The People's Record

Professor & physicist Stephen Hawking has joined the academic boycott of Israel “based upon his knowledge of Palestine & on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there.”

In another stride forward in the campaign for boycott, divestment & sanctions against Israel, Hawking pulled out of a conference hosted by President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem. 

“The situation is like that of South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue,” Hawking said after Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza in 2009.

A female Palestinian runs bare foot as she takes part in the Palestinian Marathon and passes part of the Israeli ‘separation barrier,’ or wall in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, 21 April 2013.

Palestine’s Right to Movement marathon began with a tribute to Boston. How beautiful.

(Source: mediterraneenne)

kamranzaib:

Salfit is a small district within the occupied Palestinian Territory of West Bank. The graphic explained the conflict that are currently happening and the people’s struggle for clean water as their basic human needs. The occupation of the land by Israel had played a major role in the conflict, due to the increasing population in illegal settlements and expansion of Israel territories within the West Bank. In addition, the author had made certain climatic and political predictions for the future of Salfit and its people based on current events recorded. The study was made for the Future Climate modules as part of the MSc Sustainable Architectural Studies course in the University of Sheffield, UK 2012

This is what genocide looks like. 

Palestinians to stage general strike over inmate’s death
April 2, 2013

Acting Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas has blamed the Israeli regime for refusing to grant Abu Hamdiah an early release.

Abbas said the death of Hamdiah showed the Tel Aviv regime’s “arrogance and intransigence over the prisoners.”

Abbas also stated that the Palestinian Authority had worked to get the prisoner released for treatment but the Israeli regime “refused to let him out, which led to his death.”

Nabil Abu Rudeina, Abbas’s spokesman, also said the regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was responsible for the death of the Palestinian prisoner.

Meanwhile, Salam Fayyad, the acting premier of the Palestinian Authority, also condemned Tel Aviv and called for an international inquiry into Hamdiah’s death.

On Tuesday, Palestinian prisoners in several Israeli jails protested the death of Abu Hamdiah.

People also demonstrated across the occupied West Bank. In the city of al-Khalil (Hebron), Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and rubber bullets at nearly 300 angry demonstrators. Three people were reportedly injured in another demonstration held in East al-Quds (Jerusalem).

Source
Photos

“I would prefer to die on my hospital bed to being deported from Jerusalem. Jerusalem is my soul and my life. If I was uprooted from there, my soul would be uprooted from my body. My life is meaningless away from Jerusalem. No land on earth will be able to embrace me other than Jerusalem. Therefore, my return will be only to Jerusalem but nowhere else. I advise all Palestinians to embrace their land and their villages and never succumb to the Israeli Occupation’s wishes. I don’t see this issue as a personal cause that is related to Samer Issawi. It is a national issue, a conviction and a principle that every Palestinian who loves his homeland’s sacred soil should hold. Finally, I reaffirm for the thousands time that I continue my hunger strike until either freedom and return to Jerusalem or martyrdom!” - Samer Issawi, Palestinian prisoner on hunger strike for more than 245 days.

(Source: palsolidarity.org)

Obama, the Israel sycophant: Follow the money trail, not his words
March 24, 2013

Never in my life have I seen a president that fawns over the Israelis, begs for their approval, sings their praises and lauds their achievements and history like the American President, Barack Obama.

Obama set a historic record in his country by becoming the first elected non-white president. However, we wrongly assumed that just because of his racial background, and the fact that he belonged to a people who had suffered centuries of persecution, that his stance would be different. It was expected that because he spoke so bitterly about the racial discrimination his grandparents and uncles had suffered through in Chicago, such as being prohibited from sitting on the same bus with white people, that he would better understand our suffering under the discriminatory Israeli occupation. However, he has disappointed us and reminded us of Uncle Tom in the famous American novel in which the black slave’s humanity and dignity is disregarded by his white master.

Mr Barack Hussein Obama surprised us in the speech he made before a group of Israeli youth in occupied Jerusalem in which he, the African, demanded that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state and urged the Arabs to normalise with this state. He also said to those who reject Israel’s right to exist that they might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above. He stressed that Israel is not going anywhere, and as long as the US exists, the Israelis will not be alone.

