Not far, geographically, from the only rain forest in the contiguous United States the forests are dying. Through a combination of bugs, wind, drought and fire, trees are dying. The old-growth trees are being logged despite the fact that “To moderate the effects of climate change, foresters need to retain the largest trees, and recruit more by letting forests grow, scientists have found.” (Seattle Times, “Scientists say the last of British Columbia’s old-growth trees will soon be gone, if policies don’t change“)
Throughout the ports on the Puget Sound there are piles of lumber ready to be shipped to China. It doesn’t matter if the foresting companies claim that the trees chopped down are replanted – they’re not, by definition, old-growth. I know we all like to build fences, houses, and furniture with lovely wood products. To mitigate the effects of climate change, something has to change. Stop the flow of timber before it’s too late.
I’m sure we’ve all put stay-in-place orders to good use in a slough of productivity. I’m sure we all have unfinished books sitting nearby and bad artwork we don’t want to put our names to.
In an effort to create the world we want to live in part of my time has been writing to my congressman. I wrote last week about what he will do to prevent Israel’s impending annexation of the West Bank, and today’s writing was about climate change and environmental degradation.
Here’s what I wrote:
Dear Rep. —-
This message is prompted by an article published today (June 13) in the Guardian about how our climate change models may have been off, and we are in a worse climate-induced catastrophe than we thought. (See: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/13/climate-worst-case-scenarios-clouds-scientists-global-heating)
My question for you is whether you have cosponsored H.Res 109 supporting the statement that the government must act on climate change. I hope you have done that and gone further, introducing comprehensive legislation that will mitigate climate change, and have pressured your colleagues to join you.
In appreciation in your efforts to ensure our planet remains livable I thank you always for your representation,
Always remember that we have a representative government. Reach our to your representatives. Hello Mr. Congressman ——-
Always remember to follow the money. Phillip Weiss put out a great piece today about how Sheldon and Miriam are poised to give as much as $200 million to Republican causes this year. He explains why, and here’s part of of it:
Look at it from Trump’s point of view. He doesn’t care about peace in the Middle East or Palestinian human rights. He wants one thing, to win in November, and he needs money.
Think of it from the Adelsons’ point of view. Why should they risk $200 million on a loser? Well, because it’s not a losing cause: they get their payback now. They figure that Israeli annexation is permanent no matter what happens to Trump. “Facts on the ground” is the Israeli way of expansion. The embassy move will never be reversed by a Joe Biden. So let’s annex.
Always follow the money.
It should be noted that I’m writing this in the midst of protests that were sparked by the killing of George Floyd, which help lead me to sources and facts, but this article has been brewing in my mind for some time.
For simplicity’s sake we can say that the United States has been a security state for many years starting with the Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (PATRIOT) Act of 2001.
As the ACLU says:
Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet. While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.
There’s decades of history before the Patriot Act that led to us being a police state. The Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch page said the U.S. began as a national security state in 1947, and over the years it led to the demise of the New Deal state that emphasized social spending, leading instead to a militaristic national security state.
Fast forward to a decade after the Patriot Act. We’d been in unwinnable war in the Middle East for several years and the economy had already tanked at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. With the rent too damn high nonviolent people started the Occupy Wall Street movement, to demand that money was flowing to the people rather than corporations.
A militarized police was sent against U.S. citizens in U.S. cities for the first noticeable time (excluding numerous onslaughts against Native Americans over the centuries). The president was a Democrat – Obama.
The rent stayed too damn high but the Occupy movement went on with life. A few year later, in August 2014 protests began due to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown, an 18 year-old African American was shot by a white officer. Again, the protesters, demanding justice for another unnecessary death by an officer of the peace, were attacked by a militarized police force using rubber bullets and tear gas.
