tested here before they are exported. If too many Palestinians end up dying from the gas, or there is an international outcry, it won’t be exported, if it found ‘effective’ it will be sold worldwide and used by governments on their own people, such as at G20 protests.

While, western governments buy these security apparatuses and support a government that does testing on human beings we are not surprised when cancer becomes more prominent to people under occupation. We are not surprised when children in Gaza are increasingly born with birth defects. In the mean time, my head hurts from the smell gas but I am already half an hour late for my meeting, so there is

no time to complain.

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[ePalestine] Fighting a Forbidden Battle: How I Stopped Covering Up for a Hidden Wrong

2012-01-17T10:55:00.000-08:00

Superb, but he will still need to learn the difference between his, yet great, religion and how it was hijacked by Zionism.

---

Dietrich College News

January 2012

2012 Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Awards

Prose: High School

First Place (Tie)

Fighting a Forbidden Battle: How I Stopped Covering Up for a Hidden Wrong

By Jesse Lieberfeld 11th grade, Winchester Thurston

I once belonged to a wonderful religion. I belonged to a religion that allows those of us who believe in it to feel that we are the greatest people in the world—and feel sorry for ourselves at the same time. Once, I thought that I truly belonged in this world of security, self-pity, self-proclaimed intelligence, and perfect moral aesthetic. I thought myself to be somewhat privileged early on. It was soon revealed to me, however, that my fellow believers and I were not part of anything so flattering.

Although I was fortunate enough to have parents who did not try to force me into any one set of beliefs, being Jewish was in no way possible to escape growing up. It was constantly reinforced at every holiday, every service, and every encounter with the rest of my relatives. I was forever reminded how intelligent my family was, how important it was to remember where we had come from, and to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel.

This last mandatory belief was one which I never fully understood, but I always kept the doubts I had about Israel’s spotless reputation to the back of my mind. “Our people” were fighting a war, one I did not fully comprehend, but I naturally assumed that it must be justified. We would never be so amoral as to fight an unjust war. Yet as I came to learn more about our so-called “conflict” with the Palestinians, I grew more concerned. I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. “Genocide” almost seemed the more appropriate term, yet no one I knew would have ever dreamed of portraying the war in that manner; they always described the situation in shockingly neutral terms. Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides, that no one was really to blame, or simply that it was a “difficult situation.” It was not until eighth grade that I fully understood what I was on the side of. One afternoon, after a fresh round of killings was announced on our bus ride home, I asked two of my friends who actively supported Israel what they thought. “We need to defend our race,” they told me. “It’s our right.”

“We need to defend our race.”

Where had I heard that before? Wasn’t it the same excuse our own country had used to justify its abuses of African-Americans sixty years ago? In that moment, I realized how similar the two struggles were—like the white radicals of that era, we controlled the lives of another people whom we abused daily, and no one could speak out against us. It was too politically incorrect to do so. We had suffered too much, endured too many hardships, and overcome too many losses to be criticized. I realized then that I was in no way part of a “conflict”—the term “Israeli/Palestinian Conflict” was no more accurate than calling the Civil Rights Movement the “Caucasian/ African-American Conflict.” In both cases, the expression was a blatant euphemism: it gave the impression that this was a dispute among equals and that both held an equal share of the blame. However, in both, there was clearly an oppressor and an oppressed, and I felt horrified at the realization that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists. I was part of a group that killed while praising its own intelligence and reason. I was part of a delusion.

I thought of the leader of the other oppressed side of years ago, Martin Luther King. He too had been part of a struggle that had been hidden and glossed over for the convenience of those against whom he fought. What would his reaction have been? As it turned out, it was precisely the same as mine. As he wrote in his letter from Birmingham Jail, he believed the greatest enemy of his cause to be “Not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who...lives by a mythical concept of time.... Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” When I first read those words, I felt as if I were staring at myself in a mirror. All my life I had been conditioned to simply treat the so-called conflict with the same apathy which King had so forcefully condemned. I, too, held the role of an accepting moderate. I, too, “lived by a mythical concept of time,” shrouded in my own surreal world and the set of beliefs that had been assigned to me. I had never before felt so trapped.

I decided to make one last appeal to my religion. If it could not answer my misgivings, no one could. The next time I attended a service, there was an open question-and- answer session about any point of our religion. I wanted to place my dilemma in as clear and simple terms as I knew how. I thought out my exact question over the course of the seventeen-minute cello solo that was routinely played during service. Previously, I had always accepted this solo as just another part of the program, yet now it seemed to capture the whole essence of our religion: intelligent and well- crafted on paper, yet completely oblivious to the outside world (the soloist did not have the faintest idea of how masterfully he was putting us all to sleep). When I was finally given the chance to ask a question, I asked, “I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?” I was met with a few angry glares from some of the older men, but the rabbi answered me. “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it?” he said. “But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.” I knew, of course, that the war was no simple matter and that we did not by any means commit murder for its own sake, but to portray our thousands of killings as a “fact of life” was simply too much for me to accept. I thanked him and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back. I thought about what I could do. If nothing else, I could at least try to free myself from the burden of being saddled with a belief I could not hold with a clear conscience. I could not live the rest of my life as one of the pathetic moderates whom King had rightfully portrayed as the worst part of the problem. I did not intend to go on being one of the Self-Chosen People, identifying myself as part of a group to which I did not belong.

It was different not being the ideal nice Jewish boy. The difference was subtle, yet by no means unaffecting. Whenever it came to the attention of any of our more religious family friends that I did not share their beliefs, I was met with either a disapproving stare and a quick change of the subject or an alarmed cry of, “What? Doesn’t Israel matter to you?” Relatives talked down to me more afterward, but eventually I stopped noticing the way adults around me perceived me. It was worth it to no longer feel as though I were just another apathetic part of the machine.

I can obviously never know what it must have been like to be an African-American in the 1950s. I do feel, however, as though I know exactly what it must have been like to be white during that time, to live under an aura of moral invincibility, to hold unchallengeable beliefs, and to contrive illusions of superiority to avoid having to face simple everyday truths. That illusion was nice while it lasted, but I decided to pass it up. I have never been happier.

http://www.hss.cmu.edu/pressreleases/pressreleases/jesselieberfeld.html

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[ePalestine] The Independent: EU on verge of abandoning hope for a viable Palestinian state

2012-01-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

NOTE: I've had the opportunity to privately read this report, it's shocking and long overdue.

The Independent

EU on verge of abandoning hope for a viable Palestinian state

Israel's foreign ministry denied that Israeli settlers were taking water resources from the West Bank

Donald Macintyre Thursday, 12 January 2012

The Palestinian presence in the largest part of the occupied West Bank – has been, "continuously undermined" by Israel in ways that are "closing the window" on a two-state solution, according to an internal EU report seen by The Independent.

The report, approved by top Brussels officials, argues that EU support, including for a wide range of building projects, is now needed to protect the rights of "ever more isolated" Palestinians in "Area C", a sector that includes all 124 Jewish settlements – illegal in international law – and which is under direct Israeli control. It comprises 62 per cent of the West Bank, including the "most fertile and resource rich land".

With the number of Jewish settlers now at more than double the shrinking Palestinian population in the largely rural area, the report warns bluntly that, "if current trends are not stopped and reversed, the establishment of a viable Palestinian state within pre-1967 borders seem more remote than ever".

The 16-page document is the EU's starkest critique yet of how a combination of house and farm building demolitions; a prohibitive planning regime; relentless settlement expansion; the military's separation barrier; obstacles to free movement; and denial of access to vital natural resources, including land and water, is eroding Palestinian tenure of the large tract of the West Bank on which hopes of a contiguous Palestinian state depend.

International brokers are trying to persuade both sides to reach a peaceful settlement through talks, which had stalled over the building of Israeli settlements and the Palestinians' recent declaration of statehood at the UN.

The report points out how dramatically the settler population – now at 310,000 – of Area C has increased at the expense of Palestinian numbers – estimated at around 150,000. In 1967, there were between 200,000 and 320,000 Palestinians in just the agriculture-rich Jordan Valley part of the zone.

Area C is one of three zones allocated by the 1993 Oslo agreement. Area A includes major Palestinian cities, and is under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Area B is under shared Israeli-Palestinian control.

Although Area C is the least populous, the report says "the window for a two-state solution is rapidly closing with the continued expansion of Israeli settlements and access restrictions for Palestinians in Area C [which] compromises crucial natural resources and land for the future demographic and economic growth of a viable Palestinian state".

It says the EU needs "at a political" level to persuade Israel to redesignate Area C, but in the meantime it should "support Palestinian presence in, and development of the area". The report says the destruction of homes, public buildings and workplaces result in "forced transfer of the native population" and that construction is effectively prohibited in 70 per cent of the land – and then in zones largely allocated to settlements of the Israeli military.

In practice, it says Palestinian construction is permitted in just 1 per cent of Area C, "most of which is already built up". The EU report's short- and medium-term recommendations include calling on Israel to halt demolitions of houses and structures built without permits – of which there have been 4,800 since 2000. But there is also a call for the EU to support a building programme that includes schools, clinics, water and other infrastructure projects.

The EU should also be more vocal in raising objections to "involuntary population movements, displacements, evictions and internal migration".

The report says Area C – along with East Jerusalem – has not benefited from the gradual reversal of the West Bank economic collapse since the beginning of the intifada in 2000 which saw growth of 9 per cent in 2010. It also claims Palestinian economic activity is mainly "low intensity" agriculture in contrast to specialised, export-directed farming by Jewish settlers in the Jordan Valley "which uses most of the water resources in the area", and that it is of "great concern" that cisterns and rainwater structures have been destroyed by the Israeli authorities since January 2010 – a claim which Israel's foreign ministry denied.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/eu-on-verge-of-abandoning-hope-for- a-viable-palestinian-state-6288336.html#

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[ePalestine] Siegman: The Mideast Peace Process in 2011: Hopes and Disillusionment

2012-01-06T12:21:00.000-08:00

The National Interest

January 6, 2012

The Mideast Peace Process in 2011: Hopes and Disillusionment

By Henry Siegman

This past December, four European countries—the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Portugal, all members of the UN Security Council—harshly faulted Israel for its violation of international law and the rights of the Palestinian people by continuing the expansion of illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel’s intemperate response to that criticism exposed for all to see the moral and political obtuseness of its settlement policy, telling these European countries to mind their own business instead of interfering in Israel’s “internal” affairs.

The Israeli notion that the Occupied Territories beyond the 1967 border are “internal,” allowing Israeli governments to do with them as they please without regard for the rights of the Palestinian people or for international law, has not just “complicated” the peace process, as the United States and other governments have often put it. It has turned the peace process into a farce, for it exposes the strategic choice of Israel’s current and previous governments of territory over peace, and leaves no doubt that the goal of Israel’s settlement project is the prevention of Palestinian statehood.

Mostly ignored or forgotten is the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran on a Likud party platform that explicitly opposed Palestinian statehood; later, after he made his speech claiming to have been converted to acceptance of a two-state solution, key members of his government established the “Entire Land of Israel” parliamentary caucus whose official goal is the prevention of a Palestinian state anywhere in the West Bank. It is the largest of the Knesset’s many caucuses. There is no record of Netanyahu ever having criticized this caucus or having ordered members of his government to leave it.

Even as Netanyahu proclaims how desperately he wishes to renew peace talks with President Mahmoud Abbas, his government distributed hateful and defamatory accusations against Abbas, describing him as a “radical” who glorifies and perpetuates violence and terrorism—this of the man who not only publicly opposed the violence of the second intifada but whose collaboration with Israeli security forces put an end to violence and terrorism in the West Bank. A “circular note” issued to foreign governments by Israel’s Foreign Ministry in October 2011 reaches the “inescapable” conclusion that “no agreement will ever be possible [with the Palestinians] as long as Mahmoud Abbas leads the Palestinian Authority.”

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Obama asserted that Palestinians can achieve statehood only through direct negotiations with Israel, effectively subjecting the Palestinian right to national self-determination to Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman’s veto. If Netanyahu and his government choose to present Abbas terms for an agreement that no Palestinian leader could conceivably accept—which, by insisting on Israel’s annexation of all of Arab East Jerusalem is exactly what they have done—they will be able to keep the West Bank and its population under permanent subjugation.

Before demanding that Palestinians return to bilateral talks with Israel, and certainly before punishing Palestinians for refusing to do so, President Obama had an obligation to answer a simple question: What would he have done if Palestinians acceded to his demand and resumed bilateral talks, but continued to encounter Netanyahu’s refusal to negotiate territorial issues from the 1967 border, or to limit changes in that border to territorial swaps? Would he then have allowed the Security Council to address Israel’s rejection without resorting to a veto? His September speech left little doubt about the answer to that question.

So as 2011 ended, the Middle East peace process became history. Despite the U.S. administration’s rhetorical objections to Israel’s settlements and its equally rhetorical support of Palestinian statehood, Obama’s rejection of international intervention and his insistence that a Palestinian state can come about only as the result of a bilateral Israeli-Palestinian agreement sent a clear message to Netanyahu’s government. For all practical purposes, a Palestinian state is no longer on America’s political horizon.

But for this very reason, 2011 was the year in which the international community, including America’s most important European allies, realized the groundlessness of their long-standing belief that the United States is uniquely positioned to leverage its unprecedented support for Israel into pressure to accept a just and balanced peace accord. The international community now sees that the United States is uniquely preventing an agreement, repeatedly using its Security Council vote, or the threat of a veto, to shield Israel from international pressure that might have changed its cost-benefit calculations.

It is this new awareness of an intolerable American bias that provoked four European members of the Security Council to drop the pretense that their governments believe Netanyahu is committed to a two-state solution. Following a closed meeting of the Security Council at which its members received a briefing on Israel’s newly announced construction plans, which would effectively exclude a Palestinian state from any part of East Jerusalem, and therefore rule out a two-state solution, these key European governments described Israel’s continued territorial confiscations as sending “a devastating message” about Israel’s intentions. One senior European official who did not wish to be identified [3]said [3], “We don’t know where this government is leading Israel to, or what its position is regarding the peace process.” That is diplomatic-speak for “We know where this government is leading Israel and what its position regarding the peace process is, and it can no longer count on our complicity.” India, Brazil and South Africa also condemned Israel’s behavior, as did Russia’s UN envoy.

