Category: In the Media

Real World Radio: Hernan Zin live from Gaza

Real World Radio interviewed Hernan Zin, an independent journalist who lives in Spain. Zin has been traveling around the world for 13 years —as he explains in his own blog — in order to “give voice to the excluded, the marginalized, those who are in the final step of the social ladder”.

He is currently reporting on armed conflicts, that’s what took him to Palestine. From there, he spoke about what is happening in Gaza, about the terrible situations that the civil population have to face everyday, where the heat coexists with the lack of food, the lack of medicines, the lack of power… the lack of nights without bombings, the lack of streets without dust, which keeps falling from the structures of the buildings.

Zin explained very clearly what we are talking about when we speak of Gaza.

“Literally, it is a 45-km long strip, surrounded by Israel, by walls and electric fences. Then, they control what goes in and out and they have imposed a brutal blockade that is destroying the civil population, and especially and as usually, the poorest people”.

Since his arrival in Gaza, Zin has watched the destruction caused by the Israeli blockade, which has ruined the Palestinian people; fishefolks that have been prevented from going to the sea by the Israeli Army for over 50 days; farmers submerged in a deep crisis, because half of Gaza’s cultivable soil has disappeared. And everything is surrounded by non-stop death, something reminded every second by the sound of the airplanes.

“If the Israeli States has a conflict with Palestine, it has to solve it by means of dialogue and not by punishing the civil population”, Zin argued. He added that “the elderly people, women, children whose death I have witnessed in these two months, who are starving, who do not have medicines to go to the hospital, who cannot leave the country to have surgery, who do not have to pay for all of this”.

The military operation led by Israel the day after the kidnap of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit (known as “Summer Rain”), the vision of the Palestinians of ruling party Hamas and the arrest of Lebanese lawmakers by Israel, the marginalized role of the international community in the conflict—which shows a “double standard”, according to which an Israeli and a Palestinian life are not of equal worth—were some of the issues discussed by Zin at the interview, during which he tried to make this war, that has been forgotten by the West, visible.

Hernan Zin an Argentine born journalist has written and directed documentaries for El Mundo TV and TVE, published stories and reports all over the world and written books that have been published by several editorial houses.

St Louis Post: “Area woman, 24, places herself as human shield for Palestinians”

by Sylvester Brown Jr. St. Louis Post, 08/29/2006

The woman’s defiant stance – back arched, arms outstretched – seemed to say, “Bring it on!” Yet, the scene seemed to betray her resolve. St. Louis County resident Jennifer Presson, 24, stood in front of a line of Israeli soldiers. They were armed with batons, guns and Plexiglas body shields.

The photos were sent to me via e-mail. One shows Presson being knocked aside by advancing shields. She included a detailed description of her encounter:

“I stayed in front of them with my arms wide out to the side, trying to stand still. They pushed, I stumbled, they pushed, I stumbled and stood again. . . . they started beating me with batons.”

Presson was one of two St. Louis women involved in Friday’s protest march in Bil’in village, west of Ramallah, in the northern part of the West Bank. They are members of the International Solidarity Movement, a group of activists founded in 2001, dedicated to “nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestinian farmland.” Operating under the theory that the media will be more sympathetic when Westerners are involved, some ISM members believe their presence ensures a degree of protection for the Palestinians.

However, the Anti-Defamation League’s website lists the ISM as a “well-organized movement that spreads anti-Israel propaganda and misinformation” while supporting those engaged “in armed resistance against Israel.”

I’m not taking any sides and don’t pretend to understand the complexity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Presson’s e-mail presented a disturbing front-line account of the protest marches, which, she says, have occurred every Friday since January 2005. The impassioned plea attached at the end of her e-mail was hard to ignore:

“If you know anyone in the media, please pass this on . . .”

Members of the ISM, which received international attention in 2002 when they entered the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem during a standoff between Israeli and Palestinian forces, place themselves in the midst confrontations, hoping to discourage bloodshed.

It doesn’t always work.

