Cavalier Zee

~ Palestine: What Hope For Peace ~

“It’s not about peace, it’s about justice.” ~ Gideon Levy, Award-winning veteran Israeli journalist.

This is a feature length documentary film which asks, and presents testimony on the following key questions:

Kerry-anne Mendoza has been traveling to Israel, Gaza and the West Bank for twelve years.  When Operation Protective Edge commenced in July 2014, readers of Scriptonite Daily crowd funded her to return and report with a perspective and depth missing in the mainstream media.

You can see those reports here.

While producing daily written reports and live Q&A sessions from Gaza, she was also interviewing key witnesses to Israel’s brutal military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Kerry-anne traveled to the very worst hit areas of Gaza and recorded Israel’s military assaults as they happened, capturing footage you will see nowhere else.

This is a film which puts names and faces to the statistics.

It is about a people under siege, and the indomitable determination of the human spirit to be free.

Kerry-anne Mendoza will be touring the film from November 2014, along with Gaza resident Khalil AlTatari.

Bring the film to your school, community centre, cinema or any other venue, together with live Questions and Answers with Kerry-anne and Khalil, by emailing: [email protected]

If you’d like to donate to support the film and the tour, please do so below:

Scriptonite Daily is a citizen funded news site. If we want to make an alternative media, then we need to build it. Your donations make the difference.

Palestine Is Still The Issue 

Palestine Is Still The Issue' tells how almost a million Palestinians had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in 1967.  John Pilger asks why the Palestinians, whose right of return was affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught in a terrible limbo - refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the longest military occupation in modern times.

Pilger distills the history of Palestine during the twentieth century into an easily comprehensible struggle for land - the loss of seventy-eight per cent of that belonging to Palestinians when the state of Israel was founded in 1948 and their claim to only the remaining twenty-two per cent, which had for thirty-five years been occupied by Israel. In a series of extraordinary interviews with both Israelis and Palestinians, he speaks to the families of suicide bombers and their victims. He witnesses the humiliation of Palestinians at myriad checkpoints with a permit system not dissimilar to apartheid South Africa's infamous pass laws.  One Palestinian woman tells of how she was stopped from passing through a checkpoint when she went into labour and had to return home to give birth with her mother-in-law using a razor to cut the umbilical cord. The baby later died.  He goes into the refugee camps and meets children who, he says, "no longer dream like other children, or if they do, it is about death."  He is shown round the Palestinian Ministry of Culture in Ramallah after a recent Israeli attack where he discovers faeces smeared on walls and floors and a room of children's paintings vandalised. Archive footage shows pledges by successive American presidents in support of Israel. Pilger describes the Israeli administration as"America's deputy sheriff" in the oil-rich Middle East, receiving billions of dollars and the latest weapons: F16 aircraft, bombs, missiles and Apache helicopters.  He reveals that Britain also fuels the conflict even though it condemns Israel for its illegal occupation. 

Pilger concludes: 

Living Under Occupation: Daily Life In Occupied Palestine

A film made by EFA MEPs François Alfonsi, Jill Evans and Ana Miranda during their visit to the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Participants:

Visit: European Free Alliance

~ The Aliya Battalion ~ Israel’s Secret War On Palestinians In 1948 hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the war as Israeli forces depopulated and destroyed hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages to make way for their settlers arriving from Europe and to establish the Zionist state of Israel. The Palestinians who fled their ancestral land have not been allowed to return to their homes even after 60 years. Their homes and lands are now occupied by Israeli citizens. Those Palestinians are still refugees in neighboring countries and across the globe. They have formed the Palestinian Diaspora.  But as tragic as that maybe, this is not the end of the story, those Palestinians who stayed inside their country’s borders have watched their lands being stolen by the Zionist regime. These rightful owners of the land who once enjoyed a prosperous life have experienced all hell break loose as the Zionist regime of Israel wages war after war on these defenseless people. The “The Aliya Battalion” is a documentary about Israel’s secret activities in targeting and terrorizing the civilian population in an effort to annihilate and eradicate the Palestinian nation. With interviews from the Palestinians and Israelis and members from the Aliya Battalion this eye opening documentary reveals what is really happening in Palestine.

