Yaba Yaba

Today is the Nakba day.
Mohamed writes a beautiful piece on why Israel needs to recognize the Nakba for its own sake.

Meron Benvenisti, who acknowledges it as much as anyone could, urges Palestinian Israelis to
move on, stop morning and instead celebrate their achievment.

The number of Israelis willing to confront the Nakba is growing steadily. In percentiles, Israelis are probably second only to the Palestinians in commemorating the Nakba. But we need national, institutional recognition.

Last week, Bassam and I talked about how Palestinians (at least those in Palestine) know more about the Holocaust and respect the sentiments it provokes, yet most Israelis are still afraid of the word Nakba.

Palestinians learn about the Holocaust because they understand that is has direct implications on their every day life. In that sense, it is part of their history. Israelis know that the Nakba is part of their history, but they are afraid of the implications admitting it - even to themselves - will have on their lives. For a Palestinian, the image of an old woman holding a rusty key is a symbol for the pain, the humiliation, the yearning. For most Israelis, it is a direct threat.

Acknowledging the Palestinian narrative does not imply accepting their most naive and uncompromising dreams. We need to learn to face each others pains, dreams and desires, while at the same time maintaining the principle that the living have precedence over the dead. Respect the past but commit to the future.

One day we will note the Nakba and Independence day together.

Aaron David Miller tells a tale of how Palestinian and Israeli leaders made an art of missing every opportunity, and how American administrations, left and right, helped them perfect that art.

Disclaimer: I only read the book review by David K. Shipler

One gloomy day in January 1997, an experienced negotiator from the State Department, Aaron David Miller, found himself crawling around with a tape measure on a street in Hebron, figuring how to create a boundary between Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the seething West Bank city. Only Americans could implement this aspect of the Oslo accords, apparently; neither side trusted the other to measure the width of a road.

The incident became a famous metaphor at the time, illustrating the desperate suspicions that had frustrated American “peace processors” for decades, and Miller now tells the story as a bit of self-deprecating comedy. “I felt small and ridiculous,” he writes, “certainly as a representative of the world’s only superpower.”

The verdict on American contribution?

Sometimes, when the United States gets intensely involved, the parties negotiate more with the Americans than with each other, setting up an unhealthy dynamic. And major progress has been made behind Washington’s back: the first Egyptian-Israeli breakthrough in secret talks between Moshe Dayan and Hassan Tuhaimi; the Oslo accords of 1993, hammered out by Israeli and P.L.O. officials meeting without Americans; and the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, worked out clandestinely by the two countries on their own.

But as always, Bush tops them all:

In 2004, the President arrived for a photo with nearly 200 Israelis and Arab teenagers who had spent three weeks at a camp in Maine run by Seeds of Peace, which Miller led after leaving government. Having reached across the chasm of distrust, the youngsters represented hopeful elements of the next generation, and when Miller asked Bush if he’d “offer a word or two of encouragement to these remarkable young leaders,” Bush replied, “Gotta go, gotta go,” strode away, then stopped and called back over his shoulder before disappearing, “Gotta implement that road map, gotta do it.”

According to Miller, for the last couple of decades America has been treating Israel as that cute spoiled nefew:

He blames himself as much as anyone else. Under Clinton, he admits, the Office of the Special Middle East Coordinator, headed by Dennis Ross with Miller as deputy, was insular, improperly supervised, and imbued with such a “pro-Israel orientation” that “not a single senior-level official involved with the negotiations was willing or able to present, let alone fight for, the Arab or Palestinian perspective.” As the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza grew by 46 percent during the Rabin years, “None of us ever gave much thought to challenging the prime minister,” he observes. “I don’t recall a single tough, honest conversation in which we said to the Israelis, Look, settlements may not violate the letter of Oslo, but they’re wreaking havoc with its spirit and compromising the logic of a gradual process of building trust and confidence.”

but that doesn’t mean they were any better with Arafat -

Paradoxically, the Clinton administration didn’t lean hard enough on the Palestinians, either. “We failed to press [Yassir] Arafat sufficiently” on the corruption, cronyism, incitement, and terrorism over which he presided as the Palestinian Authority, created by the Oslo accords, took over parts of the West Bank and Gaza, Miller says.

Should we call in Putin?

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As a rule, I bluntly turn down sponsorship requests. If you can show me the logical link between you bungee jumping of Victoria falls and the welfare of blind cats, I’ll pay you a tenner. Otherwise, I’m happy to pay for you not to go. If you really want to help those cats, get a job, make some money, and do what you please with it.

But rules are made to be broken:

My dear friends,

As most of you know, Barnet Refugee Service is “my” organization. I was involved with it since its conception, was pregnant with it (as a team member and as an acting-coordinator of one of its parents organizations, which I had joined first as a volunteer in January 1999), and has been active in it in different capacities from the day it was born.