In another photo Presson sent, she’s seen crouched on the ground with other activists and villagers, as soldiers pummel them with batons. After the clash, Presson is photographed displaying wounds received in her right hip and lower back – from rubber-coated bullets fired by soldiers.

“Normally, my white skin and international passport is a huge ‘Don’t shoot here’ sign,” Presson wrote. “I heard the BOOMs, I heard screams . . . I felt the first bullet . . . the next one hit my back. I limped towards the stone wall to my left, hoping to be out of their sight.”

It was late at night in Beit Ommar village, in the northern part of the West Bank, when I reached Presson by phone Sunday. Dogs yapped in the background as she described the village she now calls home.

“There’s all kinds of animals here – dogs, chickens, sheep, goats . . . cats everywhere,” Presson said.

We discussed the gap from 2003, after she graduated from St. Louis University with a nursing degree, to her current role as a Middle East activist. She started to “question things” after 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war. Those answers turned to outrage, and that outrage turned to action for her. She wasn’t trying to be a hero when she confronted the soldiers, Presson said, admitting her daily fear: “I pray that I’m not killed. I ask often ask myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ I’m from St. Louis County, for God’s sake.

“But the Palestinians’ fear is greater than my fear. They often say they have no hope, no dreams, no life. Anybody seeing what I’ve seen would recognize the injustice,” she said.

Presson considers herself lucky. Unlike the Palestinians, she has the privilege of getting on a plane and escaping “the insanity.” When she returns to the United States in October, Presson said, she will continue to dedicate her time to presenting an accurate depiction of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. Most Americans are woefully unaware, she said. And that is the reason she’s in the Middle East today:

“If our journalists, politicians and soldiers aren’t going to do anything . . . somebody has to.”

Baltimore Sun: “Unilateral Action by Israel Spawns Violence in Gaza”

Published on Thursday, August 17, 2006 by the Baltimore Sun (Maryland)

by George Bisharat

SAN FRANCISCO – With the spotlight on Lebanon, another Middle East milestone is passing largely unnoticed. However, its lessons are just as important. A year ago this week, Israel began implementing its unilateral Gaza disengagement plan — yet the region is beset by violence. Why did withdrawal of 8,500 Jewish settlers from Gaza lead to more conflict? Can Israel withdraw from Arab territories without inviting attack?

Last August, Gaza Palestinians greeted disengagement with both cautious hope and cynicism. They relished freedom from the daily humiliations of military occupation. Students longed to study, children to frolic on the beach, and entrepreneurs to build businesses. Yet many also saw disengagement as an expression of racial preference for Jews. Israel could not annex the Gaza Strip without absorbing 1.4 million Palestinians, thus jeopardizing its status as a Jewish state.

Israel marketed disengagement to Americans as a step toward peace, but Palestinians remembered the October 2004 comment of Dov Weisglass, adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: “The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”

Why would Israeli politicians subvert negotiations with Palestinians? Perhaps because no Palestinian leader could agree to Israel’s planned takeover of Jerusalem and much of the West Bank.

Thus, the Gaza “disengagement” plan is also the Jerusalem and West Bank “expansion” plan. The number of Israelis settling in the West Bank this year exceeds the number withdrawn from Gaza.

Further conflict, therefore, was inevitable.

Moreover, while Israel decolonized Gaza, its military occupation continues. Israel still controls the entry and exit of people and goods into the region, patrols its coast and airspace, oversees its water, fuel, electric utilities, and sewage, and enters it with military forces at will. Under international law, “effective control” determines whether a territory is occupied.

Since the January Palestinian elections, hailed as the fairest in the Arab world, Israel has strived to undermine the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, withholding $50 million to $60 million monthly in tax revenues owed to the authority. The U.S. and European Union have followed, halting aid to the Palestinians until the Hamas government renounces violence, recognizes Israel and pledges to honor prior agreements of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas has not yet bowed but has repeatedly signaled willingness to negotiate.

