Dove's Eye View

Not celebrating

Regarding Israel's 60th anniversary and the Palestinian Nakba, British Jews and others write: Letters: We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary | The Guardian.

Hat tip to Philip Weiss, who is running a Nakba watch at his blog. He celebrates Lila Abu-Lughod and her book, Nakba, published last year.

As'ad Abu-Khalil alerts us to this letter to Nadine Gordimer from a professor in Gaza whose students are literally starving while reading her books.

My cold and hungry students have divided themselves into two groups, with one group adamant that you, like many of your courageous characters, will reconsider your participation in an Israeli festival that aims to celebrate the annihilation of Palestine and Palestinians. The other group believes that you have already crossed over to the side of the oppressor, negating every word you have ever written. We all wait for your next action.

All Palestinian Factions Agree to Ceasefire

From The Hindu News Update Service.

all the Palestinian militant factions have agreed to an Egypt-mediated ceasefire with Israel, "starting in the Gaza strip".

"All the Palestinian factions have agreed to the Egyptian proposal on a truce with Israel," Egyptian state news agency, MENA said citing an unnamed high level Egyptian official.

The Egyptian proposal included a "comprehensive, reciprocal and simultaneous truce, implemented in a graduated framework, starting in the Gaza Strip and then subsequently moving to the West Bank, the official said.

The BBC also gives details.

I find this stuff by checking Google News occasionally.

Carter: Hamas is willing to accept Israel as its neighbor

There it is: Carter: Hamas is willing to accept Israel as its neighbor - Yahoo! News.

Former President Carter said Monday that Hamas — the Islamic militant group that has called for the destruction of Israel — is prepared to accept the right of the Jewish state to "live as a neighbor next door in peace."

But Carter warned that there would not be peace if Israel and the U.S. continue to shut out Hamas and its main backer, Syria.

The Democratic former president relayed the message in a speech in Jerusalem after meeting last week with top Hamas leaders in Syria. It capped a nine-day visit to the Mideast aimed at breaking the deadlock between Israel and Hamas militants who rule the Gaza Strip.

"They (Hamas) said that they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, if approved by Palestinians and that they would accept the right of Israel to live as a neighbor next door in peace," Carter said.

The buzz on the internet and from my cousins with Lebanese army connections: war, war, war.

Carter's visit shows that peace is always possible. No war could solve any real problem this summer. We need sane leaders to pull the bloodthirsty back from the brink.

Update: The New York Times elaborates.

Also, regarding war, war and more war, see Joshua Landis at Syria Comment. He reprints a long analysis of the prospects for war, but Josh himself states at the outset that he thinks it won't come to that. Too costly, too little benefit to anybody. My hopeful self believes that cooler heads will prevail.

Who's playing?

A dust-up in the press: corporations and a few leading Jewish groups are SHOCKED over Mr. Mosley's possibly Nazi-scented S&M sex play. Toyota, Daimler Benz, various Jewish groups are all issuing condemnations and asking that he resign his job in racing.

You see, Mosley used a German accent during consensual, paid role-play in which he whipped a woman; then let some more women dressed in black and white stripes whip him. Therefore hinting of Auschwitz. Everybody is so horrified that he might have play-acted the Holocaust in what he thought was a private sexual act. (one of the women had a hidden camera in her bra). The black-and-white miniskirt outfits might imply prison camp...and his father was a British Fascist and notorious friend of Hitler.

Meanwhile the Israelis have put up a giant walled ghetto and are starving the inhabitants; rounding people up and expelling them; celebrating the sixty-year anniversary of a mass expulsion with massacres; etc. (draw your favorite Nazi tactic here) and is Toyota complaining? The World Jewish Congress? Anybody? I guess play-acting a Nazi is horrible, but really doing what Nazis did is okay - if you're Israeli.

