Cinnamon Zone: Gaza

How Not to Be "Indifferent"

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:11:00 GMT

During the few last weeks, everyone was following the updates of the war on Gaza closely, following the news, writing and reading articles on the net and in the different newspapers, donating blood, collecting donations, boycotting, demonstrating, signing petitions and trying to show solidarity in any possible way for the people in Gaza.

All in all, it was impressive to see how strongly everyone felt about this, and how that aggrevating situation brought out the best in many people. It proved that everyone has something to give, and most importantly, it showed that no matter who they are, what they think or how they look; everyone has a bigger cause that they believe in and care about.

But, once a ceasefire was announced, we found ourselves slowing down and going back to our normal lives. I’m not saying we shouldn’t, what I’m saying is that this sense of duty and commitment to a bigger cause should actually be a part of our normal life. We shouldn’t wait for a catastrophe to drive us to action. It should be a part of our daily routine to think of those people who struggle with siege and security threats every day, not only when their homes are demolished and kids are killed or orphaned.

They may not be demonstrations or charity drives every day, but certainly there are many possible ways through which you can stay connected to the Cause and reminded of it every day, and here are a few suggestions:

- Stay informed and up-to-date, follow the news on TV, radio, on the net or any other means you have to keep you aware of what’s going on.

- Spread the truth, let the world know what’s actually happening and who’s terrorist and who’s not, especially those of you who live abroad where people are sheltered by a CNN-kind-of-mdia.

- Read history, learn more about the history of Palestine and the conflict, because history is power, history is legitimacy, which is why the Zionists have been known to forge it and throw it in the world’s face, crying wolf whenever they get the chance.

- Keep donating whenever and whatever you could through trusted organizations and committees, and don’t forget that there are thousands of refugees in refugee camps everywhere, not only in Palestine, who could use this help that we owe to them.

- Be a constant reminder for the people around you, and find ways to work together to support the Cause.

- If you’re a writer, and artist or have any other talent that you could use to shed light on the Cause and introduce it to more people then, by all means, do! Be that by writing articles, holding themed art exhibitions, fund raisers, making movies and what not.

-Take a stand and boycott any companies and organizations known to support Israel. Don’t say it will not affect them because even if that’s true, you can still take a stand and not take part in supporting those who are killing your people.

- Finally and most importantly, keep the faith. That may mean different things to different people. In general, it means believe in your Cause, don’t fall for any propaganda trying to convince you that Palestine was sold by its people or any such blatant lies. On the other hand, as a Muslim, I believe that the most important thing first and foremost is for us to stay connected to God, and I don’t mean only Muslims but all people, because that’s our source of power, that’s what made the people in Gaza survive all the losses and all the agony. Read history and you’ll find that whenever people were connected to God, Palestine and its people were free, and whenever they drifted away from their faith, Palestine was under some gruesome occupation. That’s how Saladdin claimed Jerusalem back to its people, by faith, he was not blood thirsty, he didn’t act on fanaticism, he didn’t massacre his enemies, but he was a man who believed he had a fair cause, and was connected to God at all times.

Why Israel Won't Survive

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:38:39 GMT

Why Israel won't survive

By Ali Abunimah

The Electronic Intifada
19 January 2009

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10215.shtml

The merciless Israeli bombardment of Gaza has stopped --
for now -- but the death toll keeps rising as more bodies
are pulled from carpet- bombed neighborhoods.

What Israel perpetrated in Gaza, starting at 11:30am on 27
December 2008, will remain forever engraved in history and
memory. Tel al-Hawa, Hayy al-Zeitoun, Khuzaa and other
sites of Israeli massacres will join a long mournful list
that includes Deir Yasin, Qibya, Kufr Qasim, Sabra and
Shatila, Qana, and Jenin.

Once again, Israel demonstrated that it possesses the
power and the lack of moral restraint necessary to commit
atrocities against a population of destitute refugees it
has caged and starved.

