Exploitpatriots.com

Scanning through a list of posts from a writers' group on the LinkedIn networking site (probably the only 'social networking' site I've ever found professionally useful, although SheWrites looks like it may be competition), I noticed the following post, and feeling particularly masochistic followed it up:

Patriotic Supporters
Read wonderful comments made by users of HirePatriots.com.
By Mark Baird

(LinkedIn is, of course, a US site and therefore most of the posts are American-focused, in case you were wondering which 'patriots' we're talking about here.)
HirePatriots.com is a website which uses social networking technology to find work for US military veterans, which is a pretty worthwhile effort. I fully acknowledge that there are many US squaddies who are racist scumbags who do appalling things in Iraq, Afghanistan etc - but there are also a lot of young men with feck all else in the way of job prospects who end up in hideous situations for which they have no political, emotional or other preparation. What is a bayonet? A weapon with a worker at both ends. Etc.
But what's interesting about this predictably jingoistic website is the bizarre perspective on who it's peddling these demobbed squaddies to, and what for. The site - especially the element of it being plugged by Mr Baird as worthy of people going to read, ie the effusive comments of HirePatriots.com hirers - show just how that wonderful Free Market that sundry Yank squaddies get sent off to fight and die for, also seems to entail paying them absolutely squat once they get home - and bragging about it.
Take the comments by Ron & Dee N, who've "had two Camp Pendleton marines working for us at our home for the last 5 weeks."

"If we could have had employees like these two men at our different businesses, we would have been thrilled. Our point is: We ARE THRILLED we these two service men. They show up on time. They speak perfect English. They are hard-working, they are CLEAN and they clean up after each work period. They are happy and appreciative of the opportunity! They gladly work for us for $8.00 an hour- doing everything. Weeding, planting, painting, staining, electrical work etc. They don’t blast rap music and they DON’T WASTE TIME. They are here to do a job-and that is what they do. They arrive on time- they do their job- and they leave. We don’t worry about things going missing- or being broken."

Anyone notice that rate of pay? Yep, $8 per hour. I checked that on the Financial Times currency converter today, and that works out at about £4.70 an hour - well below UK minimum wage. Last time I checked the US cost of living was not significantly below that of the UK, and no-one outside the British Tory Party thinks that the minimum wage actually constitutes a living wage.
HirePatriots.com says that its primary role is "honoring our veterans for their valiant service." Maybe there is some massive UK-US cultural gap I'm missing here. Or maybe not.

My First Book Cover and Openspace launches its documentary films

Nearly a month since I posted anything on here, so this is just a quick one to keep my hand in until I come back up for air after finishing an edition of Enterprising, the social enterprise magazine for Greater Manchester and a product report on Toys for the Christmas edition Ethical Consumer magazine.
The main thing I've been up to over recent months is helping Sharyn to edit her amazing blogs from Gaza into a book for Pluto Press. We now have a draft of the cover, which I got very excited about even if it feels very wrong that I should be deriving excitement from a book about something so grim. But I guess that's the bind of writing about this kind of thing... anyway, this image is a draft of the cover; the real one will have my name in smaller letters (at my request).
Secondly I need to give a little plug to the co-operative documentation film launch at my home-from-home at Openspace this evening. The press release is below, including links to Damien Mahoney's films...

Openspace launches Co-operative documentation film series

This evening, Wednesday 9th September, Openspace workspace co-operative, based in Hulme, Manchester, will launch the series of five short films by Damien Mahoney which document the founding and development of this successful social enterprise.

The films will be showcased at an event at Openspace this evening, to an invited audience of social and creative entrepreneurs and co-operators. Featuring in-depth interviews with founding and early members of the co-operative including eco web specialists Finn Lewis and Luke Geaney, social entrepreneur Jonathan Atkinson, gender consultant Hannah Berry and cartoonist Paul 'Polyp' Fitzgerald, the films will be introduced by Openspace's newest member, illustrator Ben Tallon.

Openspace's model, which provides affordable co-operatively managed workspace for ethical and creative freelancers and small businesses and freelancers, has bucked recessionary trends and attracted a full complement of tenants. A grant from the Co-operative Fund is due to be invested in refurbishment work on Openspace's offices, which will include a major extension.