We do not understand why Obama used these words or why he went through with this demeaning ingratiation; Israel is the one threatening our existence, denying our rights and monopolising over 300 nuclear warheads capable of destroying the entire region.

We are astonished that a president of African descent is demanding that we comply with the same discrimination his ancestors rejected; they sacrificed thousands to break the bonds of slavery and racial and religious discrimination. His demands to recognise Israel as a discriminatory Jewish state threatens the existence of a quarter of its population and strips them of their right to citizenship.

None of the “white” presidents stooped so low on this racial slope, and most of them pressured Israel in order to force them to recognize the rights of the Palestinian people. What drove Obama to deviate from the rule and grovel at Netanyahu’s feet, asking for forgiveness, as he has done in the last 2 days”

Obama’s visit to the region was not that of a peace mediator, but of a warlord who came to spark its fire, and agree on the details with his Israeli counterpart, Netanyahu, who openly insulted him when he publically announced his support for republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

Obama gave Israel the green light to launch an assault on Iran without first deliberating with the US, and urged the world to add Hezbollah to the list of terrorists. He also vowed not to allow Iran to possess any nuclear weapons.

It is unfortunate that Obama is asking President Mahmoud Abbas to resume negotiations without stipulating a freeze on settlements, which is the condition he himself set during his speech made at Cairo University just weeks after winning the election.

We must expect such lean positions that are fully attuned with their Israeli counterpart over the next 4 years, which is the duration of Obama’s second term. Lean in the view of Arabs and Muslims, but firm in the view of the Israelis and their extremist right-wing government.

The Palestinians who protested in Ramallah, and were driven away by the Palestinian security forces who prevented them from approaching the PA headquarters where Obama’s plane landed were expressing the true feelings of the Palestinian people towards the American president who turned his back on the injustice and oppressed, and favoured the tyrant and oppressor.

The Palestinian Authority, led by Mr Abbas, which halted reconciliation talks once Obama’s visit was announced, is mostly responsible for this American shift in favour of Israel. This is because it is still counting on meaningless negotiations and has high hopes in Israel. This is why it prevented the protests and aborted an Intifada that was forming as a result of the death of the Palestinian prisoner, Arafat Jaradat, who died while being tortured in an Israeli prison. The Palestinian Authority did not even demand an investigation into his death.

Now, after Obama’s black smoke has been revealed and we have discovered the truth about his fully submissive positions with Netanyahu, we must take on a new position; a position of intifada, civil disorder, going to the International Criminal Court and Human Rights Council and making every possible effort to confront the Israeli occupation.

Finally, we hope that the cheque Obama waved at the Palestinian Authority for $500 million will not have the desired effect of taming the Palestinians and confirming Obama’s impression of the Palestinians; that they are being beggars waiting for crumbs of financial aid granted by donor countries, in exchange for relinquishing its legitimate rights and ending all forms of resistance against the occupation.

Obama is supplying the Israelis with iron domes and advanced warplanes, and has vowed to support their security and existence forever; meanwhile, he has presented the Palestinians with compliancy cheques… it is an utter tragedy.

Why would he urge the Arabs to normalise with Israel; is it to reward Israel for Judaising occupied Jerusalem, settling 600,000 settlers in the West Bank, storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque and undermining its foundations and scorning their peace initiatives”

We live in a time of American hypocrisy and undisputed Arab shame.

Source

Iraq War 10 years later: The occupation & the resistance
March 21, 2013

George W. Bush declared victory and an end to combat operations on May 1, 2003, but the war in Iraq was, in fact, just beginning.

The U.S. military would hunt down the Baathist leadership one by one, eventually killing most of them, including Saddam Hussein himself, who was captured and ultimately hung in December 2006. But this was only a sideshow to the U.S. war on the multiple and fractured Iraqi resistance movements.

Bush’s colonial viceroy in Iraq, Paul Bremer, carried out a campaign of terror and repression. Yet the resistance managed to bog the U.S. down in a brutal counter-insurgency campaign, preventing Bush and Co. from their neoconservative plan to topple regimes in Iran and Syria.

