Tag: Cast Lead

Students are revolting: The spirit of ’68 is reawakening

Emily Dugan | The Independent

8 February 2009

They are the iPod generation of students: politically apathetic, absorbed by selfish consumerism, dedicated to a few years of hedonism before they land a lucrative job in the City. Not any more. A seismic change is taking place in British universities.

Around the UK, thousands of students have occupied lecture theatres, offices and other buildings at more than 20 universities in sit-down protests. It seems that the spirit of 1968 has returned to the campus.

While it was the situation in Gaza that triggered this mass protest, the beginnings of political enthusiasm have already spread to other issues.

John Rose, one of the original London School of Economics (LSE) students to mount the barricades alongside Tariq Ali in 1968, spent last week giving lectures on the situation in Gaza at 12 of the occupations.

“This is something different to anything we’ve seen for a long time,” he said. “There is genuine fury at what Israel did.

“I think it’s highly likely that this year will see more student action. What’s interesting is the nervousness of vice chancellors and their willingness to concede demands; it indicates this is something that could well turn into [another] ’68.”

Beginning with a 24-hour occupation at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) on 13 January, the sit-ins spread across the country. Now occupations have been held at the LSE, Essex, King’s College London, Birmingham, Sussex, Warwick, Manchester Metropolitan, Oxford, Leeds, Cambridge, Sheffield Hallam, Bradford, Nottingham, Queen Mary, Manchester, Strathclyde, Newcastle, Kingston, Goldsmiths and Glasgow.

Among the demands of students are disinvestment in the arms trade; the promise to provide scholarships for Palestinian students; a pledge to send books and unused computers to Palestine; and to condemn Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Technology has set these actions apart from those of previous generations, allowing a national momentum to grow with incredible speed. Through the linking up of internet blogs, news of successes spread quickly and protests grew nationwide.

Just three weeks after the first sit-in at SOAS, students gathered yesterday at Birkbeck College to draw up a national strategy. The meeting featured speeches from leaders in the Stop the War movement, such as Tony Benn, George Galloway MP and Jeremy Corbyn MP. There has also been an Early Day Motion tabled in Parliament in support of campus activism.

At the end of the month students from across the country will gather for a national demonstration calling for the abolition of tuition fees, an event that organisers say has rocketed in size following the success of the occupations over Gaza.

Vice chancellors and principals have been brought to the negotiating table and – in the majority of universities – bowed to at least one of the demands. The students’ success means that now there is a new round of protests. On Wednesday two new occupations began at Strathclyde and Manchester universities, and on Friday night students at the University of Glasgow also launched a sit-in.

Emily Dreyfus, a 21-year-old political activist in her third year of reading classics at Oxford, was one of around 80 students to occupy the historic Bodleian library building in the city and demand that the university issue a statement condemning the Gaza attacks and disinvest from the arms trade. She said: “I found Oxford politically very dead when I arrived, but it’s completely different now. There seem to be more and more people talking about politics, which is so exciting. It’s really been aided by the communication tools we’ve got, things like Facebook.”

Wes Streeting, the president of the National Union of Students, said: “What we’ve seen over the Gaza issue is a resurgence of a particular type of protest: the occupation. It’s a long time since we’ve seen student occupations on such a scale. It’s about time we got the student movement going again and had an impact.”

Establishments that have not previously been known for their activism have also become involved. Fran Legg was one of several students to set up the first Stop the War Coalition at Queen Mary, a research-focused university in London, a month ago. Now they are inundated with interest.

“Action on this scale among students hasn’t been seen since the Sixties and Seventies,” she said.

“This is going to go down in history as a new round of student mobilisation and it will set a precedent. Gaza is the main issue at the moment, but we’re looking beyond the occupation; we’re viewing it as a springboard for other protests and to set up a committee to make sure the university only invests ethically.”

As the first generation of students to pay substantial direct fees to universities, their negotiating power has also been strengthened. Their concern over their college’s investments have been given new legitimacy because it is partly their money.

Ms Legg said: “For the first time, you’ve got students getting principals to the negotiation table, saying they don’t want their tuition fees funding war. Everybody wants to know where their money is going.”

