A vision of collective identity, purpose and values written by and for young Jews committed to justice in Israel and Palestine. It is an invitation and call to action for both our peers and our elders, launched as a counter-protest at the 2010 Jewish Federation General Assembly in New Orleans.
I. we exist.
We exist. We are everywhere. We speak and love and dream in every language. We pray three times a day or only during the high holidays or when we feel like we really need to or not at all. We are punks and students and parents and janitors and Rabbis and freedom fighters. We are your children, your nieces and nephews, your grandchildren. We embrace diaspora, even when it causes us a great deal of pain. We are the rubble of tangled fear, the deliverance of values. We are human. We are born perfect. We assimilate, or we do not. We are not apathetic. We know and name persecution when we see it. Occupation has constricted our throats and fattened our tongues. We are feeding each other new words. We have family, we build family, we are family. We re-negotiate. We atone. We re-draw the map every single day. We travel between worlds. This is not our birthright, it is our necessity.
II. we remember.
We remember slavery in Egypt, and we remember hiding our celebrations and ritual. We remember brave, desperate resistance. We honor a legacy of radical intellectuals and refugees. We remember the labor movement. We remember the camps. We remember when we aged too quickly. We remember that we are still young, and powerful. We remember being branded as counterrevolutionaries in one state and hunted during the red scare of another. We remember our ancestors’ suffering and our own. Our stories are older than any brutal war. We remember those who cannot afford to take time to heal. We remember how to build our homes, and our holiness, out of time and thin air, and so do not need other people’s land to do so. We remember solidarity as a means of survival and an act of affirmation, and we are proud.
III. we refuse.
We refuse to have our histories distorted or erased, or appropriated by a corporate war machine. We will not call this liberation. We refuse to knowingly oppress others, and we refuse to oppress each other. We refuse to be whitewashed. We will not carry the legacy of terror. We refuse to allow our identities to be cut, cleaned, packaged nicely, and sold back to us. We won’t be won over by free vacations and scholarship money. We won’t buy the logic that slaughter means safety. We will not quietly witness the violation of human rights in Palestine. We refuse to become the mother who did not scream when wise King Solomon resolved to split her baby in two. We are better than this. We have ancestors to honor. We have allies to honor. We have ourselves to honor.
IV. we commit.
We commit ourselves to peace. We will stand up with honest bodies, to offer honest bread. We will stand up with our words, our pens, our songs, our paintbrushes, our open hands. We commit to re-envisioning “homeland,” to make room for justice. We will stand in the way of colonization and displacement. We will take this to the courts and to the streets. We will learn. We will teach this in the schools and in our homes. We will stand with you, if you choose to stand with our allies. We will grieve the lies we’ve swallowed. We commit to equality, solidarity, and integrity. We will soothe the deepest tangles of our roots and stretch our strong arms to the sky. We demand daylight for our stories, for all stories. We seek breathing room and dignity for all people. We are committed to the struggle. We are the struggle. We will become mentors, elders, and radical listeners for the next generation. It is our sacred obligation. We will not stop. We exist. We are young Jews, and we get to decide what that means.
22 octobre 2010
Four years and going strong
The popular struggle in Ma’asara stops the fence of annexation
October 2006 saw the beginning of regular demonstrations against the fence in the South Bethlehem region: women and kids from the villages most harmed by the fence stood in front of bulldozers and stopped the construction, and Palestinians and Israelis joined hands in a popular non-violent struggle to defend the land and stop the settlements.
Now, after four years of constant popular resistance in the face of on going military oppression, violence and arrests, we unite in a larger demonstration than usual, and tell the occupation forces that our message still stands:
Nov 09, 2010 12:04 am | Hamde Abu Rahme
(Photo: Hamde Abu Rahme)
Today, November 9 at about 3:00 in the morning, the Israeli army entered the village of Bil’in. About 50 soldiers entered the village by jeep and foot. When they arrived at the two targeted houses, they ran and took positions outside while a number of soldiers entered the house.
(Photo: Hamde Abu Rahme)
At first the soldiers were hammering on the door of one house, demanding to see 30-year old Ashraf al-Khatib. It turned out they went to the wrong house. They then went to another house – forcing one of Ashraf’s brothers to show them where Ashraf lives. Soldiers then entered that house, and his brother’s family’s house, and again they woke up the family, asking for Ashraf al-Khatib. His brother, Haytham al-Khatib, is a journalist from the human right’s group B’tselem and was of the ones woken up by the army. Even though they entered a house where their target didn’t live, they stayed there for about one and a half hours, searching all the rooms.
Haytham al-Khatib told me about his 6-year-old son’s reaction to waking up to see dozens of soldiers in his house, “he asked me to close the door, because he didn’t want to see them.” Haytham himself was prevented when he wanted to record the raid in his family’s houses – the soldiers simply locked him in a room for more than an hour, away from his children and wife. The children in the houses are ages 1,5 and 8 years old, and this is not the first time they have seen their homes raided at night.
However, after 1.5 hours of searching for the target in three houses, two of which he doesn’t reside in, Ashraf al-Khatib was not found. Five weeks ago Ashraf was shot in his leg with live ammunition by an Israeli soldier during a demonstration in Bil’in. The bullet went through his leg, breaking the bone. Even though he was heavily injured and in major pain, the soldiers tried to arrest him. Luckily he was brought to safety, and then taken to a hospital for surgery by fellow protesters. Tonight the army decided to come and take him in front of his wife and 1.5 year old daughter instead.
