Map Card of Disappearing Palestine
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- Written by Peter Miller Peter Miller
- Published: 15 August 2013 15 August 2013
- Hits: 88179 88179
The "map card" depicting the history of the conflict between Palestinians and Israeli Jews has been a very effective tool in educating people about the conflict and demonstrating that Israel's colonization of Palestinian lands continues aggressively to this day.
These maps attract attention because they graphically tell a story of dispossession.
They point to an important reality: that as Israel has expanded in what was historic Palestine, the majority of the indigenous people of that land - the Palestinians - have either been driven off their land, or, where they remain, have no sovereignty and few rights.
The four panels of the map card depict key periods:
The first map (1946), approximately a year before Israel was created, shows that Jewish communities in historic Palestine owned no more than 6% of historic Palestine and represented 30% of the population.
For a complete report on land ownership pre-1946 and the continued taking of Palestinian lands by Israel, see the 2005 publication on the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Occupied Territories (OCHA-oPt) website: http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/opt_prot_COHRE_Seizure_Of_Land_And_Housing_In_Palestine_may_2005.pdf
The second map (1947) spells out the United Nations partition plan of 1947, which awarded the Jewish community a state on 55% of the land alongside a much reduced Palestine even though Palestinians were the majority of the land’s inhabitants.
This map never represented a reality on the ground, as the creation of Israel resulted in the Zionists taking 78% of historic Palestine, expelling over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and depopulating or razing over 400 Palestinian villages in what is now Israel. For more information see Walid Khalidi's book All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948
The third map (1948-1967) displays the armistice lines from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In this map Israel controls 78% of the land.
The map has the outlines of the original UN Partition plan to show how much additional land, way beyond any international recognition or mandate, was taken from the Palestinians in 1948.
What Israeli's remember as the birth of their nations, Palestinians remember as the Nakba or "Catastrophe."
For an excellent history of the Nakba, see the book by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe entitled The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
The fourth map is where we are today. In the 1967 war, Israel took control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank – now in its 46th year in 2013 - is being made permanent as Israel systematically takes more and more Palestinian land to accommodate Israel’s massive settlement project to establish irreversible “facts on the ground”. Over half a million Israeli settlers now live in the occupied West Bank. Under international law, it is illegal for Israel to move Israeli settlers into the occupied Palestinian territories. Israel is on the verge of annexing over 60% of the West Bank.
The UN OCHA-oPt website has excellent resources and maps, including the map of Area C in the West Bank which represents over 60% of the West Bank. Area C is completely controlled by Israel and is actively being developed and settled by Israeli Jews. As you can see, Area C forms the painful basis of the fourth map.
See Juan Cole's article "How a Map of Palestine Drove the American Neocolonial Elite Mad" for how this information is treated by supporters of Israel's occupation and colonization.
You can also get a map from any Israeli Tourism office that shows the same reality. Israel's own tourist map doesn't show the West Bank borders and shows the Palestinian areas as disconnected islands in a sea of Israel roads, settlements, and control (see also http://goisrael.com/Tourism_Eng/Tourist%20Information/Discover%20Israel/Documents/MapOfIsrael1.pdf)
Students offered grants if they tweet pro-Israeli propaganda
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- Written by Ben Lynfield Ben Lynfield
- Published: 14 August 2013 14 August 2013
- Hits: 9874 9874
In a campaign to improve its image abroad, the Israeli government plans to provide scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and tweets to foreign audiences.
The students making the posts will not reveal online that they are funded by the Israeli government, according to correspondence about the plan revealed in the Haaretz newspaper.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, which will oversee the programme, confirmed its launch and wrote that its aim was to “strengthen Israeli public diplomacy and make it fit the changes in the means of information consumption”.
The government’s hand is to be invisible to the foreign audiences. Daniel Seaman, the official who has been planning the effort, wrote in a letter on 5 August to a body authorising government projects that “the idea requires not making the role of the state stand out and therefore it is necessary to adhere to great involvement of the students themselves, without political linkage or affiliation”.
According to the plan, students are to be organised into units at each university, with a chief co-ordinator who receives a full scholarship, three desk co-ordinators for language, graphics and research who receive lesser scholarships and students termed “activists” who will receive a “minimal scholarship”.
Mr Netanyahu’s aides said the main topics the units would address related to political and security issues, combating calls to boycott Israel and combating efforts to question Israel’s legitimacy. The officials said the students would stress Israeli democratic values, freedom of religion and pluralism.
But Alon Liel, the doveish former director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry, criticised the plan as “quite disgusting”. “University students should be educated to think freely. When you buy the mind of a student, he becomes a puppet of the Israeli government grant,” he said. “You can give a grant to do social work or teach but not to do propaganda on controversial issues for the government.”
SOUTH HEBRON HILLS URGENT ACTION: Ask U.S. Secretary of State Kerry to heed Israeli jurists' and writers' petitions against forced evacuation of people in Firing Zone 918
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- Written by Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT)
- Published: 13 August 2013 13 August 2013
- Hits: 6960 6960
3 August 2013
SOUTH HEBRON HILLS URGENT ACTION: Ask U.S. Secretary of State Kerry to heed Israeli jurists' and writers' petitions against forced evacuation of people in Firing Zone 918
To sign the petition and obtain more information, click here.
