Having watched TV half the day, I can say with assurance that the symbolic meaning of Obama's elevation is too large to be contained by any policy pronouncement or interpretation. Which is making me optimistic re Israel/Palestine. President Obama's mere presence is sending shockwaves through the culture. The repeated insistence today by white commentators that America is finally dealing with its "original sin"–slavery, racism–and the repeated invocations of the Emancipation Proclamation are just too profound not to have a big effect on our politics and the politics of the Middle East.
I noticed that when Tom Brokaw was talking about segregation in the south today he called it "apartheid."
The beauty of his comment was the understanding that "apartheid" is not limited to the legal system of South Africa. It is applicable to any situation in which one group has privileged legal rights over another. There is apartheid on the West Bank. How Americans can destroy apartheid here over 40 years of struggle and ignore it when it exists at our behest in the Middle East–this is simply unsupportable. The Israel lobby cannot last.
On a not-very-related noted, today on Brian Lehrer's show on WNYC in New York he interviewed sociologist Amitai Etzioni whom he described as the founder of the "communitarian movement" in the United States. Etzioni then said that Obama represented the triumph of the idea of community over particularism. And proceeded to gush over the fact that Obama's election
was like the fall of apartheid in South Africa and a couple other great democratic advances in the west I now forget. Lehrer said that Etzioni "happened to be" in Israel for the interview. Well, actually, Etzioni is an Israeli-American. And I'm sure that Etzioni is bien-pensant re that promised Palestinian state, some where over the rainbow. As Lehrer is. But I found it unsettling to have an Israeli-American guy with a foreign accent chattering from Israel about community and minority just after Israel killed 1300 Arabs and destroyed just about every important structure in Gaza. Lehrer would never give this place to a Chinese guy without questioning him about China's human-rights record. It reflects once again the entrenchment of Israel-forgiving ideas in the liberal mainstream. (Phil Weiss)
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
January 19, 2009
British Academics Slam Israel
On the war:
"…Israel must lose. It is not enough to call for another ceasefire, or more humanitarian assistance. It is not enough to urge the renewal of dialogue and to acknowledge the concerns and suffering of both sides. If we believe in the principle of democratic self-determination, if we affirm the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation, then we are obliged to take sides… against Israel, and with the people of Gaza and the West Bank.
We must do what we can to stop Israel from winning its war. Israel must accept that its security depends on justice and peaceful coexistence with its neighbours, and not upon the criminal use of force.
We believe Israel should immediately and unconditionally end its assault on Gaza, end the occupation of the West Bank, and abandon all claims to possess or control territory beyond its 1967 borders. We call on the British government and the British people to take all feasible steps to oblige Israel to comply with these demands, starting with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions."
Full letter and signatories…
On the humanitarian consequences:
"…casualty data are indicative of a military campaign being waged in an indiscriminate, disproportionate, and therefore under International Humanitarian Law, illegal fashion. Failure of the international community to ensure legal culpability would provide military forces around the world with a clear message that the Geneva Conventions can be discarded with impunity, as in Gaza today. If this happens, children and women will continue to pay heavily in future conflicts."
University College London, CIHD
Well, when Joseph Lowery said "and when white will embrace what is right," I felt ashamed for americans. This is no way to address the most capable part of the american people and I hardly understand why any white person wouldn't feel segregated by such words. I live in the third world and I know the difference between what we are able to do here and what white americans built there. I'm really ashamed by your lack of self-respect. Really.
White guilt is very strong in the USA and in europe. It doesn't exist in the majority of the people of Israel or Arabia or Africa. That should frighten everyone.
It's just patronising crap for the masses.
Yeah, nothing like wishing for the day when white will embrace what is right. That was Obama's speech supplement–he was broadly beaming at the old preacher as he chuckled it out.
All other colors are just victim, black kicked in back, brown can't stick around, yellow ain't mellow, and the red man, can't get ahead.
Meanwhile,
link to ipsnews.net
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Generations of families are vanished, and entire villages now destroyed. Many of the dead are still buried beneath the rubble, their neighbours and relatives left with no way to retrieve them.
In one of the most harrowing incidents, 35 members of the Samouni family were killed in Zeitoun by an F-16. The surviving members dug the bodies out on Sunday, the first day of the ceasefire.
At least 5,000 houses have been destroyed and 20,000 buildings damaged throughout the strip, according to local officials. The Gaza Strip is just 40 kilometres long and 10 kilometres wide.
Twenty mosques and sixteen ministry offices were destroyed, with at least 200 million dollars worth of damage to local infrastructure. The face of the Al-Quds Hospital is scorched from tank fire, and Gaza City is still without power.
On Tuesday, in the northern Gaza City neighbourhood of Al-Attatra, almost entirely demolished and laced with tank treads, the body of a 94-year-old woman was pulled from the wreckage by her son. The Israeli army shot and killed her, he says, before they brought the house down, again with an F-16.
"What did she have to do with rockets being fired into Israel?" he asked. The family had been looking for her for days.
Such stories are commonplace in Gaza since Israel unleashed its deadly war on the territory Dec. 27.
More than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed in the past three weeks, a third of them children, according to both Gaza health officials and the United Nations. Some 5,500 people have been injured.
According to the civil defence force in Gaza, which has been tasked with helping pull bodies from the debris, there are still up to 200 persons missing in the northern areas of Gaza. They are presumed dead.
"This is the worst violence we have seen since the nakba," says 75-year-old Ibrahim Mohamed Hindi of Zeitoun, using the Arabic word for 'catastrophe' to refer to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the creation of Israel in 1948.
What is also alarming is the apparent vicious nature of the destruction, locals are saying.
Khamis Mohamed Al-Atar and several other members of his family were forcibly removed from their home in Al-Attatra and taken to a prison in the Negev for 15 days while IDF soldiers occupied the house, which sits on a hill overlooking Gaza City, the strip's major population centre.
"One soldier brought me outside and another came out and asked the first one where the rest of my family was," Mohamed Al-Atar said. "Then he suggested to the soldier that they bring us all outside, line us up against the wall and shoot us. He said they didn't care which houses had people in them. I thought they were going to kill us all."
When Mohamed Al-Atar returned, he found the body of his son left rotting among the family's now decimated orange groves. He had been shot.
The inside of their house was smeared with graffiti in Hebrew. The Star of David, an icon of both the Jewish faith and the Israeli state, was spray-painted on the hallways. The toilets had been blasted with grenades, and the floor was blanketed with Israeli food wrappers and bullet shells.
In a farming area near Beit Hanoun cows lie dead across an entire field, some ripped open by shrapnel and others simply crushed by tanks. The corpses of donkeys, horses, goats and chickens line the streets.
"This is my family's livelihood," said Youssef, 18, of his farm's slaughtered animals. "And now it's gone. Who would take the time to kill cows in this war?"
In the same area, residents found a type of weapon that sends a throng of nails as far as the size of a football field in each direction, according to an Amnesty International representative investigating its use in Gaza.
A resident, father of an ambulance driver killed by a drone missile Jan. 5, pointed to nails lodged in the side of his house. He said IDF forces used the weapon on them during his son's funeral procession.
"I don't have any feelings any more," said Mohamed Hindi. "The Israelis have managed to destroy everything. Even our emotions."
See also
The Israeli government is stepping up efforts to suppress dissent and crush resistance in the streets. Police have been videotaping the demonstrations and subsequently arresting protesters in large numbers.
link to ipsnews.net
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090121/pl_afp/uspoliticsobamaabbas_20090121174249
Obama's first call is to Abbas. A good omen perhaps.