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Nurit Peled-Elhanan's new book, exposing the racism of Israel' s education system.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a long time Israeli peace activist and an academic, has just got her book "Palestine in Israeli School
Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education" published by I.B. Tauris. Part of the publisher's description of the book: "She
analyzes the presentation of images, maps, layouts and use of language in History, Geography and Civic Studies textbooks,
and reveals how the books might be seen to marginalize Palestinians, legitimize Israeli military action and reinforce Jewish
-Israeli territorial identity. Read more. You can also watch her interview Kelly James Clark by visiting our Videos page.
Summer of Demolition, by Itay Epshtain (CEO of ICAHD, which is an Israeli non-violent, direct-action  organization
established in 1997 to resist Israeli demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories ). First
published in Palestine News, Autumn 2011.
Hours after his modest home was demolished by Israeli bulldozers, Khaled Abdallah Ali Ghazal stands
astride the wreckage in the scorching desert heat and vows to hold on. "We have nowhere else to go,
we will rebuild," he says. For hundreds like him in the Jordan Valley, this is the reality of what the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolition calls “the summer of demolitions.” Read more
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LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
, Vol. 33 No. 14 · 14 July 2011
Is Palestine Next? By
Adam Shatz
No one in the Arab world was watching the news more closely than the Palestinians during the revolutions in Tunisia
and Egypt. The first emotion they experienced was disbelief; the second – particularly when they saw Palestinian
flags being raised in Tahrir Square – was relief that they were no longer alone.
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Why is Israel Aid Exempt?
As US fiscal conservatives cut food programmes for poor children, military aid for Israel is left untouched.
By MJ Rosenberg (Jewish writer)
March 07, 2011 "Al-Jazeera" --- Once upon a time, social security was considered the "third rail" of American politics.
The "third rail" is the train track that carries the high-voltage power; touching it means instant death.
The "third rail" metaphor has for decades been applied to social security, a government program so popular with the
American public that proposing any changes in it would mean political death to the politician.
No more. Although social security is as popular as ever, politicians routinely propose changes in the program —
including privatisation and means testing. While the proposals usually go nowhere, and rightly so, the politicians who
support them live to fight another day. Today, with those massive deficits and the astronomical national debt, not
even social security is sacrosanct.
Few, if any, government programs are.
But US aid to Israel is. In fact, the $3bn Israel aid package is the new third rail of American politics: touch it and die. It
is also the one program that liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans and tea partiers all agree should not
sustain even a dollar in cuts.
Actually, that is something of a mis-statement. These various parties and factions do not agree that the $3bn Israel aid  package is sacred. They just say that they do because a powerful lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), makes clear to them that touching the aid package will mean big trouble for them in the next election.
Cuts to social programmes
It no longer comes as much of a surprise that the average
Democrat or Republican will rule that Israel aid cuts are off the table — while supporting cuts in programs like head start,
which educates poor children, or WIC, which provides nutrition assistance to disadvantaged women and their infants.
It is not a surprise because everyone knows that the Democratic and Republican campaign finance committees
warn their members of the dire consequences that might ensue if they dare to stand up to the lobby.
That is why even the most liberal members of congress never point out the absurdity of supporting full funding of military
aid to Israel while slashing vital domestic programs. In fact, the only members of congress who have suggested that
Israel share some of the sacrifice are Reresentative Ron Paul (R-TX) and his son, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) who would
pretty much cut every program in the budget, including Israel aid.
But the two Pauls, all by themselves, put enough of a scare into AIPAC that it immediately got to work to make sure
that other like-minded Republicans (the "cut everything" caucus) did not go off and follow them in the name of, say,
logic and consistency.
Fiscal conservatives?
AIPAC was most concerned about the Republican first-termers, most of whom were elected with the support of tea
partiers, who are generally extreme fiscal conservatives and tend not to favor any exemptions from the budget axe.
Almost immediately, AIPAC produced a letter for the Republican first-termers to sign in which they pledged that, no
matter what else they cut, Israel would be exempt. And almost immediately, 65 of the 87 Republican freshmen signed
on, with more signing on later.
