At the end of March, the Israeli parliament passed the Nakba Law which states that any body that receives government funding, such as schools, can be fined for commemorating the Nakba on Israel’s Independence Day. The Nakba means “Catastrophe” in Arabic and refers to the 1948 war, the result of which was the depopulation of two thirds of the Palestinian population, which today numbers millions of refugees. To this day many still hold the keys to their original homes, but are not allowed to return. In defiance of the law, the Israeli organization Zochrot posted a sign with the law in German throughout the core of Tel Aviv where thousands celebrated. Within minutes, police surrounded the Zochorot office.
History
Morderchai Vanunu demands to apply a recently passed law and revoke his Israeli citizenship. “I have no interest in Israeli citienship, I don’t want to go on living here.”
To an outside observer, Israel looks like a nation obsessed with finding a technological fix for problems that are historical, national, and moral – but entirely not ‘technical.’ [Instead,] the Occupation must be dismantled.
Gilbert Achcar and Tom Segev discuss The Arabs and the Holocaust
Ghada Karmi: “On setting up its state in 1948, Israel set about demolishing every vestige of Palestinian life and history in the land… The battle to preserve Lifta must be won – it remains a physical memory of injustice and survival.”
In memoriam: Moshé Machover remembers his close friend, Matzpen co-founder Oded Pilavsky.
Oded Pilavsky: I finally started to comprehend what was happening there. A collectivist bunch imbued with socialist ideals, equipped with the best of agricultural machinery purchased on credit from the Jewish Agency, was reaping- robbing the fruit of the labor of poor Arabs who had been expelled from their land and their country…
Human Rights Watch Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson: “These laws threaten Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and others with yet more officially sanctioned discrimination… Israeli parliamentarians should be working hard to end glaring inequality, not pushing through discriminatory laws to control who can live where and to create a single government-approved view of Israel’s history.”
On March 30, 2011, join the international campaign to Stop the Jewish National Fund. A key pillar of the colonization of Palestine – from the founding of the State of Israel to the present – has been the Keren Kayemet LeIsrael (KKL), commonly known in English as the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF enjoys charity status in over 50 countries. This is despite its role in the on-going displacement of indigenous Palestinians from their land, the theft of their property, the funding of historic and present-day colonies, and the destruction of the natural environment.
Noam Chomsky speaks about Cairo and Wisconsin – social struggles in both Egypt and the US, including the history of union activism.
Suddenly, to be an Arab has become a good thing. People all over the Arab world feel a sense of pride in shaking off decades of cowed passivity under dictatorships that ruled with no deference to popular wishes. And it has become respectable in the West as well. Egypt is now thought of as an exciting and progressive place; its people’s expressions of solidarity are welcomed by demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin; and its bright young activists are seen as models for a new kind of twenty-first-century mobilization.
Seven Deadly Myths examines the concept of knowing and not knowing at the same time. Seeing and not comprehending what you see. It starts in the West Bank colony of Ariel where director Lia Tarachansky grew up. As she returns to the settlement, she discovers as though for the first time that it is surrounded by Palestinian villages, that the dispossessed are right next door, behind electrical fences, under watch towers, locked behind walls. But the Palestinians were not made invisible by accident.
IOA Editor: Highly recommended! And, this trailer will be removed this coming weekend – very few days left to watch it.
Lifta has become known within Israel and internationally as a quintessential Palestinian village, one of the few of the 500 villages that had not been completely destroyed by Israeli forces in the war of 1948. Lifta is celebrated as part of a beautiful landscape of ruins, loved by walkers and nature enthusiasts, but remembered primarily by its original inhabitants many of whom live nearby but have never been allowed to return.
Israelis and Palestinians dedicated to the village Lifta’s preservation have called the plan to build 212 luxury units and a small hotel the end for the last Palestinian village of its kind.
IOA Editor: Yet another example of Palestinian history to be erased by Israel — this time, while not physically razed, it will be raped and pillaged by government planners and private developers. Even greater than the loss of the remarkable architectural beauty of the remnants of this village (which managed to escape Israeli bulldozers for 63 years) is the importance of the ‘big picture’ behind the story: Israel has methodically eradicated most of Palestine’s pre-1948 Palestinian history — the more than 400 conquered Arab villages it destroyed after 1948 — while reconstructing Palestine’s Jewish history. This is particularly true for Jerusalem, where the ‘battle of the narratives’ continues to be at the forefront of the Occupation.
Israeli civics teacher: “When we have a discussion in class about equal rights, the class immediately gets out of control. The students attack us, the teachers, for being leftist and anti-Semitic, and say that all the Arab citizens who want to destroy Israel should be transferred… It’s very sad, but the students justify the [Kafr Qasim] massacre and say, ‘A good Arab is a dead Arab.'”
RELATED Israeli Humor: Hope Kindergarten
A brilliant skit from the Israeli comedy show “Eretz Nehederet” (“Wonderful Country”) on Israel’s Channel 2 TV showing anti-Arab racism introduced to young Israeli children very early in life.
IOA Editor: If you think that this is some sort of an abstract humor, think again. For the latest, see Student’s answer on civics test: Death to Arabs
Attorney Kais Nasser: “Anyone who reads the documentation file can see that the request for a permit was in fact intended to take revenge on the mufti in his grave, 100 years later, for his political positions in the Arab-Jewish conflict… The request for a permit has a political and Zionist agenda.”
IOA Editor: From the Before and After photos, the demolition of this fine example of Jerusalem architecture appears to be a done deal. Yet another bit of Palestinian history erased by Israel.
Hilik Bar, secretary general of the Labor Party: “Judea and Samaria is the land of our fathers and the Bible, and the Labor Party and its members are not disconnected from what this region represents, historically and religiously. We should all stay true to the legacy of the nation’s Fathers and Mothers, and pass it on from generation to generation. Labor belongs to the center and not to the far left […] we feel closer to the settlements’ people here than to the far left.”
IOA Editor: As Sheizaf correctly points out, Labor has not evacuated even a single settlement, and the colonization of the West Bank started on the party’s watch in the 1970s. It was subsequently expanded greatly under Rabin and prospered under Barak, throughout the Oslo “peace talks.” Indeed, Israel’s Labor movement was responsible for the colonization of Palestine from pre-statehood and, since 1967, it has steadfastly rejected opportunities to end the conflict with the Palestinians based on Land-for-Peace, that is, ending the Occupation in return for peace. Historically, there’s little doubt that Labor had played a far larger role in dispossessing the Palestinians than than the various Likud-led governments.
From an unbiased viewpoint, even if it were true that present-day Jews are descended from an ancient people forcibly exiled from Palestine, it would clearly not justify Zionist colonization and the ‘repossession’ of the country after two millennia from its long-standing inhabitants. This is the epitome of hutzpah coming from Zionists, who deny the right of return to the Palestinians they evicted and exiled 62 years ago.