Notes:

Last-minute requests to attend the launch should be made to Jonathan Atkinson at jonathan [at] lowwintersun.info or to the Openspace office on 0161 209 9930. Space is limited so please do get in touch before coming. Directions can be found at: http://www.openspace.coop/location

Openspace is a co-operative co-working project, offering cheap, flexible office space in a creative, friendly atmosphere. “We are all freelancers and small businesses who were sick of working out of our bedrooms and spare rooms. We created an office where we could work, meet clients and be around other nice people. Because we run the space ourselves we get cheap rent and to be our own landlord. We work for good people doing creative community or environmental work.” Openspace is also part of the second-tier Work For Change co-operative, http://www.work.change.coop/. More information on Openspace can be found at http://www.openspace.coop/

The full range of Damien Mahoney's videos documenting the vision and processes behind the establishment of Openspace can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/user/OpenSpaceCoop

Openspace Co-operative members currently include:
Ben and Ink
Ecobee and Ecohost Co-ops
Entreprenurses
The GAP Unit
lowwintersun
Polyp
Sarah Irving
Streamengine

Non-co-operative-member tenants include:
Columbidae Conservation
Helen Clifton – freelance journalist
Pow Wow Eco Arts
Proper Job Theatre Company

Politics of food on a Tuesday morning

Tuesday is the morning when I often get woken up at about 6.30 by the sound of the delightful Alan from Dig dropping off the weekly organic vegbox on our doorstep. Since I moved out veg delivery over from another Manchester box scheme, which shall remain nameless, this has been a genuinely exciting event more – although maybe that just says I need to get out more.
In this week's box, we had:
- courgettes from Glebelands, a market garden in Sale which is, I believe, the closest producer of commercial veg to central Manchester;
- romanesco (those mad trippy-looking green cauliflowers), new potatoes (lovely purple ones), tomatoes, broccoli and green chilis from Dunham Massey (in Cheshire, not far from Altrincham);
- French beans with an 'L' mark which means that come from within 50 miles of Manchester;
- apples from Herefordshire;
- some amazing rich purpley-red carrots from Lincolnshire
- beautiful black plums from France
- and, the environmental baddy – but shipped not flown – bananas from Ecador.

Before it just looks like I'm going on some kind of self-indulgent Nigella-style riff about the glories of food, I want to stress that while obviously the object of this lovely box of food is keeping OA and me fed, there are also some major politics going on here.
Firstly, of course, there is the ethical quagmire that is food sourcing, and the need to reduce our carbon footprints versus the necessity of supporting majority world farmers, especially those producing under fair trade conditions.
There is also the issue of the shameful amount of food we waste in this country – an estimated 1/3 of that which we buy – and the amount of land, water, energy, agrochemicals, transport and packaging that is taken up before we even get our hands on that food to leave it in the fridge too long and end up binning it. I find these figures completely shocking because I was brought up with the influence of my grandfather, who had a terrifically poor upbringing in York before WWI and was so obsessive about not wasting food that he once downed a cup of Dettol mix my mum had left on the counter after cleaning off my grazed knee – he'd thought it was milk. But luckily for me, my mum taught me to cook – and I enjoyed and was fascinated by it – so I am confident and happy with food in a way that people who've spent their lives surrounded by ready meals just can't be. And that says a lot about how our society should be addressing cooking and our general relationship with food in school and in supporting families.
The other set of politics that came into my food decision making and led me to Dig are also – quelle surprise – those of the Middle East. I'd already become slightly sceptical of my previous vegbox suppliers when they switched their tofu brand from Clear Spring, a fairly small ethical company, at least last time I checked their credentials, to Cauldron, which is owned by Premier, one of the biggest processed food companies in the UK.
But the final straw was when a former colleague from Ethical Consumer mentioned in passing that her vegbox from the same company had included Tivall sausages. She'd done exactly what I always did, which was just sent an email in requesting 'veggie sausages' without specifying a brand, but assuming it would be the Taifan or organic Cauldron ones usually supplied. But, tracing back from the apologetic email I got from the company when I wrote to tell them they were losing a regular customer, they seem to have a 'special dietary request' from another customer for which they'd sourced Tivall sausages, and then without checking the company's ethics decided for ease to switch more supply over to these.
My objections to Tivall are two-fold. The brand is owned by Osem Industries, an Israeli company which is majority owned by Nestle – the subject of the longest-running consumer boycott in the world over its deeply unethical practices in marketing breast milk substitutes, as well as a despoiler of ecosystems through its bottled water activities in Brazil.
Osem is also a company group which includes a firm in Bet Shean, a town in the Galilee, just north of the string of illegal Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley which grow large quantities of fresh produce for export to Europe, and which use Palestinian labour working under appalling conditions and with risible pay. This company was set up – according to Osem's website – to market the produce from these settlements.
So not only was I fairly disgusted with my original vegbox scheme for selling this stuff, but it also led me to question my trust in the 'UK-only' vegbox which I got from them, which I knew from the fine print was sometimes, in the toughest seasons, topped up with veg from outside the UK – but where?
So I did a bit of a ring-round some other schemes, and found Dig, who very specifically said they know their stuff on the ethics of Israeli produce and don't buy it, and who have good policies on where else they'll source their produce from.
And they also do amazing Cheshire cheese which is so concentrated it's almost like Parmesan – from Leagram's, the nearest organic cheese producer to Manchester, based in Chipping, near Preston. Yummm...