Occupation Triggers Resistance

The dominant explanations for why the resistance forces grew are simply wrong.

One common argument made by figures like Gen. Eric Shinseki is that the U.S. didn’t have enough troops to enforce order after toppling Saddam Hussein. But the truth is that the Iraqi people, like any other oppressed people in history, from colonial America under the English king to Vietnam in the 1960s, were going to rise up against occupation.

The second explanation, made by Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, is that the U.S. didn’t have a plan for how to reconstruct Iraqi society. This, too, is false. However bungled, the Bush administration did have a plan to transform Iraq. It wanted to impose a neoliberal democracy on the country, open up the economy to multinationals and establish permanent U.S. military bases from which the neocons could carry out their plans for rolling regime change.

That plan to occupy and transform Iraq into a servile state actually sharpened the Iraqi resistances.

While the U.S. had promised that Iraq would have the first free and fair election in decades, it did the opposite. The Bush administration delayed elections and instead installed Bremer as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in April 2003. Bremer ominously declared himself “the only paramount authority figure—other than dictator Saddam Hussein—that most Iraqis had ever known.”

Bremer’s first three orders transformed the smoldering Sunni and Shia frustration with the U.S. invasion into active resistances.

His Order Number One commenced the de-Baathification of the Iraqi state and society. The 2 million members of the Baath Party had been disproportionately Sunni. They had joined the party not out of any conviction, but in order to get jobs in state-run industry. Bremer’s order was thus a direct attack on both the Sunni elite and Sunni workers—it drove them into opposition to the occupation.

Bremer’s Order Number Two dissolved the Iraqi military and security forces, immediately pushing 450,000 people into unemployment and destitution. The military was the last integrated Arab institution, made up of predominantly Sunni officers and a majority of Shia conscripts. One U.S. general told the New York Times that this order “made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq.” Sunni soldiers joined the burgeoning guerilla resistance, and the Shia gravitated toward Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

Bremer then issued Order Number Three that postponed democratic elections and declared that his CPA would rule Iraq. The U.S. realized that the main Shia Islamist parties—the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and Dawa—would win any election and would ally with Iran, nominally America’s next target for regime change.

So Washington nixed an early election, and in doing so, alienated the Shia majority. As one Army colonel admitted, “When they disbanded the military and announced we were occupiers, that was it. Every moderate, every person that had leaned toward us, was furious.”

The Neoliberal Deconstruction of Iraq

Bremer’s dictatorship then proceeded to impose the neoliberal deconstruction of Iraqi state-based capitalist economy.

Iraq’s people had wrongly expected the U.S. would actually rebuild their economy, as promised, and bring back the country’s “Golden Age” during the 1970s oil boom, when Iraqi living standards rivaled those of Greece. Instead, Bremer inflicted a free-marketeer’s fantasy on Iraq, impoverishing Iraq’s population in the process.

The CPA slashed the top tax rate from 45 percent to a flat tax of 25 percent; abolished import-export duties to the advantage of multinational corporations; established foreign investment protocols that allowed Iraqi companies, including, crucially, the state oil industry, to be at least partly foreign-owned; and started the privatization of state monopolies.

The CPA’s neoliberal plan was a failure—but a very profitable failure for American capital. In his book The Occupation, journalist Patrick Cockburn reports:

Before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, 50 percent of Iraqis had access to drinkable water, but this figure had dropped to 32 percent by the end of 2005. Some $4 billion was spent by the U.S. and Iraqi governments on increasing the electricity supply, but in April 2006, this fell to 4,100 megawatts, below the pre-invasion level, which represents half the 8,000 megawatts needed by Iraq. Oil production touched a low of 1.4 million barrels a day. These figures meant that most Iraqis lived on the edge of destitution, surviving only because of cheap government rations. At least 50 percent of the people who could work were unemployed.

Nevertheless, Bush’s favored corporations—Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater—secured no-bid contracts in Iraq and raked in untold profits. Bush thus replaced Hussein’s decrepit state capitalism with a crony neoliberalism that shattered Iraqi expectations of a rejuvenated economy. As a result, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh concluded, “The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency.”

