Israel/Palestine

Breaking the Israeli stranglehold on Gaza

War on Gaza
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Activists manage to break through the Israeli blockade of the Gaza coast:

GAZA, Aug 23 (Reuters) – Two boats carrying activists challenging an Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip reached the shore of the Hamas-controlled territory on Saturday.

The 44 “Free Gaza” activists from 17 nations, who had set out on Friday from Cyprus in two wooden boats, were met by thousands of Palestinians who cheered along the shoreline at their arrival.

“Today is a special day, we hope it’s the beginning. We have opened the path and we hope there will be more travellers,” said Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian peace activist, after the ship anchored off shore.

Israel may have “withdrawn” from Gaza back in 2005, but took care to keep its control of Gaza’s borders; all its borders, not just the ones with Israel. The usual excuse is terrorism, but the reality is the slow economic strangulation of Gaza as part of a deliberate strategy to starve the territory into submission. Even the sea is off-limit for the people of Gaza, with Israeli warships firing on any fishing ship getting too far out of the coast. What the activists attempted to do is draw attention to this strangulation, but also to actually break the blockade. Just having another press stunt is not enough, but fortunately it seems the presence of the activists has enabled some fishermen to actually fish:

A statement by the group said the activists boarded Palestinian fishing boats on Monday and travelled with local fishermen eight miles (13 km) off shore, passing a 6-mile limit they said was generally enforced by the Israeli military.

The Gaza fishermen said that Israeli ships normally fire at them in deep waters and they had not travelled that far from shore in more than five years.

“We hope we will be able to go that far every day because it is our right, and it should not be a one-time event because of the presence of the foreigners,” said 27-year-old fisherman Fawzi al-Hessi.

The Palestinians themselves than are realistic about the chances of Israel allowing this situation to continue once the cameras have gone… To properly break the stranglehold the Israelis have on Gaza, not to mention the West Bank, there needs to be constant pressure from Europe and America and our governments need to stop supporting Israel.

Israel/Palestine: when did the NYT get a clue?

Israel/Palestine, Zionism
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Because this article by Jeffrey Goldberg is surprisingly insightful:

“We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us,” he said. If this happens, and worldwide sanctions are imposed as they were against the white-minority government, “the state of Israel is finished,” Mr. Olmert said in an earlier interview. This is why he, and his mentor, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, turned so fiercely against the Jewish settlement movement, which has entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians. Once, men like Mr. Sharon and Mr. Olmert saw the settlers as the vanguards of Zionism; today, the settlements are seen, properly, as the forerunner of a binational state. In other words, as the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy.

Other Israeli leaders have spoken with similar directness. The former prime minister, and current defense minister, Ehud Barak, told The Jerusalem Post in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state that might then become another Belfast or Bosnia.”

[…]

And the best way to bring about the birth of a Palestinian state is to reverse — not merely halt, but reverse — the West Bank settlement project. The dismantling of settlements is the one step that would buttress the dwindling band of Palestinian moderates in their struggle against the fundamentalists of Hamas.

No, these ideas aren’t particularly shocking, radical or even progressive, but the fact that they can now be expressed in the New York Times, perhaps the cheerleader for zionism must be a good thing. For too long American zionism in particular has held to the idea that Israel could have its caek and eat it: have a greater Israel incorporating the Occupied Territories without having to deal with the Palestinians, the idea that the Palestinians could be bought off by a sham state. If it is no longer beyond the pale to demand a Palestinian state controlling the whole of the Occupied Territories, progress has been made. That said, I still believe even this maximalist two-state solution is least acceptable valid solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. My preference is still a new state, neither Jewish nor Palestinian but open to both.

I also think that the idea that in Israel there’s a greater range of debate possible on this subject, while true, should not be taken too optimistically. there are still incredibly strong political pressures against any Israeli politician being too accomedating to the Palestinians, or being too realistic in which Palestinian organisations are credible discussion partners. Some of these pressures are from imported superzionists from America or Europe, but there are plenty of domestic wingnuts as well. the main difference between Israel and the US is that the day to day reality of Zionist Israel is harder to ignore.

Dutch media bias in the Middle East

Israel/Palestine, Manufacturing Consent, Zionism
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Branko reports on the findings of political scientist Jacqueline de Bruijn on how the Dutch media reports on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The results are depressing but unsurprising:

  • the press under-reports Israeli attacks on Palestinians, even when there are dozens of victims, but it reports on every Palestinian attack on Israelis, even when there are no victims;
  • as a result, the few times Israeli aggression is reported on, this makes it seem that the supposedly rare Israeli attack is a response to a continuous stream of Palestinian aggression

As one person cynically noted: dead Palestinians are not news, simply because there are so many of them. Israel’s state propaganda makes handy use of this fact by continuously stressing that its attacks are merely responses to Palestinian aggression (a tactic Israel also uses with the PR for its attacks on Lebanon). What makes the whole matter worse is that Israel’s heavy handed violence against the occupied population is actually beneficial for this PR strategy. There’s no reason for Israel to tone down the murderousness of its regime.

