Replies to post #121832 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[teapeebubbles]

THE HISTORY OF PROFILING


The day it all started was March 6, 1836. On that fateful day, Davy
Crockett woke up and rose from his bunk on the main floor of the Alamo .
He then walked up to the observation post along the west wall of the
fort.

William B. Travis and Jim Bowie were already there, looking out over
the top of the wall. These three great men gazed at the hordes of
Mexicans moving toward them.

With a puzzled look on his face, Crockett turned to Bowie and said:
"Jim, are we having some landscaping done today?"

[F6]

Israeli troops kill Palestinian man at checkpoint in West Bank

By Joel Greenberg
Sunday, January 2, 2011; 5:25 PM

JERUSALEM - Israeli soldiers fatally shot an unarmed Palestinian man who approached them at a West Bank checkpoint Sunday. The army said he had been holding a bottle and was shot according to the military's rules of engagement.

The shooting underscored simmering tensions in the West Bank as peace efforts remain at an impasse.

Palestinian witnesses and a military spokeswoman gave differing accounts of the incident, which the Israeli army said was under investigation. The dead man was identified as Ahmad Maslamani, 24, a farm laborer who worked at nearby Israeli settlements.

The shooting occurred at an army checkpoint on a road linking the West Bank city of Nablus to the Jordan Valley. Palestinian witnesses said travelers pass through the checkpoint by first crossing a turnstile and then going through a metal detector.

Abdallah Sbeitan, a farmer who was at the scene, said in a telephone interview that Maslamani had passed through the metal detector, emptying his pockets, and then mistakenly turned left instead of right to leave the checkpoint area. "A female soldier starting screaming, and soldiers, one behind her and another near a concrete barrier, opened fire from about five meters away," Sbeitan said.

Sbeitan said Maslamani was empty-handed, but Rashid Sawafta, a driver who was standing nearby, said in a telephone interview that he heard the female soldier loudly question Maslamani and heard him reply that he was carrying a bottle of water. "She screamed, 'Bottle!,' in Hebrew, and then I heard gunfire."

The military spokeswoman said Maslamani approached "from an unauthorized lane holding a glass bottle" and ignored orders to halt. He "came to stand several meters away from the soldiers, who then operated according to the Israel Defense Forces rules of engagement and fired towards him."

Palestinian medical officials who received the body from the army said Maslamani had been shot in the chest, hand and leg. Sbeitan said soldiers made no attempt to treat the wounded man.

Israeli military checkpoints, which control Palestinian movement in the West Bank, are frequent flash points of tension, with Palestinians often complaining of humiliation and harsh treatment by troops, who are on guard for possible attacks.

In other violence Sunday, Israeli aircraft attacked targets in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, wounding two Palestinians, medical officials said. The military said it had struck a "Hamas terror activity center in northern Gaza and a weapons manufacturing facility in central Gaza" in response to a rocket strike on Israel on Saturday.

As peace efforts remain stalled, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he is ready to sit down with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for one-on-one talks until they reach a peace deal. "If Abu Mazen agrees to my proposal to directly discuss all the substantive and core issues, we will know very quickly if we can reach an agreement," Netanyahu said, using Abbas's nickname.

Netanyahu was responding to a statement by Abbas that a peace deal could be reached within two months if Netanyahu showed "goodwill."

Direct talks faltered in late September after Israel ended a 10-month freeze on new construction [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2010/12/07/ST2010120707415.html ] in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Abbas has insisted that Israel must halt all settlement construction before the negotiations can resume.

Greenberg is a special correspondent.

© 2011 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/02/AR2011010202230.html [comments at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/02/AR2011010202230_Comments.html ]


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The price of resisting


Picture: AP

By Jody McIntyre [ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/author/jody-mcintyre/ ]
Eagle Eye
Sunday, 2 January 2011 at 10:05 am

On New Year’s Eve, as people across the world celebrated together, Jawaher Abu Rahmah lay alone, struggling for breath in a Ramallah hospital. The day before, the people of her village, Bil’in, in the West Bank, had marched to Israel’s wall, which cuts through half of the village, to non-violently demonstrate against the theft of their land, just as they have done every Friday since construction on the wall began in 2005.

Jawaher had suffered from asphyxiation as a result of the tear gas the Israeli army had fired at demonstrators. Jawaher, however, was not participating in the demonstration herself; she was sitting at her family’s home 500 metres away when she begun to suffocate. On Saturday morning, Jawaher, aged 35, died in hospital.

In 2009, I spent six months living in Bil’in; for four months straight, the Israeli army would raid the village at night, taking young teenage boys from their homes, some as young as thirteen years old, and imprisoning them for months on end. No reasons were given for their arrests, but those attending the demonstrations were often targeted.

The first person I met upon my arrival in Bil’in was a man called Haitham. He was working as a film maker, and came out every night to document the army raids, and every Friday to film the demonstrations at the wall. Haitham had a two year-old son called Karme, who had been diagnosed with leukemia just a few months after his birth. Before the demonstrations began, Haitham took his son to hospital in Jerusalem every day to get treatment, but since he began filming, the Israeli army refused to renew his permit to travel to Jerusalem.

I spent much of my time in Bil’in living with Hamde Abu Rahmah, a young photo-journalist, and we developed a close relationship. During one of the Friday demonstrations at the wall, Hamde’s oldest brother, Khamis, had been shot by an Israeli soldier in the head with a high-velocity tear-gas canister. He spent two weeks in a coma, and still suffers from his injuries today. One of the people to care for Khamis during the first few months was his cousin, and Jawaher’s brother, Bassem Abu Rahme. In April 2009, Bassem died after being shot in the chest with the same weapon.

