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Tuesday, 02 October 2007 |
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'The right to exist'
- states or people? by Sonja Karkar CounterPunch
2 October 2007 It is a curious phrase this 'right to exist'. Israel wants the world to accept its 'right to exist' as a state, but it denies the indigenous Palestinians their right to exist as a people in their own land.
International relations only acknowledges the rights of people, not states. [1]
States exist because of the formal recognition afforded them by other states, and now that Israel is recognised as a state, it in fact exists.
It makes no sense to demand that a political party recognise Israel's 'right to exist', much less punish 4 million Palestinians because a majority voted the Hamas Party into government. Yet, these are the very words that are holding the Palestinians, particularly those in Gaza, to an impossible ransom. For the outside world, Israel's demand for the 'right to exist' seems a natural enough request and easy enough words to say. However, most people have no idea of the real import of those words for the Palestinians. For them to accept the 'right to exist', effectively means that they accept their own dispossession. That dispossession is still going on after 60 years and there are now some 6 million Palestinian refugees who are refused their right to return home or even a modicum of compensation. |
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Remembering Sabra And Shatila |
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Sunday, 16 September 2007 |
Sabra And Shatila
On massacres, atrocities and holocausts
by Sonja Karkar
September 16, 2007
Women for Palestine
The Massacre
It happened twenty-five years ago – 16 September 1982. A massacre so awful that people who know about it cannot forget it. The photos are gruesome reminders – charred, decapitated, indecently violated corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, still as foul to those who remember it as when they were recoiling from all those years ago. For the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour holocaust without mercy. It was deliberate, it was planned and it was overseen. But to this day, the killers have gone unpunished.
Sabra and Shatila – two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon – were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children - more specifically, Israel’s inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel’s bidding and the world’s inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence. There were international witnesses - doctors, nurses, journalists - who saw the macabre scenes and have tried to tell the world in vain ever since.
Each act was barbarous enough on its own to warrant fear and loathing. It was human savagery at its worst and Dr Ang Swee Chai was an eye witness as she worked with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society on the dying and the wounded amongst the dead. What she saw was so unimaginable that the atrocities committed need to be separated from each other to even begin comprehending the viciousness of the crimes. [1]
People tortured. Blackened bodies smelling of roasted flesh from the power shocks that had convulsed their bodies before their hearts gave out, the electric wires still tied around their lifeless limbs
People with gouged out eye sockets. Faces unrecognisable with the gaping holes that had plunged them into darkness before their lives were thankfully ended.
Women raped. Not once - but two, three, four times – horribly violated, their legs shamelessly ripped apart with not even the cover of clothing to preserve their dignity at the moment of death.
Children dynamited alive. So many body parts ripped from their tiny torsos, so hard to know to whom they belonged - just mounds of bloodied limbs amongst the tousled heads of children in pools of blood.
Families executed. Blood, blood and more blood sprayed on the walls of homes where whole families had been axed to death in a frenzy or lined up for a more orderly execution.
There were also journalists who were there in the aftermath and who had equally gruesome stories to tell, none of which made the sort of screaming front page headlines that should have caused lawmakers to demand immediate answers. What they saw led them to write shell-shocked accounts that have vanished now into the archives, but are no less disturbing now. These accounts too need to be individually absorbed, lest they be lumped together as just the collective dead rather than the systematic torture and killing of individual, innocent human beings.
Women gunned down while cooking in their kitchens. [2] The headless body of a baby in diapers lying next to two dead women. [3] An infant, its tiny legs streaked with blood, shot in the back by a single bullet. [4] Slaughtered babies, their bodies blackened as they decomposed, tossed into rubbish heaps together with Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey. [5] An old man castrated, with flies thick upon his torn intestines. [6] Children with their throats slashed. [7] Mounds of rotting corpses bloated in the heat - young boys all shot at point-blank range. [8]
And most numbing of all are the recollections of the survivors whose experiences were so shockingly traumatic that to recall them must have been painful beyond all imaginings. One survivor, Nohad Srour, 35 said:
“I was carrying my one year-old baby sister and she was yelling “Mama! Mama!” then suddenly nothing. I looked at her and her brain had fallen out of her head and down my arm. I looked at the man who shot us. I’ll never forget his face. Then I felt two bullets pierce my shoulder and finger. I fell. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I pretended to be dead.”[9]
The statistics of those killed vary, but even according to the Israeli military, the official count was 700 people killed while Israeli journalist, Amnon Kapeliouk put the figure at 3,500. [10] The Palestinian Red Crescent Society put the number killed at over 2,000.[11] Regardless of the numbers, they would not and could not mitigate what are clear crimes against humanity.
Fifteen years later, Robert Fisk, the journalist who had been one of the first on the scene, said:
“Had Palestinians massacred 2,000 Israelis 15 years ago, would anyone doubt that the world’s press and television would be remembering so terrible a deed this morning? Yet this week, not a single newspaper in the United States – or Britain for that matter – has even mentioned the anniversary of Sabra and Shatila.”[12]
Twenty-five years later it is no different. |
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Is Israel an apartheid state? |
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Wednesday, 05 September 2007 |
Perhaps you have heard of moves to declare Zionism a "racist" ideology or you have heard it said that Israel is an "apartheid state". On the face of it, this may seem ridiculous. Isn't Israel a democracy? For one thing, there is Israel's occupation of Palestine and its treatment of the Palestinians. That alone is enough to make Israel a particularly brutal colonial power. Visit my Palestine page to learn more about this. But that is not all. In Israel, citizenship and nationality are two different things. Both Jews and non-Jews may have Israeli citizenship, but nationality is based on race. There is a Jewish nationality and an Arab nationality. All citizens must register with their nationality. Then Israel sets legal rights based on nationality rather than just citizenship. Here are some articles that explain more about this situation. After you have read these, I hope you will begin to understand why words like "racism" and "apartheid" are used to describe Israel. 'Democratic' racism, by Jonathan Cook 'Democratic' racism, part 2, by Jonathan Cook 'Jews-Only' Law Sparks Firestorm, by Bradley Burston 'State lands' rule also used to expropriate West Bank territory, by Aluf Benn, Ha'Aretz 'Who is a Jew' Matters in Israel, by Sheldon L. Richman 41% of Israel's Jews favour segregation of Arabs, by Chris McGreal 70% of Israeli Jews oppose selling JNF lands to Arabs, by Amiram Barkat Arab spouses face Israeli legal purge, by Ben Lynfield Brothers in arms, by Chris McGreal Call for more rights for Arab minority in Israel, by Rory McCarthy Can you really not see?, by Amira Hass Carter: Israeli apartheid worse than South Africa, by BBC News | | Last Updated ( Thursday, 06 September 2007 15:54 ) |
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