More photos

So, here are a few more images from the last month. The first, since it's now Easter week, is of candles burning in th Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the outside wall of the tiny chapel that allegedly contains the tomb of Christ.
The second is also from Jerusalem and shows posters raising awareness of the Armenian Genocide by Turkey at the beginning of the 20th Century. This is a sensitive topic here, both because Turkey has been one of Israel's big political allies in the region, and because the Armenians have been denied the right to use words like 'Holocaust' for what happened to them. As I write this, I noticed that Robert Fisk has been writing about the subject too, here.
Thirdly, one of Deheishe camp's newer martyrs, a teenager shot last autumn for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers who were demolishing a house.

6th April: women workers

It's Monday and now I get my weekend, or in fact the nearest I've had to a break in several weeks.
The last two days have been sad and mad. I've spent them in the company of the amazing Salwa from KavLaOved, interviewing women who work in the Israeli settlements – in industrial zones like Barkan and Mishor Adumim, and in agricultural settlements in the vast swathe of stolen land that is the Jordan Valley.
These women are strong but the stories they have to tell are dreadful. Working condition s in the settlements are the kind of thing you're used to reading in scandalised Guardian reports from China and India. Terrible health and safety conditions, including exposure to pesticides, factories with no air conditioning in the roasting temperatures which are common here in summer, or no heating in the bitter cold of the hills in winter, and machinery with the safety guards taken off. Rates of pay a third of the Israeli minimum wage, which a court ruling says should apply in the settlements, and 12 or 14 hour days without proper overtime pay. Bullying and harassment by managers – both Israeli and from Palestinian middlemen and gangmasters. Uncompensated workplace injuries. The list goes on.
And, of course, these women also experience prejudice in their own communities. In the factories and agricultural packing houses around Jericho, at least women working outside the home is something well established in society, but in the tiny village in Salfit governorate to the north of the West Bank the women I met were the first amongst their neighbours to be employed, and they faced disapproval because of that. But all of them experienced discrimination for working in the settlements themselves, seen as somehow collaborating. The effects of this included many of them being regarded as unmarriageable, or only marrying too late to have children; one woman whose family's dire poverty meant that sometimes her children went without proper food for days said that despite this her daughters were considering quitting their settlement jobs for fear that they would never get husbands. But there is no work in the village, and mental health problems have stopped her husband working for over 20 years. So what are the household going to live on?
The women I met in Salfit are part of a legal case against their employers, an international bedding manufacturer called Royalife, which ships to Europe and the USA. So maybe the report I'll be writing for Women Working Worldwide can form part of some efforts to campaign for them to be reinstated (they were fired for continuing the legal case against their employers for their illegally low pay and poor safety conditions). But it's a difficult balance here; the boycott campaigners would obviously be saying that those products shouldn't be sold at all. But who else is going to bring these women jobs? The more time I spend here, the fewer ideas I have about what the answers might be.
And somehow it all seems all the worse for the heartbreaking beauty of the setting. The desert in the Jordan Valley is stunningly vast and mountainous and stark, while the hills of Salfit are covered with spring wildflowers and olive trees and should be the most serene and lovely place, if they weren't the backdrop to brutal extremist settlers and terrible poverty and military occupation and these labour abuses.

A few pictures...

So, here are a few of the terrifying number of pictures I've taken over the last few weeks. The first is a nice one - kids playing sack races as Bab al-Amud (Damascus Gate) on Saturday 21st March. They were, however, being closely watched over the Israeli police, as this was the launch day for Al Quds, Capital of Arab Culture, which was an event the Israeli authorities were less than keen to support.
Second is, quite simply, Netanyahu exactly where he belongs.
And the third is a little girl holding a singed page from the Quran, standing in front of a burnt-out room in her house. She has the misfortune to be growing up in Hebron and the roof of her home is accessible by settlers, who torched this room, killing her 3 year old brother. The house is now meant to be protected by a metal grille in the top of the stairwell, but the settlers have recently thrown a boulder through it - we saw the shattered pieces on the stairs, and by good if someone had been hit they would have been done for. And now, of course, the can start throwing shit (literally) down into the family's home.


href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh895vyHGD33C3GeO7Vtmb14NOKZD6kK4-3_Kfa6fUJafWCRtHVQ7ryEvtcyNHCR0FYp3DA2ea7dJccm5bDCyR6Tsqm0YXQWn_3RnAndiqoX2HpakBZlIjz3N6OQBRGxl6VfVjFcA/s1600-h/Netanyahu+where+he+belongs.jpg">
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV6mBLekQ1uW7LdZQX98wAVVpRaYQ5RT7OFN__MZGdAfmZW_jZ5Q2-eL25XhjwzUVTnJ0y8tdD6kCokZU5S0VR2EaZKgKzEZmTBXnqnQrgsHxJ1t1fagyXfFUTvJJ8nEwckix9-g/s1600-h/burnt+room.jpg">

2nd April: Dodgy jokes and all over the place

This is one of the more printable of the many jokes my friend S tells. Most of the others are Khalili jokes – about people from Hebron, who seem to be the butt of 99% of Palestinian jokes. But M (see previous post) has been telling me about the Hebronite pop singer who lives in Jerusalem, who 3 years ago was booked for a concert in Hebron, only to find out that the booking was a way to get him down there to beat him up for telling jokes against the people of his town. So maybe they're best not reproduced. Anyway:

A Lebanese guy is standing in the street, very angry. A Saudi guy walks up and says to him, why are you angry?
The Lebanese guy says, I lost my wife.
The Saudi guy says, I lost my wife too, let's look for them together. What does your wife look like?
The Lebanese man says, well, she's tall, blonde, got a good body, wearing a short skirt and a little t-shirt. What does your wife look like?
And the Saudi guy says, forget my wife, let's go and find your wife.

