Please download and / or circulate this handy reminder of 60 years of Israeli racism, ethnic cleansing and oppression, and 90 years of betrayal by Britain and the West.
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Israel's 60th anniversary
As Western leaders mark the rogue state of Israel's 60th birthday with a back-slapping show of friendship, what exactly is there to celebrate?
Please download and / or circulate this handy reminder of 60 years of Israeli racism, ethnic cleansing and oppression, and 90 years of betrayal by Britain and the West.
Please download and / or circulate this handy reminder of 60 years of Israeli racism, ethnic cleansing and oppression, and 90 years of betrayal by Britain and the West.
Thursday, 24 April 2008
Hamas's evolving guerrilla tactics
Courtesy of Gabriel Ash*
Hamas guerrillas deliver a smart and successful blow to an "elite" unit of the Herrenvolk Army of Israel
Three Israel Defense Forces soldiers from the elite Givati Brigade were killed on Wednesday in an exchange of heavy gunfire with Palestinian militants next to the Gaza Strip security fence....Three other soldiers were wounded in the clashes, two of them moderately.... (Haaretz, 17 April 2008) Who says the media doesn't publish the good news!
The guerrillas did it by the book!
The soldiers were killed after troops spotted two Hamas militants planting a bomb near the Israeli border. Troops pursued the militants, only to fall into an ambush by another Hamas force lying in wait...
The Herrenvolk army is embarrassed: the natives are supposed to be the stupid ones. The soldiers too are confused. They're used to shooting fish in a barrel, or children from a watchtower.
The Herrenvolk Army must therefore avenge its honor. It is one thing to bomb Sderot with fire crackers. Who cares about Sderot? Certainly not the Israeli elite. But to kill soldiers – "elite" soldiers – that is the most horrible offense.
So here is a question for the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Are 20 dead Palestinians, including five children and a cameraman, enough vengeance for three dead soldiers? I want an official fatwa.
Yet, with all the sadness that such a bloody day brings, never forget that a success for the resistance is a success for humanity, and the defeat of an "elite" Herrenvolk unit is always also a cause for celebration.
(…)
Hamas evolves in the right direction, or spot the fascist
According to military Analyst Rob Ben Yishai Hamas is moving towards a strategy of "quality" guerrilla attacks on military targets. The reason?
Hamas leaders in Gaza and Damascus who are carefully, if not passionately, following Israeli media reports apparently concluded, just like Hizbullah realized in the Second Lebanon War, that the Israeli public is sensitive to casualties among troops more than it is sensitive to moral and physical damage caused to civilians as a result of the Qassams and Grads in Sderot and Ashkelon. (Ynet, 21 April 2008)
This is fantastic news!! The focus on military targets is important both morally and strategically. It also reflects increased self-confidence and greater operational capacity.
But let's just think for a moment about what Ben Yishai says. The Israeli public cares more about the life of soldiers, whose very job description implies the risk of death and injury, than about the life of civilian residents, including children in Sderot.
It is a bit warped, isn't it? Soldiers are supposed to take risks defending civilians. That is the theory behind the official name of the Herrenvolk army, i.e. "Israel defense forces."
But that is not how fascist ideologies work. Civilians are unimportant. The fascist state isn't an institution whose purpose is to secure inalienable rights or promote the pursuit of happiness. The state of Israel is sacred. Moreover, this sacred status is not based on religious belief. Moshe Dayan, who was as irreligious as one can ever be, referred to the state of Israel as "the third temple." The sacred state is its own religion. The state is the altar and the temple at which Israelis are supposed to worship and, when necessary, sacrifice themselves.
Uniformed soldiers are therefore sacred. They are the altar boys of fascism. Killing them is blasphemy and lèse majesté. In contrast, the death of civilians can be sad, painful, scary. But it remains a purely secular affair. And since it is a secular affair, it is subject to rational cost-benefit considerations. Israelis living around Tel Aaviv have a good degree of tolerance for civilians casualties, especially when the casualties are from Sderot or Shlomi.
Finally, how does Ben Yishai think the Herrenvolk army should counter the new direction taken by Hamas?
In order to deter Hamas from implementing its new strategy and combat methods, a strategic balance of terror must be created vis-à-vis the organization... the fuel supply and humanitarian aid directed into the Strip should be curbed to a minimum, until the attacks stop.
Ben Yishai believes that merely killing the guerrillas and frustrating their operations is not going to be enough. They won't be deterred unless the ratchet is tightened and Palestinian noncombatants suffer a great deal more.
No brownie points for noting that Ben Yishai advocates terrorism, massive human rights abuse and potentially genocide. This is what colonialism looks like.
But consider this: according to Ben Yishai, in Israel, the public is more sensitive to the death of soldiers than to the suffering of civilians. Hamas, according to Ben Yishai, has the very opposite sensitivity, it values reducing the suffering of civilians over and above the life of its guerrilla units.
Perhaps Israel refuses to negotiate with Hamas because Hamas is just not fascist enough for Israel.
--
*Gabriel Ash is an activist and writer who writes because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword and sometimes not. He welcomes comments at: g.a.evildoer@gmail.com
Hamas guerrillas deliver a smart and successful blow to an "elite" unit of the Herrenvolk Army of Israel
Three Israel Defense Forces soldiers from the elite Givati Brigade were killed on Wednesday in an exchange of heavy gunfire with Palestinian militants next to the Gaza Strip security fence....Three other soldiers were wounded in the clashes, two of them moderately.... (Haaretz, 17 April 2008) Who says the media doesn't publish the good news!
The guerrillas did it by the book!
The soldiers were killed after troops spotted two Hamas militants planting a bomb near the Israeli border. Troops pursued the militants, only to fall into an ambush by another Hamas force lying in wait...
The Herrenvolk army is embarrassed: the natives are supposed to be the stupid ones. The soldiers too are confused. They're used to shooting fish in a barrel, or children from a watchtower.
The Herrenvolk Army must therefore avenge its honor. It is one thing to bomb Sderot with fire crackers. Who cares about Sderot? Certainly not the Israeli elite. But to kill soldiers – "elite" soldiers – that is the most horrible offense.
So here is a question for the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Are 20 dead Palestinians, including five children and a cameraman, enough vengeance for three dead soldiers? I want an official fatwa.
Yet, with all the sadness that such a bloody day brings, never forget that a success for the resistance is a success for humanity, and the defeat of an "elite" Herrenvolk unit is always also a cause for celebration.
(…)
Hamas evolves in the right direction, or spot the fascist
According to military Analyst Rob Ben Yishai Hamas is moving towards a strategy of "quality" guerrilla attacks on military targets. The reason?
Hamas leaders in Gaza and Damascus who are carefully, if not passionately, following Israeli media reports apparently concluded, just like Hizbullah realized in the Second Lebanon War, that the Israeli public is sensitive to casualties among troops more than it is sensitive to moral and physical damage caused to civilians as a result of the Qassams and Grads in Sderot and Ashkelon. (Ynet, 21 April 2008)
This is fantastic news!! The focus on military targets is important both morally and strategically. It also reflects increased self-confidence and greater operational capacity.
But let's just think for a moment about what Ben Yishai says. The Israeli public cares more about the life of soldiers, whose very job description implies the risk of death and injury, than about the life of civilian residents, including children in Sderot.
It is a bit warped, isn't it? Soldiers are supposed to take risks defending civilians. That is the theory behind the official name of the Herrenvolk army, i.e. "Israel defense forces."
But that is not how fascist ideologies work. Civilians are unimportant. The fascist state isn't an institution whose purpose is to secure inalienable rights or promote the pursuit of happiness. The state of Israel is sacred. Moreover, this sacred status is not based on religious belief. Moshe Dayan, who was as irreligious as one can ever be, referred to the state of Israel as "the third temple." The sacred state is its own religion. The state is the altar and the temple at which Israelis are supposed to worship and, when necessary, sacrifice themselves.
Uniformed soldiers are therefore sacred. They are the altar boys of fascism. Killing them is blasphemy and lèse majesté. In contrast, the death of civilians can be sad, painful, scary. But it remains a purely secular affair. And since it is a secular affair, it is subject to rational cost-benefit considerations. Israelis living around Tel Aaviv have a good degree of tolerance for civilians casualties, especially when the casualties are from Sderot or Shlomi.
Finally, how does Ben Yishai think the Herrenvolk army should counter the new direction taken by Hamas?
In order to deter Hamas from implementing its new strategy and combat methods, a strategic balance of terror must be created vis-à-vis the organization... the fuel supply and humanitarian aid directed into the Strip should be curbed to a minimum, until the attacks stop.
Ben Yishai believes that merely killing the guerrillas and frustrating their operations is not going to be enough. They won't be deterred unless the ratchet is tightened and Palestinian noncombatants suffer a great deal more.
No brownie points for noting that Ben Yishai advocates terrorism, massive human rights abuse and potentially genocide. This is what colonialism looks like.
But consider this: according to Ben Yishai, in Israel, the public is more sensitive to the death of soldiers than to the suffering of civilians. Hamas, according to Ben Yishai, has the very opposite sensitivity, it values reducing the suffering of civilians over and above the life of its guerrilla units.
Perhaps Israel refuses to negotiate with Hamas because Hamas is just not fascist enough for Israel.
--
*Gabriel Ash is an activist and writer who writes because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword and sometimes not. He welcomes comments at: g.a.evildoer@gmail.com
Sunday, 20 April 2008
An open letter to Nadine Gordimer
from the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine
Dear Nadine Gordimer,
Many of us who paid attention to, and valued, your writing during the dark days of apartheid are dismayed to see that you are participating in the International Writers' Festival in Israel in May.
It can only send a dispiriting message to the Palestinians that a writer of your moral standing and international renown is prepared to appear in a city at least half of which is under illegal military occupation by a state founded on ethnic cleansing. ("Ethnic cleansing" isn't just our term – it's what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe says he has finally accepted as the most accurate description for what Israeli forces did to the Palestinians in 1948.)
Think of a Palestinian villager in the occupied West Bank – hemmed in by Israeli army roadblocks, cut off from her fields by the Wall, the water in her wells drained by a nearby settlement, some of her sons and daughters in prison without charge or trial, her other children unable to leave the village to go to school. There are hundreds of thousands like her. In this context, isn't it a contradiction to be sitting in occupied Jerusalem, discussing the morality and responsibility of "the writer" with Amos Oz?
We take it as given that you still believe everything you said during apartheid times about the responsibility of the writer not to ignore injustice, and about your hatred of racism. But how does your visit square with this? By taking part in an event substantially funded by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, you will be lending credibility to the state that has for decades subjected Palestinian towns and villages to collective punishment, that boasts of its extrajudicial killings, that carpeted south Lebanon with cluster bombs in 2006 when the ceasefire had already been agreed (the list truly is endless).
In one of your essays you describe Professor John Dugard as a friend. You must know that in his capacity as UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, John Dugard unequivocally denounced the wrongs inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. His doing so has not brought Palestinian suffering to an end. But he did, to his great credit, unmask the systematic cruelty of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.
The whole of Palestinian civil society has called for a cultural boycott of Israel. Please don't give the Israeli establishment, the Israeli press, the whole Israeli PR machine, the prize they want – your apparent condoning of their policies.
Your reputation as a figure of conscience is world-wide.
Your withdrawal from the May event will have a great impact on an Israeli public largely in denial about the cruelties it perpetrates. Please don't go.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Hilary Rose
Professor Steven Rose
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead
British Committee for the Universities of Palestine
BM BRICUP
London WC1N 3XX
Dear Nadine Gordimer,
Many of us who paid attention to, and valued, your writing during the dark days of apartheid are dismayed to see that you are participating in the International Writers' Festival in Israel in May.
It can only send a dispiriting message to the Palestinians that a writer of your moral standing and international renown is prepared to appear in a city at least half of which is under illegal military occupation by a state founded on ethnic cleansing. ("Ethnic cleansing" isn't just our term – it's what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe says he has finally accepted as the most accurate description for what Israeli forces did to the Palestinians in 1948.)
Think of a Palestinian villager in the occupied West Bank – hemmed in by Israeli army roadblocks, cut off from her fields by the Wall, the water in her wells drained by a nearby settlement, some of her sons and daughters in prison without charge or trial, her other children unable to leave the village to go to school. There are hundreds of thousands like her. In this context, isn't it a contradiction to be sitting in occupied Jerusalem, discussing the morality and responsibility of "the writer" with Amos Oz?
We take it as given that you still believe everything you said during apartheid times about the responsibility of the writer not to ignore injustice, and about your hatred of racism. But how does your visit square with this? By taking part in an event substantially funded by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, you will be lending credibility to the state that has for decades subjected Palestinian towns and villages to collective punishment, that boasts of its extrajudicial killings, that carpeted south Lebanon with cluster bombs in 2006 when the ceasefire had already been agreed (the list truly is endless).
