Originating in ancient Mesopotamia, the Keffiyah was popular among Arab men who used it to protect their face, head, and neck from the elements of nature. The traditional pattern, which is still used today in Palestine and other Arab Nations, was modeled after fishing nets and ears of grain. During the Arab Revolt in the 1930s, the keffiyah became a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and in the 1980s Yasser Arafat made the keffiyah a globally recognized symbol of the Palestinian struggle. Today, cheaper imports of the keffiyah from China threaten an already troubled industry. Rebecca Fudala takes a look inside the last keffiyah factory in Palestine. Read more-The Palestine Monitor
Turkish Military officials are currently in Israel to receive instructions and test four Israeli drones, Heron, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries, owned by Israel. Read more
In Iraq's date-production heyday, official estimates put the number of palm trees at 30 million, but decades of war and water salinity have cut that figure so dramatically that the United Nations agriculture mission considers date-palm rehabilitation an urgent national priority.
It would take armies of gardeners to revive the industry, and they'd have to be as skilled as Kadhim is, knowing how to pollinate, when to trim the leaves and the precise moment when dates are ready for picking.
Many of his old gardening friends said they're not willing to risk their lives to work for the equivalent of $10 a tree, which is still more than customers pay in the south, where it's safer and the trees are more abundant.
Kadhim left his farming community near the southern Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf a decade ago, after he heard how much Baghdad families were willing to pay to keep their palm trees groomed. Few of his original customers remain.
"So many families have left," Kadhim said, rattling off examples from neighborhoods throughout Baghdad . "Even when I find strangers in their houses, they never tell me they were displaced. They say the old families left or that they're relatives. Some of them just say, 'We live here now instead of them.'"
Palestine Liberation Organization Representative in Lebanon Abdullah Abdullah hailed government efforts aimed at giving Palestinian refugees their civil rights. "There is an encouraging factor behind the proposals to grant Palestinians in Lebanon their civil rights," Abdullah told Lebanese daily An-Nahar. "This stems from the fact that the Lebanese are convinced that the Palestinians reject naturalization," he explained. Abdullah stressed that both Lebanese and Palestinians are against the naturalization of Palestinians and that both sides support the right of return. He slammed as "unrealistic" some reports that said about 400,000 Palestinians intend to buy apartments in Lebanon, a matter that is likely to cause housing price hike. Read more
Arab leaders pay lip service to Palestinian rights – except when it comes to the rights of domiciled refugees in their countries. I moved to Beirut from New York nine months ago and began looking for an apartment. After 10 continuous years in America, I wanted to return to the Arab world – and returning to my family's roots in Palestine wasn't an option. Read more- The Guardian
Barack Obama, the US president, has dismissed General Stanley McChrystal, the US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, over disparaging comments about the president's staff in a Rolling Stone magazine interview. Obama said he would not tolerate any act that could undermine civilian control of the US military. The president was quick, however, to say that the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan would continue -- though without its chief architect. Afghan officials expressed disappointment over McChrystal's dismissal, but Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, said he accepted the decision. Al Jazeera's Nick Spicer reports. Video
General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, has replaced General Stanley McChrystal as commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, following the latter's removal. Petraeus is widely seen as being instrumental in turning around US fortunes in the Iraq war, and many are waiting to see if he can he do the same in Afghanistan. Al Jazeera's Patty Culhane reports. Video
Wikileaks.org plans to release as soon as this week documents related to a U.S. airstrike that killed Afghan civilians last year and plans to release combat footage of the incident this summer, the founder of the whistleblower site said in an interview Monday. Read more
Does anyone remember the movie The Boys from Brazil? It told the story of how a group of top Nazis had moved to Brazil where they made a number of clones of Hitler-as-a-child that were being strategically placed around the world to eventually bring about a Fourth Reich. The movie ended ambiguously, with many of the Hitler children still alive and evidently expected to eventually turn into Hitler adults. The movie makers were clearly on to something because there have been a lot of Hitler sightings by Israel and its friends over the past few years. Saddam Hussein was described as a new Hitler while Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been depicted in even more heinous terms as a reborn Nazi leader preparing a new Holocaust. More recently Israel demonstrators have displayed effigies of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with the hairline altered and a moustache added to create a caricature of Hitler. Full article
I'm not alone in my disproportionate interest in Israel – but why do so many of us pick away at this conflict like it's a giant scab? When I see Binyamin Netanyahu and his colleagues putting their side of some event, I do not see honest men.
