Maali Adnan, 4, holds a picture of her father Khader Adnan, 33, a senior member of Islamic Jihad jailed in Israel who has been on hunger strike for 62 days, during a solidarity protest in the northern West Bank village of Arrabeh, Friday, Feb. 17, 2012. Adnan is on a hunger strike to protest what he says is humiliation that he faces in Israel’s military justice system. He is being held in “administrative detention,” under which an Israeli military judge can imprison Palestinians for six-month periods without charge. (AP Photo/Mohammed Ballas)
Israeli decision to release Palestinian detainee in April ‘insufficient’ | Amnesty International
His wife was overjoyed at the news of his imminent release.
“By God’s will, I am proud of him. Not just as a husband, but as a leader of our people. This is a great victory,’’ she said.
There are still 309 other Palestinians detained without trial, 4417 Palestinians in Israeli jails, including some 200 children.
O to go with a bang,
And not be made to stab you to death with toothpicks,
Year after year, a 168 hour work week.
In our minds the television sets are always on
In our skulls, always our childhood kitchens, parents conversing
About grownup stuff (do grownups exist?)
And in the paper: the cross-section of a rubber bullet, not made entirely of rubber.
So yes,
The radio in his town played different tunes,
Allah is merciful, we are not, and august is not. The gravel, he knows the gravel.
I know the gravel.
Allah is merciful. Is Khader Adnan?
February isn’t, February is a ribcage.
When I betray by caring, I betray,
And he, the suicide, betrays well.
To make them murder is to make the murder seen.
Here is what they never told:
Anything.
Then, the gravel was outside, but the kitchen was clean, now the enemy plate
Is full of the most fluid mud,
And in the paper: the picture of the burning tire, made entirely of rubber,
And of the explosive belt, made of murder,
And of the gun, made of murder
And of Syria and Itamar and every wall and the gravel and mud and the blur, the blur
Of hunger
And of the judges and the doctors, made of murder
And of the silence
In place of justice (do grownups exist?)
And of his chained hands, changing hue, growing slender, made of murder
And of my typing hands, made of murder.
I yield, I extend them. Mother, if you want me to withdraw them, tell me what
This man has done. Then tell me what you have done
Tell me what I have done, for once, rubber bullet mother, tell me,
Because I’m fading too, so much more slowly, and choking
On on the paper, pictures and all.
And biting my cheeks
hard
With blood
On what you cook for us.
(Source: 972mag.com)
Khader Adnan, Bobby Sands - moving song by David Rovics (by drovics)
Today marks Day 65 of Khader Adnan’s hunger strike. He is near death. He is protesting his administrative detention by Israel, without charges, evidence or a trial. There are some 300 others in his situation. He has a mother and a father and children and a pregnant wife. His hunger strike is now the longest in Palestinian history. Please sign this Amnesty International action to call on Israel to end his detention and help save his life.
This made my Invasion Day.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard dragged away from a restaurant by security after protestors from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy gathered and banged on the glass walls, yelling “shame” and “racist”. This was in response to comments by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott that the Tent Embassy should close. He actually said, “I think a lot has changed for the better since then…I think it probably is time to move on from that.”
This year is the 40th Anniversary of the Tent Embassy. Another “Australia Day” passes without acknowledgement of invasion, colonialism, genocide, massacres or frontier wars. A government that upholds systems of apartheid in jails and income quarantining and the Northern Territory Intervention; and deaths in custody; and forcing people to move off their homelands; and education and health inequalities, and dying languages and schools where children learn only english; and mining companies stealing and raping land and telling traditional owners they should work on their stolen land to end a so called “welfare mentality”. Happy fucking Australia Day. We still don’t have a treaty and Indigenous peoples never ceded sovereignty. We are not a post-colonial country.
It really seemed to matter to everybody that other human beings were being treated in that way.
We didn’t just talk about it, we did things, I remember boycotts and marches and demos all being held because we couldn’t bear that people were being treated like that.
A few years ago I watched a documentary about life in Palestine.
There’s a section where a UN dignitary of some kind comes to do a photo opportunity outside a new hospital.
The staff know that it communicates nothing of the real desperation of their position, so they trick her into a side ward on her way out.
She ends up in a room with a child who the doctors explain is in a critical condition because they don’t have the supplies to keep treating him.
She flounders, awkwardly caught in the bleak reality of the room, mouthing platitudes over a dying boy.
The filmmaker asks one of the doctors what they think the stunt will have achieved.
He is suddenly angry, perhaps having just felt at first hand something he knew in the abstract. The indifference of the world.
“She will do nothing,” he says to the filmmaker. Then he looks into the camera and says: “Neither will you”.
I cried at that and promised myself that I would do something. Other than write a few stupid jokes I have not done anything. Neither have you.
Palestinian artists penetrated the heavily fortified heart of West Jerusalem overnight and painted graffiti bearing political messages on walls, doors, construction sites and other surfaces.
The artists struck in two areas, the West Jerusalem city center (near Jaffa Road and King George Street) and the German Colony/Talbiyye area.
The city center is today full of bars and restaurants frequented by Israeli Jews and tourists. Talbiyye was a once prosperous Arab neighborhood. These areas and large swathes of West Jerusalem were ethnically cleansed of their Palestinian populations in 1948 and are now almost exclusively Jewish.
As the photos show, the art includes the map of Palestine with the Arabic prounoun أنا (“I” or “me”) and an image of a woman wearing a kaffiyeh with the word “revolt.” This image is a reminder of the central role women have played in Palestinian popular struggle. The artists plan to undertake similar actions in coming days and weeks.
