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WAWA/WeAreWideAwake is my Public Service to America as a muckracker who has journeyed seven times to Israel Palestine since June 2005.
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The Walls of Berlin and Bil'in |
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 Garth Hewitt: From the Broken Heart Of Gaza |
FACTS ABOUT THE WALL from friends in Bethlehem
Read the truth about the Wall and what is happening today in the Holy City of Bethlehem. |
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Eileen Fleming's Biography
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We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that, among these, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. -July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence |
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Home  Blog January 2009 January 16-17, 2009
WAWA Blog January 16, 2009: Where's the Love+Peace+VOICE of the Artists Against Apartheid?
Lay down your guns
All your daughters of Zion
All your Abraham sons
I don't know if I can make it
I'm not easy on my knees
Here's my heart and GAZA broke it
We need some release, release, release
We need
Love and peace
Love and peace
I wonder what is Bono and the rest of the Artists Against [South African] Apartheid thinking about Gaza?
In
1985 Bono joined forces with a group of artists concerned about
Apartheid in South Africa. Inspired by his meetings with several of
them, he wrote "Silver and Gold"
"Yep, silver and gold.
This song was written in a hotel room in New York City.
'Round about the time a friend or ours, little Steven,
was putting together a record of artists against apartheid.
This is a song written about a man in a shanty town outside of Johannesburg.
A man who's sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa.
A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up arms
against his oppressor.
A man who has lost faith in the peacemakers of the west while
they argue and while they fail to support a man like bishop Tutu
and his request for economic sanctions against South Africa.
Am I buggin' you?"
Well, I mean to bug you!
Just weeks after his FREEDOM OF SPEECH TRIAL began the whistle blower of Israel's underground WMD Facility sent this message to Senator Clinton and USA Christians re: The Apartheid Wall and The Bombs. Excerpted from "30 Minutes with Vanunu" freely streaming @ WeAreWideAwake
Dear 20th Century Artists Against Apartheid,
Have you heard about 21st century Apartheid in the 'Holy' Land; for it is in pieces: Bantustans!
In
2004 the International Court of Justice ruled that The Wall is a
violation of International Law because it cuts through the West Bank
appropriating Palestinian land and destroying Palestinian villages and
economy to make way for further Israeli settlements, all of which are
illegal under international law.
Negligently
unreported by corporate media are the thousands of indigenous
Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis and internationals who have been
waging a major grassroots nonviolent campaign of resistance to the
route of Israel's Wall.
In
November 2005, this reporter attended the Gainesville, Florida,
Anarchist's Against the Wall Power Point Lecture by Ayed Morrar from
the West Bank village of Budrus and Jonathon Pollak, an intense young
Israeli and committed activist and organizer for Anarchists Against the
Wall/AAtW.
Anarchy
is best understood as Rebellion against UNJUST laws.
The Yang/male force of anarchy resists authority and causes disorder and is
socially and politically incorrect by the norms of the status quo for
it seeks the higher ground of justice.
The Yin/feminine force of anarchy births a new order out of the chaos and chaos is creativity in action.
Pollak:
"I was six years old at my first demonstration and active on my own at
thirteen. I am 23 now. When they started to build the Apartheid Wall in
the West Bank I would go a few times a week and watch them deceive the
world. The Israeli government successfully marketed the Apartheid Wall
as a security barrier. But it is all about segregation, separation and
ethnic cleansing. The Apartheid Wall has put 76% [of what had been the
village of] Jayous on the Israeli side of the Wall."
"Not such a great shock when government lies to you.
"Civilian
uprising and non-violent activism is not like the Gandhi movie. It's
not carrying posters and saying we don't like your wall, go away. We
stand in front of Caterpillar's knowing we will be shot and arrested. I
was shot five times in the last two years by rubber bullets which are
1/2 inch steel bullets covered with plastic. I have been shot in the
head and the more I experience I have the scarier it is. One learns to
recognize the ritual of it all: when the IDF will begin using the billy
clubs, when the tear gas will come, when the bullets will come.....We
are not a dialogue group, AAtW is an Israeli organization and we are
not colonial liberators. All the strategy is done by Palestinians, we
are with them seeking justice and giving support. There is no price to
high to pay for freedom, equality and universal rights. Without justice
there can be no peace.