Robert Fowke
One reason why Israel is singled out for so much attention is because its supporters are so very vociferous, pushing their agenda at every opportunity. As a consumer of news, the speed of their responses and their sheer ubiquity inflames my interest and my antipathy. Why do they persist in trying to defend the indefensible?
Another reason for my disproportionate interest in this conflict is that I feel I have been lied to, and I feel that people are still trying to lie to me and I don't like it. Why try to convince me that those Turkish activists on board the Mavi Marmara were terrorists? Whatever else they were, they patently were not that. If the word "terrorist" is to have any meaning at all it must refer to those who attack innocent civilians. From an Israeli propaganda perspective, silence would be better than lies.
I can remember a time back in the 1960s when I accepted a view of Israel as a plucky little state full of kibutzes busily taming the desert. At that time I had scarcely heard of the Palestinians. Then I discovered the other narrative.
My purpose here is not to go into the rights or wrongs, but to point out that if Israel had been described to me from the start as the product of remorseless expropriation of some else's land (not the full story, I know), I might well have lost interest by now.
But having been told how heroic and wonderful it was and then to find out that, at the very least, there is a different and more troubling story running in parallel, that affects me emotionally....
.....When I see Binyamin Netanyahu and his colleagues putting their side of some event, I do not see honest men and my emotions are the same as those I experience when I see burglars and con-men – distaste and disapproval. And yet they won't shut up.
Someone recently asked me whether I thought Helen Thomas was guilty of anything. My reactions were mixed.
Emotionally, I have to admit that there was something very gratifying about what she said, however flip it was. The fourteen year old boy inside of me loved it. Anyone who is an Arab or a Muslim who is honest will tell you that they had the same reaction. They probably emailed an article about it to a friend, approvingly, though they might deny having done so if asked. And it’s not just Arabs and Muslims who had a moment of private exhilaration at Helen Thomas’s words. Anybody who has ever stopped reading something by Marty Peretz or Charles Krauthammer or Barry Rubin or any number of other writers and analysts mid-paragraph, in quiet revulsion at their undiluted bigotry, or anyone who has been incredulous and felt powerless and angry when one elected official or pundit after another insouciantly talks about sending the Palestinians packing out of the West Bank, or expelling them from Israel, or anyone who has listened to some figure in a position of authority speak with exquisite ignorance, confidence, condescension and derision about Palestinian history and Arab culture will feel the same way.
I have heard the Palestinians demonized so much, called so many bad things (non-existent is actually relatively tame) in so many fora, in an unchallenged way that it felt really good to hear somebody say what she said. Even if it was only to quote her and damn her. The shoe was on the other foot—not even on the other foot, sort of in the vicinity of the other foot—for a split second in the national discourse, and there was some inexplicable sense of pleasure in that. Saree Makdisi’s piece in the LA Times was delicious because he chose just a few examples (many, many more could have been adduced) and he called out the hypocrisy. He held a mirror up to our cultural and political elite; I’m sure they looked away.
