El pueblo unido, el shaab yurid, ha'am doresh..... time to take the streets of Israel

"The people demand social justice" shouted 150 000 Israelis in different parts of the country, In Jerusalem 10 000 marched to the PM residence. A strong evening reminded  me the days in Bs As, not there yet, not even close, but the conscience is building up.

"Only free people can negotiate" Thousands of Israelis and Palestinians march in Jerusalem to support Palestinian independence

About 2 500 Palestinians and Israelis took part in the "March for Independence" Friday, July 15 calling for the recognition of a Palestinian state.
The route, following the green line that used to divide East and West Jerusalem before the Six Day War in 1967, began at Jaffa Gate and ended at the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, the opposite route taken by right-wing activists during Jerusalem Day last month.

Shakira visits "Hand in Hand" School in Jerusalem

“My visit to Max Rayne School today here in Jerusalem – an inspirational school where students learn together, across all divides, speaking both Arabic and Hebrew, learning and playing together without difference— only reminded me, once again, that the most crucial decisions we can make for a better tomorrow concern how to raise and educate our children.”

Shakira during her visit to Hand in Hand School in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Boxing Club - The Guardian

Gallery

Jerusalem boxing club brings Arabs and Jews together

Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem

 guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 June 2011 17.03 BST

Gym in converted bomb shelter opens doors to all comers, with one rule – politics is left outside

The two men – one a Palestinian, the other an Israeli Jew – square up, the muscles in their faces clenched as they prepare to hit each other. They circle each other, fists raised. Then it begins: punches aimed at the head, accompanied by sharp grunts.
It's over quickly. Panting and dripping with sweat, they pull apart. They grin at each another, and the Palestinian truck driver claps a comradely hand on the shoulder of the Israeli soldier.
The pair are not fighting as enemies, but training as friends in an unusual subterranean boxing club, based in a converted bomb shelter in a rundown area of west Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Boxing Club opens its doors to everyone: Jews, Arabs, Russians, boys and girls. Its youngest member is eight years old; the oldest is in his mid-60s.
Gershon Luxemburg, an immigrant from Uzbekistan who has run the club with his brother for 30 years, firmly believes sport can overcome political, religious, nationalist and cultural differences and act as a bridge across a 63-year conflict. "This is not war, this is sport," Luxemburg, 66, says. "There is never any trouble, never any abuse here between the kids."
Later this week, Luxemburg will take eight of his young boxers to compete in the Israeli junior championships. Russian clubs and Arab clubs compete alongside Israeli Jewish clubs; the Jerusalem Boxing Club is the only one which, most years, presents a mixed team.
The walls are covered with posters of Muhammad Ali, photographs of club members and other boxing memorabilia. Shelves are crowded with trophies and medals. On a warm Sunday evening, around 20 of the club's 200 members turn up for training, including three teenage girls. Luxemburg barks out orders in Russian-accented Hebrew.
"The ones who can, pay – and the ones who can't, don't," he says. "Kids with money go to play tennis. Most of the kids here are coming from difficult families, sometimes no mother or father."
The Palestinian members sometimes struggle to attend training regularly, he says. "They are hard workers, often they are coming after a long day of working, supporting their families. They are not as free as the Jewish kids."
Asked if the Palestinian and Israeli members get on, Luxemburg laughs. "You will see. Some of the Jewish members live in settlements built across the "green line" in East Jerusalem. "When they come in cars, they give a lift to the Arab kids," says Luxemburg.
He hasn't always been such a strong advocate for coexistence. He arrived in Israel from Uzbekistan ("there was a lot of antisemitism") at the age of 28, and served in the Israeli army during the Yom Kippur and first Lebanon wars. "I was fighting Arabs in my tanks," he says.
In the late 1980s he spent six months in prison and two years under house arrest for his involvement in an underground Jewish cell, including stockpiling weapons.
A building superintendent by day and the author of three books of poetry, Luxemburg says it became clear to him that Jews and Arabs had to learn to live together. "I understood we can't fight each other forever. They won't expel us and we won't expel them. We need to work together and understand each other in order to change things."
He began handing his boxing club card to Palestinians he met. "Every time I saw someone who could be a boxer – like when filling up my car at a gas station – I gave them my card and said come and train with me."
Back at the training session, Ismail Jafrei, 37, the Palestinian truck driver from East Jerusalem, says he and his Jewish fellow boxers are "like brothers".
"There is one condition: we leave politics outside. I was here in the worst times, when there were suicide attacks, and no one ever said anything bad to me."
His sparring partner, Israeli soldier Yehuda Luxemburg, 23, says there is "no relation between me defending my country and boxing with Arabs. They are my friends.
"There is a difference between the Palestinians we fight, the terrorists, and the people we live with. For us it's very clear. Maybe you get the impression that it's all the Jews against all the Arabs, but this is not the case."