Yes, yes, I know that Israelis have not sent anybody to gas chambers, and when they committed mass expulsions they did not put people on cattle cars or build work camps for them; nor have the Israelis killed six million Arabs. (Not quite a hundred fifty thousand dead Arabs by now, if you include Israel's wars on Lebanon. And of course a hundred fifty thousand dead Arabs don't matter to anybody but their relatives and countrymen).

If you don't see the similarity between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, then you are trying not to look. I think the Israelis are acting out their own trauma unconsciously upon the Other, stimulating all kinds of murderous response, which they use as an excuse to continue killing and oppressing the people under their control.

Hotheaded replies will tend to one of several positions: 1) it's not so bad what the Israelis are doing; 2) Arabs deserve it anyway; 3) Israel is justified because she's under so much stress/threat or 4) you are anti-Semitic for talking about this.

What's the highest spiritual truth about this? We all need to forgive each other and quit hurting each other. Pretty simple.

Arab-Jewish Peace Actions

American Goy is surprised to hear of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, which I blogged in February 2004. I thought I'd review the last four years of this blog for other joint Arab-Jewish efforts:

Philip Weis reported on this Palestinian-Jewish protest at Gaza, 2008.

Palestinian-Jewish peace camp held yearly in California - one of several such camps around the nation.

September 2007: Islamic Society of North America Welcomes Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue.

The Sulha Peace Project (YouTube video) in Israel. Sulha is a traditional Arab mediation technique.

Jewish Voice for Peace sends a medical delegation to Palestine to work with partner groups including The Palestinian Medical Relief Society.

Jewish Voice for Peace's Olive Harvest Delegation goes to Palestine to help harvest olives with Palestinians under attack by violent Israeli settlers.

Some words from a Jewish teacher revered by Christians and Muslims alike.

IDF soldiers and Palestinian fighters form Combatants for Peace.

A Palestinian and Israeli, both professors, teach a joint history class in which they show each party's narrative side-by-side.

Palestinian teacher of Holocaust history.

List of projects for coexistence and Palestinian-Jewish peace from Answers.com. I know I have blogged a lot of these groups... where are my old posts? Neve Shalom, Givat Haviva. Heck, my parents went to a fundraiser for Givat Haviva back in the late 1980s, when Camryn Manheim's uncle, the late Bill Nuchow, invited them to NY for the shindig. The Answers.com list also includes peace initiatives put out by both sides.

Mayors make peace in Jerusalem - 50 from Israel and Palestine.

Two cool projects for writers and artists.

There's more - I've only gone back to 2005 and there's another year's worth of posts to sift.

American Goy, are you happy?

Cheney says an independent Palestinian state is 'long overdue' - Los Angeles Times

Uh Huh: Cheney says an independent Palestinian state is 'long overdue' - Los Angeles Times.

Cheney says an independent Palestinian state is 'long overdue'

Yep. Just don't read the rest of his statement with all the caveats, backstepping and blame.

Denied Entry

Earth activist and spiritual leader Starhawk has been denied entry to Israel - she was invited to teach permaculture techniques to several Israeli groups, but she had worked with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine five years ago, and wrote about that experience. So although she is a Jew, Israel denied her entry.

She sent around this letter today, which I reproduce in part. Update 3/20/08: link to full text here.

Denied Entry By Starhawk

Today is March 16. Five years ago, I was in a small village in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank of Palestine with a group of volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement, which supports nonviolent resistance against the Occupation. We had gone because the villagers were being menaced by tanks from the Israeli military, and wanted witnesses, but by the time we arrived, the tanks had gone. Instead we wandered through the olive groves, studded with pink cyclamen and blood-red anemones, and ate barbecued lamb in the courtyard of an ancient stone house with domed ceilings and arched portals. It was a strangely
idyllic day—until on our way back to Nablus we got a call. Down in Rafah, in the Gaza strip, a young volunteer named Rachel Corrie had been crushed to death by a an Israeli military bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family’s house.

