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It’s the 75th anniversary of Al-Nakba this year, and things never appear to have been worse for the Palestinian people. 

The On-Going Palestinian Nakba

By Jafar M Ramini

May 15th, is the 75th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe). And counting. I say ‘and counting’ because the theft of our land, the occupation, the siege on Gaza, the disposition of our people, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and replacement of the Palestinian nation, with Jews, often of dual nationality, from around the world, continues more aggressively than ever. So does the building of illegal settlements to house those interlopers. They too are still going on apace with no end in sight.

Add to that toxic mix, the total indifference of western leaders and the conniving and betrayal of some Arab leaders, not to mention the shameful capitulation and collaboration of the Palestinian Authority and the picture is complete.

Try as I may to look for the infamous light at the end of the long, dark tunnel, I can’t find even the tiniest glimmer.

And I haven’t even got around to mentioning the Israeli prisons which are full of Palestinian men, women and children, tortured and held in disgusting conditions without charge or legal recourse. As if all of this was not enough to emphasise the cruelty and inhumanity of the occupation of our land, the longest in history, the Israeli Occupation Forces continue to raid, unhindered, cities, towns and villages all over Palestine. And what does the ‘free, democratic world’ do about it? This is but a small example of what they do.

The President of the European Commission, Madame Ursula Von der Leyen lauded Israel’s democracy and its ties to Europe.

“Today, we celebrate 75 years of vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East,” the German politician said. “We also celebrate 75 years of friendship between Israel and Europe,” pointing out that; “We have more in common than geography would suggest: our shared culture, our values and hundreds of thousands of dual European-Israeli citizens have created a deep connection between us.”

Really, Mme Von der Leyen? Shared values? Is the European Union proud to share with the Israeli Government the concentration camps and the ghettos Israel created for us Palestinians, in our own land? Is Israel’s ‘Administrative Detention policy’ which allows the imprisonment of Palestinians, men, women and children, indefinitely, without charge or legal representation, or even family visits, one that Europe might embrace? Is this what you might call a shared value?

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source: Mehr News (www.mehrnews.com…), licensed under a Creative Commons

So often I have heard people say, “if only the Palestinians would use non-violence as their form of protest, the world would listen.” Khader Adnan, a Palestinian baker, died due to his hunger strike – the same form of non-violent resistance used by Gandhi. Is anyone listening?

An excerpt from:

Khader Adnan, who yearned to live free, dies in Israeli prison

by Tamara Nassar

Palestinian writer Yousef Aljamal recalled speaking to Adnan by phone in 2021 while co-editing with Norma Hashim the book, A Shared Struggle—Stories of Palestinian & Irish Republican Hunger Strikers.

“I remember his voice was very weak and he was barely able to talk due to his illness and the damage his vocal cords suffered from past hunger strikes,” Aljamal wrote in a tribute to Adnan.

But if Israel broke and finally destroyed Adnan physically, it did not do so spiritually.

“Our freedom is the most precious thing we have,” Adnan explained in an essay published in the book.

“Being locked in a dark dungeon, where Israeli soldiers beat my chained body was deeply humiliating and oppressing,” Adnan said. “Their punches and their weapons have left permanent scars on my body. Their barbarism itself stood before me, literally.”

“Freedom beckoned me from the moment I was first imprisoned, it haunted me. My quest for liberty also drove me to bolster the morale of my friends and brothers.”

By waging his hunger strikes, Adnan said he was determined “to teach the occupiers a lesson in dignity and defiance.”

He also recalled how his captors moved his “weak, faint and emaciated body from one prison to another.”

“Their hatred, oppression and brutality still live with me,” he said. “They pretend to act humanely in front of the rest of the world, but they don’t.”

Adnan never lost sight of what motivated him: his devotion to his people, his land and his family.

“During my struggle I occupied my mind by recalling the sun on the distant green lands. I missed most of all the feel of grains of sand, the scent of the almond and lemon trees,” he said.

“I demanded to go home, to my family, to my daughters, who had spent long periods of their childhoods without me since I was jailed.”

read this article in full here.

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As George Orwell said, “Those who control the present, control the past, and those who control the past control the future.” (1984). Below is from another powerful essay from Illan Pappe, detailing the way the Israeli media help maintain the Palestinian Occupation by controlling the narrative of past and present.

A letter from Palestine

By Ilan Pappe

A mini-intifada is taking place this 2022 autumn in Palestine, spreading over Jenin, Nablus and Jerusalem. What is incredible is not that these uprisings occur, but rather the way the Israeli media is trying to explain their occurrence. One ex general after the other, on ex secret service expert after the other, provide an analysis that is familiar for anyone studying the history of colonialism in Asia and Africa. European colonialist policy makers always attributed resistance to the colonisation as the outcome of “incitement” and never attributed the revolts against them to their own callous oppression.

The daily humiliation in the checkpoints, the collective punishmentsthat include closure and endless curfews, the mass arrests without trial including of children, tortures in the interrogations, confiscation of land, ethnic cleansing operations and settlers’ attacks are all not sufficient causes, in the view of this narrative, for an ongoing uprising. Unemployment among the youth, the absence of any vision for a different future and the international indifference also do not factor into the analysis not just of the securitization sector but also in that provided by very respected doyens of the Israeli academy. They appear constantly in TV studios and explain how the violent nature of “Arabs” and “Muslims” are the sole causes for this and previous uprisings.