In one of your essays you describe Professor John Dugard as a friend. You must know that in his capacity as UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, John Dugard unequivocally denounced the wrongs inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. His doing so has not brought Palestinian suffering to an end. But he did, to his great credit, unmask the systematic cruelty of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.
The whole of Palestinian civil society has called for a cultural boycott of Israel. Please don't give the Israeli establishment, the Israeli press, the whole Israeli PR machine, the prize they want – your apparent condoning of their policies.
Your reputation as a figure of conscience is world-wide.
Your withdrawal from the May event will have a great impact on an Israeli public largely in denial about the cruelties it perpetrates. Please don't go.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Hilary Rose
Professor Steven Rose
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead
British Committee for the Universities of Palestine
BM BRICUP
London WC1N 3XX
Wednesday, 2 April 2008
Land Day protest at LEVIEV New York: 60 Years of Nakbah
Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East
New York, NY, March 29, 2008 – Saturday’s Land Day protest at the Madison Avenue jewelry store of Israeli billionaire and settlement mogul Lev Leviev highlights the sixty-year Israeli campaign to displace Palestinians from their land, and Palestinian defiance and resistance – from the Nakbah, or Catastrophe, in 1948, when around 800,000 Palestinians were driven from their villages by Israeli forces to become refugees; to the original Land Day protests in 1976; to present day settlement construction by Israeli settlement builders like Lev Leviev in Bil’in, Jayyous, Jabal Abu Ghneim and Maale Adumim.
The first Land Day protests were held on March 30, 1976. Israel’s Ministry of Finance confiscated 5000 acres of Palestinian land between the Palestinian villages of Sakhnin and Arraba in the Galilee in northern Israel. Construction of eight Jewish industrial villages was planned on the seized land. On March 30, 1976, Palestinian towns from the Negev to the Galilee launched a day of nonviolent protests and strikes in solidarity with Sakhnin and Arraba. Six Palestinian civilians were killed and over 100 Palestinians injured by the Israeli military and police as they violently repressed the protests. Palestinians have held Land Day protests every year since 1976, on and around March 30th.
Lev Leviev’s company Africa-Israel, which he purchased in 1996, has been directly involved in the long history of Jewish settlement and displacement of the indigenous Palestinian people. A 2004 Africa-Israel report notes that the company was established in 1934 as Africa Palestine Investments Ltd. "by a group of Jewish investors from South Africa, with the purpose of engaging in acquisition and development of real estate for Jewish settlement in Israel." Its name was changed to Africa-Israel in 1967, the year that Israel took control of and occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
60 years after the Nakbah, and 32 years after the original Land Day, Israeli land seizure and repression continue in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and inside Israel, as does Palestinian resistance. The testimonies below - from refugees from the Nakbah in 1948, from Land Day protests in 1976 and from present day Bil’in and Jayyous where Leviev’s companies are building settlements - demonstrate the continuity of both Israeli repression and Palestinian steadfastness and resistance that Palestinian communities in Israel, in the Occupied Territories and living in exile as refugees around the world are commemorating at protests this Land Day.
Responding to the failure of the international community to act to stop Israel’s ethnic cleaning of the Palestinian people, the 2005 call by Palestinian civil society organizations for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel (www.bds-palestine.net/) has resulted in a growing international BDS movement. For more on the the Land Day protest in New York City and the boycott of settlement builders Lev Leviev and Shaya Boymelgreen see: www.adalah.ny.org
Nakbah: 1948
Hafiza Abdullah (Kanon/ Tulkarem district): The people of my village were only simple farmers and did not have any weapons when we were driven out during the wheat and watermelon picking season of 1948.
Abdul Qader Al-Ha (Qaqon village, Tulkarem): Our village had fertile land and we had a field next to it; The Mediterranean Sea was just eight kilometres away.
Abu Khader Hamdan (Salameh, Yaffa District): I lived and worked in my home village, Salameh, which was less than six kilometers from Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is a relatively new city, it was built on Palestinian land called Tel Al-Rabe, and it was part of Yaffa city.
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh (Shekh Emwanes, Yafa District): We owned a 100-dunum farm, which we planted with wheat and other cereals and vegetables, but we were forced to leave it without harvesting our crops.
Abu Khader Hamdan: It was during the orange season and we had managed to harvest our oranges for a month before we were deported.
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh: For a time the Palestinians and Jews were like one people. There was a sizeable Jewish minority but we lived together in peace, as these were not the same as the Jews who came from the West.
Abdul Qader Al-Ha: The British gave the Jews their national home in our homeland.
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh: Those who came from abroad were militants and racists. They formed the Hagana and Stern militia gangs in Palestine, which started killing us and forced us to leave our homes.
Abdul Qader Al-Ha: They wanted our village in particular because it was in an important location strategically. We tried not to flee, but in the end they brought armed militia with tanks and launched a sustained attack on our village; they wanted to clear all the people from our village.
Mohammad Ahmad Abu Eisha (Al-Sufsaf village, Safad): They had killed every one who they believed was able to carry a gun.
Abu Khader Hamdan: We went first to the town of Sarafand, which was on the border. But then the Jews occupied Sarafand too, even though it was supposed to lie outside the border of their state. So we went to Lydda city, where the Jews committed an atrocity in July 1948.
Hafiza Abdullah: We did not leave of our own accord: we were forced to flee from the terror and the murders; we were afraid because of what we had heard about the massacres.
Hafiza Abdullah: Our village lands were taken and I can still remember the sizes: Alkhuwar, 30 dunum; Nareyeh, 27 dunum, and Aljereh, 15 dunum. Our trees were uprooted, we lost our home; we had no more wheat, no more corn and no more farm. Even today, the image of what the wheat fields looked like is as fresh in my mind as if I had seen it yesterday. They damaged them and left nothing for us
Mohammad Ahmad Abu Eisha: My village had suffered the same fate as every other village that had resisted and been destroyed.
Abu Khader Hamdan: My friends who did visit it told me Salameh is not there any more--it has been removed from the map.
Abdul Qader Al-Ha: We saw the Jewish militia that became the Israeli army occupy the rest of Palestine.
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh: If I had known I would become a refugee and unable to return home, I would have stayed in my village, regardless of what might have happened to me.
Land Day: 1976
Saleh Taha: On the morning of March 30, 1976 the whole village, including farmers, workers, youth, students and others, began a strike to express solidarity in defending their land.
Qassem Sahawhneh: In the morning hours of March 30, 1976, I was in my house when I heard someone announcing a curfew on a loudspeaker. So I told my family that we needed to stay in the house.
Mu'een Khatib: At roughly 6:00 AM on March 30, 1976, I woke up to noise and screaming in our house. Soldiers took me out of my bed and ordered me to go with them outside. Someone grabbed me from my penis and dragged me to the car.
Samia Tawfiq: My son 'Arif was standing next to the road, and an army squad came and took him. When I heard them, I went outside to see what was happening to my son. I saw around five soldiers beating my son (he is 16 years old).
Abed Khalayleh: In the morning of March 30, 1976, I was drinking coffee with my son Khadr on the balcony of our house in Sakhnin, when we heard someone announcing a curfew on a loudspeaker. Suddenly we saw a group of soldiers near our house.
Qassem Sahawhneh: Around 7:30 we heard screaming outside. One of the children, Khalid, who is 9 years old, ran in the direction of the screaming. Then my wife asked our deceased daughter Khadijah to go bring her brother back into the house.
Samia Tawfiq: On the streets there were kids no more than 7 or 8 years old. The soldiers started chasing them and throwing tear gas at them.
Abed Khalayleh: Around 7:30, the teacher Amneh 'Ammar went to school. She ran into a group of soldiers. They ordered her to go back into her house, and as soon as she turned her back, they shot and wounded her.
Qassem Sahawhneh: And then my wife followed Khadijah to see what was happening when they ran into some soldiers. One of the soldiers ordered them to go back into the house, so Khadijah and my wife went back into the house. When she turned around, the soldiers shot her in the back. A bomb exploded in the street about 50 meters from the house. Khadijah was martyred when she was 23 years old.
Abed Khalayleh: After that there was a big commotion, and we heard someone saying that Amneh was killed and others saying that she was wounded. I went down to Khadr and others to help her and take her to the hospital.
Samia Tawfiq: And when I tried to save him from them, they started beating me and cursing at me. I went back into the house, and after a short while, APCs came filled with soldiers.
Abed Khalayleh: Khadr got there before me, and while he was trying to help Amneh, the soldiers shot him. Someone else was shot as well, Sayyid Khalaylah, when he was trying to help the wounded. Khadr was hit in his head and his arm and he died on the spot.
Saleh Taha: The strike organizers were working to keep the strike peaceful and not to respond to the provocations of the authorities, including the police and border patrol, who were trying to provoke the youngsters by cursing and spitting at them and insulting their religion.
Mu'een Khatib: Then they took us to a barn outside our village, while continuing to beat us. They shoved me over to a small tree and I ran away. They ran after me while shooting at me, and I heard one of them say in Hebrew, "I hit him and he is going to die like the others; leave him."
Subhi Hudhud: I was arrested Tuesday morning, March 30, 1976, inside the mosque, when they pointed a gun at me and took me to a car and began beating me with sticks.
Saleh Taha: The border patrol assaulted the women and the youngsters by hitting them with sticks and throwing tear gas at them. They attacked the village from the west and the east; they stormed the houses, broke doors and beat anyone they found inside the houses. The assaults by the authorities led to the killing of one of the villages, the martyr Muhsin Taha, and the wounding of others. It continued until 1:00 in the afternoon. It took place in the presence of an Israeli colonel and other high ranking officers.
Samia Tawfiq: They stormed our house and found my two young boys, one who is 12 years old and the other who is two years old, and began destroying the furniture in the house. They broke the closet, two windows, a stove, a radio, plates, and other things around the house. They beat my twelve year old son and threatened my little one to scare him.
Ibrahim Yassin (63 years old): The policemen and army broke into my house, and started beating us. I dashed to protect my daughter Fatima, when the policeman in my house beat me and dragged my daughter Fatima outside to the hall. They put her down, stepped on her and broke two teeth of hers. They also beat my other daughter (Miriam), then they took me to the carpentry and beat me and arrested me.
Mohammad Abu Yunis: I was in my house in Sakhnin on the morning of March 30, 1976 when I heard shooting. I went near the main road in town to get my children, who were playing next to the road. Then I felt two bullets hit my left leg.
Saleem Khalifeh: Around 8:00 in the morning on March 30, 1976, I was listening to the radio on my balcony. Suddenly, my brother Na'im Muhammad Khalifah, who was standing next to me, was wounded. The injury was in his abdomen. My brother was around 11 years old.
Mohammad Badarneh: At 10:00 in the morning, March 30, 1976, I was in my house in Sakhnin. I saw my cousin who lives next to me; he was wounded. I ran to help him and carried him toward the car to take him to the hospital. While I was carrying him, the soldiers shot at me from about 10-15 meters away and hit me in my leg. It caused a severe injury.
Ali Dgheim: Around 9:00 in the morning of March 30, 1976, I was in the electronics store in Sakhnin that belonged to my brother. The Israeli soldiers were flooding into the village and shooting heavily everywhere. I said two men, Subhi Muhammad Badarneh and Muhammad Deeb Badarneh, who were wounded next to my brother's store, so I ran to help them. While I was trying to carry one of the wounded, the soldiers shot at me from about 10-15 meters away.
Saleh Taha: When the provocations didn't stop but instead escalated, the whole village protested, young and old alike. The police responded by shooting at the student at the village Northern School and wounding one of the villagers. The shooting continued, as did the protest.
Abdel Qader Taher: The authorities began widespread arrests in the middle of the night of March 31, 1976. They raided my home . . . they destroyed things in the house, frightened my children and hit my wife. They pointed their weapons at the chests of my children
Subhi Hudhud: They took me with others to the Kfar Saba police station and they crammed a large number of us in a small room. During my interrogation, they beat me with sticks and chairs and forced me to sign a confession.
Abdel Qader Taher: In the Kfar Saba station they locked us in a room that looked like a cell and continued to beat us, while they were hysterically yelling that we should have been arrested as children so that they wouldn't have to dirty their hands with us as adults. They called us filthy communists, saboteurs and bastards.
Bil'in and Jayyous: 2003 to present
Sharif Omar: Jayyous' farmland includes some of the most fertile and water rich land in the West Bank. The Israeli government has used British mandate laws, Ottoman laws, and the absentee landlord law to confiscate Palestinians' land. If this is not enough the Israeli army confiscates our land for "security reasons."
