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An orthodox Jewish rally took place in Foley Square in New York City today to denounce the Israeli military & its latest efforts to draft orthodox Jewish men into the Israeli Defense Forces.
“The evil rulers in the Holy Land want to incite and seduce young men and teenagers to acquiesce to idol worship and to participate in the impure army,” reads one poster, a digital copy of which was obtained and translated by the Forward. Yiddish language posters not only denounced the new draft policy, but the Israeli government & the military itself.
Ramallah official statistics: One Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every 3 days for the past 13 years
June 4, 2013
Official statistics from the Ministry of Information in Ramallah have revealed that 1,518 Palestinian children were killed by Israel’s occupation forces from the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000 up to April 2013. That’s the equivalent of one Palestinian child killed by Israel every 3 days for almost 13 years. The ministry added that the number of children injured by the Israelis since the start of the Second Intifada against Israel’s occupation has now reached 6,000.
“The International Day for the Protection of Children is on June 1,” said a spokesman, “but Palestinian children are still subject to attacks by the Israelis and Jewish settlers on an almost daily basis.”
Noting that 2012 saw an unprecedented rise in the number of children arrested by Israeli forces, the report pointed out that 9,000 Palestinians under 18 years old have been arrested since the end of September 2000. Almost half of the Palestinian population is under 18. Almost two hundred and fifty Palestinian minors are being held in prison by Israel; 47 of them are children under 16 years of age.
The Guardian has an awesome tool for educating yourself about the first year of ‘the Arab Spring’ called ‘The Path to Protest’
For those who weren’t old enough or who weren’t interested at the time but who have since become interested (maybe for those whose interest has been sparked by the uprising in Turkey), this is a great tool to learn a little more about politics in various regions of the Middle East.
Covering from December 19, 2010 to the very end of 2011, scroll through this interactive tool packed full of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of protests & news stories relevant to protests across the Middle East just after the inception of ‘the Arab Spring’.
Here are some starting resources for you to education yourself with:
- Omar Barghouti on ‘Why BDS?’
- Sherry Wolf in a panel discussion on why divestment is a good strategy for ending Israeli occupation
- Democracy Now! speaks to Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti, author of the new book, “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights
- Alice Walker’s blog posts about Israel
Dear Alicia Keys,
I have learned today that you are due to perform in Israel very soon. We have never met, though I believe we are mutually respectful of each other’s path and work. It would grieve me to know you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists. You were not born when we, your elders who love you, boycotted institutions in the US South to end an American apartheid less lethal than Israel’s against the Palestinian people. Google ‘Montgomery Bus Boycott’ if you don’t know about this civil rights history already. We changed our country fundamentally and the various boycotts of Israeli institutions and products will do the same there. It is our only nonviolent option and, as we learned from our own struggle in America, nonviolence is the only path to a peaceful future.
If you go to my website and blog alicewalkersgarden.com you can quickly find many articles I have written over the years that explain why a cultural boycott of Israel and Israeli institutions (not individuals) is the only option left to artists who cannot bear the unconscionable harm Israel inflicts every day on the people of Palestine, whose major “crime” is that they exist in their own land, land that Israel wants to control as its own. Under a campaign named ‘Brand Israel’, Israeli officials have stated specifically their intent to downplay the Palestinian conflict by using culture and arts to showcase Israel as a modern, welcoming place.
This is actually a wonderful opportunity for you to learn about something sorrowful, and amazing: that our government (Obama in particular) supports a system that is cruel, unjust, and unbelievably evil. You can spend months, and years, as I have, pondering this situation. Layer upon layer of lies, misinformation, fear, cowardice and complicity. Greed. It is a vast eye-opener into the causes of much of the affliction in our suffering world.
I have kept you in my awareness as someone of conscience and caring, especially about the children of the world. Please, if you can manage it, go to visit the children in Gaza, and sing to them of our mutual love of all children, and of their right not to be harmed simply because they exist.
With love, younger sister, beloved daughter and friend,
Alice Walker
Source: Rolling Out
Watch: Alice Walker visits Gaza
Related: Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of IsraelYes!
Also Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters added his name to Walker’s:
Dear Alicia Keys,
I read today Alice Walker’s eloquent and moving entreaty to you in her open letter.
It is hard to add anything except to implore you to follow all the links she has directed you to.