A few years later, from the spring of 2016 to early 2017 a significant movement began protesting oil pipelines being built from Canada that would terminate in Texas – and cross numerous rivers. People (including some Hollywood stars and activists) including the non-indigenous population gathered at Standing Rock on Sioux land to protest the Dakota Access pipeline passing through native American land. The activists were confronted at times by a mercenary force (called a “private security force) that used police dogs, by the National Guard, by pepper spray, by a police force using militarized tanks, water tanks (in subfreezing weather) rubber bullets, and unusual punishment after arrest.
Before we fast forward to now it’s important to summarize SourceWatch’s breakdown of what comprises a security state. This is based on the book “Brave New World Order” by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer. There are seven elements that are listed: 1) “The military is the highest authority” that “guarantees the security of the state against all internal and external enemies” and has enough power to determine the overall direction of the society.” 2) The state maintains a semblance of democracy while “political democracy and democratic elections are viewed with suspicion, contempt, or in terms of political expediency.” 3) “The military and related sectors wield substantial political and economic power” under an ideology which stresses that ‘freedom” and ‘development’ and “capital is concentrated in the hands of elites.” 4) “Defending against external and/or internal enemies becomes a leading preoccupation of the state, a distorting factor in the economy, and a major source of national identity and purpose.” 5) The enemies of the state are ruthless and cunning, therefore “any means used to destroy or control these enemies is justified.” 6) A National Security State restricts public debate and limits popular participation through secrecy or intimidation with appeals to phrases such a ‘higher purpose’ and vague appeals to ‘national security.’ 7) “The church is expected to mobilize its financial, ideological, and theological resources in service to the National Security State”
Nelson-Pallmeyer’s work focused on states such as El Salvador. In the summary of the conclusion, though, responses ranged from recognizing that the U.S. contributed to El Salvador being a security state to realization that “there are people who see many of the characteristics of a National Security State operating within the United States.” “Brave New World Order,” from which these observations came, was written in 1992. The observations are just as telling almost thirty years later.
Now we are in 2020 a couple weeks after George Floyd was choked to death by a police officer. The protests resulting from his death are ongoing. Protesters are against facing tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful protests while journalists and citizens are arrested for filming the police assaulting people. The First Amendment right to peaceable assemble and the right to a free press are under assault by police and encouraged by the President.
More than 10,000 people have been arrested in the last two weeks of protesting; I would hazard a guess that 90% were acting peacefully and/or were arrested a few minutes after arbitrary curfews cities have enacted the day of a gathering.
Already this year the Democratic-majority House in Congress has reauthorized warrentless searches under the FREEDOM Act (the PATRIOT Act on steroids). We expect the Republican Party to advocate for Law and Order and are not surprised that Republicans like the police and the security state. The Republicans are not alone in advocating for a security state.
Some people have began to remark that we live not in a security state but a police state. According to Merriam-Webster, a police state is “a political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures.”
I wrote the following to the Democratic Party today. They can be contacted on the “contact us” page on their website:
Dear Democratic Party leadership,
As a fellow Democratic I’m writing to you concerned that Joe Biden is incapable of winning this election.
I am also concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to lead should he be elected. He has repeatedly said, even in the middle of this pandemic, that he will not support universal healthcare. He’s also against a massive overhaul of our dependency on fossil fuel, and other human actions that hurt our planet. At best, we have a few years left before we’re past the point of no return on the environment.
Biden has said a lot of things that can, individually, be taken as gaffes. They add up to a systematic disregard for many things, including the current anger boiling over due to the racially motivated death in Minnesota, and the events like it that happen all over the country.
Now is the time for a leader.
Please inform the Joe Biden that it is either time to lead in a way he never has, or it is time to step aside and allow the voting people to elect a leader that we need.
With regards and appreciation with the work you do to represent the people,
It would be a daunting task to document all of Joe Biden’s racist remarks, racist connections, and racist-tinted legislation. The most recent comment this week was to a non-white host of the Breakfast Club during an interview.
“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black” Biden said to his somewhat-black, quite American, host. Biden later claimed that it was banter, and he apologized for saying that “you ain’t black”.
Now, I’ve been trying to figure out the phrase “you ain’t black,” so I called in my expert MiniPearl.
