“Denying my entry to the West Bank was a minor event, but significant because it indicates irrational behavior on the part of Israel,” the linguist Noam Chomsky said at the start of his lecture last Tuesday to a few dozen students and faculty members of Bir Zeit University. He delivered his lecture, “Americans and the World,” by video conference, of course: He in Amman, his audience in one of the university’s lecture halls.
Occupation
[N]either Chomsky nor I are have any illusions about the limits of the aforementioned initiatives or their possible (if not probable) failure in the face of Israel’s hubris and the power disparity between the parties. But Chomsky also alluded to the lesson of a movement that succeeded, not by waiting for favorable political conditions to hand it the vision it sought, but by moving ahead with building its project and waiting for the right political conditions to incrementally achieve what it did.
[C]reate a park at the site in memory of the people buried there, serving all the city’s residents… the part of the cemetery that remains should be restored and cared for; it should be turned into one of the sites that Jerusalem is proud of. The absence of construction on the excavation site must be part of the healing process that Jerusalem so needs: healing through tolerance.
The decision to resume opposition to the project follows a Haaretz investigation into excavation at the site, located in the Mamilla area of Jerusalem, and the damage it has caused to hundreds of graves there. The museum is being built by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Haaretz: Skeletons, High Court rulings, bigwigs embroiled in other scandals, a world-famous architect and some Hollywood panache − all are part of the story of the Museum of Tolerance, slated for one of the most sensitive parts of Jerusalem: on top of a Muslim cemetery. For the first time, Haaretz reveals evidence of a highly dubious, five-month rescue excavation that took place secretly on the site, plus other previously unknown details. A three-part saga.
IOA Editor: The Mamilla Cemetery is a Muslim cemetery with thousands of grave sites that go back some 1200 years. Grave sites are sacred to both Islam and Judaism. This case demonstrates vividly how important it is for Israel to eradicate every possible trace of Palestinian life from the history of Palestine – chapters of history that document non-Jewish life – and doing so even at the risk of embarrassment and international criticism. And while the erasure of the history of the Palestinian dead is important, it actually compliments a far greater injustice: the razing of some 500 Palestinian villages by Israel during the 1948 Nakba and the Occupation.
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Following Haaretz report: Arabs to resume Museum of Tolerance battle
Haaretz: Skeletons, High Court rulings, bigwigs embroiled in other scandals, a world-famous architect and some Hollywood panache − all are part of the story of the Museum of Tolerance, slated for one of the most sensitive parts of Jerusalem: on top of a Muslim cemetery. For the first time, Haaretz reveals evidence of a highly dubious, five-month rescue excavation that took place secretly on the site, plus other previously unknown details. A three-part saga.
IOA Editor: The Mamilla Cemetery is a Muslim cemetery with thousands of grave sites that go back some 1200 years. Grave sites are sacred to both Islam and Judaism. This case demonstrates vividly how important it is for Israel to eradicate every possible trace of Palestinian life from the history of Palestine – chapters of history that document non-Jewish life – and doing so even at the risk of embarrassment and international criticism. And while the erasure of the history of the Palestinian dead is important, it actually compliments a far greater injustice: the razing of some 500 Palestinian villages by Israel during the 1948 Nakba and the Occupation.
Haaretz: Skeletons, High Court rulings, bigwigs embroiled in other scandals, a world-famous architect and some Hollywood panache − all are part of the story of the Museum of Tolerance, slated for one of the most sensitive parts of Jerusalem: on top of a Muslim cemetery. For the first time, Haaretz reveals evidence of a highly dubious, five-month rescue excavation that took place secretly on the site, plus other previously unknown details. A three-part saga.
IOA Editor: The Mamilla Cemetery is a Muslim cemetery with thousands of grave sites that go back some 1200 years. Grave sites are sacred to both Islam and Judaism. This case demonstrates vividly how important it is for Israel to eradicate every possible trace of Palestinian life from the history of Palestine – chapters of history that document non-Jewish life – and doing so even at the risk of embarrassment and international criticism. And while the erasure of the history of the Palestinian dead is important, it actually compliments a far greater injustice: the razing of some 500 Palestinian villages by Israel during the 1948 Nakba and the Occupation.
