Madison-Rafah Journal

Reuters, Jun 15, 2008

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday it was "extremely important" Israel allow three Palestinians to leave the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to take up prestigious U.S. fellowships.

Earlier this year the U.S. government was embarrassed when it became public it had withdrawn Fulbright fellowships for seven Gaza students because Israel had not granted them exit permits from the blockaded territory.

Israel tightened its cordon of the Gaza Strip after the Hamas Islamist group took control there nearly a year ago. Israel gives few Palestinians, other than some who are gravely ill, permission to leave.

Israel has also tightened rules for Palestinian staff of the United Nations who travel in and out of the occupied West Bank, internal U.N. emails and aid workers say.

After media reports about the students' case, the United States restored the fellowships and formally asked Israel to allow them to leave Gaza.

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Wednesday, June 11 the annual Caterpiller shareholder meeting will be held in Chicago. The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is calling for two things:

Details on both of these options, including a link to send a letter, are below.

Thanks,
Barb O.

Boycott & Divestment  »  Caterpillar Campaign  »  CAT Campaign  »

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This past weekend, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation began a month-long advertising campaign in New York City to raise awareness about the 60th anniversary of the Nakba.

Over the course of the next month, more than 1,000 of these posters will be displayed on the streets of Manhattan, educating New Yorkers about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

Mehdi Lebouachera, AFP, May 28, 2008

Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu on Wednesday plunged into the harsh reality of the conflict in Gaza where a tearful Palestinian family recounted losing loved ones in an Israeli attack and the ruling Hamas movement expounded its hardline stance.

The South African cleric, heading a team of UN human rights observers, listened to members of the Assamna family tell of a 2006 Israeli shelling of their village that killed 19 civilians, including eight children, while they were sleeping.

On the top floor of the Assamna's bombed home, the glass in the windows is gone and there is a hole in the ceiling and the blue sky can been seen through the rusted iron frame of the house.

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Posted by guevaragz on YouTube, January 01, 2007

This clip is taken from the film The Frontiers Of Dreams and Fears by Mai Masri. It's about refugees in Lebanon meeting with their families and relatives from occupied Palestine after the liberation of the South in Lebanon. They are meeting at the border where the fences are created by the Israelis between Lebanon and Palestine.

I can't talk about why and what this movie is about. You see for yourself and judge how shattered the families are, and how it feels to see someone you love on the other side and you can't even hug them, while you know that none of you had done anything to deserve such a treatment except that you're Palestinian.

Sorry for the delay between audio and video, but it's the only version I have.

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Palestinian Center for Human Rights, 15 May 2008

“I am not sure what year I was born. But it was around 78 years ago, in Palestine.” Handuma Rashid Najja Wishah sits on the patio overlooking her large garden, recalling the turbulent story of her long life. “I am a Palestinian from the village of Beit Affa” she says, tucking her long white scarf under her chin. “It was a beautiful village and we had a good life there. There was a small Jewish settlement nearby, called Negba, and we had a good relationship with the Jews. Whenever we had weddings, we would invite them to come and celebrate, and we women all used to dance dabka (Palestinian traditional dance) together. The muktar (or chief) of the settlement, was called Michael. He used to arrive at the weddings with a gift, like a goat, and we would cook it and share the meat between us.”

Beit Affa was a village of around 500 people, in southern Palestine, 29 kilometers north east of the Gaza Strip. Most of the villagers were farmers, but even those who did not solely earn their living from farming had, says Handuma, “an intimate relationship with the land.” Like many of the local women, Handuma married young and stayed in her village. But in 1948, after the end of the British Mandate in Palestine and the declaration of the new State of Israel on Palestinian land, mass violence erupted. “The Zionists refused the division of the land into two states, and the massacres started” she says. “The first massacre was in Deir Yasin, where they slaughtered more than a hundred people.” The Deir Yasin villagers were killed by the notorious Zionist Lehi and Etsel gangs, which had originally been part of the 50,000 strong Haganah militia (which later became the core of the Israeli Defence Force, or IDF). These heavily armed gangs of Zionists were intent on driving Palestinians from their homes en masse. After the Deir Yasin massacre, they targeted villages across Palestine, threatening the Palestinians that if they did not leave their homes immediately they would be killed like the people of Deir Yasin.

“It was a terrible time. The Zionists killed women and children, young and old. The Haganah would slit women’s throats. We were all terrified.” Handuma and her family, which included her eighteen month old son, Ibrahim, stayed at home, waiting. She recalls the Jordanian and Egyptian armies arriving at the border of nearby Ashdod city, and asking local Palestinians to volunteer to leave their homes, reassuring them they would be able to return within the week. “My family refused to leave our village. It was the wheat harvest and we had just stored our wheat. With the Egyptian and Jordanian troops nearby we hoped we would be safe.”

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Expressions of Nakba is an international competition and exhibition to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba: the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948. The competition strives to present the extraordinary narrative of a dispossessed people through a diverse range of expressions that interpret the collective identity, historic struggle, and emotional experience of the Nakba for Palestinians.

This online gallery showcases the wining entries from the competition in addition to a wonderful range of selections in the form of visual arts, poetry, essays, music, video and digital media.

–Sponsored by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation

No one wishes to hear the Palestinian story. Their history has been written by the victors: Israel has thus succeeded in blotting out its “original sin,” as the French author Dominique Vidal referred to the situation. Were it not for the courageous voices of Israeli “new historians” like Ilan Pappé, the world would not have come to admit that a people had been expelled from their land in a comprehensive ethnic cleansing operation, given the name “Plan D” by Israelis.

ELIAS KHOURY, The New York Times, May 18, 2008

IN 1948, during the war known to the Israelis as the war of independence, the historian Constantine K. Zurayk wrote the book “Ma’na al-Nakba,” later translated as “The Meaning of the Disaster.” The title struck a resounding chord, and nakba (catastrophe) became the term Palestinians used for the cataclysm that befell them that year.

I always considered the word “catastrophe” inappropriate. It rendered the perpetrator anonymous, and it exempted the vanquished from bearing any responsibility for their defeat. Like many members of my generation, born around the time of the war, I tended to place the blame for our defeat on the traditional Palestinian leadership under the sway of the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Arab regimes of the day.

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