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U of Chicago, Oren’s newest propaganda playground

April 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

After inviting former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to speak about leadership and peace just months after authorizing a brutal invasion of the Gaza Strip, it comes as no surprise that the administration at the University of Chicago welcomes Israeli ambassador Michael Oren with open hands.

At this university in particular, discourse concerning Israel’s occupation of Palestine is typically circumvented or distastefully kept under the radar. Instead, campus administrators feign objective neutrality and, for once afraid to challenge the status quo, make it a point to “show both sides” by presenting students with state-sponsored propaganda that virtually absolves Israel of any regional responsibility.

We saw this firsthand in October 2009 when the University invited Olmert to speak about moral leadership even though he faced indictments for criminal corruption charges. Asked about his idea of a lasting peace, he failed to mention that he had recently called for “disproportionate” assaults against the Palestinian people.

We saw this again earlier in the week when the University invited Oren to solicit American support in his campaign to whitewash Israel’s abuse of Palestinian rights.

Oren is currently on an extended tour of college campuses. His purpose at each campus is to draw parallel’s between U.S. democracy and Israel’s Jewish democracy and to stress the importance of the U.S. as a staunch ally and military financer. Organized by Israel’s Consulate General, his talks are blatant attempts to put Israel in a favorable light without ever considering its policies towards Palestinians under its occupation. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Local Events, Opinion Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

A Palestinian mother, a Palestinian son, and Eid in America

August 31, 2011 By 4 Comments

In 1993, my mother made it a point to enthusiastically celebrate Eid. I was only two years old and she was still settling into her new life in America.

Having left her home, her family, and her friends in Gaza City one year before I was born, my mother found it challenging to publicly maintain her cultural and religious identity, the very same identity already threatened by occupation. She never lost grasp of her religiosity nor did she ever lose sight of her hope for self-sovereignty — a fundamental tenet defining the Palestinian identity — but it became increasingly tricky for her to emulate her Palestinian traditions in her American setting.

At home in Palestine, Eid marks a truly festive time of the year. Fawanees, or colorful lanterns, line the streets. Schools close for the holidays and their grateful students march through the city avenues, singing songs and nursery rhymes throughout the night. Firecrackers go off and family members gather to exchange stories, gifts, and money. Worshipers spill into the streets after Eid prayers and spend the remainder of the afternoon showering one another with kind words and well-wishes. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: , , , ,

EMERGENCY POST // The Palestine Entries: Rally in support of Flotilla in Gaza City as soon as possible

July 4, 2011 By 2 Comments

// Entry #20

This is an emergency post. I don’t really know how to accomplish this but I have an amazing image in my head. I see thousands of Palestinian, Turkish, French, Spanish, South African, and even Greek flags waving through the crowded streets of Gaza. I hear hundreds of thousands of voices chanting in unison, demanding that the Flotilla be allowed to travel to the shores of Gaza in full safety and security.

I have less than two more weeks and Gaza but I want to be a part of this scenario before I leave. We, the people of Palestine, must stand up against the outsourcing of Israel’s blockade to Greece. We need to be out on the streets, we need to do what the French did under the Eiffel Tower and what activists all across the globe continue to do in front of their Israeli embassies, their Greek consulates. There is no better time than now. The world’s eyes are on the Flotilla and people are steadily becoming more aware of the oppression and injustice this noble humanitarian effort intends to challenge. We need to give them — the Flotilla activists and the international community — every opportunity to do what’s right in the name of service to humankind.

The Gaza Strip is the Flotilla’s final destination. Even though the fleet of ships has not yet arrived, we need to be on the coasts pulling them in. We need to break the siege ourselves, to unsilence ourselves, to swim out into the sea towards the solidarity activists who have nothing else on their minds except for a free Palestinian people.

Today is the last day for tawjeehi testing, the final examination period for students completing high school. These tests are taken very seriously and the entire Gaza Strip undergoes a brief lull in activity to respect the students. But with the testing phase of the school year over, the youth must head to the streets. We need to outdo the world’s activism. After all, we are the ones under siege.

Pull your mothers, your fathers, your aunts and uncles. Drop your weapons. Ignore your political allegiances. Hug your Palestinian brethren. Don a keffiyeh, wave a flag, hold a sign. Let us break the siege with our voices and our strong will.

Rally in Gaza City, as soon as possible.

Filed Under: The Palestine Entries Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Memoirs of a closed Rafah crossing and how they might soon be erased

April 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil El-Arabi spoke to Al Jazeera today, announcing plans to permanently open Gaza’s border at the Rafah Crossing within seven to ten days in an effort to alleviate the strangling blockade of the Gaza Strip.

