Month: May 2016

“. . . raze to the ground every farm and every village . . .” (Fawaz Turki)

Harold KnightLeave a comment
1-IMG_3404
Israeli By-Pass Road over Cremisan Valley near Bethlehem as seen from Palestinians-only road (Photo: Harold Knight, November 18, 2015)

❶ Report: Israel plans massive land takeover in Hebron Governorate through bypass road
❷ Israeli civil administration remapped 62,000 West Bank hectares to expand settlements
❸ Palestinians to form ‘protection committees’ against Israeli settler violence
❹ Opinion/Analysis: ISRAEL’S  COLONIALISM  IS  FAILING  AND  FALLING
❺ POETRY by Fawaz Turki
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ REPORT:  ISRAEL  PLANS  MASSIVE  LAND  TAKEOVER  IN  HEBRON  GOVERNORATE  THROUGH  BYPASS  ROAD
Palestine News Network
May 31, 2016
Since the beginning of April 2016, the Israeli machinery and bulldozers affiliated to the so-called Israeli Civil Administration (ILA) commenced the construction of a new bypass road on lands of Halhul town in the northern Hebron Governorate. The work being implemented on the ground is . . . a new Israeli bypass road that extends all the way from Al Arroub refugee camp north of Hebron to reach Halhul town, through lands of Beit Ummer.       MORE . . .  
First published:
poica.org – Monitoring Israeli Colonization Activities in the Palestinian Territories
April 26, 2016

The closure system in the West Bank refers to a series of restrictions placed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to control the movement of more than 2.3 million Palestinians living there . . . .
___The closure system has become steadily more sophisticated and has increasingly channelled Palestinian traffic onto smaller, local roads, leaving main . . . routes reserved exclusively for Israeli settlers to travel to settlements inside the West Bank [. . . .]
___ The construction of the Barrier has meant that Palestinians can no longer travel through Jerusalembut instead have to take a winding road around the city. Once the Barrier is completed this road will pass under the Barrier through specially constructed tunnels thereby preventing Palestinians from using Israeli roads that go to settlements [. . . .]
___ The urban and manufacturing hub of the main towns of Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron and Jericho, that are critical for Palestinian jobs and the economy, are also difficult to access because of tight restrictions. [. . . .]
___As the closure system becomes more institutionalised it has a myriad of other impacts [. . . .]

  • Shearer, David. “Territorial Fragmentation Of The West Bank.” Forced Migration Review 26 (2006): 22-23.    ARTICLE. . .

❷ ISRAELI  CIVIL  ADMINISTRATION  REMAPPED  62,000  WEST  BANK  HECTARES  TO  EXPAND  SETTLEMENTS
Palestine News Network
May 31, 2016
The Israeli civil administration in 2015 has re-mapped an area of 62 thousand hectares in the West Bank in order to expand illegal Israeli settlements. The old maps are being digitally scanned to enhance their accuracy.
___The report, composed by Dror Etkes, founder of Kerem Navot, an NGO that monitors the Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, is based over the map digitizing at COGAT.
___“It’s important to understand that the mapping efforts are directed almost exclusively at the depth of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and to settlements which are well outside the ‘settlement clusters,’ as well as, most emphatically, to areas declared by Israel to be ‘fire zones’ despite the fact that in reality they are part of the lands reserve which Israel gradually assigns to settlement,” Etkes told Ha’aretz.       MORE . . . 

Recognizing now that the Palestinian narrative gets erased and misappropriated through a biblical theology of dispossession, what does this mean, in practical terms, for the conflict? How does it function on a daily basis? If a people have no history, then their ability to interrogate the past and engage with it for the present will constantly encounter insurmountable limits. In this regard, the first act of true liberation and freedom is to be located in the mind, with the reclamation of the history and memory of the Palestinians and Palestine.
___We must also note that to interrogate the above ques­ tions would be a normal academic exercise if it had to do with any other region in the world, but when it comes to Palestine and its people, the starting point for many tends to be the rendition of the familiar biblical narrative, ending with the creation of modern Israel by Zionism. Indeed, the success of modern Zionism in Palestine complicates our attempts to locate and treat the history of the indig­ enous Palestinians, since the colonial project undertook the normative strategy of negating or problematizing the relationship of the people to their ancestral lands.

  • BAZIAN, HATEM. “The Indigenous Palestinians.” Harvard International Review 35.3 (2014): 40-43.   ARTICLE . . .
Israel-Settlements
Israeli West Bank Settlement (Photo: Flikr, posted in The Oxford University Politics Blog, March 1, 2013)

❸ PALESTINIANS  TO  FORM  ‘PROTECTION  COMMITTEES’  AGAINST  ISRAELI  SETTLER  VIOLENCE
Middle East Eye
May 30, 2016
Nearly 200 members of the most isolated and under threat Palestinian communities living in the occupied West Bank came together on Monday for the launch of a new project aimed at establishing “protection committees” to document Israeli human rights violations.
___Community leaders and families from villages across the governorates of Hebron and Bethlehem met at a school in the tiny poverty stricken village of Imnezel, which is surrounded by Israeli settlements filled with new and luxurious homes deemed illegal under international law.
___Sheltered from the hot sun by a beige tarpaulin in a makeshift marquee, Palestinians welcomed the launch of a new three-year project by international aid agency ActionAid, which will see the formation of local community protection committees that will document human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.    MORE . . .

[. . . . ]
As we have seen, the ambiguity surrounding the formal status of the Israeli state in the OTP creates a governmental void. This void is filled, inter alia, by greater freedom of action of the settlers, who, in effect, act as informal agents of the state, behaving as vigilantes and taking the law into their own hands. The settlers’ violence . . . brings Israeli dominance to areas with a scarce presence of military forces, generating ad hoc ‘effective control’ over Palestinian territory and population even in the absence of state officials. . .  based on permanent-temporariness and political ambivalence. Such actions contribute to the ambivalence surrounding the identity of ‘the sovereign’ and form localized, temporary ‘sovereign’ domains [. . . .]
___The elusive political and legal structural frameworks of the Israeli occupation are important factors of this phenomenon, generating the necessary ‘degrees of freedom’, so to speak, that allow, and even support, a proliferation of settlers’ violence against Palestinian civilians. In other words, the Israeli state itself, assisted by its agents, works in collusion with the settlers, and maintains the structural preconditions for this provisional political activity, even if it challenges its exclusive jurisdiction.

  • Gazit Nir. (Ruppin Academic Center, Israel). “State-sponsored Vigilantism: Jewish Settlers’ Violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”  Sociology 49.3 (2015): 438–454.

❹ Opinion/Analysis: ISRAEL’S  COLONIALISM  IS  FAILING  AND  FALLING 
The Middle East Monitor – MEMO
Zaakir Ahmed Mayet
May 30, 2016
It is often easy to be absorbed by plebeian geopolitics, the sectarian divides plaguing Syria or the outward lack of unity amongst various resistance movements within the Middle East and North Africa. On the face of it, the situation is particularly bleak . . . .
___ . . . . However, the world has unmasked the [Israeli] state as one which cannot function within the fabric of normal society. It has become harder to protect and defend the outlandish action of Israel, be it the continued illegal blockade of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and slow strangulation by the Apartheid Wall of those in the West Bank; the occupation in contravention of international law; or the continued development of colonial-settlements on stolen Palestinian land. . . .       MORE . . .   

“THE  SEED  KEEPERS,”  BY  FAWAZ  TURKI 
(A Recital)

Burn our land
burn our dream
pour acid onto our songs
cover with sawdust
the blood of our massacred people
muffle with your technology
the screams of our imprisoned patriots,
destroy,
destroy
our grass and soil
raze to the ground
every farm and every village
our ancestors had built,
destroy every city and every town
every tree and every home
every book and every law,
flatten with your bombs
every valley,
erase with your edicts
our past
our literature
our metaphor,
denude the forests
and the earth
till no insect
no word
can find a place to hide.
Do that and more,
I do not fear your tyranny.
I guard one seed
of a tree
my forefathers have saved
that I shall plant again
in my homeland.

About Fawaz Turki (b. 1940)
From ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN PALESTINIAN LITERATURE. Ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Available from Columbia University Press

“. . . Where’s my father now? So we might join hands . . .” (Waleed al-Halees)

Harold KnightLeave a comment

PLEASE NOTE: The content of this blog is changed: it presents fewer news items and gives more background for those items. This will provide deeper understanding of the issues shaping the news. All articles without direct links can be found through an EBSCO search in any library with online databases.

b'tselem
A still from July 2013 video footage taken by Israeli human rights watchdog group B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories – shows five-year-old Wadi Maswadeh and his younger sister with an unknown adult surrounded by soldiers before Wadi’s arrest

❶ Israeli forces detain alleged ‘Hamas cell’ behind Jerusalem bus explosion
❷ Switzerland gets active on Palestinian reconciliation
❸ Report: “Israel Issued 729 Administrative Detention Orders This Year”
❹ Opinion/Analysis: WHY  B’TSELEM’S  LATEST  REPORT  IS  GROUND  BREAKING
❺ POETRY by Waleed al-Halees
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ ISRAELI  FORCES  DETAIN  ALLEGED  ‘HAMAS CELL’  BEHIND  JERUSALEM  BUS  EXPLOSION
Ma’an News Agency
May 29, 2016
The Israeli army announced on Sunday that Israel’s internal security service agency had apprehended six Palestinians belonging to a “Hamas terror cell” allegedly behind a Jerusalem bus explosion in April.
___An Israeli army spokesperson told Ma’an that the Shin Bet agency had detained Palestinians in the occupied West Bank district of Bethlehem in past weeks, over their alleged involvement in a group which planned an explosion on a bus in southern Jerusalem on April 18 [. . . .]
___The Hamas movement claimed responsibility for the explosion . . .    MORE . . .   

