SECURE BORDERS FOR ISRAEL, END OF ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE AND RETURN TO 1967 BORDERS, Information and Calls to Action by Dick Bennett, 2-22-11
Contents
Contact President Obama for UN Settlement Resolution
Calls to Action in March, March 30 BDS DAY of Action
The Palestine Papers and Obama
The Goldstone Report
US Campaign to Stop the Occupation
Former Israeli Troops Oppose Occupation
Presbyterian Church Statement
Videos
Books
Action: Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution. Jewish Voice for Peace, Americans for Peace Now, and Churches for Middle East Peace are speaking out. Add your voice.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
“Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
Is this potentially a winnable fight? We argue it is:
Can US Support UN Resolution on Israeli Settlements? Yes We Can!
This is a winnable fight if we move the debate beyond the usual suspects.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/can-us-support-un-resolut_b_813233.html
Take Action on March 30th:
Join the 3rd Global BDS Day of Action! (from Anna Baltzer)
Above: Palestinian poster announcing Land Day, 1985.
Dear Dick,
As popular uprisings continue across the Middle East, boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) organizing is heating up in the United States!
March 2011 promises to be a month full of creative events and actions, starting with Israeli Apartheid Week and wrapping up with a BDS Day of Action on March 30th, Palestinian Land Day. Please be a part of it!
Palestinian Land Day, "Yom al-Ard," commemorates the Israeli military's 1976 killing of six young Palestinians as they protested the Israeli government's seizure of Palestinian land. The day has since become a symbol of Palestinian resistance to land theft, colonization, occupation and apartheid.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is calling on supporters around the world to unite in a March 30th Day of Action by organizing BDS activities supporting: divestment; consumer, cultural and academic boycott; legal action and media activism. Click here to read the full call.
Not sure what to do? There's something for everyone! Here are just a few ideas:
Host a "Stolen Beauty" House Party. Still cold outside? Gather friends and laptop computers for some online activism to promote the campaign to Boycott Ahava. Enjoy tea, cookies, and good company while you publicize Ahava's occupation profiteering. Click here to write CODEPINK for details.
Gather signatures for the "TIAA-CREF: Divest from Occupation" Campaign. Pass around this petition at work, at school, in your faith community or any institution where TIAA-CREF retirement plans are offered. Last fall, one professor at the University of Massachusetts collected 80 signatures from colleagues and staff. Can you beat that?
Write an article about BDS for your local newspaper, campus publication or faith community newsletter. Click here for an example from the divestment campaign at the University of California at San Diego. Click here for a clear, compelling piece by Naomi Klein.
Take your BDS campaign to the next level, with a flash mob, using the US Campaign's new BDS Flash Mob Step-by-Step How-To Kit!
Host a speaker to talk about BDS. Get a speaker from the Speakers Bureau of the Palestine Freedom Project, a US Campaign member group.
Host a public film screening to garner support for a local BDS campaign. Palestine Online Store, our member group, has a comprehensive selection here.
Keep your eyes peeled for productions fit for cultural boycott. For example, Adalah-NY, our member group, and others are preparing to boycott productions by the Israeli Philharmonic.
Many more creative activities can connect you with a promising global movement to end Israeli apartheid. Street theatre! Poetry readings! Even just holding a sign that reads "Boycott Israeli Apartheid" on a crowded street corner will build awareness toward future BDS campaigns.
Write to bdsdayofaction@bdsmovement.net to register your action on the global Day of Action calendar. Be sure to add your event to the US Campaign's online calendar, for publication in our biweekly email newsletter, Occupation End Notes.
As we promote BDS actions on Land Day, our government is preventing Palestinian leaders of nonviolent activism from advocating BDS in the United States. Last week the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem delayed a visa for Omar Barghouti, effectively canceling a spring tour to promote his book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Barghouti was the keynote speaker at our National Annual Organizers' Conference two years ago in Chicago.
Dick, click here for more information and ideas to take action in preparation for Land Day, and support Palestinians' human rights on their land!
Yours,
Anna
National Organizer
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
THE PALESTINE PAPERS and OBAMA
Ali Abunimah: “A dangerous shift on 1967 lines” / english.aljazeera.net
Jewish Peace News to jbennet
This is an article of major importance. Ali Abunimah has been given access to the "Palestine Papers" - a trove of documents
Al Jazeera has gotten hold of by way of a leak. In this piece he examines and analyses the way the US position in regards to the 1967 border
has shifted in an ominous way under the leadership of Obama.
By effectively repudiating the Road Map "which has formed the basis of the "peace process" since 2003", writes Abunimah, the US under Obama "has backed away even from commitments made by the George W. Bush administration, and blown an irreparable hole in the already threadbare "two state solution".
The article demonstrates US refusal to stand by the international consensus regarding the 1967 border, and thereby opens the door to Israel's less-than-hidden ambitions to re-draw the border in such a way that many of its own Palestinian citizens will find themselves removed to "Palestine", so that Israel can keep its mission of creating an ethnically pure "Jewish State". Needless to say, the subjects of this ethnic cleansing are not to be consulted in the matter.
Abunimah concludes by saying: "This is not only catastrophic for Palestinian rights and the prospects for justice, but represents a return to nineteenth century notions, banished in the wake of two world wars, that population groups can be traded between states without their consent as if they were mere pieces on a chess board."
Racheli Gai.
http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112411450358613.html
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT
Naomi Klein, “Goldstone’s Legacy for Israel.” The Nation (Feb. 14, 2011). “The Goldstone Report, with its uncompromising moral consistency, has revived the old-fashioned principles of universal human rights and international law….” Important essay.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION
January 14, 2011
“King laid the groundwork. Let us keep building!”
Dear Dick,
The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is one we truly enjoy commemorating. To reflect on King's life and work is to find hope in the future, and reverence for grueling campaigns past.
Dr. King at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967
As we approach Dr. King's birthday, at a moment when Palestinians and many Israelis are mourning the Israeli military's killing of Jawaher Abu Rahmah with U.S.-made tear gas during a nonviolent West Bank protest conducted in the spirit of MLK...
...and also commemorating the 1,400 dead after the Israeli military's attrocities in Gaza two years ago...
...and while our own country is mourning the dead and injured in Tucson...
We remember the lessons of Dr. King.
We remember his wise linkage of the three evils of poverty, racism, and militarism, and his understanding that fighting for civil rights and racial justice in our own country requires all of us to fight against war abroad at the same time. (Click here to read or listen to King's magnum opus on the subject, "Beyond Vietnam.")
In those days, it was Vietnam. Today it is Afghanistan and Iraq and, yes, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which is funded, armed and enabled by our taxes and our government.
We affirm Dr. King's commitment to undoing those three evils together. We recognize that the $30 billion in military aid that the U.S. has promised Israel over a 10-year period must be better used (for example, to retrain 600,000 U.S. workers for new green jobs).
We understand that racism lies at the root of Israeli apartheid, now cemented in the segregation of everything from roads to courts of law. We know that crushing material poverty defines life in Gaza, due to Israel's U.S.-backed illegal siege that still eliminates the possibility to export goods and earn the basic income to rebuild a society.
The antidote to all three evils is creative nonviolent action. As the US Campaign turns 10 years old this year, we reaffirm our mission to build a nonviolent social movement that will defeat U.S. support for Israel's violent occupation and apartheid rule over Palestinians.
This coming weekend, while reflecting upon King's legacy and re-listening to his messages, let us rededicate our efforts to the emergence of a peaceful, just Middle East and a peaceful, just world.
In these efforts we are profoundly grateful to have you with us.
Yours,
Felicia Eaves & David Wildman
Co-Chairs
The US Campaign aims to change U.S. policies that sustain Israel's 43-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and that deny equal rights for all.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION | PO BOX 21539 | WASHINGTON, DC 20009
202-332-0994 | USCAMPAIGN@ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG | WWW.ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG
BREAKING THE SILENCE
Shovrim Shtika/Breaking the Silence is a recently organized group of former Israeli toops—men and women—who are speaking up against the immoral and illegal behavior of the military in the occupied territories. See “Female Israeli Soldiers Breat the Silence,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010) 41.
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ISRAEL, OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, AND MIDDLE EAST The Middle East Study Committee of the 218th General Assembly (2008) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) released its full report on Israel and Palestine on March 10, 2010, entitled “Breaking Down the Walls.” The report includes a call for a dismantlement of the occupation apparatus, including a stop to all settlement expansion. See “Presbyterian Church (USA) Unveils Report on Middle East Peace,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010).
Video: "Occupation Has No Future"
--Through conversations with Israeli conscientious objectors, former soldiers, and Palestinians living under occupation, the film creates a survey of the current atmosphere in the State of Israel and the West Bank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-G5D7bLx1s
FILMS
--FPL HAS FILM PROMISES ON CHILDREN LIVING IN DIVERSE AREAS OF Israel and Palestine. Shot between 1997-2000.
--Budrus by Julia Bacha (2010) about a Palestinian village that resists Israeli occupation nonviolently, led by an ordinary citizen Ayed Morrar. Rev. In These Times (Nov. 2010): Bacha “lets the dynamic of resistance vs. militaristic oppression…speak for itself.”
--Miral, dir. By US/Jewish artist Julian Schnabel, to be released in 2011 by US/Jewish movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Rev. The Nation (Nov. 8, 2010). Film about the Dar Al-Tifl orphhanage, established in Jerusalem by Palestinian Hind Husseini, following Israel’s 1948 War for Independence.
----“American Radical: the Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” documentary film by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). The filmmakers began filming in 1998, and accumulated 300 hours of footage, from which the film was made.
2010-2011 BOOKS: NONVIOLENT OPPOSITION TO THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF THE PALESTIANS
--Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation Ed by Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin. Berghahn Books , 2010.
--Adelgang, Osie Gabriel, ed. Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation. Whole Earth P, 2010. Rev. YES! (Winter 2011). A collection of personal essays by 14 women activists opposed to the human costs of “Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland.” “…true stories that stress human rights over political expedience.”
--Bayoumi, Moustafa, ed. Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict. OR Books, 2010. The failed flotilla achieved global protest and demand that Israel halt its siege.
--Finkelstein, Norman. This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. Rev. The Washington Report on ME Affairs (Nov. 2010).: Finkelstein “demonstrates, as did the Goldstone Report and numerous human rights observers, that the Israel Defense Forces (IdF) was reckless of civilian casualties.”