There are two ways to understand this news. The first is through a international and public policy perspective. Avi Issacharoff from Haaretz sums it up nicely:

“The announcement indicates a significant change in the policy on Gaza, which before Egypt’s uprising, was operated in conjunction with Israel. The opening of Rafah will allow the flow of people and goods in and out of Gaza without Israeli permission or supervision, which has not been the case up until now.”

Since the blockade began in 2007, the border around the Gaza Strip has been forced shut. The only openings were tremendously arbitrary and lasted for limited amounts of time. Things like chocolate, wood, notebooks, vehicles, most medical supplies, and, you can argue, people are among an enormous list of items banned from crossing through the border passages. Today’s announcement brings some form of relief. Humanitarian aid might soon be able to pass into the Gaza Strip. Families might become whole again.

It is an unfortunate circumstance that most people make the mistake of thinking that the tight border control began in 2007 as a direct consequence of Hamas’ election in 2006. Correcting this misconception constitutes the gist of the second perspective of understanding: the personal one.

In 2004, years before Hamas ever considered running for elections that hadn’t even been planned, the blockade of Gaza’s borders stood in classic defiance of most human rights charters. It certainly existed to a lesser degree — bread was allowed through, unlike today — but it existed nonetheless. My family and I spent a total of six days on the Rafah border crossing. We were part of thousands that year who experienced difficulty (and sometimes failure) at getting in or out of Gaza through the crossing. [Read more...]

Filed Under: News, Personal Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Reconciliation is a good thing but will it actually represent the Palestinian people?

April 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Hamas and Fatah agreed on Wednesday to reconcile and end all infighting, and to begin work toward establishing a non-partisan-based interim government ahead of long overdue elections. The reconciliation comes over a month after Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip took to the streets to demand unity between the feuding political parties each operating under a different umbrella of policies and circumstances.

The agreement, which resulted from private talks held in the newly liberated Cairo, came as a surprise to unsuspecting Palestinian and international communities. The underlying premise is that division opens the door for occupation whereas unity moves Palestinians one step closer toward declaring statehood. Put this way, it has garnered significant amounts of praise – and justifiably so. But the praise is a bit premature.

There are those who will argue that optimism is the only way to endure decades of occupation. To a certain extent, sure. After all, if it serves as a coping mechanism, then it has proven effective. But blind optimism should never compel the Palestinian people to automatically sign off on a vague proposition as if it’s a last ditch effort for liberation. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analysis Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Ynet’s first relatively objective piece questions Israel’s license to kill

April 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Israel’s Ynet News has published its first relatively objective piece! Written by Susie Becher of the progressive Zionist Meretz party, the editorial puts into focus the citizen-approved license to kill seemingly entrusted to Israeli soldiers. The notion that non-hostile, non-threatening, non-militant Palestinians can’t be recognized as civilians has been referenced on this blog in the past as “the IDF mentality”. Seeing it on Ynet of all places is definitely a step in the right direction.

There is one section that deserves full quotation:

In the minds of the Israeli public, threats to security – real or imagined – trump legal considerations every time.

Earlier this week, it was reported that the military advocate general is going to close the investigation into the killing of Palestinians carrying white flags who were ordered out of the house in which they had taken shelter in the al-Zaytoun neighborhood during the Gaza war. Among those killed in the incident were several members of the Hajji family, including a three-year-old, another of the so-called “uninvolved.”

According to the reports, the investigation is going to be closed because no evidence was found that the soldiers acted against orders. Surely there is no need to elaborate on the associations generated by the “only following orders” defense.
A license to kill, Susie Becher (Ynet)

This revelation is of particular interest given the fact that Judge Richard Goldstone recently praised Israel’s cooperation in self-investigating alleged war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead. Among the large amount of criticism directed toward Goldstone, I’ve seen very little criticism of Israel’s self-investigative techniques which is surprising to say the least. But this specific case makes for a good starting point. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Commentary, News, Opinion Tagged With: , , , , ,

Goldstone Report vs. Goldstone Op-Ed

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Soon after Israel’s 2008-2009 invasion of the Gaza Strip, Judge Richard Goldstone chaired a fact-finding mission that published the Goldstone Report which accused both Hamas and Israel of committing war crimes. Two and a half years later, Judge Goldstone published an op-ed through the Washington Post in which he retracts a the Goldstone Report’s initial claim that the Israeli army intentionally targeted Palestinian civilians.

To preface any subsequent discussion, it is important to note that Judge Goldstone did not retract the report in its entirety. Even though Israel’s current administration is calling on the United Nations to “bury” the report, Goldstone’s editorial does not detract from the validity of the evidence used to compile the report. However, this should not prevent us from understanding the implications set forth by this recent op-ed.

