Fedwa Wazwaz, The Star-Tribune, June 2nd. 2010.

As events unfolded during the attack on the Freedom Flotilla in international waters, what was amazing was how credible news agencies like CNN opened the airwaves to Israeli government spokespeople to speak unchallenged. This while those who knew the other side of the story—the activists–were being detained, and after their personal belongings, including pictures and video footage, were seized by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Had this event happened off the shores of Iran, for instance, the news coverage would have been mainly on how Iran censors freedom of press and free speech.  But time and time again, when Israel attacks, and creates a news blackout – we find that in America, Israel speaks unchallenged.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) released a media advisory that can be read here.

“Much of the U.S. press coverage takes Israeli government claims at face value, and is based largely on footage made available by Israeli authorities–while Israel keeps the detained activists away from the media (not to mention from lawyers and worried family members).”

There were also no international law experts who appeared on maintstream news stations to debunk the Israeli claim that their actions were legal within international law.

As mentioned in FAIR advisory

“According to Craig Murray (5/31/10), former British ambassador and specialist on maritime law, the legal position ‘is very plain’: ‘To attack a foreign flagged vessel in international waters is illegal. It is not piracy, as the Israeli vessels carried a military commission. It is rather an act of illegal warfare.'”

What happened in the aftermath of Freedom Flotilla attack is no different than what has happened before.

We are hearing the same old ‘they started it’ and ‘Israel is acting in self-defense’ argument.  Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT, responded to this classic argument best:  “You can’t defend yourself when you are militarily occupying someone else’s land.  Call it what you like, it is not self-defense.”

In this situation, the ships were on International waters, around 50-70 miles from Gaza.  Israel invaded the ships, so the self-defense argument does not stand here as well.  Israel was not defending itself because Israel’s self was not being invaded or attacked.

The context of this crisis is an occupation that is illegal within international law. It is a humanitarian struggle like the struggle for civil rights here and over apartheid in South Africa.  The world leaders have had their turn to resolve this situation and for decades they failed. Mainstream American media outlets have failed throughout these decades to ask the necessary critical questions before the American public square.  So, as with South Africa, ordinary people decided to take action.

People of many faiths, including Jews, and of many ethnicities and many walks of life–from holocaust survivors to intellectuals–have joined an international movement to dismantle Israel’s apartheid regime.

Unlike the media outlets, these ordinary citizens asked many questions of themselves and others.  They went on painstaking trips to see the situation on the ground.  They respected themselves enough to verify, to investigate and to dig for the truth.

Please read below some of these voices:
Desmond Tutu, South Africa
“It is not with rancor that we criticize the Israeli government, but with hope, a hope that a better future can be made for both Israelis and Palestinians, a future in which both the violence of the occupier and the resulting violent resistance of the occupied come to an end, and where one people need not rule over another, engendering suffering, humiliation, and retaliation. True peace must be anchored in justice ”

Judith Butler, Jewish faculty member at Berkeley.
“But if you struggle against voicelessness to speak out for what is right, then you are in the middle of that struggle against oppression and for freedom, a struggle that knows that there is no freedom for one until there is freedom for all. There are those who will surely accuse you of hatred, but perhaps those accusations are the enactment of hatred.”

Hajo Meyer is the author of The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed.
“I am pained by the parallels I observe between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by Palestinians today. I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of ‘blood and soil’ in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people — coerced ghettoization behind a ‘security wall’; the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields; the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings; an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival — force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth. This century-long process of oppression means unimaginable suffering for Palestinians.”

And the sad part is, as Norman Finkelstein points out in this footage here.  Unless, Israel is stopped – this is a very serious situation.  We need to get beyond the morality contest discussions, and childish who started it tag games, and get to the hard work of seeking truth, critical thinking, independent investigations and holding people responsible accountable before a court of law.
If you are interested in a campaign to investigate the raid and bringing a peaceful end to the blockade, then please sign the petition here.

The petition simply reads:

“We call for an immediate, independent investigation into the flotilla assault, full accountability for those responsible, and the lifting of the Gaza blockade.”

