The Oslo Accords (signed in 1995) were one great big snow job at the expense of the Palestinians & appropriately considered by many (including Edward Said), even at the time, as a document of surrender. The Accords legitimized a bantustate solution & divided the West Bank into three administrative units, Areas A, B, & C, according to how much self-government Palestinians are allowed by Israel. The Area A, B, & C stuff is in part a legal fiction since Israel occupies all of the West Bank but Area C is the one Israel controls lock, stock, & barrel. Israel uses that complete control as a means of more aggressively expropriating Palestinian lands. According to the UN, over 350,000 Zionist settlers now inhabit over 200 settlements & outposts in Area C.

Last year, Amira Haas, the remarkable columnist for Haaretz (who lives & reports from the West Bank), reported on a meeting between Knesset politicians & representatives of settlers from Area C. They all agreed on the goal of clearing Palestinians out of Area C & forcing them into Areas A & B. The methods they discussed to clear out Palestinian communities, who they referred to as “weeds,” was designating districts as live-fire zones & conducting military exercises on them; declaring Palestinian land as Israeli state land (& then using it for settlements); refusing to connect Palestinian communities with water or electricity; evictions & forced transfers of residents; destroying water wells & solar panelling; denying Palestinians, who are mostly farmers & shepherds, access to grazing & farm land; refusing construction permits to repair or rebuild homes or construct health & other public facilities.

In 1983, Israel (in league with the World Zionist Organization) established the settlement of Susya just south of Hebron & within Area C on lands that belonged to the Palestinian community of Khirbet Susiya. Several other settlements have also been established in the area. Khirbet Susiya is one of at least thirty Palestinian villages under threat of demolition in the area & has been under siege for decades by violent settlers, Israeli soldiers, the Israeli administrators of Area C, & by the Israeli courts who repeatedly issue demolition orders.

One of the ruses Israel used to clear Khirbet Susiya is that it’s the site of an archaeological dig where they unearthed a synagogue. Even if they did unearth the ruins of a synagogue, Israel has no more right to the site than the ancient Babylonians do–or the Edomites, the Philistines, or the Canaanites who also inhabited ancient Palestine. This is just another episode in the invented people of Israel creating a mythological past to justify modern colonialism. Zionist writers have referred to the people of Khirbet Susiya as squatters & as an imaginary village but they can’t explain why there are mosques in the region & why they have to dig all the way to Argentina to find a shard that might be a synagogue.

Israel wants to outright annex Area C–which is why they’re expanding the settlements & linking them to Israel with a network of roads but denying all development to Palestinians & attempting to force them to move. The Israeli courts have once again issued a demolition & removal order for all the residents of Khirbet Susiya.

(Photo is child in Khirbet Susiya by Abed Al Haslhamoun/EPA)

PBS had a wonderful documentary on rescuing parrots surrendered or abandoned by “owners.” They’re near extinction in the wild but millions are held in captivity just in the US. They’re so complex & demanding, so intelligent & emotional, & cannot bear loneliness so that thousands are surrendered every year.

People buy them on a whim or without knowing much about them & then are horrified at the commitment involved. When in captivity, they lose their purpose for being–foraging, mating, nurturing young–& can develop aggressive or self-mutilating behaviors. Many require psychiatric interventions to heal from abuse or neglect.

How I wish I wanted to read “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” by Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn, but Kristof has written more crap, especially about women, than any one person should be allowed in a lifetime. Like all misogynists & banal thinkers, he’s a bore & quite frankly talks mostly through his ass. He’s an amoral ideologue for neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism. A chorus of raspberry tarts in his direction!

It didn’t take too long into this massive humanitarian & immigration crisis in the Mediterranean before someone raised the question, “Why aren’t African countries helping the immigrants?” You mean the countries they’re fleeing from? The ones run by dictators like Eritrea, the war zones like Somalia, or the ones where a third of the people live under $1.25 a day like Gambia? It’s a remarkably trite question, evincing not a whit of understanding about how the world is run. Or how it should be run.

This woman from Dhaka, Bangladesh is a garment worker protesting with a few hundred others outside the offices of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers & Export Association–the trade association that brokers sweatshops for retailers in the US, Europe, & Japan. They’re protesting because Swan garment factory–a Hong Kong manufacturer that operated for decades in Bangladesh & boasts of millions of dollars in sales–closed down their operation & skipped town still owing workers back wages. The protesters are also demanding the factory be re-opened.

