Some 18 months after the end of his posting as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, Tim Franks returned to Israel to discover how much things had changed there. As he noted on the flight in, “There was the same right-leaning government, the same absence of peace talks with the Palestinians. But all around, the region had transformed, as the winds of the Arab Spring had blown.” On the subject of this summer’s social protests in Israel, he said this (my emphasis added):
“They appeared to share, with many western countries, the rage at capitalism’s inequalities. And yet Israel’s economy is growing apace – 5% a year – thanks to its world-beating hi-tech sector. And the protestors took a vow of silence on the most contentious issue of all – the conflict with the Palestinians.”
One of the major figures Franks interviewed was Naftali Bennett, the CEO of the Yesha Council. It is the umbrella organization of the municipal councils of the illegal settlements on the occupied West Bank. It was founded in the 1970’s as the successor to Gush Emunin and its mandate is “to assist Jewish settlement (for which read colonization) in every possible way.” Presumably every possible way includes making sure that Prime Minister Netanyahu tells President Obama to go to hell from time to time.
As Franks revealed, Mr. Bennett himself no longer lives with the settlers on the West Bank. This young, hi-tech millionaire recently moved into a large house on Israel’s expensive central plain. Apparently he sees great symbolic significance in this. It signals that the settlers are “moving into the mainstream in Israel.” In fact that’s an understatement. As some Israeli commentators have noted over recent months, the settlers are now calling the political shots in Israel and the Netanyahu government is implementing their agenda.
One of Mr. Bennett’s first comments to Franks was, “There ain’t going to be peace any time soon with the Arabs, so let’s fix Israel.” And he predicted that the next Israeli election will be the first in which domestic matters and internal issues rather than “the conflict” will be what the parties scrap over.
At a point Franks said to him, “Are you not on the wrong side of history?”
Bennett replied, “What do you do when the overwhelming majority of countries in the world want you to commit suicide?” He went on to say that if a Palestinian state came into being “the missiles will fall on Israel.”
So here it is again. The assertion that a Palestinian mini would pose a serious and unmanageable threat to Israel’s security and even its existence.
I was disappointed but not surprised that the BBC’s man didn’t challenge Bennett’s assertion (what he said and what he implied).
As I have explained in previous posts and my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews (it bears repeating again and again), the notion that a Palestinian mini state would pose a threat to Israel’s security and existence is too silly for words. It was Arafat who gave me the best and most honest explanation of why.
He asked me to imagine two things. The first was that a Palestinian mini state was in existence on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem its capital or, better still, with Jerusalem an undivided, open city and the capital of two states. The second was that rocket and other attacks were launched on Israel from inside the Palestinian state. “How do you think Israel would respond?” he asked me.
I replied: “At a point their tanks would roll over the borders and crush your little state out of existence. Then they’d say to the world something like: ‘We presume you understand why we had to do this and close the Palestine file for ever. We also presume that you will never again ask us to do business with these terrorists.'”
“Exactly!”, Arafat said, almost shouting. Then, after a pause and with controlled passion, he added: “After struggling for so long and sacrificing so much to achieve a small measure of justice, do you really think we Palestinians would be so stupid as to give Israel the pretext to take everything from us and close the Palestine file for ever?”
I replied with just one word. “No.”
A rational Israeli mind would be open to and comforted by the logic of that argument. Unfortunately most Israelis are not rational.
Franks also interviewed Amiad Cohen, the head of security at the West Bank settlement of Eli, 40km outside Jerusalem. As they talked, Cohen gestured to the hills around them and said: “This is our country. We will live here. The question is – Will it be with peace, or will they force us to fight?”
That begs another question which Franks did not ask. What is it that could “force” Israel to fight the Palestinians, by obvious implication from what Cohen said to the finish in an end-game scenario?
Zionism has remained constant in its determination to take for keeping the maximum amount of Arab land (and water) with the minimum number of Arabs on it. Arguably from 1897 and definitely from 1967, Zionism’s strategy has been to break the will of the Palestinians to remain steadfast and continue their struggle for an acceptable amount of justice and force them to accept crumbs from Zionism’s table or, better still from Zionism’s perspective, take leave of their homeland and start a new life elsewhere. I’ve long thought and often said that when Zionism’s leaders conclude that they can’t break the Palestinian will, they’ll create a pretext to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into the neighbouring Arab states and beyond. (The original Sharon plan was to de-stabilize Jordan, get rid of the Hashemite monarchy and say to the Palestinians, “There’s your state, take it.” King Hussein himself told me he had absolutely no doubt that was and would remain a Zionist option, quite possibly its preferred option in an end-game sacenario).
