Posts Tagged ‘Military Occupation’
The Palestinians’ last option: A struggle for equal rights
Palestinians must shed the illusion of the current peace process and at least push for equitable rights. Ghada Karmi 23 Jun 2013 Aljazeera
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…Israel/Palestine is today one state. But it is an apartheid state which discriminates against non-Jews in favour of Jews. The Palestinian task now is to fight against this apartheid and mount a struggle, not for an impossible Palestinian state, but for equal rights under Israeli rule. They would need to dismantle the Palestinian Authority, which is now a liability that only camouflages the true situation, and then confront Israel, their actual ruler, directly. As stateless people under military occupation, they must demand equal civil and political rights with Israeli citizens, and apply for Israeli citizenship if necessary. That puts the onus on Israel to respond: either to ignore the five million Palestinians it rules, or vacate their land, or grant them equal rights.
Israel will reject all of these, but whatever it does will be against its own interests. And Palestinians at one stroke will have broken up Israel’s hegemonic hold on the political discourse and changed the rules of the lethal game being played against them….
“Walking through walls” — Israeli IDF invasion of Nablus
“Imagine it—you’re sitting in your living room, which you know so well; this is the room where the family watches television together after the evening meal. . . . And, suddenly, that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after the other…… The children are screaming, panicking. . . . Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, twelve soldiers, their faces painted black, submachine guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall? ”
While watching Die Hard the other night—one of the best architectural films of the past 25 years—I kept thinking about an essay called “Lethal Theory” by Eyal Weizman—itself one of the best and most consequential architectural texts of the past decade (download the complete PDF).
In it, Weizman—an Israeli architect and prominent critic of that nation’s territorial policy—documents many of the emerging spatial techniques used by the Israeli Defense Forces in their high-tech, legally dubious 2002 invasion of Nablus. During that battle, Weizman writes, “soldiers moved within the city across hundred-meter-long ‘overground-tunnels’ carved through a dense and contiguous urban fabric.” Their movements were thus almost entirely camouflaged, with troop movements hidden from above by virtue of always remaining inside buildings. “Although several thousand soldiers and several hundred Palestinian guerrilla fighters were maneuvering simultaneously in the city,” Weizman adds, “they were so ‘saturated’ within its fabric that very few would have been visible from an aerial perspective at any given moment.”
Worthy of particular emphasis is Weizman’s reference to a technique called “walking through walls”:
Furthermore, soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors.
Weizman goes on to interview a commander of the Israeli Paratrooper Brigade. The commander describes his forces as acting “like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. We were thus moving from the interior of homes to their exterior in a surprising manner and in places we were not expected, arriving from behind and hitting the enemy that awaited us behind a corner.”
This is how the troops could “adjust the relevant urban space to our needs,” he explains, and not the other way around.
Indeed, the commander thus exhorted his troops as follows: “There is no other way of moving! If until now you were used to moving along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!” Read the rest of this entry »
Endless wars: another name on the wall (video)
Source: War Is A Crime
Justice Through Music, www.jtmp.org, partners again with the band Op-Critical, www.myspace.com/opcritical, in a new music video rendition of Roger Waters’ “The Wall,” to focus attention on the heartbreak of endless wars. “We made a few changes in the lyrics,” said Op-Critical’s Storm, “with the most powerful being: ‘Daddy, what’d you leave behind for me? On the Mall you left another name on the Wall.’” The video, posted a few days ago on YouTube, has already had thousands of views and rave reviews.
The chorus hook is sung by the fabulous Harmonic Angels Children’s Choir whose members are featured in the video. Roger Waters said that he encourages artists to use the song to resist all forms of oppression and that he sees artists as playing a vital role in resistance to repression and brutality. “I applauded and supported the resistance of schoolchildren in South Africa to that repressive and brutal regime,” he said, “and also applaud and support the resistance of Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank to the repressive and brutal occupation they endure.”
The music video was animated and directed by world renowned Scottish film director Matt Brown.
Justice Through Music is a non profit charity that works with famous bands to inspire young people to get involved with social causes. The organization has worked with Op-Critical on a number of music videos focusing on Darfur, Torture, Nuclear Weapons, Fracking, Propaganda, and Arlington Cemetery.
See also:
Bradley Manning Humiliated and Abused:
Why Is Exposing a War Crime More Dangerous Than Committing One?
