THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

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Boston artist Steve Mills - realistic painting

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

"The house is dark without them": Israel kills father and daughter as they water vegetables

"The house is dark without them": Israel kills father and daughter as they water vegetables

Rami Almeghari

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Muhammad al-Hisoumi is mourned during his funeral in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya. (Ashraf Amra / APA images)

March 19, 2012

Said al-Hisoumi lost both his father and his sister when Israel bombed the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya earlier this month.
"My father [Muhammad Awad] struggled throughout his life up to 12 March 2012," al-Hisoumi said. "At noon on that day, my father and my sister Fayza were bending down, working in a greenhouse right here, when an Israeli missile tore their bodies apart."
As he spoke, al-Hisoumi pointed to the spot where the Israeli missile struck.
Muhammad al-Hisoumi, a 72-year-old native of Beit Lahiya and his daughter Fayza, 30, were watering vegetables when an Israeli drone attacked their greenhouse.
This was part of an Israeli air offensive on the coastal territory that left 24 Palestinians dead and 74 injured, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights’ weekly report for 8–14 March, and damaged or 32 houses, a school, a Palestine Red Crescent Society center and a workshop.
The Israeli assault began on Friday 8 March, when Israel carried out the extrajudicial execution of Popular Resistance Committee leader Zuhair al-Qaisi.
In retaliation, Palestinian resistance factions began firing rockets at Israel, and Israel escalated its attacks on the Gaza Strip until a ceasefire, brokered by Egypt, was reached four days later.

Hard life

Al-Hisoumi recalled how his father recently visited Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and France to see his relatives in Europe.
The elderly victim of the Israeli missile had a hard life. Before Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, he worked as a school teacher in Saudi Arabia. He had also been a steelworker for an Israeli company. In the early 1980s, Muhammad began to work as a farmer inside Gaza, eventually acquiring a small piece of land.
Fathi Taha, 68, a neighbor and brother-in-law of al-Hisoumi, spoke to him briefly just before he was killed.
"I saw him and his daughter, moments before they were killed and I said to him, 'Take care Abu Said Muhammad, the situation is scary with the continuous air strikes on Gaza,’" Taha recalled.
"He responded to me by saying, 'I am an elderly person and this is my land which I am used to working on; just don’t worry, brother Fathi.’"
"May God lay him to final rest. Muhammad was a man with strong values. I worked along with him inside Israel and once our Israeli boss didn’t like my work and was threatening to sack me. Muhammad didn’t feel comfortable and decided to stop working in protest that day," Taha said.
Walking on al-Hisoumi’s small piece of land, Taha added, "Muhammad’s good deeds were many. For example, I wanted once to send my son to Germany to study medicine but I couldn’t afford the financial guarantee of $20,000, but Muhammad met that financial demand with pleasure."

"Father to us all"

Ahmad al-Hisoumi, Muhammad’s 60-year-old brother, spoke while surrounded by his small grandchildren in the vicinity of Muhammad’s family home.
"My brother Muhammad was not only a brother, he was a father for all of us. He was at the center of every family occasion. Recently, my son Yousef got married with a great deal of financial help from my brother Muhammad."

"A dark house" now

At the front door of Muhammad’s two-story house, a group of women sat consoling Muhammad’s ageing wife, Um Said.
"Abu Said was a very good man to me, to my children and to all others around us. Now I am left alone, after he and my daughter Fayza died. I am the only one left at home now and I feel the house is so dark without them," Um Said said.
Akaber al-Hisoumi, a sister-in-law of Muhammad, told The Electronic Intifada that she experienced a great deal of kindness from the al-Hisoumi family since she married Muhammad’s brother Asad 25 years ago.
"Fayza was such a quiet and kind girl, who was very tender, sensitive and generous. She used to be so helpful, just a couple of days before she died, I returned from being in the hospital to find that Fayza had cleaned my home. On the day she was killed, she even promised to bake bread for me."
Akaber added that Fayza had been helping out nieces and nephews who had lost their father. "She used to tell me that taking care of orphans will be rewarded by God. Fayza’s income from her farming work used to be almost entirely spent on her orphaned nieces and nephews."
Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.