--Goldberg, Alfred. Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. Knopf, 2006. Rev. NYT Book Review (Nov. 12, 2006). About a friendship between an Arab and Goldberg, but criticizes G’s inability to tell his friend’s story. “The Middle East will remain one big prison as long as there
--Born a Refugee by Dixiane Hallaj, 2010. Fiction Tells the story of four brothers and their widowed mother living in the claustrophobic environment of their two room house in the Kalandia. More info at:http://radaris.com/p/Dixiane/Hallaj/
--Kaufman-Lacusta, Maxine. Refusing to Be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israelli Occupation. Ithaca P (UK), 2010. Rev. The Catholic Worker (Oct. Nov. 2010): “…material gleaned from many interviews, with a somewhat greater emphasis on Palestinian nonviolent activists, because their work is so little khnown.” Mubarak Awad, Sami Awad, Muhammad Jadarat, May Rosenfeld, Ido Khenin, Mustafa Shawkat Samha. Includes discussion of two ongoing nonviolent campaigns: the joint Israeli and Palestinian activism against the Wall, and the weekly demonstrations in the West Bank village of Bil’in, and four brief essays. Also rev. Fellowship (Fall 2010).
--Letters from Palestine: Palestinians Speak Out about Their Lives, Their Country, and the Power of Nonviolence. Kenneth Ring and Ghassan Abdullah. Wheatmark, 2010. A collection of 30 personal stories from Palestinians, inside and outside the occupied territories, that provide penetrating insights into their daily lives and thoughts.
--The Much Too Promised Land by Aaron David Miller
The official web site for The Much Too Promised Land, America's elusive search for Arab-Israeli peace, a nonfiction book by Aaron David Miller.
www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/muchtoopromisedland/ -
--Oz, Amos. How to Cure a Fanatic. 4th ed. Princeton UP, 2010. 2 essays and an interview. Oz and other Israeli writers have advocated for the Palestinian state since 1967.
--Polakow-Suransky, Sasha. The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Rev. Forward (6-18-10). Documents extent of Israel’s “secret relationship” with apartheid South Africa.
--Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Popular Resistance in Palestine: AHistory of Hope and Empowerment, 2011. . Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May-June 2010), “Mazin Qumsiyeh on the History and Practice of Nonviolent Palestinian Resistance.” http://www.qumsiyeh.org/popularresistanceinpalestine/ ). “I am planning a trip to the US in March”.
--Rhodes, Richard. The Twilight of the Bombs. Documents the current nuclear threat in the Middle East and North Korea; concludes an exhaustive, multi-volume history of nuclear weaponry, which he began in 1986 with The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
--ALICE WALKER, Alice Walker on “Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel”
Alice Walker was the first African American woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction: author, poet and activist. . She was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple. She was interviewed by Amy Goodman April 13, 2010, about her new book Overcoming Speechlessness. One section of the book is about her visit to the West Bank and Gaza and her strong disapproval of Israeli tyranny and violence against the Palestinians. The interview includes a clip of her visit to Gaza following the Israeli onslaught in 2009.
--Wiles, Rich. Our Eyes: Photography by the Children and New Generation of Lajee Center. Lajee Center, 2008. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). Photos in 2007 by 42 young refugees in the Aida Camp in Bethlehem ages 11 to 18 about their lives. Also from the Lajee Center: The Boy and the Wall.
--“Military historian Geoffrey Wawro has made a valuable new contribution to the scholarship on the US relationship with the Arab/Muslim world. Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East is a must read. US leaders have always seen Israel as a strategic liability but short term domestic electoral imperatives — aka, the lobby — have forced policy makers into uncritical support of the Zionist entity against their better judgment. (Patrick Tyler reaches the same conclusion in his superb A World of Trouble) The costs of this relationship have been staggering. Though it is common for critics to point out the nearly $140 billion that the United States has given Israel in direct aid, the late Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer placed the real costs of US alliance with Israel at over $1.6 trillion between 1973-2002 alone! But the costs to the US economy have been even bigger….” [D: I did not record the name of the reviewer].
SECURE BORDERS FOR ISRAEL, END OF ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE AND RETURN TO 1967 BORDERS, Information and Calls to Action by Dick Bennett, 2-22-11
Contents
Contact President Obama for UN Settlement Resolution
Calls to Action in March, March 30 BDS DAY of Action
The Palestine Papers and Obama
The Goldstone Report
US Campaign to Stop the Occupation
Former Israeli Troops Oppose Occupation
Presbyterian Church Statement
Videos
Books
Action: Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution. Jewish Voice for Peace, Americans for Peace Now, and Churches for Middle East Peace are speaking out. Add your voice.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
“Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
Is this potentially a winnable fight? We argue it is:
Can US Support UN Resolution on Israeli Settlements? Yes We Can!
This is a winnable fight if we move the debate beyond the usual suspects.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/can-us-support-un-resolut_b_813233.html
Take Action on March 30th:
Join the 3rd Global BDS Day of Action! (from Anna Baltzer)
Above: Palestinian poster announcing Land Day, 1985.
Dear Dick,
As popular uprisings continue across the Middle East, boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) organizing is heating up in the United States!
March 2011 promises to be a month full of creative events and actions, starting with Israeli Apartheid Week and wrapping up with a BDS Day of Action on March 30th, Palestinian Land Day. Please be a part of it!
Palestinian Land Day, "Yom al-Ard," commemorates the Israeli military's 1976 killing of six young Palestinians as they protested the Israeli government's seizure of Palestinian land. The day has since become a symbol of Palestinian resistance to land theft, colonization, occupation and apartheid.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is calling on supporters around the world to unite in a March 30th Day of Action by organizing BDS activities supporting: divestment; consumer, cultural and academic boycott; legal action and media activism. Click here to read the full call.
Not sure what to do? There's something for everyone! Here are just a few ideas:
Host a "Stolen Beauty" House Party. Still cold outside? Gather friends and laptop computers for some online activism to promote the campaign to Boycott Ahava. Enjoy tea, cookies, and good company while you publicize Ahava's occupation profiteering. Click here to write CODEPINK for details.
Gather signatures for the "TIAA-CREF: Divest from Occupation" Campaign. Pass around this petition at work, at school, in your faith community or any institution where TIAA-CREF retirement plans are offered. Last fall, one professor at the University of Massachusetts collected 80 signatures from colleagues and staff. Can you beat that?
Write an article about BDS for your local newspaper, campus publication or faith community newsletter. Click here for an example from the divestment campaign at the University of California at San Diego. Click here for a clear, compelling piece by Naomi Klein.
Take your BDS campaign to the next level, with a flash mob, using the US Campaign's new BDS Flash Mob Step-by-Step How-To Kit!
Host a speaker to talk about BDS. Get a speaker from the Speakers Bureau of the Palestine Freedom Project, a US Campaign member group.
Host a public film screening to garner support for a local BDS campaign. Palestine Online Store, our member group, has a comprehensive selection here.
Keep your eyes peeled for productions fit for cultural boycott. For example, Adalah-NY, our member group, and others are preparing to boycott productions by the Israeli Philharmonic.
Many more creative activities can connect you with a promising global movement to end Israeli apartheid. Street theatre! Poetry readings! Even just holding a sign that reads "Boycott Israeli Apartheid" on a crowded street corner will build awareness toward future BDS campaigns.
Write to bdsdayofaction@bdsmovement.net to register your action on the global Day of Action calendar. Be sure to add your event to the US Campaign's online calendar, for publication in our biweekly email newsletter, Occupation End Notes.
As we promote BDS actions on Land Day, our government is preventing Palestinian leaders of nonviolent activism from advocating BDS in the United States. Last week the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem delayed a visa for Omar Barghouti, effectively canceling a spring tour to promote his book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Barghouti was the keynote speaker at our National Annual Organizers' Conference two years ago in Chicago.
Dick, click here for more information and ideas to take action in preparation for Land Day, and support Palestinians' human rights on their land!
Yours,
Anna
National Organizer
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
THE PALESTINE PAPERS and OBAMA
Ali Abunimah: “A dangerous shift on 1967 lines” / english.aljazeera.net
Jewish Peace News to jbennet
This is an article of major importance. Ali Abunimah has been given access to the "Palestine Papers" - a trove of documents
Al Jazeera has gotten hold of by way of a leak. In this piece he examines and analyses the way the US position in regards to the 1967 border
has shifted in an ominous way under the leadership of Obama.
By effectively repudiating the Road Map "which has formed the basis of the "peace process" since 2003", writes Abunimah, the US under Obama "has backed away even from commitments made by the George W. Bush administration, and blown an irreparable hole in the already threadbare "two state solution".
The article demonstrates US refusal to stand by the international consensus regarding the 1967 border, and thereby opens the door to Israel's less-than-hidden ambitions to re-draw the border in such a way that many of its own Palestinian citizens will find themselves removed to "Palestine", so that Israel can keep its mission of creating an ethnically pure "Jewish State". Needless to say, the subjects of this ethnic cleansing are not to be consulted in the matter.
Abunimah concludes by saying: "This is not only catastrophic for Palestinian rights and the prospects for justice, but represents a return to nineteenth century notions, banished in the wake of two world wars, that population groups can be traded between states without their consent as if they were mere pieces on a chess board."
Racheli Gai.
http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112411450358613.html
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT
Naomi Klein, “Goldstone’s Legacy for Israel.” The Nation (Feb. 14, 2011). “The Goldstone Report, with its uncompromising moral consistency, has revived the old-fashioned principles of universal human rights and international law….” Important essay.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION
January 14, 2011
“King laid the groundwork. Let us keep building!”
Dear Dick,
The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is one we truly enjoy commemorating. To reflect on King's life and work is to find hope in the future, and reverence for grueling campaigns past.
Dr. King at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967
As we approach Dr. King's birthday, at a moment when Palestinians and many Israelis are mourning the Israeli military's killing of Jawaher Abu Rahmah with U.S.-made tear gas during a nonviolent West Bank protest conducted in the spirit of MLK...
...and also commemorating the 1,400 dead after the Israeli military's attrocities in Gaza two years ago...
...and while our own country is mourning the dead and injured in Tucson...
We remember the lessons of Dr. King.
We remember his wise linkage of the three evils of poverty, racism, and militarism, and his understanding that fighting for civil rights and racial justice in our own country requires all of us to fight against war abroad at the same time. (Click here to read or listen to King's magnum opus on the subject, "Beyond Vietnam.")
In those days, it was Vietnam. Today it is Afghanistan and Iraq and, yes, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which is funded, armed and enabled by our taxes and our government.
We affirm Dr. King's commitment to undoing those three evils together. We recognize that the $30 billion in military aid that the U.S. has promised Israel over a 10-year period must be better used (for example, to retrain 600,000 U.S. workers for new green jobs).
We understand that racism lies at the root of Israeli apartheid, now cemented in the segregation of everything from roads to courts of law. We know that crushing material poverty defines life in Gaza, due to Israel's U.S.-backed illegal siege that still eliminates the possibility to export goods and earn the basic income to rebuild a society.
The antidote to all three evils is creative nonviolent action. As the US Campaign turns 10 years old this year, we reaffirm our mission to build a nonviolent social movement that will defeat U.S. support for Israel's violent occupation and apartheid rule over Palestinians.
