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Geia sas from Greece! Sorry for not alerting you earlier, but I am in Greece with Ilektra until May 6. Consequently, I will not have time to post, though I will still be monitoring comments… The Guillermo Habacuc Vargas post is still going crazy.

Please remember to read our comments policy before taking the time to write a response. I have no qualms about deleting vulgar, aggressive or otherwise inane comments. And while I’m vacationing in Greece, I am in no mood to accept comments that insult me personally. I have been running this blog a long time and moronic insults no longer phaze me…

There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history’s trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia.

The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible. A British colony lying midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty, and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: “American B-52 and Stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan).” It is the word “uninhabited” that turns the key on the horror of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defence in London produced this epic lie: “There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation.” Read more

The dark-haired 22-year-old in black T-shirt, blue jeans and red Crocs is understandably hesitant as he sits at a picnic table in the incongruous setting of a beauty spot somewhere in Israel. We know his name and if we used it he would face a criminal investigation and a probable prison sentence.

The birds are singing as he describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back – for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten “to a pulp” when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.

The young man left the army only at the end of last year, and his decision to speak is part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. Not least because Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there. He says firmly that he now regrets what repeatedly took place during his tour of duty. Read more

The frontrunner for the Democratic U.S. Presidential nomination, Barack Obama, was apparently very impressed with the killing of Palestinian children and a Reuters cameraman yesterday. Obama voiced his support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” and condemned Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Hamas leader, Khaled Mashaal—even as bombs rained down on Gaza’s refugee camps.

Immediately following Wednesday’sskirmish near the Gazan border which resulted in the deaths of three IOF soldiers at the hands of Hamas fighters, Israel retaliated by… bombing the densely populated al-Bureij refugee camp.

I am always struck by the sensitivity of politicians when they choose to praise Israel in the midst of such glaring atrocities. Read more

When did the Lebanese civil war (the major one) start? Did it start in February of 1975 when Sidon-based leader, Ma`ruf Sa`d, was assassinated by a Lebanese Army intelligence sniper? Or was it the widely accepted “Sarajevo” (of the civil war) of 13th of April, 1975? I think that the civil war started in 1973, in April, when 3 Palestinian leaders (one of them a poet, Kamal Nasir) were shot in their sleep by an Israeli terrorist team headed by Ehud Barak (later prime minister of Israel). It brought the Lebanese internal divisions into the fore.

I was 15 years old, 30 years ago when the civil war started on April 13th, 1975. It was a Sunday that I still remember. My parents were out, and I was home in our middle class neighborhood in Beirut. We did not hear shots fired. We were not close to the scene of the crime. On that day, a bus carrying Palestinians who were earlier attending a rally for the PFLP-GC was ambushed by armed gunmen of the Lebanese fascistic Phalanges Party. My enmity to that party started earlier, much earlier. When I read about the civil war in Spain, I always felt that I could recognize the fascist side. When I read about the communist struggle against the Nazis in Germany, I recognized the Nazi side. I saw them in Lebanon. Read more

Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The president of the Israeli Friends of the Tibetan People, the psychologist Nahi Alon, who was involved in the murder of two Palestinians in Gaza in 1967 – as was revealed in Haaretz Magazine last weekend – chose to make his private “atonement” by fighting to free Tibet, of all places. He is not alone among Israelis calling to stop the occupation – but not ours. No small number of other good Israelis have recently joined the wave of global protest that broke out over the Olympics, set to take place in Beijing this summer. It is easy; it engenders no controversy – who would not be in favor of liberating Tibet? But that is not the fight that Israeli human rights supporters should be waging.

To fight for Tibet, Israel needs no courage, because there is no price to pay. On the contrary, this is part of a fashionable global trend, almost as much as the fight against global warming or the poaching of sea lions.

These fights are just, and must be undertaken. But in Israel they are deluxe fights, which are unthinkable. When one comes to the fight with hands that are collectively, and sometimes individually, so unclean, it is impossible to protest a Chinese occupation. Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation. Read more

“Archaeology has become a weapon of dispossession,” Yonathan Mizrachi, an Israeli archaeologist, said in a recent telephone interview with us. He was referring to the way archaeology is being used in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the oldest part of Jerusalem, where, we believe, archaeological digs are being carried out as part of a concerted campaign to expel Palestinians from their ancestral home.

That effort is orchestrated by an Israeli settler organization called Elad, a name formed from Hebrew letters that stand for “to the City of David.” For several years, Elad has used a variety of means to evict East Jerusalem Palestinians from their homes and replace them with Jewish settlers. Today Silwan is dotted with about a dozen such outposts. Moreover, practically all the green areas in the densely populated neighborhood have been transformed into new archaeological sites, which have then been fenced and posted with armed guards. On two of these new archaeological sites, Jewish homes have already been built. Read more

At a time when a majority of Israelis support an open dialog with Hamas, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is on his way to Damascus to meet with exiled Hamas leader, Khaled Mashaal.