To control the growing resistances, the CPA diverted more and more money to policing and repression. It ploughed billions into constructing five massive military bases throughout Iraq. It spent approximately 25 percent of its budget on security.

By early 2006, the U.S. had paid $1 billion to the private security firm Blackwater. In total, there were 60,000 of these so-called private contractors in Iraq—about half of them were, in fact, mercenaries hired to repress Iraqis.

Full article

In response to President Obama’s visit to Israel today, Palestinians built a new protest tent village of Afhad Younis in the E1 area. More than 15 tents were erected while anti-US & anti-Obama signs were scattered throughout the village near the site of the Bab al-Shams protest village that Israeli forces tore down in January.

Mohammad Khatib, a spokesman for the activists, said soldiers handed protesters a document declaring the area a closed military zone.

“We are staying. We are Palestinians, and we will stay here. They will have to evacuate us. They will have to use their power to do it, but we will not do it by ourselves,” Khatib told Ma’an.

“We are staying here because this is Palestinian land. This is our land, and no one has a right to evacuate us.”

Watch a video of the new protest site here.

Photo

(Source: maannews.net)

nowinexile:

Fatima Altiti covered in her brother’s blood, Mahmoud Altiti after receiving his body  earlier today. Mahmoud, 22, was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces with Dum-Dum bullets which are prohibited by international law. At such a young age, Mahmoud had spent 3 years in Israeli occupation prisons.

‘Erase Israel from the Internet’: Anonymous plots cyber-attack
March 14, 2013

Hacktivist group Anonymous, along with numerous other hackers, is planning a massive cyber-attack on Israel, threatening to “erase” the country from Internet. Israel is apparently taking the threats seriously, with defensive preparations underway.

“Hacktivists Starting Cyber Attack against Israel on 7th of April,” Anonymous wrote on Twitter, calling on hackers around the world to join up for a second ‘OpIsrael.’

Israeli government agencies are reportedly readying for the attack: “It’s something being organized online over the past few days. What distinguishes this plan when compared to previous attacks is that it really seems to be organized by Anonymous-affiliated groups from around the world in what looks like a joining of forces,” Ofir Ben Avi, director of online group Accessible Government told Haaretz.

The first ‘OpIsrael’ cyber-attacks were launched by the hacktivist group during Israeli’s ‘Pillar of Defense’ assault on Gaza in November 2012.

“We are Anonymous. We are legion. We will not forgive. We will not forget. Israel, it is too late to expect us,” their message to Israeli authorities read. 

Some 700 Israeli website suffered repeated cyber-attacks, including high-profile government systems such as the Foreign Ministry, and the Israeli President’s official website. The Israeli Finance Ministry reported an estimated 44 million unique attacks on government websites.

Following ‘OpIsrael,’ Anonymous posted the online personal data of 5,000 Israeli officials, including names, ID numbers and personal emails.

Anonymous was also involved in an attack in which the details of some 600,000 users of the popular Israeli email service Walla were exposed online.

Source

Iraq War costs US more than $2 trillion
March 14, 2013

The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.

The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

When security forces, insurgents, journalists and humanitarian workers were included, the war’s death toll rose to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000, the study said.

The report, the work of about 30 academics and experts, was published in advance of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.

It was also an update of a 2011 report the Watson Institute produced ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that assessed the cost in dollars and lives from the resulting wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

The 2011 study said the combined cost of the wars was at least $3.7 trillion, based on actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury and future commitments, such as the medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans.

That estimate climbed to nearly $4 trillion in the update.

The estimated death toll from the three wars, previously at 224,000 to 258,000, increased to a range of 272,000 to 329,000 two years later.

Excluded were indirect deaths caused by the mass exodus of doctors and a devastated infrastructure, for example, while the costs left out trillions of dollars in interest the United States could pay over the next 40 years.

The interest on expenses for the Iraq war could amount to about $4 trillion during that period, the report said.