In my analysis global concern from here on should be less about trying to start a real peace process in which Israel’s present and likely future leaders have no interest and more about stopping a final Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Footnote:
Some time ago I wrote that my sources were telling me that behind closed doors all European governments were fed up with Israel in general and Netanyahu in particular. Sarkozy’s comment to Obama about Netanyahu – “I can’t look at him anymore, he’s a liar” – suggests that my sources were more right than wrong. And I think Obama’s response – “You may be sick of him but I have to deal with him every day” – adds weight to my own view that the private Obama loathes having to do the bidding of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress.
* Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthor
Last 5 posts by Alan Hart
- American hypocrisy at its most naked – October 7th, 2011
- Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year): Will God forgive? – October 3rd, 2011
- Palestine – Hope or Despair? – September 21st, 2011
- 9/11: Open letter & challenge to ADL’s Abe Foxman – September 9th, 2011
- Norway’s monster and the poison of Zionist propaganda – July 28th, 2011
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
The following is a the second half of an interview conducted by the new NYTimes eXaminer with PULSE co-editor Belén Fernández about her book The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work. Read the first half here.
Q: Did you come away with a lower opinion of Friedman or of the people and institutions that continually give him platforms to spew his idiotic, loathsome views? I find it so telling that, when Friedman did his “suck on this” performance on Charlie Rose, Rose just nods and leans in for the next question instead of calling Friedman out for saying one of the most offensive things ever said on television. Or to put it another way: Do you think the New York Times would allow one of their columnists to consistently dehumanize entire groups of people – to the point of openly calling for civilian deaths in Gaza, Afghanistan and Iraq – if those people weren’t Arab/Muslim?
Unfortunately, Orientalist dehumanization is institutionalized in US media discourse, the result being that there is no overwhelming public concern when over a million Iraq lives are lost thanks to America’s bellicose projects or when 1400 Palestinians perish in a matter of 22 days at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces.
It is utterly appalling that neither Charlie Rose nor anyone else in the US establishment media took issue with Friedman’s obscene proclamation, and that he was never required by his employer to apologize for it in the interest of maintaining a pretense of objectivity. One can imagine the uproar that would have ensued—and over which Friedman himself would have presided—had, for example, Yasser Arafat instructed Israelis to suck on things, or had Osama bin Laden justified 9/11 with similar terminology. Friedman, on the other hand, is permitted to continue blissfully peddling his contemptuous analyses of the Arab/Muslim world, such as his 2007 assessment—with regard to the US military—that Iraqis “don’t deserve such good people… if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids.”
Of course, it is safe to assume that most Iraqis exhibit normal human affection for their offspring, including for those millions of offspring that have been killed, maimed, displaced or otherwise made to suffer as a result of a US military-inflicted sucking, and that the half a million Iraqi children previously killed by US-championed sanctions were probably also loved by their parents.
Even if Charlie Rose et al. fail to comprehend that sucking orders do not qualify as proper journalistic etiquette, they should at least be able to comprehend that Friedman’s argument for why the sucking should occur is in complete defiance of logic. According to Friedman, Iraqis must be made to suck so that the US can effectively combat the “terrorism bubble” that has developed in “that part of the world” and that poses a “fundamental threat to our open society,” something Americans discovered on 9/11. However, this very same Friedman also explains that the real threat to “open, Western, liberal societies today” consists not of “the deterrables, like Saddam, but the undeterrables – the boys who did 9/11.” The resulting argument—made by someone who himself criticizes the Bush administration for implying a link between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein—is that war against deterrables whose weapons are not the problem will solve the problem of undeterrables who are the weapons and who by definition cannot be deterred anyway.
Regarding your question of whether I have a lower opinion of Friedman or of those who encourage and promote him, they are all part of the same system that rewards the willful subversion of human empathy on behalf of empire and capital. The system would naturally exist without Friedman; he just does his part to sustain it.