The soldiers finally retreated from the targeted houses by foot, walking toward the military road that follows the illegal segregation fence in Bil’in, at about 4.30 AM. The village of Bil’in has suffered from frequent night raids over the last few years, and a number of villagers have been taken for interrogation and imprisoned for their non-violent resistance to the occupation and segregation wall on Bil’in’s land.
(Photo: Hamde Abu Rahme)
Nov 082010
Monday, November 8, 2010 at 9:39AM Gilad Atzmon
If you are interested in Jewish political power and Zionist morbidity you must find the time to watch the first forty minutes of this incredible Israeli documentary. The film outlines what early Zionists thought of their Diaspora Jewish brothers, Jewish wealth, Jewish war mongering and Jewish power.
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=9024068972366598651&hl=en&fs=true
I do not know much at all about the people behind this film, except that they belong to the Israeli Ultra Orthodox sector. The film is there to expose the inherent anti Jewish discrimination within the Zionist discourse.
It is there to prove that Zionism is deeply anti- Semitic. The film is well made and very well researched, and the shocking quotes it outlines are all genuine.
In case you fail to realise the role of Jewish wealth, the impact of AIPAC, Lord Cash point Levy, the Conservative Friends of Israel, and other relentless Jewish lobbies, Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl (the founder of modern political Zionism) doesn’t seem to mince his words.
Just five minutes into the documentary, Herzl is quoted as saying: “The wealthy Jews control the world…In their hands lies the fate of government and nations” (4:59)
But it isn’t just money the founder of Zionism is concerned with: Herzl was also very unhappy with what he saw as the role of Jews in setting off wars and world conflicts. Needless to say of course, Herzl couldn’t know about what else was to come, decades later — He didn’t know about Neo-conservatism; he didn’t know about Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby setting the USA’s doctrine of moral interventionism; Herzl couldn’t know that it would be the Labour Friends of Israel who would contribute funds to the Labour Government in 2003; and Herzl couldn’t foresee that people like Jewish Chronicle writers David Aaronivitch and Nick Cohen would rally within the British press for further aggression in the Middle East, namely, the Iraq War.
But somehow Herzl was observant enough to suggest that “They (the Jews) set governments one against the other and by their decree governments make peace” (5:07)
Herzl indeed, appeared to despise Jewish Power. “When the wealthy Jews play, the nations and the rulers dance”, he wrote with contempt.
Pre Zionist writings by Herzl suggest that the promising Viennese Journalist was convinced that Anti-Semitism was actually good for the Jews : He thought that it would mount pressure that would lead Jews eventually to “adapt” and transform into Goyim by means of conversion (5:49).
Later, when Herzl, changed his mind, and decided that Zionism was the ‘way forward’, he still thought that anti Semitism was a good thing, since it could only push Jews more urgently towards establishing the future Jewish State.
And it seems that Zionism still benefits from anti Semitism. Apparently, Herzl’s paradigm is still in place.
Bravely, the film elaborates on the similarities between Herzl and Hitler. It is rather clear that — at least ideologically — the two political thinkers shared a deep aversion towards Jews.
Zionism was there to erect a ‘new Jew’: It promised to transform the Jews into “civilized people”. The documentary exposes the level of loathing early Zionists felt towards their Diaspora brothers.
In 1919, the Zionist socialist, Josef Haim Brenner, insisted that “Jewish national character has been at fault since time immemorial. We (Jews) have never been a creative people. We’ve always lived lives of gypsies and dogs.” Brenner continues, “what do you expect from the anti Semites?” (25:10). To a certain extent they were right to hate us all. “The Jews,” says Zionist Brenner, “are Gypsies, contagion, slop and decay, a rotten egg.. We are remotely humane… scum of mankind”
David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, and probably the ultimate Zionist pragmatist, agreed that “transforming humanoid raw material (the Diaspora Jews) into a cultural nation is not an easy task.”
The Israeli documentary discloses the Zionists’ conscious dismissal of European Jews’ tragedy during The Second World War –In 1943, as European Jews suffered the ultimate form of oppression, Itzhak Greenbaum (the Zionist leader in charge of the rescue efforts) wrote, “when they ask me, can you not use funds to rescue Jews in the Diaspora? I said No and I repeat No! “
Greenbaum then insists that the struggle for Zionist redemption is more important than any efforts to save Diaspora Jews. (31:00)
In 1937 Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist Organisation and later the first Israeli President, declared “The hope of six million[1] Jews is focused on rising up from the depth of tragedy. I wish to save two million youth. The elderly will perish and await their final destiny. They are, economically and ethically –sub human-in cruel world.” (32:18)
David ben Gurion repeated more or less the same line of thought: “If I should be able to save all the children of Germany via transport to England, and merely half of them via transport to Israel, I will choose the latter”
The film goes on to review the Zionists’ total betrayal of, and failure to assist European Jews at the time of World War Two.
It also exposes the total political and legal abuse of Yemenite, Arab Jews and the Orthodox community in Israel.
It is important also to note that — as much as this film protests against anti Jewish discrimination in Israel — it hardly mentions the Palestinians or their plight. It totally neglects the crimes committed day by day against the Palestinian people.
As one expects — universal ethics hardly comes into play in Hebrew; not even in a film about Zionist discrimination and human rights abuse.
[1] Note the number (6.000.000) and the year (1937)
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