Between all these oppressions the Gazan people are smothered, which prompts talk in Gaza of the “two occupations.” These indignities and oppressions highlight the absurdity of having all the responsibilities of associated with governing a state but without sovereignty—usually the first requirement for a government, at least, roughly speaking. And that’s why Palestinian political analysts are now talking about dissolving the governments in Ramallah and Gaza. They’re useless: once a resistance movement becomes a government it can become directly responsible for oppression. That’s reasonable. What’s less reasonable is that it becomes responsible for welfare, and we see how that turns out with the ridiculous back-and-forth over Gaza’s electricity, which is Israel’s responsibility and no one else’s. If Israel wants to occupy, let it at least do the occupying itself.

*Plus the Empire.

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: Egypt, Fatah, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, misogyny, Palestine, Ramallah, resistance movements

Related posts:

1. the blackouts in Gaza are over, for the moment I didn’t know before I came to Gaza how laptop...
2. Gisha on the “easing of the blockade” for people Via Gisha: As discussion of “easing” the closure of Gaza...
3. No, I don’t care about the new “mall” in Gaza I did not see the new Gaza “mall” before leaving...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Article from Jewbonics read more here

The war, when it came, was directed as much against Gaza’s economy as against Hamas militants. Key features of the bombing campaign were designed – as its principal planner, General Gabi Ashkenazi of the Israeli air force, explained to me afterwards – to destroy the ‘critical nodes’ that enabled Gaza to function as a modern society. The air force had dreamed of being able to do this sort of thing since before the 2006 Lebanon War, and Ashkenazi thought the introduction of precision-guided ‘smart bombs’ now made it a practical proposition. Gaza’s electrical power plants, telecommunications centres, sewage plants and other key infrastructure were destroyed or badly damaged. Ashkenazi, I recall, was piqued that bombing in addition to his original scheme had obscured the impact of his surgical assault on the pillars supporting modern Gazan society.

…

Visiting Gaza in that first summer of postwar sanctions I found a population stunned by the disaster that was reducing them to a devastated Third World standard of living. Gaza City auction houses were filled with the heirlooms and furniture of the middle classes, hawked in a desperate effort to stay ahead of inflation. In the upper-middle-class enclave of Tel al-Hawa, I watched as a frantic crowd of housewives rushed to collect food supplies distributed by the American charity Catholic Relief Services. Doctors, most of them trained in Britain, displayed their empty dispensaries. Everywhere, people asked when sanctions would be lifted, assuming that it could only be a matter of months at the most (a belief initially shared by Haniyeh). The notion that they would still be in force several years later was unimaginable.

The crossing authorities’ stated purpose was to review and authorise exceptions to the sanctions, but its actual function was to deny the import of even the most innocuous items on the grounds that they might, conceivably, be used in the production of rockets. An ingenious provision allowed any committee member to put any item for which clearance had been requested on hold. So, while UNRWA and other NGOs, and aid-giving nation states, might wish to speed goods to Gaza, Israel and its ever willing American partner could and did block whatever they chose on the flimsiest of excuses. As a means of reducing a formerly functioning territory to a pre-industrial condition and keeping it there, this system would have aroused the envy of the blockade bureaucrats derided by Keynes. Thus in 2007 Israel blocked, among other items, salt, water pipes, children’s bikes, materials used to make nappies, equipment to process powdered milk and fabric to make clothes. The list would later be expanded to include switches, sockets, window frames, ceramic tiles and paint. In 2009 Israeli representatives forcefully argued against permitting Gaza to import powdered milk on the grounds that it did not fulfill a humanitarian need. Later, the diplomats dutifully argued that an order for child vaccines, deemed ‘suspicious’ by weapons experts in Tel-Aviv, should be denied.

Throughout the period of sanctions, Israel frustrated Gaza’s attempts to import pumps needed in the plants treating water from Wadi Gaza, which had become an open sewer thanks to the destruction of treatment plants. Chlorine, vital for treating a contaminated water supply, was banned on the grounds that it could be used as a chemical weapon. The consequences of all this were visible in pediatric wards. Every year the number of children who died before they reached their first birthday rose, from one in 30 in 2006 to one in eight four years later. Health specialists agreed that contaminated water was responsible: children were especially susceptible to the gastroenteritis and cholera caused by dirty water.

Obviously, not exactly the same as in Iraq. I had to do a bit of re-writing, but not so much; replacing place-names nearly suffices. In Gaza, sanctions have alternated with massacres; summer 2008, winter 2008-2009, while sanctions began in 2005 and continue to this day, predated by the violent repression of the Second Intifada. Sanctions were obviously ineffective in both cases in terms of their objectives: getting rid of the government and replacing a belligerent government with a friendlier one, more amenable to American/Israeli diktat. Another crucial difference? In the case of Gaza the world resisted and resists. Boats went in to try and break the siege insistently, and that insistent pressure perhaps prevented the very worst from taking place in Gaza. Gaza is not Iraq from 1991-2003 and that is very good. But it could have been, and since there will inevitably be more resistance from Gaza, it could yet be.