As for whether Friedman will ever be made to atone for his crimes, I’ve personally found that one effective means of stress relief is to ponder reincarnation options for him, an activity that he himself actually used to engage in on occasion in order to highlight what he deemed to be unethical behavior by certain sectors of the US citizenry. In a 2004 column entitled “In My Next Life,” for example, Friedman sarcastically described his desire for reincarnation as a college or professional athlete:
For a mere dunk of the basketball or first-down run, I want to be able to dance a jig, as if I’d just broken every record by Michael Jordan or Johnny Unitas. For the smallest, most routine bit of success in my sport, I want to be able to get in your face – I want to know who’s your daddy, I want to be able to high-five, low-five, thump my chest and dance on your grave. You talkin’ to me?
Why athletic grave-dancing is more offensive than telling entire populations to “suck. On. This” is unclear.
I would meanwhile suggest Friedman contemplate reincarnation as an Afghan civilian, an aspiration that might merit the following description (as well as sudden re-reincarnation):
“Yes, in my next life I want to be an Afghan civilian. I want to meet my demise by American B-52, and, when I do, I want the foreign affairs columnist of the US newspaper of record to place the ‘civilian’ portion of my identity inside quotation marks. I want him to take time out of his busy schedule of complaining about his own horrific experiences and the tendency of other diners to interrupt his restaurant meals with their cell phone conversations, and I want him to debunk the blasphemous idea espoused by the European and Arab media, according to which I had not actually been ‘praying for another dose of B-52’s to liberate [me] from the Taliban.
Did you find that Friedman tries to rewrite his own role in history, even though it’s quite easy to fact-check these days? For instance, I’ve noticed he often claims that he called for a $1/gallon “Patriot Tax” on gas on 9/12/01 when, in fact, he didn’t call for one until more than two years later – after both wars he had cheerled for were well under way.
Yeah, it’s not clear whether Friedman intentionally rewrites his own history or whether the rewriting is just a byproduct of the fact that he is employed in a position that does not require him to understand or keep track of what he himself thinks about things.
To give a very simple example of self-contradiction, Friedman announces 200 pages into his book The World Is Flat that Globalization 1.0 was the era in which he was required to physically visit an airline ticket office in order to make his travel arrangements. According to the definition provided at the start of the book, however, Globalization 1.0 ended around the year 1800.
On the subject of India, Friedman goes from arguing that “Indian democracy” and “economic liberalization” have enabled the high-tech industry in Bangalore to flourish, to arguing two years later that Bangalore high-tech firms “thrive by defying their political-economic environment, not by emerging from it.” Indian “democracy” is meanwhile additionally credited with the fact that “rioting didn’t spread anywhere” after the 2002 pogrom incited by the Hindu nationalist government of the state of Gujarat, in which several thousand Muslims were massacred. The article is perplexingly titled “Where Freedom Reigns,” in spite of the massacre of Muslims.
A month after declaring the war-based democracy experiment in Iraq “the most important task worth doing,” Friedman announces that he doesn’t “want to hear another word about Iraq” given that there is a sniper on the loose in Montgomery County, Maryland, who is forcing him to become well-acquainted with the delivery man from California Pizza Kitchen and to “duck… behind a pillar” while filling up his car with gas. He fails to add this to the list of reasons America must cease its dependence on oil, though he does subsequently go from insisting that George W. Bush renounce his limousine and set a “geo-green” example to exulting the following year over the fact that he himself is being chauffeured around Budapest in one. (Friedman goes as far as to provide his driver’s website—www.fclimo.hu—so that everyone can witness the capitalist evolution and integration into the global economy of a “Communist-era-engineer-turned-limo-proprietor,” but refrains from mentioning that none other than Bush is listed as a reference on the company’s website.)
A few more quick examples of Friedman’s historical revisions:
In 2005 Friedman declares the need for “a proper civil war” in Iraq. In 2011 he miraculously displaces the blame for civil war-mongering: “For all of the murderous efforts by Al Qaeda to trigger a full-scale civil war in Iraq, it never happened.”
