Comments watch – ‘Turning Bedouin village into Jewish settlement is racist’ – Ynet news

A Bedouin village in the Negev desert, Southern Israel, is to be removed with a Jewish settlement built in it’s place.

The Bedouin village of Um-al-Hiran has been applying for building permits so that their village, or as some would call it a hamlet, can be deemed legal, but their requests have been ignored or rejected thus far. Instead, the government has decided to build what the article terms a “Jewish settlement” called Hiran in it’s place.

Now, the term “Jewish settlement” can be a bit misleading, since if it is located without the 1967 borders and in Israel proper then it shouldn’t really be called that. Nevertheless, the Bedouin residents are going to be evicted from the area entirely. Here are a couple of quotes from the residents:

“Salim Abu Al-Kian, 53, told Ynet. ‘We are ready to reach a settlement on the matter. We’re willing to get permits for homes that have yet to receive them. Unfortunately, the state does not want to help us. They want to expel us from our land. We have no value to them,’ he said”

“‘We wouldn’t mind living alongside Jews. I wouldn’t object to us being neighbors,’ said Salim Abu Al-Kian.
“You can’t just take an Arab and put a Jew in his place. This is racism. This is the Nakba of 2012,’ he added.“

The Bedouin village of Um Al Hiran – Credit goes to Ynet news

To call this a Nakba, referring to the Palestinian catastrophe in 1948, is a pretty bold statement considering how some Israelis have reacted to any mention of it’s event.

Now someone called “Zionist Forever” on the site commented:

“This village was built illegally on state owned land ( not Bedouin land ) and they are complaining the state cannot force them to move and redevelop the area.”

Which is probably true. But here is the kicker guys. The Israel Land Agency (or ILA) has a governing board that decides the policies. 12 of the 22 members are elected governors. While 10 of the members are from the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the same organization that was founded in 1901 to buy land from Ottoman landlords and evict all the Arabs. To this day they have made it clear that they will only serve Jews, and no other type of Israeli, because of the nature of their organization…and these people decide the policy of land ownership. So is it a surprise that application after application for building permits by the Bedouins was refused? Nope.

But there is another comment of note as well. A man who named himself “Jack Bauer” simply commented:

“Send them all back to the Sinai”

A democracy is only as good as the people who inhabit it folks. And if you have been following the work of Israeli journalist David Sheen you would know about the recent xenophobia, especially against African blacks, that has gone through Israel. It was to the point that an Israeli MK said that Israel was a country for the “white man”. So never mind the Mizrachi or Ethiopian Jews!

These attitudes still freely prevail, but of course it is also essential to keep in mind that Israeli social movements such as the J14 are the polar opposite to this sort of rhetoric. One can only hope that as the generations pass, then there will be change. But I don’t think things will change within one generation…especially in Israel.

Catwezle Oxford and my first performance

I don’t know why the heck I tried, but I did. I went to the Catweazle club in Oxford; a club where artists of all types, from singers, musicians, magicians and poets can sign up and preform to a respecting and a very welcoming audience. The atmosphere is very friendly, but that is not stopping me from cringing. I signed up to preform a piece of spoken word poetry.

Some artists indeed brought their lyrics on paper to help them on stage. But good old me didn’t do that, oh no! Why? Because I wanted to impress. Note-to-self: no matter how hard you practice, being on stage is always different than standing up in your room like an idiot and reciting it to yourself.

I did a witty introduction to break the ice, about how royally and artistically screwed I was considering the other acts I have seen (and I really think I was). Nevertheless, I got on with it, but as happens, I got the shakes and stumbled on the very first sentence. I apologized, calmed down, and just went for it, and the audience were simply brilliant. Well over a half were performers tonight, and they all undoubtedly remember the first few times they preformed. But I still cringe…

All credit goes to the Catweazle website for these pictures

Another reason that I felt terrible was because the atmosphere was so happy and amazing. I felt that my bleak piece turned that around on it’s head, just for a little bit, but the performers after managed to fix that right up! There was one funny magician who spoke only in gibberish, a girl who played a pirate song where we all went “YOHOHO” like drunks together, more than our fair share of guitar players but each with their own style. And of course, amazing singers that made me jealous of their voices.