As long as the peace process was based on the illusion that Israel was always ready to return the Occupied Territories in exchange for Palestinian and Arab recognition, and that America would use its leverage to bring Israel into line if it failed to do so, there was no chance that the peace process could lead to a two-state solution. Now that Netanyahu and Obama have put an end to these two illusions, international sanctions fairly applied to both parties for illegal and predatory behavior are no longer inconceivable. If such intervention were now pursued by an international community no longer willing to accept an American Middle East peace policy that is hostage to its Israel lobby, a Palestinian state living in peace alongside an Israel reconciled to its internationally recognized borders may yet be achievable.

Henry Siegman, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, is a non-resident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Source: bit.ly/yIsuaD

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[ePalestine] TWIP: Reality versus Image A Return to Galilee (By Fida Jiryis) - A MUST READ

2012-01-03T02:38:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

Happy New Year to you all.

My friend Walid Abu Rass, Finance and Administration Manager at the Health Work Committees (HWC) is still in an Israeli prison, being held without charge for 6-months. We anxiously await his appeal date in hopes that all the lobbying may get him home to his wife and two daughters sooner.

Also, we continue to raise funds for the Palestinian Circus School. Thanks a million to those who have already given and for those who would like to visit: http://www.indiegogo.com/Palestine-Circus-School . No gift is too small.

I can't think of a more appropiate topic to start off the 2012 posts than Palestinians inside Israel. The below article is from a writer colleague of mine, Fida Jiryis. She really touches on a deep topic in a way that deserves serious attention. She is one of 50 Palestinians who have been allowed to implement the "right of return" ...A MUST READ. Fida is currently writing a book on this topic and really welcomes any comments on this article. You may reach her at: fida_jiryis@hotmail.com .

---

TO READ ONLINE: http://bit.ly/uKckmS

This Week in Palestine, Issue No. 165, January 2012

Reality versus Image A Return to Galilee

By Fida Jiryis

As a Palestinian who was born and grew up in the diaspora, I always had a powerful notion of Palestine in my mind and emotions, yet it had no physical association. It was difficult to imagine a place I’d never seen but only heard of. The Oslo Accords in 1993 changed all that. A year later, I visited Palestine for the first time and, in June 1995, relocated with my family to my parents’ native village of Fassouta, in Galilee.

We were the exception and not the rule: out of the entire Oslo process, fewer than fifty people were allowed to return to inside Israel, and they were all Palestinians who had been issued Israeli IDs when the state was formed, and subsequently left the country to join the resistance movement abroad. When they returned after the Oslo Accords, very few of their families came with them, so my case of coming to Israel for the first time in my early twenties was unique.

Few words can express the magnitude of emotions of someone who grew up a Palestinian then found herself, overnight, an “Israeli citizen” who had to learn Hebrew, find a job, and integrate into Israeli society. To call this social schizophrenia would be an understatement.

I floundered in this new, alien, hostile environment, wondering where I was, wondering, even more, how I could survive. To be face to face with those who had taken our country, to have to learn their language, to have to seek work in their institutions - and to have to do all this while somehow pretending that everything was fine and that I was just going through the process of a normal relocation - was too much. Again, Palestine had only been a fleeting concept to me before. I knew it was under occupation; I knew my village had become a part of “Israel,” but what that meant in concrete terms was, at best, cloudy and elusive until I experienced it.

A close friend of mine felt the same when she returned with her family to Ramallah and shortly after, went to visit Jaffa, her father’s hometown. My friend was ecstatic: after a childhood and adolescence spent in one refugee domicile after another, she was finally making the return home. Her visit to Jaffa, though, hit her like a bullet in the stomach. With her own eyes, she was witnessing the foreign occupation of her city, her father’s birthright and her emotional anchor for so many years - the peg upon which she, like so many millions of other Palestinians, had hung her dreams and identity to maintain her sense of belonging and homeland when the rest of the world was just one large diaspora.

It is heart-breaking to dream of a place for so long and then to find a reality that is so different, so wretchedly painful, that one almost wishes it had stayed as a dream.

I fell back on my own culture, attempting to find belonging and security there and escape the daily aggression of Israeli society. It seemed not only natural to do that, but the physical location of my village, tucked away in the Galilean mountains, was a likely cocoon, a respite where I could go and forget about the outside world for a while.

But the initial euphoria at meeting so many relatives and loving members of my extended family gave way to reality, as I tried to learn the ropes of my new society and find belonging and acceptance there. I had come from mellow, easy-going Cyprus, which had provided a safe, relaxed haven for my family after our difficult ordeals in Beirut in the early 1980s. We lived in Cyprus from 1983 till 1995, and I went to Britain for three of those years to study for my first degree.

When the dust settled and we began living in Fassouta, I experienced a culture shock so profound that I could never get past it. To begin with, for Palestinians brought up in non-Arab countries, the return to live in Palestinian society is fraught with frustration. My brother and I were not used to the confines, behavioural norms, and restrictions of a traditional Arab society. It took months of initial, painful integration, followed by years of an on-going search for understanding, for us to attempt to integrate.

The integration was never complete. To outsiders, to our family and other villagers, we seemed to roll along just fine; we settled in, found work, behaved more or less according to custom, and showed a willingness and desire to fit in. One of my cousins sourly remarked, a year after my arrival in the village, that she was surprised at how short a time it took for me to acclimatise. While I was basking in my newly found sense of community and belonging, she was expressing the frustrations and despair with our society that are so prevalent among the young population.

Then the deeper problems emerged. I could find very few people to talk to who could relate to my world, and vice versa. Their world was alien to me; I had no concept of their context of growing up and living in Israel, and they, equally, could not begin to imagine what my life had been like before. Often, I would be in social situations and feel people’s looks of burning curiosity, hear them asking each other who I was, then nodding and dissecting me with their eyes. I had barely come out of my teen years and was still an awkward, shy girl in her early twenties, so these social situations were difficult and embarrassing. Notwithstanding, I did my best to fit in: I attended weddings and got a young cousin to teach me dabke; I showed up frequently at houses of uncles and aunts, who were thrilled to have me visit; and I quickly created a large social circle.

But something was deeply wrong, and it took a long time before I could find my feet and figure it out: aside from our surface culture, another subculture existed, one which made me profoundly uncomfortable. We were all part of “Israel.” We consumed Israeli products; my cousins were all educated in the Israeli system; we depended on the state for employment, health care, social benefits; Hebrew was everywhere, including, to my horror, in our own dialect at times. Our identity was a warped mutation between Arab and Israeli, and we, collectively, seemed to be a hybrid that was neither - a minority struggling to survive in a hostile environment, yet intrinsically holding on to its own fabric, all the while becoming more and more ostracised.

Sixty years of occupation had not stopped timeless traditions: strongly interdependent parent- child relationships; olive picking and numerous harvests of carob, thyme, mloukhiyyeh; traditional kubbeh, made with raw meat paste, with Arak on the side; the wedding season in the summer; people’s close-knit social relationships, and a thousand other norms and practices that had been there for centuries before this conflict brought yet another alien people to our land.

But venture outside the village, and people were hit by the daily struggle for survival in an entire system designed to marginalise them, at best, to ethnically cleanse them, at worst. I heard countless ordeals of trying to be accepted to university, trying to find work, battling with the health system, constant discrimination. My experience of studying Hebrew and working in Israeli companies was a bitter one of alienation and depression.

There was no escape. Buried so deep in my culture, I tried to reconcile my feelings of frustration at its constraints and shortcomings, with those of resentment against the larger, hostile state, and the yet deep feeling of attachment and wonder I felt at being in Palestine - this feeling that ultimately kept me here or brought me back no matter how many times I left and how far I went.

No image could have prepared me for this reality, one that is so multi-layered and complex that I am writing a book about it, due to come out in a year. The euphoric, idealistic image of Palestine sustained by so many Palestinians in the diaspora is entirely fictional; ours is a country riddled with difficulty, one that needs hard work and perseverance to forge our path. Yet our sense of belonging and homeland here, impossible to feel anywhere else, makes the effort the most worthwhile, true undertaking we can embark on.

- Fida Jiryis is a writer, editor, and author of Hayatuna Elsagheera (Our Small Life), 2011, a collection of Arabic short stories depicting village life in Galilee. She can be reached at fida_jiryis@hotmail.com.

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[ePalestine] TWIP: Palestine's Economic Hallucination (By Sam Bahour)

2011-12-29T00:32:00.000-08:00

TO READ ONLINE: http://bit.ly/sPfCqj

This Week in Palestine (Issue No. 165, January 2012)

Palestine’s Economic Hallucination
By Sam Bahour

It’s the end of the year and time to turn the page after a bit of reflecting. What better way to reflect than to contrast image and reality, and even more so when the topic is Palestine’s economy? For starters, I ask, Do we have an economy, real or imagined? For a long time, many would just sweep this question under the rug of the Israeli military occupation and say No. How could we when every aspect of our livelihood is ultimately micromanaged by the Israeli government?

But such a knee-jerk answer did not make sense after the Oslo Agreement and the advent of the Palestinian Authority. From that point on, the economic reality under occupation was spiced up with heavy doses of self-made artificial images. The starting image, if my memory serves me well, was that we would “build a Singapore.” May God rest that imager’s soul. I hope the real Singapore never asks Palestinians to compensate them for the damage done to its good name.

These now infamous Palestinian negotiators who signed the agreement in Paris back on April 29, 1994, termed the Protocol on Economic Relations between Israel and the PLO (better known as the “Paris Protocol”), agreed to what our economy could and couldn’t do. The Paris Protocol was, with only minor modifications, incorporated as Annex V in the Interim Agreement - the equally infamous Oslo Agreement - signed in Washington on September 28, 1995.

So with the Oslo Agreement, which descended like a parachute from above, emerged the agreement’s spectacular brainchild, the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Authority, which is its accurate name in the Oslo Agreement, wasted no time in producing all the trappings of a real economy. Before one could say “the Authority is an Orwellian double-speak Authority,” economic ministries, ministers, laws, policies, regulations, and even a few “strategic” plans started to pop up here and there.

From the outset, the powers that be even squeezed the word “National” in between “Palestinian” and “Authority,” which seemed to give many people patriotic goose bumps. Anyone engaged in trying to build a real economy got little more than a permanent rash.

A decade later, the Palestinian economy was in our face. The image of an economy had taken form. The superheroes were not the negotiators who signed the Paris Protocol, and not even the Audi-happy Palestinian ministers, but rather the donors and their agents who built an entire aid industry using the agreements, Paris Protocol included, as its foundation.

When reality sunk in after the collapsed Camp David II talks in the year 2000, more and more people started to see the artificial economy for what it was - a farce. We were back to hearing: How could we have an economy when every aspect of our livelihood is ultimately micromanaged by the Israeli government?

But then came along Israeli peace activist (and good friend) Jeff Halper and made an analogy: even a prison has an economy, albeit 95 percent of the prison is occupied (not to be confused with militarily occupied) by the prisoners. The prison warden only needs a small percent of space to control all the doors, entrances, exits, and windows. What gets traded in a prison is what the warden allows in or is smuggled in: cigarettes, drugs, books, chores, favours, and the like.

This “Inconvenient Truth,” to borrow Al Gore’s words, that the whole of the occupied territory was no more than a prison where the prisoners seemingly have space, but zero voluntary ability of movement and access, was an eye-opener to many. When one added the fact that 60 percent of the West Bank was classified in Oslo as “Area C” - off limits to Palestinian economic development - many started to see a prison as a step up from the reality that was called the Palestinian economy.

Then came political infighting on the heels of long overdue elections. A convenient new chapter was born to rebrand the past economic failure.

For so many years, if you read the reports, listened to all the speeches, read the billboards, scanned the newspaper advertisements, noted all the prizes being offered by the banking system, you would never believe that a real economy never existed here. And just in case you started to feel that this may be an artificial economy after all, the banking system jumped out of its conservative straightjacket and started begging for customers to take out loans. Not one loan, not two, but as many as possible. Why not? - since the mighty all-knowing donors were quietly hiding behind the bank vaults, guaranteeing every move and cheering on the structural change that was taking place with full Palestinian government acceptance.

Indebtedness! Good ol’ American indebtedness. Need a student loan? No problem. Need a car loan? Simple. Want to get married - how much do you need? A home? Why rent when you can own? Don’t have the latest iPhone? Don’t sweat it, just sign here and pay NIS 5 for the next 200 years. While you’re at it, every home needs a computer, what’s the difference between a NIS 5 and NIS 7 payment? And the list goes on.

OK. I’m being a little too sarcastic, but not much. Let me try to bring this hallucination into focus.

Back to basics! What the hell is an economy anyway? Well, the dictionary says an economy is “the system of production and distribution and consumption.” OK, that’s a decent starting point, but it reflects a normal condition. Palestine, the occupied part, is far from normal. The phase of our development is not just producing, distributing, and consuming. We are supposed to be removing the boot of an entrenched military occupation from our necks while simultaneously building a state that needs an economic foundation to serve it. Yes, we must eat, sleep, and be clothed in the meantime, but that is surely not going to be enough.

So, what does an economic foundation to serve a forthcoming sovereign state need? A few more cafés? A larger supermarket? KFC? Another hotel? A bowling alley? Bars?

BEEP! Wrong answer. All of those are fine and dandy to have, but they will not move us one iota closer to freedom and independence, economically.

The economic resources we need are known to all who need to know, first and foremost the donor community. Strategic state-building economic resources are land, water, roads, borders, electromagnetic spectrum, airspace, movement, access, electricity, free trade relations, and the most important resource of all, the human resource. All of these and many more are not 99 percent in Israeli hands but are 100 percent micromanaged by the Israeli military occupation.

Without taking a step back and taking note of the systematically planned integration (better known as forced dependence) of the Palestinian economy with Israel, we will continue to believe a reality of an economy that is simply an economy in the occupier’s defined image.

