WAWA/WeAreWideAwake is my Public Service to America as a muckracker who has journeyed seven times to Israel Palestine since June 2005.
WAWA is dedicated to confronting media and governments that shield the whole
truth.
We who Are Wide
Awake are compelled by the "fierce urgency of Now" [Rev MLK, Jr.] to raise
awareness and promote the human dialogue about many of the crucial issues of our
day: the state of our Union and in protection of democracy, what life is like
under military occupation in Palestine, the Christian EXODUS from the Holy Land,
and spirituality-from a Theologically Liberated Christian Anarchist
POV.
"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all...and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave...a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils." George Washington's Farewell Address - 1796
"My aim is to agitate & disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast." Unamuno
"Imagine All the People Sharing All the World." John Lennon
"If enough Christians followed the gospel, they could bring any state to its knees." Father Philip Francis Berrigan
"You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down." Tom Petty
"If I can't dance, it's not my revolution." Emma Goldman
"We have yet to begin to IMAGINE the power and potential of the Internet." Charlie Rose, 2005
Only in Solidarity do "We have it in our power to begin the world again" Tom Paine
"Never doubt that a few, thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead
"You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free." John 8:32
DO SOMETHING!
Photo of George shown here and in web site banner courtesy of Debbie Hill, 2000.
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
June 15, 2009: Israeli Police and Military Brutalize PEACEFUL Protesters at Netanyahu's Speech and related links
I returned home from my 10 days in Israel and Occupied Palestine two hours ago. Also, had the worst flight of my life. After getting gassed in Bil'in on Friday, I said good bye for a while to the CODE PINK activists who went to Tel Aviv and I returned to Jerusalem.
Ann Wright, retired US Army Reserves Colonel,former U.S. diplomat, CODE PINK activist reported:
Israeli Police and Military Brutalize Peaceful Protesters at Netanyahu’s Speech By Ann Wright
While
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was making a major foreign
policy speech at Tel Aviv university on June 14, 2009, Israeli police
outside the university attacked international protesters of Israel’s
invasion of Gaza, illegal settlements and the apartheid wall.
Heavy
handed police treatment of the CODEPINK: Women for Peace delegation
began immediately after members of the group unfurled several pink
banners that read “Free Gaza” and “End the Occupation.” CODEPINK
co-founder Medea Benjamin and New York activist Zool Zulkowitz were
physically dragged across the street from their original protest site
next to the entrance gate to Bar Ilan University where audience members
and press entered the university complex to attend the speech.
Several
hours later, a French journalist who was a member of the CODEPINK
delegation, was arrested as she crossed a small street in an attempt to
take photos of the demonstration. As she was placed in an Israeli
police car, several members of the delegation converged to determine
why the journalist was being held. Israeli police and military
violently shoved the group back into a wall. Delegation member Tighe
Barry from Santa Monica, California was struck in the face with the
butt of a military rifle and pushed to the ground where he could barely
breathe. He was taken by ambulance to the Trauma Center of
Tal-Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv where he was treated for a
concussion, an injured neck and an asthma attack. Medea Benjamin and
several other delegation members were bruised in the arms and upper
body from being shoved and manhandled by the police and military.
The
journalist was taken to a local police station and released an hour
later without charges. Mr. Barry was treated overnight at the hospital.
The
CODEPINK delegation has requested that the Israeli police and military
investigate the brutality used by their forces on the peaceful,
non-violent protesters.
When President Obama spoke in Cairo on
June 4, a separate CODEPINK delegation that had just returned from six
days in Gaza in early June, held a demonstration right outside Cairo
University holding signs that read “Stop funding Israeli War Crimes.”
Egyptian police allowed the demonstration to take place.
“Is
this the great democracy that the U.S. taxpayers pay for with $3
billion dollars a year?”, cried Medea Benjamin as she was being dragged
away by the police.
About the Author: resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war Ann Wright is a retired US Army Reserves Colonel and a former U.S. diplomat.
She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Sierra Leone, Micronesia, and Mongolia. She was on a small State
Department team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in
December, 2001. She has visited Gaza three times in the past three
months, co-leading two delegations over of 120 persons.
Jerry Levin was my first guide through Hebron, in June 2005. He wrote:
The consequences for peace of the demonstrably undemocratic Jewish State
Introductory
comment: My home base newspaper the Birmingham News, has once again
taken the lead among large daily newspapers in the U.S. in being
hospitable to long over due critiques of the implications of false
claims by apologists for a Jewish State that Israel is a Middle East
democracy in a way that none of the Islamic nations are. After the
first OP-ED, "Israel is not a democracy," ran in early April, I
submitted updated reworkings of the same thesis to much larger dailies
in the U.S.: twice to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and
once to the Los Angeles Times and USA today. All were summarily
rejected without comment.
