Tag Archives: Israeli siege of Gaza 2014

Intifada: Palestinian resistance to ethnic cleansing

Gaza intifada July 18 2014

Most of us are overwhelmed with images & reports of unspeakable Israeli barbarity in Gaza & now phalanxes of tanks have entered Gaza supporting an infantry indoctrinated in Zionist ideology & racist hatred. It isn’t worse than US-NATO wars in Iraq & Afghanistan but it is considerably more concentrated & hell-bent on genocide.

We are overcome with grief & terror for the people of Gaza but we continue to organize public opposition in a growing & thunderous international chorus of “Stop the massacre in Gaza!”

This photo is a Palestinian woman sitting in the rubble of her home in Gaza City which was targeted by Israeli bombers under the ruse she harbored rocket launchers in her closet. But Israel isn’t afraid of those; they have the most sophisticated military apparatus in the world & can take most of them out in a trice. What they’re afraid of is intifada–Palestinian resistance to ethnic cleansing. It isn’t wishful thinking or projection that sees resistance & determination written all over this young boy’s face. In all that rubble & carnage, intifada only grows.

And so must our solidarity. The mission of Palestinian supporters is to remain steadfast & not buckle before the onslaught. We have “miles to go before we sleep.” Until the last Palestinian cries “uncle”, we stand with them because that is where justice stands & because staying the hand of genocide has the power to inspire millions around the world to defy power & fight for human freedom.

Reports continue of solidarity protests around the world: now the Maldives & new protests in Turkey, India, Ireland, the UK, Scotland, Cape Town, Durban, & Johannesburg, South Africa. In the US, rallies are slated in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, California, Minnesota, New York, Washington DC, Texas, & elsewhere: all demanding “Stop the massacre in Gaza!”

If you cannot get to a rally, honoring the economic & cultural boycott of Israel is a powerful show of solidarity (barcode beginning 729).

Long live intifada!

(Photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

A portrait of grief; a portrait of 66 years of Palestinian intifada

Palestinian woman July 17 2014

A portrait of grief; a portrait of 66 years of resistance & Palestinian intifada: this Palestinian woman fled her home close to the Israeli apartheid wall for refuge at the school in Gaza City opened by the UN to accept the thousands fleeing from Israeli bombing.

Photos of the school show it hasn’t a stick of furniture & no place for refugees to sleep. Instead they are on bare floors & the cement courtyard sleeping on what they managed to bring with them. (Remember that the next time the UN comes tugging on your heart strings for money.)

When you picket & rally in the coming days, keep this beautiful woman in your heart; she has a right to see peace before she dies & we have every obligation to render active solidarity against those who consider her an encumbrance to their racist, colonial project.

Stop the massacre in Gaza! Boycott Israeli goods.

(Photo by Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters)

National march in Washington DC to demand “Stop the massacre in Gaza!”

Gaza City (Mohammed Saber:EPA) July 15 2014

There have been Palestinian solidarity protests reported in 50 cities around the world (if you count a lone picketer in McAllen, TX). Some have been “small but spirited”; some have been immense, numbering in the thousands. Eleven of those were in the US, though there were certainly more rallies unreported. These protests have to continue, have to grow, have to reach out & involve everyone under the sun demanding “Stop the massacre in Gaza.”

So it is great news that Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, has called a national demonstration in Washington, DC on Sunday, July 20th, calling for an immediate end to Israeli bombing & an immediate end to US military funding to Israel.

Here’s the info: Al-Awda National Rally to Defend Palestine; End the Genocide
Sunday, July 20, 2014
3 PM
US State Department to the White House
3514 International Drive NW
Washington DC

Organizations wishing to endorse and take part in this action, contact Don Bryant at 216.285.0223 or don@immigrantsupportnetwork.org

Everybody on the East Coast & east of the Mississippi River should consider finding a way to this rally & know it is an honor to support the people of Gaza in their struggle.

This is a photo of Israeli bombing in Gaza City where over half a million people live. There’s no way Zionists can put the soundtrack to “Exodus” to this carnage. “We Shall Overcome (for Palestine)” by Roger Waters is the only suitable anthem.

(Photo by Mohammed Saber/EPA)

Israeli propaganda piles surrealism on lies: the farce that is hasbara

Sderot Israel July 15 2014

Israeli propaganda has gone to the next level, as they say–from bald-faced lies to science fiction. It’s on a par now with the guys who claim space aliens built the pyramids. It’s one thing to get nailed claiming traumatized residents of Sderot, Israel cower in terror in bomb shelters when photojournalists show them sitting in lawn chairs & moving in furniture to watch Israel slaughter thousands of Palestinians. It’s another level of deceit to claim the Israeli military is taking out Hamas drone aircraft. But there’s no shame in hasbara-land & the Israeli military reported an unmanned Hamas aircraft was taken out by a Patriot surface-to-air missile along the southern Israeli coastline near the city of Ashdod.

