altered billboard in Ramallah from "Taste The Occupation"

A recent action in Ramallah from "Taste The Occupation" which is a campaign against Israeli products and in particular the Shtraws Ice cream (which is Israeli) publicity campaign in Palestine. Shtraws billboards are all over Ramallah.....

الله يرحم شاعرنا الكبير محمود درويش

this was one of my favorite poems

Hasan Hourani

a moment....a breath...for Hasan


This post is for my friend Hasan who left us 5 years ago today....

I wrote this in August of 2003:

I see Hasan everywhere..in the streets of Ramallah and New York, on the subway, in Ziryab and in Union Square, in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. Whenever I think of Hasan I see him laughing and happy. I was overjoyed when Hasan told me he was coming to New York. I couldn't wait.

Hasan arrived in New York in the spring of 2001 full of energy, big ideas and big plans. He charmed and amazed everyone around him with his joy of life, his free spirit and his dreams. I loved being by his side. Hasan loved people and made many friends from every walk of life and background. There are so many stories to tell about his life in New York. There were the days in Union Square, his dancing, his art projects, his solo exhibition, the demonstrations, the eggs he cooked, September 11th, and much, much more.

Before I left New York last May, he told me he was going to South Africa to live on a beach and work on his book. Months later, I was happily surprised to see him in his beloved Ramallah. The last time I saw Hasan was the night before his death. He came to my house bursting with joy from being back in Palestine. He had just found a house in Jifna in which he was going to
settle in to finish his book.

I left the day after Hasan's funeral. As the plane flew over Jaffa, I looked down at the sea and remembered the necklace Hasan loved to wear. A white spoon with a scoop of blue glass, like a spoonful of sea, hung from his neck. He used to laugh and say he wore it so that he could take the sea with him wherever he went.

I know Hasan will be with many of us wherever we go.

Don't Play Israel

Don't Play Israel joins other groups in celebrating the list of artists to recently cancel appearances/engagements in Israel. We believe the cultural boycott is gaining in effect.

Recent cancellations include:
Jean-Luc Godard
Bjork
Chris Cornell
Siouxie Sioux
Snoop Dogg

We believe that the hard work of activists and calls issued by organizations such as PACBI have been effective in increasing consciousness of the boycott -- many other artists are refusing to play Israel, but are doing so quietly. The next challenge is to encourage these artists to publicly engage with the boycott.

And much remains to be done. Artists to have recently announced upcoming concerts include:
Laurie Anderson
Mercedes Sosa

Details on how to contact these artists appear on the Don't Play Israel blog:
http://www.dontplayisrael.blogspot.com

Pass on the word... the cultural boycott is spreading.

Peace,
DPI

Slingshot Hip Hop comes to Ramallah finally!!!!!!!!!!!

My friend Jackie Salloum came to Ramallah to show her film last Thursday and we were so lucky to have a live concert after the film.
I love DAM! Thank you!

Here is the trailer of the film:

Untitled (servees) (بلا عنوان‏(سرفيس

I am exhibiting a new work in this years Jerusalem Show. It opens next Wednesday night so if you are in Palestine please come to the opening and party! There are a lot of great artists taking part in the show.

I can not post this without noting the fact that most of my friends and my family will not be able to come because they are West Bank I.D holders living in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus etc and the Israeli state forbids them from entering Jerusalem.

Untitled (servees) (بلا عنوان‏(سرفيس

"Untitled (servees)" is an audio work located at Damascus Gate (Bab il Amoud) which stands at the start of the road leading to Nablus and onward to Damascus. Once a massive hub of the main regional transport network of serveeses (communal taxis), it had direct links to Beirut, Amman, Baghdad, Kuwait as well as every urban Palestinian center such as Lyd, Jaffa, Ramallah, Nablus, Gaza, Ramle. Damascus Gate was the point where servees drivers used to pick up customers by calling out the names of their various destinations. "Untitled (servees)" recalls that purpose and the once fluid space of movement, connection and exchange and attempts to make visible the fractures and interactions of everyday life within the disintegrating urban landscape. Calling out cities servees drivers recall their destinations.

This audio work is a part of ongoing long-term research, which explores and investigates the disappearing transportation network in Palestine and its implications on the physical and social experience of space. This is a result of the ongoing fragmentation and continued destruction of the urban landscape by the Israeli Occupation.

بلا عنوان (سرفيس)

"بلا عنوان (سرفيس)" هو عمل فنيّ سماعيّ مسجل في "باب العامود" والذي يقع على بداية الطريق المؤدية إلى مدينة نابلس، ومنها تستمر إلى دمشق.

كان "باب العامود" في فترة ما المركز الرئيسي لشبكة مواصلات المركبات العمومية، وكان نقطة الوصل المباشرة لبيروت، عمّان بغداد،والكويت، بالإضافة إلى مراكز مدنية رئيسية في فلسطين، مثل اللدّ و الرملة، يافا، رام الله، نابلس،وغزّة. في ذلك الزمن،كان سائقو هذه المركبات العمومية يتجمعون في ساحة باب العامود ليقلّواُ الركاب عن طريق نداء - بأصوات مرتفعة - أسماء المدن المختلفة التي يقصدونها. وبناءً على هذا التاريخ، يقوم عمل "بلا عنوان (سرفيس)" بإعادة ذكرى ذلك الزمن الذي كانت فيه الحركة حرّة تتدفق بلا عقبات، حيث كان هناك تواصل وتبادل بين الناس. ويحاول أن يظهر التشقق و طبيعة التفاعل في الحياة اليومية ما بين المناطق الجغرافية المدنية والتي في حالة تفسّخ مستمر. وبمناداة أسماء المدن، يتذكر سائقو السرفيسات تلك الأماكن التي كانوا يقصدونها.

هذا العمل السماعي هو جز من مشروع بحث طويل الأمد الذي يتحرّى ويحقق في واقع تلاشي شبكة المواصلات في فلسطين وتداعيات هذا التلاشي وتأثيره على مفهوم الحيّز من النواحِ المادية والاجتماعية؛ وما هذا إلاّ نتيجة استمرار أعمال تشقيق وتدمير الأراضي المتعمدة من قبل الاحتلال الإسرائيلي

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE JERUSALEM SHOW
http://www.almamalfoundation.org/

The Jerusalem Show, edition 0.1, July 9-19, 2008

A Contemporary Art Show in the Old City of Jerusalem

Wednesday, 9 July

19:00 Opening Exhibition Tour with curator Jack Persekian starting from Al-Ma'mal Foundation, New Gate

21:00 Opening Reception , Padico Services, Haret Al-Sa'idiyeh

Participating Artists:

Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Mohammad Al-Hawajri, Jawad Al-Malhi, Basma Al-Sharif, Berndt Anwander, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Phil Collins, Aissa Deebi, Sophie Elbaz, Roza El-Hassan, Hana Farah, Akram Halabi, Emily Jacir, Leopold Kessler, Jumana Manna, Sliman Mansour, Henrik Placht, Judy Price, Nathalie Retivoff, Peter Riedlinger, Nida Sinnokrot, Samir Srouji, Oraib Toukan, Elisabeth Von-Samsonow, Wafaa Yasin, Inass Yassin, Manar Zuaibi

Enacting Emancipation

Although I am in Ramallah I wanted to post this Toronto exhibition for anyone who may be in that area. This show is very dear to me because it brings together the indigenous peoples of Palestine and North America. The opening is June 28th so please drop by if you live there. We will be doing a panel - I am going to be speaking live from Ramallah on that same day.

James Luna, Apparitions, 2008

http://www.aspacegallery.org/programming.html

When engaging with the similarity of colonial oppression between the Indigenous peoples of North America and Palestine, the late Edward Said stated that the task at hand was 'to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others.' Enacting Emancipation was born from this intention.

This study of the interconnectedness of the First Nations and Palestinian experience was inspired by the sixtieth-year memorial of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe of 1948). The exhibition unravels a universal and international system of colonial technique and strategy, while remaining fully cognizant of the dangers in homogenizing resistant cultures. The curators sought contrast in defining strategies of resistance, which elucidated the fact that the differences of defense were culturally based and inheritably Indigenous.

Together the artists in this exhibition - James Luna, Emily Jacir, Erica Lord, and John Halaka - signify the individualized experiences of Fourth World peoples who have been stripped of context, denied distinction, and disenfranchised from traditional territories. Together they present an immediacy of need in defending land and citizenry, the recognition of sovereignty, and their personal engagements in the quest for freedom.

Denied the Right to go Home

I am Palestinian – born and raised – and my Palestinian roots go back
centuries. No one can change that even if they tell me that
Jerusalem, my birth place, is not Palestine, even if they tell me
that Palestine doesn’t exist, even if they take away all my papers
and deny me entry to my own home, even if they humiliate me and take
away my rights. I AM PALESTINIAN.

Name: Zeina Emile Sam’an Ashrawi; Date of Birth: July 30, 1981;
Ethnicity: Arab. This is what was written on my Jerusalem ID card. An
ID card to a Palestinian is much more than just a piece of paper; it
is my only legal documented relationship to Palestine. Born in
Jerusalem, I was given a Jerusalem ID card (the blue ID), an Israeli
Travel Document and a Jordanian Passport stamped Palestinian (I have
no legal rights in Jordan). I do not have an Israeli Passport, a
Palestinian Passport or an American Passport. Here is my story:

I came to the United States as a 17 year old to finish high school in
Pennsylvania and went on to college and graduate school and
subsequently got married and we are currently living in Northern
Virginia. I have gone home every year at least once to see my
parents, my family and my friends and to renew my Travel Document as
I was only able to extend its validity once a year from Washington
DC. My father and I would stand in line at the Israeli Ministry of
Interior in Jerusalem, along with many other Palestinians, from 4:30
in the morning to try our luck at making it through the revolving
metal doors of the Ministry before noon – when the Ministry closed
its doors - to try and renew the Travel Document. We did that year
after year. As a people living under an occupation, being faced with
constant humiliation by an occupier was the norm but we did what we
had to do to insure our identity was not stolen from us.

In August of 2007 I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC to
try and extend my travel document and get the usual “Returning
Resident” VISA that the Israelis issue to Palestinians holding an
Israeli Travel Document. After watching a few Americans and others
being told that their visas would be ready in a couple of weeks my
turn came. I walked up to the bulletproof glass window shielding the
lady working behind it and under a massive picture of the Dome of the
Rock and the Walls of Jerusalem that hangs on the wall in the Israeli
consulate, I handed her my papers through a little slot at the bottom
of the window.

“Shalom” she said with a smile. “Hi” I responded, apprehensive and
scared. As soon as she saw my Travel Document her demeanor
immediately changed. The smile was no longer there and there was very
little small talk between us, as usual. After sifting through the
paperwork I gave her she said: “where is your American Passport?” I
explained to her that I did not have one and that my only Travel
Document is the one she has in her hands. She was quiet for a few
seconds and then said: “you don’t have an American Passport?”
suspicious that I was hiding information from her. “No!” I said. She
was quiet for a little longer and then said: “Well, I am not sure
we’ll be able to extend your Travel Document.” I felt the blood
rushing to my head as this is my only means to get home! I asked her
what she meant by that and she went on to tell me that since I had
been living in the US and because I had a Green Card they would not
extend my Travel Document. After taking a deep breath to try and
control my temper I explained to her that a Green Card is not a
Passport and I cannot use it to travel outside the US. My voice was
shaky and I was getting more and more upset (and a mini shouting
match ensued) so I asked her to explain to me what I needed to do.
She told me to leave my paperwork and we would see what happens.

A couple of weeks later I received a phone call from the lady telling
me that she was able to extended my Travel Document but I would no
longer be getting the “Returning Resident” VISA. Instead, I was given
a 3 month tourist VISA. Initially I was happy to hear that the Travel
Document was extended but then I realized that she said “tourist
VISA”. Why am I getting a tourist VISA to go home? Not wanting to
argue with her about the 3 month VISA at the time so as not to
jeopardize the extension of my Travel Document, I simply put that bit
of information on the back burner and went on to explain to her that
I wasn’t going home in the next 3 months. She instructed me to come
back and apply for another VISA when I did intend on going. She
didn’t add much and just told me that it was ready for pick-up. So I
went to the Embassy and got my Travel Document and the tourist VISA
that was stamped in it.

My husband, my son and I were planning on going home to Palestine
this summer. So a month before we were set to leave (July 8, 2008) I
went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC, papers in hand, to ask
for a VISA to go home. I, again, stood in line and watched others get
VISAs to go to my home. When my turn came I walked up to the window;
“Shalom” she said with a smile on her face, “Hi” I replied. I slipped
the paperwork in the little slot under the bulletproof glass and
waited for the usual reaction. I told her that I needed a returning
resident VISA to go home. She took the paperwork and I gave her a
check for the amount she requested and left the Embassy without
incident.

A few days ago I got a phone call from Dina at the Israeli Embassy
telling me that she needed the expiration date of my Jordanian
Passport and my Green Card. I had given them all the paperwork they
needed time and time again and I thought it was a good way on their
part to waste time so that I didn’t get my VISA in time. Regardless,
I called over and over again only to get their voice mail. I left a
message with the information they needed but kept called every 10
minutes hoping to speak to someone to make sure that they received
the information in an effort to expedite the tedious process. I
finally got a hold of someone. I told her that I wanted to make sure
they received the information I left on their voice mail and that I
wanted to make sure that my paperwork was in order. She said, after
consulting with someone in the background (I assume it was Dina),
that I needed to fax copies of both my Jordanian Passport and my
Green Card and that giving them the information over the phone wasn’t
acceptable. So I immediately made copies and faxed them to Dina.

A few hours later my cell phone rang. “Zeina?” she said. “Yes” I
replied, knowing exactly who it was and immediately asked her if she
received the fax I sent. She said: “ehhh, I was not looking at your
file when you called earlier but your Visa was denied and your ID and
Travel Document are no longer valid.” “Excuse me?” I said in
disbelief. “Sorry, I cannot give you a visa and your ID and Travel
Document are no longer valid. This decision came from Israel not from
me.”

I cannot describe the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach. “Why?”
I asked and Dina went on to tell me that it was because I had a Green
Card. I tried to reason with Dina and to explain to her that they
could not do that as this is my only means of travel home and that I
wanted to see my parents, but to no avail. Dina held her ground and
told me that I wouldn’t be given the VISA and then said: “Let the
Americans give you a Travel Document”.

I have always been a strong person and not one to show weakness but
at that moment I lost all control and started crying while Dina was
on the other end of the line holding my only legal documents linking
me to my home. I began to plead with her to try and get the VISA and
not revoke my documents; “put yourself in my shoes, what would you
do? You want to go see your family and someone is telling you that
you can’t! What would you do? Forget that you’re Israeli and that I’m
Palestinian and think about this for a minute!” “Sorry” she said,”I
know but I can’t do anything, the decision came from Israel”. I tried
to explain to her over and over again that I could not travel without
my Travel Document and that they could not do that – knowing that
they could, and they had!

This has been happening to many Palestinians who have a Jerusalem ID
card. The Israeli government has been practicing and perfecting the
art of ethnic cleansing since 1948 right under the nose of the world
and no one has the power or the guts to do anything about it. Where
else in the world does one have to beg to go to one’s own home? Where
else in the world does one have to give up their identity for the
sole reason of living somewhere else for a period of time? Imagine if
an American living in Spain for a few years wanted to go home only to
be told by the American government that their American Passport was
revoked and that they wouldn’t be able to come back!

If I were a Jew living anywhere around the world and had no ties to
the area and had never set foot there, I would have the right to go
any time I wanted and get an Israeli Passport. In fact, the Israelis
encourage that. I however, am not Jewish but I was born and raised
there, my parents, family and friends still live there and I cannot
go back! I am neither a criminal nor a threat to one of the most
power countries in the world, yet I am alienated and expelled from my
own home.

As it stands right now, I will be unable to go home – I am one of many.

Waltz with Bashir - Trailer

I really want to see this.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7412088.stm

رام اللة هل ايام

"Salt of this Sea" Premiere at Cannes and Trailer

!!!!!!!!!مبروك يا اختي

I am so happy and proud of my sister Annemarie! Yesterday her film "Milh Hadha al-Bahr" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival!!!!! Here is a link to the festival page about her film:

www.festival-cannes.fr/en/article/56057.html

And here is a beautiful photo from the site (Photo:Julia Brechler) of them on the stage right before the screening:


The film was supposed to premiere here last week but the Israelis denied my sister entry (see earlier post). That did not stop us from celebrating this momentous occasion with her! We all gathered together here in Ramallah and threw the "RAMALLAH CANNES PARTY (umbilical cord from Ramallah to Cannes)" We all raised our glasses high and got to do a video conference with the Annemarie and some of the cast and crew before they headed off to the red carpet and we spoke to them by phone. We were all together every step of the way.

As soon as the film is scheduled to show here I will post it. In the meantime here is the trailer!

ذكرى النكبة في رام الله اليوم

ENTRY DENIED: Annemarie Jacir

Here is the letter Annemarie wrote after being brutally denied entry into Palestine yesterday at the Allenby Bridge. She was coming to attend the world premiere of her film and we were all going to celebrate her film and her success with her.