The dehumanization and demonization of Palestinians, Arabs
and Muslims has escalated to the point where Israel can
with full self- righteousness bomb their homes, places of
worship, schools, universities, factories, fishing boats,
police stations -- in short everything that sustains
civilized and orderly life -- and claim it is conducting a
war against terrorism.

Yet paradoxically, it is Israel as a Zionist state, not
Palestine or the Palestinian people, that cannot survive
this attempted genocide.

Israel's "war" was not about rockets -- they served the
same role in its narrative as the non-existent weapons of
mass destruction did as the pretext for the American-led
invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Israel's real goals were to restore its "deterrence"
fatally damaged after its 2006 defeat in Lebanon
(translation: its ability to massacre and terrorize entire
populations into submission) and to destroy any
Palestinian resistance to total Israeli-Jewish control
over historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the
Mediterranean Sea.

With Hamas and other resistance factions removed or
fatally weakened, Israel hoped the way would be clear to
sign a "peace" deal with chief Palestinian collaborator
Mahmoud Abbas to manage Palestinians on Israel's behalf
until they could be forced out once and for all.

The US-backed "moderate" dictatorships and absolute
monarchies led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia supported the
Israeli plan hoping to demonstrate to their own people
that resistance -- whether against Israel or their own
bankrupt regimes -- was futile.

To win, Israel had to break Palestinian resistance. It
failed. On the contrary, it galvanized and unified
Palestinians like never before. All factions united and
fought heroically for 23 days. According to well-informed
and credible sources Israel did little harm to the modest
but determined military capacity of the resistance. So
instead Israel did what it does best: it massacred
civilians in the hope that the population would turn
against those fighting the occupier.

Israel not only unified the resistance factions in Gaza;
its brutality rallied all Palestinians and Arabs.

It is often claimed that Arab regimes whip up anti-Israel
anger to distract their populations from their own
failings. Actually, Israel, the US and subservient Arab
regimes tried everything -- especially demonizing Iran and
inciting sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims
-- to distract their populations from Palestine.

All this failed as millions of people across the region
marched in support of Palestinian resistance, and the Arab
regimes who hoped to benefit from the slaughter in Gaza
have been exposed as partners in the Israeli atrocities.
In popular esteem, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance
factions earned their place alongside Hizballah as
effective bulwarks against Israeli and Western
colonialism.

If there was ever a moment when the peoples of the region
would accept Israel as a Zionist state in their midst,
that has passed forever.

But anyone surveying the catastrophe in Gaza -- the mass
destruction, the death toll of more than 100 Palestinians
for every Israeli, the thousands of sadistic injuries --
would surely conclude that Palestinians could never
overcome Israel and resistance is a delusion at best.

True, in terms of ability to murder and destroy, Israel is
unmatched. But Israel's problem is not, as its propaganda
insists, "terrorism" to be defeated by sufficient
application of high explosives. Its problem is legitimacy,
or rather a profound and irreversible lack of it. Israel
simply cannot bomb its way to legitimacy.

Israel was founded as a "Jewish state" through the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine's non-Jewish majority Arab
population. It has been maintained in existence only
through Western support and constant use of violence to
prevent the surviving indigenous population from
exercising political rights within the country, or
returning from forced exile.

Despite this, today, 50 percent of the people living under
Israeli rule in historic Palestine (Israel, the West Bank
and Gaza Strip) are Palestinians, not Jews. And their
numbers are growing rapidly. Like Nationalists in Northern
Ireland or non-whites in South Africa, Palestinians will
never recognize the "right" of a settler-colonial society
to maintain an ethnocractic state at their expense through
violence, repression and racism.

For years, the goal of the so-called peace process was to
normalize Israel as a "Jewish state" and gain
Palestinians' blessing for their own dispossession and
subjugation. When this failed, Israel tried
"disengagement" in Gaza -- essentially a ruse to convince
the rest of the world that the 1.5 million Palestinians
caged in there should no longer be counted as part of the
population. They were in Israel's definition a "hostile
entity."