The report also examined the burden on U.S. veterans and their families, showing a deep social cost as well as an increase in spending on veterans. The 2011 study found U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war totaled $33 billion. Two years later, that number had risen to $134.7 billion.

FEW GAINS

The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it. The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women’s rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said. Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud, it said.

Former President George W. Bush’s administration cited its belief that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s government held weapons of mass destruction to justify the decision to go to war. U.S. and allied forces later found that such stockpiles did not exist.

Supporters of the war argued that intelligence available at the time concluded Iraq held the banned weapons and noted that even some countries that opposed the invasion agreed with the assessment.

“Action needed to be taken,” said Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think-tank.

Bucci, who was unconnected to the Watson study, agreed with its observation that the forecasts for the cost and duration of the war proved to be a tiny fraction of the real costs.

“If we had had the foresight to see how long it would last and even if it would have cost half the lives, we would not have gone in,” Bucci said. “Just the time alone would have been enough to stop us. Everyone thought it would be short.”

Bucci said the toppling of Saddam and the results of an unforeseen conflict between U.S.-led forces and al Qaeda militants drawn to Iraq were positive outcomes of the war.

“It was really in Iraq that ‘al Qaeda central’ died,” Bucci said. “They got waxed.”

Source

muslim-latina:

palcatpap:

In our second week, the West Bank tour continued with a trip to Hebron.

Hebron is divided into areas H1 and H2, which are under Palestinian Authority and Israeli military control, respectively. Palestinians are banned from using Shuhada Street in H2, a main commercial street of the city, as well as other areas, which has resulted in many local businesses closing down.

Another result is that those with homes opening onto these restricted areas are now forced to climb in through back windows instead of entering their homes through their own front doors.

Que coños? Fucking Zionists!

In other infuriating news, Israel launches ‘Palestinian only’ buses. 

Excerpts from Indignez-vous!
By Stéphane Hessel (October 20, 1917 - February 26, 2013)

I wish for you all, each of you, to have your own motive for indignation. It is precious. When something outrages you as I was outraged by Nazism, then people become militant, strong, and engaged. They join this current of history, and the great current of history must continue thanks to each individual.

Today, my main indignation concerns Palestine, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank of Jordan. This conflict is outrageous. It is absolutely essential to read the report by Richard Goldstone, of September 2009, on Gaza, in which this South African, Jewish judge, who claims even to be a Zionist, accuses the Israeli army of having committed “acts comparable to war crimes and perhaps, in certain circumstances, crimes against humanity” during its “Operation Cast Lead,” which lasted three weeks.

I went back to Gaza in 2009 myself, when I was able to enter with my wife thanks to our diplomatic passports, to study first-hand what this report said. People who accompanied us were not authorized to enter the Gaza Strip. There and in the West Bank of Jordan. We also visited the Palestinian refugee camps set up from 1948 by the United Nations agency UNRWA, where more than three million Palestinians expelled off their lands by Israel wait even yet for a more and more problematical return.

As for Gaza, it is a roofless prison for one and a half million Palestinians. A prison where people get organized just to survive. Despite material destruction such as that of the Red Crescent hospital by Operation Cast Lead, it is the behavior of the Gazans, their patriotism, their love of the sea and beaches, their constant preoccupation for the welfare of their children, who are innumerable and cheerful, that haunt our memory. We were impressed by how ingeniously they face up to all the scarcities that are imposed on them. We saw them making bricks, for lack of cement, to rebuild the thousands of houses destroyed by tanks.

They confirmed to us that there had been 1400 deaths — including women, children, and oldsters in the Palestinian camp — during this Operation Cast Lead led by the Israeli army, compared to only 50 injured men on the Israeli side. I share conclusions of the South African judge. That Jews can, themselves, perpetrate war crimes is unbearable. Alas, history does not give enough examples of people who draw lessons from their own history.

To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts,
TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.

Full translation

Robert & I had the pleasure of listening to Hessel speak at the Russel Tribunal on Palestine in New York City in September. Hessel was a steadfast, dedicated resistance leader, radical author, survivor of Buchenwald & one of the drafters of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

RIP