Another person I became close to during my time in Bil’in was Rani Burnat, a man who had been paralysed after being shot in the spine on the first day of the second intifada. I remember once asking him if the Israeli soldiers treated him differently because he was in a wheelchair. He said, “Jody, I want to tell you two things… firstly, I think you know very well by now, as I do, that the Israeli army do not care if you are walking, in a wheelchair, man, woman or child!” ”And the second thing I want to tell you,” Rani said, “is that it doesn’t matter if you’re in a wheelchair or not. What’s important are the ideas, and the resistance, that’s in your mind.”

Jawaher Abu Rahmah died for refusing to accept the theft of her family’s land. How many more will suffer a similar fate?

©independent.co.uk

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/01/02/the-price-of-resisting/ [with comments]


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Spent tear gas canisters thrown at US amb. house


Photo by: AP

11 people arrested outside James B. Cunningham's house in a protest against death of woman who died from tear gas in Bil'in.

By BEN HARTMAN
01/03/2011 04:39

Eleven people were arrested outside the Herzliya residence of US Ambassador James B. Cunningham early overnight Saturday, after they threw spent tear gas canisters at the building during a loud protest.

The protest, which took place around 12:30 a.m., was in response to the death on Saturday morning of Jawaher Abu Rahma, 36, who is believed to have died from tear gas fired by soldiers during a protest against the West Bank security barrier on Friday [ http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=201758 ] outside Bil’in, near Modi’in Illit.

According to online reports from activists and bloggers associated with the protesters, the ambassador’s residence was chosen for the demonstration partly because US corporations supply non-lethal crowd control equipment like tear gas to the IDF.

The 11 protesters – 10 Israelis and a female German tourist – were brought to the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court on Sunday, where their remand was extended by three days.

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said police received a complaint around 12:30 a.m. that a large group of people was creating a disturbance outside the ambassador’s house. Officers were dispatched who arrested the 11 activists. He added that searches turned up a metal chain and two additional tear gas canisters in one of the protester’s cars.

The protest took place hours after police arrested several protesters, including former Meretz MK Mossi Raz, at the end of a rally outside Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv also protesting Abu Rahma’s death.

Witnesses said Raz was struck by a police officer during the fracas, and was later released from custody.

During some of the recent riots in the valleys of east Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods, the acrid smell of tear gas has hung over the houses for hours.

That is why Abu Rahma’s death after the weekly Bil’in protest raised fears in the Silwan neighborhood.

“We’re more worried now, because now we can see what happens with tear gas,” said Murad Shafi, 35, a Silwan resident and a member of the al- Bustan community council. “They throw it at us in the middle of the night. It’s not healthy; because of one person who throws a rock they tear-gas a whole neighborhood. There’s no defense against it.”

Attorney Nisreen Alyan of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel called on the security forces to consider using less dangerous types of tear gas or “set a limit on the means that can be used to disperse a protest.”

Rosenfeld said the police would not change the procedures for using tear gas during riots in east Jerusalem, or anywhere else in the country, as a result of Abu Rahma’s death.

Melanie Lidman contributed to this report.

---

RELATED:

Bil’in victim dreamed of meeting brother ‘in paradise'
http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=201982

---

© The Jerusalem Post 2011

http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=201981 [no comments yet]


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also (items linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53926596 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=58335233 and preceding (and any future following)

[fuagf]

F6, Hanna Braun's words are most refreshing and add, clarify and remind of many things. I've just now decided it feels right to begin this post by repeating bits originally emphasized, (some emphasis repeated, with a couple of words also included which were not) .. lol, thanks for the posts and for that, until i find a bit seen before and wanted particularly for here (am sure that bit is here somewhere) .. so, to some of Hanna Braun's words ..

"This is an account of a personal Journey to try and help to explain how so many of us fell for the Zionist myth and how difficult it was -and still is- to see the truth beyond it." [...]

"By that time it had become clear that the Land of Israel that we had sung about and idealised endlessly was meant exclusively for Jews." [...]

"My homeland is the Land of Canaan", My sea of Galilee" and more. Few of us ever questioned the fact that we were Palestinians living in Palestine and that there was some contradiction in asserting that this was, apparently simultaneously, the Land of Israel." [...]

"David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) asserted and later reiterated that had there been a choice of saving one million Jewish children by sending them to the UK prior to the war or only half that number by sending them to Palestine, he would always have opted for the latter." [...]

"By the end of the "Independence" War the terrible Palestinian Nakba had occurred and over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs had become refugees, never to be allowed to return to their homes." [...]

However, during the early 50’s I became aware firstly of the shabby treatment of non European immigrants, many of them Arab Jews, upon arrival in the new state. Even more appalling was the way in which the remaining Arab citizens were treated. They became the target of institutional racism, regarded as non-equal to Jewish Israelis just by not being Jews. [...]

"This expansion and the enforced separation, i.e. apartheid, can only be achieved by brute force, and indeed the Israeli army/police have brutalised Palestinians in a shocking manner which would not be tolerated had any other state acted in this way."

The next one is an impulsive extra, one drift from my intention as outlined above ..

"It has become acceptable to shoot young children, to humiliate people at the endless checkpoints surrounding all Palestinian towns and villages. The demolition of whole rows of houses as "collective punishment" or as "collateral damage" is widespread. [...]

.. ok, back to the originally highlighted bits ..

"Israel still cynically claims to be the "victim"; while it is the second largest arms manufacturer in the world and has the fifth biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons worldwide." [...] By imprisoning the "other" they imprison themselves, most glaringly with the monstrous "Security Wall" now growing apace. [...] This is not about security; it is naked apartheid. [...]

DARN, ROTFLMAO! SHUCKS .. the words i was looking for either i missed just now, or were not in that article, must be in another one about here. Anyway, the crux of them was the point that the idea that European Jews, in coming to Israel, were returning to their homeland was a myth .. the Khazars were mentioned ..