Uncontroversial yet Taboo: Gaza in Context

Uncontroversial yet Taboo: Gaza in Context

By Roger Sheety

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Palestinians endured 6 decades of dispossession, occupation. (Julie Webb)

March 19, 2012

The recent killing of 25 Palestinians in Gaza and the wounding of at least 80 more within four days—March 9-12—requires some context as the majority of western mainstream media outlets are either unwilling or unable to provide any.

More often than not these mainstream media reports in some form or another refer to the Palestinian dead as "militants." The term militant is defined simply as "vigorously active and aggressive, especially in support of a cause" and "engaged in warfare; fighting." Synonyms listed include "belligerent, combative, and contentious. See: fanatic." Already then, Palestinians, even as they are killed in large numbers by the most sophisticated weapons money can buy, are marked as the aggressors. Further, as implied within the definition, they are fanatics, irrational and bent on destruction—the victim in this case being poor, nuclear-armed and US-protected Israel.

Virtually none of the major western media outlets ever ask questions such as: who exactly are these "militants"? Why are there so many of them in such a small place as Gaza? Why, if they are such an existential threat to poor Israel, are they always being killed in such substantial numbers? And why do the dead always include scores of women, children, the elderly and the sick? These, apparently, are taboo questions in the free western media and therefore beyond the realm of permitted discussion.

Here, however, is some background to help answer these supposedly unspeakable questions.

Al-Nakba, 1948

One reason why Gaza, an area that is today no larger than about 360 square kilometers (140 square miles), is so densely crowed is that many of its 1.6 million residents were originally ethnically cleansed from hundreds of destroyed ancient Palestinian towns and villages in 1948. This deliberate ethnic cleansing, depopulation and destruction was carried out by Zionist militias, colonists recently arrived from Europe and Russia and led by David Ben-Gurion, a revered hero among Israelis, western elites and their media apologists. The port city of Jaffa, a once vibrant Palestinian city before 1948, was also ethnically cleansed of almost all of its original Palestinian residents, many of whom also ended up in refugee camps in Gaza. Any Palestinians who tried to go back to their destroyed homes, their usurped farms and fields or tried to locate lost relatives left behind in what was now suddenly "Israel" were shot on sight by those same Zionist militias.

As noted and documented by the superb scholar and historian Ilan Pappe, "When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants" (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, xiii). In subsequent decades the number of razed villages would rise to over 600 as the Israeli state continued its systematic policy of depopulating Palestinian towns and villages. Now, though, they would demolish only a few at a time so to escape any international scrutiny and rebuke.

Khan Yunis and Rafah Massacres, 1956

Not satisfied with the theft of eighty percent of historical Palestine in 1948, the Zionist leadership, collaborating with France and Britain, decided to attack Egypt and take the Sinai. The path to Egypt, however, went through the now much smaller Gaza Strip, recently cut-off from Palestine, now Israel. Commanded by Moshe Dayan, a by-now veteran and decorated war criminal, the Israeli army marched into Gaza, occupied it and proceeded to commit two separate massacres in November of 1956, murdering 275 Palestinians in the town of Khan Yunis and another 111 in the neighbouring town of Rafah.

In a moment of clarity, Dayan would later comment on the Palestinian refugees he had helped ethnically cleanse and dispossess in 1948: "What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us?" he would ask rhetorically. "For eight years now they [Palestinians] have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home… We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house" (Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall, 101). Under orders from the United States, Ben-Gurion would withdraw his army from the Sinai and Gaza but Israel was not yet done with conquest.

Permanent Occupation, 1967

Having failed to steal the Sinai from Egypt in 1956, Israel attempted yet again to take land which did not belong to it. This time, however, the Sinai on its own was not enough, for Israel also had its eye on the West Bank, Gaza and Syria’s Golan Heights which it occupied with typical brute force in June 1967 crushing any resistance and killing at least 22000 Egyptians, Palestinians, Jordanians and Syrians. Israeli casualties on the other hand would remain below 1000.