Among the signatories are some of the most vehement supporters of cutting virtually every domestic program. These
are people who support programs that cut jobs in their own districts and proudly point to their devotion to the
principle that shared sacrifice means everyone.
But not Israel.
The AIPAC letter seems to recognise that virtually every other program is sustaining cuts. It refers to "runaway
spending and trillion dollar deficits." It even concedes that "tough choices must be made to control federal spending"
and that "we must do a better job of prioritising appropriations". Those priorities can be seen in this list of draconian
budget cuts the freshmen support.
But then this: "Therefore, as this congress considers the upcoming continuing resolution, we strongly urge you [the
House leadership] to include America's full $3bn commitment for Fiscal Year 2011 under the 10-year US-Israel
Memorandum of Understanding.
And that is where fiscal hawks become the most docile of doves: when it comes to Israel.
Conditional aid
This is not to say that the United States should eliminate military aid to Israel. Much of the aid package can be
justified on the grounds that Israel is an ally, one that still has enemies bent on its destruction.
But how can anyone justify picking this one program out of the entire federal budget and saying, without discussion,
that it merits full funding, without scrutiny, while virtually every other program is cut?
The simple fact is that both the United States and Israel would be better off if we attached strings to our aid, as we
do with other foreign assistance programmes.
For instance, we might say that for every dollar Israel spends on expanding settlements, we will subtract one dollar
from the aid package. Or we can put some of the package on hold until Israel agrees to freeze settlements, thereby
enabling negotiations with the Palestinians to resume.
Or we can simply examine the aid budget, item by item, to make sure that each program in it supports US policy goals
. Do those US -provided cluster bombs that are still exploding in Lebanon serve our interests?
But we do none of that. Israel prepares a shopping list and congressional appropriators provide the goods. Shop 'til you drop.
This is wrong. Congress should treat the Israel aid package the same way it deals with programs that directly benefit
Americans. Those who support it should be forced to defend it, line by line.
But the sad fact is that special interests like AIPAC, the Chamber of Commerce and the Club for Growth intimidate
Congress into exempting their favorite projects even from discussion. Aid to Israel will not even be discussed this
year, except for members of Congress informing AIPAC of their unquestioning devotion to it.
If only infants, working Americans, and the poor were somebody's special interest. Maybe then, someday, they too
could intimidate congress. As the old Jewish expression goes: we should all live so long.
MJ Rosenberg is a senior foreign policy fellow at Media Matters Action Network. The above article first appeared in
Foreign Policy Matters, a part of the Media Matters Action Network.
Noam Chomsky: Breaking the Israel-Palestine Deadlock
By Noam Chomsky
“One analogy between Israel and South Africa merits attention. Once apartheid was implemented, South African  nationalists recognized they were becoming international pariahs because of it. In 1958, however, the
foreign minister informed the U.S. ambassador that U.N. condemnations and other protests were of little
concern as long as South Africa was supported by the global hegemon – the United States. By the 1970s
, the U.N. declared an arms embargo, soon followed by boycott campaigns and divestment. South Africa
reacted in ways calculated to enrage international opinion.
In a gesture of contempt for the U.N. and President Jimmy Carter – who failed to react so as not to
disrupt worthless negotiations – South Africa launched a murderous raid on the Cassinga refugee camp
in Angola just as the Carter-led “contact group” was to present a settlement for Namibia. The similarity
to Israel’s behavior today is striking – for example, the attack on Gaza in January 2009 and on the Gaza
freedom flotilla in May 2010”. Read the full article.
We are dealing with a carefully planned military operation.
Perdana Global Peace Organization International Conference on Gaza: Breaking the Siege
In the Spirit of Rachel Corrie and Mavi Marmara, 11, July 2010, Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
The Israeli Navy Commando which attacked the Marvi Marmara on May 31st had prior knowledge of who was on the
Turkish ship including where passengers were residing in terms of cabin layout. According to Swedish author Henning
Mankell, who was on board the Marmara , "the Israeli forces attacked sleeping civilians." Read the full article (PDF file).