The activist: ‘Students will see they can take action’

Katan Alder, 22, student leader speaking from the occupation at Manchester University

“We’ve been occupying the university since Wednesday. More than 500 people came to an emergency Students’ Union meeting and we took the vice chancellor’s administration block that afternoon. Israel’s assault on Gaza made people angry, and we heard about the occupations at other universities through blogs. This is the biggest student campaign we’ve had and it’s also the most wide-reaching. We’ll stay until the university lets us meet with the vice chancellor. I think students will see they can take action on more issues, such as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the education system; the Government’s refusal to stop the marketisation of education has provoked a lot of anger.”

The ’68 veteran: ‘It changed our lives’

John Rose, 63, former student organiser at the London School of Economics in 1968; now a lecturer and author on the Middle East

“I arrived at the LSE in ’66 as an extremely naive liberal student and I left in ’69 as a revolutionary socialist. It changed our lives. I was one of the student organisers with Tariq Ali and attended all the demonstrations and occupations. We did think a revolution was coming; we thought mass action of students might overthrow capitalism and bring genuine equality. It took us some time to realise that wasn’t going to happen.

“It wasn’t just about rioting and having fun, it was political argument that probed all the assumptions about the world. It was a highly intense period and the memory stays powerfully with anyone involved; it’s the memory of those times that has kept me going.

“It was a feeling of fantastic elation: we began to realise that mass action could change things. Once it started, we developed a taste for it and began to consider mass activity as a way of doing politics, which is what’s happening now. People are fed up with bankers, politicians and elite institutions. Hundreds of us thought the revolution was coming in ’69, but maybe the revolution is coming now.”

A beautiful place

Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell

8 February 2009

9 year old K is on the right with the blue backpack on her chair
9 year old K is on the right with the blue backpack on her chair

Before the strikes, the group 14 Friends of Palestine asked E and me to make contact with a little girl they sponsor via Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children. It’s taken a while for us to catch our breath and follow this up, but we got there today. We followed our usual pattern; meeting at Al Shifa hospital, grabbing a falafal sandwich, then striding off down the dusty streets ignoring all the beeping taxis that want to drive us (shared taxis are as close as Gaza gets to public transport.)

20 minutes later, I am startled by the wholeness of the Atfaluna building. Several of the buildings nearby are in small concrete pieces, but Atfaluna has grass, Atfaluna has windows. I doubt Israel avoided Atfaluna deliberately, since they bombed schools and hospitals, so Atfaluna also has good luck. Inside, we meet S, our initial contact, who has arranged for us for K’s social worker M to take us to visit her family. They live in Shayjaiee, in four rooms – K’s parents, and their 7 girls (born in a row), followed by 4 boys, the last one a smiley 5 months.

K’s mum S is a friendly woman, who tries mostly in vain to coax her girls, just home from school, to appear for us in anything other than shyly giggling glimpses, though we do eventually manage a photo with some of them. She manages to introduce us to two of the little boys with the lure of the arabic sweets we’d brought. We ask her how the Israeli strikes had affected them; she says they stayed in their home for the first ten days but the rocket attacks then became too close and frightening and they moved in with their downstairs neighbours, that being the only place they had to go.

The bread shortage has hit them hard, she says, describing bargaining for a bag of flour and being 20 shekels (about £3) short. A wave of guilt hits me; if only we had got to see them before the attacks, they would have had the equivalent of K’s dad’s salary for a month (he’s a cleaner) that we are bringing them today from 14 Friends of Palestine. S, apparently not giving this a moment’s thought herself, cheerfully says they did manage to get the flour after all in the end, and I remind myself the bread shortage continues, and the money is just as welcome now.

K’s home is very simple, they don’t have much, and when we ask S what the donation might go on, it’s clear they will carefully keep themselves in the basics for the children to be well and comfortable: mattresses, floor mats, food, clothes, gas maybe. J from 14 Friends of Palestine said we could use our discretion as to whether to buy the family things or hand over the donation itself, and it’s clear to us that the family will know better what they need than we will and use it wisely. Also at J’s suggestion, we’ve kept a little money back to buy some unnecessary things for the children that we think K’s parents might feel they shouldn’t buy with it themselves, so we’ll be back another day with the rest of the donation and maybe things like coloured pens, drawing books… we’ll see what’s available that looks like it will last a series of small hands.