Why and how young men choose to join violent terrorist/military organisations – often using their bodies as deadly weapons – is a matter that continues to puzzle social scientists and the policy world, as well as society at large. This enduring question, which is ultimately about humanity and the allure of violence, has become particularly salient given the changing nature of the global landscape concerning security development. [. . . .]
___Hamas is particularly interesting because of its unique positioning as a legal, democratic, legitimate political actor, as a terrorist organisation, as a paramilitary force, and as a social association. Hamas has used both suicide bombings and rocket attacks as part of its political struggle against Israelis, and has been classified as a terrorist organisation by the EU and the US, as well as by Russia, Israel, Japan and Canada. However, the Arabic “Islamist” party democratically won the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, with a political platform that underlines Shari’a as the basis of the law. Thereafter Hamas has reduced their “terrorist” activity.

  • Malmström, Maria Frederika. “Porous Masculinities: Agential Political Bodies Among Male Hamas Youth.” Etnográfica: Revista Do Centro De Estudos De Antropologia Social 19.2 (2015): 301-322.   ARTICLE . . .   

❷ SWITZERLAND  GETS  ACTIVE  ON  PALESTINIAN  RECONCILIATION
Al-Monitor (Palestine Pulse)
Ahmad Melhem
May 27, 2016
Paul Garnier, the Swiss ambassador to Palestine, visited the Gaza Strip through the Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing, which is controlled by Israel, twice in a short period. The first visit was on April 6, and the second on May 9. These visits attest to the Swiss’ intensified action regarding reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, hoping to overcome the division that has plagued the Palestinian scene since 2007.      MORE . . .  

Oslo is history. Twenty years have passed since the last significant peace accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The intervening years have been marked by an intifada and three military interventions in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces that have left around seven thousand Palestinians and one thousand Israelis dead. The so-called “Peace Process” is in tatters and there seems to be no way of re-stitching it.
___But the West still can’t let go of the nostalgic image of Bill Clinton inviting the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to shake hands with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat in September 1993. The handshake was real, but the accord itself was illusory.

  • Casertano, Stefano. “Broken Peaces.” World Affairs 177.5 (2015): 69-74.     ARTICLE . . .    
hamas
Rally celebrating the surprise 2006 Hamas election victory in the West Bank (Photo: BBC News, July 11, 2014)

❸ REPORT:  “ISRAEL  ISSUED  729  ADMINISTRATIVE  DETENTION  ORDERS  THIS  YEAR”
International Middle East Media Center – IMEMC
May 28, 2016
Riyad al-Ashqar, the media spokesperson of The Palestinian Prisoners’ Center for Studies, has reported that the Israeli occupation authorities issued 729 arbitrary Administrative Detention orders, since the beginning of this year, and that most of the orders were renewals of previous ones.
___Al-Ashqar stated that these numbers are a %35 increase of the same period of last years, when Israel issued 493 orders.        MORE . . .  

Thus, if the authorities could guarantee better conditions to detainees by holding them in Israel, rather than in the OT as required under Article 76 of the Convention, they were conforming with ‘the substantive provisions of the Geneva Convention relating to conditions of detention’. The rhetoric in this judgment would seem to imply that, by holding that the Convention should be interpreted for the benefit of the protected persons, the Court was departing from the approach described above that prefers state interests to the rights of individuals, and was holding that the Convention should be interpreted for the benefit of the protected persons. However, the rhetoric was employed in the concrete case so as to justify the authorities’ refusal to comply with the strict requirements of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The decision therefore appears to be consistent with the general approach of the Court mentioned above, which favors the interpretation that supports the government’s position.

  • Kretzmer, David. “The Law of Belligerent Occupation in the Supreme Court of Israel.” International Review of the Red Cross 94.885 (2012): 207-236. ARTICLE . . .  

❹ Opinion/Analysis: WHY  B’TSELEM’S  LATEST  REPORT  IS  GROUND  BREAKING
The Middle East Monitor – MEMO
Asa Winstanley
May 28, 2016
B’Tselem is probably the most influential Israeli human rights group there is.  The group was founded during the first Palestinian intifada, and thus has been working on compiling evidence of violations of Palestinian human rights in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip for more the 25 years.   [. . . .]
___A turning point in the group’s history came this week, as it published a new report titled “The Occupation’s Figleaf”. In it, B’Tselem announced that it would no longer refer complaints of abuses to Israel’s military law enforcement system in the West Bank. [. . . .]
___ The B’Tselem report explains the group’s reasons for this seminal decision: “There is no longer any point in pursuing justice and defending human rights by working with a system whose real function is measured by its ability to continue to successfully cover up unlawful acts and protect perpetrators.”      MORE . . .   

Colonialism is not just about a seminal moment of conquest but rather the implementation of various designs that over decades actively and radically alter laws, land use policies, property rights, and that also reconfigure urban spaces with new city planning strategies.
___Race and new racist logics are crucial to these violent transformations — and they are usually quite violent in one way or another. Israeli governance, I assert in the book**, is consistent with settler-colonialism, a specific form of colonial rule that seeks to replace one group of people with another.  [. . . .]
___What I witnessed in Jerusalem and other places was a Palestinian population increasingly “warehoused” in deeply circumscribed and policed areas — almost completely under Israeli control. These towns, villages, neighborhoods, and refugee camps are often surrounded by Israel’s destructive (and illegal) separation barrier. At the same time, those who resist Israeli military rule (even children as young as 10) are routinely detained and most of these detainees, Israeli and other human rights organizations tell us, are badly beaten or tortured.Interview withThomas Abowd. “Jerusalem: Colonized City.”

  • Against The Current 31.181 (2016): 25-28.     ARTICLE . . .
  • ** Colonial Jerusalem. The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012 (Syracuse University Press, 2014).

____
from “DAYS  IN  THE  LIFE  OF  A  PALESTINIAN  BOY,”  BY  WALEED  AL-HALEES  (B. 1952)
[. . . .]
Where’s my father so I might tell him
his seed is not content merely with life,
a faint hope for life?
that a warm womb
is equal to all kinds of life.
Where’s my father now?
So we might join hands
and laugh, spitting, gripping life with force
(no life can be had but by force)
―I swear I’ve lied to God just now
for life taken by force only equals
all the warm wombs of women.
Forgive me, Mother,
Slowly I became the wise child of this life!
[. . . .]
―Translated by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye

from ANTHOLOGY  OF  MODERN  PALESTINIAN  LITERATURE. Ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Available from Columbia University Press. Waleed al-Halees (b. 1952), a contemporary Palestinian poet from Gaza who currently lives in a compulsory exile, composed a poem entitled, “A Poem on a Closed Summer” in which ‘ among other things ‘ he mentions the hardships and agonies he encounters, but he never despairs.

 

 

“. . . Can defiled cities be the outcome . . .” (Harun Hashim Rasheed)

Harold KnightLeave a comment

PLEASE NOTE: The content of this blog is changed: it presents fewer news items and gives more background for those items in hope of providing deeper understanding of the issues shaping the news. All articles without direct links can be found through a search in any library with EBSCO online databases. See FINDING  SCHOLARLY  ARTICLES  above.

Protest against the wall, Bilin, West Bank, 28,2,2014
A Palestinian youth places a flag on the Israeli wall during a protest marking nine years of struggle against the wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in, February 28, 2014. (Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

❶ Israeli forces avoid crowd dispersal weapons in Bilin protest for first time in 11 years
❷ Israel Delivers Demolition Notices for Palestinian Houses in Jerusalem Town
❸ Opinion/Analysis: THE  PALESTINIANS  IMPRISONED  BY  ISRAEL  FOR  THEIR  FACEBOOK  POSTS
❹ POETRY by Harun Hashim Rasheed
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ ISRAELI  FORCES  AVOID  CROWD  DISPERSAL  WEAPONS  IN  BILIN  PROTEST  FOR  FIRST  TIME  IN  11  YEARS
Ma’an News Agency
May 27, 2016
For the first time in the 11-year history of weekly popular resistance demonstrations in the central occupied West Bank village of Bilin, Israeli forces did not use tear gas and other crowd control weapons to disperse protesters [. . . .]
___Protesters raised Palestinian flags and marched in the streets chanting songs of unity and resistance [. . . .]
___Bilin has long been one of the most active villages in organized opposition against Israeli policies, this year marking the eleventh consecutive year of weekly marches against expanding nearby settlements and the separation wall which separates residents from their private land.      MORE . . .