The State and Local Bases of Zionist Power in America, click here to read the full article (PDF file).
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E-book on Jewish National Fund's role in colonization of Palestine released
Press release, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, 16 February 2010
The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has published an e-book on the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that meets a
need for an affordable introduction to the activities of the JNF, an organization supported financially by the British
taxpayer but whose activities in Israel/ Palestine are politically-driven, and whose politics are nakedly racist. This little
book reveals how a British charity works openly for the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs and the establishment of
fully segregated Jewish-only communities and areas that exclude Arabs.
The book explains why, when the JNF Committee sought legal advice from England in 1905 as to the possibility of
registering as a charity, their legal advisors were unanimous that it would be impossible:
"We therefore conclude that the purpose of the Fund will be a political rather than a
charitable one and that limiting the Fund's use to strictly charitable purposes would run
counter to the main purpose of the Fund ..."
The JNF initially failed to secure charitable status, being refused by the House of Lords in
1932, but it now enjoys charitable status for activities that would be illegal if carried out in
the countries where it raises the funds, including the UK where the JNF enjoys the
patronage of Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the leaders of the other two main political parties.
Edited by Mortaza Sahibzada, JNF: Colonising Palestine since 1901 is available for download from the Scottish
Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Ilan Pappe's introduction reveals through the open commitment of the JNF's founders to the expulsion, what is today
termed "ethnic cleansing," of the native Palestinians and their replacement by Jewish immigrants. Pappe discusses
the JNF's success in obtaining much of the land pillaged from the Palestinians by the Zionist militias through murder
and violence in 1948 and its effective control of much more through its role as an agent of the State of Israel in
keeping almost all the land surface of Israel for exclusively Jewish ownership at the expense of Israel's one million
Palestinian citizens. The author shows the JNF's audacity in presenting itself as a "green" movement as it plants trees
with the express aim of obliterating all traces of ethnically cleansed and destroyed Palestinian communities.
Abe Hayeem of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine analyses the intense politicization of Israeli architects
and their complicity in Zionist war crimes. While the JNF was intimately involved in the racially-driven confiscation of
Palestinian lands, architects also worked easily in the nightmare world of legally-designated "Present Absentees," i.e.
Palestinians still inside Israel after 1948 but whose land was slated for transfer to exclusively Jewish ownership.
Bringing the story up to date, Hayeem notes the JNF's involvement in illegal confiscation operation on behalf of the
Israeli state, in collusion with illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank, the intimidation of Palestinian land-owners by
Jewish authorities, and the complicity of the country's architects in racist schemes to oppress and dispossess Palestinians.
Uri Davis examines the British Park, proclaimed in a sign there as "a gift of the
Jewish National Fund of Great Britain." The British Park is built on the ethnically
cleansed Palestinian villages of Ajjur and Zakariyya, making the UK JNF complicit in
war crimes and unfit for charitable status on grounds of multiple violations of
international humanitarian law. Astonishingly, Prof. Davis alleges that the British
Park is used to store some of Israel's nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
Susannah Tarbush looks at Gordon Brown's decision to become a Patron of the JNF
on his arrival in 10 Downing St, shortly after the Israeli Knesset passed a racist law
confirming the apartheid nature of JNF-controlled lands in Israel, forbidding their
transfer to any non-Jew. She deals with the petition from Architects and Planners for
Justice in Palestine and the inevitable accusation from Israelis that the British
architects who criticized the JNF's involvement in human rights violations as "anti-Semitic."
Sonia Karkar criticizes Australian PM John Howard for allowing a JNF park to be
named after him in the Negev, where the Israeli system of apartheid takes the form
of forcing the local Bedouin Arabs off their land and into villages that the
government they are citizens of refuses to recognize or supply with basic services.
The John Howard Park shares the Negev with Government crop-spraying aircraft which destroy the Bedouin's crops.
