July 2008

60th Anniversary of Nakba

We Are All Refugees

We're Going!

Blogging for Palestine

Intel: Nakba Inside

Olive Harvest in Jalud

A British Soldier at Nakba '48-'49

Volunteers Needed for Autumn 2008 Harvest

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60th Anniversary of Nakba

-the Editors, June 2008

2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Nakba ("the catastrophe"): the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948. While Israel celebrates the anniversary of its founding, it remains in violation of UN resolution 194, and the fourth Geneva Human Rights Convention, preventing the return of approximately six million Palestinian refugees. Meanwhile, Israel grants citizenship and the right to “return” to Israel to any person of Jewish ancestry worldwide.

In this issue, we Wepresent three articles that offer perspectives different from what you will find in the mainstream media. Colin Guiver shares recollections of what he saw as a soldier in the British Mandate in 1948. Henry Norr’s article explains how Intel, considered one of our most respected local companies, profits from the Nakba with a factory built on confiscated Palestinian land. Wilhemene Baramki writes about her family’s flight from their home in West Jerusalem.

-Eds

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We Are All Refugees

By Wilhemene Baramki, February 2008

In May of 1948, 14-year-old Wilhelmine Baramki and her family packed a few of their bags and fled their west Jerusalem home. For several months prior, Zionist gunmen had been shooting at the bus that carried her father to and from work and the occasional bullet came through the windows of their home. It became too dangerous for her father to go to work. In the face of increasing violence, the family moved in with their aunt in a convent in Jerusalem's Old City.

"Our home is still there but we can't go back to it," said Baramki. "We thought we were going temporarily. We locked all the doors, and marked which key went to which door. We just took the necessary things because we thought we were just leaving for two or three weeks and then we'd come back."

However, the weeks passed and still they could not return home. Instead, the family decided to spend three months in Beirut. Before leaving, despite her family's fears for her safety, Baramki's mother snuck back to their home to wash, iron and fold the family's laundry, so that they would have clean clothes upon their return, and to maintain a sense of normalcy amidst the uncertainty of the future.

Three months turned into a year and a half, after which they moved to East Jerusalem, then occupied by Jordan, where Baramki still lives today. She was not able to see her home on the Israeli side of Jerusalem until after the 1967 war. Four Jewish families had moved in. "It's very sad to stand in front of your home and not be able to enter," she said. "All our clothes, furniture, everything we had was in there and the Israelis came and took it. Even today the initials of my father, Anton Khoury, are on the façade."

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We're Going!

By Greta Berlin, May 2008

We’re going! Nothing will stop us from sailing to Gaza. And we’re here to tell you that we need your support, your donations, and your desire to see the Palestinians of Gaza free from this horrible occupation.

--Dr. Paul Larudee and Greta Berlin, Free Gaza Movement

More than 75 people have asked to be on the list of potential boat passengers sailing from Cyprus to Gaza on August 5, 2008. They come from 15 countries; the oldest is 84 and the youngest is 25. The list includes Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals, all with the same goal: to break the siege of Gaza and bring attention to Israel’s slow-motion genocide of 1.5 million people locked into an outdoor prison.

Gaza’s people are being slowly starved to death, denied medical treatment, and forbidden to leave their prison. Only an action as bold as sailing to Gaza will bring the world’s attention to the plight of these people. Israel tells the world that it no longer occupies Gaza, so we don’t need their permission to sail into the port. And we won’t ask for it. Nor will we allow the Israeli military to stop us, since we are sailing from international waters directly into the waters of Gaza.

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Blogging for Palestine

- the Editors, May 2008

The blogosphere has become both an activist tool and a new media outlet in and of itself, allowing people from around the world to add their voice to the noise of the mainstream media or even challenge it. But what does this mean for advocates for justice in Palestine? Are the pro-Israel media biases found in the mainstream media the same in the blogosphere? If not, how is the blogosphere different? To find out, Norcal ISM discussed the issue with several bloggers who write frequently about Palestine. Here's what they had to say.

Q In general, the mainstream media suppresses voices that express unfavorable opinions of Zionism and the state of Israel. Are alternative media and the blogosphere more open to these points of view?

A Yes, they're much more open. The mainstream media in the U.S. are almost fanatically "pro-Israel", and while dissenting viewpoints are occasionally given space they are almost completely marginalized. This is primarily because mainstream journalism is to a significant degree shaped by the demands and interests of power, and Israel is viewed by the U.S. establishment as a valuable client state. The internet is a much more open medium, and is far less subject to the constraints imposed on the mainstream media. Alternative media such as Znet, CounterPunch, AntiWar.com, and the Electronic Intifada are free to be as critical of Israel as they want. Similarly, in the blogosphere there are virtually no barriers to entry. Anyone can set up a blog for free and begin writing about whatever they want, expressing their opinions freely. The flipside of this is that the vast majority of blogs have very small readerships, which is a big handicap for those trying to use blogs to campaign for a particular issue. Excellent critiques of Israeli policy are not much use if no one reads them.

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Intel: Nakba Inside

By Henry Norr, May 2008

Sixty years ago, there was no Kiryat Gat. Then came the Naqba, an extraordinarily brazen case of ethnic cleansing, and, a few decades later, a record-breaking series of investments from chipmaker Intel.