It really was a wonder for me to see so much creativity squeezed in one room…literally. I was so amazed that I had forgotten myself, and although I was very humbled by the skills of other people I am also driven to write better and better poetry. So am I going back? Definitely!

Oh and here is my poem that I preformed (I didn’t even give it a title and only realized when I got on stage!)

Imagine a cave; decrepid, dark and where the shadows dance

Produced by the outlines of puppets, moving in a trance

I want to take a chance

Crawl out, but these shadows grip my mind

I’m in a moral debt and living on borrowed time

 

I’m afraid that if I awake 

I will see the landscape transform to a waste 

A place where magnificent materials are built on spiritual ruin

The box in the room claims truth

Bearing rotten moral fruit

While it hides the bodies of children

And I ask myself “is their blood with so-called democracy?”

Or did they die for some corporation

Or ideologies more entrenched than rotten remains

In mass graves 

 

And these puppets change,

but they all dance the same

To the orchestra of capital

I cannot help but consume for I’m a lowly animal 

I feed the machine while I continue to dream of being self-sustainable

A utopia is impossible

But so is living hell if you allow your third eye to shine

And wrestle these shadows that grip our minds 

Fighting divide and conquer, standing on common ground

Where the truth abounds

Not the battlefields of history,

Where bodies are strewn around senelessly 

 

For you cannot deny the oneness of man

Whether we come from the remains of stars or fashioned by divine hands

This one source from which we’ve come

Is itself a force that we can harness as one 

For if there was ever a weapon that destroyed or awakened nations

It was never blade or bullets but the power of conviction 

And that is why we must break free, from invisible chains 

Because we carry the key

 

There are those who turn a profit when we fight each other 

But it is priceless and beyond all wealth to simply know

That all women are sisters, and all men are brothers

Conversation with an Israeli – “but I never hear your voice”

The flag at our stall in Oxford

As usual, I was working at the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign stall on a Saturday. We hung a a banner at the front of our table showing the fragmentation of the West Bank by Israeli settlements, military zones, checkpoints and so on. It worked wonders because it was visual, and many people would stop and look.

Among these people was a group of three, one of whom crouched and took a picture of the banner with his phone. I thought that, due to his looks and his interest he might be Arab. But he and two of his friends turned out to be Israeli. I was relieved that they didn’t overturn the entire table in rage (apparently something like that happened before but I never experienced it myself). And instead of shouting in our faces they were willing to listen. I think that may have been because they were from a younger generation, although I am not sure.

Firstly, me and my colleagues spoke to all of them at once, and when one of us mentioned a possible “One-state solution”, one of the Israelis said “but the Palestinians don’t want us here”. Of course, as a Palestinian, I stepped in and said that I in fact Do want them there, and for a few seconds they were dumbstruck.

Anyway, the conversation moves along, me and another Israeli start talking. After telling him that I have no problem with Israel existing he said (this is paraphrased of course)

“But I never hear your voice, you see. I am still afraid that if I go to Mahmoud Abbas (Palestinian president) I will get bombed. The Palestinians elected Hamas as well…but I never hear your voice”.

It was worrying but to be expected. Hamas is the new bogey man (well relatively new to the “Communist threat” before), he didn’t even know that the settlements and settler movements gain government support and subsidized housing, he thought they were private!

Even after mentioning the settlements, he also said that “Arabs live in our neighbourhoods, go in our malls, but I never see Jews live in the West Bank”. Well some of them sure live there. Not to mention one of my professors who is Jewish, and went there during the first Intifada in 1987.