MiniPearl, said I one morning “you ain’t black”. Well I’ll tell you this, it just didn’t feel right.
I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t calling her black, or if I was affirming that she was not black. Was it a compliment or insult?
MiniPearl ain’t telling, but the non-white community was put off – although perhaps not surprised by Biden’s comments. He has no right to expect that because they’re black they’ll vote for him. His comment is part of a Democratic Party race problem. Two weeks ago Politico reported that Biden has no outreach to the latino community.
Even more recently (there’s a video):
Unless the plan is to use reverse psychology to, by insulting the black – and latino – communities Biden expects to win their vote, something weird is going on. MiniPearl might be black, but to tell her “you ain’t black” is a little different than a presidential race.
U.S. foreign policy has not come up often in the 2020 presidential campaign, Carnegie’s U.S. article on foreign policy’s case study, determined. Any debate that there is “takes place within relatively small circles within Washington, DC, without the benefit of input from state and local officials, small business owners, community leaders, local labor representatives, and others on the front lines of addressing the challenges facing middle-class households.” Looking a three states over the last few years, the study found that “similar to Colorado and Ohio, doubts abound in Nebraska that foreign policy professionals in Washington, DC, truly understand the economic realities confronting middle-income households or that they prioritize these realities in the development of U.S. foreign policies.”
These foreign policy issued addressed range from foreign trade, to climate change. Carnegie concluded that
it becomes clear that foreign policy professionals need to reexamine how they are defining the national economic interests intended to be advanced through U.S. foreign policy. These case studies reveal that rates of economic growth and unemployment are important but incomplete measures of the economic well-being of the country’s middle class. One must also examine the effects of foreign policy on middle-class jobs, standards of living, and the economic viability of local communities. There must be greater acknowledgment of how these effects diverge in different places.
The Seattle Times weekly magazine this weekend was about the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980, and and one couple’s experience with the blast.
The Mountain reminded us that it’s there. Anyone in the Pacific Northwest, caught between the mountains and the sea, are reminded that the Mountain is still there, and it’s in a long chain of active mountains. How active, we don’t know.
The Pacific Northwest was reminded a few years ago that it’s geologically behind for the next big earthquake.
If you look – and you don’t need to look closely – you can see that the ocean was where land is now. We know that the water will rise again and swallow the land.
Forty years is a very short time, geologically speaking. Will it be the next big blast, the next big quake, or the rising of the waters that will alter the landscape forever? When will it happen? Will we listen, instead of ignoring the signs, like they did forty years ago?
The Nakba, or Catastrophe happened 72 years ago today. An ongoing process, that officially began in late 1947 and lasted until past the end of 1948, Palestinians were forced to leave their home, either through fear or through gunpoint, and have become a refugee population. The following writing comes from my own thoughts and sources (well-documented in the footnotes) . This is an incomplete writing that reminds us that Never Again means Never Again, and past time for recognize the wrongs of the past.
The creation of Israel and the destruction and denigration of Palestine happened in part because “to be a Jew is to be the ultimate victim in perpetuity and only the nonvictim (but also nonperpetrator) state can shield her from harm.”[1]
The Institute for Middle East Understanding says that “from the earliest days of the movement, Zionist leaders struggled with the dilemma of how to deal with the non-Jewish Palestinians who inhabited the land on which they wanted to create their state. Most, including Herzl, concluded the only solution was what became known as ‘transfer,’ a euphemism for what is known as ‘ethnic cleansing’ today.” It refers to the Twentieth Zionist Congress in Zurich. Here, in August 1937, “transfer was discussed.” The leader of the Zionist community in Palestine (the Yishuv) and Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, referring to the “the systematic dispossession of Palestinian peasant farmers (fellahin) that Zionist colonists had been engaged in for decades,” IMEU quotes him as saying ‘you are no doubt aware of the JNF’s (Jewish National Fund) activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin.” He added, the Institute says, ‘Jewish power [in Palestine], which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale.’ Further, the IMEU says that in an October 1937 letter to his son, Amos, Ben-Gurion wrote: ‘We must expel Arabs and take their place.’[2] (My parantheses, their bold emphasis, and their brackets).
