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NPK-info 16-05-2006 - Nederlands Palestina Komitee / www.palestina-komitee.nl
Today in Palestine! http://www.theheadlines.org
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> Nogmaals: 19 t/m 21 mei NSF te Nijmegen [1]
> Programma via http://www.sociaalforum.nl/
Ons motto: No peace without justice. Één der seminars
focust daarop.
Ter herinnering: Willy Madisha [COSATU] on Israel’s apartheid
policies
http://www.palestinecampaign.org/news.asp?d=y&id=1627
Overige activiteiten
- 18-5 Amsterdam Arti: Persoonlijk perspectief op "het Israelisch-Palestijnse
conflict" [*].
http://www.arti.nl/home.html
- 21-5 Amsterdam Première "The Iron Wall" met
discussie, meer hierna [2]
En 20-5 de NSF-voor-première.
Berichten
- VS blokkeren fonds voor Palestijnen [als met deze gelden de
salarissen van
165.000 ambtenaren van de Palestijnse Autoriteit worden betaald]
http://www.nrc.nl/buitenland/article318614.ece
- Israeli Soldiers Shoot Two International Peace Activists In
The Head at Bil’in, May 12th, 2006
http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/05/12/israeli-soldiers-shoots-two-foreigners-in-the-head-at-bilin/
- The great catastrophe, Karma Nabulsi [3]
- 58th Anniversary of the Palestinian NAKBA
http://www.badil.org/Nakba58/NAKBA58.htm
- Final statement fourth conference of Palestinians in Europe
http://www.prc.org.uk/data/aspx/d2/2822.aspx
Opmerkelijk
- Volkskrant redactioneel 13-5: "..van Israel kan niet worden
verwacht dat het zomaar
afstand doet van de verworvenheden van vijftien jaar vredesproces..";
de muur en zo?
- Metro 15-5 over 14 mei 1948 in de nederzetting Metulla:
".. bloederige confrontatie tussen Hamas en de joden..."
NPK/WL, 16-5-2006
[*] soms gebruikt synoniem voor Palestijnen-verdrijving.
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[1] / NSF-sprekers o.a.:
Akiva Eldar, wereldberoemd journalist van Haaretz. Over Hamas,
het "vredesproces", het nieuwe annexatieplan van Olmert
en ontwikkelingen in de Israëlische samenleving.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtVty.jhtml?sw=akiva+eldar&itemNo=711325
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/691467.html
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=665425
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtVty.jhtml?sw=akiva+eldar&itemNo=715456
Prof. Dr. Rema Hammami, winnaar van Prins Claus leerstoel 2006
Gender en Gender Development, specialist op het Israelisch-Palestijnse
conflict. Zij geeft les aan het Institute for Social Studies in
Den Haag: over de positie van vrouwen in Palestina, over de politiek
ontwikkelingen, de boycott van de Hamasregering en de Palestijnse
samenleving.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4065.shtml
http://www.winternachten.nl/winternachten/anieuwsbericht.php?taal=nederlands&id=0066
Dr. Stephen Sizer, Anglicaans dominee in Sussex, Engeland, en
als theoloog en publicist gespecialiseerd in het opkomende onderwerp
christelijk zionisme en het Palestijns-Israëlisch conflict.
Hij weet veel over en is activist voor desinvestering in de settlements.
- http://webapp.uvt.nl/fsw/spitsjohn.nb_lib.frmToonPersbericht?v_id=5546
- http://www.sizers.org/
Ook zijn Robert Fisk en [niet geheel zeker] Mustafa Barghouti
er.
Interview-opties: Lambrecht Wessels, Media Coordinator UCP
cell: +31 (0)651999711 / phone: 31 (0)30 880 1533
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[2] / 21 mei 2006: Premiere "The Iron Wall" + discussie
Organisatie: United Civilians for Peace, Pax Christi en Een Ander
Joods Geluid
Tijd en plaats: 14.00 uur: Amsterdam, Desmet Studio's, Plantage
Middenlaan 2a
De documentaire wordt geïntroduceerd door Mohammed Alatar
(coördinator van de filmproductie) alsmede door Akiva Eldar
(journalist van de bekende Israëlische krant Ha'aretz) waarna
discussie.
