Egypt and Israel: hand in hand to crush the Palestinians

There is an enduring myth amongst many Palestine solidarity campaigners that there is a single anti-Palestinian force, Israel, and that despite the odd blip, Arab/Muslim states are basically on-side. My own experiences of the Jordanian and - most recently and frustratingly - Syrian authorities have taught me that this is far from true, but I've tended to put it by on the basis that I can understand why they might be suspicious of some random white woman bimbling round the Middle East in an unaffiliated kind of way.
But the following terrifically powerful and horrible account of the brutality of the Egyptian forces at the Rafah crossing out of Gaza is a graphic illustration of how completely Egypt is happy to collaborate with Israel to crush the people of Gaza. The FreeGaza Movement is appealing for people to contact their own governments and that of Egypt to demand that Jenny and Natalie of FreeGaza/ISM and all Palestinians wanting to cross through Rafah are allowed to do so.

"WHO WILL HOLD US ACCOUNTABLE?"
Natalie Abou Shakra, The Electronic Intifada, 15 July 2009

I will never forget the image of the elderly woman whose son was dying in a hospital in Egypt. She only wanted to be with him. Crying, her hand touching the glass window of the office of the Egyptian intelligence services, she pleaded, "Please, please. I beg you, show mercy, let me go in." Another woman sat by the State Security office, looking up at an officer blocking her path. "You promised to let me in," she said with her soft, tired and drained voice. "Please let me in" she repeated calmly with her tired voice, then she looked at me with wide, tearful, sad eyes.

I came to Gaza a week before Israel's winter invasion began. After seven months, I spent two days at Rafah crossing with the Egyptian authorities refusing to allow me to return to Lebanon, despite having all the necessary coordination documents, approval and permission from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Egyptian authorities made people wait in the arrival hall at the Rafah crossing, sitting on filthy floors where names for either the entry to Egypt or to return to Gaza were called by the voices of aggressive Egyptian police officers, or state security or intelligence personnel. After hours of waiting, two officers headed towards us: "you are being returned to Gaza." "No!" we would reply, "We have coordination documents!" But, the officers and intelligence personnel grew angrier and threw the papers in our faces humiliatingly: "This means nothing! Move on! Hurry!"

After being asked numerous times "what were you doing in Palestine for seven months," I answered the intelligence officer simply, "what you didn't do." Another officer asked, "How did you come to Gaza?" "By the boats" I replied, referring to the Free Gaza Movement ship that brought me. "So, now you know why you ... can't leave," he answered back.

It was a simple message to the Free Gaza Movement and anyone hoping to break the siege: they and the Palestinians will be punished. Yet, it must be done, something must be said, this injustice cannot be allowed to stand in silence, whatever the price. And there is a huge price to pay -- that of not being able to go back.

As I was explaining the situation to someone on the phone, a sick, elderly Palestinian man fell to the ground unconscious. I approached as a state security officer began dragging the elderly man across the floor. I was intercepted by Said, the intelligence officer, who pointed his finger at me and said in a cruel and wicked tone, "I will make sure you will never get out of here." I countered, quoting the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, "all that you have done to our people is registered in notebooks." He replied in a vindictive tone, "Really? Who will hold us accountable?"

I watched as my International Solidarity Movement (ISM) colleague Jenny was dragged across the floor by security officers screaming, "Get off of me! Get off of me!" I watched her disappear behind a wall as I clung to a window and the officers came for me. I looked at each of the men in the eye, knowing I had to humanize them to humanize myself. I asked them, "You have a daughter my age? I am 21." There was no reply. I tried again, "Would you accept your daughter being treated this way? I am your daughter, and your daughter and your daughter." I was pulled away by my wrists and dragged along the dirty floor, and the man dragging me said, "You are lucky my shoe is not in your mouth."

At Rafah, I saw a voiceless Palestinian man in a wheelchair being pulled and shaken. I watched women begging on their knees, children and the elderly sitting on dirty floors. And all us were dragged by the Egyptian security officers and thrown out.

At Rafah I also saw laughter and love. A little girl on a bus asked her mother, "Can we gather a shekel from each to give to the Egyptians to pass through?" I watched as people shared bread and water, share laughter as well as pain and tears. Yes, we laughed. Laughter and love under the bombs, to laugh and love under racism, degradation, humiliation, by monsters clad in the uniforms of a brotherly Arab state.