And Jewish Voices for Peace also has a petition that sends directly to your U.S. congresspeople.

I further invite you this coming Friday to an event on the Al-Nakba Commemoration.  Please bring your critical questions regarding the event to the speakers.

Friday, June 4, 2010
6:00 p.m.
Speakers George Galloway, British parliamentarian and founder of Viva Palestina
Dr. Hatem Bazian, UC Berkeley professor
Refreshments will be served
$10.00 admission fee
Crowne Plaza Minneapolis North
2200 Freeway Boulevard, Brooklyn Center, MN 55430

(originally posted at: http://www.startribune.com/yourvoices/fedwawazwaz.html?elr=KArks47cQiUdcOy_9cP3DiU47cQU7DYaGEP7U )

Marc Trius, May 14

I would like to start with a simple statement: a racially stratified, undemocratic, and warlike State isn’t good for anybody. It certainly isn’t good for those who get ground under the unsympathetic wheels of racial domination, or shot, blown, and burned by the fires of war. But neither is it good for those who benefit from enforced privilege or sit safe and secure in the bunker while the war is happening to someone else. Those who live by the sword will eventually die by the sword no matter how good their sword technology is, and those who live on the backs of others will end up consumed by their own cruelty and arrogance, no matter how long they themselves have previously been downtrodden.

Israel is a racially stratified, undemocratic, and warlike State. Israel is a State in which a fifth of the citizenry is denied a stake of ownership and required to forswear their own identity and history to avoid being branded enemies of the State. Even to call for equal rights is sufficient for an Israeli Arab to be hounded by the Security Services; to make alliances with Palestinians who are not citizens of Israel is even worse. When Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian Member of Knesset(MK)—the Israeli Congress—called for a ‘State of all its Citizens’ and refused to deny his cultural and political links with other Arabs, he was stripped of parliamentary immunity by special legislation, and eventually driven out of the country by harassment and threats of a trial for High Treason.

The so-called ‘Nakba Law’ is another attack on Palestinian identity, history, and self-expression. This law forbids public commemoration of the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from Israel in 1948; any public institution that commemorates the Day of the Nakba (May 15th) will be fined ten times the amount it spent on the event. This law passed the first reading in the Knesset last month, and has two more votes before it goes on the books.

There’s more: A series of ‘Loyalty Laws’ have been proposed that would strip anyone of citizenship for reasons such as refusing to swear fealty to Israel as a Jewish State; still pending is a law that would require Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that receive funds from sources outside of Israel to register on a special list; and a law, inspired by the Goldstone Report, that would shut down any organization which “provides information to foreign authorities and act to bring Israeli Military officers or Israeli leaders to trial on alleged war crimes” (from Ha’aretz Newspaper) has been proposed by MKs from Kadima, a centrist Israeli party, and from the National Union, a far-right party.

This onslaught of legislation is partly the result of the last elections, when far-right parties such as Israel Our Home and The National Union entered the governing coalition. The underlying reasons, however, include the rising civic consciousness among the Israeli Arab public and the increasing threat it poses to Jewish supremacy in Israel.

That is why Arab civil society is targeted with such verve. A recent example is the arrest of Ameer Makhoul on May 6th. Makhoul, the head of an Arab NGO called ‘Ittijah’, or The Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, and chairman of the Public Committee for the Defense of Political Freedom, was taken from his home at 3:10am by Israeli Security Services, and is being held for the allegation of ‘grave espionage.’ A gag order on news coverage of this event stood for a few days, until Israeli and international bloggers brought it to light. While the Security Services claim that Makhoul was giving secrets to a Hizbullah agent in Lebanon, it was eventually revealed that the accusation relies on a meeting between Makhoul and a Palestinian environmentalist from Jordan. This is what happens to Arab citizens of Israel who, like Makhoul and Bishara, speak to Arabs who are not also Israeli citizens.