Haaretz: Skeletons, High Court rulings, bigwigs embroiled in other scandals, a world-famous architect and some Hollywood panache − all are part of the story of the Museum of Tolerance, slated for one of the most sensitive parts of Jerusalem: on top of a Muslim cemetery. For the first time, Haaretz reveals evidence of a highly dubious, five-month rescue excavation that took place secretly on the site, plus other previously unknown details. A three-part saga.
IOA Editor: The Mamilla Cemetery is a Muslim cemetery with thousands of grave sites that go back some 1200 years. Grave sites are sacred to both Islam and Judaism. This case demonstrates vividly how important it is for Israel to eradicate every possible trace of Palestinian life from the history of Palestine – chapters of history that document non-Jewish life – and doing so even at the risk of embarrassment and international criticism. And while the erasure of the history of the Palestinian dead is important, it actually compliments a far greater injustice: the razing of some 500 Palestinian villages by Israel during the 1948 Nakba and the Occupation.
Haaretz: Skeletons, High Court rulings, bigwigs embroiled in other scandals, a world-famous architect and some Hollywood panache − all are part of the story of the Museum of Tolerance, slated for one of the most sensitive parts of Jerusalem: on top of a Muslim cemetery. For the first time, Haaretz reveals evidence of a highly dubious, five-month rescue excavation that took place secretly on the site, plus other previously unknown details. A three-part saga.
IOA Editor: The Mamilla Cemetery is a Muslim cemetery with thousands of grave sites that go back some 1200 years. Grave sites are sacred to both Islam and Judaism. This case demonstrates vividly how important it is for Israel to eradicate every possible trace of Palestinian life from the history of Palestine – chapters of history that document non-Jewish life – and doing so even at the risk of embarrassment and international criticism. And while the erasure of the history of the Palestinian dead is important, it actually compliments a far greater injustice: the razing of some 500 Palestinian villages by Israel during the 1948 Nakba and the Occupation.
Haaretz: Skeletons, High Court rulings, bigwigs embroiled in other scandals, a world-famous architect and some Hollywood panache − all are part of the story of the Museum of Tolerance, slated for one of the most sensitive parts of Jerusalem: on top of a Muslim cemetery. For the first time, Haaretz reveals evidence of a highly dubious, five-month rescue excavation that took place secretly on the site, plus other previously unknown details. A three-part saga.
IOA Editor: The Mamilla Cemetery is a Muslim cemetery with thousands of grave sites that go back some 1200 years. Grave sites are sacred to both Islam and Judaism. This case demonstrates vividly how important it is for Israel to eradicate every possible trace of Palestinian life from the history of Palestine – chapters of history that document non-Jewish life – and doing so even at the risk of embarrassment and international criticism. And while the erasure of the history of the Palestinian dead is important, it actually compliments a far greater injustice: the razing of some 500 Palestinian villages by Israel during the 1948 Nakba and the Occupation.
Chomsky spoke yesterday to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, whom he was supposed to meet in Ramallah. Fayyad’s office released a statement saying the two men “discussed the political situation and developments in Palestine.” Fayyad said he “strongly condemns the decision of the occupation forces to prevent Chomsky from entering Palestinian land.”
I have never heard of a democratic state denying entry to thinkers… who neither call for violence or break local or international law. So what on earth is happening to Israel? … If anything, barring Chomsky gives ammunition to those who say that Israel is infringing on academic freedom in the Palestinian Authority, and that a boycott against its universities is therefore justified.
Palestinian activists: [W]hy shouldn’t the PA change the addresses of thousands of people, instead of having its officials turn them away while explaining obediently that “the Israelis don’t agree to it”? In this way, the PA will exercise its authority in accordance with Oslo. This would be a form of integrated civil disobedience: the leadership and the public together reject the occupiers’ dictates.