Website: http://www.unitedcivilians.nl/nl/doc.phtml?p=Agenda&article=35
Waarom is het eigenlijk zo moeilijk om vrede te bereiken tussen
Israël en de Palestijnen? De verklaring hiervoor hangt voor
een groot deel samen met Israëls nederzettingenbeleid: de
kolonisatie van bezet Palestijns land. In de sinds 1967 bezette
gebieden zijn met dit beleid voldongen feiten gecreëerd,
die een Palestijnse staat daar anno 2006 onmogelijk maakt. De
uitstekende documentaire legt uit hoe het zo ver kon komen. Klik
voor meer informatie op de website en meldt je aan via ucp@icco.nl.
Synopsis documentaire:
In 1923 schreef Vladimir Jabotinsky, intellectueel leider van
de zionistische beweging en vader van de rechtervleugel van deze
beweging .
"Zionistische kolonisering moet óf stoppen, óf
anders doorgang vinden zonder rekening te houden met de oorspronkelijke
bevolking. Wat betekent, dat dit slechts doorgang kan vinden en
zich kan ontwikkelen onder de bescherming van een macht die onafhankelijk
is van de oorspronkelijke bevolking - achter een IJZEREN MUUR
(IRON WALL), die de oorspronkelijke bevolking niet kan breken."
Vanaf die dag vormden deze woorden het officiële en ongesproken
beleid van de zionistische beweging en later de staat Israël.
Sinds het begin werden nederzettingen opgezet om meer en meer
voet aan de grond te krijgen in Palestina.
Na de bezetting van de Westoever en Gaza in 1967 werd het doel
van Israel met de nederzettingenbeweging duidelijker - feiten
op de grond creëren en het stichten van een Palestijnse staat
onmogelijk maken. Negenendertig jaren van bezetting en het kolonisatiebeleid
heeft resultaat opgeleverd. Nu zijn er meer dan 200 nederzettingen
en buitenposten verspreid over de Westoever met ruim 450.000 kolonisten
waardoor daar het verkrijgen van een aaneensluitend Palestijns
gebied wordt geblokkeerd.
The Iron Wall toont dit verschijnsel in de tijd ook qua omvang
en bevolking alsmede het effect ervan op het "vredesproces".
De film behandelt ook de huidige fase waarin de nederzettingen
tot een voldongen feit worden gemaakt m.b.v. de muur die Israël
bouwt op de Westoever en ook het effect daarvan op de Palestijnen.
Nederzettingen en de daaraan gerelateerde infrastructuur hebben
hun weerslag op elk aspect van het dagelijks leven van alle Palestijnen,
beginnend bij de inbeslagneming van land, de diefstal van natuurlijke
bronnen, het afpakken van de basale mensenrechten, het in het
leven roepen van een soort apartheidssysteem, tot aan de verwoestende
invloed met betrekking tot de toekomst van de regio en het vooruitzicht
op een rechtvaardige vrede.
Het "vredes-principe" land voor vrede wordt door de
doorgaande kolonisatie vernietigd en leidt dus tot een land zonder
vrede.
