why is this okay?

From ISM and Mondoweiss. Why do we think that the kidnapping of 70 men and boys by Israeli forces, since 2008, for protesting the building of a wall which will, for all intents and purposes, jail them in the oft-quoted open-air prison, and which will block and blocks them off from the land they have lived on all their lives and for many generations - why do we think this kidnapping, and the building of the wall is okay? The occupation, even?



Why do we think it is okay to herd people into queues like sheep waiting for a dip? Think it is okay to limit their movement? Why do we think it is okay to deny people medication and goods? Why do we think it is okay deny people their land and livelihoods?

PHOTO: Rina Castelnuovo, New York Times
Article found here.

in a way i'm yearning to be done with all this measuring of truth

I had a dream once. Nick Cave was in it. We were at a party, and he chose me. Now, over at PAN we've been having discussions of how you feel when people get the wrong idea about you. My particular hang-up, more so when I was younger than now, is when I'm wearing something really, really, really straight. Maybe as an experiment, maybe for work, and someone like Nick Cave sees me and thinks, Wow, that chick's really straight. I'm never going to talk to her. Whilst my (silent but rapidly beating) heart of hearts is crying out, but I'm just like you! I'm a goth on the inside! I'm tortured and angsty! This Amish cover is all a clever ruse! Then I sob into my scrunched up tissue, ensuring that, not only does Nick not give me a second glance, he looks away in pity and disgust. Or sneers. He's got quite the sneer on him.

It was more of an issue when I was insecure and in my twenties. Now that I'm insecure and in my forties I know for sure that no-one is going to mistake me for hip. Still, I don't want to be mistaken for a school marm just yet, even though I am one, except for the marm bit (guess that just makes me a school).

So, the important part about this dream is that it also featured a guy I was seeing a lot of at the time. In fact I was smitten. It's a shame that the feeling was not officially reciprocated. As our relationship progressed, I ended up having a dream where, like Ozymandias, he was this rather vitriolic talking torso, his arms cut off at the triceps, no lower body to speak of, but still spouting wisdoms - he was the very model of a very modern major talking head, or John Bobbit at the least. Vitriolic but no longer virile. Oh, and I know Ozymandias didn't talk, well his statue didn't, but I'm sure he was very eloquent when he ordered the artisans to sculpt his likeness.

Oh my, the Specials are on the radio, but that is an aside (just to show you that really, I am still hip by referencing bands from my teens that are maybe still influential. I like ska but not reggae - I don't like cricket, oh no...).

Anyway, before the talking torso dream came about, well, talking torso with head, we were at a party (in the first dream) and the one with whom (?) I was smitten had to go meet a Dr. Zhivago kind of train, such as the Orient Express, to meet his ex, who had basically kicked him in the head when she'd broken up with him. He met her because he rode a high horse of propriety (unlike me) and felt he had an obligation to do so (to meet her), and because of course, she was the very major model of some form of perfection (unlike me - not that I'm bitter. No, no, no. Special Agent Dana Scully was his perfect woman, and I cannot think of someone more unlike her than me. He wasn't going to meet Scully on the Orient Express, by the way. Remember, it was all a dream. Except for the Scully being his perfect woman bit).

I think Nick then picked me up, twirled me in the air. Hah! Dana Scully lover, that'll show you (he was a Nick Cave fan, too). And we talked about our favourite Abba songs. I am sure I was even wearing an old, and not really liked, but much worn, bright green jumper, pilled and unravelling. Daggy in the Australian parlance. I was back to being awkward and fourteen, at least in my dress sense. Nick was alluring and strangely down to earth (the radio is playing reggae Beatles now [not bad], just to spite me). Considering Nick the Stripper, Mercy Seat and so on, the wild heroin use, and the dark, dark psyche, Nick Cave is probably the same as you and me. Actually, my sister used to write these wickedly dark plays, but I knew she wasn't a wickedly dark person. Maybe they were just wickedly dark because I knew the background. Family maybe shouldn't read family's work (hi sis!). Not that there were any stretching racks or cat o' nine tails or stocks lurking around our suburban home. As I recall, her plays, like our house, were permeated with the smell of the spaghetti bolognese that our father often cooked. Anyway, back to the nefarious Nick. It could be that the arts is what saves many a wicked thought from being a wicked actuality.

Which is why more people should pick up paint brushes instead of guns.

And should allow women to give birth in hospitals rather than out in the open at checkpoints, surrounded by men.

a wedding that won't be attended

My friend, let's call him Toufiq, his nephew is getting married. He has ten brothers and sisters, that is, not twenty, but a total of ten. I think there are four women and six men. The men are part of the great Palestinian diaspora, the women have married and still live in the West Bank in the occupied Palestinian Territories. His nephew is getting married this summer, that is, the son of one of his sisters.

Toufiq left the West Bank in 1984 to study overseas. He studied in both the Philippines and India, gaining a PhD in linguistics. He is close to my age. 40 something. He and his brothers all work in the Gulf countries: U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Oman. He was lucky to go to Jordan instead of Lebanon, so he got a passport, instead of indefinite internment in a refugee camp. I've spoken about him before. His family had money, so he and his brothers got an education, and maybe because of that, he never would have ended up in a refugee camp no matter where he went. The sisters had the option to study too, but they didn't take it up.

His parents died while he was in India. That would have been in the nineties or late eighties. Both were only sixty. First his mother died, then two weeks later, his father. They say he died of a broken heart. They were farmers. They made olive oil. His older brothers and sisters remember when the West Bank was under Jordanian control, and Toufiq remembers it only under Israeli. As for his parents, I am not sure.