A lot of this conflict, at least in the western media, boils down to the refusal in our discourse to acknowledge the equal humanity of Palestinians. I remember reading the NYT very closely every day during the Second Intifada. You could have done studies on the amount of ink and where that ink was spilled (p. A1 or p. A15?) in terms of its coverage of Jewish and Palestinian deaths. The valuation of human lives implicit in those decisions about space allocation communicated a lot about the relative worth of Arabs and Jews in American mainstream discourse. At Baruch Goldstein’s funeral, the rabbi there announced that a million Arabs weren’t worth a Jewish fingernail. The NYT and other news sources seemed to me to be different only in degree, not in kind, in the assumptions they brought to their coverage. I remember going to a protest once as an undergrad; the sign I held just said, "Arabs are People, too." I don’t think many Americans really believe it. And when I read about Israel funding therapy for pets traumatized by rocket attacks and at the same time that Israeli sonic booms over Gaza have caused a ‘malignant spread of deafness among children,' I wonder whether the Israeli government really does, either.
At a non-emotional level, of course, I know that Thomas was wrong. To make Jewish Israelis leave would be to repeat the disaster of 1948. It would be to inflict upon Jews what the Zionists inflicted upon the Palestinians. It would be to do unto others what they did unto you, not as you would have them do unto you. It would be a mess and a huge human disaster. And, apart from the morality of it all, it would be totally foolish for the Palestinians to do just that. Israel has a highly educated population with a strong economy. It would be an act of national idiocy to try to make Jews leave. You can just look at the mess Mugabe has created in Zimbabwe if you need any more proof of this. (And with this said, I should add that I really don't think anybody wants to ship Jews out or push them into the sea: this is nothing but a bogeyman that has been held up by Zionists for decades to shut down serious debate and discussion or change the subject away from Israeli crimes and misdemeanors. I hesitate to even mention this issue because in so doing, one plays to Zionist fear-mongering and the image of the Arab as the heartless, barbaric savage, capable of any cruelty). If Arabs and Jews could somehow learn to all get along, it would be one of the most amazing countries in the world. Just a phenomenal place.
Thomas’ words were gratifying in the same way that seeing a bully get punched in the nose is gratifying—like that scene at the end of Back to the Future when Biff gets decked—but it’s a dead end in terms of resolving the conflict in real life or in any real way. It’s also wrong because what you have now are generations of people who have been born there and grew up in that place.
I like what Ahmad Tibi says. He says I have no problem with Jews being here, but if you want to start talking about shipping people out—a common topic in Israeli mainstream political discourse—we should do it according to the principle that the last to come should be the first to leave. That seems most fair to me.
If there were a one-state solution, it would actually be a source of strength to make it a homeland for the Jewish people, even if they are a minority. But nobody is asking me. I'm like Will Rogers: all I know is what I read in the newspapers. But that's usually pretty depressing, and predictably depressingly slanted. So now I check the blogosphere.
Which is often worse. I just read Jeffrey Goldberg’s take on the Helen Thomas controversy. In two paragraphs, he really piles on some hefty charges. Thomas is a foot soldier in a Roman-inspired war against the Jewish people and commits a sin that is "the first cousin of Holocaust denial": denying that Jews are a nation. Also, she seeks to deny Jews "the truth of their history" (whatever that means). He reels off the charges like a cop reading off of a notepad after arresting a perp.
A reading of Thomas’ statement that is much more charitable, plausible and also just simpler would be that Thomas probably doesn’t give a fig about his nationalist anxieties. What Helen Thomas cares about is Palestinians. I don't know her and have never met her, but my suspicion is that she sees them as...human beings.
It’s not metaphysical at all. Nor is it national. Nor is it about denying anything. It’s about affirming the humanity and dignity of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and refusing to deny them rights and respect because of wrongs inflicted on Jews by Europeans (not by Palestinians), and because they didn’t have the good fortune of being born Jews and not Arabs. Tortured attempts by Zionists to use Hajj Amin al-Husayni’s interactions with Nazis to tar all Palestinians (including the large number of Palestinian Christians) as having been at the forefront of the Final Solution represent an implicit acknowledgment that the moral calculus of Zionism doesn’t quite add up. The journalist Bat Yeor’s polemical, pseudo-historical construction of the notion of dhimmitude represents a similarly deeply problematic effort coming from much the same place.