Snaking its way through the West Bank, weaving an intricate path that encircles, isolates and sometimes divides Palestinian cities and villages, the Israeli ‘separation’ wall stands as a stark symbol of both the occupation and overall Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The ‘wall’ is in fact a hybrid system of control, made up of a complex mix of electronic fences, dirt paths, barbed wire, radar, cameras, trenches, checkpoints and 8-metre tall concrete blocks, with almost 70 per cent of its path completed since construction began  in 2002. As one of the most prominent and contested instances of such a structure built in the last decade, the Israeli wall is particularly unique in a global scene increasingly captivated by the fortification of borders and the building of barriers, in the sense that the line it traces is disputed and not internationally recognized [. . . .]
___Perhaps the most apparent among these factors is that the wall by no means represents a simple division of territory: it does not run along the 1967 borders (the 1949 Armistice line) that are internationally agreed upon as the basis for future peace settlement, and in fact . . . only 15 per cent of the wall sits on the 1967 borders, with the remaining 85 per cent cutting at times 18 kilometres deep into the West Bank . . . .  Not only are some 80 Israeli settlements located behind it (with an overall population of approximately 75,000), but the wall also separates Palestinian from Palestinian – cutting off neighbouring villages from each other and sometimes dividing them in two. This is most evident in Jerusalem.

  • Busbridge, Rachel. “Performing Colonial Sovereignty and the Israeli ‘Separation’ Wall.” SOCIAL  IDENTITIES  19.5 (2013): 653-669.   SOURCE.

❷ ISRAEL  DELIVERS  DEMOLITION  NOTICES  FOR  PALESTINIAN  HOUSES  IN  JERUSALEM  TOWN
Palestine News and Information Agency – WAFA
May 28, 2016
Israeli police Saturday delivered demolition notices for at least two Palestinian houses in Silwan town, south of Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, said WAFA correspondent.
___Israeli police along with staff from the so-called Jerusalem Municipality raided the Silwan neighborhood of Ein al-Louza, where they handed notices to demolish the houses . . . .
___Israel has systematically targeted Palestinian residential structures in Silwan with demolition orders.      MORE . . .

Israel ‘s policy―one may even say obsession―of systematically demolishing Palestinian homes, urban neighborhoods and entire towns and villages goes back to 1948 and continues with a vengeance up to this moment, both within Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The motivation is obvious: it is merely one expression of the twin processes of ethnic cleansing and Judaization, both of those, in tum, being consequences of defining Israel as a “Jewish state” and taking the steps necessary to make it so. The house demolition policy represents the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: denying the Palestinian people the right to remain in the Land of Israel, either as a national collective or as individuals, and their displacement by Jews. [. . . .]
___The “neighborhoods” built in East Jerusalem serve to isolate Palestinian populations in small and disconnected enclaves, and to prevent the development and expansion of the Palestinian side of the city. Together with a new system of Israeli “ring roads” and the creation of a “Greater Jerusalem” enveloped by a wall, Jerusalem is being transformed from a city into a region dominating the entire central portion of the West Bank.

  • Halper, Jeff. “The Policy Of House Demolitions In East Jerusalem: What It Is, How It Is Done And To What End.” PALESTINE-ISRAEL  JOURNAL  OF  POLITICS,  ECONOMICS  &  CULTURE 17.1/2 (2011): 74-82.  SOURCE. 
search
Israeli soldiers stop and search a young Palestinian man walking near the Damascus gate. They forced him to “raise your arms” to pat him down. A member of a Sabeel Witness delegation crossed the street to investigate and was blocked. (Photo: Harold Knight, November 13, 2015)

❸ Opinion/Analysis: THE  PALESTINIANS  IMPRISONED  BY  ISRAEL  FOR  THEIR  FACEBOOK  POSTS
The Middle East Monitor – MEMO
Asa Winstanley
May 28, 2016
The propaganda goes that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East”. But for anyone familiar with the realities that Israel imposes on the Palestinians and on its neighbours, this has always been a cruel joke.
___The West Bank, occupied in violation of international law by Israel since 1967, is for Palestinians a military dictatorship imposed by Israel. The 600,000 or so (estimates vary) violent Israeli colonists that live in the West Bank settlements are the direct beneficiaries of this dictatorship.      MORE . . .

There is a natural inclination among political scientists and politicians involved in peacemaking to look at the past and memory as obstacles to progress. They recommend liberating oneself from the past as a prerequisite for peace. This view is entrenched in a wider context of reconciliation and mediation policies that emerged in the United States after the Second World War. This school of thought was based on a businesslike approach that treats the past as an irrelevant feature in the making of peace.
___[. . . .] Noam Chomsky, noting such a tendency in the Middle East peace process, concludes that the result was a never-ending “peace process” which was not meant to bring peace, but rather provides jobs and preoccupations for a large group of people belonging to the peace industry.
___This philosophy has informed the peace process in Palestine ever since 1948 and in particular after 1967. It has destroyed the chances of peace in Israel and Palestine; only the re-introduction of the historical dimension can save the peace effort. The starting point that has been totally neglected . . . is the year 1948.

  • Pappe, Ilan. “Historiophobia or the Enslavement of History: The Role of the 1948 Ethnic Cleansing in the Contemporary Peace Process.” ARAB  STUDIES  QUARTERLY 38.1 (2016): 402-417.  SOURCE.

(Note: The poetic image below is of the speaker being forced against a wall, either for search by soldiers or for execution. It is, however, an uncanny [prophetic?] description of the “separation” wall, construction of which did not begin until exactly ten years after this poem was published.)

“RAISE  YOUR  ARMS,”  BY  HARUN  HASHIM  RASHEED

―Raise your arms . . . .
they aimed their guns at me . . . .
―Raise your arms . . . .

I stood, my eye flaming
and scorching with anger
as an insistent film of events
assailed me.
Can defiled cities be
the outcome of our struggle?
Have years of suffering,
long days of vigilance
in trenches, on hills
and in tattered tents
led to this?

The world blackened in my eyes
my hand on the wall
as guns were pointing at me
I wished the wall would fall on my head
My comrades and I waited
for their bullets
for their bullets

They walked away, and the wall
remained, gazing back at us
waiting for a fiery volcano, for the flames.
―translated by Sharif Elmusa and Naomi Shihab Nye

Harun Hashim Rasheed (b. 1927)
Born in Gaza, poet Harun Hashim Rasheed witnessed, as a child, British soldiers demolishing his and his neighbors’ home in reprisal against Palestinian rebels, an incident which left a deep mark on him as a poet. After obtaining a Higher Teacher Training Diploma from Gaza College, he worked as a teacher until 1954. He then became director of the Sawt Al-Arab broadcasting station in Gaza. After the fall of Gaza to the Israelis in 1967, he was harassed by the Israeli occupation forces and was eventually compelled to leave. He has had a long and illustrious career as a Palestinian poet and literary figure in exile.

From: ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN PALESTINIAN LITERATURE. Ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Available from Columbia University Press.

“. . . for my city’s sake, raped and abused . . .” (Harun Hashim Rasheed)

Harold KnightLeave a comment

PLEASE NOTE: The content of this blog is slightly changed: it presents fewer news items and gives more background for those items. This will provide deeper understanding of the issues shaping the news. All articles without direct links can be found through an EBSCO search in any library with online databases. 

1-IMG_2861
Inside Al-Aqsa Mosque (Photo: November 13, 2015, Harold Knight)

❶ Israeli calls for collective break-ins into al-Aqsa
❷ Israeli Justice Minister: West Bank settlements will continue
❸ Retracing Jaffa’s erased Palestinian history (Photo essay)
❹ Opinion/Analysis: IT  JUST  AIN’T  CRICKET:  HOW  ISRAEL  ‘TRANSFERS’  LAND  FROM  PALESTINIANS  TO  SETTLERS
❺ POETRY by Harun Hashim Rasheed
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ ISRAELI  CALLS  FOR  COLLECTIVE  BREAK-INS  INTO  AL-AQSA
The Palestinian Information Center
May 26, 2016
Israeli extremist groups have called on Thursday for collective break-ins into al-Aqsa Mosque on the 5th of June that coincides with the occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem. According to Quds Press, the extremist groups called through social media for massive participation in collective break-ins into the Islamic holy shrine and Talmudic rituals in its plazas to celebrate what they called “the anniversary of Jerusalem’s reunification.” Israeli police will provide security protection for the plan, the groups pointed out.      MORE . . . 

Jerusalem is an arena of conflicting and competing visions of both the past and the future. While Israeli political and military control over both halves of the city has not been disputed since its occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, there is no sense in which the Zionist imaginary of a Jewish city has been achieved or is irreversible. This has meant that alternative visions of the city, both ethno-national and eschatological in nature, continue to vie for dominance and act as mobilizing forces for dissident groups.
___This battle for the sacred is most famously played out on Jerusalem’s ancient fault­ line: the Jewish “Temple Mount” [ Har haBayit] or the Muslim “Noble Sanctuary” [al­ Haram al-Sharif] , the site of the Western (Wailing) Wall and the only visible remainder of the second Jewish Temple and the al-Aqsa Mosque, the place of Muhammad’s legendary night journey to Heaven. While scholars have extensively charted the historic conquests and religious imaginings that imbue this revered 66 square acre compound, our interest is in its contemporary politicization as a dynamic symbol and site of Israeli­ Zionist domination and Palestinian-Muslim resistance.