The wake-up call has arrived. State or no state, this occupation is illegal and must end now. In the world of military occupations, third states, signatories to the Fourth Geneva Convention, carry the burden of holding the occupier accountable. Enough with this glorified empty talk of institution building and bilateral negotiations. Our economic resources are being raped as donor-funded cappuccinos keep the doors of our cafés open.

If donors can’t place their efforts where they belong, then they should kindly be asked, by their own people before us, to stop wasting their citizens’ tax dollars by feeding us an illusion of building a Palestinian economy, which has now been exposed as the fragile house of cards it is. If our water resources continue to be diverted, if our frequencies continue to be commercially abused by unlicensed Israeli telecom operators, if our movement is going to remain hostage to an ID, a magnetic card, a businessman’s card, and a permit, if a Gazan student can’t study in a West Bank university, and if illegally annexed Jerusalem is going to remain so difficult an issue for donors to address, well then why are we all wasting our time?

It seems the Palestinian “leadership” purchased its first mirror this past September and is starting to see the reflection of what it has created and thus beginning to make some slight adjustments. I would hope that not only legacy-building is in the reflection, but an honest approach to where we have reached, on all fronts. The times do not call for more resounding speeches or cosmetic changes to a warped reality.

Palestine’s economic hallucination has the power to maintain an image of a reality that is growing at more than 9 percent a year. It used to take us 20 minutes to travel from Ramallah to Bethlehem. Now, we are forced to circumvent Jerusalem, around cement walls and through multiple Israeli checkpoints. Today it takes us over 60 minutes, at best. For GDP growth, this is great news. During those extra 40 or more minutes we burn more gasoline, require more lighting on the longer roads, eat more sandwiches on the way, spend more time driving, hit more potholes, which causes more work for the road engineers in the morning, etc., etc. All of this extra spending is great for a higher GDP but catastrophic for our livelihood and state-building exercise.

It’s time for a new economic model, one built on economic justice, social welfare, solidarity, and sustainability. We should all have one goal in mind: lowering the cost of living under occupation so more people can remain steadfast during these troubling times. If you don’t believe me, no hard feelings - feel free to transfer your salary to that other bank down the street, they are giving away the best prize yet: one- way airline tickets for your entire family to anywhere, but Palestine. Bon Voyage!

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American based in Al-Bireh/Ramallah, Palestine. He is a freelance business consultant and was instrumental in the establishment of the Palestine Telecommunications Company and the PLAZA Shopping Center. Sam writes frequently on Palestinian affairs and has been widely published. He is co- editor of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians and may be reached at sbahour@palnet.com . He blogs at www.epalestine.com .

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[ePalestine] WATCH: Ultra-Orthodox spit on “immodest” 8-year-old girl in Beit Shemesh

2011-12-27T22:58:00.000-08:00

http://972mag.com/watch-ultra-orthodox-spit-on-immodest-8-year-old-girl-in-bet-shemesh/31268/

Israel has caught up with itself. This mess must stop for all our sakes, Israeli and Palestinian!

Dismantle racism, in all its forms,

Sam

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[ePalestine] Huffingtonpost: Waking Up Stateless in Jerusalem (by Danielle C. Jefferis)

2011-12-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

Waking Up Stateless in Jerusalem

By Danielle C. Jefferis, Third-year law student, Georgetown University

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danielle-c-jefferis/waking-up-stateless-in-je_b_1171010.html?ref=israel

This article is based on the forthcoming paper Institutionalizing Statelessness: The Revocation of Residency Rights of Palestinians from East Jerusalem in the International Journal of Refugee Law.

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2011-12-20T10:47:00.000-08:00

Palestinian clowns are everywhere

By Sam Bahour

Some Palestinians refuse to just sit still and accept theirfate as a permanently, militarily occupied people. One would think by now thatPalestinians would have received the message loud and clear – the worldcouldn’t care less about their fate. But no, these Palestinians just refuse tosit still. They continue to defy their reality and can be seen across the Holy Land – jumping, climbing, swinging, falling, tripping, singing,twirling, juggling, cycling, tight roping, and the like. Their nerve! To thinkthey can attempt to live a normal life when the powers that be are spendingbillions, literally, to cause a collapse of Palestinian society.

And who is it exactly I speak of? Palestinian clowns. No,I’m not taking a swing at the political leadership, at least not here. I’mtalking about the real thing: circus clowns, like in clowns that make you laughand make you forget that the boot of occupation is pressing on your neck.

I can understand your confusion. Clowns and circus do notusually appear in the same sentence with Palestine.You are probably much more attuned to how Palestinians have been labeled overthe years by some Israelis and their marionettes – everything from terrorists, crocodiles,‘beasts walking on two legs,’ grasshoppers, cockroaches, slaves, ‘a communityof woodcutters and waiters,’ the ‘penniless population,’ ‘not worth a Jewishfingernail,’ all the way to the most recent classification of being an ‘inventedpeople.’

As many are bent on dehumanizing Palestinians,systematically and with contempt, others are mending the wounds of a people whohave been purposely stripped of their well-being in one of the world’s mostunjust chapters of history. One group tending to that process of mending thedeep wounds that 44 years of military occupation continue to inflict is thePalestinian Circus School (PCS), based in Birzeit, Palestine.

Yes, you read correctly. There is a Palestinian Circus Schoolin Palestine! However, as I havelearned while working closely with this professional team of circus artists,this is not what we all think of when we first think of circus. There are noelephants here, only Palestinian children engaged in a form of art andexpression that uses their body to tell a story which can make audiences laugh,cry, or both.

Although the school recently moved from Ramallah to itsnewly donated headquarters in Birzeit (thanks to Dr. Hanna Nasir), itsactivities are spread across the West Bank, and Gazawill be added as soon as possible. The School operates local circus clubs and givesperformances in various cities, villages and refugee camps.

The Palestinian Circus School is a non-profit,non-governmental organization established in 2006 and registered with thePalestinian Authority since February 2007. You can read more and view somevideos of their work at: www.palcircus.ps.

My consulting firm, which mainly serves the private sector, wascommissioned by a unique donor, the Drosos Foundation,to assist the Palestinian Circus School in developing a five-yearbusiness plan which we successfully completed. Drosos has a rock solid motto ofbeing ‘committed to enabling disadvantaged people to live a life of dignity.’ Itis rare I would choose to write about one of my work assignments; however, whatI witnessed over several months sparked an interest that I want to share. Ialso want to appeal to you to support their efforts. Likewise, Palestine isflooded with donor agencies, and most want to drive Palestinians’ development agenda,so when I worked with a funding agency that was sincere about supportingPalestinians by providing resources, but didn’t stand in the way of indigenousplanning, I felt this was one of those cases that is the exception and also deservesto be shared.

Contemporary circus (or nouveau cirque as it wasoriginally known in French-speaking countries) is a genre of performing artdeveloped in the late 20th century, in which a story or theme is conveyedthrough traditional circus skills. It may all look like a game to the untrainedeye, but this is serious business. At its heart, this style of circus is asocietal change agent. The Circus Schoolteaches young Palestinians the circus pedagogy to stimulate and develop theirphysical, mental, artistic, emotional, social and cognitive abilities. Thecircus then employs these skills in bringing smiles to the faces of childrenthroughout Palestine, especially inmarginalized areas.

If you spend any time in any part of Palestine, or even inPalestinian refugee communities outside of Palestine, you will quickly noticethat the ultimate weight of this conflict is falling on the shoulders of ouryoungsters—shoulders that should never have to carry the weight of a militaryoccupation! These young minds continue to be systematically damaged, butsociety is not standing still.

The Palestinian Circus School puts smiles on children’sfaces as well as using the platform of circus to link to a global circus artscommunity. Circus schools and troupes worldwide are acting in solidarity withPalestinians by exchanging trainers, performances and experiences. It’s seriousbusiness with serious results. Maybe that’s why, last year, Israeli authoritiesdenied entry to Mr. Ivan Prado, the most famous clown in Spain,who was coming to perform to Palestinian audiences.

Robert Sugarman, author of The Many Worlds of Circus,described the impact of circus best when he wrote, “By turning you upside down,we teach you to stand on your own two feet. By dropping objects we teach you tocatch them. By having you walk all over someone, we teach you to take care ofthem. By having you clown around, we teach you to take yourself seriously.” Thechildren of Palestine have hadtheir lives turned upside down. Help us bring a smile to their faces and buildconfidence in their futures to make their lives worth living.

So, as you prepare to bring in a new year, I appeal for yourgenerous support to the Palestinian Circus School in any way you can. You willnot be disappointed. There are three places donations can be made:

- IndieGoGo Campaign to raise $25,000 to kick offfundraising for erecting a movable training hanger, which will be locatedadjacent to the newly donated headquarters. This new addition will house thehigh circus equipment, which are now placed outside in the cold under the opensky. This campaign just started and will run through February 20, 2012 at: http://igg.me/p/52303.

- Alternatively, donations to the Palestinian Circus Schoolin the U.S. canbe made through The Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA is atax-exempt 501(c) 3 organization, so your gift is tax-deductible) www.mecaforpeace.org/partners/palestinian-circus-school.

- Of course, direct donations and/or student scholarships canbe made via the School’s website at home.palcircus.ps/en/1/1/3.

Happy Holidays.

- Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American businessdevelopment consultant from Youngstown,Ohio living in thePalestinian City of Al-Bireh in the West Bank. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine andPalestinians (1994) and may be reached at sbahour@palnet.com. Disclosure:Sam’s firm, www.aim.ps, provides consulting services to PCS.

[ePalestine] Addameer Concerned About Wave of Arrests since First Phase of Prisoner Exchange

2011-12-15T06:23:00.000-08:00

NOTE: Walid Abu Rass is still being held!

Dec. 15, 2011

Addameer Concerned About Wave of Arrests since First Phase of Prisoner Exchange

Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) have arrested nearly 470 Palestinians since 18 October 2011 , when 477 Palestinian political prisoners were released in exchange for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as part of the first phase of the prisoner exchange deal concluded by the Israeli government and Hamas authorities. This wave of arrests reveals that the exchange deal has not deterred Israel’s policy of detention of Palestinians; rather, Israeli prisons are being refilled with almost the exact number of Palestinians that were released in October. Even the released prisoners were not safe from harassment, as the IOF has regularly raided their homes, issued summons to meet with Israeli intelligence and re-arrested one individual.

The 470 Palestinians who were arrested between 18 October and 12 December include about 70 children and 11 women. The IOF continued to employ brutal methods of arrest, including the use of undercover Israeli forces, commonly known as musta’arabeen, who dress as Palestinian civilians in order to carry out ambushes and arrests of Palestinians from their homes and places of work. In many cases, joint army and intelligence raids occurred after midnight, where soldiers deliberately destroyed contents of the houses they were searching. Of the 70 children arrested during this period, the majority are from Shuafat camp in Jerusalem and Dheisheh camp in Bethlehem. In the past two weeks alone, 11 children were arrested in Shuafat and 10 in Dheisheh. Two of the 11 women arrested in during the past two months remain in detention. One of the released women is Irsa Salhab, a journalist who spent more than 20 days in Moskobiyyeh interrogation center. Six of the women were arrested during a demonstration outside Hasharon prison, where they were calling for the release of female prisoners not included in the first phase of the prisoner exchange. Three of these women were released shortly after their arrest, and three were sentenced to house arrest.

Political activists were especially targeted for arrest during this period. Approximately 150 arrests of alleged party members occurred, particularly including those whom the IOF claims are active in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), some of whom received indictments issued against them, while others received administrative detention orders. The IOF has continued to arrest and renew administrative detention orders of members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Two PLC members were arrested since 18 October, the administrative detention orders of 6 PLC members were renewed and one PLC member received a 30-year sentence. Furthermore, on 27 October, following a mass hunger strike protesting punitive measures against prisoners including the use of isolation, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) renewed the isolation order for Ahmad Sa’adat for another year. At the beginning of December, Ahmad entered his 34th consecutive month in isolation.

The IOF also continued to carry out arrests against human rights defenders in order to further repress the popular resistance movement. During the past two months, arrests of protestors participating in peaceful demonstrations occurred in almost all of the villages with an active weekly demonstration. These arrests include at least 2 from Bil’in, 3 from Nabi Saleh, 17 from Beit Ummar, 3 from Al-Ma’asara, 1 from Kufr Qaddum and 2 from Al-Walajeh, with arrests in East Jerusalem and the South Hebron Hills as well. In addition to these arrests, the IOF used extreme violence to disperse demonstrations, resulting in the death of protestor Mustafa Tamimi, 28, on 10 December. Mustafa was fatally injured when hit by a teargas canister in the head fired at close range by an Israeli soldier on 9 December, during the weekly demonstration against the Israeli settlements and Annexation Wall in Nabi Saleh. The arrests of human rights defenders, use of violence against peaceful protestors and threats to family members of activists are in clear violation of Palestinians’ right to freedom of expression and assembly.

In light of this heightened wave of arrests, Addameer is concerned about what will happen after the conclusion of the second phase of the prisoner exchange deal. The IPS has announced that 550 prisoners will be released on Sunday 18 December. Addameer calls for the implementation of the rights of released prisoners and urges the international community, including the United Nations and European Union, to intervene rapidly to prevent Israel from its continued practice of brutal and arbitrary detention.

http://www.addameer.org/etemplate.php?id=423

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2011-12-09T01:10:00.001-08:00

Walid Abu Rass

Where’s my friend?
By Sam Bahour

My friend is Walid Abu Rass. He is the Finance and Administration Manager for the Health Work Committees (HWC, at www.hwc-pal.org), one of the largest community health service providers in the occupied Palestinian territory. HWC serves over 500,000 patients/beneficiaries per year! More on HWC in a second.

I had not seen Walid for a while. We are both knee deep in Palestine’s daily rat race. About two months ago, Walid and his HWC colleagues called for a meeting of their circle of friends. They sought assistance. HWC was going through some financial hard times, especially with the financial crisis in Europe, where many of their donors are based.