For more information on this unofficial Israeli policy of denying entry:
http://www.righttoenter.ps/

Here is a letter she wrote when she was sent back yesterday:

I have been looking forward to this week for months now – it was to be one of the most important moments for me - the world premiere of our feature film "milh hadha al- bahr" (Salt of this Sea) in Palestine.

The premiere was to take place in Amari Refugee camp in Ramallah, with the cast and crew, the people who helped make this film happen, who believe in it, to be in attendance. An outdoor screening and an occasion to share the completion of a project which has been the result of a five-year struggle. What made this event so special was that it is also a big celebration for us – that we received the incredible news that the film was selected for the Cannes Film Festival as an Official Selection (May 14th – 25th, 2008).

As you may know, the Israeli Authorities have not allowed me to return to Palestine for 9 months now. Because of this we were not able to film a main scene of the film and in the end, the scene had to be shot in Marseille, France. My lawyer has been working now for eight months on the issue of my return home. So for the premiere of the film, I also had an invitation from the French Consulate in Jerusalem, who have been supporters of the film, and the International Art Academy of Ramallah were co-sponsoring the screening. There was nothing I was looking forward to more than fianlly being back in Palestine and sharing the film.

From Amman, Jordan, I took the bus to the Allenby bridge (Sheikh Hussein) in order to cross the Jordanian border and enter the West Bank. I arrived at the bridge at 10 in the morning. The Israelis held me there for six hours, during which time I was interrogated approximately five times. In the beginning I was made to wait in the main room with all the other people crossing. After some time, I was taken to another section in the back, separated from the others, and spent the remaining period of my time waiting there alone. Every now and then people would come in and out of a door, sometimes to ask me questions, sometimes just on their way somewhere else. My telephone was taken from me.

At the end, I was then taken to the general room once more and asked to sit and wait. After about 20 minutes, a woman in a blue uniform (the others wore a different uniform), came towards me with my passport in her hand and four security agents behind her. She handed me my passport and said, "The Israeli Ministry of Interior has denied you entry." I asked if a reason was given. She said, "You spend too much time here." I was then deported - escorted by two of the agents out of the terminal and onto a bus back to Jordan.

I got on the bus. I felt like my legs weren't strong enough to carry me.

Annemarie Jacir

Milh Hadha al-Bahr (Salt of this Sea) GOING TO CANNES!

The Palestinian film, Salt of this Sea ("milh hadha al bahr"), directed by Annemarie Jacir and starring Suheir Hammad and Saleh Bakri, has been accepted as an "Official Selection" of the Cannes Film Festival 2008.

The Cannes Film Festival takes place in May 2008, which is also the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Salt of this Sea, the first feature film by a Palestinian female director to be accepted to the Cannes Film Festival, follows the story of third generation refugees in search of freedom and is a commemoration of the ongoing Nakba.

In May 1948, Israel was declared a "Jewish state" despite the fact that the majority of the indigenous population consisted of Palestinian Arabs, Christian and Muslim. Zionist leader David Ben Gurion instituted "Plan Dalet" in order to change the demographic make-up of historic Palestine and secure physical control over the territory. What followed is the expulsion and dispossession of 780,000 Palestinians from their homes and land (75% of the population). More than 530 Palestinian villages were depopulated and/or completely destroyed. And the world's largest and longest-standing refugee population was created.

Before Cannes, the film will have its world premiere in Amari Refugee camp in Ramallah with the presence of the film director Annemarie Jacir and main cast.

Milh Hadha al-Bahr (Salt of this Sea)
Palestine 2008
Directed by Annemarie Jacir
Produced by JBA Production
1'43" min.

Soraya, born in Brooklyn in a working class community of Palestinian refugees, discovers that her grandfather's savings were frozen in a bank account in Jaffa when he was exiled in 1948. Determined to reclaim what is hers, she fulfills her life-long dream of "returning" to Palestine. She meets a young man whose ambition, contrary to her, is to leave forever and find a life far away. Tired of the constraints that dictate their lives, they know that in order to be free, they must take things into their own hands, even if it's against the law.

بيت مكان 2008 برنامج اقامة و تبادل الفنانين العرب

Bush's "vision" is Palestine's nightmare

The illustration commissioned by the Campaign for the Right of Entry/Re-entry to the Occupied Palestinian Territory that Al-Quds newspaper refused to publish.



From ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9214.shtml

Bush's "vision" is Palestine's nightmare
Sam Bahour writing from al-Bireh/Ramallah, occupied West Bank, Live from Palestine, 10 January 2008

US President George W. Bush landed in Israel yesterday on his first presidential trip to the country. He participated in a press conference in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, what both men termed a "historic" and "monumental" occasion. After listening to both so-called leaders make their opening comments and fielding questions from journalists, the only groundbreaking revelation I could register was that Bush's naivete, either real or feigned, only served the agenda of one party in the region -- Hamas. The radical Islamists at Hamas could not find a better recruiter for their movement if they tried.

My opinion may be extreme, but then again, I live in extreme limbo under Israeli military occupation, shaped by a policy both men continuously refuse to call by its true name -- state terror.

My opinion is certainly subjective but I started my day by reading a communique from the real world: a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs that the background of the issue: on 28 June 2006 the Israeli Air Force bombed the power plant in the Gaza Strip, destroying all six transformers and cutting 43 percent of Gaza's total power capacity. The report states, "households in the Gaza Strip are now experiencing regular power cuts" and notes that "the irregular [electricity] supply causes additional problems. Running water in Gaza is only available in most households for around eight hours per day. If there is no power when water is available, it cannot be pumped above ground level, reducing the availability of running water to between four and six hours per day." The result of this single punitive measure, as stated in this report, is that if Gaza's Coastal Municipalities Water Utility "cannot provide its own emergency power supply because of its own fuel shortages, it has to pump raw sewage into the sea which damages the coastline in Gaza, southern Israel and Egypt."

In another report, released the same day, the World Food Programme spokesperson Kirstie Campbell finds that 70 percent of the population of Gaza has to choose between putting food on the table or a roof over their heads.

Bush and Olmert do not seem to worry there will be any fallout from the disturbing information in these reports, released one day before Bush's arrival. As a matter of fact, the reality that Israel has successfully placed 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, over 50 percent of them children, in the dark and under the most draconian siege in recent history did not even make it to the margins of either leader's speeches.

Much more important issues were on Bush's agenda. The need to realize and work on a "vision" for the future was in the forefront of Bush's mind. "The parties" should now sit down and "negotiate a vision" -- the parties being Israel, the fourth strongest military might in the world and a forty-year-long occupier, and the Palestinians, a stateless people who have been dispossessed by Israel for sixty years and under brutal military occupation by their colonizers for over four decades.

Both Bush and Olmert did send one united message to the world: the two-state solution was still the aim of the negotiations. Reading between the lines, we can infer that to them, the specter of a single democratic state, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, is the most frightening vision of all. To ensure that a one-state solution of Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) and Israelis (Jews, Muslims, and Christians) living side by side with equal national and civil rights in historic Palestine does not materialize, the US and Israel talk about a two-state solution, but in the meantime, the US bankrolls Israel as it continues to create facts on the ground that make any viable Palestinian state impossible.

Olmert was clear beyond a doubt: President Bush has been very, very good for Israel. Olmert was nearly jumping for joy as he praised Bush for increasing the comprehensive US aid package to Israel to a whopping $30 billion.

Journalists constantly raised the issue of Israeli settlement-building in the occupied territory. Again, Olmert said Jerusalem is different, and no one should expect settlements to stop there. As for the other settlements, he said it was complicated and began elucidating the lexicon of "outposts," "population centers," etc. Bush, for his part, was only able to remind us all that Israel has been promising for over four years to stop settlements but has yet to do so. Even that came with a chuckle amongst journalists, as if the human tragedy these settlements are causing was a side show. Rarely has Bush given so persuasive an impression of being detached not just from the facts but from any sort of empathy for the victims of this appalling situation.

But mainly, it looks like Bush came to Israel to speak about Iran. Bush seemed very enthused about threatening Iran from Israel. His glaring inability to articulate a basic understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli issue left seasoned Israeli journalists chuckling in disbelief at the president's replies. The local press corps noted every opportunity seized by Olmert to hitch a ride on each one of Bush's superficial comments, lauding the importance of the Bush visit, the Bush commitment to peace, and Bush's courage in confronting the region's difficulties.

Today Bush arrives in my Israeli-occupied city of al-Bireh/Ramallah. He plans to land two blocks away from my home, in a sports field that I happen to be developing as a commercial project for the nearby Friends (Quaker) School. We were notified today that our street will be one of the many that will be under 100 percent lockdown. We were advised we would be risking our lives if we went to our rooftop to watch the charade unfold. Public notices from the Palestinian police chief warned that absolutely no protests would be tolerated. In short, we were told to stay indoors. Even our local newspaper, Al-Quds, refused to publish as an advertisement a cartoon satirizing Bush's visit submitted by a civil society campaign I work with. So much for running a business, economic development, and freedom of the press. So much for Palestinian democracy too.

As an American and a Palestinian, if I could advise Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on how to greet his American peer today, I would ask him to declare the end of the Palestinian Authority, which Israel has purposefully and systematically destroyed. I would ask him to announce that the Palestinians will not accept Rambo-style diplomacy and will revert to international law as the only reference point for resolving the conflict. I would ask Abbas to request America's support for nonviolent resistance against sixty years of dispossession and forty years of military occupation by calling for a strategy of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it joins the community of law-abiding nations.

But that's not all. If I were Abbas I would tell the world that the Palestinian people will remain committed to the two-state solution until the end of 2008, and after that, if the international community fails yet again to end this nightmare of occupation, the Palestinian people will return to their original strategy of calling for one democratic secular state, where Palestinians and Israelis of all religions can live in dignity and mutual respect as equals -- one person, one vote, with appropriate arrangements for cultural autonomy for all.

Sam Bahour is a business consultant and may be reached at sbahour@palnet.com.

Israel steals Christmas: clergy denied entry to occupied territories

MAAN NEWS AGENCY
---------------------------

Israel steals Christmas: clergy denied entry to occupied territories

Date: 27 / 12 / 2007 Time: 14:56

Bethlehem – Ma'an – Israeli travel prohibitions put a damper on this year's Christmas celebrations as Christian clergy were unable to reach their congregations in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In late October the Israeli interior ministry cancelled the multiple-entry visas that many foreign clergy possess, issuing instead single-entry visas, and sometimes completely denying access to the very birthplace of Christianity.

The Our Lady of Annunciation Catholic church in the West Bank city of Ramallah cancelled its Christmas celebrations completely, because the priest, Jordanian national Seres Lalkhlisat, could not return to the West Bank from Jordan, where he went to visit his family.

"A church without a priest; it's very hard. People call saying 'we want to hold a funeral, but there is no priest to conduct the funeral," said Anan Abu Saadeh, a teacher at the school affiliated with Our Lady of Annunciation.

Saadeh said Lalkhlisat has worked at two West Bank congregations since 2004, and used to travel back and forth from Jordan freely on his multiple-entry visa, which now has an 'X' drawn through it.

"We are waiting," said Saadeh, "they are always saying 'you have to wait' …they have still not given us a real reason."

Israeli Interior Ministry spokesperson Sabine Haddad told the Associated Press, "According to a request by security officials, we restricted the visas of the clergy." Yet this reasoning leaves Palestinian parishioners like Saadeh puzzled. "He is not a political man; he is not doing something bad," he said of the Priest.

The grassroots Campaign for the Right of Entry/Re-Entry to the Occupied Palestinian Territory says that clergy are only a few of the "tens of thousands of ordinary foreign passport holders of Palestinian and non-Palestinian origin who wish to be with their families, work or study, as well as tourists and pilgrims."

Palestine's small Christian population is shrinking, and Saadeh attributed some the much-discussed 'Christian flight' to Israeli restrictions that limit freedom of worship. "For Christian Palestinians, it's hard to see churches closing, so people are leaving," he said.

Israel controls all but one of the entry points in to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The one Palestinian-controlled crossing, at Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, has been closed since the June due to an Israeli-led international blockade.

Amnesty International estimates that by 2006, at least 120,000 families of various religious affiliations have been denied the right to be together by Israeli travel restrictions.

! اعياد سعيدة ! كل سنة وانتو سالمين

عيد ميلاد مجيد و عيد مبارك من رام الله

'Palestinian Women Artists' book launch

Artists Inass Yassin and Vera Tamari standing with Rawan Sharaf (Director of al Hoash Gallery) and Reem Fadda (Director of the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA)

We had a very successful event at the Academy the other night which was the launch of the book: "Palestinian Women Artists: the Land = the Body = the Narrative"

The Palestinian Art Court - Al Hoash published the book with the support of the Spanish General Consulate, the Spanish Cooperation Office, and the Three Cultures Foundation.

During the event, Al Hoash also launched the new calender for 2008 featuring artists from the book. The calender is great and makes a perfect gift for the upcoming Eids!

Curator Reem Fadda, academic director of the International Academy of Art-Palestine, was commissioned to be the editor and curator of the book and she has wrote an extensive essay for it.

The book features 41 Palestinian artists and is in 3 languages: Arabic, English and Spanish.
Copies of the book and the calender may be obtained through the Palestinian Art Court - Al Hoash, in Jerusalem, or the International Academy of Art-Palestine, in Ramallah (well actually in Bireh...heehee)

A packed house for the launch!

And from the press: http://ara.today.reuters.com

فنانات فلسطينيات..الارض..الجسد..الرواية) كتاب جديد بثلاث لغات
Thu Dec 13, 2007 3:10 PM GMT

رام الله (الضفة الغربية) (رويترز) - يلقي الكتاب الجديد (فنانات فلسطينيات..الارض..الجسد..الرواية) الصادر بثلاث لغات الضوء على مساهمة الفنانات الفلسطينيات في الفن البصري منذ ثلاثينات القرن الماضي الى اليوم.

ويقدم الكتاب الصادر عن مؤسسة حوش الفن الفلسطيني والذي يقع في 400 صفحة من القطع المتوسط باللغات العربية والانجليزية والاسبانية سردا لاسماء 150 فنانة وصورا ملونة لاعمال متميزة ومتعددة لاحدى واربعين منهن اضافة الى تحليل لهذه الاعمال.

ويستعرض الكتاب بالتحليل ثلاثة ابعاد في اعمال الفنانات الفلسطينيات في الاراضي الفلسطينية المحتلة وداخل اسرائيل وحتى أولئك اللواتي يعشن في المهجر في مجال الارض والجسد والرواية وعلاقة كل من هذه الابعاد بالحياة السياسية التي شهدتها الاراضي الفلسطينية منذ القرن الماضي.

ويشير الكتاب الى ارتباط الفنانة الفلسطينية بالارض "الارض مصدر الهام للعديد من الفنانات الفلسطينيات منذ اكثر من مئة عام وقد خلدت المشاهد الطبيعية الفلسطينية الغنية في لوحات زيتية لعدد من الفنانات مثل نهيل بشارة وصوفي حلبي وفاتن طوباسي وعفاف عرفات."

ويرى الكتاب "تغيرا صامتا ان لم يكن بشكل واع ومستفز من عدد من المؤثرات باتجاه العمل الفني الذي يظهر الجسد وخاصة جسد الفنانة نفسها في عدد من الاعمال."

ويوضح الكتاب ان معظم الفنانات الفلسطينيات اللواتي اتبعن هذا الاسلوب كن يعشن في اوروبا وامريكا "حيث وجدن المجتمع الذي يتقبل اظهار جسد المرأة من خلال الفن."

ويقدم الكتاب استعراضا كاملا لهذه المرحلة التي شهدت استخدام الجسد في الفن.

وتروي الفنانات الفلسطينيات من خلال اعمالهن الفنية حكاية المكان والاوضاع السياسية والاجتماعية والاقتصادية. ويقول الكتاب "قام عدد من الفنانات بانتاج مشاريع مرئية واضحة في محاولة لاعطاء وجهة نظر شخصية للمكان بكافة تعقيداته فسرد القصة بنبرة غير مجسدة اصبح عاملا يكشف وقائع اجتماعية وسياسية وصور لداخل البيت وصور شخصية وتفاصيل المكان تخلق شبكة معلومات متكاملة."

وقالت روان شرف مديرة مركز حوش الفن الفلسطيني في حفل اقيم مساء الاربعاء في الاكاديمية الفلسطينية للفن المعاصر للاعلان عن اطلاق الكتاب "اصدار الكتاب الاول في سلسلة الفن في فلسطين مشروع بدأ بحلم في مثل هذا الوقت من العام الماضي وها نحن نقدم هذا الانتاج لثقافتنا وهويتنا وحضارتنا ومستقبلنا."

وقالت ريم فضة محررة الكتاب لرويترز خلال الحفل "يقدم هذا الكتاب الذي يتناول بالتحليل فن النساء الفلسطينيات من منظور الافكار الارض والجسد والرواية ضمن ترابط."

وأضافت "نحاول من خلال هذا الكتاب عمل اضافة جدية الى المكتبة العربية بلغة فلسطينية اصلية تعبر عن الثقافة الفلسطينية تعمل على التحليل والنقد البناء وتبرز اعمال العديد من الفنانات الفلسطينيات."