"Although
Israel marketed the Wall as a security barrier, logic suggests such a
barrier would be as short and straight as possible. Instead, it snakes
deep inside the West Bank, resulting in a route that is twice as long
as the Green Line, the internationally recognized border. Israel chose
the Wall's path in order to dispossess Palestinians of the maximum land
and water, to preserve as many Israeli settlements as possible, and to
unilaterally determine a border.
"In
order to build the Wall Israel is uprooting tens of thousands of
ancient olive trees that for many Palestinians are also the last
resource to provide food for their children. The Palestinian aspiration
for an independent state is also threatened by the Wall, as it isolates
villages from their mother cities and divides the West Bank into
disconnected cantons [bantusans/ghettos]. The Israeli human rights
organization B'Tselem conservatively estimates that 500,000
Palestinians are negatively impacted by the Wall.
"We
believe that, as with Apartheid South Africa, Americans have a vital
role to play in ending Israeli occupation - by divesting from companies
that support Israeli occupation, boycotting Israeli products, coming to
Palestine as witnesses, or standing with Palestinians in nonviolent
resistance." [1]
According
to a UN report, Haaretz columnist Danny Rubinstein admitted that
"Israel today was an apartheid State with four different Palestinian
groups: those in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israeli
Palestinians, each of which had a different status...even if the wall
followed strictly the line of the pre-1967 border, it would still not
be justified. The two peoples needed cooperation rather than walls
because they must be neighbors." [2]
"An
apartheid society is much more than just a 'settler colony'. It
involves specific forms of oppression that actively strip the original
inhabitants of any rights at all, whereas civilian members of the
invader caste are given all kinds of sumptuous privileges." [3]
On
May 14, 1948, The Declaration of the establishment of Israel affirmed
that, "The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace
as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete
equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants
irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and]
conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations."
However,
reality intrudes, for "The truth which is known to all; through its
army, the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in
the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian
village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp."-
Israeli Minister of Education, Shulamit Aloni quoted in the popular
Israeli newspaper, Yediot Acharonot on December 20, 2006.
How
could a state founded on "equality of social and political rights to
all its inhabitants" come to be such a state of hypocrisy?
A Little History:
On
July 5, 1950, Israel enacted the Law of Return by which Jews anywhere
in the world, have a "right" to immigrate to Israel on the grounds that
they are returning to their own state, even if they have never been
there before. [4]
On
July 14, 1952: The enactment of the Citizenship/Jewish Nationality Law,
results in Israel becoming the only state in the world to grant a
particular national-religious group—the Jews—the right to settle in it
and gain automatic citizenship. In 1953, South Africa's Prime Minister
Daniel Malan becomes the first foreign head of government to visit
Israel and returns home with the message that Israel can be a source of
inspiration for white South Africans. [IBID]
In
1962, South African Prime Minister Verwoerd declares that Jews "took
Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand
years. In that I agree with them, Israel, like South Africa, is an
apartheid state." [IBID]
On
August 1, 1967, Israel enacted the Agricultural Settlement Law, which
bans Israeli citizens of non-Jewish nationality- Palestinian Arabs-
from working on Jewish National Fund lands, well over 80% of the land
in Israel. Knesset member Uri Avnery stated: "This law is going to
expel Arab cultivators from the land that was formerly theirs and was
handed over to the Jews." [IBID]
On
April 4, 1969, General Moshe Dayan is quoted in the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz telling students at Israel's Technion Institute that "Jewish
villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don't even know
the names of these Arab villages, and I don't blame you, because these
geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the
Arab villages are not there either… There is not one single place built
in this country that did not have a former Arab population."[IBID]
On
April 28, 1971: C. L. Sulzberger, writing in The New York Times, quoted
South African Prime Minister John Vorster as saying that Israel is
faced with an apartheid problem, namely how to handle its Arab
inhabitants. Sulzberger wrote: "Both South Africa and Israel are in a
sense intruder states. They were built by pioneers originating abroad
and settling in partially inhabited areas." [IBID]
On
September 13, 1978, in Washington, D.C. The Camp David Accords are
signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin and witnessed by President Jimmy Carter. The Accords
reaffirm U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, which prohibit acquisition of
land by force, call for Israel's withdrawal of military and civilian
forces from the West Bank and Gaza, and prescribe 'full autonomy' for
the inhabitants of the territories. Begin orally promises Carter to
freeze all settlement activity during the subsequent peace talks. Once
back in Israel, however, the Israeli prime minister continues to
confiscate, settle, and fortify the occupied territories. [IBID]
On
September 13, 1985, Rep. George Crockett (D-MI), after visiting the
Israeli-occupied West Bank, compares the living conditions there with
