I am Israel (video - documentary)

Not long, dynamic and very explanatory video on what is wrong with Israel (if you had still any doubt). It is available in several languages (version here in English).

The fact that it can explain so much in so little time really shows why Israel and its Lobby cannot win even the propaganda war: because truth defends itself and does it with relative ease, because it's too easy to identify the racist, colonialist and genocidal nature of this abhorrent polity.



Found at Justice, posted at YouTube by Jihano92, original site: I am Israel.

Anarchists Against the Wall

I've just now come to know of this nonviolent movement of Israeli anarchists and other anti-Zionists against the wall of shame that Israel has set to enforce apartheid in Palestine.



Looks promising, specially as they have been growing slowly but steadily along the years. With the many differences, I can hint to a parallel with the antimilitarist struggle we held in the 1980s and early 1990s against conscription in the state of Spain, which was a total success.

The keys of the success were, I understand: nonviolence, pedagogy, grassroots organization and the fact that the system was so rotten and delegitimized that it was relatively easy to pull it down. Of course people went to jail for that... but that was part of the plan.


Similarly the state of Israel and its apartheid and criminal genocide is morally bankrupt and it is just a matter of time until it falls.

This kind of struggle is what is needed in order to mend the wounds. It is important, I think, that the lead is being taken by people with no religion when it is that farce of religious sectarianism what is used as pretext for apartheid and colonization.

I am glad that it is expanding more and more.

Read more at: Anarchists Against the Wall and Ilan Against the Wall.

Freedom Flotilla (10): Rachel Corrie nearing Gaza

Free Gaza has posted today at their site an article saying that the ship is just 150 miles from Gaza. However:

The passengers on board the ship have stated, “communication is difficult and sometimes impossible and there are many rumors out there started by Israeli authorities, but there is no way we are going to Ashdod. We are, for sure, on our way to Gaza.”

The Malayo-Irish crew includes a Nobel Prize laureate, a Malaysian MP, a former UN Assistant Secretary General, a former Political Secretary to the PM of Malaysia, among other people, including Malaysian journalists.


Huwaida Arraf arrested at Bilin

Huwaida Arraf, chairwoman of Free Gaza, was arrested again by the Israeli authorities while taking part at a weekly nonviolent protest against the wall of shame, reports Free Gaza. Bilin is a Palestinian village strangled by the construction of the Apartheid Wall.


Habeas Corpus petition

Free Gaza attorneys have also issued an habeas corpus petition to the High Court of Israel demanding information about the health and whereabouts of the 54 passengers who were admitted to Israeli hospitals after the raid.

They also sent a letter to Israeli health officers asking them to set up a hotline for the families of the injured and deceased.


Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, which calls to boycott Israel for its apartheid and genocidal policies, in response to the criminal attack against the Freedom Flotilla makes a call to:

• Mobilize for an emergency Global BDS Day of Action on Saturday 5 June 2010 -- the 43rd anniversary of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem
• Pressure governments to start implementing trade sanctions and arms embargos
• We call specifically on transport and dock workers and unions around the globe to: Refuse to load/offload Israeli ships and airplanes, following the historic example set by the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) in Durban in February 2009 and endorsed by the Maritime Union of Australia (Western Australia).

Navarrese demand linguistic equality

Thousands of southern Navarrese demonstrated yesterday in Pamplona in demand of equal rights in access to education and services in the Basque language.

'Freedom to choose the Basque language'

A key issue is availability of public education in Basque language but they also demand the right to access TV in Basque and the legal possibility of expressing themselves in Basque language in everyday situations.

The artificial division of Navarre in three linguistic zones (Basque, mixed and non-Basque), which is designed to discriminate against Basque speakers has been often described as Napartheid and has been criticized by EU institutions (to no avail).

Source: Gara.

Spanish Inquisition: 'Mandela never used violence'

It would be laughable if one had not too present the aphorism of that Nazi propagandist who stated "a lie repeated one thousand times is a truth". And in Spain what the authorities say, specially in regards to Basques, is parroted by all the media without any criticism at all.

This single-discourse regime is incredibly said to be a "democracy" just because now and then they allow for ritual elections where nothing is decided at all.