This coming weekend, while reflecting upon King's legacy and re-listening to his messages, let us rededicate our efforts to the emergence of a peaceful, just Middle East and a peaceful, just world.
In these efforts we are profoundly grateful to have you with us.
Yours,
Felicia Eaves & David Wildman
Co-Chairs
The US Campaign aims to change U.S. policies that sustain Israel's 43-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and that deny equal rights for all.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION | PO BOX 21539 | WASHINGTON, DC 20009
202-332-0994 | USCAMPAIGN@ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG | WWW.ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG
BREAKING THE SILENCE
Shovrim Shtika/Breaking the Silence is a recently organized group of former Israeli toops—men and women—who are speaking up against the immoral and illegal behavior of the military in the occupied territories. See “Female Israeli Soldiers Breat the Silence,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010) 41.
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ISRAEL, OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, AND MIDDLE EAST The Middle East Study Committee of the 218th General Assembly (2008) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) released its full report on Israel and Palestine on March 10, 2010, entitled “Breaking Down the Walls.” The report includes a call for a dismantlement of the occupation apparatus, including a stop to all settlement expansion. See “Presbyterian Church (USA) Unveils Report on Middle East Peace,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010).
Video: "Occupation Has No Future"
--Through conversations with Israeli conscientious objectors, former soldiers, and Palestinians living under occupation, the film creates a survey of the current atmosphere in the State of Israel and the West Bank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-G5D7bLx1s
FILMS
--FPL HAS FILM PROMISES ON CHILDREN LIVING IN DIVERSE AREAS OF Israel and Palestine. Shot between 1997-2000.
--Budrus by Julia Bacha (2010) about a Palestinian village that resists Israeli occupation nonviolently, led by an ordinary citizen Ayed Morrar. Rev. In These Times (Nov. 2010): Bacha “lets the dynamic of resistance vs. militaristic oppression…speak for itself.”
--Miral, dir. By US/Jewish artist Julian Schnabel, to be released in 2011 by US/Jewish movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Rev. The Nation (Nov. 8, 2010). Film about the Dar Al-Tifl orphhanage, established in Jerusalem by Palestinian Hind Husseini, following Israel’s 1948 War for Independence.
----“American Radical: the Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” documentary film by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). The filmmakers began filming in 1998, and accumulated 300 hours of footage, from which the film was made.
2010-2011 BOOKS: NONVIOLENT OPPOSITION TO THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF THE PALESTIANS
--Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation Ed by Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin. Berghahn Books , 2010.
--Adelgang, Osie Gabriel, ed. Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation. Whole Earth P, 2010. Rev. YES! (Winter 2011). A collection of personal essays by 14 women activists opposed to the human costs of “Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland.” “…true stories that stress human rights over political expedience.”
--Bayoumi, Moustafa, ed. Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict. OR Books, 2010. The failed flotilla achieved global protest and demand that Israel halt its siege.
--Finkelstein, Norman. This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. Rev. The Washington Report on ME Affairs (Nov. 2010).: Finkelstein “demonstrates, as did the Goldstone Report and numerous human rights observers, that the Israel Defense Forces (IdF) was reckless of civilian casualties.”
--Goldberg, Alfred. Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. Knopf, 2006. Rev. NYT Book Review (Nov. 12, 2006). About a friendship between an Arab and Goldberg, but criticizes G’s inability to tell his friend’s story. “The Middle East will remain one big prison as long as there
--Born a Refugee by Dixiane Hallaj, 2010. Fiction Tells the story of four brothers and their widowed mother living in the claustrophobic environment of their two room house in the Kalandia. More info at:http://radaris.com/p/Dixiane/Hallaj/
--Kaufman-Lacusta, Maxine. Refusing to Be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israelli Occupation. Ithaca P (UK), 2010. Rev. The Catholic Worker (Oct. Nov. 2010): “…material gleaned from many interviews, with a somewhat greater emphasis on Palestinian nonviolent activists, because their work is so little khnown.” Mubarak Awad, Sami Awad, Muhammad Jadarat, May Rosenfeld, Ido Khenin, Mustafa Shawkat Samha. Includes discussion of two ongoing nonviolent campaigns: the joint Israeli and Palestinian activism against the Wall, and the weekly demonstrations in the West Bank village of Bil’in, and four brief essays. Also rev. Fellowship (Fall 2010).
--Letters from Palestine: Palestinians Speak Out about Their Lives, Their Country, and the Power of Nonviolence. Kenneth Ring and Ghassan Abdullah. Wheatmark, 2010. A collection of 30 personal stories from Palestinians, inside and outside the occupied territories, that provide penetrating insights into their daily lives and thoughts.
--The Much Too Promised Land by Aaron David Miller
The official web site for The Much Too Promised Land, America's elusive search for Arab-Israeli peace, a nonfiction book by Aaron David Miller.
www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/muchtoopromisedland/ -
--Oz, Amos. How to Cure a Fanatic. 4th ed. Princeton UP, 2010. 2 essays and an interview. Oz and other Israeli writers have advocated for the Palestinian state since 1967.
--Polakow-Suransky, Sasha. The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Rev. Forward (6-18-10). Documents extent of Israel’s “secret relationship” with apartheid South Africa.
--Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Popular Resistance in Palestine: AHistory of Hope and Empowerment, 2011. . Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May-June 2010), “Mazin Qumsiyeh on the History and Practice of Nonviolent Palestinian Resistance.” http://www.qumsiyeh.org/popularresistanceinpalestine/ ). “I am planning a trip to the US in March”.
--Rhodes, Richard. The Twilight of the Bombs. Documents the current nuclear threat in the Middle East and North Korea; concludes an exhaustive, multi-volume history of nuclear weaponry, which he began in 1986 with The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
--ALICE WALKER, Alice Walker on “Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel”
Alice Walker was the first African American woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction: author, poet and activist. . She was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple. She was interviewed by Amy Goodman April 13, 2010, about her new book Overcoming Speechlessness. One section of the book is about her visit to the West Bank and Gaza and her strong disapproval of Israeli tyranny and violence against the Palestinians. The interview includes a clip of her visit to Gaza following the Israeli onslaught in 2009.
--Wiles, Rich. Our Eyes: Photography by the Children and New Generation of Lajee Center. Lajee Center, 2008. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). Photos in 2007 by 42 young refugees in the Aida Camp in Bethlehem ages 11 to 18 about their lives. Also from the Lajee Center: The Boy and the Wall.
--“Military historian Geoffrey Wawro has made a valuable new contribution to the scholarship on the US relationship with the Arab/Muslim world. Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East is a must read. US leaders have always seen Israel as a strategic liability but short term domestic electoral imperatives — aka, the lobby — have forced policy makers into uncritical support of the Zionist entity against their better judgment. (Patrick Tyler reaches the same conclusion in his superb A World of Trouble) The costs of this relationship have been staggering. Though it is common for critics to point out the nearly $140 billion that the United States has given Israel in direct aid, the late Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer placed the real costs of US alliance with Israel at over $1.6 trillion between 1973-2002 alone! But the costs to the US economy have been even bigger….” [D: I did not record the name of the reviewer].
SECURE BORDERS FOR ISRAEL, END OF ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE AND RETURN TO 1967 BORDERS, Information and Calls to Action by Dick Bennett, 2-22-11
Contents
Contact President Obama for UN Settlement Resolution
Calls to Action in March, March 30 BDS DAY of Action
The Palestine Papers and Obama
The Goldstone Report
US Campaign to Stop the Occupation
Former Israeli Troops Oppose Occupation
Presbyterian Church Statement
Videos
Books
Action: Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution. Jewish Voice for Peace, Americans for Peace Now, and Churches for Middle East Peace are speaking out. Add your voice.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
“Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
Is this potentially a winnable fight? We argue it is:
Can US Support UN Resolution on Israeli Settlements? Yes We Can!
This is a winnable fight if we move the debate beyond the usual suspects.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/can-us-support-un-resolut_b_813233.html
Take Action on March 30th:
Join the 3rd Global BDS Day of Action! (from Anna Baltzer)
Above: Palestinian poster announcing Land Day, 1985.
Dear Dick,
As popular uprisings continue across the Middle East, boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) organizing is heating up in the United States!
March 2011 promises to be a month full of creative events and actions, starting with Israeli Apartheid Week and wrapping up with a BDS Day of Action on March 30th, Palestinian Land Day. Please be a part of it!
Palestinian Land Day, "Yom al-Ard," commemorates the Israeli military's 1976 killing of six young Palestinians as they protested the Israeli government's seizure of Palestinian land. The day has since become a symbol of Palestinian resistance to land theft, colonization, occupation and apartheid.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is calling on supporters around the world to unite in a March 30th Day of Action by organizing BDS activities supporting: divestment; consumer, cultural and academic boycott; legal action and media activism. Click here to read the full call.
Not sure what to do? There's something for everyone! Here are just a few ideas:
Host a "Stolen Beauty" House Party. Still cold outside? Gather friends and laptop computers for some online activism to promote the campaign to Boycott Ahava. Enjoy tea, cookies, and good company while you publicize Ahava's occupation profiteering. Click here to write CODEPINK for details.
Gather signatures for the "TIAA-CREF: Divest from Occupation" Campaign. Pass around this petition at work, at school, in your faith community or any institution where TIAA-CREF retirement plans are offered. Last fall, one professor at the University of Massachusetts collected 80 signatures from colleagues and staff. Can you beat that?
Write an article about BDS for your local newspaper, campus publication or faith community newsletter. Click here for an example from the divestment campaign at the University of California at San Diego. Click here for a clear, compelling piece by Naomi Klein.
Take your BDS campaign to the next level, with a flash mob, using the US Campaign's new BDS Flash Mob Step-by-Step How-To Kit!
Host a speaker to talk about BDS. Get a speaker from the Speakers Bureau of the Palestine Freedom Project, a US Campaign member group.
Host a public film screening to garner support for a local BDS campaign. Palestine Online Store, our member group, has a comprehensive selection here.
Keep your eyes peeled for productions fit for cultural boycott. For example, Adalah-NY, our member group, and others are preparing to boycott productions by the Israeli Philharmonic.
Many more creative activities can connect you with a promising global movement to end Israeli apartheid. Street theatre! Poetry readings! Even just holding a sign that reads "Boycott Israeli Apartheid" on a crowded street corner will build awareness toward future BDS campaigns.
Write to bdsdayofaction@bdsmovement.net to register your action on the global Day of Action calendar. Be sure to add your event to the US Campaign's online calendar, for publication in our biweekly email newsletter, Occupation End Notes.
As we promote BDS actions on Land Day, our government is preventing Palestinian leaders of nonviolent activism from advocating BDS in the United States. Last week the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem delayed a visa for Omar Barghouti, effectively canceling a spring tour to promote his book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Barghouti was the keynote speaker at our National Annual Organizers' Conference two years ago in Chicago.
