"from which
part of Palestine
do I come
?....."
I come from that part
of Palestine
called the Lebanon
of that Palestine-Village
called the oppressed-nation
of that Palestine,
a huge-River
called the Arab Nation
My Jesus was also an Arab
who carried the
Cross of humiliation,
the Cross of Liberation
the Cross of resistance
against
the imperial-Rome
and against
the exclusive-Zion
my Jesus was also
a Palestinian
just like me
and like
200 Million other
Arabs.......
Jesus grew up on
the banks of the Nile
and
Abraham grew up on
the banks of the Tigris
and
they all met in our Palestine.
Mohammad grew up in the hills
of Mecca and finished
delivering
the Divine-Message ,
also here ,
in our Palestine .
And if you still dare asking me
which part ? am
I from ...?
I say ,
I am a Lebanese
born in those
Syrian-Mountains
in the Sea of the Arabs
under God's Sun
that gave us light,warmth
and showed us the Path.
Which part , you still ask ?
North to the North of Palestine,
where the river Jordan
springs up !
and
where also the Euphrates
sees his first light !
where Princess Europa
was born .
south to Anatolia
west to Persia
north to Aden
Where Mohammad met Jesus
and
where Moses
was not allowed to enter .....
Palestine of the Arabs
!
byRaja Chemayel©
an
Arab-Lebanese-Christian
ZNet Commentary
A Boycott Of
Israel: Something Has Changed
By John Pilger
August 23, 2007
I suppose I hate them now,
or maybe I pity them for their stupidity. They can't win.
Because we Palestinians are the Jews now and, like the
Jews, we will never allow them or the Arabs or you to
forget. The youth will guarantee us that, and the youth
after them . . .
"the greatest moral issue of the age"
Nelson Mandela
From a limestone hill rising above Qalandia refugee camp
you can see Jerusalem. I watched a lone figure standing
there in the rain, his son holding the tail of his long
tattered coat. He extended his hand and did not let go.
"I am Ahmed Hamzeh, street entertainer," he
said in measured English. "Over there, I played many
musical instruments; I sang in Arabic, English and
Hebrew, and because I was rather poor, my very small son
would chew gum while the monkey did its tricks. When we
lost our country, we lost respect. One day a rich Kuwaiti
stopped his car in front of us. He shouted at my son,
"Show me how a Palestinian picks up his food
rations!" So I made the monkey appear to scavenge on
the ground, in the gutter. And my son scavenged with him.
The Kuwaiti threw coins and my son crawled on his knees
to pick them up. This was not right; I was an artist, not
a beggar . . . I am not even a peasant now."
"How do you feel about all that?" I asked him.
"Do you expect me to feel hatred? What is that to a
Palestinian? I never hated the Jews and their Israel . .
. yes, I suppose I hate them now, or maybe I pity them
for their stupidity. They can't win. Because we
Palestinians are the Jews now and, like the Jews, we will
never allow them or the Arabs or you to forget. The youth
will guarantee us that, and the youth after them . .
."
That was 40 years ago. On my last trip back to the West
Bank, I recognised little of Qalandia, now announced by a
vast Israeli checkpoint, a zigzag of sandbags, oil drums
and breeze blocks, with conga lines of people, waiting,
swatting flies with precious papers. Inside the camp, the
tents had been replaced by sturdy hovels, although the
queues at single taps were as long, I was assured, and
the dust still ran to caramel in the rain. At the United
Nations office I asked about Ahmed Hamzeh, the street
entertainer. Records were consulted, heads shaken.
Someone thought he had been "taken away . . . very
ill". No one knew about his son, whose trachoma was
surely blindness now.
Outside, another generation kicked a punctured football
in the dust.
And yet, what Nelson Mandela has called "the
greatest moral issue of the age" refuses to be
buried in the dust. For every BBC voice that strains to
equate occupier with occupied, thief with victim, for
every swarm of emails from the fanatics of Zion to those
who invert the lies and describe the Israeli state's
commitment to the destruction of Palestine, the truth is
more powerful now than ever. Documentation of the violent
expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is voluminous.
Re-examination of the historical record has put paid to
the fable of
heroic David in the Six Day War, when Ahmed Hamzeh and
his family were driven from their home. The alleged
threat of Arab leaders to "throw the Jews into the
sea", used to justify the 1967 Israeli onslaught and
since repeated relentlessly, is highly questionable.
In 2005, the spectacle of wailing Old Testament zealots
leaving Gaza was a fraud. The building of their
"settlements" has accelerated on the West Bank,
along with the illegal Berlin-style wall dividing farmers
from their crops, children from their schools, families
from each other. We now know that Israel's destruction of
much of Lebanon last year was pre-planned. As the former
CIA analyst Kathleen Christison has written, the recent
"civil war" in Gaza was actually a coup against
the elected Hamas-led government, engineered by Elliott
Abrams, the Zionist who runs US policy on Israel and a
convicted felon from the Iran-Contra era.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America's
crusade as Israel's. On 16 August, the Bush
administration announced an unprecedented $30bn military
"aid package" for Israel, the world's fourth
biggest military power, an air power greater than
Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other
country on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act
without sanction, as Israel. No other country has such a
record of lawlessness: not one of the world's tyrannies
comes close. International treaties, such as the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored
by Israel. There is nothing like it in UN history.