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[3] / The great catastrophe
Monday marks the 58th anniversary of the founding of Israel in
1948 - and the
expulsion of Palestinians from their land. With millions still
living under
occupation or in exile, what Palestinians call their 'nakba' remains
at the
heart of their national identity, argues Karma Nabulsi
Karma Nabulsi
Friday - May 12, 2006
Guardian (UK)
In the last week of April 1948, combined Irgun-Haganah forces
launched an
offensive to drive the Palestinian people out of the beautiful
port city of
Jaffa, forcing the remaining inhabitants to flee by sea; many
drowned in the
process. My aunt Rose, a teenager at that time, survived the trip
to begin
her life in exile on the Lebanese coast. Each Palestinian refugee
family
grows up hearing again and again the stories of those final moments
in
Palestine, the decisions, the panic, as we live in the midst of
their
terrible consequences. Throughout 1948, Jewish forces expelled
many
thousands of Palestinians from their villages, towns and cities
into Gaza,
the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq. Hundreds
of thousands
of others fled in fear. The purpose was to create a pure Jewish
state,
ethnically cleansed of the original inhabitants who had lived
there for
centuries. The creation of the state of Israel was the heart of
this
cataclysmic historical event for the Palestinians - the mass forced
expulsion of a people; the more than 50 massacres carried out
over the
summer of 1948 by various armed Jewish forces; the demolition
of villages to
ensure the refugees could not return - all this is summed up in
a single
word for Palestinians: nakba, the catastophe.
"We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians]
never do return ...
The old will die and the young will forget," said David Ben-Gurion,
the
founder of Israel, in 1949. But the young have not forgotten.
The event is
remembered every year on May 15, and the youth are at the heart
of it: at a
rally on the site of the destroyed village of Umm al-Zinnat near
Haifa,
Salim Fahmawi, now 65, a primary school student when the soldiers
entered
the village 56 years ago to expel them, told an Israeli reporter:
"The
presence of so many young people, many of whom are third- and
fourth-generation post-1948, gives me a sense of relief - because
I know the
torch has not been extinguished and is passing from generation
to
generation."
Nakba day has now become a profoundly political event - unlike
other cultural
and social manifestations of our national identity - because it
is all about
resistance to the current Palestinian situation rather than enshrining
past
memories of victimhood. The project against the Palestinians begun
at the
start of the past century had two purposes: first, to deny the
very concept
of Palestine and destroy its political and social institutions,
and second,
to annihilate the spirit of the Palestinians as a people, so that
they would
forget their collective identity once scattered far from home.
But the
relentless and dynamic nature of the catastrophe - it is an ongoing
daily
Palestinian experience - binds this generation directly to the
older one,
and binds the exiled to Palestine. Indeed, the past few years
have witnessed
a violent acceleration in this process of attempted destruction
- hence the
title of this year's event: The Nakba Continues.
The nakba is being lived again today in the brutal thrust of
the current
policies of the Israeli state. More than 10,000 Palestinian refugees
have
been created by the construction of the concrete separation wall
that has
cordoned off huge new tracts of occupied land. This wall, condemned
as
illegal by the International Court of Justice, has turned West
Bank cities
such as Qalqilya into ghost towns, and thousands of refugees have
been
created for the third and fourth time in the refugee camps in
Gaza. Yet it
is not simply in the building of the walls and checkpoints by
Israel's
occupying forces, or the different roads created for Jews and
Arabs on
Palestinian land, or the use of specially constructed bulldozers
that rip up
Palestinian orchards and olive groves and demolish hundreds of
homes, or the
imprisonment of thousands of political prisoners, or the daily
murder of
Palestinian civilians, that demonstrates the continuing nature
of the nakba.
It is also in the dedication of Israel's military and political
machinery to
the destruction of Palestinian resistance to their project.
This resistance operates on two levels, just as the nakba operated
- and
operates today - on both. The first is the Palestinians' physical
effort to
resist Israeli attempts to dispossess, disinherit and physically
control
them and their land, to get rid of its people and to militarily
control and
legally disenfranchise those they cannot. The second lies in the
Palestinians' existential affirmation of their identity in the
face of a
systematic Israeli effort to fragment and destroy it, so that
Palestinians
will surrender, submit, forget. But no matter how violently the
first method
is used by Israel, the second has been a failure: Palestinian
identity is
stronger than ever in 2006.
Nevertheless, the denial of the Palestinians' right to resist
what has been
imposed on them has been demonstrated dramatically in recent weeks.
We have
witnessed the astonishing international policy of imposing sanctions
as a
form of collective punishment on an occupied people - rather than
on their
occupier who is maintaining that occupation through brute violence.