Given it was close to the end of year, a season when I usually donate some time to assist a community based organization to fundraise, I offered to volunteer. Walid was my counterpart. During the past weeks, we were in daily phone and email contact, and every few days we met up to visit a potential local donor. Progress was being made. We then started to plan, with a few others, an end-of-year fundraising raffle. Plans were coming together, and there was excitement among the team and staff that we were taking our fundraising needs to our local community to compensate for the loss in European institutional funding. This is even more significant since HWC does not accept funding with strings attached (“conditional donor funds”), so they have to struggle just to keep the doors open in this tainted donor-driven market.

For nearly a week I was emailing Walid with no reply. This was not like him. He and I nearly live behind our keyboards. The deadline for the raffle details was rapidly approaching and if we did not get started, we would miss the end of year opportunity for fundraising. I started to think Walid was mad at me for some reason. I rethought our last few weeks of working together. There was absolutely nothing there to cause him to just ignore my calls; after all, I was his volunteer counterpart.

Walid Abu Rass, daugthers Malak, 4 yrs old, Mais, 13 yrs old

Then, last night I learned why Walid stopped replying to me. On November 22nd, Israeli occupation soldiers arrived at his home at 1:30 A.M. Walid lives in Ramallah with his wife, Bayan, and two daughters, Mais, 13 years old, and Malak, 4 years old, who were all frighteningly awakened during his arrest. Walid was taken into custody and transported in the bone chilling cold of the night to Israel’s Ofer Military Detention Center where hundreds of Palestinians are detained, the vast majority with absolutely no knowledge of why.

The Israelis have been arresting Palestinians nightly for years now. Israel releases a few hundred prisoners in a media frenzy and then, the same night, starts to refill its prisons, a few Palestinians at a time. Although, as per the Oslo Agreements, the Palestinian side is responsible for security inside the Palestinian cities, Israeli armed forces routinely—read nightly, every night—enter the cities in their armored vehicles in the middle of the night and arrest a dozen or so Palestinians from their homes. Walid was merely the latest victim of this kidnap-by-night strategy.

The routine then goes something like this. Within eight days he will be brought before an Israeli military “judge” for the sake of processing only, not deliberating. The entire kangaroo court then, without sharing the reason why the Palestinian detainee is being held, flashes the security card to justify not sharing information on why they have acted against a specific individual. Then the court slaps a six month Administrative Detention Order on the detainee. That means you sit in prison for six months for no reason at all. Walid has already been given just such an order.

Your wife, your children, your work, your end-of-year fundraising campaign, your 500,000 patients/beneficiaries, your life, all abruptly stop. Then, usually, that six month order gets extended a few times before you are released. Walid is not unacquainted with this Orwellian mess. He previously spent nearly five years in and out of detention, never once being charged with anything!

The Health Work Committees association is registered as a not-for profit organization with the Palestinian Ministry of the Interior and also has a Jerusalem registration since they work in Jerusalem as well. HWC employees over 300 persons and operates 14 clinics throughout the West Bank, providing primary health services via these health clinics, mostly in areas not fully covered by the Ministry of Health. HWC also has a community development aspect of their work and operate the following: Jadal Center for Culture and Social Development, Nidal Center (providing health education to East Jerusalem schools), Community Development Plan, Oasis Rehab Center, Community Based Rehabilitation, and the Elderly Care Nursery and Kindergarten. One of the success stories of HWC is its partnership with the Dunya Women's Cancer Clinic.

All of these activities need health care administrators, of which Walid is one. At a time when the Israeli closure system is making life hell for Palestinians, especially those living in marginalized areas or areas directly affected by the Separation Wall, HWC is needed more than ever. Likewise, at a time when international organizations, like USAID, have dramatically cut funding and laid off staff from their heath care programs (such as Flagship) as punishment to the Palestinians for pursuing membership in UNESCO, HWC’s services are needed more than ever.

The era of silence is over. Also, over for me are the slogans that can’t be operationalized. Yes, we want all 5,000 or so Palestinian detainees released. Yes, the policy of administrative detention is inhumane and must end. However, these slogans, although needed at times, must be matched with action items. Each life being destroyed by the Israeli revolving door policy of detainment is a person with a name and a family and a job. And when the person is my friend or colleague, I refuse to swallow the fact that Israel has carte blanche to act above the law.

Help me get Walid back to his family and his desk so we can get back to the work of improving the Palestinian health care system. Consider contacting your local Israeli Embassy and any or all of the following and demanding his immediate release. Reference his name, Walid Abu Rass, and his ID # 9-9702819-6.

Judea and Samaria Region
Office of the Legal Advisor
P.O. Box 5
Beit El, 90631
via Israel
Tel: +972-2-997-7071
Fax: +972-2-997-7326

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Office of the Prime Minister
3 Kaplan Street
PO Box 187
Kiryat Ben-Gurion
Jerusalem 91919
Fax: +972-2-651-2631 or +972-2-670-5475
E-mail: rohm@pmo.gov.il or pm_eng@pmo.gov.il

Deputy Prime Minister & Minister of Defence Ehud Barak
Ministry of Defence
37 Kaplan Street
Hakirya, Tel Aviv 61909
Israel
Fax: +972.3.691.6940
Email: minister@mod.gov.il

For more information on Administrative Detention see ADDAMEER (Arabic for conscience) Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association at www.addameer.org.

- Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant from Youngstown living in the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh in the West Bank. He is co-author of “Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians” (1994) and may be reached via www.ePalestine.ps.

[ePalestine] The Myth of "Resuming Negotiations" (by By John Kleinheksel Sr)

2011-12-06T10:36:00.000-08:00

The Myth of "Resuming Negotiations"

By John Kleinheksel Sr, FPI, (Friends of Palestinians and Israelis)

http://friendsofpalestiniansandisraelis.blogspot.com/2011/12/myth-of-resuming-negotiations.html

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[ePalestine] Palestine in Israeli School Books (by Nurit Peled-Elhanan) (A MUST VIEW)

2011-12-04T00:58:00.000-08:00

Alternate Focus interviews Nurit Peled-Elhanan, author of the forthcoming book Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. Nurit Peled-Elhanan argues that the textbooks used in the school system are laced with a pro-Israel ideology, and that they play a part in priming Israeli children for military service. She analyzes the presentation of images, maps, layouts and use of language in History, Geography and Civic Studies textbooks, and reveals how the books might be seen to marginalize Palestinians, legitimize Israeli military action and reinforce Jewish-Israeli territorial identity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pWKPRC-_oSg

NOTE: Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a Professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an Israeli peace activist, and one of the founders of the Bereaved Families for Peace. After the death of Elhanan's 13 year-old daughter in a 1997 suicide bombing, she became an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

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[ePalestine] ATLANTIC: Netanyahu Government Suggests Israelis Avoid Marrying American Jews

2011-12-02T02:09:00.000-08:00

The Atlantic

Netanyahu Government Suggests Israelis Avoid Marrying American Jews

By Jeffrey Goldberg

http://bit.ly/uMLwdo

No comment,

Sam

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[ePalestine] Souciant: Home and Garden (by Mitchell Plitnick)

2011-11-30T11:48:00.000-08:00

The Harper's article mentioned in this article may be found here:

http://mitchellplitnick.com/2011/11/29/avishai-abrahams-children-toward-a-right-of-return-for-palestinians/

BEST TO READ BELOW ARTICLE AT URL GIVEN EMBEDDED LINKS:

http://souciant.com/2011/11/home-and-garden/

Souciant

Geographies / Near & Middle East

Home and Garden

by Mitchell Plitnick on Nov 30, 2011

This week, Iceland became the first European country to recognize the State of Palestine. The declaration had a curious clause: “Iceland recalls also the right of Palestinian refugees to return to former homes in accordance with numerous UN resolutions.”

To be sure, this carries little weight; Iceland is a country of less than 320,000 people. It’s a political maverick, frequently charting its own course, and is not a member of the EU. While it’s unlikely that other European states will follow Iceland’s lead, the fact remains that a first world country has formally endorsed the return of Palestinian refugees.

Coincidentally, the issue of the Palestinian Right of Return (RoR), made some waves a few days earlier when the noted Zionist dove, Bernard Avishai, published a piece in Harpers (print only, but available here) which took on the issue directly and tried to find some resolution to it that both Israelis and Palestinians can live with.

This was no small task Avishai took on. For the overwhelming majority of Israelis, including most of the Israeli left, Right of Return is nothing more than code for the end of Israel as a Jewish state. For most as well, this has connotations of mass expulsions or fleeing the country at best, violent dangers at worst. Thus, even among most supporters of peace and withdrawal from all the Occupied Palestinian Territories, RoR is anathema to Israelis.

For Palestinians, the Right of Return is not just a negotiating point. It is the very heart of their nationalism, the focus of their historical claim to lands from which they were driven. It is both a national right, which can be negotiated by their leaders, but also an individual right, which cannot. It is at once the key elderly Palestinians still keep with them to the homes from which their families were driven more than 60 years ago; it is also the grievance they feel must be addressed, the fact of that expulsion, if there is ever to be reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis.

In more than a decade of activism, including many visits to Palestinian towns, cities and refugee camps, I have spoken with Palestinians from all parts of the political, cultural, religious and economic spectrum. I have heard many views regarding the implementation of RoR. But not a single man, woman or child has ever said they would give it up.

Except for the tiny minority of Israeli Jews who support the Right of Return, the mere mention of the idea casts a pall of terror across their faces. Many Israelis will withdraw from the West Bank, abandon the settlements and in smaller numbers, share Jerusalem. But RoR is an absolute non-starter.

It is little wonder, then, that there has been virtually no serious discussion about the Right of Return, in or outside of Israel/Palestine. There have been repeated declarations by both sides of the heartfelt, and absolutist, stances, but little real discussion. In peace proposals, the “refugee issue” is left to vague wording that promises nothing to the Palestinians, yet still raises Israeli anxiety to a boiling point. For this reason, both Iceland’s declaration and Avishai’s article are extremely important.

The Icelandic statement is a reminder to the West that this issue cannot be skirted around. The well-worn cliché about the only resolution being negotiations between the parties conducted in a fair and balanced atmosphere (that is, one where outside parties strive to balance the skewed power dynamics between the regional superpower, Israel, and the occupied, stateless and powerless Palestinians) is absolutely true in this case.

But instead of taking that on, the United States, Europe, and all the other major players have tried their best to avoid it. Frankly, this is absurd, and always has been.

No peace deal yet devised has ever taken a real look at RoR. Discussions ensue about what “the people” will accept, and it is usually, if quietly, assumed that the Palestinian position is so weak that they will swallow forgoing the Right of Return in order to end the occupation and build their state. Those making that assumption have never bothered to talk to an actual Palestinian. Whether in a café in Ramallah, a workshop in Gaza City, a refugee camp in Lebanon or an organizers’ meeting in Paris, they would have gotten a clear message that RoR must be seriously addressed if any peace proposal is to garner even moderate Palestinian support.

Avishai, who has come under some justifiable criticism for an approach to this issue reflective of his privileged Israeli position, must be applauded for finally bringing this question into mainstream US discourse.

It is the discourse, in the US, Europe and most of all in Israel and the Occupied Territories that has been missing for all these years. On all other issues, there have been the stated demands on both sides and then public discussion, within and across borders, about how to reconcile pragmatism with ideology, historical wrongs with present-day realities. But on RoR, there has been only the tense exchange of absolutism.

Avishai’s proposed solution may not seem realistic to many. However, the solution isn’t the point right now. Opening a discussion about this, allowing Palestinians to make their case in a public forum, and Israelis and their advocates to respond, like every other issue, is the task at hand.

Already, Avishai’s piece stirred up intense debate on the very nature of Zionism and the Jewish State. And that is precisely the discussion that Right of Return is going to provoke. Instead of running away from that discussion, it should be embraced.

More than any other issue, RoR both challenges the status quo and stirs serious legal and ethical questions of history. Until they are grappled with, we are likely to see a continuation of the polarization we have seen in recent years and an ongoing stalemate which only leads to more violence and insecurity.

The Right of Return is the very heart of the conflict, the definition of Palestinian dispossession and the cause of the fear, born (for the many Israelis of conscience) of historical guilt in Israel. Resolving it in a manner that both sides can live with is indispensable. Who knows. Maybe Avishai is right, and the road to resolving it, whether on his path or some other, contains the key to resolving the conflict as a whole.

- Jaffa tanner’s home portrait courtesy of gnuckx. Published under a Creative Commons license.

Source: http://souciant.com/2011/11/home-and-garden/

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[ePalestine] NEWSWEEK: Moshe Dayan's Widow Ruth: Zionist Dream Has Run Its Course

2011-11-17T14:19:00.000-08:00

"We move from war to war, and this will never stop. I think Zionism has run its course.” ~Ruth Dayan

NEWSWEEK

Moshe Dayan's Widow Ruth: Zionist Dream Has Run Its Course

By Rula -Jebreal

These startling words were uttered last week in Tel Aviv by 95-year-old Ruth Dayan, widow of one of Israel's founding fathers

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/30/moshe-dayan-s-widow-ruth- zionist-dream-has-run-its-course.html

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[ePalestine] Rafeef Ziadah - 'We teach life, sir', London, 12.11.11

2011-11-13T15:11:00.000-08:00

RAFEEF ZIADAH is a Canadian-Palestinian spoken word artist and activist. Her debut CD Hadeel is dedicated to Palestinian youth, who still fly kites in the face of F16 bombers, who still remember the names if their villages in Palestine and still hear the sound of Hadeel (cooing of doves) over Gaza.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xHtM&feature=colike

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[ePalestine] bitterlemons.org: The Quartet facade (By Sam Bahour)

2011-10-31T15:39:00.000-07:00

bitterlemons.org

The Quartet facade

Sam Bahour

Israel and the United States have perfected, almost to a science, the management of international players who dare to intervene in trying to advance peace in the Middle East between Palestinians and Israelis. The most recent political configuration to serve this purpose is the "Quartet on the Middle East", better known as just "the Quartet", a self- appointed foursome of nations and international and supranational entities involved in mediating the peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Quartet is comprised of the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia. The group was established in Madrid in 2002. Given that the United States dominates the Quartet, one does not need to be a political scientist to conclude that the entire setup merely serves as a facade for continued American unwillingness to uphold its legal obligations, under international law, to hold its strategic ally, Israel, accountable for maintaining an unlawful four-decade military occupation of Palestinians.