To introduce myself to you, I am a fellow musician, my name is Roger Waters, I used to be in a band called Pink Floyd, and, believe it or not, I still work.
I had reason last December to write a letter to Stevie Wonder to encourage him to withdraw from an engagement in LA. It was a Gala to raise funds for the Israeli Defense Force. I wasn’t the only one to write, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the great advocate of peace and reconciliation, was among many, many others who wrote as well. To Stevie’s great credit he withdrew.
We are all part of the same old story, nothing has changed since the bad old days of apartheid South Africa and Segregated America. We must stand united with all our brothers and sisters against racism, colonialism, segregation and apartheid.
With love and respect,
Roger Waters (Waters’s letter is also posted at PACBI)
(via makeanewbeginning)
Israel & Mexico swap notes on abusing rights
May 22, 2013
Earlier this month, Jorge Luis Llaven Abarca, Mexico’s newly-appointed secretary of public security in Chiapas, announced that discussions had taken place between his office and the Israeli defense ministry. The two countries talked about security coordination at the level of police, prisons and effective use of technology (“Israeli military will train Chiapas police,” Excelsior, 8 May [Spanish]).
Chiapas is home to the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), a mostly indigenous Maya liberation movement that has enjoyed global grassroots support since it rose up against the Mexican government in 1994. The Zapatistas took back large tracts of land on which they have since built subsistence cooperatives, autonomous schools, collectivized clinics and other democratic community structures.
In the twenty years since the uprising, the Mexican government has not ceased its counterinsurgency programs in Chiapas. When Llaven Abarca was announced as security head in December, human rights organizations voiced concerns that the violence would escalate, pointing to his history of arbitrary detentions, use of public force, criminal preventive detentions, death threats and torture (“Concern about the appointment of Jorge Luis Llaven Abarca as Secretary of Public Security in Chiapas,” Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (Frayba) Center for Human Rights,14 December 2012 [PDF, Spanish]).
Aptly, his recent contacts with Israeli personnel were “aimed at sharing experiences,” Abarca has claimed. This may be the first time the Mexican government has gone public about military coordination with Israelis in Chiapas. Yet the agreement is only the latest in Israel’s longer history of military exports to the region, an industry spawned from experiences in the conquest and pacification of Palestine.
Weapons sales escalate
The first Zionist militias (Bar Giora and HaShomer) were formed to advance the settlement of Palestinian land. Another Zionist militia, the Haganah — the precursor to the Israeli army and the successor of HaShomer — began importing and producing arms in 1920.
Israeli firms began exporting weapons in the 1950s to Latin America, including to Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic under the Somoza and Trujillo dictatorships. Massive government investment in the arms industry followed the 1967 War and the ensuing French arms embargo. Israeli arms, police, military training and equipment have now been sent to at least 140 countries, including to Guatemala in the 1980s under Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator recently convicted of genocide against the Maya.
Mexico began receiving Israeli weaponry in 1973 with the sale of five Arava planes fromIsrael Aerospace Industries. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, infrequent exports continued to the country in the form of small arms, mortars and electronic fences. Sales escalated in the early 2000s, according to research that we have undertaken.
In 2003, Mexico bought helicopters formerly belonging to the Israeli army and Israel Aerospace Industries’ Gabriel missiles. Another Israeli security firm, Magal Security Systems, received one of several contracts for surveillance systems “to protect sensitive installations in Mexico” that same year, The Jerusalem Post reported.
In 2004, Israel Shipyards sold missile boats, and later both Aeronautics Defense Systems and Elbit Systems won contracts from the federal police and armed forces for drones for border and domestic surveillance (“UAV maker Aeronautics to supply Mexican police,”Globes, 15 February 2009). Verint Systems, a technology firm founded by former Israeli army personnel, has won several US-sponsored contracts since 2006 for the mass wiretapping of Mexican telecommunications, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly.
Trained by Israel
According to declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents [PDF] obtained via a freedom of information request, Israeli personnel were discreetly sent into Chiapas in response to the 1994 Zapatista uprising for the purpose of “providing training to Mexican military and police forces.”
The Mexican government also made use of the Arava aircraft to deploy its Airborne Special Forces Group (Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, or GAFE). GAFE commandos were themselves trained by Israel and the US. Several would later desert the GAFE and go on to create “Los Zetas,” currently Mexico’s most powerful and violent drug cartel (“Los Zetas and Mexico’s Transnational Drug War,” World Politics Review, 25 December 2009).
