Total number of comments: 16 (since 2010-01-19 06:50:01)
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Laura Durkay is a writer and activist living in New York City, involved in the queer rights and Palestine solidarity movements as a member of the International Socialist Organization. She blogs about film, struggle, history and their intersections at http://lauraontheleftcoast.blogspot.com/
Website: http://lauraontheleftcoast.blogspot.com
Update! After a spirited protest at the Jet2 check-in desk by those denied boarding and a number of their supporters, the "no refunds" airline decided to reconsider their policy and gave us letters saying they would refund our tickets.
Out of the group traveling from the UK, I'd say 15-20 were denied boarding (including one person snatched minutes before getting on the plane.) 11 people from Manchester and 4 or 5 people from Luton slipped under the radar and have made it to Tel Aviv where they are presumably in the process of being detained.
I haven't read all 203 comments on this post, so forgive me if some of these things have already been mentioned.
Joseph Dana has been reporting for months now on the repression of nonviolent protest in Nabi Saleh, Islam Tamimi's hometown, over at link to
While the Independent article is very good, the headline is a bit misleading. Islam Tamimi wasn't arrested and tortured for throwing rocks (although that may have been the official justification). He was arrested solely because his adult cousin, Bassem Tamimi, is the head of the popular committee in the village. How do the Israelis know who's who in the village? Because there was a systematic mapping operation conducted months ago to photograph and catalog all the male children (see link to 972mag.com
after which several of them were targeted for arrest, including Islam and his 11-year-old brother Kareem (video here: link to 972mag.com
It's not just revenge. It's a systematic, planned, entirely deliberate attempt to break an entire village community by attacking its children.
No, I think it was just sloppiness. The other American had her passport stamped Entry Denied.
I was a bit disappointed, actually. I was looking forward to having one as a badge of honor.
Yes, I should have put this in the article, in fact. July 9 (the official first day of solidarity actions inside Palestine) is the anniversary of the International Court of Justice ruling that the apartheid wall and Israeli colonization of the West Bank were illegal. It is also the anniversary of the BDS call to action, for the same reason.
All the actions you suggest are complementary. It's not a case of one or the other.
The point of this action is that it's not secret, because we have nothing to hide. It's been publicized on the websites I linked to for months. In fact, JPost reported about it (in a somewhat distorted way) several weeks ago: link to jpost.com
We are taking our cue from the strategy of the Flotilla, which is to declare plainly and clearly what our intentions are, that we are nonviolent and unarmed, and that we have every right to enter Palestine. How the Israeli government responds to that is up to them.
I'm sure people also said "Not at the Lebanese border," "Not in the Golan Heights," and "Not by sea into Gaza." No one's ever tried something like this at the airport, so we can't predict exactly what will happen. I would say we have a distinct advantage over all those other ventures in that it's very unlikely we'll be shot.
If you want to hear a paean to martyrdom and resistance, check out the lyrics to "Bella Ciao": link to en.wikipedia.org
And yet somehow we never hear about Italians and their disturbing culture of martyrdom. Or perhaps some people's resistance is just better than others'.
Excellent review, Susan. I saw the film last weekend and think you're right on about its flaws.
Very exciting news about the possibilities for your book becoming a film. Make sure it only goes to someone you trust to do it justice.
This post confuses me. It's not clear to me whether the title is a rhetorical question or a genuine one.
Any genuine leftist in the United States should be against all US intervention in Libya (and everywhere else) including sanctions. It's never done for any reason other than to serve the interests of the US. The Libyan situation is proving that right now. It's not that the Obama administration "has its hands full." You can't convince me that Obama couldn't scramble a fighter jet or two from one of the numerous US bases, aircraft carriers and military operations currently going on in and around the Middle East. But he won't, because all rhetoric aside, they don't actually care any more about ordinary people in Libya than they do about ordinary people in Egypt or Tunisia or Yemen or Bahrain...or the US, for that matter.
The answer is and always has been the power of the Libyan people. They are proving their amazing bravery right now and they will achieve victory soon.
Thanks for all your insights, Pamela. I'm laughing right now because it didn't even *occur* to me to give them a fake email address! Of course there's no way they can verify it! Amazing how well conditioned we are to think we have to tell the truth to those in positions of power. I'll definitely remember that for next time :-).
Hmm, I don't know if anyone will read a comment on a post that's a year old, but I stumbled across this when Googling "Palestinian characters in American film."
Salt of This Sea is a brilliant film and you should all buy it now that it's finally--FINALLY--available on DVD in the US. It's not accurate to call it a Hollywood film, however. It was shot in Palestine with money scraped together from various European, Arab, and other independent financing sources. It screened at Cannes--in 2008. It's won award after award in international film festivals, yet Annemarie had to struggle for YEARS to get any kind of distribution in the US. That's how hard you have to fight if you're an independent, female, Palestinian filmmaker.
Oh and for the record, I bought two solidarity tickets for opening weekend even though I was in Baltimore, because I'm a filmmaker and I know opening weekend grosses count, and because I loved the film and wanted to support it.
Not to get too far into the business of comparing genocides, but I think conditions in Gaza are quite similar to the Warsaw Ghetto before it was "cleared," ie. before the Nazi policy went from slow starvation and random repressive violence to systematic, mechanized killing. Joseph Glatzer has made that observation on this very blog: link to mondoweiss.net
Let us hope the comparisons can end there.