On May 15, Palestinians across the world mourn al-Nakba, the destruction of historic Palestine and the massive displacement of Palestinians by Israeli forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Al-Nakba was not a singular event; displacement continues to this day affecting thousands of Palestinians throughout the Middle East. There are approximately seven million Palestinian refugees and 450,000 internally displaced persons, representing 70% of the entire Palestinian population worldwide (9.8 million).
Amira Hass: Chomsky told Haaretz that he supports a two-state solution, but not the solution proposed by Jerusalem, “pieces of land that will be called a state.” He said that Israel’s behavior today reminds him of that of South Africa in the 1960s, when it realized that it was already considered a pariah, but thought that it would resolve the problem with better public relations.
IOA Editor: See also Al-Jazeera: Chomsky ban – “An end to freedom”?
Noam Chomsky… has been barred from entering the West Bank… across the Allenby Bridge from Jordan on Sunday. The linguistics professor, who frequently speaks out against Israeli policy in the occupied Palestinian territories, had been scheduled to give a lecture at Birzeit University in the West Bank. (Video interview with Noam Chomsky)
Noam Chomsky: “The government did not like the kinds of things I say and they did not like that I was only talking at Bir Zeit and not at an Israeli university too,” he said… I asked them if they could find any government in the world that likes the things I say.”
Mustafa Barghouti, one of the leaders of the struggle against Israel, was slated to accompany Chomsky on his tour of the West Bank and separation fence. He said that “Israel’s decision testifies to its racist nature. Even a person like Chomsky couldn’t avoid it. We are proud of Chomsky’s role in supporting the Palestinians and the struggle against the injustice of the occupation.”
IOA Editor: Neither Barghouthi nor Chomsky is a leader of “the struggle against Israel.” Rather, they both take part in the struggle against Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Each of them has clearly and specifically supported a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the basis of a two-states solution, Israel and Palestine, existing side by side, without Israel controlling and dominating the Palestinians. It is this last point which Israeli commentators like to twist as being “against Israel.”
In reality, the Israeli authorities denied Chomsky the right of entry into the West Bank — he did not seek entry into Israel — a territory Israel controls by military force, for nearly 43 years, against the wishes of its Palestinian inhabitants and in violation of numerous international laws, conventions, and UN resolutions. It is interesting that the Israeli media (both Ynet and Haaretz) misrepresent this story by referring to it as a denial of entry to “Israel.”
It would be possible to identify with these intolerant reactions were it not for the fact that Israel itself is one of the world’s prolific boycotters. Not only does it boycott, it preaches to others, at times even forces others, to follow in tow. Israel has imposed a cultural, academic, political, economic and military boycott on the territories. At the same time, almost no one here utters a dissenting word questioning the legitimacy of these boycotts. Yet the thought of boycotting the boycotter? Now that’s inconceivable.
For the past 43 years, Israel has been occupying Palestinian and other Arab lands conquered in 1967. Since then, and especially in the past 20 years, a campaign of ethnic cleansing has been vigorously underway, one which at times borders on genocide… Israel is methodically replacing the Palestinian population of Palestine with a Jewish population. This is not new. Looking back in time, one sees a pattern and direct connection between this and the 1948 period called the Nakba.
A professor at Bethlehem University told me they refer to the [Bethlehem] checkpoint as “Lambs to the Slaughter,” and as I made my way through the metal chute towards the narrow turnstile, I did feel like a variety of livestock. In addition, the disembodied, garbled soldiers’ voices barking through loudspeakers gave the whole thing the aura of a dystopian science fiction novel.
Human rights organizations are persecuted – simple as that – exactly in the name of the refusal to know. “It is forbidden to know” means that it is forbidden for our consciousness to move freely among the facts, the scenes, the voices, the options. All these were supposed to comprise the awareness of the Israeli who lives five minutes from these unimaginable things – 43 years of military dictatorship over another people.
The Shin Bet security service is trying to recruit Palestinian medical students as a condition for granting them entry permits to Jerusalem, according to two medical students at Al-Quds University pursuing internships in Palestinian university hospitals in the city.