Racism Is Embedded In Jewish Israeli Society

The casualness in which the man expresses his sense of entitlement, reveals something so extraordinary about how racism is embedded and reinforced within Jewish Israeli society. 

Here’s The Transcript:

Some of the other people on the bus normalize this man’s request by their agreement, some by their silence, as if it’s the most natural thing for any Jewish person to have the right to request inspection of any Palestinian person anywhere, simply as a matter of course. The blond girl also trying to convince the woman, it’s mind-boggling.

David Remnick writes in an article in the NewYorker, Israel’s One-State Reality,

This rhetoric of Jewish supremacy, how are people supposed to live around and deal with this mentality? That is a serious question.

Translation and subtitles by Ronnie Barkan 

By Annie Robbins

The Grave Of Mass-Murderer Baruch Goldstein

On a hillside in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, overlooking the large West Bank Palestinian city of al-Khalil — known to Israeli Jews and most foreigners by its biblical name of  “Hebron” – is the grave monument of Dr. Baruch Goldstein.

  On the Jewish holiday of Purim, February 25, 1994, Goldstein, then a reserve officer in the Israeli army, walked into the Mosque of Ibrahim (the traditional burial place of the Patriarch Abraham) in uniform and with his army-issued weapon, opening fire on the Muslim worshippers. 29 people were murdered outright and 125 wounded before the survivors managed to disarm Goldstein and kill him on the spot.

  For many far-right Israeli Jews and especially the settler movement Goldstein was a martyr to the cause of religious Zionism.  His grave in a ceremonial plaza overlooking the Palestinian town became a place of pilgrimage and celebration – to the great embarrassment of the Israeli government and many of its supporters in the US. 

  The Hebrew inscription on Goldstein’s grave monument reads, in part:

During the annual observance of the Purim holiday, settlers gather at Goldstein’s grave to celebrate his deed and sing songs in praise of the man they regard as a noble martyr.  One of the songs includes the verse: 

Then the settlers march down to pray at the Mosque/Synagogue of Abraham, accompanied by a  massive show of force by Israeli army troops. 

The 1994 Hebron Massacre launched a fierce outburst of violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories, which included the first suicide bombings carried out by Hamas within the 1948 borders.  

But in this case (Jewish) terrorism worked.  The ancient burial place of the Patriarchs, was now divided into a Muslim and a Jewish section and made accessible to Jewish worshipers and foreign tourists.  

Source: MondoWeiss The above post is in response to the following post made by, "Ram Locke," from Google Plus, about the Synagogue attack that occurred in occupied Jerusalem:

I do not condone attacks on civilians, but I am merely exposing the suffocating double standards and the "convenient" loss of memory by members of Israeli society, some followers of the Jewish faith and their supporters.

~ The Rising Tide Of Anti-Semitism ~

To the Editor:

(Rev.) BRUCE M. SHIPMAN Groton, Conn., Aug. 21, 2014 The writer is the Episcopal chaplain at Yale.

Why Would A Texan Boycott Israel?

I finally realized that what I had been seeing all these years was not Israel defending itself, but rather Palestinians defending their homes and families, even when the best they could do was to throw rocks at tanks.

Stand Firm Against Israel Until It Complies With International Law & Previous Agreements

... We believe that the necessary confidentiality that Secretary Kerry imposed on the resumed negotiations should not preclude a far more forceful and public expression of certain fundamental U.S. positions:

Settlements: U.S. disapproval of continued settlement enlargement in the Occupied Territories by Israel’s government as “illegitimate” and“unhelpful” does not begin to define the destructiveness of this activity. Nor does it dispel the impression that we have come to accept it despite our rhetorical objections. Halting the diplomatic process on a date certain until Israel complies with international law and previous agreements would help to stop this activity and clearly place the onus for the interruption where it belongs.

