Closed Zone

Yoni Goodman, director of animation for the Academy Award-nominated film, "Waltz with Bashir", has created a new animated short film on the closure of Gaza together with the human rights group, Gisha. It's 1:34 minutes long. Click here to watch.

by Ghassan Bannoura - IMEMC News

A shoe was thrown at Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, Mr. Benny Dagan, when he was giving a speech at Stockholm University on Thursday . It was followed by two books and a note pad, all hitting the severely embarrassed ambassador. 

The two protesters, a young woman and a young man, shouted “Murderers!” and “Intifada!” while pelting Dagan with the objects. They are currently under arrest and charged with assault and public disturbance.

Tensions between campus pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups that flared at McMaster one year ago during an event called Israeli Apartheid Week appear to have calmed as the 2009 version of the same event opens.

But some are concerned that outside organizers of a campus rally at noon today could upset that delicate peace.

First launched in Toronto in 2005, IAW has grown to become one of the most important global events in the Palestine solidarity calendar. Last year, more than 25 cities around the world participated in the week's activities, which also commemorated 60 years since the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homes and land in 1947-1948. IAW 2008 was launched with a live broadcast from the South African township of Soweto by Palestinian leader and former member of the Israeli Knesset, Azmi Bishara.

CUPE Needs Your Solidarity for Bravely Standing in Support of Palestinian Academics
 Find below:
 * Text of the two historic resolutions;
 * Concrete ways to show your support.

 Toronto, February 23, 2009 - The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) congratulates CUPE-Ontario’s University Workers Coordinating Committee (OUWCC) conference in Windsor for passing a historic resolution in support of the Palestinian civil society call for an academic institutional boycott of Israel. The resolution calls for education and research into institutional links between Israeli and Canadian Universities that serve to perpetuate apartheid.

Hampshire College becomes first college in U.S. to divest from Israeli
Occupation!

Press release, Students for Justice in Palestine (Hampshire College), 12 February 2009

Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, has become the first of any college
or university in the U.S. to divest from companies on the grounds of
their involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestine.  This
landmark move is a direct result of a two-year intensive campaign by
the campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The group
pressured Hampshire College's Board of Trustees to divest from six
specific companies due to human rights concerns in occupied Palestine.
Over 800 students, professors, and alumni have signed SJP's
"institutional statement" calling for the divestment.

(French below)  * Montreal: professors and university employees call for Israel boycott
Le Devoir. January 24 2009.

We are a group of teachers and employees at Quebec colleges and universities who stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and with the people of Gaza who have suffered through the Israeli siege as targets of Israel's brutal military attack. It will take more than ceasefires to bring a just and lasting peace in Palestine and Israel. We are acting in response to an appeal for support issued January 2, 2009 by the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees. In the wake of the Israeli bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza, the Federation of Unions has urged academics around the world to support a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

Sevilla striker Fredi Kanoute, a Malian, lifted his jersey to reveal a pro-Palestinian t-shirt after scoring against Deportivo La Coruna in the Copa del Rey today. He was given a booking -- which the ref can shove up his ass -- for making a political statement. When we get world class futbol players doing this, Israel better know it's in trouble with the world (who can forget Ronaldo's Palestine visit and Italy's 1982 World Cup dedication to the Palestinians; I did forget about Abou Trika's t-shirt after his goal against Sudan this year, but QuiQui reminded me).

Canadian Response to Gaza Situation - Dear Prime Minister Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister Cannon: We the undersigned academics and educators express our condemnation of Israel's attack on Gaza. With over 600 dead, including 100 children, we call on the Canadian government to demand an immediate cessation of Israeli hostilities.

We received this open Letter Written by Rapper The Narcicyst announcing his new song "HAMDULILAH (GAZA REMIX) ft. SHADIA MANSOUR in Support for the Palestinian People.

* You Can hear the song on Nacys' page on MySpace Music Here

My brothers and sisters,

I recently remixed a song for our family in Gaza to know that the hip-hop community stands with them. The song features Shadia Mansour, a Palestinian woman and singer residing in London. This email is the one going out to those close to me, the next one will be a press release.

During the United States election campaign, racists and pro-Israel hardliners tried to make an issue out of President-elect Barack Obama's middle name, Hussein. Such people might take comfort in another middle name, that of Obama's pick for White House Chief of Staff: Rahm Israel Emanuel.

Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 4 September 2008
 
In his foreword setting the historical and political context for the book, a useful and important document in itself, Jonathan Cook describes A Doctor in Galilee as "a key text for scholars, diplomats and journalists." This it certainly is, but it is a very great deal more. It is, in fact, a work of literature of the highest quality. Raymond Deane reviews for The Electronic Intifada.