Just in case anyone happens to do as the Spanish media and believe such nonsense, I must remind here that Nelson Mandela was a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) an armed organization that fought by military means against the "democratic" racist regime that existed in South Africa.

This absurd claim that pretends to alter the historical reality of the South African struggle for democracy and human rights in order to adequate it to the reactionary ideals of a weakened regime, as is that of post-Francoist Spain, was made in the context of yet another inquisitorial trial against Basque citizens, in this case the rather well known speaker of the Basque Nationalist Left Arnaldo Otegi.

The trial, which concluded with a condenatory sentence of two years of prison and 16 years of absolute inhabilitation to exert public office for Otegi but acquitment of the other four prosecuted, was engineered around some declarations of the Basque politician, which neither the prosecutors nor the tribunal had any idea initially what they might mean, as they were said in Basque language and they had not even bothered to order a translation.

Otegi had dared to speak, in June 2005, in the homage to Basque prisoner Joxe Mari Sagardui, Gatza, who had been in prison for 25 years already (i.e. since 1980).

A. Otegi in the 2005 homage meeting.
Behind the photos of Gatza in 1980 and today.

In his defense Otegi mentioned that Nelson Mandela was also a political prisoner, to what the tribunal, that showed shamelessly its lack of neutrality all the time, replied in the sentence that the South African leader "never used violence nor supported it in order to achieve the suppression of apartheid".

This is blatantly false. Nelson Mandela was a founding member of the armed group, which the racist regime naturally used to dismiss as terrorism and that was the main justification for his life sentence, now so much regretted by all. Also Mandela has often defended that resorting to violence was the only thing that they could do in that time.

In his own words:

Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

Besides of this convenient falsification of history by a supposedly objective and well informed tribunal (ahem), the, eventually translated, evidence against Otegi is summarized in the sentence as the following fragment:

... we proposed two [negotiation] boards and those boards, we don't know when, but will exist.

And, finally, in these two boards, like in South Africa, the future of this people will be built in agreement, with compromise, freedom, democracy and justice. Acknowledging the territoriality and the self-determination of this people, but this cannot be built without struggle, without organization and without compromise.

Gatza has been 25 years in prison, Mandela came out after 27 years. But Mandela did not leave prison to meet a South Africa of the past, Mandela came out of prison with aprtheid overcome, with democracy built and with freedom achieved. And that is the way that will come out in this people ["nation" or "country" meant in the original surely] the Collective of Basque Political Prisoners.

We still don't know if it will be long, short or breve, what we know is that in South Africa they achieved after 27 years. And what we know is that, if we keep the political lucidity, intelligence and prudence that Jon Idigoras told us about, maybe in 27 years will also be achieved in the Basque Country through negotiation the democratic national scenario is owed, that is deserved, that is needed. We owe that to the Basque political prisoners, refugees and so many comrades we have left behind in the struggle and we will achieve it. We are going through the good path, we are in the good path, the conditions are being created and we are going to manage those conditions within the will of the people. Territoriality and self-determination, democracy and justice.

And all the repressed Basques building the Basque Country with us at home, at the streets, in the Basque Country. Forward the Nationalist Left! Forward the Basque Country!

Sorry about some punctuation issues and some confusing sentences but I've tried to follow to the word the version reported (in Spanish, not the original Basque one) by the tribunal in its sentence, which, no doubt, is just a poor translation of the original discourse.

This new attack comes in the context in which the Nationalist Left is pushing forward yet another proposal for a democratic solution to the Basque-Spanish conflict and when Basque independentists of all colors are gathering into a wider movement.

Source: Gara [es].

Update (March 8): even the president of the Western Basque section of the ruling Socialist Party, Jesús Egiguren has declared that "is somewhat strange what has happened because they have applied the maximum possible penalty" (...) "it seems all exaggerated but who dares to criticize the judges!". Meanwhile the tories are proposing even further measures to make sure that the Nationalist Left cannot take part in Basque institutional politics in any way under any scenario. Source: Gara.