  • Larkin, Craig, and Michael Dumper. “In Defense Of Al-Aqsa: The Islamic Movement Inside Israel And The Battle For Jerusalem.” Middle East Journal 66.1 (2012): 31-52.

❷ ISRAELI JUSTICE MINISTER: WEST BANK SETTLEMENTS WILL CONTINUE
Palestine News Network
May 26, 2016
The Israeli Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked on Tuesday night promised that her government will continue settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank.
___Shaked’s statement came during the opening of a new school in Itamar illegal settlement.  MORE . . .

Since 1967, Israeli policy in the West Bank (referred as Judea and Samaria by Israel since 1967) have been to create facts on the ground by annexing land without its people, by constructing enclaves within and a round the Palestinian built-up areas.
___Since 1967, Israel has been attempting to create facts on the ground that would forever link East Jerusalem to West Jerusalem and Israel. Israel has been trying to limit Palestinian natural growth as much as possible. . .
___According to many Israeli criticisms, settlement polices considers as a problematic issue for both Palestinian and Israeli communities, this is due to many reasons such as the way the settlements damage the Arab-Jewish relations, the negative influence of the settlements on the Israelis security, the role of settlements in deepen the social disparities, and the way the settlements generate a massive waste of resources. In spite of that, Israel continue constructing settlements as a part of its national strategy. . .

  • Thawaba, Salem A. “Jerusalem Walls: Transforming and Segregating Urban Fabric.” African & Asian Studies 10.2/3 (2011): 121-142. EBSCO.

❸ RETRACING  JAFFA’S  ERASED  PALESTINIAN  HISTORY  (PHOTO  ESSAY)
The Electronic Intifada
Silvia Boarini
24 May 2016
In mid-May, when Israeli Jews celebrate Independence Day, Palestinians commemorate the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of people from cities and villages across Palestine that began in December 1947 and intensified throughout 1948, both before and after the declaration of the State of Israel.
___This process of removing Palestinians from their land continues in various forms to this very day.
___Palestinian refugees as a whole have never been allowed to exercise their right to return to their homeland.      MORE . . .  

In Jaffa, 4,000 Palestinians–a mixture of original inhabitants and refugees from surrounding villages–were gathered in the southern Ajami neighborhood while their houses in other parts of the city, or the surrounding villages, were occupied or destroyed. In June 1948 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: “Jaffa will be a Jewish city. War is war.” Less than a year later he reported to the Israeli parliament that 45,000 new Jewish immigrants had been settled in the city’s “abandoned” homes.
[. . . .]
___A look at the Judaization of Jaffa’s Old City illustrates something of what Israeli policymakers have in mind for the Ajami neighborhood. The heart of the Old City today has been totally renovated, with Palestinian residents long gone. Spotless pedestrian walkways weave between buildings that once served as Palestinian homes, shops and factories and now have been transformed into expensive restaurants, galleries and gift shops for foreign and Israeli tourists. The simple fact that the asking price is beyond the range of the average Jaffa Palestinian would prevent them from even attempting to move into the area.

  • Humphries, Isabelle. “The Nakba Continues: The Ethnic Cleansing Of Jaffa’s Ajami Neighborhood.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 27.5 (2008): 14-15.
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Evidence of Israeli “transfer” of land, Hebron. (Photo: Harold Knight, November 18, 2015)

❹ Opinion/Analysis:  IT  JUST  AIN’T  CRICKET:  HOW  ISRAEL  ‘TRANSFERS’  LAND  FROM  PALESTINIANS  TO  SETTLERS
The Palestinian Information Center
Kamel Hawwash
May 22, 2016
The cricket season is in full swing in England and this was possibly playing on my mind when I read this headline in Haaretz: “Israel seized Palestinian family’s East Jerusalem land behind its back, gave it to settler NGO.”
___My immediate reaction was this is simply not cricket, a British term used to describe an act that is unfair, not honest, or immoral. . . .  Israel expropriated the land from the Abu Ta’ah family in East Jerusalem without a tender and against the rules, then handed it over to Amana, an organisation that works to establish settlements and outposts for Jews.
MORE . . .  

“POEM TO JERUSALEM,” Harun Hashim Rasheed (b. 1927)

For the sake of a city that’s imprisoned,
for its Dome and Aqsa Mosque,
for the annihilated sanctuary
where Muhammad’s feet once stood,
for all this city has endured,
and for all it has preserved,
for Mary and Jesus,
for all the beings she has known,
for my city’s sake,
raped and abused,
on its wounded brow
God’s words are effaced.

I call on all our dead
and all our living
with verses from the Bible
if only they could hear
with verses from the Quran
in the name of God
calling the young among them and the very old
calling them from my depths
to every brave fighter
I tell them the struggle is for Jerusalem
I call on them to resolve and have faith
tell them how Jerusalem’s sanctity is wounded
I call upon them all to help Jerusalem
She cannot wait any longer,
she overflows with grief.

From the Atlantic to the Arabian Gulf
I call upon you in the name of God
with the purity of anger I beseech you
for the city with the humiliated eyes
I call you in your name,
I call my Arab people.
―translated by Sharif Elmusa and Naomi Shihab Nye

Harun Hashim Rasheed (b. 1927)
Born in Gaza, poet Harun Hashim Rasheed witnessed, as a child, British soldiers demolishing his and his neighbors’ home in reprisal against Palestinian rebels, an incident which left a deep mark on him as a poet. After obtaining a Higher Teacher Training Diploma from Gaza College, he worked as a teacher until 1954. He then became director of the Sawt Al-Arab broadcasting station in Gaza. After the fall of Gaza to the Israelis in 1967, he was harassed by the Israeli occupation forces and was eventually compelled to leave. He has had a long and illustrious career as a Palestinian poet and literary figure in exile.

From: ANTHOLOGY  OF  MODERN  PALESTINIAN  LITERATURE. Ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Available from Columbia University Press.

 

“. . . Gone were the children and the songs . . .” (Fadwa Tuqan)

Harold KnightLeave a comment

PLEASE NOTE: The content of this blog is slightly changed with fewer news items and more background for those items. This will provide deeper understanding of the issues shaping the news. All articles without direct links can be found through an EBSCO search in any library with online databases.

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Homes demolished in Nablus, Feb. 7, 2016 (Photo: Ma’an News Agency)

❶ Israel to Demolish Palestinian Houses, Sheds, Electricity Line in Nablus Village
❷ Israel extends detention of 12-year-old Palestinian for 1 year
❸ Opinion/Analysis: FREE  AND  DANGEROUS  CONCESSIONS
❹ POETRY by Fadwa Tuqan
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ ISRAEL  TO  DEMOLISH  PALESTINIAN  HOUSES,  SHEDS,  ELECTRICITY  LINE  IN  NABLUS  VILLAGE
Palestine News and Information Agency – WAFA
May 26, 2016
Israeli forces Thursday delivered demolition notices for a number of Palestinian houses, sheds and an electricity grid in Duma village, south of Nablus, said a local activist.
___Ghassan Daghlas, an official who monitors Israeli settlement construction in northern West Bank, said that Israeli forces delivered demolition notices for three houses and two sheds in the Duma locality of Abu Safi.      MORE . . . 

“. . . the qualification of the occupation as “illegal” [by the International Court of Criminal Justice] while it does not affect the continued application of both humanitarian and human rights law . . . does affect the legality of the security measures taken in its defense―as distinct from measures undertaken to protect Israel itself―as such measures are thereby illegal themselves. This consequence is relevant . . . to the legal assessment of various security measures undertaken by Israel, including but not limited to the Wall . . . . Indeed, the perception of the Israeli occupation as illegal and illegitimate might well have been the main factor which informed the ICJ’s perception of the Wall . . .  While refraining from commenting on the occupation regime itself, the Court was well aware of the “greater whole” of which the Wall is but one aspect.”

  • Ben-Naftali, Orna, Aeyal M. Gross, and Keren Michaeli. “Illegal Occupation: Framing the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Berkeley Journal of International Law 23.3 (2005): 551-614

“As happened in South Africa, what begins as segregation is liable to evolve into an institutionalized system of racial domination. Such separateness cannot be sustained without spawning suffering and cycles of violence. . . . With the dual system of law that currently prevails in the occupied Palestinian territory . . . logic dictates that Israel will inevitably reach the tipping point at which it is forced to confront its own racial realities vis-à-vis the Palestinians. While the shape that such a transformation ultimately takes will depend primarily on social attitudes and political craft, international law may retain a role through the light that it shines on the normative issues to be resolved in this context.”   MORE . . .

  • Dugard, John, and John Reynolds. “Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” European Journal of International Law 24.3 (2013): 913.

❷ ISRAEL  EXTENDS  DETENTION  OF  12-YEAR-OLD  PALESTINIAN  FOR  1  YEAR
Ma’an News Agency
May 25, 2016
The Israeli magistrate court extended the detention of 12-year-old Muhammad Ismail Hushiyeh for a year on Wednesday, according to the head of the Jerusalem Committee for Families of Prisoners.
___Amjad Abu Asab told Ma’an that Hushiyeh would be detained in a juvenile facility in the town of Ablin in northern Israel.
___Hushiyeh is the youngest Palestinian prisoner from Jerusalem held by Israeli authorities.       MORE . . .

