Honored to be published in a Kashmiri journal.
Monthly Archives: January 2019
Indian military officials have announced the use of “non-lethal” plastic bullets as a substitute for pellet guns in Kashmir. Plastic & rubber bullets are called Kinetic Impact Projectiles (KIPs) because they are ostensibly used to injure, not kill. We can dispense with any notion that the Indian army will actually discontinue pellet guns since they’ve proven so effective against unarmed protesters in terms of injuries, disabilities, disfigurement, & deaths. This so-called substitution is a cynical maneuver, almost certainly a response to quell international criticism by media & human rights groups over the use of pellet guns, which are also called non-lethal.
What makes this ‘substitution’ so cynical & contemptible is that there is a very public record going back decades of morbidity & mortality rates from the use of plastic & rubber bullets. British occupation forces first introduced their use into Northern Ireland in 1973. There has been extensive litigation against the British Ministry of Defence for attempting to conceal the dangers of plastic bullets from Irish victims seeking compensation. They were used in the 1980s against anti-apartheid protesters in South Africa, as recently as 2014 by Spanish police against Catalan protesters, & since 1988 by Israeli occupying forces against Palestinians. Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin introduced them against the First Intifada which had begun several months earlier in 1987. When a UN official pointed out the high number of Palestinian children injured by plastic & rubber bullets, Rabin responded, “Our purpose is to increase the number {of wounded} among those who take part in violent activities but not to kill them.” Despite his genocidal disregard for the lives of Palestinian children, Rabin went on to win the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.
Last year, the journal BMJ Open published a study by a team of scientists & medical researchers who reviewed 26 worldwide studies conducted on the use of plastic & rubber bullets from January 1990 through June 2017. That study was reported widely, including in Israeli media. The study encompassed 1,984 people who had been injured (the majority classified as severe) & 51 people killed by KIPs. They found that 300 (15%) of those injured were permanently disabled, most commonly through loss of vision. “Blindness, & removal of the spleen, or a section of the bowel as a result of abdominal injuries, accounted for most of this disability.” The researchers pointed out that statistics are probably incomplete & conservative because of tendentious or under-reporting by police, military, & manufacturers.
India actually introduced the use of plastic bullets in Kashmir early last year. It was reported as early as April 2017. Like Yitzhak Rabin, an Indian army official claimed that plastic bullets do not pierce the body & at most cause minor abrasions & contusions. That’s called lying through your teeth. The Indian army knows very well the kind of damage caused by KIPs but are as indifferent about that as they are toward the disability, disfigurement, & deaths caused by pellet guns. Although they kill, the purpose of KIPs is to permanently disable activists & demoralize resistance to occupation.
Stop the use of pellet guns & plastic bullets. End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
BMJ Open study: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/12/e018154
A good synopsis of 2018, the ‘year of living dangerously’ in Kashmir. It should be noted that 2018 was also a year of extreme violence in Palestine. As international understanding & solidarity grows for these freedom struggles, it appears the oppressive regimes are accelerating violence & genocide.
https://www.newsclick.in/kashmir-2018-year-bloodshed-and-resistance?
Israeli author Amos Oz (1939-2018) habitually used the literary conceit of metaphors to dodge hard questions & dissemble the character of Zionism & Israeli apartheid. Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), the rock star of Palestinian poetry, wrote many poems & reflections on metaphor–one titled “The cunning of the metaphor”–using metaphors as they are poetically & psychologically intended: to deepen understanding & change the way we see things. Exiled with his family in the 1948 Naqba, he became the Palestinian voice of loss & exile & his poetry readings drew thousands..
“A River Dies of Thirst” (titled “The Trace of the Butterfly” in Arabic) was Darwish’s last collection published eight months before his death in 2008 from heart disease. It’s a wondrous collection of poems, prose poems, journal entries, meditations. The collection in English is under copyright & I do not wish to be dragged into court for violating intellectual property rights. I only highly recommend the book as well as collections of other Darwish works like “Almond Blossoms & Beyond”, “If I Were Another”, “Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?”, “Memory of Forgetfulness”, “Unfortunately, It Was Paradise”, “The Adam of Two Edens”, “The Butterfly’s Burden”. He published over twenty volumes of poetry & ten volumes of prose, some translated into 35 languages. Translating poetry is always a problematic matter but even in translation Darwish’s poetry is magnificent & powerful.
This is his poetic farewell to Edward Said who died in 2003: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmPCZhk3y1E
This poem is available on the internet, apparently not under copyright:
I Come From There
I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.
I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland…..
Free Kashmir.