Mule in Guardian plug shocker

Nice one to the Mule newspaper - not just for its shiny new website, but particularly to Andys Bowman and Lockhart for being listed on the Guardian's Liberty Central list of recommended reading on civil libs and human rights, for their article on the lack of transparency in local government.

How the hell did I get here?

I spent a very strange Monday evening this week burning up my phone bill on a call to a Syrian mobile phone number.
On the other end of the line with Khalil Maqdesi, head of the English language section of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
I was interviewing Mr Maqdesi for a number of purposes. Partly for the biography of aeroplane hijacker Leila Khaled which I'm writing for Pluto Press and which – heh heh heh – is due finished in about 8 weeks. And partly for some prospective articles for Electronic Intifada on the Palestinian Left and where exactly it's at nowadays...
Once upon a time, it wasn't Hamas that made people in the West think of Palestinian terrorism, it was the PFLP and Fatah. Israel and the USA – as with the mujahideen in Afghanistan – tolerated, even encouraged, the growth of the Islamic movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad because they thought they would break the strength of the Left, which in the Cold War days they feared immeasurably more.
The PFLP is still firmly on the EU's list of Banned Terror Organisations. But its strength in this post-Soviet era is massively diminished, and like left-wing parties and organisations the world over it's looking for ways to be seen as relevant, especially by younger generations. I'm sure there are people who will see my biog of Leila as part of that attempt. I think she's really interesting, so I'll risk it.
I have to admit, despite a lurking fear of the potential repercussions (beyond the financial) of spending an hour and a quarter chatting away to a PFLP official, to having rather enjoyed it. There's something about a voice which drops in 'yanni' when it can't find a word, and punctuates statements with the sound of a cigarette being lit and drawn heavily on, that takes me right back to the West Bank, and I love and miss it. He was a quick, knowledgeable interviewee (it's his job, after all) and he had a cracking sense of humour. The political content of the interview I'll save for the articles and book, at this point I'm just musing on it.
I recently finished re-reading for the umpteenth time one of my Sara Paretsky VI Warshawski novels. It would be wrong to call them candyfloss for the brain – more the sort of chocolate you tell yourself is Good Quality and Probably Has Antioxidants In It – detective novels with some decent feminist leftie politics to make the car chases seem less dumb.
In this one (Fire Sale, also with lots of political undercurrents about the exploitation of unauthorised immigrants in the USA) the feisty female journo, veteran of warzones, is a gorgeous Prada-wearing shagmonster who nearly gets herself killed (again) in the passionate search for The Story and the thrills.
Now I'm a female journo (of sorts) and I've done a certain amount of warzoning, but let's face it – I'd look ever so silly in Prada, am tediously monogamous, have very little in the way of physical courage and have never properly had my moral courage tested, that I can really think of. While I can muster a certain amount of enthusiasm for fine wine or good whisky I'm generally much happier with A Nice Cup of Tea. As the lovely David Mitchell said on the radio the other week, I may have been born with tweed on the inside... I went to uni to study archaeology, for heaven's sake, and for reasons more to do with labelling mediaeval potsherds and correct use of a theodolite than Indiana Jones. I suppose I have a vague attachment to the journalistic pursuit of The Truth but I think most of the time I'm just kind of curious about stuff...
Which, to bring me back to my original subject, makes me wonder how the hell I ended up happily chatting to PFLP guy, wondering what little notes might be accumulating on some governmental computer somewhere, on Monday evening?

