For Immediate Release: KCL Action Palestine Campaign against Ahava

KCL Action Palestine (KCLAP) Campaign against Ahava

Press Release: King’s College London Students Vote to End Research with Ahava

kclactionpalestine@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/KCLAP.Ahava.Campaign

At its first meeting of the year on 20^th October, the King’s College London Student Council voted overwhelmingly to condemn the involvement of the university in an EU-funded research project that also includes Ahava.

With 26 votes for, 5 abstentions and just 1 vote against, the councillors voted to “demand the immediate end of the university’s involvement in the project, and the rejection of the financial grant King’s has received for its participation,” in a margin of victory that surprised even the most optimistic campaigners. The students also voted to urge the university to re-evaluate its commitments to ethical research, and work towards establishing a formal ethical research policy.

The success at King’s follows a similar vote at the University of London Union (ULU) Senate meeting on 12^th October, where senators passed a motion to “condemn in the strongest terms” the collaboration between King’s and Ahava, and to support the campaign launched by students and staff at the university. The margin of the vote was again outstanding – 9 votes for, 3 abstentions, and no votes against. ULU is the largest students’ union in Europe; any motion it passes, especially one concerning Israel-Palestine, is of great significance and sends out a clear message.

King’s College London is involved in NanoReTox, a research project under the guise of the European Commission and its Framework 7 research programme. Ahava is among the other partners in the project, as are Imperial, various other European universities, and the United States Geological Survey, which is part of the US Department of the Interior.

Ahava is a commercial cosmetics company whose premises are located on the illegal Israeli settlement of Mitzpe Shalem, around 10km inside occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank. The company is also partly owned by the council of this illegal settlement. The illegality of Israeli settlements inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) under international law is overwhelmingly accepted by the international community, under the Fourth Geneva Convention, UN Resolution 446, ICJ rulings, and the official positions of the EU and the UK government. By accruing profits from, extracting resources from, and sustaining itself on, an illegal settlement, Ahava is complicit with Israeli violations of international law. And by working with them, King’s has become a partner to this complicity.

We have received messages of support from students in Gaza, and our petition has been signed by more than 800 people so far, including Remi Kanazi, Ahdaf Soueif, Ali Abunimah, Jeremy Corbyn MP, and Professor Noam Chomsky, who also sent a short statement of support. The petition can be found here: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/petition-against-king-s-college-london-involvement-with.html. The official University and College Union (UCU) representative at King’s has also pledged his support for the campaign, and will work with us throughout its duration.

The overwhelmingly supportive stance of students and staff at King’s and beyond towards the campaign illustrates the legitimacy of its demands, and the illegitimacy of the university’s involvement with Ahava. We urge King’s to take this opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to ethical research and the integrity of international law.

An Open Letter from Palestinian Students to Their Peers in Europe

KCL Action Palestine recently launched a campaign against the involvement of the university in an EU-funded research project that also includes Ahava – an Israeli cosmetics company located in, and partly owned by, the illegal Israeli settlement of Mitzpe Shalem.

Ahava is complicit in, and profits from, Israeli violations of international law. By actively working with them, King’s has now become a part of this complicity. We are calling on KCL to drop out of the project immediately, reject the financial grant it has received as part of the project, and take active steps to ensure a similar situation does not arise in the future.

After gaining the support of both the University of London Union and King´s College London Student Union, we have received further support from those that are most affected – Palestinian students living in Palestine.

We enclose their letter of support below.

 An Open Letter from Palestinian Students to Their Peers in Europe: “Time Now to Boycott Israeli Apartheid on University Campuses”

Besieged Gaza, Occupied Palestine

21.10.2011

We Palestinian students of the Gaza Strip wish to send a message to all European student groups in solidarity with the Palestinians to do all they can to increase Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel this academic year.

We also reiterate our support for the recent call by Palestinian Civil Society, of which we are a signatory, to end all collaborative research between European Universities and Israeli universities.^[1] Research centers in Israeli academic institutions are actively involved in fuelling Israel’s huge weapons industry and tools of its military occupation and siege. It is this apparatus of violence that makes studying in Gaza so difficult, not to mention the daily toils and tragedy of Israeli apartheid policies. We, therefore,  call for an end to this compliance on all campuses with those directly complicit in the war crimes and colonial subjugation of us the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank,‘48 Palestine and throughout the Diaspora.