I wasn't surprised. But, of course,
hope does spring eternal. But that only emphasizes even more the
importance, I think, that if you feel so inclined, to e-mail your
appreciation to the News' Editor Tom Scaritt at tscarritt@bhamnews. com
with a copy to Viewpoints Editor, Joey Kennedy at jkennedy@bhamnews.
com for being willing to give exposure to my currently
counter-intuitive argument.
In subsequent reports I will pass on
some of the pieces rejected by the big majors because the critiques
remain as current as the Israeli government's latest public statements,
and because of their currency will additonally amplify my argument.
Specifically
that argument is that it is illogical to expect any constructive action
to take place in the Israel Palestine region unless crucial reforms
begin inside Israel State in the form of dismantling all the de jure
apartheid laws and regulations making life for non-Jews there as almost
egregiously miserable as life for non-Jews in the occupied
territories…minus the retail violence meted out by the Jewish State's
internal security forces. But, of course, it continues to be meted out
wholesale, as for instance, to the thirteen non-Jews shot dead in
October 2000 protesting nonviolently in their villages the ferocious
Army violence perpetrated in the West Bank and Gaza at beginning of the
second uprising and continuing to today. So after reading this second
OP-ED in the Birmingham News and the brief explanation above honk twice
if they resonate constructively with you. Thanks.
Sunday June 14th Birmingham News OP-ED follows: There's Inequality in Israel too.
There
are serious omissions in President Obama's historic speech in Cairo
having to do with the Israel Palestine conflict. For instance when
Obama said that he has an unyielding belief that all people yearn for
the ability to speak their minds in how they are governed and the need
to have confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of
justice, he needed to make that clear by admitting to the following:
That
he knows those rights are lacking not only in the occupied territories
but in the State of Israel too. Arab Christian and Muslims and other
non-Jews living inside Israel do not enjoy the same rights, privileges
and individual freedom as do its Jews.
That Obama knows
that serious restrictions are embedded in Israeli laws and governmental
regulations that were enacted to ensure that Jewish nationality counts
for considerably more than it does for Israel's non-Jewish citizens.
When it comes to collective legal rights and individual dignity,
Israel's non-Jews, despite the fact that they are citizens, have been
subjected to oppressive confiscatory second class citizenship since
1948.
That Obama knows apartheid is alive and well not
just in the occupied territories but also inside Israel. Because of
apartheid laws, non-Jews living inside Israel are not legally eligible,
to state just two examples, for equal distribution of public funds for
such vital social programs as education and health; or for the freedom
to build a home anywhere outside of Arab villages and towns. Jews, of
course, may live anywhere.
That Obama knows that because of
these facts, Israel is neither a pervasively humane nor real democracy
in the best sense of that word. The effect of its internal
discrimination is not much different from the kinds of oppression the
President alluded to that currently exists in some Islamic nations. So
it would have been monumentally historic had he called on Israel to
live up to the human and civil rights needs of its non-Jewish citizens.
Obama knows that many Israeli Jews and American Jews are
demanding that too. But currently they are outnumbered, so it would
have been helpful for him to have encouraged them to keep at it because
he like they know that such demands are precisely similar to those
cited in the November 1947 United Nation resolution which enabled
creation of a "Jewish State" and "Arab State." In it, the UN
meticulously directed the establishment of constitutional rights in
both states guaranteeing for "all persons… equal and nondiscriminatory
rights in civil, political, economic and religious matters and the
enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms including freedom of
religion, language, speech and publication, education, assembly and
association. "
Moreover he as well as they know that
Israel's leaders failed to live up to the formal affirmation of the
UN's directives even though they were agreed to by its founders in the
May 1948 Declaration that announced the establishment of the "State of
Israel." That Declaration proclaimed that the "Jewish State" will
"ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its
inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex."
When
Obama ended the speech, it would have been reassuring to all those who
want to believe that the United States stands for impartial democracy
for him to have pledged that the United States will start holding
Israel up to the same high standards of rule and governance that it is
holding up to Islam. Those omissions notwithstanding, and to give
credit when it is due, it was encouraging to hear the President declare
it is time for the "settlements to stop," that Palestinians who are
being obliged to "endure the daily humiliations - large and small -
that come with occupation," are deserving of his sympathy, that
"America will not turn its backs on the legitimate Palestinian
aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own. It was
also appropriate for him to warn Hamas "to put an end to violence."
That
above was the latest OP-ED run in the news. I'm copying in below for
those, new to my list serv, the first OP-ED run by the news, which
kicked off my subsequent analysis of the implications for peace of the
demonstrably undemocratic Jewish State.
Sunday April 12th Birmingham News OP-ED follows: In truth, Israel is not a democracy.
Birmingham
Jewish Federation Executive Director, Richard Friedman in recent
writings in the Birmingham News continues to claim that "the Jewish
State" of Israel is a "tiny and humane democracy struggling against
Islamic fanaticism in the Middle East [and so] deserves our support and
admiration." As the anniversary of Israel's momentous, violent and
controversial establishment nears, I am challenging those assertions.