The commotion over the PA’s economic campaign against the settlements indicates, more than anything else, how the colonialist mindset has been branded into Israeli consciousness. The protests over the threatened loss of the hewers of wood and drawers of water shows how hard it is to shake off the master-servant attitudes that have taken root over the last 43 years.
[W]ork has recently begun for the construction of 14 housing units in an old Israel Police station in East Jerusalem, where plans are in the works for the largest Jewish neighborhood in that part of the city… When the two neighborhoods are completed and linked, a Jewish settlement of more than 1,000 people will be situated in the heart of Ras al-Amud, a neighborhood comprising 14,000 Palestinians.
Amira Hass: The Defense Ministry is refusing – on security grounds, it says – to reveal why Israel prohibits the import into the Gaza Strip of items such as cilantro, sage, jam, chocolate, french fries, dried fruit, fabrics, notebooks empty flowerpots and toys, while allowing cinnamon, plastic buckets and combs.
“The most important task for us, expatriate Israeli dissidents, is educational – in the broad sense of the word. When I first came to the UK, not only general public opinion, but even much of the radical left, was very sympathetic to Israel. We had a tremendous job educating the left on the true nature of Zionism as a colonizing project and Israel as an expansionist settler state.”
The IOA sat with Professor Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, to discuss US-Israel relations, The Obama Administration’s Middle East policies, and effective strategy and tactics for those fighting for justice for the Palestinians.
The anti-missile systems currently operating in Israel do not provide the country with sufficient protection against surface to surface missiles and rockets, according to the chief of the Israel Air Force’s air defense network… The M-600s, which are manufactured on standard assembly lines in Syria, have a 300-kilometer range, can carry a warhead weighing up to half a ton (including unconventional warheads) and… can be prepared for launch quickly. Most worrisome is the fact that they are more precise than other weapons in the Hezbollah arsenal.
IOA Editor: A peace agreement with Syria could have resolved all this. President Assad has been relentlessly pushing for it while Israel steadfastly rejecting it: Clearly, for Israel, a piece of Syria is more important than Peace with Syria. Expect a military blowup.
Prado, director of the International Clown Festival in Galicia… planned to go to Ramallah to help organize a festival but was taken aside by a Shin Bet officer [for questioning] about his connections to various Palestinian organizations… After Prado returned to Madrid he launched a media campaign denouncing Israel and comparing the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank with Jews in Poland.
Even if not one more Jewish home is built in the occupied territories (including East Jerusalem), the enormous apparatus of domination continues to operate there with an inner logic of many years’ duration. It moves along by itself, like some huge aircraft without a pilot.
The Kibbutz Movement is encouraging demobilized soldiers to join settlements in the Jordan Valley, according to a document distributed by the organization’s special task force on settlement last month.
An interview with Israeli socialist activist Tikva Honig-Parnass who fought in 1948 War as a Zionist. Years later she would break with Zionism and join the ranks of the Matzpen, a Marxist anti-Zionist group that was active in Israel during the 1960s and 1970s. Matzpen called for the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a regional framework that would involve the unification of the Arab East under a socialist and democratic banner, while also granting Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews equal national rights.
Amira Hass: Some settlers are employing a new strategy to get Palestinians evicted from their land in the northern region of the Jordan Valley: set[ting] up a “protest” tent next to a tent belonging to Bedouin herdsmen near Wad el Maleh, on private Palestinian land. [The result:] both the Israelis and Palestinians there were handed decrees declaring the area a closed military zone.
In a cruel historical twist, nearly all of the Palestinians evicted from their homes in Sheik Jarrah in the last year-and-a-half were originally expelled in 1948 from their homes in the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbieh. In the wake of the Six-Day War, Israeli courts ruled that some of the houses these Palestinian refugees have lived in since 1948 are actually legally owned by Jewish Israelis, who have claims dating from before Israel’s founding.
[C]orruption on the hill in West Jerusalem is nothing compared to the theft of land, identity rape, and the body of lies and criminal discrimination against 270,000 residents of the eastern part of the city. Although these despicable acts have been going on in broad daylight for years, the public and the media don’t find them interesting. After all, it’s about Arabs.