In the opening paragraph of their first joint statement in Madrid on April 10, 2002, the Quartet members stated that, "We reviewed the escalating confrontation in the Middle East and agreed to coordinate our actions to resolve the current crisis." Note the timing of their actions and their focus. The Quartet emerged in an attempt to negotiate a ceasefire between then- Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israel, the occupying power, who at the time had re-invaded all Palestinian cities and surrounded Arafat's Ramallah headquarters with tanks. Also interestingly, their scope of work--as defined in their own statement--was aimed to "resolve the current crisis" and not necessarily bring about a lasting peace among the parties, even as the same statement paid lip-service to a supposed peace process that would lead to the end of the conflict.

This poor excuse for a balancing act between maintaining an Israeli security agenda while assuming to advance peace has been the mantra that the Quartet has become known for. Fast forward to the Quartet's most recent statement, issued on September 23, 2011, the same day Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas submitted an application to the secretary general of the United Nations for full membership for Palestine. In this statement, the Quartet called for "an agreement within a time frame agreed to by the parties, but not longer than the end of 2012". What they have failed to advance, one iota, for over more than nine years, they now want to do in a single year, utterly ignoring that their repeated failures, purposeful or not, have caused serious damage on the ground: they have allowed for not only the total collapse of any serious resemblance of a peace process, but more importantly allowed Israel to continue building more facts on the ground, such as tripling the Jewish-only settlement enterprise in the West Bank, as well as building the internationally-condemned Separation Wall cutting deep into Palestinian lands and communities. This is not to mention the Quartet turning a blind eye to the ongoing onslaught by Israel on Gaza and continued siege of the Gaza Strip.

As if the Quartet itself was not enough, the group has created another layer of the facade of being genuine mediators by creating the Office of the Quartet and appointing high-profile envoys to this office. The current envoy is the United Kingdom's ex-prime minister Tony Blair, who succeeded James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank who resigned from his post at the Quartet in disgust with American hegemony and unwillingness to allow the Quartet to play a real role in making peace.

Much has been reported about the office of the Quartet representative and its style of leadership, but this is all a sideshow. The core of the matter is political, not personal. Regardless of who the special envoy is, the parties to the Quartet are political and have a political role to play. They cannot shed their political responsibility--and legal one, too--by laying blame on the envoy.

In an extended interview with Haaretz more than a year after he resigned from his 11-month ordeal as Quartet special envoy, James Wolfensohn said it best: "I feel that if anything, I was stupid for not reading the small print. I was never given the mandate to negotiate the peace." Haaretz noted in reporting the interview that, "The mandate he received, he says--which is identical to the one Tony Blair has now been given--was solely to try to improve the economic situation in the territories and to improve the Palestinians' situation in general, whereas he naively thought that this included intervention to advance peace."

Sadly, it is not surprising that the nation states represented in the Quartet would play along with this sham. What is unacceptable is that the United Nations itself, the body tasked with holding nations accountable for their actions, would accept to play along. The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will reveal much more than how the Holy Land was torn apart; it will also feature how the Palestinians' struggle for freedom and independence became the Achilles' heel of an international system of governance that has become broken beyond repair.-Published 31/10/2011 © bitterlemons.org

Sam Bahour is a Ramallah-based management consultant.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/td6Y4P

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[ePalestine] PETITION: Respect Palestinians' Right to Self-determination in Development. Reform the International Aid System

2011-10-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

Kindly consider adding your name to this campaign calling for reform of the international aid system:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/daliaassociation/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=system&utm_campaign=Send%2Bto%2BFriend

Aid for progress, not dependency,

Sam

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[ePalestine] THE ECONOMIST: Illusionary peace negotiations can only lead to a hallucinated peace (by Sam Bahour)

2011-10-18T00:24:00.000-07:00

ECONOMIST DEBATES

Middle East peace

This house believes that bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are not currently a viable way to reach a two-state solution.

See my Featured Guest Commentary at: http://econ.st/oJsLbi

Read and join the debate.

There is a way out,

Sam

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[ePalestine] JUST VISION: Home Front: Portraits from Sheikh Jarrah (Short videos)

2011-10-14T02:34:00.000-07:00

Home Front is a new series of four video portraits chronicling the resolve of a neighborhood [Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem], and the support it receives from the most unexpected of places.

1. A Palestinian teenager whose family is forced to give up part of their home and live under the same roof as a family of settlers. He comes of age in the face of unrelenting tension with his neighbors and unexpected cooperation with Israeli allies in his backyard. (8:50min)

2. An American-born Israeli mother who to her own surprise becomes involved in the demonstrations after her children are arrested for protesting. (8:09min)

3. A Palestinian community organizer from Sheikh Jarrah who spearheads the involvement of local women in the movement while facing the risk of losing her own home to the settlers. (7:55min)

4. A former Israeli soldier from a religious background who only several years after his combat service in the West Bank finds himself taking on a leading role in the protests. (7:19min)

WATCH THEM ALL AT: http://www.justvision.org/homefront

Sheikh Jarrah, and every inch of Palestine, struggles on,

Sam

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[ePalestine] NYT Magazine: A State is Born in Palestine (A MUST READ DOSE OF HISTORY)

2011-10-08T13:57:00.000-07:00

NYT Magazine

A State is Born in Palestine

By RONEN BERGMAN

Published: October 7, 2011

Read at: http://nyti.ms/mTfteB

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[ePalestine] NYT: Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy? (By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF)

2011-10-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

The New York Times

October 5, 2011

Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

For decades, Palestinian leaders sometimes seemed to be their own people’s worst enemies.

Palestinian radicals antagonized the West, and, when militant leaders turned to hijackings and rockets, they undermined the Palestinian cause around the world. They empowered Israeli settlers and hard-liners, while eviscerating Israeli doves.

These days, the world has been turned upside down. Now it is Israel that is endangered most by its leaders and maximalist stance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hard line on settlements seems like a national suicide policy.

Nothing is more corrosive than Israel’s growth of settlements because they erode hope of a peace agreement in the future. Mr. Netanyahu’s latest misstep came after the Obama administration humiliated itself by making a full-court diplomatic press to block Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. At a time when President Obama had a few other things on his plate — averting a global economic meltdown, for example — the United States frittered good will by threatening to veto the Palestinian statehood that everybody claims to favor.

With that diplomatic fight at the United Nations under way, Israel last week announced plans for 1,100 new housing units in a part of Jerusalem outside its pre- 1967 borders. Instead of showing appreciation to President Obama, Mr. Netanyahu thumbed him in the eye.

O.K., I foresee a torrent of angry responses. I realize that many insist that Jerusalem must all belong to Israel in any peace deal anyway, so new settlements there don’t count. But, if that’s your position, then you can kiss any peace deal goodbye. Every negotiator knows the framework of a peace agreement — 1967 borders with land swaps, Jerusalem as the capital of both Israeli and Palestinian states, only a token right of return — and insistence on a completely Israeli Jerusalem simply means no peace agreement ever.

Former President Bill Clinton said squarely in September that Mr. Netanyahu is to blame for the failure of the Middle East peace process. A background factor, Mr. Clinton noted correctly, is the demographic and political change within Israeli society, which has made the country more conservative when it comes to border and land issues.

Granted, Mr. Netanyahu is far from the only obstacle to peace. The Palestinians are divided, with Hamas controlling Gaza. And Hamas not only represses its own people but also managed to devastate the peace movement in Israel. That’s the saddest thing about the Middle East: hard-liners like Hamas empower hard-liners like Mr. Netanyahu.

We’re facing a dangerous period in the Middle East. Most Palestinians seem to feel as though the Oslo peace process has fizzled, and Israelis seem to agree, with two- thirds saying in a recent poll published in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot that there is no chance of peace with Palestinians — ever.

The Palestinians’ best hope would be a major grass-roots movement of nonviolent peaceful resistance aimed at illegal West Bank settlements, led by women and inspired by the work of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A growing number of Palestinians are taking up variants of that model, although they sometimes ruin it by defining nonviolence to include stone-throwing and by giving the leading role to hotheaded young men.

The Israel Defense Forces can deal with suicide bombers and rockets fired by Hezbollah. I’m not sure that they can defeat Palestinian women blocking roads to illegal settlements and willing to endure tear gas and clubbing — with videos promptly posted on YouTube.

Mr. Netanyahu has also undermined Israeli security by burning bridges with Israel’s most important friend in the region, Turkey. Now there is also the risk of clashes in the Mediterranean between Israeli and Turkish naval vessels. That’s one reason Defense Secretary Leon Panetta scolded the Israeli government a few days ago for isolating itself diplomatically.

So where do we go from here? If a peace deal is not forthcoming soon, and if Israel continues its occupation, then Israel should give the vote in Israeli elections to all Palestinians in the areas it controls. If Jews in the West Bank can vote, then Palestinians there should be able to as well.

That’s what democracy means: people have the right to vote on the government that controls their lives. Some of my Israeli friends will think I’m unfair and harsh, applying double standards by focusing on Israeli shortcomings while paying less attention to those of other countries in the region. Fair enough: I plead guilty. I apply higher standards to a close American ally like Israel that is a huge recipient of American aid.

Friends don’t let friends drive drunk — or drive a diplomatic course that leaves their nation veering away from any hope of peace. Today, Israel’s leaders sometimes seem to be that country’s worst enemies, and it’s an act of friendship to point that out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/kristof-is-israel-its-own-worst- enemy.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

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[ePalestine] Israeli settlers of Anatot settlement in action...

2011-10-05T23:11:00.000-07:00

If you missed the clip, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbv8a3l6qts&feature=email

Given those protesting the settlers are Israeli peace activists the clip is in Hebrew, but you can read here to see what was being said:

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2011/10/04/eyewitness-to-anatot-pogrom-attest-to-sexual-abuse/

No comment,

Sam

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[ePalestine] America's Dangerous Game at the UN (by Atty. John V. Whitbeck)

2011-09-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

Palestine Chronicle

09/27/2011

America's Dangerous Game at the UN

By John V. Whitbeck

The number of UN member states extending diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine has now risen to 131, leaving only 62 UN member states on the wrong side of history and humanity.

If one ignores small island states in the Caribbean and the Pacific, almost all of the non-recognizers are Western states, including all five of the settler-colonial states founded on the ethnic cleansing or genocide of indigenous populations and all eight of the former European colonial powers.

It appears that the current American strategy to defeat the State of Palestine's UN membership application is to try to deprive Palestine of the required nine affirmative votes in the Security Council by convincing all five European members (including Bosnia & Herzegovina, which has recognized the State of Palestine) and Colombia (the only South American state which has not recognized the State of Palestine) to abstain, leaving only eight affirmative votes and thus making America's lone negative vote not technically a "veto".

Even though everyone knows that the Security Council would approve Palestinian membership unanimously if the United States announced its support, the explanation and expectation behind this strategy is, apparently, that, in the absence of a "veto", no one would notice America's fingerprints all over this result, no one (notably in the Arab and Muslim worlds) would be outraged by America's blocking of Palestine's membership application and Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues would crawl back into the hamster cage from which they have so recently and dramatically escaped, duly chastened and docile, and resume running mindlessly on the Israeli-American exercise wheel.

This is not simply a breathtakingly naïve strategy but an extraordinarily dangerous one -- and not only because the Ramallah leadership, having experienced enlightenment and a spine transplant, has also recovered its self-respect and human dignity and will not be crawling back into its cage.

An American veto would be neither a big deal nor a bad thing. It would unequivocally confirm the sad and humiliating reality, now almost universally recognized, that the United States of America is enslaved to Israel, paying tribute and taking orders. By doing so, an American veto would definitively disqualify the United States from playing any significant role in any genuine Middle East "peace process" which would replace the fraudulent one which the United States has been controlling and manipulating on Israel's behalf for the past 20 years and, thereby, would finally give peace a chance.

Indeed, since state observer status would confer on the State of Palestine virtually all the same benefits as member state status (most importantly, right of access to the International Criminal Court, where it could sue Israelis for war crimes, including settlement building, and crimes against humanity), an American veto in the Security Council followed by an upgrade to state observer status by the General Assembly might actually be the most constructive possible result for Palestine -- even better than full UN membership with American acquiescence but with the United States maintaining its monopoly stranglehold on any "peace process".

One might then realistically hope that the new emerging international force, the "BRICS" countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- all current members of the Security Council which have recognized the State of Palestine and are on record as planning to vote for Palestinian membership), and the European Union could jointly mobilize the true international community behind a genuine and urgent effort to actually achieve peace with some measure of justice.

On the other hand, America's unanimous European abstention strategy, if successful, would have catastrophic consequences. While the Arab and Muslim worlds have learned to expect the worst from the United States, they have, at least until now, maintained some hope that Europe is not their enemy. If Palestine's membership application were to be defeated by a united Western front, the world would be confronted by a fundamental clash of the "West against the Rest", resurrecting memories of the most arrogant and contemptuous periods of Western imperialism and colonialism and confirming the belief, already widespread in the Arab and Muslim worlds, that the Judeo-Christian world is at war with the Muslim world.

Of course, it is within the power of one man to prevent this ugly scenario from playing out. Are the prospects of a few more votes for himself and less campaign money for his eventual Republican opponent really more important to America's multi-racial president than preventing a long-running clash of civilizations, cultures, races and religions and permitting -- indeed, promoting -- progress toward a more peaceful, just and harmonious world?

The world should find out in the coming weeks.

