"It's just like closing your eyes.”

Despite the alleged ceasefire in Gaza - throughout which the Israeli army has continued to kill people, including civilians - my friend Sharyn has continued to post stories of some of the many people whose injuries she's helped treat or whose tales she's listened to in Gaza over the past week.
As well as her brilliantly written accounts of the horrors of the Israeli airstrikes and invasion, I'm reposting this account of Sharyn's because it illustrates some of the issues that journalists and viewers have to consider in situations like this.
The bastard Ch4 journalist demanding to know only about children is probably no more or less ignorant than many of the other correspondents sent in at short notice to get 'the story.' But his insistence on hearing only about dead children is indicative - we demand 'really' innocent victims - the adult women and civilian men also butchered and burned are apparently judged insufficiently blameless to warrant being reported.
The most intense period of time I spent in Palestine, during the invasion of the West Bank by the Israeli army in spring 2002, was less militarily intense than the weeks that Sharyn has just experienced, but was also the subject of major press interest. I have very mixed memories of that. On one hand, I remember Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's main Middle East correspondent, being a decent and humane individual. On one expedition, to try and take food into the area around the Church of the Nativity which was held under 24/7 curfew for 6 whole weeks, he came with us carrying a big box of powdered milk packets. At the corner of a street where we found burning cars and watched bit of other vehicles flying into the air on the next street over as Israeli soldiers blew them up, he handed me the box. "I've been doing this for 20 years," he said. "This is far enough for me." It was a good move - a few minutes later the soldiers realised we were there and started shooting and the walls above our heads, and I found myself trying to figure out what exactly had happened to make blood run down from the top of my scalp.
Jon Snow of Channel 4 also came on that walk into the curfew area. Half an hour before he'd been interviewing my friend Georgie, who at that time was living in Bethlehem, and despite having the same limited access to water as the rest of us was, as usual, managing to look fabulously dapper. They started filming the interview with Georgie looking cool in a pink Jermyn St shirt and designer jeans, and Snow bundled up in a flak jacket and military helmet. After about 30 seconds he ordered the cameras to stop, and started taking off his protective gear.
"The insurance people will go mad," he said, "but I can't do this with her dressed like that and me in this lot."
Set against these two basically decent guys, however, are examples like the French photographer, a macho scumbag dressed in excessive quantities of camouflage gear, who loudly declared one afternoon in the Star hotel, surrounded by Palestinians who had friends and relatives in the besieged Church of the Nativity, that the Israelis should just 'nuke the terrorists in the Church."
What's been really frustrating about much of the coverage from Gaza is the lack of interest that the mainstream press shows in anything not generated by themselves or their friends in the 'right' publicity departments. Information about phosphorus shells and massive civilian casualties had been coming out of Gaza for days, if not weeks, before BBC and other reports managed to transcend the IDF propaganda and engage with the idea that Israel might be using illegal munitions, or that the main target of the Israeli terror was not really a few militants but to try and crush the spirit out of an entire population. It reminds me why I rarely, and only under duress, describe myself as a journalist, and why that profession tends to rank amongst politicians and estate agents as the least trustworthy.

23rd January: Amer's story - they killed me three times

Ramatan TV, nine floors up and open 24 hours, was the last bastion of internet during the strikes. We knew the place because we got asked in for interviews, and then called a few press conferences there, for example announcing that internationals would be riding with ambulances. We began to hang around in the corners at other times, hoping no-one would mind us hitching a ride on the wifi.
Instead of complaining about random internationals cluttering up the place, Ramatan journalists wholeheartedly adopted us, brought us tea, gave us blankets if we needed to stay the night. Now most nights at about 9pm, you'll find some of us there being fed a small feast in the kitchen.

I forgot that I didn't like journalists much, because these guys are firstly Palestinian, and their reporting is compassionate. Now journalists are flooding in through Rafah (though I do like some of them) I was reminded. Two days ago a recently arrived Channel 4 guy came into Yousef's office on a deadline, wanting to know how many children died in the UNWRA schools. Yousef said “Two children at one school. Forty five people at another.”
“But how many of them were children?” Channel 4 guy insisted.
“Forty five people altogether,” Yousef said, thinking he'd misunderstood.
“No,” Mr Channel 4 said irritatedly, “I want to say the number of children.”
“Oh!” I said, and stomped off, remembering my former journalist feelings.

Yousef Al Helou has the end office in Ramatan. His TV speaks English sometimes, and he's always willing to pool information and help us figure out what is going on. Today he took me and E to Zaytoun to hear the story of his cousin's family. When we arrived, I realised we were only two houses from the first house we'd evacuated people from on the Red Cross evacuation I went on. I
would have walked past Amer and Shireen Al Helou's house that day. But by then it was empty and broken, because the day Amer told us about was January 4th.

Amer is 29. 14 people from his family were in the house that night, and they were all trying to sleep under their stairs as some sort of shelter. Even though the stairs were partly open to the back yard, the F16 attacks on the house made downstairs seem the safest place. The house now has holes from shell blasts and thousands of pock-marks from the three inch nails that the shells were filled with.

“We hadn't known how bad it would get,” said Amer. “Or we would have left our house and gone somewhere else. But we thought our area was a quiet area. And then that night we thought they would go past us at the front. But they came from the back.”

Amer didn't know it yet, but his brother Mohammed had already been killed elsewhere that day, struck by drone rockets.

The Israeli soldiers came to their house at about 5.30am, after the house had been shelled for 15 hours, and immediately opened fire on the family, killing Amer's father with three shots. Then they told the family to leave. Amer had called an ambulance (which had to turn back after being shot at) and was refusing to leave his father's body but the soldiers said they would shoot him if he stayed, so they fled 300 yards up the dirt track behind their house, at which point they were shot at again by another group of soldiers.

This time Amer's brother Abdullah was shot, Amer and Shireen's 6 year old daughter Saja was shot in the arm, and their 1 year old daughter Farah was shot in the stomach. They spent the next 14 hours sheltering behind a small hill of dirt, while the wounded bled, and were not allowed to access help though the soldiers were aware of the injuries. Having no other way to comfort her small daughter, whose intestines were falling out, Shireen breastfed Farah as the little girl slowly bled to death.

After 14 hours, at about 8 in the evening, the soldiers sent dogs to chase them out of their shelter and dropped phosphorous bombs near them, but due to the wounded family members and having bare feet in an area of broken glass and rubble, escape was difficult. The army took the three wounded and put them behind the tanks, and captured Amer, but the rest of the family managed to get away and call the Red Crescent. The ambulance that eventually reached the injured people 7 hours later (driven by my medic friend S) took an hour to find them, and by this time Farah was dead. (When I heard Amer's story I realised S had already told me about collecting 'a small shaheed' from this area.)

Amer was held for 5 days in army custody (the first 3 without access to food, water, or a bathroom), beaten and tortured, and questioned about resistance activity which he knew nothing about. When he was finally released on the border, the army sent two known collaborators to escort him, so it would look to the resistance fighters like he himself was a collaborator. But the fighters knew who he was and that he was not a collaborator. He tells us:

“I had my four children young, and they gave me the most happiness in my life. I took such good care of them. I didn't let them just play on the street, we had a big living room in our house with toys for them, we would invite all the neighbours' children to come play there with ours, so that we could be sure they were all safe. I always drove them to and from school, I didn't even let them walk. Whenever I was depressed, I would gather all my kids, pile them in the car, take them somewhere nice like the park or the beach, and then to see them happy and having fun would make me happy again.
“Now my remaining children will not go to sleep without their shoes on, because they think we will have to run for our lives again.”
“We love life as the Israelis do. Are they the only people allowed life? They killed me three times that day, first when they killed my brother, then when they killed my father, then when they killed my daughter. We looked for my father's body later; they had buried him under rubble, eventually we found his foot sticking out. Sometimes now I think we have to leave Gaza, to join my brother in South Africa. Sometimes I think, no - Gaza is worth fighting for, this is our home.”