Dick, click here for more information and ideas to take action in preparation for Land Day, and support Palestinians' human rights on their land!
Yours,
Anna
National Organizer
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
THE PALESTINE PAPERS and OBAMA
Ali Abunimah: “A dangerous shift on 1967 lines” / english.aljazeera.net
Jewish Peace News to jbennet
This is an article of major importance. Ali Abunimah has been given access to the "Palestine Papers" - a trove of documents
Al Jazeera has gotten hold of by way of a leak. In this piece he examines and analyses the way the US position in regards to the 1967 border
has shifted in an ominous way under the leadership of Obama.
By effectively repudiating the Road Map "which has formed the basis of the "peace process" since 2003", writes Abunimah, the US under Obama "has backed away even from commitments made by the George W. Bush administration, and blown an irreparable hole in the already threadbare "two state solution".
The article demonstrates US refusal to stand by the international consensus regarding the 1967 border, and thereby opens the door to Israel's less-than-hidden ambitions to re-draw the border in such a way that many of its own Palestinian citizens will find themselves removed to "Palestine", so that Israel can keep its mission of creating an ethnically pure "Jewish State". Needless to say, the subjects of this ethnic cleansing are not to be consulted in the matter.
Abunimah concludes by saying: "This is not only catastrophic for Palestinian rights and the prospects for justice, but represents a return to nineteenth century notions, banished in the wake of two world wars, that population groups can be traded between states without their consent as if they were mere pieces on a chess board."
Racheli Gai.
http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112411450358613.html
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT
Naomi Klein, “Goldstone’s Legacy for Israel.” The Nation (Feb. 14, 2011). “The Goldstone Report, with its uncompromising moral consistency, has revived the old-fashioned principles of universal human rights and international law….” Important essay.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION
January 14, 2011
“King laid the groundwork. Let us keep building!”
Dear Dick,
The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is one we truly enjoy commemorating. To reflect on King's life and work is to find hope in the future, and reverence for grueling campaigns past.
Dr. King at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967
As we approach Dr. King's birthday, at a moment when Palestinians and many Israelis are mourning the Israeli military's killing of Jawaher Abu Rahmah with U.S.-made tear gas during a nonviolent West Bank protest conducted in the spirit of MLK...
...and also commemorating the 1,400 dead after the Israeli military's attrocities in Gaza two years ago...
...and while our own country is mourning the dead and injured in Tucson...
We remember the lessons of Dr. King.
We remember his wise linkage of the three evils of poverty, racism, and militarism, and his understanding that fighting for civil rights and racial justice in our own country requires all of us to fight against war abroad at the same time. (Click here to read or listen to King's magnum opus on the subject, "Beyond Vietnam.")
In those days, it was Vietnam. Today it is Afghanistan and Iraq and, yes, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which is funded, armed and enabled by our taxes and our government.
We affirm Dr. King's commitment to undoing those three evils together. We recognize that the $30 billion in military aid that the U.S. has promised Israel over a 10-year period must be better used (for example, to retrain 600,000 U.S. workers for new green jobs).
We understand that racism lies at the root of Israeli apartheid, now cemented in the segregation of everything from roads to courts of law. We know that crushing material poverty defines life in Gaza, due to Israel's U.S.-backed illegal siege that still eliminates the possibility to export goods and earn the basic income to rebuild a society.
The antidote to all three evils is creative nonviolent action. As the US Campaign turns 10 years old this year, we reaffirm our mission to build a nonviolent social movement that will defeat U.S. support for Israel's violent occupation and apartheid rule over Palestinians.
This coming weekend, while reflecting upon King's legacy and re-listening to his messages, let us rededicate our efforts to the emergence of a peaceful, just Middle East and a peaceful, just world.
In these efforts we are profoundly grateful to have you with us.
Yours,
Felicia Eaves & David Wildman
Co-Chairs
The US Campaign aims to change U.S. policies that sustain Israel's 43-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and that deny equal rights for all.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION | PO BOX 21539 | WASHINGTON, DC 20009
202-332-0994 | USCAMPAIGN@ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG | WWW.ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG
BREAKING THE SILENCE
Shovrim Shtika/Breaking the Silence is a recently organized group of former Israeli toops—men and women—who are speaking up against the immoral and illegal behavior of the military in the occupied territories. See “Female Israeli Soldiers Breat the Silence,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010) 41.
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ISRAEL, OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, AND MIDDLE EAST The Middle East Study Committee of the 218th General Assembly (2008) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) released its full report on Israel and Palestine on March 10, 2010, entitled “Breaking Down the Walls.” The report includes a call for a dismantlement of the occupation apparatus, including a stop to all settlement expansion. See “Presbyterian Church (USA) Unveils Report on Middle East Peace,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010).
Video: "Occupation Has No Future"
--Through conversations with Israeli conscientious objectors, former soldiers, and Palestinians living under occupation, the film creates a survey of the current atmosphere in the State of Israel and the West Bank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-G5D7bLx1s
FILMS
--FPL HAS FILM PROMISES ON CHILDREN LIVING IN DIVERSE AREAS OF Israel and Palestine. Shot between 1997-2000.
--Budrus by Julia Bacha (2010) about a Palestinian village that resists Israeli occupation nonviolently, led by an ordinary citizen Ayed Morrar. Rev. In These Times (Nov. 2010): Bacha “lets the dynamic of resistance vs. militaristic oppression…speak for itself.”
--Miral, dir. By US/Jewish artist Julian Schnabel, to be released in 2011 by US/Jewish movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Rev. The Nation (Nov. 8, 2010). Film about the Dar Al-Tifl orphhanage, established in Jerusalem by Palestinian Hind Husseini, following Israel’s 1948 War for Independence.
----“American Radical: the Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” documentary film by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). The filmmakers began filming in 1998, and accumulated 300 hours of footage, from which the film was made.
2010-2011 BOOKS: NONVIOLENT OPPOSITION TO THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF THE PALESTIANS
--Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation Ed by Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin. Berghahn Books , 2010.
--Adelgang, Osie Gabriel, ed. Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation. Whole Earth P, 2010. Rev. YES! (Winter 2011). A collection of personal essays by 14 women activists opposed to the human costs of “Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland.” “…true stories that stress human rights over political expedience.”
--Bayoumi, Moustafa, ed. Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict. OR Books, 2010. The failed flotilla achieved global protest and demand that Israel halt its siege.
--Finkelstein, Norman. This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. Rev. The Washington Report on ME Affairs (Nov. 2010).: Finkelstein “demonstrates, as did the Goldstone Report and numerous human rights observers, that the Israel Defense Forces (IdF) was reckless of civilian casualties.”
--Goldberg, Alfred. Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. Knopf, 2006. Rev. NYT Book Review (Nov. 12, 2006). About a friendship between an Arab and Goldberg, but criticizes G’s inability to tell his friend’s story. “The Middle East will remain one big prison as long as there
--Born a Refugee by Dixiane Hallaj, 2010. Fiction Tells the story of four brothers and their widowed mother living in the claustrophobic environment of their two room house in the Kalandia. More info at:http://radaris.com/p/Dixiane/Hallaj/
--Kaufman-Lacusta, Maxine. Refusing to Be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israelli Occupation. Ithaca P (UK), 2010. Rev. The Catholic Worker (Oct. Nov. 2010): “…material gleaned from many interviews, with a somewhat greater emphasis on Palestinian nonviolent activists, because their work is so little khnown.” Mubarak Awad, Sami Awad, Muhammad Jadarat, May Rosenfeld, Ido Khenin, Mustafa Shawkat Samha. Includes discussion of two ongoing nonviolent campaigns: the joint Israeli and Palestinian activism against the Wall, and the weekly demonstrations in the West Bank village of Bil’in, and four brief essays. Also rev. Fellowship (Fall 2010).
--Letters from Palestine: Palestinians Speak Out about Their Lives, Their Country, and the Power of Nonviolence. Kenneth Ring and Ghassan Abdullah. Wheatmark, 2010. A collection of 30 personal stories from Palestinians, inside and outside the occupied territories, that provide penetrating insights into their daily lives and thoughts.
--The Much Too Promised Land by Aaron David Miller
The official web site for The Much Too Promised Land, America's elusive search for Arab-Israeli peace, a nonfiction book by Aaron David Miller.
www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/muchtoopromisedland/ -
--Oz, Amos. How to Cure a Fanatic. 4th ed. Princeton UP, 2010. 2 essays and an interview. Oz and other Israeli writers have advocated for the Palestinian state since 1967.
--Polakow-Suransky, Sasha. The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Rev. Forward (6-18-10). Documents extent of Israel’s “secret relationship” with apartheid South Africa.
--Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Popular Resistance in Palestine: AHistory of Hope and Empowerment, 2011. . Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May-June 2010), “Mazin Qumsiyeh on the History and Practice of Nonviolent Palestinian Resistance.” http://www.qumsiyeh.org/popularresistanceinpalestine/ ). “I am planning a trip to the US in March”.
--Rhodes, Richard. The Twilight of the Bombs. Documents the current nuclear threat in the Middle East and North Korea; concludes an exhaustive, multi-volume history of nuclear weaponry, which he began in 1986 with The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
--ALICE WALKER, Alice Walker on “Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel”
Alice Walker was the first African American woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction: author, poet and activist. . She was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple. She was interviewed by Amy Goodman April 13, 2010, about her new book Overcoming Speechlessness. One section of the book is about her visit to the West Bank and Gaza and her strong disapproval of Israeli tyranny and violence against the Palestinians. The interview includes a clip of her visit to Gaza following the Israeli onslaught in 2009.
--Wiles, Rich. Our Eyes: Photography by the Children and New Generation of Lajee Center. Lajee Center, 2008. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). Photos in 2007 by 42 young refugees in the Aida Camp in Bethlehem ages 11 to 18 about their lives. Also from the Lajee Center: The Boy and the Wall.
--“Military historian Geoffrey Wawro has made a valuable new contribution to the scholarship on the US relationship with the Arab/Muslim world. Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East is a must read. US leaders have always seen Israel as a strategic liability but short term domestic electoral imperatives — aka, the lobby — have forced policy makers into uncritical support of the Zionist entity against their better judgment. (Patrick Tyler reaches the same conclusion in his superb A World of Trouble) The costs of this relationship have been staggering. Though it is common for critics to point out the nearly $140 billion that the United States has given Israel in direct aid, the late Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer placed the real costs of US alliance with Israel at over $1.6 trillion between 1973-2002 alone! But the costs to the US economy have been even bigger….” [D: I did not record the name of the reviewer].