Ahmad Abed writing from London, UK, Live from Palestine, 10 September 2008 It was a very sudden moment when I realized that I was no longer a child. Occupation, intifada, Israel, enemy, Zionists, curfew, revolution, all these words were repeatedly spoken everywhere and I was very confused trying to understand what they all meant. No place to play or to meet my friends, no freedom. I could no longer go to the fields to pick oranges and grapes and have barbecues with my family and our friends' families and I was forbidden from going to the sea after 7pm. It was a long list of restrictions that killed my childhood in one moment. Coping with all these dramatic and sudden changes was never easy. When someone misses a dear friend or a loved one it takes him or her a long time to recover, but when one loses one's childhood suddenly and without notice, one can never recover.

Maureen Clare Murphy, The Electronic Intifada, 10 September 2008

_{{mosimage}By This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , Haaretz Correspondents}

The Knesset plenum approved a bill Wednesday, in its preliminary reading, which calls for all lands under the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to be allocated to Jews only. The bill passed by a massive majority of 64 MKS to 16.

The bill, initiated by MK Uri Ariel (National Union-National Religious Party), MK Zeev Elkin (Kadima), and MK Moshe Kahlon (Likud), is geared to bypass a 2004 court ruling which annulled an Israel Lands Administration (ILA) policy that prevented Arabs from participating in bids to purchase land owned by the JNF.

{mosimage}As the enemies of the Palestinian people have been attacking them on every front -- Israel with its inquisition against Azmi Bishara and with him Palestinian resistance to the racist basis of the Jewish state inside the green line, or Hariri Inc. and its 14 March allies intent on proving the might of the Lebanese army at the expense of Palestinian civilian lives in Nahr al-Bared, and the continued siege by the Israeli military occupation and its US sponsor of the occupied territories -- the latest attack came from Palestinian collaborators with the enemy: the Fatah leadership abetted by the United States. Indeed the subversion of Middle East democracy has been the mainstay of US policy in the region since the CIA supported the 1949 Hosni al-Zaim coup that overthrew democracy in Syria. The list after that is long, US support for the shah of Iran's coup in 1953 against the Mossadegh government, destroying the Jordanian liberal parliamentary experience by organising a Palace coup in 1957, supporting the Baathist coup in Iraq in 1963 against the popular Abdul-Karim Qassim, and so forth. American policy has not been limited to the overthrow of liberal and democratic governments in the region but of actively supporting if not planning and abetting dictatorial rule in its place and training and supplying those rulers who have instituted regimes of extreme repression and tyranny. Its current role in subverting Palestinian democracy and imposing a corrupt collaborator class on the Palestinian people is therefore anything but novel.
 

{mosimage}For all the attention and hysteria the latest events in Gaza have generated since the Hamas “takeover,” for Israel they represent nothing but a minor blip in its inexorable drive towards its own unilateral “solution:” apartheid. Israel’s end-game, explicit and unruffled by the recent turmoil on the ground, is clear. It is laid out in detail in the Convergence Plan” Olmert presented to a joint session of the American Congress in May, 2006, based on Sharon’s plan of “cantonization.” With minor adjustments, it constitutes the plan Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is quietly advancing with the help of Condoleezza Rice, and it is accepted in its entirety by Ehud Barak, the newly-elected leader of the Labor Party, who played a key role in its formulation. The Israeli plan for apartheid is as follows:

{mosimage}The highest ranking UN official in Israel has warned that American pressure has "pummelled into submission" the UN's role as an impartial Middle East negotiator in a damning confidential report.

The 53-page "End of Mission Report" by Alvaro de Soto, the UN's Middle East envoy, obtained by the Guardian, presents a devastating account of failed diplomacy and condemns the sweeping boycott of the Palestinian government. It is dated May 5 this year, just before Mr de Soto stepped down.

{mosimage}Yesterday a tragic event took place in Virginia Tech in the US that shocked not only the people of the United States but people all across the globe. A violent massacre took place there that resulted in thirty two killed, individuals who presented different cultures, religions and nationalities. Words can never express our sadness over this tragic event.

Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) would like to extend sincere condolences to all students, staff, faculty and others involved at Virginia Tech. Campuses across the America and Canada been holding special vigils in memory of the Virginia Tech students.

