Category Archives: occupation

Movie Review: Budrus

Posted on July 7, 2010 by | 1 comment

Budrus (2009, Julie Bacha) is a film about the village of Budrus and its struggle against the apartheid wall cutting through 300 acres of its land. The film follows three people, a Fatah member, a Hamas member, and a young woman who is the daughter of the Fatah member. The viewer explores the unique situation of Budrus, how it was the first village to exercise inclusive non-violent protests against the confiscation of land. It shows the brutality of the IOF perfectly as the filmmaker captures IOF soldiers beating the fellaheen with sticks and shooting at them with live ammunition. The film emphasized the people of the village and their bravery admirably, however, there were a few criticisms I must mention.

In Budrus, the filmmaker uses the rather neutral term “barrier” when referring to the wall. In addition, by the end of the film one is unclear if the filmmaker is for or against the wall, as it seems by the end that the villagers have earned a victory by forcing the Israelis to build closer to the green line (1967 borders). I think the film would have been better if it had taken a stronger stand against the wall. However, seeing as the film also took great lengths to illustrate the bravery of the Israeli leftists who joined the protests and saught to humanize one of the soldiers who was captured on film beating Palestinians, I suppose there must be a desire to reach a broad audience. Unfortunately, when one seeks to capture a broad audience they fail to accurately portray the truth, the truth being that the wall is a disgusting blight on humanity and will hopefully be seen one day in the same light (popularly) as the Berlin Wall.

I watched this movie at the Ramallah Cultural Palace with a 50/50 mix of Palestinians and foreigners. Queen Noor of Jordan was also in attendance, and it seemed many were more keen on getting a photo of her than sticking around for the question and answer session afterward. Although the main characters and filmmaker were present on stage after the showing, the woman MCing the event had to appeal to the audience to  stay for Q&A instead of rushing out to watch the World Cup match. Indeed, nobody stayed. There were only a handful left seated for the Q&A and the rest rushed off to chatter excitedly about the match while hustling to one of the Ramallah clubs to watch.

“Come on, guys! This is more important than a football match!” she pleaded.

The foreigners and Palestinians begged to differ.

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Posted in imperialism, israel, neo-colonialism, occupation, palestine, terrorism, the future, war, warfare, western lifestyle

Americana 2010

Posted on July 4, 2010 by | Leave a comment

This morning I woke up to my second Fourth of July in Nablus. Last night I’d jerked awake to the sound of dogs barking and a smattering of sharp sounds. I recalled, tense in my bed, the first night I slept in Nablus last year to wake up to dogs barking, gunfire, and sound grenades. Fajr came on just as the racket stopped and lulled me back to sleep.

So this morning I thought a lot about my last time here and how my feelings changed about America since I last posted on the Fourth of July. I knew going back to America would be hard when I boarded the plane last time, but I hadn’t any idea how difficult it would actually be. I felt a lot less shy about airing my feelings and opinions in public and the response was sharp and dismissive in return. I stopped being able to stomach a lot of the activities and social events I used to enjoy and the response was a lot more loneliness and isolation. My first outing back, people would drunkenly ask me how Pakistan was, or wasn’t I in Germany or something? What’s a Palestinian? Going out and seeing my fellow citizens get in on in the clubs instilled great feelings of loathing and pain in me as I could still see the kids in the villages and the damaged buildings, the sallowness of a corpse’s face when I closed my eyes.

I watched when Nablus came under direct attack in December of 2009 and two men were murdered in their beds. The television showed the streets I’d walked every day in Nablus with tanks and kids and stones. “I’d hate to be there, those terrorists would chop my head right off!” a woman said next to me. American taxpayer commentary. Your ignorance and racism paid for those tanks, those bullets, that wall, those bodies. It keeps the wheels turning.

I don’t want to make it seem like nobody cared or listened to me when I got home, but a lot of people I expected to didn’t. Not my problem, not your problem, so let’s get over it. Get back to whatever. And now even as millions of gallons of oil stains my backyard a dead black people still don’t care. A nation of sleeping fat babies.  I only wish that our high-flautin ideals we brag about on t-shirts – freedom, liberty, self-determination, independence – were still ideals we were willing to fight and die for. I took them so seriously as a child, sitting at my grandpa’s knee and listening to him explain the great responsibility of being an American. Now, at 25, I get the feeling I wasn’t supposed to take it all so seriously. Perhaps for the majority it’s easier to just accept living life one day at a time instead of focusing on all the evil done in our name. Maybe it’s too much to bear. Maybe we just don’t know. I’d like to dedicate the rest of my life to trying to inform others, but it’s hard when people seem so disinterested in listening.