- John V. Whitbeck is an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=17144

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[ePalestine] TEXT: President Abbas speech in UNGA Sept 23 2011

2011-09-23T12:02:00.000-07:00

http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=17480
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[ePalestine] New Docu Trailer: "Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists - A MUST WATCH

2011-09-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

‘Forward’s ad director says he’s chosen not to visit Israel because it’s gone ‘so far afield’

by Philip Weiss on September 13, 2011

New Documentary Trailer: "Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists

http://mondoweiss.net/2011/09/forwards-ad-director-says-he-wont-visit-israel- because-its-gone-so-far-afield.html

Labels belong on clothes, not people,

Sam

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[ePalestine] Cleveland Plain Dealer: Palestinian U.N. bid teaches us about America: Sam Bahour

2011-09-18T02:35:00.000-07:00

Plain Dealer

Published: Sunday, September 18, 2011

Palestinian U.N. bid teaches us about America: Sam Bahour

http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/09/palestinian_un_bid_teaches_us.html

Consider leaving a comment at the Plain Dealer site.

also, in the Guardian :

Saturday 17 September 2011

Daily life in the occupied Palestinian territories — in pictures

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/gallery/2011/sep/17/palestinian-territories- levene?CMP=twt_gu#/?picture=379159707&index=6

Pics #7 and 8...that's my girl! Go AREEN Go!

One people, in struggle, generation after generation, until total freedom and independence!

Sam

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[ePalestine] Dozens of Israelis questioned at length upon landing in Turkey

2011-09-05T03:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/dozens-of-israelis-questioned-at-length-upon-landing-in- turkey-1.382629

What goes around, comes around...,

Sam

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[ePalestine] Looking for a business that’s Arab-free? Try Yellow Pages!

2011-09-03T23:25:00.000-07:00

Only in the only democracy in the Middle East, NOT!

http://972mag.com/yp1/

Racism will never have a right to exist,

Sam

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[ePalestine] UNRWA: Beyond the Myths (By Chris Gunness)

2011-08-30T23:53:00.000-07:00

The Huffington Post

UNRWA: Beyond the Myths

By Chris Gunness, UNRWA Spokesman

Posted: 8/30/11 09:29 AM ET

As debate intensifies over the anticipated Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN in September, many column inches have been devoted to UNRWA, the Agency mandated by the General Assembly to offer education, health, relief and social services to Palestinian refugees until a just and lasting resolution of their plight is achieved. Some commentators have focused on neutrality issues around UNRWA, its staff, its installations and its education programs. Also, UNRWA has been accused of "perpetuating the refugee situation" and the question has been asked "why not dissolve UNRWA and hand the refugees over to UNHCR which would resettle them?"

The alleged issues around neutrality are founded on discredited myths and misunderstandings. Most important, they fail to take account of the neutrality work which the Agency undertakes. The critiques of UNRWA's alleged role as a "perpetuator of the refugee situation" fail to grasp the fact that UNRWA's work is consistent with established international refugee law and practice and that the Agency's mandate to protect and assist refugees, as exclusively granted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, will remain in effect until its parent body decides otherwise.

Neutrality

UNRWA imposes the strictest standards of neutrality on its staff, beneficiaries, suppliers and installations that go well beyond those of many comparable organizations and even governments. From recruitment to separation there are a broad range of Agency processes and mechanisms to ensure staff neutrality. Every six months, staff names are checked against the UN 1267 Sanctions Committee list of terrorists and terrorist entities. There have been no matches. Annually lists of all staff are provided to, for example, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

UNRWA conducts six-monthly checks of the names of all suppliers and other payees against the 1267 list. There have been no matches. With regard to UNRWA installations, in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, UNRWA's Operations Support Officer Programme, a team of specially tasked officials, conducts regular installation inspections. The Agency protests armed incursions into its installations by the Israel Defense Force and Palestinian militants. There is a strict no weapons policy in UNRWA installations. Inappropriate conduct triggers Agency investigations and can result in the denial of discretionary assistance such as burial expenses, shelter rehabilitation or re-housing assistance. In addition, the gravest accusations made by UNRWA's critics have been shown to be unfounded upon investigation. The repeated claim during the Gaza war that there were militants in our installations is perhaps the most notable high profile recent example.

All the above neutrality measures are underpinned by internal and external oversight and auditing. Moreover, we report regularly on all the above to our donors, including the United States who conduct their own regular reviews. The support for the work of UNRWA from the governments of the US and Israel speaks for itself.

Likewise, our curriculum and text books have been subjected to independent review. UNRWA in the West Bank and Gaza uses the books of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, which makes sense given that we are preparing students for public exams. A US State Department review of the text books used by UNRWA found them to be free of incitement, that the curriculum was "peaceful" and one in which "religious and political tolerance was emphasized".

Critiques of UNRWA's role

The other set of arguments advanced against UNRWA is based on the fanciful notion that UNRWA itself and its approach to its work are per se the reason for the continuing existence of Palestinian refugees. Therefore, as the false argument goes, Palestinian refugees and the issues they represent would disappear if UNRWA were dissolved and the refugees became the responsibility of another agency such as UNHCR. These notions have no foundation. They are contradicted by the established principles and practice of international law and by the realities of the Israel- Palestinian conflict and its political context.

Like many other refugee populations, Palestinian refugees emerged from circumstances of armed conflict, forced displacement and dispossession of land. To the present day, and particularly in the occupied Palestinian territory, their state of exile is compounded by human rights violations, intra-Palestinian tensions and economic deprivation. Palestinian refugees continue to be refugees because the issues which caused their exile remain outstanding. Only by addressing in a just and durable fashion the underlying causes of conflict -- and by doing so in accordance with international law and the rights of refugees -- can the refugee issue be laid to rest. This is the responsibility of the parties and international political actors. It is wishful, cynical thinking to suppose that Palestinian refugees can be made to "go away" by dispersing them around the globe or by dissolving the Agency established to protect and assist them pending a just and lasting solution to their plight.

In addressing the Palestinian refugee issue, agencies and actors are guided by various considerations and frames of reference which are integral to the international framework of protecting and assisting refugees, including Palestinian refugees. These include established principles that are of universal application and must be observed by all, including UNRWA or any other agency or actor seized with the Palestinian refugee issue. Those who critique UNRWA's role conveniently ignore these considerations.

In the context of seeking solutions to refugee situations, one such consideration is the importance refugees attach to voluntarily returning to the country from which they originally took flight. In the global context, voluntary repatriation is generally referred to as the "preferred choice" of refugees. A pertinent reference is Article 13 (2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which states that, "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his country."

Another relevant and universally recognized principle is that refugees and their dependants retain their status as refugees until such time that a just and lasting solution to their plight is realized. That some refugee situations (for example, the situation of groups of refugees from Western Sahara, Burundi, Somalia, Myanmar and Afghanistan) are described as "protracted" reflects this recognition. Given that this principle (the principle of family unity") is universally recognized and implemented, there is no basis to question the reality that Palestinian refugees have for generations been compelled by circumstances, to retain their refugee status. Such questions betray a lack of understanding of the international protection regime and serve only to distract from the need to address the real reasons for the protracted Palestinian refugee situation, namely the absence of negotiated solution to the underlying political issues.

Let me conclude by saying that UNRWA will continue to advocate for the full protection of the human rights of Palestinian refugees as required by UN resolutions and international law. We will continue to advocate for a resolution of their plight in the context of a just and lasting peace, agreed by the parties in consultation with the refugees, whose freely exercised and informed choices must be respected. It is the failure of the parties to reach such a peace that has led to the perpetuation of the refugee question, not UNRWA's continued service provision, without which hundreds of thousands of the most disadvantaged people in the Middle East would be deprived of essential services - a situation that would hardly advance regional stability. Meanwhile, we will continue with our human development work in education, health, relief and social services, thus contributing to calm in the communities in which refugees live.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-gunness/unrwa-beyond-the-myths_b_941669.html?view=screen

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[ePalestine] Wikileaks: 09JERUSALEM1830, ABSENCE OF ISRAELI VISAS HINDERS WEST BANK

2011-08-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

"The lack of clarity and flexibility at crossings for international workers in the West Bank, coupled with the continued use of the "PA-only" stamp, hampers the ability of companies and NGOs in the West Bank to hire and retain the talent they need."

To read full cable: http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/10/09JERUSALEM1830.html

Issue has been cabled until all blue in the face. Question remains, what will they do about it?!

Stop the charades of making peace,

Sam

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[ePalestine] Ma'an: UN bid 'endangers Palestinian rights'

2011-08-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

Ma'an

UN bid 'endangers Palestinian rights'

Today (Last Update) Time 15:40

BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- The Palestinian team responsible for preparing the United Nations initiative in September has been given an independent legal opinion that reveals a high risk involved with its plan to join the UN.

An initiative to transfer the Palestinians' representation from the PLO to a state will terminate the legal status held by the PLO in the UN since 1975 that it is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, according to the document.

Crucially, there will no longer be an institution that can represent the inalienable rights of the entire Palestinian people in the UN and related international institutions, according to the brief.

Representation for the right to self-determination will be gravely affected, as it is a right of all Palestinians, both inside and outside the homeland, the legal opinion says. This change in status will severely disenfranchise the right of refugees to return to their homes and properties from which they were displaced.

The seven-page legal opinion, obtained by Ma'an, was submitted to the Palestinian side by Guy Goodwin-Gill, a professor of public international law at Oxford University and a member of the team that won the 2004 non-binding judgement by the International Court of Justice that the route of Israel's wall was illegal.

The Palestinian team, headed by Saeb Erekat, has been preparing an initiative that involves the replacement of the PLO at the UN, substituting it with the State of Palestine as the representative of the Palestinian people.

As an actual state will not be created in September, as Israel's occupation continues, the debate is focused on whether membership should be requested from the Security Council or if the General Assembly should be asked to grant recognition of the state as "observer," a status that conveys less than full UN membership.

Yet, no consideration of the dramatic legal implications for Palestinian rights have been discussed, which this legal brief says will occur if the PLO loses its status.

The brief is to "flag the matters requiring attention" so that a substantial amount of people who have interests in the right of return, for example, are not "accidentally disenfranchised."

The prospect of substituting the PLO with the State of Palestine raises "constitutional" problems in that they engage the Palestinian National Charter and the organization and entities which make up the PLO, he writes. Secondly, "the question of the 'capacity' of the State of Palestine effectively to take on the role and responsibilities of the PLO in the UN; and thirdly, the question of popular representation," the opinion says.

Due to the constitutional structure of the PLO and the history of the Palestinian Authority, which was established by the PLO as a short-term, administrative entity, the PA "has limited legislative and executive competence, limited territorial jurisdiction, and limited personal jurisdiction over Palestinians not present in the areas for which it has been accorded responsibility," it says.

The brief says the PA "is a subsidiary body, competent only to exercise those powers conferred on it by the Palestinian National Council. By definition, it does not have the capacity to assume greater powers."

It cannot "'dissolve' its parent body, or otherwise to establish itself independently of the Palestinian National Council and the PLO. Moreover, it is the PLO and the Palestinian National Council which derive their legitimacy from the fact that they represent all sectors of the displaced Palestinian people, no matter where they presently live or have refuge."

Particularly crucial are the potential implications for Palestinians in the Diaspora. The majority of Palestinians are refugees, and all of them are represented by the PLO through the PNC.

"They constitute more than half of the people of Palestine, and if they are 'disenfranchised' and lose their representation in the UN, it will not only prejudice their entitlement to equal representation ... but also their ability to vocalise their views, to participate in matters of national governance, including the formation and political identity of the State, and to exercise the right of return," the legal briefing says.

Karma Nabulsi, a former PLO representative and now a professor at Oxford University, says she is familiar with the document. Palestinian officials have also seen the legal opinion, she says.

"Without question, no Palestinian will accept losing such core rights for such a limited diplomatic initiative in September," she says. "First, we will not have liberated territory upon which to establish a State. But in losing the PLO as the sole legitimate representative at the UN, our people immediately lose our claims as refugees to be part of our official representation, recognized by the world.

"This is an urgent and critical issue for our whole people. We must ensure our representatives advance our rights in international forum, not weaken or endanger them. Of course now that the legal dangers have been raised so fully, I am confident the initiative will protect the status of the PLO as sole legitimate representative in the UN in order to advance the rights" of the Palestinian people.

She says Goodwin-Gill has defined and clarified the "red lines" in legal terms.

"The PLO is the representative of the people, not just a part of the people; the PLO is the architect and creator of the Palestinian Authority; that any change in who represents the people or a part of the people requires an expression of the popular will and international recognition," she explained.

"Neither the Palestinian Authority nor the PLO can alter the role and structure of the PLO without the agreement of the entire Palestinian people. In any case, the PLO and the Palestinian people were not aware that by losing the PLO as representative at the UN, it would create such legal dangers. Now they are."

She concluded: "Obviously, we need clarity from the PLO on this critical issue, and it is important that the Palestinian public everywhere, especially the refugees in the shatat, are given concrete reassurances that representation of their core rights -- on both representation and right of return -- will remain untouched in September."

Source: http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=415804

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[ePalestine] Vindicator: Looking for ways to cut budget? Start with the billions given to Israel (Hanna Kassis)

2011-08-13T22:58:00.000-07:00

The Vindicator (Yougstown, Ohio)

Looking for ways to cut budget? Start with the billions given to Israel

Published: Sun, August 14, 2011

Finally some type of debt agreement has been reached — a pitiful one, to say the least — and the S&P rating agency and stock market apparently agree. This was a terrible debt agreement, but we must take it in stride, and I commend Congressman Tim Ryan for voting against it.

As expected, conversations and debates have already begun about where we should be cutting our spending. Here’s an unlikely suggestion, recently proposed by the Tea Party: cut foreign aid to Israel. At the very least, until they comply with U.S. demands. As an American living in Palestine through November, the waste of our tax dollars by Israel could not be any more obvious.

Several estimates of the total amount of funding the U.S. has given Israel since 1948 range from of $109-120 billion. Direct foreign aid is currently over $3 billion a year, in addition to several billions in direct military funding. Contrary to U.S. policy, Israel is the sole country that is permitted to use 25 percent of the billions in military aid received from the United States to purchase directly from their own weapons manufacturers. Because of this, Israel has become one of the world’s largest exporters of fire arms, often selling to entities the U.S. prohibits arms sales to; for instance, China.