The myth, still perpetuated to this day, was that this was a defensive war on Israel’s part. No serious historian or scholar, however, ever believed this was true, particularly after close examination. Indeed, as is usually the case, even Israeli officials would later admit in either private or public statements that the 1967 war was just another land grab in the guise of "self-defense" and "security." As Mordechai Bentov, Minister of Housing, would later confess: "The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail, and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory" (Al-Hamishmar, April 14, 1971).

And here is General Mordechai Hod, Commanding General of the Israeli Air Force on the planning of this annexation: "Sixteen years planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it" (Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, 558-559). Israel’s war of aggression allowed the Zionist state the chance to expel a further 300,000 Palestinians from their homes—a detail usually glossed over or forgotten by mainstream comment. Israel would also expel 130,000 Syrian civilians from the Golan, a territory it continues to occupy.

Moshe Dayan would soon after succinctly outline Israeli policy for Palestinians, particularly those in Gaza and the West Bank: "We have no solution… You [Palestinians] shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads" (Yossi Beilin, Speaking of the Palestinians, in Mehiro shel Ihud (Revivim, 1985), p. 42). This policy, supported and funded by the United States Government and its client states with grants of several billion dollars annually, continues to this day.

In order to expand its stolen territory, Israel would in the late seventies and early eighties attack Lebanon and occupy it for two decades, killing tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and leaving the country in ruins before finally being driven out in the year 2000.

Siege and Massacres, 2006-2012

By 2006 Gazans and Palestinians in general had endured nearly six decades of dispossession and occupation. Palestinian civil society had long tired of the Fatah political leadership which by then was viewed by many West Bank and Gaza Palestinians at least as corrupted and so, as most people around the world often do when faced with a similar situation, they voted for the opposition party.

As punishment for daring to vote as they wished, Israel walled in the Gaza Strip and sealed it off from the rest of the world, an act of war approved and aided by the governments of the United States, Britain, Europe, Canada and Australia. Between 2006 and 2008 Israel would bomb the now besieged Gaza Strip killing civilians on a regular basis and with permission from its sponsors. In 2007 and 2008 alone, before its major attack of December 2008, the Israel forces killed over 700 Palestinians including women, children and the elderly. The siege also effectively destroyed the remnants of Gaza’s already tattered economy, creating a deep societal crisis that lasts to this day. Food and clean water shortages, lack of electricity due to constant Israeli bombings and rampant unemployment are now among the regular struggles of Gazan society.

Not content with its punishment of Gaza, the Zionist state decided to break its own truce with Hamas, the governing party, launching a vicious attack on December 27, 2008. This attack, dubbed Operation Cast Lead, killed 1417 Palestinians and injured or maimed over 5300 more in a three-week period finally ending on January 18, 2009. Israeli casualties reached a total of thirteen, a handful of them killed accidentally by Israeli forces. The massacre shocked and disgusted many around the world including Israeli poet and novelist Yitzhak Laor. Laor correctly summed up the Zionist state’s long-term plan, a plan that most Palestinians had understood since at least 1948:

"Israel is engaged in a long war of annihilation against Palestinian society. The objective is to destroy the Palestinian nation and drive it back into pre-modern groupings based on the tribe, the clan and the enclave. This is the last phase of the Zionist colonial mission, culminating in inaccessible townships, camps, villages, districts, all of them to be walled or fenced off, and patrolled by a powerful army which, in the absence of a proper military objective, is really an over-equipped police force, with F16s, Apaches, tanks, artillery, commando units and hi-tech surveillance at its disposal" (London Review of Books, January 2009).

With all the above in mind, one may now properly re-ask the questions: who are the real militants and aggressors? Who are the true fanatics? Who are the colonizers and who are the colonized, the occupiers and the occupied?