But something is changing. Perhaps last summer's
panoramic horror beamed from Lebanon on to the world's TV
screens provided the catalyst. Or perhaps cynicism of
Bush and Blair and the incessant use of the inanity,
"terror", together with the day-by-day
dissemination of a fabricated insecurity in all our
lives, has finally brought the attention of the
international community outside the rogue states, Britain
and the US, back to one of its principal sources, Israel.
I got a sense of this recently in the United States. A
full-page advertisement in the New York Times had the
distinct odour of panic. There have been many
"friends of Israel" advertisements in the
Times, demanding the usual favours, rationalising the
usual outrages. This one was different. "Boycott a
cure for cancer?" was its main headline, followed by
"Stop drip irrigation in Africa? Prevent scientific
co-operation between nations?" Who would want to do
such things? "Some British academics want to boycott
Israelis," was the self-serving
answer. It referred to the University and College Union's
(UCU) inaugural conference motion in May, calling for
discussion within its branches for a boycott of Israeli
academic institutions. As John Chalcraft of the London
School of Economics pointed out, "the Israeli
academy has long provided intellectual, linguistic,
logistical, technical, scientific and human support for
an occupation in direct violation of international law
[against which] no Israeli academic institution has ever
taken a public stand".
The swell of a boycott is growing inexorably, as if an
important marker has been passed, reminiscent of the
boycotts that led to sanctions against apartheid South
Africa. Both Mandela and Desmond Tutu have drawn this
parallel; so has South African cabinet minister Ronnie
Kasrils and other illustrious Jewish members of the
liberation struggle. In Britain, an often Jewish-led
academic campaign against Israel's "methodical
destruction of [the Palestinian] education system"
can be translated by those of us who have reported from
the occupied
territories into the arbitrary closure of Palestinian
universities, the harassment and humiliation of students
at checkpoints and the shooting and killing of
Palestinian children on their way to school.
These initiatives have been backed by a British group,
Independent Jewish Voices, whose 528 signatories include
Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh and Eric Hobsbawm.
The country's biggest union, Unison, has called for an
"economic, cultural, academic and sporting
boycott" and the right of return for Palestinian
families expelled in 1948. Remarkably, the Commons'
international development committee has made a similar
stand. In April, the membership of the National Union of
Journalists (NUJ) voted for a boycott only to see it
hastily overturned by the national executive council. In
the Republic of Ireland, the Irish Congress of Trade
Unions has called for divestment from Israeli companies:
a campaign aimed at the European Union, which accounts
for two-thirds of Israel's exports under an EU-Israel
Association Agreement. The UN Special Rapporteur on the
Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, has said that human rights
conditions in the agreement should be invoked and
Israel's trading preferences suspended.
This is unusual, for these were once distant voices. And
that such grave discussion of a boycott has "gone
global" was unforeseen in official Israel, long
comforted by its seemingly untouchable myths and great
power sponsorship, and confident that the mere threat of
anti-Semitism would ensure silence. When the British
lecturers' decision was announced, the US Congress passed
an absurd resolution describing the UCU as
"anti-Semitic". (Eighty congressmen have gone
on junkets to Israel this summer.)
This intimidation has worked in the past. The smearing of
American academics has denied them promotion, even
tenure. The late Edward Said kept an emergency button in
his New York apartment connected to the local police
station; his offices at Columbia University were once
burned down. Following my 2002 film, Palestine is Still
the Issue, I received death threats and slanderous abuse,
most of it coming from the US where the film was never
shown. When the BBC's Independent Panel recently examined
the corporation's coverage of the Middle East, it was
inundated with emails, "many from abroad, mostly
from North America", said its report. Some
individuals "sent multiple missives, some were
duplicates and there was clear evidence of pressure group
mobilisation". The panel's conclusion was that BBC
reporting of the Palestinian struggle was not "full
and fair" and "in important respects, presents
an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture".
This was neutralised in BBC press releases.
The courageous Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, believes a
single democratic state, to which the Palestinian
refugees are given the right of return, is the only
feasible and just solution, and that a sanctions and
boycott campaign is critical in achieving this. Would the
Israeli population be moved by a worldwide boycott?
Although they would rarely admit it, South Africa's
whites were moved enough to support an historic change. A
boycott of Israeli institutions, goods and services, says
Pappé, "will not change the [Israeli] position in a
day, but it will send a clear message that [the premises
of Zionism] are racist and unacceptable in the 21st
century . . . They would have to choose." And so
would the rest of us.
Boycott all goods with this Bar-code!!!
|