Nonviolent movememnt for a single state solution in Palestine

I believe it is very worth mentioning this Gaza group, new to me, that is launching a campaign to solve the problem of Palestine by the only means possible: the constitution of a multiethnic secular democratic unified state. The fact that they are also nonviolent makes them even more interesting in a context marked by violence and continuous crimes against humankind (very specially by Israel - there's no comparison!)

Link: The One Democratic State Group (ODSG).
.

Israeli Apartheid: real and with legal implications worldwide

Similarly to the previous report by a South African committee, this new paper by Luciana Coconi ratifies the idea that what happens in Palestine has no other name than Apartheid, which is a crime against humankind and therefore Israeli officials and collaborators of all sorts can be prosecuted internationally anywhere on Earth.

The paper, titled Apartheid against the Palestinian people, has been published by ACSUR and is available in English, Spanish and Catalan (direct link to English PDF here).
.

Palestinians demolish part of the Wall of Shame on the anniversary of Berlin Wall

A group of Palestinian and foreign activists have demolished a small section of the Zionazi wall of shame that was built to enforce apartheid in Palestine.

In Qalandiya, some 50 masked activists demolished a section of the wall using a truck, then crossing the apartheid line and burning tyres at the other side. The slogan of the action was "Jerusalem we are coming" and was visible in some shirts.

Last friday another section at Nilin was almost demolished using a hydraulic car-jack.

The activities are directed to raise awareness on the apartheid wall, which is almost identical in design to the Berlin wall. Abdullah Abu Rahma, leader of the People's Campaign to Fight the Wall, declared:

Today we commemorate 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is the beginning of the activities, which we do, to express our hold on our land, and our refusal to this wall - the wall of torture, the wall of humiliation.

Activities through the world are scheduled for this week in order to raise awareness of the abuse this barrier is, to claim its demolition in agreement with the International Criminal Court sentences, and to demand the release of imprisioned anti-wall activists.

Source: Al Jazeera.
.

Bilin or Berlin

I was reading this news item at TAANS and, still sleepy from my long nap, I was understanding

... separation barrier in Berlin...

One of the many useful properties of the twilight zone is to blur time and space and reveal unusual truths that way.
.

Would a Peace Nobel veto sanctions against criminal Israel?

Indeed if that one is Barack Obama.

And the Norwegian prize has covered itself in shame with this year's decision of giving it to the US President Obama only because he sells "hope" and "change" well, talks smoother and looks smarter than his extremist cowboy predecessor.

The first test of the validity of this wishful thinking Nobel prize is precisely now at the UN, as the Goldstone Report, denouncing some of the criminal brutality of the occupying power in Gaza Strip this past winter, brutality that continues every single day, as the nuclear residues cause mutations and the rebuilding aid is systematically blocked at the ghetto's checkpoints. As the report makes its way through the General Assembly, the US threatens with veto, showing again that justice and human rights don't matter in the agenda of the Empire but only what Israel and the Zionist Lobby wish.

By the way, some days ago Joachim Martillo wrote at Ethnic Ashkenazim Agains Zionism, explaining that the Lobby's GDP is the size of that of large power like the UK or France, more than 2 trillion USD, without the liabilities of running a state, what in his opinion makes the GDP effectively 10 times larger or more. For comparison the US GDP is of 14 trillion dollars, and a good deal of it belongs to the Lobby anyhow.

But there are some timid signs that the all-encompasing influence of Zionism in the West is weakening. Recently Sweden rejected to bow to Zionist pressure to persecute a newspaper that denounced Israeli crimes, and later they rejected the visit of the particularly extremist Zionist foreign minister Avigador Liebermann. Now Turkey has snubbed Israel, by swiftly discarding them from a NATO military exercise, what has brought the Zionists to ponder if they can count on their traditional Turkish allies anymore.

The Zionists still have the money and lots of power but some are feeling the potentially greater pressure of the public shame that comes from association with such overtly racist criminals. Or maybe is that even among politicians there are some who still have a bit of dignity.