It's been a hectic week. There was the terrific meeting with Daoud Hamoudi of Stop the Wall, who occupies a position of minor intellectual hero in my world and who I was pathetically impressed to meet. He was very cool, very kind, gave us a good hour plus of his time despite also being very busy. He does terrific research on the economic impacts of the Occupation, including the various industrial zones that the Turkish, German, French and Japanese governments and the World Bank are busy building in several parts of the West Bank, aimed at using the Palestinian population as cheap labour for Israeli export companies. Palestinian salaries are, according to the World Ban, too high and need cutting to something in the region of US$300/month, which is of course a fraction of the Israeli minimum wage.
This was followed up by another interview with the stunning Salwa Alinat of KavLaOved, an Israeli labour rights NGO which I wrote about in the Big Issue last spring because they do work with migrant labourers brought from places like Thailand and the Philippines as cheap, often bonded, labour on Israeli flower farms which supply the likes of Tesco and Sainsburys.
But Salwa heads their groundbreaking project with Palestinian workers in Israeli settlements and rather than the overarching Israeli boycott approach taken by Stop the Wall, they have a classic workers' rights position of engaging with individual groups of workers, factory by factory, and trying to improve their conditions. There have been various legal wrangles in Israel over the applicability of Israeli labour laws in the settlements, and in the meantime Palestinian workers there are subjected to long hours, undocumented overtime, low pay, arbitrary firings, lower pay for women workers and atrocious health and safety conditions. But KLO has had some successes in getting pay increases and improved conditions.
Salwa herself is terrific young woman, originally from the Galilee, and I'll never forget the pride and strength in her eyes and face as she told me: “I feel strongest when I'm in the office of a company in the settlements. I know that they hate me – because I'm with Kav La Oved, because I'm a woman, because I'm a Muslim. And I feel really strong.”
And then there was the day I expected to spend helping write Hebron & Bethlehem day tour leaflets for the Alternative Tourism Group, old friends in Beit Sahour who I used to work with when I was with Olive Co-op, organising solidarity tours to the West Bank. I did indeed spend some of the day successfully writing and printing up these leaflets, but it did kind of descend into an afternoon of Taybeh beer and arak with S and some German visitors.
And then there was the visit to Nablus, bumming a ride with a couple of people from the Empire & Commonwealth Museum who are researching an exhibition for the back end of 2010 on the British Mandate here. Which given the extent to which the extraordinarily screwed up nature of this place is down to the good ol' Brits seems a worthwhile effort. This meant I got to have a very constructive meeting myself with my friend N, but also got to earwig at their interviews.
This very excitingly meant I got to meet Bassam Shakaa, the former elected mayor of Nablus who spent a chunk of the 70s in Israeli jails and then, 4 years after being elected, had his legs blown off by a car bomb planted by the Jewish fundamentalist terror group Gush Emunim. The guy who did it got a weeny little sentence, shock horror. N, who is a fortysomething man of considerable gravitas, was very cutely excited about the meeting as well, and demanded to have his photo taken with Shakaa (he, as a schoolboy, was at the huge demonstration which greeted Shakaa from prison in the 70s), while when I was in Beit Sahour again yesterday telling S about the visit he also had stories of being in the crowd when Shakaa visited Bethlehem after his return from treatment in the UK after his bombing.
Which covers a reasonable amount of the last week, and I've run out of steam now anyway. TTFN.

March 27th: Jerusalem, Akka

A and I have finally returned to Jerusalem after an exhausting few days chasing round some of the Palestinian cities of Israel – Jaffa, Nazareth, Haifa and Akka. It's been interesting but tiring.