One doesn’t know who the Associated Press is talking to in Hamas since they don’t name names, but they report Hamas acknowledged it has drones in its arsenal, claimed it launched three yesterday (two have disappeared in fairy land), & have developed one type of drone for surveillance & one for delivering munitions. And as they used to say, if granny had wheels, she’d be a Ford.

The whole shebang would be a burlesque except that millions of people read this stuff & think it’s reality–& all of this crap is to justify ethnic cleansing.

We keep the people of Gaza in our hearts, along with our grief about what they are sustaining, but there is a deeper understanding now of how malignant & profoundly corruptive Zionism is to its adherents. Like every other form of racism, it creates sociopathology, emotional & spiritual hollowness incapable of human empathy.

Supporting Palestinian intifada, standing with the people of Gaza is the duty of all who believe in a just & humane world & it is the only possible liberation from the stranglehold of Zionist hatred.

(Photo of Israelis in Sderot, Israel watching the slaughter in Gaza by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP)

Fighting the propaganda war against Zionist lies

LA rally July 15 2014

Israel & the Alibi Ikes of media have been pawning off rubbish as truth for so long they almost got caught unawares by the boycott movement & the massive growth of Palestinian solidarity. But Zionism has a lot of money at its disposal to catch up & there’s evidence of that everywhere: they have taken over the Israel-Palestine narrative on Wikipedia; are targeting student boycott (BDS) groups; Zionist-sponsored speakers tour campuses denouncing “honor killings” under the guise of feminism & human rights to discredit Middle Eastern cultures as irredemiably violent; they’re even trying to bring back pro-Israel rallies. Above all, they work tirelessly to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. And of course, in all this the media plays the indispensable role.

Palestinians have enough to do defending themselves against Israeli settlements, land expropriations, the military occupation & jackboot tyranny in the West Bank, incarcerations, including of their children, the unspeakable blockade of Gaza, & the ethnic cleansing assault going on now. It is the Palestinian solidarity movement around the world that must take up the propaganda flank of this struggle & work as tirelessly to get the truth out as hasbara agents work to dispense lies.

Irish activists are circulating a petition to get their news network to give honest coverage in place of hasbara lies; English activists are protesting at the BBC because of its wretched history of lies. These actions matter because even if they don’t compel news networks to stop covering for Israeli ethnic cleansing, many will see there is another side to the story. Each media source doesn’t have to be specifically targeted because they’re all complicit & massive protests with placards demanding “stop the massacre in Gaza” will put the lie to all of them.

In the 1970s, when Palestinian justice didn’t appear to have a snow ball’s chance in hell, political relations between liberal Zionists (those who want a bantustate solution rather than a democratic secular state) & Palestinian supporters were almost amicable but as BDS gains ground around the world, amity morphs into rancor & incompatibilities between justice & apartheid become crystal clear.

Every year since 1964, Israel has sponsored a Celebrate Israel Parade in NYC where Zionists from around the country (& probably fleets from Israel) march up Fifth Avenue to salute Israel. It’s a spectacle of hasbara & organizers claim it attracts thousands; last year they claim it drew a million. A few years ago, they initiated the same parades in London & Manchester, England. But there hasn’t been a Zionist popular movement in the streets because media was all wrapped up & there wasn’t much need for a social movement to counter the lies.

BDS is changing that & we can expect to see Zionist rallies around the world, especially as counter-protests to Palestinian support rallies. Last Sunday, Zionist protesters gathered for a pro-Israel rally in Los Angeles, apparently as a counter-protest to a Palestinian solidarity rally across the street. One account estimated Palestinian supporters at 200 & different media estimated the Zionist group from 500 to 1,800. Media reports are completely conflicted & quite frankly questionable; the most honest appears to be in The Jewish Press. Photos show the Zionists flipping the bird to pro-Palestinian protesters & there was of course mutual taunting involved. It isn’t the most gracious way of operating but it isn’t fisticuffs either. What appears to be an entirely minor scuffle between protesters–provoked by a Zionist when he grabbed a Palestinian flag & stomped on it–became national news when a federal officer shot at the Palestinians driving away after the altercation where no one was hurt.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli-American Council, which co-organized the rally, characterized it as very peaceful & described the altercation as a minor incident (probably so nobody in her group would get arrested) but cops arrested the four Palestinians & booked them for assault with a deadly weapon. We’re talking the stick holding the flag, which multiplied into several sticks in media accounts.