But I should have told him that my voice is the voice of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement. It was a call by the overwhelming Palestinian civil society for peaceful resistance for a just, two-state solution which recognized Israel’s right to exist. Hamas’ victory over Fatah by a small percentage, coupled with tactical voting against the PLO and the complacent Palestinian Authority is one reason why they just about won. Not to mention how Hamas is actually charitable in terms of supporting schools and hospitals which greatly appealed to the poor.

It was clear what I saw in this group of Israelis. Although open minded, they are victims of the politics of fear. The only times they were in the West Bank was when they served in the Army and stood at checkpoints, as one himself said. Ramallah is only a twenty minute drive from Jerusalem, especially if you are an Israeli, but it might as well be light-years away. It is a distance of fear, not a physical distance.

If you are Israeli and are reading this, I encourage you to go to the West Bank. Talk to Palestinians inside and outside Israel itself face to face, and get to know your neighbours.

Comments watch – In suspected Jerusalem lynch, dozens of Jewish youths attack 3 Palestinians – Haaretz

Reading a news article gives you information about a certain event. But what is also important is to read the comments of people and their reactions to said event, and it becomes news worthy of itself.

Zion Square – credit goes to Haaretz

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/in-suspected-jerusalem-lynch-dozens-of-jewish-youths-attack-3-palestinians-1.459002

This article from Israeli newspaper Haaretz details a suspected “lynch”. Dozens of Jewish youth attack three Palestinians in Zion square in Jerusalem, and one of them was beaten to death. An eye witness, who was Jewish and tried to help said this:

“”But today I saw a lynch with my own eyes, in Zion Square, the center of the city of Jerusalem ….. and shouts of ‘A Jew is a soul and Arab is a son of a –,’ were shouted loudly and dozens (!!) of youths ran and gathered and started to really beat to death three Arab youths who were walking quietly in the Ben Yehuda street,”

But please, read the article for yourself to get a good idea of the story. But when it comes to politically heated or racially heated articles concerning Palestine and Israel, I can’t help but read the comments too. Thankfully, many of them were sympathetic, calling for justice. But even in such an obviously hateful and disgusting attack, some people still had negative things to say:

Arnold from Canada writes – “This is all wrong.. Why are we ( Jews ) acting like them ( Arabs )”
This is contradictory in and of itself beyond belief to me. The Jewish youth clearly acted with racist intent in the event. Arnold makes a racist statement while saying that it is wrong to be or act racist. I will give you a minute to figure it out.

But it doesn’t come as a surprise to me. Having met and talked to Israelis in real life and online, they seem to be a very polarized society. Some are fierce in defending human rights and equality, others have openly said that I ought to have my human rights stripped away from me. What is surprising in Arnold’s statement is not the airbrushing of Arabs as one entity, but of Jews as well, the “Us and Them” mentality.

Paul simply says - “Arabs back to Arabia – problem solved.”
This is an argument that I come across with very fierce right-wing Zionists all the time. When they use the argument that Jews lived in the land first as an ethnicity then I know that we can never come to an agreement. My fundamentals are purely different in deciding who should stay, who should leave and who should be treated with human dignity, and it has nothing to do with ethnicity.

But if this attitude grows, then I wonder how the Arab natives of Israel will feel. I bet they will feel like foreigners, strangers and in a country that does not belong to them. In other words, if this attitude does grow (and there are a sizeable number who believe this line of argument), then Israel will be an ethnocracy, not a democracy, for it is “only or the Jewish people”.

Producing beats live on the streets of Oxford – Mr. Woodnote and little Rhys

Oxford has it’s fair share of buskers and street performers. But sometimes, something will catch your eye, your ear or maybe even your nose and you will stop and watch. This is what happened when I first heard Mr. Woodnote and little Rhys, a hip-hop group perform a few years ago. Now they seem to be coming back every summer.

Forgive my thumb being in the way, that was terrible of me!

What was so special about them? Well they produced their beats right there and then in front of you. The thing you see on the ground is a pedal system that allows you to loop sounds that you record into a microphone. One of the performers will play a bit of saxophone and loop that. Then he will beat box to add the drums, and loop that over it. All of it, there and then, it is produced in front of you which I think is quite awesome.