Amongst their crumpled belongings, next to the spot Amer's father died, the family gives us tea. Shireen solicitously dusts the sand off my back. We ask them how it is they have not gone crazy from the pain of these events.
“It's not us, it's God who gives us peace and strength. Without this I would be dead too. What happened to my family was like a horror film” says Amer. He shows us photos of Farah (whose name means 'joy') and Saja on his phone. “I don't think I can have any more children. I am too broken inside.”

The family is not living in the house right now, they are split between different homes, and Abdullah is in hospital in Egypt. Amer is wearing Abdullah's jacket, complete with bullet holes. “It is hard to be here again in this house after what happened. But your presence has lifted my spirits” he tells us.

Back at Ramatan, I hear one of the journalists talking. “I couldn't protect my children - this is my responsibility, and I couldn't.” He says. “My daughter asked, what is it like to die? I told her, it's just like closing your eyes.”

Inauguration Day

This morning, I feel like one of those X Files geeks: I Want To Believe. The little bit of me that isn't utterly tired and jaded is still looking around for excuses to get excited about Barack Obama. But I suspect I may be with Frank in Marc Robert's great cartoon. I'd left the Labour Party in 1995 (after being a member for a grand total of about 4 months), but I was still excited about Tony Blair's election in 1997, if only because it heralded the end of such a catalogue of hideousness and ineptitude under the Tories. The speed with which I was disillusioned then makes me very wary now.
And the evidence for why I'm going to be disillusioned if I do let much of that hope creep in is already strong. Even before the appalling massacres in Gaza over the past 3 weeks, Obama's position on Palestine was looking bad. He'd supported Israel's claims to the city of Jerusalem, 'undivided.' He'd appointed the former Israeli soldier Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff, and Hilary Clinton, whose election campaign included threats to bomb Iran to defend Israel, as Secretary of State. While Gazan civilians were blown apart and burnt and crushed under their homes, he remained silent but allowed his advisers to brief that he understood Israel's need to 'respond' to attacks on its civilians. And going further back, he'd supported many Israeli acts of aggression in the region.

On climate change, I'm deferring to those with more knowledge of both Obama's position and of international climate change policy, who seem to be at least a little bit optimistic about his grasp of the issue and genuine aspirations to reduce the USA's carbon footprint. Mind you, post-Bush anyone could look ok on this, with the possible exception of that rabid bitch Sarah Palin. God, I hate sharing a name with that woman.
I'm not denying the importance of the USA electing its first black president, though I am stunned by the naivete of the people I keep hearing claim that this indicates that America is no longer a racist society, which I'm sure will surprise many of the population of New Orleans who sat and waited for help after Hurricane Katrina, and yes I am betting that it would have got there a damn site faster if the people waiting hadn't been poor and black. Or the African-American women who can't access abortions because they're too expensive, or who get put on physically damaging long-term contraceptives while they're still at school. Or the Haitian guys who get shot and attacked by the New York police for having the effrontery to be suspected of something... anything.
The symbolism of Obama is amazing, but I also suspect I'm with those who reckon that his scope for doing anything to help the position of black people of all origins in the USA will be extremely limited by his need to save up political capital, to not be seen as 'favouritist.' The symbolism of him wearing a 'this is what a feminist looks like' t-shirt was also amazing, although the pose he strikes doing so also says a lot about what might be offered on that front - you need saving, li'l lady? Well here comes Superfeminist!
We're having a little inauguration party here tonight. Not so much a celebration, more an excuse to have some nice people round, and to have the coverage on. To recognise that this is a historic moment, but not to inflate the expectations and hopes we may each be harbouring. I think I'd be more hopeful if it wasn't for Obama's cowardly failure to speak out on Gaza - it would have been more honest of him to just spit out the fact that basically he's yet another US president who'll pander to Israel, instead of pretending that he was respecting the fact that he wasn't yet in power. But... fingers crossed.

The photo of Obama with an 'I love Sderot' t-shirt is courtesy of Electronic Intifada

Women in Black vigils for Gaza

Despite the so-called ceasefire, which Isreal has repeatedly broken, vigils and demonstrations are still ongoing in Manchester, including these:

Women in Black vigil
Tuesdays and Thursdays 5-6pm
Market Street, near Tesco
"Let Gaza live - End the siege, End the Occupation"

------------------------------------------------
WOMEN IN BLACK
Women in Black is an international peace network. Women in Black vigils were started in Israel in 1988 by women protesting against Israel's Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The Women in Black stand in silent vigil to protest war, rape as a tool of war, ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses. We wear black because it is the colour of resistance. We are silent because so many words have already been said.

LET GAZA LIVE:
END THE SIEGE,
END THE OCCUPATION
In order for Gaza to rebuild and for the security of Southern Israel to improve the Israeli Forces must leave Gaza and the borders must be opened to allow goods in and out. The tunnels were previously being used for everything including food and medicines not just rockets. The British Government have supported the Israeli government unilateral ceasefire. Pressure them to support steps towards a just peace and security for all.
Manchester Women in Black, wibmanc@yahoo.com

The price of oil

Loath as I am to say anything nice about the BBC at the moment, given its revoltingly poor and misleading coverage of Gaza, I do want to record the harrowingly powerful Radio4 Saturday Play I just switched on by chance.
Stephen Phelps' 'Piper Alpha' tells, over 20 years since the disaster, the story of the hours in which 167 men died from the fire, smoke and explosions of a series of conflagrations on this production platform in the North Sea, 110 miles North of Aberdeen. The play's use of enquiry testimonies and reconstructed control centre and police conversations, as well as events on the platform itself, not only evokes the horror of the incident itself but also the confusion and chaos of malfunctioning communications, and most importantly the utter corporate negligence of management who allowed gas and oil pipelines which ran through the platform to continue running, feeding the flames and explosions. Occidental Petroleum, which had failed to consider the possibility of the destruction of the control room in its plans for a disaster situation and had cut costs on its emergency equipment, as well as keeping the feeder pipes running, was found guilt in the Cullen Enquiry of having inadequate maintenance and safety procedures, but no charges were ever brought against it.
Piper Alpha was the world's biggest single oil platform disaster in terms of both loss of life and insured loss - £1.7 billion.
Occidental has also been responsible for other deaths around the world, including that of 17 civilians, including 7 children, bombed by the Colombian Airforce after Occidental officials identified them as a FARC guerilla group. Occidental was also the oil company involved in a long-running dispute with the U'wa indigenous people, also in Colombia. In 2001, Occidental finally withdrew from efforts to drill for oil on U'wa land after a nine-year struggle in which the tribe threatened to commit mass suicide if the expropriation of their land went ahead.

This post also appeared on http://pendingecologicaldebacle.blogspot.com

"That was the reply of a Nazi"

From http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090115/debtext/90115-0013.htm
Speech by British Member of Parliament, Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab):

I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine.
I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times than I can count. I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel. One of them fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded in two of them. The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign decoration awarded to him, which he presented to me. I have known most of the Prime Ministers of Israel, starting with the founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meir was my friend, as was Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister, who, as a general, won the Negev for Israel in the 1948 war of independence.
My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.
My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.
On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians - the total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that '500 of them were militants.'
That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.
The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni's father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.
Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah's previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him.
Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat's death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed.
The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for peace on many platforms, said: "You make peace by talking to your enemies."
However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 million more on the west bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel.
It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis' real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools.

