A rally was held this evening protesting the arrival of the US envoys in Israel. Members of National Union, Likud and Israel Beiteinu led the crowd, which included Kahanists wearing t-shirts saying “Kahane was right,” referring to Meir Kahane’s ideology of violence against all who stand in the way of the constant expansion of Jewish territory.
The row over a racist advert of Cellcom – an Israeli mobile phone operator, which shows Israel Occupation Forces soldiers playing football with Palestinians on both sides of the Apartheid Wall, continues.
In the Cellcom advert, IOF soldiers on patrol along the Wall stop their army jeep when it is hit by a soccer ball from the Palestinian side of the Wall. A game ensues, back and forth with the unseen Palestinians after a soldier dials up “reinforcements,” including two smiling women in uniform, to come and play.
The advertisement made by McCann Erickson, part of U.S. Interpublic Group, ends with the upbeat voiceover: “After all, what are we all after? Just a little fun.”
The advert has been extensively criticized for making light of the Palestinian suffering inflicted by the West Bank Apartheid Wall.
this is the Palestinian retort
IT WAS A joke of exasperation that I heard from a number of Palestinian farmers months ago: “Next we’ll need permits from the Israelis to sleep with our wives,” they would say after they had summarized the bureaucratic hoops they have to jump through to go about their normal lives. Having witnessed the catalogue of Kafkaesque routines and requirements that they patiently undergo to, for example, access their farmland to earn an honest living, it didn’t sound so outlandish a prediction.
What should be outlandish—and outrageous—is Israel’s blatant duplicity concerning the separation wall it has erected within much of the Palestinian West Bank. Israel speciously calls it a “security barrier.” Anyone who examines Israel’s policies and methods of ethnic cleansing of Palestine, however, will quickly realize that “security” is an over-exploited ruse used to legitimize its colonial policies and to shield itself as a nation from moral responsibility for its actions. The annexation, apartheid or separation wall, or barrier, or fence—whatever phraseology one wishes to….
Monday 6th July, Heathrow, London Adie Mormech, one of the six British Free Gaza boat passengers and crew deported today from an Israeli jail, says he’s raring to return.
The Free Gaza boat Spirit of Humanity was forcibly boarded by the Israeli navy last Tuesday while trying to sail to Gaza through international and Gazan waters. The boat remains at the Israeli port of Ashdod. “Another boat which tried to reach Gaza a few months ago is still there, so we don’t have much hope of getting ours back” says Mormech, “but the lawyers are working hard on it and we will be fundraising for new ones.”
Of the experience of being boarded by Israeli soldiers, Mormech remained upbeat about his memories. “The soldiers were trying to look intimidating,” he said, “but the boat was rocking so much that they kept sliding all over the place and falling over each other… the Special Forces weren’t looking so special!”
Of his time in the Israeli immigration jail at Ramle, though, he emphasised the appalling conditions for people – mainly from Africa and South East Asia – being held there for years at a time. “It was like dipping your toe in an enormous pool of lost people,” said Mormech. He described the jail, where Free Gaza prisoners were helped by fellow inmates with mobile phones and in return gave English lessons and took testimonies, as a ‘hellhole.’ Many of the inmates, he said, have no money for lawyers, and described one individual from Cote d’Ivoire who had been incarcerated for two years with no hope of legal representation or release.
And, said Mormech, the inconsistencies and irregularities of the Israeli system which seemed like a “game of cat and mouse” for him as an internationa,l are “of course, a brutal reality governing the lives of thousands of Palestinians.”
“It’s not about me, it’s about Gaza entirely,” he stressed.
From the comments in Haaretz about the boat seizure
1. It is laughable that Israel is so scared of one tiny boat and 21 unarmed civilians. This shows the level of cowardice in Israel.
