And this was on Huffpo-- Absolutely stunning piece in the Independent, by Fares Akram, who, huddled with his pregnant wife and family in Gaza city, and decided not to be on his 48-year-old father's farm, the closest farm to the Israeli border.
My father, Akrem al-Ghoul, was no militant. Born in Gaza and educated in Egypt, he was a lawyer and a judge who worked for the Palestinian Authority. After Hamas took over, he quit and turned to agriculture. Dad's father, Fares, who had been driven out of his home in what is now Israeli Ashkelon in 1948, had bought the land in the 1960s.
Many of the cows killed. Body of teenage Mahmoud thrown 300 meters by the strike. Read this piece and you will understand why my friend James North says the most salient aspect of the Arab temperament revealed by the Nakba and the continuing dispossession of lands and resources is:
Restraint.
Thanks to Leila Abu-Saba, who writes: "This piece was on Huffington Post's front page just now, with a photo of a 48 year old lawyer holding his darling grand-daughter. One of those pictures where you don't know if the man in question is an Israeli Jewish casualty or a Palestinian casualty... what's most interesting is that Huffpost runs this front page with photo. They also are running that Gideon Levy piece with a picture, front and center. I would have thought these are too incendiary for the mainstream US press, and Huff Post prints liberal Israel apologizers all the time. Something is changing"
waiting for HuffPost to 'change' is a bit like believing in santa claus, the tooth fairy, and the easter bunny.
This is not exactly the kind of stuff Arianna's good friend, Mort Zuckerman, prints in the "Daily News."
My word of choice is 'pacific'. We have been fed a steady diet of wild-eyed Arab madmen by our mainstream media. Read The Gun and the Olive Branch and tell me Palestinian response hasn't been almost comatose. Check your local library, and share your copy with friends if you do decide to buy it.
Personally I found that book pretty unuseful.
Current list of authors heading HuffPo's page on Gaza:
Mitchell Bard
Marty Kaplan
Max Blumenthal
Ilana Teitelbaum
(The first is the son of the executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. The last is an Israeli.)