To Exist Is to Resist

In my mind
I’ve freed Palestine
Envisioned a dream
That just needs to be seen
Olive trees and fields of figs
Orange groves
That lead to our roads
No blocks filled with cops
No ten-year-olds shot
Freedom
Is what I got

I understand my grandmother’s plan
To live on her bought and paid-for land
And though it isn’t in her hands
It remains in her heart
Every time another is killed
We go back to the start

1948: the date you make us remember
The star and scars of David
And we’re the ones who’ve hated?
We’ve been raped and berated
By bullets and forced “immigration”
Squatting and settling
Left wrestling with the best Zionism has to offer
While the US fills its coffers
We’re seen as monsters

Our people blow up in pain
Black-eyed and half-insane
Wouldn’t you be?
If an Israeli bullet penetrated your child’s brain?

I envision Palestine in my mind
With the “chosen” frozen in time
To realize their morality’s blind
To take back generations of crime
And put an end to Apartheid
How many kids sit and wish
They could be labeled other than a terrorist
To exist is to resist!
Reads the graffiti in their cities

Give them chalk instead of rocks
They’ll use the blackboards
If you let them go to school

Give them chalk instead of rocks
Instead you bulldoze the block
Destroy their homes
Palestine is what you call the “no building zone”

But you can’t bulldoze our minds
Every time we’ll rise through ashes
Like Cassius Clay
We’ll bob and weave for infinity
There is no divinity
In bombing our cities
Setting up committees to treat us differently
We’re from Falasteen
The land where dreams are made

So just remember one thing
One day the bells of freedom will ring
And you’ll see me smiling
Loving life in Palestine

- Remi Kanazi

This news report was broadcast, of all places, in the U.S. corporate media. A rarity indeed.

It’s the truth uncensored about what is happening in Gaza.

Genocide is exactly the right word to describe what is taking place in Gaza.

The Israeli propaganda machine and their media allies in the West are doing their best to demonize Hamas, as they continue to promote the idea that it was Hamas that provoked Israel into attacking Gaza, therefore it is Hamas who are primarily responsible for the war crimes that the Israeli military is committing.

However, it was Israel that broke the truce with Hamas, back on November 5th, with an attack that killed six Palestinians. Until that point, the Palestinians had abided by the 5-month-old truce, only firing rockets after Israel attacked.

Now, eleven days into its savage invasion of Gaza, Israel is still claiming that they are zeroing in on “Hamas targets” but those targets continue to be hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure.

There are numerous human rights groups and news organizations that
are exposing the lies that the Israeli government is telling about the supposed targets of its attacks.

Because of Israel’s ground offensive the majority of the population in Gaza are without electricity, a large number are without water, food shortages are rampant and sewage flows in the streets.

Meanwhile, the toll of Palestinians killed and wounded continues to rise at a fast pace as Israel intensifies its air and ground assault on the largely defenseless and starved Gaza Strip.

And Israel is, as usual, preventing medical and humanitarian responses. All of this deepening an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

So, what is president-elect Obama’s view on what is happening in Gaza? Any public statements?

The silence is deafening.

The current U.S. administration is, of course, blocking any and all proposals calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.

People in the U.S., whose government is the chief backer of Israel, and the masses all over the world must mobilize opposition to Zionist brutality and demonstrate complete solidarity with the oppressed people of Gaza as they continue to fight for their survival.

http://www.canpalnet.ca

WE CANNOT CELEBRATE

Around the world, plans are being made to mount major celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. But this year also marks 60 years since 750,000 Palestinians were brutally expelled from their homeland in what they refer to as the Nakba or “catastrophe”.

Given this history, and the deepening conflict in the region today, we believe there is no grounds for celebration.

We cannot celebrate
while Israel starves and bombs the people of Gaza.

We cannot celebrate
while Israel extends its apartheid wall.

We cannot celebrate
while Israel builds Jewish only settlements and
roads on stolen Palestinian lands.

We cannot celebrate
while Israel continues to violate United Nations
Resolution 194, refusing to let Palestinians return
to their homes.

We cannot celebrate
while Israel continues to promote wars and expand
its nuclear arsenal.

We cannot celebrate
while the policies of Israel’s leaders fuel a conflict
in which innocent lives on both sides are lost.