Now don’t get me wrong: I am not at all impressed by Carter’s lukewarm criticism of the Israeli occupation (yes, I read his book) and Khaled Mashaal should be slapped for his pontifications about a third Palestinian uprising from the comfort Damascus while the people of Gaza are starving and exhausted. So in my opinion, the meeting will do little good. Nevertheless, if they want to meet, so be it.

But the stonewall face of Israel’s opposition to Palestinian democracy cannot stomach such a meeting and neither can their counterparts in Washington (including all three of the main Presidential candidates):

“US government policy is that Hamas is a terrorist organization and we don’t believe it is in the interest of our policy or in the interest of peace to have such a meeting,” spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

Read more

As a 10-year-old growing up in Johannesburg, I celebrated Israel’s birth, 60 years ago. I unquestionably accepted the dramatic accounts of so-called self-defensive actions against Arab violence, to secure the Jewish state. The type of indoctrination South African cartoonist Zapiro so bitingly exposes in his work, raising the hackles of scribes such as David Saks of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. When I became involved in our liberation struggle, I became aware of the similarities with the Palestinian cause in the dispossession of land and birthright by expansionist settler occupation. I came to see that the racial and colonial character of the two conflicts provided greater comparisons than with any other struggle. When Nelson Mandela stated that we know as South Africans “that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” [1] he was not simply talking to our Muslim community, who can be expected to directly empathize, but to all South Africans precisely because of our experience of racial and colonial subjugation, and because we well understand the value of international solidarity.

When I came to learn of the fate that befell the Palestinians, I was shaken to the core and most particularly when I read eye-witness accounts of a massacre of Palestinian villagers that occurred a month before Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence. This was at Deir Yassin, a quiet village just outside Jerusalem, which had the misfortune to lie by the road from Tel Aviv. On 9 April 1948, 254 men, women and children were butchered there by Zionist forces to secure the road. Because this was one of the few such episodes that received media attention in the West, the Zionist leadership did not deny it, but sought to label it an aberration by extremists. In fact, however, the atrocity was part of a broader plan designed by the Zionist High Command, led by Ben Gurion himself, which was aimed at the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the British mandate territory and the seizure of as much land as possible for the intended Jewish state. Read more

Record!
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the nineth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry?

Record!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks..
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry? Read more

Today marks the anniversary of the Nazi German invasion and subsequent occupation of Denmark in 1940—the so-called Operation Weserübung. Early that morning 68 years ago, German warships entered Copenhagen harbor in violation of a German-Danish non-aggression treaty signed the prior year. The Danish military was in no condition to pose a serious obstacle to German forces; Copenhagen was taken in a matter of hours and by dawn, Denmark had capitulated. Only 39 Danish soldiers were killed in the short battle.

Of course, Denmark was not strategically crucial to Hitler’s plans and was only occupied “on the way” to Norway, where the Nazis secured critical iron-ore reserves. By all accounts, Hitler intended the occupation in Denmark to be a “model protectorate” in Europe and because Danes were “fellow Nordic Aryans”, they could be trusted to handle their own domestic affairs. For this and a number of other reasons, the Nazis were inclined to be lenient with Denmark. Besides, the official reason for the occupation provided by Germany was to safeguard Denmark from a potential British invasion… But the Danes had other plans. Read more

I am not usually inspired to write about something (in my opinion) so silly, but the uninformed furore over alleged cruelty during an art exhibition has truly bothered me.

As the story goes, a Costa Rican artist named Guillermo Habacuc Vargas used a stray dog as part of an art exhibition held last year at the Códice Gallery in Managua, Nicaragua. The artist tethered the dog to the wall, without food or water, while the Sandinista anthem was played backwards and a massive incense bowl filled with crack cocaine burned nearby. The entire spectacle appeared under words made out of dog food: “Eres Lo Que Lees” (You are what you read).

Chaining a dog to a wall without food or water is certainly controversial, but perhaps those outraged by this story should look into how the dog was actually treated. Yet this is where the events gets fuzzy…

If you believe innumerable blogs and YouTube videos, the dog was kept tied up for several days before the poor animal died of exhaustion in the exhibition as apathetic chardonnay-sipping onlookers casually passed by. Inevitably illustrated by some pictures of a rather pathetic-looking, unhealthy dog, one can only imagine the kinds of vitriolic comments directed at this “artistic animal killer” on the dozens of blogs I read through. Read more

“There have been rapid price increases over the last few months because of the closure. Three months ago, for instance, a litre of corn oil cost 19 Shekels (the equivalent of $4.5). Now it costs 29 Shekels ($7). The price of flour has also doubled; three months ago a kilo of flour was 2 Shekels. Now our customers have to pay 4 Shekels.”

The Abu-Alkass mini-market has been a popular feature of central Gaza city for more than thirty years. Anwar Abu-Alkass has worked here since he was a teenager, and now manages the mini-market with his brother. “We used to have a lot of fresh goods on sale, but now the majority of our goods are dry products” he explains, as we wander round the mini-market aisles. “Every business has been affected by the closure – we used to sell lots of fresh milk and different kinds of cheese – but now we are forced to depend on two Israeli companies for our dairy imports. Their products are expensive for us, but we have no choice.” Read more