Democracy Now!
"The United States recently announced plans to scale back aid to Egypt’s military government three months after the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. Last week, the State Department said the United States will withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance until “credible progress” is made toward a “an inclusive, democratically elected civilian government.” But a new investigation from Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines program shows that the recent aid cuts might be more symbolic than anything else. Al Jazeera recently revealed that from July 3 to September 24, eight ships left New York, Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia, bound for the Egyptian cities of Damietta and Alexandria, where they unloaded defense equipment covered by laws that require State Department approval. We speak to Anjali Kamat, correspondent and producer for Al Jazeera’s “Fault Lines.”...."
Friday, October 18, 2013
عكا وحيفا تنثران الورود على روح اللاجئين الغارقين؛ ومطالبة منظمة التحرير بالتحرك
عــ48ـرب/ ربيع عيد
بمبادرة عدد من النشطاء في الداخل الفلسطيني، نُظم في اليومين الماضيين في
مدينتي حيفا وعكا وقفتا حداد ونثر ورود على أرواح الشهداء الغارقين من اللاجئين
الفلسطينيين والسوريين الذين لقوا حتفهم أمام سواحل جزيرة مالطا.
وكانت الوقفة الأولى في مدينة عكا يوم الثلاثاء في أول أيام عيد الأضحى، إذ شارك العشرات من الناشطين وأهالي مدينة عكا في نثر الورود من على ميناء عكا، اضافة للإبحار في سفينة الى داخل البحر في خطوة رمزية لذكرى 200 لاجئة ولاجئ فلسطيني سوريّ، وافتهم المنيّة غرقًا في طريق الهرب من أهوال الحرب.
أما الوقفة الثانية، فجرت يوم أمس الأربعاء على شاطئ مدينة حيفا، إذ حمل المشاركون الأعلام الفلسطينية واللافتات المنددة بحصار مخيم اليرموك.
وفي حديث لموقع عـ48ــرب مع الناشطة رنا عوايسي، إحدى المبادرات للوقفة في حيفا، قالت: "هذه الوقفة هي وقفة وفاء لأرواح اللاجئين الفلسطينيين والسوريين الذين أغرقهم رصاص الغدر وهم هاربون من جحيم الحصار والموت في سوريا، وبالذات في مخيم اليرموك المحاصر منذ ما يقارب العام، وللمطالبة برفع حصار التجويع عن المخيم المهدد بكارثة إنسانية إذ أن المعبر الرئيسي للمخيم مغلق إغلاقا تاما منذ ثلاثة أشهر إضافة لتعرضه للقصف المتواصل والنقص الحاد في المستلزمات الطبية".
صمت شعبي ورسمي
وأضافت " إن مأساة قوارب الموت نابعة بالأساس من حصار المخيم وقصفه المستمر، القضية التي تغيب إعلاميًا ورسميًا. هنالك صمت شعبي ورسمي معيب جدا حيال هذه القضية تحديدا، وعلى منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية وسلطتي رام الله وغزة تحمل مسؤولياتهم تجاه قضية مخيم اليرموك وقضية اللاجئين بشكل عام. لا يعقل أن يتم إصدار فتوى بإجازة اكل لحم القطط والكلاب والحمير ويستمر هذا الصمت، هذه الفتوى صدرت في السابق خلال مجزرة تل الزعتر، وعلينا منع تحول مخيم اليرموك إلى تل الزعتر 2".
وخلصت إلى القول "جنى حسن هي طفلة رضيعة من مخيم اليرموك توفيت بسبب عدم توفر الحليب في المخيم وعدم تقبلها لحليب أمها، إضافة لمئات الشهداء الذين سقطوا نتيجة للقصف وإطلاق النار من قبل النظام والمعارضة المسلحة، ناهيك عن الموت في أقبية التعذيب، والذي كان آخر ضحاياه الناشط الإغاثي الشهيد ابن لوبية خالد بكراوي وعدنان شهابي الذي يبلغ من العمر 60 عامًا".
يُشار أيضا الى انه تم تنظيم وقفة في مدينة غزة أيضا بداية هذا الأسبوع.
عريضة تطالب منظمة التحرير بالوقوف على مسؤولياتها
ومن ضمن التحركات الداعمة للفلسطينيين في سوريا، أطلق فلسطينيون من الداخل والشتات عريضة تطالب منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية بالوقوف على مسؤولياتها تجاه اللاجئين الفلسطينيين في الشتات، وخاصة في سوريا وما يتعرضون له من معاناة ونكبة جديدة.
وجاء في العريضة "إنّ منظمة التحرير اليوم مطالبةٌ بل ومسؤولة عن متابعة أمور اللاجئين الفلسطينيين السوريين، والتخفيف من معاناتهم ونكبتهم أينما كانوا على اعتبار أن منظمة التحرير حسب ميثاقها الوطني وكل الاعترافات الدولية هي الممثل الشرعي والوحيد للشعب الفلسطيني في جميع أماكن تواجده، وبالتالي فهي تتحمل مسؤولية متابعة وتمثيل اللاجئين في الشتات وفي كل أنحاء العالم، ولدى كل السلطات الرسمية في جميع الدول العربية والأجنبية."
وطالب الموقّعون بالتدخل لدى جميع أطراف الصراع في سوريا، وتقديم الاحتجاج الرسمي لدى كل الهيئات الدولية لتأمين احتياجات المُحَاصَرين في مخيم منذ أكثر من تسعين يوماً، والعمل بالتنسيق مع كل أطراف الصراع على تحييد المخيمات الفلسطينية عن دائرة الحرب المشتعلة في سوريا. إضافة إلى تقديم اعتراض رسمي لدى السلطات المصرية وشكوى لدى الأمم المتحدة ضد التهجير القسري إلى سوريا ولبنان، والحاصل من قبل السلطات المصرية بحق اللاجئين الفلسطينيين من سوريا الى مصر.
كما طالبوا بتكليف بعثة المنظمة الديبلوماسية في إيطاليا وهي سفارة فلسطين في روما بمتابعة تجاوزات السلطات الإيطالية بحقّ اللاجئين الفلسطينيين في جزيرة صقلية، واستخدام العنف ضدهم لإجبارهم على التبصيم، وبالتالي تقديم طلبات لجوء في إيطاليا وأخذ شهادات اللاجئين الذين جرى تبصيمهم وتقديمها للحكومة الإيطالية ومطالبتها بفتح تحقيق رسمي في هذا الموضوع.
رابط الفعالية على الفيس بوك اضغط هنا
رابط الحملة على موقع أفاز اضغط هنا
بمبادرة عدد من النشطاء في الداخل الفلسطيني، نُظم في اليومين الماضيين في
مدينتي حيفا وعكا وقفتا حداد ونثر ورود على أرواح الشهداء الغارقين من اللاجئين
الفلسطينيين والسوريين الذين لقوا حتفهم أمام سواحل جزيرة مالطا.وكانت الوقفة الأولى في مدينة عكا يوم الثلاثاء في أول أيام عيد الأضحى، إذ شارك العشرات من الناشطين وأهالي مدينة عكا في نثر الورود من على ميناء عكا، اضافة للإبحار في سفينة الى داخل البحر في خطوة رمزية لذكرى 200 لاجئة ولاجئ فلسطيني سوريّ، وافتهم المنيّة غرقًا في طريق الهرب من أهوال الحرب.
أما الوقفة الثانية، فجرت يوم أمس الأربعاء على شاطئ مدينة حيفا، إذ حمل المشاركون الأعلام الفلسطينية واللافتات المنددة بحصار مخيم اليرموك.
وفي حديث لموقع عـ48ــرب مع الناشطة رنا عوايسي، إحدى المبادرات للوقفة في حيفا، قالت: "هذه الوقفة هي وقفة وفاء لأرواح اللاجئين الفلسطينيين والسوريين الذين أغرقهم رصاص الغدر وهم هاربون من جحيم الحصار والموت في سوريا، وبالذات في مخيم اليرموك المحاصر منذ ما يقارب العام، وللمطالبة برفع حصار التجويع عن المخيم المهدد بكارثة إنسانية إذ أن المعبر الرئيسي للمخيم مغلق إغلاقا تاما منذ ثلاثة أشهر إضافة لتعرضه للقصف المتواصل والنقص الحاد في المستلزمات الطبية".
صمت شعبي ورسمي
وأضافت " إن مأساة قوارب الموت نابعة بالأساس من حصار المخيم وقصفه المستمر، القضية التي تغيب إعلاميًا ورسميًا. هنالك صمت شعبي ورسمي معيب جدا حيال هذه القضية تحديدا، وعلى منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية وسلطتي رام الله وغزة تحمل مسؤولياتهم تجاه قضية مخيم اليرموك وقضية اللاجئين بشكل عام. لا يعقل أن يتم إصدار فتوى بإجازة اكل لحم القطط والكلاب والحمير ويستمر هذا الصمت، هذه الفتوى صدرت في السابق خلال مجزرة تل الزعتر، وعلينا منع تحول مخيم اليرموك إلى تل الزعتر 2".
وخلصت إلى القول "جنى حسن هي طفلة رضيعة من مخيم اليرموك توفيت بسبب عدم توفر الحليب في المخيم وعدم تقبلها لحليب أمها، إضافة لمئات الشهداء الذين سقطوا نتيجة للقصف وإطلاق النار من قبل النظام والمعارضة المسلحة، ناهيك عن الموت في أقبية التعذيب، والذي كان آخر ضحاياه الناشط الإغاثي الشهيد ابن لوبية خالد بكراوي وعدنان شهابي الذي يبلغ من العمر 60 عامًا".
يُشار أيضا الى انه تم تنظيم وقفة في مدينة غزة أيضا بداية هذا الأسبوع.
عريضة تطالب منظمة التحرير بالوقوف على مسؤولياتها
ومن ضمن التحركات الداعمة للفلسطينيين في سوريا، أطلق فلسطينيون من الداخل والشتات عريضة تطالب منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية بالوقوف على مسؤولياتها تجاه اللاجئين الفلسطينيين في الشتات، وخاصة في سوريا وما يتعرضون له من معاناة ونكبة جديدة.
وجاء في العريضة "إنّ منظمة التحرير اليوم مطالبةٌ بل ومسؤولة عن متابعة أمور اللاجئين الفلسطينيين السوريين، والتخفيف من معاناتهم ونكبتهم أينما كانوا على اعتبار أن منظمة التحرير حسب ميثاقها الوطني وكل الاعترافات الدولية هي الممثل الشرعي والوحيد للشعب الفلسطيني في جميع أماكن تواجده، وبالتالي فهي تتحمل مسؤولية متابعة وتمثيل اللاجئين في الشتات وفي كل أنحاء العالم، ولدى كل السلطات الرسمية في جميع الدول العربية والأجنبية."
وطالب الموقّعون بالتدخل لدى جميع أطراف الصراع في سوريا، وتقديم الاحتجاج الرسمي لدى كل الهيئات الدولية لتأمين احتياجات المُحَاصَرين في مخيم منذ أكثر من تسعين يوماً، والعمل بالتنسيق مع كل أطراف الصراع على تحييد المخيمات الفلسطينية عن دائرة الحرب المشتعلة في سوريا. إضافة إلى تقديم اعتراض رسمي لدى السلطات المصرية وشكوى لدى الأمم المتحدة ضد التهجير القسري إلى سوريا ولبنان، والحاصل من قبل السلطات المصرية بحق اللاجئين الفلسطينيين من سوريا الى مصر.
كما طالبوا بتكليف بعثة المنظمة الديبلوماسية في إيطاليا وهي سفارة فلسطين في روما بمتابعة تجاوزات السلطات الإيطالية بحقّ اللاجئين الفلسطينيين في جزيرة صقلية، واستخدام العنف ضدهم لإجبارهم على التبصيم، وبالتالي تقديم طلبات لجوء في إيطاليا وأخذ شهادات اللاجئين الذين جرى تبصيمهم وتقديمها للحكومة الإيطالية ومطالبتها بفتح تحقيق رسمي في هذا الموضوع.
رابط الفعالية على الفيس بوك اضغط هنا
رابط الحملة على موقع أفاز اضغط هنا
Palestinians in Yarmouk Refugee Camp Near Damascus Are Besieged and Forced to Eat Cats and Dogs to Survive!
(Courtesy of Azmi Bishara's Facebook Page)
Rebel Snipers Kill Key Syrian General
Gen. Jamaa Slain in Deir Ezzor
"Syrian Major General Jamaa Jamaa, the top military intelligence officer for Deir Ezzor Province, was assassinated today in the province by rebel snipers, according to Syrian state media.
Jamaa had previously served as a top Syrian military official in Lebanon, and was blacklisted by the US Treasury Department in 2006 after the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, though he was never charged with involvement in the death.Deir Ezzor is a key province in eastern Syria, and clashes were reported between military and rebel forces in several parts of the oil-rich province. The details surrounding the assassination are unclear, though it was said to happen in the capital city’s Rashdiya District.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory claimed Jamaa was shot in the middle of a battle in which the military was fighting against al-Qaeda forces. That hasn’t been confirmed by any other outlets "
Thursday, October 17, 2013
FBI Urged to Reopen Probe Into 1985 Assassination of Arab-American Leader Alex Odeh in California
Democracy Now!
"The FBI and Justice Department are being urged to renew its investigation into one of the most shocking political murders in recent U.S. history. Twenty-eight years ago, on October 11, 1985, a prominent Palestinian-American leader named Alex Odeh was killed by a powerful pipe bomb planted at the Santa Ana, California, offices of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, where Odeh worked as the group’s western regional director. The FBI quickly named the militant Jewish Defense League or JDL as a focus of its investigations. But decades later, no one has been questioned or indicted for Odeh’s murder. “Despite 28 years of knocking on the doors of justice, we have not found it yet. Alex was a very peaceful man,” says Albert Mokhiber, former president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “He was known as an activist, in not just the Arab-American movement and Palestinian issues, but civil rights in general.” We also speak to attorney Abdeen Jabara who helped found the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Rep. John Conyers of Michigan....."
"The FBI and Justice Department are being urged to renew its investigation into one of the most shocking political murders in recent U.S. history. Twenty-eight years ago, on October 11, 1985, a prominent Palestinian-American leader named Alex Odeh was killed by a powerful pipe bomb planted at the Santa Ana, California, offices of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, where Odeh worked as the group’s western regional director. The FBI quickly named the militant Jewish Defense League or JDL as a focus of its investigations. But decades later, no one has been questioned or indicted for Odeh’s murder. “Despite 28 years of knocking on the doors of justice, we have not found it yet. Alex was a very peaceful man,” says Albert Mokhiber, former president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “He was known as an activist, in not just the Arab-American movement and Palestinian issues, but civil rights in general.” We also speak to attorney Abdeen Jabara who helped found the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Rep. John Conyers of Michigan....."
Arab-American Attorney Abdeen Jabara: I Was Spied on by the National Security Agency 40 Years Ago
Democracy Now!
"As more revelations come to light about the National Security Agency, we speak to civil-right attorney Abdeen Jabara, co-founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He was involved in a groundbreaking court case in the 1970s that forced the NSA to acknowledge it had been spying on him since 1967. At the time of the spying, Jabara was a lawyer in Detroit representing Arab-American clients and people being targeted by the FBI. The disclosure was the first time the NSA admitted it had spied on an American......"