It
is true that tiny Israel is struggling to protect its noncombatant
citizens from potentially deadly rocket attacks by its tinier violent
opponent, the militant wing of Hamas, as well it should. But what
Mr. Friedman's arguments on behalf of Israel obscure is the Jewish
State's historic and violently abusive and predatory treatment of
non-Jewish citizens living inside Israel or its non Jewish subjects
hanging on in the West Bank and Gaza.
Until now, however,
publicly questioning the Jewish State's exclusionary conduct has been
an elephant in the room that has been avoided by U.S policy and opinion
makers for generations. Apparently believing it not to be particularly
relevant with respect to our interests in that part of the world, a
succession of U. S. administrations have rationalized their massive
economic and military support by giving disingenuous lip service to Mr.
Friedman's eyes wide shut claim that Israel is the only "true democracy
in the Middle East."
Israel has no constitution and no bill of
rights. In addition its history of legislating apartheid, unequal civil
rights, privileges and access to public funds make a disqualifying
mockery of the definition of "true" and the concept of "democracy." The
truth is there are no true democracies in the Middle East. Amazingly
while the concept of an Islamic state ruled by either authoritarian
theocratic, monarchical or secular elites is not compatible with
American political values, the notion of a Jewish defiantly ethnically
exclusionary state continues to be o.k. The sensibilities of the
strongest supporters of Israel do not seem to be offended by the second
class status Israel's Jewish majority has legally imposed on its
Christian and Arab Muslim populations even though doing that does not
square with an egalitarian view of what constitutes "democracy" and the
Jeffersonian concept of equal inalienable rights for "all men." It
is true those living in Israel have citizenship; but it is even truer
that Jewish nationality still counts the most. Nevertheless Israel's
exaggerated democratic characterizations of itself have gained such
astounding credibility that its government has been able to put off
reversing the inferior civil and human rights status of Palestinians
living in Israel or under its control in the West Bank and Gaza. Meanwhile
the kind of effective massive few strings attached support Israel
continues to receive from especially the United States is enabling its
military/industrial /theocratic ruling establishment to put off coming
to grips fairly and decently with West Bank and Gazan Christian and
Muslim Palestinians' aspirations for political, economic, and
territorial integrity. Still a succession of U. S. administrations has
participated in the scornful rejection of any persons or parties who
challenge the "right" of the exclusivist Jewish State "to exist."
Except
for a violent extremist Islamic fringe that does not speak for all
Palestinians, what most Palestinians are calling into question when
they dispute "Israel's right to exist," is not the right of Jews to
continue living there. What they are still futilely disputing is the
moral and ethical legitimacy of Israel's current legally discriminating
militantly elitist ethnically pure governing establishment. Also
contrary to the kind of negative stereotyping rhetoric still prevalent
in the United States, what Christian and Muslim Palestinians in the
street mean when they talk about "the destruction of Israel" is a
radical but nonviolent change of government orientation from political
and social exclusion to inclusion. In other words, what they want to
have established at last is the first true democracy in the Middle
East.
Moreover, even though some militant Hamas leaders
behind the unconscionable indiscriminate sometimes lethal rocket
attacks on Israeli noncombatants do call for violent upheaval, most
Palestinians including politically oriented Hamas leaders do not. They
favor one achieved by the kind of dramatic internal political reform in
Israel that I have been describing.
At this moment it does
not seem likely that President Obama's policy includes encouraging the
kind of political change in Israel that will result in an end to the
current exclusivist Jewish state and the beginning of a truly
democratic pluralist equalitarian society that would not be prey to any
sectarian, ethnic, gender, or racial interests. To bad because such
nonviolent regime change could set the stage for the establishment of
two side by side similar truly democratic states, one in Israel and one
in Palestine, that could go far in creating political stability in the
Middle East that has been so tragically elusive until now.
Jerry
Levin is a former CNN Middle East reporter, who was kidnapped and held
hostage by Hezbollah in 1984. He escaped after eleven and a half months
in captivity due to the nonviolent behind the scene efforts of friends
and colleagues organized by his wife, Sis Levin. The group included
Muslim, Christian, and Jews in the U.S. and the Middle East. Since
then he has been working for the absolute release of non-Jews in the
region from every aspect of Israeli domination, control, expropriation,
and pogrom-like violence. Over the years he has worked with several
violence reduction organizations in the West Bank (including CPT -
Christian Peacemaker Teams) and Gaza, and with nonviolent peace and
nonviolent justice organizations in the U.S . In April at a ceremony in
San Francisco he and his were recognized by the Dali Lama as one of
2009's "Unsung Heroes of Compassion.
In addition to this site, he has also created a blog that can be accessed via http://fromtheinsid elookingout- jerrylevin. blogspot. com/
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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
Everyone has the right to freedom of
opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions
without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
" In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."-Mother Teresa
“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
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
“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
Establishment of Israel
"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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