END OF ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN NEWSLETTER
Contents
Contact President Obama for UN Settlement Resolution
Calls to Action in March, March 30 BDS DAY of Action
The Palestine Papers and Obama
The Goldstone Report
US Campaign to Stop the Occupation
Former Israeli Troops Oppose Occupation
Presbyterian Church Statement
Videos
Books
Action: Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution. Jewish Voice for Peace, Americans for Peace Now, and Churches for Middle East Peace are speaking out. Add your voice.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
“Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
Is this potentially a winnable fight? We argue it is:
Can US Support UN Resolution on Israeli Settlements? Yes We Can!
This is a winnable fight if we move the debate beyond the usual suspects.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/can-us-support-un-resolut_b_813233.html
Take Action on March 30th:
Join the 3rd Global BDS Day of Action! (from Anna Baltzer)
Above: Palestinian poster announcing Land Day, 1985.
Dear Dick,
As popular uprisings continue across the Middle East, boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) organizing is heating up in the United States!
March 2011 promises to be a month full of creative events and actions, starting with Israeli Apartheid Week and wrapping up with a BDS Day of Action on March 30th, Palestinian Land Day. Please be a part of it!
Palestinian Land Day, "Yom al-Ard," commemorates the Israeli military's 1976 killing of six young Palestinians as they protested the Israeli government's seizure of Palestinian land. The day has since become a symbol of Palestinian resistance to land theft, colonization, occupation and apartheid.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is calling on supporters around the world to unite in a March 30th Day of Action by organizing BDS activities supporting: divestment; consumer, cultural and academic boycott; legal action and media activism. Click here to read the full call.
Not sure what to do? There's something for everyone! Here are just a few ideas:
Host a "Stolen Beauty" House Party. Still cold outside? Gather friends and laptop computers for some online activism to promote the campaign to Boycott Ahava. Enjoy tea, cookies, and good company while you publicize Ahava's occupation profiteering. Click here to write CODEPINK for details.
Gather signatures for the "TIAA-CREF: Divest from Occupation" Campaign. Pass around this petition at work, at school, in your faith community or any institution where TIAA-CREF retirement plans are offered. Last fall, one professor at the University of Massachusetts collected 80 signatures from colleagues and staff. Can you beat that?
Write an article about BDS for your local newspaper, campus publication or faith community newsletter. Click here for an example from the divestment campaign at the University of California at San Diego. Click here for a clear, compelling piece by Naomi Klein.
Take your BDS campaign to the next level, with a flash mob, using the US Campaign's new BDS Flash Mob Step-by-Step How-To Kit!
Host a speaker to talk about BDS. Get a speaker from the Speakers Bureau of the Palestine Freedom Project, a US Campaign member group.
Host a public film screening to garner support for a local BDS campaign. Palestine Online Store, our member group, has a comprehensive selection here.
Keep your eyes peeled for productions fit for cultural boycott. For example, Adalah-NY, our member group, and others are preparing to boycott productions by the Israeli Philharmonic.
Many more creative activities can connect you with a promising global movement to end Israeli apartheid. Street theatre! Poetry readings! Even just holding a sign that reads "Boycott Israeli Apartheid" on a crowded street corner will build awareness toward future BDS campaigns.
Write to bdsdayofaction@bdsmovement.net to register your action on the global Day of Action calendar. Be sure to add your event to the US Campaign's online calendar, for publication in our biweekly email newsletter, Occupation End Notes.
As we promote BDS actions on Land Day, our government is preventing Palestinian leaders of nonviolent activism from advocating BDS in the United States. Last week the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem delayed a visa for Omar Barghouti, effectively canceling a spring tour to promote his book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Barghouti was the keynote speaker at our National Annual Organizers' Conference two years ago in Chicago.
Dick, click here for more information and ideas to take action in preparation for Land Day, and support Palestinians' human rights on their land!
Yours,
Anna
National Organizer
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
THE PALESTINE PAPERS and OBAMA
Ali Abunimah: “A dangerous shift on 1967 lines” / english.aljazeera.net
Jewish Peace News to jbennet
This is an article of major importance. Ali Abunimah has been given access to the "Palestine Papers" - a trove of documents
Al Jazeera has gotten hold of by way of a leak. In this piece he examines and analyses the way the US position in regards to the 1967 border
has shifted in an ominous way under the leadership of Obama.
By effectively repudiating the Road Map "which has formed the basis of the "peace process" since 2003", writes Abunimah, the US under Obama "has backed away even from commitments made by the George W. Bush administration, and blown an irreparable hole in the already threadbare "two state solution".
The article demonstrates US refusal to stand by the international consensus regarding the 1967 border, and thereby opens the door to Israel's less-than-hidden ambitions to re-draw the border in such a way that many of its own Palestinian citizens will find themselves removed to "Palestine", so that Israel can keep its mission of creating an ethnically pure "Jewish State". Needless to say, the subjects of this ethnic cleansing are not to be consulted in the matter.
Abunimah concludes by saying: "This is not only catastrophic for Palestinian rights and the prospects for justice, but represents a return to nineteenth century notions, banished in the wake of two world wars, that population groups can be traded between states without their consent as if they were mere pieces on a chess board."
Racheli Gai.
http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112411450358613.html
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT
Naomi Klein, “Goldstone’s Legacy for Israel.” The Nation (Feb. 14, 2011). “The Goldstone Report, with its uncompromising moral consistency, has revived the old-fashioned principles of universal human rights and international law….” Important essay.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION
January 14, 2011
“King laid the groundwork. Let us keep building!”
Dear Dick,
The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is one we truly enjoy commemorating. To reflect on King's life and work is to find hope in the future, and reverence for grueling campaigns past.
Dr. King at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967
As we approach Dr. King's birthday, at a moment when Palestinians and many Israelis are mourning the Israeli military's killing of Jawaher Abu Rahmah with U.S.-made tear gas during a nonviolent West Bank protest conducted in the spirit of MLK...
...and also commemorating the 1,400 dead after the Israeli military's attrocities in Gaza two years ago...
...and while our own country is mourning the dead and injured in Tucson...
We remember the lessons of Dr. King.
We remember his wise linkage of the three evils of poverty, racism, and militarism, and his understanding that fighting for civil rights and racial justice in our own country requires all of us to fight against war abroad at the same time. (Click here to read or listen to King's magnum opus on the subject, "Beyond Vietnam.")
In those days, it was Vietnam. Today it is Afghanistan and Iraq and, yes, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which is funded, armed and enabled by our taxes and our government.
We affirm Dr. King's commitment to undoing those three evils together. We recognize that the $30 billion in military aid that the U.S. has promised Israel over a 10-year period must be better used (for example, to retrain 600,000 U.S. workers for new green jobs).
We understand that racism lies at the root of Israeli apartheid, now cemented in the segregation of everything from roads to courts of law. We know that crushing material poverty defines life in Gaza, due to Israel's U.S.-backed illegal siege that still eliminates the possibility to export goods and earn the basic income to rebuild a society.
The antidote to all three evils is creative nonviolent action. As the US Campaign turns 10 years old this year, we reaffirm our mission to build a nonviolent social movement that will defeat U.S. support for Israel's violent occupation and apartheid rule over Palestinians.
This coming weekend, while reflecting upon King's legacy and re-listening to his messages, let us rededicate our efforts to the emergence of a peaceful, just Middle East and a peaceful, just world.
In these efforts we are profoundly grateful to have you with us.
Yours,
Felicia Eaves & David Wildman
Co-Chairs
The US Campaign aims to change U.S. policies that sustain Israel's 43-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and that deny equal rights for all.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION | PO BOX 21539 | WASHINGTON, DC 20009
202-332-0994 | USCAMPAIGN@ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG | WWW.ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG
BREAKING THE SILENCE
Shovrim Shtika/Breaking the Silence is a recently organized group of former Israeli toops—men and women—who are speaking up against the immoral and illegal behavior of the military in the occupied territories. See “Female Israeli Soldiers Breat the Silence,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010) 41.
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ISRAEL, OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, AND MIDDLE EAST The Middle East Study Committee of the 218th General Assembly (2008) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) released its full report on Israel and Palestine on March 10, 2010, entitled “Breaking Down the Walls.” The report includes a call for a dismantlement of the occupation apparatus, including a stop to all settlement expansion. See “Presbyterian Church (USA) Unveils Report on Middle East Peace,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010).
Video: "Occupation Has No Future"
--Through conversations with Israeli conscientious objectors, former soldiers, and Palestinians living under occupation, the film creates a survey of the current atmosphere in the State of Israel and the West Bank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-G5D7bLx1s
FILMS
--FPL HAS FILM PROMISES ON CHILDREN LIVING IN DIVERSE AREAS OF Israel and Palestine. Shot between 1997-2000.
--Budrus by Julia Bacha (2010) about a Palestinian village that resists Israeli occupation nonviolently, led by an ordinary citizen Ayed Morrar. Rev. In These Times (Nov. 2010): Bacha “lets the dynamic of resistance vs. militaristic oppression…speak for itself.”
--Miral, dir. By US/Jewish artist Julian Schnabel, to be released in 2011 by US/Jewish movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Rev. The Nation (Nov. 8, 2010). Film about the Dar Al-Tifl orphhanage, established in Jerusalem by Palestinian Hind Husseini, following Israel’s 1948 War for Independence.
----“American Radical: the Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” documentary film by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). The filmmakers began filming in 1998, and accumulated 300 hours of footage, from which the film was made.
2010-2011 BOOKS: NONVIOLENT OPPOSITION TO THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF THE PALESTIANS
--Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation Ed by Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin. Berghahn Books , 2010.
--Adelgang, Osie Gabriel, ed. Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation. Whole Earth P, 2010. Rev. YES! (Winter 2011). A collection of personal essays by 14 women activists opposed to the human costs of “Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland.” “…true stories that stress human rights over political expedience.”
--Bayoumi, Moustafa, ed. Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict. OR Books, 2010. The failed flotilla achieved global protest and demand that Israel halt its siege.
--Finkelstein, Norman. This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. Rev. The Washington Report on ME Affairs (Nov. 2010).: Finkelstein “demonstrates, as did the Goldstone Report and numerous human rights observers, that the Israel Defense Forces (IdF) was reckless of civilian casualties.”
--Goldberg, Alfred. Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. Knopf, 2006. Rev. NYT Book Review (Nov. 12, 2006). About a friendship between an Arab and Goldberg, but criticizes G’s inability to tell his friend’s story. “The Middle East will remain one big prison as long as there
--Born a Refugee by Dixiane Hallaj, 2010. Fiction Tells the story of four brothers and their widowed mother living in the claustrophobic environment of their two room house in the Kalandia. More info at:http://radaris.com/p/Dixiane/Hallaj/
--Kaufman-Lacusta, Maxine. Refusing to Be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israelli Occupation. Ithaca P (UK), 2010. Rev. The Catholic Worker (Oct. Nov. 2010): “…material gleaned from many interviews, with a somewhat greater emphasis on Palestinian nonviolent activists, because their work is so little khnown.” Mubarak Awad, Sami Awad, Muhammad Jadarat, May Rosenfeld, Ido Khenin, Mustafa Shawkat Samha. Includes discussion of two ongoing nonviolent campaigns: the joint Israeli and Palestinian activism against the Wall, and the weekly demonstrations in the West Bank village of Bil’in, and four brief essays. Also rev. Fellowship (Fall 2010).