That axiom about “the truth will set you free” is a cliché & quite frankly tedious as all get-out but in fact, truth & strength in numbers are the only weapons we have & when we combine them in a thunderous international chorus of “Stop the massacre in Gaza”, we shake the very foundations of tyranny & injustice.

(Photo of Palestinian solidarity rally in Los Angeles by Rick Loomis/LA Times)

Solidarity rallies in Kashmir in solidarity with Gaza

Kashmir solidarity with Gaza protest July 14 2014

In the past week, there have been several Palestinian solidarity rallies in Indian-occupied Kashmir. The conflict between India & Kashmir results from the British colonial partition when it gave up colonial control of South Asia in 1947. The occupation by the Indian military is every bit as brutal & relentless as the British colonial arrangement with Zionism in 1947 that led to Israeli apartheid & Palestinian bantustates.

The resistance among Kashmiri youth has been called intifada because of it’s similarities to Palestinan political resistance. As we can see from these photos, Kashmiri solidarity with Gaza is rooted in their own struggle against occupation & their heartfelt, blood-soaked understanding of injustice, persecution, & social hatred.

Our solidarity with the Kashmiri freedom movement who also stand with Gaza. Stop the massacre in Gaza! End the occupation of Kashmir!

(This photo from INn AMm)

Palestinian diaspora 2014

Palestinian diaspora July 14 2014

And so Palestinian diaspora continues: now 66 years of young, old, infirm, disabled, terrorized off their lands, out of their homes into refugee camps or exile. Operation Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza is intended to destroy the infrastructure of Gazan society & forcibly destroy or expel the population; it hasn’t a damn thing to do with fictitious rocket barrages from Hamas militants.

Netan-psycho-yahu proclaims Israel will not buckle before international pressure & he is not referring to a groundswell of revulsion at ethnic cleansing from any government. The regimes weighing in outdo each other with scurrilous, shameful denunciations of “Hamas terrorism” & weepy-assed declarations that Israel has a right to defend itself against those rockets–for which nobody can provide documentation because there is none. Showing photos of Israelis in parking garages waiting out sirens is not documentation of terrorism. It is Israeli political theater to scare the hell out of its citizens & fool them & us into thinking massive rocket barrages really exist.

As we would expect, the US Congress & Canada have issued inflammatory proclamations endorsing Israeli genocide. If you can imagine, the resolutions are even more war-mongering than the Knesset. But what do we expect from governments that conduct wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, DR Congo, & so many other places, & work tirelessly to thwart popular thrusts for democracy, like the Arab uprisings? Barbarism is the very nature of neoliberal capitalist regimes.

India, whose new prime minister is a fascist, issued a less inflammatory statement, shaking the naughty finger at both sides & urging restraint from both Palestinians & Israel. Not too much restraint on the part of Israel though because behind the scenes India has a lucrative political & military relationship with Israel, including $10 billion in military sales in the past decade.

Maybe the saddest proclamation of all comes from Cuba. No one is demanding long-winded denunciations of Israeli genocide but it certainly merits more than a couple sentences in Granma. The Cuban statement condemned Israel’s policy of collective punishment & disproportionate use of force & then went on to call for peace talks between Israel & Palestinians to set up a Palestinian state–the old bantustate solution long-since discredited by the Oslo Accords & confirmed in the past two decades of trying to implement them. As for peace talks, what did Cuba miss in the catastrophe of Israel talking peace with the Palestinian Authority & US while it escalated settlements in the West Bank & conducted bombing sorties in Gaza?

And where is the UN in all this? After all, isn’t harmoney between nations their stated mission? Don’t they have a pile of proclamations & resolutions defining war crimes & genocide? And doesn’t Israeli conduct in Gaza violate every single one of them? Why instead of denouncing this war does the UN content itself with mopping up some of the carnage by providing abandoned schools for Palestinians running from bombs to live in, sleeping on bare floors with blankets as mattress? Why does the UN make public estimations that 77% of the victims in Gaza are civilians when 100% of the people of Gaza are civilians? And why does it issue the same kind of equivocations as India, urging restraint on both sides? How does the distinction between ethnic cleansing & self-defense so escape them?