Jerusalem Boxing Club - long term project

Ayed Murad, the man of Budrus

 

 The movie Budrus will be screen  in Jerusalem so I brought back Don's article on our visit to Budurs.

Ayed Morrar: The West Bank's reluctant movie star

The activist's Palestinian protest movement is the focus of a new documentary film. Donald Macintyre meets him

Friday, 1 October 2010, The Independent

Away to the west of Budrus, a startlingly red sun was sinking towards the horizon behind Jaffa as the Israeli border police patrol arrived. They had driven at speed in their two jeeps along the military road beside the footprint-detecting sand track and the electronic fence that help to make up the separation barrier here. To the north, beyond a straggling, rocky olive grove and perched on top of a 160ft pylon, we could just make out the security camera, capable of taking a recognizable image of a human face from three miles. "What are you doing here," asked the armed and uniformed men donning their helmets as they jumped from the jeeps, and used their keys to open the locks in the barrier to reach us. "You should be 150 metres back from the fence," they said. "And you certainly shouldn't be taking pictures. You are being held for questioning."

Besides being a sudden reminder of the occupation on an otherwise perfectly tranquil September evening in the West Bank, this trivial incident, lasting no more than 15 minutes, had a symbolic, if unintentional, significance. For the order to withdraw by 150 metres – which had no discernible authority or legal basis-took us back almost to the village school, along the very line where the barrier had originally been planned to run seven years ago. There it would have remained, had it not been for a remarkable popular struggle led by the man we had taken to the barrier to photograph, a struggle portrayed in a compelling and multiple award-winning 90-minute documentary now showing at the Empire, Leicester Square, London, and due to screen in the US next month.

It would be a gross over-simplification to describe Ayed Morrar, the film's undoubted star, as the Gandhi of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the success of Morrar (together with his fearless, then 15-year-old, daughter Iltezam, who is seen in the film jumping in front of an Israeli Army bulldozer) in galvanizing a whole village to rise up in protest at the barrier has made Budrus a model of unarmed resistance against the 43- year-old occupation.

By repeatedly demonstrating until the military did what it had repeatedly told Morrar it would never do and reroute the barrier, the villagers and their supporters – most notably Israeli activists – pioneered a form of local popular protest, and at real risk to their lives, given that five Palestinians were injured by live ammunition during the protests. As Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, ponders the intense pressure on him not to break off direct negotiations with Israel those marches and demonstrations are today the one durable form of Palestinian popular uprising. That is particularly resonnant 10 years to the week after the protests which opened the second intifada when Ariel Sharon made his famous promenade on Jerusalem's Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif. And if the direct negotiations were to resume, only to break down next year after some climax akin to the Camp David talks of 2000, they could just be a pointer to a much wider eruption across the west Bank.

It's not only that Budrus was able to reclaim some 280 of the 300 acres of olive groves and pasture it would have lost under the original route. It was that this emblematic victory for unarmed struggle was won while the intifada, now transformed, was still underway. Thanks to several factors, arguably including the force used against those early demonstrations, it had become a militant insurrection contaminated by suicide bombings of Israeli civilians. And it was making no such measurable gains. Rather, in the retrospective view of many West Bank Palestinians, it was creating a serious setback for their cause. "We didn't choose popular resistance because we are the politest people in the world, or because we are the only ones to renounce violence," says Morrar in the film. "We chose it because it is the best interest of the Palestinian people to take that path."

It's not surprising that Budrus the movie has been shown in some of the villages where such protests now take place every week. Through interviews and collating footage taken by activists as the action developed, it has shed a bright light on the spirit of that struggle.

