Not many Palestinians were familiar with the name Uri Davis until yesterday when the media reported that the “Jewish member of Fateh” had been nominated for a spot on the movement’s Revolutionary Council. Davis, recruited into Fateh in the 1980’s by assassinated Fateh leader Khalil Al Wazir, was born in Jerusalem in the early forties to Jewish immigrants who believed in the Zionist dream.
Obviously, Davis did not adopt his parents’ ideologies, calling himself a “Palestinian Jew.” An academic, Davis has been an avid proponent of human rights, Palestinian especially, and an opponent of the nature of Israel as a Jewish state. In 1987, he wrote a book entitled, “Israel: an apartheid state” and penned his autobiography in 1995 entitled, “An autobiography of an anti-Zionist Palestinian Jew.”
On June 5, when several hundred Israelis marched from Tel Aviv’s Yitzhak Rabin Square to the Israeli Defense Ministry to protest the anniversary of the Six Day War, I was able to meet some of the country’s most vociferous cheerleaders of Barack Obama. In complete contrast to the characters who appeared in my video report, “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem,” those I interviewed at the demonstration (organized by the Israeli left-wing party Hadash) were invigorated by Obama’s speech in Cairo, and excited by the prospect of an American president who would pressure Israel into making meaningful concessions towards peace. As one demonstrator remarked to me, “[Obama] must save us from ourselves.”
Read on
The UN Durban Review Conference on Racism held in Geneva on April 20-24.Representing the Alternative Information Center at Geneva , I was the only Israeli-Jew participating in this important gathering. Here are some of my impressions:
Between Durban II and Durban I there is no more in common than between the First Intifada and the so-call Second Intifada, i.e. absolutely nothing.
The UN Durban I Conference, held in South Africa in 2001, was a powerful statement by almost all the nations of the world against racism, and in spite of some marginal anti-Semitic incidents, an extraordinary outcry of international civil society. In fact, Durban was the last international demonstration of the decolonization era that started with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the awakening of the colonized nations.
Durban I was also the starting point of a global counter-reform launched by the big powers, under the leadership of the US and Israeli neoconservative administrations. That counter counter-offensive used the terrible accusation of anti-Semitism as its battle flag, and a permanent blackmail to paralyze any potential opposition.
The Durban II Conference against Racism was supposed to review the implementation of the Durban I decisions. In reality it was its planned assassination and funeral. The State of Israel and the USA played the leading role in that extremely well planned maneuver, with the assistance of some of the European countries. For three years, at least, they have been working hard to fix new guidelines for the conference, “the red lines” as they were labeled, mostly aimed to avoid any criticism of Israel, that in Durban I was indeed singled out in both the States and the Civil Society conferences. One must remember that 2001 was the year of Ariel Sharon’s “Defense Shield” murderous offensive against the Palestinian people, and the targeting of Israel was the direct and natural result of the massacres in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Arabs, Jews join forces to demonstrate against home demolitions in east Jerusalem
Ronen Medzini
About 150 Jews, international human rights activists, and local Arabs hit the streets in east Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood Saturday to protest demolition orders for homes in the area.
The protesters rallied under the slogan: “Jews and Arabs against house demolitions.”
One of the stops in the march was the ruins of a home razed two weeks ago. “Under these ruins, you can still find the furniture of a whole family, with five daughters, that has no other home,” one protester declared. “This is an act by (Jerusalem Mayor) Barkat, who in his first day on the job already decided to raze homes, and is going to continue razing homes in the area.”
One of the protest organizers, Abdul Halik Shaludi, told Ynet that back in 2005 city hall issued demolition orders for 88 homes.
“We set up a protest tent back then that lasted almost five months, until the previous mayor agreed to sit with us and gave us the opportunity to create a master plan, at our expense,” he said. “We did everything, paid $77,000 from our own pocket, yet 40 days ago we were summoned by the Interior Ministry and told that they’re rejecting our plan because it contradicts city hall’s policy. The next day we erected our current protest tent, which draws people from all over the world.”
Blaming the settlers
The local activist says Mayor Barkat adopted the plans of settlers who plan to take over the neighborhood.
“It’s obviously a political story aimed at kicking us out of the eastern part of the city,” Shaludi said. “Today, almost 300 settlers live in Silwan, and every time they come in and buy another part of the neighborhood in ways that are not kosher.”
The issue of house demolitions in eastern Jerusalem was addressed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently. The demolitions are not helpful, Clinton said at the beginning of the month, adding that the US Administration is monitoring the issue vis-à-vis the Israeli government and Jerusalem city hall.
You don’t have to be a brutal tyrant to want to commit crimes against humanity. Hatred is alive and well in Israel in nice young patriotic families. Israel is a country bad enough as it is, without making historical comparisons.
