Judefa

… and get involved!

This is a valuable TUMBLR site for updates on Libya and other Arab flashpoints (in English).
It is from Telecomix, the network that provides work-arounds and resources for keeping the info flowing where it has been shut down. It consists mostly of a feed of relevant Twitter and news updates.

Existence Denied: Apartheid on Google Maps

whereispalestine:

If you are trying to drive from Ramallah to Bethlehem — Palestinian towns in the West Bank (which Google automatically labels as “Israel”) — Google Maps won’t help you find your way.

But if you are in an illegal Israeli settlement right next to Ramallah and you want to drive to an illegal Israeli settlement right next to Ramallah and you want to drive to an illegal settlement right next to Bethlehem, your route pops right up — on roads that Palestinian cars are forbidden to drive.

Palestinians have cobbled together a winding, nauseating, dusty and dangerous route that forces them to drive around the ever-expanding land in the West Bank that Israel claims for their illegal settlements. (See AP story, “Separate Roads Push West Bank Arabs to the Byways.”)

(featured photos all edited and presented by activist AnomalousNYC in a project on Palestine)



Former CIA staffers Kathleen and Bill Christison:

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.


Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst who has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years and the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. Bill Christison was a National Intelligence Officer and a Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis.

Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud cuts through the bullshit and empty rhetoric on the Middle East …

… Even in Cairo, he had the audacity to lecture Palestinians, the very victims of Israel’s brutal occupation, which is armed and funded by US money.
“Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build.”

We must note that the US government continues to make these demands of Palestinians, ignoring the fact that Israel’s reign of terror has never ceased, including Israeli violence against Palestinian non-violent resistance in the West Bank.

Still, Obama did state that “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society.”

Alas, the Obama administration faltered on its demand of a complete Israeli freeze, and is now harassing the ineffective leadership of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank to return to the negotiation table without conditions.

In addition, the hope of ensuring that “Palestinians can live, and work and develop their society,” is nothing but a pipedream, considering that Palestinians in Gaza teeter between chronic malnutrition and starvation. We cannot forget the fact that the siege on Gaza would not have been possible without US support.

So before we giddily gather to discuss Obama’s legacy the next time another round number is celebrated on our television screens, let’s remember that for an Iraqi father, frantically searching for his son’s remains in a Baghdad street, numbers matter little, whether even, odd, round or in any combination.

A massacre is a massacre, and a war of choice is a crime, any day, any time.