Okay, they’re very different, but here they are:
- 1. This beautiful essay by African-American poet and author Alice Walker: Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters “the horror” in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel. It is a powerful reflection on some of what Walker experienced as a participant on the recent CODEPINK delegation to Gaza. It takes time to read, but is well worth it.
When our Quaker group published its 2004 book on the Israel/Palestine conflict we called the final chapter, “Beyond Silence.” Alice Walker goes very beautifully beyond silence in this essay. Including writing about the painful fact that her (Jewish) husband still
- could not tolerate criticism of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians./Our very different positions on what is happening now in Palestine/Israel and what has been happening for over fifty years, has been perhaps our most severe disagreement. It is a subject we have never been able to rationally discuss. He does not see the racist treatment of Palestinians as the same racist treatment of blacks and some Jews that he fought against so nobly in Mississippi. And that he objected to in his own Brooklyn-based family… His mother, when told of our marriage, sat shiva[because of Alice’s skin color], which declared my husband dead. These were people who knew how to hate, and how to severely punish others, even those beloved, as he was, of their own. This is one reason I understand the courage it takes for some Jews to speak out against Israeli brutality and against what they know are crimes against humanity.
A shorter version of Walker’s essay has been published at Electronic Intifada– HT: Ray Close. But it’s better to read the whole thing.
2. I told you this would be different. But “Rbguy”, writing his regular diary at “Daily Kos” this week, has done a great job of pulling together the many recent resources in the English language (including one of my own) on the topic of including Hamas in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
I was planning to do a longer JWN post on all these resources. But then, after reading Rbguy’s diary I realized I really don’t need to.
Rbguy, btw, is one of the new generation of Jewish-American bloggers and other activists who are certainly ready to “speak out against Israeli brutality” and to join with everyone else who is sincerely brainstorming fair and sustainable ways to end Israel’s long-running oppression of the Palestinian people and all other manifestations of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
And yes, his writing is also beautiful in its own way!
Barghouti to Run for PLO Commitee Post
source
While many people and governments believe that Hamas is a terrorist organization… the majority of Palestinians who voted for Hamas are as convinced that those people and governments are terrorists. So let’s just drop this talk of terrorists, ok? rbguy makes a very mild and obvious point here.
But Cecilie Surasky reports of censorship af Daily Kos, aka DLC mouthpiece :
This isn’t the first time they’ve banned bloggers for writing about Israel and Palestine, but this surely is the dumbest case. Guess that free trip to Israel really went to their heads.
Mondoweiss* reports that Jane Stillwater got booted from DailyKos for making fun of, um, settlements.
Seriously. She made fun of illegal, immoral, ridiculously anti-peace, settlements, and US support for them as in:
Read my [Cecilie Surasky’s] less tongue-in-cheek op-ed here about the real horror of settlements, which, in fact, are made possible through US support.
Shame on DailyKos.
*The Daily Kos Ministers of Moral Hygiene actually banned Jane Stillwater for polling the Daily Kos ditto-heads on the subject of settlements. Polls, referenda, elections of all sorts are banned by the “Democrat” faithful. Let the masters decide!
Thanks for the link to Alice Walker, I’m settling in.
I could have gone home then. I had learned what I came to know… That hatred of ourselves is the root cause of any harm done to others, others so like us! And that we are lucky to live at a time when all lies will be exposed, along with the relief of not having to serve them any longer…
They broke my house, he said, by bombing it, and then they came with bulldozers and they broke my lemon and olives trees. The Israeli military has destroyed over two and a half million olive and fruit trees alone since 1948… After the bombing the Israelis had indeed bulldozed everything so that I was able to find just one piece of evidence that beauty had flourished on this hillside; a shard from a piece of colorful tile, about the size of my hand… They had taken pains to pulverize what they had destroyed…
These were people who knew how to hate, and how to severely punish others, even those beloved… of their own…
Rachel had been working in Palestine and witnessed the ruthlessness of the deliberate destruction of Palestinian homes by the Israeli army, most surrounded by gardens or small orchards of orange and olive trees, which the army consistently uprooted. No doubt believing the sight of a young Jewish woman in a brightly colored jumpsuit would stop the soldier in the tank she placed herself between the home of her Palestinian friends and the tank. It rolled over her, crushing her body and breaking her back. The Corries spoke of their continued friendship with the family who had lived in that house. Everywhere we went, after arriving in Gaza, locals greeted the Corries with compassion and tenderness…
Most Jews who know their own history see how relentlessly the Israeli government is attempting to turn Palestinians into the “new Jews,” patterned on Jews of the holocaust era, as if someone must hold that place, in order for Jews to avoid it…
No wonder that most people prefer to look the other way during this genocide, hoping their disagreement with Israeli policies will not be noted. Good Germans, Good Americans, Good Jews…
We don’t hate Israelis, Alice, she says, quietly, what we hate is being bombed, watching our little ones live in fear, burying them, being starved to death, and being driven from our land. We hate this eternal crying out to the world to open its eyes and ears to the truth of what is happening, and being ignored. Israelis, no. If they stopped humiliating and torturing us, if they stopped taking everything we have, including our lives, we would hardly think about them at all. Why would we?
The most important job Barack Obama had when he took office was to send aid to the Palestinians of Gaza. The US Navy has a fleet in the Mediterranean, his job was to order them to land in Gaza and for the SeaBees to begin the emergency reconstruction of Gaza after the US/Israeli onslaught. His job was to open up the Gaza Strip to the tender mercies of the world, to aid and succor rather than to continue to murder and punish… to set in motion a change we could all believe in.
Alice Walker tells the truth. Barack Obama is a cynical liar. A rogue who has cut his deals with all the world’s devils. And now we all face it, must face the truth we squeezed tight shut our eyes in denial of as we pulled the lever that put him in power… four more years.