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| Palestine Chronicle | | The Palestine Chronicle is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to educate the general public by providing a forum that strives to highlight issues of relevance to human rights, national struggles, freedom and democracy in the form of daily news, commentary, features, book reviews, photos, art, and more.
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| | | FEATURED - EDITORIAL | | Libya's 'Operation Odyssey Lightning' - The Obama Doctrine is Ravaging the Middle East By Ramzy Baroud Everyone seems to have a theory on how to obliterate ISIS, or 'Daesh'. However, two points are rarely raised: one, concerning the origins of the group and the second, on whether there are genuine intentions to defeat it, in the first place. We must boldly address the first to unravel the enigma behind the rise and growth of 'Daesh' - otherwise, how else can the group be dismantled. We must contend with the second point before engaging in superfluous discussions about the most appropriate war strategy - that if war is, at all, the answer. The questions are quite urgent yet, somehow, they are frequently overlooked, glossed over through some disingenuous logic or the blame is always placed somewhere else. Now that the Americans have launched yet another aerial war against Libya, purportedly to target 'Daesh' positions there, the discussion is being carefully geared towards how far the US must go to defeat the militant group? In fact, "can airstrikes alone win a war without 'boots on the ground'?" has morphed, somehow, to become the crux of the matter, which has engaged a large number of intellectuals on both sides of the debate. US media gurus, split between two equally war-mongering parties, love to jump at such opportunities to discredit one another, as if waging wars in other countries is an exclusively local American affair. Days are long gone when the US labored to establish coalitions to wage war, as it did in Kuwait and Iraq in 1990-91 and, to a lesser extent, again, in Iraq in 2003. Now, wars are carried out as a matter of course. Many Americans seen to be unware, or oblivious to the fact, that their country is actually fighting wars on several fronts, and is circuitously involved in others. With multiple war fronts and conflicts fermenting all around, many are becoming desensitized. Americans particularly have, sadly, swallowed the serum of perpetual war, to the extent that they rarely mobilize in any serious way against it. In other words, a state of war has become the status quo. Although the US Administration of President Barack Obama has killed thousands, the majority of whom were civilians, there is no uproar nor mass protests. Aside from the fact that the Obama brand was fashioned to appear as the peaceable contrast to warmongering George W. Bush, there has been no serious change in US foreign policies in the Middle East in any way that could suggest that one president is 'better' than the other. Obama has simply continued the legacy of his predecessor, unhindered. The primary change that has occurred is tactical: instead of resorting to massive troops' buildup on the ground with an assignment to topple governments, Obama has used airstrikes to target whoever is perceived to be the enemy, while investing in whoever he deemed 'moderate' enough to finish the job. Like Bush's preemptive 'war on terror', Obama's doctrine has been equally disastrous. Obama's wars were designed to produce little or no American casualties, since they were almost entirely conducted from the air and via unmanned drones operated by remote control, sometimes thousands of miles way. That approach proved less taxing, politically. However, it worsened the situation on the ground, and instead of ending war, it expanded it. While Bush's invasion of Iraq revived al-Qaeda and brought it to the heart of the region, Obama's aerial wars forced al-Qaeda to regroup, employing a different strategy. It rebranded itself, from militant cells to a 'state', sought swift territorial expansion, used guerrilla warfare when facing an organized army or is bombed from the sky, and carried out suicide bombings throughout the world to break the morale of its enemies and to serve its propaganda efforts aimed at keeping the recruits coming. Considering that enemies of 'Daesh' are themselves enemies of one another, the group is assured that its existence, at least for the foreseeable future, is tenable. The truth is that 'Daesh' thrives on military intervention because it was born from previous military interventions. It is expanding because its enemies are not in unison, as each is serving agendas that are rarely concerned with ending war, but rather seeing war as an opportunity to realize political gains. With this logic in mind, one cannot expect the US 'Operation Odyssey Lightning', which officially began on August 1 in Libya, to achieve any results that could end up in stabilizing the country. How could such 'stability' be projected, if it were not the US and other NATO members' war on Libya in 2011 that has largely dismembered a once rich and relatively stable Arab country? Indeed, it was the vacuum left by subsequent conflicts that invited 'Daesh' to Sirte and other areas. Now, the US - and other western powers, led by the French - are applying unwinnable war tactics to stave off a messy crisis they had created themselves when they waged an earlier war. Even if 'Daesh' is driven out of Sirte, it will find some other unstable environmentelsewhere where it will spawn and wreak havoc. Sirte, in turn, will, likely, fall back into a state of bedlam where various militias, many of whom were armed by NATO in the first place, turn their guns against each other. Without a whole new approach to the problem, the conflicts will certainly keep multiplying. According to airwars.org, which keeps track of the war on 'Daesh', 14,405 coalition airstrikes against the group have been carried out in Iraq and Syria through 735 days of a relentless campaign. An estimated 52,300 bombs and missiles were dropped, although the number must be much higher, since there are numerous strikes that are never claimed by any