Excellent article, Max. I agree with everything you've written, but even if I didn't, I would give a great deal of weight to what you had to say, knowing your are currently on the ground in Gaza, where these questions are far from abstract.
This is a bit tangential, but since you mentioned the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, anyone who has not read Marek Edelman's splendid account of that action and its effects should do so. A short version can be found here: link to writing.upenn.edu
I would love to see some opinion polls or statistics backing up your claims about trends in Israeli public opinion over the past thirty years (if you are indeed talking about both intifadas, we're talking about going back to the '80s.) For some reason I suspect the empirical evidence may be a bit thin there.
As for your claim that "all those in responsible roles within functioning states" had their hearts and minds turned off from the Palestine solidarity movement because of the Flotilla events...um, what kind of state to you consider Turkey to be?
I won't go into how insufferably condescending, patronizing and preachy I find this article, or how I think it reinforces the good activist/bad activist narrative that Israel is consciously trying to spin about the people on the Mavi Marmara versus the rest of the Flotilla. Other comments have already addressed those points.
What I want to take up is Taylor and Nagler's argument that the value of "pure" nonviolence is in its ability to "persuade the oppressor." I think this is a tremendously flawed view of how change happens. The implication is that oppression is a product of bad ideas, and that it will end when oppressors see the light and change their behavior. This is false. Oppression ends when it becomes unsustainable. It can be made unsustainable in a number of ways, from armed resistance, to forms of nonviolent direct action (what Palestinians call "civil resistance") such as strikes, sit-ins, marches, civil disobedience, etc., to international pressure tactics such as BDS. Which of these methods or combination of methods is most appropriate for a given situation should be a question of tactics and strategy, not principle.
There is a common misconception on the American left that change happens when we just convince enough people to shed their bigoted ideas, be they racism, sexism, homophobia, Zionism, what have you. In fact a careful study of history indicates it's often the other way around. Particularly in situations of oppression, change happens because a determined minority who is directly affected refuses to give up fighting, and wins enough solidarity to force a concession from the powers that be. One small example from the US: in 1968, a year AFTER the Supreme Court struck down all laws banning interracial marriage, only 20% of Americans approved of marriage between Blacks and whites. By 2003 that figure was up to 73%. What happened? A bunch of people got interracial marriages and the 80% who'd been against them either realized the world hadn't ended or at least realized it was no longer acceptable to air their racist views on the matter in public.
A more striking example, from apartheid South Africa, can be found in this excellent article by Ali Abunimah: link to electronicintifada.net
As Ali points out, as late as 1990, only 2.2 percent of Afrikaners said they were willing to accept majority (Black) rule in South Africa. If South African Blacks had waited to win over the most trenchant racists apartheid would still be alive and well today.
By all measures, nonviolent resistance is now the dominant form of struggle in Palestine. (There hasn't been a suicide bombing in Israel since February 2008.) If Taylor and Nagler's arguments about nonviolence were true, the Israeli public should be moving toward enlightenment. Instead it is marching toward fascism at a frightening and accelerating pace.
Nonviolent resistance tactics have many advantages, but being more palatable to the oppressor isn't one of them.
Beautiful piece, Phil, brought tears to my eyes. Wish I could have seen Judson that night. I've been involved in the Palestine solidarity movement for ten years, and this past year has been the first time I've started to really believe I would live to see a free Palestine. We still have an enormous amount of work to do, but something has begun that can't be turned back.
annie, thanks for your comments. My experience too in Gaza in May/June was much closer to what you describe vis-a-vis Hamas. Yes, there were lots of armed guards with us, and they were sometimes controlling of our movement. But I found that if you interacted with them with mutual respect and the assumption that we were, in fact, on the same side, they were quite approachable. I didn't feel that they were trying to "hide" any part of Gaza from us, and I did feel that they were trying to protect us. In fact, we were treated with a degree of respect by the Hamas-led government that I could only hope to one day receive from my own government here in the US!
I would have expected the author of this article, who seems from his bio to have lived and traveled quite a bit in the Middle East, to be a bit more astute about the political realities on the ground in Gaza. The situation there is extremely tense at the moment, perhaps the most tense it's been since the end of Cast Lead. Unfortunately, fears about the safety of internationals and the risk of infiltration on the part of the government of Gaza are entirely justified. It does seem that some possibly undemocratic maneuvers went down between Hamas and civil society groups regarding the march, but frankly I don't know the details and don't feel that I can comment on that.
When I went to Gaza, one of the things I was struck by was not how closed and uniform the society was politically, but how open and diverse. Palestinians have a long tradition of political debate and diversity and are generally not shy at all about sharing their political alliances--whether they are with Hamas, another party, or no party. As for the PFLP, they have a de facto alliance with Hamas at this point; there are PFLP flags flown openly all over Gaza, and I've seen martyr billboards from joint operations with Hamas and PFLP flags flying together.
As for the dig at Omar Barghouti and Haidar Eid for disagreeing with Finklestein, I simply can't let that slide. To back out of organizing a major international demonstration over political disagreements with two leading members of Palestinian civil society is not only petty on Norm's part, it is breaking the first rule of international solidarity work, which is to listen to and agree to be led by the oppressed people you are supporting. Frankly I would not have felt comfortable participating in the Gaza Freedom March without the endorsement of Omar and Haidar. For an American activist not to respect the political positions of two leaders of the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement living in Palestine--at least enough to work with them--is simply arrogant.