Israel turns sixty. It stands tall and proud (mostly proud) on the heads, shoulders, backs, ankles and land of others.
Here is an article about life in Gaza, which is an area Israel controls but denies responsibility for. It serves as a reminder of the reality of what sixty years of Zionism has brought to the mideast.
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8 - 14 May 2008 Issue No. 896 Region |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Flew from Boston. Four hours and fifty minutes. Young man next to me from France, didn't speak much English but wanted to talk to everyone around him. Full of energy, even to the point of pulling out all the magazines and safety instructions (in case of a plane crash) to flip through. I put on music and pulled out my black and white composition book. I wrote four songs (lyrics) and felt good about them. The plane landed, no bump at all, and the plane emptied much much faster than it had filled up.
I left my notebook in the seat pocket in 40A. Damn.
Show us your guitar.
Submitted by Sean J. O'Rourke.
Here is a potent summary of where "we" are in the mideast.
From Al-Ahram Weekly.
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Sinkable Israel
While on the surface it appears invincible, Israel lies exposed in its behaviour as a racist, belligerent, arrogant and colonial pariah, writes Ayman El-Amir
Next week Israel will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its declaration of independence in the presence of an enviable number of dignitaries and heads of state. One week later, on 15 May, the Palestinians will commiserate their Nakba -- the day they were driven from their homeland by Jewish paramilitary settlers who established the state of Israel. While Israel will be showered with words of admiration and congratulation, principally by those countries that helped create it, the Palestinians will be huddled together in exile or under military occupation, encircled by the Israeli wall of shame that was probably inspired by the Nazi wall that enclosed the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1940. The only statements making reference to them will be the empty rhetoric of Arab officials calling for peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state, and probably maligning Hamas. Victors will continue writing history, at least as long as they remain powerful.
At 60, Israel appears solid, focussed, constantly expanding and basking in the adulation of its powerful supporters and the resignation of its intimidated neighbours. By contrast, the Palestinians, evicted from their homeland, appear weak, divided, starved, vulnerable and spurned by most Arab leaders. Israel, a warrior state armed to the teeth with conventional and nuclear weapons, represents a success for the great powers in more ways than one. Their most important achievement was offloading the centuries old "Jewish question" on the Arabs. Ever since, Israel has proved a belligerent state bent on aggression and expansion, which was also useful to the powers that nurtured it. However, Israel's atrocities against the Palestinians and other Arabs, and its extensive settlement under occupation of their land, makes it appear more like a giant on stilts than a peace-loving nation that lives by the norms of international law.
In spite of the glow of success, two historical factors are corroding the underpinnings of Israel as a state. First, Israel was founded on the 17th century doctrine of settler colonialism -- the New World migration model of which the United States is the unique surviving example. As European settlers arrived in droves to the New World that Christopher Columbus discovered in 1492, the land was ethnically cleansed of its indigenous population, especially North American Indians. Hundreds of tribes and ethnic communities were systematically devastated or driven west of the Mississippi river to make room for European colonists. In 1778, even before becoming the nation, new Americans signed a treaty with the Indian Delawares -- the first of what would become a body of more than 380 treaties that never held in the face of the desire to expand. Under those treaties, the nascent US gained more than one billion acres of Indian land in North America, mostly by force, coercion and outright war, with some bought for as little as 10 cents an acre. Consciously or otherwise, this was the model adopted by the Zionist movement to seize Palestine under the fallacy of "a land without a people for a people without a land", with the support of the British via the Balfour Declaration. This shared model of ethnic cleansing and land expropriation is the strongest bond between Israel and the US.
During its so-called "war of liberation", Israel committed 70 massacres and atrocities against the Palestinian people as part of a methodical campaign of ethnic cleansing. It terrorised and expelled 85 per cent of the population from 747 Palestinian towns and villages. Most of these were either obliterated to prevent the return of Palestinian inhabitants or given to immigrant Jewish settlers. At the time, this created a population of 900,000 refugees who were "temporarily" relocated to neighbouring Arab countries. Palestinian refugees are now estimated at 4.5 million, half of them in host Arab countries. According to Salman Abu Setta, general coordinator of the Right of Return Congress, 80 per cent of the Jewish population of Israel live in about 10 per cent of the historic land of Palestine under the British mandate. Most of the territories extending from Beersheba in the south to the northern swathe of the Upper Galilee are scarcely populated. The density of the Palestinian population in Gaza is 6,000 individuals per one square kilometre -- a total of 1.5 million Palestinians heaped upon each other under inhuman blockade conditions. Israel rejects the Palestinians' right of return even to these vacant areas, justified by what amounts to a racist policy of maintaining the "Jewish" nature of the state -- another echo of Nazi Germany under Hitler.
Immigration to Israel has become a matter of economic opportunity, not the claimed pseudo-religious Zionist ideology of "return to the Promised Land". The population of Israel is 5.2 million out of a world Jewry population of 13 million, with about five million living in the US. Immigration to Israel is declining; the fertility rate among the Jewish population is 0.5 per cent, far below the population replacement value, while the Palestinian fertility rate is nearly three per cent. Israeli politicians regard this as a bomb ready to explode. Israeli concerns have prompted rising calls to declare Israel an exclusively Jewish state where only Jews are eligible for citizenship. The rest -- that is, the Palestinians who have lived on that land since the time of the Canaanites -- are regarded as a nuisance to be evicted when circumstances are favourable.