"As more revelations come to light about the National Security Agency, we speak to civil-right attorney Abdeen Jabara, co-founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He was involved in a groundbreaking court case in the 1970s that forced the NSA to acknowledge it had been spying on him since 1967. At the time of the spying, Jabara was a lawyer in Detroit representing Arab-American clients and people being targeted by the FBI. The disclosure was the first time the NSA admitted it had spied on an American......"
Current Al-Jazeera (Arabic) Online Poll
Do you support Iran's right to make a nuclear weapon?
The vote is split almost evenly, with over 800 responding so far, 52% said yes.
Al-Jazeera Video: مستقبل الانقلاب العسكري في مصر
"تناولت حلقة الأربعاء 16/10/2013 من برنامج "بلا حدود" مستقبل وفرص الحكم العسكري بمصر في ظل تواصل المظاهرات المعارضة له. واستضافت الحلقة محرر شؤون الشرق الأوسط بصحيفة ذي غارديان البريطانية ديفد هيرست.
تقديم: أحمد منصور
الضيف: ديفد هيرست
"
تقديم: أحمد منصور
الضيف: ديفد هيرست
"
Egypt: End deplorable detention and deportation of refugees from Syria
Following the deaths in recent weeks of refugees and asylum-seekers crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa, a short report published by Amnesty International today, ‘We cannot live here any more’: Refugees from Syria in Egypt, throws a spotlight on the tragic consequences of Egypt’s hardline stance towards refugees from Syria.
More and more refugees are risking their lives to make the treacherous journey by sea to Europe – often paying smugglers up to US $3,500 each to make the trip.
“The Egyptian authorities have a duty to provide protection to anyone who has fled the conflict in Syria and is seeking safe refuge in their country. At present Egypt is failing abysmally to meet its international obligations to protect even the most vulnerable refugees,” said Sherif Elsayed Ali, Amnesty International’s Head of Refugee and Migrants’ Rights.
“Instead of offering vital help and support to refugees from Syria the Egyptian authorities are arresting and deporting them, flouting human rights standards. Most refugees lost their homes and livelihoods when they fled Syria. Failing to help and protect them is a stain on the reputation of Egypt and could seriously damage its image as a key stakeholder in the region.”
Hundreds of refugees who fled Syria, including scores of children, many of them without their parents, face ongoing detention in poor conditions or deportation – in some cases separating family members. Amnesty International found two one-year-old twins among the refugees being indefinitely detained.
Several refugees told the organization that they felt compelled to leave Egypt due to the hostile conditions they face in the country.
The Egyptian navy has intercepted around 13 boats carrying refugees from Syria in their attempt to reach Europe. According to the latest figures from the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, 946 people have been arrested by the Egyptian authorities while attempting the crossing and 724 – women, children and men – remain in detention.
In most cases, once arrested people are kept in continued detention under orders of Egypt’s National Security agency, even after the public prosecution has ordered their release....."
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Egyptian coup leaders hire US lobbyist with ties to Israel
The group's managing director, Arik Ben-Zvi, is an Israeli citizen who served in the Israeli army and consulted on Israel's elections"In response to the Obama Administration's announcement last week that it will be restructuring US military aid to Egypt in light of the ongoing military crackdown, officials in Cairo have hired a well-known lobby group to improve the image of Egypt's coup, according to a US newspaper.
The Hill, a political newspaper based in Washington DC, has revealed that documents filed with the US Justice Department on Friday confirm that Egypt's interim authorities are employing the Glover Park Group to "provide public diplomacy, strategic communications counsel and government relations services" for Egypt's post-coup government.
The records filed indicate that the firm's work for Egypt "will include communications associated with the Government's implementation of its Road Map to build the institutions of an inclusive democratic state through parliamentary and presidential elections."
The Glover Park Group is no stranger to Israel. The group's managing director, Arik Ben-Zvi, is an Israeli citizen who served in the Israeli army and consulted on Israel's elections. In addition, one senior executive previously served as the National Deputy Political Director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, also known as AIPAC, the most powerful arm of the Israel Lobby in the US, while another senior executive served in its legislative department.
The newspaper describes the Glover Park Group as one of Washington's most experienced lobbyists when it comes to representing foreign governments and politicians.
The interim Egyptian government's "recent violent crackdown on its opponents" has led the United States to suspend some of its foreign aid to Egypt, "including proposed sales of F-16 fighter jets, M1 Abrams tanks and Apache attack helicopters as well as about $260 million in cash assistance," according to the newspaper
U.S. Eases Rules on Exporting Military Technology to Secure Role as World’s Leading Arms Dealer
Democracy Now!
"In a boon for military contractors, the United States is relaxing controls on military exports, allowing some U.S.-made military parts to flow to nearly any country in the world with little oversight. ProPublica reports that beginning this week, thousands of parts for military aircraft can be sent freely around the world, even to some countries currently under U.N. arms embargoes. Previously, military firms had to register with the State Department and obtain a license for each export deal. That allowed U.S. officials to screen for issues including possible human rights violations. But now, tens of thousands of items are shifting to the Commerce Department, where they fall under looser controls. The changes were heavily lobbied for by military firms including Lockheed Martin, Textron and Honeywell. “The whole globe, basically, is going to get an easier deal in terms of getting access to U.S. military technology without very many questions asked,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. The United States already heavily dominates arms exports market: In 2011, the U.S. concluded $66 billion in arms sales agreements — which accounts for nearly 80 percent of the global market....."
"In a boon for military contractors, the United States is relaxing controls on military exports, allowing some U.S.-made military parts to flow to nearly any country in the world with little oversight. ProPublica reports that beginning this week, thousands of parts for military aircraft can be sent freely around the world, even to some countries currently under U.N. arms embargoes. Previously, military firms had to register with the State Department and obtain a license for each export deal. That allowed U.S. officials to screen for issues including possible human rights violations. But now, tens of thousands of items are shifting to the Commerce Department, where they fall under looser controls. The changes were heavily lobbied for by military firms including Lockheed Martin, Textron and Honeywell. “The whole globe, basically, is going to get an easier deal in terms of getting access to U.S. military technology without very many questions asked,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. The United States already heavily dominates arms exports market: In 2011, the U.S. concluded $66 billion in arms sales agreements — which accounts for nearly 80 percent of the global market....."
‘I am Israeli’
Israel will not recognize an Israeli nationality while it seeks to maintain Jewishness at all costs
By Jonathan Cook
"Israel is almost certainly the only country that deceives the global community every time one of its citizens crosses an international border. It does so because the passports it issues contain a fiction.
When a border official opens an Israeli passport for inspection, he or she sees the passport holder’s nationality stated as “Israeli.” And yet inside Israel, no state official, government agency or court recognizes the existence of an “Israeli” national.
This month the highest court in the land, Israel’s Supreme Court, explicitly affirmed that it could not uphold an Israeli nationality. Instead, the judges ruled, citizenship and nationality in Israel should be considered entirely separate categories, as they have been since Israel’s founding in 1948. All Israelis have Israeli citizenship, but none enjoys Israeli nationality.
This fiction of Israeli nationality, contained in Israeli passports and presented to the international community, is not simply a piece of legal eccentricity on Israel’s part. It is the keystone of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state – and much depends on it.
From this simple deception, Israel has been able to gerrymander its population by excluding Palestinian refugees from their land and homes while allowing millions of Jews to immigrate. And the same deception has served to veil a system of segregation in legal rights – a form of apartheid – between Israeli Jews and the country’s Palestinian minority, who comprise a fifth of the total population......"
By Jonathan Cook
"Israel is almost certainly the only country that deceives the global community every time one of its citizens crosses an international border. It does so because the passports it issues contain a fiction.
When a border official opens an Israeli passport for inspection, he or she sees the passport holder’s nationality stated as “Israeli.” And yet inside Israel, no state official, government agency or court recognizes the existence of an “Israeli” national.
This month the highest court in the land, Israel’s Supreme Court, explicitly affirmed that it could not uphold an Israeli nationality. Instead, the judges ruled, citizenship and nationality in Israel should be considered entirely separate categories, as they have been since Israel’s founding in 1948. All Israelis have Israeli citizenship, but none enjoys Israeli nationality.
This fiction of Israeli nationality, contained in Israeli passports and presented to the international community, is not simply a piece of legal eccentricity on Israel’s part. It is the keystone of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state – and much depends on it.
From this simple deception, Israel has been able to gerrymander its population by excluding Palestinian refugees from their land and homes while allowing millions of Jews to immigrate. And the same deception has served to veil a system of segregation in legal rights – a form of apartheid – between Israeli Jews and the country’s Palestinian minority, who comprise a fifth of the total population......"
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Glenn Greenwald Leaving The Guardian For 'Momentous' New Venture
"Glenn Greenwald is leaving the Guardian for a new, as-yet-undescribed website, BuzzFeed reported Tuesday.
Greenwald did not specify what his new project would look like, describing it only as a "momentous new venture" and a "once-in-a-career-dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline." He said that the site would be a general-interest outlet, that he would be responsible for its journalism output, and that it had substantial money behind it.
Speaking to the Washington Post's Erik Wemple, Greenwald said the site would have branches in New York, Washington and San Francisco, and that it was being funded by a "particular backer."
"It would be impossible for any journalist, let alone me, to decline this opportunity," he added.
Greenwald had been with the Guardian for just over a year, during which he led the paper in its reporting of Edward Snowden's NSA leaks and saw his own public profile reach new levels of fame and notoriety.
Greenwald was a blogger with Salon and an independent writer before his move to the Guardian. Before that, he was a constitutional lawyer....."
Greenwald did not specify what his new project would look like, describing it only as a "momentous new venture" and a "once-in-a-career-dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline." He said that the site would be a general-interest outlet, that he would be responsible for its journalism output, and that it had substantial money behind it.
Speaking to the Washington Post's Erik Wemple, Greenwald said the site would have branches in New York, Washington and San Francisco, and that it was being funded by a "particular backer."
"It would be impossible for any journalist, let alone me, to decline this opportunity," he added.
Greenwald had been with the Guardian for just over a year, during which he led the paper in its reporting of Edward Snowden's NSA leaks and saw his own public profile reach new levels of fame and notoriety.
Greenwald was a blogger with Salon and an independent writer before his move to the Guardian. Before that, he was a constitutional lawyer....."
Western PR firms bid for Bahrain contract
| The 'acceptable' face of repression |
By Brian Whitaker
"Seven public relations firms – mostly British or American – are vying to win a contract from Bahrain's repressive government.
Western PR companies have often been criticised in the past
for taking up lucrative assignments aimed at polishing the kingdom's tarnished
image. In Bahrain itself, they have also been denounced as "PR
mercenaries" that charge hefty fees while failing to deliver positive
results.
Bidders for the latest contract were named
last week by the Bahrain Tender Board. They are:
Gulf Hill & Knowlton
Bell Pottinger Bahrain
Portland PR Ltd
Consulum Bahrain
Media Consult.
Weber Shandwick
Citigate Dewe Rogerson
Bahrain's government has not published details of the contract
apart from saying that it involves PR services for the Economic Development
Board (EDB). Bahrain Watch, the advocacy group that highlighted the bids in a
blog post yesterday, says the EDB is "a governmental body responsible for
attracting international investment to Bahrain, and re-branding the country as
'business-friendly'."
Three of the bidding companies – Bell Pottinger,
Hill &
Knowlton and Weber
Shandwick – have previously done PR work for Bahrain.
Another of the bidders, Consulum, is a newer company
set up by former Bell Pottinger employees based in the Gulf, according to
Bahrain Watch. It has offices in London, Bahrain and Dubai and describes itself as "an international strategic
communications consultancy that uses an in-depth understanding of public,
commercial and political drivers to provide insightful strategic counsel and
meet complex communications challenges". It claims to deliver "sophisticated
communications programmes that shape awareness, guide opinion and enhance
understanding on a national, regional and international basis".
Citigate Dewe Rogerson is a London-based firm which boasts of
providing "seamless communication consultancy across the world’s business
centres". It recently advised the British government on PR for the privatisation
of Royal Mail.
Portland PR Ltd is part of Portland Communications, a
British firm founded by Tim
Allan, a former adviser to Tony Blair. Portland's website says:
"Our Leadership Team has 40 years experience on Fleet Street and 35 years in Downing Street, as well as experience on The Hill. They know how Government, the media and business influence each other. And they know how successful campaigns work – because they have been there."
Last year Portland was accused of "improving" the Wikipedia
entries for a number of its clients. This included deleting
a reference to "Wife Beater" – the popular nickname in Britain for
Stella Artois lager.
Stella Artois lager.
Finally, there is a bidder listed as "Media Consult".
This may not be its full name and its identity at present is unclear.
For more background on western PR firms and Bahrain, here are
some previous blog posts:
-
Bahrain's failed charm offensive (8 January 2013)
-
Bahrain: a busy time for Qorvis (29 February 2012)
-
Just too much (22 December 2011)
-
Qorvis and Bahrain (10 December 2011)
-
Bahrain: more rubbish from Huffington (23 October 2011)
-
Bahrain's PR offensive continues (9 October 2011)
-
Bahrain's latest PR stunt (30 September 2011)
-
Bahrain election spin (27 September 2011)
-
Spinning Bahrain, the Qorvis way (11 September 2011)
From Azmi Bishara's Facebook Page
وردتني رسالة في العيد،
صديقي العزيز،
كل عام وأنتم بخير
أنا بخير، حالي أفضل من الآخرين. سمعت من بعيد أن منزلي قد تهدم. لكننا لم نواجه الجوع، ولم نعش في مخيمات الذل بعد، أبنائي أحياء، وبناتي لم تغتصبن، وهذا أفضل من حال كثيرين. نعيش في هذا المكان وحدنا سوية. وأحيانا نكون سوية وحدنا. ولكي نواصل العيش غالبا ما تزورنا النسبية. لكن حكم العادة لم يزرنا بعد.
أرى الدمار وأسمع الثرثرة. وفي كل مساء أخرج غلى ...الشرفة فأرى الأفق مخضّبا بالدماء.
قبل يومين حملت الرياح إلينا رعب أطفال أمسكوا عن البكاء من شدة الخوف، وما لبث أن تغلب الخوف على الخوف، وردد الفضاء انفجار البكاء من جديد.
حملت الرياح صدى عواء كائنات نصفها الأسفل آدمي، ونصفها الأعلى ذئبي، تعدو وهي تطلق النار، وتدوس على الضحايا.
وحملت الرياح رمالا، وغبارا، وابتسامات صفراء من أروقة الأمم.
حملت رياح ضحك ضباع تنطق بلغة البشر، وتضحك دون أن تتوقف عن الكلام، ترغي أن القتل افتراء، وانه في أفضل الحالات وجهة نظر، وأن الشاهد هو الضحية، والضحية ماتت. رواية القاتل ورواية القتيل وجهتا نظر. ضباع تستهتر بآلامنا ومآسينا، تزعم أن الاستعباد ليس سببا للثورة، وتعيّر الضحايا بأن الاستعباد على كل حال كان أفضل لهم من الموت؛ وتحمّل المسؤولية لمن أدخل أفكارا مثل الحرية والكرامة في عقول هؤلاء. الحرية مؤامرة، ومقاومة الظلم خيانة.