More photos: Palestinian graffiti artists penetrate heavily fortified heart of West Jerusalem | The Electronic Intifada
“Tahrir, what is your final destination?” Lotayef, who is a poet, responded, “the betterment of mankind.”
Palestinian women and girls from the West Bank at the beach in Tel Aviv, after a group of Israeli women snuck them into the country for a daylong excursion. Most of the Palestinian women had never seen the ocean before, because they live in a part of the West Bank that is landlocked. Skittish at first, then wide-eyed with delight, they waded into the Mediterranean, smiling, splashing and then joining hands, getting knocked over by the waves, throwing back their heads and ultimately laughing with joy. Read more here.
So beautiful to know the reason behind their smiles :)
“What we are doing here will not change the situation,” said Hanna Rubinstein, who traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part. “But it is one more activity to oppose the occupation. One day in the future, people will ask, like they did of the Germans: ‘Did you know?’ And I will be able to say, ‘I knew. And I acted.’ ”
Three thousand letters of hope folded into paper boats to sail to Gaza. Israel sneers, we own this ocean and all the tears cried into it.
Don’t die, soldier, hold the radiophone,
don your helmet, your flak jacket, surround
the village with a trench of crocodiles, starve
it out if need be, eat Mama’s treats, shoot
sharp, keep your rifle clean, take care of the armored
Jeep, the bulldozer, the land, one day it will be
yours, little David, sweetling, don’t die, please.
Keep watch for Goliath the peasant, he’s trying to sell his
pumpkin at a local market, he’s plotting to buy a gift for his grandkid, erase
the evil Haman whose bronchitis you denied treatment, eradicate
the blood of Eva Braun by checking on the veracity of her labor pains, silence her
shriek, that’s how every maternity ward sounds, it’s not easy
having such humane values, be strong, take care, forget
your deeds, forget the forgetting.
That thy days may be long, that the days of thy children may be long, that one day
they shall hear of thy deeds and shall stick fingers in their ears and scream
with fear and thy sons’ and thy daughters’ scream shall never fade.
Be strong, sweet David, live long unto seeing thy children’s eyes,
though their backs hasten to flee from thee, stay in touch with thy comrades-at-arms,
after thy sons deny thee, a covenant of the shunned.
Take care, soldier-boy.
Translator’s Note: 5 Iyar, by the Hebrew calendar, is Israel’s Day of Independence, which Palestinians commemorate by the Gregorian calendar, on May 15, as the Nakba, the Catastrophe. As thousands of Palestinians streamed across Israel’s borders last week, meeting with armed resistance, meeting with injury and death, I remembered a poem by Yitzhak Laor. “Take Care, Soldier” was first published in 2004 in a collection called Ir Ha’Leviyatan (“Leviathan City”). —Joshua Cohen
(via n 1: Take Care, Soldier)
Maryam Monalist Gharavi’s previously unpublished interview with Juliano Mer-Khamis, director of Jenin Freedom Theatre. Juliano was murdered two days ago, on 4th April 2011. Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz of his death yesterday,
The seven bullets extinguished the light of courage that he radiated. “Jule was murdered,” a trembling voice belonging to a refugee camp resident on the other end of the phone told me. My voice also trembled.
Yet I do; eight grandchildren thus far. What will I tell them, if they ask, once they reach the age where they can choose their own path? I would lie if I tell them that a Jew has no place except this place. I will lie if I tell them that only here they can be fully fulfilled. I will not be telling them that they must pay with their future for the sacrifices made by their forefathers to cling to this land. I will certainly not tell them that God ordered us to do so.
Up until a few years ago, I could say that Israeli society is wonderful: Colorful, lively, shows solidarity, and optimistic. A good society that will become even better in the future. I would have told them that everything depends on us. But I can no longer say that. The latest revelations about the Netanyahu family’s lifestyle made it impossible for me to keep clinging. I just cannot overcome the nausea.
It is too easy to demonise Israel, in part because the government, the army and some of the people do things that make it so easy.
But one of the ugliest truths about Israel - a truth that must be faced in both the US and Europe, where xenophobic and anti-Islamic sentiments are also on the rise - is that Israel offers the Western world a reflection of itself.
Of course, it is an exaggerated, hyperbolic image. But it is a picture of nationalism gone wrong. It is a picture of what can happen when a state believes that its very survival depends on maintaining a certain demographic balance. It is a picture of what happens when any country believes that those who change these numbers are an existential threat.
And it is getting more and more frightening here by the day.
Photo by William Parry
From Deck London’s Walls with Bethlehem’s Calls « P U L S E (click through for more photos) Two dozen children, aged 5-17, from the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, cut out stencils of letters, stars and Christmas trees and sprayed painted ‘MERRY CHRISTMAS WORLD FROM BETHLEHEM GHETTO’ on Israel’s illegal separation wall. Photographed by UK-based photojournalist William Parry, images of the children and their message – along with powerful images of checkpoints and life under occupation – will temporarily ‘hijack’ prominent wall spaces in central London throughout the week leading up to Christmas, with the help of projection artist, Beverley Carpenter.
Video report from Palestine Video: Palestine suffering projected onto London landmarks
An Israeli motorist runs down a masked Palestinian youth who was standing among a group of youngsters throwing stones at Israeli cars on October 8, 2010 in the mostly Arab east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. (ILIA YEFIMOVICH/AFP/Getty Images) #
2010 in photos (part 3 of 3) - The Big Picture - Boston.com
I’ve watched the video of this on YouTube - but I don’t recommend clicking through because it’s too distressing. The child bounces off the car, his body at strange angles. The car speeds off. Cameramen keep shooting, these are usually the only images of the Occupation we see in the papers or on the news - children throwing rocks at settlers.