Ben-Gurion, being the quintessential colonial settler that he always was, of course already knew the answers long ago. Thus, as early as 1938 he would state: "Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves… A people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily...politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country" (Address at the Mapai Political Committee, June 7, 1938 as quoted in Zionism and the Palestinians (1979) by Simha Flapan, 141 – 142).

These, then, are just a few of the uncontroversial—yet somehow taboo—contextual and historical facts not allowed within mainstream media discourse. For year after year and decade after decade since 1948, Palestinians in Gaza and indeed throughout historical Palestine have been punished simply because they are, as author and journalist Ali Abunimah has ironically stated, the "wrong type of people." They are, as Noam Chomsky has also ironically termed them, "unpeople," and can therefore be ethnically cleansed, dispossessed, imprisoned, demonized, ignored and even massacred with impunity.

Israeli fabrications and propaganda (hasbara) on the other hand are permitted and even encouraged. Indeed, many a western journalist has made a career of spouting and recycling such fabrications. See, for example, the writings of the celebrated Thomas Friedman or the usual daily nonsense peddled as hard news at CNN and Fox. At the same time, the expectations of the Israeli state, its western allies and its media advocates is that Palestinians, unlike all other peoples, are not allowed to defend themselves or even march in protest and therefore have no other option except to shut up and die silently as the world watches on. This is essentially the western/Zionist definition of "peace."

Palestinians, who do not believe they are exceptional, and who have existed as a people on this earth for far longer than either their oppressors or their sponsors, naturally have other ideas.

Settlers Attack Homes In Hebron


Settlers Attack Homes In Hebron

Saed Bannoura

March 19, 2012

A group of armed extremist Israeli settlers of the Ramat Yishai illegal settlement outpost, in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, attacked on Sunday at night several Palestinian homes in Tal Romedia neighborhood, and chased the children around while cursing at them.


The Palestinian News and Info Agency, WAFA, reported that the settlers terrified several children while running after them, shouting and using dirty curse words.


Resident Hisham Al-Azza, one of the residents of Tal Romedia, stated that the settlers broke into his home while insulting him and his family, and even held his son, Younis, 8, in the dark for a hull hour.


Al-Azza added that the Israeli Police was in the area but did not even attempt to stop the settlers or force them away.


The attack is one of the latest attacks and violations carried out by extremist Israeli settlers against the residents and their lands in the occupied West Bank, including in occupied East Jerusalem.

Palestinians face repeated house demolitions in the Jordan Valley; al-Araqib

Palestinians face repeated house demolitions in the Jordan Valley; al-Araqib

Nora Barrows-Friedman

March 19, 2012

A girl collects her family’s belongings during a demolition in Jiftlik.
(Jordan Valley Solidarity Campaign / Flickr)
 
 
 
 












Last week, Israeli bulldozers razed homes and livestock pens in a wave of demolitions in the occupied Jordan Valley in the West Bank. And on 6 March, the Bedouin village of al-Araqib in the Naqab was destroyed for the 33rd time since July 2010. Because of the rampant demolitions, the residents of al-Araqib have now been forced to live in the village’s cemetery.