Ben White, author of Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide, tackles the Kafka-esque mind-game of an Israeli park
being dedicated to Black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, the non-Jewish property owners being categorized as
"present absentees," and the fruits of Zionist ethnic cleansing supposedly "perpetuating the message of equality and
peace." White shows how the attempt to associate the Zionist colonial venture with the US civil rights movement
comes up against the harsh reality of Israeli ethnic cleansing with the JNF center stage.
In similar vein, Raheli Mizrahi argues that the Venezuelan and Bolivian governments should take action against their
local JNF bodies and deny the Israelis the ideological cover provided by their appropriation of the symbols of the anti
-colonial struggle in South America. She touches on the sometimes cruel treatment of Arab, notably Yemeni, Jews in Israel.
The authors of the closing remarks section report on the intra-Zionist discussions at a London JNF fundraiser before
their vocal protest at the JNF's ongoing land theft and racism.
Seven appendices contain important documents relating to the struggle to end the impunity the JNF derives from
official support in many countries.
Click here to download the book.
Zionism for Dummies: By William James Martin
“... one sometimes hears that it is all about Arab/Palestinian „terrorism and suicide bombings and the ultimate goal of
the terrorists-Palestinians is to “push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive” and that their motives are those of anti
-Semitism and hatred of Jews. Those who hold this view see the conflict as one of the survival of the Jewish state
amid a sea of irrational hatred....” Click here to download and read the article.
 Divided by faith, united by war
Friday, 16 April 2010, the Independent
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Sara Pecanac was born a Muslim in Sarajevo,
but fled to Israel from Bosnia with her family during the war in 1994 with the help of Jerusalem Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem
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When Bosnian Muslim Sara Pechanec cried out for help as Serbian forces
ransacked Sarajevo in 1992, she could not have imagined that her saviours
would be Israeli Jews – who were themselves rescued from the Nazis by her own parents. Jerome Taylor hears her story.
It was an artillery shell in the middle of the night that plunged Sara Pechanec's
family head-first into the cruel realities of war. In the spring of 1992, Serbian
paramilitary forces began their notoriously brutal siege of Sarajevo as the
Balkans descended into an orgy of violence and ethnic cleansing.
Day after day the Serbian guns fired down on to their targets from the hills
surrounding the city, pummelling what was once one of the most religiously
diverse metropolises in Europe. It was only a matter of time before the Pechanec household took a direct hit.
"A shell landed on our house in the middle of the night and destroyed
everything in an instant," Mrs Pechanec, now 52, recalls. "All we had left was each other and hope. For the next six
months we spent our entire lives in an underground room just waiting to die."
As the Bosnian Muslim woman huddled in a dark cellar with her husband and 10-year-old daughter, she wondered
how she'd ever escape the maelstrom engulfing her city. Little did she know that an astonishingly brave decision by
her parents, half a century earlier, to give sanctuary to a family the last time war engulfed the Balkans would
eventually lead to her own remarkable rescue.
As video footage of the Sarajevo siege was beamed across the world on nightly news bulletins, a Jewish family in
Jerusalem watched the events unfold on their television set.
For the Kavilios, Sarajevo had always held a warm place in their hearts. Their children had grown up on stories of how
it was thanks to a kind-hearted Muslim family that Yosef Kavilio, the family patriarch, was able to escape the Nazi
occupation of Yugoslavia during the Second World War and bring his family to Jerusalem.
It was Mrs Pechanec's mother and father, Zejneba and Mustafa Hardaga, who had risked their lives to shelter Yosef
throughout 1941 and 1942, as Germany's Gestapo and the Croatian Ustasa regime joined forces in liquidating Jews,
Serbs, gypsies and political opponents.
The Hardagas became the first Muslims to be recognised as Righteous Among the Nations, the official title that Israel
bestows on non-Jews who took extraordinary risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Now, as the shells rained down on Sarajevo once more, it was time to return the favour. Mustafa had died long
before the tumultuous break-up of Yugoslavia, but an ailing 76-year-old Zejneba and her youngest daughter, Sara,
were still living within the shattered remains of Sarajevo.