Mohammed Khatib: The olive is a symbol of our land and of the Palestinian people. We are connected to the land. We were born in Bil'in like our fathers and grandfathers and their fathers. We belong here. Our mothers took us to harvest olives before we could speak. We remember playing under the olive trees which have since been uprooted by Israeli settlers who have come to live here.
Sharif Omar: In October, 1988 the Israeli military governor of our district, Qalqilya, gave Jayyous' mayor a military declaration saying that nearly 500 acres of Jayyous' agricultural land "state land" and Israeli settlers began to build the colony of Zufim on our land.
Sharif Omar: In 1993 Leader - a real state enterprise owned by the businessman Lev Leviev - established a quarry on some of Jayyous' land. During this period it became clear that Leader was an enemy of the people of Jayyous. Leader used bulldozers to prepare our land for houses for Israeli settlers, and TNT to detonate more than 16 acres for a quarry. They uprooted all the olive trees on that land. Many olive trees died because sewage from Zufim ran for many years many years through other plots. Other plots were annexed to Zufim.
Sharif Omar: In September, 2002 a shepherd found a paper hanging from an olive tree. It was a military order instructing us to meet an Israeli army officer to tour the "separation" wall's path. Hundreds of area Palestinians turned out. Most farmers expected the wall would be near the Green Line, Israel's pre-1967 border with the West Bank. But we learned that the wall would be built almost four miles east of the Green Line, as close as 90 feet from Jayyous' homes, separating our residential area from our farmland.
Mohammed Khatib: Bil'in is being strangled by the Wall. Though our village sits 2 1/2 miles east of the Green Line, Israel's Wall and the settlement being built by Lev Leviev will take more than 60 percent of our land. This land is also money to us; we work it. Bil'in's 1,600 residents depend on farming and harvesting our olive trees for our livelihood. The Wall will turn Bil'in into an open-air prison.
Sharif Omar: People burst into tears. Some fainted. With the wall, Israel is taking 75% of Jayyous' most fertile land, including all our irrigated farmland, seven wells and 12,000 olive trees. Jayyous' 3,000 residents depend almost entirely on agricultural income. So this means a loss of our livelihoods, dreams, hopes, future and heritage.
Mohammed Khatib: There is now a huge and growing settlement called Modi'in Illit where we played as children. Instead of seeing my children play under those trees, I will watch a child who is a stranger play there -- a child whose family just recently came to live on our land, without any right to do so, simply because of the power of the occupation.
Sharif Omar: Leader then announced that it would build 1500 new homes in a large area located 1.2 miles north of Zufim for "North Zufim" that would be cut off from Jayyous by the Wall.
Mohammed Khatib: We refuse to be strangled by the Wall in silence. In a famous Palestinian short story "Men in the Sun," Palestinian workers suffocate inside a tanker truck. Upon discovering them, the driver screams, "Why didn't you bang on the sides of the tank?" We are banging; we are screaming.
Sharif Omar: Jayyous' farmers have organized dozens of peaceful protests against the wall, supported by international solidarity movements and Israeli peace activists. Our weapons in those activities were only slogans that condemn the occupation and the wall. All of us participated, young and old, men and women. We are determined never to surrender or forget our sacred land. We faced the bulldozers destroying our fields as well as armed Israeli soldiers and guards. During one peaceful march, an Israeli military officer explained to me that Sarah, the wife of our common ancestor Abraham, was their mother but not ours, and that because Sarah went to heaven, Jews were entitled to the land. After his lecture, he used tear gas and rubber-coated bullets to break up our protest.
Mohammed Khatib: For the last three years we have engaged in a nonviolent campaign of creative protests with the support of Israeli and international activists to prevent the construction of Israel's wall and the expansion of Modi'in Illit by Leviev's company on our land. The Israelis want to control the Palestinians, push us off our land and seize it for themselves.
Sharif Omar: Despite more than 60 nonviolent protests, the wall has been built, uprooting 4,000 trees and cutting off 75% of our land. More than 70% of Jayyous' farmers are now denied access to their land, many to the area where Leviev plans to expand Zufim. Hundreds of Israeli activists helped us to harvest our olives this fall because so many people from Jayyous could not reach their land.
Mohammed Khatib: We developed creative activities for our weekly protests. One Friday, activists locked themselves inside a cage, representing the wall's impacts. Another time, we built a Palestinian "outpost" on our village's land located behind the wall and next to an Israeli settlement, mimicking the Israeli strategy of establishing outposts to expand settlements. Another Friday we handed the Israeli soldiers a letter saying, "Had you come here as guests, we would show you the trees that our grandfathers planted here, and the vegetables that we grow... There will never be security for any of us until Israelis respect our rights to this land."
Sharif Omar: We are engaged in a struggle for justice, for our freedom - indeed, for our very lives.
Mohammed Khatib: Over three years of protests in Bil'in more than 800 activists were injured in more than 200 demonstrations in Bil'in. An Israeli attorney and a Bil'in resident both suffered permanent brain damage from rubber-coated steel bullets shot by Israeli soldiers from close range. Another Palestinian lost sight in one eye. 49 Bil'in residents, including some protest leaders, were arrested. Some spent months in prison.
Sharif Omar: Last September I was working in my olive grove near the wall, when I came across uprooted olive trees coming out of the bulldozed ground. These green young branches are soft and beautiful, deeply rooted in the ground and stronger than the wall and bulldozers. These trees refuse to die or to surrender, and send a message to all farmers and people who love the land. "Do not give up, and keep struggling and one day you will touch the sun." We have been here longer than these trees, and we will stay here longer than the stones.
Mohammed Khatib: In Bil'in, we have chosen a strategy which makes clear who is the victim and who is the victimizer. We know the Israeli army can choose to deal with us in two ways. If they choose violence, we make sure to get photographs for the media so that everyone sees what we were up against. And if they don't use violence then we achieve our aim of stopping their bulldozers and delaying construction of their Wall and settlements. But even if the soldiers put down their weapons, which they have not, that would not make us equals in the field. We would always be the stronger because we have the power of justice on our side.
Mohammed Khatib: As a result of our protests and in response to our legal petition, in September, 2007, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that Israel's wall must be rerouted to return half of our land that was being seized, but the Supreme Court also legalized the settlement that Leviev is building on the remaining 25% of our land, though the wall is being built in violation of even Israeli law.
Mohammed Khatib: In response, we vowed to continue our nonviolent struggle to save the olive groves that our families have cultivated for centuries, and we have put our experience at the service of other communities struggling against the wall and settlements.
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh: I do have hope that I will be able to go home to my village and this thought does not leave my mind. Even though I am a very old woman I still have hope, especially for the younger generation of refugees: they are determined to keep their rights; I keep telling them about our land. Our land was not empty as the Jews claim. It was not an empty land for a homeless Jewish nation. I'm not prepared to accept compensation in lieu of my land.
Excerpts taken from the testimonies of:
NAKBAH: 1948
Hafiza Abdullah,original village: Kanon/ Tulkarem district, current address: Shweikeh/ Tulkarem
Abu Khader Hamdan, born in 1928, original home: Salameh, Yaffa District, current address: Askar Refugee Camp/ Nablus
Abdul Qader Al-Ha, born in 1938, original home: Qaqon village, Tulkarem, current address: Askar Refugee Camp, Nablus
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh, born in 1916, original home: Shekh Emwanes, Yafa District, current address: Askar Refugee Camp, Nablus City
Mohammad Ahmad Abu Eisha, 18 years old in 1948, original home: Al-Sufsaf village/ Safad, current address: Al-Ein Refugee Camp/ Nablus
LAND DAY: 1976
Abdel Qader Thaher: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/4-1.htm
Saleh Taha: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/3-2.htm
Ali Dgheim: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/2-5.htm
Subhi Hudhud: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/4-3.htm
Mohammad Badarneh: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/2-3.htm
Saleem Khalifeh: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/1-7.htm
Mohammad Abu Yunis: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/2-4.htm
Ibrahim Yassin, Arraba.
Samia Tawfiq: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/5-7.htm
Mu'een Khatib: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/1-6.htm
Abed Khalayleh: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/2-7.htm
Qassem Sahawhneh: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/2-6.htm
BIL’IN AND JAYYOU: 2003 – Present
Sharif Omar, the Village of Jayyous' Land Defense Committee
Mohammed Khatib, the Village of Bil'in's Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements.
New York, NY, March 29, 2008 – Saturday’s Land Day protest at the Madison Avenue jewelry store of Israeli billionaire and settlement mogul Lev Leviev highlights the sixty-year Israeli campaign to displace Palestinians from their land, and Palestinian defiance and resistance – from the Nakbah, or Catastrophe, in 1948, when around 800,000 Palestinians were driven from their villages by Israeli forces to become refugees; to the original Land Day protests in 1976; to present day settlement construction by Israeli settlement builders like Lev Leviev in Bil’in, Jayyous, Jabal Abu Ghneim and Maale Adumim.
The first Land Day protests were held on March 30, 1976. Israel’s Ministry of Finance confiscated 5000 acres of Palestinian land between the Palestinian villages of Sakhnin and Arraba in the Galilee in northern Israel. Construction of eight Jewish industrial villages was planned on the seized land. On March 30, 1976, Palestinian towns from the Negev to the Galilee launched a day of nonviolent protests and strikes in solidarity with Sakhnin and Arraba. Six Palestinian civilians were killed and over 100 Palestinians injured by the Israeli military and police as they violently repressed the protests. Palestinians have held Land Day protests every year since 1976, on and around March 30th.
Lev Leviev’s company Africa-Israel, which he purchased in 1996, has been directly involved in the long history of Jewish settlement and displacement of the indigenous Palestinian people. A 2004 Africa-Israel report notes that the company was established in 1934 as Africa Palestine Investments Ltd. "by a group of Jewish investors from South Africa, with the purpose of engaging in acquisition and development of real estate for Jewish settlement in Israel." Its name was changed to Africa-Israel in 1967, the year that Israel took control of and occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
60 years after the Nakbah, and 32 years after the original Land Day, Israeli land seizure and repression continue in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and inside Israel, as does Palestinian resistance. The testimonies below - from refugees from the Nakbah in 1948, from Land Day protests in 1976 and from present day Bil’in and Jayyous where Leviev’s companies are building settlements - demonstrate the continuity of both Israeli repression and Palestinian steadfastness and resistance that Palestinian communities in Israel, in the Occupied Territories and living in exile as refugees around the world are commemorating at protests this Land Day.
Responding to the failure of the international community to act to stop Israel’s ethnic cleaning of the Palestinian people, the 2005 call by Palestinian civil society organizations for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel (www.bds-palestine.net/) has resulted in a growing international BDS movement. For more on the the Land Day protest in New York City and the boycott of settlement builders Lev Leviev and Shaya Boymelgreen see: www.adalah.ny.org
Nakbah: 1948
Hafiza Abdullah (Kanon/ Tulkarem district): The people of my village were only simple farmers and did not have any weapons when we were driven out during the wheat and watermelon picking season of 1948.
Abdul Qader Al-Ha (Qaqon village, Tulkarem): Our village had fertile land and we had a field next to it; The Mediterranean Sea was just eight kilometres away.
Abu Khader Hamdan (Salameh, Yaffa District): I lived and worked in my home village, Salameh, which was less than six kilometers from Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is a relatively new city, it was built on Palestinian land called Tel Al-Rabe, and it was part of Yaffa city.
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh (Shekh Emwanes, Yafa District): We owned a 100-dunum farm, which we planted with wheat and other cereals and vegetables, but we were forced to leave it without harvesting our crops.
Abu Khader Hamdan: It was during the orange season and we had managed to harvest our oranges for a month before we were deported.
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh: For a time the Palestinians and Jews were like one people. There was a sizeable Jewish minority but we lived together in peace, as these were not the same as the Jews who came from the West.
Abdul Qader Al-Ha: The British gave the Jews their national home in our homeland.
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh: Those who came from abroad were militants and racists. They formed the Hagana and Stern militia gangs in Palestine, which started killing us and forced us to leave our homes.
Abdul Qader Al-Ha: They wanted our village in particular because it was in an important location strategically. We tried not to flee, but in the end they brought armed militia with tanks and launched a sustained attack on our village; they wanted to clear all the people from our village.
Mohammad Ahmad Abu Eisha (Al-Sufsaf village, Safad): They had killed every one who they believed was able to carry a gun.
Abu Khader Hamdan: We went first to the town of Sarafand, which was on the border. But then the Jews occupied Sarafand too, even though it was supposed to lie outside the border of their state. So we went to Lydda city, where the Jews committed an atrocity in July 1948.
Hafiza Abdullah: We did not leave of our own accord: we were forced to flee from the terror and the murders; we were afraid because of what we had heard about the massacres.
