Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Sheikh Jarrah residents charged with refusing to leave their homes
The court cases of Maher Hannoun and Afed El Fatah Gawi, charged with contempt of court for refusing to leave their homes, were yesterday postponed until the 17th May. Hannoun, 51, and El Fatah, 87, are residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem where a spate of houses are threatened with eviction in Israel’s latest attempted purge of the Palestinian people.
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No doubt the Zionists will call the supporters visiting the homes "human shields." They are like the other "human shields" that resist illegal and murderous occupation, and thumb their noses at so called "courts" that are purely illegitimate laughing stocks (which is characteristic of all the "institutions").
ReplyDeleteCan you imagine that this "wonderful israeli society" will steal a house with a "court order" to make it legitimate and then punish those people that dont want to get out?
ReplyDeleteIs that some sick Nazism or what?
Can you imagine if Hitler sent an electricity bill to the Jews during the holocaust?
Israel is worse than a banana republic, they want this displayed as a valid society? I mean, you find the same nonsense historically in all colonial occupations - does that mean we need to watch and embrace these atrocities again in the 21st century? Your right Saif, it is like the Nazis giving us speeding tickets for trying to escape the fate of the concentration camps.
ReplyDeleteExcerpt from Jonathan Cooks new book - Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments In Human Despair
ReplyDeletehttp://www.jkcook.net/DisappearingPalestineXtract-2.pdf
http://www.jkcook.net/DisappearingPalestineXtract-1.pdf
http://www.jkcook.net/DisappearingPalestine-ContentsXtract.pdf
<span><span>Cook's thesis is that "the goal of Israeli policy is to make Palestine and the Palestinians disappear for good."</span></span>
ReplyDeletehttp://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10300.shtml
<span><span>"However, when a driver has an accident every year, it is not enough to note that each accident was different -- here the street lighting was faulty, there the brakes malfunctioned, one time happened during a snow storm; we are at fault if we ignore the pattern. Cook synthesizes a voluminous array of books relating to both the ideology and practices of the Israeli state, in order to present a compelling and appalling pattern of actions and words leading, planning and driving in one inexorable direction, the disappearance of Palestine and Palestinians."</span></span>
ReplyDelete<span><span> "Cook weaves into the historical swipe copious evidence about the planning and thinking behind the settlement project. This thinking appears most clearly in the Kafka-esque legal subterfuges that Israel devised in order to give ethnic cleansing the patina of legality. The chapters about the law is a must-read primer into one of the most chilling aspects of Palestinian life under Israeli rule, chilling precisely because of its seemingly aseptic calm and the invisibility of violence. Political theorist Hannah Arendt's phrase, "the banality of evil," both resonates in and is questioned by this account: the banality of the local commanders and petty bureaucrats who make the occupation happen cannot exist without the sadistic creativity of its lawyers."</span></span>
ReplyDelete<span><span>"The final pages of the essay assess the implications of this story. Cook uses the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling's concept of "politicide" to call attention to the careful ways in which Israel constructs and describes its policies in order to dodge an accusation of genocide, when in fact the accusation is fully merited:
ReplyDelete"So long as Israeli outrages can be presented as spontaneous, unsystematic and related to security needs, the international community will turn a blind eye. As long as Israel ensures that politicide -- a subtle incremental, war of attrition against the Palestinian public and private life -- does not look much like the popular notion of genocide (concentration camps and butchery) Israel will be able to continue its policies unchecked. The ultimate goal, however will be the same: the disappearance of a Palestinian nation for good.""</span></span>
<span><span>"Part of what the essay reveals, although Cook does not make it explicit, is how much the Israeli dependence on constructed historical narratives also translates into an almost "literary" sensitivity to the power of narration that is itself harnessed to the goals of disappearing Palestinians. Not only does Israel seek to erase the Palestinian presence in the land, and with it that historical memory, but its strategies of erasure are constrained by narrative rules, and designed with a view of fragmenting the potential national narrative that emerges from the erasure itself. Israel seeks not only to erase, but, borrowing from the language of architecture, to erase the erasure of Palestine, thus satisfying both internal needs for a clear conscience as well as the demands of Western amnesia to depict every new phase of this genocide as "spontaneous, unsystematic and related to security needs." History and journalism with memory, writing that insists on un-erasing the erasure, defragmenting the accidental and the spontaneous and tracing its patterns back to the bureaucrats, ideologues and politicians behind it and simultaneously to the resistance in front of it, is not just a matter of accuracy and knowledge, but also of survival."</span></span>
ReplyDelete<span><span>"Cook not only seeks to meet this requirement, but also exposes the complicity of those writers for whose consumption Israel tailors its genocide the way it does. This is done in the second half of the book. The reprinted articles are a useful series of "snapshots" from different moments in the war of disappearance. They tackle a variety of topics, from the persecution of Palestinian political leader Azmi Bishara, the rise of the Russian right-winger Avigdor Lieberman, the difference between left and right in Israeli politics, the siege of Gaza and more. An important number deal with analyzing the way various narrators of the events in question play an active role in the erasure of the disappearance of Palestine. Here, Cook takes to task Israeli writers Uri Avnery and David Grossman, as well as the rights organizations B'Tselem and Human Rights Watch for the complicit ways they represent the Palestinian struggle and Israeli actions."</span></span>
ReplyDeleteThanks for the links to Cook's book, v. I'll make a post later.
ReplyDelete.
Cook's Book if anyone interested US$99 at Amazon, and $US15 at abooks.com (UK).
ReplyDelete