I’m not afraid to say I don’t feel any sense of celebration on the Fourth of July anymore. When I think about what this nation was founded upon and what it eats for dinner and how it makes a living, I feel sick to my stomach. Today’s the day everyone wants to hear it the least, but it’s also the day I feel it’s most important to reaffirm my position and my ideals. I’d like to assert I feel the same way everyone should about things like liberty and freedom and justice, I just don’t feel like being an American and celebrating America’s continued existence (234 years of the same old game) represents those anymore.

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Posted in america, neo-colonialism, occupation, palestine, war, warfare, western lifestyle, Western perspective

the worst thing that could happen

Posted on July 2, 2010 by | Leave a comment

It’s been a while because I’ve been in a bad place. The World Cup is on and everyone feels that way more important than what is happening in Palestine. The new strategy of the colonists is made visible in a place like this, where the money flows in and where the foreigners walk with heads held high. Police – four to six on street corners – play the new occupiers, hosting flying checkpoints and shaking down motorists for money and studying IDs with the same sort of sickening scrutiny you’d see at an Israeli checkpoint. The case is made when Israel feels comfortable enough with their trained PASF to pull out checkpoints and soldiers from the West Bank to work in Gaza. The case is made when Israel considers allowing the Palestinian Authority to have control over Gazan checkpoints, allowing Palestinian to continue to crush Palestinian.

Thomas Friedman wrote a disgusting article about the new elite in Ramallah a few days ago. Entitled “The Real Palestinian Revolution”, he makes the case that

The Abbas-Fayyad state-building effort is still fragile, and it rests on a small team of technocrats, Palestinian business elites and a new professional security force. The stronger this team grows, the more it challenges and will be challenged by some of the old-line Fatah Palestinian cadres in the West Bank, not to mention Hamas in Gaza. It is the only hope left, though, for a two-state solution, so it needs to be quietly supported.

What he means by fragile is what every autocratic regime in the region faces. The Abbas-Fayyad government is not elected. It is not popular with the people. Outside of Ramallah – in the camps, in the villages – it can barely claim sovereignty. My professor wistfully recalls the days when Abu Amar would come out and mix with the people. Mahmoud Abbas, on the other hand, must mix with the citizens of Palestine in much the same way Thomas Friedman does — infrequently,  in the dead of night, and under armed guard. This is a problem with any dictator in the Middle East. Recall Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his many doubles, the mysterious absence of Hosni Mubarak in public for the last twenty years, or perhaps the Jordanian Royal Family as it appears in TV and on Youtube but never under any circumstances among the people. The worst thing that could happen to Palestine is what is happening to it right now. The last bastion of actual democracy in the Middle East – Gaza – continues to be under siege and it is not just in Israel and America’s interest to starve them out, but the Palestinian Authority as well. The Palestinian Authority, as Mr. Friedman points out, is becoming a business class elite that eats up USAID money with one hand and sells out the kids in the camps with the other.

The most important thing President Obama can do when he meets Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, on July 6 is to nudge him to begin gradually ceding control of major West Bank Palestinian cities to the Palestinian Authority so that Fayyad can show his people, as he puts it, that what he is building is an independent state “not an exercise in adapting to the permanence of occupation” — and so that Israel can test if the new Palestinian security forces really can keep the peace without Israel making nighttime raids. Nothing would strengthen Fayyadism more than that.

Now that the Palestinian Authority is run by old guard corrupt PLO, American-educated hyper-capitalist technocrats, and an American-trained police force, Mr. Friedman finally feels comfortable outsourcing the occupation of the Palestinian people to the Palestinians themselves. This will be accomplished by two means: hard and soft pressure. The police will continue the nighttime raids for the Israelis and will gladly torture and imprison their own countrymen for the Israelis. Meanwhile, imported goods and cultural lifestyles (will write more on this later) will lull the Palestinians of Ramallah to sleep long enough for the foxes to make off with the chickens. One day the Palestinians of Ramallah will shake off their hangovers, wake up, and realize their birthright has been sold for a handful of shekels and false-peace talks. I mean really, what is a securities exchange that runs on foreign currency or a peace talk that can claim with a straight face that East Jerusalem will ever belong to Palestine? After they wake up, that’s when the blood will come again, but this time the Israelis and their American masters will be pleased to note it is Palestinian killing Palestinian, Palestinian imprisoning Palestinian. Just like 2006. Unity is smashed through capital and pressure. The American-Israelis can continue their beach-side siestas in Tel Aviv without worrying about someone coming for their privilege… no, the creation of such a successfully fragile “state-building effort”, one that will constantly depend on their masters for continued existence, will ensure their security for years to come.