These are crucial times as we youth in Gaza are seeing glimpses of the kinds of mass international movement that we are certain will one day bring us the liberation, justice and equality expected by others but denied to us for so long. Each university that boycotts, divests and sanctions from Israel’s apartheid regime is standing on the right side of history, just as students played a huge role in boycotting South Africa’s ugly and similarly racist apartheid regime until it fell in 1994.

Yet apartheid against Palestinians since then has only become more entrenched. In response, our call for boycott from over 170 organisations from Palestinian civil society in 2005^[2] has been a lightning rod for others who can relate to our plight. When endorsing the successful boycott and ending of ties between the University of Johannesburg and Ben Gurion University (BGU) this year, the first of its kind, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said:

“While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation. BGU is no exception. By maintaining links to both the Israeli Defence Forces and the arms industry, BGU structurally supports and facilitates the Israeli occupation.” ^[3]

There was no negotiating with such oppression based on race – there was only one word: BOYCOTT. Just as students around the world were banning Barclays bank from campuses for their investment in South African Apartheid in the 1980s, this year we call on you to take similar steps to end Israel’s systematic brutality. To say, “We will no longer be complicit!”, in the decades of ethnic  cleansing, military occupation, medieval blockade that has lead to so much tragedy and broken dreams for our youth and students.

Our spirits have been raised by the BDS efforts so far in European Universities, exemplified by King’s College where students and academics have begun a campaign against the research collaboration between their university and Ahava, the cosmetics company based in an illegal settlement. Such long term campaigns are what is required, the cutting edge of international resistance. We ask you to do whatever it takes to isolate and hold Israel to account until it abides by international law and accepts basic premises of human rights and equality for all, including us Palestinians.

This year it is in your hands to see that the tide finally turns across the campuses in Western countries that most enable the Israeli regime’s crimes against us to continue. We hope you put BDS at the forefront of your campaigns and join together for the Israeli Apartheid Week^[4],, the pinnacle of action across universities worldwide. And while the walls around us stop us from meeting in person, we have many students and youth happy to participate in skype conferences and other collaborations. We give you all our solidarity and send you our dearest wishes to do us proud this year.

[1] http://www.bdsmovement.net/2011/dont-collaborate-with-apartheid-8202#.Tp-H9Vv9oY1

[2] http://www.bdsmovement.net/bdsintro#.Tp-L81v9oY0

[3] http://www.middleeastmonitor.org.uk/articles/africa/1556-israeli-ties-a-chance-to-do-the-right-thing

[4] http://apartheidweek.org/

Why Gaza? Why Now?

The Middle East is in the midst of its most volatile period since 1967, though all the signs suggest the ramifications of the current period will far outlive even those of the Six-Day War.

Palestinians pray for their dead. An appendix of all those killed, from 2-year-old Malak Shaath to two elderly Palestinians, is listed at the bottom of this post.

Inside Israel, the country is experiencing its worst social crisis for decades and the largest demonstrations in its history, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets and setting up camps to protest against social issues, particularly housing, healthcare and education. It would be remiss not to mention the salient absence of Palestinian rights within the umbrella of these movements, in spite of the fact that the occupation is an integral part of Israel’s economy; a debate on the housing crisis which doesn’t factor in the 500,000 settlers on Palestinian land or the continued demolition of Palestinian homes to make way for Israeli settlers is flawed at best. Indeed, for many Knesset members the solution is precisely to continue to build more settlements on Palestinian land and continue to make even more Palestinians homeless.

There is also, of course, the greater regional turmoil with popular movements clamouring for democracy, sparked by Tunisia, followed by Egypt and then quickly spreading across many countries, most prominently Bahrain, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Democracies in Arab countries are a threat to Israel’s position simply because the people are infuriated by the ignominy of being forced into complicity with Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians by their autocratic leaders.

Moreover, although the impending vote for statehood at the United Nations in September has divided Palestinian supporters – Viktor Kattan has called it a ‘turning-point’ whilst Ilan Pappe believes it’s ‘a charade’ and Ali Abunimah dismisses it as an ‘elaborate farce’ – the Israeli government has been united almost without exception in its condemnation of the plan. This isn’t because they necessarily see it as a threat in and of itself, but rather because they have subsumed the strategy into their professed anxieties over ‘delegitimisation’.