But Obama is certainly not among those. He has fulfilled so far the more pessimistic analysis that I could read upon his ascenssion, betraying the people that supported him, not reverting or investigating the criminal policies of his predecessor for the most part, keeping the sanctions against Cuba and anyone who dares to trade with them, and also keeping the criminal association with the Zionist apartheid regime up to the point of vetoing a clearly objective and neutral report that happens to condemn Israel for some of its worst criminal practices, widely denounced worldwide. Practices that have in fact backfired in the public opinion arena much further than Zionists would ever have expected, clouted as they are in the extreme arrogance that too powerful people and gangs often fall into.

But practices that are still active for the most part, causing the slow death of Gazans and continuing with the daily ethnic cleansing of other parts of Palestine.

Criminal practices and criminal nature that we can't but denounce once and again until the apartheid regime itself falls.

We shall overcome.
.

Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid

That is the conclusion of an independent South African committee, enlisted by the Human Sciences Research Council to verify the claims of apartheid in Palestine.

The committee concludes, following international jurisprudence that race is a social construct relative to local perceptions and that, in this sense, Jewish and Palestinian are racial categories in the Near East.

It then goes on to examine Israeli practices on light of the article 2 of the Apartheid Convention.

Finding that:

Section a) Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person.- YES: Israel’s policies and practices include murder, in the form of extrajudicial killings; torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees (...) All of these practices are discriminatory in that Palestinians are subject to legal systems and courts which apply standards of evidence and procedure that are different from those applied to Jewish settlers living the OPT and that result in harsher penalties for Palestinians.

Section b) Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part.- NO: Not satisfied, as the Israel’s policies and practices in the OPT are not found to have the intent of causing the physical destruction of the Palestinian people.

Section c) Measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups.- YES:

i) (...) Restrictions on the Palestinian right to freedom of movement are endemic in the West BankPalestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not allowed to visit the other territory and are not allowed to enter East Jerusalem with a pass.

ii) The right of Palestinians to choose their own place of residence within their territory is severely curtailed by systematic administrative restrictions on Palestinian residency and building in East Jerusalem, by discriminatory legislation that operates to prevent Palestinian spouses from living together on the basis of which part of the OPT they originate from, and by the strictures of the permit and ID systems.

iii) Palestinians are denied their right to leave and return to their country. Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 from the territory now inside Israel who are living in the OPT (approximately 1.8 million people including descendents) are not allowed to return to their former places of residence. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced to surrounding states from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 have been prevented from returning to the OPT. (...) Political activists and human rights defenders are often subject to arbitrary and undefined ’travel bans’, while many Palestinians who travelled and lived abroad for business or personal reasons have had their residence IDs revoked and been prohibited from returning.

iv) Israel denies Palestinians in the OPT their right to a nationality by denying Palestinian refugees from inside the Green Line their right of return, residence, and citizenship in the State (Israel) governing the land of their birth. Israel’s policies in the OPT also effectively deny Palestinians their right to a nationality by obstructing the exercise of the Palestinian right to self-determination through the formation of a Palestinian State in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip.

v) Palestinians are restricted in their right to work (...)

vi) Palestinian trade unions exist but are not recognised by the Israeli government or by the Histadrut (the main Israeli trade union) and cannot effectively represent Palestinians working for Israeli employers and businesses. Although these workers are required to pay dues to the Histadrut, it does not represent their interests and concerns, and Palestinians have no voice in formulating Histadrut policies. (...)

vii) The right of Palestinians to education is not impacted directly by Israeli policy, as Israel does not operate the school system in the OPT, but education is severely impeded by military rule. (...)

viii) The right of Palestinians to freedom of opinion and expression is greatly restricted through censorship laws (...).

ix) Palestinians’ right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association is impeded through military orders. (...) Most Palestinian political parties have been declared illegal and institutions associated with those parties, such as charities and cultural organisations, are regularly subjected to closure and attack.

x) The prevention of full development in the OPT and participation of Palestinians in political, economic, social and cultural life is most starkly demonstrated by the effects of Israel’s ongoing siege and regular large-scale military attacks on the Gaza Strip. Although denied by Israel, the population of the Gaza Strip is experiencing an on-going severe humanitarian crisis.