“The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) held a June 2 [2015] congressional briefing at the Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, DC to reveal widespread and systematic ill-treatment of Palestinian children held in Israeli military detention. Speakers urged the 100 attendees, including staff members from 30 different congressional offices, to bring international juvenile justice reform to children in Israeli military detention by signing on to Rep. Betty McCollum (DMN)’s letter to Secretary of State John Kerry. . . .  Israel is the only nation in the world that systematically and automatically prosecutes children in military courts.”   MORE . . .

  • Quinn, Erin, and Delinda C. Hanley. “Israeli Detention Of Children: “It’s Time To Break The Cycle.” Washington Report On Middle East Affairs 34.5 (2015): 46-47.

The Israeli Army has maintained an unwelcome military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for over 40 years. During this time, an increasing carceralization of society has occurred, most evident in three architectural forms: prisons, checkpoints, and walls. These three forms and their accompanying practices of social control, which have been refined and developed, are purportedly intended to prevent Palestinian violence against Israelis. But carceralization has had more insidious outcomes: dividing Palestinians, confiscating their land, destroying their livelihoods, and, thus, giving rise to some submission (collaboration with occupiers or emigration) but mostly to resistance (ranging from non-cooperation to militancy).   MORE (via EBSCO) . . . 

  • Bornstein, Avram. “Military Occupation as Carceral Society Prisons, Checkpoints, and Walls in the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle.” Social Analysis 52.2 (2008): 106-130.
hebron child detention
Seven-year-old Oday Rajabi detained by Israeli border police, September 9, 2014 (Photo: International Solidarity Movement)

❸ Opinion/Analysis: FREE  AND  DANGEROUS  CONCESSIONS
The Middle East Monitor – MEMO
Hussein Laqra’a
May 26, 2016
A number of recent reports have been talking about Arab countries, which describe themselves as “moderate” countries, making amendments to the Arab Peace Initiative approved during the Beirut summit in 2002. These countries presented the Israelis, through an international mediator, with new proposals regarding the occupied Golan Heights and the right of Palestinians to return to their land, and are now waiting for the Israelis to respond. This is in an effort to revive the direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in order to reach a comprehensive peace agreement, based on the initiative.
___Experience has taught us that the Arabs make one concession after the other, and when the Israelis reject them, they present more.      MORE . . . 

“MY SAD CITY,” BY FADWA TUQAN
(The day of Zionist Occupation, June 27, 1967)

The day we saw death and betrayal,
The tide ebbed.
The windows of the sky closed,
And the city held its breath.
The day the waves were vanquished, the day
The ugliness of the abyss revealed its true face,
Hope turned to ashes,
And gagging on disaster,
My sad city choked.

Gone were the children and the songs,
There was no shadow, no echo.
Sorrow crawled naked in my city,
With bloodied footsteps,
Silence reigned in the city,
Silence like crouching mountains,
Mysterious like the night, tragic silence,
Burdened,
Weighed down with death and defeat.
Alas! My sad and silent city.
Can it be true that in the season of harvest,
Grain and fruit have turned to ashes?
Alas! That this should be the fruit of all the journeying!
―Translated by A.M. Elmesseri

From BEFORE  THERE  IS  NOWHERE  TO  STAND:  PALESTINE ISRAEL  POETS  RESPOND  TO  THE  STRUGGLE. Ed. By Joan Dobbie and Grace Beeler. Sandpoint ID: Lost Horse Press, 2012. Available from B&N.
Obituary for Fadwa Tuqan, 2003.

“. . . killed me once Then wore my face . . .” (Samih Al-Qasim)

Harold KnightLeave a comment

PLEASE NOTE: The content of this blog has slightly changed. It presents fewer news items and gives more background for those items. This is in hopes of providing the reader (and the blogger) with deeper understanding of the issues that shape the news. Soon a means of linking to all of the articles will be provided. All can be found through an EBSCO search through any library with online databases.  Thank you. H.K.

Silwan, East Jerusalem, 28.03.2007
A group of Israeli settlers moved into an apartment building in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan on August 28, 2015. (Photo: Active Stills)

❶ Israeli minister orders suspension of return of Palestinian bodies
❷ Israeli Bulldozers Demolish Tin-Sheet Muslim Chapel in Jerusalem Neighborhood
❸ Occupied Jerusalem’s Silwan under attack
❹ Opinion/Analysis: GAINING  GROUND:  ISRAEL’S  PERMANENT  REPRESENTATION  AT  NATO
❺ POETRY by Samih Al-Qasim
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ ISRAELI  MINISTER  ORDERS  SUSPENSION  OF  RETURN  OF  PALESTINIAN  BODIES
Ma’an News Agency
May 24, 2016
Israeli Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan announced on Tuesday that he had ordered Israeli police to suspend the return of bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces [. . . .]
___Israel dramatically increased its policy of withholding bodies since the beginning of a wave of unrest across the occupied Palestinian territory since October, although it has scaled back on the policy in recent months.
___A joint statement released in early April by Addameer and the Israeli minority rights group Adalah condemned Israel’s practice of withholding bodies as “a severe violation of international humanitarian law as well as international human rights law, including violations of the right to dignity, freedom of religion, and the right to practice culture.”
MORE . . .

International Committee of the Red Cross
“Customary IHL – Rule 114.  Return of the Remains and personal Effects of the Dead”
Rule 114. Parties to the conflict must endeavour to facilitate the return of the remains of the deceased upon request of the party to which they belong or upon the request of their next of kin. They must return their personal effects to them.

Laucci, Cyril. “Customary International Humanitarian Law Study: Fundamental Guarantees.” Slovenian Law Review 6.1/2 (2009): 191-204.
___Rule 104: Respect for convictions and religious practices
Religious convictions and practices are protected by IHL treaties. [. . . .]
___Rule IO5: Respect for family life
Family life is protected under Articles 27 and 82 of Geneva Convention N and Articles 4(3) and 5(2)(a) of Additional Protocol II. [. . . .]

Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem and Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
Israel’s Refusal to Return Bodies of Deceased Palestinians Violates International Law
12 December 2015
At the time of writing, Israel has the bodies of 41 killed Palestinians in its possession and is refusing to return them to their families. Rather than reducing conflict, this practice has created more tension with Palestinians, and sparked demonstrations and clashes.
___Israel’s refusal to return Palestinian bodies violates provisions of both international humanitarian law and international human rights law.
International Humanitarian Law
___Returning bodies of the deceased from a conflict is an obligation under customary international law  [. . . . ]
___Failing to return the bodies of the deceased is a violation, inter alia, of the right to dignity, freedom of religion, and the right to practice one’s culture.

❷ ISRAELI  BULLDOZERS  DEMOLISH  TIN-SHEET  MUSLIM  CHAPEL  IN  JERUSALEM  NEIGHBORHOOD
Palestine News and Information Agency – WAFA
May 23, 2016
Israeli bulldozers Monday dawn demolished a Muslim chapel made of tin sheets in al-Musrara neighborhood opposite to Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, said a local information center [. . . .]
___The chapel was set up by Palestinian traders and public bus drivers who needed a chapel where they can perform their prayers.
___Meanwhile, Minister of Waqf and Religious Affairs Yusef Id’eis slammed the chapel demolition as an “aggression” and a “terrorist attack”.      MORE . . .

Matar, Ibrahim. “The Jewish Conquest of West and East Jerusalem: 1948 to the Present.” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics & Culture 17.1/2 (2011): 214-223.
Throughout its history Jerusalem was  a  united city. From the 7th  century  up  to  May  1948,  it was an Arab-Palestinian city with open access to the  faithful  of  the::  three  monotheistic religions.
___Jerusalem was a model of tolerance and coexistence, administered over the years by  a Palestinian  municipality  headed  mainly  by a Muslim mayor.
___The events of 1948 and 1967 changed this picture, when Jewish forces conquered Jerusalem: Its west, then eastern, parts came under sole Israeli control. As a consequence, the conquering forces engaged in uprooting and displacing the indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinian population . . . .

Safieh, Afif. “On Jerusalem.” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics & Culture 17.1/2 (2011): 224-229.
There were several Palestinian residential neighborhoods [in Jerusalem] where middle-class Palestinians, civil servants, lawyers, engineers and doctors lived and worked. To name just a few: Qatamon , Upper and Lower Baq’a -before 1948 my family lived in Upper Baq’a -Talbiyeh , Mamillah, Shamma’a, Musrara, Abu-Tor, etc. The Palestinians left with only the key to their houses and one of the sad jokes among Palestinians is that their country was taken furnished. The late Professor Henry Cattan has analysed in great depth the “legalised theft” that followed, where all these real estate properties were declared “absentee property.”

1-silwan-kid
A Palestinian child plays next to the wall in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, February 21, 2016. (Activestills.org)

❸ OCCUPIED  JERUSALEM’S  SILWAN  UNDER  ATTACK
Alternative Information Center – AIC
Danielle Natan
Published: 25 May 2016
Israeli forces raided Palestinian homes and commercial stores in the Ein al-Lozeh area of Silwan on Monday afternoon. Israeli Border Patrol officers arrested two brothers and served a warrant for the arrest of a third man for alleged stone throwing [. . . .]
___In addition to targeting Palestinian family’s homes in Silwan, Israeli forces raided shops in the area [. . . .]
Monday’s raid of Silwan’s stores supports suspicions that Israel is escalating its efforts to undermine Silwan’s local businesses.      MORE . . .