We can and will continue our efforts to end
these injustices, upholding international law,
human rights and United Nations resolutions.

This is the only road map to peace.

This case is unbelievable. Dr. Al-Arian was a tenured professor at the University of South Florida and was accused by the Bush regime of having “terrorist ties”. Even though in 2005 he was found not guilty in a court of law, he is still locked up.

Miscarriage of justice isn’t even a suitable term to describe this man’s ordeal of harassment, repression, civil rights violation and racist detention, inflicted on him by the Bush Gestapo.

Dr. Al-Arian’s Third Strike

By Chris Hedges

The Palestinian activist Dr. Sami Amin Al-Arian, imprisoned for five years despite a jury’s failure to return a single guilty verdict against him, has gone on a hunger strike in Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Va. Al-Arian, who has abstained from food and water since March 3, began his hunger strike after being informed he would be called before a third grand jury. He has lost 15 pounds and has been moved to the jail’s medical unit.

“A great nation is ultimately defined and judged by its system of justice,” Al-Arian said in a statement released through his family. “When the system is manipulated by the powerful and tolerates abuses against the minorities or the weak members of society, the government not only loses its moral authority and betrays future generations, but will also be condemned by history.”

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Diary

Yonatan Mendel: How to Become an Israeli Journalist

“A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent at Ma’ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn’t get the job.

My next interview was with Walla, Israel’s most popular website. This time I did get the job and I became Walla’s Middle East correspondent. I soon understood what Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, meant when she said: ‘Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders.’”

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Israel mounts bloody offensive against Gaza
By Jean Shaoul

In the last few days, Israel has mounted a massive offensive against the political leadership of Hamas and its military wing as well as the civilian population of Gaza. The attacks, claiming the lives of over 100 Palestinians, including many civilians, presage a full scale aerial bombardment and a possible ground invasion. Israeli officials are already describing the conflict with Gaza as a “war”.

Early Sunday morning, Israel’s air force demolished the office of Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, in Gaza City, wounding five people, and hit seven weapons depots in northern Gaza, killing five militants. While the office was empty at the time of the air strike, there was no mistaking its message to the Hamas leadership—the same given to Yasser Arafat in April 2002 when his Ramallah compound was demolished—that nothing but total submission to Israel’s diktats will suffice. It was one of a dozen targets of a dawn raid by the Israel air force.

The previous day, in the deadliest attack since Israel supposedly “disengaged” from Gaza in August 2005, Israeli ground forces entered northern Gaza, targeting militants in and around Jabaliya refugee camp. They killed 61 Palestinians, at least two dozen of whom were civilians, including a baby, and wounded about 200, 14 of them critically.

“We are in the middle of a total war. We hear the rockets and the explosions everywhere… we cannot leave our homes,” a Jabaliya resident, Abu Alaa, told the BBC. “They’re shooting at everything that moves.”

Gaza’s streets are deserted. Universities and schools have closed.

The latest attacks bring to at least 100 the number of Palestinians killed since Wednesday last week. This compares with 80 Palestinians killed and 82 injured in January, with deaths running at the rate of at least 20 a week in the last few months. In 2007, 379 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces.

The number of Israel casualties testifies to the grossly unequal balance of forces. Two Israeli soldiers were killed and seven were injured in the operations over the weekend. While the injured soldiers were airlifted for treatment to a hospital in Beer Sheva, where six of them are reported to be in a good condition and the seventh in a moderate condition, wounded Palestinians face a desperate situation where the hospitals have little or no power or medication as a consequence of Israel’s economic blockade of the territory. Only 100 Palestinians are to be allowed to enter Egypt for medical treatment.

Added to this, there is now the threat of water borne disease. Gaza’s water authority has urged people to boil their drinking water as Israel has withheld essential supplies such as chlorine. Water contamination, now a very real threat, could lead to a health disaster for Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Israel would press on with military action against Gaza rocket squads, saying the current operation would not be halted even for a second.

“If anyone in Gaza has illusions that extending the range of rocket fire will bring our operations to an end they are sorely mistaken,” Olmert told ministers in a cabinet meeting. “Let me be clear, Israel has no intention of stopping the fight against terror for even a second, and we will act according to the blueprint set by the government at a time and intensity of our choosing, in order to strike the terror organizations and those who provide them with cover and the ability to operate.”

The immediate pretext for Israel’s declared intention of wiping out Hamas’s political leadership by targeted assassinations and of destroying its military capabilities is the ongoing firing of Qassem rockets from Gaza against Israel’s southern towns. Most of the rockets are inaccurate, with less than half reaching Israel. But they have caused 13 Israeli deaths, numerous injuries, and considerable damage and disruption since 2001. Sederot, which borders the Gaza Strip, has faced daily rocket attacks.

In January, 267 rockets and 256 mortars were fired at Israel, injuring nine Israelis. In February, three children were wounded, one of whom lost his leg. Last Wednesday, a 47-year-old Israeli was killed by a Hamas fired rocket, the first fatality in Sederot in nine months. On Saturday, six Israelis were injured.

On Thursday, in a new development, a rocket hit a block of flats in Ashkelon, a city of 120,000 inhabitants, ten miles north of the Gaza Strip, breaking through the roof and slicing through three floors below. While no one was injured in that incident, another rocket landed near a school, wounding a 17-year-old school girl.

The greater range and accuracy of these latest rocket attacks has raised the possibility that Hamas has obtained more lethal weapons from Iran, possibly during the Gaza breakout in January.

The former army general, Matan Vilnai, utilised this unproven threat to warn that Israel was close to launching a full scale military operation against Gaza and that the Palestinians “would bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves”. His remarks were particularly significant as he used the Hebrew word shoah which is usually reserved for the Nazi genocide of six million European Jews.

On Thursday, February 28, Defence Minister and Labour Party member Ehud Barak, speaking in Ashkelon, said that a response was “required”. “Hamas bears responsibility for this deterioration and it will also bear the results,” he continued. Yesterday, Barak made it clear that Israeli Defence Force (IDF) was intending to escalate operations against Gaza. He said that the IDF operation against Gaza rocket fire would broaden, and reiterated earlier comments that a major ground offensive was a real and tangible option. “We are not happy about it [referring to the Palestinian civilian casualties], we won’t shy from it,” Barak told Israel Radio. “There are many considerations about the timing,” he said, without elaborating.

In a separate interview on Army Radio, Barak said, “This is not the broad ground operation, but whoever says there will not be a big ground operation speaks on his own behalf.”

Any broad incursion into Gaza would seek to crush militant rocket squads and also “weaken the Hamas rule, in the right circumstances even bring it down,” he said.

Israel’s Kadima coalition cabinet, including Labour Party members, support such an escalation, with many calling for a full scale invasion. Eli Yishai (Shas party), Haim Ramon (a former Labour party member who joined Ariel Sharon’s Kadima party in 2005), and Ami Ayalon (Labour) have gone so far as to propose that the IDF fire on residential areas from which the Qassem rockets are launched after warning residents to evacuate their homes.

Such a policy in fact flows inexorably from former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s policy of “escalate, escalate, escalate” in pursuit of the Zionist aim of a Greater Israel at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population (and of the Israeli working class, who have borne the costs)—an aim that can only be achieved by military means. It was for this purpose that he formed the Kadima party from both the Likud and the Labour parties, with the backing of Washington.

While the government is determined to press ahead with its attacks on Gaza and Hamas, yet another opinion poll indicated that 64 percent of Israelis want an end to the conflict and favour direct negotiations with Hamas to secure a ceasefire and the release of Gilad Shalit, the young soldier captured by Hamas in June 2006.

Hamas has indicated that it is willing to negotiate a ceasefire in return for the release of prisoners held in Israel and a lifting of the blockade on Gaza.

The broader context of Israel’s military offensive against Gaza is Washington’s increasingly threatening stance against Iran, which backs Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Syria. The US decision to deploy the USS Cole and other warships off the coast of Lebanon has also been linked by Nabih Berri, the Lebanese parliament speaker and opponent of the pro-Washington government of Fouad Seniora, to Israel’s raids in the Gaza Strip.

“The target [of US warships] is Gaza. It is aimed to allow what must happen in Gaza to happen without anyone moving to support [the Palestinians],” he said. “This is a real threat, not merely a muscle-flexing.”

Berri also said that the US military move was designed to focus attention on Lebanon “in order to cover up the massacres being committed in Gaza” He added, “This [US] fleet comes to back Israel so that it can complete its plan.”

Israel’s actions drew perfunctory condemnation from the European Union, while the Arab regimes were also muted in their criticism. The United Nations Security Council voiced its concern at the events. The US, which as a permanent member can veto any resolution, would not accept any criticism of Israel’s actions.

The White House made clear its support for the Israeli onslaught. While issuing a formal call for an “end to violence,” national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe, speaking from Bush’s Texas ranch, stressed, “There is a clear distinction between terrorist rocket attacks that target civilians and action in self-defence.”

Both Democratic presidential contenders chimed in with support for the Israeli attacks. “Israel has a right to defend itself,” declared Senator Barak Obama, while Senator Hillary Clinton criticized the White House for failing to take “a more active role in bringing international pressure on Hamas.”

Riyad Mansour, the Permanent Observer of Palestine to the UN, accused the international community of an “unjustifiable and unacceptable” silence on events in Gaza.

Gazan schoolteacher Tawfek Shaban, a 44-year-old father of five, summed up the reaction of the people of Gaza when he told the Associated Press, “Shame on the Arabs, shame on the Muslims, shame on humanity … When they will act to stop Israel?”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who lost control of Gaza to Hamas last June, condemned Israel’s operations on Saturday, calling Israel’s pounding of Gaza a “holocaust” and “genocide” and suspended peace talks. These recent attacks on Gaza threaten to unleash a backlash against him in the West Bank. In Ramallah, thousands of schoolchildren demonstrated against Israel. Some accused Abbas of being an Israeli agent, and protesters threw stones at cars and burned tires, forcing shopkeepers to close their stores.

Violent protests erupted near Jerusalem, as Palestinians in Atarot, Har Adar and Qalandia began throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at IDF troops. Spontaneous demonstrations took place throughout the West Bank at checkpoints, watchtowers and patrol routes and there were angry clashes with the IDF. In Hebron, hundreds of Palestinian youths threw stones and bottles at an Israeli checkpoint in the city centre. Israeli troops fired on the crowd, killing a teenager and wounding two people.

Later, about 2,000 angry Hamas supporters marched through the city, waving copies of the Quran and green Hamas flags and chanting, “Revenge. Revenge. Retaliate in Tel Aviv”. Demonstrations also took place in Palestinian refugee camps in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

In Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Africa there have been promises of hope, and even of “official” freedom, but in their divided societies, real freedom remains elusive. In Palestine, the world’s longest occupation continues with no resolution in sight. And the little-known island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, has become a microcosm of the ruthlessness of great powers. The island–sold by the British to the U.S. military in the 1960s, the indigenous population forced out–remains the United State’s third largest military base in the world.

Yet across these places, people find ways to resist. In Freedom Next Time, John Pilger gives voice to the millions affected by imperial adventures across the globe, illuminating in gripping detail, who are the true enemies of freedom, and saluting those who refuse to be victims.

Official Website

A powerful commentary by a veteran journalist, well established in Washington. How many US papers will actually publish the article? It’ll probably be ignored just like all other writings by anti-Zionist Israelis.

Commentary: Embarrassing history
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large

WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 (UPI) — The Palestinians call Israel’s 1948 war of independence their nakba, or catastrophic ethnic cleansing, or forced exile. The Israelis, for their part, have steadfastly rejected any suggestion of ethnic cleansing as calumny in all its anti-Semitic horror.

Historic revisionism is now under way. Without fanfare, just below the media radar screen, the Israeli Education Ministry has approved a textbook for Arab third-graders in Israel that concedes the war that gave birth to Israel was a “nakba” for the Palestinians. The textbook refers to the “expulsion” of some of the Palestinians and the “confiscation of many Arab-owned lands.”

Textbooks for Jewish Israelis in the same grade make no such verbal concession. But Israel’s “new wave” historians have been combing through fresh material now available from the British mandate period and Israeli archives that document the history of Israel before and after it became a state. Long-lasting myths are being debunked.

Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian and Haifa University lecturer, whose ninth book is titled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” documents how Israel was born with lands forcibly seized from its Palestinian inhabitants who had lived there for hundreds of years.

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