Sunday, July 20, 2014
Actions Taken, Refusing Silence
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
From Hannah Safran in Haifa, trying to wake us all:
Ongoing Catastrophe since 1948 - Zochrot statement
For more than 66 years, the Israeli Regime had been violating, systematically and harshly, the human rights of millions of Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the refugee's camps located in the Middle East.
The violent reality we are witnessing these days, that takes a heavy toll from many, especially the Palestinian Refugees, is a direct outcome of a racist regime which established itself based on an ongoing destruction, dispossession, expulsion and occupation, while turning 70% of the Palestinian population into refugees.
Since 1948, the Israeli regime had been denying the Palestinian disaster, its daily harsh implications, and the political and moral rights of the Palestinians to return to their homeland.
Therefore, a back and forth Ad hoc ceasefire solutions will not be enough. Only a fundamental change in the regime, which will be based on taking responsibility on the ongoing crimes of the Nakba and the implementation of the right of return of the Palestinian Refugees will bring about the ending of the violence
זה קורה מאז 1948 - הנכבה עוד נמשכת - עמדת זוכרות
מזה למעלה משישים ושש שנים מפר המשטר הישראלי, בשיטתיות ובבוטות, זכויות אדם של מיליוני פלסטינים בישראל, בגדה המערבית, ברצועת עזה ובמחנות הפליטים במזרח התיכון.
המציאות האלימה שאנו עדות לה בימים אלו, הגובה מחיר כבד מציבורים נרחבים, בראשם הפליטים הפלסטינים, היא תולדה ישירה של משטר גזעני אשר כונן עצמו במעשי גזל, הרס, נישול, עקירה וכיבוש מתמשכים, תוך הפיכה של 70% מהאוכלוסייה הפלסטינית לפליטים.
מאז 1948 מתכחש המשטר הישראלי לאסונם של הפלסטינים, להשלכותיו היומיומיות הקשות, ולזכויותיהם הפוליטיות והמוסריות של הפלסטינים לשוב למולדתם.
לפיכך, הרגעה נקודתית חזור ושנה של הלחימה אינה מספקת. רק שינוי מהותי במשטר המבוסס על לקיחת אחריות על הנכבה המתמשכת ומימוש זכות השיבה של הפליטים הפלסטינים יביא לסיום האלימות.
מזה למעלה משישים ושש שנים מפר המשטר הישראלי, בשיטתיות ובבוטות, זכויות אדם של מיליוני פלסטינים בישראל, בגדה המערבית, ברצועת עזה ובמחנות הפליטים במזרח התיכון.
המציאות האלימה שאנו עדות לה בימים אלו, הגובה מחיר כבד מציבורים נרחבים, בראשם הפליטים הפלסטינים, היא תולדה ישירה של משטר גזעני אשר כונן עצמו במעשי גזל, הרס, נישול, עקירה וכיבוש מתמשכים, תוך הפיכה של 70% מהאוכלוסייה הפלסטינית לפליטים.
מאז 1948 מתכחש המשטר הישראלי לאסונם של הפלסטינים, להשלכותיו היומיומיות הקשות, ולזכויותיהם הפוליטיות והמוסריות של הפלסטינים לשוב למולדתם.
לפיכך, הרגעה נקודתית חזור ושנה של הלחימה אינה מספקת. רק שינוי מהותי במשטר המבוסס על לקיחת אחריות על הנכבה המתמשכת ומימוש זכות השיבה של הפליטים הפלסטינים יביא לסיום האלימות.
النكبة المستمرة منذ عام 1948 - بيان جمعية ذاكرات
منذ أكثر من ستة وستين عامًا يُخلّ النظام الإسرائيليّ، بمنهجية وفظاظة، بحقوق الإنسان الخاصّة بملايين الفِلَسطينيين في إسرائيل، في الضفة الغربية، في قطاع غزة، وفي مخيمات اللاجئين في الشرق الأوسط.
إنّ الواقع الأليم الذي نشهده في هذه الأيام، والذي يجني ثمنًا باهظًا من مجتمعات واسعة، وعلى رأسهم اللاجئون الفِلَسطينيون، إنّما هو نتاج مباشر لنظام عنصريّ أنشأ نفسه من خلال أعمال متواصلة من النهب، الهدم، السلب، الاقتلاع، والاحتلال، حيث جعل 70% من المجتمع الفِلَسطينيّ لاجئين.
منذ عام 1948 ينكر النظام الإسرائيليّ كارثة الفِلَسطينيين، إسقاطاتها اليومية الخطيرة، وحقوق الفِلَسطينيين السياسية والأخلاقية في العودة إلى وطنهم.
وبناء عليه، إنّ التهدئة الموضعية، مِرارًا وتَكرارًا، للقتال، ليست كافية. بل إنّ التغيير الجوهريّ في النظام، فقط، المبنيّ على أساس تحمّل المسؤولية عن النكبة المتواصلة وإجراء حقّ العودة للاجئين الفِلَسطينيين، سيؤدّي إلى إنهاء العنف.