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Posted in addicts, america, capitalism, gaza, imperialism, israel, neo-colonialism, occupation, palestine, the future

defending the indefensible

Posted on June 3, 2010 by | Leave a comment

From Foreign Policy magazine:

1. We didn’t do it! (Denials usually don’t work, but it’s worth a try).

2. We know you think we did it but we aren’t admitting anything.

3. Actually, maybe we did do something but not what we are accused of doing.

4. Ok, we did it but it wasn’t that bad (“waterboarding isn’t really torture, you know”).

5. Well, maybe it was pretty bad but it was justified or necessary. (We only torture terrorists, or suspected terrorists, or people who might know a terrorist…”)

6. What we did was really quite restrained, when you consider how powerful we really are. I mean, we could have done something even worse.

7. Besides, what we did was technically legal under some interpretations of international law (or at least as our lawyers interpret the law as it applies to us.)

8. Don’t forget: the other side is much worse. In fact, they’re evil. Really.

9. Plus, they started it.

10. And remember: We are the good guys. We are not morally equivalent to the bad guys no matter what we did. Only morally obtuse, misguided critics could fail to see this fundamental distinction between Them and Us.

11. The results may have been imperfect, but our intentions were noble. (Invading Iraq may have resulted in tens of thousands of dead and wounded and millions of refugees, but we meant well.)

12. We have to do things like this to maintain our credibility. You don’t want to encourage those bad guys, do you?

13. Especially because the only language the other side understands is force.

14. In fact, it was imperative to teach them a lesson. For the Nth time.

15. If we hadn’t done this to them they would undoubtedly have done something even worse to us. Well, maybe not. But who could take that chance?

16. In fact, no responsible government could have acted otherwise in the face of such provocation.

17. Plus, we had no choice. What we did may have been awful, but all other policy options had failed and/or nothing else would have worked.

18. It’s a tough world out there and Serious People understand that sometimes you have to do these things. Only ignorant idealists, terrorist sympathizers, craven appeasers and/or treasonous liberals would question our actions.

19. In fact, whatever we did will be worth it eventually, and someday the rest of the world will thank us.

20. We are the victims of a double-standard. Other states do the same things (or worse) and nobody complains about them. What we did was therefore permissible.

21. And if you keep criticizing us, we’ll get really upset and then we might do something really crazy. You don’t want that, do you?

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Posted in america, death toll, gaza, human rights, israel, occupation, palestine, terrorism, war, warfare

contradictory stances

Posted on June 2, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Israel keeps changing their story.

First the flotilla victims were IHH (which was suddenly a radical Islamic terrorist organization) and then they were just simply Hamas/Terrorists. First the international protesters were simply uninformed, now they’re Islamic extremists/sympathizers. First the Israelis were going to “deliver” humanitarian aid (see Amira Hass’s views on this one here) and now the Israelis claim  up to 50 on the ship “could have terrorist connections with global jihad-affiliated groups”. I guess if the flotilla was such a publicity stunt, like Israel keeps claiming, they would have taken care to not pack night vision goggles and bulletproof vests (which today you can’t find a source for) and admit terrorists to their ranks, right?

If you can’t see through this I don’t know what to tell you. Israel boarded a ship in international waters (piracy) and killed unarmed civilians with head shots (murder/warcrime) because they are so desperate to keep their Gazan prison tight and secure and starving and hopelesss.

Even though Turkey is talking tough, my guess is that next Israel will be blaming Lebanon. I honestly don’t know at this point. They’re going to keep sending ships and Israel says next time they’ll use “more force”, as if killing up to 20 unarmed civilians  isn’t enough. Turkey threatens to escort the next flotilla with their navy, but we’ll see how NATO responds. Meanwhile, the United States couldn’t be bothered to respond with any kind of indignation past “deep condolences” for the families affected. Business as usual.

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Posted in gaza, human rights, imperialism, occupation, palestine, terrorism, war, warfare

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real chutzpah

Posted on May 31, 2010 by | Leave a comment

A friend of mine messaged me this morning to find out if I knew that internationals had been killed at sea on their way to Gaza. At first I thought he was joking. There was no way things could get so sloppy so fast. Of course, I was wrong. It seems like every year Israel tries to see how far they can push the envelope in these times of globalization of information. Cast Lead was awful, and the outcry was significant considering, but it didn’t keep them from forging passports and assassinating Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

Now up to 20 internationals on a flotilla to deliver aid in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces in international waters.