Section d) Measures designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.- YES:

i) Israel has divided the West Bank into reserves or cantons in which residence and entry is determined by each individual’s group identity. Entry by one group into the zone of the other group is prohibited without a permit. The Wall and its infrastructure of gates and permanent checkpoints suggest a policy permanently to divide the West Bank into racial cantons. Israeli government ministries, the World Zionist Organisation and other Jewish national institutions operating as authorised agencies of the State plan, fund and implement construction of the West Bank settlements and their infrastructure for exclusively Jewish use.

ii) Article 2(d) is not satisfied regarding a prohibition on mixed marriages between Jews and Palestinians.

iii) Israel has extensively appropriated Palestinian land in the OPT for exclusively Jewish use. Private Palestinian land comprises about 30 percent of the land unlawfully appropriated for Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Presently, 38 percent of the West Bank is completely closed to Palestinian use, with significant restrictions on access to much of the rest of it.

Section e) Exploitation of the labour of the members of a racial group or groups, in particular by submitting them to forced labour.- NO: Not significantly satisfied, as Israel has raised barriers to Palestinian employment inside Israel since the 1990s and Palestinian labour is now used extensively only in the construction and services sectors of Jewish-Israeli settlements in the OPT. (...)

Section f) Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.- YES: Arrest, imprisonment, travel bans and the targeting of Palestinian parliamentarians, national political leaders and human rights defenders, as well as the closing down of related organisations by Israel, represent persecution for opposition to the system of Israeli domination in the OPT, within the meaning of Article 2(f).

Additionally the committee finds the following similitudes of Israeli policies with the three pillars of South African apartheid:

1. Demarcation of South Africans into formal racial groups, with different legal systems applying to each of them (Population Registration Act of 1950).
2. Segregation of these racial groups in separate geographic areas, culminating in the formation of the bantustans (Group Areas Act of 1950 and Pass Laws of 1952-69).
3. Draconian security laws and policies to enforce the system, including extra-judicial killings, torture and degrading treatment.

Israel does all this:

1. It divides the population into Jews, "Israeli Arabs" and Palestinians, privileging naturally the Jewish settlers (and all Jews worldwide are entitled to Israeli citizenship, while the native Palestinians are not). Palestinians are even banned from family reunification if the spouses live in distinct areas under this system.
2. It creates separate areas for Palestinians and Jews, the first with a clear tendency to shrink and the latter to grow. The first fragmented and marginalized and the latter well connected and serviced. It has also segregated East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.
3. It does have, upholds and enforces a series of special laws that allow and encourage brutal and degrading treatment of Palestinians. Torture and extra-judicial killings are the norm, not any exception.

The committee concludes that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid.

Source and further details at Voltairenet: Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?, by Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. Also available as PDF.
.

Israel more akin to Nazi Germany than to Apartheid South Africa

There is an interesting meditation by Salim Nazzal at Sabbah Blog on the unique type of racism that the Zionist regime is founded upon.

He argues that White South Africans arrived there without a pre-defined racist project or any project whatsoever in fact: the racist ideology and regime only evolved trough time ad contextually. Meanwhile Zionists arrived to Palestine with a clear genocidal goal: supress all natives, either by murder or forced exile, and take their land.

He mentions as illustrative example the Israeli officer in the massacre of Kufr Qasim which took place in 1956 was not only proud of what he committed of murder but summarized the Zionist worldview: "In killing of any Arab here (in Palestine) we save the life of an Israeli, and by killing Arabs outside we save Israel!". Sentence that resembles way too much that one of Hitler about what mattered the death of one hundred Polish women digging a trench if those deaths could save a single German soldier.

A rather unique element of Zionist genocidal policies is what Nazzal describes as "kill and cry": that particularly annoying attitude of blaming their victims for the Zionist criminal acts. Maybe Torquemada acted the same way, blaming Jews and presumt witches of forcing him to torture and murder them.

Another very much unique and also disturbing element is trying to bring back history back to 2000 years ago, like if nothing have happened in between, both in Palestine and also among the international Jewry that feeds Israel with flesh and gold.

There are other differential elements but certainly it is very much worrying that it resembles so much, like so many abused people, to the ones who abused them. We may feel pity for their dramatic historical traumas (but they are not the only ones who have suffered nor certainly the main ones suffering in colonized Palestine) but that cannot ever serve as excuse to do the same unto others.

