Tag: Gaza

Mohammad’s story

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

10 March 2009

An elderly man saw me walking the other morning. “Bless you, bless you,” he said, holding out his palm as I gave him 20 shekels.

What has rendered a man in his late years impoverished and begging, in a manner Palestinians are not accustomed to?

I followed him home yesterday. It took some doing, as the name he had told me, while correct, didn’t seem to register with his wife when my friend Mohammed called. Establishing that he was the same man I’d met on the street took some time two days ago. Then locating his home in a swirl of alleys after the Sahaa market area took more doing.

But we finally reached it and I saw the same beaming older man, greeting us with the same enthusiasm and gratitude of two weeks ago.

Mohammad Ahmad Kahawish lives in the Tuffahh area, a neighbourhood in Gaza city’s older area. His family is unusually small for a Palestinian family, with only 3 children. His house is also small, and now is quite damaged from the intense shelling during Israel’s 3 weeks of attacks on Gaza.

“The house jumped from side to side with every missile,” his wife explained.

He’s fortunate that none of the missile hit his home, but suffers nonetheless from a combination of debilitating factors, including at least a natural one: age. He is nearly 70, born in 1940 in Jaffa, in the former Palestine.

Until Mohammad fell off of his bicycle 6 months ago, injuring his lower left leg, he had worked as a cleaner, on the street, in homes, wherever he could get work. Post-accident, his doctor strongly advised him not to walk excessively, though out of necessity he’s had to ignore this. When I met him, he was walking in the other end of town, by the marina, collecting sellable bits of rubbish and imploring passersby for some token shekels.

Out of work, injured, and also blind in one eye -[he has a cataract in the left eye (Left traumatic vitreous hemorrhage) which he cannot get treatment for in Gaza. Despite having a referral for surgery in Israel he has yet been denied an exit permit by Israeli authorities]-Mohammad has his family to provide for, and now a house to try to repair.

The reverberations for the bombing around his home caused cracks all along where walls meet ceiling. Some of the cracks are a couple of inches deep, wall torn from roof. Cold air and rainwater stream in. The entire ceiling leaks, there isn’t a dry corner in the tiny 2.5 room and a kitchen home. One room, where his daughters sleep, has no actual roof: the ceiling, a layer of overlapping planks of plywood, is all that shelters from the elements.

Mohammad’s son is 34 but doesn’t contribute to the family income. “He’s got psychosis,” the parents explain. “And at night he cannot see at all.” In 1987, during the 1st Intifada, Israeli soldiers had come to the house and beat the boy, around 12 or 13 at the time.

My original query, how did this dignified elderly man end up so, begging and grateful for the smallest scrap, was answered yesterday.

ISM Sweden protest Swedish-Israeli Davis Cup matches

On Friday the 6th of March protesters from ISM Sweden joined with other activists in a peaceful demonstration outside the arena in Malmö, Sweden, where the Davis Cup matches between Sweden and Israel are being played.

Activists participated in street theater, spoke to media and passers-by, and shouted out their anger and frustration outside the enclosed area around the arena, which is being guarded by one of the largest police contingencies in Swedish history. Debate about the matches has been hot in Sweden the last few weeks, and the ISM sees their work during the weekend as part of an international campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

The matches are being played without audiences – a partial victory for the campaign run by a broad coalition of political parties, cultural groups and organisations that has been working since the beginning of the Gaza massacre.

The demonstration was a clear statement against the opening of the Davis Cup weekend in Malmö, especially through work with the national and international media. Instead of getting caught in the hype about perceived threats of violence against the matches, ISMers managed to raise the critical issues at hand, namely the daily situation of millions of Palestinians and the inappropriateness of welcoming representatives of the state of Israel to a city where many inhabitants have lost friends and family in the Israeli massacre on Gaza. Matches are scheduled during the whole weekend, and manifestations and rallies are planned to continue, the largest one on Saturday expecting to gather around 10.000 protesters. The ISM are proud to have been present from the start to show our disgust of the decision to welcome Israeli tennis players to Sweden, and to stand in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Palestine.

Stop the match! Boycott Israel!

ISM Sweden

Amnesty: Evidence of misuse of US-weapons reinforces need for arms embargo

Amnesty International

Amnesty International
Amnesty International

Both Israel and Hamas used weapons supplied from abroad to carry out attacks on civilians, Amnesty International said today as it released fresh evidence on the munitions used during the three-week conflict in Gaza and southern Israel and called on the UN to impose a comprehensive arms embargo.

[Download report: Fueling Conflict: Foreign arms supplies to Israel/Gaza]

“Israeli forces used white phosphorus and other weapons supplied by the USA to carry out serious violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes. Their attacks resulted in the death of hundreds of children and other civilians and massive destruction of homes and infrastructure,” said Donatella Rovera who headed Amnesty International’s fact-finding mission to southern Israel and Gaza. “At the same time, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups fired hundreds of rockets that had been smuggled in or made of components from abroad at civilian areas in Israel. Though far less lethal than the weaponry used by Israel, such rocket firing also constitutes a war crime and caused several civilian deaths.”

Even before the three-week conflict, those who armed the two sides will have been aware of the pattern of repeated misuse of weapons by the parties. They must take some responsibility for the violations perpetrated with the weapons they have supplied and should immediately cease further transfers.

“As the major supplier of weapons to Israel, the USA has a particular obligation to stop any supply that contributes to gross violations of the laws of war and of human rights. The Obama Administration should immediately suspend US military aid to Israel,” said Malcolm Smart, Director for the Middle East.