In 2002 Friedman informs Saudi crown prince Abdullah that “the Jews of the Clinton administration are gone” and that their replacement “WASPs” of the Bush administration “couldn’t care less about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It is not an issue that resonates with them at all.” In 2003 Friedman announces that the Bush team “has fallen so deep into the pocket of Ariel Sharon you can’t even find it any more” and that Bush may “be remembered as the president who got so wrapped around the finger of Ariel Sharon that he indulged Israel into thinking it really could have it all—settlements, prosperity, peace and democracy.”
And so on.
One of the more intriguing things about Friedman’s rewriting of history is that he relentlessly plugs his friend Dov Seidman’s book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything … in Business (and in Life), according to which the centrality of blogs, Facebook, and YouTube to modern life ensures that “more and more of what you say or do or write will end up as a digital fingerprint that never gets erased.” Friedman provides the following illustrative anecdote in 2007:
Three years ago, I was catching a plane at Boston’s Logan airport and went to buy some magazines for the flight. As I approached the cash register, a woman coming from another direction got there just behind me — I thought. But when I put my money down to pay, the woman said in a very loud voice: ‘Excuse me! I was here first!’ And then she fixed me with a piercing stare that said: ‘I know who you are.’ I said I was very sorry, but I was clearly there first.
If that happened today, I would have had a very different reaction. I would have said: ‘Miss, I’m so sorry. I am entirely in the wrong. Please, go ahead. And can I buy your magazines for you? May I buy your lunch? Can I shine your shoes?’
Why? Because I’d be thinking there is some chance this woman has a blog or a camera in her cellphone and could, if she so chose, tell the whole world about our encounter — entirely from her perspective — and my utterly rude, boorish, arrogant, thinks-he-can-butt-in-line behavior. Yikes!”
It goes without saying that defending Israel’s strategy of inflicting mass civilian casualties in Lebanon in 2006, for example, does not in Friedman’s world qualify as rude, boorish, or arrogant behavior. This item from 2010 meanwhile suggests that Friedman is not overly preoccupied with the prospect of domestic cell phone cameras and blogs.
Punditry, like banking, seems to be a profession free of accountability. The more Friedman is wrong, the more Sunday morning shows he gets invited on. Is it time to Occupy Tom Friedman’s house? (He certainly has the room.)
It is definitely time to occupy Friedman’s house. I would advise incorporating an Arab and/or Muslim military into the endeavor and referring to the “occupation” only in quotation marks, as Friedman does following the US invasion of Iraq.
Incidentally, given the schizophrenic nature of his discourse, Friedman could conceivably be persuaded to advocate for the occupation of his own house if he were assured that in doing so he would somehow remain relevant to the effort to recuperate US glory.
Despite marrying into one of the one hundred richest families in the US, Friedman recently attempted to co-opt Occupy Wall Street by classifying it as an “effective” movement (in an interview with MTV, no less). Perhaps as a next step he should consider channeling his affection for Google Earth and the role it allegedly played in sparking the Arab uprisings—by alerting Bahrainis to the dimensions of the ruling family’s palaces—into an investigation of what his own 11,400-square-foot house looks like from the air.
In the immediate aftermath of the illegal capture of the Freedom Waves flotillas, Israel’s public image has been tarnished, as reports of violence at sea surface to counteract its claims of a peaceful takeover, and as human rights cyber-resistance group Anonymous retaliates by shutting down Israeli government web sites.
As Israeli naval soldiers boarded the Tahrir and Saoirse Friday afternoon, the IDF released a statement saying that the ships were intercepted peacefully, and that no activists were harmed in the takeover. In addition, in an attempt to portray its own reasonable benevolence, the IDF released a video of soldiers contacting the ship and offering to reroute its humanitarian aid by land or through Ashdod, shortly before releasing another video which seemed to show Israeli soldiers peacefully and non-threateningly boarding one of the flotillas.
When Egyptian journalist Lina Attalah, an activist aboard the Tahrir, wrote an account of Israel’s seizure of the boats after her release on Saturday, however, the world began to see a different picture. “Towards the early afternoon,” she said, “we saw three Israeli warships in the horizon… Soon after, the Israeli presence in the waters around us intensified. We counted at least 15 ships, four of which were warships, and the rest a mix of smaller boats and water cannons. From inside the smaller boats, dozens of Israeli soldiers pointed their machines guns at us. This is when our communications system was jammed and we lost contact with the world…the Israelis sent radio messages to our boat, asking us to stop sailing because they would board the boat and take us to the Israeli port of Ashdod. When our boat refused to surrender, they aimed their canons at us, showering us with salty water. The boat had become highly unstable and panic was in the air… Israeli ships hit our boat and soldiers started boarding. Dozens of masked soldiers screamed “on your knees,” and “hands up.””