Vital
international aid for basic services has been cut off by the European
Union
and the US - from Palestinians in the territories occupied by
Israel since
1967 - because they elected Hamas, voting for representatives
who had
campaigned on a platform promising to hold the line against this
destruction
of their national identity and rights.
The most malicious aspect of this policy is the fact that the
money being
withheld is only needed because the occupation tactics of curfews,
closures
and checkpoints have destroyed the Palestinian economy. The financial
catastrophe triggered by these sanctions is created entirely by
the Israeli
occupation itself, as World Bank and British parliamentary select
committee
reports have made clear. The punishment of starving the Palestinians
is
quite blatant: to force them to their knees and make them repudiate
their
elected representatives. Even more absurdly, Israel has not accepted
- or
even been asked to accept - any of the parallel conditions being
demanded of
the Palestinians for a resumption of aid: an end to violence;
the acceptance
of the 1993 Oslo agreements; or the recognition of a Palestinian
state in
the territories occupied by Israel in 1967: the West Bank, East
Jerusalem
and Gaza. Instead they build expand settlements, denounce the
Oslo accords,
and have used increasingly indiscriminate violence in both Gaza
and the West
Bank. The west's response in a conflict it helped created 58 years
ago has
fallen to a truly cruel, but also bizarre level.
This denial of Palestinians' worth has been demonstrated again
in the way
western media studiedly ignore their daily suffering. In April
and May, more
than 40 Palestinians have been killed by the army - most of them
civilians,
at least eight of them children - with the most perfunctory coverage
in the
western press. Schoolchildren blown to bits while playing in Beit
Lahia,
like Mamdouh Obeid; Eitan Youssef, a 41-year-old mother from Tulkarm,
shot
in front of her children because troops "thought they saw
a suspicious
movement"; an old man, Musa Sawarkah, herding his flock in
Gaza, gunned
down; a taxi-driver, Zakariya Daraghmeh,"accidentally"
shot in the back in
Nablus. Each one a story unheard, untold.
The predicament of life under military occupation is usually
recognised in
principle, but life in exile has its own characteristics, and
continues to
create its own bitter experience for Palestinians. Most young
Palestinians
today live not in the West Bank or Gaza, but in the immediate
region outside
of historic Palestine in the Arab world: stateless, ID-less, jobless,
without the international legal protections of other refugees
from other
countries. Theirs is often a relentless struggle to live any kind
of life at
all. The younger generation, wherever they are, possess a common
character
created through these harsh conditions of exile and passed on
through
others' memories of place names, old liberation songs, photographs
of
eternally absent relatives, intimate domestic connections and
objects -
above all, the rusted key to the front door of the lost house,
never seen.
As the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs first
noted,
human memory is an entirely collective engagement. In his nook
La mémoire
collective, published in 1949 four years after he was executed
at
Buchenwald, Halbwachs was the first to recognise that memory itself
is never
really individual.
In 2005, young Palestinian activists helped to organise more
than 100
meetings in refugee camps and exile communities in more than 28
countries.
The idea was to bring Palestinians together - whether under occupation
or in
exile - to discuss the things they want to do next. I participated
in many
of these gatherings and witnessed the promise of this generation
replicating
something they have no first-hand experience themselves, for it
is rarely
talked about and is as yet unwritten: the secret history of the
previous
generation of Palestinian resistance activists and fighters. Their
current
endeavours echo the same practices, the same spirit, and the same
direction.
Although these huge meetings held last year were all organised
locally, the
transcripts - from places as far apart as Australia, Iraq, Egypt,
Sweden,
Lebanon, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Greece - show that a shared
conversation
is happening. Palestinians are reclaiming their past - of the
nakba and
dispossession - and at the same time preparing the next phase
of their fight
for justice. By some miracle of the general will, every Palestinian
has
somehow, through different journeys, arrived together at the same
place.
Karma Nabulsi is a politics fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford
University and
a former PLO representative.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1773284,00.html
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BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
PO Box 728, Bethlehem, Palestine
Telefax: 00972-2-2747346
info@badil.org - www.badil.org
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