And, “In June 1938, transfer was the major focus of a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, the de facto government of the Yishuv,” says the Institute. “Arthur Ruppin, head of the Jewish Agency from 1933 to 1935 and one of the founders of Tel Aviv, declared: ‘I do not believe in the transfer of individuals. I believe in the transfer of entire villages.’ As we have seen, Ben-Gurion also argued in favor of transfer, stating: quotes the IMEU ‘With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.’ (Again, their bold emphasis). In 1940, says the IMEU Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund’s Lands Department, wrote that ‘There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [Bedouin] tribe.’ After this happens, ‘the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.’[3]
On March 10, 1948, the IMEU says, Zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion met in Tel Aviv and formally adopted Plan Dalet (also called Plan D). Plan Dalet, in the words of Palestine Studies, was a “master plan to expel Palestinian Arabs from within and outside the territory allotted to the Jewish state in the United Nation’s 1947 Partition Plan.” Plan Dalet, the IMEU says, merely accelerated expulsions and made the process of ethnic cleansing systematic and marked a time when Israeli forces went on ‘the offensive’. Attacks by Zionist forces against Palestinian population centers actually began a few days after the Partition Plan. Within two weeks of the passage of the Partition Plan, more than 200 Arabs and Jews had been killed, says the IMEU. [4]
In January 1948 “a ragtag group of volunteers from neighboring Arab countries formed by the Arab League” and entered Palestine in order “to help the outnumbered and outgunned Palestinian defenders”. These volunteers were “disorganized, poorly armed and trained, and failed to coordinate with local Palestinian fighters due to hostility between the Arab League and Arab Higher Committee”; the British High Commissioner of Palestine, Alan Cunningham, said the Arab volunteers were ‘poorly equipped and badly led’ and that ‘In almost every engagement the Jews have proved their superiority in organisation, training and tactics.’[5] In February Ben-Gurion wrote to Moshe Sharett that he was sure that if Zionists received the already-purchased arms ‘and maybe even receive some of that promised to us by the UN,’ the Zionists could not only defend themselves but ‘inflict death blows on the Syrians in their own country – and take over Palestine as a whole.’[6] (His emphasis) Ilan Pappe says that by then, the Haganah was mobilizing for full-scale war and by May – around the time the Mandate ended and Israel declared independence – “the Zionists had some 50,000 fighters under arms versus no more than about 10,000 Palestinian irregulars and Arab volunteers.”
Deir Yassin
On April 9, 1948 – before Britain ended its Mandate – Zionists attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, close to where Mount Herzl is today. Dan Freeman-Maloy points out that Deir Yassin was not the largest village, but the massacre of Palestinians in Deir Yassin happens to be the best-documented depopulated village.. He rightly says it “was no isolated incident” but it became “the most infamous massacre of the war.”