ويكشف الكتاب النقاب عن حركة فنية نشطة في الاراضي الفلسطينية تعود الى فترة الثلاثينات كان للمرأة الفلسطينية دور بارز فيها.

وجاء في الكتاب "لقد مثلت الفنانة زلفى السعدي فلسطين في المعرض العربي الاول في العام 1933 في القدس ومعنى ذلك ان شكلا من البينالي او المهرجان الفني كان موجودا في فلسطين التي لم تكن مجرد دولة مشاركة بل كانت البلد المضيف لهذا الحدث.

"والذي يدل على ان فلسطين كانت منتجة للفن لدرجة تتويج ذلك بعقد مهرجان عربي...وفوق ذلك فان فنانة فلسطينية هي من مثلت فلسطين ملقية بذلك الضوء على دور المرأة (الفلسطينية) وموقعها المتقدم في المجتمع."

ويستعرض الكتاب نماذج لفنانات فلسطينيات حظين بمكانة عالمية ومنهن منى حاطوم واملي جاسر وروزليندا نشاشيبي وليلى شوا وجوليان سيرافيم "على سبيل المثال لا للحصر".

وقالت فضة "لقد حرصنا في هذا الكتاب ان يضم اجيالا مختلفة من الفنانات وان لا يقتصر على الفنانات المشهورات في وقت لا نستطيع فيه ذكر جميع الفنانات."

وقالت الفنانة التشكيلية الشابة ايناس ياسين لرويترز خلال مشاركتها في الحفل "هذا الكتاب مرجع مهم باللغة العربية وخصوصية هذا الكتاب انه يتحدث عن النساء الفلسطينيات في الداخل والخارج والشتات اللواتي تتنوع اعمالهن ويمثل ارشفة لهذه الاعمال."

فيما قالت الفنانة التشكيلية فيرا تماري المحاضرة في جامعة بيرزيت وهي في العقد السادس من العمر خلال كلمة لها في حفل الافتتاح "هذا الكتاب مرجع للفن الفلسطيني وهو شامل من انتاج فلسطيني وخبرات فلسطينية شابة ويضم عددا كبيرا من الفنانات."

وقال الفنان التشكيلي خالد الحواراني المحاضر في الاكاديمية الفلسطينية للفن المعاصر لرويترز "هذا الكتاب يقدم اطلاله بالصور على فن المرأة الفلسطينية التي تعيش بظروف خاصة بسبب الاحتلال وكنت اتمنى ان يكون الكتاب بشكل عام عن الفن ولكنه خطوة جيدة."

وأضاف "كون الكتاب بأكثر من لغة فانه يقدم رسالة للعالم ان الفن موجود في فلسطين منذ زمن."

وجاء في مقدمة الكتاب الذي صدر بدعم من القنصلية الاسبانية في القدس ومؤسسة الثقافات الثلاث في حوض المتوسط الاسبانية "يأمل حوش الفن الفلسطيني ان يشكل اصدار هذا الكتاب نقطة مضيئة في عالم الفن والفنانات الفلسطينيات وان يصبح مرجعا هاما وقيما لمحبي الفن...والمهتمين في الاستكشاف ومعرفة الفنانات الفلسطينيات وانتاجهن الفني."

من علي صوافطة

Coptic Church. Why?

I have been wondering for some time now why on earth someone is constructing a massive Coptic Church in Ramallah. Though we have tons of all denominations of Christian Palestinians, we do not have any Copts.

If someone can please tell me who is building this and for what purpose that would be great.

AGAINST EMAIL

ramallah is cold, cold, cold...
so staying warm and reading is what i am up to
had to post this. its hilarious and so true!
this is just brilliant! thanks apsara.

for full article go to:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/email.html

"One now recalls those early days of sparse email traffic much as the cokehead recollects the first bumps of powder snorted sweetly up his nose. How quickly pleasure turned to compulsion and unhappiness! Nothing was left, in the end, but anxiety (who am I forgetting to reply to?) and guilt (I know who). And yet the compulsive emailer, addict of the insubstantial, is ultimately even worse off than the substance abuser: no clinic for him to check into. Western civilization has become a giant inbox; it will swell and groan but never be empty till it crashes."

SAVE Shar3 il Maktabeh

Please come to this important meeting tomorrow if you are here.

the last day of Al Bardaouni's

Sadly the oldest restaurant in Ramallah - Al Bardauni - served its last customers today. This restaurant has been open since before the Israeli occupation. Ibrahim Boulous opened it in 1962. It is very famous and people from all over the Arab world that used to come to Ramallah pre-Israeli Occupation know of this restaurant. Two famous guests include Jane Fonda and Robert DiNiro.
Its so depressing to lose this historic and important place...they are planning on building a big huge ugly building full of offices in its place....
good bye...

i took one of their sugar packets and a coaster....reem brought one of the plants from their garden to our garden at the Academy.

if you want to see some old photos of the place please go to:

http://www.albardauni.com/

There are some really cool photos which I was going to post here but there were copyrights all over everything so I figured I am not allowed to

the charade that is Annapolis

ah......Annapolis....
Frankly it is just to distant and irrelevant and removed from reality for me to take seriously. For those of you who are naive enough to eat up the hype here are some excerpts and links:

from Karma Nabulsi's article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2216914,00.html

We have not given up

The Palestinian people will not yield to the west's cynical pressure on them to surrender

If you want bad symbolism, you need look no further than the venue. The US naval academy of Annapolis is the current representation of unrestrained global supremacy, from where young cadets are being sent forth to occupy Arab land by force of arms. Appropriate place, then, for the US to host the meeting between Palestinian officials and the Israeli state, with every important government and international institution in obedient attendance. No one has misunderstood the nature of this meeting or is vaguely fooled by what is taking place. What we have at Annapolis is yet another ultimatum to the Palestinian people to surrender their sovereign rights.

The language of the Middle East peace process has become utterly weary, intellectually bankrupted; embarrassing. The tarnished trickery of those tired catchphrases - "last chance for peace", "painful compromises", "moderates against extremists" - is now worn so thin a child would not be taken in. There is no peace process, and hasn't been one for a very long time. It is no secret this conference won't bring an improvement in the intolerable status quo. It is a meeting to legitimise that status quo.



from Laila El-Haddad's article in The Electronic Intifada, 23 November 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9120.shtml

Annapolis, as seen from Gaza

The conference simply generates new and ever-more superfluous and intricate promises which Israeli leaders can commit to and yet somehow evade. An exercise in legal obfuscation at its best: we won't build new settlements, we'll just expropriate more land and expand to account for their "natural growth," until they resemble towns, not colonies, and have them legitimized by a US administration looking for some way to save face. And then we'll promise to raze outposts.

Each step in the evolution of Israel's occupation -- together with the efforts to sustain it and the language to describe it -- has become ever more sophisticated, strategic and euphemistic.



from Mazin Qumsiyeh
http://www.qumsiyeh.org/whathappensatandafterannapolis/

What happens at and after Annapolis

We expect accolades for Olmert merely saying Israel will freeze settlement expansions except in East Jerusalem and the large settlement blocks (the Road map demands a freeze in all Settlement growth including for "natural growth"). The Israeli paper Haaretz actually summed up well "According to the Israeli government sources, the Americans asked Israel whether it preferred to announce a settlement freeze or outpost evacuations. 'Of the two, a settlement freeze is easier than evacuating the outposts, because this only involves a declaration, not a confrontation with settlers in the field,' explained one [government official]." Olmert, like Sharon, will be labeled by the pandering US politicians "a man of peace". The apartheid (hafrada in Hebrew) state will be showered with more US aid (stolen from US citizens to satisfy the Israel lobby). Mahmoud Abbas will be covered in the media only when he talks about how bad is Hamas and thus will be labeled "moderate". Everyone will be expected to attack Iran verbally and soon in other ways and Israel and the US still hope to build a block of "moderates" against Iran by giving the illusions of progress on the issue of Palestine. The daughter of the terrorist who oversaw the bombing of the King David hotel will be praised for speaking eloquently about combating "Arab" and "Muslim" terrorism and thus advance her ambition to move from Israeli foreign minister to a future Prime Minister. It will be a great photo opportunity for all attending. Meanwhile, Gaza will continue to be starved (a creeping genocide) and four million Iraqis and seven million Palestinians refugees and displaced people will get angrier.

Earthquake hits Palestine at 11:15 Tuesday

[Ma'anImages] Bethlehem – Ma'an – A an earthquake registering 4.5 on the Richter Scale shook the West Bank at 11:15am on Tuesday. Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem said they felt the earthquake for a matter of seconds. Rif'at Sbeih from the southern West Bank town of Al-Khadir told Ma'an that he felt the earthquake in his home, describing his fear as "everything was shaking for a few seconds." Ma'an's correspondent in the northern West Bank city of Nablus said that residents felt the earthquake, with some even taking to the streets out of fear. No injuries or damage were reported.

يوم الاستقلال

I woke up in a bad mood today and tried to ignore the fact that today is our so-called "Independence" Day. I don't think it is necessary for me to expound on the magnitude of the irony of that.

I headed out to the center of town and tried not to remember what happened to me and my sister last year on this day.
See: http://majnouna.blogspot.com/2006/11/almost-got-shot.html

I saw Raed, my favorite policeman directing traffic and I decided to stop and just enjoy. No matter what is going on, seeing him in the manara just makes me happy and changes my mood. Always.
I leave you with this short video clip of him directing traffic (filmed on my crappy little digital camera bess malash)

(By the way on November 4th he was awarded one of the Palestine Prize for Excellence and Creativity by the PA)

3rd Anniversary of the Passing of Yasser Arafat

Just came back from the commemorative ceremony for Arafat. My friend Ahmed Habash performed a live sand animation entitled "From the Memory of the Sand" with live music on oud by Jamil Sayeh to a packed house.

Then Rashid Masharawi screened his film "From the Diaries of the Siege" which is an intimate portrait of Arafat shot during the seige of 2002. It was really emotional to watch scenes of the invasion now 5 years after living it... in a theater full of all of us who lived it...all together. I can't believe that was 5 years ago...

The night ended with the announcement of the winners of the "Yasser Arafat Achievement Award". 30 people representing the residents of Bilin received the award on stage for their weekly protests and peaceful resistance against Israel's apartheid wall.

Carreta Nagua, Siglo 21

Check out my good friend Ricardo's animation! He just presented this TRANSITIO_MX02 the Festival of Video and Electronic Arts in Mexico City. He presented this piece in a rickshaw, offering free rides to everyone in the colonial park-Alameda Central and only asked in return that passengers watched the animation.




For more information on his piece please go to:

http://www.ambriente.com/carreta_nagua/about.php

Yazeed, me, and the Qalqilya Zoo

Yazeed and I decided to head out to the Qalqilya Zoo today. Today was the first time Yazeed has been able to drive his car out of Ramallah and over to Qalqilya in 7 years. (Obviously he hasn't been able to due to the Israeli closures and restrictions on freedom of movement)
I think the last time I was in Qalqilya was in 2004 to document the wall which has completely encircled the town and totally cut it off from its agricultural lands, has separated families and
crushed vital trade links.
The zoo is actually really interesting in terms of public space. There is a playground for the kids, a swimming pool, families and friends gathered in large circles sitting in the gardens socializing and eating together. Its incredibly relaxing and a very calm and peaceful atmosphere. Its also amazingly kitsch, my favorite thing being the wall made out of animal bones inside the museum, sort of reminded me of the Capuchin Bone Church in Rome (its made out of the bones of 4000 monks).


















I have been obsessed with the Zoo for some time now for several reasons. When the Israelis entered Qalqilya during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the male giraffe was killed. Gunfire, tear-gas and explosions were all around the zoo and he panicked and ran frenziedly in circles around his cage ending up slamming his head into a metal bar and he fell to the ground and died. His mate was pregnant and ended up miscarrying from depression. The zoo's doctor decided to stuff both Brownie (the male giraffe) and the child. Three zebras died from inhaling Israeli forces' tear gas during an invasion. He stuffed them too.









Slowly this living zoo is turning into a collection of mummified animals frozen in time. The section of the zoo that hosts these dead animals has become a major attraction. (By the way they built the structure to host the giraffe around him after he was stuffed). The symbolism of this and how it reflects our own situation....our towns being slowly choked to death... is too much.


Brownie is actually on exhibit in Germany at this years Documenta. German artist Peter Friedl visited the zoo and asked to borrow the giraffe for the exhibition. Personally I was really disapointed when I saw Brownie in Germany. He is just standing there in the middle of the exhibition hall, you have no idea who he is, where he came from, what the story behind him is...nothing.

The most depressing part of the day was witnessing the Syrian bear desperately trying to bang his way out of his cage.

No comment

Ramallah Doldroms

Looks like we are finally getting some much needed rain. Nothing much to report. The political situation is so depressing and I don't even want to talk about it. I would just be repeating myself anyways.

In short, I have been mainly consumed with teaching my video class.

Some good news is the "Three Jubran" Majaz concert which took place at the Ramallah Cultural Palace last Thursday. They were amazing and it was broadcast live on al-Jazeera. Best of all was that Jawwal fully funded the whole concert! It was the first time that the Jubran brothers play here with everything supported financially by Palestinian money. (Usually cultural events here have European or American funding but this one didn't!).

Some very sad news is that al-Bardauni's is going to close at the end of the month! (this is the oldest restaurant in Ramallah). It has been open since the 50's. In its place they say they are going to build a huge building full of offices. There are already initiatives to try to stop this tragic loss. More on those later.

Lastly, something has got to be done about the toxic fumes from the bloody garbage dump. It is under the responsibility of the Ramallah Municipality. It is horrible. Last night I couldn't even work in my house because my eyes were burning so badly from the smoke. It seems like half the people in my hara have headaches. We need to do something about this. This tradition of burning garbage needs to be stopped. Its dangerous and toxic.

the Jerusalem show

This exhibition is taking place in various locations all over Jerusalem. The last tour is Tuesday October 30th at 5 PM so if you are joining meet at Al-Ma'mal Foundation, New Gate.

From 6:30 - 8:30 I will be screening my film ENTRY DENIED (a concert in Jerusalem) at the Tile Factory.

Here is a description of my piece:

Austrian nationals Marwan Abado, Peter Rosmanith, and Franz Hautzinger were invited to perform in Jerusalem as part of the 2003 12th Jerusalem Festival -- Songs of Freedom concert series organized by Yabous Productions. Abado, who is of Palestinian origin, was officially invited by the Austrian Embassy in Tel Aviv as well as the United Nations Development Program. He obtained a visa through the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Vienna prior to his arrival.
On July 20th, 2003 Marwan Abado arrived at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport and was immediately detained by the Israeli authorities. After being held for 24 hours in the airport prison, Israeli Security cancelled his visa and he was put on the next plane back to Vienna. He was denied entry into Israel for "security reasons". No further explanation was given.
ENTRY DENIED (a concert in Jerusalem), 2003, was filmed in an empty theater in Vienna, where I asked Marwan and his band to perform the concert exactly as it was to have taken place in Jerusalem, as if they were in Jerusalem.

FOR MORE INFORMATION on the Jerusalem show - artists, works, locations, and partners please go to: http://www.almamalfoundation.org/

Leone d’oro ~ Golden Lion

Biennale Art 52nd International Art Exhibition Awards of the 52nd International Art Exhibition

Venice, October 17th, 2007

The awarding ceremony of the 52nd International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Davide Croff, has taken place at the Teatro alle Tese dell’Arsenale di Venezia; more than 300 international guests from the national participations and the collateral events, artists and professionals have attended the event. For the first time ever, the awarding ceremony has been organised a month before the closing date of the exhibition, which has been Italy’s most visited art event, with more than 232,000 visitors in about 100 opening days.

While the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement has been assigned by the Board of Directors of the Biennale di Venezia to the artist Malick Sidibé (Soloba, Mali, 1936) at the Giardini della Biennale on June 10th, on the occasion of the official opening to the public, the International Jury, proposed by the 52nd International Art Exhibition Robert Storr and formed by Manuel J. Borja-Villel (president), Iwona Blazwick, Ilaria Bonacossa, Abdellah Karroum, and José Roca has today assigned four Golden Lions and two Honourable Mentions:

Golden Lion to an art critic or an art historian for his or her contribution to contemporary art: “The award for Art Criticism is given for a body of writing characterised by an uncompromising and scholarly attitude towards Contemporary Art practice and to the history of art. The Jury also recognizes in this work a profound knowledge of art from the ‘60 and ’70, and the articulation of the historical avant-gardes in the context of art today. The Golden Lion to an art critic or art historian for his or her contribution to Contemporary Art is awarded to Benjamin Buchloh.”

Honourable Mention to a national pavilion: “The Jury has cited for Honourable Mention a Pavilion that offers an insightful and subtly humorous investigation into the notion of the pavilion and the meaning of national identity, engaging the spectator within a compelling narrative. This special citation is given to the Lithuanian Pavilion featuring the artists Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas.”

Golden Lion for the best national participation: “The Golden Lion for an outstanding national participation is being given to a Pavilion where architecture and cultural history are deployed to generate intelligent and poetic relations between content, visual language and strucural display. The Jury also considers important the artist’s approach to modernity, its utopias and failures in the context of a shared history. The Golden Lion for the best national participation is awarded to the Hungarian Pavilion featuring the artist Andreas Fogarasi.”