The Three Legged Cat gets famous

Not this blog, but the Real Three Legged (One Fanged) Cat, the lovely Cassidy. Not content with being a yowly slinky little thing, he's started penning scientific articles. And the marvellous Marc Roberts has been turning them into cartoons about the dismal failure of the mass media to engage with the issue of climate change in a remotely meaningful way.

Challenging Gaza slogans

Further to my post yesterday about some of the distressingly racist and nationalistic currents emerging amongst Gaza demonstrations, I want to share the email below, which I received from a friend who was amongst those disturbed by some of the slogans being used on the counter-demonstration against the Zionist rally last Sunday and increasingly on the BBC vigils. Although he was told that no-one had complained before, I've also spoken to or had messages from a number of other people who've felt moved to protest to demonstration organisers about some of the chants being used. Some of them have had their concerns listened to and been told that actions would be taken, or at least that this would be discussed. Others have effectively been turned away. Fortunately, Action Palestine have now started up a second set of daily vigils, on Market St every day at 5pm, with the intention of trying to have something more dignified and less aggressive, and Women in Black Manchester are intending to join these every Tuesday and Thursday.

Hi there,
yesterday at the BBC Gaza vigil I challenged the man leading the chanting about saying "from the river to the sea", saying I and other people (Jews & non-Jews) I knew thought it was dodgy and could be taken by people hearing it as anti-semitic. He (& the 2 other people who engaged me following my challenge!) came up with lots of predictable but irrelevant arguments, but basically weren't able to listen to what I was saying. One person, who seemed to be one of the organisers, said it was the first time he'd heard someone say they found it offensive. Other people have told me about the "end Israel" chant - I'm sure you've got your own examples of dodgy shit!
So if you do too, and you're at a vigil or march or rally, please speak up, to those with megaphones especially.
Thanks

Deaths in Gaza, squabbles in activist-land

The scenes from Gaza just get more terrible, with the death toll now passing way above 1,000 and allegations of all sorts of very nasty unconventional munitions being used - the kinds of things that unspeakably sick people in laboratories dream up to make human flesh burn and wounds expand and extend across bones and organs.
Non-combatants, as usual, make up the vast majority of casualties, with around a third of them children. The ongoing destruction of power and communications infrastructure means that the moving and powerful blog posts from TalesToTell have now been replaced by occasional grim facts posted by a friend in the UK from occasional phone calls when the networks are sporadically up.
The civilian/ combatant figures quoted by the mainstream press are incredibly misleading anyway, as any adult male is classed as a potential combatant - so the teachers, garbage collectors, medics, factory workers, taxi drivers, fishermen, weavers, woodcarvers and any other man who gets burned or sliced to bits or crushed by Israeli weaponry is painted as a 'legitimate' casualty of war.
The spectacle at home is unedifying, to go with it. Depressingly, many of the vigils have degenerated into the usual paper-selling competition between the SWP and FRFI cliques. The chant-chant-slogan-slogan-slogan format has gone beyond tedious into ill-considered and dangerous, with calls for Palestine to be free "from the river to the sea" or "Israel, down down" both denying the presence of millions of Israeli Jewish civilians, many of whom don't support their government's actions and who have lived In Israel for generations. Yes, economic, political and cultural justice for Palestinians should be a no-brainer, and addressing the Palestinian Right of Return will have to be a high priority in any (ha!?!) peace negotations, but that is not the same as calling for the triumph of reactionary nationalisms of whatever nation.
Using such chants is also tactically cretinous, playing directly into the hands of those who would dismiss all pro-Palestinian calls as anti-semitic and as supporting a wholesale massacre or ethnic cleansing of Jews. There are plenty of people out there who claim to support Palestine who do have such fundamentally revolting views (I have to deal with the many nauseatingly offensive posts they leave on the Free Gaza Facebook group I moderate), but they must be rejected as actively and robustly as the arch-Zionists who pepper such groups with comments about 'sandniggers' and nuking Gaza.
On the other hand, so-called 'anarchists' who tie themselves in such knots about their personal intellectual purity that they can't bear to be on a demo where nationalists are present also seem pretty disassociated from either basic human compassion or, indeed, the real world. Whether Indymedia is a useful or intelligent forum for that debate is a whole other issue...
So, more encouragingly, I'm ending with a post from LA Indymedia. Plenty of the more rabid supposedly pro-Palestinians present blanket condemnations of Israel and the USA. They miss the word 'state' out of those, and this US action by Jewish groups is a thing of beauty and a reminder that actions that come out of decency and compassion cross all boundaries and should overcome all ideological fallings-out: http://la.indymedia.org/news/2009/01/223875.php
All the photos reproduced in this post are courtesy of handouts from "Jewish People of Conscience"

"In the rocket attack that just happened, her mother held her so tight she wasn't able to get enough air"

Another account from Sharyn, www.talestotell.wordpress.com

Last night, Monday, at about 5am, one of our calls was to Jazeera Hotel in Al Mina (the port area) which had been shelled by Israeli ships. When we first arrived it seemed there was no-one there, but eventually the medics retrieved the two caretakers from under the rubble. 50 year old Faieq Moshtaha had shrapnel injuries but was able to walk and was put into our accompanying ambulance, 33 year old Helmi Moshtaha had shrapnel inuries and a deep head wound and was stretchered into my ambulance.

I filmed the first bit of this but then had to stop to help staunch bleeding; they might post the footage up on the ISM website but it's not the best quality. (My voiceover sounds like I'm stoned, but it honestly is just lack of sleep!) Living by the sea as I do, I know the shells are usually followed by another lot of shells five minutes later, and I was really thinking the medics were going to get hit before they got Faieq and Helmi out, but all was well. As I held a compress to Helmi's head I noticed something strange. If you have a woodburning stove, like I do, you often burn yourself mildly, and the hairs on your hand go all crisp. All of the hair on Helmi's head was like that.

Tonight, Tuesday, just before I came on shift, I caught a ride with S that turned unexpectedly into the pickup of the body of a resistance fighter. This was in fact the first time in all these days since I began riding with the ambulances, that I saw a fighter in my ambulance. Since it was just the two of us I helped to haul what was left of him - which didn't involve a head or the top of his torso - onto the stretcher. I was glad of the darkness that blurred the details, though it also made me very aware that our every move in this apparently empty wasteland was probably being observed. Back at the hospital I discovered that in the basement there is a man who washes and dries any of your clothes that have got blood on, within an hour.

For the medics here, it seemed this episode meant I had crossed some sort of line that brought me a little closer to their own lives. Several asked me if I had been afraid, and I gave the answer I've given you, but with the increasing feeling that not to be afraid is meaningless when it's probably just because you really don't quite get what awful things can happen to you and your friends and family. I have started to answer apologetically, "I'm not afraid, but I'm sure I should be." Later on into the night, medic E asks me more specifically what I had felt when seeing the 'shaheed' resistance guy. I think about it for a while and say,

"I think my strongest feeling is that I am very sad that any of us can do this to each other. Any human to any other human, no matter what reason. And, I feel respect for the strength of someone who does this job."

He begins to talk to me about his own feelings. He is 36, has been a medic for ten years. He has a wife and four children. He says he has never seen anything as bad as these days, in that time. And he says a lot of the time he is very frightened. Sometimes so frightened, if the area is dangerous, that he almost can't bring himself to continue to drive towards the call-out location. He describes a call-out during the night that we had both been on (perhaps thinking I had observed this hesitation) saying that he first thought he couldn't do it; he had to stop, talk himself through his fear, and then continue with the collection, expecting a rocket to blow him apart at any moment. It seems that with the drone surveillance technology, they really can send rockets with your name on.