Who are the inciters is never totally clear from the analysis. Usually, the “culprits” is the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip. However, the fingers are pointed to all kinds of organizations such as the Islamic Jihad, the Fatah and a new group called “the Lions’ Den” situated in Nablus. The contradictions have never bothered the analysts with their clear narrative which needed to have inciters and an easily incited crowd.

The depiction of the Palestinian liberation struggle as a series of senseless assaults by an incited mob is very familiar for those us exposed to the Israeli educational textbooks and public discourse. The Israeli academia provided scholarly scaffolding for this narrative and
articulated it in a more sophisticated discourse.

This analysis had been put forward already after the first significant Palestine uprising during the Mandatory period in 1929 (_thawrat al-Buraq_). While the British inquiry commission that was set up after the uprising, did attribute that particular uprising to the Zionist policy of land purchasing that pauperised rural Palestine, the Zionist assessment was that pro-Arab British officers and “fanatic” religious leaders incited the uprising which was carried out by “criminal gangs”. In 2022, the same Zionist discourse is employed for depicting the present Palestinian resistance (that already cost the life of more than 100 young Palestinians) as a mixture of criminal gangs and incited youth.

It is important to acknowledge the explanation official Israel, and by extension its civil society, provides for the present and past Palestinian uprisings. This discourse analysing Palestinian violence as the product of an “Arab culture” and “Islamic primitivism” is
widely shared within Israel.

These images and prejudices are deeply rooted, and are planted and replanted in every new generation of young Israelis passing through the educational system, the media, the political discourse and the socialisation processes, the most important taking place during the compulsory military,

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‘Israel is not exercising the right to defend itself”, says Chris Hedges. “It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.”

Hedges, in my opinion, is one of the most insightful and honest commentators alive when it comes to Israel/Palestine. He spent seven years as Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times. He is also an ordained Presbyterian Minister! Read the full article here.

Father Dave

Chris Hedges: Israel, the Big Lie

Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie.  Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. 

Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage. 

I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror.  And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.

The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia.  Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.  

The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” 

This is the truth.  Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.

Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy.  Saudi Arabia, a country that  produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan TalibanLashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.  

Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges.  The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions. 

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Free Palestine

I reprint below an excerpt from an article by Steven Sahiounie – a Syrian journalist and friend. The bulk of this article, published in the Middle East Discourse, is an interview with Palestinian writer and political analyst, Jafar Ramini, who points out that this savage attack on Gaza may, ironically, serve to bring unity between the various Palestinian factions – something that the Palestinians have struggled to accomplish on their own!

Father Dave


How can we look at Palestine with no moral compass and no sense of justice or fair play?

“This is truly a massacre that cannot be described,” said Dr. Al Reesh at the al-Shifa Hospital which received the bodies of 10 Palestinians killed, including eight children, and 15 people wounded by an Israeli air raid on the Shati Refugee Camp in the Gaza strip in the hours of Friday night and Saturday morning.  Among the dead were visiting relatives of a family on the second day of the Al-Fitr holiday.

Shati is the third largest of the Gaza Strip’s eight refugee camps and one of the most crowded, with more than 85,000 refugees, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

The crisis began Monday, following days of protests against the forced expulsion of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Israeli security forces brutally crackdown on the peaceful protests, and further inflamed tensions with a raid on the Al-Aqsa mosque, preventing prayers in the holy month of Ramadan. This unprovoked Israeli aggression led to Hamas firing rockets at Israel.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza has killed at least 139 Palestinians, including 40 children, and wounded more than 920 since Monday. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank began protesting at security checkpoints in solidarity with their countrymen in Gaza under siege. Israeli forces have killed at least 13 in the West Bank while Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship rose in protests in mixed cities such as Lod, where Jews attacked their Palestinian neighbors and damaged homes and businesses.

To better understand the current crisis, and the underlying root causes, Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse reached out to Jafar Ramini, a Palestinian writer and political analyst and activist born in May 1943 in Jenin, northern Palestine. He was educated at Jenin local secondary school and then completed his education in London where he has resided for the past 53 years. In January 2021 he moved to Perth, Western Australia. Jafar lectures, and writes, and appears regularly on various international TV networks explaining both the history and modern-day politics of the Palestinian NAKBA.  At 78 years old he is still as passionate and as vocal as he has always been and has traveled extensively through Europe, the Middle East, and North America looking for the answer to a question that still eludes him.  Why have successive US Administrations since Harry Truman, supported Israel and its land-grabbing theft and ethnic cleansing of Palestine so blind-folded? And why do the UK, Canada, and Australia follow their lead without question? It would seem, says Jafar that we look at a country and a people with no moral compass and no sense of justice or fair play.

1.  Steven Sahiounie (SS):  What is your opinion of the report by Human Rights Watch labeling “Israel” as an Apartheid state?

Jafar Ramini (JR):  Of course I support the Human Rights Watch declaration that Israel is an Apartheid state.  It is about time it was recognized as such having been practicing Apartheid, albeit undercover, since the inception of the Zionist state.  Now with the Nation-State Bill passed into law on1 May 1918 declaring that only Jews in Israel have the right to self-determination it is an unapologetic, unashamed admission of Apartheid as you could get. Israeli Arabs may have, so far, the right to vote but their vote is of little consequence and in all other matters they are second or even third-class citizens in Israel. As for the West Bank, occupied since the six-day war of June 1967 with citizens having no rights of any kind and for Gaza, continually under siege and especially now with this latest savage bombardment the Palestinian people have been described by Bishop Desmond Tutu under a worse version of Apartheid than South Africa in the 60s and 70s.

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