أنا مثلك وقفت ضد العدوان الأميركي على العراق، وضد العدوان الإسرائيلي على لبنان وغزة، ووقفت مع المقاومة بالفعل والقول. ومثلك لم اتفق مع جزء من المعارضة في بلادي حين راهن على التدخل الأميركي في العراق. ولكني حين وقفت مع جيل أبنائنا المنتصب القامة في وجه الاستبداد والإذلال،فلنقاوم الظلم في بلادنا، اتهمنا بأننا ضد المقاومة. المقاومة الوحيدة في نظر النظام وحلفائه هي المقاومة هكذا وحدها بدون مضاف إليه، أو مفعولا به. لقد أصبحت المقاومة لقبا. واللقب في بلادنا قد لا يمت بصلة لصاحبه. وقد يمنح لقاتل أو مغتصب، وحتى لمن وقف مع إسرائيل، طالما يقف الآن معنا. أما مقاومة أي شيء مثل مقاومة الظلم، مقاومة الفساد، مقاومة الذل، وحتى مقاومة الاحتلال، فكلها أنواع من الخيانة إذا أضرت بنظام الاستعباد والجريمة.
لم تتدخل أميركا وعقدت مع النظام صفقات، ولكم يتدخل ما يسمى "المجتمع الدولي". والتدخل المنظم الوحيد في بلادي هو تدخل حلفاء النظام. والتدخل لصالح الثورة "فزعات" لا نعرف لها أول من آخر، أفراد متعددو الدوافع، لا نعرف عن دوافعهم الكثير، ولا يعرفون عنا الكثير، يحاربون أعداءنا ويحاربونا في الوقت ذاته. أعرف أنهم لم يأتوا من أجلنا. وأنا مثلك أجد نفسي مع أطراف عربية، كانت وما زالت خصوما، لم افكر يوما أني سوف أكون معها على الجانب نفسه من المتراس، أطراف لم تربح في حياتها معركة واحدة.
ضباع كلامية ضاحكة تتابع بحماس مشاهد القصف والقتل، تدير ظهرها إلى الكامير وتحيي القتلة وتوصيهم "لا تترددوا في فعل شيء! ففي الحرب كما في الحرب"، ثم توجه كلامها إلى الكامير وتنكر القتل وتتهم الضحايا بأنهم قتلوا أطفالهم وانتحروا. وضباع كلامية أخرى تزني بأقلام مسروقة.
وألمس يا صديقي الطغيان في نفوس الضحايا. انتصرنا على النظام القائم فتحول إلى إمارة حرب، وأنتصر هو علينا فصرنا أمراء حرب. أمراء حرب بيننا يرددون صدى أمير الحرب القاتل القابع في العاصمة. كان في حلمنا حقدٌ مشروعٌ على الظلم ، أتوا بكوابيسهم على الحلم، وأبقوا من الحلم الحقدَ. هل فقدنا الأفق، هل أضعنا المدى؟
النظام يقصف مدننا وقرنا بشكل منهجي، بكل ترسانة الأسلحة التي يمكن تخيلها. ومعنا ترسانة من فوضى الشجاعة والجرأة والإقدام والحقد والكره والجبن والانتهازية والنرجسية والتفاني، والفوضى مرة أخرى... ومعنا أهلنا.
هل قدم شعب هذا الكم والكيف من التضحيات من أجل حريته. هل قرأت عن شجاعة مثل شجاعة شعبي، هل سمعت بمثلها؟ إذا كان شعبي لا يستحق الحرية والكرامة فما من شعب يستحقها. فهل سوف يودي أسوأ من فينا وما فينا بكل الشهامة والبطولات، هل سوف تذهب سدى؟ لست أبحث عن جواب، ففي المرة الأخيرة أجبتني أنك قلت ما عندك. ولكني أخاطب نفسي.
اشتاق لبلدي الذي تغير وأخشى أن لا يعرفني، ولكن هل سوف أرى البلد؟
ومرة أخرى كل عام وأنت بخير
وردتني رسالة في العيد،
صديقي العزيز،
كل عام وأنتم بخير
أنا بخير، حالي أفضل من الآخرين. سمعت من بعيد أن منزلي قد تهدم. لكننا لم نواجه الجوع، ولم نعش في مخيمات الذل بعد، أبنائي أحياء، وبناتي لم تغتصبن، وهذا أفضل من حال كثيرين. نعيش في هذا المكان وحدنا سوية. وأحيانا نكون سوية وحدنا. ولكي نواصل العيش غالبا ما تزورنا النسبية. لكن حكم العادة لم يزرنا بعد.
أرى الدمار وأسمع الثرثرة. وفي كل مساء أخرج غلى ...الشرفة فأرى الأفق مخضّبا بالدماء.
قبل يومين حملت الرياح إلينا رعب أطفال أمسكوا عن البكاء من شدة الخوف، وما لبث أن تغلب الخوف على الخوف، وردد الفضاء انفجار البكاء من جديد.
حملت الرياح صدى عواء كائنات نصفها الأسفل آدمي، ونصفها الأعلى ذئبي، تعدو وهي تطلق النار، وتدوس على الضحايا.
وحملت الرياح رمالا، وغبارا، وابتسامات صفراء من أروقة الأمم.
حملت رياح ضحك ضباع تنطق بلغة البشر، وتضحك دون أن تتوقف عن الكلام، ترغي أن القتل افتراء، وانه في أفضل الحالات وجهة نظر، وأن الشاهد هو الضحية، والضحية ماتت. رواية القاتل ورواية القتيل وجهتا نظر. ضباع تستهتر بآلامنا ومآسينا، تزعم أن الاستعباد ليس سببا للثورة، وتعيّر الضحايا بأن الاستعباد على كل حال كان أفضل لهم من الموت؛ وتحمّل المسؤولية لمن أدخل أفكارا مثل الحرية والكرامة في عقول هؤلاء. الحرية مؤامرة، ومقاومة الظلم خيانة.
أنا مثلك وقفت ضد العدوان الأميركي على العراق، وضد العدوان الإسرائيلي على لبنان وغزة، ووقفت مع المقاومة بالفعل والقول. ومثلك لم اتفق مع جزء من المعارضة في بلادي حين راهن على التدخل الأميركي في العراق. ولكني حين وقفت مع جيل أبنائنا المنتصب القامة في وجه الاستبداد والإذلال،فلنقاوم الظلم في بلادنا، اتهمنا بأننا ضد المقاومة. المقاومة الوحيدة في نظر النظام وحلفائه هي المقاومة هكذا وحدها بدون مضاف إليه، أو مفعولا به. لقد أصبحت المقاومة لقبا. واللقب في بلادنا قد لا يمت بصلة لصاحبه. وقد يمنح لقاتل أو مغتصب، وحتى لمن وقف مع إسرائيل، طالما يقف الآن معنا. أما مقاومة أي شيء مثل مقاومة الظلم، مقاومة الفساد، مقاومة الذل، وحتى مقاومة الاحتلال، فكلها أنواع من الخيانة إذا أضرت بنظام الاستعباد والجريمة.
لم تتدخل أميركا وعقدت مع النظام صفقات، ولكم يتدخل ما يسمى "المجتمع الدولي". والتدخل المنظم الوحيد في بلادي هو تدخل حلفاء النظام. والتدخل لصالح الثورة "فزعات" لا نعرف لها أول من آخر، أفراد متعددو الدوافع، لا نعرف عن دوافعهم الكثير، ولا يعرفون عنا الكثير، يحاربون أعداءنا ويحاربونا في الوقت ذاته. أعرف أنهم لم يأتوا من أجلنا. وأنا مثلك أجد نفسي مع أطراف عربية، كانت وما زالت خصوما، لم افكر يوما أني سوف أكون معها على الجانب نفسه من المتراس، أطراف لم تربح في حياتها معركة واحدة.
ضباع كلامية ضاحكة تتابع بحماس مشاهد القصف والقتل، تدير ظهرها إلى الكامير وتحيي القتلة وتوصيهم "لا تترددوا في فعل شيء! ففي الحرب كما في الحرب"، ثم توجه كلامها إلى الكامير وتنكر القتل وتتهم الضحايا بأنهم قتلوا أطفالهم وانتحروا. وضباع كلامية أخرى تزني بأقلام مسروقة.
وألمس يا صديقي الطغيان في نفوس الضحايا. انتصرنا على النظام القائم فتحول إلى إمارة حرب، وأنتصر هو علينا فصرنا أمراء حرب. أمراء حرب بيننا يرددون صدى أمير الحرب القاتل القابع في العاصمة. كان في حلمنا حقدٌ مشروعٌ على الظلم ، أتوا بكوابيسهم على الحلم، وأبقوا من الحلم الحقدَ. هل فقدنا الأفق، هل أضعنا المدى؟
النظام يقصف مدننا وقرنا بشكل منهجي، بكل ترسانة الأسلحة التي يمكن تخيلها. ومعنا ترسانة من فوضى الشجاعة والجرأة والإقدام والحقد والكره والجبن والانتهازية والنرجسية والتفاني، والفوضى مرة أخرى... ومعنا أهلنا.
هل قدم شعب هذا الكم والكيف من التضحيات من أجل حريته. هل قرأت عن شجاعة مثل شجاعة شعبي، هل سمعت بمثلها؟ إذا كان شعبي لا يستحق الحرية والكرامة فما من شعب يستحقها. فهل سوف يودي أسوأ من فينا وما فينا بكل الشهامة والبطولات، هل سوف تذهب سدى؟ لست أبحث عن جواب، ففي المرة الأخيرة أجبتني أنك قلت ما عندك. ولكني أخاطب نفسي.
اشتاق لبلدي الذي تغير وأخشى أن لا يعرفني، ولكن هل سوف أرى البلد؟
ومرة أخرى كل عام وأنت بخير
"
Egypt: End of Hope
Battleground Cairo
by ANDRE VLTCHEK
CounterPunch
Cairo
"Instead of passion and hope, all there is left on the streets of Cairo is depressing defeatism, frustration and hate.
Once there were heads and hands raised high, and the Egyptian flags flew proudly in the wind; there were fiery speeches, dreams of social justice, of a brand new country with an enormous heart and a distinct place for every citizen. Once it all was not unlike what has been taking place all over Latin America for more than a decade.
But it now appears to be over, burned down and in ruins. These days it is hate that has replaced hope, and there is so much of it, so much hate, all over the capital and all over the country!
And it is not a healthy, constructive hate pointed at savage capitalism or imperialism. It is a depressing hate, a defeatist hate; a hate that Egyptians are now showing towards each other. There is hardly any ideology left, except in the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionary Organization, and very few other groups and movements that are still fighting for the essential values of the 2011 Arab Spring.
There is still a core, a skeleton of the “Movement of the 6th Of April” – the organization that stood at the vanguard of the Revolution. But even that suddenly appears to be too weak – not strong enough to halt this depressing reverse trend.
As I look down from the bridge at Bulak neighborhood, the citizens are engaged at finder-pointing and loud shouting. Men and women are insulting each other, and soon there are skirmishes and fistfights. This is some sort of local-level settling of scores between the supporters of The Muslim Brotherhood and the followers of the military – that very same military which overthrew the moderate but inept Islamic government in July 2013.
Soon I am spotted and several fists are raised towards me, fingers pointed. One minute later, stones are flying my way.
“Get into the car!” My Egyptian friend shouts at me. “Get inside! If even one person attacks you, the crowd will get here in no time and they will take you apart… They will kill you.”
“But why?” I wonder naively.
“These days they don’t need any reason”, he explains. “They hate foreigners. They hate each other. Don’t you see what is happening in my country?”
I see. And what I observe, I don’t like at all. The hope is over. What is left is a terrible hangover and a bad, dark mood.
But many rich urban dwellers are trying to convince each other that things will get better soon. The upper and upper-middle classes are openly supporting the military, not unlike in Chile, after the 9-11-1973 military coup’ d’état in which the pro-Western faction of the army led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the progressive government of Salvador Allende......."
by ANDRE VLTCHEK
CounterPunch
Cairo
"Instead of passion and hope, all there is left on the streets of Cairo is depressing defeatism, frustration and hate.
Once there were heads and hands raised high, and the Egyptian flags flew proudly in the wind; there were fiery speeches, dreams of social justice, of a brand new country with an enormous heart and a distinct place for every citizen. Once it all was not unlike what has been taking place all over Latin America for more than a decade.
But it now appears to be over, burned down and in ruins. These days it is hate that has replaced hope, and there is so much of it, so much hate, all over the capital and all over the country!
And it is not a healthy, constructive hate pointed at savage capitalism or imperialism. It is a depressing hate, a defeatist hate; a hate that Egyptians are now showing towards each other. There is hardly any ideology left, except in the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionary Organization, and very few other groups and movements that are still fighting for the essential values of the 2011 Arab Spring.
There is still a core, a skeleton of the “Movement of the 6th Of April” – the organization that stood at the vanguard of the Revolution. But even that suddenly appears to be too weak – not strong enough to halt this depressing reverse trend.
As I look down from the bridge at Bulak neighborhood, the citizens are engaged at finder-pointing and loud shouting. Men and women are insulting each other, and soon there are skirmishes and fistfights. This is some sort of local-level settling of scores between the supporters of The Muslim Brotherhood and the followers of the military – that very same military which overthrew the moderate but inept Islamic government in July 2013.
Soon I am spotted and several fists are raised towards me, fingers pointed. One minute later, stones are flying my way.
“Get into the car!” My Egyptian friend shouts at me. “Get inside! If even one person attacks you, the crowd will get here in no time and they will take you apart… They will kill you.”
“But why?” I wonder naively.
“These days they don’t need any reason”, he explains. “They hate foreigners. They hate each other. Don’t you see what is happening in my country?”
I see. And what I observe, I don’t like at all. The hope is over. What is left is a terrible hangover and a bad, dark mood.
But many rich urban dwellers are trying to convince each other that things will get better soon. The upper and upper-middle classes are openly supporting the military, not unlike in Chile, after the 9-11-1973 military coup’ d’état in which the pro-Western faction of the army led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the progressive government of Salvador Allende......."
Monday, October 14, 2013
استقبال العيد تحت الحصار
AN EXCELLENT EDITORIAL
رأي القدس
"انشغلت الفضائيات العربية ووكالات الانباء الاجنبية يوم امس ببث صور واشرطة عن استعدادات المسلمين للاحتفال اليوم بعيد الاضحى المبارك، من خلال شراء الاضاحي والحلويات والملابس الجديدة. وغابت عن هذا المشهد صور بثها ناشطون فلسطينيون للاجئين الفلسطينيين، وهم يعتصمون في مخيم اليرموك، ويرفعون يافطات تطالب بادخال الخبز وحليب الاطفال والادوية.