party, thus are not officially recorded, as such. But what good did this do, aside from killing many civilians, destroying massive infrastructure and spreading 'Daesh' further into the abyss of other vulnerable Middle East and North African spots? There are few voices in the US media and government that seem serious about changing the perspective completely on the Bush-Obama war on terror. Sensible calls by the likes of Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for President, that the root causes of terror must be addressed to end terrorism, rarely register in the halls of US government and Congress. In January, the cost of the war on 'Daesh', as estimated by US Defense Department data has jumped by $2 million dollars a day to a total of $11 million. "The air war has cost the US about $5.5 billion total since it began in August 2014," Business Insider reported. The escalation in Libya is likely to produce new, more staggering numbers soon. Expectedly, this is a great time for business for those who benefit from war. Concurrently, the cycle of war and violence is feeding on itself with no end in sight. "Hope in aerial bombardment as the prophylactic for peace is absurd," Vijay Prashad, Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, wrote recently about the futility of airstrike wars. "It has given us instability and chaos. Other roads have to be opened. Other paths ceded." I couldn't agree more. - Dr Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include "Searching Jenin", "The Second Palestinian Intifada" and his latest "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story". His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.
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| BOOK REVIEW | Through a Glass Darkly: A Poetry Review - I Remember My Name
Reviewed by Hatim Kanaaneh (I Remember My Name - Poetry by Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso. Vacy Vlazna, ed., 2016, Novum Publishing. Kindle Edition.) In penning this review, the primacy of Israel in North America's hegemonic cultural circles limits my expectation of a sympathetic Western readership. The recent furor in Israeli government circles over the public broadcasting of Mahmoud Darwish's poem is only a warning signal. Thugs and war criminals take on the mantel of literary critics to attack Palestine's national poet and ascribe to him their own internalized fascist values. Judging from experience the malicious smear is bound to gain traction in Zionist-aligned literary circles at home and abroad. Our lead Palestinian politician in Israel, Ayman Odeh, explains well the Israeli officials' fear: "If we were to know and acknowledge each other's culture we may finally want to live together," [al-Ittihad, July 21, 2016.] I am an Israeli citizen and know firsthand how Israel's rightist leaders view the world. I know precisely where my place is in their narrow field of vision. I experience daily how they deal with my issues of the heart; such issues always fall outside the purview of the Israeli majority's definition of itself. Their politically inspired national, religious and racial exclusionism debases what I and other outfielders say. I live that reality and it strains my ability to reach out to the world, to humanity as a whole. It threatens my poetic and intellectual freedom. I worry that the pro-Israel hegemonic sway in Western culture will affect a 'security wall' around my intellectual property and that of other Palestinian writers and of kindred marginalized groups. That, in turn, dims my hope to be understood by the world at large and hence my worry. The dedication of the current thin collection of poetry by the three internationally savvy poets, Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso, to Gaza and Gazans blows their cover: They are diaspora Palestinians, world citizens and enemies of hegemonic cultural Zionism from within its field of operation; they are Trojan horses. Between them they span the globe in poetic exile seeming to be in constant flight from the inescapable curse of who they are, Palestinians by nature and nurture. The book is by four poets, not three, for I cried just as much peering into the illustrations as I did reading the lines that inspired them. The way David Borrington renders the feelings behind the words of the poets in heartfelt visual images is a form of poetry as well. How else can he show you again and again what it means to be "anxious at the cellular level" for example? Samah Sabawi admits to using her "140 characters to liberate Palestine." Within Israel lesser thought crimes led to a pre-dawn police raid and landed the poet Dareen Tatour first in jail and later in exile from home. The state has deemed her too much a threat to have access to the Internet, or to be free on her own recognizance till the formal court proceedings. But Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso all have escaped the geographic confines of Palestine/Israel to their emotional and physical global exile. Tethered by their heartstrings to their shared homeland and Gazan suffering, all three transcend their Palestinian roots to a universal core that snares readers everywhere. They soar across the globe to share in the pain of others whether in Kashmir, South Africa, Chile, Burma or Mali. Between the three of them our poets cover a wide span of the literary field and the physical globe: There isn't a continent or a writing art they haven't visited. Whether they cut their sentiments in stone or siphon them from an ocean, the classic similes for the craft of Arabic poetry, all three share the common demeanor coloring the lives of Palestinians everywhere: They harbor a sense of injured pride at the deferred and devalued, even if no longer totally denied, innate justice of their case, the Palestinian Nakba. The hue each of them reflects of this shared, heartfelt and pervasive Palestinian sentiment sets them apart from each other. The editor tells us: "Although Samah, Ramzy and Jehan have distinctive styles, they possess in common incisive intellects, finely tuned by a sense of justice inherent in the Palestinian experience and in their love for Palestine particularly besieged and suffering Gaza."