منذ أكثر من ستة وستين عامًا يُخلّ النظام الإسرائيليّ، بمنهجية وفظاظة، بحقوق الإنسان الخاصّة بملايين الفِلَسطينيين في إسرائيل، في الضفة الغربية، في قطاع غزة، وفي مخيمات اللاجئين في الشرق الأوسط.
إنّ الواقع الأليم الذي نشهده في هذه الأيام، والذي يجني ثمنًا باهظًا من مجتمعات واسعة، وعلى رأسهم اللاجئون الفِلَسطينيون، إنّما هو نتاج مباشر لنظام عنصريّ أنشأ نفسه من خلال أعمال متواصلة من النهب، الهدم، السلب، الاقتلاع، والاحتلال، حيث جعل 70% من المجتمع الفِلَسطينيّ لاجئين.
منذ عام 1948 ينكر النظام الإسرائيليّ كارثة الفِلَسطينيين، إسقاطاتها اليومية الخطيرة، وحقوق الفِلَسطينيين السياسية والأخلاقية في العودة إلى وطنهم.
وبناء عليه، إنّ التهدئة الموضعية، مِرارًا وتَكرارًا، للقتال، ليست كافية. بل إنّ التغيير الجوهريّ في النظام، فقط، المبنيّ على أساس تحمّل المسؤولية عن النكبة المتواصلة وإجراء حقّ العودة للاجئين الفِلَسطينيين، سيؤدّي إلى إنهاء العنف.
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Monday, July 14, 2014
As They Lay Dying
How can any Jew live with what is happening to the people of Gaza now? People being told to run for their lives when there is no place to run, when the sea and border are the sources of killing barrages. What are the supporters of Israel's Occupation hoping for--that Palestinians will disappear , go up in ashes and let Israel get on with its well connected life. Go up in ashes. Israel as a state will forever be tainted by its murderous Occupation, by this death falling from the skies that it alone controls--the sky, the ocean, the earth, this is what happens when gods go mad. We are a people now driven mad by our own history and what we thought it demands of us. The final victory of those who wanted us to disappear from the earth--to turn us into them.
Poem
by Muriel Ruckeyser
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get pen to paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined
values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with our sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of wars.
(1963)
Friday, July 11, 2014
 
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Nothing else matters now; we must stop the war on the people of Gaza. I will send the words that come to me, that make us see and hear the flow of death.
“I’m sorry for what my people did to your people”
This is how Batsheva introduced herself to me in 1997. We were in a ladies toilet and I said something while waiting. She straight away looked at me and asked “where are you from?” I said “Palestine, and you?” “Israel” she said. We just looked at each other a bit too long for me to start getting nervous. Occupation and soldiers came to mind, fear of being humiliated right in the toilet in front of the Aussies (abbreviation for Australians) set in. She kept looking without saying anything. It could have been a minute of silence. I felt the tension and I was not sure what to do, what to say. She is probably going to say “It’s not Palestine bitch, it’s Israel”. But she came closer and was inches away from my face and said those unforgettable words “I’m sorry for what my people did to your people”. I don’t know who hugged first. We were there in a toilet full of Aussie women. There was a lot of crying, it was more than crying, it was cathartic. I have never cried in my life like this before. It was not only my pain that I was feeling. It was my grandparents’ pain and feelings of loss and dispossession. It was Palestine’s pain that I was feeling and it was very painful. I felt my grandparents’ pain of losing their homes in Palestine. I remembered their stories of being forced to leave from Jaffa and Ramleh in 1948. My father was six years old then and was forced to walk with his siblings and my grandparents from Ramleh to Ramallah for three days with thousands of Palestinian refugees driven out of their homes to make way for Jewish refugees from Europe to create the State of Israel. My mum was not born yet but my maternal grandparents found a truck and drove to Jordan where they stayed there for two years before leaving to live in Ramallah where my mum was born. I felt the pain of the 1967 occupation of being born under its control, I felt the oppression, the humiliation. Memories of checkpoints, smells of burning tyres, beatings by the army taking away my cousin (for riding his bike as the curfew started, an unfortunate episode of being in the wrong place at the wrong time) all came flooding in. Memories have power to take you back in time and space, reliving unpleasant situations. I was still in the toilet in Sydney hugging an Israeli woman while all this was playing in my mind, while I was feeling Palestine’s and its people pain of dispossession. That’s the Palestinian story frozen in time and place since 1948. The same story shared by millions of Palestinians across the middle east, in the diaspora and in particularly Gaza where 80% of its 1.6 million people are refugees from other nearby towns and villages that are now under the control of the State of Israel. They have not lost hope that one day they go back to their villages. They are frozen in time and place living a transitional life squeezed on 365 square kilometres of land (yes they are not real Gazans!) holding on to their house keys and memories, holding on to images of their homes and olive trees, telling their grandchildren stories of a bygone era. They believe their leaders who are promising them what they cannot deliver. They sell them empty dreams – Hamas sells the Return to Palestine dream and Fatah sells the two State Solution dream and neither have delivered anything meaningful worthy of the Palestinian people’s perseverance (Sumud) the past six decades.  |
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Our friend in Haifa, peace activist Hannah Safran, wrote: "Palestine is burning and the world is busy with football." Then she sent links to voices that refuse to look away, to be silent or accepting. Here is one.