One of the chief architects of Operation Cast Lead, Ehud Barak, has referred to the seismic events taking place as a ‘regional earthquake’ and ‘diplomatic tsunami’. In short, this is a defining moment in the history of the region and -crucially- the momentum is stacked overwhelmingly against Zionist aspirations.

The only thing that could possibly detract attention from social unrest and international pressure is renewed military conflict with the Palestinians. This is why, during a lecture last week, the esteemed Israeli historian and professor Ilan Pappe predicted that Israel was on the brink of instigating another major war.

Wars, except in the most belligerent of cases, require pretexts; though thinly veiled, Israel has offered a pretext to a rabidly supportive ‘international community’ (read: leaders) for its aggression throughout the years, including Operation Cast Lead where it falsely claimed that Hamas broke a ceasefire.

The pretext for Israel’s present bombardment of Gaza is the attack on Israelis near Eilat. The loss of civilian life of any shade is deplorable and to be condemned with the utmost vigour. Those responsible should be brought to justice. That much is surely a given.

Yet whilst the facts surrounding the Eilat attacks remain unclear, Israel’s response is vivid and instructive: return to our favourite punch bag Gaza, detract attention from domestic and international problems and reinforce our ‘deterrence capacity’, which has taken yet another blow. And seemingly this has worked: the tent protests in Israel have been called off, US Congressmen are reiterating calls to veto the Palestinian Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and Palestinians have taken another merciless battering in the besieged Gaza strip.

Mahmoud Abu Samra (left), 13, was one of the first victims, killed in an Israeli airstrike early on Friday

Yet Ali Abunimah’s outrage conveys the incredulity that many onlookers are feeling and reality that many nonpartisan citizens are waking up to: ‘Zionists literally don’t get that you can’t just kill a bunch of random Arabs and say it’s justified because someone else attacked you.’

There is no evidence that anyone in Gaza carried out the Eilat attack – it has been denied by Hamas and the more plausible explanation given the nature and location of the attack is that it was Egyptian-led – yet Gaza has once more been made to pay the price. And it is a heavy price, with 15 dead so far and dozens injured. As the siege of Gaza exceeds 1,5000 days, it is clear that the collective punishment of the Gazans, illegal under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, seems to know no bounds.

There have since been retaliatory airstrikes launched from Gaza and Egypt has recalled its ambassador in Israel for the first time in a decade as the tensions look set to escalate further still.

Israel’s attempt to diverge attention from its domestic problems is indicative of a wider instability and disunity within the country, which requires an external enemy to keep it united. For years, the conflict with the Palestinians has been the glue keeping the disparate, unequal and deeply divided Israeli civil society together.

Long after the innocent Gazans have finished counting their dead, however, the biggest threat for Israel will continue to emerge: the shattering of this very mirage. This latest attack is a self-defeating move – another deterioration, Norman Finkelstein might say, in the state’s ‘decision making’.

Hesham Zakai

Appendix I: Full list of the residents killed by the army since Thursday;

1. Abu Awad Al Nairab, Secretary General of the Salah Ed Deen Brigades.
2. Imad Hammad, Popular Resistance Committees.
3. Abu Jamil Shaath.
4. Khaled Al Masry.
5. Imad Nassr.
6. Malak Shaath, 2 years old.
7. Mahmoud Abu Samra, 13 years old.
8. Ashraf Azzam, 30.
9. Mohammad Enaya, 22.
10. Samed Abed, 25.
11. Anwar Islayyim, 21.
12. Imad Abu Abda.
13. Monther Qreiqe’, 32.
14. Islam Qreiqe; 2.
15. Mo’taz Qreiqe’.

The Worrisome Israeli Mindset

[This article was originally written for, and published on, The Platform]

If we were to characterise states in human terms, correlating them with their level of maturity and chronological development, Israel would be a spoilt, petulant child – taking what does not belong to it, squealing when challenged or threatened with punishment, sticking its tongue out at authority, and in doing so, harming its own long-term development. I tend to see states as rational actors; not benevolent or just, but rational, insofar as their own geopolitical and economic interests (or perceived and self-attested interests, rather) are concerned. However, the Israeli state has clearly lost it, so to speak, and is a special case.