E heads off to see if 18 year old Abd at Al Wafa is managing to imagine some sort of life for himself in a wheelchair yet. Back at Atfaluna, I am taken in to meet K, in amongst a class full of beaming kids. She leaps from her chair, glowing at finding herself the centre of attention. M signs to her that we come from Jane and 14 friends, and have met her family. She introduces herself to me with her sign name, a curving stroke of her finger from her forehead to her cheek, imitating the sweep of her dark curly hair. I am pleased to be able to return the sign name I was given once, the placing of an imaginary hat on my head (I like hats.) I meet also her sister S, also deaf, a calm 14 year old, smiling in her own more restrained class.

Then I am taken down to the kindergarten class, in a series of green carpeted rooms that imitate a lush outdoors that Gaza city children don’t see, except here where there are also gardens outside. They also bubble over with enthusiasm for a visitor, and I learn the Palestine sign for salaam aleikum. Surrounded by energetic and joyful small people, I realise what incredibly expressive faces and bodies deaf children can develop, with space and permission to move, from supportive teachers, many of whom are deaf themselves. Next I go to see some of the traditional craftwork the adults who work here produce.

This place is amazing. For the first time ever, I am seeing what Palestinians look like when they are surrounded by beauty: by art, by books and resources, by unbroken, unbombed, undamaged, working things. It makes me want to cry. (Currently a lot of random stuff makes me want to cry; I didn’t cry for any of those broken, bombed, damaged children in my ambulance and I guess that sadness is waiting somewhere deep.)

That makes me think of the modern sweeping design of the Jabalia Red Crescent building. I saw the Jabalia building before Israel fired shells at it, when it was new and whole like Atfaluna. It still works, only one room is burnt out. But now it looks like everything else in this place. Big shell holes, smaller bullet holes. Blackened patches.

300 children are studying at Atfaluna. 150 are on the waiting list. While it continues to stay in one piece, they will grow up with a vision that hearing Gaza children will simply have to imagine; what the world looks like when it isn’t all dust and crumbled concrete.

Ezbet Abed Rabbo: “They make like art here”

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

7 February 2009

On a visit to Ezbet Abed Rabbo during which I heard more harrowing testimonies of life under invasion, children shot dead before parents’ eyes, and being held captive for days on end, I took more photos than I could testimonies. Such is the widespread destruction in the eastern Jabaliya region that the testimonies will be spilling forth for weeks, if not longer.

Below are photos for which there wasn’t enough time that day to get the stories. Many of them speak for themselves, and the general theme is one of being held captive in one’s house or a neighbour’s for 3-5 days in general –in miserable conditions, without food, water, medicine, toilets…–and either having family members shot or being terrorized as captives who when finally released tried to run away only to be sniped or accosted by further Israeli snipers and soldiers positioned in occupied houses and on the streets.

Of those who survived the ordeal, or had evacuated before the land invasion, many came back to partially or completely destroyed homes. With no where else to live, some have erected tattered tents in the place of their houses, some are moving into refugee tents reminiscent of the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland (the “Nakba”), when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes, left to miserable conditions in refugee tents which have evolved into the densely inhabited refugee camps throughout Gaza and the West Bank (as well as those in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria).

While many buildings were evidently hit by missiles from F-16s, Apache helicopters, and the massive tanks occupying the area, others were leveled by bulldozers and by explosives, the remnants of which were littered in and around houses in the region.

My friend escorting me through the ravaged area pointed out of the Israeli invasion: “They make like art here,” of the houses. Indeed, Dali and Escher seem to have created these houses whose angles defy proportionality, which seem to melt into the earth.

He also pointed out various destroyed houses belonging to Fatah members, including one with a toppled roof resembling icing dripping off of a cake: it belonged to a high-up Fatah intelligence officer.

Down the road, Mahmoud Abed Rabbo stood outside a home which had housed 38 people. He said it was the 4th attack by invading Israeli soldiers on his house in 3 years, though by far the worst. He gestured to the A-frame which had been a normal 90 degree angle home, and said that his family had been home on Jan 7, when the Israeli military began heavy attacks on homes in the area.