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Iraq, Israel, Joy Gordon, Palestine, resistance movements, sanctions

Related posts:

1. US Government Supports Sanctions Against Itself Not literally, no. What the US government is calling for...
2. matt taylor responds. can we stop discussing “non-violence” please??? Here is Matthew’s response. And mine. Matt, The only person,...
3. is there a humanitarian crisis in Gaza? not the point Israeli hasbara and the nincompoops who repeat it in the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Article from Jewbonics read more here

Saber Kushour apologises as he asks his guests to move the plastic chairs on his breeze-block balcony a little closer to the door to his house. If he were to sit where they are now, he explains, the electronic tag attached to his ankle would set off an alarm. Kushour's edginess is understandable – he is recalling a 15-minute encounter almost two years ago which he says "has destroyed my life". Last week the married father of two from east Jerusalem was sentenced to 18 months in jail for the "rape by deception" of a Jewish woman who claimed she would not have had sex with him had she known he was an Arab.

What might have been a tawdry episode – casting neither Kushour nor the woman in a favourable light – exploded into a debate in Israel about racism, sexual mores and justice. "I am paying the price for a mistake that she made," Kushour, 30, told the Observer. "I was shocked at the sentence – it shows a very vivid and clear racism." The message from the judge, he says, was that "because you are an Arab and you didn't make that clear, we are going to punish you". In his verdict, Judge Zvi Segal conceded that it was not "a classical rape by force". He added: "If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated. The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price – the sanctity of their bodies and souls." At his home in Sharafat, where he is confined while awaiting an appeal, Kushour tells a different story. The woman has not been identified and has not gone public with her account.

Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews:

Ezra held [mixed-marriages] to be a terrible sin. For the Judean or Israelitish race was in his eyes a holy one, and suffered desecration by mingling with foreign tribes, even though they had abjured idolatry...That moment was to decide the fate of the Judean people, Ezra, and those who thought as he did, raised a wall of separation between the Judeans and the rest of the world.

Simon Dubnow, History of the World-People:

These mixed marriages, customary alike among the humble and the great, jeopardized the purity of the of the race and the religion. The national culture of the Judahite people was not yet strong enough to absorb alien elements without their leaving a trace. During this period when it was constructing its habitation, it needed national isolation so as not to disappear among the nations, and so that Judaism would not become one of the numerous religious cults in the East, which lacked all universal value and were ultimately washed away in the deluge if history.

From The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand. That's the progression of Zionism. Dies hard. But still, seriously: don't we want to kill it?

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: Israel, nationalism, Palestine, racism, Zionism

Related posts:

1. “Jewish challenges to Zionism on the rise in the US” I looked for an aphoristic or stunning, incisive sentence...
2. Israel left/Israeli right “No! No, fascism will not be accepted!” Click here...
3. International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network open letter The International Jewish anti-Zionist Network–I am nominally a member–posted this...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Article from Jewbonics read more here

What would have happened if Egypt had actually cut off the tunnel trade when 80 to 90 percent of Gazan imports were coming in through the tunnels? People would have started starving to death. Israel currently wants people to suffer—the Palestinians in Gaza “will get a lot thinner, but won’t die”—but it does not want to provoke actual famine. Israel doesn't mind the tunnels. If it minded them, it would bomb them more frequently. It’s not like the world does anything when it does so, or when it re-bombs Rafah airport or anywhere in the Philadelphi corridor, despite the flagrant illegality of such bombing raids. But it must be seen as to mind them so the government can get hysterical about the weapons-smuggling that it doesn't care about either. In turn, Israel and America lean on Egypt to build a wall, while their consultants probably tell them that it will be easily penetrated. Then it gets penetrated. Goods keep on flowing in, along with weapons. Israel does not mind those weapons, because they provide a pretext for keeping Gaza under occupation and severing Gaza from the West Bank. The government can also spend public money on missile-shield systems that it can sell to India and Singapore (which partially funded the development of the Iron Dome system). And everyone stays happy. Gaza maintains its lifeline. The Egyptian dictatorship makes a show of complying with American demands, keeping the military aid flowing in. And because people aren’t starving to death, the pressure to totally lift the blockade is eased just enough so as to head off an explosion, especially, as always, in neighboring Arab dictatorships and Europe, where public opinion matters a bit more than it does in the United States. Meanwhile Israeli public opinion sees the military and elites claiming to act in the interest of their "security." And everything stays the same—the players pedal furiously simply to remain in place, and maintain the appearance of change amidst a static reality.