Anyway, if you have not returned to Palestine for six years, despite being born there, and despite growing up there, the Israelis no longer consider you a resident. The only way he can visit his homeland is for his sister to write a letter to the Israeli authorities, and if all is quiet in the West Bank, then he is granted permission to enter as a visitor. He did this once in 1995. So, in twenty-five years he has visited his homeland once, and he is not considered Palestinian, I guess, according to Israeli law. Unable to return, and really, unwilling to return until conditions improve, he has lived outside of his homeland longer than within it, and as stated above, under the occupying power, he cannot return even if he wanted to. However, under international law, the right to return is sacrosanct, and is particularly pertinent in the case of the Palestinians.

Unable to exercise the fundamental right of self-determination during the period of a the mandate, although recognized in the Covenant of the League of nations as a provisionally "independent" nation, the Palestinian people have struggled to regain this right since 1947, when the United Nations became involved in the Palestine issue and recommended the partition of Palestine into two states – one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish. While Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948, on the basis of the Untied nations partition resolution, war and politics (both Israeli and Arab) prevented the Palestinian Arab state envisaged in the resolution in the resolution from coming into existence

Instead, after Israeli declarations of independence in 1948, and the consequent annexation of about 70% of the land designated for the Palestinian state, many Palestinians fled. When the remaining lands were invaded and occupied in 1967, further ethnic cleansing and exodus occurred and is still occurring.

The right of a person to return to his home in his native country traditionally has been included among an individual's fundamental rights. Only in the case of criminals was its denial regarded as a justifiable punishment, exile or banishment being regarded as one of the more severe penalties.

Remember the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

"1. Everyone has a right to freedom of movement and residence without the borders of each State.

"2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own and to return to his country".

Israel does not adhere to these principles in relation to the Palestinians. It, on the other hand, has the Law of Return, [which was]...enacted in 1950, [and which]... gives Jews, those of Jewish ancestry, and their spouses the right to migrate to and settle in Israel and gain citizenship. At the same time, they can expel Israeli Arabs who are born in the state and raised there. Israel, in the past, has especially been scared of those promoting peaceful forms of resistance to occupation, stating: ''This nonviolence is a smart way to trigger Israeli violence and thus incite the uprising,'' which then triggers deportation in the case of the expulsion of a Jerusalem born and raised Arab who gained American citizenship. His story, linked to above, is one case among many. In the past, the current foreign minister, Lieberman, has suggested expulsion as a good policy for all Israeli Arabs, despite the generations upon generations they have lived on the land. He still seems to hold these views and they proved very popular at the recent elections.

Anyway, it is not necessarily safe for an adult male in the West Bank, and can anyone really bear the humiliation of check points, random strip searches and the constant presence of a foreign army nearby? The curtailing of movement and day to day life? The possibility of going to jail to join the other 10,000 Palestinians, many being held for many years without a trial, or worse? [T]en Palestinian legislative members and political leaders who are supposedly associated with Hamas in West Bank were kidnapped by Israeli forces the other day in relation to the breakdown of negotiations over the return of Israeli soldier Gilad Shilat. There are many representatives of the Palestinian government, both Fatah and Hamas, in Israeli jails. Imagine how we would feel if New Zealand kept making incursions into Australia and kidnapping our members of parliament? Business as usual, I guess, and government representatives are the ones who make it into the news. There are many more who are not important enough to gain the few lines of print that newspapers allocate them. There are some who are dangerous. I doubt all 10,000 are. There seem to be just as many, if not more, dangerous IDF members. So saying, I wouldn't want my friend to take the risk of going to his nephew's wedding and possibly not coming back.
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From Al Jazeera . Northern Ireland, anyone?

Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Umm el-Fahm, said a group of about 100 Israeli right-wingers wanted to march in the town, home to about 15,000 Palestinians.

He said the group's march followed a supreme court decision that allowed them [the Israelis] to "excerise their sovereignty over the city".

'Provocative decision'

"They wanted to come with Israeli flags and many people thought that was a very provocative decision," he said.

challenges

The number of West Bank barriers (roadblocks, checkpoints, and other obstacles) has increased nearly 70% in the last three years, and now exceeds 625 -- this in a land about the size of Delaware. (Sandy Tolan, Mitchell's Challenge: After Gaza, Five Questions about Palestinian and Israeli Realities, 2009).
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Please read Eva Bartlett's blog , too, and also view these pictures below of just how much destruction there is in Gaza which come from another Gaza blog, Tales to Tell. The pictures are from the post Temporary shelters in Jabalia , but the whole blog contains straightforward, but humane, stories of the people in Gaza at the moment. If you skip everything else in this post, read those two blogs just mentioned.

Jabalia is a refugee camp. This is what it used to look like in 2006. In view of all the destruction, This decision by the BBC and Sky TV (Murdoch owned) is unfathomable, really (Sky joins BBC on Gaza screening ban, 26 January, 2009, ITN).

As Human Rights Watch has said, and other international bodies:

Even though it withdrew its permanent military forces and settlers in 2005, Israel remains an occupying power in Gaza under international law because it continues to exercise effective day-to-day control over important aspects of Gazan life. Israel has the obligation to protect its population from rocket attacks from Gaza, but it also must ensure the safety and well-being of the Gazan population under its occupation (January 22, 2008).

These two places are pretty close to each other. I imagine the contrast between the day to day running of each place is pretty stark and severe. In the West Bank, that is further explored by Sandy Tolan's opening article.
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Lastly, an interesting article on destruction of production capability in Gaza (An assault on the peace process, Donald Macintyre, The Independent, 26 January, 2009).