When news of the assault on the flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza broke out last year, my initial thoughts and feelings were not of disgust or grief, but a sense of incomprehension. In recent years, the Israeli state’s “decision-making”, as Norman Finkelstein puts it, has “deteriorated”. The 2006 war in Lebanon was a failure, even according to Israeli military pronouncements. The Gaza massacre too was both a PR blunder, marking a clear turning point in public discourse and perception surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict, and a strategic and military disaster – not just failing to dislodge Hamas, but in fact increasing support for them. I would have thought that considering its worsening image across the world (which the Israeli state has clearly recognised and is attempting to counteract), it would not have boarded a humanitarian fleet in the middle of the night in international waters, would not have fired live rounds, andwould not have killed nine people.

It is not that I doubt or underestimate the sinister nature of the Israeli state and security forces, but I would have expected them to act in a way that acknowledged the hostile international climate towards them. What we have seen over the last few years, however, is an increasingly irrational, unpredictable and vicious character of Israeli actions towards the Palestinians and other parties who are deemed as a “threat”.

It might seem very cynical and crass to describe Israeli actions as strategic blunders, rather than calling them for what they are – crimes, both immoral and illegal. But by recognising the increasingly illogical and self-defeating nature of Israeli actions and policies, we reach two conclusions, one more urgent and worrying than the other: the Israeli state is imploding; and unfortunately, in the short-term at least, this will mean further acts of crazed violence, as the state struggles to contain largely imagined “threats”.

The flotilla incident last year demonstrated this very clearly. Israel’s actions ended up publicising the mission and cause of the fleet, drawing attention to the continued siege on Gaza, and fuelling widespread criticism and condemnation from international human rights organisations, activists, and various governments.

Similarly, Israel’s denial of entry to 82 year old renowned linguist and thinker, Noam Chomsky, within that same year is difficult to justify in terms of security; he certainly would have enthused the students at Birzeit University, but I doubt he would have inspired them to take up arms. The Israeli authorities merely presented themselves as timid and paranoid, as well as indecisive, as they later described the decision as a “mistake”.

It is also non-violence that is stripping Israel of its democratic, liberal simulacra. It would be inappropriate and conceited of me to preach non-violence and passive resistance to an occupied people; however it is clearly very exposing and effective – as exemplified by the first days of both Palestinian Intifadas – in revealing state aggression and brutality. The idea is to provoke the state to react excessively and harshly. This is working. What is not working is what should happen next: a castigating international response. Among more recent events, on Sunday 5 June, when Israeli forces fired indiscriminately on 1,000 unarmed civilians marching to the ceasefire line between Syria and the occupied Golan Heights, there was not a word from the White House, nor from Downing Street. At least 23 civilians were killed and hundreds wounded in just a matter of hours. Again, Israel’s incoherence and absurdity were very overtly noticeable. The protesters never crossed the ceasefire line. Arguments relayed by Israeli Media Spokesman, Mark Regev, among others, which asserted the notion that demonstrators almost crossed into Israeli territory, simply did not hold water, because under international law the area in question belongs to Syria. Unarmed protestors were shot at whilst standing behind barbed wire.

What else can we expect from this insane state? Will they attack Iran and how will they respond to the new flotilla, departing in late June? What Israeli actions show, over the course of the last few years, is that they are becoming increasingly nervous and insecure. It would be unwise to attempt to gauge, or worse, underestimate, their brutality at this point. Traditionally viewed as the standard-bearer of Enlightenment rationality and liberalism, trapped in the midst of bloodthirsty, emotional Arabs, Israel is beginning to resemble the suicidal gunman. Some might rejoice at this; I, for one, am fearful. A lunatic with arms is nothing to celebrate – they usually kill many before turning the gun on themselves.

Mehdi Beyati is reading History at King’s College London. He has worked for the KCL Action Palestine student society for two years and is soon beginning his term as President of the society.

‘Theft is illegal under English law, although thieves dispute this’: Bias And The BBC

Let us imagine that an old lady is walking down Kensington High Street on a sunny afternoon when a gang of thugs run towards her, snatch her handbag and throw her to the ground. Not realising that Kensington High Street is more intrusive than the Big Brother Diary Room, they are eventually identified on CCTV, arrested and sent to court. At the hearing, one of the defendants tells the judge: “Yes it was us, no we don’t regret it and yes we will continue to do it; we disagree that theft is against the law.” Would the BBC, upon reporting the story, put a ridiculous sentence near the end of the article which reads: ‘Theft is illegal under English law, although the thieves dispute this?’ Of course they would not.