“Israel Military action is an unjustified aggression that is being carried out in a style of Hitler, in a fascist fashion.” (Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez)
“Clearly, President Chavez needs a reality check when it comes to the Middle East conflict.” (Anti-Defamation League National Director, Abraham H. Foxman)
There is a trend amongst us all, the critical voices of Israel and Zionism. Time after time we compare Israel to the Third Reich; we equate the IDF to the Wehrmacht, we find a resemblance between the Israeli Air Force’s tactics to the blitz technique of the Luftwafe, we occasionally associate Sharon’s and Olmert’s war crimes with those of Hitler. I myself have fallen into this very trap more than once. But I have now made up my mind. This fashion of speaking must be stopped once and for all.
To regard Hitler as the ultimate evil is nothing but surrendering to the Zio-centric discourse. To regard Hitler as the wickedest man and the Third Reich as the embodiment of evilness is to let Israel off the hook. To compare Olmert to Hitler is to provide Israel and Olmert with a metaphorical moral shield. It maintains Hitler at the lead and allows Olmert to stay in the tail.
My mother, indeed a very clever woman, challenged me a long time ago asking: “Tell me Gilad, why is it that you and your friends always compare Israel to the Nazis? Isn’t Israel bad enough?”
Ezer Weizman once said “The nuclear issue is gaining momentum [and the] next war will not be conventional.” From the 1950s the US trained Israeli nuclear scientists and providing nuclear technology, including a small ‘research’ reactor in 1955 under the ‘Atoms for Peace’ program. The French built a uranium reactor and plutonium reprocessing plant in the Negev desert, called Dimona. The Israelis lied, stating it was “a manganese plant, or a textile factory”. In return for uranium, Israel supplied South Africa with the technology and expertise that allowed the white supremacist regime to build the “apartheid bomb”.
In 1979 US satellite photographs revealed the atmospheric test of a nuclear bomb in the Indian Ocean off South Africa, Israel’s involvement was quickly whitewashed by a carefully selected scientific panel, kept in the dark about important details. Israeli sources have since revealed “there were actually three tests of miniaturised Israeli nuclear artillery shells”.
Mordechai Vanunu worked as a nuclear technician at Dimona. A supporter of Palestinian rights, Vanunu believed it was his duty to warn the world about the danger Israel posed. In 1986, he smuggled out photographs showing that the plant was producing enough plutonium to make 10 to 12 bombs a year, and that at least 200 miniaturised bombs had been built.
The present dismal reality unfolding in the Middle East has clear historical roots and a journey into the past may help to illuminate what lies behind the destructive policies of Israel in both Palestine and Lebanon.
Zionism arrived in Palestine in the late 19th as a colonialist movement motivated by national impulses.
The colonisation of Palestine fitted well the interests and policies of the British Empire on the eve of the First World War.
With the backing of Britain, the colonisation project expanded, and became a solid presence on the land after the war and with the establishment of the British mandate in Palestine (which lasted between 1918 and 1948).
While this consolidation took place, the indigenous society underwent, like other societies in the rest of the Arab world, a steady process of establishing a national identity.
But with one difference. While the rest of the Arab world was shaping its political identity through the struggle against European colonialism, in Palestine nationalism meant asserting your collective identity against both an exploitative British colonialism and expansionist Zionism.
Thus, the conflict with Zionism was an additional burden. The pro-Zionist policy of the British mandate there naturally strained the relationship between Britain and the local Palestinian society.
This climaxed in a revolt in 1936 against both London and the expanding Zionist colonisation project.
At the end of November 1947, the UN offered to divide Palestine into two states almost equal in their territorial space. The Jews were only one third of the population by 1947 and most of them had arrived in Palestine only a few years earlier.
The categorical Palestinian refusal to go along with this deal, backed by the Arab League, allowed the Zionist leadership to plan carefully the next step. Between February 1947 and March 1948, a final plan for ethnic cleansing was prepared.
The Zionist leadership defined 80 percent of Palestine (Israel today without the West Bank) as the space for the future state.
This was an area in which one million Palestinians lived next to 600,000 Jews.
The idea was to uproot as many Palestinians as possible. From March 1948 until the end of that year the plan was implemented despite the attempt by some Arab states to oppose it, which failed. Some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, 531 villages were destroyed and 11 urban neighbourhoods demolished.
Half of Palestine’s population was uprooted and half of its villages destroyed. The state of Israel was established in over 80 percent of Palestine, turning Palestinian villages into Jewish settlements and recreation parks, but allowing a small number of Palestinian to remain citizens in it.
The June 1967 war allowed Israel to take the remaining 20 percent of Palestine.
This seizure defeated in a way the ethnic ideology of the Zionist movement. Israel encompassed 100 percent of Palestine, but the state incorporated a large number of Palestinians, the people who Zionists made such an effort to expel in 1948.
The fact that Israel was let off easily in 1948, and not condemned for the ethnic cleansing it committed, encouraged it to ethnically cleanse a further 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza strip.
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