Arafa was a good friend of his, he told me, and described phoning Arafa's wife several times since his death. He tries to talk to her but she can't stop crying.

His family worry about him very much; when he visits his parents his father begs him to take a different job. But this job is important to him and he knows someone must do it. He tells me that if he came across an injured Israeli he would treat him with the same care he would anyone.

I want to hear more, but at this point that, in true Palestinian style, some of
the others start getting actually distressed about the fact that there is hot food next door and I am not there eating it. It isn't good enough that I can come and have some later, or that some can be put aside for me; it doesn't matter that this is an important conversation, I am A Guest And I Must Eat Now.

Tonight, we collect two men carrying a little girl of 13 months. She is still warm, but EB finds no pulse. If I understood correctly, she has had breathing difficulties since she was born, and in the rocket attack that just happened, her mother held her so tight she wasn't able to get enough air. I ask to clarify this story several times because I want to think I've misunderstood.

At one point tonight I come out of the Disaster Management room and am confronted with a family of about 12 small children, 1 old women, and a couple of young women, all on a sofa and all looking at me with mute appeal. The effect is so overwhelming I have to retreat back into the Disaster room again.

Ambulance convoys were allowed to come up from Rafah today, and it seems this family caught a ride; whether they're here to return home or to stay with relatives because Rafah is under attack is unclear. Shortly after we load them all into an ambulance and drive them to their destination.

This appears to be a bit of town that our driver considers extremely dangerous. They have all started smiling, he is getting more and more stressed, and the fact that they are all shouting directions at him does not help. We manage to suppress all but one set of directions, and then tip out the family at their door, trying to do it all at top speed. Our driver screeches off, shouting in one-part jest and three-parts panic that we are crazy to be here at all, that look! there isn't even a cat or dog on these streets, they have too much sense, that this is all a game to the Israelis, a computer game, that we and our ambulance are just blips on their computer screens, that they'll destroy us just for fun.

In the light of dawn, we collect an old woman and a young man from a shelled building down near Gaza beach; I clean the young man's head wound. A couple of times tonight, I've look round for the medic and realised I'm it.

By the way - it turns out the triplets (Abdullah, Mohammad, and Samih) are about 28 days old, and have been separated from their family ever since their birth. They needed hospital care at first, but now could go home - except their home is in Khan Younis, which is cut off. Their poor mother is phoning every day. They are getting great care here, but an incubator is a poor replacement for a mother's arms.

Tea & Cake at the Airport

With the government apparently about to help send us all that little bit further down the planetary pan with the likely announcement of a new runway at Heathrow, and hundreds of climate change protesters trying to point out that this might be a fucking lousy idea, Marc Roberts again blesses us all with a neat summary of the quality of mainstream media reporting on the subject.
The mentality of most of the pondscum at the BBC (etc) is illustrated in a fairly benign way by a former BBC environment correspondent speaking at a Panos event. Anyone really wishing to grasp the extent of the BBC's ignorance and out-of-date stances on climate change only needs to listen to the Today Programme or You and Yours on R4. Having said that, the defence of Peter Sissons' laughable interview with the Green Party's Caroline Lucas that my beloved husband received in the post a week or two ago was particularly spectacular. I thought he'd blogged it, but I obviously need to do my wifely duty and nag him into getting it done.

Ian Brown/Sinead O'Connor - Illegal Attacks

Nice bit of political comment from one of Manchester's finest (and a damn good song too...)

Weird beasties

This is some footage of a brilliant creature called the Hispaniolan solenodon - kind of a giant Caribbean shrew with (like our shrews) a poisonous bite. I have no particular reason for posting this, except that I think it's kinda cool, and I could do with a brief respite from the relentless horror of Gaza. Although of course our giant shrew story isn't wholly fun, since it's an endangered species...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7792789.stm

Vittorio Arrigoni, Gaza, January 9, 2009

This email came from Vittorio, another of the Free Gaza/ISM crew in Gaza at the moment, a friend of Sharyn's. He blogs (in Italian) at http://guerrillaradio.iobloggo.com/

"Take some kittens, some tender little moggies in a box", said Jamal, a surgeon at the Al Shifa, Gaza's main hospital, while a nurse actually placed a couple of blood-stained cardboard boxes in front of us. "Seal up the box, then jump on it with all your weight and might, until you feel their little bones crunching, and you hear the last muffled little mew."

I stared at the boxes in astonishment, and the doctor continued: "Try to imagine what would happen after such images were circulated. The righteous outrage of public opinion, the complaints of the animal rights organisations…" The doctors went on in this vein, and I was unable to take my eyes off those boxes, sitting at our feet. "Israel trapped hundreds of civilians inside a school as if in a box, including many children, and then crushed them with all the might of its bombs. What were the world's reactions? Almost nothing. We would have been better off as animals rather than Palestinians, we would have been more protected."

At this point the doctor leans towards one of the boxes, and takes its lid off in front of me. Inside it are the amputated limbs, legs and arms, some from the knee down, others with the entire femur attached, amputated from the injured at the Al Fakhura United Nations school in Jabalia, which resulted in more than fifity casualties. Pretending to be taking an urgent call, I took my leave of Jamal, actually rushing to the bathroom to bend over and throw up.

A little earlier I'd been involved in a conversation with Dr. Abdel, an ophtalmologist, regarding the rumours that the Israeli Army had been showering us with non-conventional weapons, forbidden by the Geneva Convention, such as cluster bombs and white phosphorous. The very same that the Tsahal Army used in the last Lebanese war, as well as the US air force in Falluja, still violating international norms. In front of Al Auda hospital we witnessed and filmed white phosphorous bombs being used about five hundred metres from where we were, too far to be absolutely certain there were any civilians underneath the Israeli Apaches, but so terribly close to us all the same.

The Geneva Treaty of 1980 forbids white phosphorous being used directly as a war weapon in civilian areas, allowing it only as a smoke screen or for lighting. There's no doubt that using this weapon in Gaza, a strip of land concentrating the highest population rate in the world, is a crime all on its own. Doctor Abdel told me that at Al Shifa hospital they don't have the medical and military competence to say for sure whether the wounds they examined on certain corpses were indeed provoked by white phosphorous bullets.

But on his word, in twenty years on the job he had never seen casualties like those now being carried into the ward. He told me about the traumas to the skull, with the fractures to the vomer bone, the jaw, the cheekbones, tear duct, nasal and palatine bones showed signs of the collision of an immense force against the victim's face. What he finds inexplicable is the total lack of eyeballs, which ought to leave a trace somewhere within the skull even in case of such a violent impact. Instead, we see Palestinian corpses coming into the hospitals without eyes at all, as if someone had removed them surgically before handing them over to the coroner.

Israel has let us know that we've been granted a daily 3-hour truce, from 1:00 to 4:00 PM. These statements from the Israeli military summit are considered by the people of Gaza as having the same reliability as the Hamas leaders' declarations that they've just provoked a massacre of enemy soldiers. Just to be clear on this point, the soldiers of Tel Aviv's worse enemy are the very same who fight under the Star of David.

Yesterday a war ship off the coast of Gaza's port picked out a large group of alleged guerrilla fighters from the Palestinian Resistance, moving as a united front around Jabalia. They shot their cannons at them. But as it turned out, they were their own fellow soldiers, with the shooting resulting in three being killed and about twenty injured. No one here believes in the truces that Israel declares, and as it happens, today at 2:00 PM Rafah was under attack by the Israeli helicopters. There was also yet another massacre of children in Jabalia: three little sisters aged 2, 4 and 6 from the Abed Rabbu family were slaughtered. Just half an hour earlier in Jabalia, once again the Red Crescent hospital's ambulances were under attack. Eva and Alberto, my ISM colleagues were on board that ambulance and managed to film everything, passing those videos and photos on to all the major media.