Gideon Levy: Our Wretched Jewish State
Now we know: In the Jewish state, there is pity and humane feelings only for Jews, rights only for the Chosen People. The Jewish state is only for Jews.
By Gideon Levy
July 07, 2014 "ICH" – "Haaretz" – - The youths of the Jewish state are attacking Palestinians in the streets of Jerusalem, just like gentile youths used to attack Jews in the streets of Europe. The Israelis of the Jewish state are rampaging on social networks, displaying hatred and a lust for revenge, unprecedented in its diabolic scope. Some unknown people from the Jewish state, purely based on his ethnicity. These are the children of the nationalistic and racist generation – Netanyahu’s offspring.
For five years now, they have been hearing nothing but incitement, scaremongering and supremacy over Arabs from this generation’s true instructor, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not one humane word, no commiseration or equal treatment.
They grew up with the provocative demand for recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state,” and they drew the inevitable conclusions. Even before any delineation of what a “Jewish state” means – will it be a state that dons tefillin (phylacteries), kisses mezuzot (doorpost fixtures with prayer scrolls), sanctifies charms, closes down on the Sabbath and keeps strict kashrut laws? – the penny has dropped for the masses.
The mob was the first to internalize its true significance: a Jewish state is one in which there is room only for Jews. The fate of Africans is to be sent to the Holot detention center in the Negev, while that of Palestinians is to suffer from pogroms. That’s how it works in a Jewish state: only this way can it be Jewish.
In the Jewish state-in-the-making, there is no room even for an Arab who strives his utmost to be a good Arab, such as the writer Sayed Kashua. In a Jewish state, the chairman of the Knesset plenary session, MK Ruth Calderon (from Yesh Atid – the “center” of the political map, needless to say), cuts off Arab MK Ahmed Tibi (United Arab List-Ta’al), who has just returned all shaken up from a visit to the family of the murdered Arab boy from Shoafat, impudently preaching to him that he must also refer to the three murdered Jewish teens (even after he did just that).
In a Jewish state, the High Court of Justice approves the demolition of a murder suspect’s family home even before his conviction. A Jewish state legislates racist and nationalist laws.
The media in the Jewish state wallows in the murder of three yeshiva students, while almost entirely ignoring the fates of several Palestinian youths of the same age who have been killed by army fire over the last few months, usually for no reason.
No one was punished for these acts – in the Jewish state there is one law for Jews and another for Arabs, whose lives are cheap. There is no hint of abiding by international laws and conventions. In the Jewish state, there is pity and humane feelings only for Jews, rights only for the Chosen People. The Jewish state is only for Jews.
The new generation growing in its shadow is a dangerous one, both to itself and its surroundings. Netanyahu is its education minister; the militaristic and nationalist media serves as its pedagogic epic poem; the education system that takes it to Auschwitz and Hebron serves as its guide.
The new sabra (native-born Israeli) is a novel species, prickly both on the outside and the inside. He has never met his Palestinian counterpart, but knows everything about him – the sabra knows he is a wild animal, intent only on killing him; that he is a monster, a terrorist.
He knows that Israel has no partner for peace, since this is what he’s heard countless times from Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett. From Yair Lapid he’s heard that they are “Zoabis” – referring dismissively to MK Haneen Zoabi (Balad).
Being left wing or a seeker of justice in the Jewish state is deemed a crime, civil society is considered treacherous, true democracy an evil. In a Jewish state – dreamed of not only by the right wing but also by the supposed center-left, including Tzipi Livni and Lapid – democracy is blurred.
It’s not the skinheads that are the Jewish state’s main problem, it’s the sanctimonious eye-rollers, the thugs, the extreme right wing and the settlers. It’s not the margins but the mainstream, which is partly very nationalistic and partly indifferent.
In the Jewish state, there is no remnant of the biblical injunction to treat the minority or the stranger with justice. There are no more Jews left who marched with Martin Luther King or who sat in jail with Nelson Mandela. The Jewish state, which Israel insists the Palestinians recognize, must first recognize itself. At the end of the day, at the end of a terrible week, it seems that a Jewish state means a racist, nationalistic state, meant for Jews only.
© Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved
Source: Information Clearing House
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