All three poets harbor a deep sense of history, of time and place that always translates to Palestine. I have travelled and met many fellow Palestinians in their diaspora. The phenomenon of Nakba-centered existence is near universal among us. Like a hereditary trait it spans generations and transcends time and space, it colors a Palestinian's existence wherever he/she treads and whatever air he/she breathes. Take Samah for example: She smiles at us brightly from the first page of her contribution. There is no mistaking her striking Greek (or is it Spanish, Italian, Mexican, Native American or South-East Asian) looks. Speaking for her fellow Palestinian poets, her words live up to the global sentiment her looks spark: "I am a Palestinian-Canadian-Australian writer, commentator and playwright. ... I travelled the world and lived in its far corners, yet always felt haunted by the violence and injustice perpetrated against the poor, the marginalized, the colonized and stateless. No matter where I was, or how vast the world appeared around me, I always felt as though I remained trapped in my place of birth Gaza. The war torn besieged and isolated strip shaped my understanding of my identity and my humanity."
Ramzy concurs: "Wherever I am in the world, from Seattle to Chile to South Africa and regardless of which struggle I am involved in, from Mali to the Rohingya, I am always thinking Palestine, even when I am not conscious of it. "So, don't talk to me about the Pharaoh: My Father's blood drenched the skin of Jesus After the Romans caught him at a checkpoint Hiding a recipe for revolution, and a love poem"
And here is Jehan Bseiso: "Since 2008 I have been working with Médecins Sans Frontières - Doctors Without Borders. My work has taken me to countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Ethiopia and others. In all my travels and encounters, I've experienced how support and understanding of the Palestinian cause can cross borders and traverse barriers of culture and language."
The with-it modernity of the three exiled Palestinian poets is such that it makes it possible to include such scribbles as "@ CNN@ Foxnews" meaningfully in a poem. Yet on the first reading, it is only at the very end that the picture becomes stunningly clear, explained in a single exclamation "Hashtag Gaza." This gives the entire collection its full clarity: Samah floats on an ethereal atmosphere focusing on Gaza willingly or against her will, Ramzy fills every internationally significant calamity with his remembered Gazan content and Jehan experiences everything firsthand as #Gaza. "How [else] can we remember what we can't forget?"
