40 years of occupation

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Six Days War and thus the fortieth anniversay of the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

At the time General de Gaulle told a press conference that Israel ‘is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions — and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called “terrorism”‘.

And as Amnesty International reports in Enduring Occupation reports this is the way it has played out with the added twist of the occupier implementing a series of, ’so-called “temporary” measures which appear, in fact, to be intended to bring about long-term demographic changes. They have had the effect of establishing or increasing the Israeli presence and appropriation of land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, while at the same time reducing or removing the presence of Palestinians in these areas.’  Let’s call a spade a spade — colonisation and ethnic cleansing. But unlike Saddam’s Iraq, Israel acts with impunity in its defiance of both international law and UN resolutions even despite its attack on the USS Liberty and assassinations in European cities.

The response has been as de Gaulle as predicted with a desperate people responding with increasingly desperate measures: when women in labour hemorrhage to death in ambulances refused passage to hospital, just how do the occupiers expect their husbands, brothers, sons and sisters to respond? This is not an endorsement of their tactics or of their politics; it is a statement of the bloody obvious: as Tariq Ali said of Iraq ‘an ugly occupation does not lead to a beautiful resistance’. One wonders to what measures the French Resistance would have resorted to by 1979 if the Nazi occupation had still been continuing then. 

realpolitik again

Well I guess that we all knew that George Bush had little, if any, commitment to a Israeli—Palestinian peace process in any shape or form. But it is still possible to be surprised at the sheer blatancy of the admissission by US Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, who holds the Israeli—Palestinian portfolio in the White House, that the talks in which the US has engaged are sometimes nothing more than ‘process for the sake of process’ to keep the EU off George Bush’s back. That he made the admission to a group of Jewish Republicans is probably indicative of the true target of American foreign policy on the issue. (source: Haaretz)

Day of the Political Prisoner

10,000 Palestinians, including almost 400 children and 120 women, are currently imprisoned by Israel; 3,500 Palestinians, including forty-one elected members of the Palestinian Legislative Council have been imprisoned Hamas captured Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier in June 2006. It is a sobering thought that one in five Palestinians have been imprisoned at some point by Israel throughout the 40 years of Israeli occupation.

Today Palestinians commemorate the Day of the Political Prisoner.

that ‘a’ word again

Darn it. Just went the Israeli propagandists thought they’d swept up after one embarrassing reference to apartheid up pops another.

John Dugard, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told the UN Human Rights Council that restrictions on movement and separate residential areas gave a sense of ‘deja vu’ to anyone with experience of apartheid, noting that apartheid was ‘contrary to international law’. He said:

Of course there are similarities between the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territory] and apartheid South Africa… Settlers, largely unrestrained by the Israel Defence Forces, subject many Palestinians to a reign of terror — particularly in Hebron

There are now some 500,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, territories seized by Israel during the 1967 war, in contravention of international law. (source: al-Jazeera)

The Lost Tomb of Jesus

Oh gosh, is it the silly season already?

James Cameron’s latest work (for the Discovery Channel) apparently argues that Jesus had a son named Judah and was buried alongside his wife, Mary Magdalene; and he has the ossuary to prove it. Now, I’ve got no particular axe to grind on this issue; this version of the story seems at least as plausible as either the ‘official’ or the gnostic versions — but the issue is essentially unknowable. 

All we ‘know’ of Jesus from independent, and roughly contemporary, sources comes down to one sentence in the writings of Flavius Josephus (Ananus, the High Priest ‘assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, [who was called Christ,] whose name was James’) where the reference to Jesus as ‘called Christ’ may be a later interpolation. There is, of course, a longer reference to Jesus elsewhere in Josepheus, but that so-called Testimonium Flavianum ’seems to suffer from repeated interpolations’; there is no consensus on which portions are corrupt, or to what degree, although most scholars would probably accept that there was some reference to the execution of a religious leader, teacher or activist called Jesus.

Anyway, back to that ossuary. The bit that intrigued me was the reference to DNA evidence. Sounds good, I mean they use that in courts. But what can it prove in this case? Well unless The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail is true and they’ve got a genuine descendant to prove a family connection, then all it can show is that they’ve got a family group; now, that would be a surprising discovery in a family grave. 

So all we’ve got is some possibly-authentic names carved on some probably-authentic ossuaries. In themselves, they can not prove, nor disprove, any version of the story; no more than would ’Horsa’ carved on a stone found near Maidstone prove that stone to be Bede’s stone, never mind bear the burden of proof for the adventus Saxonum.

‘a mistake’

Shimon Peres, Israel’s deputy prime minister, has spoken to al-Jazeera about Israel’s use of cluster bombs in Lebanon : ‘To be short and clear, we committed a mistake, regrettably.’

Some mistake: around one million cluster bomblets according to UN estimates. So far, only 19,000 cluster bombs have been cleared; twenty-seven people have died and more than 140 have been wounded by them since the end of the war; tens of thousands of refugees are unable to return to their homes because of them.

Not only that, but the Isrealis appear to have violated usage agreements with the USA and Peres admitted that they were used ‘apparently … without the knowledge even of the chief-of-staff’.

For some reason the phrase ‘out of control’ springs to mind. (source: al-Jazeera)