From Wikepedia

The Khazars (Turkish: Hazar Kaganligi) were semi-nomadic Turkic people who established Khazaria or Khazar Empire between 7th and 10th centuries. They were one of the largest polities of medieval Eurasia, with a capital in Atil and territory comprising much of modern-day Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, large portions of the Northern Caucasus (Circassia, Dagestan), parts of Georgia, the Crimea, and Northeastern Turkey. A successor state of the Western Turks, Khazaria was a polyethnic state with a population of Turkic, Iranian, Finno-Ugric, Slavic, and Palaeo-Caucasian peoples. Khazaria was the first feudal state to be established in Eastern Europe. During the 9th and 10th centuries, Khazaria was one of the major arteries of commerce between Northern Europe and the Middle East, as well as a connection to the Silk Road. The name "Khazar" is found in numerous languages and seems to be tied to a Turkic verb form meaning "wandering".

Khazaria had an ongoing entente with Byzantium, serving as its partner in wars against the Arabian Caliphate. After fighting the Arabs to a standstill in the North Caucasus, Khazars became increasingly interested in replacing their Tengri shamanism with a state religion that would give them equal religious standing with their Abrahamic neighbors. During the 8th century, Khazar royalty and much of the aristocracy converted to Judaism.

Between 965 and 969, Khazar sovereignty was broken by Sviatoslav I of Kiev. They became a subject people of Kievan Rus'. Gradually displaced by the Rus, the Kipchaks, and later the conquering Mongol Golden Horde, the Khazars largely disappeared as a culturally distinct people. .. continued ..

Much more with Wiks usual swarm of links inside the link above.

[fuagf]

Palestinian refugee camps



Ramallah: Youth Hunger Strike before "Day of Reconciliation"
http://www.newsfrommiddleeast.com/?new=75876

Life in a Palestinian Refugee Camp

Grace Halsell covered both Korea and Vietnam as a journalist, was a White House speech-writer under Lyndon Johnson, and wrote eleven books, among them the well-received Soul Sister. This essay was excerpted from her 1981 book Journey to Jerusalem.

Grace Halsell is listed in Who's Who in America. She was named the Green Honors Chair Professor of Journalism at Texas Christian University and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of Pennsylvania.

By Grace Halsell
Award-winning journalist
Excerpted from Journey to Jerusalem

It is predawn, and Sameetha has overslept. Bashir, her husband, calls her. He speaks
in Arabic: “Come on, you’ve overslept. Get dressed. Make my coffee. I must be off to work.”

I do not understand the Arabic words, yet I understand his tone, gestures, and the diurnal pattern: Bashir rises early; Sameetha wants to sleep.

Bashir, forty-eight, thinks his job important. For three decades he has lived in the refugee camp, and he has been out of work as often as not. Now, through a United Nations agency, he has a porter’s job. With a protective leather pad on his back, he hoists and carries steamer trunks, huge bags of produce, or pieces of furniture. As a one-man moving van, he earns the equivalent of fifty dollars a month.

Sameetha and Bashir are the parents of five children, the youngest named Nahla. Meeting Nahla, who is sixteen, I at once feel an affinity for her. Like Kareemi [a young Palestinian woman, who Halsell stayed with several times], she is tall and slender and has dark hair and dark eyes. Unlike Kareemi, she is painfully shy, turned in on herself, even furtive, like an animal in a cage. About her there seems to be the humility that comes with knowing you are living in a very limited space belonging to others who are more powerful than you.

I come to know Nahla in this way. I am visiting Bir Zeit campus and mention to one of Kareemi’s professors, Lisa Tariki, that I would like to live awhile in a refugee camp. “No problem,” she replies. “We have many students here who live in refugee camps.” And she introduces me to Ahmad, twenty, a scholarship student, who is Nahla’s brother. It came as a surprise to me that Palestinians from refugee camps were at Bir Zeit. Until then I had somehow imagined all the refugees were removed from the mainstream of life, perhaps like Indians on United States reservations whom we Anglos for so long kept hidden from sight.

I talk with Ahmad, and he agrees at once that I will be welcome in his family’s home. About a week later we meet in Ramallah. We walk along streets crowded with Arab Palestinians, looking into shop windows filled with TV’s and even commodes, and I realize anew that the world is divided between those who can buy and those who cannot. Then we board an ancient bus and after a fifteen-minute ride get out on the outskirts of town and walk a short distance to the camp.

Entering the refugee camp, I feel I am entering some medieval ghetto. I walk along a narrow alleyway, skirting an open sewage ditch. I pass tens of dozens of one- and two-room houses, each leaning on the other for support. I am in a ghetto without streets, sidewalks, gardens, patios, trees, flowers, plazas, or shops—among an uprooted, stateless, scattered people who, like the Jews before them, are in a tragic diaspora. I pass scores of small children, the third generation of Palestinians born in the ghetto that has almost as long a history as the state of Israel itself. Someone has said that for every Jew who was brought in to create a new state, a Palestinian Arab was uprooted and left homeless.

We enter the door of a dwelling, not distinguishable to my eyes from hundreds of others like it, and I see two women on their hands and knees, both in shirts and pants, scrubbing a concrete floor. They rise, one somewhat laboriously, as she is heavy with child, and the other, the mother of Nahla and Ahmad and other sons, a woman made old before her time by endlessly making do in a makeshift home, a home that is only this room with a concrete floor and blankets stacked against the walls for beds. And, for a toilet, a closeted hole in the floor. Nahla has never known the convenience of a tub or a commode, nor do any members of her family enjoy that greatest of all luxuries, a room or even space into which one can for an hour or a few moments of each day retire, and in solitude meld mind, body, and soul.

The United Nations provides funds to meet basic needs, such as medical clinics and schooling. But no one has extended the kind of help that would allow people like Sameetha and Bashir to somehow help themselves, to somehow propel themselves into a bigger space, a fuller life. Americans, for example, annually give five hundred and twenty-eight dollars per capita to Israelis and three dollars per capita to the Palestinians.