The international pressure that concerns Netan-psycho-yahu is Palestinian solidarity & the boycott movement. Mobilizing opposition to genocide is not a flash-in-the-pan operation but an ongoing campaign calling to men & women of good will across this planet to join in & make the voice of justice thunderous: Stop the massacre in Gaza!

(Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)

Israel bombs center for disabled rehab claiming it was hiding Hamas rocket launchers

Disabled center July 13 2014

Netanyahu (who we will refrain from describing with adjectives since the only suitable ones are epithets) is vowing to ignore international pressure & take out every rocket launcher & sniper’s nest in Gaza: “We will continue to forcefully attack anyone who is trying to hurt us,” he said. “No terrorist target in Gaza is immune.” So that explains why he hit the outdoor cafe, the mosque, the hospital, a rehab center for the disabled, & a charitable association for the disabled, bombed them into smithereens, & killed some of the residents & nurses. As hasbara & the Alibi Ikes of media would portray it, those disability centers were harboring Hamas rocketeers & had to be taken out.

But exactly what international pressure is Netan-psycho-yahu referring to? Since there isn’t any public opposition from a single government on planet Earth, he can only be referring to the thunderous international protests around the world demanding an end to the massacre in Gaza. For those who question if protests matter, Netan-psycho-yahu reminds us of Richard Nixon who used to claim he didn’t notice millions of anti-Vietnam War protesters marching in front of the White House because he was watching a football game. At all times, they measure how far they can go by the strength of public opposition which they pretend doesn’t exist.

These international protests do matter & right now are the only thing that can stay the hand of Israeli genocide. Last night, Israeli marines sitting in tanks on the Gaza border initiated the first ground incursion into Gaza. According to the official lies, they exchanged gunfire with “Hamas gunmen” & attacked a site used to launch long-range rockets. Was that site one of the disability centers? Or was it the mosque?

This photo is a young boy salvaging a wheelchair from the rehab center, which according to the caption “police said was struck by an Israeli tank shell.” Who the hell else would take out a rehab center? Evil fairies? Or the same space aliens who built the pyramids?

If you have any respect for the truth, support the economic boycott of Israel (barcode beginning 729); support the cultural boycott of Israel. And most importantly now, grab a placard & find a rally to demand “Stop the massacre in Gaza!”

(Photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

Israel preparing massive occupation of Gaza

Israeli tanks at Gaza border July 11 2014

During the Vietnam War, there was widespread opposition among US soldiers to the war & they played a central role in mobilizing antiwar sentiment. It was common to see photos of US GIs in Vietnam flashing the peace sign or wearing it as an insignia on their helmets in solidarity with the antiwar movement. The breakdown in military discipline justifiably made the Pentagon sweat bullets about its ability to conduct the war. That’s a proud part of GI antiwar activity.

But that history makes this photo even more repugnant. These are two of the tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers lined up in tanks on the Gaza border preparing for what Netanyahu & the Israeli war minister claim will be an extended offensive against Gaza by land, air, & sea. These two guys are preparing for genocide by taking a selfie & flashing a peace sign for ethnic cleansing. Of course, what he’s really doing is flipping the bird to the humanity of Palestinians.

Someone recently pointed out that genocide is happening in several countries including Sri Lanka, Burma, Kashmir, & elsewhere, & objected to Palestinians receiving more political attention & solidarity than other peoples. It’s a peculiar complaint because clearly, with Israel embarking on a major escalation of ethnic cleansing, Palestinians are not receiving enough solidarity to restrain genocide. For decades, Palestinian intifada stood alone against Israeli apartheid & they did not retreat against the insuperable odds of US & Israeli military might. Now the boycott movement (BDS) has changed all that & they have allies across the globe willing to stand with them–but still insufficient to restrain genocide.

What makes the Palestinian struggle evoke such widespread support is the pivotal role their struggle plays in world politics, especially in the Middle East. The US bankrolls Israeli apartheid with billions of dollars a year. They don’t do that to protect democracy in the Middle East but to maintain tyranny & the Arab uprisings made that absolutely clear. Palestinian courage & intransigence challenge the colonial schemes.

Israel, with US & European backing, is preparing to do in Gaza what was & is being done to suppress the Arab uprisings. We need only look at Egypt to see what they have planned for Gaza & the West Bank.

There can never be too much solidarity until justice is achieved. It’s time to mobilize; time to hold forums, speak-outs, rallies defending Palestinian justice & opposing genocide.

Support Palestinian justice by boycotting all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729); supporting the cultural boycott of Israel; & demanding “No military aid to Israel!”

(Photo by Ariel Schalit/AP)