Golden Lion to an artist under 40 exhibited in the central international exhibition or in the national participations: “The award for an artist under 40 is given for a practice that takes as its subject exile in general and the Palestinian issue in particular. Without recourse to exoticism, the work on display in the central Pavilion at the Giardini establishes and expands a crossover between cinema, archival documentation, narrative and sound. The Golden Lion to an artist under 40 overall, is given to Emily Jacir.”

Honourable Mention to an artist exhibited in the central international exhibition: “There is an installation in the Arsenale that impressed the Jury with its content, presentation and particular relevance to its location. The Jury wishes to give an honourable mention to an artist whose aesthetic projects span a diverse range of strategies, and in recognition of the provocative links he suggests between culture, politics and symbolic representation. The artist given an Honourable Mention for his participation in the central International Exhibition is Nedko Solakov.”

Golden Lion to an artist exhibited in the central international exhibition: “There is a body of work in the Arsenale that presents just some examples of a long and substantial career. The artist in question has continued a critical practice in the context of an often antagonistic political and social situation. He is given this award not only for his ethical attitude and political commitment, but also for a contemporary aesthetic relevance that is unexpected for a practice that spans six decades. The Golden Lion to an artist exhibited in the central International Exhibition is given to León Ferrari.”

new york city

i am in nyc after 2 weeks out in wyoming writing.
it was incredible out there - i will keep that for me.

flying over nyc...brooklyn...queens.. and staring out the window of the plane down at the city was amazing - it looked denser then i have ever seen it.
so so dense compared to where i been.
thousands of twinkling lights like stars below me.

i love new york. crazy fucking new york city.
it just doesn't give a shit when you leave or when you come back.
and you never come back in the way you left.
you come in one door and you leave through another.

will be back in palestine in a few days.
if any of you are in jerusalem on the 24th please come out to my film screening

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

i am out west writing.
one of the other writers out here with us is Julian Rubinstein who wrote:

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts

it is the story of Attila Ambrus which is so damn incredible (its my new favorite bank robber story). This guy used to be seen drinking a whiskey at a bar prior to his robberies, he never ever hurt anyone in his robberies and apparently he had some pretty amazing disguises, he used to give female tellers flowers right before robbing them, and also send the police wine bottles.

Ambrus is currently serving a 17 year sentence in a maximum security prison. Earlier this year Julian went back to the prison to see him...

GAZATON archive

2007

2006

2005

Palestine Revolution Cinema 1968-1982

I curated a selection of shorts - the Palestine Revolution Cinema (1968 - 1982) last February and it has been on tour in the US since. The next venue is in Boston on October 7th.
Here is what I wrote on the selection:

Film still from Mustafa Abu Ali's They Don' t Exist (1974)

Notes on Palestinian Revolution Cinema

The New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival will pay tribute to a group of filmmakers who have made significant contributions to various categories of Palestinian Revolution Cinema between the years of 1968 and 1982. Given the current political environment in Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon in 2007, it is especially important to screen these films which have slipped through the cracks of history. They are a visual testament to past events and offer us a glimpse of history from the perspective of the people who actually lived it, a perspective not sanctioned by the official US/European meta-narrative of the region. In the context of last summer's Israeli invasion of Lebanon, screening Monica Maurer's film Born Out of Death of the aftermath of the Israeli bombardment of Beirut in 1981 has an ever more present urgency. How does our frame of reference of the current dire and desperate situation for Palestinians shift when we see the 1974 Israeli destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp Nabatiya in Mustafa Abu Ali's film They Do Not Exist?



















Film stills from Khadijeh Abu Ali's Children Nonetheless (1980)

A brief history

In 1968 in Jordan, the Palestine Liberation Organization founded Aflam Filasteen (Palestine Films). In the beginning, they focused on documenting the struggle through photography. Mustafa Abu Ali, a director with the Jordanian film department, along with photographer Hani Jawharia and cinematographer Sulafa Jadallah (incidentally the first camerawoman in the Arab world), were the force behind it. In 1969, they produced their first film, No to the Option of Surrender which was filmed by Mustafa Abu Ali and edited by Salah Abu Hannood. The film recorded the demonstrations taking place in Amman against the Rogers Plan. Also in 1969, at the invitation of al-Fateh, Jean Luc-Godard traveled to the refugee camps in Jordan and spent time with the film unit. Upon his departure from Amman he donated his video camera, (with a recorder/player vtr -- one of the first models of video) to the group. [*] The first cine camera, an Ariflex BL 16, was provided to the group by Abu Jihad, Khalil Al Wazeer, a Fateh Central Committee member. [**] Previous to this they had been borrowing cameras to do their work. Another key film and the last film from the period in Jordan was With Soul and Blood(1971), filmed and directed by Jawharia and Abu Ali. It was shot during the events of Black September in 1970 when the Jordanian Army massacred Palestinians.

After the horrific events of Black September, Mustafa Abu Ali, along with the rest of the PLO left Jordan and went to Beirut. Hani Jawharia and Sulafa Jadallah were unable to get out of Jordan. Once in Lebanon, cinema activity intensified as other Palestinian factions like the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine started using film as a tool for liberation. At one point in 1973, there was an attempt to form a "Palestinian Cinema Group" which had no allegiance to any faction, but it was only able to produce one film: Scenes of Occupation in Gaza, directed by Mustafa Abu Ali. It was not until 1973 that they actually began to put their names on the films, because their intent was not to be "filmmakers" but to make films for the "revolution". [*] It was in Beirut in 1974 that Mustafa Abu Ali made the film we are screening in this festival: They Do not Exist. Others who joined after the move to Beirut to produce films documenting resistance include Palestinian painter Ismail Shamout, and Iraqi filmmaker Kassem Hawal whose fiction film Return to Haifa (1981) we are screening. Two films that documented the resistance fighting Israel in Lebanon include Kafr Shoba (1975) directed by Iraqi Samir Nimr, and Guns are United, (1973) directed by Lebanese Rafiq Hajjar.

Film still from Kais al-Zubaidi's The Visit (1970)

Film still from Kais al-Zubaidi's The Visit (1970)

Meanwhile in the 1960s Syria had become a center for exiled Palestinians as well as pan-Arabists and it was there that the Iraqi filmmaker Kais al-Zubaidi focused his lens on the socio-political situation of the Palestinians. We will screen two films he made during this period and which are both Syrian productions: Away from Home (1969) and The Visit (1970). Kais al-Zubaidi also worked with the PLO film unit in Beirut intermittently. Most recently, Kais has published an excellent anthology called Palestine in the Cinema (2006). It is an archive of the history of Palestinian cinema and lists over 800 films produced by Palestinian, Arab and non-Arab artists about Palestine and the Palestinian people.

Over a period of fourteen years the PLO Film Unit recorded Palestinian history and created films. They documented military actions, revolutionary events, the Palestinian resistance, everyday life in the refugee camps and they promoted the Palestinian national cause. The film unit received filmmakers and writers from all over the world including Argentina, France, Chile, Cuba, and Italy. Some like Monica Maurer, featured in our festival, came to document life and make films in solidarity with the Palestinians. "They used to be amazed that we Palestinians were in the middle of a revolution, of a struggle and we had cinema." [*] Unlike the national cinema that emerged out of Cuba after the Cuban Revolution, and out of Iran after the Islamic Revolution, the Palestinian national Cinema was created and documented life during the revolution. Khadija Abu Ali told me that Cuba's Santiago Alvarez met Mustafa Abu Ali at a film festival in Algeria and exclaimed, "You are the first among all revolutions who had cinema during the struggle". [*] Mustafa Abu Ali recounted:

I remember Alvarez expressing his extreme admiration of my film "Zionist Aggression," saying: "It has achieved the maximum expression with the least means". He was so kind and he insisted on giving me a present of 22 bottles of fine Cuban Rum, which was all he had with him. After a long argument in which he tried to convince me to take them all and if not all, at least half, I accepted two bottles. I never met anybody with such genuinely warm feelings like Santiago Alvarez. [**]

Many of these films were screened and won awards at international festivals between 1969 and 1976 like the Leipzig International Festival for documentaries and short movies, the Palestine Film Festival in Baghdad, the Festival of Young Arab Cinema in Damascus and the Carthage Film Festival. In Lebanon as elsewhere, they had film screenings, they donated footage to whoever wanted to use it, and they also sent out newsreel footage for film festivals to screen prior to films in the same vein as the "War Diaries" presentation in this festival.











Film stills from Monica Maurer's Born Out of Death (1981)

The lost Palestinian Film Archive

After the first Israeli aerial bombardment of Beirut in 1981, filmmaker Khadija Abu Ali began to worry about the security of the archives, so they rented a safer place in Hamra in a basement with air conditioning. [*] It contained thousands of films stored in cans that filled three rooms of floor to ceiling shelves. [*] It was a record of Palestinian history full of political cinema, documentation of the struggle, the resistance movements, daily life and precious historical footage. In between bombing raids during the Israeli siege on Beirut, some of the film unit risked their lives to preserve some of the footage by making their way to the archive and relocating some of the footage. [*] Then there was the 1982 Israeli bombardment on Beirut, the PLO was expelled and the film unit dispersed as they had to relocate. Two years later the Palestinian cinema archive disappeared. For 25 years the archives have been missing and no one knows what has happened to them and whether they were stolen, buried, burned or lost. There have been several individual initiatives over the years to find and uncover the archive, but the effort has been too dispersed. The individuals who have sought out these films in isolation reflect the deep state of fragmentation and the very complicated condition of Palestinians today.

In an effort to resist the erasure of cinematic history and Palestinian memory from the region, we present you with this small selection of films. They preserve a history, they document an era and events, and they show us fragments of both Palestinian narratives as well as the larger Arab narrative.

I want to thank Khadija Abu Ali for all the help she gave me as well as for her endless generosity in sharing her life as well as the lives and histories of these films with me. I also want to thank Kais al-Zubaidi and Mustafa Abu Ali for sharing their insights and anecdotes about these films and their stories with me. Lastly, thanks to all three for reviewing my text and correcting my errors.

Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948

Today I was going through some old video footage and decided to upload some excerpts of us working on this piece...this is from 6 years ago...pre 9/11...it was an amazing time to be an Arab in New York then. Our community was really active and vibrant in intellectual, political and cultural spheres.



These are video excerpts from the making of "Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948"2001. This piece is a document (or the remains) of a 3 month community based project. Over 140 people came through my studio to sew and socialize, often there was live Arabic music. There were lawyers, bankers, filmmakers, dentists,consultants, playwrights, artists, human rights activists, teachers, etc. There were Palestinians (some of whom come from these villages), Israelis ( who grew up on the remains of these villages) and people from a multitude of countries. (I used the archive of Palestinian villages compiled by Walid Khalidi in "All That Remains". )

The Falafel Chronicles on the FM Ferry Experiment

Today Jamal Rayyis and I did a live, improvisational performance of fragments from our on-going "Falafel Chronicles." We broadcasted live from the Staten Island Ferry which my friends Valerie and Angel have turned into a mobile radio station. Check out their project at:

http://www.fmferryexperiment.net/

There will be a podcast of our performance on their site soon.

in Berlin

I am in Berlin for a week.

This is the first time I have come back to this city since the day the wall came down in 1989.
I have documentation of that and the heady days which followed and will post it later. I can't believe I was here for that and that I witnessed the whole thing first hand. (I had gone to Berlin completely on accident. I had taken a train from Rome and when I got off the train in Berlin...the events were unfolding right before my eyes....). Anyways more later on what it feels like to be here now after so long .... and all that has happened since then.

Today was the inaugural broadcast of the WUNP// The United Nations Plaza Radio Network hosted by neuroTransmitter.

http://www.unitednationsplaza.org/radio.html

Here are some picts:

Valerie Tevere and Angel Nevarez preparing for the big night.

Regine Basha and Julieta Aranda present Radio Baghdad

A live video feed of the broadcast was projected downstairs at the UN Plaza. Down there you could watch , listen and have drinks. Later there was a party with lots of dancing in the same space.


Stefan Saffer - Der Grüne Punkt

this post is dedicated to Leeza Doreian

Leeza Doreian is one of my best friends and in New York city she has known me longer and probably knows me better then anyone else. Without her I don't know where I would be. She has taught me so much about life, friendship, love, being a woman and more. She is definitely up there as one of the most incredible human beings I have even encountered in my life.

I wanted to publicly thank her for her hard work and tireless support during the installation of my piece in Venice. I can't imagine what it would have been like to install "Material for a film" without her. Thank you.

She has also been a major pillar in my studio and life for the last several years and her input, friendship, patience, support and love is invaluable.

This is her website: http://leezadoreian.com/

Here is an image of one of my favorite paintings from her Airport series:

"Material for a film" at the Venice Biennale

I am currently exhibiting a new work at this year’s Venice Biennale. Robert Storr invited me to participate in his exhibition entitled Think with the senses – Feel with the mind.
I am presenting Material for a film (2005 – ongoing). This installation in Venice is comprised of photographs, text, video and sound pieces and was devised in part with the support of La Biennale di Venezia.
Here is a brief text I wrote, one installation shot, and some components from the piece.


Material for a film (2005 – ongoing)

Wael Zuaiter was the first victim in Europe in a series of assassinations committed by Israeli agents of Palestinian artists, intellectuals and diplomats that was already underway in the Middle East. Zuaiter was gunned down with 12 bullets outside his apartment in Piazza Annibaliano, Rome on October 16th, 1972.

In 1979, Wael Zuaiter’s companion of eight years, Sydney born artist Janet Venn-Brown published For A Palestinian – A Memorial to Wael Zuaiter. One chapter, titled Material for a film by Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro, is comprised of a series of interviews conducted with the people who were part of Wael’s life in Italy, including Janet herself. They were going to make a film, but Elio Petri died shortly afterwards and the film was never realized. This chapter was the point of departure for my project.

I went back to Rome in 2005 to continue collecting material for a film.

I visited his friends in Rome, Massa Carrara and elsewhere and I made several trips to Nablus to visit his sister Naila and see his family home where he grew up. I visited Janet Venn-Brown in Rome regularly during these three years. We spent many weeks together, calling on Wael’s old friends and going through her extensive archives. I found a letter Janet had written to Costas Gavras asking him to consider making a film about Wael because she believed that through his story, the story of thousands of other Palestinians could be told.

Wael’s friends during his ten years in Rome included a myriad of cultural leaders, artists, journalists and poets, including Alberto Moravia (with whom he traveled twice to the Middle East with), Raphael Alberti, Antonio Gambini, Bruno Cagli, Jean Genet, Ennio Politi, Piero Della Seta, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Janet told me “He was a poet. He was completely lost without poetry.”

Wael Zuaiter in Peter Seller's "Pink Panther"

When Wael was living in Italy he used to sometimes be an extra in films in order to have some money. During my research I discovered that Wael Zuaiter had a role as a waiter when he was an extra in Peter Seller's film The Pink Panther, Rome, Cinecitta Studios, 1963. According to Janet he was so charismatic that the director picked him out of the crowd and offered him a speaking part but each time he got in front of the camera and they said; "Ready! Shoot!" he froze and forgot all his lines.
After Janet described his role to me, I managed to find 3 glimpses of him in the film. Janet told me she was quite disappointed when the film came out, as she sat through it twice only to see that he was a quick flash across the screen.




15/9/2005, Piazza Annibaliano, Roma

15/9/2005
Piazza Annibaliano, Roma

Wael Zuaiter lived here in apartment #20 on the 7th floor. The 93 bus and the 80 bus come here. I am sitting outside across the street from his building eating lunch on Viale Eritrea, wondering which streets he walked down. Did he ever eat here? Where did he buy his paper and cigarettes?

He made a phone call at the Trieste Bar next door before going home as both his electricity and phone bills had been cut because he did not have enough money to pay his bills. Wael entered this doorway to go across the courtyard and enter Scala C, which was the entrance to his wing of the building (to the left).

Where were the Mossad agents hiding? It was around 10:30 p.m. when he headed to the stairwell of entrance C to take the elevator up to his flat. He made a phone call at the Trieste Bar next door before going home as both his electricity and phone bills

He reached the elevator. He was shot 12 times with a .22 calibre pistol with a silencer at close range.

After spending several hours inside his building examining his floor, the courtyard and elevator, I leave. As I am crossing the street to take one last picture of his side of the building I look down and see an old suitcase before me.




la rivoluzione palestinese

Mahmoud

"Material for a film" goes to Sienna

I was invited to show the piece I made for the Sydney Biennale at Palazzo delle Papesse. The show "System Error: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" was co-curated by Papesse chief curator Lorenzo Fusi and New York/Dhaka based artist Naeem Mohaiemen. For more information and images of the show: www.papesse.orghttp://www.papesse.org/w2d3/v3/view/papesse/utf/mostre--36/index_en.html


On Monday October 16, 1972, Wael Zuaiter left Janet Venn-Brown’s apartment and headed to his apartment at no. 4 Piazza Annibaliano in Rome. He had been reading A Thousand and One Nights on Janet’s couch searching for references to use in an article he was planning to write that evening. He took two buses to get from Janet’s place to his in northern Rome. Just as he reached the elevator inside the entrance to the building of the apartment block where he lived, Israeli assassins fired 12 bullets into his head and chest with 22 caliber pistols at close range.