Hassan was kneecapped, fresh from mourning the death of his friend Araf, a paramedic who was killed two days ago as he came in aid of the injured in Gaza City. They had stopped to pick up the body of a man languishing in agony in the middle of the road, when they were under fire by about ten shots from an Israeli sniper. One bullet hit Hassan in the knee and the ambulance was filled with holes. We're now at a death toll of 688, in addition to 3,070 injured, 158 dead children and countless missing. Only yesterday, we counted 83 dead, 80 of which were civilians. Thankfully, the death toll on the Israeli side is still only at 4.

Travelling towards Al Quds hospital, where I'll be working all night on the ambulances, as I raced along on board one of the very few fearless taxis left, zig-zagging to avoid the bombs, on the corner of one street I saw a group of dirty street urchins with tattered clothes, looking exactly like the "sciuscià" kids of the Italian afterwar period. They threw stones towards the sky with slingshots, at far away and unapproachable enemy who was toying with their lives. This is a crazy metaphor, which could serve as a snapshot of the absurdity of this time and place.

Stay human
Vittorio Arrigoni

A two-state solution?

I hold no particular position in favour of one or two state solutions in Palestine and Israel; maybe because I'm too pessimistic to see any likelihood of a solution of any kind in the near or medium term.
Anyway, here is an update of the excellent postcards showing why a two-state solution is a ludicrous idea at the moment, unless the illegal outrage that are the West Bank settlements is properly dismantled.
I came across a website the other day, a very good example of the disingenuous sneakiness of the pro-Israeli camp. The website - PalestineFacts or something like that - purported to be a purely factual presentation of the situation in Palestine and Israel, allowing people to choose for themselves. The tone was fairly dry and academic, and there was official-looking information on how to cite the website. The historical stuff looked ok (I was specifically looking for information on the Palestinian killings of dozens of Jews in Hebron in 1929, to inform a post on Hebron).
But get to the settlements page and the site reveals its true colours. Far from being a 'factual' account, a substantial part of the page was occupied (no pun intended) by the argument that it wouldn't be acceptable for white neighbourhoods in the US to refuse black people the right to build houses in the middle of their communities, juts because they were black. So, the argument goes, it's racist of Palestinians to refuse to have Jewish settler neighbourhoods in their areas. No account taken, of course, of the fact that if a black community sought to build houses in a white neighbourhood in the USA they would presumably be aspiring to fit in and meet with their neighbours, and would build their homes in empty spaces after going through a due process of planning permission. Whereas these put-upon and racially vistimised settlers in the West Bank only have the intention of building ethnically pure communities where Palestinians are permitted occasionally as underpaid and abused labour and certainly not near any homes, and that these communities come aong not with planning permissions and local integration plans but with bulldozers, land confiscation plans and the full military might of the world's fourth largest military, and they then routinely shoot at, steal more land from, expropriate massively disproportionate amounts of water from and damage the olive trees and mutilate the sheep of their unreasonable Arab neighbours.
Wow, Palestinians are just so unreasonable as to not want shooting and their livestock torturing. Outrageous.

Manchester Gaza vigils this week

BBC, Oxford Rd - 5.30pm - 6.30pm daily
Tues 6th Jan 5.30pm - 6.30pm
Weds 7th Jan 5.30pm - 6.30pm
Thurs 8th Jan 5.30pm - 6.30pm
Fri 9th Jan 5.30pm - 6.30pm
(bring candles and jars)

Grist to the anti-European mill

By the way, for anyone who thinks we're not all doomed on a number of fronts, please observe the new head of the EU for the next 6 months. Czech President Vaclav Klaus thinks that climate change is a dangerous myth, has declared that Israel's butchery in Gaza is 'defensive not offensive,' and has a picture of Maggie Thatcher on his desk.
Wahey.

80% of emergency calls cannot be answered

This is what happens to ambulance workers when the Israeli army attacks. From http://talestotell.wordpress.com/:

6pm: To Al Awda hospital, run by the Union of Health Work Committees. It normally has a 50 bed capacity but has been stretched to 75. E and Mo interview Ala'a, the medic from Jabalia RC who was injured when Arafa was killed yesterday.

The story goes as follows:

It was about 8.30 am Saturday morning in Jabalia. Five teenagers found themselves under shell attack and tried to get away. Three escaped. One, Tha'er, 19, had his foot blown off. His friend Ali, also 19, tried to pick him up and carry him to safety, but was shot in the head and killed. It took 75- 90 minutes before a Jabalia Red Crescent ambulance could reach them. Medic Arafa, 35, and Ala'a, 22, carried Tha'er to the ambulance, and then went back for Ali's body. As they closed the van door, they were shelled.

Ala'a says "I felt nothing - just that I was flying in the air and then falling." Other ambulances evacuated all. Arafa, who was married with 5 children, had a severe chest wound with most of one lung gone and only survived 2 hours. Ali's head was blown off. Ala'a is now in hospital with severe shrapnel wounds all over, especially chest and legs. Tha'er survived but also now has several lacerations to back and body from shrapel.

Arafa was a teacher for the UN, gave medic training, and volunteered as a medic after being one professionally earlier.

Resources to oppose arms manufacturers supplying Israel

The following information was distributed on leaflets on the Gaza march on Saturday, and on Manchester Indymedia:

Target your local weapons manufacturer. Companies like BAe, EDO, and others supply Israel with the aircraft, tanks and components they need to carry out these murderous attacks - and have offices and factories right here in the UK:

Brimar (make components for Apache attack helicopters)
Greenside Way, Middleton, Manchester, M24 1SN

BAe (supply F16s to Israel)
MBDA, Station Road, Bolton, BL6 4BR
Shared Services, Brisance House, Euxton Lane, Chorley, PR7 6AQ
Military Air Solutions, Woodford Aerodrome, Chester Road, Woodford, SK7 1QR
Land Systems UK, Leeds Valley Park, Leeds, LS10 1AB
more at: http://www.baesystems.com/WorldwideLocations/UnitedKingdom/Locations/

Or get involved in an existing campaign...
...against Heckler & Koch, Nottingham: http://nottsantimilitarism.wordpress.com/
...against EDO, Brighton: http://smashedo.org.uk/

See: http://www.stoparmingisrael.org/info/companies.php
for more ideas and: http://www.caat.org.uk/issues/israel.php
for more background.

Text from Sharyn in Gaza, 11.50pm 3.1.09

[Re the numbers on today's marches] Yay, very good to hear.
Ambulance guys having philosophical discussion while we wait for next injuries, explosions rocking the building. Where do they find this determined good humour?