Hafiza Abdullah: Our village lands were taken and I can still remember the sizes: Alkhuwar, 30 dunum; Nareyeh, 27 dunum, and Aljereh, 15 dunum. Our trees were uprooted, we lost our home; we had no more wheat, no more corn and no more farm. Even today, the image of what the wheat fields looked like is as fresh in my mind as if I had seen it yesterday. They damaged them and left nothing for us
Mohammad Ahmad Abu Eisha: My village had suffered the same fate as every other village that had resisted and been destroyed.
Abu Khader Hamdan: My friends who did visit it told me Salameh is not there any more--it has been removed from the map.
Abdul Qader Al-Ha: We saw the Jewish militia that became the Israeli army occupy the rest of Palestine.
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh: If I had known I would become a refugee and unable to return home, I would have stayed in my village, regardless of what might have happened to me.
Land Day: 1976
Saleh Taha: On the morning of March 30, 1976 the whole village, including farmers, workers, youth, students and others, began a strike to express solidarity in defending their land.
Qassem Sahawhneh: In the morning hours of March 30, 1976, I was in my house when I heard someone announcing a curfew on a loudspeaker. So I told my family that we needed to stay in the house.
Mu'een Khatib: At roughly 6:00 AM on March 30, 1976, I woke up to noise and screaming in our house. Soldiers took me out of my bed and ordered me to go with them outside. Someone grabbed me from my penis and dragged me to the car.
Samia Tawfiq: My son 'Arif was standing next to the road, and an army squad came and took him. When I heard them, I went outside to see what was happening to my son. I saw around five soldiers beating my son (he is 16 years old).
Abed Khalayleh: In the morning of March 30, 1976, I was drinking coffee with my son Khadr on the balcony of our house in Sakhnin, when we heard someone announcing a curfew on a loudspeaker. Suddenly we saw a group of soldiers near our house.
Qassem Sahawhneh: Around 7:30 we heard screaming outside. One of the children, Khalid, who is 9 years old, ran in the direction of the screaming. Then my wife asked our deceased daughter Khadijah to go bring her brother back into the house.
Samia Tawfiq: On the streets there were kids no more than 7 or 8 years old. The soldiers started chasing them and throwing tear gas at them.
Abed Khalayleh: Around 7:30, the teacher Amneh 'Ammar went to school. She ran into a group of soldiers. They ordered her to go back into her house, and as soon as she turned her back, they shot and wounded her.
Qassem Sahawhneh: And then my wife followed Khadijah to see what was happening when they ran into some soldiers. One of the soldiers ordered them to go back into the house, so Khadijah and my wife went back into the house. When she turned around, the soldiers shot her in the back. A bomb exploded in the street about 50 meters from the house. Khadijah was martyred when she was 23 years old.
Abed Khalayleh: After that there was a big commotion, and we heard someone saying that Amneh was killed and others saying that she was wounded. I went down to Khadr and others to help her and take her to the hospital.
Samia Tawfiq: And when I tried to save him from them, they started beating me and cursing at me. I went back into the house, and after a short while, APCs came filled with soldiers.
Abed Khalayleh: Khadr got there before me, and while he was trying to help Amneh, the soldiers shot him. Someone else was shot as well, Sayyid Khalaylah, when he was trying to help the wounded. Khadr was hit in his head and his arm and he died on the spot.
Saleh Taha: The strike organizers were working to keep the strike peaceful and not to respond to the provocations of the authorities, including the police and border patrol, who were trying to provoke the youngsters by cursing and spitting at them and insulting their religion.
Mu'een Khatib: Then they took us to a barn outside our village, while continuing to beat us. They shoved me over to a small tree and I ran away. They ran after me while shooting at me, and I heard one of them say in Hebrew, "I hit him and he is going to die like the others; leave him."
Subhi Hudhud: I was arrested Tuesday morning, March 30, 1976, inside the mosque, when they pointed a gun at me and took me to a car and began beating me with sticks.
Saleh Taha: The border patrol assaulted the women and the youngsters by hitting them with sticks and throwing tear gas at them. They attacked the village from the west and the east; they stormed the houses, broke doors and beat anyone they found inside the houses. The assaults by the authorities led to the killing of one of the villages, the martyr Muhsin Taha, and the wounding of others. It continued until 1:00 in the afternoon. It took place in the presence of an Israeli colonel and other high ranking officers.
Samia Tawfiq: They stormed our house and found my two young boys, one who is 12 years old and the other who is two years old, and began destroying the furniture in the house. They broke the closet, two windows, a stove, a radio, plates, and other things around the house. They beat my twelve year old son and threatened my little one to scare him.
Ibrahim Yassin (63 years old): The policemen and army broke into my house, and started beating us. I dashed to protect my daughter Fatima, when the policeman in my house beat me and dragged my daughter Fatima outside to the hall. They put her down, stepped on her and broke two teeth of hers. They also beat my other daughter (Miriam), then they took me to the carpentry and beat me and arrested me.
Mohammad Abu Yunis: I was in my house in Sakhnin on the morning of March 30, 1976 when I heard shooting. I went near the main road in town to get my children, who were playing next to the road. Then I felt two bullets hit my left leg.
Saleem Khalifeh: Around 8:00 in the morning on March 30, 1976, I was listening to the radio on my balcony. Suddenly, my brother Na'im Muhammad Khalifah, who was standing next to me, was wounded. The injury was in his abdomen. My brother was around 11 years old.
Mohammad Badarneh: At 10:00 in the morning, March 30, 1976, I was in my house in Sakhnin. I saw my cousin who lives next to me; he was wounded. I ran to help him and carried him toward the car to take him to the hospital. While I was carrying him, the soldiers shot at me from about 10-15 meters away and hit me in my leg. It caused a severe injury.
Ali Dgheim: Around 9:00 in the morning of March 30, 1976, I was in the electronics store in Sakhnin that belonged to my brother. The Israeli soldiers were flooding into the village and shooting heavily everywhere. I said two men, Subhi Muhammad Badarneh and Muhammad Deeb Badarneh, who were wounded next to my brother's store, so I ran to help them. While I was trying to carry one of the wounded, the soldiers shot at me from about 10-15 meters away.
Saleh Taha: When the provocations didn't stop but instead escalated, the whole village protested, young and old alike. The police responded by shooting at the student at the village Northern School and wounding one of the villagers. The shooting continued, as did the protest.
Abdel Qader Taher: The authorities began widespread arrests in the middle of the night of March 31, 1976. They raided my home . . . they destroyed things in the house, frightened my children and hit my wife. They pointed their weapons at the chests of my children
Subhi Hudhud: They took me with others to the Kfar Saba police station and they crammed a large number of us in a small room. During my interrogation, they beat me with sticks and chairs and forced me to sign a confession.
Abdel Qader Taher: In the Kfar Saba station they locked us in a room that looked like a cell and continued to beat us, while they were hysterically yelling that we should have been arrested as children so that they wouldn't have to dirty their hands with us as adults. They called us filthy communists, saboteurs and bastards.
Bil'in and Jayyous: 2003 to present
Sharif Omar: Jayyous' farmland includes some of the most fertile and water rich land in the West Bank. The Israeli government has used British mandate laws, Ottoman laws, and the absentee landlord law to confiscate Palestinians' land. If this is not enough the Israeli army confiscates our land for "security reasons."
Mohammed Khatib: The olive is a symbol of our land and of the Palestinian people. We are connected to the land. We were born in Bil'in like our fathers and grandfathers and their fathers. We belong here. Our mothers took us to harvest olives before we could speak. We remember playing under the olive trees which have since been uprooted by Israeli settlers who have come to live here.
Sharif Omar: In October, 1988 the Israeli military governor of our district, Qalqilya, gave Jayyous' mayor a military declaration saying that nearly 500 acres of Jayyous' agricultural land "state land" and Israeli settlers began to build the colony of Zufim on our land.
Sharif Omar: In 1993 Leader - a real state enterprise owned by the businessman Lev Leviev - established a quarry on some of Jayyous' land. During this period it became clear that Leader was an enemy of the people of Jayyous. Leader used bulldozers to prepare our land for houses for Israeli settlers, and TNT to detonate more than 16 acres for a quarry. They uprooted all the olive trees on that land. Many olive trees died because sewage from Zufim ran for many years many years through other plots. Other plots were annexed to Zufim.
Sharif Omar: In September, 2002 a shepherd found a paper hanging from an olive tree. It was a military order instructing us to meet an Israeli army officer to tour the "separation" wall's path. Hundreds of area Palestinians turned out. Most farmers expected the wall would be near the Green Line, Israel's pre-1967 border with the West Bank. But we learned that the wall would be built almost four miles east of the Green Line, as close as 90 feet from Jayyous' homes, separating our residential area from our farmland.
Mohammed Khatib: Bil'in is being strangled by the Wall. Though our village sits 2 1/2 miles east of the Green Line, Israel's Wall and the settlement being built by Lev Leviev will take more than 60 percent of our land. This land is also money to us; we work it. Bil'in's 1,600 residents depend on farming and harvesting our olive trees for our livelihood. The Wall will turn Bil'in into an open-air prison.
Sharif Omar: People burst into tears. Some fainted. With the wall, Israel is taking 75% of Jayyous' most fertile land, including all our irrigated farmland, seven wells and 12,000 olive trees. Jayyous' 3,000 residents depend almost entirely on agricultural income. So this means a loss of our livelihoods, dreams, hopes, future and heritage.
Mohammed Khatib: There is now a huge and growing settlement called Modi'in Illit where we played as children. Instead of seeing my children play under those trees, I will watch a child who is a stranger play there -- a child whose family just recently came to live on our land, without any right to do so, simply because of the power of the occupation.
Sharif Omar: Leader then announced that it would build 1500 new homes in a large area located 1.2 miles north of Zufim for "North Zufim" that would be cut off from Jayyous by the Wall.
Mohammed Khatib: We refuse to be strangled by the Wall in silence. In a famous Palestinian short story "Men in the Sun," Palestinian workers suffocate inside a tanker truck. Upon discovering them, the driver screams, "Why didn't you bang on the sides of the tank?" We are banging; we are screaming.
Sharif Omar: Jayyous' farmers have organized dozens of peaceful protests against the wall, supported by international solidarity movements and Israeli peace activists. Our weapons in those activities were only slogans that condemn the occupation and the wall. All of us participated, young and old, men and women. We are determined never to surrender or forget our sacred land. We faced the bulldozers destroying our fields as well as armed Israeli soldiers and guards. During one peaceful march, an Israeli military officer explained to me that Sarah, the wife of our common ancestor Abraham, was their mother but not ours, and that because Sarah went to heaven, Jews were entitled to the land. After his lecture, he used tear gas and rubber-coated bullets to break up our protest.
Mohammed Khatib: For the last three years we have engaged in a nonviolent campaign of creative protests with the support of Israeli and international activists to prevent the construction of Israel's wall and the expansion of Modi'in Illit by Leviev's company on our land. The Israelis want to control the Palestinians, push us off our land and seize it for themselves.
Sharif Omar: Despite more than 60 nonviolent protests, the wall has been built, uprooting 4,000 trees and cutting off 75% of our land. More than 70% of Jayyous' farmers are now denied access to their land, many to the area where Leviev plans to expand Zufim. Hundreds of Israeli activists helped us to harvest our olives this fall because so many people from Jayyous could not reach their land.
Mohammed Khatib: We developed creative activities for our weekly protests. One Friday, activists locked themselves inside a cage, representing the wall's impacts. Another time, we built a Palestinian "outpost" on our village's land located behind the wall and next to an Israeli settlement, mimicking the Israeli strategy of establishing outposts to expand settlements. Another Friday we handed the Israeli soldiers a letter saying, "Had you come here as guests, we would show you the trees that our grandfathers planted here, and the vegetables that we grow... There will never be security for any of us until Israelis respect our rights to this land."
Sharif Omar: We are engaged in a struggle for justice, for our freedom - indeed, for our very lives.
Mohammed Khatib: Over three years of protests in Bil'in more than 800 activists were injured in more than 200 demonstrations in Bil'in. An Israeli attorney and a Bil'in resident both suffered permanent brain damage from rubber-coated steel bullets shot by Israeli soldiers from close range. Another Palestinian lost sight in one eye. 49 Bil'in residents, including some protest leaders, were arrested. Some spent months in prison.
Sharif Omar: Last September I was working in my olive grove near the wall, when I came across uprooted olive trees coming out of the bulldozed ground. These green young branches are soft and beautiful, deeply rooted in the ground and stronger than the wall and bulldozers. These trees refuse to die or to surrender, and send a message to all farmers and people who love the land. "Do not give up, and keep struggling and one day you will touch the sun." We have been here longer than these trees, and we will stay here longer than the stones.