Coming from Lebanon to Gaza initially seemed surreal. Larnaca, Cyprus was the checkpoint, and the sea was the road to Palestine. In the beginning, breaking the siege was all that came to mind. It was almost three years to the medieval, hermetic siege that the apartheid state of Israel had imposed on Gaza's million and a half residents. All I thought of then was: Israel, the occupation, the monster. But, the monster, as I later became aware, was not one but many, who were all devouring the souls of Palestinians in Gaza. The official Arab regimes were sharing the crimes that Israel was committing. These regimes, especially Egypt, are not complicit -- their participation is direct, clear, observable, noticeable, felt and lived directly, and therefore has transcended complicity into direct participation.

In Gaza, I have lived the "quintessential Palestinian experience." I have lived a nakba, a man-made disaster, a disease of hatred, racism to the bone. In Gaza, I have
lived under occupation, a brutal, savage blockade. The epitome of the Palestinian experience comes in what historian Rashid Khalidi says is lived "at a border, an airport, a checkpoint ... at any one of those modern barriers where identities are checked and verified." It is what the eminent Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani
described in Men in the Sun. It is Laila El-Haddad's description of how she and her children lived suspended, humiliated, and stranded in a Cairo airport waiting and wanting to return home to Gaza.

It is the experience of every Palestinian. I became a Gazan -- I am now a refugee, a prisoner. I am now, as El-Haddad explained, holding a passport "that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry ... to mark me, brand me, so that I am easily identified and cast aside without questions; it is convenient for those giving the orders. It is a system for the collective identification of those with no identification."

I came to stand with the suffering, besieged Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. I came to learn from their resistance, in all its forms, and to fight hand in hand with local activists in acts of non-violent civil resistance. After all, I came from a supposed "resisting Lebanon" and therefore, resistance was no stranger to me. I came to Gaza to confront the occupation and know it through a window other than that of the biased petrol-dollar media of our times. And I did.

I learned that the Arab regimes were Israel's best friends in the region, not out of love of the colonizer, but out of the intense hatred they hold for the Palestinians and their own people. Oh, Palestinians, you are on your own! Where has the cause of Jerusalem gone? It was certainly not in the eyes, hearts and minds of those intelligence agents and members of the security services based at the Rafah crossing, one of Gaza prison's gates. All I could find there was hate.

The psychological and physical torture Palestinians are subjected to at the Rafah crossing is a clear message from the Egyptian authorities. It is intended to frighten and punish the Palestinian people and all those who stand in solidarity with them. The Egyptian authorities at the crossing violated our basic human rights, a daily reality for Palestinians. The degrading and the humiliating manner in which we were treated also violated our rights as women.

During my time in Gaza, as in July 2006 in Lebanon, I endured a hellish assault and massacre designed to break a people but which once again only revealed the criminality of the apartheid regime and the complicity of the international community. Gaza is our South Africa, our Guernica. The Palestinian people exceed their unworthy leadership, and if there is a victory it is that of the people who endured, who drank tea above the rubble of their destroyed homes, who still stand up high, steadfastly against their uprooted olive trees, against occupation, betrayal, complicit silence, and neglect.

Natalie Abou Shakra is an activist from Lebanon and is affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement and Free Gaza Movement. She defied Israeli orders for Lebanese citizens not to go to Gaza and was able to get in with the Free Gaza movement's SS Dignity on the 20 December, 2008.

Copenhagen wheeze

Sometimes, PR folks just really, really fail to Get It. A prime example of this turned up in my email inbox today: a press release from the Danish tourist board promoting the country as a ecotourism destination during the Copenhagen climate change summit this autumn. As a sop to the environmental interests they're trying to tap into, the release's writers did suggest that:

"Those inspired by the Danes’ low-impact lifestyle can follow the ‘flight-free’ route by visiting the country by sea. DFDS Seaways (www.dfds.co.uk) offers a regular service of overnight departures between Harwich and Esbjerg, with prices starting from £222, based on two people and one car travelling one way with a sea view cabin."

Getting back to the Real World, however, they then followed it with:

"Alternatively, fly Norwegian airlines (www.norwegian.com), Ryanair (www.ryanair.com), bmi (www.flybmi.com or SAS Scandinavian Airlines (www.flysas.co.uk) to various Danish gateways from several UK airports and opt to offset your flight’s carbon emissions..."

Humans. What can you do.

Palestine as the Philippines...