Why, then, does a search for ‘the settlements are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this’ in quotation marks on the BBC website throw up over 150 results? (If you vary the syntax and lexicon you can get even more results). There is no question as to the lack of legality of the ‘settlements’: The International Court of Justice, the highest judicial body in the world, has said that ‘the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including East Jerusalem) have  been  established in  breach of international law’ (ICJ Report, p. 184); Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that an ‘Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies’; UN Security Council Resolution 465 (adopted unanimously) denounced Israeli settlements, which they said have ‘no legal validity and… constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention’ (UNSCR 465); not a single member of the international community support Israel’s settlements, and they are certainly not supported by the world’s most reputable NGOs, including Human Rights Watch who say the ‘settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories violate two main principles of international humanitarian law’, and Amnesty International, whose quotidian way of referring to them is as the ‘unlawful Israeli settlements’.

In short, there is absolutely no legal basis for the settlements whatsoever; even the handbag robbers have a greater claim to a ridiculous caveat like ‘although X disputes this’ than Israel does. Yet the BBC relentlessly insist on using it for Israel – and no-one else – including on yesterday’s article on the talks between Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama. In repeatedly giving such ludicrous claims textual space the BBC are legitimising them. Very few things are taken for granted in journalism and rightly so, but surely there is something amiss when the UK’s state television brings into disrepute the UK’s clearly defined view towards legal issues and their authority? Otherwise we may as well begin questioning the very authority of words themselves and leave the BBC’s pages looking like cut-outs from a megalomaniac philosopher’s scrapbook.

Of course words do matter. They matter a great deal. This is where an even greater issue arises with the reporting on this aspect of the conflict – something that is far more endemic than just the BBC: referring to new houses built on Occupied Territory as ‘settlements’ or, even worse, ‘neighbourhoods’. Such words completely cleanse the actions behind them of the belligerence and brutality which characterise them. It’s not like we don’t have a word in the English dictionary for territory forcibly seized from another people and ruled over – we do. We call it a colony. I would very much like to see the BBC simply refer to Israel’s expansionist actions as they are.

So when Israel announces 1,500 Jewish-only housing units in Occupied East Jerusalem the day before Obama’s Middle East speech, the accurate way to report this would be: ‘Israel expands colony in Palestine’. Instead, we are told of ‘settlement activity’, bored with committee details, insulted with Israel’s disputation of international law and, essentially, sanitised of the crimes of apartheid.

In the second part of my analysis of the BBC, I will take a much broader look at the question of the BBC’s impartiality, referring to the report on reporting of the Israel/Palestine conflict in 2006, the recent decision to censor the words ‘Free Palestine’ from a hip-hop song, the infamous decision not to air a humanitarian appeal during Operation Cast Lead, and much more.

This first, brief introspection into the BBC and the question of bias has been a very focussed linguistic one where I have sought to give a key example of the inherent bias in the BBC’s discourse that is widespread and central to the conflict. The problem is certainly a systemic one; when individual journalists try to be fairer, such as Jeremy Bowen referring to Israel’s ‘defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own’, they are adjudged to have breached BBC regulations and punished. (The spuriousness of the Trust’s justification is lucid). Couple Bowen’s statement with the plethora of legal backing I have supplied above, and surely the only logical conclusion one could reach is that Bowen referred simply to facts as they are. And was punished for it.

Essentially, my point is that reader reception and understanding is contingent on language. Therefore, it is only when the BBC and all other media organisations use language in a way that strives to accurately reflect reality – rather than deceptively ameliorate it – that we can truly expect ordinary readers to ascertain an accurate understanding of what’s really going on in the Middle East.