Who can keep track of all the trials & retrials of Hosni Mubarak, the former military dictator of Egypt? He’s got one case going for corruption & another for murdering protesters. There isn’t much point in monitoring cause we’re looking at a done deal. Not to mention a mockery of justice. He’s gonna walk. The Egyptian appeals court opening tomorrow will uphold the lower court ruling to drop all charges against him for murdering protesters in the 2011 uprising that overthrew him. No need to play Nostradamus or lay odds with a bookie.

The media caption to this April 28th photo read simply: “A woman cries at the funeral of Mohammed Yehya, who died while fighting with Israeli troops in the West Bank city of Jenin.” The brevity covers a multitude of lies.

A canned Associated Press (AP) article circulated in several media sources explained that 18-year-old Yehya died at a hospital in Nablus (in the West Bank) after being shot in the abdomen for hurling rocks at Israeli troops. The article accepted the Israeli military’s claim that they saw a group of Palestinians “trying to breech the security fence of a West Bank settlement & called on them to desist.” When they did not, soldiers “opened fire on them”, shooting toward their lower extremities. The military also claimed that over the weekend, Palestinians carried out three separate attacks against “Israeli police” & two knife-wielding attackers were shot dead.

Now let’s hear the real story, beginning with who the grieving woman is–namely Mohammed Yehya’s mother. Yehya & his family were preparing for the wedding of his older brother & were hosting relatives from Jordan visiting for the ceremony. The family group all went to visit family land near the apartheid barrier wall in the village of Al Araqa which had been divided by Israel to build the wall. Israeli soldiers objected to their presence & ordered them to leave.

Witnesses say before they had a chance to leave, a soldier shot Yehya point-blank in the abdomen. Or as the Israeli military admitted, “opened fire on them.” Even if the group gave the soldiers lip, there is no conceivable justification for shooting Yehya since he was not throwing rocks at them. Or even if he was throwing rocks at them.

Israeli soldiers arrested two of his Jordanian relatives & obstructed an ambulance for over half an hour trying to take Yehya, who was bleeding profusely. He was eventually taken to a Jenin hospital where doctors determined he required surgery they could not provide. They requested permission to transfer him to Israel for treatment but when denied entry permits transferred him in critical condition to a hospital in Nablus, twenty miles away on a road with checkpoints, where he died.

Yehya was the third Palestinian man gunned down last week by Israeli soldiers. Another was a young man in East Jerusalem and one in Hebron. Al Araqa, East Jerusalem, & Hebron are occupied territories, not the jurisdiction of Israeli police, as AP reported. Media can’t even get that straight.

The murder of these three young men is part of a general crack-down in the West Bank including overnight raids on dozens of houses, Israeli troops storming into homes & violently searching them, causing excessive property damage, & arresting dozens of Palestinians in a dragnet. According to one human rights group, Israeli troops shot seven Palestinians & arrested at least 375 others (including 55 children & 19 women) just last month. In that time they also abducted eleven Palestinians from Gaza.

More than 7,000 Palestinians are being held in 17 Israeli prisons & detention camps. Of these, 540 Palestinians are held under administrative detention which means imprisonment without trial or formal charges & allows Israel to incarcerate Palestinians indefinitely. It not only violates due process & the Geneva Accord about rules of occupation; it violates so many international laws the UN should be jumping up & down like monkeys instead of standing mute as a dumbbell.

Build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel to defend Palestinians from the barbarism of Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing. May our brother Mohammed RIP.

(Photo by Majdi Mohammed/AP)

NBC nightly news did what they called a “heart-warming” story about a little girl in Central African Republic who lost both parents in the civil war. Last year the smarmy reporter Ann Curry did a report on how the child forgave the killers, like it was a conflict between good & evil. There was no political explanation of the conflict.

Some good-hearted rich guy in the US arranged to bring her here & get her adopted into another rich family. There’s no question this little girl will thrive–even though she’s wrenched out of her own culture to “save.” But there is still a civil war left unexplained & thousands of other little kids. What’s so “heart-warming” about that?