Of the four Akka is definitely my favourite – a beautiful little port city full of haunting Crusader halls, 18th century khans built to house thousands of merchants and their horses and camels and wares, fishing boats and amazing markets. It has the gorgeous al-Jazzer mosque and the – ahem – interesting Akko Gate Hostel, a slightly ramshackle place run by a guy called Walid, whose family have lived in the Old City for generations. He had a lot to say about bureaucracy and the strangling of small business by red tape, which inevitably becomes that much worse when the business is Arab-run in Israel, and where the Israeli state still claims a third of the ownership of any building registered as having been abandoned by its Palestinian occupants in 1948. Walid himself lost his mother to the shelling of Akka when he was six weeks old.
In Jerusalem, I'm now strung out and nauseous after spending the afternoon drinking evilly strong coffee with an old friend who runs an internet cafe in the Old City. So my clothes also stink of smoke from the cafe's clientèle of young men playing football games on the computers and puffing away. As ever, M was a mine of Old City gossip and scandal and tales of the dark underbelly of Jerusalemite Palestinian life – so the conversation ran the gamut of honour killings (yes, he did tell me exactly which shop owner offed his daughter after she was caught with her lover; I'm not sure I wanted to know), embezzlement, adultery, the shenanigans of sundry nuclear whistleblowers and people taking up going to the mosque and on Haj in order to make their seedy businesses more respectable to the locals.
Oh, and apparently small Palestinian boys make great internet cafe customers, because none of them can touch type so they take ages to get anything done. But Mordechai Vanunu had to be barred because the Israeli police kept turning up and demanding to examine the computer he'd been using, and it put the other customers off.
The conversation also ran over subjects like the increasing rate of Israeli land grabs in Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem like Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, and new Israeli tactics for getting rid of its Palestinian citizens, like raiding East Jerusalem houses at 2am and delisting as residents anyone not there – even though they might be on holiday, or visiting a sick relative, or at a party. And the unintended (one hopes, although these things are always questionable) side-effects of the EU and USA's demands for a crackdown on corruption in the PA, which have meant that buying cheap stocks for Jerusalem shops in the West Bank has become much harder, which has hit everyone's profit margins considerably. And his gloomy but probably not far off the mark prediction that of the 150,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, only 30,000 or 40,000 will be left in 5 years, and that they will be the rich who are able to withstand the worst vicissitudes of Israeli policies which make it so hard for Arab residents to get decent jobs or run businesses.
M didn't used to talk politics. It's a measure of how bad the situation is that this tidal wave of anger and frustration came out of him so quickly. “This is my city?” he said, in reply to my asking him about somewhere to go for a drink. “Really?”

20th March: Nablus, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem

Well, we're back in Jerusalem now after a fairly hectic few days in which Dad got his first proper checkpoint experience, A got invited for dinner in Beit Safafa by a nice lady on a bus and found that there's a brand of water named after her, and I got fed so many different kinds of little Arabic sweets and pastries in Nablus that I got a massive attack of the sugar shakes, and officially became a year older and less wise.
My friend Naseer very kindly took the time to show the three of us around Nablus again. Between destroyed buildings and ancient stonework, one of the highlights was watching kanafeh being made. This delicious sweet is a layer of chewy cheese topped with crunchy baked semolina, which turns bright orange when cooked, and doused in sugar water. It's made in metre-wide metal trays in a kind of upside-down-cake style, where the semolina layer turns orange by being baked against the bottom of the pan with the cheese on top of its, and then a second pan is placed on top and the whole thing turned over with one terrifying but skillful flip. At the al-Aqsa sweet house in Nablus Old City, it is then sliced up and served hot and one of these metre-wide trays lasts about 5 minutes.
Anyway, I've got a terrific sequence of photos of it being made so if anyone can think of a place I can pitch a kanafeh piece too, let me know!
The following day, after a slightly tense and very odd morning amongst Mt Jarzim/Gerizim's Samaritan community for an article for The Arab, we headed back to Jerusalem and on to Bethlehem via Ramallah. At Huwarra we had a bit of a wait because we were in a private taxi but all generally went pretty smoothly.
At Kalandia checkpoint, however, Dad and A got their first real taste of how these monstrous barriers to movement work. Last year when I passed through it the public buses from Ramallah to Jerusalem were being permitted to pass, albeit with men and boys having to get down and be id'd.
This week, however, they were being strict, so we all had to get out and pass through the full battery-animal process. Although it was busy, only a couple of channels (narrow rows between metal grid walls and corrugated iron roofs) were open, with x-ray machines and id checks at the end of the lengthy queues. After that check there were ore turnstiles – great fun for getting through with large bags, small children, sick people etc – and then more id checking. This was being carried out by a small, plump and exceptionally shouty Israeli female soldier, who kept yelling at people to get behind the line. If she thought this was inspiring discipline and gravitas amongst her line of victims she was wrong, as most of the Palestinian people in the line with us were in massive fits of giggles over her antics and kept delivering stage-whispered instructions to their friends 'not to annoy the lady.'
Several more buses later we were in Bethlehem, staying at the Star. Now, last time I was in that particular part of town for any length of time it was 2002 and in the middle of some humongous invasion, with tanks and squished street lamps littering the streets and a heady blend of ISMers, international journalists and Israeli soldiers making life hellish for the staff of the hotel. I was staying down the road in the Palestine TV building, helping out with Indymedia and the occasional food run into the area around the Nativity Church which was under 24/7 curfew. So being there was a fairly memory-laden experience, and to see it all busy and full of shops and cars and buses was odd, if good. The Star still has lousy plumbing and minimal hot water though.
I figured that given Dad's short time here an ATG day tour would be a good way to introduce him to some of the Southern part of the West Bank, namely Bethlehem and Hebron. As well as full organised tours, an increasing number of organisations here, including ATG and PACE, seem to have realised that there are plenty of people who don't necessarily want or can't afford full length organised tours, but who are in the market for day-long experiences which introduce them to the issues and sights. It was also lovely to see Samer from ATG again, from my Olive Co-op days.
So, this tour included visits to the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tombs of the Patriarchs in Hebron, a 2-thousand-year old part-synagogue, part-mosque which houses the resting places of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah and other significant early Biblical figures. It's also, of course, the site of the massacre of several dozen Palestinian worshippers by the settler Baruch Goldstein in 1994, when he and possibly others walked into the early Friday prayers spraying bullets, having locked the doors to prevent any escapes.
Hebron is also shocking for the revolting behaviour of the settlers – who live inside the city, not around it – towards the local Palestinian population. They through piss and dirty nappies and rotting food into the streets, necessitating nets across the souq roads to catch it all. Where they want to drive a family out, they commit appalling acts of cruelty. In the case of one family we visited, this included torching rooms in the house using Molotov cocktails, on one occasion burning a three year old boy to death. The family have had to put a grille up above their stairwell to stop rubbish being thrown in by the settlers, but this has now been punctured by a boulder which was thrown in a few weeks ago, shattering on the stairs but fortunately not hitting any people.
Heading back to Bethlehem, we passed through Deheishe refugee camp, where 12,000 people live in a space spanning a kilometre by a kilometre, enduring 75% unemployment and a complete lack of space and privacy. There are new martyr posters in the entrance to the camp, after a 16 year old was killed last autumn for throwing stones at soldiers demolishing a house.
And now back into the melee that is Jerusalem, with Dad sorting out his journey home and A and I working out our plans from here.