On 2 September 2013, the Israeli High Court will rule on whether more than 1,000 Palestinians, including 452 children may remain on land in the South Hebron Hills where their families have lived for many generations. The Israeli military wants to force the villagers off their land so they can use the land for live fire training, which is in absolute contravention of international humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49, and the Hague Regulations, Articles 46 and 52. For further background see the following expert legal opinions:
Expert Opinion by Prof. Michael Bothe on The Limits of the right of expropriation (requisition) and of movement restrictions in occupied territory (Firing Zones)
Christian Peacemaker Teams has had a relationship with villagers in this area since the late 1990s, including a seven year period when it had a team in the village of At-Tuwani. It is asking its constituents to express their support for petitions sponsored by prominent Israeli writers and legal advocates--available on CPT’s Palestine team’s website--who are speaking out on behalf of the residents of the region. The petition CPT is asking its consituents to sign adjures U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who is trying to foster new peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, to demand that the Israeli military cease its ongoing live fire training in the South Hebron Hills and stop trying to expel the more than 1,000 Palestinian shepherd families from their villages.
To sign the petition and obtain more information, click here.
John Kerry’s doomed peace process is deja vu all over again
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- Written by Phyllis Bennis Phyllis Bennis
- Published: 13 August 2013 13 August 2013
- Hits: 6505 6505
Secretary of State John Kerry’s latest foray into Middle East negotiations should be called the Einstein peace process. Doing the same thing over and over again and still expecting different results is the great scientist’s definition of insanity. This time around, indications are that Kerry actually believes, all evidence to the contrary aside, that this latest iteration of the decades-old industry known as the “peace process” might really succeed. But unfortunately for Kerry, his political calculations are about to run aground on the unforgiving shoals of political reality.
Whatever Kerry’s beliefs, the timing of this latest version of the talks clearly has a lot to do with the crises erupting across the Middle East region. The escalating civil and regional war in Syria, the growing sectarian and religious-secular divides exploding across the region, and even the Pentagon-backed Egyptian military’s coup against the Muslim Brotherhood all reflect broader U.S. weakness and failures in the Middle East. The inability of the U.S. to respond strategically to those challenges is certainly part of why plunging back into Israel-Palestine talks, however repetitive of earlier failures, might have seemed a useful move – for distraction, for reassurance of Israel’s backers, for reassertion of a weakened empire’s fading but still extant power.
But despite all those reasons, these talks are doomed to the same failure as the 22 years of failed diplomacy that precedes them.
Read more: John Kerry’s doomed peace process is deja vu all over again
Top Ten Ways Bradley Manning Changed the World
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- Written by Juan Cole Juan Cole
- Published: 02 August 2013 02 August 2013
- Hits: 5159 5159
[See original article with links]
Bradley Manning will be sentenced today, having been found guilty of 20 counts on Tuesday, including espionage (despite the lack of evidence for intent to spy and the lack of evidence that his leaking ever did any real harm). Whatever one thinks of Manning’s actions, that we deserved to know some of what he revealed and that his revelations changed the world are undeniable.
1. Manning revealed the Collateral Murder video of a helicopter attack in Iraq on mostly unarmed non-combatants (though some of those struck may have been armed), including two Reuters journalists, whose cameras were taken for weapons, and children. The army maintains that the video does not show wrongdoing, but the killing of unarmed journalists is a war crime, and the callousness of video gives an idea of what was going on in Iraq during the years of the US occupation. When the Bush administration asked the Iraqi parliament for permission to keep a base in the country, the parliamentarians said, absolutely not. The US military was forced to withdraw from Iraq by Dec. 31, 2011.
2. Manning revealed the full extent of the corruption of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidin Ben Ali, adding fuel to the youth protest movement of late 2010, which translated the relevant US cables into Arabic. Manning contributed to the outbreak of powerful youth movements demanding more democratic governance in the Arab world.
3. Manning revealed to the US and Yemeni publics the secret drone war that Washington was waging in that country. That the cables show then dictator Ali Abdallah Saleh acquiescing in the US strikes on his country probably played into the movement to remove him as president, which succeeded in early 2012.
4. He revealed that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered US diplomats to spy on their United Nations counterparts. The UN spy requests included cables that “demanded detailed intelligence on the UN leadership including forensic detail about their communications systems, including passwords and personal encryption keys,” foreshadowing later revelations of extensive US spying on even allies like Germany via the NSA.
5. His leaks show that then Senator John Kerry pressed Israel to be open to returning the Golan Heights to Syria as part of a peace negotiation. This item suggests that Kerry might be more of an honest broker in the current negotiations than some observers give him credit for.
6. Revealed that Afghanistan government corruption is “overwhelming”. This degree of corruption, which has shaken the whole banking system and caused US funds to be massively misused, is still a factor in our decision of whether to stay in Afghanistan in some capacity after December 2014. The US public is in a better position to judge the issue with these documents available.
7. Manning revealed the degree of authoritarianism and corruption of the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak, which was subsequently swept away.
8. Manning revealed that hard-nosed realist, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, was against striking Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities because it would only slow their program down slightly, but would inevitably cause Iranians to be angry and mobilized in the aftermath.
9. Manning revealed that the Israeli authorities had a secret plan to keep the Palestinian population of Gaza on the brink of food insecurity and poor health, in among the creepiest military operations in history: “Israeli officials have confirmed to Embassy officials on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.”
10. Manning’s act of courage encouraged hackers to leak the emails of Bashar al-Assad and his wife, showing their jewelry buys in Europe and gilded style of life while al-Assad’s artillery was pounding Homs and other cities with no regard for the lives of noncombatants. In fact, Manning inspired numerous leakers, including some who blew the whistle on PLO corruption and willingness to give away most of Jerusalem to Israel, and, likely, Edward Snowden, who revealed to us that our government has us all under surveillance.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/top-ten-ways-bradley-manning-changed-world-1375364969. All rights are reserved.