{mosimage}By Robert Fisk  

Israel's Prime Minister was a ruthless military commander responsible for one of the most shocking war crimes of the 20th century, argues Robert Fisk. President George Bush acclaims Ariel Sharon as 'a man of peace', yet the blood that was shed at Sabra and Chatila remains a stain on the conscience of the Zionist nation. As Sharon lies stricken in his hospital bed, his political career over, how will history judge him?

In sharp contrast to the growing consensus of Jerusalem's security and political establishment, President Bush argued this week that Israel's safety depends on democratization of the Arab world.

{mosimage} By MIFTAH

{mosimage}The Guardian by Chris McGreal in Jerusalem

An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza dismissed a warning from another soldier that she was a child by saying he would have killed her even if she was three years old.

The officer, identified by the army only as Captain R, was charged this week with illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and other relatively minor infractions after emptying all 10 bullets from his gun's magazine into Iman al-Hams when she walked into a "security area" on the edge of Rafah refugee camp last month.

A tape recording of radio exchanges between soldiers involved in the incident, played on Israeli television, contradicts the army's account of the events and appears to show that the captain shot the girl in cold blood.

On 11 September 1982, Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, the architect of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, announced that "2,000 terrorists" had remained inside the Palestinian refugee camps around Beirut.

On Wednesday 15 September, the day after the assassination of Israeli-allied Phalangist militia leader and Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, the Israeli army occupied West Beirut, "encircling and sealing" the camps of Sabra and Shatila, which were inhabited by Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. By mid-day on 15 September 1982, the refugee camps were entirely surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers, who installed checkpoints at strategic locations and crossroads around the camps in order to monitor the entry or exit of any person. During the late afternoon and evening of that day, the camps were shelled. Around mid-day on Thursday 16 September 1982, a unit of approximately 150 Israeli-allied Phalangists entered the first camp. For the next 40 hours members of the Phalangist militia raped, killed, and injured a large number of unarmed civilians, mostly children, women and elderly people inside the encircled and sealed camps.

The estimate of victims varies between 700 (the official Israeli figure) to 3,500.

{mosimage}by Samer Elatrash  2004-12-23

Recently Omar Barghouti, an eloquent and keen critic of the Israeli occupation and colonialism, argued in an article published in Znet for imposing a boycott against Israel. His arguments focused on cultural and academic boycotts. Barghouti is an effective writer, and very knowledgeable about Israel?s policies, but after reading his article??Why Boycott Israel??one can still (and should, I would say) ask: ?Why boycott Israel, indeed??

by Samer Elatrash

The matrix of concrete walls and coils of barbed wire that the Court ruled is ?illegal? and must be dismantled is illegal because Israel is constructing it on occupied lands. The court rejected Israel?s argument, which was presented in an affidavit to the court, that these territories cannot be considered ?occupied territories?. The route of the barrier has less to do with ?security considerations? and more with what this occupation has always been about: brazen colonialism.

{mosimage}by Samer Elatrash; June 12, 2004

{mosimage} by Samer Elatrash

For all the roaring condemnations the Palestinian Authority directed towards George Bush?s recent declarations on the Palestinian right of return and Israel?s settlements, they still sounded very much like squeaks of protest from a mouse that had enjoyed masquerading as a lion before being abruptly put back in its place. There was nothing in George Bush?s letter to Ariel Sharon, in which he declared a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it had conquered in 1967 as ?unrealistic? (1), and that the Palestinian refugees cannot return to the lands they were expelled from in present day Israel, that had not been tacitly, and occasionally unequivocally, accepted by the Palestinian Authority since the launching of the Oslo Accords in 1993. The reason behind all these condemnations from the Palestinian Authority, as well as from other parties that! long for the sunny days of Bill Clinton, is that George Bush, in his singularly inartful way, held up a mirror to the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian ?peace process?, both in its current ?roadmap? incarnation and the Oslo negotiations in the 1990?s.

The twin spectres of "politicizing" the UN and damaging the "fragility" of non-existent peace talks between General Sharon and the decrepit Palestinian Authority are again being invoked, this time to scuttle the upcoming deliberations in the International Court of Justice at the Hague on the legality of Israel's separation barrier in the occupied West Bank. Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham announced his government's opposition to sending the matter before the International Court at press conference last month, opining: "it's not time for the court to take this as a legal question", and that the matter should be left to "discussions between the parties, as mandated by the (UN) Security Council." True, the 700 km long matrix of walls, electronic fences and trenches that threatens to bring about a humanitarian disaster in the already throttled West Bank raises some "legal questions", according to Canada's deputy ambassador at the UN Gilbert Laurin, who nonetheless points to "the highly charged environment" as grounds for opposing the hearings that are scheduled to start this February (1).