The real fault of the Palestinians is not that they were Nazis and flaming anti-Semites, it was that they were living in the wrong place at the wrong time and had the audacity to not compliantly go along with decisions about their fate that were made without their input and against their wishes in faraway European and American cities. They didn’t do what they were told to do. They didn’t behave as they were expected to behave. This is still the problem with the Palestinians. They will not do as they are told—by the Americans or by the Israelis—and this simply will not do. Good Arabs, those who will do what they are told, get a pass and a pat on the head. So Ahmedinejad (who is Iranian and not Arab) is rightly excoriated for his despicable Holocaust denial but nobody talks about Abu Mazen’s equally despicable doctoral work on Holocaust denial. Abu Mazen says things the Israelis and Americans (and Jeffrey Goldbergs) like. At least most of the time. If Abu Mazen falls out of line, be sure we'll hear about the Holocaust denial. I guess Sadat being assassinated meant that he could never fall out of line; we remember him as a good Arab and forget that he was a Nazi, too.
Because Thomas herself has Middle Eastern heritage, she might be less inclined than other pundits, many of whose knowledge of Arab culture probably does not go much beyond buying Sabra Hummus at Costco, to see the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine as lesser humans than Europeans and somehow, some way, not entitled to the same dignity, self-respect and human rights, essentially because they had the misfortune of being born speaking Arabic and not English, French or German. If achieving and maintaining the Zionist dream means destroying a society, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, killing tens of thousands more, invading, bombing and attacking at least half a dozen countries, developing a large nuclear arsenal, denying minorities equal rights, maintaining a decades-long military occupation, reducing 1.5 million people to grinding poverty, giving aid and comfort to Apartheid South Africa, etc., then maybe that dream should be put into early retirement or atleast radically reconfigured. Something has gone terribly wrong.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Was it?
There is a world beyond Europe, eastern and western. You might even say that the world is flat. Non-European peoples have had their own historical experiences and have their own histories of tragedy, suffering and struggle. These are no less vivid, painful, human and important simply because we in the US do not learn about them in school, best-selling popular histories are not written about them and Hollywood does not make movies about them.
It is not a coincidence that most of the wider, non-European world is generally more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than it is to the Zionist one. Helen Thomas’s comments raised ire in the US, but they would be seen as utterly unremarkable to much of the population of this planet. Now, this might be because the entire world is anti-Semitic and really just hates Jews. (And there is undoubtedly anti-Semitism at work in some criticism of Israel; and it should be deplored, denounced and shunned.) But chalking all such support up to an irrational, primal hatred of Jews is too facile and too self-serving. Global sympathy for Palestinians might perhaps be because much of the world was colonized by Europe and then went through decolonization. Much of the world recognizes in the Palestinian struggle things that resonate with its own long walk to freedom. Because much of that world, like the Palestinians, had little to do with inflicting suffering on Jews in Europe, it finds the self-pity and persecution complex which seems to animate wealthy, well-educated American Zionists to be bizarre, self-indulgent and totally alien to their own historical experience, not to mention contemporary realities. Netanyahu thinks this is 1938. It feels a lot more like 2010 to me. And I’ve been scratching my head and trying to recall the last pogrom that happened on the Upper West Side, and just can’t remember. It must have been before the Giuliani years. Yes, that’s it. Before Rudy. I’m sure he put a stop to them when he cleaned up the city.
With Apartheid over, Israel stands alone as an historical relic and curiosity—the last remaining example of European settler colonialism. And this is how much of the globe sees the question of Palestine, through the lens of anti-colonial struggle and liberation.
The French were in Algeria for 130 years and fought savagely to stay there. Israel is only 62 years old and it, too, has fought with a ruthless amorality to maintain its ethnocracy. Time will tell if the Zionists last as long as the French did.