“We are only seven,” Nahla comments the first evening, as we sit on the floor. Members of the family-in addition to Nahla, her parents, and her brother Ahmad, include her eldest brother Zayid, twenty-four, a construction worker, and his wife, Rima, nineteen, who is nine months pregnant. Nahla has two other brothers, Abdul and Salah, who are not at home. She does not tell me immediately, but in time Nahla says they are both in Israeli prisons.

Living with Nahla and her family, I am astonished both by their poverty and also by their will to survive under the weight of being a people without a political party, a government, a land, a people without an identity and without a promise for tomorrow. I learn they unite through the shared experience of exile. Once Nahla introduces me to an old man in the alleyway near her home, and she tells me he is the head man of the camp, having once been a village mukhtar in the area of Lydda. Her parents and others like them from Lydda wandered from camp to camp until they found this old man, their mukhtar, and other friends from home and then they set up the same kind of community, as best they could, that they had known before the 1948 war that disrupted their lives.

I sit beside Nahla listening to her read her English lesson. On the sides I hear a cacophony of radios, loud voices, and wailing babies. Nahla, like every child in this camp, is handicapped in her attempts to study. Moreover, Sameetha constantly asks Nahla’s help in household chores. She has no time to think or plan a future outside the camp.

“I feel buried here,” Nahla tells me. “I know there is a world out there”—and her eyes seek space beyond the ghetto walls.

Nahla’s family does not own a television set, but hundreds of camp refugees do, and Nahla sees, in regularly rerun Hollywood movies, luxurious homes with carpeting and bathrooms and kitchens, and a thousand amenities missing in her life.

For so young a person, she seems uncommonly perceptive about human nature and the unnaturalness of the crowded conditions in which she lives.

“My brothers knew when I began my period. Living so close, none of us is ignorant about the changes in our bodies, about life,” she confides, adding that often she must undress before Ahmad and that he trains his eyes not see, psychologically, what in truth he sees. “Once, removing my dress I deliberately studied his face. I saw that his features did not change. I knew he was ‘not seeing.’” Only in this way, she explains, does each member of the family give the other a sense of space, of living in a room of one’s own.

Nahla hopes to go beyond the nightmare of her parents’ past. And she has one dream—to continue her education, and then—her eyes widen at the possibility—to leave the camp and get a job. I ask casually, What kind of job? And then I realize I am thinking of Nahla and her future as if she were living in America, in a land that still provides alternatives. But I am in Nahla’s world, where as many as three generations are born in a cramped room, and their only alternatives are to survive or not survive.

Also, I am in a world where women have traditionally never left home, and those who work outside the camp are liberated only to the point of being “free” to labor in Israeli factories and return to what is too often called woman’s work.

I watch Sameetha, seated cross-legged on the concrete floor, mixing flour and water, and kneading dough into flat, round, pizza-sized loaves. She has only a hot plate, no oven. She must send the loaves outside her home to be baked.

For meals, we sit on the floor around a low table. We do not use spoons, knives, or forks. At each meal, Sameetha distributes freshly baked bread loaves, the main staple at all meals. I place my loaf on my lap, tear off a chunk and use it to spoon spicy crushed chickpeas with garlic sauce. I lift small bits of food such as olives, eaten at most meals, with the fingers of my right hand. Sometimes we eat sliced cucumbers seasoned with mint and mixed with thinned yogurt. Most frequently, we dip chunks of bread first into a bowl of olive oil—a big staple in the diet—then into another small bowl of thyme.

Once, we are all sitting on the floor, eating. Sameetha brings a pot of hot tea. As she bends to serve, Bashir inadvertently turns and hits the pot, sending the boiling tea pouring down Sameetha’s thighs. She screams, curses, and slaps Bashir, who cowers like a beaten animal.

“Get the paste!” Sameetha shouts to Nahla, who runs to a small cardboard box of possessions and returns not with a medication but with the only salve they have, a tube of Crest toothpaste. Sameetha, still grimacing in pain, lifts her skirt and Nahla applies the paste.

After supper, Sameetha sits on the floor before an old sewing machine with no legs. She motions to a space beside her on the floor, and she shows me how she changes a bobbin, threads the machine, and turns its wheel. She is using these gestures to tell me that the storm—with her angry unleashing of words and her blow at Bashir—is past, and she and her husband will continue to care for the family and continue in the way they know to survive, and that her striking out at Bashir was her desperate attempt to hit not him but the fate that had brought them to this level.

Often Sameetha conveys a hatred for Bashir. Or rather, a hatred for what life has done to him. In more than three decades, Bashir, who looks twenty years older than his age, has never been able to find himself, which is to say he has never been able to find a means to extricate himself and his family from the slough of poverty and despondency in which they seem mired. He comes home from his porter’s job looking demeaned, brutalized. He reminds me of a bewildered Navajo Indian I once saw in a crowded city. Separated from his land, the Navajo lost his sense of Indianness, his sense of self. Now Bashir, separated from his “mother earth”—an expression both the Navajos and the Palestinians repeatedly use-feels orphaned, alien, lost.

I meet other men who feel brutalized by living in the camp. They talk of their villages where they “grew up and laughed.” Laughter is only a remembered experience. Ibrahim, the baker is an example.

I accompany Nahla, with a tray of pie-shaped dough, to a small shop where refugees pay a few pennies to get the dough baked. I find myself in a cramped, dark room with a low ceiling. The room is filled with smoke and seems like a dungeon. Ibrahim, a stooped, dark-skinned man of about fifty who seems at the end of his tether, says he starts work at 5:00 A.M., finishes at 7:00 P.M. and bakes about a thousand loaves a day.