In the last 2 years I have been one of the trustees of this wonderful organization, and saw it going from strength to strength, recruiting more staff for more projects, assisting more and more clients, who – due to tightening of immigration legislation and withdrawing of support from asylum seekers – are becoming more and more destitute and desperate.

One of the things we offer our clients is legal advice – an invaluable stuff in times when most of the good immigration solicitors had withdrew their services, yet again because of bad government policy. A newish piece of legislation limits Legal Aid funding to such a few hours per asylum case, that the good law firms declared that under these conditions they cannot possibly prepare a strong asylum claim or represent clients in Home Office interviews and further legal proceedings. The disastrous result of this is that many asylum seekers are being refused asylum and returned to their countries to face persecution and possible death.

Another frustrating fact which we need to address now is huge funding cuts that we recently suffered, and that is despite our commended services and successful outcomes year by year. We are not the only charity who suffered these cuts of public funding from the Lottery Fund and I guess we can thank the Olympic games for that…

SO, we need your help. I won´t go on about our great aims and ethos and won´t go into further details of the services we offer – you can read all that on our website at http://www.barnetrefugeeservice.org.uk/.

I would just ask you to sponsor me (and/or Rony…) in a 10 km walk we will join ON 19th May as detailed below,
TO RAISE MONEY FOR BARNET REFUGEE SERVICE LEGAL ADVICE SERVICES.

PLEASE SPONSOR ME GENEROUSLY.

Yours,
tirza

***

The 4th London Legal Support Trust  sponsored walk is a 10 km circle round London’s legal landmarks which starts at the Royal Courts of Justice at 5.30 and ends at the Law Society.
Last year 1,800 walkers raised over £200,000.
Your donation will go directly to BRS and will help us to provide advice and support to  asylum seekers who have fled persecution.

To sponsor me please go to www.justgiving.com/BarnetRefugeeService

If you prefer to send a cheque, please make it payable to “Barnet Refugee Service” and send it with a completed GiftAid form (attached) to:
BRS, c/o Peter Salomon, 30 Gurney Drive, London, N2 0DG

To join the walk and find your own sponsors please contact Peter Salomon at p@kandps.co.uk .

***

PS. as it happens, we are also looking for new trustees to join us in our AGM in July. If I got you interested in BRS - why not volunteer a few hours per month and offer your skills and experience to better the lives of those fleeing persecution?

Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity and recently the Open Architecture Network, was awarded the TED prize in 2006. In his acceptance speech, he talks about housing crisis, HIV/AIDS, natural catastrophes, and how solutions can be designed for saving lives and making them better. How? not by a centralized structure. By a global network of design innovation, based on an open source model.

A model that assumes that every human being is a potential design innovator, every person is an expert in his environment and needs, and the role of the Architect is to bring out that expertise and unleash that potential.

Mira Vogel interviewed me for engage.

The first thing I came to realise was that the boycott was promoting exactly the kind of thing it claimed to oppose. It’s a collective discrimininative action, a form of collective punishment if you like which is exactly the kind of action which should be stopped. I’ve been working in the peace movement to stop Israel taking collective action against Palestinians. I’ve been campaigning against that, and here is a group applying collective punishment to Israel. So, idealistically and pragmatically it’s wrong.

Something that happened quite recently I was visiting York and walking down the street and there was a Palestinian stand with, among other things, leaflets promoting boycott. And I got into an argument with people standing there and I found myself getting emotional. And I reflected on this and thought “Hang on, why am I getting so emotional? There’s a lot of good rational reactions against boycott but my reaction was emotional. And I realised that I feel personally hurt by boycott because it puts me in the same lump as Lieberman, Elyakim Haetzni and all those evil Israelis I’ve been fighting all my life because the boycott doesn’t discriminate between me and them. Suddenly I’ve become one of them, in the same bag with all their lot.

read it all

With Walter Bender’s resignation from OLPC and Microsoft’s announcement the low cost scene is becoming the best show in town.

Open source is about freedom of choice and ownership. If people are free to choose, they are also free to make bad choices - such as running windows on their nice little low cost laptop.

The other side of the equation is, of course, they should be free to run the copy of OS they bought on any hardware they choose. To be honest, I’m not worried: a) I doubt it will hold in court. b) even if it will, it won’t hold in real life. Vendors will simply make it easy to upgrade machines after purchase. The only snag is the touch screen.

But the main scoop here shouldn’t be lost in the flurry of gossip: OLPC won. Remember Negraponte and Papert’s original claim? For years, computers have been getting more expensive when they should have been moving in the opposite direction. This was driven by producer agenda, not by user’s needs. If we want children worldwide to be a part of the global conversation and have access to the canon of human knowledge, we need to reverse the trend. When OLPC started is was a crazy dream. Now its a thriving market. And the more competition, the more options, the more flavours of hardware and software - the better for all.

Bassam will be speaking at the Goodenough college on Monday. If you want to come, drop me a line.