Israeli tanks head into Gaza

Not a fun Saturday night. Between the news that Israeli tanks are heading into Gaza, Marc getting called in to do physio-y things to a very sick teenager and the residual desire to slowly and painfully break the arm of the gobshite who killed the lovely little plum tree on my allotment, my attitudes towards life, the universe and everything are currently a tad jaundiced.
My friend Sharyn is riding with ambulances in Gaza tonight. One Red Crescent station has already been damaged so working alongside medics is no guarantee of safety. Sharyn knows what the Israeli forces are capable of - she has a nice ring of shrapnel from a splinter bullet in her stomach to show it - and one of her latest blog posts, cited below, wondered what it was the Israelis didn't want the hundreds of international they let out through Erez the other day to see. I guess this is the answer.
I remember so well what it's like being aware that an incursion is on its way, watching the sun go down and wondering what will be revealed when the darkness lifts next day. The strange sensation of compression at the base of the throat that is the tension of not knowing.
The last 36 hours have seen hundreds of thousands of people - maybe millions - demonstrating around the world. Yesterday was mainly the Muslim countries, with crowds heading out onto the streets after prayers.
Today was Europe, Australia, the USA. 20,000 in Paris. The lily-livered lying scum at the BBC, whose coverage wasn't too bad at the start but which has degenerated into whinging apologias for the Israeli military, reported 12,000 in London today but I prefer to rely on my mum's description, which suggests that it's bollocks and should be comfortably doubled. Manchester was a good couple of thousand, which given that coaches went from hear to London wasn't too bad.
There are legitimate critiques of marches and their failure to build in participation and to build on their energy to keep working in the communities from which the marchers come. But I also know that the sight of people demonstrating around the world is a terrific boost to the morale of Palestinians when they come under attack, and however dispiriting another bloody chant-chant-slogan-slogan-slogan, SWP-dominated, patriarchal march can feel, they do have their uses. As emphasised by Sharyn's words below, and in a chat I had on the subject with Kevin Brown of the FBU, who was on a solidarity delegation to the West Bank last June.
My brilliant mum was commenting on a news piece she saw which showed an Israeli policeman holding the remains of one of the Hamas rockets we keep hearing so much about in the news - a glorified firework, maybe 2 feet long. And then it cut to an unexploded Israeli missile, the size, as she put it, of a room. A pity not all the fools bleating about Hamas violence haven't been made to view that news item. As I've said publicly and repeatedly, Hamas are largely a nasty, reactionary bunch and targeting civilians is inexcusable. But to talk as if the two had some parity is also offensively stupid, as well as tediously predictable.
Also not an enhancement to my love for my fellow (hu)man has been the process of editing for length an article by Naela Khalil, a journalist from the West Bank who was threatened with suspension for carrying out a piece of investigative work into the use of torture and illegal detention by Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, against each other's supporters. Naela won the Prix Samir Kassir for her article, which is a valuable contribution to revealing the truth about political conflict within Palestine. It's hardly a shock to find that members of the Palestinian security services are learning the tricks of the Israeli torturers who abused them and are turning them on their political rivals at home, but it's not an encouraging spectacle either. The piece is supposed to be running in Red Pepper, but I suspect they're going to bottle it.

The maths of lives

Here is an excellent post from Brian Candeland of Manchester Green Party, on the relative value of lives, be they Indian, Gazan, Congolese - or rich white Westerners.

Gaza ongoing

I just got a very moving email from my friend Sharyn, who is still in Gaza, still bearing witness to the effects of the Israeli atrocities there. As she says, it is hard not to wonder why the Israelis permitted several hundred international passport holders – mainly foreign women with Palestinian husbands – to leave via the Erez checkpoint today. As Sharyn puts it, “and we wonder what they have planned next that they don't want outsiders here to witness.”
The focus, rightly, is on the human horrors, the children killed by indiscriminate bombing and missile strikes. But as Sharyn observes, the architectural heritage of Gaza is also being reduced to rubble – beautiful old mansions and mosques destroyed, in a similar (if more extreme) destructive frenzy to that which my friend Naseer, a conservation architect in Nablus, spends his working life struggling against in the old city there.
Another distressing aspect of the news is now the Israeli response to protests against its actions. In the West Bank village of Nil'in, the army shot dead two young men. Arafat Khawaje, 22, was shot in the back and died that day (last Sunday). Mohammed Khawaje, 20, was shot in the forehead and died in a Ramallah hospital a couple of days later. Today, protesters from the nearby village of Bil'in report that they've been fired on with a type of bullet they haven't come across before, a small plastic sphere filled with some kind of liquid, but which breaks the skin and causes bloody lacerations.
Gush Shalom reports 'mass arrests' amongst Palestinian citizens of Israel and have called for as many people as possible from all Israeli communities to attend a demonstration at Sakhnin on Saturday 3rd, as well as the main peace movement protests planned for Tel Aviv later that day. And the Ma'an News Agency reports that five people have been injured in Hebron as demonstrators clashed with the ever-present soldiers there, and that the West Bank is being subjected to prolonged Israeli-imposed curfews aimed at preventing people from answering Hamas' call for mass demonstrations. Reports of turnouts of thousands suggest that this tactic has been unsuccessful... but the bombing goes on.

On First World Nationalisms

Given the discussion today of the Tory poll on class and race resentment amongst the white British working class, the following quote sent to me by Marc seemed very apposite. It's taken from The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky by Alison Edgley.

"America and 'first world' nationalisms are, it seems, highly successful at disguising themselves, particularly from political theorists. Their invisibility is suggestive of the extent to which their manifestation is taken as the norm. As black writers and feminists have argued, one extremely significant characteristic of racism and sexism is the extent to which the white male is taken as normal so that everything else is 'other', different, pathology. This is also true for state and nationalist propaganda. For the invisible to remain invisible and for the norm to remain the norm, the possibility of the 'other' must be quieted, removed. This means information, knowledge and rhetoric must secure these requirements."

Manchester New Year's Eve candlelit vigil for Gaza

Train companies continue to take the piss...

... and Marc Roberts, of course, has a brilliant cartoon about it. So, we lose billions in public transport investment (thanks to lots of bloody stupid Manchester voters) and now train travel is going up. And this contributes to a viable strategy for decarbonising the British economy how?

Mazin Qumsiyeh

The best list of suggested action I've seen, from Bethlehem University science professor Mazin Qumsiyeh.

Subject: What can you do?

So far hundreds of civilians have been killed in Gaza. Five sisters in
one family, four other children in another home, two children on a
cart drawn by a donkey. Universities, colleges, police stations, roads,
apartment buildings were all targeted. The UN Special Rapporteur on
Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian areas issued a statement that
"The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent s evere and massive
violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva
Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and
in the requirements of the laws of war."

Twenty things to do to bring peace with justice:

1) First get the facts and then disseminate them. Here are some basic
background information
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.btselem.org%2Fenglish%2FGaza_Strip
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://electronicintifada.net%2Fv2%2Farticle4933.shtml
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.mepeace.org%2Fforum%2Ftopics%2Fthe-true-story-behind-this-war
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.unitedforpeace.org%2Fdownloads%2FIf%2520Gaza%2520falls.pdf

2) Contact local media. Write letters to editors (usually 100-150
words) and longer op-eds (usually 600-800 words) for local newspapers. But
also write to news departments in both print, audio, and visual media
about their coverage. In the US
You can find media listings in your country using search engines like
google

3) Organize and join demonstrations in front of Israeli and Egyptian
embassies or when not doable in front of your parliament, office of
elected officials, and any other visible place (and do media work for it).

4) Hold a teach-in, seminar, public dialogue, documentary film viewing
etc. this is straightforward: you need to decide venue, nature, if
any speakers, and do some publicity (the internet helps).

5) Pass out flyers with facts and figures about Palestine and Gaza in
your community (make sure also to mention its relevance to the audience:
e.g, US taxpayers paying for the carnage, increase in world
instability and economic uncertainty)

6) Put a Palestinian flag at your window.

7) Wear a Palestinian head scarf (Koufiya)

8) Wear Black arm bands (this helps start conversations with people)

9) Send direct aid to Gaza through the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency (UNRWA).
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.un.org%2Funrwa%2F

10) Initiate boycotts, divestments and sanctions at all levels and
including asking leaders to expel the Israeli ambassadors (an ambassador of
an apartheid and rogue state). See Palestinian call
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://electronicintifada.net%2Fv2%2Farticle10056.shtml

11) Work towards bringing Israeli leaders before war crime courts
(actions along those lines in courts have stopped Israeli leaders from
traveling abroad to some countries like Brigtai9n where they may face
charges)

12) Calling upon all Israelis to demonstrate in front of their war
ministry and to more directly challenge their government

13) Do outreach: to neighbors and friends directly. Via Internet to a
lot of others (you can join and post information to various
listservs/groups).