A friend sent me this recently, with the following message:
"This map is, to my mind, the most effective work I've seen explaining just how - well - archipelago-ised the West Bank is, what an impossibility political and social entity it is forced to be. It's done in this dream like manner that makes the physical discontinuity of the areas clearer than ANYTHING I've seen OCHA or ICAHD or any other mapping folk achieve, because it's so simple."
It certainly shows the shocking extent to which Israel has reduced the West Bank to a multitude of tiny, discontinuous areas that could never form the basis of a viable two-state solution. It's from http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/270-palestines-island-paradise-now-with-a-word-from-its-creator/ I suppose the only thing missing is a load of armed forces stopping people from moving between some of the islands...

Another very useful website

Here's another in my very occasional series of links to Extremely Useful websites. In this case, one which allows you to convert any hideous .pub (evil Microsoft) files that annoying people might send you into nice easily-opened PDFs. A big hand for www.pdfonline.com!
I should of course be saying something about the fact that we now have an effing BNP MEP for the North-West - despite, actually, the BNP getting fewer votes than last time.
It's hard to actually work out what to say though, partly because I'm so angry and disgusted that the BNP have got in, and partly because I'm so furious with ego-driven cretins like No2EU, who unfortunately normally sensible people like Attila the Stockbroker were bigging up at the otherwise excellent Billy Bragg/David Rovics/ Attila/Alun Parry gig at the Picket in Liverpool a few weeks back.
23,000 people voted for No2EU. 5,000 votes was the gap in the NW between the Green Party and the BNP. Even Respect had the sense and decency to stand aside, recognising that the Greens were the best chance of keeping the BNP out. But no, a bunch of idiots had to split the Left vote. Half of them don't even seem to know what they were campaigning for - Marc found a bunch of them flypostering in Moss Side a couple of days before the election and tried to engage them on this, and just got a mouthful. Well, No2EU, I hope your little ego project was worth the hundreds of thousands of pounds Nick Griffin is going to be getting in funding over the next few years. Nice one lads.

Waiting for the results...

Well, the European election results come out this evening, which means we'll finally know if the North-West has subjected itself to the shame of electing a BNP MEP.
Whilst the Tories have been the biggest beneficiaries of disillusionment with New Labour (not sure quite why that sweep has been so comprehensive; it was Conservatives who had perpetrated some of the most laughable expenses gaffs, like duck islands and that prick Steen from Totnes chastising the proles because apparently we're all just jealous of his mansion), the BNP has picked up a few new county council seats in the likes of Lancashire and Leicestershire.
My dad, standing for the Lib Dems and subjecting himself to an even greater-then-usual kicking from the Tories in leafy Herts, also got an enhanced level of punishment from the Greens (good!) and the BNP (bad!).
My mum's comment on much of this, made while arguing with a Telegraph-reading uncle while on one her escapes from the depths of Croydon, was that anyone who is a grandparent (and I guess also a parent, aunt, uncle, brother or sister) should first and foremost be choosing their votes on the grounds of climate change policy. Which was hideously pertinent in the week that the Carteret Islands became the first to be systematically evacuated because of the effects of climate change. Something that remained barely commented on in the general media.
Meanwhile another contact, a fan of Friend Sharyn's Gaza blog, observed that she'd written to her UKIP MEP (now sacked) about the issue of Palestine/Israel/settler produce labelling and received a letter back from his assistant saying that she was clearly a terrorist sympathiser and that the correspondence was now closed. Now that's constituency relations for you!
And by way of an update to the last post I did here, the billboard agency which hosted the Israeli Tourist Agency ads which obliterate the West Bank and Gaza into a big glowing yellow Israel outline have bowed under the weight of letters to the ASA, themselves and the Underground and are taking them down. One small victory...
In the West Bank itself another young man has been shot dead in the peaceful protests against the Wall at Ni'lin, while the liberal media creams itself over Obama's Cairo speech. Here is an account of the young man's funeral, from Ma'an News Agency:

Clashes erupted as the funeral procession for the Ni’in man killed by Israeli forces Friday were prevented from reaching the burial grounds in the village on Saturday morning.
Hundreds of mourners including several Palestinian leaders, clergy and political activists, left the Ramallah hospital with Yosef A’qel Srur’s body and took to the streets to accompany the man, shot in the chest with a live bullet by Israeli soldiers, to his grave.
The procession chanted slogans affirming their belief in non-violent resistance and dedication to the struggle against the wall.
The slain man was a 37-year-old father of three young children. Three others were injured by live bullets at the event, and were taken to hospital for treatment.
When the funeral procession arrived to the entrance to the village, four Israeli military checkpoints were set up. Mourners were forced out of their vehicles and walked the rest of the way to the village, said Salah Al-Khawaja, coordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Ni’lin.
According to Al-Khawaja, Srur spent four years in an Israeli prison for his participation in the non-violent protests, and had been arrested several times and charged fines totaling over 1000 Israeli shekels (250 US dollars). During one home invasion, Israeli forces broke into Srur’s apartment and shot his brother in the eye. Though he was rushed to the hospital he lost the eye and is partially blind.
Srur participated in the rallies each week for years.