Wael Zuaiter had become the first victim in Europe in a series of assassinations committed by Israeli agents on Palestinian artists, intellectuals and diplomats that was already underway in the Middle East.

Wael ended an article he wrote for the newspaper L’Espresso two or three weeks before his assassination by quoting the English mystic Francis Thompson:

"That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star"

Wael Zuaiter's dream was to translate A Thousand and One Nights directly from Arabic into Italian. He had been working on this project since his arrival in Italy in 1962. To this day an Italian translation from the Arabic does not exist, all the Italian translations are from other translations.

Wael had photocopied 4000 pages of one of the oldest Arabic editions from a library in Rome. He asked Laila Baido, a woman from Sardinia living in Rome, to help with the translation and they worked on it for many years. Janet and I searched for her last December, so I could see his xeroxes and their translations of the first book, but no one knew anything regarding her whereabouts.

The night Wael was killed he had volume 2 of the book in his pocket. Twelve of the bullets entered his body but there was a thirteenth bullet which pierced through the book and got lodged in its spine. Janet kept this book hidden for thirty years, recently she donated it to the Wael Zuaiter Center in Massa Carrara. On December 5th, 2005, I took a train to Massa Carrara to meet his old friends and to document the book. I photographed each page the bullet had gone through, until I could no longer see marks or imprints from the bullet.

I went into training at a shooting center in Sydney, Australia to learn how to use a gun. After my training, I shot 1000 blank white books with a 22 calibre pistol. The same gun the Israeli Mossad used to hunt and kill Palestinians in Europe.

7 Palestinians Killed by Palestinians

28 injured.

I have been too depressed to write anything or post since this descent into madness began.
But today I want to mark.
Record that 7 Palestinians were killed by their own people.
The highest number of dead in a day since this started.

I only have 5 of their names. I will work on getting the names of the other two:

Ismail Abu Al Kheir
Mohammad Kassab
Mohammad Harazin
Shadi Mohammad Tahir
Omar Nadir

Here in Ramallah, things have been extremely tense. Everyone is trying to go about their day as normal: going to work, dropping off the kids at school, meetings, etc but the air is so tight....
Everyone is on edge....you feel it even as we all try to act normal. The laughter is too hard, the effort too forceful....and there is fear. Fear in our own streets from ourselves. No one knows anything anymore.

From my view it seems that everyone has a gun (and that nobody knows how to use them). Thank you America and Israel for pumping the weapons in here.

This thought leads me to maybe a positive note? If you took my neighborhood in NYC and completely sealed it off behind a massive apartheid wall and cut people off from their families and their jobs forever, and then forbade anyone from coming and going, and then stopped letting in food supplies, and then cut off the electricity for weeks on end, and then only allowed weapons to make its way into the ghetto..... MAN there would be hundreds dead. No way in hell could that neighborhood handle all these weapons.....so we are actually doing pretty good compared to how people in places like Berlin, New York, London would act in such horrific conditions.

Meanwhile, everywhere I turn I see friends of mine working on getting out of here. Khalas enough is enough.....there is no future they say. Who wants to live in a ghetto behind concrete with 18 year old armed Russians with M-16's threatening you and your children? With no room to move or grow.
Suffocation.

Well...I stocked up on food and water just in case but hopefully the worst is over and this won't continue when I wake up tomorrow.

for my father

I was 13 years old standing next to my father in Bethlehem one sunny and windy day when he took my hand and pointed to the settlement of Gilo and said: "See baba, see there?". Then my eyes followed his finger as it moved across the landscape and stopped at the settlement of Har Gilo; "and there. See? They are going to build settlements just like those all around us". Then with his arm still outstretched, we turned in a circle and I watched his finger pointing at the horizon line around Bethlehem and Bayt Jalla, he said "One day they will encircle us."

This post is for my father Yusuf Nasri Suleiman Jacir. My father who taught me what it means to be free, what justice is, how to fight, and who gave me his love for Palestine. He is my biggest hero. He is the most giving and loving person I have ever known in my entire life. His first priority has always been his family and he did anything he could to make us happy.

If he could have done what he wanted in his life he would have been a professor. That was his dream. For him this was the highest and most honorable profession. No one deserved more respect than a teacher. But a poor man from Bethlehem, with a family to support and family back home to take care of, could not afford to indulge in such bourgeoisie fantasies.

He fought hard to get where he is and he did it all by himself. Nothing was handed to him. He always had a lot of hardship in his life but he made it through and he did a great job. Because of him, I know that it is possible to do anything, at any age and that it is never too late.

My father was born and raised in Bethlehem where, although he came from a historically famous and wealthy family (our family tree goes back to 1500), he grew up poor. The Jacir family had gone bankrupt in the 30's and lost absolutely everything. What remains of their legacy is the historic "Jacir Palace". My great grandfather Suleiman built it in 1910 with the intention that him and his 5 brothers families would all live in the house together, and they did for a short time but then the family lost everything and his dream was lost forever. Suleiman had quite a reputation around the region for his incredible generosity, everyone knew that if you were hungry you could go there and he would feed you.

The Jacir “palace” is currently owned by Padico and is an International Hotel but prior to this it has had an interesting history of occupants. In the 40’s the British used it as a prison. In the 50’s it was a private school called Al-Ummah, and in fact my grandfather Nasri taught there. Al-Ummah was originally located in Al-Baqaa’ in Jerusalem but after the 1948 catastrophe it was reborn in Bethlehem. Later the house became a government secondary boys’ school and then at a later stage was transformed in to a government girl’s school. Ironically, I saw recently in an Israeli tourist guide the Jacir palace described as built by a "Turkish Ottoman Merchant". Not surprising as they are working on all fronts to erase and distort our history.

My father did not have the opportunity to go to college until the age of 33. He was newly married with kids on the way, and working a full-time job and yet he managed to get his B.A.. He kept struggling so that eventually he got his master's degree at the age of 39 from the University of Chicago which was a major achievement. Of course he could have never accomplished this without the help and support of my mother who worked a retail job selling clothes, and did things like hand sew clothes for us to wear. My father would work full-time and take night courses, and then he would come home where my mother would have dinner waiting for him. Right after he was finished eating, she would make him study until the wee hours of the morning. He said there was no way he could have done it without her. Her background was different then my fathers. She was well-educated at a young age and already had a bachelors degree at the time of her marriage. Her dream was to get a masters degree which she started to slowly work on after getting married.

Eventually my father decided he was willing to go and live in a country where he would be deemed a "guest worker" and be made to feel estranged. This was Saudi Arabia and he accepted it so that his kids could have a better life then he did. Most importantly he wanted us to have a chance to have what he couldn’t get until he was in his mid-30's - a college education. Saudi Arabia was not easy for my parents and they had to make huge sacrifices and adjustments. They were forbidden from practicing their religion and their culture. They were forbidden from holding hands, or displaying any signs of public affection. Their children could not study in an Arabic school because we were not Saudi nationals so the only option was the foreign schools. There was no cinema, no dance, and no theater. At one point my mother found out about a dance teacher who was secretly teaching and she immediately signed me and my sister up....but alas the teacher was found out and promptly thrown out of the country (along with my 8 year old dream of becoming a professional dancer). All foreign teenagers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at that time were forced to leave to pursue their high school education outside the country as it was forbidden for them to stay. Coming from a traditional Bethlehem family you can imagine what a sacrifice this was for my father to have to send his children away from him. It was unheard of and heartbreaking for him. I will never forget the day I left home for Italy at the age of 14, my father (who was always open and free with his emotions which is another reason he is my hero) wept openly as he hugged me good bye.

In Saudi Arabia, my mother could no longer pursue her Masters degree and had to give that up. She managed of course, and became the first Arabic teacher at the American School in Riyadh. She also got involved in several Saudi women's groups. Best of all, was that she refused to wear the black abaya. She thought it was too dark and depressing and decided to make her own abaya. Her abaya was also black, and followed the rules by covering her body head to toe, but her abaya was covered in giant brightly colored flowers - they were pink, purple and green. When I was a young girl I was embarrassed at the way she stuck out of the crowd and wished she would wear a plain black one like me and my sister, but now when I look back at it I am proud.

But we were close to Palestine. We were near our homeland and for my father the most important thing was being able to go back as much as we could. We went back (sometimes three times a year) in the 70's and 80's via Jordan and the infamous bridge where I have many deep memories of being stripped searched as a child, and having things like my chewing gum confiscated. Working in Saudi Arabia also gave my father the ability to support his family still in Bethlehem. When I was growing up, he worked almost 7 days a week, office hours were not 9 - 5, they were 8 a.m. to midnight. He would come home for dinner but then he would have to rush back to the office where I always felt he worked like a slave. In Bethlehem, it seemed our family and other people had no idea what our lives were like outside Palestine and I heard them say many things. It didn't matter what we said, they had a fantasy in their mind about how we lived and nothing would change that. When I would complain about this to my mother, she would just quietly say "let them talk".

I remember walking the streets of Bethlehem as a child and holding my fathers hands, I was always in awe as it seemed everyone knew him, everyone! My father never did resolve the fact that his children were growing up away from his parents and extended family. This fact hurt him and has always made him doubt if he made the right decision to leave Palestine.

Before my father got married and went to college he worked in Hebron from 1962 until 1969. He was working for UNRWA as the Area Welfare Officer for the Hebron and Bethlehem areas. The UNRWA headquarters was in Hebron and it's area covered Bethlehem and all the surrounding villages and refugee camps. My father's specific job was that he was in charge of case work, youth activities, welfare distributions, and sewing centers, in Bethlehem, Hebron, Arroub Camp, Fawwar camp and Deheishe camp. He also supervised case workers, youth leaders and sewing center supervisors. This job gave him the opportunity to travel to the USA for the first time in 1966 as a representative of Jordan to the Chicago International Program for Youth Leaders and Social workers. He spent 4 months in America and visited New York, Washington and Chicago. As a joke, they decided to dress in traditional Arab costumes when they flew to America to play with the American’s stereotypes of who we Arabs are.

During his eight year time period as a social worker, he used to commute daily to his work in Hebron from Bethlehem on the Hebron/Bethlehem bus. It was bus number 23. This bus originated in Jerusalem and made its way along the Jerusalem-Hebron road through Bethlehem and onwards to Hebron. He tells me that he had fun on his daily bus ride. In those days it was a long trip, depending on the weather and traffic it normally took anywhere from 40 to 50 minutes for him to get to the UNRWA office.

I tried to find this bus a few weeks back. It no longer runs. It stopped running ten years ago. There is also no way to get from Bethlehem to Hebron now on the Jerusalem-Hebron Road as the Israelis have chopped it into pieces and blocked it in several places. I tried to follow its route but instead of the wide open road, I found various checkpoints and at several points the wall completely closing the road. It seems like only a few years ago when I could follow this exact route.

My father was in Hebron at work when the war broke out on June 5, 1967. He managed to return to Bethlehem on UNRWA transportation from the Hebron office to the UNRWA office in Bethlehem. From the UNRWA office in Bethlehem he walked home to his house as the Israelis were shelling the city.
Meanwhile my mother at the same time was on her way from Amman to Bethlehem by car. Her car was attacked by the Israeli army and run over by a tank. She spent three days hiding in the hills and made it back to Bethlehem on foot.

My father eventually realized that UNRWA was created to ensure that we remain beggars and never create the means to help ourselves. UNRWA seemed to do nothing but keep us stagnate and in a state of permanent waiting.
He left.

*******

This photo essay was taken the day I tried to follow Bus Number 23’s route, my father’s daily commute to Hebron.
He was right.
They have completely encircled us, not only by the settlements, but by the wall, and the by-pass roads.
Bethlehem is a ghetto.

Bus No. 23

Two kilometers outside Bethlehem coming in from Jerusalem is Jebel Abu Ghneim which was once a green forest with 60,000 pine trees, and hundreds of animals and plants. The land's owners are from Bethlehem, Bayt Sahour, Sur Baher and Um Tuba. In 1997, the Israelis began destroying the forest by uprooting all the trees in order to build Har Homa settlement. Now I see there is new construction on the bottom of the mountain as well.

I could not continue on the historical road which connects Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Hebron ( bus number 23's route) because the wall chopped it here.

Standing in front of the wall and looking to the right I saw the wall criss-crossing across the landscape and cutting Bethlehem off from her agricultural lands.

In order to enter Bethlehem, we had to make a left and get off the Jerusalem-Hebron Road. Here we are stopped at the first checkpoint and we are looking ahead. Soldiers are checking our passports.

After passing through the first checkpoint, we made a right and we were able to enter Bethlehem through the large gate. You can see a tourist bus on its way out exiting the city. Palestinian I.D. holders can not enter or exit from here.

In case you didn't notice in the other picture, the Israel Ministry of Tourism strung up a poster about "peace" ON the wall which has turned the city of Bethlehem into a ghetto. This is one of the most vile ironies of a tourist poster I have ever seen.

Once inside Bethlehem, I made a right to try to get back to the Jerusalem-Hebron Road.

We got lost and ended up in what seemed like an endless maze of wall.

Everywhere I looked I saw the wall, in all directions.
Here we got out of the car and had to walk. I wanted to get to the Jerusalem-Hebron Road and examine the area around Rachel's Tomb and we couldn't drive since the road was blocked, chopped and split in several places.

This is Claire Anastas' house. It is surrounded all all three sides by the wall.

Back on the Jerusalem-Hebron Road businesses have been shut down as the wall has completely shut them in (or out). As you can see there is no road here, it is more like an alleyway - the rest of the once wide road is on the other side of the wall - part of Rachel's Tomb.

Here facing the direction of Hebron, the Rachel's Tomb complex on the right behind the wall. The road to the left of the house leads to Manger Square. Rachel's Tomb and the surrounding area which they have enclosed behind the wall is all Bethlehem's land. In September 2006 the Israeli government offically annexed it as part of Jerusalem.

This is the southside of Rachel's Tomb. Rachel's Tomb now has two settler families living in it. They are building a yeshiva and plan to have 400 apartments for Israeli settlers. It won't be long until we end up like Hebron...

This is the view from the northside of Rachel's Tomb, and the Llama Brothers souvenir shop cut off from the rest of Bethlehem.

Along the side of the wall and the Llama brothers souvenir shop.

We backtracked and walked along the road in the direction of Jerusalem until we reached the wall. (This is what the other side of the Jerusalem-Hebron Road which I couldn't stay on looks like. See second picture.)

This is where Palestinian I.D. holders have to line up to enter or exit. There will only be two entrances in and out of Bethlehem.

We went back to the car and found our way back to the Jerusalem-Hebron Road past Rachel's Tomb, but to get to Hebron we made a right at Bab Al-Zaq and headed to Bayt Jalla instead of going straight. There was no way to stay on this road as the road was cut off again before Dheishe Camp. We stopped at the top of Bayt Jalla to see the olive trees the Israelis had chopped down. This marks the route of the wall as it snakes its way up here. All of Bayt Jalla's agricultural lands will be on the other side cut off from her people. The next time I stand here I will not be able to see this vista, I will only see grey concrete.

This is Hebron's old market. The last time I was here was 2000. It was a bustling commercial and cultural area then. Now it is a ghost town. The city of Hebron is surrounded with checkpoints, road blocks and military barriers cutting roads leading to other parts of the city. The most violent settlers in the West Bank live in the center of Hebron in homes they stole from Palestinians. They routinely attack Palestinians in an effort to get them to leave. They are heavily guarded by 2000 members of the Israeli Army.
Please see: http://www.cpt.org/csd/campaign.php

Is this Bethlehem's future?

Security Chaos

Fatah - Hamas
Hamas - Fatah
Fatah - Fatah

"International Human Rights Day"

December 10th, 2006

Press Release

On the Occasion of the "International Human Rights Day"
Occupation and Siege are a Systematic Policy of Impoverishment of Palestinian People

Today marks the 58th anniversary of the International Human Rights day. It is the day the UN declared the issuance of the "International Declarations of Human Rights" to put new international foundations for enforcing and respecting the sacred life and dignity of human beings.

It might be a co-incidence for the birth of this declaration with the anniversary of the Palestinian uprooting in 1948, still experienced by Palestinians up until today.

This year, the occasion is designated to focus on efforts of eliminating poverty worldwide under the theme "Fighting Poverty is a Matter of Obligation not Charity" for the mere fact that poverty is a genuine dilemma penetrating all over the world, particularity in developing countries.

This occasion comes as Palestine and the whole region are immersed in continuing incidents of violence, political instability, and violations of human rights. Although the Israeli unilateral disengagement plan from Gaza led to absence of the physical existence of Israeli army from inside Gaza, it did not end the effective control of Palestinian civilian life; thus converting Gaza into a big prison with tremendous political, and socio-economical problems and challenges.

Israel has continued its policies of assassination, closures, expansion of settlements, and building the separation wall in the West Bank. Israel continued with its policy of strict political and economical siege, through policies of closures, restrictions, and more than 520 checkpoints partitioning the whole OPT and restricting freedom of movement. Israel persisted to use the policies of political assassinations, targeting innocent civilians and objects, confiscating land, uprooting trees, demolishing homes, and preventing citizens from using their natural resources such as land, water, and fishing wealth.