(via Zachriah Sulayman)
The journalism of Gideon Levy, one of the most uncompromising & penetrating Israeli critics of Zionism, is distinguished by a profound humanity toward Palestinians. There is no detachment but only a commitment to tell the truth about the brutalities of the occupation. Levy has long-since decisively broken with Zionism, supports a secular, democratic state for Jews & Palestinians, supports BDS “as the only game in town”, & offers excoriating critiques of the deceits & delusions of Israeli liberal Zionists, calling them collaborators & accomplices of the occupation. He is a towering figure in the struggle against Zionism. That’s why his eulogy for Amos Oz in Haaretz titled “The Prophet Amos Oz Was the Last of the Moral Zionists” is so surprising, if not altogether disappointing. Oz, who died last Friday at the age of 79, was Israel’s most renowned writer. Levy must have allowed grief at the death of a personal friend to overcome his good judgement in assessing the political character of Oz who was hardly a prophet & certainly not a moral Zionist. He was a good writer & may have been an affable friend but he was racist as hell toward Palestinians & exhibited none of the humanity so inherent to Levy.
There’s no question Oz was a good writer but the leitmotif of all his fiction & nonfiction works is justification for Zionism & the formation of Israel as a Jewish state which he posits as historical necessity for a people ‘faced with extinction’. Acknowledging that it was based on the forcible displacement of Palestinians was his little genuflection to historic reality but he repeatedly claimed with detestable nonchalance that Zionist bombers versus indigenous unarmed Palestinians was ‘a clash between right & right’.
Oz is a dishonest, manipulative ideologue who romanticizes Zionism & the “founding fathers & mothers” of Israel as visionaries. He calls Israel “a dream come true”, sweet-talking away colonialism, genocide, occupation, apartheid by saying Israel “could not live up to the supreme expectations of the founding fathers & mothers.” According to him, some of those founders–most of whom served in Zionist paramilitary terrorist groups–had a biblical vision, others a shtetl vision, others a socialist vision for what Israel should be. What he doesn’t say–& what Levy & other anti-Zionist Israelis have so profoundly elaborated–is that the core of Zionism is a belief in the superiority of Jews & the refusal to integrate or assimilate with others in pluralistic societies. That is the founding vision of Israel. The historic persecution of Jews is only used to seduce Jews into Zionist ideology, not to eliminate the persecution.
One of Oz’s constant themes is the contentious, argumentative nature of Israelis & Jews in general. He seems to take great pride in this & even glorifies it, calling them “a very Mediterranean people.” Hardly. Jews are no more asocial & uncooperative than any other ethnic or religious group & there is no such thing as what Oz calls “the Israeli soul.” The country is only 70 years old & if there is contention it is from trying to forge a unified culture out of the 136 different nationalities that make up Israeli settlers. It is from having a society based in colonialism, genocide, & militarism.
It would be so easy to claim that Oz had cognitive dissonance because he was a leading figure among Israeli Zionists who claimed to oppose the occupation. It would be more accurate to say he was a bullshit artist. He was a supporter of a two-state solution & every time he was asked about the possibility of one democratic state for Jews & Palestinians, he would first retreat behind metaphors about bedrooms, then move to anarchist rhetoric about preferring no state, & some times would admit he was afraid of a Palestinian majority. Fear of being outnumbered is the classic refuge of racists. How could he possibly claim to oppose the occupation when he championed the Israeli bombing sieges of Gaza in 2008-2009, 2012, & 2014? When asked about that, he again retreated behind personal metaphors–which is actually a classic evasion device used by rightwing ideologues. His constant use of metaphors to dodge the tough questions made him one hell of an artful dodger. In one of his more detestable metaphors justifying the carpet bombing of Gaza in 2014, he actually said Palestinians in Gaza sat their children on their laps as they lobbed mortars at Israel. How contemptible can you get claiming like Golda Meir & Netanyahu that Palestinians used their children as human shields? What kind of prophet does that? How damn moral is it to make such racist imputations against Palestinians?
Oz of course rejected the apartheid designation for Israel & opposed BDS, saying it was “childish”, “counterproductive”, & increased paranoia among Israelis. But what about the Palestinians? How else can an unarmed people oppose military occupation & genocide? In denying that Israel was like South Africa, he once again pulled the trite metaphor thing with some non sequitur about medicines for cholera & the plague. He also said that anti-Zionism became anti-Semitism if it challenged the existence of Israel. There was nothing moral about Amos Oz. He was willing to justify anything Israel did to accomplish his dystopic, racist vision of a Jewish-only state. May he Rest In Peace. Maybe he was a great writer. But what he wrote was soured by racism. What’s more important is the thousands of Palestinians unable to realize their dreams, including as writers, artists, musicians, because they are fighting for their very existence against the genocidal state of Israel.
(Photo by Amos Oz from Getty Images)
Momtaz Begum, a young Rohingya woman, testifies to the massacre of her children, husband, & parents by the Burmese military:
https://freepresskashmir.com/2018/12/31/2018-the-year-when-violence-turned-vitriolic-in-valley/amp/?
Compelling photo essay by Bilal Ahmad on “2018: The year of funerals, political coups, & burning homes.”
The US Border Patrol shot tear gas into Mexico at refugees, including children, trying to cross the wall near Tijuana. US authorities claim they were aiming at stone pelters & trying to help kids cross over the razor wire barrier. Just how stupid do they take us for?
Immigration is a human right; asylum is international law. Open the damn borders.