“First, the Israeli army attacked around the house,” he said. “Then, the Israeli army attacked the home with 2 tank missiles. The radio said the army had declared a ceasefire from 1-4 pm, so our neighbours [the family of Khaled Abed Rabbo] left their home, to flee. They were carrying a white flag but the Israeli soldiers shot at them anyway, killing 2 children (2 year old, 1 year old), and injuring another child and an older man.”

At 2 pm, Mahmoud explained, the Israeli army detonated some explosives next to the wall of the house, then entered through the hole they’d made. His family was still inside.

He reported that the Israeli soldiers ordered his family to leave, to ‘go to Jabaliya and don’t turn back or we will kill you.’ Yet, he said they’d only gone about 200m down the road leading out of his area, arriving at the mosque, when they were stopped by more Israeli soldiers. The army picked out the young men, ordering the women and children to continue walking. Sixty men were led to a shelter for animals, their IDs were taken, and they were ordered to take off their clothes.

Naked except for their underclothes, they were used by the Israeli army as human shields while the army went house to house, knocking and blasting holes in walls to use as doors.

Mahmoud said that around 10 pm, most of the young men were released, all but 10 of them. Those 10 were abducted, believed to have been taken to Israel’s notorious Nakab prison. The rest were ordered rest to walk to Jabaliya, not to turn back or they would be killed.

When ground strikes finished and Israel army left the areas they had occupied, Mahmoud Abed Rabbo’s family, like many of those from Ezbet Abed Rabbo, came back home to find it destroyed.

[except for the first 4 photos (all of the Mahmoud Abed Rabbo home, in Ezbet Abed Rabbo), all others below are of different homes in the ravaged Ezbet Abed Rabbo area.]

An open letter to Sir Roger Moore

PACBI | Unless we do something about it, we’ll never ever be able to hold our heads up!! An Open Letter to Sir Roger Moore

8 February 2009

The Palestinian arts community has received the news of your plans to make a special guest appearance at the Red Sea International Music Festival in Eilat this February in a state of disbelief. At a time of unprecedented Israeli war crimes and grave violations of human rights, condemned by leading UN officials and international human rights organizations, with Israel just ending its atrocious assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, after more than 18 months of a criminal siege, described as a “prelude to genocide” by the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, your participation in this festival can only be understood as condoning this injustice and celebrating it.

We feel exceptionally disappointed because of your otherwise significant record in advocating human rights, particularly in your capacity as the UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Israel’s bloody war on occupied Gaza caused the immediate death of over 1,300 people, of whom 410 were children, in addition to injuring another 5,300 people [1]. As UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman noted in her statement regarding the Israeli aggression on Gaza:

“Each day more children are being hurt, their small bodies wounded, their young lives shattered. These are not just cold figures. They talk of children’s lives interrupted. No human being can watch this without being moved. No parent can witness this and not see their own child.” [2]

In response to this systematic brutality, and to Israel having bombed clearly marked UN schools and storage compounds with white phosphorus munitions and other banned weapons killing dozens of civilians taking shelter under the UN flag, the UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International and many leading international jurists have all called for a war crimes investigation. Given this context, your participation in this festival would constitute a gesture of “goodwill” towards a state which is widely viewed by people of conscience the world over as a rogue state above the law of nations, a state that commits severe and persistent human rights violations which amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, with utter impunity.

Palestinian civil society also responded by fully uniting behind the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it fulfills its obligations under international law and fully recognizes Palestinian rights [3]. Hundreds of progressive Israeli academics, intellectuals and activists have also come out in support of punitive measures by the international community against Israel to make it accountable for perpetrating war crimes [4].

Beyond the recent Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip, Israel is recognized by the United Nations and the absolute majority of nations as a repressive occupying power that maintains illegal colonies in the occupied Palestinian territory, violates international law, UN resolutions, and the basic human rights of the Palestinian people. These are not abstract notions, at least not to Palestinians. Israel denies millions of Palestinian refugees their internationally recognized right to return to their homes of origin, as stipulated by international law; it is building settlements and a monstrous Wall, both of which were declared illegal by the International Court of Justice; it is regularly demolishing thousands of Palestinian homes as a form of collective punishment; it is killing Palestinian children with impunity; it is uprooting hundreds of thousands of Palestinian trees; and its ubiquitous roadblocks are imprisoning Palestinian civilians, denying them access to health care, schools and jobs. Moreover, Israel maintains a system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens reminiscent of South African apartheid. These injustices, among others, have been well documented by leading human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Physicians for Human Rights.