Nablus, March 17th

Sitting in the sun in Nablus, turning my eyes to mush on the first decent stretch of internet access I've had since we arrived. It's beautiful weather but it's bloody freezing at night. The great green dome of the an-Nasir mosque just to my right – at this precise moment a very musical call to prayer is going out from the minaret. To my left a couple are chatting away, the guy smoking a nargila and the women eating manakeesh.
The apparent 'normalisation' process by the Israelis continues, with the checkpoints easy to pass through coming in this direction. Heading the other way will probably be a bit slower, but still easy enough for us. Even at Huwarra we were able to drive straight through in a local taxi, after being dropped off by the bus from Ramallah – something I remember as being nigh impossible, even for internationals. But, as we've seen with the vicious Israeli military response at places like Bilin and Nilin, this is a fragmented and illusory normalisation, all too easy to crack when Israeli domestic politics demands it.
There are lots of soldiers around, but except at the checkpoints themselves these are all PA security forces of one variety or another. I may support the Palestinian right to self-determination, but I'm reluctant to see men with large weaponry as a positive thing, regardless of which side they're from. The need for this highly visible presence bespeaks problems in itself.
Jerusalem was its usual insane self, although with more settler types wandering round the Old City, which is disturbing. Dad and I witnessed a heavily-policed funeral round by Lion Gate, heralded first by loud chanting and then a huge crowd – hundreds of young men, mainly – surging out the gate and into the Muslim cemetery immediately outside the walls. The dead man, being called a shahid by the crowd, was shot by the police after being chased away from an upscale Israeli neighbourhood he'd apparently been burgling with a female Jewish accomplice.
Once again, my companion(s) and I are the only guests staying at the Yasmeen, although it's busy during the day – Medicins san Frontiers meetings, couples drinking coffee, families coming in for leisurely meals. But it still seems to be in ok nick, although they haven't managed to replace the lovely stained glass window of the an-Nasir dome which has several bullet holes in it, including one clean through the middle of the dome. There seems to be more building work (with terrifying health and safety standards!) and commerce going on than last time I was here, a year ago, but whether this is an illusion remains to be seen – I intend to go and chat to a few people and find out (if I can speak after I get out of this nargila smoke.)

Israeli army seriously injure another Nilin peace protester

Well, just as I arrive in Palestine again, the grim news that on Friday the Israeli army seriously injured another peace activist, a 37 year old American called Tristan Anderson. The protests against the daily oppression of the people of Nilin by the proximity of the Wall to their lands have been met with utter brutality from Israeli forces, with a number of Palestinian children and youth being hurt and killed in recent months. At the moment, Anderson's condition is said to be life-threatening, and parts of the frontal lobe of his brain have had to be removed because they had been punctured by bone fragments caused by the force of the tear gas canister he was hit by - a type of canister I've never had the misfortune to encounter in my days with ISM, as it's a new high-velocity one which makes no sound and emits no smoke trail, and is therefore impossible to run away from. Classy one there, IDF.

Co-ops rant!