يعاني مخيم اليرموك من الحصار المحكم الذي يفرضه النظام السوري منذ عدة شهور، وقد بدأ الحصار منذ 26 كانون الاول (ديسمبر) 2012، بعد استهداف المخيم بغارات جوية، واشتد الحصار خلال الشهور الثلاثة الاخيرة، ما ادى لنفاد معظم المواد التموينية والادوية والوقود، وتقول مجموعة العمل من اجل فلسطينيي سورية، ان المواد الاساسية لاستمرار الحياة البشرية، وخاصة الخبز والدواء وحليب الاطفال لم تعد متوفرة للاجئين بالمخيمات الفلسطينية في سورية، اضافة الى انقطاع خدمات البنى التحتية عنها من ماء وكهرباء واتصالات.
بعد زيارة المبعوث الفلسطيني عباس زكي موفدا من الرئيس الفلسطيني محمود عباس الاسبوع الماضي لدمشق، ولقائه الرئيس السوري بشار الاسد، وتصريحاته بعد الزيارة المتعاطفة مع النظام، كان من المقرر خلال اليومين الماضيين ادخال قافلة مساعدات انسانية الى المخيم، الا ان ذلك لم يتم. وقبل زيارة عباس زكي، كانت منظمة التحرير ارسلت وفدا رباعيا، ضم عضو اللجنة التنفيذية احمد مجدلاني، وزكريا الاغا وبلال قاسم والعميد اسماعيل جبر، حاملا مبادرة لرفع الحصار عن المخيمات ووقف اقحام وزج مخيم اليرموك وسكانه بالصراع العسكري، في سورية والحفاظ على المخيمات بيئة آمنة تحتضن سكانها من فلسطينيين وسوريين، ولم تصل تلك المبادرة الى اي نتيجة.المأساة في مخيم اليرموك وصلت حد الاعلان من خلال منابر المساجد عن تحليل اكل لحم الكلاب والقطط، وهو ما يذكرنا بحصار المخيمات في لبنان، الذي بدأ في ايار (مايو) 1985 واستمر حتى اواسط عام 1988، حيث عانى السكان نقصا حادا في الاحتياجات بما في ذلك المياه.
مأساة المخيمات الفلسطينية في سورية لا تقف عند مخيم اليرموك، فالايام الماضية شهدت مقتل واصابة العشرات في مخيم درعا جنوب سورية.
ومن بين 510.500 لاجئ فلسطيني في سورية، اضطر 250 الفا الى النزوح من مخيماتهم الى اماكن اخرى في سورية، ونجح عشرات الآلاف بالهجرة من جديد. وفي حين يستطيع السوريون دخول تركيا بدون تأشيرات ويستطيعون دخول مخيمات اللاجئين السوريين في الاردن، الا ان الفلسطينيين محرومون من ذلك، ومن نجح منهم باللجوء الى لبنان ينضم الى مخيمات مكتظة تعاني اصلا من نقص كبير في البنى التحتية، وادنى المستلزمات الصحية والحياة الكريمة.
بعض اللاجئين الفلسطينيين نجح بالوصول الى مصر، وبسبب الاوضاع البيروقراطية وعدم وجود وكالة غوث وتشغيل اللاجئين الفلسطينيين (الاونروا) يحاول معظم الفارين الى مصر، البدء برحلة محفوفة بالمخاطر وعبر قوارب الموت الابحار الى اوروبا، وقد غرق الاسبوع الماضي 70 فلسطينيا في مياه المتوسط. ومن ينجح بالوصول لشواطئ اوروبا يبدأ معاناة محاولة الحصول على صفة لاجئ من جديد.
رغم الاسى الذي يثيره وضع المخيمات في سورية، فاننا لا ننسى ان سورية نفسها اصبحت بمثابة مخيمات فلسطينية، فكما عاش السوريون والفلسطينيون معا في مخيم اليرموك وغيره، كذلك يعانون اليوم معا من الحرمان والجوع، فالنظام الذي يرفض ادخال الاغاثة الى ابناء شعبه في مختلف انحاء سورية، ليس غريبا عليه ان يكون سجانا للفلسطينيين، كما سبق ان فعل في لبنان ايضا.
"
رأي القدس
"انشغلت الفضائيات العربية ووكالات الانباء الاجنبية يوم امس ببث صور واشرطة عن استعدادات المسلمين للاحتفال اليوم بعيد الاضحى المبارك، من خلال شراء الاضاحي والحلويات والملابس الجديدة. وغابت عن هذا المشهد صور بثها ناشطون فلسطينيون للاجئين الفلسطينيين، وهم يعتصمون في مخيم اليرموك، ويرفعون يافطات تطالب بادخال الخبز وحليب الاطفال والادوية.
يعاني مخيم اليرموك من الحصار المحكم الذي يفرضه النظام السوري منذ عدة شهور، وقد بدأ الحصار منذ 26 كانون الاول (ديسمبر) 2012، بعد استهداف المخيم بغارات جوية، واشتد الحصار خلال الشهور الثلاثة الاخيرة، ما ادى لنفاد معظم المواد التموينية والادوية والوقود، وتقول مجموعة العمل من اجل فلسطينيي سورية، ان المواد الاساسية لاستمرار الحياة البشرية، وخاصة الخبز والدواء وحليب الاطفال لم تعد متوفرة للاجئين بالمخيمات الفلسطينية في سورية، اضافة الى انقطاع خدمات البنى التحتية عنها من ماء وكهرباء واتصالات.
بعد زيارة المبعوث الفلسطيني عباس زكي موفدا من الرئيس الفلسطيني محمود عباس الاسبوع الماضي لدمشق، ولقائه الرئيس السوري بشار الاسد، وتصريحاته بعد الزيارة المتعاطفة مع النظام، كان من المقرر خلال اليومين الماضيين ادخال قافلة مساعدات انسانية الى المخيم، الا ان ذلك لم يتم. وقبل زيارة عباس زكي، كانت منظمة التحرير ارسلت وفدا رباعيا، ضم عضو اللجنة التنفيذية احمد مجدلاني، وزكريا الاغا وبلال قاسم والعميد اسماعيل جبر، حاملا مبادرة لرفع الحصار عن المخيمات ووقف اقحام وزج مخيم اليرموك وسكانه بالصراع العسكري، في سورية والحفاظ على المخيمات بيئة آمنة تحتضن سكانها من فلسطينيين وسوريين، ولم تصل تلك المبادرة الى اي نتيجة.المأساة في مخيم اليرموك وصلت حد الاعلان من خلال منابر المساجد عن تحليل اكل لحم الكلاب والقطط، وهو ما يذكرنا بحصار المخيمات في لبنان، الذي بدأ في ايار (مايو) 1985 واستمر حتى اواسط عام 1988، حيث عانى السكان نقصا حادا في الاحتياجات بما في ذلك المياه.
مأساة المخيمات الفلسطينية في سورية لا تقف عند مخيم اليرموك، فالايام الماضية شهدت مقتل واصابة العشرات في مخيم درعا جنوب سورية.
ومن بين 510.500 لاجئ فلسطيني في سورية، اضطر 250 الفا الى النزوح من مخيماتهم الى اماكن اخرى في سورية، ونجح عشرات الآلاف بالهجرة من جديد. وفي حين يستطيع السوريون دخول تركيا بدون تأشيرات ويستطيعون دخول مخيمات اللاجئين السوريين في الاردن، الا ان الفلسطينيين محرومون من ذلك، ومن نجح منهم باللجوء الى لبنان ينضم الى مخيمات مكتظة تعاني اصلا من نقص كبير في البنى التحتية، وادنى المستلزمات الصحية والحياة الكريمة.
بعض اللاجئين الفلسطينيين نجح بالوصول الى مصر، وبسبب الاوضاع البيروقراطية وعدم وجود وكالة غوث وتشغيل اللاجئين الفلسطينيين (الاونروا) يحاول معظم الفارين الى مصر، البدء برحلة محفوفة بالمخاطر وعبر قوارب الموت الابحار الى اوروبا، وقد غرق الاسبوع الماضي 70 فلسطينيا في مياه المتوسط. ومن ينجح بالوصول لشواطئ اوروبا يبدأ معاناة محاولة الحصول على صفة لاجئ من جديد.
رغم الاسى الذي يثيره وضع المخيمات في سورية، فاننا لا ننسى ان سورية نفسها اصبحت بمثابة مخيمات فلسطينية، فكما عاش السوريون والفلسطينيون معا في مخيم اليرموك وغيره، كذلك يعانون اليوم معا من الحرمان والجوع، فالنظام الذي يرفض ادخال الاغاثة الى ابناء شعبه في مختلف انحاء سورية، ليس غريبا عليه ان يكون سجانا للفلسطينيين، كما سبق ان فعل في لبنان ايضا.
"
Egypt: State-sanctioned pattern of excessive use of force by security forces
"Evidence gathered from eyewitnesses, health officials and wounded protesters suggests security forces used live ammunition to disperse crowds of mostly peaceful demonstrators on 6 October, said Amnesty International.
At least 49 people were killed and hundreds injured in Cairo alone, as security forces used excessive and unwarranted lethal force to disperse pro-Morsi protesters. According to eyewitnesses, in some instances, security forces stood by as men in civilian clothing armed with knives, swords or firearms attacked and clashed with demonstrators.
“The Egyptian security forces patently failed to prevent the loss of life. In a number of cases bystanders or non-violent protesters were caught up in the violence,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
“Although some pro-Morsi protesters threw rocks, burned tyres and used fireworks or other incendiaries against security forces and local residents, the security forces – once again -resorted to the use of lethal force when it was not strictly necessary. Excessive use of force seems to have become the ‘normal’ modus operandi of Egyptian security forces.”
Under international law and standards, security forces should refrain from the use of firearms unless there is an imminent threat of death or serious injury.
Amnesty International is calling for a full, impartial and independent investigation into the events on 6 October.
No members of the security forces were killed during the violence......"
Edward Snowden Speaks Out Against NSA "Dragnet Mass Surveillance"
Democracy Now!
"For the first time in months, the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has appeared on video speaking in Moscow. He warned about “dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under sort of an eye that sees everything even when it’s not needed.” Snowden’s remarks were made after four American whistleblowers traveled to Russia to give him the Integrity Award from the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence...."
"For the first time in months, the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has appeared on video speaking in Moscow. He warned about “dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under sort of an eye that sees everything even when it’s not needed.” Snowden’s remarks were made after four American whistleblowers traveled to Russia to give him the Integrity Award from the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence...."
The Folly of Empire
By Chris Hedges
"The final days of empire give ample employment and power to the feckless, the insane and the idiotic. These politicians and court propagandists, hired to be the public faces on the sinking ship, mask the real work of the crew, which is systematically robbing the passengers as the vessel goes down. The mandarins of power stand in the wheelhouse barking ridiculous orders and seeing how fast they can gun the engines. They fight like children over the ship’s wheel as the vessel heads full speed into a giant ice field. They wander the decks giving pompous speeches. They shout that the SS America is the greatest ship ever built. They insist that it has the most advanced technology and embodies the highest virtues. And then, with abrupt and unexpected fury, down we will go into the frigid waters......
Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.
It is more pleasant, I admit, to stand mesmerized in front of our electronic hallucinations. It is easier to check out intellectually. It is more gratifying to imbibe the hedonism and the sickness of the worship of the self and money. It is more comforting to chatter about celebrity gossip and ignore or dismiss what is reality.
Thomas Mann in “The Magic Mountain” and Joseph Roth in “Hotel Savoy” brilliantly chronicled this peculiar state of mind. In Roth’s hotel the first three floors house in luxury the bloated rich, the amoral politicians, the bankers and the business owners. The upper floors are crammed with people who struggle to pay their bills and who are steadily divested of their possessions until they are destitute and cast out. There is no political ideology among decayed ruling elites, despite choreographed debates and elaborate political theater. It is, as it always is at the end, one vast kleptocracy.
Just before World War II, a friend asked Roth, a Jewish intellectual who had fled Nazi Germany for Paris, “Why are you drinking so much?” Roth answered: “Do you think you are going to escape? You too are going to be wiped out.” "
"The final days of empire give ample employment and power to the feckless, the insane and the idiotic. These politicians and court propagandists, hired to be the public faces on the sinking ship, mask the real work of the crew, which is systematically robbing the passengers as the vessel goes down. The mandarins of power stand in the wheelhouse barking ridiculous orders and seeing how fast they can gun the engines. They fight like children over the ship’s wheel as the vessel heads full speed into a giant ice field. They wander the decks giving pompous speeches. They shout that the SS America is the greatest ship ever built. They insist that it has the most advanced technology and embodies the highest virtues. And then, with abrupt and unexpected fury, down we will go into the frigid waters......
Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.
It is more pleasant, I admit, to stand mesmerized in front of our electronic hallucinations. It is easier to check out intellectually. It is more gratifying to imbibe the hedonism and the sickness of the worship of the self and money. It is more comforting to chatter about celebrity gossip and ignore or dismiss what is reality.
Thomas Mann in “The Magic Mountain” and Joseph Roth in “Hotel Savoy” brilliantly chronicled this peculiar state of mind. In Roth’s hotel the first three floors house in luxury the bloated rich, the amoral politicians, the bankers and the business owners. The upper floors are crammed with people who struggle to pay their bills and who are steadily divested of their possessions until they are destitute and cast out. There is no political ideology among decayed ruling elites, despite choreographed debates and elaborate political theater. It is, as it always is at the end, one vast kleptocracy.
Just before World War II, a friend asked Roth, a Jewish intellectual who had fled Nazi Germany for Paris, “Why are you drinking so much?” Roth answered: “Do you think you are going to escape? You too are going to be wiped out.” "
The Desert of Israeli Democracy
by Max Blumenthal and Tom Engelhardt
October 14, 2013
".....
Only one problem: just about all the "Israeli" news here is focused on its future policy toward Iran, and remarkably little of it on the way Israel continues to eat up Palestinian lands and displace Palestinians on the West Bank and elsewhere, or the way in which Israeli control over so much of the West Bank is stunting the Palestinian economy. Fortunately, Max Blumenthal, who previously slipped inside the Republican Party and produced a bestselling book, has spent four years researching the on-the-ground realities of Israel. Today, he offers us a powerful, if grim, glimpse of just where Israel has been and where it’s heading, the sort of up-close-and-personal reporting you’re not likely to see in the American mainstream media (not, at least, since President Obama tried – and failed – to get the Israelis to stop building new settlements and other housing on Palestinian or contested lands). But think of today’s TomDispatch post as just a snapshot. The full picture can be found in Blumenthal’s new blockbuster of a book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. It’s an odyssey of a trip into a largely unknown Israel and a remarkable, as well as riveting, piece of reportage. ~ Tom
A Trip Through the Negev Desert Leads to the Heart of Israel’s National Nightmare
By Max Blumenthal
From the podium of the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seamlessly blended frightening details of Iranian evildoing with images of defenseless Jews "bludgeoned" and "left for dead" by anti-Semites in nineteenth century Europe. Aimed at U.S. and Iranian moves towards diplomacy and a war-weary American public, Netanyahu’s gloomy tirade threatened to cast him as a desperate, diminished figure. Though it was poorly received in the U.S., alienating even a few of his stalwart pro-Israel allies, his jeremiad served a greater purpose, deflecting attention from his country’s policies towards the group he scarcely mentioned: the Palestinians.
Back in November 1989, while serving as a junior minister in the Likud-led governing coalition of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a younger Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University, "Israel should have taken advantage of the suppression of demonstrations [at China’s Tiananmen Square], when the world’s attention was focused on what was happening in that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the Territories. However, to my regret, they did not support that policy that I proposed, and which I still propose should be implemented."