[…]

For the press to combat this bias, it first has to recognize that it does have a problem. Everybody can see that De Bruijn’s qualitative statements are correct simply by opening the newspaper and observing the loaded language, regardless of the merits of De Bruijn’s methodology and quantitative statements. Next, the press has to figure out how to attack this problem.

De Bruijn presented her findings during a meeting in which the press were present. Also there was essayist Mohammed Benzakour who came with an equally interesting observation: several of the major Dutch newspapers have correspondents in Israel who are allied with the Zionist cause. The correspondent for Algemeen Dagblad and broadcaster EO (evangelists) is former chairman of the Nederlandse Zionisten Bond and has a daughter who works as press spokes person for the Israeli army, and the correspondent of the Volkskrant organizes trips to Jerusalem for Cidi. That does not necessarily invalidate their reporting (for all I know they take great care to remain as objective as possible), but it does signal a clear conflict of interest, which should in turn alert news consumers. Then again, why should I consume news from a suspect source?

I’ve noticed the tendency of the Dutch media to largely look at the conflict through Israeli eyes before, so it’s good to see my suspicions being confirmed. It’s also another blow against zionist propagandists like the bad news movement who like to pretend the Dutch media are biased against Israel.

Israeli defence minister threatens Holocaust

Israel/Palestine
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No kidding. That’s what deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai said last week:

Israel’s deputy defence minister has said Israel will have “no choice” but to invade Gaza if Palestinian militants step up rocket attacks.

Matan Vilnai said Palestinians risked a “shoah”, the Hebrew word for a big disaster – and for the Nazi Holocaust.

Mr Vilnai made the comments after rockets hit the city of Ashkelon, 10km (six miles) from Gaza. His colleagues insisted he had not meant “genocide”.

This was immediately followed by a weekend of increased attacks on Gaza, which left over a hundred Palestinians dead, at least half of which were civilians:

According to B’Tselem figures, from 27 February to the afternoon of 3 March, 106 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip. Contrary to the Chief of Staff’s contention that ninety percent were armed, at least fifty-four of the dead (twenty-five of them minors) did not take part in the hostilities. In addition, at least forty-six minors were wounded.

Of course, according to Israel this was all just a response to the rocket attacks launched by Hamas earlier, omitting that these in turn were a response to an earlier Israeli attack that left six Palestinians dead. And so on, ad infinitum, because Israel persists in attempting to create peace exclusively on their terms. Over the decades successive Israeli governments would rather tolerate continuing terror campaigns against their population than deal with the Palestinians on equal terms, refusing to deal with those organisations created by Palestinians to fight for their cause. It used to be Yassir Arafat’s PLO/Fatah that the Israelis considered beyond the pale, until the first Intifada made Arafat the lesser of two evils. Now it’s Hamas that cannot be reasoned with, even though it won the support of a majority of the Palestinians in elections two years ago and even though any “peace” negotiated without Hamas is a farce. Instead Hamas needs to be eliminated, as David Rose made clear.

Why this is? Because Israel want to dictate a peace on the Palestinian people and to be able to do this an ability of the Palestinians to resist needs to be broken. So far this has not yet happened, even with the massive advantages Israel enjoys in money, support and weapons. Which is why we now hear government ministers threatening Holocausts. So far this is just rhetoric.

So far.

Remembering the Nakba

Amsterdam, Israel/Palestine, Zionism
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On May 14th it will be exactly sixty years ago that the state of Israel was founded. A moment of celebration for the Israelis, but for the original Palestinian population of the country that day in 1948 was the start for a gigantic humanitarian tragedy: the Nakba, or catastrophe.

The Dutch Tropical Museum now has put up an exhibition on the Nakba, showing the eyewitnesses testimonials of those Palestinians caught up in it. Much of the video material used in this exhibition originated with the Nakba Archive, an international attempt to document and research the experiences of the first generation of Palestinian refugees from what would become Israel. This is important, because this generation is slowly dying of old age and this is the last opportunity to document their stories. The exhibition itself is also important, because the story of the Nakba is little known in the Netherlands, whose sympathies traditionally lie with Israel rather than the Palestinians. That an exhibition on such an important aspect of Palestinian history can now be shown in such a renowned museum with none of the usual zionist outcry is a good sign