Klein, Menachem. “The Shift — Israel’s New Goals in Jerusalem.” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics & Culture 17.1/2 (2011): 135-140.
. . . . A few conclusions can be drawn. First, neither the line of June 4, 1967, nor the Israeli annexation line of June 29, I 967, is relevant today from the Israeli point of view. On the ground they do not exist. Israel expands beyond them to create “Greater Jerusalem” along the line delineated by the wall and to impose it on the Palestinians.

❹ Opinion/Analysis: GAINING  GROUND:  ISRAEL’S  PERMANENT  REPRESENTATION  AT  NATO
The New Arab
May 18, 2016
Ramona Wadi
The news that Israel will now have a permanent representation at NATO headquarters is a prime example of how the colonial security rhetoric has been approved and endorsed at an international level.
­­­___Israel, which was previously a participant in the NATO Mediterranean Dialogue Programs, along with Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, can now look forward to more direct contributions to the alliance, as well as reaping its benefits.  MORE . . .

“HOW I BECAME AN ARTICLE,” BY SAMIH AL-QASIM

They killed me once

Then wore my face many times.

From: Adonis, Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim. VICTIMS  OF  A  MAP:  A  BILINGUAL  ANTHOLOGY  OF  ARABIC  POETRY.  Trans. Abdullah al-Udhari. London: Saqi Books, 2008. Available from Amazon.

 

“. . . they come to burn the love in our hearts . . .” (Yousef Al-Mahmoud)

Harold KnightLeave a comment

PLEASE NOTE: With this posting the form and content of this blog will slightly change. It will present fewer news items and give more background for those items. This is in hopes of providing the reader (and the blogger) with deeper understanding of the issues that shape the news. I will soon find a means to provide direct links to these articles.
Thank you. H.K.

1-bedouin boy
A Palestinian Bedouin boy feeds camels in a poverty-stricken quarter of the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis. (Photo: Getty Images, January 20, 2016)

❶ Video: Hebron settlers steal wooden furniture from Palestinian home for Lag BaOmer bonfire
❷ Israel steps up war on Palestinian culture
❸ Why camels mean more than just money to Gaza’s Bedouin
❹ Opinion/Analysis: TIME  TO  END  THE  ‘HASBARA’:  PALESTINIAN  MEDIA  AND  THE  SEARCH  FOR  A  COMMON  STORY
❺ NOTES – Writings related to above news stories
❻ POETRY by Yousef Al-Mahmoud
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ VIDEO:  HEBRON  SETTLERS  STEAL  WOODEN  FURNITURE  FROM  PALESTINIAN  HOME  FOR  LAG BAOMER  BONFIRE
Ma’an News Agency
May 24, 2016
A group of right-wing Israeli settlers broke into an uninhabited Palestinian house in the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron on Tuesday and stole wooden furniture, presumably to be burned during bonfire celebrations for the Jewish holiday of Lag BaOmer.
___A spokesperson for Hebron-based activist group Youth Against Settlement, Issa Amro [said] the families have been banned from accessing their homes in Hebron’s Old City since Israeli forces sealed the area around al-Shuhada Street in 1994.     MORE . . .
(Note below)

❷ ISRAEL  STEPS  UP  WAR  ON  PALESTINIAN  CULTURE
The Electronic Intifada
Alia Al Ghussain
May 18, 2016
The Palestinian community in Haifa enjoyed a small victory in March when a theater successfully challenged the Israeli government to win reinstatement of official funding cut after controversy over the staging of a play about prisoners last year.
___But the reinstatement also threw into focus the constraints on Palestinian artistic expression in present-day Israel and some saw the resumption of official funding as a double-edged sword.    MORE . . .     RELATED FROM THE NEWS . . .   
(Note below)

❸ WHY  CAMELS  MEAN  MORE  THAN  JUST  MONEY  TO  GAZA’S  BEDOUIN
Al-Monitor (Palestine Pulse)
Rasha Abou Jalal
May 22, 2016
Despite the difficulties that hinder camel breeding in the Gaza Strip, such as the scarcity of green pastures and ongoing urban sprawl, Bedouin families continue to breed camels as part of their heritage. To them, camels are a source of income and livelihood [. . . .]
___ . . . Arabs used to praise camels in poetry, and the Quran gives the example of camels in Surat al-Ghashiyah, verse 17, to show the greatness of God’s creation: “Do they still not look at the camel, how it had been created?”       MORE . . .    

1-destruction Hebron-001
The Israeli demolition of Palestinian structures in central Hebron. (Photo: Ahmed A. Rjoob, Conservation and Management of Archeological Sites 11: 3–4, 2009)

❹ Opinion/Analysis:  TIME  TO  END  THE  ‘HASBARA’:  PALESTINIAN  MEDIA  AND  THE  SEARCH  FOR  A  COMMON  STORY
Middle East Monitor
Ramzy Baroud
May 24, 2016
Merely being in the company of hundreds of Palestinian journalists and other media professionals from all over the world has been an uplifting experience. For many years, Palestinian media has been on the defensive, unable to articulate a coherent message, torn between factions and desperately trying to fend off the Israeli media campaign, along with its falsifications and unending propaganda or ‘hasbara’ [ . . . . ]
___ Not only are Palestinians expected to demolish many years of Israeli disinformation, predicated on a make-believe historical discourse that has been sold to the world as fact, but also to construct their own lucid narrative that is free from the whims of factions and personal gains.       MORE . . .  
(Note below)

❺ NOTES –  WRITINGS  RELATED  TO  NEWS ITEMS
(complete writings are available online through EBSCO databases from most libraries)

DEMOLITION  OF  PALESTINIAN  CULTURE  IN  HEBRON
In 2000, during the al-Aqsa Intifada, Palestinian heritage was destroyed by the military operations of the Israeli army. They deliberately demolished the historic centres of Nablus and Hebron, and subsequently constructed the separation wall inside the OPTs, causing unprecedented and irreversible damage to Palestinian heritage. The separation wall also cuts off hundreds of archaeological sites annexed to Israel or to illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
__From:  Rjoob, Ahmed A. “The Impact of Israeli Occupation on the Conservation of Cultural Heritage Sites in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: The Case of ‘Salvage Excavations’.” Conservation & Management of Archaeological Sites 11.3/4 (2009): 214-235.

RESISTING THE WAR ON PALESTINIAN CULTURE
Writing is an act not only of preserving history and human experience, but also of resistance to intruders and colonizers. Although we do not write only because there is occupation and injustice, we write the kind of literature we do because there is occupation. . . .  We know we belong here in Palestine. We write not to beg for our rights and for a better life, but to fulfill our obligations to ourselves, to others, and to the generations to come.
__From: Alareer, Refaat R. “Gaza Writes Back: Narrating Palestine.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 37.2 (2014): 524-537.

REGARDING  THE  ‘HASBARA’
So these assumptions are reinforced. You know, the Jews are the good people; Arabs are the bad people. Jews are like us. They’re white people creating a Western-style state in a savage untamed region of the world. So after ’67, there was this move towards making uncritical support of Israel the cornerstone of being a good Jew. Being a Jew and a Zionist are now merged, and Israel is the religion. Christian Zionists marched up and embraced the idea. We all got to return so we can have an apocalypse. So they embraced this settler movement. Liberal Christians then bought the mythology. The U.S. government developed our huge military industrial complex. With this framing, the history and trauma and aspirations of Palestinians become more and more invisible.
___So this manipulation happens by controlling the message. How is that done? We have Birthright trips, which are basically brainwashing. We have students that have been recruited and, I’ve heard, paid to use social media to compliment Israel. They call this public diplomacy. There are a ton of free junkets for all kinds of people, ranging from academics to food and wine critics, to go to Israel. We have all the academic collaborations. We have our Israeli ambassadors in all sorts of Jewish settings and forcing what the message is. So there is this multimillion-dollar industry to brand Israel with pink washing, green washing, faith washing, and all those kind of things.
___From: Rothchild, Alice, and Askia Muhammad. “Silencing Voices That Question Israeli Actions.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (2015): 21-25.

“ENEMY,”  BY  YOUSEF  AL-MAHMOUD
They come from all the ends of the earth to sit among us
they come from the ends of the winds
they bring sickness and a hissing like sakes
they come from the ends of the snows
they come smelling of death
they come with blood-dipping knives
they bring panic and terror
they are utterly not-to-be-trusted
they are utterly murderous
they are proud of their murders, they are drinkers of blood
proud of tooth and nail
even more proud of guns and treachery
they come to burn the love in our hearts
and turn it to torture and bitterness
they bring sorrow, terror, sickness. . .
How have they come to sit among us?
—Translated by DM Black

Yousef Al-Mahmoud is a prominent broadcaster and poet, and former head of the Ministry of Culture in his native Jenin.
From: A  BIRD  IS  NOT  A  STONE:  AN  ANTHOLOGY  OF  CONTEMPORARY  PALESTINIAN  POETRY (Glasgow: Freight Books, 2014) –available From Amazon.com.