Now the country’s top official, Netanyahu has updated the smokescreen strategy. While the prime minister ranted against Iran in New York City and in a meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office, his government was preparing to implement the Prawer Plan, a blueprint for the expulsion of 40,000 indigenous Bedouin citizens of Israel from their ancestral Negev Desert communities that promised to "concentrate" them in state-run, reservation-style townships. Authored by Netanyahu’s planning policy chief, Ehud Prawer, and passed by a majority of the members of the mainstream Israeli political parties in the Knesset, the Prawer Plan is only one element of the government’s emerging program to dominate all space and the lives of all people between the river (the Jordan) and the sea (the Mediterranean).
Expulsions in the Desert
On September 9th, I visited Umm al-Hiran, a village that the state of Israel plans to wipe off the map. Located in the northern Negev Desert, well behind the Green Line (the 1949 armistice lines that are considered the starting point for any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations) and inside the part of Israel that will be legitimized under a U.S.-brokered two-state solution, the residents of Umm al-Hiran are mobilizing to resist their forced removal.
In the living room of a dusty but impeccably tidy cinderblock home on the outskirts of the village, Hajj al-Ahmed, an aging sheikh, described to a group of colleagues from the website Mondoweiss and me the experience of the 80,000 Bedouin living in what are classified as "unrecognized" villages. The products of continuous dispossession, many of these communities are surrounded by petrochemical waste dumps and have been transformed into cancer clusters, while state campaigns of aerial crop destruction and livestock eradication have decimated their sources of subsistence.
Although residents like al-Ahmed carry Israeli citizenship, they are unable to benefit from the public services that Jews in neighboring communities receive. The roads to unrecognized villages like Umm al-Hiran are lined with electric wires, but the Bedouins are barred from connecting to the public grid. Their homes and mosques have been designated "illegal" constructions and are routinely marked for demolition. And now, their very presence on their own land has been placed in jeopardy.
Under the Prawer Plan, the people of Umm al-Hiran will be among the 40,000 Bedouins forcibly relocated to American-Indian-reservation-style towns constructed by the Israeli government. As the fastest growing group among the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Bedouins have been designated as an existential threat to Israel’s Jewish majority. "It is not in Israel’s interest to have more Palestinians in the Negev," said Shai Hermesh, a former member of the Knesset and director of the government’s effort to engineer a "Zionist majority" in the southern desert.
According to the website of the Or Movement, a government-linked organization overseeing Jewish settlement in the Negev, residents of the unrecognized villages will be moved to towns constructed "to concentrate the Bedouin population." In turn, small Jews-only communities will be constructed on the remnants of the evicted Bedouin communities. They will be guaranteed handsome benefits from the Israeli government and lavish funding from private pro-Israel donors like the billionaire cosmetics fortune heir Ron Lauder. "The United States had its Manifest Destiny in the West," Lauder has declared. "For Israel, that land is the Negev."
When I met al-Ahmed, he described a group of 150 strangers who had suddenly appeared at the periphery of his village the previous day. From a hilltop, he said, they had surveyed the land and debated which parcels each of them would receive after the Prawer Plan was complete. Al-Ahmed called them "the Jews in the woods."
Several hundred meters east of Umm al-Hiran lies the Yattir Forest, a vast grove in the heart of the desert planted by the para-governmental Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1964. The JNF’s director at the time, Yosef Weitz, had headed the governmental Transfer Committee that orchestrated the final stages of Palestinian removal in 1948. For Weitz, planting forests served a dual strategic purpose: those like Yattir near the Green Line were to provide a demographic buffer between Jews and Arabs, while those planted atop destroyed Palestinian villages like Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Imwas would prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. As he wrote in 1949, once Israel’s Jewish majority had been established through mass expulsion, "The abandoned lands will never return to their absentee [Palestinian Arab] owners.”
As darkness came to the desert, I set out with my colleagues into the piney woods of Yattir. In a small car, we wound along its unlit roads until we reached a gate bristling with barbed wire. This was the settlement-style village of Hiran – "the Jews in the woods," as al-Ahmed had put it. We called out into the night until the gate was opened. Then we parked in the middle of a compound of trailer homes. Like a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement, the hard-bitten Imperial Russian territory once reserved for Jewish residency, the place exuded a sense of suspicion and siege.
A bearded religious nationalist stepped out of an aluminum-sided synagogue and met us at a group of picnic benches. His name was Af-Shalom and he was in his thirties. He was not, he said, permitted to speak until a representative from the Or Movement arrived. After a few uncomfortable minutes and half a cigarette, however, he began to hold forth. He sent his children, he told us, to school over the Green Line in the settlement of Susiya, just eight minutes away on an Israelis-only access road. He then added that the Bedouins were "illegals" occupying his God-given land and would continue to take it over unless they were forcibly removed. Just as Af-Shalom was hitting his stride, Moshe, a curt Or Movement representative who refused to give his last name, arrived to escort us out without a comment.
"The World’s Biggest Detention Center"
Only a few kilometers from Umm al-Hiran, in the southern Negev Desert and inside the Green Line, the state of Israel has initiated another ambitious project to "concentrate" an unwanted population. It is the Saharonim detention facility, a vast matrix of watchtowers, concrete blast walls, razor wire, and surveillance cameras that now comprise what the British Independent has described as "the world’s biggest detention center."
Originally constructed as a prison for Palestinians during the First Intifada, Saharonim was expanded to hold 8,000 Africans who had fled genocide and persecution. Currently, it is home to at least 1,800 African refugees, including women and children, who live in what the Israeli architectural group Bikrom has called "a huge concentration camp with harsh conditions."
Like the Bedouins of the Negev’s unrecognized villages, the 60,000 African migrants and asylum seekers who live in Israel have been identified as a demographic threat that must be purged from the body of the Jewish state. In a meeting with his cabinet ministers in May 2012, Netanyahu warned that their numbers could multiply tenfold "and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state." It was imperative "to physically remove the infiltrators," the prime minister declared. "We must crack down and mete out tougher punishments."
In short order, the Knesset amended the Infiltration Prevention Act it had passed in 1954 to prevent Palestinian refugees from ever reuniting with the families and property they were forced to leave behind in Israel. Under the new bill, non-Jewish Africans can be arrested and held without trial for as long as three years. (Israel’s Supreme Court has invalidated the amendment, but the government has made no moves to enforce the ruling, and may not do so.) The bill earmarked funding for the construction of Saharonim and a massive wall along the Israeli-Egyptian border. Arnon Sofer, a longtime Netanyahu advisor, also urged the construction of "sea walls" to guard against future "climate change refugees."
"We don’t belong to this region," Sofer explained.
In that single sentence, he distilled the logic of Israel’s system of ethnocracy. The maintenance of the Jewish state demands the engineering of a demographic majority of nonindigenous Jews and their dispersal across historic Palestine through methods of colonial settlement. State planners like Sofer refer to the process as "Judaization." Because indigenous Palestinians and foreign migrants are not Jews, the state of Israel has legally defined most of them as "infiltrators," mandating their removal and permanent relocation to various zones of exclusion – from refugee camps across the Arab world to walled-off West Bank Bantustans to the besieged Gaza Strip to state-constructed Bedouin reservations to the desert camp of Saharonim.
As long as the state of Israel holds fast to its demographic imperatives, the non-Jewish outclass must be "concentrated" to make room for exclusively Jewish settlement and economic development. This is not a particularly humane system, to be sure, but it is one that all within the spectrum of Zionist opinion, from the Kahanist right to the J Street left, necessarily support. Indeed, if there is any substantial disagreement between the two seemingly divergent camps, it is over the style of rhetoric they deploy in defense of Israel’s ethnocracy. As the revisionist Zionist ideologue Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his famous 1923 "Iron Wall" essay outlining the logic of what would become Israel’s deterrence strategy, "there are no meaningful differences between our ‘militarists’ and our ‘vegetarians.’"
During the Oslo era, the time of hope that prevailed in mid-1990’s Israel, it was the "dovish" Labor Party of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak that began surrounding the Gaza Strip with barricades and electrified fencing while drawing up plans for a wall separating the West Bank from "Israel proper." (That blueprint was implemented under the prime ministership of Ariel Sharon.)
"Us over here, them over there" was the slogan of Barak’s campaign for reelection in 1999, and of the Peace Now camp supporting a two-state solution at the time. Through the fulfillment of the Labor Party’s separationist policies, the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank have gradually disappeared from Israel’s prosperous coastal center, consolidating cities like Tel Aviv as meccas of European cosmopolitanism – "a villa in the jungle," as Barak said.
With the post-Oslo political transition that shattered Israel’s "peace camp," ascendant right-wing parties set out to finish the job that Labor had started. By 2009, when Israel elected the most hawkish government in its history, the country was still full of "infiltrators," the most visible of whom were those African migrants, deprived of work permits and increasingly forced to sleep in parks in south Tel Aviv. According to a report by the newspaper Haaretz on a brand new Israel Democracy Institute poll on Israeli attitudes, "Arabs no longer top the list of neighbors Israeli Jews would consider undesirable, replaced now by foreign workers. Almost 57% of Jewish respondents said that having foreign workers as neighbors would bother them."
Unrestricted by the center-left’s pretensions to tolerance, rightist members of the government launched a festival of unprecedented racist incitement. Interior Minister Eli Yishai of the Shas Party (replaced after the 2013 election), for example, falsely described African asylum seekers as infected with "a range of diseases" and lamented that they "think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man."
"Until I can deport them," he promised, "I’ll lock them up to make their lives miserable."
At a May 2012 anti-African rally in Tel Aviv, on a stage before more than 1,000 riled up demonstrators, Knesset member and former Israeli army spokesperson Miri Regev proclaimed, "The Sudanese are a cancer in our body!" Incited into a violent frenzy, hundreds of protesters then rampaged through south Tel Aviv, smashing the windows of African businesses and attacking any migrant they could find. "The people want the Africans to be burned!" they chanted.
As during other dark moments in history, eliminationist cries booming from an urban mob against a class of outcasts signaled a coming campaign of ethnic purification. And following the night of shattered glass, the cells of Saharonim continued to fill up.
Going South
Just as Western media consumers will find details about the Prawer Plan and the Saharonim camp hard to come by, casual visitors to the Negev Desert will find little evidence of the state’s more disturbing endeavors. Instead, highway signs will direct them to a little museum at Sde Boker, the humble kibbutz that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, called home.
In Ben Gurion’s memoirs, he fantasized about evacuating Tel Aviv and settling five million Jews in small outposts across the Negev, where they would be weaned off the rootless cosmopolitanism they inherited from diaspora life. Just as he resented the worldly attitude of Jews from Tel Aviv and New York City, Ben Gurion was repelled by the sight of the open desert, describing it as a "criminal waste" and "occupied territory." Indeed, from his standpoint, the Arabs were the occupiers. As early as 1937, he had plans for their removal, writing in a letter to his son Amos, "We must expel Arabs and take their places."
Ben Gurion’s house is an austere-looking, single-story structure, sparsely furnished and poorly lit. The separate, spartan bedrooms he and his wife slept in are impeccably preserved, as though they might return home at any time. Nearby is a compact, somewhat shabby museum commemorating his legacy in a series of exhibits that do not appear to have been updated for at least a decade.
The site is a crumbling remnant of a bygone era that the country has left in the dust. The enlightened public of Israel’s coastal center has turned its back on the desert, preferring instead to face toward the urbane capitals of Europe, while the rest of the country draws increasing energy from the religious nationalist fervor emanating from the hilltops of the occupied West Bank. In the Negev, perhaps all that endures of Ben Gurion’s legacy is the continuous expulsion of the Bedouins.
On a gravelly path leading towards his home, a series of plaques highlight tidbits of wisdom from that Israeli founding father. One quote stands out from the others. Engraved on a narrow slab of granite, it reads, "The State of Israel, to exist, must go south.""
October 14, 2013
".....
Only one problem: just about all the "Israeli" news here is focused on its future policy toward Iran, and remarkably little of it on the way Israel continues to eat up Palestinian lands and displace Palestinians on the West Bank and elsewhere, or the way in which Israeli control over so much of the West Bank is stunting the Palestinian economy. Fortunately, Max Blumenthal, who previously slipped inside the Republican Party and produced a bestselling book, has spent four years researching the on-the-ground realities of Israel. Today, he offers us a powerful, if grim, glimpse of just where Israel has been and where it’s heading, the sort of up-close-and-personal reporting you’re not likely to see in the American mainstream media (not, at least, since President Obama tried – and failed – to get the Israelis to stop building new settlements and other housing on Palestinian or contested lands). But think of today’s TomDispatch post as just a snapshot. The full picture can be found in Blumenthal’s new blockbuster of a book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. It’s an odyssey of a trip into a largely unknown Israel and a remarkable, as well as riveting, piece of reportage. ~ Tom
A Trip Through the Negev Desert Leads to the Heart of Israel’s National Nightmare
By Max Blumenthal
From the podium of the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seamlessly blended frightening details of Iranian evildoing with images of defenseless Jews "bludgeoned" and "left for dead" by anti-Semites in nineteenth century Europe. Aimed at U.S. and Iranian moves towards diplomacy and a war-weary American public, Netanyahu’s gloomy tirade threatened to cast him as a desperate, diminished figure. Though it was poorly received in the U.S., alienating even a few of his stalwart pro-Israel allies, his jeremiad served a greater purpose, deflecting attention from his country’s policies towards the group he scarcely mentioned: the Palestinians.
Back in November 1989, while serving as a junior minister in the Likud-led governing coalition of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a younger Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University, "Israel should have taken advantage of the suppression of demonstrations [at China’s Tiananmen Square], when the world’s attention was focused on what was happening in that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the Territories. However, to my regret, they did not support that policy that I proposed, and which I still propose should be implemented."
Now the country’s top official, Netanyahu has updated the smokescreen strategy. While the prime minister ranted against Iran in New York City and in a meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office, his government was preparing to implement the Prawer Plan, a blueprint for the expulsion of 40,000 indigenous Bedouin citizens of Israel from their ancestral Negev Desert communities that promised to "concentrate" them in state-run, reservation-style townships. Authored by Netanyahu’s planning policy chief, Ehud Prawer, and passed by a majority of the members of the mainstream Israeli political parties in the Knesset, the Prawer Plan is only one element of the government’s emerging program to dominate all space and the lives of all people between the river (the Jordan) and the sea (the Mediterranean).
Expulsions in the Desert
On September 9th, I visited Umm al-Hiran, a village that the state of Israel plans to wipe off the map. Located in the northern Negev Desert, well behind the Green Line (the 1949 armistice lines that are considered the starting point for any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations) and inside the part of Israel that will be legitimized under a U.S.-brokered two-state solution, the residents of Umm al-Hiran are mobilizing to resist their forced removal.
In the living room of a dusty but impeccably tidy cinderblock home on the outskirts of the village, Hajj al-Ahmed, an aging sheikh, described to a group of colleagues from the website Mondoweiss and me the experience of the 80,000 Bedouin living in what are classified as "unrecognized" villages. The products of continuous dispossession, many of these communities are surrounded by petrochemical waste dumps and have been transformed into cancer clusters, while state campaigns of aerial crop destruction and livestock eradication have decimated their sources of subsistence.