Palestinian Incitement: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s charge that various Palestinian claims to all of historic Palestine constitute incitement that stands in the way of Israel’s acceptance of Palestinian statehood reflects a double standard. The Likud and many of Israel’s other political parties and their leaders make similar declarations about the legitimacy of Israel’s claims to all of Palestine, designating the West Bank “disputed” rather than occupied territory. 

Moreover, Israeli governments have acted on those claims by establishing Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank. Surely the “incitement” of Palestinian rhetoric hardly compares to the incitement of Israel’s actual confiscations of Palestinian territory. 

If the United States is not prepared to say so openly, there is little hope for the success of these talks, which depends far more on the strength of America’s political leverage and its determination to use it than on the good will of the parties.

The Jewishness Of The State Of Israel: Israel is a Jewish state because its population is overwhelmingly Jewish, Jewish religious and historical holidays are its national holidays, and Hebrew is its national language. But Israeli demands that Palestinians recognize that Israel has been and remains the national homeland of the Jewish people is intended to require the Palestinians to affirm the legitimacy of Israel’s replacement of Palestine’s Arab population with its own. It also raises Arab fears of continuing differential treatment of Israel’s Arab citizens.

Israelis are right to demand that Palestinians recognize the fact of the state of Israel and its legitimacy, which Palestinians in fact did in 1988 and again in 1993. They do not have the right to demand that Palestinians abandon their own national narrative, and the United States should not be party to such a demand. 

Israeli Security: The United States has allowed the impression that it supports a version of Israel’s security that entails Israeli control of all of Palestine’s borders and part of its territory, including the Jordan Valley. Many former heads of Israel’s top intelligence agencies, surely among the best informed in the country about the country’s security needs, have rejected this version of Israel’s security. Meir Dagan, a former head of the Mossad, dismissed it as “nothing more than manipulation.”

Israel’s confiscation of what international law has clearly established as others’ territory diminishes its security. 

Illegal West Bank land grabs only add to the Palestinian and the larger Arab sense of injustice that Israel’s half-century-long occupation has already generated, and fuels a revanchism that sooner or later will trigger renewed violence. 

No Palestinian leader could or would ever agree to a peace accord that entails turning over the Jordan Valley to Israeli control, either permanently or for an extended period of time, thus precluding a peace accord that would end Israel’s occupation. 

The marginal improvement in Israel’s security provided by these expansive Israeli demands can hardly justify the permanent subjugation and disenfranchisement of a people to which Israel refuses to grant citizenship in the Jewish state.

The Terms For A Peace Accord advanced by Netanyahu’s government, whether regarding territory, borders, security, resources, refugees or the location of the Palestinian state’s capital, require compromises of Palestinian territory and sovereignty on the Palestinian side of the June 6, 1967, line. They do not reflect any Israeli compromises, much less the “painful compromises” Netanyahu promised in his May 2011 speech before a joint meeting of Congress. Every one of them is on the Palestinian side of that line. 

Although Palestinians have conceded fully half of the territory assigned to them in the U.N.’s Partition Plan of 1947, a move Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, has hailed as unprecedented, they are not demanding a single square foot of Israeli territory beyond the June 6, 1967, line.

Netanyahu’s unrelenting efforts to establish equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian demands, insisting that the parties split the difference and that Israel be granted much of its expansive territorial agenda beyond the 78 percent of Palestine it already possesses, are politically and morally unacceptable. The United States should not be party to such efforts, not in Crimea nor in the Palestinian territories.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, FRANK CARLUCCI, LEE HAMILTON, CARLA A. HILLS, THOMAS PICKERING and HENRY SIEGMAN

~ Israel Responsible For Current Deadlock ~

US secretary of state John Kerry, told the Senate foreign relations committee... that Israel was responsible for the current deadlock.

~ Western Hypocrisy: Crimea and Israeli War Crimes ~

The West Hits Russia With Sanctions For Annexing Crimea, But It Has Yet To Punish Israel For War Crimes In Palestine.