We see a local Hamas leader, Ahmed Awwad, who joined Fatah supporters and the majority of demonstrators who belonged to no faction at all, saying: "If we use violence to oppose the wall, the resistance movement will not last long. The Israeli Army would see this as a justification to say, they are terrorists." And while the film's subtitle "It takes a village to unite the most divided people on earth" may be promotional licence, it is still a surprise for Israeli audiences to hear Awwad declaring: "We had already heard that there were some Israelis who wanted peace with the Palestinians. But these demonstrations exceeded expectations. In these marches I saw these Israeli voices in real life; it wasn't just something I heard about."

Indeed one of those Israeli "voices", mathematician Kobi Snitz, joined the protest because he felt that direct action was one of the Israeli peace camp's missing assets. He says in the film: "When we got about 200 metres from the soldiers, and they were armed... I was sure we were going to die. But there were others around me who weren't even cowering. And gradually I got over my fear and got stronger from their strength and determination."

This judgement is endorsed by one of the film's most compelling interviewees, Yasmine Levy, a tough but strikingly honest border police squad commander, who worked in Budrus, and formed a complex relationship with women among the protesters, who regularly chanted her name during stand-offs. Despite that connection, she never doubted that her duty lay. "Even the women [who] were beaten up or hit by rubber bullets or stun grenades they had no problem with it," she says. "They went to all lengths to ensure their land would remain theirs."

Six years after the victory that marks its climax, Ayed Morrar, thoughtful, quietly spoken, is anything but star-struck by the film's international success. While its "neutral" approach might not have "exactly" been the one the Budrus villagers would have adopted, "I appreciated the movie and accepted it. It is a good opportunity ....to speak about the example of civil resistance, what it achieved and how it works."

Morrar, now 48, spent almost six years, from 1993-8, in an Israeli prison as a local leader of Fatah – which he has since left – and before that spent three years on the run after being shot twice. But unarmed struggle has been embedded in his approach from the start. First arrested as a student activist at the age of 19 in 1981, when it was still illegal to raise a Palestinian flag, he spent most of the first intifada organising strikes, demonstrations, protest roadblocks and boycotts of Israeli goods. Even when he was in charge of investigating collaborators he ensured that in contrast to a widespread practice elsewhere, none in his area of responsibility were executed. When the second intifada broke out he chose the option of "civil resistance".

Morrar is conscious that at present the movement is limited – at least on a regular basis – to around 10 villages. The reasons are complex but one, in Morrar's view, is that there is not the same connection between the Palestinian leadership that there were during the two intifadas.

Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's Cabinet has endorsed the village protests and provided bail money for ever increasing numbers of those arrested. But Morrar complains that the PA leadership has made little, "effort to encourage the popular resistance" Although officials and leaders attended demonstrations in the past, he says that hasn't happened in the last three months, mainly, it seems, on the grounds that the currently negotiations should be allowed to take their course. "But even if we expect something from the negotiations it's not a mistake to still struggle," he says, "especially when we aren't killing anybody... we aren't damaging the negotiations. Maybe we will encourage both sides to make a serious effort to find a solution."

One surprising criticism from some in the movement is that the film if anything plays down the level of violence on both sides – tear gas, rubber and live bullets from the security forces, and stone throwing by usually boys and young men – with the result that some foreign observers who have seen the film arrive at today's protests expecting something akin to passive resistance and are then dismayed to Palestinians throwing stones at the security forces.

"In fact the level of violence at Budrus was not so different from now," says Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli veteran of village protests and media officer of the Popular Struggle Co-Ordinating Committee. The military say that "rock-throwing is considered a serious offence, placing others at significant risk and endangering both public and regional security". Morrar says that in any case where any stone thrower aimed to kill he would immediately condemn it. But where it is a response to say army jeeps entering villages or tear gas and shooting, he will not do so because "I think it's part of civil resistance, of popular resistance, which uses all the means of pressure except killing." And he adds: "It is a way for our young people to express rage and say 'we don't want you here. We will not let you be here. Go away." When The Independent last visited Nabi Saleh, in March, soldiers fired tear gas and rubber bullets on what was then still a peaceful march, with resulting running battles between stone-throwing youths and troops using tear gas and small arms. A 14-year-old Palestinian boy was seriously injured by a rubber coated steel bullet which penetrated his skull.

Last Saturday the scene at Nabi Saleh was very different. Five army jeeps drove towards the centre to block off a smaller march before it had even reached the road leading out of the village. The marchers sat down in the road; on this occasion – a day of events to celebrate international Peace Day – the organisers went out of their way to stop stones being thrown. None were, apart from a handful by young children. No shots were fired. But of course the marchers had no chance of getting past.

