Ha’aretz is continuing to divulge soldier testimonies from Gaza. You can find the fullest report yet here. The messianic fervor that fueled the Israeli policy of collective punishment is laid bare.I’m not going to comment on it yet, just go read it.
There is another report in today’s Ha’aretz that I do want to comment on. Uri Blau’s article “‘No virgins, no terror attacks'” describes the practice of Israeli soldiers getting custom clothing printed with their unit’s insignia along with graphics and text. Below are some examples of shirts that were printed, along with some of the images. These images only appeared on Ha’aretz’s Hebrew-language website:
* Sdfsd A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription “Better use Durex,” next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him.
* A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, “1 shot, 2 kills.”
* After Operation Cast Lead, soldiers from that battalion printed a T-shirt depicting a vulture sexually penetrating Hamas’ prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh
* A “graduation” shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, “No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it.”
The Israeli armed forces chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, met yesterday with top US officials in Washington, including General James Jones, the national security adviser, and Dennis Ross, the State Department’s special adviser on “the Gulf and Southwest Asia,” and he warned that Israel is preparing for a military strike on Iran. According to Haaretz, the Israeli daily….
“Université Libre de Bruxelles”
Paul Emile JANSON Auditorium
Thursday 26 march at 20.00 p.m.
Speakers:
Maha abu Dayyeh, Director Women’s Center for Legal Aid
and Counseling (WCLAC)
Bassam Ezbidi, political Sciences Professor at Birzeit
University
Naomi Chazan, Former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset (Merets),
Chair New Israel Fund (NIF), Head School of Government and Society, Academic
College of Tel Aviv Yaffo
Yossi Alpher, Coeditor of the Bitterlemons.org family of
internet publications and former Director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic
Studies at Tel Aviv University
Hussein Agha, senior Associate, member of St Anthony’s
College, Oxford
Scott Lasensky, Senior Research Associate, US Institute of
Peace,Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention, Author of Negociating
Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Meaddle East
Yves Aubin de la Messusière, former Director at the Quai
d’Orsay for the Middle-East, Vice-President of the “Institut du Monde Arabe”
Chair: Simone Susskind, Actions in the Mediterranean
Partners:
Cercle du Libre Examen
Institut Marcel Liebmann
Dor Hashalom
Israel-Palestine: Europe: Réveille-toi
With the Support of the Heinrich Böll Fondation and the Pôle Berheim – Paix
et Citoyenneté
The evening will be in English with simultaneous translation
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.
Professor Shlomo Sand, the Tel Aviv University history professor and author of a controversial book on the genetic origins of the Jews, this week received a top critics prize from French journalists.
Sand, whose book “When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?” ignited controversy in Israel and in Jewish circles, is the recipient of the Aujourd’hui Award, which is given to the best non-fiction political or historical work.
The book, which was published by the Resling imprint, spent 19 weeks on the bestseller list in Israel. Though it has been in bookstores for just six months in France, it has thus far sold 25,000 copies, good enough to remain on the bestseller list.
Sand’s book deals with questions that remain taboo in Israeli society, among them the ancestral origins of the Jewish people and the genetic lineage shared with modern-day Israelis.
Past winners of the prize include French intellectual Raymond Aron, literary critic George Steiner, author Milan Kundera, and historian Francois Pare
I would like to invite you to come to the lecture on the 13th of march at the Arenberginstitute in Leuven (Naamsestraat 96) at 3pm given by Prof Ilan Pappé.
Ilan Pappe, born in Haifa in 1954 is currently a Chair in the Department of History, the University of Exeter and a co-director of the Exeter Center for Ethno-Political Studies.
He wrote extensively on the 1948 Naqbah and is regarded as one of Israel `new historians’ who challenged the official Zionist version of events.
Among these, he defends the Palestinian narrative and analysis of the events of the 1948 War. In particular he subscribes to the thesis that Palestinians were intentionally expelled by Yishuv and later Israeli forces in terms of a plan drawn up even before the war.
Extract of his books introduction:
“I am pro forced transfer, I see nothing immoral in it.” David Ben-Gurion said to the Executives of the Jewish Agency, June 1938
On the cold morning of March 10, 1948 a group of eleven men, consisting of Zionist leaders of the old guard and young Jewish military officers, finalized a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine . That same evening military orders were given to the ground units who had to prepare for the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from large parts of the country. The orders contained a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcefully expulse the people: large scale harassment, intimidation; besieging and bombarding villages and population centers; burning houses, country estates and merchandise; expulsion; and, finally, placing mines in the rubble to prevent the displaced residents to return. Each unit had its own list of villages and neighborhoods that together formed the goals of the overall plan. This Plan D (DALET in Hebrew) was the fourth and final version of less comprehensive plans that described the fate that the Zionists had in store for Palestine and therefore for its indigenous people.
Once the decision was taken, it took six months to complete the task. After that time, almost 800,000 people were displaced – more than half of the original Palestinian population – 531 villages were destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods were emptied of their inhabitants.
Israeli director Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir took Best Foreign Film at this year’s Golden Globes, reigniting a debate about Israeli public support of war. As the Gaza war rages on with a 90 percent public approval rating despite horrific scenes of civilian death, MENASSAT’s Tania Tabar asks why an ‘anti-war’ film like Waltz With Bashir is still not addressing the root causes of war in Israel.
By Dalila Mahdawi
Daily Star staff
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
BEIRUT: Lebanon on Tuesday renewed its demand that Israel pay compensation for damage inflicted during the summer 2006 war. Lebanon’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Nawwaf Salam, passed on an official letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon outlining repeated Israeli violations of UN Security Council Resolution 1701. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora demanded in the letter that Israel compensate Lebanon for inflicting “unimaginable losses” on the country’s infrastructure, which has not yet fully recovered.
band annie's Weblog 