“. . . this purgatory Of sorrow In the Holy Land. . .” (Samih Al-Qasim)

Harold KnightLeave a comment
1-DEMOLITION
Palestinian homes demolished in Beit Sahour by Israeli Occupation Forces, January 31, 2006. (Photo: The Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem)

❶ Israeli Military Vows Collective Punishment against Bethlehem Village
. . . ❶ ― (ᴀ) Collective Punishment [Geneva Conventions]
❷ Netanyahu, Lieberman discuss death penalty for Palestinian prisoners
❸ Nakba without end: Memories of shattered Palestinian communities in Syria
❹ Hundreds of academics call for boycott of genocide conference in Israel
❺ Opinion/Analysis: SOWING  STEADFASTNESS,  HARVESTING  HOPE
❻ POETRY by Samih Al-Qasim
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ ISRAELI  MILITARY  VOWS  COLLECTIVE  PUNISHMENT  AGAINST  BETHLEHEM  VILLAGE
Palestine News and Information Agency – WAFA
May 23, 2016
The Israeli military last night threatened to consider collective punishments against the Palestinian residents of al-Khader, a village located south of Bethlehem, according to local sources.
___Witnesses told WAFA that Israeli troops distributed sheets warning the entire village about potential collective punishments, IN CASE LOCAL YOUTHS CONTINUE TO ATTACK WITH STONES ISRAELI VEHICLES passing outside the village.      MORE . . .  
. . . ❶ ― (ᴀ) COLLECTIVE  PUNISHMENT  [GENEVA  CONVENTIONS]
Crimes of War
Daoud Kuttab
For 14 years, George Qumsieh [built a home] in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour. . . . [In February 1981] Israeli soldiers arrived at the home [near Bethlehem] to arrest their youngest son, Walid, age 15. The army accused Walid of having thrown stones . . . .
___The following day . . .  Members of an Israeli engineering brigade placed the explosives and blew up the Qumsieh stone house. . . .
___Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, collective punishments are a war crime.
MORE . . .
RELATED (UN REPORT OF QUMSIEH INCIDENT)  

❷ NETANYAHU,  LIEBERMAN  DISCUSS  DEATH  PENALTY  FOR  PALESTINIAN  PRISONERS
Middle East Monitor
May 23, 2016
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of Yisrael Beitenu Avigdor Lieberman are nearing a deal to execute Palestinians involved in fighting the occupation, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported yesterday.
___Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported that Israelis who carry out deadly attacks against Palestinians would not be subject to this law because the law would only be enforced by military trials, settlers and Israeli nationals are tried in civil courts.
___If this happened, tens of Palestinians could be sentenced to death. . . .     MORE . . .
BACKGROUND . . .   

❸ NAKBA  WITHOUT  END:  MEMORIES  OF  SHATTERED  PALESTINIAN COMMUNITIES  IN  SYRIA
Middle East Eye
Tom Rollins
May 17, 2016
On 15 May 2011, thousands of Palestinian refugees from Syria are marching towards Syria’s long, quiet border with Israel. Even though the protests are not as big as the organisers promised, it is both a symbolic and physical statement [. . . .]
___Palestinian-Syrian displacement, memory and loss is not history, it is happening right now. In recent weeks and months, Yarmouk camp, the beating-heart of the Palestinian-Syrian diaspora, has seen some of its fiercest clashes . . . .      MORE . . .

❹ HUNDREDS  OF  ACADEMICS  CALL  FOR  BOYCOTT  OF  GENOCIDE  CONFERENCE  IN  ISRAEL
Palestine News Network
May 23, 2016
In a letter to the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS), 270 academics from 19 countries have called for the cancellation of the 5th Global Conference on Genocide taking place on 26-29 June at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
___The letter sent to the organizers of the conference on the 3rd of May points at the hypocrisy of having the conference in Israel at a time when Israel’s actions are “increasingly being viewed through lenses of ethnic cleansing and genocide linked to settler colonialism”. The signatories call on scholars and professionals to boycott the conference should it go ahead.      MORE . . .

daoud nassar
Daoud Nassar stands near a lone fig tree, the only tree remaining standing after Israeli authorities bulldozed his family’s grove of some 1,500 fruit trees near the West Bank village of Nahalin, June 3, 2014. (Photo: Activetills.org)

❺ Opinion/Analysis:  SOWING  STEADFASTNESS,  HARVESTING  HOPE
The Electronic Intifada
Claire Thomas
May 19, 2016
The view from Daoud Nassar’s farm southwest of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank is very different from what it was when he was a child.
___Pointing to the five Israeli settlements that surround the farm, he asked, “People come from outside and they can build houses and here I’m not allowed to build one house.”
___Daoud’s family has farmed and lived on their 100 acres of land ever since his grandfather purchased it a hundred years ago this month. The Nassars marked the centennial with a week of celebrations.      MORE . . . 

“PSALMS OF THE PALESTINIANS,” BY SAMIH AL-QASIM

From here
From this purgatory
Of sorrow
In the Holy Land
The orphaned birds beseech
Mankind
From here
From Jenin
From Old Jerusalem
Alleluia.

Once
A Gaza tune of yearning
Played
Once
The sad refrain
Kindled tragedy
In refugee tents
Once
In Jerusalem
The little ones chanted
We shall return
We shall return
Alleluia.

The birds nest on our roof
The sparrow flies
In the horizon
And in exile
Under the hot sun
In the wind
Hearts―eyes
Implored:
God of glory
Return us
Our trial
Has gone on too long!
Alleluia―Alleluia

And then it happened
The metallic eagles swept down
They did not bring the sons of Zion
To Zion
Not the remaining crowds
They did not bring
Pious psalms
To the wailing wall
God of Glory!
What did they bring?
Do not ask me
For in my voice a pagan flame
Burns
And listen O God of Glory
Listen to the outcry of a dispossessed people
We have been tested long enough
We have carried the weight of centuries
Long enough
―Why aren’t you convinced?―
Our days of trial have been too long
So
Return us―Return us
Alleluia―Alleluia―Alleluia.

From: Aruri, Naseer and Edmund Ghareeb, eds. ENEMY  OF  THE  SUN:  POETRY  OF  THE  PALESTINIAN  RESISTANCE.  Washington, DC: Drum and Spear Press, 1970. Available from Amazon.
Interview with Samih al-Qasim (August 20, 2014)

“. . . For a human being: Only thirst! . . .” (Rashid Hussein)

Harold KnightLeave a comment
birzeit
Birzeit University graduates (Photo: Birzeit University)

❶ Birzeit University Celebrates 41st Commencement
❷ Settlers are daily razing Palestinian lands in northern West Bank
❸ Israeli Navy kidnaps 10 Palestinian Fishers, Confiscates Five Boats
❹ Black Panthers and Diaspora Palestinians illuminate shared struggle on Nakba day [Oakland, CA, USA]
. . ❹ ― (ᴀ) Palestinian Art Court Al Hoash holds “WHAT’S NEXT” exhibition
❺ Opinion/Analysis: THE  COUP  AGAINST  ISRAEL’S  ARMY
. . ❺― (ᴀ) BARGHOUTHI:  NETANYAHU’S  GOV’T  GOES  FROM  EXTREMISM  TO  INSANE  EXTREMISM
❻ POETRY by Rashid Hussein
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ BIRZEIT  UNIVERSITY CELEBRATES  41ST  COMMENCEMENT
Birzeit University
May 21, 2016
Birzeit University continues the commencement ceremonies of the 41st cohort of students. University President Abdel Latif Abu Hijleh, members from the Board of Trustees, faculty, staff and the students families celebrated the graduation of the students from the faculties of Arts, Education and Science.
MORE . . .  
RELATED . . .

❷ SETTLERS  ARE  DAILY  RAZING  PALESTINIAN  LANDS  IN  NORTHERN  WEST  BANK
Palestine News Network – PNN
May 22, 2016
Israeli settler bulldozers on Sunday morning have razed Palestinian lands in areas south of Nablus and east of Salfit, northern West Bank.
___Eyewitnesses from Jalood nearby village said that the settlers have razed the lands where settlement units are being built outside of the Shvot Rahel settlement, without any media coverage.
___Eyewitnesses added that the bulldozers have been razing another land near the Ge’olat Zion illegal settlement which had already been approved by the Israeli government.      MORE . . .  
RELATED . . .   PALESTINIANS  CAPTURE  ISRAELI  EXTREMISTS  WHO  ATTACKED  FARMERS

settlers
Israelis from illegal settlement stealing Palestinian farm land (Photo: Palestine News Network)

❸ ISRAELI  NAVY  KIDNAPS  10  PALESTINIAN  FISHERS,  CONFISCATES  FIVE  BOATS
International Middle East Media Center – IMEMC
May 22, 2016
Israeli navy ships opened fire, on Sunday morning, at several Palestinian fishing boats near the shore in Gaza waters, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, kidnapped ten fishers, and confiscated five boats in two separate attacks.
___Zakariyya Abu Bakr, the head of the Fishers Committees of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees said the kidnapped fishers have been identified as . . . .
___They were all taken to an unknown destination, after the navy towed their boats.
___The attack is part of repeated Israeli violations against the fishers in the besieged coastal region, in addition to its attacks against Gaza farmers and workers, in Palestinian
lands close to the border fence.      MORE . . . 