The velocity with which the US and EU imposed economic sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea is equal to the mass of hypocrisy on Israel's creeping annexation of Palestinian land through colonial-settlement expansion. The ongoing expansion is seen as a war crime "falling into the provision of Article 8 of the International Criminal Court statutes".

  Following the overwhelming vote by Crimeans to secede from the Ukraine and join Russia in the rushed referendum on March 16, US President Barack Obama, on March 20, ordered a second round of soft sanctions targeting a list of key Russian officials, businessmen and bankers, sending ripples of instability through Russia's stock market. 

  Israel's Illegal Annexations

  When in 1947, the UN grappled with the idea of partitioning Palestine, it was rejected, outright and rightfully, by the Palestinians. Nor were the entire inhabitants under the British mandate granted a referendum, as were the Crimeans, on the matter because the indigenous population far exceeded the  Zionist immigrants whom the international community favoured.

  So when Israel - unilaterally -  declared the state of Israel, after massacring unarmed Palestinian children, women, elderly and men, destroying over 500 villages and forcefully deporting 700,000 terrified Palestinians, the West did not impose economic sanctions nor lift a military finger to redress the grave violations of international law then.

  Furthermore, the West ignored Israel's unilateral annexation, on June 28,1967, of East Jerusalem, including the Old City, that placed its Palestinian residents under Israeli jurisdiction, administration and illegal military occupation as well as ignoring Israel's annexation of Syria's Golan Heights.

  Both annexations have been deemed invalid by many UNSC Resolutions such as 478, 269 and 497 - all rejected by Israel that, 47 years later, relentlessly fuels its annexation drive by the expansion of its settlement colonies.

  On March 20, while the Ukrainian crisis unfolded, the Israeli Civil Administration, with Putinesque arrogance, defied the Israeli-Palestinian peace process demand for a settlement freeze, by announcing the approval of more than 2,000 housing units in the illegal West Bank settlements.

  Today, there are 121 colonies plus 101 offshoot outposts subsidised by the government of Israel and supported by monies from Jews worldwide through rich Zionist organisations like the apartheid JNF"charity" whose provision of illegal settlement housing and leases on stolen Palestinian lands are "chartered to benefit Jews exclusively". Moreover, JNF's racist policies and illegal operations are tax-exempt in the US, UK, Australia and Canada.  

  Almost half a million illegal colonists reside in the encroaching settlements. They have the right to bear arms and enjoy the impunity to act as government militia under the protection of the Israeli Occupation Forces. Systematic settler oppression includes torching fields, uprooting thousands of fruit and olive trees, damaging property, arson, poisoning sheep, defacing graves and mosques, illegal squatting, water and farmland contamination by diversion of sewerage, throwing sewerage on Palestinian passer-bys, road blocks, attacks on schoolchildren and school buses, intimidations,  beatings, shootings, deliberate hit and run, vile verbal abuse, racist and threatening graffiti.

  Judaisation Plans

  Over the recent months of peace talks, provocative assaults by settler and military activity against the al-Aqsa mosque has heightened fears of Zionist desecration and judaisation of  al-Haram al-Sharif, marked for the site of the Jewish Third Temple as demonstrated in the propaganda film featuring Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

  Billions of dollars to fund the Third Temple are set aside and ready to literally blast away the Dome of the Rock and the holy al-Aqsa Mosque which are under daily threats by excavations below and above by the Zionist religious and settler zealots impervious to the inevitable repercussion of a Muslim conflagration.

  The judaisation of East Jerusalem is fundamental to Israel’s annexation master plan to unite East and West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

  The relentless coercion and the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian residents is executed by the Israeli government, the Municipality of Jerusalem and Elad, the right-wing settler organisation through the revocation of residency rights, absentee property laws, discriminatory taxation policies, home demolitions, transfer of Palestinian residents,.

  In short -  ethnic cleansing in direct violation of Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention: "Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons is prohibited." 

  Every day, with every brick laid in the colonial settlements, a war crime is committed as Palestine shrinks before the eyes of the world.The very same eyes that have been indifferent to and complicit with 67 years of the longest brutal occupation in modern history have suddenly flared with indignation for the Russian annexation of the Crimea implemented with the blessing of the Crimean people.  