For a State that sees the Palestinian Arab minority, which comprises a fifth of its population, as a “Strategic Threat,” as Avi Diskin, head of the Israeli General Security Services, proclaimed in 2007, acts of repression are inescapable. The grudging grant of citizenship to those Palestinians who failed to flee in 1948 (an event which, as we recall, it may soon be a crime to commemorate) does not change the fact that, as Bishara wrote in the Los Angeles Times, they have been transformed into “foreigners in [their] own country,” made to face discrimination in housing, education, and employment, turned into scapegoats for anything that goes wrong in the land, and denied political freedom.

It takes more than elections to make a Democracy: it takes a system where the rule of law, freedom of expression and conscience, and equality are paramount. As the new, draconian legislation and Makhoul’s and Bishara’s cases demonstrate so clearly along with many other cases here unmentioned, whatever can be said of Israel—whether it’s good or bad, necessary or counterproductive, Jewish or anti-Jewish—a Democracy is certainly isn’t.

Originally posted at:  http://open.salon.com/blog/mtrius/2010/05/14/israel_a_democracy_for_jews_only

Photo source: http://ruslantrad.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/some-facts-you-may-not-have-known-about-israel-the-only-democracy-in-the-middle-east/

Heidi Rimpila, Editorial in Star Tribune, April 26, 2010

The conflict in the Middle East continues to escalate at an alarming rate. The violence and the destructiveness experienced by both the people of Israel and Palestine is unacceptable.

Unfortunately, the United States continues to come up short of taking real action to put an end to the occupation and oppression of Palestinians. After the recent American vow to halt Israel building settlements in East Jerusalem, the response from Israel should be a big eye-opener for all of us. This action taken by Israel should make us all question how much of a bilateral relationship there really is between Israel and the United States. It seems that Israel will do what it wants to do, with or without our consent.

If there is going to be any real action to bring about peace, there needs to be more than simply peace talks and negotiations between the United States, Israel and Palestine.

When is the United States going to see its role in this issue and take egalitarian action to bring about an end to this awful occupation that is hurting so many people on both ends?

Instead of trying to engage in peace talks that have so far done no good, the U.S. needs to stop providing financial support for Israel’s continuing oppression of the Palestinian people. By taking this step, America will engage in real action to stop Israel’s occupation of Palestine and move closer to bringing about a just peace.

Heidi Rimpila is a resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Sanna Towns, Race-Talk, 4 March 2010

In two of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most memorable writings, his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and his 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence,” he bemoaned the failure of Americans to speak out, to break their silence when witnessing injustice and immoral acts against humankind.  He confessed his disappointment that Birmingham’s white Christian and Jewish communities were more devoted to “’order’ than to justice.”  Motivated in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech to break “the betrayal of [his] own silences,”

King called for a “true revolution of values” within the United States – a revolution that shifted from profit motives and property rights to a society that valued people.   A society, he lamented, that didn’t speak to the social betterment of humanity was not just and thus made the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism . . . incapable of being conquered.”

Today there is a growing community of human rights activists in the U.S., around the world, and especially in Palestine-Israel whose behavior mirrors and extends King’s confrontation with injustice in their own efforts to break the silence on the injustice of the cruel, oppressive Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian people.  They realize that by maintaining a deafening silence, mainstream U.S. media and political leadership keep large segments of the U.S. population ignorant about the true nature of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice, and human rights.  Few Americans know that the Palestinian freedom struggle has been predominantly nonviolent for the vast majority of Palestinians, and has always been grounded in some of the same principles expounded by Martin Luther King, Jr.

In his “Letter,” King identifies four basic components of a nonviolent campaign:  “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.”  So what are the facts of the Israeli injustices against the Palestinian people?  For more than 62 years beginning in 1948, reminiscent of the ethnic cleansing experienced by Native Americans, Palestinian Muslims and Christians (the indigenous descendants of the first Christians) have suffered as the Israeli government expels them from their homelands, creating the state of Israel upon the 500-plus Arab-Palestinian towns and villages.[i] The suffering continues under a 42-year Israeli occupation marked by land confiscations for settlement building and wall construction and by restrictions on movement: to work, markets and water; to agricultural land and olive trees; to health facilities and educational institutions; and to Christian and Muslim religious sites, all but destroying family ties – discrimination similar to America’s segregated past.  The separation wall and Israeli-only roads and settlements in Palestine divide populations racially for the benefit of illegal Israeli settlers (echoes of apartheid South Africa).  Israel’s apartheid system has caused thousands of civilian deaths, many of them children, and widespread human rights violations.[ii] While the injustices mount, Israel has defied rulings by the International Court of Justice,[iii] violating more than 65 UN Resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention.[iv]