Members of the Irgun and of the Stern Gang, Freeman-Maloy says, “entered the village around dawn.” They then “proceeded to carry out a massacre which they themselves then helped to publicize,” judging apparently that panic would be “a useful force in clearing Palestine of its population.”[7]
Elmer Berger adds to this that ‘the savagery and brutality of the attack on the villagers played the important role of turning the original flight of the non-combatant Palestinian Arabs into a stampede from their homes.’ The massacre at Deir Yassin definitely helped the ‘Zionist goal of reducing the Arab population and the realization of ultimate demographic domination by Jews.’[8] Already –again before the end of the Mandate – Zionists had also attacked other villages such as Baldat al-Sheikh, on December 31, 1947, where almost seventy Palestinians died.[9]
Freeman-Maloy begins his story in media res on July 19, 1948 when “a young Yitzhak Rabin sent orders to Israeli units near the border of what would become the West Bank.” In what Israeli history books refer to as ‘The Ten Days’ the paramilitary troops “destroyed key communities in central Palestine. The Palestinian towns of Lydda and Ramla were no more.” He begins his story here, he says, tying it to Deir Yassin, for two reasons: “because it’s past time to pop the bubble of liberal Zionist sensitivities. Yes, the legacy of 1948 is one of open brutality, as at Deir Yassin; but it’s also one of forgotten atrocities–of massacres denied, dismissed, covered up. Our memories of each need to intermingle. Palestinians were forced into Gaza, for example, mainly through the decisions of labor Zionist leaders.” Secondly, he mentions Rabin’s order “to draw attention to some of the soldiers who received it.” Among those troops, he says,
was a unit in the Israeli army’s 82nd Tank Battalion known as the ‘English company.’ It was one of many Zionist units deployed in 1948 Palestine with soldiers from the West–with veterans of the armies of the United States and Canada, of South Africa and Britain. These English-speaking members of the Zionist armed forces ranked among a larger number of ‘volunteers from abroad,’ or Mahal (from the Hebrew Mitnadvay Hutz La’aretz). They were the Anglo-Saxim,(italics in original)[10]
Lester Gorn, an American who appears to be Jewish, was an Anglo-Saxim. He published the historical fiction “The Anglo–Saxons: A Historical Novel of Israel’s War of Independence,” on the tenth anniversary of what Freeman-Maloy calls “the 1948 war.” Friedman-Maloy says Gorn’s “celebratory account” of the war is not all fiction. The Zionist forces – what became the IDF – deployed “a significant number of Western recruits in northern Palestine, where they served under Moshe Carmel’s command,” because their knowhow was needed. Not all of the Anglo-Saxim were Jews. Tom Bowden, a British Christian says he attracted to the fight because the Zionists ‘were like Wild West settlers and I loved their history’.[11]
A cultural-studies academic, Ella Shohat, notes the stratification of castes that Zionists developed. The the Ostjuden of Europe – the East European Jews, historically looked down upon by the communities of the West – created in Palestine their own “Ostjuden,” the Mizrahi or Eastern Jews. Mizrahi have long been considered second-class citizens in Isreal; Shohat herself is a American-Israeli of Mizrahi descent. Anglo-Saxim could carry a sense of superiority towards them all.[12]
By the autumn of 1948, writes Freeman-Maloy, “about three hundred English-speaking World War II veterans were clustered together in the north in the IDF’s 7th Armored Brigade.” The unit, which “was instrumental in conquering the Upper Galilee,” was called ‘the Anglo–Saxon Brigade’ by the leading historian of the Nakba in the Galilee, Nafez Nazzal. Some of the soldiers also helped themselves to Palestinian property; Ben Dunkelman, the commander of the Brigade “was and a veteran of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada.” Dunkelman boasted in his memoirs, says Freeman-Maloy “that cattle looted from Palestinian villagers provided hundreds of trays of beef for his wedding.” More worrisome for the general history of the Nakbah, Moshe Carmel sent Dunkelman a message the on October 31, 1948 that ‘The inhabitants should be assisted to leave the conquered areas.’ Palestinians were already fleeing by the thousands into Lebanon, and Carmel and Dunkelman, along with the Anglo-Saxim, helped create this refugee crisis.[13]