Although residents like al-Ahmed carry Israeli citizenship, they are unable to benefit from the public services that Jews in neighboring communities receive. The roads to unrecognized villages like Umm al-Hiran are lined with electric wires, but the Bedouins are barred from connecting to the public grid. Their homes and mosques have been designated "illegal" constructions and are routinely marked for demolition. And now, their very presence on their own land has been placed in jeopardy.
Under the Prawer Plan, the people of Umm al-Hiran will be among the 40,000 Bedouins forcibly relocated to American-Indian-reservation-style towns constructed by the Israeli government. As the fastest growing group among the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Bedouins have been designated as an existential threat to Israel’s Jewish majority. "It is not in Israel’s interest to have more Palestinians in the Negev," said Shai Hermesh, a former member of the Knesset and director of the government’s effort to engineer a "Zionist majority" in the southern desert.
According to the website of the Or Movement, a government-linked organization overseeing Jewish settlement in the Negev, residents of the unrecognized villages will be moved to towns constructed "to concentrate the Bedouin population." In turn, small Jews-only communities will be constructed on the remnants of the evicted Bedouin communities. They will be guaranteed handsome benefits from the Israeli government and lavish funding from private pro-Israel donors like the billionaire cosmetics fortune heir Ron Lauder. "The United States had its Manifest Destiny in the West," Lauder has declared. "For Israel, that land is the Negev."
When I met al-Ahmed, he described a group of 150 strangers who had suddenly appeared at the periphery of his village the previous day. From a hilltop, he said, they had surveyed the land and debated which parcels each of them would receive after the Prawer Plan was complete. Al-Ahmed called them "the Jews in the woods."
Several hundred meters east of Umm al-Hiran lies the Yattir Forest, a vast grove in the heart of the desert planted by the para-governmental Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1964. The JNF’s director at the time, Yosef Weitz, had headed the governmental Transfer Committee that orchestrated the final stages of Palestinian removal in 1948. For Weitz, planting forests served a dual strategic purpose: those like Yattir near the Green Line were to provide a demographic buffer between Jews and Arabs, while those planted atop destroyed Palestinian villages like Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Imwas would prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. As he wrote in 1949, once Israel’s Jewish majority had been established through mass expulsion, "The abandoned lands will never return to their absentee [Palestinian Arab] owners.”
As darkness came to the desert, I set out with my colleagues into the piney woods of Yattir. In a small car, we wound along its unlit roads until we reached a gate bristling with barbed wire. This was the settlement-style village of Hiran – "the Jews in the woods," as al-Ahmed had put it. We called out into the night until the gate was opened. Then we parked in the middle of a compound of trailer homes. Like a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement, the hard-bitten Imperial Russian territory once reserved for Jewish residency, the place exuded a sense of suspicion and siege.
A bearded religious nationalist stepped out of an aluminum-sided synagogue and met us at a group of picnic benches. His name was Af-Shalom and he was in his thirties. He was not, he said, permitted to speak until a representative from the Or Movement arrived. After a few uncomfortable minutes and half a cigarette, however, he began to hold forth. He sent his children, he told us, to school over the Green Line in the settlement of Susiya, just eight minutes away on an Israelis-only access road. He then added that the Bedouins were "illegals" occupying his God-given land and would continue to take it over unless they were forcibly removed. Just as Af-Shalom was hitting his stride, Moshe, a curt Or Movement representative who refused to give his last name, arrived to escort us out without a comment.
"The World’s Biggest Detention Center"
Only a few kilometers from Umm al-Hiran, in the southern Negev Desert and inside the Green Line, the state of Israel has initiated another ambitious project to "concentrate" an unwanted population. It is the Saharonim detention facility, a vast matrix of watchtowers, concrete blast walls, razor wire, and surveillance cameras that now comprise what the British Independent has described as "the world’s biggest detention center."
Originally constructed as a prison for Palestinians during the First Intifada, Saharonim was expanded to hold 8,000 Africans who had fled genocide and persecution. Currently, it is home to at least 1,800 African refugees, including women and children, who live in what the Israeli architectural group Bikrom has called "a huge concentration camp with harsh conditions."
Like the Bedouins of the Negev’s unrecognized villages, the 60,000 African migrants and asylum seekers who live in Israel have been identified as a demographic threat that must be purged from the body of the Jewish state. In a meeting with his cabinet ministers in May 2012, Netanyahu warned that their numbers could multiply tenfold "and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state." It was imperative "to physically remove the infiltrators," the prime minister declared. "We must crack down and mete out tougher punishments."
In short order, the Knesset amended the Infiltration Prevention Act it had passed in 1954 to prevent Palestinian refugees from ever reuniting with the families and property they were forced to leave behind in Israel. Under the new bill, non-Jewish Africans can be arrested and held without trial for as long as three years. (Israel’s Supreme Court has invalidated the amendment, but the government has made no moves to enforce the ruling, and may not do so.) The bill earmarked funding for the construction of Saharonim and a massive wall along the Israeli-Egyptian border. Arnon Sofer, a longtime Netanyahu advisor, also urged the construction of "sea walls" to guard against future "climate change refugees."
"We don’t belong to this region," Sofer explained.
In that single sentence, he distilled the logic of Israel’s system of ethnocracy. The maintenance of the Jewish state demands the engineering of a demographic majority of nonindigenous Jews and their dispersal across historic Palestine through methods of colonial settlement. State planners like Sofer refer to the process as "Judaization." Because indigenous Palestinians and foreign migrants are not Jews, the state of Israel has legally defined most of them as "infiltrators," mandating their removal and permanent relocation to various zones of exclusion – from refugee camps across the Arab world to walled-off West Bank Bantustans to the besieged Gaza Strip to state-constructed Bedouin reservations to the desert camp of Saharonim.
As long as the state of Israel holds fast to its demographic imperatives, the non-Jewish outclass must be "concentrated" to make room for exclusively Jewish settlement and economic development. This is not a particularly humane system, to be sure, but it is one that all within the spectrum of Zionist opinion, from the Kahanist right to the J Street left, necessarily support. Indeed, if there is any substantial disagreement between the two seemingly divergent camps, it is over the style of rhetoric they deploy in defense of Israel’s ethnocracy. As the revisionist Zionist ideologue Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his famous 1923 "Iron Wall" essay outlining the logic of what would become Israel’s deterrence strategy, "there are no meaningful differences between our ‘militarists’ and our ‘vegetarians.’"
During the Oslo era, the time of hope that prevailed in mid-1990’s Israel, it was the "dovish" Labor Party of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak that began surrounding the Gaza Strip with barricades and electrified fencing while drawing up plans for a wall separating the West Bank from "Israel proper." (That blueprint was implemented under the prime ministership of Ariel Sharon.)
"Us over here, them over there" was the slogan of Barak’s campaign for reelection in 1999, and of the Peace Now camp supporting a two-state solution at the time. Through the fulfillment of the Labor Party’s separationist policies, the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank have gradually disappeared from Israel’s prosperous coastal center, consolidating cities like Tel Aviv as meccas of European cosmopolitanism – "a villa in the jungle," as Barak said.
With the post-Oslo political transition that shattered Israel’s "peace camp," ascendant right-wing parties set out to finish the job that Labor had started. By 2009, when Israel elected the most hawkish government in its history, the country was still full of "infiltrators," the most visible of whom were those African migrants, deprived of work permits and increasingly forced to sleep in parks in south Tel Aviv. According to a report by the newspaper Haaretz on a brand new Israel Democracy Institute poll on Israeli attitudes, "Arabs no longer top the list of neighbors Israeli Jews would consider undesirable, replaced now by foreign workers. Almost 57% of Jewish respondents said that having foreign workers as neighbors would bother them."
Unrestricted by the center-left’s pretensions to tolerance, rightist members of the government launched a festival of unprecedented racist incitement. Interior Minister Eli Yishai of the Shas Party (replaced after the 2013 election), for example, falsely described African asylum seekers as infected with "a range of diseases" and lamented that they "think the country doesn’t belong to us, the white man."
"Until I can deport them," he promised, "I’ll lock them up to make their lives miserable."
At a May 2012 anti-African rally in Tel Aviv, on a stage before more than 1,000 riled up demonstrators, Knesset member and former Israeli army spokesperson Miri Regev proclaimed, "The Sudanese are a cancer in our body!" Incited into a violent frenzy, hundreds of protesters then rampaged through south Tel Aviv, smashing the windows of African businesses and attacking any migrant they could find. "The people want the Africans to be burned!" they chanted.
As during other dark moments in history, eliminationist cries booming from an urban mob against a class of outcasts signaled a coming campaign of ethnic purification. And following the night of shattered glass, the cells of Saharonim continued to fill up.
Going South
Just as Western media consumers will find details about the Prawer Plan and the Saharonim camp hard to come by, casual visitors to the Negev Desert will find little evidence of the state’s more disturbing endeavors. Instead, highway signs will direct them to a little museum at Sde Boker, the humble kibbutz that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, called home.
In Ben Gurion’s memoirs, he fantasized about evacuating Tel Aviv and settling five million Jews in small outposts across the Negev, where they would be weaned off the rootless cosmopolitanism they inherited from diaspora life. Just as he resented the worldly attitude of Jews from Tel Aviv and New York City, Ben Gurion was repelled by the sight of the open desert, describing it as a "criminal waste" and "occupied territory." Indeed, from his standpoint, the Arabs were the occupiers. As early as 1937, he had plans for their removal, writing in a letter to his son Amos, "We must expel Arabs and take their places."
Ben Gurion’s house is an austere-looking, single-story structure, sparsely furnished and poorly lit. The separate, spartan bedrooms he and his wife slept in are impeccably preserved, as though they might return home at any time. Nearby is a compact, somewhat shabby museum commemorating his legacy in a series of exhibits that do not appear to have been updated for at least a decade.
The site is a crumbling remnant of a bygone era that the country has left in the dust. The enlightened public of Israel’s coastal center has turned its back on the desert, preferring instead to face toward the urbane capitals of Europe, while the rest of the country draws increasing energy from the religious nationalist fervor emanating from the hilltops of the occupied West Bank. In the Negev, perhaps all that endures of Ben Gurion’s legacy is the continuous expulsion of the Bedouins.
On a gravelly path leading towards his home, a series of plaques highlight tidbits of wisdom from that Israeli founding father. One quote stands out from the others. Engraved on a narrow slab of granite, it reads, "The State of Israel, to exist, must go south.""
Some things are far scarier than a map
By Rami Khouri
Daily Star
"An article and map in The New York Times’ Sunday edition two weeks ago examined the possibility that current upheavals may cause some Arab states to break up into smaller units. Written by the veteran foreign correspondent Robin Wright, the article created lively discussion among Middle East-focused circles in the United States, and in the Middle East it sparked wild speculation that it evidenced a new plan by Western powers, Israelis and others of evil intent to further partition large Arab countries into many smaller, weaker ones. The title of the article, “How 5 Countries Could Become 14,” naturally fed such speculation, as did the immediate linkage in millions of Arab minds of how British and French colonial officials in 1916-1918 partitioned the former Ottoman lands of the Levant into a series of new countries called Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Israel, while their colonial handiwork had also created new entities that ultimately became independent countries such as Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and others.Wright’s article explored the possibility that Libya could fracture into three units, Iraq and Syria into five units (of Druze, Kurds, Alawites, Sunnis and Shiites), Saudi Arabia into five units, and Yemen into two units. Syria might trigger such fragmentation across the region in stressed multisectarian societies. She did not advocate this, but only speculated whether sectarian stresses and conflicts might reconfigure countries that were not designed by the will of their own people.
Most critics of the article and map were horrified by the possibility that foreign powers may once again be at work redrawing the map of the Middle East, reaffirming two of the greatest lived traumas that have long plagued the Arab world: the ability and willingness of external powers to meddle deeply and structurally in our domestic condition, and the total inability of vulnerable, helpless Arab societies to do anything about this.
I understand the harsh reactions by Arabs who fear another possible redrawing of our map by foreign hands, but I fear that this is not really the bad news of the day; the really bad news is the state of existing Arab countries, and how most of them have done such a terrible job of managing the societies that they inherited after 1920.
The horror map is not the one published in the NYT two weeks ago; it is the existing map and condition of the Arab countries that have spent nearly a century developing themselves and have so little to show for it.
Not a single credible Arab democracy. Not a single Arab land where the consent of the governed actually matters. Not a single Arab society where individual men and women are allowed to use all their God-given human faculties of creativity, ingenuity, individuality, debate, free expression, autonomous analysis and full productivity. Not a single Arab society that can claim to have achieved a reasonably sustainable level of social and economic development, let alone anything approaching equitable development or social justice. Not a single Arab country that has protected and preserved its natural resources, especially arable land and renewable fresh water resources. Not a single Arab country that has allowed its massive, ruling military-security-intelligence sectors to come under any sort of civilian oversight. Not a single Arab country that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on foreign arms and other imports and found itself able to ensure the security of its own land and people. And not a single Arab country that has developed an education system that harnesses and honors the immense wealth and power of millions of its own young Arab minds, rather than corralling those minds into intellectual sheep pens where the mind’s free choice is inoperative, and life only comprises following orders.
This perverse reality of Arab statehood and independence – not any possible future map – is the ugly reality that should anger us, even shame us. We have endured this for over four generations now, unsurprisingly bringing us to the point today where every single Arab country, without exception, experiences open revolt of its citizens for freedom, dignity and democracy of some sort, demands for real constitutional reforms, or expressions of grievances via social media by citizens in some wealthy oil-producing states who are afraid to speak out because they will go to jail for tweeting their most human sentiments or aspirations.
There is not much to be proud of in the modern era of Arab statehood, and much to fix and rebuild along more rational, humane lines. I don’t much care about lines on a map. I do care about the trajectories of our own national management experiences, which have been mostly disappointing, and in some cases profoundly derelict."
Daily Star
"An article and map in The New York Times’ Sunday edition two weeks ago examined the possibility that current upheavals may cause some Arab states to break up into smaller units. Written by the veteran foreign correspondent Robin Wright, the article created lively discussion among Middle East-focused circles in the United States, and in the Middle East it sparked wild speculation that it evidenced a new plan by Western powers, Israelis and others of evil intent to further partition large Arab countries into many smaller, weaker ones. The title of the article, “How 5 Countries Could Become 14,” naturally fed such speculation, as did the immediate linkage in millions of Arab minds of how British and French colonial officials in 1916-1918 partitioned the former Ottoman lands of the Levant into a series of new countries called Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Israel, while their colonial handiwork had also created new entities that ultimately became independent countries such as Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and others.Wright’s article explored the possibility that Libya could fracture into three units, Iraq and Syria into five units (of Druze, Kurds, Alawites, Sunnis and Shiites), Saudi Arabia into five units, and Yemen into two units. Syria might trigger such fragmentation across the region in stressed multisectarian societies. She did not advocate this, but only speculated whether sectarian stresses and conflicts might reconfigure countries that were not designed by the will of their own people.