14) Start your own activist group or join other local groups (simple
search in your city with the word Palestine could identify candidate
groups that have previously worked on issues of Palestine). Many have also
been successful in at bringing coalitions from different
constituencies in their local areas to work together (human rights group, social and
civil activists, religious activists, etc).

15) Develop a campaign of sit-ins at government offices or other places
where decision makers aggregate

16) Do a group fast for peace one day and hold it in a public place

17) Visit Palestine

18) Support human rights and other groups working on the ground in
Palestine

19) Make large signs and display them at street corners and where ever
people congregate.

20) Contact local churches, mosques and other houses of worship and ask
them to take a moral stand.
--------------------

Gaza cartoon

Gee, a cartoon not by Marc Roberts. But by the indefatigable Latuff instead.

Gaza continues

The Israeli military atrocities in Gaza continue. The death toll nears 400.
Meanwhile, Obama 'monitors' and Brown has little twitches of conscience while figuring out which bank to nationalise next. In Tehran, Iranian Jews demonstrate for Palestine, and in Israel, Ha'aretz reports that the Israeli military has been cooking this up for months, during the 'ceasefire.'
It's very hard to know what to do here, of course. Yesterday, my first day properly out of bed after a week of 'flu, I took myself off to the vigil outside the BBC in Manchester. The previous day's demonstration apparently attracted maybe a couple of hundred, according to my friend Hannah. The vigil had perhaps 70. There will be one every evening that this continues, so I guess I'll be down there again tomorrow at 5pm before I head off to friend Ruth's to try and not be too much of a spirit of depression at the New Year party. And at 3pm on Saturday there will be a bigger demonstration.
It always amazes me that Palestinians in such appalling circumstances draw hope from what feel like the most tiny things we do here, but a text from my amazing friend Sharyn just after I sent her news of these two demonstrations and the bigger ones outside the Israeli embassy in London read as follows:
"Fatima is so happy telling her family what you just said. 10 people just gained some strength for this night under the bombs."
Of course I cried and felt inadequate. Doh.
What else to do? There's not much I can usefully write - my only attempt at getting into Gaza, 7 years ago, ended up with me in al-Hussain Hospital in Beit Jala, shot full of pethidine, thanks to a little altercation with the lovely Captain Joseph Levy of the Erez border crossing. I can draw on the words of friends - including Sharyn - who are there. I can help to spread Free Gaza movement press releases and the writings of those with useful things to say and reports from the ground, including Sameh Habeeb. I can keep making sure that the Free Gaza Facebook group stays up to date and also that the stupid, hateful, vile anti-semitism that Israel's stupid, hateful, vile actions engenders is not allowed to find its voice through any channel that I can stop up. And, I suppose, I can not give in to the grief and guilt that so many of us who have spent time in Palestine feel at not being there at this hour, and keep working in the ways that I can here, even if it's not there. But it feels so very little.

Eeeeuuuuwwwwhhhhh

Yuck. Don't know where Marc Roberts finds this stuff, but viewing his terrifyingly prolific output of cartoons does nothing for one's faith in humanity. Western Civilisation is decadent and muct be destroyed...

Israeli bombing in Gaza (and other Christmas happenings)

Well, Christmas is over - sort of - and the sales frenzy is busily creating a dead cat bounce in the UK economy. Harold Pinter is RIP. And the original Three Legged Cat has had a rather dramatic festive period, as a result of which he's now a three-legged, one-fanged cat.
And in Gaza, the Israeli airforce is reported on the BBC this morning to have killed 40 people and injured dozens more in bombing raids overnight. Accordingly, below is the full text of an email from an excellent Gazan reporter which I received last Friday, covering not the attacks but the general ongoing effects of the Israeli blockade.

For More Media Reportings and News Reports contact me on:
Mob: 00972599306096
Sameh.habeeb@gmail.com

Hunger before the storm
By: Sameh Akram Habeeb

Israeli politicians, in the run-up to elections, are promising to deal a severe blow to Gaza as this is how Israeli policy is made. However, every household in Gaza is already under siege. In Gaza you can only find pale, angry and frustrated faces. If you visit my house you won't find power, while my neighbor is out of gas. Another neighbor seeks potable water as power outages have left him without for four days. A third neighbor desparately looks for milk for his child but does so in vain. Another friend who lives on the corner needs medicine that can't currently be found in Gaza.

There is no shortage of such stories in Gaza (though there is a shortage of nearly everything else). Perhaps broadcasting such stories would result in pressure on Israeli leaders to stop the siege. Because what is happening is that the entire Gaza population of 1.5 million -- densely packed into a small area -- is being punished for crude rockets being fired into Israel by a few.

Shaher Mazen, 25, holds a degree in political science but works as a taxi driver to put bread on the table for his family. I spoke to him while I was on my way to some of the Gaza bakeries to cover some news that was happening there. Shaher was frustrated because of siege and furious towards the two rival Palestinian governments, considering them as weak in the face of Israel.

Mazen said, "We are under an organized Israeli media campaign. We are being starved and victimized by Israel. The world think we are besieging Israel, not the other way around. Israel is playing up the issue of rocket fire to besiege us more and more."

Al-Shanty bakery in Gaza City is one of the Strip's largest, supplying tens of thousands with bread. Yesterday, hundreds of people crowded outside the bakery in a very long queue, waiting for a bag of bread. Children, women and men were awaiting the chance to buy some bread, which has become scarce as Israel has not allowed the import of adequate supplies of flour and cooking gas.

"Our bakery is out of bread for days now and what we have will only last for another 24 hours. In fact, we stopped our work yesterday as we ran out of flour. Now, we use animal feed which will finish in a matter of hours," explained 24-year-old Abed Masod while he busily worked at the bakery.

A woman's voice arose above the crowd. She started to scream and appealed to God for salvation and relief from Gaza's dire situation. Forty-five-year-old Om Ali Shoman's weary face bore the impact of Gaza's suffering. "This is our destiny," she said. "It's a conspiracy designed against us. What did my children do to stay at home with no bread? Did they fire rockets? Did they kill Israelis? Are they holding guns?"

Only about a dozen of Gaza's 47 bakeries are currently operating as of yesterday, but with rapidly diminishing supplies. The UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) had to stop its food aid deliveries because Israel has not allowed it to replenish its stores. This affects 750,000 refugees in the Gaza Strip.

Gazans fear that the worst, however, is yet to come as the Israeli government renews its threats of a major offense against the Gaza Strip, irrespective of the civilian toll an invasion would inevitably incur.

Time is running out in Gaza and mass starvation looms as Gaza's skies are further darkened with threats of an Israeli military incursion. As a journalist, peace activist, and one of the hundreds of thousands of Gazans who are being collectively punished by Israel, I urge those who read this to appeal their governments to hold Israel accountable to international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, article 33 of which forbids the collective punishment of a civilian population. Though it unilaterally removed its illegal settlement population from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel has remained in control of Gaza's borders, sea and airspace, as well as its population registry, and remains the occupying power, and as such is obligated to abide by international humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention.

I urge readers to press their governments to force Israel to respect the countless United Nations resolutions that affirm Palestinian rights, and which Palestinian leaders demand must be immediately implemented.

Please don't let Gaza's plight be forgotten, and urge those around you to act as well.