Mohammed Khatib: In Bil'in, we have chosen a strategy which makes clear who is the victim and who is the victimizer. We know the Israeli army can choose to deal with us in two ways. If they choose violence, we make sure to get photographs for the media so that everyone sees what we were up against. And if they don't use violence then we achieve our aim of stopping their bulldozers and delaying construction of their Wall and settlements. But even if the soldiers put down their weapons, which they have not, that would not make us equals in the field. We would always be the stronger because we have the power of justice on our side.
Mohammed Khatib: As a result of our protests and in response to our legal petition, in September, 2007, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that Israel's wall must be rerouted to return half of our land that was being seized, but the Supreme Court also legalized the settlement that Leviev is building on the remaining 25% of our land, though the wall is being built in violation of even Israeli law.
Mohammed Khatib: In response, we vowed to continue our nonviolent struggle to save the olive groves that our families have cultivated for centuries, and we have put our experience at the service of other communities struggling against the wall and settlements.
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh: I do have hope that I will be able to go home to my village and this thought does not leave my mind. Even though I am a very old woman I still have hope, especially for the younger generation of refugees: they are determined to keep their rights; I keep telling them about our land. Our land was not empty as the Jews claim. It was not an empty land for a homeless Jewish nation. I'm not prepared to accept compensation in lieu of my land.
Excerpts taken from the testimonies of:
NAKBAH: 1948
Hafiza Abdullah,original village: Kanon/ Tulkarem district, current address: Shweikeh/ Tulkarem
Abu Khader Hamdan, born in 1928, original home: Salameh, Yaffa District, current address: Askar Refugee Camp/ Nablus
Abdul Qader Al-Ha, born in 1938, original home: Qaqon village, Tulkarem, current address: Askar Refugee Camp, Nablus
Om Issa Abu Sereyyeh, born in 1916, original home: Shekh Emwanes, Yafa District, current address: Askar Refugee Camp, Nablus City
Mohammad Ahmad Abu Eisha, 18 years old in 1948, original home: Al-Sufsaf village/ Safad, current address: Al-Ein Refugee Camp/ Nablus
LAND DAY: 1976
Abdel Qader Thaher: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/4-1.htm
Saleh Taha: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/3-2.htm
Ali Dgheim: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/2-5.htm
Subhi Hudhud: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/4-3.htm
Mohammad Badarneh: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/2-3.htm
Saleem Khalifeh: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/1-7.htm
Mohammad Abu Yunis: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/2-4.htm
Ibrahim Yassin, Arraba.
Samia Tawfiq: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/5-7.htm
Mu'een Khatib: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/1-6.htm
Abed Khalayleh: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/2-7.htm
Qassem Sahawhneh: http://www.baqoon.com/w1/shahadat/2-6.htm
BIL’IN AND JAYYOU: 2003 – Present
Sharif Omar, the Village of Jayyous' Land Defense Committee
Mohammed Khatib, the Village of Bil'in's Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements.
Sunday, 30 March 2008
Rabbi calls for hanging Arab children from trees
Palestinian Information Center
28 March 2008
Nazareth (PIC) -- The chief Rabbi of Safad, Shmuel Eliyahu, urged the Zionist state to exact "a horrible revenge" on Palestinians in retaliation for their attacks to serve as a deterrent.
In an article published in the newsletter "Eretz Yisrael Shelanu", which will be distributed to Synagogues this weekend, Eliyahu criticises the leaders of the Zionist state for not taking or allowing revenge against the family of Alaa Abu Dheim who carried out the Merkaz Harav attack in Jerusalem.
"A state that really respects the lives of its citizens would have hanged the 10 sons of the terrorist on a tree 50 amot [25 meters] tall, so that others would see it and be afraid," wrote Eliahu, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Eliahu called on the Zionist state to take "horrible revenge" for the attack at the Yeshiva in Jerusalem.
"We have to exact a revenge that is so painful, it will burn into the souls of all our enemies the message that Jewish blood is more valuable than gold and platinum."
On Wednesday [26 March], Mossawa Center, an Arab human rights group, called on the Attorney General to take legal action against the rabbi for inciting racism and violence.
28 March 2008
Nazareth (PIC) -- The chief Rabbi of Safad, Shmuel Eliyahu, urged the Zionist state to exact "a horrible revenge" on Palestinians in retaliation for their attacks to serve as a deterrent.
In an article published in the newsletter "Eretz Yisrael Shelanu", which will be distributed to Synagogues this weekend, Eliyahu criticises the leaders of the Zionist state for not taking or allowing revenge against the family of Alaa Abu Dheim who carried out the Merkaz Harav attack in Jerusalem.
"A state that really respects the lives of its citizens would have hanged the 10 sons of the terrorist on a tree 50 amot [25 meters] tall, so that others would see it and be afraid," wrote Eliahu, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Eliahu called on the Zionist state to take "horrible revenge" for the attack at the Yeshiva in Jerusalem.
"We have to exact a revenge that is so painful, it will burn into the souls of all our enemies the message that Jewish blood is more valuable than gold and platinum."
On Wednesday [26 March], Mossawa Center, an Arab human rights group, called on the Attorney General to take legal action against the rabbi for inciting racism and violence.
Tuesday, 25 March 2008
US Labor statement on Gaza
Friends,
Given the poor record of U.S. labor on this issue, please give all the help you can in posting, publicizing and endorsing the following statement by New York City Labor Against the War.
http://www.petitiononline.com/Gaza/petition.html
US Labor and Gaza
New York City Labor Against the War
23 March 2008
New York City Labor Against the War joins the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions in denouncing Israel's recent massacres in Gaza, the victims of which include at least 130 Palestinians -- half of them civilians, including dozens of women and children -- since February
27.
Who are the terrorists?
Israel claims that it is fighting "terrorism" in Gaza. This is the same hollow excuse with which the U.S. seeks to justify war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the erosion of civil liberties and labor rights at home.
In fact, Israel's attacks are part of a relentless, U.S.-orchestrated campaign of collective punishment -- with complicity of the corrupt Palestinian Authority -- to overthrow the democratically-elected Hamas government.
Long before its latest massacres, Israel had turned Gaza into the world's "largest open air prison," assassinating activists, and cutting-off essential goods and services to 1.5 million people. Only as a result did Hamas abandon a unilateral two-year truce.
Even now, Israel seeks to derail Hamas truce offers by escalating arrests, home demolitions, settlements and murder in the West Bank -- from which no rockets have been fired.
Despite media portrayals, this violence is overwhelmingly one-sided against Palestinians, who have no aircraft, artillery or tanks.
Thus, while only one Israeli has been killed by rockets launched from Gaza since May 2007, Israel's modern arsenal killed 60 Palestinians on March 1 alone.
On February 29, Israel's Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Valnai, threatened a bigger "Shoah" -- a reference to the Nazi Holocaust.
As UN official John Dugard has pointed out, Palestinian rockets are not the cause, but the "inevitable consequence," of Israeli state terror in Gaza, the slow-motion genocide which human rights organizations describe as "worse than at any time since the beginning of the Israeli military occupation in 1967."
Following the latest attacks, a Council on Foreign Relations expert explained, "You have Palestinians who wouldn't necessarily support the violence but they are saying, 'Well, what choice do we have?'"
Sixty years of ethnic cleansing and genocide
Israel's war on Gaza can only be understood as an attempt to stamp out all resistance -- including nonviolent protest -- to Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Indeed, most of Gaza's population are survivors of Zionist expulsions since the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948, when 13,000 Palestinians were massacred, 531 towns and villages erased, 11 urban neighborhoods emptied, and more than 750,000 (85 percent) driven from 78 percent of their country.
In 1967, Israel seized the remaining 22 percent of Palestine -- including East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza -- which, in violation of UN resolutions, remains under Israeli military rule.
Today, as a result of these policies, at least 70 percent of the 10 million Palestinians are refugees -- the largest such population in the world. Despite other UN resolutions, Israel vows that it will never allow them to return.
Palestinians who managed to remain within the 1948 areas -- today, 1.4 million (or 20 percent of the population in Israel) -- are permanently separated from their families in exile, subject to more than 20 discriminatory laws, treated as a "demographic threat," and threatened with mass expulsion.
In East Jerusalem and the West Bank, 140 illegal, ever-expanding Jewish-only settlements and road systems dominate the water resources and control 40 percent of the land. Palestinians are confined, separated, denied medical treatment, and degraded by an 8-meter-high separation wall, pass laws, curfews and 600 military checkpoints.
From 2000-2007, 4,274 Palestinians in these 1967 territories were killed, compared with 1,024 Israelis. The military has seized 60,000 political prisoners; it still holds and tortures 11,000.
All of these conditions have dramatically worsened since the Annapolis "peace conference" in November.
US sponsorship
Israel's war on Palestine depends completely on U.S. money, weapons and approval.
Since 1948, Israel -- the top foreign aid recipient -- has received at least $108 billion from the U.S. government. In the past ten years alone, U.S. military aid was $17 billion; over the next decade, it will be $30 billion.
Israel's recent assault on Gaza was endorsed by a Congressional vote of 404-1. Democratic and Republican presidential candidates fall over themselves to offer more of the same.
On March 22, Dick Cheney reassured Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of "America's. . . . commitment to Israel's right to defend itself always against terrorism, rocket attacks and other threats," and that the U.S. and Israel are "friends -- special friends."
This "special friendship" means that, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is U.S. aircraft, cluster bombs and bullets that kill and maim on behalf of the occupiers. Just one of many targets was the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions headquarters in Gaza City, destroyed by F-16s on February 28.
Such support bolsters Israel's longstanding role as watchdog and junior partner for U.S. domination over the oil-rich Middle East -- and beyond. In that capacity, Israel was apartheid South Africa's closest ally.
After 9/11, it helped intensify the demonization of Arabs and Muslims. It has 200 nuclear weapons, but helped manufacture "evidence" of Iraqi WMD. With U.S. weapons and support, it invaded Lebanon in 2006.
Together, these wars and occupations have killed, maimed and displaced millions of people, thereby creating the world's largest humanitarian crisis. Now, Israel is the cutting edge of threats against Syria and Iran.
In other words, oppression and resistance in Palestine is the epicenter of U.S.-Israeli war throughout the Middle East. These stakes are reflected in the ferocity of Israel's attacks against Gaza.
Labor’s role
In Palestine, South Africa, Britain, Canada and other countries, labor has condemned Israeli Apartheid.
Workers in the United States pay a staggering human and financial price, including deepening economic crisis, for U.S.-Israeli war and occupation.
But through a combination of intent, ignorance and/or expediency, much of labor officialdom in this country -- often without the knowledge or consent of union members -- is an accomplice of Israeli Apartheid.
Some 1,500 labor bodies have plowed at least $5 billion of union pension funds and retirement plans into State of Israel Bonds.
In April 2002, while Israel butchered Palestinian refugees at Jenin in the West Bank, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney was a featured speaker at a belligerent "National Solidarity Rally for Israel." In 2006, leadership of the American Federation of Teachers embraced Israel's war on Lebanon.
These same leaders collaborate with attempts by the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) to silence Apartheid Israel's opponents -- many of whom are Jewish.
In July 2007, top officials of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win signed a JLC statement that condemned British unions for even considering the nonviolent campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
Just days ago, the JLC and the leadership of UNITE-HERE bullied a community organization in Boston into revoking space for a conference on "Zionism and the Repression of Anti-Colonial Movements."
Even the leadership of U.S. Labor Against the War, which receives funding from several major unions, remains adamantly silent about U.S. government, corporate and labor support for Israeli Apartheid.
Labor leaders' complicity parallels infamous "AFL-CIA" support for U.S. war and dictatorship in Vietnam, Latin America, Gulf War I, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It strengthens the U.S.-Israel war machine and labor's corporate enemies, reinforces racism and Islamophobia, and makes a mockery of international solidarity.
A necessary stand
More than forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came under intense public attack for opposing the Vietnam war. Even within the Civil Rights Movement, some dismissed his position too "divisive" and "unpopular."
In his famous speech at the Riverside Church in April 1967, Dr. King answered these critics by pointing out that "silence is betrayal," and that "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today . . . [is] my own government."
At the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace in November 1967, he reiterated the most basic principles of labor solidarity: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. . . . Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus."
These principles are no less relevant today.
Yes, the Israel lobby seeks to silence opponents of Israeli Apartheid. All the more need for trade unionists to break that silence by speaking out against Israeli military occupation, for the right of Palestinian refugees to return, and for the elimination of apartheid throughout historic Palestine.
Therefore, we reaffirm our support for an immediate and total:
1. End to U.S. military and economic support for Israel.
2. Divestment of business and labor investments in Israel.
3. Withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from the Middle East.
-------------
Issued by NYCLAW Co-Conveners
(Other affiliations listed for identification only):
Larry Adams
Former President, NPMHU Local 300
Michael Letwin
Former President, UAW Local 2325/Assn. of Legal Aid Attorneys
Brenda Stokely
Former President, AFSCME DC 1707; Co-Chair, Million Worker March
-------------
NYCLAW, with Al-Awda-NY The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, is a
cofounder of Labor for Palestine .