those of South African blacks and concludes that the West Bank is an
instance of apartheid that no one in the U.S. is talking about. [IBID]
In
July 2000, President Bill Clinton convenes the Camp David II Peace
Summit between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian
Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Clinton—not Barak—offers Arafat the
withdrawal of some 40,000 Jewish settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in
209 settlements, all of which are interconnected by roads that cover
approximately 10% of the occupied land. Effectively, this divides the
West Bank into at least two non-contiguous areas and multiple
fragments. Palestinians would have no control over the borders around
them, the air space above them, or the water reserves under them. Barak
called it a generous offer and Arafat rightly refused to sign. [IBID]
August
31, 2001: Durban, South Africa. Up to 50,000 South Africans march in
support of the Palestinian people. In their Declaration by South
Africans on Apartheid and the Struggle for Palestine they proclaim:
"We, South Africans who lived for decades under rulers with a colonial
mentality, see Israeli occupation as a strange survival of colonialism
in the 21st century. Only in Israel do we hear of 'settlements' and
'settlers.' Only in Israel do soldiers and armed civilian groups take
over hilltops, demolish homes, uproot trees and destroy crops, shell
schools, churches and mosques, plunder water reserves, and block access
to an indigenous population's freedom of movement and right to earn a
living. These human rights violations were unacceptable in apartheid
South Africa and are an affront to us in apartheid Israel." [IBID]
October
23, 2001: Ronnie Kasrils, a Jew and a minister in the South African
government, co-authors a petition "Not in My Name," signed by some 200
members of South Africa's Jewish community, reads: "It becomes
difficult, from a South African perspective, not to draw parallels with
the oppression expressed by Palestinians under the hand of Israel and
the oppression experienced in South Africa under apartheid rule." [IBID]
Three
years later, Kasrils will go to the Occupied Territories and conclude:
"This is much worse than apartheid. Israeli measures, the brutality,
make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our
townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never
had tanks destroying houses. We had armored vehicles and police using
small arms to shoot people but not on this scale." [IBID]
April
29, 2002: Boston, MA. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu says he is
"very deeply distressed" by what he observed in his recent visit to the
Holy Land, adding, "It reminded me so much of what happened in South
Africa." The Nobel peace laureate said he saw "the humiliation of the
Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when
young white police officers prevented us from moving about. Referring
to Americans, he adds, "People are scared in this country to say wrong
is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful—very powerful. Well, so
what? The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no
longer exists." [IBID]
"From
Moses to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Prophets taught...that the Jewish
claim on the land of Israel was totally contingent on the moral and
spiritual life of the Jews who lived there, and that the land would, as
the Torah tells us, 'vomit you out' if people did not live according to
the highest moral vision of Torah. Over and over again, the Torah
repeated its most frequently stated mitzvah [command]: "When you enter
your land, do not oppress the stranger; the other, the one who is an
outsider of your society, the powerless one and then not only 'you
shall love your neighbor as yourself' but also 'you shall love the
other.'" [5]
For more information about AATW, please visit:
http://www.awalls.org/
[1] Eileen Fleming, Memoirs of a Nice Irish-American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory, pages 55-56
[2] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3444320,00.html
[3] Apartheid
Ancient, Past, and Present Systematic and Gross Human Rights Violations
in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine, By Anthony Löwstedt. Page 77.
[4] The Link, "About That Word Apartheid", April-May 2007, Published by Americans for Middle East Understanding, Inc.
[5] Rabbi Lerner, TIKKUN Magazine, page 35, Sept./Oct. 2007
RELATED:
September 1, 2008: Imagine: Lennon's Response to McCartney's 'Friendship First' Concert in Israel:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1015&Itemid=204
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"HOPE has two children.The first is ANGER at the way things are. The second is COURAGE to DO SOMETHING about it."-St. Augustine
"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust." - Aquinas |
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The Paradoxical Commandments
by Dr. Kent M. Keith People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway. © 1968, 2001 Kent M. Keith " In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."-Mother Teresa
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“You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police. Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased...to obey the laws of life.”- Lewis Mumford, 1946 |
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The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership....a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures." - William Fulbright |
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“Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.” - Rev. MLK |
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Establishment of Israel |
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"On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations." - May 14, 1948. The Declaration of the Establishment of Israel
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