It is true that Israel is only one of many nations (by far the largest recipient) currently receiving foreign aid. But there’s a catch: other nations comply with U.S. demands, whereas Israel does not. American economic assistance allows the Israeli government to allocate part of its budget to the advancement and maintenance of illegal Israeli colonies in the West Bank, many of which, according to Israeli military figures and Palestinian records, are built on privately owned Palestinian land. These colonies have been deemed illegal by many international bodies, and in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, they are “illegitimate.” Over 500,000 individuals from Brooklyn, Europe, Russia and other pockets of the world have illegally colonized this land.

With unemployment at 9.1 percent, a severely weak economic recovery, and now a budget that’s going to cut spending right when we need it most, it is every American’s patriotic duty to question where our money is going, and to whom it is going. Unfortunately, the United States has a double standard on this policy of foreign aid: when the Palestinians announced they want to seek independence at the U.N. in September from the illegal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, President Obama threatened to cut off funding because the Palestinians were “avoiding negotiations.” Yet we continue to fund Israel.

Where is the value added? As an economics professor, I tend to view things through the cost-benefit lens: the political and economic costs of funding Israel far outweigh the benefits.

Hanna Kassis, Birzeit

The writer is a Girard native living temporarily in Birzeit in the West Bank.

http://www.vindy.com/news/2011/aug/14/looking-for-ways-to-cut-budget-start-wit/

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[ePalestine] Nurit Peled-Elhanan's new book, exposing the racism of Israel's education system

2011-08-13T00:46:00.000-07:00

Jewish Peace News

Friday, August 12, 2011

Nurit Peled-Elhanan's new book, exposing the racism of Israel' s education system.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a long time peace activist and an academic, has just got her book "Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education" published by I.B. Tauris. Part of the publisher's description of the book: "She analyzes the presentation of images, maps, layouts and use of language in History, Geography and Civic Studies textbooks, and reveals how the books might be seen to marginalize Palestinians, legitimize Israeli military action and reinforce Jewish-Israeli territorial identity.

Full story: http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/2011/08/nurit-peled-elhanans-new-book-exposing.html

and don't miss the link to her interview at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t91McXHxiXY ( 8:48min)

Book may be ordered at:

http://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Israeli-School-Books-Propaganda/dp/1845118138

Racist educational indoctrination is a form of state terrorism,

Sam

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[ePalestine] Pianist Rich Siegel - "In Palestine"

2011-08-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

Please listen to the end. After the song he explains how he moved from a benig Zionist to seeing reality. Very moving.

http://www.vimeo.com/6630724

My thanks to Maha, my good friend in Gaza for passing this along.

Rgds,

Sam

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[ePalestine] Guardian: Palestinians will soon come full circle (by Sam Bahour)

2011-08-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

To comment on this article visit this link today: http://bit.ly/oBQQ0M

guardian.co.uk

Palestinians will soon come full circle

Years have been wasted making concessions to their colonisers. Palestinians were right to call for a secular state at the outset

Sam Bahour

Thursday 4 August 2011 09.00 BST

The Palestinian national liberation movement has reached its end. As the Palestinian leadership – if there is such a legitimate body today – prepares to bring the issue of statehood to the UN this September, the weeks and months ahead will witness the last desperate attempt to get the international community to assume their responsibilities and ensure that a Palestinian state becomes a reality in the occupied territories.

The reasons for the failure of the Palestinian national liberation movement are many. First and foremost, the shellshock that the creation of Israel caused among Palestinians in 1948 has never really gone away. Half of the Palestinian population at the time were displaced from their homes.

Those that refused to flee are today citizens of Israel – a citizenship that was not requested, but rather imposed upon them – and comprise more than 1.2 million people, Muslims and Christians.

As if the forced dispossession from 78% of their homeland was not enough, the Israeli military occupied the remaining parts of Palestine in 1967. Israel had planned for that occupation long before the war. Military occupation is, by definition, regarded as a temporary state of affairs – and one would be stretching the definition to the point of fantasy to consider Israel's presence in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as still temporary after 44 years. Reality is much more accurately described as the crime of apartheid than that of military occupation.

Beginning in the early 1970s, the Palestinians became, as former Palestinian diplomat Afif Safieh put it, "unreasonably reasonable". Year after year the Palestinian leadership offered concession after concession, trying to reach an equitable resolution to their dispossession and military occupation.

This seemingly never-ending chain of concessions culminated in what is known as the 1993 Oslo peace accords. These accords were a seriously lopsided bilateral agreement between the PLO and Israel, which attempted to bring the parties to a "final status agreement" within five years.

The Oslo accords kept the system of military occupation in place and simply codified the unsustainable imbalance between an occupying power (Israel) and an occupied people (the Palestinians). The accords failed, miserably and multiple times. Not only did a final agreement never happen, but today we are further from a two-state solution than ever before. No amount of 11th-hour wordsmithing by Barack Obama or Binyamin Netanyahu around reviving negotiations by setting a starting point for discussing borders is acceptable. Past procrastination has only created irreparable damage on the ground invoking a dire need for an end game, not yet another starting point.

After struggling to revive the peace process for two decades, the Palestinians have lost faith in the process as well as in those tasked with overseeing it, namely the Quartet – United States, Russia, the EU and the UN. For the entire period of the peace process, Israel ploughed forward with more land confiscations, more settlement building, more death and more destruction.

Any honest observer would reach a clear conclusion that Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians to create a new reality on the ground towards a feasible, workable resolution of the crisis. Nor are the powers that be, namely the US and EU, serious about ending the conflict on the basis of international law. Diplomacy has utterly failed the Palestinians, leaving them with less land and less water, more fragmented, poorer, in disunity, and with fading hopes.

The drama unfolding as we head towards September revolves around a simple equation. Those who claim to be the Palestinian leadership have no more tricks up their sleeves to justify remaining in negotiations with their occupier. Thus, they are taking what is being portrayed as a strategic move to apply for membership of the state of Palestine in the UN.

The underlying political fact they are trying to re-establish is that the resolution to this seemingly insoluble conflict is two states, Israel and Palestine, based on UN general assembly resolution 181, which in 1947 partitioned Palestine (illegally, I might add).

This move gets an "A" for effort but is doomed to fail even if Palestine is admitted into the UN this year, next year, in five years or not at all. The realities on the ground have changed drastically since 1947. Israel, with blind US support, has succeeded in removing a two-state solution from the feasible options.

The new Palestinian leaders, those whom the Israeli negotiators have not yet met, see the larger picture and refuse to believe that Israel desires to live in peace when every indication for 64 years has shown the opposite. The emerging Palestinian leaders see Israel for what it is: a settler, colonial, apartheid movement clinging to a racialist, exclusivist ideology that neither wishes nor intends to allow another state to emerge between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river, let alone allowing Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and be compensated for their hardships, as was stipulated as a condition when the UN accepted Israel as a member state on 11 May 1949.

Once this foredoomed move toward Palestinian membership in the UN runs its course, a new paradigm will take root, one that Israel dreads because it implicitly views Palestinians and Israelis as equals, as co-citizens, as partners. This new shift will see Palestinians dropping their desire for independent statehood in a fraction of their historic homeland and instead will find them, within a genuinely representative political structure, articulating their desire for self-determination within their historic homeland, even if that homeland today is called Israel.

The Palestinians are about to come full circle. They were correct, painfully so, to call for a secular democratic state at the outset of this conflict. Sadly, they wasted precious time and lost too many lives trying to accept unjust modalities of a resolution.

Now, the sooner Palestinians and Israelis realise that our destiny is to live together as equals, the sooner we can begin to rehabilitate our communities and build a single society whose citizens are all equal under law and equal as human beings.

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[ePalestine] The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide

2011-07-31T05:13:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide ( http://www.amazon.com/Other-Side-Israel-Journey- Across/dp/0385514565/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1 ).

Highly recommended, especially to my Jewish friends, and even more so to any Jewish foes out there.

Equality=Sustainable,

Sam

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[ePalestine] NYT: Where Politics Are Complex, Simple Joys at the Beach

2011-07-27T02:36:00.000-07:00

The New York Times

July 26, 2011

Where Politics Are Complex, Simple Joys at the Beach

By ETHAN BRONNER

TEL AVIV — Skittish at first, then wide-eyed with delight, the women and girls entered the sea, smiling, splashing and then joining hands, getting knocked over by the waves, throwing back their heads and ultimately laughing with joy.

Most had never seen the sea before.

The women were Palestinians from the southern part of the West Bank, which is landlocked, and Israel does not allow them in. They risked criminal prosecution, along with the dozen Israeli women who took them to the beach. And that, in fact, was part of the point: to protest what they and their hosts consider unjust laws.

In the grinding rut of Israeli-Palestinian relations — no negotiations, mutual recriminations, growing distance and dehumanization — the illicit trip was a rare event that joined the simplest of pleasures with the most complex of politics. It showed why coexistence here is hard, but also why there are, on both sides, people who refuse to give up on it.

“What we are doing here will not change the situation,” said Hanna Rubinstein, who traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part. “But it is one more activity to oppose the occupation. One day in the future, people will ask, like they did of the Germans: ‘Did you know?’ And I will be able to say, ‘I knew. And I acted.’ ”

Such visits began a year ago as the idea of one Israeli, and have blossomed into a small, determined movement of civil disobedience.

Ilana Hammerman, a writer, translator and editor, had been spending time in the West Bank learning Arabic when a girl there told her she was desperate to get out, even for a day. Ms. Hammerman, 66, a widow with a grown son, decided to smuggle her to the beach. The resulting trip, described in an article she wrote for the weekend magazine of the newspaper Haaretz, prompted other Israeli women to invite her to speak, and led to the creation of a group they call We Will Not Obey. It also led a right-wing organization to report her to the police, who summoned her for questioning.

In a newspaper advertisement, the group of women declared: “We cannot assent to the legality of the Law of Entry into Israel, which allows every Israeli and every Jew to move freely in all regions between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River while depriving Palestinians of this same right. They are not permitted free movement within the occupied territories nor are they allowed into the towns and cities across the green line, where their families, their nation, and their traditions are deeply rooted.

“They and we, all ordinary citizens, took this step with a clear and resolute mind. In this way we were privileged to experience one of the most beautiful and exciting days of our lives, to meet and befriend our brave Palestinian neighbors, and together with them, to be free women, if only for one day.”

The police have questioned 28 Israeli women; their cases are pending. So far, none of the Palestinian women and girls have been caught or questioned by the police.

The beach trip last week followed a pattern: the Palestinian women went in disguise, which meant removing clothes rather than covering up. They sat in the back seats of Israeli cars driven by middle-aged Jewish women and took off headscarves and long gowns. As the cars drove through an Israeli Army checkpoint, everyone just waved.

Earlier, the Israelis had dropped off toys and equipment at the home of one of the Palestinian women, who is setting up a kindergarten. The Israelis also help the Palestinian women with medical and legal troubles.

Israel’s military, which began limiting Palestinian movement into Israel two decades ago to prevent terrorism at a time of violent uprisings, is in charge of issuing permits for Palestinian visits to Israel. About 60,000 will be issued this year, twice the number for 2010 but still a token amount for a population of 2.5 million. Ms. Hammerman views the permits as the paperwork of colonialist bureaucrats — to be resisted, not indulged. Others have attacked her for picking and choosing which laws she will and will not obey.

The Palestinian visitors came with complicated histories. In most of their families the men have been locked up at some point. For example, Manal, who had never been to the sea before, is 36, the mother of three and pregnant; five of her brothers are in Israeli prisons, and another was killed when he entered a settler religious academy armed with a knife.

She brought with her an unsurprising stridency. “This is all ours,” she said in Tel Aviv. She did not go home a Zionist, but in the course of the day her views seemed to grow more textured — or less certain — as she found comfort in the company of Israeli women who said that they, too, had a home on this land.

Another visitor lives in a refugee camp with her husband and children. Her husband’s family does not approve of her visits (“ ‘How can you be with the Jews?’ they ask me. ‘Are you a collaborator?’ ”) but she did not hide the relief she felt at leaving her overcrowded camp for a day of friends and fun.

The beach trips — seven so far — have produced some tense moments. An effort to generate interest in a university library fell flat. An invitation to spend the night met with rejection by Palestinian husbands and fathers. Home-cooked Israeli food did not make a big impression. And at a predominantly Jewish beach, a policeman made everyone nervous.

So, on this latest visit, the selected beach was one in Jaffa that is frequented by Israeli Arabs. Nobody noticed the visitors.

Dinner was a surprise. Hagit Aharoni, a psychotherapist and the wife of the celebrity chef Yisrael Aharoni, is a member of the organizing group, so the beachgoers dined on the roof of the Aharonis’ home, five floors above stylish Rothschild Boulevard, where hundreds of tents are currently pitched by Israelis angry with the high cost of housing. The guests loved Mr. Aharoni’s cooking. They lighted cigarettes — something they cannot do in public at home — and put on joyous Palestinian music. As the pink sun set over the Mediterranean, they danced with their Israeli friends.

Ms. Aharoni was asked her thoughts. She replied: “For 44 years, we have occupied another country. I am 53, which means most of my life I have been an occupier. I don’t want to be an occupier. I am engaged in an illegal act of disobedience. I am not Rosa Parks, but I admire her, because she had the courage to break a law that was not right.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/world/middleeast/27swim.html?_r=1

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[ePalestine] Richmond Times-Dispatch: Why does state give Israel special treatment?

2011-07-24T23:13:00.000-07:00

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Why does state give Israel special treatment?

By DONALD RALLIS, RANJIT SINGH, NABIL AL-TIKRITI

Published: July 24, 2011

These are tough economic times for the nation and for Virginia. Like the federal and all other state governments, the Commonwealth has been cutting costs wherever it can, and our citizens are feeling the effects of these cuts. In May, Governor McDonnell sent an e-mail to all state employees, asking for our suggestions on ways of saving money.

Just as cuts are necessary in tough times, it also makes sense to make a special effort to encourage investment from outside the Commonwealth. The Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP) exists specifically for this purpose, and its website justifiably boasts that more than 700 internationally owned businesses from 45 countries operate in Virginia, have over the past 10 years invested $5.6 billion and employ more than 150,000 Virginians.