The violent nature of Israel’s takeover of the Tahrir and Saoirse became more apparent with a statement released mid-Sunday by Fintan Lane, the National Coordinator of the Irish Ship Saoirse, in a hurried phone call made from an Israeli prison. “The whole takeover [of the Saoirse by Israeli naval authorities] took about three hours”, claims Lane. “It began with Israeli forces hosing down the boats with high pressure hoses and pointing guns at the passengers through the windows. I was hosed down the stairs of the boat. Windows were smashed and the bridge of the boat nearly caught fire. The boats were corralled to such an extent that the two boats, the Saoirse and the Tahrir, collided with each other and were damaged, with most of the damage happening to the MV Saoirse. The boats nearly sank. The method used in the takeover was dangerous to human life.”
The same day, Saoirse activist Paul Murphy, Socialist Party and United Left Alliance MEP for Dublin, related in a 3-minute phone call, monitored by Israeli prison authorities, that “our boat was almost sunk by the manner in which it was approached and boarded by the Israeli navy. People were shackled and deprived of all personal belongings. In Givon prison the authorities tried to disorientate us through sleep deprivation and the removal of our watches and the prison clock recording the wrong time. We have been given no time frame as to how long we will be kept here before the deportation trial. We were denied our right by Israeli law to contact our families within 24 hours of our arrest.”
Also on Sunday, Greek captain of the Tahrir Giorgos Klontzas, after his release from jail, told Greek Omnia TV that during interrogation, Israeli forces handcuffed him tightly and stuck fingers in his eyes.
The clearest testament to the abuse suffered by the activists at the hands of the Israeli military has come from Canadian activist David Heap, in a letter smuggled out of his prison cell. “I write to you from cell 9, block 59 Givon Prison near Ramla in Occupied Palestine”, the letter stated. “Although I was tasered during the assault on the Tahrir, and bruised during forcible removal dockside (I am limping slightly as a result) I am basically ok… [we] were transported in handcuffs and leg shackles…[we have created] a political prisoners’ committee in order to press our collective demands- association in the block, i.e. open cells; adequate writing and reading material; free communication with outside world- i.e. regular phone calls; [and] information about shipmate women held at same prison”. In response to the shortage of information regarding the female activists currently behind bars, the Women’s Organisation for Political Prisoners (WOFPP) offered Sunday night to send a lawyer free of charge to visit the female prisoners.
As reports of Israeli military violence leaked throughout the weekend, an international group of hackers named Anonymous released a video threatening retaliation against “a clear sign of piracy on the high seas.” The ‘Open Letter from Anonymous to the Government of Israel’ was pointed in its critique- “your actions”, it claimed, “are illegal, against democracy, human rights, international and maritime laws”, and an example of “justifying war, murder, illegal interception and pirate-like activities under an illegal cover of defense” which “will not go unnoticed by us or the people of the world”. Anonymous, which has temporarily disabled many web sites in past publicized acts of moral retribution, further threatened that “if you continue blocking humanitarian vessels to Gaza or repeat the dreadful actions of May 31st 2010 against any Gaza Freedom Flotillas, you will leave us no choice but to strike back, again and again, until you stop….we do not forget, we do not forgive. Expect us.”
A day later, Haaretz reported that “the websites of the IDF, Mossad and the Shin Bet security services were down”, likely due to an Anonymous cyber-attack. Hours later, however, the Israeli government released a statement on Facebook claiming that the websites were down “due to a systematic malfunction of the servers”, denying that Anonymous was behind the crash1. It is highly unlikely, however, for this shutdown to follow so soon after Anonymous’s threat as a matter of pure coincidence.