Of course Hamas should not just halt violence — it had suspended military operations for 17 months, until June — it should also renounce it. But shouldn’t the same standard apply to both parties? Shouldn’t recognition and respect for prior agreements be reciprocally required of Israel, which denies Palestinian national rights and regularly violates the Oslo accords?

Palestinian civil servants have gone without salaries since January. Gazans have suffered serious deterioration in nutrition and health. The special U.N. rapporteur on conditions in the occupied Palestinian territories warned in June of an impending humanitarian crisis, saying, “In effect, the Palestinian people have been subjected to economic sanctions — the first time that an occupied people have been so treated.”

On June 24, Israeli troops entered Gaza and abducted Dr. Osama Muantar and his brother, Mustafa, alleging they were members of Hamas. The two joined some 9,000 Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli jails. Many have not been charged with a crime and more than 100 are minors.

The following day, Palestinian groups attacked an Israeli army post, killing two soldiers and capturing a third.

Since then, Israel has laid siege to the Gaza Strip, closing it to travel and trade and abducting 64 Hamas officials, including Cabinet ministers and parliamentary representatives. Its jets have bombed roads, bridges, government buildings, Gaza’s main electrical generating plant, homes, fields, orchards, workshops, and offices. To date, 184 Palestinians have been killed, including 42 children, while another 650 have been wounded.

In 1982, Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula as part of a comprehensive peace agreement with Egypt. Twenty-four years of peace on that border followed. But unilateral redeployments that only shift the character of Israeli control over Palestinian lives will never yield such results. Unilateralism — wherein the legitimate interests of the other party are ignored — is the flaw, not withdrawal.

Would Americans remain quiescent if a neighboring power sealed our borders and airspace, suffocated our economy, expanded into our most desirable lands and attempted to throttle our democratically elected government?

We should counsel Israel to abandon unilateralism and unremitting violence against civilians. Negotiations based on respect for international law and equal rights offer the only way to lasting peace.
George Bisharat, a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, writes frequently on the Middle East.

AP: Gazans Protest Journalists’ Abduction

Associated Press

Palestinian journalists in Gaza protested on Saturday against the kidnapping of a Fox News correspondent and cameraman, as concern about the men’s safety grew.

Cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, of New Zealand, and American correspondent Steve Centanni, 60, were snatched Monday from their TV van near the Palestinian security services headquarters in Gaza City.

More than two dozen foreigners have been abducted by Palestinian gunmen, usually in an attempt to settle personal scores, but almost all have been released within hours. This is the longest that foreigners have been held. Security officials are especially concerned because all the armed groups have denied involvement and no demands have been put forth.

About 30 members of the Palestinian Journalists’ Union gathered outside the parliamentary building in Gaza, holding up signs demanding the men be freed. Other signs called for security in Gaza, where armed men wander the streets freely.

Jennifer Griffen, chief Fox News correspondent for the Middle East, called the kidnapping a “test for the Palestinian people.”

“We don’t care who kidnapped them, we want them returned unharmed. This is a very serious case for the Palestinians, for the Palestinian Authority,” Griffen said.

Khaled Batch, a leader of the Islamic Jihad militant group, said kidnapping members of the media “silenced the voice of freedom and justice.”

“We … have experienced oppression and denial. We don’t want to practice this pain and suffering on others, on other wives and people,” Batch said.

Daily Star staff: Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement comes to Lebanon

Ecumenical, non-violent opposition group organizes civilian convoy to South

By Jim Quilty for The Daily Star
Thursday, August 10, 2006

BEIRUT: “We’ve been told the situation here is different from Palestine,” says Huwaida Arraf, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement. “In Palestine you have Israeli soldiers on the ground actively brutalizing civilians. Here, they’ve been brutalizing civilians from the air. That certainly is a tactical difference. But the brutal aggression, the terrorizing of civilians is the same. The war crimes are the same. The impunity with which Israel carries this out is the same. The dehumanization of the other is the same…”The way they expel you from your land is the same and, if you try to stay and resist, you’re terrorized and dehumanized and killed – that’s all the same as in Palestine.”

It seems you don’t have to be a Hizbullah militant to shame the Israeli and US governments.