The Seventh Brigade, during the sixty-hour Operation Hiram (Oct. 29-31. 1948), subjected the village of Tarshiha to “aerial bombardment and relentless artillery.” By 1 November, most of the villagers had been forced to flee their homes into neighboring countries, the Dr. Yara Hawari says. Citing Ilan Pappe’s seminal The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Hawari says the Zionist forces were given orders to ‘clear’ Tarshiha, a village of several hundred people northeast of Acre.[14] Tarshiha was indeed cleared by October 29 and officially occupied on November 1 by the Israelis. In 1957 the Israelis built a town nearby for Jewish immigrants – or refugees – called Ma’alot. In 1963 the towns merged to create Ma’alot-Tarshiha in a gesture of a shared future.[15] The Palestinians who returned and rebuilt, Dr. Hawari says, “now live as second-class citizens in Israel.” In 2014, she said “the village has a population of approximately 5,000 including both Muslims and Christians. It is encircled by Jewish Israeli towns which are encroaching on their land and trying to marginalize the Palestinian identity of the village.”[16]
Also during Operation Hiram, not far from Tarshiha, the Palestinian village of Iqrit was almost completely demolished and occupied on November 1, 1948. Like Tarshiha, which has Yom Tarshiha day to remember the Nakba, Iqrit “frequently holds cultural events in the ruins of its village.”[17] For the last several years, Hawari added, young activists have been trying to maintain a continuous presence in the village, and they made an attempt to return permanently in 2013.[18]
In a massacre that has been described as worse than Deir Yassin, during Operation Yoav (October 15-22, 1948) in the Negev, the 89th Commando Battalion killed hundreds of Palestinians in al-Dawayima, including women and children. Described simply as “west of Hebron” by Phillip Weiss, he says the killings were in a barbarous manner and that Israel swept “the crime is swept under the rug for decades.”[19]
Fawzi al-Qawuqji may have made Che Guevara appear a little slack. Born in 1926, George Habash, howeer, became the Palestinian Che Guevara. A Christian Palestinian, he wrote about his childhood that ‘our enemies are not the Jews but rather the British …. The Jews’ relations with the Palestinians were natural and sometimes even good.’[20] In 1948 he was on leave from the American University in Beirut visiting his parents in Lydda (now called Lod). Jewish paramilitary forces entered Lydda on July 11, 1948; on July 14 Habash was expelled from his home with the rest of his family, never to return to the city, or forgot the scenes of 1948. Habash protested – violently at times against both the nascent Israeli state and the Arab states that he felt had abandoned the Palestinians. In 1964 Habash was one of the founders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), with the view that “the only weapon left to the masses in order to restore history and progress” is violence. Habash’s belief that hijacking planes – for which he was famous – ‘was to bring the Palestinian question out of anonymity and expose it to Western public opinion, because at that time it was unknown in Europe and in the United States. We wanted to undertake actions that would make an impression on the senses of the entire world …. There was international ignorance regarding our suffering, in part due to the Zionist movement’s monopoly on the mass media in the West.’ He had a love-hate relationship with Yasser Arafat, who compromised with Israelis and recognized the Israeli state.[21]
Edo Konrad, the deputy editor for +972 Magazine, points of that new cities, such as Karmiel, which is not far from Tel Aviv, and Nazareth Illit (which now goes by the name Nof HaGalil), which is somewhat between Haifa and Tiberias, “sprouted up on land expropriated from Palestinian citizens following the Nakba, while dozens of new Jewish communities were built on hilltops as a way to disrupt the contiguity of Arab communities.” These hilltops communities were “built as ‘mitzpim,’ Hebrew for ‘outlooks,’ which served, much as their name suggests, as nodes of control over the Palestinian population below.” A photo in an article by Edo Konrad of +972 shows Israeli soldiers in battle with the Arab village of Sassa in the upper Galilee, October 1, 1948. [22]
David Remick, editor of the New Yorker, in a November 2014 article describes his conversation with Husam Zomlot in Ramallah; Zomlot is a senior advisor to the Abbas administration. Zolmot’s father, the article relates, “was born in a village near Ashkelon and, as a toddler, fled in 1948 to Gaza.” Like hundreds of thousands of refugees during the Nakba, “the family thought that they would be able to return home,” but were never able to. Zomlot’s father became a successful textile manufacturer, Remnick tells us, but “during the conflict in 2006 over the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the I.D.F. bulldozed his factory.” He left for London, where, Zomlot says, he watched on television ‘his grandchildren going through the same experience that he went through as a refugee.’[23] In 1948 the “creation of the state of Israel resulted in the creation of the largest refugee population in the world,” notes Hamzah Raza.[24]