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: American Zionism, blockade, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Israel-Palestine, Palestine, tunnel trade

Related posts:

1. Egyptians and Internationals Rally Against the Wall of Shame The building housing the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate is not beautiful....
2. What Crap, Egypt Egypt is taking a lesson from its financier. You don’t...
3. We Reject the Egyptian Government’s Offer, Thanks! Gaza Freedom March’s press release After three days of...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Article from Jewbonics read more here

Emily wrote and recorded this song, entitled “I miss you, Palestine”, and put it up on Youtube (under her nom de plume, Thirstypixels), and added this explanation: “The week I got home, I got my energy back, and I was giddy with the joy of being alive. I walked my dog and bellowed out this song in the woods. I’m no musician, but the soul of the moment carried my voice. When I came home I got out my computer and recorded this in a message for my good friend Nick… but what the heck, I want to give it to the world! Also, if someone could remix this or re-sing this with piano, that would be brilliant“.

“Because I changed, people can change”, Emily sings in her song. “It ain’t gonna go on forever … I believe it can get better, if people just open their eyes”…

Article from UN-Truth read more here

“This is a mother describing to us her daughter, 9-year-old Sammah [Eid El-Massry]as she came in to her home at 4pm after the Israeli army reportedly shelled and fired four bombs into and around a residential area in Beit Hanoun, Northern Gaza:  ‘She came in through and it wasn’t clear she was injured. Suddenly a lot of blood came from her nose and she vomited. All of the family saw this – her little brothers were very scared. She had just been playing in the front of the house’ … . She is now in a semi-critical condition in hospital, suffering extensive blood loss and very low haemoglobin. She was hit by shrapnel and ‘flechettes’ from a nail bomb that landed 100m away, causing internal bleeding to the chest, severe head trauma and nails embedded in her body … The doctor told us she was in a ‘semi-critical’ condition with severe chest, head and abdominal pain. Her blood-loss was a major concern, arriving at the hospital with 7.5 haemoglobin levels, 4-6 below the normal levels, the problem exacerbated by the fact that she, like three of her brothers, already suffered from a blood condition known as Thalassemia for which the drug Exjade is in extremely short supply due to the Israeli blockade. She was clearly in pain and confused, trying to remove the nasal tubes. Her mother showed us the bandages on her chest.  ‘She was in a very bad condition when she arrived – it’s difficult for children and very traumatic to insert a chest tube. Very painful. Blood was mainly coming from the chest. We will have to perform surgery and we will further explore her abdominal pain’, the doctor tells us.  This is not the first time the family was attacked, Sammah’s 4-year-old brother Ryad Eid El-Massry was injured during Operation Cast Lead” …

[And now, following the attack on Wednesday, there were two more children from the same family who were also injured and receiving treatment in the hospital] Azzam Mohammed El-Massry (aged 11) has a severely fractured left elbow and Ebrahim Wasseem El-Massry (aged 4) has light injuries to his abdomen …
]
[The fourth wounded child isHaitham Thaer Qasem, a four year old boy and a first and only child. He was sleeping on the hospital bed, occasionally gasping for breath through the strapping around his nose. He had suffered deep nasal trauma, and flechette darts from the nail bomb were still embedded in his tiny body, where they had pierced his back, right elbow and right leg. He was 200m from the impact of the bomb.  In his hospital ward his mother was standing to one side crying quietly …

Two young men were killed: Mohammad Al-Kafarneh, 23, from severe shrapnel injuries in his back and chest and Kasim Al-Shinbary, 19, caused by injuries from nails embedded in his skull and shrapnel wounds to the back.  It was unclear earlier whether they were resistance fighters or if they were civilians”.

All of them – the two dead young men, and the four injured children – are they all “militants”?

This was published by the ISM here.

Article from UN-Truth read more here

I don’t know if I can start dissecting this kind of “thinking,” because there’s no thought involved, just a series of stylized images standing in for thought and analysis, based on pre-rational instincts: “Defend Israel! Palestinians Aren’t People!” The images go in a rough sequence, kind of like this. The first replaces the phrase “humanitarian crisis” with protruding ribcages in Haiti. The second says that if people aren’t at the level of absolute destitution, then their crises are irrelevant and should be invisible—let’s place a screen in front of them. The third is a resolute denial of thinking: who cares what the ICRC, the World Bank, the UN, and the Lancet have to say about the humanitarian situation in Gaza: the incidence of stunting, malnutrition, hundreds dead because they can’t access medical care, a barely-functional economy reliant on the service sector, the tunnel trade, and charity. And the fourth is total racism: Israel imposes this economy and this “crisis” on Gaza, and if it were the reverse, no one would tolerate it for a moment.