In his notorious May 2004 interview with The Jerusalem
Post, Arnon Soffer, an architect of the 2005 disengagement
explained that the approach "doesn't guarantee 'peace,' it
guarantees a Jewish- Zionist state with an overwhelming
majority of Jews." Soffer predicted that in the future
"when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's
going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become
even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of
an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border
will be awful."

He was unambiguous about what Israel would have to do to
maintain this status quo: "If we want to remain alive, we
will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day."
Soffer hoped that eventually, Palestinians would give up
and leave Gaza altogether.

Through their resistance, steadfastness and sacrifice,
Palestinians in Gaza have defeated this policy and
reasserted that they are an inseparable part of Palestine,
its people, its history and its future.

Israel is not the first settler-colonial entity to find
itself in this position. When F.W. de Klerk, South
Africa's last apartheid president, came to office in 1989,
his generals calculated that solely with the overwhelming
military force at their disposal, they could keep the
regime in power for at least a decade. The casualties,
however, would have run into hundreds of thousands, and
South Africa would face ever greater isolation. Confronted
with this reality, de Klerk took the decision to began an
orderly dismantling of apartheid.

What choice will Israel make? In the absence of any
political and moral legitimacy the only arguments it has
left are bullets and bombs. Left to its own devices Israel
will certainly keep trying -- as it has for sixty years --
to massacre Palestinians into submission. Israel's
achievement has been to make South Africa's apartheid
leaders look wise, restrained and humane by comparison.

But what prevented South Africa's white supremacist
government from escalating their own violence to Israeli
levels of cruelty and audacity was not that they had
greater scruples than the Zionist regime. It was
recognition that they alone could not stand against a
global anti-apartheid movement that was in solidarity with
the internal resistance.

Israel's "military deterrent" has now been repeatedly
discredited as a means to force Palestinians and other
Arabs to accept Zionist supremacy as inevitable and
permanent. Now, the other pillar of Israeli power --
Western support and complicity -- is starting to crack. We
must do all we can to push it over.

Israel began its massacres with full support from its
Western "friends." Then something amazing happened.
Despite the official statements of support, despite the
media censorship, despite the slick Israeli hasbara
(propaganda) campaign, there was a massive, unprecedented
public mobilization in Europe and even in North America
expressing outrage and disgust.

Gaza will likely be seen as the turning point when Israeli
propaganda lost its power to mystify, silence and
intimidate as it has for so long. Even the Nazi Holocaust,
long deployed by Zionists to silence Israel's critics, is
becoming a liability; once unimaginable comparisons are
now routinely heard. Jewish and Palestinian academics
likened Israel's actions in Gaza to the Nazi massacre in
the Warsaw Ghetto. A Vatican cardinal referred to Gaza as
a "giant concentration camp." UK Member of Parliament
Gerald Kaufman, once a staunch Zionist, told the House of
Commons, "My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis
came to her home town of Staszow, [Poland]. A German
soldier shot her dead in her bed." Kaufman continued, "my
grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli
soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza." He
denounced the Israeli military spokesperson's
justifications as the words "of a Nazi."

It wasn't only such statements, but the enormous
demonstrations, the nonviolent direct actions, and the
unprecedented expressions of support for boycott,
divestment and sanctions from major trade unions in Italy,
Canada and New Zealand. An all-party group of city
councillors in Birmingham, Europe's second largest
municipal government, urged the UK government to follow
suit. Salma Yaqoub of the RESPECT Party explained that
"One of the factors that helped bring an end to the brutal
apartheid regime in South Africa was international
pressure for economic, sporting and cultural boycotts. It
is time that Israel started to feel similar pressure from
world opinion."

Israel, its true nature as failed, brutal colonial project
laid bare in Gaza, is extremely vulnerable to such a
campaign. Little noticed amidst the carnage in Gaza,
Israel took another momentous step towards formal
apartheid when the Knesset elections committee voted to
ban Arab parties from participating in upcoming elections.
Zionism, an ideology of racial supremacy, extremism and
hate, is a dying project, in retreat and failing to find
new recruits. With enough pressure, and relatively
quickly, Israelis too would likely produce their own de
Klerk ready to negotiate a way out. Every new massacre
makes it harder, but a de-zionized, decolonized,
reintegrated Palestine affording equal rights to all who
live in it, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and
return for refugees is not a utopian dream.