Throughout December 1992, employees at Yad Vashem – Israel's official Holocaust memorial authority – vigorously
lobbied their government to organise a rescue. Using contacts in Sarajevo's small remaining Jewish community, the
family were eventually located in their cellar and desperately needed medicine was smuggled to Zejneba. Finally, on 5
February 1993, the family made their way out of the besieged city in a refugee convoy headed for the Croatian border
which had been organised by Jewish aid agencies.
"When my parents decided to help the Kavilio family during the Second World War, they never could have imagined
that, 50 years later, they would need help from the same family to save them from a similar fate," recalls Mrs
Pechanec, who flew from her home in Israel to Britain this week to retell her family's story in a series of lectures to
mark Holocaust Memorial Day. "Fifty years later in exactly the same place – it's almost unimaginable."
Through a remarkable twist of fate, both the Kavilios and the Pechanec/Hardaga families now owe their lives to each other.
Even before the Second World War broke out, the two households had been firm friends in what was at the time one
of the most racially and religiously mixed areas of the world. A photograph in Yad Vashem's archives shows Tova, one
of the Kavilios' daughters, playing at the feet of Zejneba at the Hardagas' house in 1940. (When Zejneba finally
escaped to safety in Israel, it was Tova who greeted her on the runway). Mustafa and Yosef were also business
partners, owning a pipe factory on the outskirts of the city.
But the following year, spring 1941, German planes bombed Sarajevo, destroying the Kavilios' home and sending the
city's Jews fleeing into the hills. Yosef returned to the city to co-ordinate his family's escape and was immediately
taken in by the Hardegas, even though they lived opposite the Gestapo's headquarters and would have been shot
on the spot if they were found harbouring a Jew.
In the testimony he gave to Yad Vashem, Yosef described the family's remarkable kindness. "The women of the family
would hide their faces under a veil in the presence of strangers," he explained. "Never before had a strange man
stayed with them. They welcomed us with the words: 'Josef, you are our brother; and your children are like our
children. Feel at home and whatever we own is yours.'" The women never wore veils in front of Yosef again.
Eventually the Ustasa regime caught up with Yosef but he was spared being transported to Jasenovac concentration
camp because the winter snow had made the roads impassable. Instead he was put to work in a snow-clearing chain
gang. He escaped to return to the Hardaga household once more before joining his family in Italian-occupied Mostar.
From there they made their way to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem.
Sara Pechanec, who was born after the war in 1957, only found out about her family's bravery after her father's
death. But even then she wasn't surprised to find out that her father and mother had taken in a Jew.
"Our home was always very open to all sorts of people," she says in an accent flecked with both Balkan and Hebrew
tones. "It was a very democratic place. We were always taught that you can have all the money in the world but
without friends you will be very alone. My mother always told me, you might not be able to choose how pretty or rich
you are, but you can choose how good you want to be. That was the way she talked."
With such a strong bond between the two families it is perhaps no surprise that when Zejneba and her daughter
finally arrived in UN- controlled Croatia, the Israelis, in recognition of the role their family had played in helping the
Kavilios five decades before, asked them which country they wanted to relocate to. They both chose Israel.
Mrs Pechanec said: "My mother made it very clear. She said she wanted her biological children to be with their non
-biological children and by that she meant the Kavilios."
For Mrs Pechanec, now in Britain giving lectures on her experience, her journey to Israel has also provoked a spiritual
journey towards Judaism.
"In my heart I had always felt Jewish," she says. "We lived in the Jewish area of Sarajevo and I had always been
fascinated by our neighbours. In my mind we all worshipped the one, same God anyway."
Zejneba Hardaga died within a year of arriving in Israel but just before she passed away her daughter told her she
wanted to become a Jew. "That turned out to be one of the happiest days of my life. She just turned to me, smiled
and said: "If you want to do something, don't talk about it, do it." It was her way of giving me her blessing."
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 The Guardian:
Blair: Gaza's great betrayer
It's more than a year since Israel launched its immoral attack on Gaza and Palestinians are still living on the verge of
a humanitarian disaster. So what has Tony Blair done to further peace in the region? Virtually nothing, argues the
historian Avi Shlaim. Read the article online or download the file.