Israel's main problem, however, is that unlike the American Indians or indigenous populations in other colonised lands, the Palestinians refuse to disappear or melt away. Despite the brutal occupation, genocide, mass detentions, numberless checkpoints, the economic blockade, daily humiliation and starvation, and the powerful support afforded to Israel by the US administration, Palestinians refuse to be amassed together in a reservation under the title of a Palestinian state. Palestinian elders keep the keys to their original houses, the deeds to their property, and teach their children about the horrors they had to endure at the hands of those they once embraced as neighbours in the historic land of Palestine.
Sixty years after its "independence", Israel has lost its moral compass. Aggression, occupation and expansion have become its most vaunted practices. Hence it has no sense of security. It seeks regional recognition and cooperation but enforces a system of apartheid against the Palestinians. It forces a stop at Yad Vashim on the schedule of every visiting dignitary but kills Palestinian men, women and children, bulldozes their houses and orchards, confiscates their land, pumps out their water, arrests and detains thousands of them indefinitely, violates every human dignity under the sun, and denies the nation it subsumed its legitimate rights. Israel is not planning on any just and lasting settlement with the Palestinians. Like its master, the US, it only believes in the force of arms -- the ability to subjugate by destruction. That is what the Nazis did to the Jews and other minorities in Europe; and that is what the Jews of Israel are doing to the Palestinians. What Israel and the Western alliance call "acts of terrorism" by fundamentalists are the same acts they cheered as heroic by the resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe.
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In New York and Boston people
the kind of people who talk talk
about jazz in the style of jazz
the way it was not now
the way it was when cities were alive.
The city by means of bright lights
has redefined what is treason
say a star is full of darkness
you will be brought to rude trial
the ones above are above by rule.
Boys hang out with each other
making ruckus bonding like
bonding like they don't know
don't know about what they don't
know about the grammar of girls.
Drink enough to end all food
stay up late too late smoking
outside in between the obvious
arguments about we all know
what we know and still we argue.
Back and the condo sheets costing
more than grandma made in a month
puke in the bathroom crash on the bed
in your clothes nobody cares
got a closetful for the morning.
Bars and law firms courtrooms
and law firms and condos and bars
suits and wine bars and ties
a brewpub a tap room and the lawyers
all wish they could just quit.
The city by means of bright lights
has redefined what is treason
say a star is full of darkness
you will be brought to rude trial
the ones above above by rule.
In the lobby jazz with energy
of cities when workers worked
plays and the lawyers don't listen
they are on their way to work
and drink a lot and forget jazz.
Back in the day I went to work
worked all day for the family
after work I sang the songs
my mother taught me and her brothers
sang together for the grandkids.
5 May 2008
Broad and Milk in Boston
Boston pics from the North End and a leisurely walk with absolutely no direction.
The NBA, by means of refs and the financial value of star worship, has redefined what is a 'foul' in basketball.
If you play defense on a star, you will be called with a foul.
If a star plays defense on you, no foul will be called, no matter the contact.
The ideal of competition has been replaced by the ideal of fame.
Come to think of it, this is very similar to the jingoism of Americanism everywhere. Get in the way of the superpower, you will be an enemy, or perhaps evil. Stand up in the way of the imperial superpower, and you are a terrorist. Speak up about American superstar status, and you are in league with the terrorists. If you are a survivor trying to stay on your property in occupied Afghanistan or Iraq, you will be shot and labelled an insugent, or even an al-Qaida jihadist.
Can't win, unless you are number one. Then you can't lose. Working hard or trying to have your own life cannot turn the tide of the power of the powerful. Wave the flag.
Nourishing all twelve gates
after dinner unstoppable
I cannot do without
can't do without grazing
getting stronger every nibble.
Distance contented overnight
calories consumed remembering
I swallowed a language I once knew
all noodles and particles.
Sleeping close to entrances
the wake-up dark or light
I cannot do without
can't do without blazing
invitations to my own home.
Tiger table shadow chairs
sit until it is all desirous
monitored diet fears balanced
with a resume made careless.
The hand in hand walking
mentality spills and splashes
I cannot do without
can't do without phrasing
another crumb spewed thank you.
Fly west or bus north
arrive in the same state speed
sides saddling past like spice
layered like lasagna filling
the piercings we interpret as need
hours apart years to go.
4 May 2008
Boston and environs
Because April
Because march and may
show us disrespect
can a man expect
springtime in between
because march may
scamper away.
Because april is cool
little animals cavort
large mammals flirt
because april is cool
sky takes off its robe
to catch rays and turn blue.
Since pushed over
a hellacious edge
the hand cannot catch
scheduled relaxation
took all the medicine
since pushed out.
To get one hit
a batter must swing a lot
and miss a few
to hit one fly
a tail must swish away
many a mosquito.
Because love demands
april every morning
I am forlorn
because april demands
kissing while the glitter
falls we scatter.
Mourning this morning
april has died
she tried and tried
and finally finished
with a half a shine
of may's fine wine.