Israel's overt and furtive annexation of Palestine is also the annexation of Palestinian dignity, rights and  freedoms. However, it is not only the people of Palestine who are injured by the political hypocrisy of Western leaders, all of us are the losers when international law is cynically and deliberately abused and neglected. 

  Dr Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters.  She was also a convenor of Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of t he East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

By Remi Kanazi,

Nor·mal·i·za·tion: a "colonization of the mind" whereby the oppressed subject comes to believe that the oppressor's reality is the only "normal" reality...and that the oppression is a fact of life that must be coped with.  Those who engage in normalization either ignore this oppression, or accept it as the status quo that can be lived with.  In an attempt to whitewash its violations of international law and human rights, Israel attempts to re-brand itself or present itself as "normal" -- even "enlightened" -- through an intricate array of relations and activities encompassing hi-tech, cultural, legal, LGBT and other realms. Normalization applies to relationships that convey a misleading or deceptive image of normalcy, symmetry, or parity despite a patently abnormal and asymmetric relationship of colonial oppression and apartheid.

Nothing is normal about occupation

Nothing normal about apartheid ethic cleansing

Seige, blockade, settler-only roads

Bombing water wells, schools, mosques, and UN buildings

Nothing normal about putting a civilian population on a diet

Paying non-indigenous foreigners to settle land that has already been populated

Rewriting the nakba with each stolen childhood

Trying to desensitize the puncture wounds and quall marks

Put into the bodies of ? and Rachel Corry

No, I don't want to normalize with you

I don't want to hug, have coffee, talk it out, break bread, sit around the campfire, eat s'mores and gush about how we're all the same

I don't want to share stage, ? co-write a poem, ? submit to your anthology ?

Talk about how art, instead of justice, can forge a better path

I don't want to indulge your amnesia about a glorious past

Have a therapy session, I'm two sides with equal grievances

The only thing baron is a moral capacity

? semi-colonial state with an appropriative culture

I will not fight for your privilege, nor will I seek to normalize it

Your dialogue group, it's a breathing ground for injustice

Just look at the board members in the ZOA sponsorship

Zionism is a real demographic threat

Infecting the minds of millions with racism

They were hooded in the south

Pushing darker nations and ? young men ? blocks in Northern Ireland

In case you missed the hint, I don't want to pretend that all is okay

Or that bombs dropped on Gaza don't have the manufacture

The pilot doesn't have a nationality

Or ? Perez ? Lieberman

It's not just the occupation, stupid

It's the right of return

Equality for all Palestinians

It's a transformation from a racist, exclusivist, supremecist state

To a nation for all of its citizens

You deserve nothing... more than equality

Which means more than African refugees are provided in South Tel Aviv

You are the shining light on a settlement hill

Reminding the world that racism often comes in nice packaging

We don't give the Sudan 3.1 billion dollars a year in military aid

Don't have preferential trade agreements with North Korea

Don't call Iran a democracy

You're a proxy for empire

A 1950's authocracy and 21st century clothing

Yes! You're singled out

With aid, weapons, and UN vetos in your favor

Did I hurt your feelings?

Should we hug after the show?

Do these words hurt more than bombs dropped on Gaza

White ? eating the flesh of the children

I am not a bad guy, you're defending the bad system

Your words and actions have consequences

You're either with oppression, or you're against it

I didn't write history; it didn't choose to stand on the wrong side of it

Your system of oppression is coming to an end

And whether you recognize or not yet, it'll be liberated

For you, too.

Producer: Tami Woronoff  Cinematographer: Mike McSweeney  Editor: Matthew C. Levy Sound: Steve Burgess 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Remroum Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RemiPoet Website: http://www.PoeticInjustice.net Purchase Poetic Injustice:http://www.poeticinjustice.net/purchase.aspx#.UI3EKGnuVv1

PACBI (The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel): http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1850 For more information on cultural and academic boycott in the US, please visit:http://www.usacbi.org/