❶ Massacres, BDS, and more

• Background:  “Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies And The Zionist/Israeli Genocide Of Palestine.” Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal.

❷ One almighty military order and 49 dead Palestinians
❸ One Hundred Years and Counting: Britain, Balfour, and the Cultural Repression of Palestinians
❹ POETRY by Naomi Shihab Nye
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❶ MASSACRES,  BDS,  AND  MORE
Gaza.Scoop.ps – Real Time News From Gaza 
Mazin Qumsiyeh
October 30, 2016
I just returned to Palestine from the Basque Country, a European country that is partly under French and partly under Spanish rule . . .  It was great to see the mountains and to see open roads without checkpoints . . .
___I return willingly to a jailed community under an apartheid system and daily assaults (home demolitions, displacement, judaization). It is exactly where we find ourselves most needed and most alive. The staff and volunteers at the Palestine Museum of Natural History – Bethlehem University have done an excellent job in my absence of one week. . . .       ___Now for some collected items related to human rights:
Today is the anniversary of Duwaima massacre (29 Octber 1948), one of over 40 massacres committed by the Zionist colonial forces to drive native Palestinians out of our country.      More . . .      Background    

• Rashed, Haifa, Damien Short, and John Docker. “NAKBA MEMORICIDE: GENOCIDE STUDIES AND THE ZIONIST/ISRAELI GENOCIDE OF PALESTINE.” Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal (Edinburgh University Press) 13.1 (2014): 1-23.      Source.

Genocide Studies is haunted by an absence and a fear. The absence is of any sustained continuing discussion of Zionist Israel as a possible example of a nation founded on genocide . . . The fear is of becoming another victim of Zionist intimidation and retaliatory attacks if there were to be such discussion. In Foucault’s terms, Genocide Studies is uneasily aware that Zionism, as a worldwide movement with a vigilant scholarly and ideological wing, is a panopticon. Genocide Studies knows it is being watched and can be threatened with vilification at any moment, even in a preemptive gratuitous way. To fend off such attacks, it has chosen to be intellectually submissive; that is, to suppress a key (Socratic) foundation of intellectual life, to follow inquiry wherever it may lead. In particular, Genocide Studies is haunted by the fear that the historical analysis of settler colonialism, based on Raphaël Lemkin’s definitional linking of settler colonialism with genocide, may lead to recognition of Zionist Israel as a genocidal settler colonial state. The concept that the Zionist project is a settler-colonial one has been fundamental to Arab and Palestinian critical thought since the Nakba in 1948 and has been increasingly and more widely explored in recent years, even occasionally branching out of the academic arena and into the political.

❷ ONE  ALMIGHTY  MILITARY  ORDER  AND  49  DEAD  PALESTINIANS
+972 Magazine    
Sam Bahour
Oct. 29, 2016
If your Palestinian neighbors and friends seem slightly on edge today, please excuse them. October 29th brings back horrific memories to Palestinians everywhere, young and old. It was 60 years ago today that a scene of cold-blooded murder fell upon the hilltop village of Kafr Qasim, located in Israel about 20 km east of Tel Aviv near the Green Line. It was in Kafr Qasim on this day in 1956 where the Israeli military mowed down in cold blood 48 innocent civilians, one of them a pregnant woman, whose fetus is counted as the 49th victim. It was said that all of this was done in the service of the almighty Israeli “military order,” which no one dared to challenge.    More . . .    

❸ ONE  HUNDRED  YEARS  AND  COUNTING:  BRITAIN,  BALFOUR,  AND  THE  CULTURAL  REPRESSION  OF  PALESTINIANS   
Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network    
Aimee Shalan
Oct.26, 2016
If Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour passes over the perimeter of her home’s driveway in her village of Reineh in the Galilee, an alarm will sound at the British multinational security firm G4S and the Israeli authorities will be alerted. Israeli police arrested Tatour in the early hours of October 11, 2015 for her poem, “Qawem ya sha‘abi qawemhum” (Resist My People, Resist Them), which was posted to her YouTube account earlier that month. On November 2, Israel charged her with incitement to violence and support for a terrorist organization.
___In January, after three months in prison, Tatour was placed under house arrest near Tel Aviv, far from her village. After a lengthy struggle, the prosecution conceded in July that she could be held in her family’s home. . . . .Such British complicity in the cultural repression of Palestinians is not a recent phenomenon. One can argue that it has its roots in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which, by calling for the establishment of a nation for the Jewish people while all but disregarding the existence of the Palestinians inhabiting the land in question . . . .     More . . .  

A POEM FOR DAREEN
FOR PALESTINE & DAREEN TATOUR
BY THE CELEBRATED PALESTINIAN-AMERICAN POET NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

TALKING FOREVER

Say it again, resist times ten.
Those who were not politicians,
who were going to school or tending the rooms,
shops, libraries, kitchens, mint sprigs drooping in a can,
changing diapers, wiping spittle from chins,
chopping onions, snipping cucumbers from a scratchy vine,
we would have done anything for you, Palestine.
But all we knew to do was talk, talk, to everyone who already agreed.
Sign petitions, phone representatives, write checks,
wear keffiyehs tied around our necks, demonstrate,
feel hopeful that President Obama might (in his vast intelligence)
really stand up for you — what else could we do?
Talk to those who didn’t already agree? But who were we?
“If they knew our stories, they wouldn’t do these things to us,”
my Palestinian grandmother said, when she was 100 years old,
after being tear-gassed in her own room by Israelis.
She wasn’t angry – we were.
Dareen, trapped in her house for using the word “Resist” – she was there
and we were everywhere else. Easy to punish her, Israel had
no trouble trapping, oppressing, squelching, giving another name.
Pressed down for so long, those without influence over weapons or borders,
easy to ignore, refute, blame, always blame, changing the story,
inverting the facts…and they DID know the story, Sitti,
because everyone told it, Dareen told it,
Mahmoud, Fadwa, Edward, Suheir, Anton, Sharif, Nathalie, Lisa, Lena,
Khaled, Salma, Raja, Fady, Aziz, everyone told it, kept telling it,
talking forever, but the checkpoint lines got longer, pressed,
the sad orchards smaller, looming wall more riveted with cries,
the way a nightmare compounds, spinning out swirls of
hallways, blockades, locked doors, prison cells…
the powerful kept saying, Give the oppressors more money,
they are a democracy,
and the sleeping person shouted from the nightmare, Wake up!
Just let me wake up!

From Jewish Voice For Peace