Bassam Aramin is co-founder of Combatants for Peace, a movement of Palestinians and Israelis who have taken an active part in the cycle of violence and have decided to put down their guns, and to fight for peace together. Bassam’s determination was tested in 2007 when his 10 year old daughter, Abir, was killed by the Israeli border police on her way home from school. With the help of supporters from across the world, Bassam’s friends have built a garden in her memory.

Bassam grew up in Seir, near Hebron. He spent seven years in Israeli prisons. Since his marriage, he has been living in Anata, between Ramallah and Jerusalem. He works at the Palestinian National Archive Center in Ramallah.

Read: A Plea for Peace From a Bereaved Palestinian Father, By Bassam Aramin

UPDATE:

A documentary about combatants for peace, featuring Bassam Aramin and Yonathan Shapira, was one of the highlights of the Pangea day event last Saturday: http://www.pangeaday.org/filmDetail.php?id=73

Concierge.com is running a list of travel reviews for the World’s Most Controversial Destinations. Guess who’s number 10 of 13? Of course -

ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Why go: Old Jerusalem alone encompasses the Wailing Wall (pictured), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Via Dolorosa, and Al Aqsa Mosque’s Dome of the Rock. But it’s not all about religion: Israel also has sunning and surfing beaches on the Mediterranean coast around Tel Aviv, while Eilat, on the Red Sea, is the place for scuba diving and snorkeling. Caesarea, 35 miles north of Tel Aviv, has 12th-century crusader castles, the ruins of King Herod’s capital, and an undersea archeological park. The West Bank has more than 1,000 archeological sites and great tourism potential; security issues make travel inadvisable except to Bethlehem and the Dead Sea town of Jericho. In the Judaean desert, the Roman hilltop fort of Masada, reachable on foot or by cable car, overlooks the Dead Sea, whose shore is now lined with health spas.

Why not go: Both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have been accused of human-rights abuses linked to the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. The Palestinian Authority’s ruling Hamas Party, which the U.S. government designates as a terrorist organization, refuses to recognize Israel and has condoned and carried out suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. Gaza militants have fired rockets at Israeli communities. Israel has been accused of discriminating against its Arab citizens and has a long history of air strikes and artillery shelling of Palestinian settlements in the Gaza Strip to combat militants in hiding, which has resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths, according to Amnesty International. Its policy of building settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem is in violation of the Geneva Convention, and human-rights groups say the policy of barring Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza from entering or transiting Israel means they can’t go to school, find work, or visit relatives.

Fair enough (er, Roman hilltop of Massada? nice one). Who are our buddies on the list? Ethiopia, Sudan, China, Burma, Russia, Cuba, Zimbabwe, North Korea. eek. But here’s one review they missed:

United states of America

WHY GO: Beautiful country, friendly people (some), great cultural hubs.
WHY NOT GO: The government spends much more on military interference in other countries affairs than it does on its own people’s welfare. Recent years have seen a disturbing erosion of civil liberties. Amnesty reports consistent abuse of political prisoners. The economy is based on destructive and unsustainable exploitation of natural and human resources across the globe.

Bassam Aramin, co-founder of Combatants for Peace and Ra’ed Al Mickawi, director of Bustan, will be speaking this Sunday, 2:30-4:00 at ULU.

Bassam Aramin was a co-founder with Yonathan Shapera of Combatants for Peace.
He had spent many years in an Israel prison for his involvement with Palestinian
militancy, but came to the conclusion that engagement and dialogue are the only way
forward. Following the founding of Combatants for Peace, his new beliefs were sorely
tried by the killing of his 10 year old daughter, Abir, by the Israeli border police on
her way home from school and by the Israeli authorities refusal to investigate her
death properly. Combatants for Peace and local people are making a garden in her
name next to the school, supported by Jewish Groups across the world. A new play
featuring Bassam’s lifestory was performed in Jaffa recently, by well known Israeli actors.

Raed Al Mickawi is a compelling speaker who weaves his own personal story of growing
up Bedouin in the Negev with the larger civil and human rights issues facing Bedouin and
Arab people living in Israel—20% of the overall population. Learn more about the
“unrecognized” villages, the relationship between the situation of Palestinians inside and
outside the Green Line, and environmental and social policy towards Bedouin people.
Hear about BUSTAN’s role in building a sustainable, just future for ALL residents of the
Negev through small-scale, grassroots projects that advocate for human rights, cultural
preservation, and sustainable land use and development.

If hope, courage and determination have a face, it is the face of Bassam and Raed.

In a lavish vaffanculo, the outgoing Italian government has launched a web site listing the tax declarations of every citizen in the land.

The tax authority’s website was inundated by people curious to know how much their neighbours, celebrities or sports stars were making.

Unfortunately, some up-tight privacy group had it shut down before I had a chance to dip in.

Now before you roll your eyes, think. Your supermarket knows how much you earn. Your bank manager knows how much you earn. Isn’t taking the veil off, and letting your neighboors see it all, a small price to pay for knowing back?

Knowledge is power. If we can’t lock the man from knowing all about us, the only way to balance the field is to have everything out in the open.

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