Hesham Zakai

Remembering The Nakba

“We must expel the Arabs and take their place”
David Ben-Gurion, letter to his son Aron, October 5 1937

“The old will die and the young will forget”
Ben-Gurion’s diary, July 18 1948

The current period is “the second half of 1948″
Ariel Sharon’s description of the Al-Aqsa Intifada

The Port City of Jaffa

I could really have stop writing here and allowed the words of the former Israeli Prime Ministers to speak for themselves – and how candidly they do. In fact, if one were to look through the annals of history, one would discover how remarkably punctuated by frank admissions of Zionist intent it is. Just ten days ago, for example, the Commander of Operation Cast Lead, Major General Yoav Galant, openly said that Gaza was an ‘ideal training ground’ for Israel where new weapons could be tested because it lacked the capacity to inflict any serious damage in retaliation.

But the three epigraphic quotes are more than just immoral gloating. All interlinked, they represent a tripartite process which is incomplete: 1- The plan; 2- The hope; 3- The continuation. I refer, unmistakably, to the intention to diminish the number of Palestinians in historic Palestine, which is undoubtedly what the spectre of 1948 entails for a war criminal like Sharon.

In 1948, Jaffa was the most populous of the Palestinian cities, with over 70,000 inhabitants, as well as the most commercially developed. Whilst researching its history, I encountered tales of hope and tragedy; it being the eve of Yawm al-Nakba (Day of The Catastrophe), it is inevitably the latter I shall briefly rest on here. In spite of the fact that the mayor of Jaffa, Yussuf Haykal, tried to negotiate a peace deal with David Ben-Gurion, and in spite of the fact that even under the UN Partition Plan Jaffa was assigned an Arab-controlled city, the Stern Gang, Irgun and Hagana (the latter of which was the forerunner to the IDF) conspired to terrorise the city and its citizens.

Four days into 1948, a lorry was filled with explosives by the Irgun gang and left in central Jaffa, killing dozens of people and injuring hundreds, many of whom were children visiting the Welfare centre of the town hall. In Abu Kabir, a village which had seen clashes between Arabs and Jews increase, the Zionist terrorist gangs blew up 15 Arab houses in a single day during a process of systematic terrorisation. The villages around Abu Kabir were also attacked and occupied by terrorist gangs, leaving Jaffa effectively under siege whilst it was indiscriminately shelled using British weapons which had been looted by the Zionist gangs from warehouses. Armies attacking besieged populations using British weapons has a sorry ring of familiarity to it.

British General David Murray: I saw a scene which I never thought to see in my life. It was the sight of the whole population of Jaffa pouring out on to the road carrying in their hands whatever they could pick up…as fast as their legs could carry them. It was a case of sheer terror. (The Palestinian Catastrophe, p.87)

The Hagana’s Plan Dalet meant that Palestinian villages were to be taken over and subjected to: ‘occupation, and if the Jewish forces encountered resistance, the takeover would be followed by the annihilation of the resisting force; the deportation of the population; and the destruction of the village. If there were no resistance, a defensive force would remain in the village or nearby to make it secure’ (War in Palestine, p. 88). After sustained bombardment, Jaffa was eventually ‘cleansed’ of 97% of its indigenous Arab Palestinian population. Tragically, many of those who attempted to flee by sea in the final days of the catastrophe out of sheer terror and desperation drowned and died.

Similar processes happened across Palestinian villages. But the key point is that these are not merely historical events – they continue today: forced evictions, house demolitions, agricultural destruction, apartheid walls, sailors shot at sea &c. The four words highlighted above which characterised 1948 are just as applicable today: Occupation, Annihilation, Deportation and Destruction The Nakba was not a fixed historical event, static in time that happened and is now over; it is a process of continued exclusion, expulsion and destruction. During Operation Cast Lead alone, over 4,200 homes were demolished; since Israel’s military occupation in 1967 nearly 25,000 homes have been demolished; and all whilst Israel’s illegal colonial expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories continues, standing at over half a million settlers at present. This is what Ariel Sharon meant when he said that 1948 was not over and the second half of it was underway.

Yet from the dust of the rubble of demolished homes the International Solidarity Movement is growing bigger and bigger. Against the grain of Ben-Gurion’s hope that ‘the old will die and the young will forget’, the young are not forgetting at all; in fact, those who had forgotten have been reminded and those who did not know are learning. Whilst we must always remember and commemorate the Nakba, to be conscious of something is not enough. To actually affect change, we must translate remembrance into deeds: we must strive to ensure the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homelands. It is an inalienable human right enshrined in law and affirmed annually. ‘There is no greater sorrow on earth’, wrote the Greek tragedian Euripides, ‘than the loss of one’s native homeland’. The Nakba will be truly over when the Palestinian sorrow is ended, and Arabs and Jews can once more live together in a land they can both call home.