Demolitions in the Jordan Valley

According to reports by the Jordan Valley Solidarity Campaign and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Israeli forces invaded the village of Fasayil al-Wusta on 13 March, declaring the village a "closed military zone" and giving the residents 15 minutes to remove their belongings before their homes were demolished.
JVSC’s report adds:
At 8.30am on 13th March 2012, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) demolished 3 homes and 5 animal shelters in Fasayil al-Wusta. 9 military and police jeeps, 1 bulldozer and 2 civil administration jeeps arrived and surrounded the family declaring their homes a closed military zone.
… The homes belonged to Abed Yasim Rashaydeh Abu Nahar and his brothers Hassan Yasim Rashaydeh and Hador Mohammed. In total 30 family members live in the tents including 21 children.
[The] Israeli Civil Administration has ordered the whole community to evacuate the area or they will demolish every structure. Abu Nahar said, "…the young children especially, are always afraid the soldiers will come and attack our homes."
It is the 3rd time IOF has demolished their homes in less than 1 year. In June 2011, IOF demolished 18 homes and 3 animal shelters in Fasayil al-Wusta making 103 people homeless including 63 children. Many left making it even harder for the people who stayed. On 20th December 2011, "IOF demolished all Rashaydeh family homes and their animal shelters.
Living conditions are extremely difficult in this part of the village. Repeated home demolitions by IOF have made their situation even worse. At the moment they will rebuild their homes and animal shelters with the little resources available to them but continue to live in fear of the next demolition. The community has received some emergency humanitarian aid but this doesn’t address the needs of the community.
The next day, 14 March, Israeli bulldozers raided the village of Jiftlik and demolished several homes. JVSC reports that 22 persons were made homeless.
The report adds:
One bulldozer and 12 Israeli jeeps arrived and surrounded the families declaring the areas closed military zones.
The first house, a three room structure, was located in Abu al-Ajaj (al-Jiftlik) and belonged to Ayman Meteb Mahoud Ideas. He, his wife and his 5 children were given just 30 minutes to remove their belongings from the house but, as the owner of the house explained, "we didn’t have time to take all your properties, we left inside our kitchen and all the kitchenware and now they lie under the ruins of my house." Three months ago the family received a demolition order.
The second house was located in al-Jiftlik, near the main road and belonged to Yousef Bsharat. The army demolished his house without leaving his family the time to take their belongings. 7 people were displaced. Some months ago the family received an order to stop the construction of the building and, as the owner of the house said, "we didn’t continue to build, but today the army came and destroyed everything I had."
The third building, located in Makhroq (al-Jiftlik), belonged to Sulaiman Tawfiq Daraghmeh and it was a 3 room summer metal house and while the demolition occurred the owner wasn’t there.
Several days earlier, on 8 March, Israeli forces destroyed farmland in the Jordan Valley village of Al Farisiya. JVSC stated:
As women around the world celebrated International Women’s Day, the women of this community had their livelihoods destroyed. This was not an isolated incident - during the last week Israeli soldiers have been training extensively with tanks and armored vehicles in the northern Jordan Valley.
JVSC has uploaded more photographs of the recent demolitions to their account on Flickr.

Chronic demolitions continue in al-Araqib (Naqab)

Meanwhile, at noon on 6 March in the "unrecognized village" of al-Araqib in the Naqab (Negev), residential structures were destroyed for the 33rd time since July 2010 by Israeli bulldozers. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) has been a key player in organizing the demolitions and "clearing land" to make way for a forest on al-Araqib’s land.
An Israeli bulldozer razing al-Araqib lands on 6 February, 2012.
(Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality)
The Electronic Intifada spoke with Michal Rotem, coordinator and spokeswoman of the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality (DuKium), who said that because of the rampant demolitions in the last 20 months, al-Araqib’s residents have now been forced to move into the village’s cemetery.
  Rotem added: "The residents had a few shacks outside [the parameters of the cemetery], including the hospitality tent, where people go to drink tea and welcome visitors – these were all demolished. The [Israeli forces] got into the area and within a few minutes they were finished. During the first few demolitions, [the structures] were all cement, but now when we’re talking about a couple of shacks, it only takes a few minutes to finish."
Following the demolition, DuKium tweeted:
Coexistence Forum 's Twitter
For the first time residents of Al Arakib were asked to hand over their ID cards and held until demolition was finished….
Mar 06 via HootSuite Favorite Retweet Reply
Last month, DuKium photographed a bulldozer razing soil on al-Araqib land. The bulldozer was emblazoned with a JNF logo (pictured below).
An Israeli bulldozer in al-Araqib, 6 February 2012. Note the JNF logo. 
(Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality)
 
Close-up of the JNF logo on the Caterpillar bulldozer.
(Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality)