Earlier today I mentioned Palestinians at the Olympics, and the statement by Andrea Whitmore, a Methodist activist in Kansas City, that a children's pool in the Occupied Territories that our government paid for was destroyed by the Israelis. I asked Whitmore for more info. She wrote back, citing her husband Doug's observations as a volunteer in Palestine with the World Council of Churches in 2007-08:
"Attached is the demolished children's pool picture with one of Doug's teammates inspecting the ruins. It was built in Area C [a portion of the West Bank over which Israel has full control], and apparently the people aren't allowed to build in Area C. Doug says that's true practically everywhere except maybe in the center of villages. The idea may be that the Palestinians must not be able to expand. They are seldom given permits to so much as repair their houses.The pool and playground were on land far away from anything Israeli, and on Palestinian land. Nothing at all to do with security.
"Doug's job while with Ecumenical Accompaniers was to monitor agricultural gates (Israeli soldiers check farmers as they go from their villages to their land), checkpoints (there are thousands within Palestine, as you know) and the infamous Qalqilya North Terminal, where there's a maze of turnstiles and fences and electronics with a grim stone pillbox looming overhead, from which the soldiers can observe the poor souls who, having permits to work in Israel, desperately line up in the predawn dark to be checked through in time to meet their rides to get to work. Doug has a short film, maybe 20 seconds, of a meltdown on the last day he was at that terminal. It shows desperate men pushing to get through so they can be on time for work and not lose their jobs–which would mean no support for their families. I don't know how to send that or I would.
"We had an email last week from a young man in a Palestinian village telling about a farmer who lost his permit. In his struggling English, our friend tells of the farmer waiting and waiting for a permit—to farm his own land, mind you–and not being given one. "He wait for his permit since along time and the answer in the last they refuse him and all his family and as you know the main source of income for the most famels the agriculture and we are in the village dont have an thing more to do only farming" I am supposing that the old permit ran out. The farmers have to reapply frequently, and sometimes permits are issued either to people too old to farm or to children. You get the picture. So this farmer found out on the last possible day, when apparently his old one ran out. The man was broken, stood near the agricultural gate where the soldiers, bored, check farmers through to their own land–and he asked to just see his land, just a half hour, but the soldiers wouldn't let him and he stayed at the gate saying, 'Just kill me here, I want my land.'"
How many seas must the white dove sail before it can sleep in the sand?
Yes and how many stories from Palestine must Americans hear before they will change Middle East policy?
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The answer, my friend (McCain's usage?), is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind….
Paging Richard Witty, who tends to make himself scarce on shocking threads like this.
It's one of history's cruellest ironies isn't it, how the now classic image of the innocent civilised Jew besieged by the mindless violence of the surrounding barbarians has been replaced in most of the world's mind with a mirror image of innocent, civilised Palestinians besieged by the murderous racism of the barbaric Jews who surround and indeed imprison them.
Jew as barbarian; Arab as brave remnant of civilisation. Quite a turnup for the books. And one helluva mountain for our Witty's to climb; people like SOG having enough sense not to even bother.
'"Doug's job while with Ecumenical Accompaniers was to monitor agricultural gates (Israeli soldiers check farmers as they go from their villages to their land), checkpoints (there are thousands within Palestine, as you know) and the infamous Qalqilya North Terminal, where there's a maze of turnstiles and fences and electronics with a grim stone pillbox looming overhead, from which the soldiers can observe the poor souls who, having permits to work in Israel, desperately line up in the predawn dark to be checked through in time to meet their rides to get to work.'
Reminds me of a cartoon by Michael Leunig which 'showed two panels, in the first a Jewish man walks through the gate of Auschwitz which bears the sign "Work Brings Freedom" under the heading "Auschwitz 1942". The second panel shows an Israeli soldier walking through a gate in a barbed wire fence into a war zone, the gate this time bearing the sign "War Brings Peace". The second panel is entitled "Israel 2002".'
It was rejected by the Melbourne Age's (Jewish) editor, Michael Gawenda, but was widely seen in the ensuing brouhaha.
Bombing children's pools. Shooting unarmed children dead. Way to go, chosen ones.
'how many stories from Palestine must Americans hear before they will change Middle East policy?'
They can listen til they're blue in the face and five-eighths of fuck all would happen. They have to SEE what's happening before scales fall from all those sleepy eyes. It's a visual culture; what you see is what you get, and what you don't see is what you don't get.
We need samizdat TV. Max Headroom. Peter 'Network' Finch.
Eli Valley's Israel Man and Diaspora Boy provides some of the ideological context.
Here are some of my comments on the comic strip.
Here are the comments.
Dispossession, Expansion and Paranoia
http://www.counterpunch.org/shahid08082008.html
The Zionist Stratagem
By M. SHAHID ALAM
“Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow, and so do I.”
Theodore Herzl [1]
As a self-defined movement for the national ‘liberation’ of European Jews, Zionism had an anomalous relationship with its perennial Other, the Gentile nations, from whom it wanted the Jews to secede and become a distinct nation under a Jewish state.
The Zionists did not define Europe’s Gentile nations as the adversary they would have to oppose, and against whom they would struggle, to secure the rights of Jews to emerge as a distinct nation.
On the contrary, the Zionists would harness the strength of their perennial Other – their adversary – to gain their nationalist objective. Unlike nationalists who secede from a state or empire by drawing new borders, the Zionists did not demand any European territory; they planned to establish their Jewish state outside the borders of Europe.
I am going to have to break my addiction to reading Phil's excellent blog. It's making me violent and I have visions of one of those Staples 'easy buttons' I could push to blow Israel into extinction. The waterboarding I will reserve for our own congressional Israelis.
Destroying a children's swimming pool?..Jesus f'ing christ! What kind of animals do such a petty putrid thing? A swimming pool is a security threat?
Death to the child's pool.
We Americans believe that what Israel does in the occupied territories is our business, too. Here is why:
1.It is our business because we are friends of Israel to the extent it is a true democratic Jewish state in an area where there isn't much of that. It has more de facto free speech than the USA, though it has no Constitution, let alone First Amendment. Sometimes, the best thing one can do for friends is to speak candidly, and tell them when they are engaging in self-destructive behavior…like building new settlements in territory it occupies.
2. It is our business because we are Americans, and Israeli policies directly affect our own country’s interests. In the post 9/11 world; what happens in Ramallah or Gaza City reverberates beyond the region’s borders.
The continuing occupation makes it easier for terrorists to mobilize and recruit people who would just as soon blow up Tallahassee as Tel Aviv, who want to attack American soldiers in Iraq as well as Israelis in Sderot and Ashkelon. It fans the fires of hatred against America. So any Israel policy or behavior that perpetuates the occupation makes our loved ones, friends and neighbors less safe.
3. It is our business because, we share the age-old Jewish commitment to tikkun olam, to repairing the world wherever and whenever it is broken. If we see injustice, oppression and inequality anywhere in this global village, it is our duty to fight against it, whether in Darfur or the inner cities of the United States, or in Gaza.
So it is inconceivable that our ally by memorandums, Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people, will be the one place where we force ourselves to turn a blind eye to injustice, oppression and inequality. If we encounter it there, we are obligated, as Americans, to speak out.
4. It is our business because we defend Israel with our repeated power on the UN Security Counsel and in the court of public opinion against those who falsely blame it for every imaginable sin, who ignore the responsibilities of Palestinians and other Arabs for ongoing regional violence and tension. But we should not, and one day no longer will, defend the indefensible.
5. It is our business because Israelis who share our values would like to start seeing a “light unto the nations.”
6. And just look at all the money we send over there, no strings attached. It's not like we couldn't use that money at home.
A swimming pool is a security threat?
Clearly. Imagine the conspiring that could take place there, on a hot summer day.
Out of the question – remove it.
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