The last couple of weeks have had some ups and downs for the co-ops/social enterprise chunk of my life and work.
On one hand, there's been the brilliant news, which I'd heard about months ago but finally happened, that Zaytoun's fairly traded (organic, extra virgin) Palestinian olive oil has received full Fairtrade Foundation accreditation and is now therefore the first olive oil to bear the widely-recognised Fairtrade logo (a French/Moroccan outfit is also looking to get certified but it's unlikely their product will be in the shops until at least the end of this year). This is of course fantastic news for the Palestinian farmers' co-ops producing the oil, for Zaytoun and Equal Exchange who have worked so hard to market the oil and get accreditation, and for pioneers like Olive Co-op who have been selling it for the last 5 years.
On the flipside, I've had some depressing encounters with the hierarchies of the co-operative and social enterprise sectors as well.
These have largely taken the shape of trying to disentangle the jargon-laden, increasingly corporate bullshit churned out by some of the 'support agencies' and 'representative bodies' out there. Some of the stuff I've had to try and comprehend this week has been totally impenetrable, even to me, and I did social theory classes at MA level, so I've worked my way through a lot of totally opaque and atrociously written crap before.
The social enterprise support sector just seems to be more and more a gravy train for white men in suits to get nicely-paid jobs telling people with no money and tiny businesses in a credit crunch about how to be entrepreneurs, while being firmly locked into a bureaucratic mindset and fat-cat mentality themselves.
My other gripe is with some of the PR leeches who lurk round the edges of the sector. Without naming names, I thought I had managed to find someone sensible within a co-operative sector organisation who was willing to enter into a bit of debate about whether the expansion of co-ops in a recession was, willy-nilly, a good thing. Now, I've spent nearly 10 years working in co-ops, am still a member of one, and have a considerable commitment to the sector. I certainly have no interest in doing a hatchet job on them.
But I'm finding increasing amounts of credit crunch propaganda - from 'support' and 'advice' organisations whose main function is to suck up government funding like vast cash-Hoovers, and not from actual people running actual enterprises in what might be termed the 'real' world – about how bloody marvellous co-ops are, how they are the stable, sustainable soft-capitalist economic model that encourages responsible economic behaviour and would have bolstered the economy against the current crisis.
So, when the person I thought I was getting somewhere with went off on leave, I got handed over to the organisation's PR consultants instead, and any notion of realistic, sensible, real-world debate vanished, and I got yet another bit of pointless flannel attributed to the organisation's ennobled Chair, about how wonderful co-ops are and how they are the Way, the Truth and the Light.
And I'm sorry, but this does the sector no good at all. A failing enterprise is a failing enterprise, and while being a co-op might make companies more economically and socially sustainable, this is only true if they have real markets and decent marketing and good internal controls.
To promote the idea that anyone, anywhere, wanting to do anything somehow can just by being a social enterprise is totally irresponsible. Firstly it has the ability to create a lot of pissed off, skint people if their businesses do fail. Secondly in creating those people it has a massive potential to 'tarnish the brand,' devaluing the idea of social enterprise and co-ops and making them synonymous with dud enterprises. And thirdly damaging people who should never have been persuaded by ivory-tower consultants that they should run businesses in the first place.

שטח סגור | Closed Zone | منطقة مغلقة

שטח סגור | Closed Zone | منطقة مغلقة

Posted using ShareThis

The slime slimed

Got up this morning to the highly entertaining news that the slithery Mandie had been slimed by a Plane Stupid activist with a bowl of green custard, objecting to the eye-poppingly idiotic idea that Heathrow airport should be extended. Genius. Maybe he'll find true love with it.



Photo from www.planestupid.com

Moss Side graffiti

Al Baker & the Dole Queue, Roadhouse, 5th March

Last time I was in the Roadhouse, I'm pretty sure I left early because of the dense cloud of cigarette smoke that made by eyes water and obscured whatever I was trying to see onstage. I don't think there was even a mention of a smoking ban, so I guess it was a while ago.
Tonight it was Al Baker and the Dole Queue who lured me back. I've seen this talented young singer-songwriter in various settings – with a couple of members of his band supporting David Rovics and the mighty Attila the Stockbroker at the late lamented Basement, and solo, accompanied only by his guitar, at my own wedding. The band has one album, 'On the Use of Jackboots,' available through Four Dogs Music. They combine a punky-folky sound (think the Levellers, but less cheesy/twiddly, or the Pogues, but with better teeth) with clever, funny, observational lyrics that range from the fierily political to bittersweet observations of the pains of young love (when the wrong haircut's involved).
This gig was billed as one of the first outings for the new version of the Dole Queue's 'troubacore' sound, bringing together some of the folky instruments (which have attracted accusations of sounding like a ceilidh band in the past) with rockier electric guitars and bass.
Sometimes it worked. On the pacier, punkier numbers like Grandad was an Anarchist and This Machine the greater volume and gutsier sound really lifted the songs, and combined with Baker's grinning yet sarcastic enthusiasm made for an infectiously fun live set. A cover of REM's It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine) also took well to this treatment. These are all talented performers, and their tight sound deserved something much better than a three-quarters-empty Roadhouse on the Thursday night.
But the stronger sound doesn't suit all of Baker's tracks, and the clever, funny, poignant lyrics of, for instance, Till the Fences Fall, got kind of lost in the louder music. Which, given that one of the big attractions of Baker's music is his wry, intelligent songwriting, is definitely a pity. Hopefully with more outings the new sound will get a little finessing and some of those lovely lyrics will re-emerge.
That said, this was still a cracking set, and I look forward to Al Baker and the Dole Queue's upcoming sets, listed on the band's Myspace page. These include a TBC support slot with the fantastic Robb Johnson.

Ryanair 'pay to pee'

A friend sent me this the other day - I'm afraid I don't know the original source. Perhaps Ryanair would also like to charge the rest of us to stop wrecking our planet with their horrible short-haul flights.

Comment is Free

I wonder what it says about the Guardian at the moment that the best bits of political writing I've seen in it for some time haven't been in the paper itself, which is increasingly anodyne, cowardly and smugly middle-class and knowing, but in the Comment is Free section.
The articles in question are Charlie Brooker - who I associate with being the TV guy from the back of the Guide, for God's sake! - here, and Ben White on why, although the recent atrocities in Gaza deserve international attention, we must also not take our eye off Israel's activities in the West Bank.