 "Israel Commander: 'We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza' "
, The Independent, Wednesday 3 February by Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem. Click here to read it online or download it as a PDF file.
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's
legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions. This article was published on
Wednesday 7 January 2009. Click here to read it.
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Footnotes in Gaza – Book Review
By Robin Yassin-Kassab
Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel. Joe Sacco. Metropolitan Books, 2009.
Available at Amazon (UK)
This is not what you expect: an accomplished and self-reflective work of history enclosed within a layer of war
reportage – in comic book form. But Joe Sacco's "Footnotes in Gaza" is just that, an unusually effective treatment of
Palestinian history  which may appeal to people who would never read a ‘normal book’ on the subject. The writing,
however, is at least as good as you’d expect from a high quality prose work. Here, for
instance, is page nine: “History can do without its footnotes. Footnotes are inessential
at best; at worst they trip up the greater narrative. From time to time, as bolder, more
streamlined editions appear, history shakes off some footnotes altogether. And you can
see why… History has its hands full. It can’t help producing pages by the hour, by the
minute. History chokes on fresh episodes and swallows whatever old ones it can.”
The pictures – aerial shots, action shots, urban still lifes, crafted but realist character
studies – work as hard as the words. Sacco depicts fear, humiliation and anger very well
indeed, and often achieves far more with one picture than he could in an entire
newspaper column. The cranes at work on a Jerusalem skyline are worth a paragraph or
two of background. So is the fact that almost every Palestinian male has a cigarette in
his mouth. And when dealing with historical process – the changing shape of the camps,
for example – the pictures are more than useful.
The ‘footnotes’ focused on here are two massacres perpetrated by Israel in 1956. On
November 3rd, according to a UN report, 275 men were killed in the town and camp of
Khan Yunis. Homes were assaulted, men were separated from their families, were then
lined up and shot against walls, sometimes under the eyes of their parents, wives and children. One survivor
interviewed by Sacco was protected from death by his neighbours’ bodies. He lay in drying blood, his nostrils filled
with cordite, until the Israelis had moved on.
On November 12th, according to UNRWA, another 111 men were killed in Rafah. This time the occupiers announced
that all military age men should assemble in a school yard. The men who didn’t obey, or didn’t hear the order, were
killed in their homes. Those who did obey were forced to run through the streets, beaten with clubs and shot at as
they went. Shoes and the fallen wounded and dead were left littering the ground. Those who helped the injured
were shot. At the school gate, progress was hindered by a trench and a roll of barbed wire, and a soldier with a
heavy stick. His blows killed several more Palestinians. The men were kept crouched and terrified all day, with no
water or toilet facilities, as the Israelis selected who to release, who to incarcerate, and who to kill.
The immediate context is the 1956 British-French
-Israeli assault on Egypt, known in the West as the Suez crisis. Israel’s aim, as well as pleasing the two
crumbling empires and dealing an intimidatory blow to Abdul Nasser, was to eliminate the incipient
fedayeen guerilla movement in Gaza. The mid fifties had already been full of deadly raids. Israeli forces
met no resistance when they entered the West Bank village of Qibya in 1953, but they shot and
then collapsed houses on 42 cowering people, 38 of them women and children. In August 1955 Khan
Yunis police station was attacked. Up to 72 Egyptians and Palestinians were killed. In April 1956,
50 civilians were killed by a barrage on Gaza city.
Sacco also shows us the clashes and curfews of the
Second Intifada, the period in which he was researching his book. “Footnotes in Gaza” is as
much about the process of writing history, and the importance of history, as about the history itself, so
we see Sacco and his helpers collecting, sifting, cross-checking and tabulating testimony from named
eye-witnesses. Of course, half a century on, eye-witness testimony can be problematic. To bring this out, at one point
Sacco draws contradictory versions of the same event. His attention to the inconsistencies, and his careful reference
to UN and Israeli sources, strengthen his case immeasurably.