Another nice thing to see is that it is being performed in the street. We have a lot of people playing guitar, singing as duos (there were two different duos that day and another young man playing his guitar) but I rarely see someone rap in public. What is better is to see older and mature people bopping their heads to it and enjoying themselves!

It really is things like this that make me want to get back into lyricism…

P.S. I would have had a word for them, but they were working hard on performing and then trying to sell their CDs in between.

The anti-Semitic card is being played once more

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=268141

“What people of conscience need to know about Norway” reads the heading of an article by Michael Sharnoff in the Jerusalem Post. And as I read his informed testimony, I couldn’t believe my eyes…let us begin shall we?

“Casual observers of the Middle East are no doubt aware of the deeply anti-Semitic and anti- Zionist attitudes in the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. These groups make little attempt to conceal their desire for a world without Israel”

The usual “Israel is small and constantly threatened by its big Arab neighbours” argument. Take the time to look at these for a minute:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/world/middleeast/06palestinians.html

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/24/136403918/hamas-foreign-minister-we-accept-two-state-solution-with-67-borders

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2012/04/2012413151613293582.html

“However, many in its government, and some large businesses, have recently displayed a pattern of strong anti-Israel and often anti-Semitic attitudes which would make Islamist radicals very proud.”

There it is, there is the first of it, but please, let us carry on.

“Why would a very tolerant, progressive and democratic government espouse such prejudicial views?”

Sorry mister Sharnoff, but a view is only prejudicial if it is purely assumed with no evidence to back it up. Evidence such as the military occupation of the West Bank, the building of Settlements which house extremists, the checkpoints, the Wall, the eviction of Palestinians from East Jerusalem and its occupation also. The fact that military court law is used in the West Bank while civil court law is used in Israel…culminating in the impossibility of building a Palestinian state in the first place.

“They [the Norwegian leaders] typically avoid specifically targeting Jews, for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, but their actions nonetheless exhibit traits of “genteel anti-Semitism.”

Genteel anti-Semitism you say? The anti-Semitic card is evolving. So despite the fact that they don’t target Jews and they say it, you still claim that they are in a “secret” or “genteel” way. No offence, but this sounds like some neurotic paranoia here…but let us give this journalist some rope.

“Oslo may have distanced itself from Halvorsen’s controversial remarks, but it has refused to follow the United States and European Union’s classification of Hamas as a designated terrorist organization.
“We condemn organizations that are involved in terrorism,””

Excuse me, but how does that make it anti-Semitic again? It is not denying the fact that Hamas carries our terrorist activities and it condemns those activities. Just because it doesn’t do as the E.U and the U.S.A does, that is shutting its ears and saying “lalalalala” like an insolent child, doesn’t make it wrong. It makes it pragmatic.

“Støre has also insisted that Israel dismantle its security wall built in response to the wave of suicide bombings from the West Bank.”

Yes, you are absolutely right. Norwegian leaders have a secret agenda to send out radical suicide bombers into Israel, that sounds rational, and I am sure you know what rational means because you have used it in the article many times. No, I’m just joking. I just wonder why you didn’t say where the wall was built, well that is because it is in Palestinian territory, snaking this way and that, choking Bethlehem and cutting off farmland from its farmers. Also, read this article.

“A 2010 report from NGO Monitor which provides information on organizations claiming to advance human rights revealed that Oslo provides tens of millions of kroner annually to West Bank and Gaza NGOs. Some of these organizations are blatantly anti-Israel and promote anti- Israel boycotts.”

Name some of these organizations for me. And what is wrong with boycotting Israeli goods in protest of their policies? You know, the policies that I mentioned earlier in case you forgot.

“The Norwegian People’s Aid, funded by the Foreign Ministry, described Israel as “apartheid” and accused it of “war crimes.”

If you think that Norwegian organizations are the only ones saying this you are in for a nasty surprise.