Today, Intel is putting the finishing touches on Israel's biggest construction project this side of the Apartheid Wall, and Kiryat Gat has become one of the crown jewels of the country's booming high-tech economy. But if the Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, has it right, Palestinian resistance forces could soon be capable of exacting a spectacular new price for their dispossession.

I. Tragedy

Located in south-central Israel – southwest of Jerusalem, northeast of Gaza City, at the northern edge of the Negev desert – Kiryat Gat stands on land that once belonged to two Palestinian villages, al-Faluja and 'Iraq al-Manshiya.

While the area is well within the Green Line, Israel's 1949-67 border, its history is in one way unique: Israeli forces never captured it during the 1948-49 war. Egyptian troops occupied it in May, 1948, and despite Israeli counter-offensives, 4,000 Egyptian soldiers managed to hold on to the two villages until the two governments signed an armistice on February 24, 1949.

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Olive Harvest in Jalud

By Dimitri Jefferson, May 2008

The fall 2007 ISM Olive Harvest Campaign was my first visit to occupied Palestine, and I was apprehensive about what lay ahead. To say that I was shocked and saddened by what I saw and experienced would be an understatement. During my stay I witnessed the incessant race-based bigotry and violence manifested by both Israeli Occupational Forces (IOF) and Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians.

To see this oppression of Israeli apartheid firsthand was truly upsetting. The illegal settlements and hundreds of checkpoints that have metastasized in the West Bank strangle commerce and social infrastructure by inhibiting free movement. Policies of collective punishment used by the IOF are both illegal and cruel.

I experienced the idle malice of Israeli soldiers and settlers while harvesting olives with the people of Jalud, a village just south Nablus. Of Jalud’s 4000 acres, almost seventy-five percent has been illegally and forcefully confiscated to form the colony known as “Shiloh”. On a sunny day in November, a group of families from Jalud, accompanied by international human rights workers (HRWs) and Israeli activists, attempted to harvest olives from a plot of land adjacent to Shiloh. Not longer than two minutes after we arrived, IOF soldiers appeared, screaming for us to leave, cocking their rifles and pointing them in people’s faces. A man approached the soldiers and showed them the deed to his land as well as a map. Next, about a dozen male settlers walked up. Armed with guns, batons, and attack dogs, the settlers were extremely aggressive. One of the settlers approached a woman and pushed her to the ground, spilling her olives in the process. A few dozen more soldiers drove up in jeeps. The soldiers started loading up their guns with rubber bullets and threatening the farmers with tear gas. I was appalled to see the settlers and soldiers talking and laughing together as they terrorized an innocent group of people.

A British Soldier at Nakba '48-'49

By Colin Guiver, May 2008

In, 1946, I was 18 years old and the British Army was waiting to conscript me into the Royal Corp of Signals which pleased me to no end because that meant no shooting. When I learned my posting would be somewhere in the Middle East, I was thrilled as I did not wish to be serve in Germany after experiencing the bombing of London and Weymouth. My hopes lay in places like Palestine or Trans Jordan. I knew of the stories of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia as he lived and was killed in a motor cycle accident just a few miles from where I was born in Weymouth, England.

I arrived first in Cairo and soon was sitting in a jeep, crossing the famous Sinai Desert from Lawrence’s book, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”. My first sight of Palestine was at Beersheba, and I was not disappointed at all Bedouins and Palestinian Arabs in traditional clothing was the normal attire-not the t-shirts and jeans of today. My army camp was just a few miles north of Gaza and Working trips took me to places like Hebron, Akaba on the gulf, and the wonderful city of Petra in Jordan. I could not believe my luck. Once, we even followed the Turkish Railway and saw the abandoned forts and trenches of the southern desert war of the Arab revolt.

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Volunteers Needed for Autumn 2008 Harvest

By Asa Winstanley

The Olive Harvest is an annual affirmation of Palestinians’ historical, spiritual and economic connection to their land, and a rejection of Israeli efforts to seize it. As the indigenous people of this land, Palestinians have farmed olives here for thousands of years. The annual harvest is a symbol of life for Palestinian communities. Sadly, agricultural productivity over the last seven years has decreased dramatically because of closures and sieges that prohibit access to farms and markets. Over half a million olive and fruit trees have been destroyed since September 2000. Palestinian agriculture is being destroyed by the policies of the Israeli government, and the rights of Palestinians to their land and to a livelihood are being denied.

International and Israeli volunteers join Palestinians each year to harvest olives, despite efforts by Israeli settlers and soldiers with bulldozers to destroy this vital centerpiece of Palestinian life.

The 2008 Olive Harvest Campaign is part of the ongoing work of the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led movement of Palestinian, Israeli and international activists working to raise awareness about the struggle for Palestinian freedom. ISM uses nonviolent, direct-action methods of resistance to confront and challenge Israeli persecution of Palestinians. With your participation, we will expose the injustice of the Israeli Occupation and send a message to the world that the Occupation must end and the wall must fall!

Please come to Palestine and join ISM for the 2008 Olive Harvest Campaign.

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