“I am on my feet all day, my legs ache, and my head aches from the smoke, fumes, and heat. I work fourteen hours a day to make enough to feed my family. My health, perhaps also my mind, is breaking from the strain. The camp produces one generation after another of people who are trapped.”

Is he training his eldest son, I ask, to take over as baker?

“I am trying to teach him to get out of this camp!” he bellows, as if I have hit his sorest nerve. His eldest son is named Fouzi. He is seventeen and has been invited to Russia to study art.

“Wherever he goes,” Ibrahim says, “I am glad to see him escape from the camp.”

Walking back to her home, I ask Nahla: Is Ibrahim a Communist?

“I don’t know. The Communists reached in to help him,” Nahla replies, adding, “Many Israelis claim that if we recover a portion of our Palestine we will create a Communist state. But I do not think so. We are Muslim, and there is a big difference between the beliefs of our religion and Communism.”

One morning I walk with Nahla to her school, and she shows me several of her classrooms and takes me to the office of one of the administrators, a Palestinian in his late fifties, who invites me to stay for a coffee. Nahla leaves us, and the administrator begins by telling me he earned degrees in Boston and Chicago universities, and that he was a teacher “in Palestine” before the creation of Israel.

“This is one of ninety-four schools for thirty-five thousand refugee children on the West Bank,” he tells me, adding that West Bank and Gaza refugee schools, as well as all Palestinian refugee schools in the Middle East, have for three decades been operated by the UN Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA).

“Overcrowded classrooms are our worst problem. We have not been permitted by Israeli authorities to build new schools since they occupied the area in 1967. Our school population, now more than one thousand in this school, has more than doubled. Consequently, we have to use our schools on double shifts.

“Censorship is another problem,” he continues. “We made a list of 117 textbooks we think necessary for the elementary and preparatory cycles. But the Israeli government censored 42 of these. As a result, our students in several courses must rely entirely on classroom lectures.

“About ninety percent of our resources come from voluntary contributions by governments,” he continues. “The remaining ten percent is provided by the UN. The Arab countries saved us from bankruptcy in 1979 when Saudi Arabia provided the money we needed at the last minute. But the Arabs believe that the refugee camps were created by the West, and that the Western countries must finance UNRWA.”

The administrator pauses to sip his coffee, and I glance around his office, bare save for his desk and three chairs. I see no wall docorations, no photographs, diplomas, or books. What, I ask, does he need most? It is a perfunctory question, and pencil poised, I await a perfunctory answer, such as, We need more books. But he is done with discussing school needs as such.

“Our freedom! Our freedom!” he replies fervently. “We are a people exiled and held under the yoke of tyranny. We number nearly four million. Three million of us now live in exile—in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Persian Gulf countries, and in scattered groups throughout the world. Only six hundred thousand of us remain in that part of Palestine that became Israel.

“About half of the Palestinian people living outside Israel are still considered refugees, and about twenty percent continue to live in refugee camps. In our refugee school, I see the psychological effect of the prolonged stays in camps: an atrophy of initiative, an increased tendency toward passivity and fatalistic attitudes. It seems contradictory to say our young students are passive, with loss of self-confidence and increased dependence, and at the same time to say that they have mounting drives of vengeance. But their hatred builds on their lack of freedom. Israel forcibly produces a generation of tongueless people, and we will, in the end, speak with fire.

“For thirteen years, the Israelis have chosen not to hear us and not to see us. An Israeli premier, Golda Meir, said ‘There are no Palestinian people.’ But ignoring us does not make us go away. Nor will the Israelis prevent our attaining national independence. Since Israel became a state scores of nations have won national independence, including some that number no more than a few hundreds of thousands. No power on earth can stop a people from throwing off foreign rule, once they have made up their mind to do so. Israel with all its guns and power will not stop us.

“The Israelis give two reasons for not allowing refugees to return to their homeland,” the administrator continues. “First, the Israelis say the Palestinians who returned home would create a problem of security in case of war with the Arab states. But Palestinians within Israel are peaceful and quiet compared with Nahla and the thousands like her trapped in refugee camps. The Palestinians within Israel do not wish to be punished or expelled. The refugees such as Nahla, however, have nothing to lose. She will risk life itself to escape.

“The Israelis say, as the second reason why they will not permit Palestinians to return to their homeland, that to do so would make Israel bi-national and they don’t want that. They want the state to remain Jewish. The Zionists from the beginning, although they themselves were secular, wanted a totally Jewish state. This is why they felt forced to drive out the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. And that is why they rejected the Palestine Liberation Organization’s solution of a democratic state in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims would have equal rights.

“High school students are among the most politically active in the West Bank,” the administrator says. “In America, high school students, even college students, are not politically aware, especially nowadays. Here, on the contrary, students are the most vocal group. The high school students are much more numerous and more visible. Teenagers originate almost all the demonstrations and protests. They are very politically aware, and the teenage girls, particularly, are always out demonstrating.”

Nahla, he continues, helped stage a demonstration on the school grounds. “It was at the time of the arrest by the Israelis of the mayor of Nablus, Basam Shaka. She and other teenagers marched near the school one day carrying a placard stating, ‘We are Palestinians. We must be free.’

“Six armed men who spoke Hebrew—later identified as religious zealots from a nearby Jewish settlement—jumped from a car and chased them onto the school grounds. They fired their pistols and rifles around the students who were in class.

“The assailants chased Nahla and the other girls from the school into the refugee camp and began throwing stones at women and children who were outside their homes. They even threw stones at one woman who was holding her six-month-old infant in her arms. She ran into her house, but the attackers threw stones through her windows and fired shots into a water tank on the roof.

“The civilian religious zealots left. Then Israeli soldiers carrying guns rushed onto our school grounds and arrested Nahla and other teenagers and kept them in jail for two days.”