Previous NYCLAW materials on Palestine include:
Response to Anti-Boycott Attacks (October 19, 2007)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2683
Open Letter to UTLA President A.J. Duffy (October 9, 2006)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2466
U.S. Government and Labor Aid to Israel (September 1, 2006)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2442
Labor and the Middle East War (August 11, 2006)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2429
Conference: Palestine, Labor and the AFL-CIO (July 23, 2005)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2245
From Palestine to the US - Labor Fights Back! (October 7, 2004)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2111
Report on the New York Visit by Representatives from the PGFTU
(December 22, 2002)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/1359
An Evening With Palestinian Trade Unionists (December 13, 2002)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/1328
Protest Israeli Consul's Speech to AFL-CIO (May 21, 2002)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/1001
No Labor Money for Israeli War Crimes! (May 21, 2002)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/999
Monday Israeli Consul Protest Postponed April 26, 2002)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/926
-------------
Subscribe to the NYCLAW low-volume listserv:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/
New York City Labor Against the War (NYCLAW)
nyclaw01@gmail.com
PO Box 620166, PACC, New York, NY 10129
Given the poor record of U.S. labor on this issue, please give all the help you can in posting, publicizing and endorsing the following statement by New York City Labor Against the War.
http://www.petitiononline.com/Gaza/petition.html
US Labor and Gaza
New York City Labor Against the War
23 March 2008
New York City Labor Against the War joins the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions in denouncing Israel's recent massacres in Gaza, the victims of which include at least 130 Palestinians -- half of them civilians, including dozens of women and children -- since February
27.
Who are the terrorists?
Israel claims that it is fighting "terrorism" in Gaza. This is the same hollow excuse with which the U.S. seeks to justify war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the erosion of civil liberties and labor rights at home.
In fact, Israel's attacks are part of a relentless, U.S.-orchestrated campaign of collective punishment -- with complicity of the corrupt Palestinian Authority -- to overthrow the democratically-elected Hamas government.
Long before its latest massacres, Israel had turned Gaza into the world's "largest open air prison," assassinating activists, and cutting-off essential goods and services to 1.5 million people. Only as a result did Hamas abandon a unilateral two-year truce.
Even now, Israel seeks to derail Hamas truce offers by escalating arrests, home demolitions, settlements and murder in the West Bank -- from which no rockets have been fired.
Despite media portrayals, this violence is overwhelmingly one-sided against Palestinians, who have no aircraft, artillery or tanks.
Thus, while only one Israeli has been killed by rockets launched from Gaza since May 2007, Israel's modern arsenal killed 60 Palestinians on March 1 alone.
On February 29, Israel's Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Valnai, threatened a bigger "Shoah" -- a reference to the Nazi Holocaust.
As UN official John Dugard has pointed out, Palestinian rockets are not the cause, but the "inevitable consequence," of Israeli state terror in Gaza, the slow-motion genocide which human rights organizations describe as "worse than at any time since the beginning of the Israeli military occupation in 1967."
Following the latest attacks, a Council on Foreign Relations expert explained, "You have Palestinians who wouldn't necessarily support the violence but they are saying, 'Well, what choice do we have?'"
Sixty years of ethnic cleansing and genocide
Israel's war on Gaza can only be understood as an attempt to stamp out all resistance -- including nonviolent protest -- to Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Indeed, most of Gaza's population are survivors of Zionist expulsions since the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948, when 13,000 Palestinians were massacred, 531 towns and villages erased, 11 urban neighborhoods emptied, and more than 750,000 (85 percent) driven from 78 percent of their country.
In 1967, Israel seized the remaining 22 percent of Palestine -- including East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza -- which, in violation of UN resolutions, remains under Israeli military rule.
Today, as a result of these policies, at least 70 percent of the 10 million Palestinians are refugees -- the largest such population in the world. Despite other UN resolutions, Israel vows that it will never allow them to return.
Palestinians who managed to remain within the 1948 areas -- today, 1.4 million (or 20 percent of the population in Israel) -- are permanently separated from their families in exile, subject to more than 20 discriminatory laws, treated as a "demographic threat," and threatened with mass expulsion.
In East Jerusalem and the West Bank, 140 illegal, ever-expanding Jewish-only settlements and road systems dominate the water resources and control 40 percent of the land. Palestinians are confined, separated, denied medical treatment, and degraded by an 8-meter-high separation wall, pass laws, curfews and 600 military checkpoints.
From 2000-2007, 4,274 Palestinians in these 1967 territories were killed, compared with 1,024 Israelis. The military has seized 60,000 political prisoners; it still holds and tortures 11,000.
All of these conditions have dramatically worsened since the Annapolis "peace conference" in November.
US sponsorship
Israel's war on Palestine depends completely on U.S. money, weapons and approval.
Since 1948, Israel -- the top foreign aid recipient -- has received at least $108 billion from the U.S. government. In the past ten years alone, U.S. military aid was $17 billion; over the next decade, it will be $30 billion.
Israel's recent assault on Gaza was endorsed by a Congressional vote of 404-1. Democratic and Republican presidential candidates fall over themselves to offer more of the same.
On March 22, Dick Cheney reassured Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of "America's. . . . commitment to Israel's right to defend itself always against terrorism, rocket attacks and other threats," and that the U.S. and Israel are "friends -- special friends."
This "special friendship" means that, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is U.S. aircraft, cluster bombs and bullets that kill and maim on behalf of the occupiers. Just one of many targets was the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions headquarters in Gaza City, destroyed by F-16s on February 28.
Such support bolsters Israel's longstanding role as watchdog and junior partner for U.S. domination over the oil-rich Middle East -- and beyond. In that capacity, Israel was apartheid South Africa's closest ally.
After 9/11, it helped intensify the demonization of Arabs and Muslims. It has 200 nuclear weapons, but helped manufacture "evidence" of Iraqi WMD. With U.S. weapons and support, it invaded Lebanon in 2006.
Together, these wars and occupations have killed, maimed and displaced millions of people, thereby creating the world's largest humanitarian crisis. Now, Israel is the cutting edge of threats against Syria and Iran.
In other words, oppression and resistance in Palestine is the epicenter of U.S.-Israeli war throughout the Middle East. These stakes are reflected in the ferocity of Israel's attacks against Gaza.
Labor’s role
In Palestine, South Africa, Britain, Canada and other countries, labor has condemned Israeli Apartheid.
Workers in the United States pay a staggering human and financial price, including deepening economic crisis, for U.S.-Israeli war and occupation.
But through a combination of intent, ignorance and/or expediency, much of labor officialdom in this country -- often without the knowledge or consent of union members -- is an accomplice of Israeli Apartheid.
Some 1,500 labor bodies have plowed at least $5 billion of union pension funds and retirement plans into State of Israel Bonds.
In April 2002, while Israel butchered Palestinian refugees at Jenin in the West Bank, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney was a featured speaker at a belligerent "National Solidarity Rally for Israel." In 2006, leadership of the American Federation of Teachers embraced Israel's war on Lebanon.
These same leaders collaborate with attempts by the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) to silence Apartheid Israel's opponents -- many of whom are Jewish.
In July 2007, top officials of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win signed a JLC statement that condemned British unions for even considering the nonviolent campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
Just days ago, the JLC and the leadership of UNITE-HERE bullied a community organization in Boston into revoking space for a conference on "Zionism and the Repression of Anti-Colonial Movements."
Even the leadership of U.S. Labor Against the War, which receives funding from several major unions, remains adamantly silent about U.S. government, corporate and labor support for Israeli Apartheid.
Labor leaders' complicity parallels infamous "AFL-CIA" support for U.S. war and dictatorship in Vietnam, Latin America, Gulf War I, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It strengthens the U.S.-Israel war machine and labor's corporate enemies, reinforces racism and Islamophobia, and makes a mockery of international solidarity.
A necessary stand
More than forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came under intense public attack for opposing the Vietnam war. Even within the Civil Rights Movement, some dismissed his position too "divisive" and "unpopular."
In his famous speech at the Riverside Church in April 1967, Dr. King answered these critics by pointing out that "silence is betrayal," and that "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today . . . [is] my own government."
At the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace in November 1967, he reiterated the most basic principles of labor solidarity: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. . . . Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus."
These principles are no less relevant today.
Yes, the Israel lobby seeks to silence opponents of Israeli Apartheid. All the more need for trade unionists to break that silence by speaking out against Israeli military occupation, for the right of Palestinian refugees to return, and for the elimination of apartheid throughout historic Palestine.
Therefore, we reaffirm our support for an immediate and total:
1. End to U.S. military and economic support for Israel.
2. Divestment of business and labor investments in Israel.
3. Withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from the Middle East.
-------------
Issued by NYCLAW Co-Conveners
(Other affiliations listed for identification only):
Larry Adams
Former President, NPMHU Local 300
Michael Letwin
Former President, UAW Local 2325/Assn. of Legal Aid Attorneys
Brenda Stokely
Former President, AFSCME DC 1707; Co-Chair, Million Worker March
-------------
NYCLAW, with Al-Awda-NY The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, is a
cofounder of Labor for Palestine .
Previous NYCLAW materials on Palestine include:
Response to Anti-Boycott Attacks (October 19, 2007)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2683
Open Letter to UTLA President A.J. Duffy (October 9, 2006)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2466
U.S. Government and Labor Aid to Israel (September 1, 2006)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2442
Labor and the Middle East War (August 11, 2006)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2429
Conference: Palestine, Labor and the AFL-CIO (July 23, 2005)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2245
From Palestine to the US - Labor Fights Back! (October 7, 2004)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/2111
Report on the New York Visit by Representatives from the PGFTU
(December 22, 2002)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/1359
An Evening With Palestinian Trade Unionists (December 13, 2002)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/1328
Protest Israeli Consul's Speech to AFL-CIO (May 21, 2002)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/1001
No Labor Money for Israeli War Crimes! (May 21, 2002)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/999
Monday Israeli Consul Protest Postponed April 26, 2002)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/message/926
-------------
Subscribe to the NYCLAW low-volume listserv:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LaborAgainstWar/
New York City Labor Against the War (NYCLAW)
nyclaw01@gmail.com
PO Box 620166, PACC, New York, NY 10129
Saturday, 9 February 2008
Petition in support of pro-Palestinian activists
To all the friends of the freedom of speech and opponents of racism:
We are a group of Palestinians and other activists for the Palestinian cause of various nationalities and affiliations, and believe that unity and persistence is important to confront the injustice our people had suffered in the past and still at present, probably in the unforeseeable future by Zionist and colonialist powers.
Zionism has damaged us from the first day when they started implementing their colonialist project to colonize all of Palestine, and when the opportunity comes, extend it beyond the borders of historic Palestine, damaging other Arabs. From the first day, they had been resorting to physical, psychological, moral and propaganda terror against all sorts of resistance whether it is in armed self-defense, and even against the power of the word by Palestinians and their supporters. They had been resorting to personal and communal targeted assassination, terrorizing Palestinians and their supporters all round the world in order to shut up all sorts of resistance. They try to break us apart, because they know our unity is dangerous to their colonialist and racist plans.
They had been trying to control and shut the free and honest media, and political activism by financial bribery and blackmailing when running for any sort of political offices at all levels, especially against those who call for the liberation of Palestine and the Right of Return of Palestinians to their homes and land and want them to live under a democratic, sovereign and free state under the rule of law.
Among those free fighters against Zionism are two non-Arab supporters of the Palestinian cause, two outstanding personalities who are also great fighters for the implementation of freedom and liberty to all the subjugated peoples of the world, Gilad Atzmon, the ex-Zionist London-based musician and writer, and Mary Rizzo, the Italy-based blogger of Peacepalestine. They have been attacked by Zionists for a long time, but they are also being attacked by certain other people who are in the movement for Palestine.
Almost no day goes past when Tony Greenstein is not waging a war against Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo, and we believe his actions have overstepped all limits. We have watched as he tries to smear them as racists, and we are saddened that his attempts increase as our own situation becomes more and more dramatic. These useless and pointless defamation campaigns are intolerable, as he circulates falsity against these activists. His attempts to do this only hurt our cause and waste our energy, not the least, they distract from the important issues, and go against the very idea of unity that we value.
We, Palestinians and activists for Palestine, express our solidarity with Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo, who when they realized the tragedies Palestinians and other Arabs suffered, especially ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland, at the hands racist colonialist Zionism decided to fight for the rightful Palestinian cause. Atzmon willingly liberated himself from this inhuman and destructive project, by choosing the road of self-imposed exile and public exposure of what the Zionist project is all about. Tony Greenstein created among his usual lies that some Palestinians attack and defame the two dedicated supporters of the Palestinian cause, Atzmon and Rizzo. We declare that he does not speak for us or in our names when he attacks these and other activists.