Hesham Zakai

The Circles in the Sky

People keep talking of a new war. They tell you about their neighbors (they’re probably too shy to admit that it’s their family, not their neighbors) who already started stocking up food items and candles in preparation for the upcoming war. “People are really scared”, they tell you, using “people” instead of “we.” Everyone (groundless news reports and loud rumors) is saying that they can hear the war drums, can’t you?!

Well, to me war has already started, and Israel is already chanting victory, given the very conversation the two of us are having. About two weeks ago, what looked to me like a confused Israeli pilot flying around in his F-16 jet was ‘drawing’ circles in the sky. People immediately took it as a sign, a threat, and a signal that war was coming. They even made up memories from back in 2008, and were convinced that on December 27^th, 2008, an Israeli jet, possibly even the same one, drew the same circles in the sky, and that was when war started.

Picture taken on 12/1/2011in Gaza City by Yasmeen El Khoudary

Well, congratulations Israel for winning the psychological war on Gaza. No, you don’t find it enough that you are honored to be the only power on the planet that finds purpose in physically besieging a whole population, but you also want to drive them mad. Only when people started to heave a sigh of relief and take baby steps towards recovering from the 2008-2009 war do you start disseminating rumors about a new war. What a fool you are, even if you think you’re winning!

Sure, some people actually believe your rumors and have already started buying supplies in preparation for the ‘eventual’ war and shortage in all kinds of supplies, from baby milk to medicine. But have you heard of a single family that has prepared itself for leaving Gaza? That question sounds absurd to you, doesn’t it? How can anyone question the possibility of ‘running away’ in times of fear?

In your traditions, you build and hide in ‘safe’ shelters, prepare mass evacuation plans for your citizens, and buy tons of gas masks as soon as you anticipate the launching of even the smallest rocket. In our traditions, people only buy candles to light their homes and flour to bake bread while you flatten the city to the ground with your merciless army. They seek no safe resorts and nor are they provided with any kind of protection against gas, let alone phosphorous. They seek protection from God and from their unity and their love, as they find war a good time for families, or whoever remains from them, to gather and share love and warmth.

You know, Israel, you remind me of the scientist and the frog. You, in this case the scientist, order the frog to jump, and it obeys. You cut off its arms, order it to jump then it struggles to jump. You cut off its legs, order it to jump but it doesn’t jump. You then proudly announce your discovery: when a frog is limbless, it becomes deaf, and so it cannot jump. Yes, deafness caused the frog to lose that physical skill, not the fact that you amputated its four limbs.

Is that not what you are trying to do to the Palestinians every single day? You have been slowly cutting off our limbs for the past 60 years, one by one. You have been forcing us into accustoming to a life with one missing limb, two missing limbs, three missing limbs, and now four missing limbs slowly as the years go by. You run your experiments on us and show the world that we can still jump. When you cut off that last limb, however, you claim that we were unable to jump because we suddenly turned deaf. In real world terms, that translates into you blaming us for the misery that shapes our every day life, and take your occupation, your wars, your siege, and your merciless acts out of the equation.

We might be accustomed to a limbless life, but that doesn’t mean that we lost our ability to jump. We will crawl on the floor and catch our own food. You will always be the oppressor, rather the foolish oppressor with false scientific theories, at least in this case. Living a limbless life means that we will continue to live any kind of life as long as we live it in our country, where we legitimately belong.

Israel, when you cut off our limbs, we lose our ability to jump because you cut off our limbs, not because we turned deaf. However, we would indeed turn a deaf ear to your threats and your illogical claims; because frankly, nothing you say or do will succeed in making us even think of leaving this place. Some of us might see the circles in the sky as a sign of war, others might see it as a barbered wire fence stating that even the sky has a limit. To the frog, however, the circles in the sky are reason to keep its head high towards the sun, regardless of the missing limbs.

Yasmeen El Khoudary is a freelance writer and researcher based in Gaza City, Palestine. You can find her blog ‘A voice from Palestine’ here:  http://yelkhoudary.blogspot.com.