Mexico was surprised by the Zapatistas, who rose up the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. The Mexican government found itself needing to respond to the dictates of foreign investors, as a famously-leaked Chase-Manhattan Bank memo revealed: “While Chiapas, in our opinion, does not pose a fundamental threat to Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many in the investment community. The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy.”
Middlebury students stage checkpoint, Call on college to divest from Israeli apartheid
Submitted by Jay Saper
May 19, 2013
On May 15, students at Middlebury College in Vermont staged a checkpoint outside their dining hall during the busiest meal of the year to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
As the Middlebury divestment campaign from arms and fossil fuels gains national attention, a coalition that included Palestinian, Israeli, and American Jewish students staged the act of political theater in solidarity with Nakba Day demonstrations around the globe as a call to add apartheid to the students’ divestment demands.
At a midnight breakfast event during finals week, students were greeted in the dark with barricades blocking the entrance to the dining hall and flashlights from full uniformed soldiers asking for identification cards.
Alex Jackman, a junior from New York City, described the checkpoint as “one of the coolest pieces of theater I have seen on Middlebury Campus. Performed during the time when all students are wrapped up in stress about exams and schoolwork, the piece served as a reminder that there are greater battles to fight beyond our campus.”
A gate was lifted for students who had received Israeli documentation. They could pass freely to prepare themselves a plate of pancakes. Those with Palestinian IDs were directed around the checkpoint.
Some students voiced their frustration with being held up, “This is not cool, I am trying to get to midnight breakfast.” One shouted, “I have to study for finals.”
Jackman contended it was important for students to confront the checkpoint. She explained, “Middlebury College students tend to abstract issues of social injustice, a method that allows us to remove ourselves from these issues. But by being confronted, quite literally, with this piece of theater, we were not able to remove ourselves from our privileges—even if only for a moment.”
The performance, developed by students as part of a course on Theater and Social Change and members of the organization Justice for Palestine, was broken up by campus public safety.
“This is not theater, we can tell it is political,” one officer voiced. “Everything that is political has to be approved by the College.”
For Palestinians, checkpoints are not a momentary interruption, but one persistent piece of a dehumanizing system of apartheid. Between 2000 and 2005 there were 67 Palestinian mothers who were forced to give birth at Israeli military checkpoints and 36 of those babies died.
Apartheid is not enabled through merely subjecting a people to oppressive conditions, but rather through creating separate realities whereby a group of people is not forced to confront their implication in the domination of another group.
Middlebury College itself is a settlement on stolen Abenaki land. With its pristine limestone buildings and perfectly manicured grass, Middlebury manufactures an environment seemingly separate from the oppressions it perpetuates, which is itself a political act.
Students at Middlebury are stepping up and refusing to allow a separation of conscience that tolerates inaction in face of the school profiting from Israeli apartheid. Justice for Palestine has one message for administrators, particularly fitting of a midnight action, “We will not rest, until you divest.”
Jay Saper is a student organizer with Justice for Palestine at Middlebury College.
Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews protested in Jerusalem on Thursday against plans to enlist men from their community into the military, a proposal supported by the secular majority, hoping to bring more people into the fold of human rights terror & apartheid enforcement.
May 17, 2013
A sea of black coats - the traditional attire of ultra-Orthodox men - engulfed Jerusalem streets near the city’s military draft bureau where the crowd heard rabbis warn that army service would irreparably harm their way of life.
“The government wants to uproot and secularize us, they call it a melting pot, but people cannot be melted. You cannot change our (way of life),” Rabbi David Zycherman told the crowd in an anguished plea.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has committed to increase drafting ultra-Orthodox men, most of whom receive exemptions on religious grounds, forcing them to commit human rights violations against the people of Palestine.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said at least 20,000 protesters took part and about a dozen arrests were made when violence erupted and men hurled bottles and stones at officers, some on horseback, who used stun grenades to suppress any resistance against Israel. A water cannon was also deployed at protesters.
Most Israeli men and women are called up for military service for up to three years when they turn 18. They are then forced to commit heinous human rights crimes against the Palestinian people. However, exceptions are made for most Arab citizens of Israel, as well as ultra-Orthodox men and women.