Chomsky delivers a more realistic analysis of Obama's speech here, while the irascible but excellent Robert Fisk comments on what exactly the POTUS got to see of the Middle East. I wonder where Fisk will be off to if, as seems horribly likely, the Independent becomes the first national casualty of the crisis of the newspapers busy killing off our local press. Friend Ruth bumped into an old colleague from Ethical Consumer the other day who now works on a Manchester local paper. She still has her job, but other people don't and she has to do their work too - with no extra pay.
I guess that's the market for you.

Eradicating Palestine

The Israeli Ministry of Tourism has been showing its true colours on a series of new adverts in London's Underground network. The advert, extolling the beauties of Israel's landscapes and its ancient heritage (all true, of course, just a matter of acknowledging the diversity of cultures that heritage derives from), also includes in glorious yellow technicolour a map of 'Israel.' As well as the 48 territories, this includes the illegally-occupied West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights, without even the dotted line demarcations of most conventional maps. Palestine has, in this version of the map, been totally eradicated - which I suppose is the wet dream of most of the Israeli state's propagandists.


The reality of the situation, and the agenda that this apparently innocuous little tourist advert is part of, is better illustrated by the various maps showing the swallowing up of Palestinian land by settlements. The best versions are often to be found at the website of Israeli human rights organisation BtSelem.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has a form letter of protest at these adverts - I tweaked mine slightly - to be sent to the ASA, Underground officials and the agency responsible for the advertising boards, at the following email addresses:
Advertising Standards Agency Email: new.complaints@asa.org.uk
CBS Outdoor Ltd Email: customer service manager, Richard Ashman, richard.ashman@cbsoutdoor.co.uk
Transport for London Email: enquiry@tube.tfl.gov.uk

DRAFT LETTER:

Dear …
I have noticed with concern a poster which is currently being displayed on London Underground’s advertising sites.
The poster has been produced by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism as part of an advertising campaign to attract visitors to Israel.
The map on the advertisement portrays Israel as an area which incorporates the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.
However, none of these areas are part of Israel, but instead have been subject to military occupation or blockade by Israel since 1967.
UN Resolution 242 calls on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, which are Palestinian territories, but Israel remains in violation of this resolution, and also maintains its illegal occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.
Israel has sealed off the Gaza Strip since 2005, making access virtually impossible, resulting in severe shortages of food, medicine and clean water, which has left the Strip’s 1.4 million Palestinians facing a humanitarian crisis. Any ‘tourists’ would be unable to visit the Gaza Strip, as Israel prevents even humanitarian aid workers and lawyers from entering.
In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel continues to build settlements in direct contravention of international law, taking land from the Palestinians to do so and demolishing their homes and farms in the process.
In addition, Israel is in the process of building the Apartheid Wall through the West Bank, which, when completed, will expropriate 50% of Palestinian land in the West Bank, depriving farmers and families of their livelihoods and water supply, and making movement for Palestinians almost impossible.
The Wall breaches numerous international agreements, including the Fourth Geneva Convention’s articles on the destruction of land and/or property (article 53) and on collective punishment (article 33).
The Israeli Ministry of Tourism’s assertion, through the map displayed on the poster, is insidious and wrong, and I urgently call on you to remove it from all its sites to avoid being complicit in this deliberate misinformation.
I look forward to your response.
Yours ...

European elections

Now there's a title to inspire, eh? But this year's euro-elections in the North West need to be taken very seriously indeed, in that there is a very real danger that the execrable Nick Griffin, ex-National Front member and now leader of the fascist BNP, will get in. Now, the BNP may be busy pretending to be a respectable party but they are still a bunch of vile little racists (not to mention their views on anyone else who isn't white, male and conforming to their narrow and basically fundamentalist views on society - I wouldn't fancy being a single mum under them, or a women looking for reproductive choices.)
It genuinely seems that the best bets to keep these bastards out are a) a good turnout overall, and b) a high level of votes for the Green Party. The latter argument is strong enough that Respect have, to their credit, stood aside and asked left-wing voters who would have supported them to vote Green instead. So here are a few pertinent links, such as a few apposite words from the chair of Manchester Green Party, the campaign site for Peter Cranie, Green candidate in the European elections and some links to Unite Against Fascism groups in the North-West. I did want to include a link to Manchester No Borders here but can't actually find anything from them on the subject...