Rasmea Odeh lived in the United States from 1995 to 2014. Born in Lifta, which was a Palestinian village destroyed during the Nakba, she became a Palestinian Jordanian involved in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. She was convicted by Israel for being involved in a 1969 Jerusalem bombing, and freed in a prisoner exchange in 1980. When she moved to the United States and became a citizen, her paperwork declared that she had no criminal history and she has long maintained that Israeli tortured a confession out of her. A spokesman for the Rasmea Defense Council said in Detroit, in 2014, said ‘We have turned this case into Israel being on trial, its military courts, its colonization and torture, its apartheid policies and treatment of Palestinian prisoners.’[25]
It’s time the international community, which continues to send soldiers, military supplies, and money to finance the Israeli army, acknowledges some collective responsibility for the Nakba. Freeman-Maloy, as I mentioned in the introduction, he also reports that “the first U.S. ambassador to Israel would soon write of his hosts’ luck in securing “such a ‘miraculous’ clearing of the land,” obviously referring to ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.[26]
In the Nakba, between 1947- 1948 more thatn750,000 Palestinians were displaced and thousands died. More devastating to the psyche and collective memory of the Palestinians, during the Nakba “Zionist forces committed 33 massacres and destroyed 531 Palestinian towns.” Since Deir Yassin, “over 90% of the land that was allotted by the U.N. to remain Palestinian has been stolen by Israel.”[27]
[1] Melissa Levin on December 11, 2015 http://mondoweiss.net/2015/12/the-last-colony/
[2] Institute for Middle East Understanding, May 08, 2013 https://imeu.org/article/the-nakba-65-years-of-dispossession-and-apartheid accessed April 26, 2018. Originally listed as a bullet-point the IMEU article.
[3] Institute for Middle East Understanding, May 08, 2013 https://imeu.org/article/the-nakba-65-years-of-dispossession-and-apartheid accessed April 26, 2018. Originally listed as a bullet-point the IMEU article.
[4] By IMEU March 8, 2013 https://imeu.org/article/plan-dalet accessed April 28, 2020. The Palestine Studies article can be found at http://www.palestine-studies.org/node/189729 (author unlisted, and publishation date not listed). Palestine Studies is now called the Institute for Palestine Studies. To read an English translation of Plan Dalet, see the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre at http://www.jmcc.org/Documentsandmaps.aspx?id=755
[5] Institute for Middle East Understanding, May 08, 2013 https://imeu.org/article/the-nakba-65-years-of-dispossession-and-apartheid accessed April 26, 2018
[6] Institute for Middle East Understanding, May 08, 2013 https://imeu.org/article/the-nakba-65-years-of-dispossession-and-apartheid accessed April 26, 2018 citing Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”
[7] Dan Freeman-Maloy on April 9, 2018 http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/involvement-expulsion-palestinians/. Se e also Phillip Weiss, who mentions that Menachin Begin was commander of the Irgun at the time. Philip Weiss on April 1, 2018 http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/unhappy-history-massacres/. Begin was not present during the massacre.
[8] Quoted in Robert Fantina on January 19, 2017 http://mondoweiss.net/2017/01/international-nations-palestine/. Fantina also says that “Over one hundred men, women and children died in the bitter, house-to-house fighting in Deir Yassin. Palestine Studies says that 107 Palestinians died at Deir Yassin, killed by Revisionist Zionist Irgun and Lehi forces. “The Naka: In the Words of Palestinians” http://www.palestine-studies.org/node/189729 accessed April 12, 2018
[9] by Al-Jazeera Staff 23 May 2017 https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/05/nakba-start-1948-170522073908625.html
[10] Dan Freeman-Maloy on April 9, 2018 http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/involvement-expulsion-palestinians/. In “The Naka: In the Words of Palestinians,” Palestine Studies mentions that Rabin said ‘The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.’ See http://www.palestine-studies.org/node/189729 accessed April 12, 2018
[11] Dan Freeman-Maloy on April 9, 2018 http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/involvement-expulsion-palestinians/. The reference to the Wild West is quoted by Freeman-Maloy and attributed to Bowden.