Later, when I ask Nahla about the arrest, and whether she and her family have felt humiliated about her having been in jail, she replies, “No. Nowadays it is kind of a badge of honor.”

That evening, Nahla and I walk with Rima—her face chalk white—to a nearby clinic, where Rima gives birth to a boy, who she names for her husband, Zayid. Rima returns home the next day. There are only 293 hospital beds available for all the refugees in all the West Bank camps—one for every thousand. And there is only one doctor for every ten thousand refugees.

Zayid looks like all newborn babies, amazingly small and fragile. Yet Rima and the other members of the family insist I hold him and join them in their celebration. They all accept another mouth to feed as a marvelous gift of God. And where will this life end?

Bashir and Sameetha had come to the camp as teenagers, had married, had five children, and had now become
grandparents of a child born in the camp. And would the child in two decades foster more children in this same camp?

We in the West are easily critical of those in refugee camps who have many children. Such families have few amenities and forms of recreation save perhaps, the finest of all—building a family and surviving through the strength of that family. The diaspora of the Jews and their suffering in ghettos did not destroy their families. Neither has the diaspora of the Palestinians and their suffering in refugee camps destroyed the strength and unity of their families.

Nahla learns poetry by heart, and one evening she quotes a poem by a Palestinian, Tawfiq Zayad, as expressing her determination to live, free of occupational forces.

As if we were a thousand prodigies
Spreading everywhere
In Lydda, in Ramallah,
In the Galilee...
Here we shall stay,
A wall upon your breast,
And in your throat we shall stay,
A piece of glass, a cactus thorn,
And in your eyes,
A blazing fire.

The walls of the room have one decoration, a calendar with a drawing of olive trees. Nahla takes the calendar from the wall and translates its Arabic inscription:

I believe in a tomorrow.
And in the struggle;
I have faith in olive trees.

She explains the olive tree represents the future and the past of the Palestinians. “The olive tree has strength because of its long, tough roots. Our Arabic literature mentions the olive tree as the cure of all diseases, and in the holy Koran, the Prophet Muhammad says, ‘Take care of the holy olive tree; from it you will gain your benediction.’ The color green and the olive trees represent our future. We have roots here. This we know is our homeland.”

That evening Bashir tells a story he must have repeated many times. The year is 1948.

“We were about fifty thousand Palestinians living in and near Lydda [near the present Tel Aviv airport].

“The fighting rages around us, and we saw the Israelis advancing. We heard shouts and an Israeli soldier told us they were ordered not to leave any Arab civilians at their rear-to leave no one in or near Lydda. The Israeli soldiers at gun point drove us out.” The decision to drive out the Palestinians, he adds, had been taken by David Ben-Gurion, one of Israel’s founders and its first prime minister.

“We were all villagers and none of us, none of the people like my mother and father or anyone in my family, had ever owned a gun, nor did I know anyone who was a soldier. We had nothing to do with the war or the struggle of the European Jews to find a homeland. Yet we were being collectively punished.

“I was same age as Nahla—sixteen—and I remember the armed Jewish soldiers encircling our home and firing shots and shouting in Arabic that they would kill us if we did not leave at once. Yet no one obeyed; it was as if we felt ourselves tied to our soil. Soldiers dragged women by their hair, and my father shouted he could not leave his garden, his trees, and a soldier knocked him to the floor. I had a pet lamb, and I ran to hold the lamb. I was not thinking of my mother or father or our home but of that small animal.

“I watched families fleeing as from a fire, and soldiers shot around them and over their heads, driving them like cattle. Soldiers pushed us out of the house with their guns. We soon found ourselves among thousands of women and children. Some old men could barely walk and mothers carried babies in their arms, and led small children. The children were crying and begging for water, all of us fleeing we knew not where. No one was given time to collect even the necessities, no food or provisions. I mindlessly grabbed my baby lamb, and another neighbor boy carried a pigeon. On the first day of the march I lost my little lamb. Others carried a chicken, a blanket, or a sack of flour that represented their entire possessions on this earth. My mother begged to return to her village to recover her small stove, her few heirlooms, but she was forced to keep moving. On the third day I saw my mother fall. I thought she had fainted. I felt her heart and she was dead. Then later, my father died. The other Palestinians dug holes in the ground and buried first my mother and then my father. I saw many old people and children fall and die because of the heat and exhaustion.”

He sighs deeply, and goes on, “One day we were Palestinians living in Palestine; the next day we were Palestinians driven from a land called Israel.

“We were tens of thousands kicked out by force, our villages destroyed. Even the Jews admit there is not a single Jewish village in their country that is not built on the site of an Arab village. They built the Jewish village of Nahala on the Arab village of Mahloul, and the Jews built Gifat on the Arab village of Jifta.

“The drove us out, they bulldozed our homes, and they built new villages.

“In 1948 I lived in one of about six hundred Arab villages in the part of Palestine that was taken by Israelis. My village was one of about five hundred bulldozed and destroyed. Now you will not find more than one hundred Arab villages in the part of Palestine taken by the Zionists. The Israeli leaders admit they did this. They are not ashamed. They do not try to undo what they did to us. They justify their acts and glorify them.”

Once again he speaks of his family’s farm and admits he was never able to find
himself, “living on a slab of concrete. I tried—but I failed. Now my spirit is gone.”

He looks to Nahla as he talks, wanting her to understand his burden and hers. Bashir knows
he is spent by life, but he says, “Nahla, you, and others like you, will make the struggle.”
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/ref-halsell.html

[F6]

Turkey, once an Israeli ally, expels ambassador

Jay Bookman
12:38 pm September 2, 2011, by Jay

In the wake of the Israeli raid on a Turkish aid flotilla headed for Gaza, an operation that ended in the deaths of nine Turkish citizens a little more than a year ago, the Turkish government has announced that it is recalling its ambassador to Israel, expelling Israel’s ambassador to Turkey, downgrading diplomatic relations and suspending all military cooperation.

