Israel/Palestine

It really does take a whole world to starve a population. But the Palestinians are not to be counted out. This is a brilliant development... and no one describes it better than Jeff Halper:

"The people of Palestine have done it again, taking their own fate in their hands after being let down by their own "moderate" political leadership and, indeed, the entire international community in their struggle for freedom. Early this morning they simply blew up the wall separating Gaza from Egypt, breaking a siege imposed on them by an Arab government in collaboration with Israel."

Not sure what else you can call it when the Israelis prevent food from entering, knock out the electricity, other than deliberately starving people to death. The US, Canada, any other forces that could say something seem to be more interested in supporting murder.

I sent my article on Ryerson's academic boycott debate to the debaters and one of them, Stuart Murray, wrote me back. A quite friendly exchange of views ensued, which I thought was itself worth publishing on ZNet. Take a look. I found it (and Stuart) to be more productive and interesting than most such exchanges I've gotten into (and made you poor readers suffer).

I mean it very specifically. It took place tonight. I was there. Here's my report. Also below.

The most succinct bit of commentary about the US/Israel/Palestine talks at Annapolis come from a piece by Laila el-Haddad who is based some of the time in Gaza. She quotes a mother of eight saying:

"We're already dead, the only thing we need is to be buried, to be pushed into the grave and buried. It's already been dug up for us."

Chomsky's enraged too, though he notes that he's trying to keep his composure:

It might be better to wait until I know more, but I wanted to say something about what occurred in Gaza on Monday, when a demonstration organized by Fatah to commemorate Arafat was fired upon by the Hamas-controlled police, with seven people killed including one child.

Khaled Mishal of Hamas in the foreground, and a Nazi swastika in the background. Click on the story and you won't see anything Nazi. That's because there's nothing to do with the Nazis, other than the desire by the BBC and so many others to link the travails of the starving, besieged, imprisoned, tortured, slaughtered Palestinians with the genocidal Nazi regime, the better to continue starving, besieging, imprisoning, and torturing them.

I received news that Tanya Reinhart died suddenly in New York. She was always one of my guides on Israel/Palestine. When I went there in 2002 she was very helpful to me, personally, and I only didn't get to visit her in person because I fell sick. It is far too soon for her to be gone - we all needed her for a lot more years.

Here's her university page

Her wikipedia page

It's true. In his talk, "Debunking the Myth of Israeli Democracy", Jamal Zahalka quoted Hannah Arendt. I think. He might or might not have quoted Hegel, I can't remember. He definitely quoted Hannah Arendt. He also quoted Spiro Agnew, which was weird. He definitely didn't quote Hitler though, which is apparently what they've started saying about him back in Israel.

One trick of writing on the internet: if you want feedback, leave your email at the bottom of the article, and if you don't, don't. Sometimes you forget, as I did with my open letter to Mitch Potter. His reply to me, you'll recall, was basically to remind me that he has a larger audience than I do ("Enjoy your chorus of one") thanks to his employer, Torstar, being somewhat larger than ZNet or killingtrain.com, and also to remind me of a further constraint on fair coverage ("those of us on print deadlines").