[12] Dan Freeman-Maloy on April 9, 2018 http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/involvement-expulsion-palestinians/
[13] The quotes provided by Dan Freeman-Maloy article published on April 9, 2018 http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/involvement-expulsion-palestinians/
[14] The quotes are from Hawari. To see more about Tarhisha, see https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Tarshiha/index.html
[15] To see examples of disunity in Tarhisha see the Ma’alot Massacre of 1974 in which members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine took 115 hostages and killed 25 Israelis
[16] All information from Yara Hawari 30 October 2014 https://electronicintifada.net/content/young-palestinians-protect-history-and-heritage-galilee-village/13987 except the merger of Ma’alot-Tarshiha, which can be found through further research.
[17] Although the Zionist founding fathers expected that the old generation of Palestinians would eventually die and that the new generation would forget their history Harawi says “over the last two decades, there has been an increased effort to revive oral history in Palestine in a counter-struggle against the Zionist hegemonic narrative. Commemorative activities such as Yom Tarshiha are part of that revival effort.” There’s also been a strong academic revival, especially, says Hawari, at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University in New York City and the Palestine oral history archive at Birzeit University near the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. Yara Hawari 30 October 2014 https://electronicintifada.net/content/young-palestinians-protect-history-and-heritage-galilee-village/13987. To see efforts to suppress the Nakba, and further revelations about the Nakba itself, see “The Erasure of the Nakba in Israel’s Archives” Seth Anzisca Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 49 No. 1, Autumn 2019; (pp. 64-76) https://jps.ucpress.edu/content/49/1/64.full.pdf+html
[18] Yara Hawari 30 October 2014 https://electronicintifada.net/content/young-palestinians-protect-history-and-heritage-galilee-village/13987
[19] Philip Weiss on April 1, 2018 http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/unhappy-history-massacres/ To see more on Operation Yoav, see https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/operation-ldquo-yoav-rdquo-october-1948
[20] Gideon Levy Apr 15, 2018 12:45 PM https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-biography-makes-it-clear-this-palestinian-leftist-leader-was-right-1.5994244. The ellipses in the description of Habash’s childhood are in the article.
[21] Gideon Levy Apr 15, 2018 12:45 PM https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-biography-makes-it-clear-this-palestinian-leftist-leader-was-right-1.5994244. The ellipses of Habash’s quote is in the article by Levy.
[22] Edo Konrad Published March 18, 2018 https://972mag.com/even-inside-israel-colonialism-is-far-from-over/133896/. Mitzpim and other words in quotations also come from the words of Konrad. Konrad appears to be referring to the village of Sa’sa’, which was depopulated in February, 1948 and again in October, 1948. See also the article by Al-Jazeera Staff 23 May 2017 https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/05/nakba-start-1948-170522073908625.html, which says that in Sa’sa’ in February “16 houses were blown up and 60 people lost their lives”
[23] By David Remnick November 17, 2014 Issue http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/one-state-reality. Zomlot watching on tv was a direct quote from Zomlot; the rest is from Remnick.
[24] Hamzah Raza on March 6, 2018 http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/reasons-progressive-paradise/
[25] Charlotte Silver November 5, 2014 https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/dozens-travel-detroit-support-rasmea-odeh-trial-begins
[26] Dan Freeman-Maloy April 9, 2018 http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/involvement-expulsion-palestinians/ accessed April 9, 2018
[27] Robert Fantina on January 19, 2017 http://mondoweiss.net/2017/01/international-nations-palestine/
The U.S. is trying to create a coup in Venezuela.
Max Blumenthal and other good investigative reporters have reported on this as well.While we’re distracted our government is trying to instigate yet another (probably military) coup
I’ve also seen that Eric Prince, brother to Betty Devos, is involved in training these paramilitary troops.
Countries invade and degrade other countries for god, gold and glory. Let’s assume that the United States isn’t attempting a coup – which is like invasion except with just mercenaries – for god. Is it about gold (resources in general)? Or is it for the glory that precedes the invasion and degradation of everything in reach?
The Dole Blog 