Observer Woman

Makes me spit...
This is actually the title of a very funny blog which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have been updated since 2007. It catalogues some of the particularly nauseating drivel perpetrated by that smug, vacuous waste of ink, the Observer Woman supplement.
Even my mum, who can still tolerate the Guardian, thinks Observer Woman is terrible.
And then today (hence a blog post about blogs which haven't been live for 2 years), OA sent me a link to another highly entertaining piece taking apart a particularly dreadful sounding Observer Woman article, in which some especially self-satisfied Londonista hack manages, with no apparent irony, to include herself in an article about Beautiful People. Hannah Betts. You can't fucking believe some people.
My personal brush with Observer Woman was pitching an interview piece about a fairly major woman writer to them. I was expecting to get knocked back, but this was in the days when I thought I wanted to be published in a broadsheet and hadn't realised that they pay late, pay badly, and despite the kudos are just as much tomorrow's litter tray liner as any other publication. What I wasn't expecting was that their response to the idea - the interviewee in question wasn't just a fairly significant player in late 60s/early 70s feminism and a reasonbly big name in various literary genres, but also had interesting things to say about issues like Jewish perspective on Palestine and Israel - was 'we've got a piece on feminism coming out in a couple of months.'
So, the position of the women's supplement for what purports to be Britain's main centre-left Sunday paper is that 'feminism' - defined as anyone vaguely feminist, or just not about clothes, makeup, cooking or, of course 'beautiful people' - is something to be covered, oooh, about twice a year. I knew there was a reason I can't even bear to read the Observer, let alone hand over cold hard cash for it.

Domestic green-ness

OK, this is probably all terribly middle-class and boring, but in the last few days I've had an interesting (to me, anyway) insight into barriers to taking steps towards more sustainable homes.
There is currently a disturbing amount of water coming through the (probably shoddily built, ageing) flat roof of our bathroom. The bitumen roofing is on its last legs, probably not helped by being pecked at by the evil bloody magpies which make me want to own an air rifle. And to be honest, the dripping has been getting steadily worse for quite some time, which just goes to show that Denial is not a good home management technique.
But anyway, having gritted my teeth and got some quotes, OA and I decided that we'd have to fork out to have the roof repaired, obviously. But finding that it was going to cost a lot less than we thought, we figured we'd also be good little green pioneers in the non-recycling zone that is Moss Side (though I bet our street's collective carbon footprint is about the same as one three-flying-holidays-a-year-recycling-every-week-Chorltonite), and have a green roof installed at the same time as the repairs.
It all looked like a fairly easy option - it would all be done in one go, the price would be about doubled but still come in at less than I feared the repairs alone would, and I did some copywriting for Natural Economy Northwest last year on the benefits of green roofs in terms of rainwater runoff, insulation and especially biodiversity, so it was something I was really keen on.
Then I happened to do a little extra websurfing, just to check some details, and realised that although having it put in place will mean very little for the overall height of our extension and will have lots of benefits, I would have to:
a) fork out a good 10-15% extra on the price of the ENTIRE project (not just the green roof bit) in building notice or building regulations applications, and
b) apply for planning permission - and when I saw that horror I didn't even get as far as checking out what the fee structure might be.
So, there you go, Manchester City Council and your Green Action Plan process - a nice concrete action you can take to encourage a measure that financially is within the reach of a fair number of householders (hell, I discovered the other day that I'm in the bottom 10% earning bracket nationwide) and isn't just good for the environment but quite simply makes places look nicer. Building regs and planning waivers. Not rocket science.

