Offsetting the need for reform is a deep Mediterranean resignation (full article…)

“Nothing will be easy,” he added. “But I will always be honest and upfront with the Greeks.” (full article…)

On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee. (more…)

Greek authorities contacted Israel this weekend with an urgent request for teargas grenades to be used against the wave of riots that broke out in the country last week, Athens police reported on Sunday. (more…)

Police sources say they are running out of teargas after using more than 4,600 capsules in the last week and have urgently contacted Israel and Germany for more stocks. (more…)

International Human Rights Day is observed on 10 December, and it’s time we turned the rhetoric of human rights into reality. Together with the Free Gaza Movement, I am commemorating Human Rights Day this year in Gaza, a tiny strip of land wedged between Israel and Egypt, home to 1.5 million human beings, and subject to an increasingly brutal war being waged against its civilian population by the state of Israel.

We mounted this mission to give our solidarity to the people of Palestine and to highlight the strangulating conditions Israel causes in besieged Gaza. The inhumane effects of this siege threaten to stunt an entire generation — both in terms of physical and mental growth due to malnutrition, terrorization by bomb attacks, incursions and the use of sonic booms — but also in terms of the generation of students who have won places at academic institutions around the world but cannot fulfill them, and those undermined on the ground in Gaza by a lack of food, medicine, electricity, materials and the peace and space to make good use of them in.

The Free Gaza Movement is a grassroots movement of teachers, doctors, activists, union workers and other “ordinary” people who understand that we cannot wait for governments and other international organizations to present us with top-down solutions to the tribulations of the world, solutions which never quite seem to materialize. Since August, the Free Gaza Movement has been sailing ships from Cyprus to the Gaza Strip in acts of nonviolent resistance and civil opposition to the Israeli occupation and siege of Gaza.
(more…)

The relationship between the Greek people and their police force is strained at best. In the 1930s, it was the police who oppressed the labour movement under Fascism and collaborated with the Germans and they were seen as the agents of the military dictatorship that ended with a student uprising in 1974. (more…)

It began with the death of a child, a 15-year-old schoolboy with a chubby face and long brown curls and a black punk-rock T-shirt–an
ordinary teenager trying to be cool. Though he was privately educated in a wealthy Athens suburb, Alexis Grigoropoulos didn’t hang out at the mall. On Saturday night he was downtown in ungentrified Exarcheia, a neighborhood where the indie crowd collects in cafes–leftists and anarchists and music lovers, potheads and addicts and professors, dissenters and the young–and the object in recent years of an intensive cleanup operation. The police account of the events that led to Alexis’s death had the patrol car set upon by a crowd of stone-throwing youths and the boy himself wielding a petrol bomb. But eyewitness reports and videos shot on mobile phones tell a quite different story. Alexis and his friends were out to celebrate a name-day. Some unknown people passed and threw small objects at the car; the officers stopped, walked back to Alexis’s group and began to curse and threaten them. According to one of the boys, Alexis tossed an empty plastic bottle. The officer aimed and fired three shots, two in the air and one that pierced his chest.

Since then, the country has gone up in flames. There’s scarcely a town or city that hasn’t seen angry protests, many organized spontaneously by the very young. Four days after the killing of Alexis, Athens is still a war zone, with broken glass and upturned cars and flaming buildings everywhere; the New Democracy government, clinging to a one-seat majority, is utterly at a loss. Scandals, indifference and incompetence robbed it long ago of any moral authority; to declare a state of emergency would exacerbate the violence and bring dark echoes of the military dictatorship that fell in 1974, the last time Greece’s cities witnessed scenes like these.
(more…)

“[The situation there] is regrettable, but it is an issue of internal problems, and not part of some terror ideology,” she added. (more…)

As anti-government demonstrations continue in Greece for the fourth day running, Amnesty International calls for a clear commitment by the authorities to end the unlawful and disproportionate use of force by police. (more…)

I must say that these so-called “anarchists” are for the most part nothing of the sort. Most of them are hooligans without coherent political objectives beyond arbitrary acts of vandalism. So, as much as the Greek police force is a generally corrupt and abhorrent institution, the riots have no potential (or clear aspirations) to change anything as far as I can tell. Without direction, the rioting is simply pointless destruction.

I must excuse myself, yet again, for the recent lack of content on this site – but I am in Athens with Ilektra. As we know, Greece has only recently ben introduced to the internet and they haven’t yet graduated to broadband, so I am stuck with a crappy dial-up connection for now. Believe me, it’s driving me insane… but I have more time to enjoy the sun anyway. This means, however, that you cannot count on me posting very often for the next few weeks.

But while I have the chance, I should update you all to recent events… It seems I will be returning to Gaza in the New Year. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has hired me from mid-January 2009 and I will spend at least six months there. Since I left Gaza last January, it has not left my thoughts… so the prospect of returning excites me very much!

Also, I have been selected to write a chapter for an upcoming book on peace philosophy. My contribution is tentatively entitled, “Israel’s Philosophy of Separation: The Flawed Vision of Unilaterally Enforced Peace”, and will discuss the notion of separation from the occupied territories as a “solution” for peace. Naturally, I am quite skeptical. The book will be out some time in 2009 (when they find a publisher) and I will keep you all updated.

…and from September until I leave for Gaza, Ilektra and I will be living in London. This will give me time to finish my thesis, get a short internship, and to continue studying to retake the GRE.

To Greeks, the island of Crete is thought to be a scenic holiday location – albeit isolated by a particularly wide expanse of the Mediterranean sea. It is an island with a great history and a unique polymorphic landscape. As a girl, I remember hearing stories of the oddity of Crete’s inhabitants and of the amazing and unusual things that occurred there.

One summer, I visited the sleepy town of Ierapetra with my family. As I can recall, the Cretans were a kind and hospitable people with a talent for cooking – even by Greek standards. It’s common knowledge in Greece that Cretans are old-fashioned charming folks, keeping traditions as they go. Being very young (I believe I was only 5 when I visited Crete), I had wondered with some interest why so many of the Cretans dressed entirely in black. It was as if the entire island was perpetually trapped in the throes of some unspeakable tragedy. A childish thought to be sure, but I came to realize that Crete was indeed more tragic than one might have imagined. (more…)