From Haymarket Books Facebook Page:
On this day in 1980, Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II),” with its chorus of kids chanting “We don’t need no education,” is banned by the South African government. Striking black teachers & black children, upset about separate and unequal education, adopt the song as their anthem. The government said the song was “prejudicial to the safety of the state.”
For more on the role art played in the fight against apartheid in South Africa check out, Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader.& here’s the Pink Floyd song.
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About 500 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank held a mass protest after Friday prayers against the Israeli occupation & the two attacks from settlers this week in the West Bank settlement of Ofra.
Protesters hurled stones at IDF officers, who then responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.
“This was a peaceful area. We’re gathered today to say we refuse to be attacked and driven off our own land,” said Sami Issa, a resident. “We want their army to pull the settlers out.”
(Source: rss.rt.com)
Point your bullet where ever you like in my body.
I will die today, but my homeland will live tomorrow.
Be careful, Palestine is a red line.
Amer Nassar, a 17-year-old Palestinian who was killed, along with his 18-year-old cousin Naji Abdul-Karim Balbeisi, by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint on April 3. This was the last poem he posted on his Facebook page on March 15.
Rebel against the Occupation. No – it is forbidden for us to rule over another people, to oppress another [people]. The most important thing is to achieve peace and an end to the cycle of blood[letting]. My generation dreamed of peace. I so want to achieve it. You have the power to help. All my hopes are with you. If only [you could].
Chavka Fulman-Raban, one of the few remaining survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, denouncing the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
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.
(Source: cameranzeb)
Nathan Blanc: Israeli teenager & conscientious objector
April 7, 2013
Nathan Blanc is an Israeli conscientious objector. He’s getting ready to serve his 8th stint in jail for refusing to serve in the Israeli military. He believes in democracy. From the video:
The main reason for my refusal is the feeling our country is going towards a non democratic condition of civil inequality between us and the Palestinians. There are two people in the same land but only the Israelis can vote in the elections.
Blanc has internalized one state/ two peoples.
Israel is refusing to offer him civil service as an alternative to military service and he doesn’t want to get a mental health deferment; “I’m not going to put on an act,” he toldHaaretz last January. He thinks the army is trying to “wear him down with the repeated confinements until he gives in and enlists.”
That was after two months in prison, now he’s been in for over 100 days. Harriet Sherwood reports for The Guardian, Israel set to jail teenage conscientious objector for eighth time:
It is a routine Nathan Blanc knows well. At 9am on Tuesday morning, the 19-year-old will report, as instructed in his draft papers, to a military base near Tel Aviv. There he will state his objection to serving in the Israeli army. Following his refusal to enlist, Blanc expects to be arrested and sentenced to between 10 and 20 days in jail. He will then be taken to Military Prison Number 6 to serve his time. And then, following his release, the cycle will begin over again.
The reason why Blanc knows what to expect is that this will be the eighth time the teenage conscientious objector has been jailed in the past 19 weeks. Since the date of his original call-up for military service, Blanc has spent more than 100 days in prison; on one occasion, he was released on a Tuesday and re-imprisoned two days later on a Thursday.
Blanc began to consider the possibility of refusing the draft several years ago. “It was a very hard decision, it took me a long time to get to it,” he says.
The turning point was Operation Cast Lead, the war in Gaza that began at the end of 2008 and ended three weeks later with a Palestinian death toll of around 1,400. In a statement issued when he was first imprisoned, Blanc said: “The wave of aggressive militarism that swept the country then, the expressions of mutual hatred, and the vacuous talk about stamping out terror and creating a deterrent effect were the primary trigger for my refusal.”
The government, he said, was “not interested in finding a solution to the existing situation, but rather in preserving it … We will talk of deterrence, we will kill some terrorist, we will lose some civilians on both sides, and we will prepare the ground for a new generation full of hatred on both sides … We, as citizens and human beings, have a moral duty to refuse to participate in this cynical game.”
In an interview with the Guardian, he says: “The war going on in this country for more than 60 years could have ended a long time ago. But both sides are giving into extremists and fundamentalists. The occupation was supposed to be temporary, but now no one speaks of it ending.”
The Israeli state, he adds, keeps people “under our control” without democratic rights. Palestinians are subject to “collective punishment” for the actions of a few.
Will our msm write about this? Probably not. Here is a facebook page with updates about Blanc, including video messages for him from other Israeli Refusniks.