We also take the opportunity to condemn the strangling siege that is being imposed over the Gaza Strip in particular and the West Bank and the rest of the Palestinian Arab people in general to complete their ethnic cleansing from their historic homeland.
We urge all peace loving supporters of the freedom of thought, against all racism and Zionism and dedicated to the just Palestinian Arab cause as well as Iraq and all occupied Arab lands, to sign the petition calling for an end to the defamation campaign and a focus on the issues that are important to our people. Add you name, location and organization or group you are part of if you wish. Send it to palestinesomoud@yahoo.fr. A list will be made public.
نحن مجموعة من الفلسطينيين والناشطين في مجال حقوق الإنسان، نؤمن بأن الاتحاد والمثابرة أمران في غاية الأهمية لمواجهة الظلم الذي عاناه وما زال يعانيه شعبنا في الماضي والحاضر ومن المنتظر أن يبقى يعانيه في المستقبل غير المنظور من قبل القوى الصهيونية والاستعمارية.
لقد آذتنا الصهيونية منذ البداية منذ أن بدأت بتنفيذ مشروعها لاستعمار فلسطين بالكامل. وعندما واتتها الظروف، توسعت إلى ما وراء الحدود الفلسطينية التاريخية. ملحقة الأذى بأراض عربية مجاورة. منذ اليوم الأول بدأوا باستخدام العنف والإرهاب النفسي والأخلاقي ولجأووا إلى استخدام الأساليب الدعائية ضد جميع أشكال المقاومة. إلى درجة انهم قاوموا اساليب التعبير بالكلمة بين الفلسطينيين ومؤازريهم حول العالم من أجل القضاء على جميع أشكال المقاومة. حاولوا لأنهم يعلمون جيداً أن وحدتنا تشكل خطرا\ص على مشاريعهم الاستعمارية والعنصرية. حاولوا السيطرة على الإعلام الحر وإخراسه، والقضاء على النشاط السياسي من خلال تقديم الرشاوي واستخدام أساليب الابتزاز عند كل انتخابات تؤدي إلى منصب فاعل على جميع المستويات. خصوصا ضد المنادين بتحرير فلسطين والمدافعين عن حق عودة الفلسطينيين إلى وطنهم وأراضيهم والتمتع بالديمقراطية والسيادة في دولة حرة يحكمها القانون.
من ضمن هؤلاء الناشطين الأحرار الرافضين للصهيونية والدعمين للقضية الفلسطينية شخصيتان متميزتان غير عربيتين، كرسّا جل وقتيهما وحياتهما للعمل والدفاع عن قضايانا المحقة، شخصيتين بارزتين ومناضلتين كبيرتين لا يكلان في الدفاع عن حرية واستقلال جميع الشعوب المغلوبة على أمرها والمستعمرة أراضيها والمشتتة شعوبها وتعيش في دنيا اللجوء والعوز، هما جيلاد أتزمون، الكاتب والموسيقار الذي كان صهيوني سابقاً ويعيش حالياً في لندن. وماري ريزو، المدونة المقيمة في إيطاليا والناشطة في موقع سلام فلسطين المخصص للدفاع عن القضية الفلسطينية. وكلاهما تعرضا لهجمات وسائل الاعلام الصهيونية على امتداد فترة طويلة، كما تعرضا لهجمة من قبل بعض الناشطين في سبيل القضية الفلسطينية أيضاَ!
لا يمر يوم إلا ويتنطح المدعو توني جرينشتاين بشن حرب مسعورة على الصديقين الحرين جيلاد أتزمون وماري ريزو، ونعتقد بأن أعماله قد جاوزت حدودها إلى أبعد مدى. راقبنا جرينشتاين وهو يحاول تلطيخ سمعتهما وإلصاق تهمة العنصرية عليهما علما أن أعمالهما أبعد ما تكون عن العنصرية كونهما يحاربان العنصرية الصهيونية الموجهة ضد العرب أجمعين. المؤسف جداً أن محاولاته تتكاثف بينما هما يبذلان كل جهدهما في مواجهة العنصرية الصهيونية. حملات تشويه السمعة العديمة الجدوى والغير مقبولة، التي يقوم بها عن طريق نشر الأكاذيب ضد هذين الناشطين الشريفين المخلصين للقضايا العربية، وهذا طبعاً هو هدف حملاته المسعورة ضدهما. وكل ما يقوم به جرينشتاين وأمثاله هو الإساءة إلى قضيتنا وتشتيت جهودنا، وليس أقل من إبعادنا عن قضايانا الأهم، وضد الوحدة التي نقدس.
نحن الناشطون في سبيل القضية الفلسطينية العربية، نعرب عن تآزرنا مع هذين الناشطين في سبيل قضيتنا الأولى، جيلاد أتزمون وماري ريزو، الذين عندما وعيا مدى المصائب والنكبات التي تعرض لها الفلسطينيون وغيرهم من أبناء الأمة العربية، وبشكل خاص عملية التصفية العنصرية التي لا يزال العدو الصهيوني ينفذها لطردهم والحلول مكانهم في وطنهم التاريخي وبيوتهم، فإن أتزمون بكل اندفاع ذاتي حرر نفسه من الأيديولوجية العنصرية الصهيونية التي تتعارض مع القيم الإنسانية جمعاء ومشاريعها المدمرة للسلم والاستقرار الوطني والعالمي، وماري ريزو التي لم تكن صهيونية، قررا الدفاع عن والعمل في سبيل القضية الفلسطينية المحقة، نحن نعلن بأن لا علاقة لنا بتوني جرينشتاين وبحملته الهادفة جملة وتفصيلاً للإساءة إلى سمعة هذين المناضلين. جرينشتاين لا يتكلم باسمنا أو بالنيابة عنا عندما يشن حملاته عليهما وعلى غيرهما من الناشطين في سبيل قضيتنا القومية العربية وفي قلبها فلسطين.
ونحن نغتنم الفرصة لاستنكار الحصار الخانق المفروض على الشعب العربي الفلسطيني في قطاع غزة بشكل خاص والضفة الغربية وبقية فلسطين بشكل عام، ومحاولات السير حتى آخر الطريق بتصفيتهم عرقياً من كامل أرضهم التاريخية، فلسطين العربية.
نحن نناشد كل الداعين ومحبي السلام وحرية التعبير، ضد كل أصناف العنصرية الصهيونية والاستعمارية والداعمين للقضية الفلسطينية كما تحرير العراق وغيره من الأراضي العربية المحتلة لتوقيع هذه العريضة الداعية لإنهاء حملة التشهير والتركيز على الأكثر أهمية لقضيتنا ولشعبنا العربي.
الرجاء إضافة أسمك وموقعك ومكان اقامتك والمجموعة التي تنتمي إليها إذا أردت ذلك. وأرسلها إلى palestinesomoud@yahoo.fr. ستنشر لائحة على العموم.
A tutti gli amici della libertà di parola e a tutti coloro che si oppongono al razzismo:
Noi siamo un gruppo di palestinesi e di attivisti a sostegno della Palestina. Crediamo che l’unità e la costanza siano importanti per affrontare l’ingiustizia che il nostro popolo ha subito in passato, subisce ancora oggi e probabilmente subirà nel futuro prevedibile, per mano dei sionisti e delle potenze colonialiste.
Il sionismo ci ha danneggiati sin dal primo giorno in cui ha cominciato ad attuare il suo progetto di colonizzare tutta la Palestina e, quando se ne avrà l’occasione, anche di estendere il proprio dominio oltre le frontiere della Palestina storica, danneggiando altri arabi. Dal primo giorno, ha fatto ricorso alla violenza fisica, psicologica e morale e al terrorismo propagandistico contro ogni sorta di resistenza, che si tratti dell’autodifesa armata o dell’uso della parola da parte dei palestinesi e dei loro sostenitori. Hanno fatto ricorso all’omicidio mirato, sia individuale che collettivo, terrorizzando i palestinesi e i loro sostenitori in tutto il mondo per mettere a tacere ogni forma di resistenza. Cercano di dividerci, perché sanno quanto la nostra unità sia pericolosa per i loro progetti colonialisti e razzisti.
Cercano di controllare e di mettere a tacere i media liberi e onesti e la militanza politica, corrompendo e ricattando coloro che si candidano a incarichi politici di qualunque livello, in particolare coloro che chiedono la liberazione della Palestina e il Diritto di Ritorno dei palestinesi alle loro case e alle loro terre, e che vogliono che essi possano vivere in uno stato di diritto, democratico, sovrano e libero.
Tra gli spiriti liberi che combattono contro il sionismo, ci sono due sostenitori non arabi della causa palestinese, due straordinarie personalità che sono anche grandi combattenti per la libertà di tutti i popoli oppressi del mondo, Gilad Atzmon, musicista e scrittore ex-sionista che vive a Londra, e Mary Rizzo, che dall’Italia cura il blog http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/ Peacepalestine. Da molto tempo, entrambi sono il bersaglio di attacchi da parte dei sionisti, ma adesso vengono attaccati anche da alcune persone interne al movimento per la Palestina.
Quasi tutti i giorni, Tony Greenstein conduce una guerra contro Gilad Atzmon e Mary Rizzo, e adesso crediamo che le sue attività abbiano superato tutti i limiti. Lo abbiamo visto all’opera mentre cercava di diffamarli come razzisti, e siamo rattristati dal fatto che lui moltiplichi gli sforzi, proprio mentre la nostra situazione diventa sempre più drammatica. Queste inutili e futili campagne diffamatorie sono intollerabili, mentre lui diffonde affermazioni false sul conto di questi attivisti. I suoi tentativi non solo danneggiano la nostra causa e disperdono le nostre energie: non ultimo, ci distolgono dalle questioni veramente importanti, e contrastano la stessa idea di unità che noi apprezziamo.
Noi palestinesi e attivisti a favore della Palestina esprimiamo la nostra solidarietà a Gilad Atzmon e Mary Rizzo , che hanno scelto di battersi per la giusta causa palestinese, quando si sono resi conto delle tragedie sofferte dai palestinesi e da altri arabi, oggetto di una pulizia etnica per mano del sionismo razzista e colonialista che li ha espulsi dalla loro patria ancestrale. Atzmon ha scelto di liberarsi da questo progetto disumano e distruttivo, percorrendo la via dell’esilio autoimposto e del pubblico smascheramento del progetto sionista.
Noi ci dissociamo da Tony Greenstein e dalle sue campagne diffamatorie. Lui non parla né per conto né a nome nostro, né parla a nome della nostra lotta, quando attacca questi e altri attivisti.
Cogliamo inoltre l’occasione per condannare l’assedio soffocante che viene imposto alla Striscia di Gaza in particolare, ma anche alla Cisgiordania e al resto del popolo arabo palestinese, allo scopo di completare la pulizia etnica della loro storica terra.
Invitiamo tutti gli amanti della pace, i sostenitori della libertà di pensiero, contrari a ogni forma di razzismo e al sionismo e impegnati nella giusta causa araba palestinese, a firmare questa petizione che chiede di porre fine a questa campagna di diffamazione e di concentrarsi sulle questioni che sono importanti per il nostro popolo. Scrivete il vostro nome, il luogo di residenza e l’organizzazione o gruppo di cui fate parte, se volete. Mandate il tutto a palestinesomoud@yahoo.fr. La lista dei firmatari sarà resa pubblica.
We are a group of Palestinians and other activists for the Palestinian cause of various nationalities and affiliations, and believe that unity and persistence is important to confront the injustice our people had suffered in the past and still at present, probably in the unforeseeable future by Zionist and colonialist powers.
Zionism has damaged us from the first day when they started implementing their colonialist project to colonize all of Palestine, and when the opportunity comes, extend it beyond the borders of historic Palestine, damaging other Arabs. From the first day, they had been resorting to physical, psychological, moral and propaganda terror against all sorts of resistance whether it is in armed self-defense, and even against the power of the word by Palestinians and their supporters. They had been resorting to personal and communal targeted assassination, terrorizing Palestinians and their supporters all round the world in order to shut up all sorts of resistance. They try to break us apart, because they know our unity is dangerous to their colonialist and racist plans.
They had been trying to control and shut the free and honest media, and political activism by financial bribery and blackmailing when running for any sort of political offices at all levels, especially against those who call for the liberation of Palestine and the Right of Return of Palestinians to their homes and land and want them to live under a democratic, sovereign and free state under the rule of law.