All photos in the link below by Sameh A. Habeeb:
http://picasaweb.google.com/sameh.habeeb/BakeriesOfGazaOutOfBreadPeopleAreHungry#

Sameh A. Habeeb is a photojournalist, humanitarian and peace activist based in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. He writes for several news websites on a freelance basis.

Contact me:

Sameh A. Habeeb, B.A.
Photojournalist & Peace Activist
Humanitarian, Child Relief Worker
Gaza Strip, Palestine
Mob: 00972599306096
Tel: 0097282802825
E-mail: Sam_hab@hotmail.com
Sameh.habeeb@gmail.com
Skype: Gazatoday, Facebook: Sameh A. habeeb
Web: www.gazatoday.blogspot.com
Daily Photos:http://picasaweb.google.com/sameh.habeeb

More on the TIF

Why do I even bother writing anything without checking whether Marc Roberts has already done a cartoon on the subject?
Sigh.

Swings and roundabouts

It's always nice to get good feedback on work, and even nicer when it's public and from the excellent Coolerchoice environmental blog. They've posted a positive review of my Ethical Consumer magazine report on the environmental and human rights records of Premiership football clubs.
Between the content of the article and the comments, it was also heartening to see some decent debate going on about the whole issue of making football ethical. There are plenty of campaigns on this, from the rejection of corporate control of football clubs by supporters via organisations like Supporters Direct, to revelations of the outrageously small wages (in some case well below the minimum wage) paid by many Premiership clubs to low-ranking employees, whilst top-rank footballers take home sums beyond most people's wildest dreams.
Some attacks on the idea of considering ethics alongside football - such as on Indymedia - have suggested that this is just another example of middle-class environmentalists interfering in working-class culture.
I'd reject that on two grounds: one, that plenty of working-class football supporters have political, environmental and social consciences and to suggest that giving a toss about the environment is solely a middle-class trait is pretty offensive, and two, it discounts that fact that when things go pear-shaped environmentally, it's people on low incomes and with no political clout who get properly shafted - see for instance Friends of the Earth's work mapping pollution in the UK onto low income areas. Golly gee, middle-class people don't get dirty factories and particulate-clouded bypasses built next to their gardens. Next stop, the revolution.
Well, however much of a warm fuzzy feeling I might have got from that nice review, it's done little to overcome my general sense of fury, disappointment, disgust and lots of other negative emotions at the killer combination of stupidity and selfishness which has caused the population of Greater Manchester to reject the TIF bid. So, we've got some of the shitest public transport in Europe, but no, lets reject £3 billion in investment so that a load of middle-class idiot commuters in Cheshire Tractors are free to spend hours sitting stationary on Princess Parkway every morning.
You bloody morons. Especially you so-called lefties who've campaigned against the Yes vote. Worried about the 'state tracking'? Well get rid of your mobile phone before you whinge about your car. Worried about 'working class people who can't afford to get into work in the morning'? Bullshit: you're worried about your own privileged car-driving lifestyles. You just have to look at the demographics of public transport use to see that it's not the comfortable middle class that would have benefited from better buses, trams, trains and cycling and pedestrian routes. And as for the scum at Peel Holdings; well, it just adds to the myriad reasons why Peel is beneath the underneath of the belly of contempt.
Rant over. I'll just go and seethe some more in peace.

Manchester climate change essay competition

Essay contest: What do we do next?
"What are the current problems/future opportunities for climate campaigners in Greater Manchester"
First Prize- £30
Runners Up- to be confirmed
Deadline Sunday 1st February 5pm
entries to editor@manchesterclimatefortnightly.info
Winner announced on Tuesday February 10th at the "Climate Change: Global and Local" meeting hosted by Manchester Climate Forum. Friends Meeting House, 6 Mount St
More information from http://www.manchesterclimatefortnightly.info

RIP Oliver Postgate

Sad news this morning, although well into his 80s I guess Oliver Postgate had had a decent run at life, and possibly is checking out at a good time, a decade or so before things go really tits up.
Anyway, this is just the product of a desire to pay tribute not just to his wonderful children's programmes (I remember with particular love Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, the Clangers and Noggin the Nog) but also his staunch political stands - on climate change, on pacifism, and on unpopular topics such as the idea that the West should buy up the Afghan poppy crop to take it out of the hands of the world's various drug barons whilst also giving Afghan farmers a livelihood.

No comment needed

Language and journalistic arrests in Israel

Outgoing Israeli PM Ehud Olmert made an interesting choice of words the other day when talking about the appalling violence Hebron's community of extremist religious Jewish settlers have been inflicting on the city's Palestinian inhabitants. Speaking of footage of settlers opening fire on unarmed people, he used the word 'pogrom.'
Not a term used lightly by anyone in Israel, and certainly not by a Jewish Israeli of the oppression of a West Bank Palestinian. Certainly not a term that a goy (and yes, I have been called that in Israel, to my face, and on one occasion by a child who must have been all of seven years old) like me would be allowed to use of these settlers' action without howls of 'anti-semite!'
And another interesting event to note amidst the horror of events in Hebron and Gaza, Ha'aretz newspaper reports that the heroic Israeli journalist Amira Hass was arrested leaving Gaza via the Erez border crossing and questioned by Sderot police. Hass has spent much of the last ten years living in Gaza or Ramallah, one of the few Israelis to do so, and her writings, including the books Drinking the Sea at Gaza and Reporting from Ramallah, should be required reading (alongside Robert Fisk) for, well, pretty much anyone really.

Another work of genius from Marc Roberts

I was going to post something ranty about press coverage of the Plane Stupid Stansted action today. And certainly the BBC R4 lunchtime coverage was typically shite, in its usual style of 'let's give unlimited space to Michael O'Leary to talk drivel and not address any of the substantive issues at all.' But Marc Roberts has covered pretty much everything else I'd want to say.

The Guardian on writing for the internet

Now here's an interesting piece on writing for the internet, and how to go about pushing a website up the ratings not by filling it with rubbish that's searched for a lot ('Britney Spears naked' etc) but by the quality and quantity of links to it.
Michael Wignall at Streamengine does great short workshops on how to do combine writing in a search-engine-friendly way, as well as one that's attractive to website readers.

BBC in tedious old fool shocker

Well golly gee, looks like the BBC has been letting its misinformed old farts talk bollocks again. Why do the likes of the hugely tedious Peter Sissons get to interview anyone who actually knows their stuff? The case in point being his interview today with Green MEP Caroline Lucas, in which he was peddling the stunningly outdated line that there is a genuine scientific question over anthropogenic climate change. No Peter, there isn't, and there hasn't been in twenty years. There are just a few left of a dying swarm of well-funded lobbyists who are still trying to get idiots like him to cover their frankly genocidal ideas. Why do I pay my licence fee again?

All the men should leave now...

Today is the 19th anniversary of the shooting dead of 14 young women and injuring of 14 more people at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec. Marc Lepine shot the women because, he said, he was 'fighting feminism' and they were engineering students.
Women get beaten, raped and killed all over the world for asking for their right to be human beings, and it's usually done by men. I'm not arguing that men are intrinsically worse or more violent, but I am arguing that we've created societies that encourage them to be that way, and that now they are being challenged in their power some of them seem to find it legitimate to fight back in violent and horrible ways. It's also why it pisses me off that idiots like Fathers for Justice get so much coverage for their whingings about male rights; yes, there are a few men out there unjustly separated from their children, and there's an awful lot justly separated because statistically men are much more likely to be the ones beating their wives or partners and abusing their children. The press goes crazy when a Karen Matthews does something terrible to her child (at least the child is still alive...) but apparently men sitting in cars gassing themselves and their kids so their wives/mothers can't 'have them' attracts pretty brief comment nowadays. I don't see the Sun giving them front page spreads with 'pure evil' headlines...