Until fairly recently, Turkey had been a strong Israeli ally. Yes, Turkey’s internal politics has something to do with this new decision. And yes, a UN panel has concluded that Israel had the legal right under international law to halt that flotilla, although the same panel also concluded that the Israeli military used “excessive and unreasonable force.”

As an Israeli news outlet notes, the report asks some unsettling questions [ http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4116884,00.html ]:

“Forensic evidence showing that most of the deceased were shot multiple times, including in the back, or at close range has not been adequately accounted for in the material presented by Israel.”

From Israel’s point of view, the flotilla was halted, and the Israeli government’s aggressive reaction continues to draw strong popular support from voters. In that sense, it was a success, and Israel still refuses Turkish demands for an apology.

However, while Israel wins every battle, it is losing the war. In an era in which economic, political, military and cultural connections are becoming more and more important, Israel is becoming more and more isolated. If that trend is not reversed somehow … I don’t know. Short-term emotional gratification, which is what Israeli policy produces, seldom produces long-term strategic success.

© 2011 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2011/09/02/turkey-once-an-israeli-ally-expels-ambassador/ [with comments]

[F6]

to tie in:

(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79701650 and preceding (and any future following)

[F6]

THE GENERAL'S SON

Uploaded on May 21, 2011 by AlternateFocus [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxgg1nId587tt9273cBj2Tg / http://www.youtube.com/user/AlternateFocus , http://www.youtube.com/user/AlternateFocus/videos ]

Miko Peled is a peace activist who dares to say in public what others still choose to deny. Born in Jerusalem in 1961 into a well known Zionist family, his grandfather, Dr. Avraham Katsnelson was a Zionist leader and signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. His Father, Matti Peled, was a young officer in the war of 1948 and a general in the war of 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai.

Miko's unlikely opinions reflect his father's legacy. General Peled was a war hero turned peacemaker.

Miko grew up in Jerusalem, a multi-ethnic city, but had to leave Israel before he made his first Palestinian friend, the result of his participation in a dialogue group in California. He was 39.

On September 4, 1997 the beloved Smadar, 13, the daughter of Miko's sister Nurit and her husband Rami Elhanan was killed in a suicide attack.

Peled insists that Israel/Palestine is one state—the separation wall notwithstanding, massive investment in infrastructure, towns and highways that bisect and connect settlements on the West Bank, have destroyed the possibility for a viable Palestinian state. The result, Peled says is that Israelis and Palestinians are governed by the same government but live under different sets of laws.

At the heart of Peled's conclusion lies the realization that Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace as equals in their shared homeland.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4ZfnpN4Dfc [with comments] [many additional Miko Peled/related YouTubes via https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=miko+peled ]

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The General's Son
http://justworldbooks.com/the-generals-son-hardcover/
http://justworldbooks.com/the-generals-son/
http://www.amazon.com/The-Generals-Son-Journey-Palestine-ebook/dp/B00B5NP808

*

The General's Son
News and Events for Miko Peled's Great New Memoir
http://thegeneralsson.com/


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Miko Peled
Tear Down the Wall...

About Miko

This blog is dedicated to tearing down the separation wall and transforming the Israeli apartheid system into a secular democracy, where Israelis and Palestinians will live as equal citizens. As an Israeli that was raised on the Zionist ideal of a Jewish state, I know how hard it is for many Jews and Palestinians to let go of the dream of having a state that is exclusively “our own.” The articles, the stories and the pictures in this blog are meant to make a single point: For the good of both nations, the Separation Wall must come down, the Israeli control over the lives of Palestinians must be defied so that a secular democracy where all Israelis and Palestinian live as equals be established in our shared homeland.

The State of Israel today is governed in a way that cannot be sustained, where the two nations it governs, Israelis and

Palestinians are used and abused and it is a state of affairs that should not be tolerated: Half of the population is governed by a radical Zionist regime that sees the struggle for control over the land as a zero sum game, and the other half of the population is governed by the security forces of this Zionist regime; one nation ruling over another while controling of the land and its resources. It is a reality where half of the population lives in what it thinks is a Western democracy while keeping the other half imprisoned by a ruthless defense apparatus that is becoming more violent by the day.

In my book, “The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine” I show how it is that the son of an Israeli General and a staunch Zionist came to these realizations. Realizing that your side of the story is not the only side to the story, and then accepting rather than fighting this realization and in the end finding that the story upon which I was raised, was a lie – now that is an interesting journey.


“The General’s Son”

The following is an edited version of something was written by a friend, Iris Keltz, from Taos New Mexico who heard me speak:

“Miko Peled is a peace activist who dares to say in public what others still choose to deny. He has credibility, so when he debunks myths that Jews around the world hold with blind loyalty, people listen. Miko was born in Jerusalem in 1961 into a well known Zionist family. His grandfather, Dr. Avraham Katsnelson was a Zionist leader and signer on the Israeli Declaration of Independence. His father, Matti Peled was a young officer in the war of 1948 and a general in the war of 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and the Sinai.

Miko’s unlikely opinions reflect his father’s legacy. General Peled was a war hero turned peacemaker. The general clearly stated that contrary to claims made later, the 1967 war was one of choice, and not because there was no existential threat to the state of Israel. He then dedicated his life to the achievement of Israeli Palestinian peace.

The political becomes personal with Miko’s stories. He might have learned compassion from his mother who, in 1948, refused the offer of an Arab home in West Jerusalem with the understanding that the family who lived there were now forced to live in a refugee camp. As the daughter of one of the signers of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, Miko’s mother could have used her position of entitlement to get a lovely home for herself and her family. But she said, “No.”