Never again! Destroy Nazi Israel!
.

The bantustanization of Palestine

The term Apartheid sounds more and more in relation with Israel and its occupation of the formally unannexed areas of Palestine. One of the central elements of South African Apartheid was the bantustan, micro-states carved out in South African territory, often discontiguous, with no real competences in foreign or even internal policies, created basically to deprive South African Blacks from their citizenship, making the country a little more white and little less black on paper.

South African bantustans in the 1970s and later

The situation is strikingly similar in Palestine, as this Quaker video shows:





There's no two states solution largely because Israel doesn't want it. The term is only waved as support for the creation of a Palestinian bantustan and nothing else.

Source: Desert Peace, originally from Inspired Path.
.

Brands that support Apartheid in Palestine

Some of them:

Boycott them!
Boycott Israel!

Why? If you have still the slightest doubt:




.

Hawking also against Zionist apartheid

I never heard that the super-famous astronomer and cosmologist Stephen Hawking made any political statement before but in this year of 2009 he seems to have not been able to contain himself anymore, confronted with the genocide of Gaza. He said:

If Israel wants peace, it will have to talk to Hamas, like Britain did with the IRA. Hamas are the democratically elected leaders of the Palestinian people, and cannot be ignored.

The situation is like that in South Africa before 1990. It cannot continue.

Source: The First Post. Found via Mounadil al Djazaïri blog (in French).
.

No two states solution for Palestine

From CBS News (quite neutral and even "subversive" for a US media report, albeit balanced):



Then what? A single state multiethnic solution has always been the Palestinian option and the only realistic and fair democratic alternative.

But who will bell the cat?

____________________________________

Update: the Gaza Justice Action Center believes that Bob Simon (reporter) and Robert G. Anderson (producer), as well as the CBS, deserve our congratulations and support for making a (sadly rare) great impartial job with this program. You can send them a support note at this link.
.

Massacre in Gaza: Palestinian government to be toppled

Israel has killed scores in Gaza concentration camp in what ammounts to the single largest zionist massacre since 1967. The attack cannot be justified obviously - but well Israel itself can't be either.

But what is more intriguing is that some already think it is the prelude of a toppling of the democratic Palestinian government to replace it by the deslegitimated Zionist lapdog Mahmoud Abbas. It seems pretty clear by now that Abbas and Mubarak are in agreement with this operation that has only begun and will get many many more killed before it's over.

In September I mentioned certain key information where this attack had been agreed between the Fatah and Zionist leaders. It was also mentioned that Abbas, whose term ends this month of January would ilegally extend it for a whole year in order to acomplish this takeover.

This is the beginning of the takeover. Israel has not concentratd all Palestinian refugees in Gaza to allow the ghetto to become a resistence base but to exterminate them or at least keep them in total subservience. The man of Israel in the remaining Palestine is Abbas and Fatah after the supression of Arafat has become a mere puppet of the Zionist Apartheid, the pathetic bantustan dictator that is more interested in the perpetuation of his masters power, on whom he's become totally dependent by now, than in the rights and survival of the Palestinian nation.

It will be a murderous New Year time in Palestine. It will not be over, probably, before the legitimate Hamas government has been deposed and meanwhile the Zio-Nazi airplanes will fly over Gaza bombing the impoverished homes of the Palestinians imprisioned in such a tiny fraction of their own homeland.
.

Israeli active genocide in East Jerusalem

Source: Rebelión: 'Israel: compulsiva estrategia para judaizar Jerusalén Oriental'. The genocide that Zionism is causing in all palestine since 1948 with the complicity of "the West" has many faces. And East Jerusalem, ilegally annexed to Israel in 1967, is no exception but one of the main fronts of the racism of this late colonial state.

Facts of the genocide:

• In August 2008 Israel authorized the building of new 1760 homes (for Jews only).
• There are already 192,000 Jewish colonists settled ilegally in East Jerusalem.
• 25% of the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have been cut from the city by the construction of the Wall of Shame.
• 'Abandoned' lands belonging to refugees forced to flee after the war were expropiated. These lands comprise about 1/3 of all East Jerusalem and were largely used to build new illegal settelements.
  