Among those free fighters against Zionism are two non-Arab supporters of the Palestinian cause, two outstanding personalities who are also great fighters for the implementation of freedom and liberty to all the subjugated peoples of the world, Gilad Atzmon, the ex-Zionist London-based musician and writer, and Mary Rizzo, the Italy-based blogger of Peacepalestine. They have been attacked by Zionists for a long time, but they are also being attacked by certain other people who are in the movement for Palestine.
Almost no day goes past when Tony Greenstein is not waging a war against Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo, and we believe his actions have overstepped all limits. We have watched as he tries to smear them as racists, and we are saddened that his attempts increase as our own situation becomes more and more dramatic. These useless and pointless defamation campaigns are intolerable, as he circulates falsity against these activists. His attempts to do this only hurt our cause and waste our energy, not the least, they distract from the important issues, and go against the very idea of unity that we value.
We, Palestinians and activists for Palestine, express our solidarity with Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo, who when they realized the tragedies Palestinians and other Arabs suffered, especially ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland, at the hands racist colonialist Zionism decided to fight for the rightful Palestinian cause. Atzmon willingly liberated himself from this inhuman and destructive project, by choosing the road of self-imposed exile and public exposure of what the Zionist project is all about. Tony Greenstein created among his usual lies that some Palestinians attack and defame the two dedicated supporters of the Palestinian cause, Atzmon and Rizzo. We declare that he does not speak for us or in our names when he attacks these and other activists.
We also take the opportunity to condemn the strangling siege that is being imposed over the Gaza Strip in particular and the West Bank and the rest of the Palestinian Arab people in general to complete their ethnic cleansing from their historic homeland.
We urge all peace loving supporters of the freedom of thought, against all racism and Zionism and dedicated to the just Palestinian Arab cause as well as Iraq and all occupied Arab lands, to sign the petition calling for an end to the defamation campaign and a focus on the issues that are important to our people. Add you name, location and organization or group you are part of if you wish. Send it to palestinesomoud@yahoo.fr. A list will be made public.
عريضة
إلى جميع أصدقاء حرية التعبير عن النفس ومناهضو العنصرية
نحن مجموعة من الفلسطينيين والناشطين في مجال حقوق الإنسان، نؤمن بأن الاتحاد والمثابرة أمران في غاية الأهمية لمواجهة الظلم الذي عاناه وما زال يعانيه شعبنا في الماضي والحاضر ومن المنتظر أن يبقى يعانيه في المستقبل غير المنظور من قبل القوى الصهيونية والاستعمارية.
لقد آذتنا الصهيونية منذ البداية منذ أن بدأت بتنفيذ مشروعها لاستعمار فلسطين بالكامل. وعندما واتتها الظروف، توسعت إلى ما وراء الحدود الفلسطينية التاريخية. ملحقة الأذى بأراض عربية مجاورة. منذ اليوم الأول بدأوا باستخدام العنف والإرهاب النفسي والأخلاقي ولجأووا إلى استخدام الأساليب الدعائية ضد جميع أشكال المقاومة. إلى درجة انهم قاوموا اساليب التعبير بالكلمة بين الفلسطينيين ومؤازريهم حول العالم من أجل القضاء على جميع أشكال المقاومة. حاولوا لأنهم يعلمون جيداً أن وحدتنا تشكل خطرا\ص على مشاريعهم الاستعمارية والعنصرية. حاولوا السيطرة على الإعلام الحر وإخراسه، والقضاء على النشاط السياسي من خلال تقديم الرشاوي واستخدام أساليب الابتزاز عند كل انتخابات تؤدي إلى منصب فاعل على جميع المستويات. خصوصا ضد المنادين بتحرير فلسطين والمدافعين عن حق عودة الفلسطينيين إلى وطنهم وأراضيهم والتمتع بالديمقراطية والسيادة في دولة حرة يحكمها القانون.
من ضمن هؤلاء الناشطين الأحرار الرافضين للصهيونية والدعمين للقضية الفلسطينية شخصيتان متميزتان غير عربيتين، كرسّا جل وقتيهما وحياتهما للعمل والدفاع عن قضايانا المحقة، شخصيتين بارزتين ومناضلتين كبيرتين لا يكلان في الدفاع عن حرية واستقلال جميع الشعوب المغلوبة على أمرها والمستعمرة أراضيها والمشتتة شعوبها وتعيش في دنيا اللجوء والعوز، هما جيلاد أتزمون، الكاتب والموسيقار الذي كان صهيوني سابقاً ويعيش حالياً في لندن. وماري ريزو، المدونة المقيمة في إيطاليا والناشطة في موقع سلام فلسطين المخصص للدفاع عن القضية الفلسطينية. وكلاهما تعرضا لهجمات وسائل الاعلام الصهيونية على امتداد فترة طويلة، كما تعرضا لهجمة من قبل بعض الناشطين في سبيل القضية الفلسطينية أيضاَ!
لا يمر يوم إلا ويتنطح المدعو توني جرينشتاين بشن حرب مسعورة على الصديقين الحرين جيلاد أتزمون وماري ريزو، ونعتقد بأن أعماله قد جاوزت حدودها إلى أبعد مدى. راقبنا جرينشتاين وهو يحاول تلطيخ سمعتهما وإلصاق تهمة العنصرية عليهما علما أن أعمالهما أبعد ما تكون عن العنصرية كونهما يحاربان العنصرية الصهيونية الموجهة ضد العرب أجمعين. المؤسف جداً أن محاولاته تتكاثف بينما هما يبذلان كل جهدهما في مواجهة العنصرية الصهيونية. حملات تشويه السمعة العديمة الجدوى والغير مقبولة، التي يقوم بها عن طريق نشر الأكاذيب ضد هذين الناشطين الشريفين المخلصين للقضايا العربية، وهذا طبعاً هو هدف حملاته المسعورة ضدهما. وكل ما يقوم به جرينشتاين وأمثاله هو الإساءة إلى قضيتنا وتشتيت جهودنا، وليس أقل من إبعادنا عن قضايانا الأهم، وضد الوحدة التي نقدس.
نحن الناشطون في سبيل القضية الفلسطينية العربية، نعرب عن تآزرنا مع هذين الناشطين في سبيل قضيتنا الأولى، جيلاد أتزمون وماري ريزو، الذين عندما وعيا مدى المصائب والنكبات التي تعرض لها الفلسطينيون وغيرهم من أبناء الأمة العربية، وبشكل خاص عملية التصفية العنصرية التي لا يزال العدو الصهيوني ينفذها لطردهم والحلول مكانهم في وطنهم التاريخي وبيوتهم، فإن أتزمون بكل اندفاع ذاتي حرر نفسه من الأيديولوجية العنصرية الصهيونية التي تتعارض مع القيم الإنسانية جمعاء ومشاريعها المدمرة للسلم والاستقرار الوطني والعالمي، وماري ريزو التي لم تكن صهيونية، قررا الدفاع عن والعمل في سبيل القضية الفلسطينية المحقة، نحن نعلن بأن لا علاقة لنا بتوني جرينشتاين وبحملته الهادفة جملة وتفصيلاً للإساءة إلى سمعة هذين المناضلين. جرينشتاين لا يتكلم باسمنا أو بالنيابة عنا عندما يشن حملاته عليهما وعلى غيرهما من الناشطين في سبيل قضيتنا القومية العربية وفي قلبها فلسطين.
ونحن نغتنم الفرصة لاستنكار الحصار الخانق المفروض على الشعب العربي الفلسطيني في قطاع غزة بشكل خاص والضفة الغربية وبقية فلسطين بشكل عام، ومحاولات السير حتى آخر الطريق بتصفيتهم عرقياً من كامل أرضهم التاريخية، فلسطين العربية.
نحن نناشد كل الداعين ومحبي السلام وحرية التعبير، ضد كل أصناف العنصرية الصهيونية والاستعمارية والداعمين للقضية الفلسطينية كما تحرير العراق وغيره من الأراضي العربية المحتلة لتوقيع هذه العريضة الداعية لإنهاء حملة التشهير والتركيز على الأكثر أهمية لقضيتنا ولشعبنا العربي.
الرجاء إضافة أسمك وموقعك ومكان اقامتك والمجموعة التي تنتمي إليها إذا أردت ذلك. وأرسلها إلى palestinesomoud@yahoo.fr. ستنشر لائحة على العموم.
Petizione:
A tutti gli amici della libertà di parola e a tutti coloro che si oppongono al razzismo:
Noi siamo un gruppo di palestinesi e di attivisti a sostegno della Palestina. Crediamo che l’unità e la costanza siano importanti per affrontare l’ingiustizia che il nostro popolo ha subito in passato, subisce ancora oggi e probabilmente subirà nel futuro prevedibile, per mano dei sionisti e delle potenze colonialiste.
Il sionismo ci ha danneggiati sin dal primo giorno in cui ha cominciato ad attuare il suo progetto di colonizzare tutta la Palestina e, quando se ne avrà l’occasione, anche di estendere il proprio dominio oltre le frontiere della Palestina storica, danneggiando altri arabi. Dal primo giorno, ha fatto ricorso alla violenza fisica, psicologica e morale e al terrorismo propagandistico contro ogni sorta di resistenza, che si tratti dell’autodifesa armata o dell’uso della parola da parte dei palestinesi e dei loro sostenitori. Hanno fatto ricorso all’omicidio mirato, sia individuale che collettivo, terrorizzando i palestinesi e i loro sostenitori in tutto il mondo per mettere a tacere ogni forma di resistenza. Cercano di dividerci, perché sanno quanto la nostra unità sia pericolosa per i loro progetti colonialisti e razzisti.
Cercano di controllare e di mettere a tacere i media liberi e onesti e la militanza politica, corrompendo e ricattando coloro che si candidano a incarichi politici di qualunque livello, in particolare coloro che chiedono la liberazione della Palestina e il Diritto di Ritorno dei palestinesi alle loro case e alle loro terre, e che vogliono che essi possano vivere in uno stato di diritto, democratico, sovrano e libero.
Tra gli spiriti liberi che combattono contro il sionismo, ci sono due sostenitori non arabi della causa palestinese, due straordinarie personalità che sono anche grandi combattenti per la libertà di tutti i popoli oppressi del mondo, Gilad Atzmon, musicista e scrittore ex-sionista che vive a Londra, e Mary Rizzo, che dall’Italia cura il blog http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/ Peacepalestine. Da molto tempo, entrambi sono il bersaglio di attacchi da parte dei sionisti, ma adesso vengono attaccati anche da alcune persone interne al movimento per la Palestina.
Quasi tutti i giorni, Tony Greenstein conduce una guerra contro Gilad Atzmon e Mary Rizzo, e adesso crediamo che le sue attività abbiano superato tutti i limiti. Lo abbiamo visto all’opera mentre cercava di diffamarli come razzisti, e siamo rattristati dal fatto che lui moltiplichi gli sforzi, proprio mentre la nostra situazione diventa sempre più drammatica. Queste inutili e futili campagne diffamatorie sono intollerabili, mentre lui diffonde affermazioni false sul conto di questi attivisti. I suoi tentativi non solo danneggiano la nostra causa e disperdono le nostre energie: non ultimo, ci distolgono dalle questioni veramente importanti, e contrastano la stessa idea di unità che noi apprezziamo.
Noi palestinesi e attivisti a favore della Palestina esprimiamo la nostra solidarietà a Gilad Atzmon e Mary Rizzo , che hanno scelto di battersi per la giusta causa palestinese, quando si sono resi conto delle tragedie sofferte dai palestinesi e da altri arabi, oggetto di una pulizia etnica per mano del sionismo razzista e colonialista che li ha espulsi dalla loro patria ancestrale. Atzmon ha scelto di liberarsi da questo progetto disumano e distruttivo, percorrendo la via dell’esilio autoimposto e del pubblico smascheramento del progetto sionista.
Noi ci dissociamo da Tony Greenstein e dalle sue campagne diffamatorie. Lui non parla né per conto né a nome nostro, né parla a nome della nostra lotta, quando attacca questi e altri attivisti.
Cogliamo inoltre l’occasione per condannare l’assedio soffocante che viene imposto alla Striscia di Gaza in particolare, ma anche alla Cisgiordania e al resto del popolo arabo palestinese, allo scopo di completare la pulizia etnica della loro storica terra.
Invitiamo tutti gli amanti della pace, i sostenitori della libertà di pensiero, contrari a ogni forma di razzismo e al sionismo e impegnati nella giusta causa araba palestinese, a firmare questa petizione che chiede di porre fine a questa campagna di diffamazione e di concentrarsi sulle questioni che sono importanti per il nostro popolo. Scrivete il vostro nome, il luogo di residenza e l’organizzazione o gruppo di cui fate parte, se volete. Mandate il tutto a palestinesomoud@yahoo.fr. La lista dei firmatari sarà resa pubblica.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