Gaza does not have to be as bad as Burundi or Iraq or Haiti to be in intolerable crisis. Yes, there is a mall in Gaza full of stuff. But. Unemployment is at 40 percent using conventional measures that considerably underestimate effective unemployment. At last check, the consumer price index was at 131, whereas in the West Bank it is at 125. The average daily income in Gaza is 71.5 shekelim in the public sector, 43.7 in the private sector. The shekel trades at about 3.87 to the dollar. There are about 180,000 people employed in Gaza. The numbers can’t be interpreted without the correct frame: each worker supports about ~8, perhaps a little more, other people—the numbers probably don’t include those receiving money from the PA in Ramallah. Average household income in the Gaza Strip is 1,567 shekelim, a little less than 400 dollars, or about one dollar a day.

The World Health Organization comments:

There is also evidence of a health and environmental disaster in the Gaza Strip due to the destruction of infrastructure and sewage systems: the pathogen content of drinking-water samples is 16% (the universal water safety norm recommended by international standards is 1%). … It has been estimated that the health status of nearly 40% of those suffering from chronic diseases has deteriorated as a result of the reduction in health-care services.

Hamas isn’t exactly soundly managing the Gazan economy, but that's because there is barely any Gazan economy to manage. Agricultural exports--all exports are effectively banned, the seaport is unusable. Remember that. Write down the facts above and repeat and repeat and repeat them. Gaza is not Haiti and doesn’t have to be Haiti to be under unacceptable economic embargo. The closure policy is unacceptable because it’s gratuitous, it’s self-conscious state-terrorism.  It’s intolerable. Full stop.

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: Dubai, economics, Gaza, Gazan economy, humanitarian crisis, Israel, Palestine, Zionism

Related posts:

1. is there a humanitarian crisis in Gaza? not the point Israeli hasbara and the nincompoops who repeat it in the...
2. Nakba Day in Gaza Commemorating Nakba Day in Occupied Gaza felt somewhat like...
3. hurrah for John Ging I tutor a girl at the headquarters of the United...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Article from Jewbonics read more here

Fox News reported that “The Palestinians called the shooting ‘irresponsible’. Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian Authority spokesman … identified the man as Bilal Abu Libdeh, 35, from the northern West Bank city of Qalqiliya. He said Abu Libdeh was found to be unarmed when his body was recovered and that no one knew why he and the others sought to enter the settlement. ‘Regardless of the reason for them going there, they shouldn’t be killed’, he said”. This is posted here.

One of the points being debated, as “proximity” talks may soon melt into direct talks that may last for years, is whether or not the Israeli Jewish settlers can remain in the West Bank in any future scenario; maybe they can retain their Israeli citizenship and become residents of Palestine, subject to its laws, some suggest.

But former Defense Ministry official Shlomo Gazit said at a discussion organized by IPCRI (Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information) last week that there is no way Palestinian security can protect settlers who remain in the West Bank after the creation of a future Palestinian state — this can only be done by the IDF, he said.

An Israeli journalist who attended the discussion said that he believes there is no way any settlers can remain in the West Bank, because their mere presence will be an invitation to violence … of the sort that killed the merely “suspected” Bilal Abu Libdeh overnight.

Article from UN-Truth read more here

Where is this famous peace process? Does it exist? Is peace even a process to begin with? We asked blogger and author Antony Loewenstein and author and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is reported, what is the role of new media, and how can this start its own viral uprising, independent of mass media banter.

Article from GRITtv read more here

Black joins us via Skype from Kansas City, where he's professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, to break down the problems with the financial reform bill and make the case for Warren as the only way for real consumer protection.

We constantly hear about the size of the military budget, what percentage it is of our spending, what it did to the deficit. But numbers that large can simply become numbing. It's hard to fathom billions. So when Paris studio Moustache created this short film attempting to visualize the amount spent on war, we knew we had to share it with you.

Peace process, proximity talks, one state, two state...though these terms are often tossed around the mass media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they have been rendered virtually meaningless. Instead, we see footage of Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama shaking hands, waxing eloquently on the need for mutual peace as the US simultaneously slips Israeli more tax dollars to further cement their occupation of Palestine. A just peace indeed.

Where is this famous peace process? Does it exist? Is peace even a process to begin with? We asked blogger and author Antony Loewenstein and author and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abuminah about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is reported, what is the role of new media, and how can this start its own viral uprising, independent of mass media banter.

Finally, Laura has some thoughts about Top Secret America: the unlimited budget for contractors and the constant cuts for kids.

Article from GRITtv read more here