• Palestinians who do not live in Jerusalem for 7 years are deprived from their residence status. This norm is not applied to 'master race' Jews, of course.
• In 2006 ID card was revoked to at least 1360 Palestinians, according to UN. This figure was five times larger than in 2005 or any year before.
  
• Since the 2003 law on citizenship and residence, those Palestinians from the occupied territories (the bantustans) that get married with residents or citizens of Israel cannot acquire residence and therefore are forbidden from living with their partners.
• Since 1982 the Zionist government does not allow residence for Palestinian children who have one parent that is not resident in Jerusalem.
  
• While Jewish colonization is widely encouraged, Palestinian construction is nearly forbidden.
• Both Israelis and Palestinians build ilegally at similar levels but the response from the authorities is radically different: some 150 homes are demolished each year, 75% of them of Palestinian property.
  
• Racist discriminaton also exists in aspects like budget allocations, taxation and all kind of services (water, draining, roads, parks, illumination, post offices, schools, etc.)

It is time to massively boycott such a racist state as Israel. In fact it's alread some 60 years late.

Palesinian Authority may demand annexation to Israel

This was what the lead PNA negotiator Ahmed Qurei stated in August 10th as the bilateral and unequal negotiations led to yet anothe standstill: claim the West Bank and Gaza as part of Israel, with all its inhabitants - of course.

The position of Al Fatah since the Olso accord has been to claim a pragmatic two-state solution but the reality is that Israel is so much dependent of the military and administrative control of these areas, specially the West Bank and its water, that the concessions have been extremely limited causing a bantustan-like situation in which the PA administers only a scattered territory (as much as Israel allows them, not more) and Israel controls the rest, including the precious groundwater and the Jordan river bank.

The news has gone unnoticed (why?) in Western Media and it's only today that I have read it at the Hong Kong online magazine Asia Times Online.

The situation in the totality of Palestine (Israel included) is that, even in spite of the recent Russian immigration to Israel, Palestinians are close to be or already are the majority of the people in the territory. This would be even more clear if the refugees in Lebanon and elsewhere would be considered. Therefore if Israel would annex the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians would dominate the Knesset easily.

This is in line with the spirit of classical Palestinian claims of a single multiethnic state, though the formula is novel. In fact it seems the only democratic solution to the criminal status quo of apartheid against Palestinians in their own homeland. By dropping the two-states solution, less threatening for Israeli identity, the Palestinians would put the Zionist project in a lose-lose situation: they would have no justifications left for the Zionist apartheid and the conflict would become not anymore an "international" one (it has not been since Jordan and Egypt renounced to control the West Bank and Gaza respectively) and become what it actually is: a civil conflict for human rights and democracy and against ethnic apartheid and genocide.

It is an intelligent decission and the only problem is that they are not directly adopting it but actually waving it as threat.

Palestine

There are a couple of articles in Al Jazeera about Palestine I have been reading (and, what the heck? I was eager to write something about this suffering country). One of them deals with the issue of Palestine and Arab nationalism, the other is a timeline of Palestine's recent history.

The first one begins as follows:

What immediately stands out when reflecting on the plight of the Palestinians over the past 60 years is not only that they have been occupied and displaced, but that they are also being replaced by a totally different people brought to Palestine from the four corners of the globe.

Their land, their belongings and even their culture and history, are being usurped by a different population.

It is a painful repetition of the plight of native Americans we ignorantly refer to as 'red Indians'.

The Israelis, who have become the new masters of the land, are Jewish immigrants that began populating Palestine in the early years of the last century.

In fact this is a quite benevolent image of Jewish colonization: most Jewish colonists arrived only after 1945, pushed by the demolishing impact of the Holocaust. But still, in 1946, just at the end of the (quite pro-Zionist) British mandate, Jews were only about 1/3 of the total population of Palestine and they were concentrated in very specific areas, mostly urban ones (see: map of distribution of the population in Palestine 1946 - PASSIA). They were majority only in the district of Jaffa (Tel Aviv) and a large minority in those of Haifa, Tiberias and Jerusalem.