Attempting to re-frame the question of Palestine in terms of European persecution of Jews and calling Helen Thomas bad names will not make the anti-colonial narrative that she was giving voice to go away. How many Americans know that when the French left Algeria, almost all of the pied noirs went as well? How many Americans even know what a pied noir is?
If the traffic police realize that people might be operating in narratives other than their own, they might realize that it’s possible to be pro-Palestinian and critical of the Zionist project yet not driven by the nefarious (Roman) motive of denying the Jewish people the truth of their history (whatever that means). And, one hopes, they might at least think twice before throwing the book at someone.
Palestinians aren’t denying anything. They just want their houses and farms and villages back.
Boulos lives in the US. His grandparents were from Jaffa.
Few Israelis know what is written in the first pan-Arabic and pan-Islamic document that proposes recognizing Israel and exchanging hostile relations for normalization.
What would we say if the Arabs were to ignore an Israeli peace initiative for more than eight years? What would we write if, during all this time, the Palestinian leadership were not to have even one discussion about our initiative? How many Israelis, including learned members of the academic world, know what is written in the first pan-Arabic and pan-Islamic document that proposes recognizing Israel and exchanging hostile relations for normalization?
"I have to be careful saying this, because people get really upset--there's really no such thing as a Palestinian," Huckabee said during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. The Huffington Post
If the raid of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was a disaster for the Israel Defense Forces, its aftermath demonstrated an equally bewildering performance by the Israeli media. The IDF Spokesman’s Office churned out one misleading claim after another, each one more implausible than the next, seeking to implant in the public’s mind a version of events that bore little relation to reality. To a degree, this was to be expected; but it was startling to see how some of Israel’s most respected reporters lined up to serve as military stenographers, barely challenging the IDF’s rapidly changing versions of events. IDF claims about the flotilla passengers’ links to Al Qaida, anti-Semitic statements shouted at the Israeli Navy, and their terrorist intentions were eagerly broadcast by the Israeli media without a second thought. When independent reporters forced the IDF to retract or “clarify” all of these claims, Israeli news outlets refused to correct their errors, or covered them up without acknowledgment. Full story
The Quartet - the U.S., EU, Russia, and the UN - welcomes Israel's decision to ease its blockade of Gaza, but says more must be done to alleviate pressure on the population there. But the statement added that the "current situation in Gaza, including the humanitarian and human rights situation of the civilian population, is unsustainable, unacceptable, and not in the interests of any of those concerned." Article
Jewish settlers storming the garden of an elderly Palestinian woman may seem like something you would expect to happen in Hebron, not cosmopolitan Tel Aviv. But that is exactly what happened to Zeinab Rachayel, an Arab resident of Tel Aviv’s mixed suburb, Yafo. Rachayel was in her courtyard on a Sunday afternoon when several buses full of settlers from the West Bank arrived, parking nearby. Armed with Israeli flags, young men lined the sidewalk outside her home chanting “this is our land”. One by one, they entered her garden, until Rachayel was confronted by dozens of settlers in their late teens and early twenties. “Another one entered and he said, ‘Listen, you’re not staying here. Yafo is just for Jews. Get out of Yafo,’” Rachayel says. The men continued to threaten and intimidate her, repeatedly saying that the Arab presence in Yafo is only temporary. Full story
The French have a phrase, “He missed an excellent opportunity to keep his mouth shut.” That’s certainly true of Obama last Tuesday when he rolled out a big gun from the arsenal of White House crisis management, an Oval Office address. Excluding FDR’s radio chats of the 1930s, there’s scant evidence across the past forty years that as a venue for rallying the nation, the presidential sanctum did Obama’s predecessors as president much good. In Obama’s case many of his stoutest supporters in the press could say little in its favor. Obama would have been advised to say nothing and leave the nation to the evening's main business, the NBA playoffs.