Moreover roadblocks, including one nine miles from this village of 500 people at which The Independent was held up for an hour, were used to put the village of 500 under siege. Three coachloads of supporters from Bir Zeit as well as Israeli and Palestinian activists – including on this occasion Morrar himself – travelling by car were prevented from reaching the village. And 40 of those on the buses who walked to the village instead were detained by troops for the duration of the protest.

Efforts to prevent Israeli activists taking part in these protests may stem in part from the role they play in the demonstrations. As the border police's Yasmine Levy puts it bluntly in the the film: "At times, left-wing Israelis joined the Palestinians. And because they were Jews we couldn't use force against them. And they were at the front with the women, which made it even harder for us."

Morrar says: "When Israelis are in the demonstration and the soldiers keep using force, there is still a violent reaction. But it's not as bad as at any demonstration of just Palestinians." Morrar believes the presence of an Israeli minority has a value which goes well beyond this.

"They help to create an understanding between both peoples. The Palestinians can know that not all Israelis are bad, not all of them are soldiers and settlers. Many of them are good people, against the occupation and looking forward to a real peace."

Reflecting last week on six years of unarmed protest, the nascent boycotts of Israeli goods as well as the more long-standing demonstrations, Morrar summed up his philosophy. "Resistance is not just a right but a duty for everyone under occupation, young people, old people, women as well as men," he said. "And the only framework for that, for including all the components of the Palestinian people is our way, the popular way of civil resistance."

El espíritu del Che en Tel Aviv.

 

Durante la manifestación a favor del reconocimiento del estado palestino el Sábado 4 de Junio , el espíritu del Che estuvo presente.

Israelis say yes to a Palestinian state - demo in Tel Aviv

Around 5,000 people took part in a march under the slogan "Netanyahu said no - We say yes to a Palestinian state" in central Tel Aviv on Saturday evening supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.

Recognizing the Palestinian state I

Former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg

Prominent Israeli figures urge Europe to recognize Palestinian state

Leftist group Solidarity sends letter to EU leaders signed by former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, Nobel Laureate Professor Daniel Kahneman and more, saying 'peace process has reached its end.'

By Haaretz Service Tags: Middle East peace Palestinians Palestinian state

More than a dozen Israeli intellectuals and public figures have signed a letter urging European leaders to officially recognize a Palestinian State, as "the peace process has reached its end."
The letter, which will be sent to the leaders on Friday, was initiated by the leftist Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, the group which also organizes the weekly demonstrations in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
"Peace has fallen hostage to the peace process," the letter said. "As Israeli citizens, we announce that if and when the Palestinian people declare independence of a sovereign state that will exist next to Israel in peace and security, we will support such the announcement of the Palestinian State with borders based on the 1967 lines, with needed land swaps on a 1:1 basis."
"We urge the countries of the world to declare their willingness to recognize a sovereign Palestinian State according to these principles," the letter added.
In a statement on the Solidarity website, the group wrote that "the Palestinian appeal to the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian State does not harm the Israeli interest and is not at odds with the peace process."
"Netanyahu's speech in Washington and the sweeping support he received from the U.S. Congress shows that the peace process has reached its end," the statement added, stressing that Israel now has a choice between recognizing a Palestinian State or a renewed wave of violence.
The letter was signed by former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, former Foreign Ministry Director General Alon Liel, and former Ambassador to South Africa Ilan Baruch.
Among the intellectual signatories are Nobel laureate Professor Daniel Kahneman, and Israel Prize Winner Professor Avishai Margalit.

When facts are stronger than narratives .

Samir Abu Khalaf holds a picture of his son Murad, who’s Jerusalem residency was revoked by Israeli Interior Ministry.

 

 

Ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, or, democratic Israel at work

While we are still desperately concealing, denying and repressing our major ethnic cleansing of 1948 - over 600,000 refugees, some who fled for fear of the Israel Defense Forces and its predecessors, some who were expelled by force - it turns out that 1948 never ended, that its spirit is still with us.

By Gideon Levy, Haaretz.