For many years the USA has been the major supplier of conventional arms to Israel. Under a 10-year agreement to 2017, the USA is due to provide $30 billion in military aid to Israel, a 25 percent increase compared to the period preceding the Bush administration.

“To a large extent, Israel’s military offensive in Gaza was carried out with weapons, munitions and military equipment supplied by the USA and paid for with US taxpayers’ money,” said Malcolm Smart.

In Gaza, as the fighting ended Amnesty International researchers found fragments and components from munitions used by the Israeli Army – including many that are US-made – littering school playgrounds, in hospitals and in people’s homes. They included artillery and tank shells, mortar fins and remnants from Hellfire and other airborne missiles and large F-16 delivered bombs, as well as still smouldering highly incendiary white phosphorus remains.

They also found remnants of a new type of missile, seemingly launched from unmanned drones, which explodes large numbers of tiny sharp-edged metal cubes, each between 2mm and 4mm square in size. These lethal purpose-made shrapnel had penetrated thick metal doors and were embedded deep in concrete walls, and are clearly designed to maximize injury.

In southern Israel, Amnesty International also saw the remains of “Qassam”, Grad, and other indiscriminate rockets fired by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups against civilian areas. These unsophisticated weapons are either smuggled into Gaza clandestinely or constructed there from components secretly brought in from abroad. They cannot be aimed accurately and stand no comparison with the weaponry deployed by Israel but they have caused several deaths of Israeli civilians, injured others and damage to civilian property.

“We urge the UN Security Council to impose an immediate and comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups until effective mechanisms are found to ensure that munitions and other military equipment are not used to commit serious violations of international law,” said Malcolm Smart. “In addition all states should suspend all transfers of military equipment, assistance and munitions to Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups until there is no longer a substantial risk of human rights violations. There must be no return to business as usual, with the predictably devastating consequences for civilians in Gaza and Israel.”

From the ending we shall begin

Natalie Abou Shakra | Gaza 08

His green eyes divert in the opposite direction as I look into them. He smiles at me shyly, sadly, forlornly. I stand against the magnitude of a man, too great not to be noticed. His tall, dark figure directs me to the car, and his friend drives us to the sea. It is almost noon, and I peak towards his seat. The windows dark, the car white, the sun shining and we stop at the hotel. “We shall come in a minute,” he tells me, “find us a seat.”

The darkness of his skin makes his emerald green eyes fire with brightness. His name is Adnan, and he is a father of six children. “The pressure was immense, and its magnitude pushed me forward. It was a magnanimous sound with extreme pressure,” he spoke motioning his hands towards his face and his chest, his body leaning towards the table and his head rose forward not surrendering to the excruciating memory of the Israeli bombing of the Jawazat [passports] section of the Ministry of Interior. It was one of the first targets of the Israeli Apache planes at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday December 27, 2008 where around forty Palestinian citizens were slaughtered the day they were finishing their training course in being traffic officers.

Adnan was in the meeting room on the third floor, and in less than a second, he was under the rubble of a building leveled down. All he opened his eyes to, was a black void until sun rays from a nearby hole, in what seemed like a ceiling, was noticed. A flood of liquid poured down from his forehead, and he struggled to keep his eyes open against what he later realized was blood. Moments later, he was pulled out, and retrieved consciousness at the Shifa hospital full of people with amputated body parts, children with deep wounds on their faces and bodies. “I was shocked by the images. I forgot myself, I forgot my wounds, and I even forgot my pain. The images I saw were more shocking, were more painful than what my body was going through,” he told me calmly. But, Adnan is still alive, he goes back to work, he brings bread home.

The rubble of the Jawazat section are now cleared off. Days ago, however, as I walked through the eastern neighborhood of Jabalya town, the rubble of leveled down homes around me told different tales of resistance. I was greeted by families drinking tea above the ruins of their homes. As I walked past the uprooted olive tree orchards, a woman ran towards me crying “they killed the stones, the trees, the animals, the humans… they killed everything!” I observed the trails of the tanks, drawing images of the plummeting of the earth below them and devastating the life below their weight. But, I also saw a little green stem rise against the death of soil. As I ascended the staircase towards a still standing home’s roof, I saw two pigeons that the housekeeper had raised, killed. But, I also saw others flying around freely alive.

The core of this reality is not humanitarian. It is political. The core of this being is that it has been a being of 61 years of waiting, and the people are still waiting. The core of this absurdity is that there were around 483 children massacred during a period of twenty two days, and the criminal has not been tried yet. The core of this existence is that there have been numerous peace processes bringing about a series of episodes of massacres and acts of ethnic cleansing. The core of this actuality is that there is a society crippled, its development obstructed, its people repressed, oppressed, and imprisoned, and negotiations are still ongoing. From the tragedy of a siege to the tragedy of human slaughtering, and the sea still roars with pride along the coast of Gaza. “What can we do without the sea? I would die without the sea in Gaza” a friend tells me. There is always a sea.

Behind the sadness of tales, there lies a resistance, the roaring of a people with a meteoric amalgam of unforeseen power. The song of resistance has not ended yet, and the words of Frantz Fanon come again to ring in the ears of oblivion a narration of liberation. “Faced with the extent of the damage, colonialism begins to have second thoughts,” he writes, “a generation of people willing to make sacrifices, to give all they have, impatient, with an indestructible pride.” The war on Gaza was a spark, a calling onto morality and justice, onto the boycotting and isolation of an Aparthied ideology, regime and political entity. It is now that the ending is writing a new beginning, in a cause that witnessed the false notions of many new beginnings. From the ending, then, we shall start.

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.”