It was certainly the worst rally-the-nation speech by a US president I’ve ever watched, and that includes Nixon’s cornered-rat addresses of the early 1970s and – an ominous parallel -- Jimmy Carter’s fireside chat on April1977, four months into his presidency, in the Oval Office promoting his plan for Energy Independence. To dramatize the need for conservation Carter wore a cardigan. He said the crusade for energy reduction was “the moral equivalent of war.” As he said these words he clenched his fist. America was not impressed, but more than they were on Tuesday.
America is still embarrassed by the infamous McCarthy Hearings which ruined the lives of thousands of innocents during the ifties.
Anyone then, suspected of being linked to communism was arrested, interrogated and either imprisoned or forced to give names of others suspected of communist tendencies.
And so the fear and intimidation spread like a great plague across the USA. Names were blacklisted, careers and lives ruined as the authorities ruthlessly traded on peoples’ fears, paranoia and weaknesses.
With little or no evidence people were found guilty and anyone daring to question any of the actions and the wild accusations also had suspicion cast upon them.
But hey folks, that was back in the Fifties and various administrations resolved the same insane hysteria, hatred and fears would never again cast a dark shadow across the Land of the Free.
Sadly, the Salem-style witch hunts have returned, but the new villains are no longer communists. The Red Scare has been replaced by those who shout Viva Palestina!
From the very highest law-makers right down to ordinary John Doe there is an irrational fear so great that it holds many of them hostage in their homes, workplaces and schools.
Jeremy Milgram is a member of “Rabbis for Human Rights” and a participant in the inter-religious dialogue in Israel. He lives in Jerusalem.
Ludwig Watzal: What do you think of Israel´s handeling of the Gazean freedom flotillas?
Jeremy Milgram: Pretty bad. Excessive use of force. We have known this for a long time when it comes to demonstrations by Palestinians. This time it was an excessive and inappropriate use of force against Europeans and Internationals. The people today did not do anything illegal. They tried to get into Gaza. These are terrible moments in Israeli society.
My feelings are that Israel`s reckless reaction to the boats should make a lot of people very nervous, as well as the fact that Israel continues to posses atomic bombs. This was poor policy by Israel in terms of responding to a non-threat in case of the boats. Just imagine the reaction if there would have been a real threat from Iran.
Why does the Israeli government react to every crisis with such ferocity?
The idea of always using force and to be the first in using force as a last resort, has to do with the identities of those who are in charge, the group of seven who make the decisions [the so-called security cabinet L. W.] Of those seven, three were military commanders: Netanyahu, Yaalon, Barak, Lieberman and Yihsai are off-the-wall: they are people to whom you don´t want to give any power. We have a very inadequate leadership.
Has the reliance on force anything to do with the holocaust trauma?
There is an abnormal amount of fear. I think of the fear that is being manufactured from above. By this fear, any anger regarding what we suffered in the holocaust is redirected from Christian Europe to the Muslim Middle East. I think this is a manipulation. But I think also that Israelis are really afraid. The Palestinian resistance, which has also taken violent forms has been a catastrophe because it hardened Israeli attitude. Israelis are thus afraid to make any change, such as to relinquish any piece of land or accord the Palestinians any geographic advantage, even if they have a bad conscience.
NIGHT. UTTER darkness. Heavy rain. Visibility close to nil.
And suddenly – a flash of lightning. For a fraction of a second, the landscape is lit up. For this split second, the terrain surrounding us can be seen. It is not the way it used to be.
* * *
Israel’s action against the Gaza aid flotilla was such a lightning flash.
Israelis normally live in darkness as far as seeing the world is concerned. But for that instant, the real landscape around us could be seen, and it looked frightening. Then the darkness settled down over us, Israel returned to its bubble, the world disappeared from view.
This split second was enough to reveal a dismal scene. On almost all fronts, the situation of the State of Israel has worsened since the last flash of lightning.
The flotilla and the attack on it did not create this landscape. It has been there since our present government was set up. But the deterioration did not start even then. It began a long time before.
The action of Ehud Barak & Co. only lit up the situation as it is now, and gave it yet another push in the wrong direction.