Most critics of the article and map were horrified by the possibility that foreign powers may once again be at work redrawing the map of the Middle East, reaffirming two of the greatest lived traumas that have long plagued the Arab world: the ability and willingness of external powers to meddle deeply and structurally in our domestic condition, and the total inability of vulnerable, helpless Arab societies to do anything about this.
I understand the harsh reactions by Arabs who fear another possible redrawing of our map by foreign hands, but I fear that this is not really the bad news of the day; the really bad news is the state of existing Arab countries, and how most of them have done such a terrible job of managing the societies that they inherited after 1920.
The horror map is not the one published in the NYT two weeks ago; it is the existing map and condition of the Arab countries that have spent nearly a century developing themselves and have so little to show for it.
Not a single credible Arab democracy. Not a single Arab land where the consent of the governed actually matters. Not a single Arab society where individual men and women are allowed to use all their God-given human faculties of creativity, ingenuity, individuality, debate, free expression, autonomous analysis and full productivity. Not a single Arab society that can claim to have achieved a reasonably sustainable level of social and economic development, let alone anything approaching equitable development or social justice. Not a single Arab country that has protected and preserved its natural resources, especially arable land and renewable fresh water resources. Not a single Arab country that has allowed its massive, ruling military-security-intelligence sectors to come under any sort of civilian oversight. Not a single Arab country that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on foreign arms and other imports and found itself able to ensure the security of its own land and people. And not a single Arab country that has developed an education system that harnesses and honors the immense wealth and power of millions of its own young Arab minds, rather than corralling those minds into intellectual sheep pens where the mind’s free choice is inoperative, and life only comprises following orders.
This perverse reality of Arab statehood and independence – not any possible future map – is the ugly reality that should anger us, even shame us. We have endured this for over four generations now, unsurprisingly bringing us to the point today where every single Arab country, without exception, experiences open revolt of its citizens for freedom, dignity and democracy of some sort, demands for real constitutional reforms, or expressions of grievances via social media by citizens in some wealthy oil-producing states who are afraid to speak out because they will go to jail for tweeting their most human sentiments or aspirations.
There is not much to be proud of in the modern era of Arab statehood, and much to fix and rebuild along more rational, humane lines. I don’t much care about lines on a map. I do care about the trajectories of our own national management experiences, which have been mostly disappointing, and in some cases profoundly derelict."
تعذيب الفلسطينيين ليس أمنا
فهمي هويدي
حين تورط صاحبنا في تصريح دعا فيه الى فتح معبر رفح أمام فلسطينيي قطاع غزة، فإنه تعرض للاتهام والتجريح من قبل من وصفوا بأنهم "سياسيون" إذ اعتبر كلامه دليلا على الجهل بمقتضيات الأمن القومي لمصر.
وكان ذلك هو العنوان الذي نشرته جريدة الاهرام على ستة أعمدة يوم الخميس الماضي 10/10. وأصل الحكاية أن السيد حمدين صباحي مؤسس التيار الشعبي والقيادي في جبهة الإنقاذ كان قد التقى بعضا من ممثلي حركة حماس، يتقدمهم الدكتور موسى أبومرزوق نائب رئيس المكتب السياسي للحركة، وفي أعقاب اللقاء قال السيد صباحي كلامه الذي استفز أولئك النفر من السياسيين الذين كنت أتصور أنهم أدرى من غيرهم بحقائق الموضوع. وبالتالي توقعت منهم أن يكونوا أكثر رصانة ومسؤولية في التعبير عن آرائهم إزاءه.
لكن ما قرأناه منسوبا اليهم فيما نشرته "الاهرام" يكشف عن بعض أوجه الأزمة التي تعاني منها بعض عناصر النخبة المصرية الجديدة، التي تعاني من الفقر في الإدراك والمعرفة، ينطبق ذلك على قائمة طويلة ممن يكتسبون تلك الألقاب الكبيرة بمجرد ظهورهم على شاشات التليفزيون الذي يوزع عليهم تلك الألقاب بالمجان.
النقطة الجوهرية والتي اتكأ عليها أولئك السياسيون هي أن فتح معبر رفح يعد تهديدا للأمن القومي المصري، ولم يقل أحد لماذا يعد كذلك، ولا أورد واقعة واحدة تدعم ذلك الرأي، لكنهم اعتمدوا على الانطباع الشائع في أوساط عامة المصريين الذي يعتبر حركة حماس التي تدير القطاع تهديدا لأمن مصر، وأن الأنفاق التي حفرها الغزاويون للتغلب على الحصار وتوفير احتياجاتهم المعيشية ليست "سوى منافذ لتهريب الأسلحة والإرهابيين إلى داخل سيناء، لتحويلها إلى قاعدة دولية للإرهاب العالمي".
وهذه العبارة الأخيرة وردت على لسان أحد السياسيين الذين تحدثت إليهم جريدة الأهرام. واستطرد (صاحبنا بالمناسبة هو متحدث باسم حزب التجمع اليساري) قائلا إن مصر لن تشعر بأمان كامل على حدودها مع رفح الفلسطينية، إلا بعد سقوط حركة حماس من السلطة، لأنها امتداد لحركة الإخوان وفرع عن التنظيم الدولي، ورغم أن آخرين رددوا الفكرة ذاتها بدرجة أو أخرى، إلا أنني تعمدت اقتباس الفقرة التي وردت على لسان القيادى اليساري ــ الذي يكاد يتبني بالكامل وجهة النظر الإسرائيلية إزاء حركة حماس ــ لكى يدعونا ذلك إلى تصور المدى الذي يذهب إليه اليمين في مصر.
لقد دعوت أكثر من مرة في السابق إلى تفنيد التهديد من خلال تقصي حقائق الانطباع الشائع الذي يعتبر الأنفاق وحماس في القطاع بمثابة تهديد لأمن مصر، لأن ذلك الانطباع تحول بمضي الوقت إلى عقيدة استقرت في أوساط عامة الناس ونخبهم السياسيين والأمنية.
وهذه الحقيقة تشكلت بفعل حملات التعبئة الإعلامية، وروجت لها أطراف لها مصلحتها ليس فقط في تسميم العلاقة بين مصر وحماس، ولكن لها مصلحة أيضا في ضرب المقاومة وإحكام الحصار المفروض على فلسطينيي القطاع لتركيعهم وإذلالهم.
ولا يشك أحد في أن إسرائيل صاحبة المصلحة الأولى في ذلك، كما أننا لا نستطيع أن نتجاهل الدور الذي لعبته الأجهزة الأمنية التابعة للسلطة الفلسطينية في رام الله، التي لها ثأرها الذي لم تنسه إزاء حركة حماس، وكانت الوثائق التي نشرت مؤخرا قد كشفت النقاب عن الجهد الذي تبذله للوقيعة والدس بين حماس ومصر، حكومة وشعبا.
إن جهابذة السياسة الذين تحدثوا عن تهديد حماس والأنفاق لأمن مصر، انطلقوا من الاستسلام للأكاذيب الإعلامية التي لا دليل عليها، وأبدوا استعدادا مدهشا للقبول بإحكام الحصار حول القطاع، غير مبالين بمعاناة أو تدمير حياة أكثر من مليون ونصف المليون فلسطيني في غزة، الأمر الذي يمكن أن يؤدي في حال استمراره إلى المساس بأمن مصر الذي يدعي هؤلاء أنهم حريصون عليه.
في حين أن فتح معبر رفح وإخضاعه لإشراف السلطة المصرية كأي معبر حدودي آخر هو الحل الحقيقي الذي يحمي مصالح الطرفين المصري والفلسطيني.
اننا لا نستطيع أن نحمي أمن مصر بمضاعفة معاناة الفلسطينيين، ثم إن الأمن لن يقدر له أن يتوفر ويستقر إلا إذا تم التوصل إلى صيغة توفق بين المصالح المصرية والفلسطينيين في القطاع، هذا إذا كانت مصر تملك قرارها، وبوسعها ان تتحرر من حسابات وضغوط الأطراف الاخرى التي لا تتمنى الخير لا لمصر ولا للمقاومة في القطاع.
إنني لا أمل من التذكير بأن نزاهة الموقف إزاء قضية فلسطين هى أحد معايير الوطنية المصرية، من ثم فإن وطنيتك تصبح مجرَّحة إذا انحزت باسم الأمن إلى صف تعذيب الفلسطينيين وتركيعهم مقدما بذلك هدية مجانية لإسرائيل.
حين تورط صاحبنا في تصريح دعا فيه الى فتح معبر رفح أمام فلسطينيي قطاع غزة، فإنه تعرض للاتهام والتجريح من قبل من وصفوا بأنهم "سياسيون" إذ اعتبر كلامه دليلا على الجهل بمقتضيات الأمن القومي لمصر.
وكان ذلك هو العنوان الذي نشرته جريدة الاهرام على ستة أعمدة يوم الخميس الماضي 10/10. وأصل الحكاية أن السيد حمدين صباحي مؤسس التيار الشعبي والقيادي في جبهة الإنقاذ كان قد التقى بعضا من ممثلي حركة حماس، يتقدمهم الدكتور موسى أبومرزوق نائب رئيس المكتب السياسي للحركة، وفي أعقاب اللقاء قال السيد صباحي كلامه الذي استفز أولئك النفر من السياسيين الذين كنت أتصور أنهم أدرى من غيرهم بحقائق الموضوع. وبالتالي توقعت منهم أن يكونوا أكثر رصانة ومسؤولية في التعبير عن آرائهم إزاءه.
لكن ما قرأناه منسوبا اليهم فيما نشرته "الاهرام" يكشف عن بعض أوجه الأزمة التي تعاني منها بعض عناصر النخبة المصرية الجديدة، التي تعاني من الفقر في الإدراك والمعرفة، ينطبق ذلك على قائمة طويلة ممن يكتسبون تلك الألقاب الكبيرة بمجرد ظهورهم على شاشات التليفزيون الذي يوزع عليهم تلك الألقاب بالمجان.
النقطة الجوهرية والتي اتكأ عليها أولئك السياسيون هي أن فتح معبر رفح يعد تهديدا للأمن القومي المصري، ولم يقل أحد لماذا يعد كذلك، ولا أورد واقعة واحدة تدعم ذلك الرأي، لكنهم اعتمدوا على الانطباع الشائع في أوساط عامة المصريين الذي يعتبر حركة حماس التي تدير القطاع تهديدا لأمن مصر، وأن الأنفاق التي حفرها الغزاويون للتغلب على الحصار وتوفير احتياجاتهم المعيشية ليست "سوى منافذ لتهريب الأسلحة والإرهابيين إلى داخل سيناء، لتحويلها إلى قاعدة دولية للإرهاب العالمي".
وهذه العبارة الأخيرة وردت على لسان أحد السياسيين الذين تحدثت إليهم جريدة الأهرام. واستطرد (صاحبنا بالمناسبة هو متحدث باسم حزب التجمع اليساري) قائلا إن مصر لن تشعر بأمان كامل على حدودها مع رفح الفلسطينية، إلا بعد سقوط حركة حماس من السلطة، لأنها امتداد لحركة الإخوان وفرع عن التنظيم الدولي، ورغم أن آخرين رددوا الفكرة ذاتها بدرجة أو أخرى، إلا أنني تعمدت اقتباس الفقرة التي وردت على لسان القيادى اليساري ــ الذي يكاد يتبني بالكامل وجهة النظر الإسرائيلية إزاء حركة حماس ــ لكى يدعونا ذلك إلى تصور المدى الذي يذهب إليه اليمين في مصر.
لقد دعوت أكثر من مرة في السابق إلى تفنيد التهديد من خلال تقصي حقائق الانطباع الشائع الذي يعتبر الأنفاق وحماس في القطاع بمثابة تهديد لأمن مصر، لأن ذلك الانطباع تحول بمضي الوقت إلى عقيدة استقرت في أوساط عامة الناس ونخبهم السياسيين والأمنية.
وهذه الحقيقة تشكلت بفعل حملات التعبئة الإعلامية، وروجت لها أطراف لها مصلحتها ليس فقط في تسميم العلاقة بين مصر وحماس، ولكن لها مصلحة أيضا في ضرب المقاومة وإحكام الحصار المفروض على فلسطينيي القطاع لتركيعهم وإذلالهم.
ولا يشك أحد في أن إسرائيل صاحبة المصلحة الأولى في ذلك، كما أننا لا نستطيع أن نتجاهل الدور الذي لعبته الأجهزة الأمنية التابعة للسلطة الفلسطينية في رام الله، التي لها ثأرها الذي لم تنسه إزاء حركة حماس، وكانت الوثائق التي نشرت مؤخرا قد كشفت النقاب عن الجهد الذي تبذله للوقيعة والدس بين حماس ومصر، حكومة وشعبا.
إن جهابذة السياسة الذين تحدثوا عن تهديد حماس والأنفاق لأمن مصر، انطلقوا من الاستسلام للأكاذيب الإعلامية التي لا دليل عليها، وأبدوا استعدادا مدهشا للقبول بإحكام الحصار حول القطاع، غير مبالين بمعاناة أو تدمير حياة أكثر من مليون ونصف المليون فلسطيني في غزة، الأمر الذي يمكن أن يؤدي في حال استمراره إلى المساس بأمن مصر الذي يدعي هؤلاء أنهم حريصون عليه.
في حين أن فتح معبر رفح وإخضاعه لإشراف السلطة المصرية كأي معبر حدودي آخر هو الحل الحقيقي الذي يحمي مصالح الطرفين المصري والفلسطيني.
اننا لا نستطيع أن نحمي أمن مصر بمضاعفة معاناة الفلسطينيين، ثم إن الأمن لن يقدر له أن يتوفر ويستقر إلا إذا تم التوصل إلى صيغة توفق بين المصالح المصرية والفلسطينيين في القطاع، هذا إذا كانت مصر تملك قرارها، وبوسعها ان تتحرر من حسابات وضغوط الأطراف الاخرى التي لا تتمنى الخير لا لمصر ولا للمقاومة في القطاع.
إنني لا أمل من التذكير بأن نزاهة الموقف إزاء قضية فلسطين هى أحد معايير الوطنية المصرية، من ثم فإن وطنيتك تصبح مجرَّحة إذا انحزت باسم الأمن إلى صف تعذيب الفلسطينيين وتركيعهم مقدما بذلك هدية مجانية لإسرائيل.
هربوا من سورية ومن ليبيا: غرق أكثر من 200 لاجئ فلسطيني في المتوسط
أحد
الأطفال الناجين
عــ48ـرب/ وكالات
قالت مجموعة العمل من أجل فلسطينيي سوريا إن سفينة تقل مئات اللاجئين الفلسطينيين غرقت في عرض البحر الأبيض المتوسط
بعد أن أطلق خفر السواحل الليبي النار عليها ما أدى لتعطل محركاتها.
وأوضحت المجموعة أن السفينة تعرضت لإطلاق نار من قبل مسلحين ليبيين في وقت متأخر من مساء الخميس، واستمرت في مسيرتها حتى فجر الجمعة، مؤكدة أنه لم تكن هناك اتصالات ولا أي جهة تواصل منذ ذلك الحين، لهذا تم الكشف والحديث عن هذه الفاجعة مساء يوم أمس الأحد.