Furthermore, as you may know, virtually all Palestinian filmmakers, artists and cultural figures have called on their colleagues worldwide to boycott Israeli cultural and arts institutions due to their complicity in perpetuating Israel’s occupation and other forms of oppression against the Palestinian people [5]. Ken Loach, John Berger, John Williams and many other prominent international cultural figures have endorsed this call for boycott. Many artists have heeded our appeals and turned down invitations to participate in Israeli gigs and festivals. These include Bono, Snoop Dogg, Bjork and Jean-Luc Godard.

Moreover, UNICEF last year decided to cut all ties with an Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev due to his companies’ construction of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. We hope it is not too much to expect conscientious international artists to uphold the values of freedom, equality and justice for all?

In your website you emphasise that you have been drawn into work for human rights, particularly those of children, through your colleague Audrey Hepburn, and you note:

“… I listened to Audrey speak-she was so eloquent and so passionate. She said that there are millions of children out there, and they are dying. Unless we do something about it, we’ll never ever be able to hold our heads up. Also, she said, that has to be pointed out to governments.” [6]

In the spirit of such a noble and brave commitment we appeal to your moral conscience and your record of standing up for principles of human dignity and equality. We sincerely hope that you will withdraw from this event and inform the Israeli organizers and government that you will not attend their festivals as long as Israel continues to deny the Palestinian people its inalienable rights to emancipation and human rights.

Yours truly,

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)

The Al Haddad family’s story: nothing left but ashes

Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell

6 February 2009

Haddad car, brothers of Ahsan and Adi Haddad in background
Haddad car, brothers of Ahsan and Adi Haddad in background

You remember the Nadeems (I must ring and ask them how Firas’s knee operation went so I can tell you) who tried to escape from the Israel’s attacks on Tela Howa in their car, but it wouldn’t start. Also on January 15, an hour or so afterwards at about 10.15am, their neighbours the Al Haddads tried to escape in their car.

They only got a few yards.

The Kabariti family told me about this, because M’s sister’s family are also neighbours to the Al Haddads. M took me up to hear the story from Mazin, brother to Adi Al Haddad. The Al Hadded family, in the same terror of remaining in their building to die that the Nadeems described, decided the safest way to leave was in their car. Believing they were about to lose everything, they took with them a large sum of money, the price of some family land that had just been sold. Adi, with his wife Ahsan, about 40, son Hatam, aged 20, daughter Ala’a, aged 14, and Mohammed aged 23, drove them from their sidestreet into their normally quiet road. To their right, a few hundred yards away, were the tanks that had targeted the Nadeems. To their left, a few hundred yards away, the main road that had already been hit by F16 planes.

from the car looking to the right: tanks were beside mosque
from the car looking to the right: tanks were beside mosque

They got to where their road and the main road intersect. At this point the Israeli army struck the car from both tank and plane, it appears with 2 rockets or shells, and at least one phosphorous bomb. The car spun 15 metres away, and as one of the doors flew open, Mohammed was thrown out, catching only the inital brunt of the phosphorous before the car exploded. Abu Rami il Sharif, who lived in the same block as the Haddads and on the corner of this intersection, was able to reach him. As firing continued from the tanks, Abu Rami knew that he could not reach the car to help anyone else, but he knew also that there was no-one left to help.

Helmi Abu Shaban, living opposite Abu Rami on the other side of the street, ventured out to the car at midday. The phosphorous fire was still burning, and looking inside the car, he could see nothing to show any humans had ever been there. Not even any bones. Just ashes.

I went to see Mohammed in Al Shifa hospital last week. When I got there, Ramattan TV was waiting to interview him, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him to tell the story to me also. I just told him quietly that I was sorry, and left. He has lost an eye and has burns all down one side of his body. I understand he has a little brother left him who wasn’t with the family at the time.

Looking to the left: the intersection. A black stain marks the attack. Helmi's on right
Looking to the left: the intersection. A black stain marks the attack. Helmi's on right
Mazin Al Haddad shows me pieces of phosphorous bombs
Mazin Al Haddad shows me pieces of phosphorous bombs