--Letters from Palestine: Palestinians Speak Out about Their Lives, Their Country, and the Power of Nonviolence. Kenneth Ring and Ghassan Abdullah. Wheatmark, 2010. A collection of 30 personal stories from Palestinians, inside and outside the occupied territories, that provide penetrating insights into their daily lives and thoughts.
--The Much Too Promised Land by Aaron David Miller
The official web site for The Much Too Promised Land, America's elusive search for Arab-Israeli peace, a nonfiction book by Aaron David Miller.
www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/muchtoopromisedland/ -
--Oz, Amos. How to Cure a Fanatic. 4th ed. Princeton UP, 2010. 2 essays and an interview. Oz and other Israeli writers have advocated for the Palestinian state since 1967.
--Polakow-Suransky, Sasha. The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Rev. Forward (6-18-10). Documents extent of Israel’s “secret relationship” with apartheid South Africa.
--Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Popular Resistance in Palestine: AHistory of Hope and Empowerment, 2011. . Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May-June 2010), “Mazin Qumsiyeh on the History and Practice of Nonviolent Palestinian Resistance.” http://www.qumsiyeh.org/popularresistanceinpalestine/ ). “I am planning a trip to the US in March”.
--Rhodes, Richard. The Twilight of the Bombs. Documents the current nuclear threat in the Middle East and North Korea; concludes an exhaustive, multi-volume history of nuclear weaponry, which he began in 1986 with The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
--ALICE WALKER, Alice Walker on “Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel”
Alice Walker was the first African American woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction: author, poet and activist. . She was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple. She was interviewed by Amy Goodman April 13, 2010, about her new book Overcoming Speechlessness. One section of the book is about her visit to the West Bank and Gaza and her strong disapproval of Israeli tyranny and violence against the Palestinians. The interview includes a clip of her visit to Gaza following the Israeli onslaught in 2009.
--Wiles, Rich. Our Eyes: Photography by the Children and New Generation of Lajee Center. Lajee Center, 2008. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). Photos in 2007 by 42 young refugees in the Aida Camp in Bethlehem ages 11 to 18 about their lives. Also from the Lajee Center: The Boy and the Wall.
--“Military historian Geoffrey Wawro has made a valuable new contribution to the scholarship on the US relationship with the Arab/Muslim world. Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East is a must read. US leaders have always seen Israel as a strategic liability but short term domestic electoral imperatives — aka, the lobby — have forced policy makers into uncritical support of the Zionist entity against their better judgment. (Patrick Tyler reaches the same conclusion in his superb A World of Trouble) The costs of this relationship have been staggering. Though it is common for critics to point out the nearly $140 billion that the United States has given Israel in direct aid, the late Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer placed the real costs of US alliance with Israel at over $1.6 trillion between 1973-2002 alone! But the costs to the US economy have been even bigger….” [D: I did not record the name of the reviewer].
SECURE BORDERS FOR ISRAEL, END OF ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE AND RETURN TO 1967 BORDERS, Information and Calls to Action by Dick Bennett, 2-22-11
Contents
Contact President Obama for UN Settlement Resolution
Calls to Action in March, March 30 BDS DAY of Action
The Palestine Papers and Obama
The Goldstone Report
US Campaign to Stop the Occupation
Former Israeli Troops Oppose Occupation
Presbyterian Church Statement
Videos
Books
Action: Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution. Jewish Voice for Peace, Americans for Peace Now, and Churches for Middle East Peace are speaking out. Add your voice.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
“Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
Is this potentially a winnable fight? We argue it is:
Can US Support UN Resolution on Israeli Settlements? Yes We Can!
This is a winnable fight if we move the debate beyond the usual suspects.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/can-us-support-un-resolut_b_813233.html
Take Action on March 30th:
Join the 3rd Global BDS Day of Action! (from Anna Baltzer)
Above: Palestinian poster announcing Land Day, 1985.
Dear Dick,
As popular uprisings continue across the Middle East, boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) organizing is heating up in the United States!
March 2011 promises to be a month full of creative events and actions, starting with Israeli Apartheid Week and wrapping up with a BDS Day of Action on March 30th, Palestinian Land Day. Please be a part of it!
Palestinian Land Day, "Yom al-Ard," commemorates the Israeli military's 1976 killing of six young Palestinians as they protested the Israeli government's seizure of Palestinian land. The day has since become a symbol of Palestinian resistance to land theft, colonization, occupation and apartheid.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is calling on supporters around the world to unite in a March 30th Day of Action by organizing BDS activities supporting: divestment; consumer, cultural and academic boycott; legal action and media activism. Click here to read the full call.
Not sure what to do? There's something for everyone! Here are just a few ideas:
Host a "Stolen Beauty" House Party. Still cold outside? Gather friends and laptop computers for some online activism to promote the campaign to Boycott Ahava. Enjoy tea, cookies, and good company while you publicize Ahava's occupation profiteering. Click here to write CODEPINK for details.
Gather signatures for the "TIAA-CREF: Divest from Occupation" Campaign. Pass around this petition at work, at school, in your faith community or any institution where TIAA-CREF retirement plans are offered. Last fall, one professor at the University of Massachusetts collected 80 signatures from colleagues and staff. Can you beat that?
Write an article about BDS for your local newspaper, campus publication or faith community newsletter. Click here for an example from the divestment campaign at the University of California at San Diego. Click here for a clear, compelling piece by Naomi Klein.
Take your BDS campaign to the next level, with a flash mob, using the US Campaign's new BDS Flash Mob Step-by-Step How-To Kit!
Host a speaker to talk about BDS. Get a speaker from the Speakers Bureau of the Palestine Freedom Project, a US Campaign member group.
Host a public film screening to garner support for a local BDS campaign. Palestine Online Store, our member group, has a comprehensive selection here.
Keep your eyes peeled for productions fit for cultural boycott. For example, Adalah-NY, our member group, and others are preparing to boycott productions by the Israeli Philharmonic.
Many more creative activities can connect you with a promising global movement to end Israeli apartheid. Street theatre! Poetry readings! Even just holding a sign that reads "Boycott Israeli Apartheid" on a crowded street corner will build awareness toward future BDS campaigns.
Write to bdsdayofaction@bdsmovement.net to register your action on the global Day of Action calendar. Be sure to add your event to the US Campaign's online calendar, for publication in our biweekly email newsletter, Occupation End Notes.
As we promote BDS actions on Land Day, our government is preventing Palestinian leaders of nonviolent activism from advocating BDS in the United States. Last week the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem delayed a visa for Omar Barghouti, effectively canceling a spring tour to promote his book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Barghouti was the keynote speaker at our National Annual Organizers' Conference two years ago in Chicago.
Dick, click here for more information and ideas to take action in preparation for Land Day, and support Palestinians' human rights on their land!
Yours,
Anna
National Organizer
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
THE PALESTINE PAPERS and OBAMA
Ali Abunimah: “A dangerous shift on 1967 lines” / english.aljazeera.net
Jewish Peace News to jbennet
This is an article of major importance. Ali Abunimah has been given access to the "Palestine Papers" - a trove of documents
Al Jazeera has gotten hold of by way of a leak. In this piece he examines and analyses the way the US position in regards to the 1967 border
has shifted in an ominous way under the leadership of Obama.
By effectively repudiating the Road Map "which has formed the basis of the "peace process" since 2003", writes Abunimah, the US under Obama "has backed away even from commitments made by the George W. Bush administration, and blown an irreparable hole in the already threadbare "two state solution".
The article demonstrates US refusal to stand by the international consensus regarding the 1967 border, and thereby opens the door to Israel's less-than-hidden ambitions to re-draw the border in such a way that many of its own Palestinian citizens will find themselves removed to "Palestine", so that Israel can keep its mission of creating an ethnically pure "Jewish State". Needless to say, the subjects of this ethnic cleansing are not to be consulted in the matter.
Abunimah concludes by saying: "This is not only catastrophic for Palestinian rights and the prospects for justice, but represents a return to nineteenth century notions, banished in the wake of two world wars, that population groups can be traded between states without their consent as if they were mere pieces on a chess board."
Racheli Gai.
http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112411450358613.html
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT
Naomi Klein, “Goldstone’s Legacy for Israel.” The Nation (Feb. 14, 2011). “The Goldstone Report, with its uncompromising moral consistency, has revived the old-fashioned principles of universal human rights and international law….” Important essay.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION
January 14, 2011
“King laid the groundwork. Let us keep building!”
Dear Dick,
The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is one we truly enjoy commemorating. To reflect on King's life and work is to find hope in the future, and reverence for grueling campaigns past.
Dr. King at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967
As we approach Dr. King's birthday, at a moment when Palestinians and many Israelis are mourning the Israeli military's killing of Jawaher Abu Rahmah with U.S.-made tear gas during a nonviolent West Bank protest conducted in the spirit of MLK...
...and also commemorating the 1,400 dead after the Israeli military's attrocities in Gaza two years ago...
...and while our own country is mourning the dead and injured in Tucson...
We remember the lessons of Dr. King.
We remember his wise linkage of the three evils of poverty, racism, and militarism, and his understanding that fighting for civil rights and racial justice in our own country requires all of us to fight against war abroad at the same time. (Click here to read or listen to King's magnum opus on the subject, "Beyond Vietnam.")
In those days, it was Vietnam. Today it is Afghanistan and Iraq and, yes, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which is funded, armed and enabled by our taxes and our government.
We affirm Dr. King's commitment to undoing those three evils together. We recognize that the $30 billion in military aid that the U.S. has promised Israel over a 10-year period must be better used (for example, to retrain 600,000 U.S. workers for new green jobs).
We understand that racism lies at the root of Israeli apartheid, now cemented in the segregation of everything from roads to courts of law. We know that crushing material poverty defines life in Gaza, due to Israel's U.S.-backed illegal siege that still eliminates the possibility to export goods and earn the basic income to rebuild a society.
The antidote to all three evils is creative nonviolent action. As the US Campaign turns 10 years old this year, we reaffirm our mission to build a nonviolent social movement that will defeat U.S. support for Israel's violent occupation and apartheid rule over Palestinians.
This coming weekend, while reflecting upon King's legacy and re-listening to his messages, let us rededicate our efforts to the emergence of a peaceful, just Middle East and a peaceful, just world.
In these efforts we are profoundly grateful to have you with us.