Still the UN partition plan gave them more than half of Palestine. I must note here that the UN of the 1940s was not the UN we know now, as most modern sovereign countries were then just colonies of European powers or the USA, and that included most Muslim and Arab countries. Also it must be mentioned that a UN comitee had proposed a unified multiethnic Palestine instead as best solution - but that obviously clashed with the Zionist project that was being fed not just by the Western powers but also had the complicity of the USSR. Only the few sovereign Muslim countries (Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yeme, Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon) and handful of other states (Cuba, India, Greece) opposed the unjust plan of partition.

The partition plan left 33% of Arabs inside the Israeli borders (only 1% of Jews in Arab-Palestinian ones), making up 45% of the population of would-be Israel. Additionally the city or Jerusalem would remain as international territory.

The news were recieved with joy among Jewish colonists but with despair among native Palestinians. The plan was totally unacceptable and soon clashes begun. As soon as the British retreated, the Israeli and Palestinian militias tried to take over. Also the neighbour states, most of them just newly born as well, sent their armies to help their "Arab brethen", though the attitude of Transjordan specially was quite dubious. The Israelis though had good leadership and finances and managed to gather enough weapons and soldiers to even their enemies, whom they defeated or stalemated separately. What looked like a triumphal march for the Arab armies became a shameful defeat.

Meanwhile the Zionist militias comitted a massacre at Deir Yassin, murdering maybe as many as 250 villagers, most of them women, children and elder people. This sparked panic and favored the ethnic cleansing by the Israeli forces. Eventually, an armistice was signed with Israel getting not just the lands assigned by the partition plan but many others as well (notably Galilee and West Jerusalem) and Egypt and Jordan getting the rest. This armistice line of 1949 is what are the "internationally recognized" borders of Israel - though Israel disputes it, and so do several Palestinian organizations.

The vast majority of Palestinian refugees settled in Transjordan (renamed as Jordan) and Gaza strip, with lesser but meaningful ammounts arriving to Syria and Lebanon, as well as the West Bank (see: map of Palestinian refugees - PASSIA). Palestinian refugees, many of them still living in refugee camps after so many decades, account for 1/3 of the population of Jordan and the West Bank and for 85% of the population at Gaza Strip, the largest concentration camp in the World. There are more than 4 million Palestinian refugees in total and they demand the right to return.

But their villages have often been razed to the ground (see: corresponding map - PASSIA) and their lands expropiated by Israel. And of course Israel flatly rejects any concession on that issue. The situation reminds to the Serbian-controlled lands in Bosnia, where after the ethnic cleansing (euphemism for genocide) Bosniaks are still unable to return in most cases. But it is actually much worse because Israel, unlike Serbia, has the backing of the so-called "international community" (i.e. the USA and its allies).

There was some hopes years ago (1993-95) on the possibility of reaching an agreement but the murder of Yitzak Rabin and later of Yassir Arafat (I believe it was a murder) threw any hopes to the trash bin. Now virtually dead provoker Ariel Sharon ignited the Second Intifada. After sidelining Arafat and getting a more sheeply Al Fatah leadership, militant Hamas became terribly popular and won the elections.

Meanwhile the Israeli proposals in the negotiating table were each time more backwards. Their latest proposal of "final status" basically tried to create a bantustan in the West Bank (see: Final Status map presented by Israel - Taba, 2001 - PASSIA). And really the comparison of Israel with racist South Africa is not far-fetched, not in vain they were best allies for all the Cold War period, supporting each other in their secretive nuclear programs and otherwise. Israel, with its very special ethnic laws, that allow anyone with a Jewish ancestor to migrate to that country but do not allow the original inhabitants to return, is balatantly racist. Furthermore, the anti-Arab feeling is increasing in Israel and a majority of Israeli Jews seem now in favor of apartheid even regarding Israeli Arab citizens.

Another frequent comparison is with the Crusader states, in particular the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Personally I see only one solution to the Israeli problem: the supression of Israel altogether and the creation of a unified multiethnic and laicist Palestinian republic, alowing the refugees that so wish to return to their country. Also I think that, in the long run Israel has no hopes of surviving: eventually US global leadership position will change and with it the fate of the Zionist entity will be sealed.