It happened on the day after Independence Day, when Israel was immersed in praise of itself and its democracy almost ad nauseam, and on the eve of (virtually outlawed ) Nakba Day, when the Palestinian people mark the "catastrophe" - the anniversary of the creation of Israel. My colleague Akiva Eldar published what we have always known but for which we lacked the shocking figures he revealed: By the time of the Oslo Accords, Israel had revoked the residency of 140,000 Palestinians from the West Bank. In other words, 14 percent of West Bank residents who dared to go abroad had their right to return to Israel and live here denied forever. In other words, they were expelled from their land and their homes. In other words: ethnic cleansing.
While we are still desperately concealing, denying and repressing our major ethnic cleansing of 1948 - over 600,000 refugees, some who fled for fear of the Israel Defense Forces and its predecessors, some who were expelled by force - it turns out that 1948 never ended, that its spirit is still with us. Also with us is the goal of trying to cleanse this land of its Arab inhabitants as much as possible, and even a bit more. After all, that's the most covert and desired solution: the Land of Israel for the Jews, for them alone. A few people dared to say it outright - Rabbi Meir Kahane, Minister Rehavam Ze'evi and their disciples, who deserve a certain amount of praise for their integrity. Many aspire to do the same thing without admitting it.
The revelation of the policy of denying residency has proved that this secret dream is in effect the establishment's secret dream. There one doesn't talk about transfer, heaven forfend; nobody would think of calling it cleansing. They don't load Arabs onto trucks as they once did, including after the Six-Day War, and they don't shoot at them to chase them away - all politically incorrect methods in the new world. But in effect that's the goal.
Some people think it's enough if we make the lives of the Palestinians in the territories miserable to get them to leave, and many have in fact left. An Israeli success: According to the Civil Administration, about a quarter of a million Palestinians voluntarily left the West Bank in the bloody years 2000-2007. But that's not enough, so various and sundry administrative means were added to make the dream come true.
Anyone who says "it's not apartheid" is invited to reply: Why is an Israeli allowed to leave his country for the rest of his life, and nobody suggests that his citizenship be revoked, while a Palestinian, a native son, is not allowed to do so? Why is an Israeli allowed to marry a foreigner and receive a residency permit for her, while a Palestinian is not allowed to marry his former neighbor who lives in Jordan? Isn't that apartheid? Over the years I have documented endless pitiful tragedies of families that were torn apart, whose sons and daughters were not permitted to live in the West Bank or Gaza due to draconian rules - for Palestinians only.
Take Dalal Rasras, for example, a toddler with cerebral palsy from Beit Omar, who was recently separated from her mother for months only because her mother was born in Rafah. Only after her case was publicized did Israel let the mother return to her daughter "beyond the letter of the law" - the cruel letter of the law that does not permit residents of Gaza to live in the West Bank, even if they have made their homes there.
The cry of the dispossessed has now been translated into numbers: 140,000, only until the Oslo Accords. Students who went to study at foreign universities, businessmen who tried their luck abroad, scientists who went abroad for professional training, native Jerusalemites who dared to move to the West Bank temporarily - they all met the same fate. All of them were taken by the wind and expelled by Israel. They couldn't return.
Most amazing of all is the reaction of those responsible for the policy of ethnic cleansing. They didn't know. Maj. Gen. (res. ) Danny Rothschild, formerly the chief military governor with the euphemistic title "coordinator of government activities in the territories," said he heard about the procedure for the first time from Haaretz. It turns out that not only is the cleansing continuing, so is the denial. Every Palestinian child knows, and only the general doesn't. Even today there are still 130,000 Palestinians registered as "NLR," a heartwarming IDF acronym for "no longer a resident," as though voluntarily, another euphemism for "expelled." And the general who is considered relatively enlightened was unaware.
This is an absolute refusal to allow the return of the refugees - something that would "destroy the State of Israel." It's also an absolute refusal to allow the return of the people recently expelled. By next Independence Day we'll probably invent more expulsion regulations, and on the next holiday we'll talk about "the only democracy."

Una noche de Abril

Noche de Abril, filosofando sobre fotografía, y sobre el conflicto con Santiago. Senatados junto a la mesa.
Dentro de la casa el dia ha terminado, duermen, mientras nosotros charlamos.
Afuera una tormenta eléctrica. Los rayos y relámpagos iluminan el horizonte.
Decidimos salir al techo, despues de todo, siempre es bueno sacar fotos a tormentas eléctricas.
De los muchos idiomas que tenemos en común con Santiago, la fotografía parece ser el mas claro, que mejor que terminar una visita sacando fotos................