Arraf, her husband Adam Shapiro and a handful of other activists co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in 2001. The ISM is a Palestinian-led movement devoted to applying non-violent direct action to resist the Israeli occupation. ISM aims to provide Palestine’s popular resistance with two resources: international protection and a voice to resist Israel’s military occupation non-violently. Its activists argue that Israel’s occupation, oppression and domination of the Palestinians must be dismantled through people’s action.

“The occupation,” as their mission statement says, “can be defeated by strategic, disciplined unarmed resistance, utilizing the effective resources Palestinians can mobilize – including international participation.”

An ISM advanced team made up of Arraf, Shapiro and a couple of other Americans have been in Lebanon for little over a week, planning actions to confront the month-long Israeli campaign against Lebanon. Still in formulation, the ISM program will be a multifaceted one that ranges from reportage – to counter what they describe as a pro-Israeli bias in the international media – to more direct activism.

“Israel and the United States are trying to separate the Lebanese from Hizbullah, which we completely reject. Since we’ve been here, it’s been obvious this war isn’t just against Hizbullah. It’s against all Lebanese. We need to stand up to it. The ways we need to do that is to work with Lebanese civilians to break down this media message that the Israeli military tries to put out there – that it cares about Lebanese civilians.”

In their first action, ISM has asked to participate in a Lebanese initiative – a civilian aid convoy to the Southern town of Tyre. The convoy has been set to depart on August 12, the one-month anniversary of the Israeli offensive and the date chosen for the beginning of an international day of protest against Israeli aggression. So far the action has been endorsed by more than 200 Lebanese and international organizations. “The object is to … bring needed supplies to one of the villages that’s been cut off from relief,” says Arraf.

“Israel’s tactics here are different than in Palestine, but I think that the solidarity and the unity of the people that’s needed to confront this can be the same, though our tactics may be different. With this campaign for instance, we are actively challenging two things.

“First, the argument that Hizbullah is somehow separate from the Lebanese people. This convoy is an all-Lebanese initiative joined by the international community. Everyone that’s going in on this is saying that we are all the resistance and we are all resisting Israel’s aggression.

“Second, Israel is actively trying to clear out the South of her people, to make it impossible for them to return. There have been people that have stayed, that have been withstanding this brutalization. We want to be able to get to them as an act of solidarity, as a rejection of this effort to get people to leave. “If we are able to do it successfully with this convoy we’ll follow with a second convoy, and more. We may have to escalate our actions to the point of people starting to return to their homes. If that’s possible, we can let the world know that Israel is attacking civilians, that this is Lebanese land and it’s the right of Lebanese to be on it.”

War reduces normally nuanced loyalties to black-and-white terms, and one of the challenges facing Lebanon’s NGO and civil society activists for the last month has been association with Hizbullah, whose policy goals do not necessarily correspond to their own, beyond opposition to Israeli invasion.

Arraf is aware of the same dynamic from Palestine. “One of the things that ISM has been very clear about and we worked very hard to maintain is that we will not get involved in internal politics. We have to work with everybody. Israeli aggression is so massive and one of the ways they succeed is by trying to divide the people. We need to be united. A lot of people talk about unity, but it often isn’t really translated on the ground very well. ISM refuses to be too closely affiliated with any one party. We work with everybody across the political spectrum, as long as we all have the same goals. We’ve taken a lot of flak for this in the US because we refuse to say that we won’t work with Hamas or Islamic Jihad. If they’re willing to struggle in the way that we can struggle we will work with them. We’re trying not to get caught up in the same thing here. We all need to work together. We can’t force anything on the people here but it has to be known that we will work with anyone here and won’t be used for those kinds of political purposes.

“All our efforts have to be directed to Israel’s aggression against civilians. What I would love to see is thousands of Lebanese, displaced or not, marching on the South, defying Israel, insisting upon reclaiming their land.”

For more information on the International Solidarity Movement’s work in Palestine and Lebanon, see www.palsolidarity.org and www.lebanonsolidarity.org