وقال أحد الناجين في مالطا إن خفر السواحل الليبية أطلق الرصاص عليها، وأصاب اثنين من اللاجئين، فيما استمرت السفينة بالإبحار حتى وصلت إلى منطقة ما بين مالطا ولمبيدوزا، وهناك توقفت المحركات عن العمل بسبب إصابتها بالرصاص، مما أدى لغرق السفينة بمن فيها، والحديث يدور عن فقدان 200 لاجئ فلسطيني على الأقل.
وذكرت مجموعة العمل أنه تم إنقاذ حوالي 70 فلسطينياً موجودين الآن بمالطا، ويوجد عدد من المفقودين فيما كانت السفينة تقل 375 مهاجرًا.
وكانت قد انطلقت السفينة من ليبيا من شواطئ طرابلس الليبية يوم الجمعة الماضي، بعد أن ضاقت بها السبل للعيش الكريم والآمن في ليبيا حيث وصلوا من سوريا هربا من الأحداث، وتركوا ليبيا هربا من الأحداث أيضا، وقضوا لاحقا غرقا في عرض البحر.
وناشد اللاجئون الفلسطينيون الناجون الجهات الدولية والحقوقية والصليب الأحمر المالطي التدخل العاجل والفوري لانتشال من تبقى من ركاب المركب حيث لا يزال عدد كبير من ذويهم في عداد المفقودين.
وذكر منسق مجموعة العمل طارق الحمود أن ركاب السفينة تفرقوا بين غريق وناجٍ ومفقود، محملا المسؤولية للمسؤولون العرب والفلسطينيون والنظام السوري أيضا.
Sunday, October 13, 2013
المعارضة السورية لن تذهب الى جنيف 2
A GOOD EDITORIAL
October 13, 2013
بعد المذابح والقصف بالطائرات والصواريخ والمدفعية وقذف البراميل المشتعلة (وحتى الخرسانات المسلحة التي تزن 500 كغ حين تقلّ امدادات الذخيرة) والابادة بالسلاح الكيميائي وتهجير الملايين جاء دور تجويع المناطق الثائرة على النظام السوري تحت شعار ‘الركوع او الجوع′.
… لكن هذا آخر ما يهمّ روسيا او امريكا بالطبع فكل ما هو مطلوب الآن، بعد أن وافق النظام السوري على تسليم ترسانته الكيميائية، هو العمل على اعادة تأهيله سياسيا، من خلال اعتباره شريكاً في مفاوضات تخفي تحتها مسؤوليته عن جبل جثث السوريين المتعاظم يوما بعد يوم.
تصريح رئيس المجلس الوطني السوري، جورج صبرا، أمس ان المجلس لن يذهب الى جنيف 2 يعيد تذكير روسيا وامريكا بوجود معارضة سورية لا يمكن تجاهلها في سياق ترتيبات الأمم العظمى لشؤون الشعوب المنكوبة.
بعد اتفاق الكيماوي يمكن القول انه صارت هناك خطوط عامة امريكية – روسية متقاربة فيما يخص الشأن السوري.
تقوم اوركسترا واسعة متلائمة مع طروحات هذا التقارب باشاعة ‘وقائع′ ومعلومات تصب كلّها في ضرورة الحل على الطريقة الروسية الامريكية.
من هذه المعلومات هي ان المعارضة السورية متشرذمة وضعيفة، وان تشكيلاتها العسكرية صارت أقرب لتنظيم القاعدة والجهادية الاسلامية، وان المعارضة بصيغها كافة فشلت في تقديم بديل مقبول لنظام الأسد الخ…
يشتغل هذا التقارب أيضاً على التعامل مع تلفيق واختراع سريعين لاحزاب جديدة داخل سورية (وقد قام الأخضر الابراهيمي بزيارة بعض منها لإعطائها شرعية دولية)، وتلميع ما يسمى ‘معارضة الداخل’ التي هي من صلب النظام (امثال نائب رئيس الوزراء السوري قدري جميل و’وزير المصالحة الوطنية’ علي حيدر).
بعد اعدام واعتقال المعارضين وتحويل أغلب معارضة الداخل الى معارضة عسكرية، حافظ كل من النظام وحشده السابق على احتكار لقب ‘معارضة الداخل’، منافسين في ذلك حتى ‘هيئة التنسيق’، التي قام النظام بارهاب المعارضين الحقيقيين داخلها من خلال اعتقال بعض قياداتها مثل عبد العزيز الخير، او اعادة تدجين المدجن بينهم أكثر، وأخيرا لا آخراً، تفعيل المتحالفين العضويين معه ضمن ‘هيئة التنسيق’ (مثل صالح مسلّم، رئيس حزب الاتحاد الديمقراطي)، والذين يشاركون عملياً بالقتال ضد المعارضة السورية وحتى اتهامها باستخدام الكيماوي.
يحظى كل هذا الحشد، بمباركات متفاوتة من ما يسمى ‘المجتمع الدولي’ لدعم مشاركته المفترضة في المفاوضات بين النظام و’معارضته’ الديكورية، وذلك لتجويف هذه المفاوضات من أية معنى حقيقي لها.
ساهم القمع المنهجي للناشطين السلميين والتنسيقيات والحراك السياسي عموماً داخل سورية في انهاك المعارضة السورية وحرمانها من قيادات كبيرة على الأرض، كما وسّع ذلك من العسكرة والاتجاه الجهادي داخل صفوف المعارضة، وارتكبت المعارضة السورية الكثير من الأخطاء أثناء تشكيلها وما بعده، كما عجزت أكثر من مرة عن ابتكار مبادرات سياسية فاعلة.
لكن كل هذا لا يعني ان المعارضة السورية الحقيقية لنظام الأسد، الممثلة بالائتلاف الوطني (وهو أوسع تمثيل للحراك السياسي والعسكري في سورية) ضعيفة كما يقول النظام ويشيع الراغبون في إتمام الصفقة الدولية.
يتجاهل الراعيان الروسي والامريكي لـ’جنيف 2′ قضايا جوهرية لا يمكن لأية معارضة سورية حقيقية ان تتجاوزها، وأولها تنحي رئيس النظام لإفساح المجال لعملية سياسية حقيقية تقود البلاد الى مصالحة وطنية، وتقديم ضمانات دولية بتشكيل حكومة كاملة الصلاحيات على الجيش والأمن والاقتصاد، وخروج القوات الايرانية وعناصر حزب الله من سورية، وتحديد مدة محددة للتفاوض بحيث لا يستمر سنوات فيما الشعب السوري يعاني من القمع والتهجير والتجويع.
وإلا فليعقد ‘المجتمع الدولي’ مؤتمره في دمشق حيث يمكن للنظام ان يتحاور مع نفسه!
رأي القدس
بعد المذابح والقصف بالطائرات والصواريخ والمدفعية وقذف البراميل المشتعلة (وحتى الخرسانات المسلحة التي تزن 500 كغ حين تقلّ امدادات الذخيرة) والابادة بالسلاح الكيميائي وتهجير الملايين جاء دور تجويع المناطق الثائرة على النظام السوري تحت شعار ‘الركوع او الجوع′.
… لكن هذا آخر ما يهمّ روسيا او امريكا بالطبع فكل ما هو مطلوب الآن، بعد أن وافق النظام السوري على تسليم ترسانته الكيميائية، هو العمل على اعادة تأهيله سياسيا، من خلال اعتباره شريكاً في مفاوضات تخفي تحتها مسؤوليته عن جبل جثث السوريين المتعاظم يوما بعد يوم.
تصريح رئيس المجلس الوطني السوري، جورج صبرا، أمس ان المجلس لن يذهب الى جنيف 2 يعيد تذكير روسيا وامريكا بوجود معارضة سورية لا يمكن تجاهلها في سياق ترتيبات الأمم العظمى لشؤون الشعوب المنكوبة.
بعد اتفاق الكيماوي يمكن القول انه صارت هناك خطوط عامة امريكية – روسية متقاربة فيما يخص الشأن السوري.
تقوم اوركسترا واسعة متلائمة مع طروحات هذا التقارب باشاعة ‘وقائع′ ومعلومات تصب كلّها في ضرورة الحل على الطريقة الروسية الامريكية.
من هذه المعلومات هي ان المعارضة السورية متشرذمة وضعيفة، وان تشكيلاتها العسكرية صارت أقرب لتنظيم القاعدة والجهادية الاسلامية، وان المعارضة بصيغها كافة فشلت في تقديم بديل مقبول لنظام الأسد الخ…
يشتغل هذا التقارب أيضاً على التعامل مع تلفيق واختراع سريعين لاحزاب جديدة داخل سورية (وقد قام الأخضر الابراهيمي بزيارة بعض منها لإعطائها شرعية دولية)، وتلميع ما يسمى ‘معارضة الداخل’ التي هي من صلب النظام (امثال نائب رئيس الوزراء السوري قدري جميل و’وزير المصالحة الوطنية’ علي حيدر).
بعد اعدام واعتقال المعارضين وتحويل أغلب معارضة الداخل الى معارضة عسكرية، حافظ كل من النظام وحشده السابق على احتكار لقب ‘معارضة الداخل’، منافسين في ذلك حتى ‘هيئة التنسيق’، التي قام النظام بارهاب المعارضين الحقيقيين داخلها من خلال اعتقال بعض قياداتها مثل عبد العزيز الخير، او اعادة تدجين المدجن بينهم أكثر، وأخيرا لا آخراً، تفعيل المتحالفين العضويين معه ضمن ‘هيئة التنسيق’ (مثل صالح مسلّم، رئيس حزب الاتحاد الديمقراطي)، والذين يشاركون عملياً بالقتال ضد المعارضة السورية وحتى اتهامها باستخدام الكيماوي.
يحظى كل هذا الحشد، بمباركات متفاوتة من ما يسمى ‘المجتمع الدولي’ لدعم مشاركته المفترضة في المفاوضات بين النظام و’معارضته’ الديكورية، وذلك لتجويف هذه المفاوضات من أية معنى حقيقي لها.
ساهم القمع المنهجي للناشطين السلميين والتنسيقيات والحراك السياسي عموماً داخل سورية في انهاك المعارضة السورية وحرمانها من قيادات كبيرة على الأرض، كما وسّع ذلك من العسكرة والاتجاه الجهادي داخل صفوف المعارضة، وارتكبت المعارضة السورية الكثير من الأخطاء أثناء تشكيلها وما بعده، كما عجزت أكثر من مرة عن ابتكار مبادرات سياسية فاعلة.
لكن كل هذا لا يعني ان المعارضة السورية الحقيقية لنظام الأسد، الممثلة بالائتلاف الوطني (وهو أوسع تمثيل للحراك السياسي والعسكري في سورية) ضعيفة كما يقول النظام ويشيع الراغبون في إتمام الصفقة الدولية.
يتجاهل الراعيان الروسي والامريكي لـ’جنيف 2′ قضايا جوهرية لا يمكن لأية معارضة سورية حقيقية ان تتجاوزها، وأولها تنحي رئيس النظام لإفساح المجال لعملية سياسية حقيقية تقود البلاد الى مصالحة وطنية، وتقديم ضمانات دولية بتشكيل حكومة كاملة الصلاحيات على الجيش والأمن والاقتصاد، وخروج القوات الايرانية وعناصر حزب الله من سورية، وتحديد مدة محددة للتفاوض بحيث لا يستمر سنوات فيما الشعب السوري يعاني من القمع والتهجير والتجويع.
وإلا فليعقد ‘المجتمع الدولي’ مؤتمره في دمشق حيث يمكن للنظام ان يتحاور مع نفسه!
Current Al-Jazeera (Arabic) Online Poll
After 100 days since the military coup, do you see Egypt moving in the right direction?
With over 500 responding so far, 92% said no.
Mystery Attackers Hit Sinai
By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
"- A period of more than three months since former president Mohamed Morsi’s ouster by Egypt’s powerful military establishment have been marked by almost daily attacks on Egyptian security personnel, especially in the restive Sinai Peninsula. The identity of the attackers remains a mystery.
“The armed groups carrying out the Sinai attacks aren’t drawn from local families and tribes,” Sinai-based journalist Hatem al-Bulk told IPS. “Often masked, they strike their targets and vanish into the mountains.”
“The local people,” he added, “have no idea who they are.”...."
"- A period of more than three months since former president Mohamed Morsi’s ouster by Egypt’s powerful military establishment have been marked by almost daily attacks on Egyptian security personnel, especially in the restive Sinai Peninsula. The identity of the attackers remains a mystery.
“The armed groups carrying out the Sinai attacks aren’t drawn from local families and tribes,” Sinai-based journalist Hatem al-Bulk told IPS. “Often masked, they strike their targets and vanish into the mountains.”
“The local people,” he added, “have no idea who they are.”...."
Syria and its chemical weapons
What we are not being told
By Brian Whitaker
"The destruction of Syria's chemical weapons got under way this week. In a letter to the Security Council, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon reported:
By Brian Whitaker
"The destruction of Syria's chemical weapons got under way this week. In a letter to the Security Council, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon reported:
"Under the supervision of OPCW experts, supported by the United Nations, the Syrian Arab Republic began to destroy its chemical weapons. Syrian personnel used cutting torches and angle grinders to destroy or disable a range of materials, including missile warheads, aerial bombs and mixing and filling equipment."
This first stage of the process is basically about making
Syria's chemical weapons unusable before moving on to destroying the chemicals
themselves. A
note on the OPCW's website refers to the destruction of "certain Category 3
chemical weapons". Category 3 includes
"unfilled munitions, devices and equipment designed specifically to employ
chemical weapons".
So far, though, no detail has been released about what these
Category 3 weapons were and it's not at all certain that we shall ever be
allowed to find out.
Although the task of the OPCW is merely to ensure Syrian
compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention, knowing exactly what "unfilled
munitions, devices and equipment" have been destroyed would cast some useful new
light on who was responsible for the chemical attacks near Damascus last
August.
Last month's report
from UN inspectors implicated two types of munition in the August attacks. One
was a type of rocket which seems to be unique to the Syrian conflict and which
blogger Brown Moses has dubbed the UMLACA
("Unidentified Munition Linked to Alleged Chemical Attacks") and the other was a
140mm rocket thought to be a Soviet-made M14.
Since the Assad regime and Russia both deny that Syrian
government forces were responsible for the August attacks, it's relevant to ask
whether either type of munition has been declared to the OPCW as part of the
government's stockpile.
If the answer is yes, it will be extremely difficult for
anyone to continue blaming rebel fighters for the attacks. A negative answer, on
the other hand, (assuming Syria has made a full declaration) would exonerate the
regime.
Either way, it shouldn't be difficult to provide an answer –
except that the OPCW may not be allowed to say. This is because the Chemical
Weapons Convention includes an annexe
on confidentiality which imposes strict rules on what may or may not be
disclosed.
Among other things, it says:
Information shall be considered confidential if:(i) It is so designated by the State Party from which the information was obtained and to which the information refers; or(ii) In the judgement of the Director-General, its unauthorised disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause damage to the State Party to which it refers or to the mechanisms for implementation of this Convention
However, it also goes on to say:
Any information may be released with the express consent of the State Party to which the information refers.
So it appears from that the information could be made public
if the Syrian government agreed. And if the Syrian government really had no part
in the chemical attacks last August, why not seize this opportunity to prove it?"
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