Hulme graffiti

Journalistic bollocks

All very insignificant, this, but a good illustration of how inaccurate some journalists can be, and how a couple of poorly checked facts can replicate themselves...
Several years ago I interviewed a UNISON rep and psychiatric nurse called Karen Reissman about NHS privatisation, for the TogetherWorks magazine Enterprising. The article ended up as one of the excuses Karen's former employers used to sack her, since few employers are enlightened enough to want active, politicised union reps on their staff.
Unsurprisingly, this attracted a certain amount of press coverage, including from press industry publications like the Press Gazette. So when Karen settled her claim out of court during her employment tribunal, there was a certain amount of followup. This included this article by Dominic Ponsford, written using material from the PA Mediapoint agency added to by the Press Gazette. Now, this article is peppered with inaccuracies. The ones I can comment on are that he calls the magazine 'Inside Enterprise' and states that it is no longer running - when in fact there have been a number of issues of it since the Karen Reissman affair, and I'm putting together a new one at the moment. It also claims that the article was a feature on social enterprise, which is in fact the subject of the entire magazine.
A reply from the PA's Legal Editor emphasises that it was not their agency piece which included the mistakes - so I guess they were added by Dominic Ponsford at the Press Gazette.
Now, I'm not saying that these errors are particularly significant in themselves. But I am interested in what it says about poor standards of fact checking. Especially since agencies and industry publications like the Press Gazette are generally regarded as pretty reliable, which means that if anyone, for instance, ever decided to write a history of Karen's struggle, they would probably go first to these kind of sources, and get misled and sidetracked.
I'm also curious as to why the Press Gazette has removed my completely anodyne correcting comments to their web version of the article - aren't they prepared to admit they've printed an incorrect piece?

International Women's Day

A friend recently sent me this lovely and inspiring announcement from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, about a women's sport and cultural weekend being held to celebrate International Women's Day on March 8th. Despite my visceral horror of anything resembling organised games, this seems to me a much more uplifting representation of the spirit of IWD than the terrifyingly corporate 'Official' IWD site here, sponsored by huge international banks and corporations which I would would put money on, do bugger all for gender equality at any kind of grassroots level, however much they might top corporate indices for equality in their white, upper-middle-class Western offices. Who declared this site 'official' anyway? Forgive me if I'm sceptical.

Pubs, politics and Palestine

With lots in the news at the moment about pubs closing due to the recession, I was extremely pleased this week to find a great pub which combines proper beer with genuine community spirit.
The Blue Bell, on Barlow Road in Levenshulme, doesn't look terrifically prepossessing from the outside. It's one of those big pub buildings which all too often nowadays have plastic signs proclaiming steak dinners for £3.99 or burgers for less - conjuring up images of hideous livestock conditions and inedible meat. Inside it's presentable but nothing special, with a certain amount of the kind of faux-traditional chintziness which dominates so much pub decor.
I'd been lured to the Blue Bell after having, in a rash moment of helpfulness, offered to answer questions about co-operatives and social enterprises at a public meeting of people wanting to form a co-op to save their local shop, the Village Stores. So I didn't even get as far as the bar before I was sitting down and fielding queries.
Then I noticed the beermats, which proclaimed that this was a Samuel Smith's pub. This, to me, is always a good thing, as even in the most hideous depths of central London it tends to herald good beer, reasonably priced. Sam Smith's, based in Tadcaster, is still an independent brewery and produces a full range of ales, milds and lagers, including an organic lager. And the plural of mild is advisedly used – rarely, it brews both a light and dark mild, and that is a rare and wonderful thing nowadays. The full range is Vegan Society approved and the company's tied pubs have stocked Fairtrade orange juice for some years – ie before it became a hugely successful marketing bandwagon.
But my reasons for being all excited about the Blue Bell don't stop with its beer. Licensees Mark and Mary Dunn seem to be genuinely committed to being part of and improving their local community. The room we used for the meeting for the putative co-op was provided free, as it is for a number of other organisations – from swimmers' groups to tenants' associations – during the rest of the week. Mark himself sat in on the meeting, and seemed keen to make sure that the street's excellent local shop was maintained somehow.
The descendant of market traders, Mark is bringing his interest in Manchester's history of local food production to bear on his community activities. He and other residents are planning a People's Orchard, planted with regional fruit tree varieties – and he is well able to list the kind of apples he wants to see promoted, varieties like Jonathan which have distinctive flavours and textures, instead of the bland offerings in British supermarkets.
The Blue Bell also has a wild patch out the back, where there are logs for hedgehogs to hibernate in and native flowers growing. And every year, the pub presents any children who want to enter its Garden Competition with a tub and some money to buy plants and seeds from Village Stores, and at the end of the summer the best mini-gardens win prizes. As Mark says, “it keeps them out of trouble and gives them a real sense of achievement.”

On other topics, the students occupying a building at Manchester University in solidarity with the people of Gaza are still there, a fantastic array of banners still adorning the front of the Simon Building and a great range of film showings, Dabke dance workshops and Fairtrade Palestinian olive oil launches taking place in the occupied space.
In Gaza, my friend Sharyn has moved from working with ambulances and medics to accompanying farmers into their fields where, it is hoped, the presence of internationals will allow them to harvest their crops – vital for the income of so many families and communities – without the worst excesses of Israeli military brutality. To date, results have been mixed, and despite the presence of ISMers several farmers harvesting parsley and other crops have been injured and killed by Israeli soldiers shooting at them.
On the climate change front, efforts to put together a 'Call to Real Action' in response to Manchester City Council's laughable 'Call to Action' effort continue apace, drawing in a wide range of people increasingly concerned about the lack of any real constructive activity on the subject.
And the interviews Marc and I gave to the Observer and the Mail on the subject of not having kids, which spawned a host of invitations to do more interviews, appear on the radio and feature in documentaries, has come back to haunt us yet again. Some freelancer called Britt has being trying to get in touch for an interview, pitching an article to the Guardian which – she rather misguidedly tried to reassure me – would also feature Teri 'I had an abortion for the planet' Vernelli, the other interviewee from the Mail article. The unusual thing about this Britt woman, who appears to work for IPC Media when she's not freelancing for the Grauniad, has been her persistence, sending me several emails, but more annoyingly harassing my former employers at Ethical Consumer and Togetherworks social enterprise network, where I'm a director, for my sins.