Spawn of the Devil

Hahaha. Sometimes I really like the Daily Mirror, when it's not doing tabloid-celeb bollox, and the link I've just been sent sparks one of those times... with this rant against that vile travesty of the human race that is Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson's evangelical approach to macho, dangerous driving styles and general climate-change-inducing, animal-squishing, cyclist-damaging, community-dividing, health-wrecking, planet-raping behaviour is annoying enough, but when he turns himself into the wounded Messiah of a band of whinging half-wits who complain about 'attacks' on the put-upon 'British motorist' then it's hard to decide whether the correct response is to throw up or go out and strangle the first motorist who floors it to rush (dangerously through the bike lane) into the next traffic jam space.

Marguerite Dabaie, graphic artist

Having said lots of nice things about Marc Roberts and Polyp on this, blog, it's nice to feel moved to flag up a female political cartoonist. So this is a quick link to the wonderful Marguerite Dabaie, a Palestinian Christian female graphic artist whose book I am trying to buy when Paypal decides to co-operate...

Gaza benefit, Manchester, 6th May

Audio Uprising are doing a Gaza (Disasters Emergency Committee fund) benefit on 6th May at Club Academy in the Student Union, featuring a bunch of bands and musicians I've never heard of, being professionally old and boring, and a few I have, like Dom from the excellent Blood & Fire label and Caulbearers. 8pm-2am (surely that's well after bedtime!). Also visuals from Polyp, who is, let's face it, a bit of a genius even if I do have to have rows with him in the office ;-). And all for the measly suggested donation of 4 quid!

The life, death and funeral of Bassem Aburahma

Here's the Youtube video of the life, death and funeral of Bassem Aburahma, the latest victim of the new high-velocity tear gas canisters being used as anti-personnel weaponry by Israeli soldiers at the Bil'in protests against the Separation Wall and Israel's confiscation of Palestinian land:

Judge in misogynist cretin shocker

So, a London taxi driver who raped AT LEAST 12 women and possibly up to 500, having drugged them, has finally been sentenced to an indeterminate length of time 'with a minimum of 8 years.' EIGHT YEARS!!! You are having a fucking larf. Surely having been stuck in Croydon has addled the old fart of a sentencing judge's mind (I was born and raised in Croydon, I know the horrors whereof I speak). You can get more than that for fraud or nicking stuff, if it's valuable and belonged to someone posh. And, of course, the police dragged their feet over the whole thing for months, having arrested him in 2007 and let him go. But then of course the police are good at that kind of thing - just look at Peter Sutcliffe and how many women would be alive today if proper attention had been paid to him. So if they're so shite at catching rapists and murderers, what exactly is it the British police do when they're not beating up protesters and killing newspaper sellers? Enquiring (taxpayer) minds would like to know.

Auntie slides a bit further down the drain...

So, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's Middle East editor, has come in from some stick from the BBC Trust, the structure which took over from the Governors in the wake of various little spats with the Blair government.
Now, I'm fairly weary of saying that I don't believe that there is some global Zionist conspiracy to control the media, and that I think that Palestine solidarity activists who do subscribe to this view are generally being lazy, anti-semitic, or both. But what Zionist organisers are good at doing (and we're not, although we're probably getting better at it, and don't forget they've had more practice), is mobilising large numbers of people to contact organisations like the BBC and moan whenever Israel, its state and its activities aren't painted in the purest and most glorious of colours.
So Jeremy Bowen's reporting on Har Homa settlement (just outside Bethlehem, and a key part of Israel's expansion of what it classifies as 'Jerusalem' out into Palestinian West Bank land) and the anniversary of the 1967 war has been censured by the Trust in the wake of just such organised lobbying.
Har Homa is a particularly interesting case in the war of terminology and myth which Zionists are so good at. 'Official' accounts of the genesis of Har Homa settlement paint it as an unoccupied hill south of Jerusalem which was a logical building site for overspill Israeli population from the city. Anyone who's ever actually been there will know that it is very much part of the circle of hills within which Bethlehem and Beit Sahour sit. Jebel abu Ghnaim, the local name for the site, was, my Beit Sahour friends tell me, a favourite picnic site for Palestinian families on weekends, and a place where probably hundreds or thousands of local kids (including my friend S) have, over the centuries, roamed and explored.
And one of the reasons it was so free of habitation when that renowned peacemaker Shimon Peres signed the order to build 6,500 Israeli homes on it? It had been designated a 'green area' by the Israeli state, to be preserved for local ecological balance and biodiversity. But only, apparently, until the Israeli state wanted to move a population of 30-40,000 people onto it. And Bowen's crime in the eyes of the BBC Trust was, apparently, to point out that a number of governments and major international institutions consider such settlements to be illegal under international law.
I'm going to admit an interest here. I like Jeremy Bowen. In 2002, when we were under curfew and attack in Bethlehem during Israel's Operation Defensive Shield invasion of much of the West Bank, Bowen was one of many international journalists who rocked up a week or so in to report on the situation, particularly the siege in the Church of the Nativity. But he was also one of the most humane and inquisitive amongst them, genuinely interested in finding out what was going on around him rather than churning out the story and then heading for the bar. Most of the press were fairly sneery about the gangs of idealistic ISMers trying to do things like get food into the areas around the Church and Bethlehem city centre which were under 24/7 curfew for something like 6 weeks, without a break. But on one of the food runs we did, carrying UN food aid bags into the city from the warehouse where they'd been left, Bowen not only came with us (along with Jon Snow from Ch4 and some stray cameramen hoping to get a shot of some activist chicks getting shot at) but he even carried a big box of milk powder. We were bloody grateful, because all that food is pretty heavy and we had a longish walk through the backstreets, asking 'Jesh? Fi Jesh' of every bemused local resident who stuck their head out of a window to see what was going on. At a crossroads where we started to see the cars the Israeli army had been systematically blowing up Bowen finally handed me his case of milk powder, saying he's come far enough and apologising for not bringing it further - despite the fact that he was the only press person who brought anything at all.
So it pisses me off when the BBC Trust criticises his work, apparently for having the temerity to diverge from the BBC's usual newsgathering policy on Palestine and Israel, which is simply to interview Mark Regev, the smooth-talking and wholly evil Israeli government spokesman. Yes, there have been times when Bowen's coverage has irritated me for being a bit too 'balanced,' but largely I take this as a good sign, that he is actually being properly balanced and correcting my tendency towards a bias towards the human tragedy going on in Palestine. And these rulings from the corrupt little elitist cabal that is the BBC Trust just serve to demonstrate still further how far down the drain our national broadcaster is going.

More death in Bil'in

So, I did a quick post about Ian Tomlinson and the Edo Gaza 6 and then checked my email to find the report below. Not a lot to say about it really. Israeli soldiers murder peaceful protesters, the 'international community' ignores it and continues to facilitate human rights abuses and land grabs. Business as usual.

One killed, dozens injured at the Bil'in weekly protest

A Palestinian man was killed and dozens more injured on Friday during the weekly nonviolent protest in Bil'in village, near the central west Bank city of Ramallah.
Local sources told IMEMC that Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahmah, 30, died when soldiers shot him in the chest with a tear gas bomb.
The residents of Bil'in village marched towards the wall today after Friday prayers. The protest was joined by Israeli and international activists.
Protesters' held banners condemning Israel's ongoing policies and violence against civilians and demanding the release of the Palestinian political prisoners held by the Israeli army. The protest began in the center of the village then headed towards the Apartheid Wall which is being built on Bil'in land.
An Israeli army unit stationed behind the wall prevented the crowd from going through the gate and fired tear gas canisters and rubber-coated steel bullets to break up the crowd. In addition to the fatal wounding of Bassem, an international supporter was hit in the head and sustained moderate wounds from Israeli fire. Dozens were treated for gas inhalation.
Abdullah Abu Rahmah, from the local committee against the Wall and Settlements told IMEMC that the soldiers shot Bassem with a new type of gas bomb as he was imploring the soldiers to stop shooting as the protest a peaceful one and there were children present.
Abdullah Abu Rahmah added that Bassem will be buried on Saturday after the midday prayers.