Repeated imprisonment is a violation of international legal standards. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in Opinion 24/2003 on Israel came to the conclusion that the repeated imprisonment of conscientious objectors in Israel is arbitrary, and therefore it constitutes a violation of 14 par 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of which Israel is a signatory.
Natan Blanc refuses to enlist in the Israeli Army based on beliefs and conscience. He claims his human right to conscientious objection, as guaranteed by Article 18 of the ICCPR.
Death in custody prompts complaints about Israeli negligence and questions about Palestinian leadership.
April 6, 2013
With three prison guards on his bedside, 64-year-old Maysara Abu Hamdeya died of cancer shackled to an Israeli hospital bed on Tuesday.
Abu Hamdeya’s health started to deteriorate in August last year, his lawyer, Rami al-Alami, said. He was suffering severe throat ache, accompanied by swelling in lymphatic and salivary glands.
“He went to the prison clinic and was given antibiotic medications without any tests,” Alami wrote in an affidavit upon visiting Abu Hamdeya on 12 March. One of five Palestinians to die in or shortly after being released from Israeli jails this year, Abu Hamdeya’s death revived fears for the lives of sick Palestinian prisoners and anger over a perceived Israeli policy of medical negligence.
After months of pushing with the prison clinic, Abu Hamdeya got an approval from the Israeli authorities to go to the hospital in October 2012, but the visit was delayed several times.
When he made it to Soroka hospital in December 2012, he was told that he was brought due to eye problems. Abu Hamdeya returned to prison without performing needed tests. Tests were only performed on January 10; by then Abu Hamdeya’s health had deteriorated further. He was suffering acute pain in his neck and all his body.
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According to an official Israeli statement, Abu Hamdeya was diagnosed with cancer in February. On March 12, Abu Hamdeya told his lawyer that he was not given any treatment. “He has only been given painkillers,” the affidavit says.
The Israeli autopsy of Abu Hamdeya confirmed that he died of cancer. In a statement, the Israeli health ministry said they found a malignant tumour in the throat, which spread to his chest, lungs, liver, spine and some of his ribs. Nevertheless, Palestinians performed a re-autopsy. More tests were needed to prove that the cancer had spread to Abu Hamdeya’s organs years - and not months ago, the Palestinian Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs said.
One of 25 diagnosed with cancer, Abu Hamdeya was among hundreds of sick prisoners, including 48 in Ramleh prison hospital. Their families and many Palestinians say Israel is killing them slowly through negligence.
It’s Israel’s fault, Abu Hamdeya’s son Hamza said. “The logical thing to do is to blame Israel,” he said.
However, Hamza said his family also has some complaints about the Palestinian government for not following up on his father’s case. “Where have they been all that time? Why didn’t they ask about Maysara?” he said. Hamza said his father was a general in the Palestinian Preventive Security force, so Palestinian officials had an extra duty to ask about him.
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Abu Hamdeya was imprisoned several times, first in 1969. He was exiled to Jordan in 1978 and returned to the Palestinian Territories in 1998. Since his last sentence in 2002, Abu Hamdeya was almost always banned from receiving family visits. Each of his four children barely saw him during the past 11 years.
With his illness and death in prison, Abu Hamdeya has become a symbol of the Palestinians’ suffering in Israeli jails. But his case is not merely something to sympathise with, his eldest son Tareq warned.
In the street, Abu Hamdeya’s death ignited anger in various places across the West Bank. A general strike halted life in the streets of East Jerusalem, Nablus and Hebron on Wednesday. The usual group of committed Palestinians took to the streets to demonstrate against Abu Hamdeya’s death in Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarem and Ramallah.
Two Palestinian teenagers were killed in clashes north of Tulkarem, both by live fire. After their funeral there were reports of Palestinian security units trying to stop protesters from reaching tension points.
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Abu Hamdeya’s funeral on Thursday was followed by the funerals of the other Palestinians killed in Tulkarem.
On the way to Hebron, masked Palestinians were asking store keepers in Bethlehem to shut down for mourning. A similar scene took place a day earlier in Ramallah.
In Gaza, Hamas declared Abu Hamdeya one of its martyrs. In a statement, the group said he was a top commander of its West Bank military wing.
But those who knew Abu Hamdeya said he was “old-school” Palestinian - for resistance and Palestine. At the end of the day, he was not wrapped in a yellow or a green flag: it was the black, white, red and green Palestinian flag that accompanied him to the grave.