Manchester University students occupy admin buildings over Gaza

Manchester University students have joined those at a dozen other UK universities who, over the past few weeks, have occupied buildings in protest at events in Gaza. Below is their press release and list of demands; the blog detailing their events and with photos of the occupation and preceding demonstration is here:

Over 150 University of Manchester students have occupied the main university administration building in a demand for a stronger and more proactive position from the university on the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The students have proposed a set of demands on the university’s Vice Chancellor Alan Gilbert, including a boycott of Israeli goods on campus, support for a day of fundraising with proceeds to the DEC fund, and that the university end research into manufacturing arms.
Students at other universities have taken similar actions over the last three weeks and have been successful in their demands.
The conflict has killed over 1,300 Palestinians and injured thousands. Tens of thousands of civilians have been left homeless. Head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza, John Ging, is now joining international calls for an investigation into the war crimes of the recent action, wherein Israel stands accused of using banned weapons such as white phosphorus and cluster bombs, attacking medical facilities, including the killing of 12 ambulance men in marked vehicles, and killing large numbers of policemen who had no military role.
Over 500 students attended an emergency general meeting of the students union to discuss a motion on the issue of the crisis in Gaza, whereby the students marched on University administration headquarters, the John Owens Building, to draw up a list of demands.
The peaceful occupation is planned to continue for as long as it takes to achieve its demands, and promises to welcome high profile speakers during the week.

DEMANDS

1) University of Manchester should issue a formal statement condemning Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip, acknowledging particularly the effects on educational institutions such as the bombing of the Gaza Islamic University and expressing concern about war crimes allegations.
2) Support a day of fundraising across campus with the proceeds going to the DEC Gaza appeal.
3) University to publicise DEC advert in any way possible (including banner on the website) and put pressure on the BBC and sky to show the DEC advert.
4) All furniture & surplus supplies from buildings that are being renovated to be sent to Gaza on the Viva Palestina convoy.
5) Join the BDS movement through stopping sales of Israeli goods on university premises, the University should also stop buying any campus supplies from Israeli companies.
6) That the university divests from all companies directly involved in the manufacture of weaponry. We also demand that the university takes the issue of transparency in their investment seriously.
7) That the university publicly supports its students’ right to protest, such as occupations. That in line with this, the university will provide its facilities for a “Students for Palestine” conference, second week of April 09.
8 ) To send a public message of solidarity to the Islamic University in Gaza, whose campus has been virtually destroyed, and publish it on the university website and distribute it to the university wide e-mail addresses.
9) To give at lease five scholarships for Palestinian students as well as providing at least five scholarships for Israelis who refuse to serve in the IDF.
10) That the university make a module on the history of Palestine available as an optional module for any University of Manchester student.
11) That home fees apply to Palestinians students wanting to study at the University of Manchester.
12) No victimisation for those taking part in the Occupation, and free movement in and out of the occupied space.

NOTES TO EDITORS:
1) For more information please contact manuni@actionpalestine.org
2) The group have set up a blog with frequent updates at: http://manunioccupation.wordpress.com/
3) Media outlets can contact katan at 07917206282 or 01612 75800

The Three Legged Cat gets unpopular

Ooops. The Three Legged Cat has just put himself in the running for Least Popular Kitty in the World by killing Husband's PC monitor by throwing up down the back of it. Granted, this was an accident waiting to happen and it does have pluses - it was a very aged CRT and tended to go funny colours, and it removes two subjects of fear - that it would burst into flames from all the cat hair in the back of it, and that sleeping on it for hours at at time would cause Three Legged Cat to contract some hideous cancer. But it was bloody awful timing.

Why it's not over in Gaza

This account of recent events in Gaza is from Vittorio Arrigoni, there with the Free Gaza Movement. The original Italian can be found here and here:

I crossed the threshold of my house in Almina, facing Gaza City port, after several days of absence. Everything was exactly as I had left it – the gas cylinder still anorexic (feeding it is too expensive) and the electric current cut off by foreign shears. The once pleasant panorama outside my window has changed and no longer gladdens my spirits from the misery of living under siege. On the contrary, it now rubs salt in the wound, a trauma that won't heal with its reminder of a massacre. Twenty metres from my front door, where the fire station once stood, a huge crater now gapes wide enough for children to mess around in, as if to expel their parents' demon.