Today I sit in a room in Washington D.C. overcome by grief as in the next room my new friend Laurie writes out card after card with the names of the dead—American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, pile after pile of them. I’m grieving for all the dead, and a bit for myself, because I meant to be back in Palestine, or at least in Israel, now. But I have been denied entry and sent home, because of my past work with the ISM. I have been denied entry, even though my intentions this time were strictly to work with permaculture and ecology groups, including the three Israeli groups that have sent me formal invitations, and even though Israel claims to be a refuge of last resort for everyone born Jewish, as I am. The fact that I’m here, not there, is a measure of how much the Israeli authorities fear a movement of nonviolent resistance in general, and the ISM in particular.

Why is nonviolence so threatening? Violence attacks the body, but nonviolence threatens something deeper and more tenuous—the self-perceptions and rationalizations that let basically good people act in cruel and heartless ways. The Israel/Palestine conflict enacts on a mass scale some of the same dynamics as family abuse. Israel is like the abused child who grows up to be an abuser. Abusers generally feel like victims—and truly the Jewish people have been victimized, again and again in history, culminating in the still unhealed wounds of the Holocaust. Every rocket attack, every shooting spree in a Yeshivah, every suicide bomb in a bus reinforces that sense of fear and persecution that seems to cry out for violence in return.

Read the rest of Starhawk's article at her website, linked above.

Middle East Children's Alliance

This Berkeley-based group has been fighting for the children of Gaza (and Lebanon, and the West Bank, and Iraq) for over a decade: Middle East Children's Alliance : Index.

They sponsor all kinds of projects in various refugee camps; your donations will go to a children's library, a water project, games and toys for the Rachel Corrie Children's Center, and more. It's always MECA who brave rockets and warfare to bring medicine into places like South Lebanon and Iraq.

Drop by their site and read their information.

Jewish Voice for Peace Against Siege of Gaza

Jewish Voice for Peace sent me a letter this morning:

The people of Gaza cannot leave, even if they have a medical emergency. One and a half million people are packed into an area less than 1/10th the size of Rhode Island. They are being deliberately malnourished because Israel controls the flow of food and supplies. Without crucial filters, the water is becoming a source of sickness and death. A few miles away in Sderot, a working class community of Israelis is caught in the line of fire and is also dying, their suffering manipulated by their own government. Israeli papers are now talking of possible plans for a major incursion into Gaza.

Giving a donation to JVP right now is a way to take action to support an end to the siege of Gaza.

In late January, a convoy of Israeli peace and human rights organizations, in partnership with Palestinian civil society groups, drove to the entrance of the Gaza Strip to deliver badly needed food and medical supplies. Thousands of you wrote letters to your legislators to ask them to help end the siege. JVP supporters across the country stood on street corners, spoke to the media, and raised funds to support the convoy. On February 18, over 6 tons of supplies from the convoy were finally let through.

But the blockade goes on and JVP is not stopping its work on the Call to End the Siege of Gaza.

JVP would like you to donate to help their activism against the occupation and the siege of Gaza. They keep members informed of events not reported in the mainstream media, they are planning to take out ads in papers, and as you can see they are supporting supply runs, among other actions.

Go to their site to learn more and donate if you wish. JVP is based in my city, Oakland, California, for which I am proud.

Life must go on in Gaza and Sderot

Here's a blog by two men, one from Gaza and one from Sderot, who say Life must go on in Gaza and Sderot. The quote below is from the Gaza contributor, dated today.

Today its sunny and quiet in Gaza , there is no any activity or military operations we hope every day will be quiet in both side and over the world . But still the siege control our life, borders still close and we have electricity for three to six hour and some aria more , and most of the supply not available in Gaza and if its available will be more than double price, unemployment because most of the factory closed because they cont import or export

No matter what happens, life does go on. Despite rockets raining down on both sides, despite starvation and imprisonment, people continue to live and to hope and to try to make sense of their situations. Dove's Eye View has always attempted to keep this human spirit in sight. Thank you to "Life Goes On" for adding your voice.