It is within reach, in our lifetimes. But it is far from
inevitable. We can be sure that Western and Arab
governments will continue to support Israeli apartheid and
Palestinian collaboration under the guise of the "peace
process" unless decisively challenged. Israeli massacres
will continue and escalate until the nightmare of an
Israeli- style "peace" -- apartheid and further ethnic
cleansing -- is fulfilled.

The mobilizations of the past three weeks showed that a
different world is possible and within our grasp if we
support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Although they will never get to see it, that world would
be a fitting memorial for all of Israel's victims.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is
author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).

Happy Ceasefire

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:01:00 GMT

So, after 22 days of war, an over-due ceasefire is finally on the table.

Well, it's not thaty hard to think up something to say here. Of course, a thank-you-Israel-for-stopping-the-blind-and-cold-blooded-slaughter-of-innocent-people would be fairly bizarre. In fact, there's so much to say, so let me just start with this: It's about time.

Well over 1200 civilians were killed, and over 1500 injured, all in the hope that people in Gaza will die silently and continue to live under the brutal siege imposed on them by Israel, and with the attacks launched against them by the Israeli artillery, without any sign of resistance of any kind.

So once again the myth of the "invincible state" Israel had been rubbing in our ears for as long as anyone could remember was proven wrong. If anything is invincible, it's the faith and certainty of the great people of Gaza. Those people who stood loss after loss, the people who gave up their lives but refused to give up their freedom, their cause or their dignity. The people who rose high, disgracing the name of the so-called state of Israel, and putting it in mud. So, give up, Zion, no matter how much you kill of these great people, you will never crush their spirits, and they will never give up. God willing one day you will be crushed by those same people you failed to suppress over and over again.

The war may have stopped, but the blood of all these people will not go to waste. The panic and agonies the people of Gaza were put through will only breed more hatred and more resistance for the Zionists and their phony state. Violence breeds violence, so brace yourselves for what's coming, and blame it only on yourselves.

It's nowhere near over.

Smuggled Video from Gaza, Viewer Discretion is Advised

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:54:00 GMT

This video was smuggled out of Gaza and contains graphic raw footage of Israeli atrocities carried out against Palestinians in Gaza, viewer discretion is advised

What Do You Know About Gaza?

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:46:00 GMT

RASHID KHALIDI

Published: January 7, 2009

NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.

THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.

THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel is still widely considered to be an occupying power, even though it removed its troops and settlers from the strip in 2005. Israel still controls access to the area, imports and exports, and the movement of people in and out. Israel has control over Gaza’s air space and sea coast, and its forces enter the area at will. As the occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

THE BLOCKADE Israel’s blockade of the strip, with the support of the United States and the European Union, has grown increasingly stringent since Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006. Fuel, electricity, imports, exports and the movement of people in and out of the Strip have been slowly choked off, leading to life-threatening problems of sanitation, health, water supply and transportation.

The blockade has subjected many to unemployment, penury and malnutrition. This amounts to the collective punishment — with the tacit support of the United States — of a civilian population for exercising its democratic rights.

THE CEASE-FIRE Lifting the blockade, along with a cessation of rocket fire, was one of the key terms of the June cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. This accord led to a reduction in rockets fired from Gaza from hundreds in May and June to a total of less than 20 in the subsequent four months (according to Israeli government figures). The cease-fire broke down when Israeli forces launched major air and ground attacks in early November; six Hamas operatives were reported killed.

WAR CRIMESThe targeting of civilians, whether by Hamas or by Israel, is potentially a war crime. Every human life is precious. But the numbers speak for themselves: Nearly 700 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the conflict broke out at the end of last year. In contrast, there have been around a dozen Israelis killed, many of them soldiers. Negotiation is a much more effective way to deal with rockets and other forms of violence. This might have been able to happen had Israel fulfilled the terms of the June cease-fire and lifted its blockade of the Gaza Strip.

This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East."