Support the Gaza 6 and more police lies

So, today it's confirmed that Ian Tomlinson did not, in fact, die of a heart attack at the G20 as stated by the doctor who did the first post-mortem (who apparently has a long and glorious record as a police stooge.) He died of internal bleeding, and a policeman has been 'interviewed under caution' for manslaughter. History suggests that said copper will get off lightly or completely, but we can but hope. The British press have, after a brief frenzy of mea culpas, conveniently forgotten that until the video cam eto light at the Guardian, most of them were busy repeating Metropolitan Police press office lies about protesters preventing a sick man being helped by officers.
And in the meantime, here's a plea for support from the campaigners who smashed equipment at the Edo factory in Brightpon during the attacks on Gaza:

On Jan 17th, while Israeli bombs were still raining down on the people of Gaza, six people gained entry to EDO MBM/ITT, a factory in Brighton manufacturing military equipment being used by the Israeli air force, and smashed machinery and computers causing at least 300 000 pounds worth of damage and closing the factory for nearly a week.
The 6 people surrendered to the police when they arrived and have been charged with conspiracy to cause criminal damage along with three others arrested nearby. 2 people, Elijah Smith and Robert Alford, have been remanded in custody since January.
The trial of the Gaza 6 may last several months and hinge on whether the jury accepts that crimes were committed by Israel . The next hearing will be on May 8th. Details: smashedo [at] riseup.net or http://www.decommisioners.wordpress.com
Two people remain on remand, please write to them:
Elijah Smith VP7551, HMP Horfield, 19 Cambridge Road, Horfield, BS7 8PS
Robert Alford VP7552, HMP Lewes, 1 Brighton Rd, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 1E

Baby, baby it's a weird world

I'm sure there's something in Alice in Wonderland about the number of odd things that can happen in a morning. But I can't be bothered to look it up properly.
But, firstly we have an very interesting article about Somali 'pirates' from Johann Hari. Now, I have vague recollections of Mr Hari doing something helpful for me once, can't remember if it was to do with Palestine or environmental stuff, but I did for a bit have some time for him. Then he went all Cruise Missile Left, and then flip-flopped back away from Blairite spin on Iraq when it became apparent that no-one, even the Aaronovitches of this world, let alone any sane and decent human being, could carry on swallowing that line. But Hari has been asking some sensible questions about what actually goes on in Somalia - as in, dumping of nuclear waste in its waters, theft of all its fish stocks by massive Western industrial fishing boats - and points out that going in mob-handed with a bunch of UK, US etc etc etc naval vessels may not be the most useful response.
Secondly, Manchester Confidential's Property section has gone all crusading. Despite the name, Manchester Confidential is rarely confidential about anything more exciting than the menus of the latest overpriced trendy city centre restaurant. But one of its writers has clocked that some of the beautiful big old Victorian houses on Seymour Grove are being left empty - in one case boarded up but in another open to the world, no doubt in the hope that it will become derelict enough to knock down, as has happened with so many landmark Manchester buildings from the Hacienda to the old Bank building on Stretford Road in Hulme and Sunnyside House just up the road from the properties in question. And Property Confidential is proposing to Ask Some Questions about what the hell is going on here, and whether legal measures can be taken to make sure the buildings aren't left to decay and then knocked down to build yet more bloody flats. Perhaps some of Manchester's squatters should also be taking a look at the more accessible of the two houses, in a public-spirited kind of way...
And thirdly, there is a story from the International Middle East Media Centre about a toddler born in Damascus of Syrian parents who live in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. The kid is confined to his home under total house arrest for being an enemy national and must remain so until he is at least 2 years old... but then nothing the Israeli authorities do to any Arab, Palestinian or otherwise, surprises me now.

Nice things, for once

At the risk of spoiling my great track record of depressing posts, here are a couple of positive initiatives which made me smile.
The first is the Kufiyeh Project, an American initiative to promote kufiyehs generally (or at least, proper ones, not the overpriced 'anti-war scarves' sold without a trace of irony in Marks & Sparks and Urban Outfitters). It's been set up to sell the products of one of the few remaining factories in the West Bank producing kufiyehs, the Hirbawi workshop in Hebron, which Olive Co-op has been sourcing its kufiyehs from for some time. They make the lovely multicoloured ones as well as the traditional black & white.
The second is a little webpage by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre, which is simply a list of nicely-written, simple Palestinian recipes. A good resource since Sahtain, a lovely Palestinian cookbook which I have a copy of, has now gone out of print, according to the guys at the Educational Bookshop on Salah ed-Din Street. The JMCC page is great though, and I do particularly like the recipe for Shakshoukeh, which should apparently be served with 'warm Palestinian.' Yummm... ;-)

Insomnia

Yep, it's 1am and I'm meant to be sleeping, but instead I'm being grimly amused as the Metropolitan Police re-implodes with trying to cover its arse as another video of coppers smacking people around at the G20 comes to light. With the stories I've been hearing from friends at the Climate Camp in London there must be a bunch more footage out there. Anyway, the actual film is here:



and Marc Roberts' usual genius take on things is here:



The Judi of Marc's cartoons is, by the way, named after the amazing Judi Bari, an environmentalist, feminist and labour campaigner who survived being blown up in an attempted stitch-up by the FBI, only to die of breast cancer in 1997. But she's a supremely inspiring example of the way that people with clear sight and integrity draw together the many oppressions which threaten our world, seeing the connections between the way that capitalist and imperialist forces work, rather than selecting single issues and exposing themselves to the 'divide and conquer' strategy by which states manage dissent.
And speaking of amazing women activists, I just wanted to flag up Sharyn's powerful writings from Gaza again. It may not be in the headlines, but the Israeli army is still killing and maiming people in Gaza, and still imposing the blockade which systematically and deliberately destroys the health care system, economy, polity, education and social life of an entire people. Sharyn's writings capture with humour and compassion the horror of the situation in Gaza and the dogged determination of people who seek only to carry on living their lives and raising their families with a bit of dignity. So I'll leave you with a little one of her vignettes from the last few days:

J insisted on driving us back to the village house, with his two little daughters, in the rickety trailer of a tiny tractor, one of the few working pieces of machinery recent attacks have left him. I kept being convinced I was about to tumble out.
“I’m too old for this sort of thing,” I said.
“I only got in because he winked!” replied E.
“As the actress said to the bishop,” I muttered, clinging on.

We drank tea, fielded the usual plans to get us married off to the locals to keep us firmly in the country, and then left for our next appointment, determined also to find L some crutches, because she can’t stand on either leg alone. Initial enquiries suggest this is something else there is a shortage of, especially since the war. The only option might be to buy her a pair, if we can even find any.

Last few days, and back home

So, a final few days in Palestine and Israel after all the interviewing of Palestinian women workers from the settlements. Chaos, generally, as final few days tend to be.
A few little things that stand out:
- a stunningly repugnant front page of the Jerusalem Post (usually a pretty vile rag anyway), announcing that Israeli soldiers had worked hard to prevent civilian casualties in the overpopulated chaos that was Gaza during the invasion. Poor dears. I'm sure they bust blood vessels making that effort. The Israeli police spent all of about 2 seconds 'investigating' reports made by soldiers who served in Gaza of war crimes before declaring them 'hearsay';
- the truly appalling state of unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Naqab, shanty towns of ragged tents - a few of them the traditional camel and goat hair, but most of them made from plastic sheeting. And the horrid irony, pointed out by my friends L and U, who live down there, of Bedouin villages with no running water or electricity, sandwiched at just a few hundred yards' remove by a power station on one side and a water treatment plant on the other, both serving Israeli communities;
- the utter gutless half-witted rubbish being spouted by some god-awful journalist on the BBC World Service, trying to find ways to justify the British police apparently adding newspaper sellers on their way home to the list of people - Brazilian electricians, any black youth they fall over - who it's ok to murder. RIP Ian Tomlinson. The video which the Guardian managed to get hold of which reveals the extent of police lies - that they were pelted with missiles while trying to save him, when actually they basically killed him and then ignored him and impeded medical care - is here:



Yes, coming home has been less than cheerful (apart from being back with my wonderful husband, lovely friends and gorgeous cats), with police brutality and suppression of environmental and anti-capitalist protests topping the bill. But the amazing Marc Roberts has, as usual, managed to crank out a topical cartoon at light speed. For Arabic readers, some of his climate change work has also been translated for a Lebanese audience at al-Bia wal-Tanmia.

Jerusalem for maybe the last time

I stood this evening for a while at the top of the steps into Bab al Amud – Damascus Gate into the Old City of Jerusalem. This gate is at the heart of the crazy, energetic whirlpool that is old Arab Jerusalem, seething with stalls selling everything from shoes to green almonds, strawberries to designer knock-offs, crockery, tarty underwear and various weird household items of indeterminate use. For all its vice, violence, confusion and dirty underbelly (see this post), I love this place with a painful sensation like a hook in the belly.
The great pain this time is in knowing that I may never see East Jerusalem and the Old City like this again. I don't know when I'll be back, and with some of the plans Marc and I have for the next few years it could be four or five years, easily. And with Israel's Judaisation policies for Jerusalem – settlements in Palestinian East Jerusalem, toleration of the kind of psycho settlers who took over another house in the old city a couple of days ago and then place huge Israeli flags on them, and persecution of any Palestinian who they can possibly cook up an excuse to send off to the West Bank, I may never see the wonderful, energetic Jerusalem that I love again, and that is devastating to me.

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.


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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

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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.