Israel’s allies froze military ties and summoned its ambassadors Monday over the storming of an aid flotilla bound for Gaza, as Muslim leaders slammed the deadly raid as “criminal” and “inhuman”.UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he was “shocked” by the Israeli navy’s assault on a convoy carrying hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists, lawmakers and journalists through international waters towards besieged Gaza.

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Ban called on Israel to “urgently” explain itself over the raid, which Israel’s Channel 10 TV left 19 passengers killed and 36 wounded, many of them Turks.

It even seems as though some of the internationals were intentionally killed and the raid on the flotilla was used as an excuse.

Despite the fact that there is no reasonable explanation for the murder of so many in international waters, perhaps the most depressing issue is that while thousands in Istanbul tried to rush the Israeli consulate, the Palestinian response in Ramallah has been small.  Today I witnessed a protest of perhaps 60 lawyers and union members, holding pre-made signs and being careful not to block the way of traffic. Police were out in arms and watching the crowd carefully. There was no chanting because the police forbade it. It seems to me that while so many in the Western media are concerned with the “loss of rights” in Hamas controlled Gaza, nobody seems to care that the Palestinians of the West Bank – who care deeply about the issue – don’t feel comfortable protesting openly against Israeli aggression. Televisions were all tuned into Al Jazeera and everyone was discussing the issue on the street and cafes and universities, and yet…

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Posted in gaza, human rights, occupation, palestine, persona non grata, war

ahlan wa sahlan

Posted on May 25, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Besides the fact that settlers have spray painted out most of the Arabic and English on road signs in the West Bank, not much has changed. Things get worse bit by bit here, slow and steady wins the race. A frog in the pan. There are more Israeli flags littering the countryside. A friend’s wife has been finally denied entry to the West Bank and their family is under threat. Otherwise, the falafel and kunafa taste the same. Slight municipal improvements are visible in Nablus Old City. I’ll be focusing on the economic development while I’m here, but I won’t be constraining myself with regards to subjects on my blog.

However, I’m really soliciting some articles. I’ll be writing my experiences here and I suffer from tunnel vision. The format will change slightly, so bear with me. I’m still suffering from jet lag, so I’ll write more in a few days.

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Posted in israel, neo-colonialism, occupation, palestine, war

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Grieving for the Dead

Posted on May 15, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Despite the length of time occupying Iraq, no real voices dare speak of the hundreds of thousands dead. Even this Time writeup stops short of discussing our culture of indifference.

It is not inconsequential to kill 100,000 people. That much life suddenly and violently extinguished must leave a ragged hole somewhere in the universe. One looks for special effects of a metaphysical kind to attend so much death — the whoosh of all those souls departing. But many of them died ingloriously, like road kill, full of their disgrace, facedown with the loot scattered around them. The conquered often die ignominiously. The victors have not given them much thought.

Still, killing 100,000 people is a serious thing to do. It is not equivalent to shooting a rabid dog, which is, down deep, what Americans feel the war was all about, exterminating a beast with rabies. All those 100,000 men were not megalomaniacs, torturers and murderers. They did not all commit atrocities in Kuwait. They were ordinary people: peasants, truck drivers, students and so on. They had the love of their families, the dignity of their lives and work. They cared as little for politics, or less, than most people in the world. They were, precisely, not Saddam Hussein. Which means, since Saddam was the coalition’s one true target in all of this, that those 100,000 corpses are, so to speak, collateral damage. The famous smart bombs did not find the one man they were seeking.

The secret of much murder and evildoing is to dehumanize the victim, to make him alien, to make him Other, a different species. When we have done that, we have prepared ourselves to kill him, for to kill the Other, to kill a snake, a roach, a pest, a Jew, a scorpion, a black, a centipede, a Palestinian, a hyena, an Iraqi, a wild dog, an Israeli . . . it’s O.K.

If Saddam Hussein was a poisonous snake in the desert, and he had 1 million poisonous snakes arrayed around him, then it was good sense to drop bombs and kill 100,000 snakes and thus turn back the snake menace.

But, of course, the 100,000 Iraqis were not snakes.

To kill 100,000 people and to feel no pain at having done so may be dangerous to those who did the killing. It hints at an impaired humanity, a defect like a gate through which other deaths may enter, deaths no one had counted on. The unquiet dead have many ways of haunting — particularly in the Middle East, which has been accumulating the grievances of the dead for thousands of years.

And yet even now, self-confessed war criminals run for office in the United States on a populist platform. Are people just standing around wringing their hands? Can it be that Americans are not just callous about the body count but indeed find electoral occasions to celebrate it’s perpetuity?

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Posted in america, human rights, iraq, neo-colonialism, occupation, persona non grata, war, warfare, Western perspective

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