Frequently Palestinians ask him why he’s bothering himself with the past when there is destruction and desperation
all round him in the present. His response is usually a shrugging of shoulders, but the text itself suggests a couple of
reasons. One is that the historical study depicts not only isolated atrocities against the Palestinian people, but the
Palestinian condition too, entire and connected. The repetition of detail in the massacre stories chimes with the
repeated brutality experienced by the Palestinians around Sacco as he pursues his investigations. One day Sacco
asks a woman why she chooses to live in such a dangerous area of Rafah, near Israel’s ‘Philadelphi Corridor’: “She
says their home in Block J was demolished two months ago. They then rented in the Tal el-Sultan neighbourhood, but
the Israelis damaged their new apartment and destroyed their car while demolishing the home of a neighbour. With
so many people made homeless by the demolitions, there was no other place to rent but back in Block J.” Sacco
meets the woman in hospital, after she has been shot by Israeli soldiers. Her sister has had her leg blown off. Her
seven-year-old niece’s leg can’t be operated on because it won’t stop bleeding.
So the circle turns, with the Palestinians trapped inside. With the wheel spinning so fast, will anyone remember this
particular family’s pain? How many legs have been shot or blown off since, after all? And this is the second reason for
focusing on the past, because Sacco is keenly aware of the indignities done by time and forgetfulness. “Palestinians,”
he writes in the foreword, “never seem to have the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next one is upon them
.” Here’s an illustration: one day a funeral procession passes under Sacco’s balcony. A boy of 12 or 13 has been
murdered. A single shot is fired into the air. The crowd surges and moves on. In a few minutes the street is again
busy with car noise and commerce. Was this boy, Sacco seems to ask, worth no more than a mere shot, a mere
moment? By remembering, he insists upon the dignity of the victims.
It is to be hoped that an Arabic translation is in the works, to serve the generation who grew up more comfortable
with images than paragraphs. And in the West, “Footnotes in Gaza” deserves a ‘Persepolis’-type success.
“Persepolis” was Marjane Satrapi’s best-selling account, in comic book form, of her Iranian childhood. It later became
a block-busting film. But the villain of Persepolis is the already-demonised Islamic Republic. “Footnotes in Gaza” will
challenge Western readers rather more profoundly.
Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of a novel called The Road from Damascus, published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton, and
co-editor of www.pulsemedia.org. His personal blog is www.qunfuz.com. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
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Al-Nakba (The Catastrophe) by Hiyam Noir: Untold story of
great courage, suffering, struggle and survival. Click here to read the article.
Inhuman racist ideology: Zionist quotes
A very important document prepared by Paul Grenville (NPSC) and we recommend reading it
all and considering it as a reference. Download the file.
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WEST BANK & JERUSALEM MAP The Settlements: The Biggest
Threat To A Two-State Solution, click to download the file (including map) as PDF
Geoff Simons’ look at the problem in Palestine of the Israeli onslaught
against the indigenous population keeps coming at the reader, insistently, imperatively, and almost overwhelming to the point of
exhaustion. To download a book review (a PDF file) of The
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, please click here or on the icon
================
The Palestinian and Jewish Unity
(PAJU)
The Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) is a human rights
organization that explicitly recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to national existence and to live in security.
The group is comprised of Jews, Palestinians and other Canadians of good conscience who work together to promote
peace in the Middle East and to educate the public on the Palestinian question.
================
The Racist Wall
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More Bad News From Israel [Paperback]
by Greg Philo, Mike Berry
Review
This superb study ... is extensive in scope, and scrupulously fair. It will be a landmark. --Edward S.
Herman, co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of Manufacturing Consent
[The book] covers a lot of ground
in a clear and readable manner and is particularly good at airing different views about the Arab-Israeli conflict. --Professor Avi
Shlaim, St Antony's College, University of Oxford
Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often
dangerously superficial. Bad News from Israel is a strong contribution to scholarship and public debate. --John D.H.
Downing, Director, Global Media Research Center, Southern Illinois University
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“The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is
the mind of the oppressed”.
Stephen Biko
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The next NPSC meeting will be announced soon so please keep visiting the website for information.
End the siege on Gaza, 