Yours,
Felicia Eaves & David Wildman
Co-Chairs
The US Campaign aims to change U.S. policies that sustain Israel's 43-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and that deny equal rights for all.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION | PO BOX 21539 | WASHINGTON, DC 20009
202-332-0994 | USCAMPAIGN@ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG | WWW.ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG
BREAKING THE SILENCE
Shovrim Shtika/Breaking the Silence is a recently organized group of former Israeli toops—men and women—who are speaking up against the immoral and illegal behavior of the military in the occupied territories. See “Female Israeli Soldiers Breat the Silence,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010) 41.
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ISRAEL, OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, AND MIDDLE EAST The Middle East Study Committee of the 218th General Assembly (2008) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) released its full report on Israel and Palestine on March 10, 2010, entitled “Breaking Down the Walls.” The report includes a call for a dismantlement of the occupation apparatus, including a stop to all settlement expansion. See “Presbyterian Church (USA) Unveils Report on Middle East Peace,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010).
Video: "Occupation Has No Future"
--Through conversations with Israeli conscientious objectors, former soldiers, and Palestinians living under occupation, the film creates a survey of the current atmosphere in the State of Israel and the West Bank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-G5D7bLx1s
FILMS
--FPL HAS FILM PROMISES ON CHILDREN LIVING IN DIVERSE AREAS OF Israel and Palestine. Shot between 1997-2000.
--Budrus by Julia Bacha (2010) about a Palestinian village that resists Israeli occupation nonviolently, led by an ordinary citizen Ayed Morrar. Rev. In These Times (Nov. 2010): Bacha “lets the dynamic of resistance vs. militaristic oppression…speak for itself.”
--Miral, dir. By US/Jewish artist Julian Schnabel, to be released in 2011 by US/Jewish movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Rev. The Nation (Nov. 8, 2010). Film about the Dar Al-Tifl orphhanage, established in Jerusalem by Palestinian Hind Husseini, following Israel’s 1948 War for Independence.
----“American Radical: the Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” documentary film by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). The filmmakers began filming in 1998, and accumulated 300 hours of footage, from which the film was made.
2010-2011 BOOKS: NONVIOLENT OPPOSITION TO THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF THE PALESTIANS
--Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation Ed by Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin. Berghahn Books , 2010.
--Adelgang, Osie Gabriel, ed. Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation. Whole Earth P, 2010. Rev. YES! (Winter 2011). A collection of personal essays by 14 women activists opposed to the human costs of “Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland.” “…true stories that stress human rights over political expedience.”
--Bayoumi, Moustafa, ed. Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict. OR Books, 2010. The failed flotilla achieved global protest and demand that Israel halt its siege.
--Finkelstein, Norman. This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. Rev. The Washington Report on ME Affairs (Nov. 2010).: Finkelstein “demonstrates, as did the Goldstone Report and numerous human rights observers, that the Israel Defense Forces (IdF) was reckless of civilian casualties.”
--Goldberg, Alfred. Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. Knopf, 2006. Rev. NYT Book Review (Nov. 12, 2006). About a friendship between an Arab and Goldberg, but criticizes G’s inability to tell his friend’s story. “The Middle East will remain one big prison as long as there
--Born a Refugee by Dixiane Hallaj, 2010. Fiction Tells the story of four brothers and their widowed mother living in the claustrophobic environment of their two room house in the Kalandia. More info at:http://radaris.com/p/Dixiane/Hallaj/
--Kaufman-Lacusta, Maxine. Refusing to Be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israelli Occupation. Ithaca P (UK), 2010. Rev. The Catholic Worker (Oct. Nov. 2010): “…material gleaned from many interviews, with a somewhat greater emphasis on Palestinian nonviolent activists, because their work is so little khnown.” Mubarak Awad, Sami Awad, Muhammad Jadarat, May Rosenfeld, Ido Khenin, Mustafa Shawkat Samha. Includes discussion of two ongoing nonviolent campaigns: the joint Israeli and Palestinian activism against the Wall, and the weekly demonstrations in the West Bank village of Bil’in, and four brief essays. Also rev. Fellowship (Fall 2010).
--Letters from Palestine: Palestinians Speak Out about Their Lives, Their Country, and the Power of Nonviolence. Kenneth Ring and Ghassan Abdullah. Wheatmark, 2010. A collection of 30 personal stories from Palestinians, inside and outside the occupied territories, that provide penetrating insights into their daily lives and thoughts.
--The Much Too Promised Land by Aaron David Miller
The official web site for The Much Too Promised Land, America's elusive search for Arab-Israeli peace, a nonfiction book by Aaron David Miller.
www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/muchtoopromisedland/ -
--Oz, Amos. How to Cure a Fanatic. 4th ed. Princeton UP, 2010. 2 essays and an interview. Oz and other Israeli writers have advocated for the Palestinian state since 1967.
--Polakow-Suransky, Sasha. The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Rev. Forward (6-18-10). Documents extent of Israel’s “secret relationship” with apartheid South Africa.
--Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Popular Resistance in Palestine: AHistory of Hope and Empowerment, 2011. . Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May-June 2010), “Mazin Qumsiyeh on the History and Practice of Nonviolent Palestinian Resistance.” http://www.qumsiyeh.org/popularresistanceinpalestine/ ). “I am planning a trip to the US in March”.
--Rhodes, Richard. The Twilight of the Bombs. Documents the current nuclear threat in the Middle East and North Korea; concludes an exhaustive, multi-volume history of nuclear weaponry, which he began in 1986 with The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
--ALICE WALKER, Alice Walker on “Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel”
Alice Walker was the first African American woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction: author, poet and activist. . She was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple. She was interviewed by Amy Goodman April 13, 2010, about her new book Overcoming Speechlessness. One section of the book is about her visit to the West Bank and Gaza and her strong disapproval of Israeli tyranny and violence against the Palestinians. The interview includes a clip of her visit to Gaza following the Israeli onslaught in 2009.
--Wiles, Rich. Our Eyes: Photography by the Children and New Generation of Lajee Center. Lajee Center, 2008. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). Photos in 2007 by 42 young refugees in the Aida Camp in Bethlehem ages 11 to 18 about their lives. Also from the Lajee Center: The Boy and the Wall.
--“Military historian Geoffrey Wawro has made a valuable new contribution to the scholarship on the US relationship with the Arab/Muslim world. Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East is a must read. US leaders have always seen Israel as a strategic liability but short term domestic electoral imperatives — aka, the lobby — have forced policy makers into uncritical support of the Zionist entity against their better judgment. (Patrick Tyler reaches the same conclusion in his superb A World of Trouble) The costs of this relationship have been staggering. Though it is common for critics to point out the nearly $140 billion that the United States has given Israel in direct aid, the late Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer placed the real costs of US alliance with Israel at over $1.6 trillion between 1973-2002 alone! But the costs to the US economy have been even bigger….” [D: I did not record the name of the reviewer].
SECURE BORDERS FOR ISRAEL, END OF ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE AND RETURN TO 1967 BORDERS, Information and Calls to Action by Dick Bennett, 2-22-11
Contents
Contact President Obama for UN Settlement Resolution
Calls to Action in March, March 30 BDS DAY of Action
The Palestine Papers and Obama
The Goldstone Report
US Campaign to Stop the Occupation
Former Israeli Troops Oppose Occupation
Presbyterian Church Statement
Videos
Books
Action: Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution. Jewish Voice for Peace, Americans for Peace Now, and Churches for Middle East Peace are speaking out. Add your voice.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
“Urge Obama to Support UN resolution on Israeli settlement expansion
A resolution is before the UN Security Council that opposes Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, echoing longstanding U.S. positions. But President Obama is under pressure to veto the resolution from political forces that seek to maintain the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Urge President Obama to support the UN resolution.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/noveto
Is this potentially a winnable fight? We argue it is:
Can US Support UN Resolution on Israeli Settlements? Yes We Can!
This is a winnable fight if we move the debate beyond the usual suspects.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/can-us-support-un-resolut_b_813233.html
Take Action on March 30th:
Join the 3rd Global BDS Day of Action! (from Anna Baltzer)
Above: Palestinian poster announcing Land Day, 1985.
Dear Dick,
As popular uprisings continue across the Middle East, boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) organizing is heating up in the United States!
March 2011 promises to be a month full of creative events and actions, starting with Israeli Apartheid Week and wrapping up with a BDS Day of Action on March 30th, Palestinian Land Day. Please be a part of it!
Palestinian Land Day, "Yom al-Ard," commemorates the Israeli military's 1976 killing of six young Palestinians as they protested the Israeli government's seizure of Palestinian land. The day has since become a symbol of Palestinian resistance to land theft, colonization, occupation and apartheid.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is calling on supporters around the world to unite in a March 30th Day of Action by organizing BDS activities supporting: divestment; consumer, cultural and academic boycott; legal action and media activism. Click here to read the full call.
Not sure what to do? There's something for everyone! Here are just a few ideas:
Host a "Stolen Beauty" House Party. Still cold outside? Gather friends and laptop computers for some online activism to promote the campaign to Boycott Ahava. Enjoy tea, cookies, and good company while you publicize Ahava's occupation profiteering. Click here to write CODEPINK for details.
Gather signatures for the "TIAA-CREF: Divest from Occupation" Campaign. Pass around this petition at work, at school, in your faith community or any institution where TIAA-CREF retirement plans are offered. Last fall, one professor at the University of Massachusetts collected 80 signatures from colleagues and staff. Can you beat that?
Write an article about BDS for your local newspaper, campus publication or faith community newsletter. Click here for an example from the divestment campaign at the University of California at San Diego. Click here for a clear, compelling piece by Naomi Klein.
Take your BDS campaign to the next level, with a flash mob, using the US Campaign's new BDS Flash Mob Step-by-Step How-To Kit!
Host a speaker to talk about BDS. Get a speaker from the Speakers Bureau of the Palestine Freedom Project, a US Campaign member group.
Host a public film screening to garner support for a local BDS campaign. Palestine Online Store, our member group, has a comprehensive selection here.
Keep your eyes peeled for productions fit for cultural boycott. For example, Adalah-NY, our member group, and others are preparing to boycott productions by the Israeli Philharmonic.
Many more creative activities can connect you with a promising global movement to end Israeli apartheid. Street theatre! Poetry readings! Even just holding a sign that reads "Boycott Israeli Apartheid" on a crowded street corner will build awareness toward future BDS campaigns.
Write to bdsdayofaction@bdsmovement.net to register your action on the global Day of Action calendar. Be sure to add your event to the US Campaign's online calendar, for publication in our biweekly email newsletter, Occupation End Notes.
As we promote BDS actions on Land Day, our government is preventing Palestinian leaders of nonviolent activism from advocating BDS in the United States. Last week the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem delayed a visa for Omar Barghouti, effectively canceling a spring tour to promote his book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Barghouti was the keynote speaker at our National Annual Organizers' Conference two years ago in Chicago.