Americans have been led to believe that Palestinians have not been “honest partners for peace.”  The truth is, however, negotiating for their freedom has been a daunting task.  Palestinians have experienced the same broken promises, “blasted” hopes, and deep disappointments that King describes in his negotiations with Birmingham’s white leaders.  President Clinton’s famed Oslo Peace Process began in 1993 with negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli leadership and the promise to end Israel’s occupation and the formation of a Palestinian state.  Essential to these negotiations, however, was a blatant imbalance of power: on the stronger side, the nation of Israel, militarily superior and prosperous, supported by the wealth and power of the U.S., controlling more than 78% of original Palestine; on the weaker side, the Palestinians, barely surviving and holding on to the remaining 22% of land.

Currently, Palestinian leadership has refused to return to negotiations due to Israel’s unwillingness to abide by past agreements and to cease expanding illegal settlements.  Israel has scoffed at and dismissed longstanding U.S. policy of ending illegal Israeli settlement expansion in Palestine, a policy that President Obama attempted but failed to enforce upon Israel.

Surviving this imbalance and the suffering it causes has been traumatic for Palestinians, requiring unimaginable resources of strength and faith.  King would have identified with their plight and their need to find ways to cope with and confront their circumstances in ways that enable them to sustain themselves.  King describes the process of self-purification as self-analysis and a way of discovering the extent to which he and his fellow protesters were prepared to endure the ordeals of their nonviolent actions.  For many Palestinians, their lives as devoted Muslims and Christians make self-purification through fasting and prayer a much-practiced tradition and surely one that has empowered them during nearly 100 years of suffering and injustice. One ultimate self-purifying act within Palestinian society is articulated in the recent Kairos Document by Palestine’s Christian leadership, a document that proclaims “that our Christian word in the midst of all [the tragedies in our lives], in the midst of our catastrophe, is a word of faith, hope and love.”

While Americans know well the direct action tactics of the movement King led, little do they know about the decades of Palestinian engagement in nonviolent, civil resistance for justice and freedom.  As far back as 1902, Palestinian villagers, in what is now Israel, staged peaceful protests against confiscation of their land by European Zionist settlers. From 1987 to 1993, during the largely nonviolent mass movement of the First Intifada, Palestinians were involved in mass public demonstrations, refusing to pay taxes, boycotting Israeli goods and facilities, and planting olive trees on land confiscated by Israelis.[v] But the most effective resistance to Israeli expulsions, expansionism, and occupation has been their refusal to stop “living in their homes, going to school, eating and living.”

According to Palestinian scholar and human rights activist Mazin Qumsiyeh, “this colonial occupation wants all Palestinians to give up and leave the country. . . . When Shepherds . . . go to their fields despite repeated attacks by settlers and even the attempted poisoning of their sheep, that is non-violent resistance.  When Palestinians walk to school while being spat on, kicked and beaten by settlers and soldiers, that is non-violent resistance.  When Palestinians spend hours at check points to get to hospital, their farm land, their work, their schools, or to visit their friends, that is non-violent resistance.”

More recently, Palestinians, along with Israeli and international activists, are resisting by protesting the construction of the separation wall that is stealing more of their land.  In February, demonstrators in the village of Bil’in cleverly invoked Hollywood, reenacting the film Avatar by dressing up as the blue Na’vi natives opposing the encroaching occupation of an Alien (human) corporate empire.

Israel’s typical response to these nonviolent protests and others by Palestinians against home expulsions in East Jerusalem includes shooting rubber bullets and live ammunition, tossing tear gas,  and showering protesters with sewage – the Israeli equivalent of Alabama’s Bull Connor.