Reporting 'reality'

I have an interesting contrast in my head at the moment, between the attitudes of two women, both brave in their own way, to what kind of information it's important to report about world events.
On the one hand, we have the Kate Adie autobiography I'm reading. I have a certain amount of respect for Adie, for some of the places she's been risks she's taken and professional strides she's made in a pretty male-dominated environment. She's got some fairly odd views, particularly on feminism, but it's an account of an incident during her time reporting for the BBC in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s that interests me right now:

“I went into the hall and looked through into the front room. A small boy, seven or eight perhaps, was standing by the fireplace. 'Me Daddy,' he said to me immediately, 'me Daddy won't get up.' Under the Christmas tree was a man's body, awkwardly splayed.
...
You wonder what good reporting does, being at these events, a spectator, unable even to extend a reassuring arm because you feel such as intruder.
You go back to the office, with some pictures of a terraced house with a tiny hole in the front-room window made by a motorbike passenger's bullet, and type out a little list of facts: the only Protestant family who'd chosen to remain, the wife out working her nurse's night-shift, the name of the dead man.
You omit the Christmas tree and the little boy's words.”
[The Kindness of Strangers, Kate Adie, Hodder Headline 2002]

In complete contrast to this, at the moment I have the privilege of helping to edit my friend Sharyn's book for Pluto press, based on her writings from Gaza during the Israeli airstrikes and invasion of December and January just past and the months afterwards.
Working on her stuff is on one level a bloody nightmare, because it's so powerfully written and so desperately upsetting and trying to edit on-screen when your eyes keep tearing up is a right pain, and on another uplifting because of the strength and uprightness of spirit that just shines through from the people she writes about.
It rather makes me feel sorry for Kate Adie; she firmly asserts a good old-fashioned solid positivist idea of journalism, that there is A Truth somewhere which just presenting The Facts will somehow reveal. And as the incident with the little boy in Belfast seems to me to show, that reduces the news she devotedly puts (put) out on the BBC to list of numbers and the doings of the People Who Matter.
Adie also, at another point in the book, debates the extent to which journalists can and should allow what they feel about a situation to come through into what they report, and claims that when a journalist - at least a TV one - allows some sentiment to show, it's because they've been specifically given 'permission' to do so, because it suits the situation. The increasing number of such moments is, you feel, not something she sees as a positive development.
Obviously, if you are reporting news then there has to be some effort at fairness - at representing different sides of a story or versions of an event. But I've given up believing that it is possible for anyone to report anything truly 'neutrally.' The moment you decide what aspects of a story are or are not worth reporting, or whose quotes are or are not more reliable, you've taken a position. I'm not taking a completely relativist position, that anyone's views carry equal weight or are equally reliable, there will always be those with more knowledge or experience of a given situation, but once you start choosing between those who have any decently reportable level of information or opinion, you've taken a stance.
And I can't help thinking that 99% of the supposedly important news from those People Who Matter actually matters rather little – that another defunct peace plan or another empty set of climate change commitments that everyone involved knows will never by implemented or acted on – is actually pretty meaningless against something which actually impacts profoundly on the lives of a group of people – not just in terms of the depth of their immediate grief, but also of the decisions they will make in the future.
Those agreements and treaties made by governments and so on may provide the framework within which other events may occur, but if it wasn't for the pain and rage, or the dignity and mercy and compassion, of the ordinary people under the boot-heels of the Matterers then those agreement and treaties would mean nothing. You can't understand the pieces of paper without the blood and shrapnel and tears, and you can't implement it, whatever it says, without fear or hate or loyalty or belief that makes people kill and be killed. In the end, a string of mouldering official documents in some archive (as reported by Kate Adie) will mean very little if someone (like Sharyn) hasn't recorded the grief and anger of the little boy – in Belfast, or in Gaza City – that will drive the next turn of the wheel.

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.