Against this background, it is puzzling that the Commonwealth has a separate advisory board to encourage investment from only one of the 190-plus countries in the world, apparently duplicating the work of the VEDP. That country is Israel — the 18th-largest foreign investor in Virginia. (Israeli companies have over the past decade created 1,134 new jobs in the state, less than 0.8 percent of the total number of jobs attributable to foreign investors.)

According to its website, the Virginia Israel Advisory Board (VIAB) shows potential Israeli investors "how operating in Virginia will provide a host of opportunities for your business and make you successful." Last year, the VIAB cost Virginia taxpayers $134,173, including a salary of $85,225 for its director (itemized on the publicly available list of state employees and their salaries).

What is puzzling, though, is why — in times when the Commonwealth us cutting back on core services such as education and health care — it is spending more than $134,000 for an advisory board focusing on only one country. There is no special office to encourage investments from Japan, our largest foreign investor, nor for any of the other top 10 investors in the state. Only Israel warrants a special state advisory board.

This all raises two important sets of issues. The first relates specifically to Virginia's budget. Supporters of the VIAB argue that it has more than paid for itself in the investments it has brought to Virginia. If that is indeed the case, and the VIAB model works, then surely we should be sparing no effort to set up similar advisory boards for other countries — or at the very least for the 17 countries that invest more in Virginia than Israel does.

If VIAB is redundant, then eliminate it. If it works, duplicate its approach in attracting investment from other countries. Either way, the Commonwealth would benefit economically.

The second issue is specific to Israel. Why and how did the commonwealth select Israel alone for special treatment, and the promotion of Israeli investments? Some of the country's policies and practices, particularly with regard to the occupation of the Palestinian territories, are in clear violation of international law (and recognized as such by the rest of the world, including the U.S.). Have any of the investors VIAB has worked with operated in the illegally occupied territories?

If Virginia chooses to have a special relationship with Israel, and to have a well-paid director of the VIAB on its official payroll, taxpayers at least deserve a clear explanation of why this is the case.

Donald Rallis is an associate professor of geography, Nabil Al-Tikriti is associate professor of history, and Ranjit Singh is associate professor of political science and international affairs, all at the University of Mary Washington.

To leave a comment see article at: http://bit.ly/mSSSjY

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[ePalestine] America’s attempted Quartet sophistry (By Daniel Levy)

2011-07-23T01:34:00.000-07:00

America's attempted Quartet sophistry

By Daniel Levy

Friday, July 22, 2011

For a solid analysis read at: http://bit.ly/nnwN8t

Enough is enough,

Sam

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[ePalestine] Taybeh - The only Palestinian Brewery - BBC Middle East Business Report

2011-07-16T04:52:00.000-07:00

See: http://youtu.be/LBN-iXgTaQw

Economic survival is resistance,

Sam

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TEDxRamallah - Sam Bahour سام بحّور - Refugees Waiting

2011-07-11T09:31:00.000-07:00

[ePalestine] TEDxRamallah - Sam Bahour - Refugees Waiting

2011-07-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCLQICeZMq4

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[ePalestine] Haaretz: Separation anxiety (by Gideon Levy)

2011-07-09T03:54:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

As you read this human story, keep in mind the names of a few others that Israel has recently denied entry to the occupied Palestinian territory: Prof. Noam Chomsky, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 39th President of the United States Jimmy Carter, Prof. Norman Finkelstein, Judge Richard Goldstone, United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Falk, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire...and many more common folk.

We must also not forget the thousands of internally displaced Palestinians living INSIDE Israel where ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages such as Iqrit, Bir'am and al-Ghabsiyya got several Israeli High Court decisions (in the 50's) permitting them to return home, which for them is literally dozens of meters away from where they currently live, only to be denied their right to return home by the Israeli military. So much for the Israeli (in)justice system.

Everyone will come home, eventually,

Sam

---

Haaretz - Published 14:02 01.07.11

Twilight Zone / Separation anxiety

Because Israel has prevented any form of family unification in the territories since 2009, mothers and fathers are torn from each other and from their children.

By Gideon Levy

A few days ago, the Allenby Bridge between Jordan and the West Bank was again the site of one of those almost routine heartrending scenes about which Israelis are blissfully ignorant. Exactly two weeks ago, Nasser Daoud accompanied his wife and their four children to the border crossing. The wife and mother, Manal Mahamra, was returning with the children to their home in the village of Al-Karmel in the south Hebron hills. Nasser, the husband and father, was parting from them for another year of tears, sadness, longing, wrenching phone calls and worry. Just before they were separated, the father promised he would join the family soon.

Just after the parting, the only daughter, Dana, a lovely girl of 10, implored one of the officers on the Israeli side of the bridge: "Uncle, bring my father." But Dana knew, her father knew and the Israeli uncle-officer knew, too, that Dana's begging would fall on deaf ears and an even deafer heart. Israel prohibits their father from living at home with them. Manal Mahamra and family - Daniel Bar-Or - July 2011

Since the current right-wing government took power in Israel, family unifications in the West Bank have stopped. Hardly anyone writes about this, no one takes an interest, but under cover of that lack of public interest, this draconian measure has sealed the fate of many families: to be torn apart. There are no statistics on the subject, because families have simply stopped applying, knowing there is no chance the application will be granted. Some families have abandoned their homes and relatives in the West Bank and moved to Jordan; the others continue to live a fragmented life in the West Bank, mothers and fathers cut off from their partners and from their children.

The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that the right to family life is a basic right and an integral element of human dignity, but that fundamental declaration crashes on the rocks of Israeli occupation policy.

Immediately after the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel conducted a population census in the West Bank; anyone who was absent on the day of the census lost the right to live in the West Bank. For example, Nasser Daoud's father, from the town of Yatta. He had just completed his studies at a Jordanian university, and five days before the outbreak of the war he went to Amman to collect his B.A. diploma. Unfortunately for him, he was not at home on the critical day, and therefore was fated to spend the rest of his life in exile, along with tens of thousands of others.

He moved to Kuwait, where his son Nasser was born. In the first years of the occupation, first-degree family unification was allowed, but stricter rules came into force after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The approach was that the residents of the territories are in principle not entitled to family unification, and the handful of approvals that were given nonetheless, were considered by the occupying power as acts of gracious kindness.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Jerusalem-based Hamoked - Center for the Defense of the Individual submitted a series of petitions to the High Court of Justice demanding family unification, following which an arbitrary quota was laid down: at first 2,000 approvals a year, then 4,000. The subsequent Oslo accords contained explicit Israeli recognition of what should be self-evident: that marriage justifies family unification.

When the second intifada erupted, in the fall of 2000, Israel completely stopped dealing with all such requests. After the Palestinian elections in 2006, all connection between Israel and the Palestinian Authority regarding family unification was severed. In October 2007, Hamoked again filed a series of petitions in the High Court of Justice, calling for the resumption of family unification. Israel then announced that it would allow family unification as a "political gesture" (wherein lies the "gesture," and what makes it "political"? ) to the government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. As of July 2008, 32,000 requests were approved, but only for families already living in the West Bank who lacked a permit. There was no solution for people living in exile.

Upon the assumption of power of the current right-wing government, in early 2009, family unification requests for the West Bank ceased to be dealt with altogether - which might come as news to those who brag about "improvement" in the conditions of the occupation under the Netanyahu government or under the (imaginary ) control by the PA of civil matters in the West Bank.

Nasser Daoud wanted to be a law-abiding citizen. That was the mistake of his life, a fatal error. In contrast to tens of thousands of Palestinians who remained in the West Bank without papers, he traveled to Jordan in 2000, intending to return legally. His wife and children remained in the family's home in Al-Karmel. Since then, all his requests to return to the West Bank, to the place where his father has a home and land, to the place where his wife and children live, have been turned down.

In 2008, when tens of thousands of requests were momentarily approved, he too was filled with hope. The PA's Ministry for Civil Affairs informed him in an official letter, in the name of President Abbas - "may God protect him," as the letter states - that his request for family unification had been approved. Authorization number: 500012384. That document now lies useless in the family's bag of papers: Israel did not endorse it and Nasser Daoud was not allowed to be reunited with his family.

In 1994, Nasser Daoud arrived in the West Bank from Kuwait, where he was born, to visit his family in Yatta and stayed until 2000. In 1997, he married Manal, from the neighboring village. He is now 37, she is 29, and they have four children: Khalil, 12; Dana, 10; Nur a-Din, 7; and Daoud, 5. The family says that Daoud is named for a Jewish friend of his forebears who lived in Yatta in the 1930s. Dana was 40 days old when her father left for Jordan. He hasn't been back since. Her two younger brothers were born after visits to Jordan by their mother.

For three years the family was completely separated. Then, in 2003, Manal and her children spent a year with their father in Jordan. Nasser lives in a tiny apartment in Amman, barely eking out a living as a peddler of underclothing, constantly harassed by city inspectors. The children had a hard time in Amman, and after a year returned home with their mother. Since then, they have visited their father a few more times for lengthy stays, a few months at a time. Their schooling is erratic, partly in Amman, partly in Al-Karmel.

Two years ago, Manal met Musa Abu Hashhash, the Hebron area fieldworker for B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and sought the organization's help, but to no avail. Last year, the family again moved to Jordan, until they returned to the West Bank two weeks ago. All their belongings are still stuffed into two huge tattered backpacks.

They host us in an uncle's home, apparently ashamed of their own meager dwelling. The mother and the four children now live in one room in the grandparents' home across the street, a shabby room in a shabby flat, with a sheep pen, a chicken coop, garbage and junk in the yard. Nasser's phone number in Jordan is written on the moldy wall. Manal, who obtained a matriculation certificate summa cum laude, did not go on to university because of her uncertain situation. Her mother, Intissar, sighs deeply as she relates this: All her children attended university; only Manal missed out.

Why did they come back again now? Manal says it's because of the children, who feel out of place in their father's slum neighborhood in Amman. Dana, wearing a pink Guess jersey, confirms what her mother says: "Here we know all the children, but in Jordan we don't know anyone." Grandmother Intissar adds that the school in Al-Karmel is better, too. The last time they spoke to their dad was when they were on the bus that took them back to the village, two weeks ago. Nasser just wanted to be sure that they got across the border safely. The phone calls are expensive, so they call only once a month, when Manal's father, Msalem, a schoolteacher, receives his salary. Msalem sighs: his son-in-law has land in Yatta and could build a house for the family here.

Once every six months Nasser submits a request to visit the West Bank to the Israeli Embassy in Amman, for which he pays 25 Jordanian dinars; once every six months his request is rejected. Little Daoud now asks his mother to ask us, the omnipotent Israelis, to bring him his father. Msalem says that all they want is to implement the approval the family received in 2008. He faults the PA for doing nothing to unify his family. Before the family returned, he bought two used beds for his daughter and grandchildren, and a second- or third-hand computer for NIS 200, its innards torn apart. Msalem swears that the fragments of the computer work; he will show us.

No response from the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories was received by press time.

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/twilight-zone-separation-anxiety-1.370698

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[ePalestine] Guardian: Welcome to Palestine – if you can get in (by Sam Bahour)

2011-07-05T06:39:00.000-07:00

guardian.co.uk - Tuesday 5 July 2011 14.05 BST

Welcome to Palestine – if you can get in

Israel's threat to deny visitors entry to Palestine is as disturbing as it is shocking. Our protest will be a civil society tsunami.

Sam Bahour

Palestinians have globally touted an array of rights that Israel systematically denies. There is the right of return, the right of freedom of movement, the right to water, the right to education, the right to enter (not to be confused with refugees' right to return) and so on.

But the right to receive visitors, or lack thereof? This is the most recent addition. The prohibition on freely receiving foreign visitors is as disturbing as it is shocking, especially for a country that claims to be the only beacon of democracy in the Middle East.

Yes, you read correctly. Israel is threatening to refuse to allow Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory to receive visitors from abroad. We are not talking here about visitors such as the 5 million Palestinian refugees whom Israel has refused to allow to return to their homes after being expelled by force and fear when Israel was founded in 1948. Rather, the issue now is that foreigners who desire to visit the occupied Palestinian territory are being denied entry into Israel.

Remember, there is no other way to get to the Palestinian territory of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which is under military occupation by Israel, except by passing through Israeli-controlled points of entry such as Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv or one of Israel's sea ports or land crossings. The entry point to the Gaza Strip from the West Bank requires passage through Israel as well.

So, more than 300 international activists plan to arrive in Tel Aviv during the week of 8 July at the invitation of 30 Palestinian civil society organisations, to participate in an initiative named "Welcome to Palestine". Delegations from France, Great Britain, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, the USA, Japan and several African countries are expected.

Upon arrival at Ben Gurion airport, the invited guests, all from countries that have diplomatic relations with Israel, will make no secret of their intent to go to the occupied Palestinian territory. This nonviolent act, a civil society tsunami of sorts, only comes after Israel's restriction of movement and access to and from Palestine for Palestinians and foreigners has exhausted all established channels that carry the responsibility to uphold international law first and their domestic laws second.

The greatest inaction has come from the US state department, even though it has put on record, multiple times, the fact that Israel is discriminating at its borders against US citizens.

It is also worth noting that the 1951 Israel friendship, commerce and navigation treaty explicitly states: "There shall be freedom of transit through the territories of each Party by the routes most convenient for international transit …" and persons "in transit shall be exempt from … unreasonable charges and requirements; and shall be free from unnecessary delays and restrictions." So much for respecting signed agreements.

Israel, as a state and previously as a Zionist movement, has gone to every extreme to fragment and dispossess the Palestinian people. It has had accomplices every step of the way, starting with Great Britain and continuing to this very day with the US and the flock of UN member states that act more like parakeets to the US than sovereign states when it comes to Palestine.

Well, the game of inaction is coming to an end. When states fail, people take over. It is these people, like those coming to Palestine this week, or those attempting to reach the Israeli- blockaded Gaza Strip by sea, or those living in Palestine and resisting the occupation day in and day out, who will prove to historians once again that history is made of real people who have a keen sense of humanity and the courage to sacrifice.

• Sam Bahour is one of the co-ordinators of the Right to Enter Campaign.

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