Gail Chalbi, The Northern Light, 5 March 2010

In 2007 Bishop Dyck wrote about the wall being constructed by Israel on Palestinian land (“But Not So with You,” April 2, 2007). Being interested in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I asked what UMC was doing.

She directed me to the Palestine/Israel Justice Project Team, which I joined. That same summer the United Methodist Women’s School of Christian Missions highlighted the conflict. Resolution 6073 in The United Methodist Book of Resolutions 2008 expresses the church’s opposition to continued military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and other ways in which human rights have been withheld from residents of Palestinian lands.

I decided to participate in the Gaza Freedom March in December 2009. Some 1400 peace activists from 42 countries, including eight Minnesotans, would meet in Cairo and go into Gaza to commemorate the beginning of the assault by Israel in December 2008 and protest the blockade begun in 2007. We would be marching alongside 50,000 Palestinians to the Eretz crossing, while 10,000 Israeli activists would approach from Israel.

However, we learned that Egypt had withdrawn permission to enter Gaza. The first morning we were there, we made cards and tied them to the Kasr al Nil Bridge in remembrance of the 1400 Palestinians—many of whom were women and children—killed during the assault. Soon the police asked us to leave the bridge and tore down the notes..

The morning we were scheduled to depart for Gaza police told the cab drivers that if they unloaded their occupants and luggage, their taxis would be confiscated. Later we went to the UN headquarters where our leaders spoke with a delegate. As we waited in the plaza we were surrounded by police and metal barriers for six hours. It was here that Hedy Epstein, an 85-year-old holocaust survivor, started a hunger strike. She found it incomprehensible that the Israeli government would put a stranglehold on people after what the Jews themselves had suffered during World War II.

Next we went to our embassies seeking diplomatic help to enter Gaza. We were again corralled for over five hours by Egyptian riot police, who informed us that we were being contained at the request of the embassy! Organizers then met with Egyptian first lady Suzanne Mubark. Eventually 86 activists went to Gaza for 48 hours, taking a message of solidarity and hope, along with much needed warm clothing and school supplies for the Palestinians.

Back in Cairo, several major demonstrations took place. On New Year’s Eve we gathered for a candlelight vigil near Tehrir Square where a number of Egyptian families joined us. An emotional moment was a cell phone call from Gaza thanking us for bringing international attention to their plight.

That afternoon for the first time ever a large contingency was allowed to demonstrate at the Israeli Embassy. As banners were displayed among people singing and chanting, passersby flashed the victory sign and took pictures. Our presence was front-page news in the Cairo papers and our experiences were written about and televised around the world. Suzanne Mubarak said we were like an earthquake in Cairo–we had done more good by protesting in Egypt than if we had all gone to Gaza.

Rukhsana Ghouse, Woodbury Bulletin, 27 January 2010

As a resident of Minnesota, I have a moral obligation to ensure that our state doesn’t make investments that oppress others. Minnesota’s investment in Israel supports Israel’s apartheid system which has caused thousands of civilian deaths, including children, and widespread human rights violations.

This system defies rulings by the International Court of Justice, more than 65 UN Resolutions, and the Fourth Geneva Convention. Recently the Progressive Caucus of the DFL passed a resolution for the state of Minnesota to divest from Israel Bonds. This resolution is similar to past divestment campaigns targeting apartheid-era South Africa.

This resolution and the DFL’s Progressive Caucus have come under attack by numerous Zionist special-interest groups, who believe that the state of Israel is above scrutiny and international law. However, I believe that this stance by the DFL’s Progressive Caucus, based firmly on social and political justice, needs to be supported in full. I would like to highlight this publicly and ensure that this resolution is taken forward in the interests of peace and justice.

I would encourage all Minnesota residents to join me in supporting the DFL’s Progressive Caucus, and the larger campaign to divest from apartheid regimes like Israel in the interests of human rights.

Rukhsana Ghouse is a resident of Woodbury, MN., community activist, and stay-at-home mom.