Israel Plans 21st Century Mass Expulsion
Palestinians inspect house after it was demolished by Israeli troops
“This military order is part of a series of steps implemented by Israel to empty the West Bank of Palestinians, especially by removing them to Gaza. It will cause tens of thousands of Palestinians to be deported from the occupied West Bank.”
By Nasim Ahmed 22 April, 2010
The Palestine Telegraph
Briefing on the Israeli Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (Amendment No. 2) and the Order regarding Security Provisions (Amendment No. 112) passed on Tuesday, April 13 2010.
Behind the euphuism, ‘prevention of Infiltration’ lies a horrible truth which Israeli officials are trying desperately hard to conceal. This simple truth is a truth that has been cardinal throughout Israel’s existence and continues to do so. It’s a truth that connects the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and the recent military order that would result in the forced expulsion of many thousands of Palestinians. It’s the truth that Israel was founded on a policy of systematic population transfer and it has been committed to this policy ever since its inception.
This simple fact is a natural outcome of Israel’s central creed, ‘redemption of the land with as few of the indigenous people as possible’. Since its inception its central creed has been efficiently carried out through modern methods of population transfer and land appropriation. This explains why, even as rhetoric and politics change, expulsion and dispossession continue through various methods.
Its strategy commenced with a total denial of Palestinian as a people. Since than over many decades, Israel has developed and refined policies to disperse imprison and impoverish the Palestinian people, in a relentless effort to destroy them as a nation. It has industrialized Palestinian misery through ever more sophisticated systems of curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs. It has transformed the West Bank and Gaza into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, human resolve and the limits of human despair.
Viva Palestina Starts Entry To Gaza!
VIVA! VIVA! PALESTINA! Information Clearinghouse
Viva Palestina Starts Entry To Gaza
Report by GEORGE GALLOWAY
The VIVA PALESTINA Convoy, and after facing ongoing Egyptian rejection and violent attacks by the Egyptian security forces, started on Wednesday evening [6th January 2010] to roll into the besieged Gaza Strip.
Thousands of Palestinians, carrying flowers and flags, gathered in the streets while the convoy continued to move in.
A Press conference would be held on Thursday [7th January 2010] and would be followed by the official ceremony of handing the international humanitarian aid.
Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza
Flavorwire Jan 4, 2010 by Chelsea Bauch
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- … author and illustrator Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza combines hard reporting with an engrossing graphic-storytelling format to explore the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Sacco uses “comics journalism” — a genre he effectively invented with his previous books Palestine
and Safe Area Goražde
— to chronicle two reportedly overlooked Palestinian massacres that took place in the ’50s. The result is a poignant portrait of the ongoing conflict through an artistic but unflinching lens.
Check out the Wall Street Journal’s slideshow article with the author’s commentary, read an interview with Sacco, and buy the book
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another video and cartoon exerpt at site
Israeli settlers attack mosque
Mosque graffiti
Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian West Bank have vandalised a mosque, torching its library and spraying hate messages in Hebrew on the building.
The attack blamed on hardline Jews on Friday may be linked to plans that seek to curb their illegal settlement activity on land taken from Palestinians.
The Cost of Choosing Endless War
by Steven D
Sat Nov 7th, 2009 Booman Tribune
Ft. Hood has exposed a terrible wound in the fabric of America, but that wound was there long before a lone gunman named Major Hasan decided to go postal on his fellow soldiers. Our ethical and moral values have been obliterated since September 11, 2001.
Racism is on the rise. Religious fundamentalism of the kind that justifies the slaughter of innocents and torture and inhumanity has reared its ugly head. Violence has become more and more the solution too many of us Americans employ to address our grievances and our anger. How many thousands have died as a result of the actions our government took in 2001 – 2009? How many more have suffered irreparable injuries to their bodies and minds? How much hatred has been engendered because our former President chose to make war the first and only option to any problem?
Yet we continue to fight those wars.
Gaza 2009: Operation Cast Lead
An Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says many more Palestinian civilians were killed in the Israeli military’s campaign in Gaza than the army admits. |
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Israel wants laws of war changed
No, this is not a bad joke. They want to be exempted from the standards of decency, written after the ghastly persecutions of WWII. Now that Israel claims status as a Colonial Power, what’s a little genocide flavored with white phosphorus? (nothing is really bad when they do it….)
Wake-up Call 