Miko grew up in Jerusalem, a multi-ethnic city, part of a system that conspired to keep Palestinians and Israelis separate. The Arabs of Israel, as the Palestinians are called– the laborers, janitors, cooks, etc. are indistinguishable from Arabs across the Middle East and as such had no special connection to Jaffa, Lod, Ramle, Lydda, Haifa, Jerusalem or any other part of the land of Israel. Miko had to leave Israel before he made his first Palestinian friend, the result of his participation in a dialogue group in California. He was 39.

Peled insists that Israel/Palestine is one state. Facts on the ground are undeniable and irreversible– massive investment in infrastructure, cities,schools and malls for Jews only, Jewish only highways bisect and connect ever expanding settlements on the West Bank, the separation wall and the checkpoints have destroyed the possibility of a contiguous, viable Palestinian state. The question for Israelis, worldwide Jewry and the international community is: What kind of a state do we really want to see? An apartheid state with half the population confined to intolerable bantustans, without access to proper nutrition, medical care or clean water, condemned to humiliating long lines at checkpoints?

Or, will Israel/Palestine transform itself into a secular democracy for the five and a half million Israelis and almost five million Palestinians who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. To become such a sanctuary, Israel must give up the idea of Jewish dominion over all the land and resources.

Before Miko came to hold such a vision, he had to face his fears. Driving alone in the to Palestinian towns in the Galilee or the West Bank in a car with license plates that identified him as Israeli, Miko imagined a terrorist lurking behind every curve of the winding road following the rolling hills. Heading towards the village of Bil’in for the first time, he silently questioned if he was crazy to trust “these people”? Peled was afraid but kept on driving until he found the village and was greeted by friends.

The solution might be obvious but the problem remains, how to change the existing paradigm– from fear and loathing to co-existence? At the heart of Peled’s solution lies the realization that Israelis and Palestinians deserve to live in peace as equals in their shared homeland. At the a gathering in Taos, New Mexico, an Israeli woman who heard Miko speak told Miko that his father was the hero of her childhood, and in fact, a photograph of the general hung in their home. “It is an honor to meet the son of Matti Peled,” she said, “I had given up hope for any kind of just solution and try to stay removed from events there but I see how much you care and meeting you gives me hope.”

Those who cling to fear, mistrust or greed are under the false assumption that Palestinians and Israelis have a choice other than to live as equals. But it’s inevitable – the wall must come down, and the two people must be allowed to live as equal citizens in their shared homeland. Refusing this means condemning future generations of Israelis and Palestinians to ongoing mayhem and violence.

And Miko Peled’s family knows about that too. On September 4, 1997 they have lost their beloved Smadar, 13, the daughter of Miko’s sister Nurit and her husband Rami Elhanan to violence.

The bible tells us a great story of the patriarch Abraham willing to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac to prove his faith. At the moment of truth, when Abraham was about to kill his son an angel appeared telling Abraham not to harm the boy. In the Koran, Abraham is about to sacrifice Ishmael to the same God and the angel of God appears telling him not to harm his beloved son, Ishmael. The moral of the story is quite clear: Neither Israelis or Palestinians are called to sacrifice their sons and daughters to war, in fact, whether we are believers or not we are all called by our God or our conscience to care for our children so that they may live in peace and grow up as the equals that they are."

http://mikopeled.com/ [his blog's home page; access his blogs posts via]


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History of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict

Published on Nov 21, 2012 by XP [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwPCKUGPtadTZ0gpIjoEwBg / http://www.youtube.com/user/XPTHEWEB , http://www.youtube.com/user/XPTHEWEB/videos ]

By American Freelance Journalist - Alison Weir

Seminar at Case Western Reserve University, a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Q_8ZrYku4 [with (over 6,000) comments]


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Think of Them and Be Scared

Uploaded on Apr 26, 2010 by MentalRev [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgBd4Yt01MGuDPRACexdH3g / http://www.youtube.com/user/MentalRev , http://www.youtube.com/user/MentalRev/videos ]

Palestinian Children in the rural village of at-Tuwani speak of their encounters with violent Israeli Settlers in the South Hebron Hills of Occupied Palestine.

Mental-Rev Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=40912319453&v=wall&ref=search

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp9p74_D160 [with comments] [also at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1ovdA1VZ-c (with {over 4,000} comments)]


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BBC documentary - The Birth of Israel

Uploaded on Jan 20, 2012 by Bobby [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfUxj2HeT2bhy52WRXFXAHw / http://www.youtube.com/user/brashrafi1 , http://www.youtube.com/user/brashrafi1/videos ]

2008 BBC video on the birth of the state of Israel.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/birth-of-israel/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X4JCPckWgY [with comments] [also at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHxcQgDM1nY (with comments) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAgqif-1Pbw (with comments)]


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RETURN OF THE GENERAL'S SON

Uploaded on Sep 7, 2011 AlternateFocus

Miko Peled is the son of General Matti Peled, who was a leader in the 1967 war who also fought in the War of Independence in 1948. Like his father, Peled is an advocate for an end to the occupation of Palestine. As an Israeli, he offers an insider's perspective on just how far Israel has strayed from its democratic principles, and how it has created a society marred by racism and indifference to the suffering of others. His observations are now collected in a book, "The General's Son: The Journey of an Israeli in Palestine." In this segment, Miko Peled tells of his experiences as a young soldier in the Israeli army. He describes a confrontation with the same army on a recent visit to Israel and the West Bank.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI9-dEs9HIM [with comments]


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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (other) following, see also (linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54870420 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=71722366 and preceding (and any future following),
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=47823461 (the YouTube link there still good/does work) and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81548300 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95111389 (and the complete post/related linkings at)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95081519) and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95424311 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=100785304 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=100576134 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103100000 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103351861 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103764984 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103820837 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=104001407 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=104834973 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=105393647 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=105597765 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=105614785 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=105687086 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=104984570 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=105871478 and preceding and following