Adam Horowitz and Lizzy Ratner, co-editors of the book The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict, appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss the implications of Goldstone’s op-ed. Horowitz notes that although Judge Goldstone “only comments on one small part of the report”, the judge still agrees with the essence of the published report. This is a very objective and undoubtedly optimistic approach that I happen to agree with myself, but only to an extent. Goldstone’s op-ed serves to renege one of the most substantial claims of his team’s entire findings, that there is no Israeli military policy to intentionally target civilians. While this might be considered a small point, it carries heavy consequences. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analysis, Commentary, News Tagged With: , , , , ,

Land and Blood: The Transformation of an Annual Commemoration into a Daily Experience

March 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Guest contribution by Mohamad Ballan

Palestinians remember dates. For a country with such a rich heritage, this is an unsurprising fact. Over 17 civilizations have risen and fallen in Palestine in the last three millennia. It would almost be expected for such a people inhabiting an ancient land to remember some of the key dates which shaped the Palestinian people into who they are today. However, unlike other nations, which have the privilege of commemorating their accomplishments or historic milestones, Palestinians have the sad honor of recalling tragedies, not victories. For a population whose grandparents were subjected to imperial brutality, parents forced into exile, and children forced to endure one of the longest military occupations in modern history, it is no surprise that the Palestinian national calendar is devoted to remembering the martyrs that have fallen. For the sake of brevity, let us recall some of the dates which are now etched onto the Palestinian collective memory. November 27th: the illegal partition of Palestine against the wishes of its indigenous population. April 9th: the brutal massacre of 250 men, women, and children. May 15th: a day appropriately termed the “Day of Catastrophe,” commemorates hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages that were either extinguished from existence or systematically emptied of (over 750,000 of) its ancient inhabitants by Zionist paramilitaries, a process the world euphemistically terms “ethnic cleansing.” I wish to turn now to another date, no less important than those above but less understood. March 30th. Land Day. Yom al-Ard. Yom ha-Adama. This date carries its own significance. In addition to marking a historical event, it also represents a historical process and symbolizes the experience of an entire people. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analysis, Guest Contribution, Personal Tagged With: , , , , ,

A Dark Moment for ‘Liberal’ Zionism

March 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Guest contribution by Chase M.

.

Imagine, for a brief moment, that Israel treated the settlements in and around Hebron the same way it treats the Gaza Strip. After all, Kiryat Arba, like Gaza, has its share of dangerous, gun-toting extremists mingling amidst the civilian population. On a single day in 1994, the Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein mowed down twenty-nine civilians in Hebron during what became known as the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre; this is equal to the total number of fatalities to date from Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks since they commenced in 2001. So what would a Gaza policy imposed on Hebron look like?

First, a fence would be built around the settlements – not to keep Palestinians out, as with the current separation fence, but to keep settlers in. Near the fence, inside the settlements, a free-fire “buffer zone” would be unilaterally declared by the IDF, cutting right through residential neighborhoods and farmland. Armed IDF units patrolling the perimeter of the fence would be authorized to shoot at any Jewish settlers caught inside the buffer zone. Unmanned aerial drones carrying AGM-114 Hellfire anti-tank missiles would occasionally conduct sorties over the city, destroying any buildings that the IDF suspects contain weapons caches or assassinating high-profile figures who organize violence against the city’s Palestinian residents. Collateral damage would be unavoidable when operations are conducted in urban terrain. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Commentary, Guest Contribution, Opinion Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Enough with the “Gaza is impoverished” remarks

March 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu vows to strike occupied Palestine with vengeance, as the Israeli air force targets civilian infrastructure, as retaliatory strikes damage the supposed peace process beyond reconciliation, the “abject poverty” of the Gaza Strip appears to be our main concern.

Yesterday, I wrote a short piece urging specifically the international community to take notice of themissiles regularly falling on Gaza and to intervene in the same moral manner it did in Libya. Today, I direct this message to everyone.

It takes nothing more than a cursory glance at my Twitter newsfeed to recognize the tweets and retweets referencing the sub-par living conditions in Gaza. Statistics indicate that 80% of Gazans live under the established poverty line. One-liners name the sun as the only source of usable energy since virtually all of the territory’s electricity plants are either under-resourced, damaged, or destroyed. Other tweets point out the sewage on the street, the tangible despair in refugee camps, the lack of hospital equipment, the empty store shelves, the ‘they-eat-no-meat’ phenomenon. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Opinion, Personal Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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