All such measures lead to impoverishment of Palestinian people through systematic policies of deprivation of resources including; natural resources and developmental and humanitarian assistance provided to Palestinians by the international community. In a recent report published by UNRWA, it was indicated that more than 64% of Palestinians live under poverty line. The report also mentioned that the conditions are alarming, where more than one million Palestinians in the OPT live in extreme poverty.

The unjust siege imposed by the international community, following the Palestinian democratic elections and the constitution of the Palestinian government by Hamas, contributed further to a huge increase in poverty and unemployment amongst Palestinians, particularly after the inability of the PA to pay the salaries of more than 160,000 public servants for the last 10 month. Consequently, such situation led to dangerous humanitarian and psychological repercussions.

Poverty has serious negative consequences on the psychosocial functioning of individuals, leading to an increase in mental disorders in general. For poor people, there is more increase in depression, anxiety, and somatization disorders. Moreover, poverty contributes to an increase in the rate of relapses among mental health patients.

The psychological suffering is reflected in the high levels of domestic, tribal, and community violence in general. Such violence is the main factor in the continuation of violence and instability in the whole region.

The international community has a responsibility today more than ever to find new mechanisms to enforce international law and ensure adherence to it. They should work on ensuring that all human beings, wherever they are, have equal opportunities and access to resources, which will lead to enforcement and protection of human rights, dignity, and achieving security & peace worldwide.

On the occasion of the International Human Rights Day, we at the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, call upon the international community, especially the signatories of the 4th Geneva Convention, and human rights organizations to fulfill their responsibilities and urge all countries to respect articles of international law. We, also, urge them to pressure Israel to prevent its continued violations of Palestinian human rights with all of its forms, and to urgently act on lifting the political and economical siege imposed on the Palestinian People.

Again, on the International Human Rights Day, we hope to convert the slogan "Fighting Poverty is a Matter of Obligation not Charity" into a reality.

Gaza Community Mental Health Programme


--------------------------------

2006 10 ديسمبر

بيان صحفي
بمناسبة اليوم العالمي لحقوق الانسان
"الاحتلال والحصار سياسة ممنهجة لإفقار وقهر الشعب الفلسطيني"

يصادف اليوم الذكرى الثامنة والخمسين لليوم العالمي لحقوق الإنسان وهو اليوم الذي أعلنت فيه الأمم المتحدة صدور الإعلان العالمي لحقوق الإنسان ليضع أسس عالمية جديدة في تعزيز قيم وإحترام قدسية الحياة والكرامة الإنسانية.

وربما كان من المصادفة أن تتزامن ولادة هذا الإعلان مع ذكرى نكبة فلسطين التي ما زالت تداعياتها تتفاعل حتى يومنا هذا.

و في هذا العام تخصص الامم المتحدة هذه المناسبة للتركيز على قضية الفقر في العالم تحت شعار (محاربة الفقر قضية إلتزام لا إحسان) والتي أصبحت معضلة حقيقية تمس قطاعات واسعة من البشر في دول العالم كافة وخاصة الدول النامية.

إننا بهذه المناسبة نشدد على أهمية وضرورة أن تكون مبادئ الإعلان العالمي لحقوق الإنسان وما تلاها من إتفاقيات ومواثيق ذات العلاقة تراثاً إنسانياً أخلاقياً وقانونياً ملزماً للعلاقات بين الدول خاصة فيما يتعلق بالصراع العربي الإسرائيلي.

كما وتأتي هذه المناسبة بينما لا يزال الشعب الفلسطيني يتعرض للعدوان الاسرائيلي وتخترق حقوقه الانسانية بشكل كبير. فلا زالت إسرائيل تطبق حصارها السياسي حاجز يقطع أوصال الارض الفلسطينية. هذا و تستمر اسرائيل 520والاقتصادي الخانق على الشعب الفلسطيني عبر سياسة الاغلاق والحصار والحواجز حيث يوجد أكثر من أيضاً في إتباع سياسة الاغتيال وقصف المدنيين والاعيان المدنية سرقة الارض وبناء جدار الفصل العنصري وإقتلاع الاشجار وهدم المنازل ومنع السكان من إستغلال مصادرهم الطبيعية كالاراضي والمياه والثروة السمكية.

إن كل هذه الممارسات تؤدي بالضرورة الى إفقار الشعب الفلسطيني عبر سياسة ممنهجة لحرمانه من مقدراته بما فيها مصادره الطبيعية والمساعدات التنموية والانسانية التي % من أبناء الشعب الفلسطيني تحت خط الفقر حسب ما ورد في تقرير وكالة الغوث الدولية (الأنروا) والتي ذكرت فيه أن هذا الوضع 64يتلقاها، وهو الأمر الذي أدى إلى أن يعيش ينذر بالخطر حيث يعيش أكثر من مليون فلسطيني في غزة والضفة في فقر مدقع وانخفاض معدل الدخل الفردي إلى أقل مستوياته.

ولقد ساهم الحصار الظالم الذي فرضه المجتمع الدولي عقب نتائج الانتخابات الفلسطينية والتي شهد العالم بنزاهتها وفوز حركة حماس وتشكيل الحكومة الفلسطينية الى إزدياد ألف موظف منذ حوالي عشرة أشهر الامر الذي أدى إلى 160هائل في معدلات الفقر والبطالة بين الفلسطينيين وخاصة بعد ان عجزت الحكومة عن تسديد رواتب ما يقارب من تداعيات إنسانية ونفسية خطيرة.

إن للفقر نتائج خطيرة على الحالة النفسية والاجتماعية للانسان، حيث يؤدي الفقر إلى ازدياد معدلات الاضطرابات النفسية بصورة عامة لدى طبقة الفقراء حيث يشيع الاكتئاب النفسي والقلق والاضطرابات الجسدية الناجمة عن أسباب نفسية، كذلك يساهم الفقر بحدوث انتكاسات مرضية على نطاق واسع لدى المرضى النفسيين.

إن هذه المعاناة النفسية تعكس نفسها في مستوى عالي من العنف الاسري والعشائري والمجتمعي بشكل عام . وبذلك تكون أحد عوامل التوتر الدائم والعنف وعدم الاستقرار، وإن أي تغيير حقيقي باتجاه السلام والهدوء يجب أن يترافق بالضرورة مع احترام الحقوق الاساسية للانسان ومن أهمها الحق في حصوله على إحتياجاتها الاساسية.

إن على المجتمع الدولي مسئولية كبرى لايجاد آليات فعالة لتطبيق القانون الدولي وضمان إلتزام كافة دول العالم به وكذلك العمل على حصول الانسان أينما كان على فرص متساوية من المصادر الحياتية والطبيعية مما سيؤدي إلى تعزيز وحماية حقوق الانسان وكرامته وتحقيق الامن والسلم في العالم.

إننا في برنامج غزة للصحة النفسية نطالب جميع الحكومات ومؤسسات الأمم المتحدة ومؤسسات حقوق الإنسان للضغط على إسرائيل من أجل منع انتهاكات حقوق الإنسان في فلسطين بكافة أشكاله من جهة وضرورة الاسراع في رفع الحصار السياسي والاقتصادي المفروض على الشعب الفلسطيني.

أخيراً وفي هذه الذكرى فإننا نتطلع إلى تحقيق المزيد من السلام والعيش الكريم للإنسان في كل مكان عبر تطبيق روح ونصوص الاعلان العالمي لحقوق الانسان وكافة الاتفاقات الدولية التي تلته ليتحول حقوق الانسان الى حقيقة واقعة تخدم الانسانية والعدالة والسلام.

برنامج غزة للصحة النفسية

------------------------------
Please visit our site:
Gaza Community Mental Health Programme
www.gcmhp.net

George Wassouf and Ramallah epidemics

I love George Wassouf. I love his crazy, deep, husky voice. I have been sick with bronchitis for the past week, which according to the doctor I saw yesterday is a big epidemic in Ramallah lately.

The other epidemic going on here these days is a string of robberies. Yes my friends, Ramallah is no longer the safe place it once was. In the past two weeks alone, 4 of my friends have had their cars stolen and everyday you hear someone mention that someone or other's car disappeared in front of their house, or restaurant, or at the checkpoint. There have also been several purse snatchings in the city (now you have to keep an eye on your belongings all the time when in restaurants or in the market, etc.). I have heard of several house break-in's. One of those break-in's include dear Vera Tamari who awoke in the middle of the night to find a man standing in the doorway of her bedroom! Luckily nothing bad happened and he ran out of the house.
A funny aside is that when the shurta (police) arrived to search her house and around outside they did not come equipped with flashlights. Not a single one of them. So Vera had a huge gang of shurta searching all around the outside of her house in the dark using the light of their cell phones as flashlights!

This is the store where the Wassouf debates take place, right next to the pharmacy.

Anyways, I had enough strength to make my way to my favorite music store in Ramallah yesterday to engage the owner in our usual argument as to whether George Wassouf is Syrian or Lebanese. I say Syrian. He says Lebanese. This has been an ongoing debate between us for the last several years. I don't want to put an end to it, I like this tradition of ours. I welcome anyone's comments on this matter.

(I also had enough strength to make it to my friend Shuruq's birthday party but left rather early. Dancing while coughing up your lungs is NOT sexy. Dancing in a living room thick with cigarette smoke also doesn't help when one is sick. I don't recommend it.)

Lastly, I have not written about the political situation on the ground here for awhile and I am sorry. It is just too depressing. The mainstream media focuses on pretend news stories about unity governments, Abu Mazen's meetings, and the endless stream of so-called ceasefires, meanwhile the real news takes place in the shadows. The journalists focus on reporting on what happened in the latest round of unity talks......meanwhile the march of death and destruction goes seemingly unrecorded. The real story (among MANY others) is the fact that there are entire sections of Beit Hanoun gone.
Just like that.
Disappeared.

Iraqi Dates have arrived in NYC

My friend Michael Rakowitz had made one of the best art projects I have seen in New York city in a long time. He re-opened his Iraqi grandfather's import export company on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Here is the latest update on the store and more information:

Dear Friends,

It's been a long journey, but 10 boxes of Iraqi dates have made it through U.S. Customs, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspections, and are finally for sale on my store's shelves.

The initial one-ton shipment of Iraqi dates (khestawee type)was originally scheduled to be recieved in early October by my company, Davisons & Co.--a resurrected version of my grandfather's import export company that he operated out of Baghdad and subsequently New York after he fled Iraq in 1946. The dates were part of a deal to ship one-ton of the dates from Hilla, Iraq to our storefront in Brooklyn, NY, signed by our company and Al Farez Co. in Baghdad. The import was arranged through Sahadi Fine Foods in Brooklyn, NY.

The shipment left Baghdad in early October, literally days after the dates came down from the palm trees. They were to travel by truck to Amman, Jordan where they would then be shipped by air direct to JFK International Airport. On the way, however, the truck carrying the dates waited in a line of cars, reported to be days long, of Iraqis fleeing the sectarian violence and trying to gain entry into Jordan to seek refuge. Once at the border, the truck was turned away like so many of the Iraqi refugees, and was sent back to Baghdad because the shipment required a certificate declaring it free from radiation. After receiving said certificate, the truck returned to the border, only to have the Jordanian officials turn the driver away again, this time because of "security concerns." The truck then headed north to Syria, where it made it through to Damascus Airport and was then held by security officials because a form had not been completed by the truck driver that would cost Al Farez 1200 USD to have completed on the Syrian end. After yet another week, the Syrian officials released the shipment, whereupon the Sales Agent for Al Farez, Khairi, discovered that the dates had basically cooked after shuttling back and forth for three weeks in a hot truck and were not suitable to be exported. The dates were to have been sent from Damascus to Cairo, Egypt, then onward to the US.

In the end, the dates traveled the exact same path as an Iraqi refugee, many of whom sought entry to Egypt, once the Jordanian border was tightened in the early fall. They never reached their destination, much like the fleeing Iraqis.

However, in a new deal agreed upon on 7 November, 10 new boxes of 4 varieties of dates were shipped via DHL from Baghdad to the USA. We are pleased to announce that just yesterday, the FDA released the dates into our possession and they are now on sale in our store in Brooklyn. The dates are packed in boxes, clearly labeled "Product of Iraq," believed by many importers to be the first such item to enter the USA in over 25 years.We will be from 10 AM-7 PM daily, as always, and our last day of business is scheduled to be Sunday, 10 December.

Due to the very low quantity of dates in our store (we were supposed to have 200 boxes, now we only have 10), we will be limiting the amount per customer to accomodate the high number of pre-orders.

You can read more about the history of the transaction at the following blog. It is the project page for "Return" which is presented as part of Creative Time's "Who Cares" initiative.

http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2006/whocares/projects_rakowitz.html

I will be updating the blog tomorrow morning.

Also, please check out Christine Lagorio's excellent article about the project, posted today at cbsnews.com

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/05/national/main2231675.shtml

Very special thanks to Creative Time for their support and presentation of this work, and for extending the project six weeks beyond its intended closing date, in order to accomodate the arrival of the dates; to Atlantic Assets and Art Assets for the donation of the storefront space, and for agreeing to the extension of the project; to Pat Whelan and Sahadi Fine Foods for their collaboration on the import of the dates and handling all bureaucratic channels, facilitating their already difficult arrival; to Rick Morana at C-Air Customhouse Brokers for courageously agreeing to oversee an import that most would have rejected; and to Atheer Al Azawi, Khairi Fares, Suzan Othman of Al Farez Co., Baghdad/Amman, and Fallah Farms in Hilla, Iraq, for collaborating with me and establishing a new business partnership that will hopefully open as many as eyes as it will sweeten mouths.


Michael Rakowitz
Proprietor
Davisons & Co.
529 Atlantic Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
11217
tel: 917-692-5592

Israel Demolishs Bedouin Village

The Government of Israel Demolished an Entire Bedouin Village Today in Negeb

At 5:00am hundreds of police people accompanied six bulldozers and demolished 17 homes and 3 animal shacks in the village of Twail Abu-Jarwal. The entire village is demolished. People are sitting by the piles of tin that were their modest dwellings and wondering what to do, where to go even their family cannot host them, as no one has a house standing.

This is the fourth time this year that the government demolished in this village. This time they got it "right" - no house is left standing.

But the villagers have nowhere to go to. They lived on the outskirts of the Bedouin town of Laqia, the old folk paid for plots of land to build homes in the 1970s, they still hold on the receipt, hoping someday to receive the plots. For the last 30 years they have been living on land belonging to others, in shacks, the housing becoming ever more crowded, until there was no room left for another baby. They turned to the government for a solution - the option for joining the rest of the residents of Laqia, in a regular house, on a regular plot of land. But the authorities had no options for them. The owners of the land on which they were living requested that they leave - 30 years is enough. So eventually they left back to their own ancestral land - only a couple of miles south of Laqia - by the old ruined school, by their old cemetery. The adult sons built their old mother a modest brick home. The rest built tin shacks.

A year ago the government came and destroyed several houses - including the brick home. Some of the people of Twail Abu Jarwal rebuilt, some moved into more crowded homes with their adult siblings. The government came nine months later and demolished 7 more homes. Again, some rebuilt their shacks, some moved in with family. The government came back last month and just to harass, uprooted fences, holding the sheep. And now they came in order to make sure the work is complete.

Israel's Minister of Interior, Roni Bar-On, two days ago was invited to give answers to the Internal Affairs Committee in the Knesset, as to what solutions the government is advancing in order to solve the issue of the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev, and why the government is demolishing homes while these people have no "legal" options for building homes. Bar-On claimed that everything is just fine, he is doing all he can to deal with this issue, but a criminal must be punished, and therefore all the "illegal" Bedouin homes in the Negev must be demolished. He claimed that as far as he is concerned, there are not enough demolitions in the Negev. And now he has proved that he is a man of his word - 17 homes demolished in one foul swoop.

Of the 150,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel living in the Negev, over 50% live in villages that the government as policy has left "unrecognized" , meaning that there are no options for building permits, as well as running water, electricity, roads, sewer systems and trash removal, additionally there are very minimal education and health facilities. This policy's aim is to force the Bedouins off their ancestral lands and to concentrate the Bedouins in urban townships, regardless of their wishes or their culture. However, there are also no options for living in the concentration towns the government has built, as there are no available plots of land for homes, as in the case of the families of the Twail abu-Jarwal village. Therefore the government can "legally" demolish the homes of 80,000 members of this community, while they cannot build one "legal" home.

We need help! Both financial and political.

* Please donate to help the people of the village re-build their homes (tin shacks that stand as homes...) Checks can be sent to RCUV - al Awna Fund (the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages), POBox 10002, Beer Sheva, zipcode 84105, ISRAEL.
* Please write to your representatives! And tell of the quiet and brutal demolitions of homes and lives in the Israeli Negev, demand that they do something about it.

For more information: Yeela Raanan, 054 7487005. yallylivnat@gmail.com.
Civil Society Activities Coordinator, Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages.

The Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages is an NGO and was created in 1997 as the representative body for the residents of the 45 Bedouin unrecognized villages in the Israeli Negev. Hssein al-Rafaia is the elected head of the RCUV.
Emily Jacir

OLMERT is BAD for the JEWS

I went to Haifa today to help my sister with auditions for her film. I will spare you the (yawn so boring and typical) checkpoint fiasco stories from our trip.
We were waiting at a red light once we were "inside", when I noticed this bumper sticker. At first I thought it was from some cool anti-occupation Israeli group. Then I thought, no, more likely this sticker comes from the contingency of the Israeli public who come from the extremist position of thinking Olmert is too lenient with the Palestinians and not ethnically cleansing fast enough...

Investigation of STARS & BUCKS

Last June, my friend Cathy sent me an email entitled "Only in Ramallah", attached to it were photographs of the new "Stars & Bucks Cafe" which had opened up in the center of Ramallah. Today was a sunny but cold day and so I decided it was time to investigate and take my own photos of this coffeeshop which now overlooks the Manara.



This new illumination in the Manara which beckons me at night with its powerful green glow...



I went inside to find out that although the logo is akin to that of "Starbucks", that is where the similarity ends. This is the entrance...once inside you are immediately greeted by a layer of smoke hovering in the air from all the arghiles....



Unlike Starbucks, the menu items here include arghile, as well as other Ramallah restaurant staples such as nachos, chicken fingers, french fries, ice creams and cakes, and a myriad of sandwiches (including of course mortadella). Here is a view of some tasty looking cakes, fruits ready to be turned into succulent juices, and arghiles waiting to be smoked.



The best thing about Stars & Bucks Cafe was the view of the Manara. You can sip your coffee, smoke your arghile and watch the world below you in all its hustle and bustle swirling around the lions.

Suheir and me

break (balance)

everything is

looking for balance
in my body

this the thing

everything
once broke open deluge original ark stark naked fallen stars

ana beside river myself
humble prayers broke
pity please don’t become me

way poet starts poem
in full moon
in box empty
waving for a call
a soweto sunset

space habibi in head wa heart
not math space in daily

at dawn reach for ra wa kiss sky

my homegirl’s morning counting gaza bodies
she will tell you the dead do not kiss
wa curly hair needs tending

there in no remainder melting dice craps all gamble tipping
point internal compass wa complicit wa content wa violent

way poem ends poem

Leila Khaled tag on the wall

Here is a photo I took of one of my favorite tags

waiting for a servees in Bayt Hanina

Harassment Of Senior Academic at Ben Gurion Airport

another one for our records.

Dr Shahoub-Kevorkian is a scholar of international repute whose work spans criminology, social work, gender and violence in Palestinian and Israeli-Palestinian societies.
emily


Dear friends,

It is time that victims start to speak up about their humiliations and abuse.... every non-Jew who has lived in Israel has gone through one form of humiliation or another in many contexts by the leading Israeli power. This is not a tirade against Jews or the Israeli people, it is an indictment of an abusive authority, it is a way of giving voice to the victims, the unheard.... in hopes of changing the way things are now.

Yesterday, my mother who is a Hebrew University professor of Criminology in
Israel, an Israeli citizen no less, went to the airport to fly to Tunisia to attend a conference on women's rights. What happened to her in Ben Gurion airport was a humiliating experience that many of us non-Jews have gone through in this Israeli airport, but always kept quiet about it and did not let them pay for their abuse towards us. It's time to say ENOUGH! It's time for the voices of the muted to be heard. Abuse is not only physical; there is also mental and emotional abuse that can be more painful in the long run...

Please read the e mail that my mother sent to her friends, waiting for her in Tunisia....


Maro Kevorkian

_____


EMAIL FROM:

DR NADERA SHALHOUB-KEVORKIAN
LAW FACULTY, HEBREW UNIVERSITY JERUSALEM

TO THE ORGANISERS OF THE CONFERENCE IN TUNIS



I am so sad to inform you that the Israeli security forces in the airport have effectively prevented me from participating in the conference on: Women and Sexual Reproductive Rights held in Tunis.

The process of humiliation by the Israeli security forces started when we reached the airport gate. As you all know, I live in the Old City of Jerusalem, and I use the available transport from my area. The moment the security forces learned that both the driver and myself live in East Jerusalem, they asked us to park the car on the side, take all our/my luggage, and follow them for a body and luggage search. A young soldier in a small room in the airport gate searched me, asked me to take off my shoes, took my and the driver’s mobile phones and asked us to wait for almost 40 minutes until they finished checking the car’s body and engine.

After all this process, I managed to get inside the airport, and there, the process of humiliation continued. I was the only one to wait for a long time. I knew that they were doing a security check on my name, address, and other information. A young female soldier tried to help out and started convincing her superior to allow me to pass. It took her a while; then she came, asked me to put my luggage in the x-ray machines and pass. Afterwards, another security agent asked me to bring all my belongings and follow him for an additional search.

Here, something like 3-4 security personnel were checking my one small bag, my computer bag and my carry-on purse. They started taking off the clothes and other items from my luggage - shoes, under-wear, make up, medicine - and placed them in such a messy manner on a long counter. I was the only one that was searched. I did not know what to look at or what to do. My reading material was all over the counter, mixed with my clothes and shoes. Young men were emptying my make up kit and spreading out my medication; one took a picture of my girls, and the other security guy pulled my shoes out of the luggage and put them on top of the picture. My visiting cards, my papers, everything was scattered with all my belongings in such a disrespectful manner... I stood there, not knowing what to do.

I nearly cried when I saw my reading materials falling on the floor, and the pages scattered... I asked the female security personnel who was checking my printed material not to mix between the various articles; she replied (with so much vulgarity) that I could find the pages and organize them later on. While I was trying to explain to her that my reading and printing material should be kept intact, I saw another security man fetching my wallet, while pulling out all the credit cards and putting them on the counter, and emptying my purse in such a humiliating manner.

His friend on the other side was picking up my underwear, one item after the other, and joking about my bras to his friends in Hebrew - thinking that I didn’t speak the language. They also took my cell phone and I was unable to call anyone for help. At one point, the phone was ringing and I asked one of them to give it to me, and he did – but I missed the call, and he took it back.

The whole scene of people mixing all my things together - while I was standing mesmerized, captivated by their inhumanity, failing to follow up on who is doing what, where and how - was horrible and painful. I could not hold back my tears, wondering how much humiliation, shame and degradation one could accept in the name of ‘security’. When I went to get me a tissue to wipe my tears from my purse, a security officer screamed at me that I must not touch the purse.

While I was in this state, and while my belongings were so dispersed and scattered all over the long counter, the security officer in charge came and told me that I could not take my reading material to the plane. I started explaining to him - with tears and so much anger - that I need to read on my way, and it is a 5-hour flight and my reading material is crucial to me. It took me a while arguing with him and another security officer. Eventually, I managed to get their approval to take all the pages that they had scattered and messed up with me to the plane.

Time was flying; I was about to miss my flight. A very polite young female security officer told me that she would book me a seat, so as to be ready. She actually did book me a window seat. In a short time, the head of the security officers came and told me that I could not take my laptop with me to the plane. Again - and while being so hurt, while seeing them joking when looking at my clothes, ridiculing me while dropping my tooth brush on the floor, my money scattered on the counter and much, much more- I started explaining to them that I could not leave without the laptop. In trying to calm myself down, and decrease my feeling of hurt, I asked the head of the security to call his superior.

His superior came (Tal Vardi (# 14544 - he gave me this name following my request). He was disrespectful, so rude and abrasive. I explained to him how important my laptop is to me, I told him that I needed to prepare my lecture, and that a laptop from Israel would never reach Tunisia (there was a high probability that it would be lost or stolen). He kept on telling me that I could not take the laptop with me. Then I told him that if that is a rule, they should inform people that laptops are not allowed on the planes and that security forces cant just invent this without prior notice. Tal Vardi replied on such a humiliating and sarcastic manner (while having all his staff around him): “So next time I need to call you and talk to you before you fly? Do you think that we have time for you?"

At that moment I decided that I should call for additional help, as Tal Vardi refused to talk to me entirely, and left me alone. At that time, three security people were packing my stuff up in such a mess, pulling the computer’s battery out and wrapping the laptop without even getting my approval. I called Bilha Cohen, the secretary at the Institute of Criminology, and she gave me the phone number of the Dean’s office. I then called Aliza, the Dean’s secretary. She gave me his home number, and I called him; his wife passed him over to me, and he said that he could not do anything, and that I should call his deputy, she should be the one that could help me out. By that time I was 20 minutes from my flight.

I called his deputy, and there was no one in the office, and my computer was now wrapped, and about to be sent to Tunisia - as planned. I then started yelling, while trying to explain, but this time with so much anger, and told them that their way of treating people was not human. I said that I had allowed them to check everything in my luggage, that I had cooperated, but despite this, they had treated me with such a rude and inhumane manner. Their refusal to allow me to take my laptop with me, even when I was willing for them to hand it over in the airplane was unacceptable; as was their refusal to even talk to me or calm me down - they all left me sitting on that long counter alone, 15 minutes from my flight, trying to find a way out.

Their way of talking, their methods of poking fun at me, and their disrespect, made me tell them: ‘I am not flying’. I pulled my luggage, unwrapped the laptop, and left the place.

This whole process of humiliation took between 1:40- 4:30 pm. I ended up with bad chest pains, dizziness and illness, which led to vomiting and the feeling of such humiliation. I called some friends to help me out, such as Einas from Mada Organization, and Mr. Jaafar Farah and Adella from Musawa Organization. They called me numerous times, trying to calm me down, asking some activists from the office and the airport to help out. I also called my friend Dorit Roer-Streir, but no one was able to change the situation. I left the airport eventually, unable to breath, walk or function.

I am sorry again to miss you, to miss learning from the conference and to miss sharing my work with you, but must state that there is a limit to the amount of humiliation that one could take, and I felt that the whole process of turning me - a Palestinian woman - into a naked entity, with no value, no voice, no respect and no power to fight back at this ‘demonization’, made me refuse to fly. How could I fly as a human, when all they wanted to do is to strip me from my humanity, using all the power they have, while stealing from me even my ability to protect my girls' picture, my writings, my reading material, my laptop and my other personal belongings? It was indeed horrible to experience the way a system of oppression tries to turn us from humans to a metamorphised terrified being.

Please accept my apologies, and please write back to my university and to the Israeli state and ask them to stop depriving us from our ability to participate in conferences, to acquire knowledge, to get each others' support, and stop using our bodies/lives and their security reasoning to marginalize, ostracize, and humiliate us.


Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (November 16th, 2006)

Ahmad Habash's "flee"

This video is so incredible and absolutely beautiful. My friend Ahmad made it for the Summer 2006 Palestinian Filmmakers Collective. The screening of all these films was a few days ago here in Ramallah.


Both established as well as new Palestinian filmmakers came together in a project that would reflect the “mood” of this summer. In three minutes or less, filmmakers were restricted to using one-shot to tell their stories. Despite the fact that Palestinians have been dispersed across the globe, with the majority of them unable to come to their homeland, “Summer 2006, Palestine”, initiated by the Palestinian Film Collective, was limited to those filmmakers who live in Palestine.

The result is a unique collection of short films from across Palestine, delving into the personal, the political, and the poetic – the spirit of a people struggling for freedom.

A mosaic of 13 short films less than 3 minutes in length, reflecting in one shot, the mood of summer 2006.

Genocide or Erasure of Palestinians

Some of you may remember my email of April 18th "Friends. let us call it like it is, this is genocide."
A few of you wrote to me expressing concern about my use of the word "genocide" and found it quite problematic in fact.
I quote from a friend: "Thank you for your email -- I have circulated it appropriately despite that fact that I don't agree, however, with calling the systematic destruction of Palestine which you describe as a "genocide", because I'm not sure what word we will have left to use when the systematic, large-scale murder begins."

I responded quoting Article 2 from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on the definition of genocide:
Article 2
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Here is an article about this very matter :
"You can argue over terminology, but the truth is evident everywhere on the ground where Israel has extended its writ: Palestinians are unworthy, inferior to Jews, and in the name of the Jewish people, Israel has given itself the right to erase the Palestinian presence in Palestine -- in other words, to commit genocide by destroying "in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group."

Salamz
e

http://www.counterpunch.org/


November 27, 2006

Does It Matter What You Call It?
Genocide or Erasure of Palestinians

Counterpunch ~KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON ~ Having at that point just completed our fifth trip to Palestine since early 2003, we should have had the courage and the insight to call what we have observed Israel doing to the Palestinians by its rightful name: genocide.
During an appearance in late October on Ireland's Pat Kenny radio show, a popular national program broadcast daily on Ireland's RTE Radio, we were asked as the opening question if Israel could be compared to Nazi Germany. Not across the board, we said, but there are certainly some aspects of Israel's policy toward the Palestinians that bear a clear resemblance to the Nazis' oppression. Do you mean the wall, Kenny prompted, and we agreed, describing the ghettoization and other effects of this monstrosity. Before we could elaborate on other Nazi-like features of Israel's policies, Kenny moved on to another question. Within minutes, while we were still on the air, a producer handed Kenny a note, which we later learned was a request from the newly arrived Israeli ambassador to Ireland to appear on the show, by himself. Several days later, on the air by himself, the ambassador pronounced us and our comparisons of Israeli and Nazi policies "outrageous."

What else? We were not surprised or disturbed by his outrage. We had just spent two weeks in the West Bank witnessing the oppression, and it was a sure bet that, even had he not been fulfilling his role as propagandist for Israel, the ambassador would not have known the first thing about the Palestinian situation in the West Bank because he had most likely not set foot there in any recent year. In retrospect, we regret not having used even stronger language. Having at that point just completed our fifth trip to Palestine since early 2003, we should have had the courage and the insight to call what we have observed Israel doing to the Palestinians by its rightful name: genocide.

We have long played with words about this, labeling Israel's policy "ethnocide," meaning the attempt to destroy the Palestinians as a people with a specific ethnic identity. Others who dance around the subject use terms like "politicide" or, a new invention, "sociocide," but neither of these terms implies the large-scale destruction of people and identity that is truly the Israeli objective. "Genocide" -- defined by the UN Convention as the intention "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group" -- most aptly describes Israel's efforts, akin to the Nazis', to erase an entire people. (See William Cook's "The Rape of Palestine," CounterPunch, January 7/8, 2006 for a discussion of what constitutes genocide.)

In fact, it matters little what you call it, so long as it is recognized that what Israel intends and is working toward is the erasure of the Palestinian people from the Palestine landscape. Israel most likely does not care about how systematic its efforts at erasure are, or how rapidly they proceed, and in these ways it differs from the Nazis. There are no gas chambers; there is no overriding urgency. Gas chambers are not needed. A round of rockets on a residential housing complex in the middle of the night here, a few million cluster bomblets or phosphorous weapons there can, given time, easily meet the UN definition above.

Children shot to death sitting in school classrooms here, families murdered while tilling their land there; agricultural land stripped and burned here, farmers cut off from their land there; little girls riddled with bullets here, infants beheaded by shell fire there; a little massacre here, a little starvation there; expulsion here, denial of entry and families torn apart there; dispossession is the name of the game. With no functioning economy, dwindling food supplies, medical supply shortages, no way to move from one area to another, no access to a capital city, no easy access to education or medical care, no civil service salaries, the people will die, the nation will die without a single gas chamber. Or so the Israelis hope.

Surrender vs. Resistance
A major part of the Israeli scheme -- apart from the outright land expropriation, national fragmentation, and killing that are designed to strangle and destroy the Palestinian people -- is to so discourage the Palestinians psychologically that they will simply leave voluntarily -- if they have the money -- or give up in abject surrender and agree to live quietly in small enclaves under the Israeli thumb. You wonder sometimes if the Israelis are not succeeding in this bit of psychological warfare, as they are succeeding in tightening their physical stranglehold on territory in the West Bank and Gaza. Overall, we do not believe they have yet brought the Palestinians to this point of psychological surrender, although the breaking point for Palestinians appears nearer than ever before.

The anger and depression, even despair, in Palestine are palpable these days, far worse than we have previously encountered. We met two Palestinians so discouraged that they are preparing to leave, in one case uprooting family from a Muslim village where roots go back centuries. The other case is a Christian young person, also from an old family, who sees no prospects for herself or anyone and who feels betrayed by her Catholic Church for having abandoned Palestine's Christians. She would rather just be elsewhere. A Palestinian pollster who has tracked attitudes toward emigration recently reported that the proportion of people thinking about leaving has jumped from about 20 percent, where it has long hovered, to 32 percent in a recent poll, largely because of despair arising from intra-Palestinian factional fighting and from Hamas' inability to govern thanks to crippling Israeli, U.S., and European sanctions.