Dick, click here for more information and ideas to take action in preparation for Land Day, and support Palestinians' human rights on their land!
Yours,
Anna
National Organizer
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
THE PALESTINE PAPERS and OBAMA
Ali Abunimah: “A dangerous shift on 1967 lines” / english.aljazeera.net
Jewish Peace News to jbennet
This is an article of major importance. Ali Abunimah has been given access to the "Palestine Papers" - a trove of documents
Al Jazeera has gotten hold of by way of a leak. In this piece he examines and analyses the way the US position in regards to the 1967 border
has shifted in an ominous way under the leadership of Obama.
By effectively repudiating the Road Map "which has formed the basis of the "peace process" since 2003", writes Abunimah, the US under Obama "has backed away even from commitments made by the George W. Bush administration, and blown an irreparable hole in the already threadbare "two state solution".
The article demonstrates US refusal to stand by the international consensus regarding the 1967 border, and thereby opens the door to Israel's less-than-hidden ambitions to re-draw the border in such a way that many of its own Palestinian citizens will find themselves removed to "Palestine", so that Israel can keep its mission of creating an ethnically pure "Jewish State". Needless to say, the subjects of this ethnic cleansing are not to be consulted in the matter.
Abunimah concludes by saying: "This is not only catastrophic for Palestinian rights and the prospects for justice, but represents a return to nineteenth century notions, banished in the wake of two world wars, that population groups can be traded between states without their consent as if they were mere pieces on a chess board."
Racheli Gai.
http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112411450358613.html
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT
Naomi Klein, “Goldstone’s Legacy for Israel.” The Nation (Feb. 14, 2011). “The Goldstone Report, with its uncompromising moral consistency, has revived the old-fashioned principles of universal human rights and international law….” Important essay.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION
January 14, 2011
“King laid the groundwork. Let us keep building!”
Dear Dick,
The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is one we truly enjoy commemorating. To reflect on King's life and work is to find hope in the future, and reverence for grueling campaigns past.
Dr. King at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967
As we approach Dr. King's birthday, at a moment when Palestinians and many Israelis are mourning the Israeli military's killing of Jawaher Abu Rahmah with U.S.-made tear gas during a nonviolent West Bank protest conducted in the spirit of MLK...
...and also commemorating the 1,400 dead after the Israeli military's attrocities in Gaza two years ago...
...and while our own country is mourning the dead and injured in Tucson...
We remember the lessons of Dr. King.
We remember his wise linkage of the three evils of poverty, racism, and militarism, and his understanding that fighting for civil rights and racial justice in our own country requires all of us to fight against war abroad at the same time. (Click here to read or listen to King's magnum opus on the subject, "Beyond Vietnam.")
In those days, it was Vietnam. Today it is Afghanistan and Iraq and, yes, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which is funded, armed and enabled by our taxes and our government.
We affirm Dr. King's commitment to undoing those three evils together. We recognize that the $30 billion in military aid that the U.S. has promised Israel over a 10-year period must be better used (for example, to retrain 600,000 U.S. workers for new green jobs).
We understand that racism lies at the root of Israeli apartheid, now cemented in the segregation of everything from roads to courts of law. We know that crushing material poverty defines life in Gaza, due to Israel's U.S.-backed illegal siege that still eliminates the possibility to export goods and earn the basic income to rebuild a society.
The antidote to all three evils is creative nonviolent action. As the US Campaign turns 10 years old this year, we reaffirm our mission to build a nonviolent social movement that will defeat U.S. support for Israel's violent occupation and apartheid rule over Palestinians.
This coming weekend, while reflecting upon King's legacy and re-listening to his messages, let us rededicate our efforts to the emergence of a peaceful, just Middle East and a peaceful, just world.
In these efforts we are profoundly grateful to have you with us.
Yours,
Felicia Eaves & David Wildman
Co-Chairs
The US Campaign aims to change U.S. policies that sustain Israel's 43-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and that deny equal rights for all.
US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION | PO BOX 21539 | WASHINGTON, DC 20009
202-332-0994 | USCAMPAIGN@ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG | WWW.ENDTHEOCCUPATION.ORG
BREAKING THE SILENCE
Shovrim Shtika/Breaking the Silence is a recently organized group of former Israeli toops—men and women—who are speaking up against the immoral and illegal behavior of the military in the occupied territories. See “Female Israeli Soldiers Breat the Silence,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010) 41.
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ISRAEL, OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, AND MIDDLE EAST The Middle East Study Committee of the 218th General Assembly (2008) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) released its full report on Israel and Palestine on March 10, 2010, entitled “Breaking Down the Walls.” The report includes a call for a dismantlement of the occupation apparatus, including a stop to all settlement expansion. See “Presbyterian Church (USA) Unveils Report on Middle East Peace,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010).
Video: "Occupation Has No Future"
--Through conversations with Israeli conscientious objectors, former soldiers, and Palestinians living under occupation, the film creates a survey of the current atmosphere in the State of Israel and the West Bank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-G5D7bLx1s
FILMS
--FPL HAS FILM PROMISES ON CHILDREN LIVING IN DIVERSE AREAS OF Israel and Palestine. Shot between 1997-2000.
--Budrus by Julia Bacha (2010) about a Palestinian village that resists Israeli occupation nonviolently, led by an ordinary citizen Ayed Morrar. Rev. In These Times (Nov. 2010): Bacha “lets the dynamic of resistance vs. militaristic oppression…speak for itself.”
--Miral, dir. By US/Jewish artist Julian Schnabel, to be released in 2011 by US/Jewish movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Rev. The Nation (Nov. 8, 2010). Film about the Dar Al-Tifl orphhanage, established in Jerusalem by Palestinian Hind Husseini, following Israel’s 1948 War for Independence.
----“American Radical: the Trials of Norman Finkelstein,” documentary film by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). The filmmakers began filming in 1998, and accumulated 300 hours of footage, from which the film was made.
2010-2011 BOOKS: NONVIOLENT OPPOSITION TO THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF THE PALESTIANS
--Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation Ed by Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin. Berghahn Books , 2010.
--Adelgang, Osie Gabriel, ed. Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation. Whole Earth P, 2010. Rev. YES! (Winter 2011). A collection of personal essays by 14 women activists opposed to the human costs of “Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland.” “…true stories that stress human rights over political expedience.”
--Bayoumi, Moustafa, ed. Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict. OR Books, 2010. The failed flotilla achieved global protest and demand that Israel halt its siege.
--Finkelstein, Norman. This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. Rev. The Washington Report on ME Affairs (Nov. 2010).: Finkelstein “demonstrates, as did the Goldstone Report and numerous human rights observers, that the Israel Defense Forces (IdF) was reckless of civilian casualties.”
--Goldberg, Alfred. Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. Knopf, 2006. Rev. NYT Book Review (Nov. 12, 2006). About a friendship between an Arab and Goldberg, but criticizes G’s inability to tell his friend’s story. “The Middle East will remain one big prison as long as there
--Born a Refugee by Dixiane Hallaj, 2010. Fiction Tells the story of four brothers and their widowed mother living in the claustrophobic environment of their two room house in the Kalandia. More info at:http://radaris.com/p/Dixiane/Hallaj/
--Kaufman-Lacusta, Maxine. Refusing to Be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israelli Occupation. Ithaca P (UK), 2010. Rev. The Catholic Worker (Oct. Nov. 2010): “…material gleaned from many interviews, with a somewhat greater emphasis on Palestinian nonviolent activists, because their work is so little khnown.” Mubarak Awad, Sami Awad, Muhammad Jadarat, May Rosenfeld, Ido Khenin, Mustafa Shawkat Samha. Includes discussion of two ongoing nonviolent campaigns: the joint Israeli and Palestinian activism against the Wall, and the weekly demonstrations in the West Bank village of Bil’in, and four brief essays. Also rev. Fellowship (Fall 2010).
--Letters from Palestine: Palestinians Speak Out about Their Lives, Their Country, and the Power of Nonviolence. Kenneth Ring and Ghassan Abdullah. Wheatmark, 2010. A collection of 30 personal stories from Palestinians, inside and outside the occupied territories, that provide penetrating insights into their daily lives and thoughts.
--The Much Too Promised Land by Aaron David Miller
The official web site for The Much Too Promised Land, America's elusive search for Arab-Israeli peace, a nonfiction book by Aaron David Miller.
www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/muchtoopromisedland/ -
--Oz, Amos. How to Cure a Fanatic. 4th ed. Princeton UP, 2010. 2 essays and an interview. Oz and other Israeli writers have advocated for the Palestinian state since 1967.
--Polakow-Suransky, Sasha. The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Rev. Forward (6-18-10). Documents extent of Israel’s “secret relationship” with apartheid South Africa.
--Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Popular Resistance in Palestine: AHistory of Hope and Empowerment, 2011. . Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May-June 2010), “Mazin Qumsiyeh on the History and Practice of Nonviolent Palestinian Resistance.” http://www.qumsiyeh.org/popularresistanceinpalestine/ ). “I am planning a trip to the US in March”.
--Rhodes, Richard. The Twilight of the Bombs. Documents the current nuclear threat in the Middle East and North Korea; concludes an exhaustive, multi-volume history of nuclear weaponry, which he began in 1986 with The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
--ALICE WALKER, Alice Walker on “Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel”
Alice Walker was the first African American woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction: author, poet and activist. . She was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple. She was interviewed by Amy Goodman April 13, 2010, about her new book Overcoming Speechlessness. One section of the book is about her visit to the West Bank and Gaza and her strong disapproval of Israeli tyranny and violence against the Palestinians. The interview includes a clip of her visit to Gaza following the Israeli onslaught in 2009.
--Wiles, Rich. Our Eyes: Photography by the Children and New Generation of Lajee Center. Lajee Center, 2008. Rev. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (May/June 2010). Photos in 2007 by 42 young refugees in the Aida Camp in Bethlehem ages 11 to 18 about their lives. Also from the Lajee Center: The Boy and the Wall.
--“Military historian Geoffrey Wawro has made a valuable new contribution to the scholarship on the US relationship with the Arab/Muslim world. Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East is a must read. US leaders have always seen Israel as a strategic liability but short term domestic electoral imperatives — aka, the lobby — have forced policy makers into uncritical support of the Zionist entity against their better judgment. (Patrick Tyler reaches the same conclusion in his superb A World of Trouble) The costs of this relationship have been staggering. Though it is common for critics to point out the nearly $140 billion that the United States has given Israel in direct aid, the late Harvard economist Thomas Stauffer placed the real costs of US alliance with Israel at over $1.6 trillion between 1973-2002 alone! But the costs to the US economy have been even bigger….” [D: I did not record the name of the reviewer].
END OF ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN NEWSLETTER
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