2. Israel has made sure this story will gain the publicity that allowing the boat to reach Gaza would not have created.
3. Israel has confiscated medical supplies, toys and olive trees, all items guaranteed to make Israel look pathetic.
4. Israel has again proven that they still occupy Gaza.
5. What is the difference between Somali pirates and the Israeli navy? The Israeli navy has no excuse for their actions.
6. Israel seem hellbent on making sure that Shalit stays in Gaza for the rest of his life.
Israel is not only a joke but it`s own worse enemy. I can`t wait to see how Israel spins this to a world still waiting for justice after the Gazan genocide of Jan/Dec.
By Reuters
The Dead Sea will be eliminated next week from a contest to choose the seven natural wonders of the world, because of a Palestinian boycott over the participation of an Israeli settler council.
The New 7 Wonders of Nature is a global Internet contest under the slogan: “If we want to save anything, we first need to truly appreciate it.” In 2007 it chose the new seven man-made wonders of the world.
Its rules state that if a nominee site is located in more than one country, all countries in which it is located must form an Official Supporting Committee (OSC) by July 7.
Israel and Jordan have both done so for the Dead Sea, which they share, but the Palestinian Authority has decided against.
For the Dead Sea, a win would highlight the environmental threat to a unique lake which has shrunk dramatically in the past 30 years due to human exploitation of the Jordan River feed waters and Dead Sea mineral extraction.
“We will not be forming a committee,” Palestinian Tourism Minister Khouloud Douaibes told Reuters, because the Israeli committee “has been consulting with settler councilmen on occupied land and this contravenes international law”.
“Therefore, we are not interested in the issue,” she said reflecting a view that renders the contest and its potential benefits insignificant next to the Palestinians’ long struggle against settlers in their midst.
Unless there is a last-minute rethink by the Palestinians, the decision means the famously buoyant lake at the lowest point on Earth cannot advance to the next stage of the contest.
That is when Internet voters worldwide narrow down the field of 261 to 77, from which the final shortlist of 21 will be chosen ahead of the final vote in 2011, in which N7W predicts one billion electronic votes will be cast.
The Palestinian refusal was no surprise to interested Israelis who predicted months ago that the involvement of the Megilot Dead Sea Regional Council — which governs settlements — would prove a major obstacle to Palestinian participation.
“It’s very sad,” Megilot Dead Sea Council spokeswoman Gura Berger told Reuters. “The Dead Sea is so unique it’s beyond politics. Neither my kids nor Palestinian kids will be able to enjoy it if nothing is done to save it.”
Jordan benefited handsomely after the ancient ruins at Petra were voted a man-made Wonder of the World in 2007. Visits have more than doubled since it won the contest.
The Dead Sea’s water level is shrinking by 3.3 feet a year, according to a World Bank study.
Remember Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party who made a big splash four years ago when he began raving about the wonders of the Bush Doctrine? Probably not, to the relief of many a neocon. He was an embarrassing ally for the warbots even back then, but now he’s gone and done the unforgivable:
A surprise reconciliation between the leaders of Hizbullah and the Progressive Socialist Party was followed on Friday by Walid Jumblatt’s re-directing his rhetoric south, to Palestine, and warning of the “absolute extremism” of the Israeli government. “I call on all of our people in Palestine to reject sectarian and non-sectarian violence and cling to their Arabism and Palestinian national project, to confront Zionist projects that promise to be more dangerous and fiercer in the coming phase,” Jumblatt said in a statement.
The PSP leader said the Israeli government had no interest in a peace settlement and “insisted on absolute extremism” in its current policies.
I suspect we won’t be seeing any more sympathetic profiles of this “insightful interpreter of the fluctuations in Middle Eastern politics” any time soon.
A special political vocabulary prevents us from being able to recognize what’s going on in the Middle East.
By Saree Makdisi
June 19, 2009
On Sunday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech that — by categorically ruling out the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state — ought to have been seen as a mortal blow to the quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On Monday morning, however, newspaper headlines across the United States announced that Netanyahu had endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state, and the White House welcomed the speech as “an important step forward.”