As the international community rises in condemnation of Israel’s illegal takeover of a ship in international waters, 21 of the 27 activists captured by Israel remain in prison awaiting deportation, and the whereabouts of one, PressTV journalist Hassan Ghani, remains unknown. The Irish activists have refused representation by a lawyer in the Israeli court system, on the grounds that they do not acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel’s legal system. In addition, they refuse to sign a waiver which would forfeit their claim to legal representation before a judge and allow for their immediate deportation, because the offered waiver claims that they came to Israel voluntarily and entered illegally, statements which are patently untrue in light of the fact that Israeli naval boats seized the activists from the Tahrir and Saoirse, and forcibly transported them to Ashdod. They will therefore, according to Israeli law, be detained for 72 hours and then brought to court, where they will almost certainly be deported- though, because they refused to sign the waiver, the deportation will occur without their consent.
As Israel unsuccessfully attempts to save face in the aftermath of its illegal and violent seizure of innocent civilians on a humanitarian aid mission in international waters, the international community once again bears witness to the fact that, in the words of a Saturday press release by the Canada Boat to Gaza team, “there is no legal justification for stopping or in any way impeding the passage of the totally peaceful Freedom Waves boats from the international solidarity movement with Palestinian people”. What is clear to all, in spite of Israeli repression, is that the recent aid mission is only the first of many Freedom Waves bound for Gaza’s shore. “Whatever the Israeli Occupation Forces do to us,” said David Heap and Ehab Lotayef, steering committee members of the Tahrir, from behind Israeli prison bars, “this flotilla marks the launching of the Freedom Waves. It is the continuation of many efforts over the years to bring the plight of Gaza and Palestine to the world’s attention. We will keep coming again and again, until the closure of Gaza is ended and Palestinians have been able to achieve liberation and justice… Expect us. Again and again. The Freedom Waves are just beginning.”
Ben Lorber is an activist with the International Solidarity Movement in Nablus. He is also a journalist with the Alternative Information Center in Bethlehem. He blogs at freepaly.wordpress.com.
Welcome to Palestine Initiative 2012
The challenge to Israel’s illegal siege of Palestine has to move from words to deeds; a small flotilla of boats challenge the siege of Gaza by sea and the Welcome to Palestine 2012 initiative will fly in to Tel Aviv Airport on April 15th to insist on the rights of all Palestinians to freely receive visitors from abroad. Hopefully, hundreds of international visitors will celebrate with Palestinian friends on that Sunday a tiny progress towards the realisation of their full human rights.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
The Israelis may, however, as in 2011, imprison air travellers without charge for trying to go openly to Palestine, but the numbers and international scope this time will make it much more difficult and politically costly for them. If, in addition, international air carriers agree to act as auxiliary prison guards for Israel’s illegal occupation by refusing boarding to some ticket-holders in our home countries, we will know how deal through the courts and otherwise with this violation of our rights to travel.
As with other countries, UK involvement in WtP 2012 will be much greater than last year. Most will be participating for the first time, but some will be veterans of WtP2011. Organisers are already in place in London, the North of England, Wales, Scotland and elsewhere to be a point of recruitment, to fundraise, to set up support systems here, to liaise with Palestinian and Israeli welcomers, and to organise the groups that will fly into Tel Aviv Airport on April 15th from many airports internationally. Join us.
Read the endorsement of WtP 2012 from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky and many others:
“We, the undersigned, endorse the call from the Welcome to Palestine 2012 initiative for supporters of Palestinian human and national rights around the world to openly visit Palestine during Easter 2012.
There is no way into Palestine other than through Israeli control points. Israel has turned Palestine into a giant prison, but prisoners have a right to receive visitors.
Welcome to Palestine 2012 will again challenge Israel’s policy of isolating the West Bank while the settler paramilitaries and army commit brutal crimes against a virtually defenceless Palestinian civilian population.
We call on governments to support the right of Palestinians to receive visitors and the right of their own citizens to visit Palestine openly.
The participants in Welcome to Palestine 2012 ask to be allowed to pass through Tel Aviv airport without hindrance and to proceed to the West Bank to take part in a project there for children to benefit from the right to education.”
SIGNED:
Sam Bahour / Tony Benn / Noam Chomsky / Jonathan Cook / Stephane Hessel / Ronnie Kasrils / Nurit Peled / John Pilger / Nawal Al Sadaawi / Vauro Senesi / Desmond Tutu
Al Jazeera’s Nisreen el Shamayleh reports from the Jordanian capital Amman on the protest that took place there in support of the Syrian people.
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