Nothing like one-third of Palestinians will ultimately leave or even attempt to leave, but the trend in attitudes clearly points to the kind of despair that is afflicting much of Palestine. One thoughtful Palestinian writer with whom we spent an evening feels so defeated and so oppressed by Israeli restrictions that he thinks Hamas should abandon its principled stand and agree to recognize Israel's right to exist, in the hope that this concession might induce the Israelis to lift some of the innumerable restrictions on Palestinian life, end the military siege on Palestinian territories and the land theft, and in general ease the day-to-day misery that Palestinians endure under occupation. Asked if he thought such a major Hamas concession would actually bring meaningful Israeli concessions, he said no, but perhaps it would ease the misery a little. It was clear he holds out no great hope. His village's land is gradually disappearing underneath the separation wall and expanding Israeli settlements.
We met westerners who have lived in the West Bank, working on behalf of the Palestinians for various NGOs for a decade and more, who are planning to leave out of frustration at seeing the situation worsen year after year and their own work increasingly go for naught. Many other western human rights workers and educators, particularly at venerable institutions like the Friends' School in Ramallah and Bir Zeit University, are being denied visas by the Israelis as part of their deliberate campaign to keep out foreign passport holders, including thousands of ethnic Palestinians who have lived in the West Bank with their families and worked for years. The Israeli campaign to deny residency and re-entry permits is a deliberate attempt at ethnic cleansing, a hope that if a husband or wife is barred, he or she will remove the rest of the family and Israel will have fewer Palestinians to deal with. In addition, the entry denial campaign targets in particular anyone, Palestinian or international, who might bring a measure of business prosperity to the Palestinian territories, or education, or medical assistance, or humanitarian assistance.

The campaign against foreigners who might help the Palestinians or bear witness for them became particularly vicious in mid-November when a 19-year-old Swedish volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement escorting Palestinian children to school was brutally attacked by Israeli settlers in Hebron as Israeli soldiers watched. The young woman, Tove Johansson, was walking through an Israeli army checkpoint with several other volunteers when they were set upon by a group of approximately 100 settlers chanting, "We killed Jesus, we'll kill you too!" A settler hit Johansson in the face with a broken bottle, breaking her cheekbone, and as she lay bleeding on the ground, the settlers cheered and clapped and took pictures of themselves posing next to her. The Israeli soldiers briefly questioned three settlers but made no arrests and conducted no investigation. In fact, they threatened the international volunteers with arrest if they did not leave the area immediately. The assault was so raw and brutal that Amnesty International issued an alert warning internationals to beware of settler attacks. The U.S. media have not seen fit to report the incident, which was clearly part of a longstanding effort to discourage witnesses to Israeli atrocities and deprive Palestinians of any protection against the atrocities.

Palestinian resistance does figure in this dismal story. In the same small village where one of our acquaintances is uprooting his family, others are building, building small homes and multi-story apartment buildings, simply as a sign of resistance. International human rights volunteers are still trying to reach the West Bank and Gaza to assist Palestinians. When we told one Palestinian friend about our conversation with the writer who wants Hamas to concede Israel's right to exist, his immediate reaction was "absolutely not." He is himself a secular Muslim, a Fatah supporter, does not like Hamas and did not vote for Hamas in last January's legislative elections, but he fully supports Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist until Israel recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to exist as a nation. "Why should I recognize you until you get out of my garden?" he wondered.

Our friend Ahmad's views reflect the general feeling among Palestinians: a poll conducted in September by a Palestinian polling organization found that 67 percent of Palestinians do not think Hamas should recognize Israel in order to satisfy Israeli and international demands, while almost the same proportion, 63 percent, would support recognizing Israel if this came as part of a peace agreement in which a Palestinian state was established -- in other words, if Israel also recognized the Palestinians as a nation. Surrender is not yet on the horizon.
On the possibility of pulling up stakes and leaving Palestine, Ahmad was equally adamant. "Why should I leave and then have to fight to get back later? Empires never last." He mentioned the Turks and the British and the Soviets, "and the Americans and the Israelis won't last either. It may take a long time, but we can wait." He was angrier than we have ever previously seen him, and more uncompromising -- and with good reason: the separation wall is now within a few yards of his home and demolition is threatened. Ahmad and some neighbors have been fighting the wall's advance in court and succeeded in stopping it for over a year, but construction is moving ahead again. He already has to drive miles out of his way to skirt the wall on his way to work and will be able to exit only on foot when the wall is completed -- assuming his house is not demolished altogether.

But he is not giving up. He thinks suicide bombers are "a piece of shit," but he believes the Palestinians have to resist in some way, if only by throwing stones, and he sees some kind of explosion in the offing. If Palestinians do nothing at all, he said, "the Israelis will just relax" and will feel no pressure to cease the oppression. Palestinians everywhere are keeping up the pressure. Haaretz correspondent Gideon Levy described a cloth banner displayed in Beit Hanoun immediately after Israel's devastation of that small Gaza city during the first week in November. "Kill, destroy, crush -- you won't succeed in breaking us," declared the banner.

Palestinians in Beit Hanoun, as well as throughout Gaza and the West Bank, have been putting up resistance to their own incompetent, quisling leadership, as well as to Israel. It has not escaped the notice of the Palestinian man in the street that, while Israel slaughters men, women, and children in Beit Hanoun and continues its march across the West Bank, Palestinian Authority President Mamhud Abbas has been cooperating with the U.S. and Israel to undermine the democratically elected Hamas government. The U.S. is arming and training a militia that will protect Abbas' and Fatah's narrow factional interests against Hamas' fighters, in what can only be termed an open coup attempt against the legally constituted Palestinian government.

Few Palestinians, even Fatah supporters, condone this U.S. interference or Abbas' traitorous acquiescence. "Fatah are thieves," a local leader who is a Fatah member himself told us. "Hamas won because we wanted to get rid of the thieves." He thinks that if there were an election today, "ordinary people" -- by which he means people not associated with either Fatah or Hamas -- would win. In each house, he said, "we find one son with Hamas, another son with Fatah, so how is a father going to support one or the other?" It is perhaps this knowledge that they cannot fight each other without destroying the nuclear and the broader Palestinian family, and that they must not succumb to Israeli and U.S. schemes to fragment Palestinian society, that have motivated the intensive Palestinian efforts to achieve some kind of unity government.

Around the West Bank
In Bil'in, the small town west of Ramallah that has seen a non-violent protest against the wall by Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals every Friday for almost two years, the village leader, Ahmad Issa Yassin, talked about the lesson his youngest son learned after being arrested last year at age 14 in an Israeli raid. "He is more courageous now, more ready to resist," Yassin said. "So am I." We first met this boy a few months before his arrest, a particularly friendly young man with a sweet smile. He greeted us again this year with another warm smile and bantered with us as we took his picture. He gave no hint of having spent two months in one of Israel's worst prisons or of the horror of having been arrested in a Nazi-style middle-of-the-night raid. Perhaps he threw stones at the Israeli soldiers who converge on his village at least once a week and respond to non-violent protests with live ammunition, rubber bullets, teargas, concussion grenades, and batons. This boy was no terrorist. On the other hand, the Israelis may have turned him into a young man willing to fight terror with terror a few years from now.

Yassin walked us to his olive grove, half destroyed, on the other side of the wall. The Israelis allow the villagers access to lands that now lie on Israel's side of the wall, but there is only one gate, manned by Israeli soldiers who may or may not bestir themselves to open it. The villagers' names are all on a list of Palestinians authorized to pass through the gate. At this particular village, one of many whose lands have been cut off from the village, protesters have established an outpost or, as they call it, a "settlement" on the Israeli side to stake a claim to the land for the village even though it now lies on Israel's side in the path of an expanding Israeli settlement. The Palestinian "settlement" consists of a small building, a tent where a couple of activists maintain a constant vigil, and a soccer field for a bit of normality.

Yassin took us uphill on a dirt path running alongside the wall, which in this rural area consists of an electronic fence, a dirt patrol road on each side where footprints can be picked up, a paved patrol road on the Israeli side, and coils of razor wire on each side -- encompassing altogether an area about 50 meters wide, where olive groves once stood. We waited at the gate in the electronic fence while Yassin called several times to the Israeli soldiers, whom we could see lounging under a tent canopy on a nearby hillside. When they finally came to the gate, they checked Yassin's name against their list of permitees, recorded our names and passport numbers, and officiously warned us against taking pictures in this "military zone." As we made our way across country to the Bil'in outpost, Yassin pointed out olive trees burned and uprooted by Israelis and, at the outpost right next to the stump of a tree that had been cut down, a new tree sprouting from the old one.
We talked for a while with a Palestinian activist from the village and a young British activist who had both been sleeping late into the morning, after enjoying a Ramadan meal, the Iftar, late the night before. When we returned to the gate, the Israeli soldiers were even slower arriving to open it, obviously totally bored with their duty. The following Friday at the weekly protest, they enjoyed a little more excitement as protesters managed to erect ladders to scale the fence. The soldiers responded with batons and teargas.

The resistance goes on, but so does the Israeli encroachment. We took away with us two striking impressions: the little olive tree being carefully nurtured as a sign of renewal and resistance, and in the near distance the constant sound of bulldozers and earth-clearing equipment working on the Israeli settlement of Modiin Illit, being built on the lands of Bil'in and other neighboring villages.

Elsewhere, signs of the Israeli advance override the continuing signs of Palestinian resistance. In the small village of Wadi Fuqin southwest of Bethlehem, a beautiful village sitting in a narrow, fertile valley between ridge lines that is being squeezed on one side by the wall, still to be constructed, and on the other by the already large and rapidly expanding Israeli settlement of Betar Illit, we saw more destruction. The settlement is dumping vast tonnages of construction debris down onto the village, so that its fields are gradually being swallowed. This was more evident this year than when we visited last year. The settlement's sewage often overflows onto village land through sewage pipes evident high up on the hillside. Israeli settlers swagger through the village increasingly, as if it were theirs, swimming in the many irrigation pools that are fed by natural springs dating back to Roman times.

In the village of Walaja, not far away to the north, nearer Jerusalem, Ahmad took us to visit friends of his. The village is scheduled to be surrounded completely by the wall because it sits near the Green Line in the midst of a cluster of Israeli settlements. We sat in a garden of fruit trees with a family whose house is on a hill overlooking a spectacular valley and hills beyond. Jerusalem sits on another hill in the distance. We commented that, except for the Israeli settlements across the valley, the place is like paradise, but our host responded with a cynical laugh that actually it is hell. Even beautiful scenery loses its appeal when one is trapped and surrounded.

In another encircled village that we visited last year, Nu'man, the approximately 200 residents are also trapped between the wall, now completed, on one side and the advancing settlement of Har Homa, which covets the village land, on the other. Although last year, with the wall incomplete, we could drive in, this year we were denied entry at the one gate in. With Ahmad, we tried to talk to four obviously intimidated young Palestinian men waiting across the patrol road from the gate to gain entry to their homes, but the Israeli soldiers told them not to talk to us; one of them said a few words to Ahmad but never took his eyes off the Israeli guardpost. We drove off and left them to their plight. We could have tried to get to the village with an arduous cross-country walk, but we did not.

"Grand" Terminals
With the near completion of the separation wall, the Israelis have systematized the West Bank prison. Since August 2005, the number of checkpoints throughout the West Bank has risen 40 percent, from 376 to 528, according to OCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which carefully tracks the numbers and types of Israeli checkpoints, as well as other aspects of the Israeli stranglehold on the Palestinians. As part of the systematization, a series of elaborate terminals now manage the humiliation of Palestinians at major checkpoints, particularly around Jerusalem. The terminals are huge cages resembling cattle runs, which direct foot traffic in snaking lines that double back and forth. At the end of the line are a series of turnstiles, x-ray machines, conveyor belts, and other accoutrements of heavy security. Any Palestinian entering Jerusalem from the West Bank to work, to visit family, to pray at al-Aqsa Mosque or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to go to school, or for medical treatment must have a hard-to-obtain permit from Israel. The turnstiles and other security barriers are controlled remotely by Israeli soldiers housed behind heavy bullet-proof glass.

The cages are currently painted a bright, cheerful blue, but it's a fair bet that when they are older and worn, the paint job will not be renewed. Adding to the false cheer, the Israelis have erected incongruous welcoming signs at the terminals. Most egregious is the giant sign at the Bethlehem terminal. "Peace be with you," it proclaims in three languages to travelers leaving Jerusalem for Bethlehem. This is on a giant pastel-colored sign erected by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, as if travel through this terminal were the ordinary tourist lark. At the Qalandiya terminal between Ramallah and Jerusalem, a large cartoon-like red rose welcomes Palestinians with a sign in Arabic. Early this year when the terminal was opened, the rose was on a sign that proclaimed, in three languages, "The hope of us all." Apparently embarrassed at being caught so red-handed in their hypocrisy, the Israelis removed the sign, preserving only the rose, after a Jewish activist stenciled over it the words that once graced the entrance to Auschwitz, "Arbeit Macht Frei" -- work makes you free. There is still a sign saying in three languages, "May you go in peace and return in peace." The Israelis still don't really get it.

Nor do the Americans. The terminals, advertised as a way to "ease life" for Palestinians by prettying up the checkpoints of old and making passage more efficient, were paid for out of U.S. aid monies designated originally for the Palestinian Authority (before the Hamas election) but diverted to Israel's terminal-building enterprise -- helping Israel make Palestinian humiliation more efficient. Steven Erlanger in the New York Times, among others, fell for the scam, noting when the Bethlehem terminal opened in December last year that the terminals were aimed at "easing the burden on Palestinians and softening international criticism." He labeled the Bethlehem terminal a "grand" gateway for Christians visiting Jesus' birthplace -- not acknowledging that Christians had been visiting for two millennia without benefit of turnstiles and concrete walls.

The burden on Palestinians has not been significantly eased as far as we could tell. We spent some time watching at several of the terminals -- feeling like voyeurs of Palestinian misery. At Qalandiya, about 100 people stood waiting to pass through three locked turnstiles. A young Israeli woman soldier sat in a glassed-in control booth barking commands at them. Our friend Ahmad speaks Hebrew as well as Arabic and could not even make out which language she was speaking in. There was no reason for her anger or for her decision to lock the turnstiles. When she saw us observing, carrying a camera, she shook her finger in an apparent warning against taking pictures. They don't like witnesses. Immediately after this, she unlocked the turnstiles.

We walked through after everyone else who had been waiting, and Ahmad took us to the waiting area on the other side where Palestinians from the West Bank apply for permits to enter Jerusalem. About 50 people were waiting. A middle-aged man walked up to us and began telling his story. He was scheduled for neurosurgery at Maqassad Hospital in East Jerusalem in two days, according to a certificate from the hospital, written in English and clearly intended for Israeli permit authorities. He had already been waiting for six days -- three futilely sitting in this waiting area and a previous three when the Israelis had closed the terminal altogether for Yom Kippur. He was beginning to fear he would never get his permit and, as he expressed his frustration and desperation, he began to cry. He asked that we take his picture holding the certificate and tell the world. We did, but we will never know if he obtained his permit in time, or at all.

At another terminal, leading from al-Azzariyah, the biblical Bethany, into Jerusalem, a soldier screamed at us -- quite literally, his face red, blood vessels standing out on his neck -- when he saw us taking pictures of his soldier colleagues questioning Palestinians before they entered the terminal area, a pre-screening for the screening at the terminal. We told the soldier we thought pictures would be all right; this terminal was run after all by the Ministry of Tourism and so must be a tourist attraction. But our flippancy didn't go over well. He pushed us toward an exit gate, screaming that this was the "Ministry of Gates" and that we had to get out. We managed to remain inside until Ahmad, who was talking to another Israeli soldier, finished and exited with us. Maybe we saved one or two Palestinians from scrutiny by distracting a couple of soldiers -- or maybe unfortunately we just delayed them further.

At a third checkpoint, this a makeshift one set up temporarily at an opening in the wall where the concrete barrier is still incomplete, we watched as a growing crowd of Palestinians wanting to enter Jerusalem to pray at al-Aqsa Mosque tried to negotiate with two young Israeli soldiers. It was a Friday in Ramadan and, although these Palestinians had permits to enter Jerusalem, their names were not on the authorized list at this particular checkpoint. They had to go, according to Israel's administrative fiat, to the main terminal from their area into the city. As the crowd gathered, more Israeli soldiers arrived. The crowd included women as well as men, and several children. Being watched by a couple of Americans who probably appeared more patronizing than helpful clearly did not improve the mood of most of the crowd.

One little boy of about five, dressed neatly in a tie and pressed white shirt, stood looking at the commotion for a few minutes, standing slightly apart from his father, and suddenly burst into tears. A few minutes later, the soldiers exploded a concussion grenade, and most of the crowd dispersed. It's the Israeli way: make them cry, run them off in fear. We left, embarrassed by our own inadequacy.

Terminology
Is it genocide when a little boy is made to cry because belligerent armed men intimidate him, intimidate his father, and ultimately run them off; when they are forbidden from performing their religious ceremonies because a belligerent government decides they are of the wrong religion; when their town is encircled and cut off because a racist state decides their ethnic identity is of the wrong variety?

You can argue over terminology, but the truth is evident everywhere on the ground where Israel has extended its writ: Palestinians are unworthy, inferior to Jews, and in the name of the Jewish people, Israel has given itself the right to erase the Palestinian presence in Palestine -- in other words, to commit genocide by destroying "in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group."

As we debate about and analyze the Palestinian psyche, trying to determine if they have had enough and will surrender or will survive by resisting, it is important to remember that the Jewish people, despite unspeakable tragedy, emerged from the holocaust ultimately triumphant. Israel and its supporters should keep this in mind: empires never last, as Ahmad said, and gross injustice such as the Nazis and Israel have inflicted on innocent people cannot prevail for long.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. They spent October 2006 in Palestine and on a speaking tour of Ireland sponsored by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

They can be reached at kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.