Reality can be so easily stood on its head when it comes to Israel because the misreading of Israeli declarations is a long-established practice among commentators and journalists in the United States.
In fact, a special vocabulary has been developed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. It filters and structures the way in which developing stories are misread here, making it difficult for readers to fully grasp the nature of those stories — and maybe even for journalists to think critically about what they write.
The ultimate effect of this special vocabulary is to make it possible for Americans to accept and even endorse in Israel what they would reject out of hand in any other country.
Let me give a classic example.
In the U.S., discussion of Palestinian politicians and political movements often relies on a spectrum running from “extreme” to “moderate.” The latter sounds appealing; the former clearly applies to those who must be — must they not? — beyond the pale. But hardly anyone relying on such terms pauses to ask what they mean. According to whose standard are these manifestly subjective labels assigned?
Meanwhile, Israeli politicians are labeled according to an altogether different standard: They are “doves” or “hawks.” Unlike the terms reserved for Palestinians, there’s nothing inherently negative about either of those avian terms.
So why is no Palestinian leader referred to here as a “hawk”? Why are Israeli politicians rarely labeled “extremists”? Or, for that matter, “militants”?
There are countless other examples of these linguistic double standards. American media outlets routinely use the deracinating and deliberately obfuscating term “Israeli Arabs” to refer to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, despite the fact that they call themselves — and are — Palestinian.
Similarly, Israeli housing units built in the occupied territories in contravention of international law are always called “settlements” or even “neighborhoods” rather than what they are: “colonies.” That word may be harsh on the ears, but it’s far more accurate (“a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state”).
These subtle distinctions make a huge difference. Unconsciously absorbed, such terms frame the way people and events are viewed. When it comes to Israel, we seem to reach for a dictionary that applies to no one else, to give a pass to actions or statements that would be condemned in any other quarter.
That’s what allowed Netanyahu to be congratulated for endorsing a Palestinian “state,” even though the kind of entity he said Palestinians might — possibly — be allowed to have would be nothing of the kind.
Look up the word “state” in the dictionary. You’ll probably see references to territorial integrity, power and sovereignty. The entity that Netanyahu was talking about on Sunday would lack all of those constitutive features. A “state” without a defined territory that is not allowed to control its own borders or airspace and cannot enter into treaties with other states is not a state, any more than an apple is an orange or a car an airplane. So how can leading American newspapers say “Israeli Premier Backs State for Palestinians,” as the New York Times had it? Or “Netanyahu relents on goal of two states,” as this paper put it?
Because a different vocabulary applies.
Which is also what kept Netanyahu’s most extraordinary demand in Sunday night’s speech from raising eyebrows here.
“The truth,” he said, “is that in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish homeland, now lives a large population of Palestinians.”
In other words, as Netanyahu repeatedly said, there is a Jewish people; it has a homeland and hence a state. As for the Palestinians, they are a collection — not even a group — of trespassers on Jewish land. Netanyahu, of course, dismisses the fact that they have a centuries-old competing narrative of home attached to the same land, a narrative worthy of recognition by Israel.
On the contrary: The Palestinians must, he said, accept that Israel is the state of the Jewish people (this is a relatively new Israeli demand, incidentally), and they must do so on the understanding that they are not entitled to the same rights. “We” are a people, Netanyahu was saying; “they” are merely a “population.” “We” have a right to a state — a real state. “They” do not.
And the spokesman for our African American president calls this “an important step forward”?
In any other situation — including our own country — such a brutally naked contrast between those who are taken to have inherent rights and those who do not would immediately be labeled as racist. Netanyahu, though, is given a pass, not because most Americans would knowingly endorse racism but because, in this case, a special political vocabulary kicks in that prevents them from being able to recognize it for exactly what it is.
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He is the author of, among other books, “Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation.”
Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-makdisi19-2009jun19,0,1505080.story
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