“The most recent example of Norway’s genteel anti- Semitism was exemplified by Roar Arnstad, CEO of a Norwegian pharmaceutical chain called VITA, with his decision to boycott Ahava cosmetics manufactured in West Bank settlements.”

“Genteel”, there it is again. Tell me what is wrong with boycotting enclaves full of nationalist religious zealots who torch farms, form their own road blocks, drive people from water springs and so on and so forth…

“Arnstad denies holding anti-Semitic beliefs and claims his policy is only against the Israeli occupation, but if this was indeed sincere, he would apply the same boycott to other occupying nations.”

Can you give me examples of other occupying nations that they deal with. I love how Mr. Sharnoff doesn’t actually deny that Israel is an occupying nation. Because I guess the best thing you can do after your crimes are staring you in the face, is point to other nations and say “they are worse than us!”.

“Singling out Israel is anti-Semitism and this demonstrable fact cannot absolve the Norwegian government of its own bigotry.”

The bright and informed journalist seems to think every Jew in the world is Israeli or in an Israeli university. You know what anti-Semitism is? It is a policy aimed at all the Jews around the world. Israeli Jews are not the only Jews in the world, Mr. Sharnoff.

“So tell us, do you boycott cultural and academic events in Britain (occupier of the Falkland Islands), China (occupier of Tibet), Russia (occupier of the Kuril Islands), Iran (occupier of Greater Tunb, Lesser Tunb and Abu Musa Islands), Morocco (occupier of Western Sahara), Armenia (occupier of Nagorno-Karabakh) and Turkey (occupier of Northern Cyprus)? Do you ban imports from these countries? Moreover, do you criticize suicide bombings and rocket attacks against civilians with the same fervor with which you criticize Israeli policies? For many, regarding Norwegian policies – enough is enough. If Vidkun Quisling was alive today and read the anti-Israel an anti-Semitic statements that were coming out of Norway, a big smile would appear on his face.”

I love how he now expresses sudden concerns for all of these mentioned territories. Maybe if they got more media attention and pressure by activists then these will change. You know, like the activists who are in Palestinian villages getting beaten, arrested and sent to prison without trial. Maybe we should make these other issues mainstream if we can. Also, yet again you didn’t deny Israel was an occupying force itself. All that is left, after your moral collapse, is to point fingers. Meanwhile you can talk about the close friendship Israel had with Apartheid South Africa too, that was a concerning historical friendship.

“The writer completed a PhD in Middle East Studies from King’s College, London.” – This translates to “he sounds nuts, but believe him anyway”.

A dispatch from "the only democracy in the Middle East"

Reblogged from the first casualty:

Via Haaretz:

When the director of the International Writers Festival in Jerusalem wants to convince international authors to attend the festival despite pressure to boycott it, she often trots out the fact that an opening speaker in 2010 criticized Israel in his comments. But now the festival is instituting a new requirement: Opening speakers must show their speeches to management in advance - in an effort to avoid another speech like that one.

Read more… 183 more words

Israel is ruled by a liberal and progressive civil court, while the Occupied Palestinian Territories are ruled by an oppressive military court. The vileness of this military court is spilling into Israel proper. And as Palestine slowly disappears and around 2 million Palestinians are left stateless, one can only wonder what will happen if a two state solution is never reached.

CISPA – Big Brother of the internet

I am appealing to the people of the United States of America, and calling for the attention of the global citizens, because the internet is now in danger. And if you, as an amazing blogging community, truly care about the freedom of expression which has flourished here, then please take the time to read this and ACT.

CISPA = Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act

CISPA will kill all privacy on the net. Unlike SOPA and PIPA which aimed to “stop piracy”.

Note, this is taken from a thread on reddit: Click and read for a more in depth explanation.

If you want to do something, here is a list of options:

Sign this avaaz petition 

If you are a US citizen, then please take the time to contact your congressional representatives. 

Also let the author of this act, Mike J. Rogers, know what you think of it by contacting him on his facebook page or twitter.

Thank you for your time.