The afternoon call to prayer no longer has the same comforting quality of the muezzin's chant that I had grown accustomed to. I wonder where he's gone, if he managed to survive at the top of one of the few minarets that were left intact. The last time I listened to him, this anonymous muezzin had to interrupt his solemnly chanted liturgy because of a chesty cough. It's an affliction I'm familiar with myself, as the gases of the bombs in Gaza have spared no one.
I found a note at the foot of the French window looking onto a small balcony, as if it had been put there by a friendly hand. The street and garden were littered with these same leaflets. They had been dropped from Israeli airplanes warning the Palestinians to stay alert, and be aware that the walls had ears and eyes.
"At the slightest threatening action against Israel we'll be back to invade the Gaza Strip. What you've seen these days is nothing compared to what awaits you." Some kids in the streets had picked up the leaflets and folded them into paper airplanes, seemingly sending the message back to its destination.
Ahmed told me on the phone about a new kids' game – until a few days ago, they amused themselves by relighting the fires, simply by kicking the fragments of white phosphorous bombs found scattered all over the Strip. The debris left by these devices with high chemical potential has very long-lasting inflammable properties. Even when picked up several days after their detonation, it still catches fire if shaken about. The Al Quds hospital paramedics speak of how they gave up trying to put out the fires provoked by these illegal bombs – their flames seemed to feed off the water being thrown at them.
"The consequences of all the shit that's been thrown at us in these last three weeks will surface in the near future, with new cancer cases and deformed babies", Munir, a doctor at Al Shifa hospital told me. Even Gaza's neighbours seem to be worried by this massive use of weapons forbidden by all international conventions. In Sderot, and likewise in Ashkelon, Israeli citizens have formally asked their government for clarifications regarding the weapons that have been used to torment us. It's obvious that impoverished uranium and white phosphorous scattered in such a criminal manner all over the tiny patch of land that is Gaza won't discriminate between Jews and Muslims when it comes to provoking generic illnesses.
The truce ought to have started by now, but today I was woken in my bed by the deafening rumble of cannon shots from the war ships, exactly like a few days ago. Some brave Palestinian fishermen had ventured from the port on their tiny boats equipped with fishing nets. The Israeli Navy pushed them back.
Nowadays, the only edible fish found in Gaza are the Egyptian cans of tuna that came through the tunnels months ago.
Yesterday, yet two more casualties of "collateral damage" were caused by Israeli bombs. East of Gaza City two children were blown up when playing with an unexploded device. The witnesses we heard spoke of active mines in front of the Tal el Hawa houses' ruins. Some bomb disposal experts sent over by Hamas defused them and, judging by the care with which they loaded them onto an off-road vehicle, I think the al qassam brigades will soon return that message of death directly to its lawful owner.
Looking from Naema's roof, the Israeli-Palestinian border has never seemed so easy to pick out. On one side lie the green hills which are constantly watered by the Israeli kibbutzim, on the other you see the parching thirst of a land robbed of its water springs and herds.
Naema wished to tell me all about her last few days – a tactile, aural and olfactory account of the massacre, considering that Naema is blind. The soldiers threateningly ordered her fellow villagers to evacuate their homes only a few minutes before storming the place. The men loaded smaller children onto their shoulders and ran away, along with their women.
Naema chose to stay so as not to slow down their escape. She took refuge in her own house, believing herself to be safe, and welcomed her neighbours, who had nowhere to go: three women, an elderly lady and a paralyzed old man. The tanks and bulldozers then trespassed and started spreading death and destruction, devouring acre by acre, until they stopped in front of Naema's house. Standing on a small hill, the building she inhabits is the tallest in the village, and the soldiers of Tsahal, who found it was strategically positioned, let themselves in and occupied it for two weeks.
"They came in and pointed their weapons at us, pushing us into a small room, where they locked us up for eleven days." Naema continues her story: "During that entire time they brought us water to drink only twice, and food came in the form of the soldiers' rations' left-overs. They never let us go to the bathroom, so we had to go to the toilet in one corner of the room.
"They wouldn't let us talk amongst ourselves, and they would come in and beat us when at night, huddled in a circle, we tried to gather some strength in prayer. Sometimes they'd come over and, intimidating us by touching our bodies with the cold metal of their weapons, they threatened us with death to confess our support for Hamas. I gave them my cell phone, so they could check my phone book and the calls I'd made. Even this gesture didn't mellow their spite."
At the end of the eleventh day of imprisonment, the International Red Cross finally arrived and released the six prisoners from their jailers.
"They didn't allow us to pick up anything, not even my sunglasses", Naema brings her story to a close, adding that when they came back to her house, they found out about the thefts that had been carried out by the soldiers. They had taken all their gold trinkets and hidden savings, after having destroyed their few possessions, two TV sets, a radio, a fridge, and the solar panels on the roof.
I saw tears in this woman's eyes, hidden behind her new dark glasses. They seemed the most vivid I had ever seen. In fact, what Naema "saw" is a lot more that any young woman her age will ever get a chance to see, if she had the bad luck of being born in this tormented land.

Robb Johnson - This is what democracy looks like

Marc was playing the Climate Camp benefit CD when I got home this evening, and it reminded me what a piece of absolute genius Robb Johnson's This Is What Democracy Looks Like is - managing to get across the truly terrifying self-destructive nature of Western Civ, whilst also managing to be funny. Which is pretty rare. Listen to it here, or download the MP3 from here.
And so while I'm on the topic, I feel like putting up links to the brilliant Al Baker and Attila the Stockbroker, just coz I love 'em. Asylum Seeking Daleks and Libyan Students from Hell. Genius.

"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"