❹   BLACK  PANTHERS [Oakland, CA, USA]  AND  DIASPORA  PALESTINIANS  ILLUMINATE  SHARED  STRUGGLE  ON  NAKBA  DAY
Palestine News Network
May 19, 2016
Arab Resources Organizing Coalition (AROC) and Art Forces on the 68th Nakba day presented George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine; a multimedia cultural event that expresses the interconnections between current and historic struggles against colonization from Palestine to the streets of Oakland.      MORE . . .
. . ❹ ― (ᴀ) PALESTINIAN  ART  COURT  AL  HOASH  HOLDS  “WHAT’S  NEXT”  EXHIBITION
Palestine News Network
May 17, 2016
On May 16th, community members, artists and art lovers gathered at Al Hoash gallery to attend the exhibition opening entitled WHAT’s NEXT. The exhibition supported by Switzerland, through the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation – SDC, featured a collection of art works by 12 Palestinian artists from across Palestine and the diaspora, under Al Hoash’s Creative Industry project.      MORE . . .  

❺ Opinion/Analysis:  THE  COUP  AGAINST  ISRAEL’S  ARMY
Middle East Eye
Meron Rapoport
May 21, 2016
Replacing Ya’alon with Lieberman is another step in efforts by Israel’s new right-wing political elite to take over the state.
A military coup is a known political phenomenon in both ancient and recent history. The army storms the government’s palace and takes control. Yet what happened on 20 May in Israel, with the dismissal of defense minister Moshe “Bogy” Ya’alon and his replacement with Avigdor Lieberman, may be best described as a civilian coup by a right-wing political class against an army that stood in its way.       MORE . . .  
. . ❺― (ᴀ) BARGHOUTHI:  NETANYAHU’S  GOV’T  GOES  FROM  EXTREMISM  TO  INSANE  EXTREMISM
Palestine News Network
May 19, 2016
Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti today described the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman defense minister in the Netanyahu government as an Israeli transition from extremism to “insane extremism.”    MORE . . .

“LETTER TO A WOMAN,” RASHID HUSSEIN

I waited for you―but, you were not born yet!
And the train is tooting, ready to pull out.
The train has learned from Man:
Not to be patient and not to have time!
And you are not yet born,
And the train wants to start
I’m sorry,
I have to board!

But I’m leaving this letter
In the café near the station.
When you get here, take a seat and ask for coffee,
Black coffee with white milk,
They’ll make a strange combination, the two colors,
Like the color of a modern man’s heart.

Then ask the waitress:
“Didn’t he leave a letter for me?”
And she won’t understand―But perhaps she’ll answer crossly:
“Everyone leaves letters here for everybody!
And all the letters say the same thing:
‘I love you, because I love me’!”

Then go to the kitchen and see the cook;
My letter may have gone to her for cooking;
And she may well say to you:
“In the soup I once found
A slip of paper that said:
‘Darling,
They’ve sent me to die for my country;
You – you try and live for us’!”

Then go to the café owner:
It is possible that the letter was lost
Among his bills and receipts;
It is also possible that he will hand you
A menu saying:
For half a pound: You get a cup of coffee
For a pound: You get a bottle of beer
For a human being: Only thirst!

Then leave the café!
Look no further for my letter,
For selections of it have already reached you―
Each section from someone else!

I’m very glad that these sections
Will reach you after you’ve been born,
For I think that if my letter had reached you
Before you were born
You would have preferred not
To be born in this century
And that would be a loss.

From: From: Aruri, Naseer and Edmund Ghareeb, eds. ENEMY  OF  THE  SUN:  POETRY  OF  THE  PALESTINIAN  RESISTANCE. Washington, DC: Drum and Spear Press, 1970. Available from Amazon.
About Rashid Hussein

“. . . you will only reach a dignity . . .” (Fouzi El-Asmar)

Harold KnightLeave a comment
0b378e87354c4057acc915382676c33b_18
Hunger striker, Muhammed Al Qeeq was held by Israel in administrative detention and released May 20, 2016. (Photo: Al Jazeera)

❶ Hunger Striker, Mohammed Al-Qeeq Finally Set Free by Israel
❷ Israel interrogates 2 Palestinian children for 6 hours over allegations of stone throwing
❸ Israeli legal plan for settlements raises red flag in West Bank
❹ Hamas: Lieberman’s threats of assassination do not scare us
❺ Opinion/Analysis: ZIONIST  IDEOLOGY  AND  WHERE  IT  HAS  LED  ISRAEL
❻ POETRY by Fouzi El-Asmar
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
❶ HUNGER  STRIKER,  MOHAMMED  AL-QEEQ  FINALLY  SET  FREE  BY  ISRAEL
Palestine Chronicle
May 20 2016
Mohammed Al-Qeeq, a Palestinian activist and journalist, has been released from prison by Israel. After a 94-day hunger strike in protest against his treatment by Israeli authorities, a deal was reached in February securing his release.
___Al-Qeeq, 33 worked as a news reporter for the Saudi-owned TV network, Al Majd. He was held in Israeli detention, without trial since November 2015. Only four days later, he began his hunger strike.       MORE . . .    

❷ ISRAEL  INTERROGATES  2  PALESTINIAN  CHILDREN  FOR  6  HOURS  OVER  ALLEGATIONS  OF  STONE  THROWING
Ma’an News Agency
May 21, 2016
Israeli authorities Friday released two Palestinian children after detaining them for six and a half hours for allegedly throwing stones at settlers in the village of al-Tur in occupied East Jerusalem, according to the Wadi Hilweh Information Center.
___Israeli forces detained Muhammad Samih Ulayan, 10, and Mustafa Abu al-Hawa, 12, as they were walking in al-Tur, before transporting them to a nearby illegal Israeli settlement and then to the al-Tur police station. After transferring the children to the Salah al-Din police station, they were interrogated for six and a half hours, the information center reported.
___The center added that the Israeli police interrogated the children without anyone present.       MORE . . .  
. . . . . ❷ ― (ᴀ)  MILITARY  COURT  WATCH Briefing Note – March 2016      MORE . . . 

1-ramla
Ramla Prison where Muhammed Al Qeeq was held (Photo: Active Stills)

❸ ISRAELI  LEGAL  PLAN  FOR  SETTLEMENTS  RAISES  RED  FLAG  IN  WEST  BANK
Al-Monitor (Palestine Pulse)
Rasha Abou Jalal
May 19, 2016
Numerous Palestinian groups are condemning Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s plan to apply Israeli laws to Jews living in West Bank settlements, which the groups said would further divide Palestinians and Israelis and give Israel the chance to annex the settlements.       MORE . . .   

❹ HAMAS:  LIEBERMAN’S  THREATS  OF  ASSASSINATION  DO  NOT  SCARE  US
Ma’an News Agency
May 20, 2016 5:00 P.M. (Updated: May 21, 2016)
A Hamas official on Friday said threats by ultranationalist Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman, who was offered the position of defense minister at the Israeli Knesset a day earlier, would not scare the movement’s leaders.
___Member of Hamas’ politburo, Fathi Hammad, said Lieberman’s threats of assassinating Hamas political and military leaders would not affect the movement [. . . .]
___“We do not call for war, but we would fight if it was imposed upon us,” Hammad said.
MORE . . .   

❺ Opinion/Analysis:  ZIONIST  IDEOLOGY  AND  WHERE  IT  HAS  LED  ISRAEL
Palestine Chronicle
Jeremy Salt
May 18 2016
Israel beyond redemption? Should we conclude, after seven decades of worsening behavior, that while there’s life there’s hope – life for the Zionists and Israel, of course, and, in fact, no hope for Palestine and the Palestinians, at least as far as the state of Israel is concerned.
___The binary divide is marked on the 68th anniversary of Israel’s ‘independence’. While the Zionists celebrated with street parties and flyovers, the Palestinians in the West Bank were put under lockdown. This was no more a war of ‘independence’ than was the ‘Unilateral Declaration of Independence’ (UDI) by the Rhodesian white minority leader, Ian Smith, in the 1960s.  It was a war of colonial conquest, the most extreme ever waged, even worse than the French invasion of Algeria. It ushered in the Nakba, the takeover of Palestine which has proceeded in stages ever since.       MORE . . .

“DETERMINATION,”  BY  FOUZI  EL-ASMAR
(From “Letters from an Israeli prison,” 1977 ―Fouzi El-Asmar was imprisoned for a year in 1969-1970, then subject to a year of house arrest in 1971.)

I.
Man, whenever you reach out
to snatch my bread
and the remaining rays of light
in my eyes,
to dissolve some dream
of mine . . . a remaining pride
to delay a rising sun.

Deep in my loins
you will only reach
a dignity and
a solid determination.

II.
Whip me
Fetch more whips
more executioners
by the thousands
Turn my skin
into shoe soles
Rub salt in every wound
old wounds
new wounds
Search my mind
for every thread of a new image
of a new poem,
Take away the pen and the pencil.
With my blood
I shall write
every day
a million songs.

El-Asmar, Fouzi. THE  WIND-DRIVEN  REED  AND  OTHER  POEMS. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1979.   Available from Amazon.
An interview with Fouzi El-Asmar about “Al-Ard.”