Peace talks have actually made things worse. “Peace talks are good if they’re real, but not if they’re theater, to cover a landgrab.” Against the US superpower that funds Israel, another superpower can make a difference: You. Boycott. “Now it’s the Palestinians’ turn for freedom and justice.” The narration (superb) is by Marilyn Neimark.
Jewish Voice for Peace video seeks to explain the conflict in 6 minutes. Pass it along. “What would happen if you built a refuge for a persecuted people in a place where another people already lived?” Persecuted Jewish refugees from Europe found a home; another group of refugees was created. Israeli expansion has created “Jewish only cities” in an occupation that is “permanent and entirely unjust.” And Israel has bombed a captive population in Gaza. “All to gain maximum land.”
What an absolutely marvelous video. Thanks, JVP!
What if the persecuted adopted war as their default diplomatic strategy and it was successful for 2 generations ?
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/the-washington-post-s-israel-problem-and-ours.premium-1.481395
From a distance, you might well think nothing’s changed. From a distance of 6,000 miles or so, it might elude notice that every single war destroys Israel. Every one, every time. Each war here is a watershed. It leaves an entirely different Israel and different Israelis in its wake.
You can’t see it, but this war changed everyone here. Out of view, deep inside, something shifted. For some, it may have been the horrifying sense that this is what we can expect – from the other side and from ourselves as well – every couple of years. Forever. Like hurricanes in Haiti. Bombs, rockets, a new cohort of children with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And every single time, it comes closer to your own home. Wherever you are.
Great video. Thanks.
Very well done, with one important exception. When it says, “…several Arab states invaded the new state of Israel,” this fails to acknowledge that one of the reasons the Arab states intervened was because the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, the erasure of “over 400 villages and towns,” had begun in earnest in December of 1947 and was well under way before any Arab country “invaded.”
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians had already been driven off their lands by a campaign of violence and terror on the part of the Zionist militias (not yet soldiers of what was at that point the undeclared state of Israel). The British troops who were obligated to “maintain order” during the partition process stood by and watched as helpless men, women and children were being murdered and/or driven out of their homeland.
Note that the massacre at Deir Yassin, just one of many such events, took place on April 9, 1948. The end of the British mandate and the unilateral declaration of statehood by the Zionists occurred a month later.
it’s the people’s turn
not only in gaza
everywhere
because now that the last chain’s broken
everyone’s set free