Aversion to hyperbole limits one's choices for comparison. Still, Gaza's reality is of the same genre as the Holocaust or Hiroshima. Except that Gaza's plight is stretched out over decades with the perpetrators' skilled consistency and aggressive projection of inner violence on its victim so artfully that violence becomes the norm for Gaza if not for the whole of Palestine. The 'international community' is numbed into accepting the buzz of its drones, helicopters and F-16s as part of the standard background noise and its fireworks as another light show to observe and to report on occasionally to fill the bulk requirements of international dailies. "Counting lashes is unlike receiving them," a Palestinian saying goes. The Palestinian experience, especially in Gaza, not only of suffering but also of being ignored, shunned and ridiculed for incurring such punishment is extremely private. It is so private and foreign it is difficult to communicate to others. The basic elements of their private world are so harshly incomprehensible that even when you scream them at 'normal people' you do it out of despair knowing that such reality is unexplainable, that only living such reality permits one to understand it. Hence, and logically, some of the language is so unusual as poetry that it rubs against the grain. And yet, there is an amateurish freshness to the raw rub and the sanguinity of it all. It is so painfully touching it sinks and sticks to the depth of the heart: "Habeebi, I thought you lost my number, turns out you lost your legs." How else can one perceive such nightmarish reality as: "In the hospital, they put the pregnant women alone, because they're carrying hope, because they don't want them to see what can happen to children. ... There's more blood than water today in Gaza." - Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh is the author of Chief Complaint as well as A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel (Pluto Press, 2008). |
| FEATURE |
On the 8th Anniversary of Sailing into Gaza
By Greta Berlin We were so late leaving Cyprus for Gaza. The 30+ passengers waiting in the hot, dusty confines of the University in Nicosia were fed up and beginning to wonder if two boats ever existed. Every day, I went into the morning meeting and said, "Not today, they are in a storm." Or, "Not today, they have had problems with the steering." Or, "Not today, one of the captains quit." We had been due to sail on July 31 2008. It was now August 18, and the last communication we received was the boats would finally pull into the harbor in Larnaca on the 20th, three weeks late. Mary Hughes Thompson was sending out pleas for more money, as our adventure to Gaza was becoming more expensive by the day. People donated their social security checks, their military pensions, part of their pay checks because they believed in us, that we would actually sail to Gaza. The media was calling all the time, the Israelis were spending thousands of shekels trying to find out where the boats were or threatening us by phone that we would never make it. "There's a bomb on board," was one call. Another came in late at night, a heavy Israeli accent, "Do you know how to swim?" Lauren Booth, the sister-in-law of Tony Blair was receiving phone calls telling her that her children were in danger. We paid no attention to any of these calls, and we were naïve enough to think Israel would play fair and let two small fishing boats crammed with 44 passengers sail to Gaza. Why not? Israel said Gaza was free, and we were going straight from international waters into the waters of Gaza. What could be easier? The night of August 20, 2008, two tiny boats rounded the corner of Larnaca and limped into port, a bedraggled crew who hadn't bathed in days making a run for the Sunflower Hotel to stand under the showers, while those of us waiting for them to arrive just wanted to get on board and sail. Everyone was irritated at everyone else; 44 people from 17 countries and a dozen different cultural backgrounds tried to hold a meeting that night to strategize. And we were frightened, even the hardy sailors who had navigated the 1200 miles (1900 kilometers) to get from Greece to Cyprus. And we had the most dangerous 240 miles to go to make it to Gaza. After all, the Israelis had threatened us repeatedly over the past month. Israel was frustrated, because they had been looking for the boats since June. We had written they were in Alexandria, Egypt (and they sent a team there to question port authorities). Then we said they were coming down from different locations in Greece, only we hadn't posted the correct names on the boats. We knew Israeli commandos had blown up the engines on the Ship of Return in 1988 and murdered three of the Palestinian organizers. But we were determined to set sail and hoped our deception cost the Israeli government money. When passengers finally lined up to get on board the morning of Friday August 22, we were shocked to realize we had to go through passport control. It never occurred to any of us that we actually had to have our passports stamped, since we were leaving the EU for Gaza. The passport control agent, a patient Greek Cypriot, asked us to collect all of the passports and line up until our names were called. A Port Authority officer stood next to him. "You realize that these two boats are only certified for 22 passengers and you have 44." No, actually, we didn't know that. "I'm going to stand right here and watch the passports stamped, and when I turn around to look at the boats, I only want to see ten people on board the Liberty and 12 on board the Free Gaza. Do you understand?' Twenty-two of us went below deck until we pulled out to the cheers of the people standing on shore. The Cypriot Coast Guard escorted us out and we were on our way. Before we set sail on Friday, the Israeli foreign ministry had warned us to steer clear of the Gaza coastline, and said Gaza was "the subject of an [Israeli Navy] advisory notice," and we are warning off foreign vessels from the "designated maritime zone". (It's important to see that, in August 2008, there was never any talk about a military blockade, legal or illegal). Thirty-three hours on the sea were harrowing, because most of us had no idea how rough the sea would be. And the Israeli military had blocked all our communications, from GPS to sat phones. The two captains were navigating with paper and compass for the entire night, and many people following our trip thought we had been lost at sea. On Saturday, August 23, an Israeli spokesman said we would be 'allowed in'. "They wanted a provocation at sea, but they won't get it," foreign ministry spokesman Aviv Shiron told the AFP news agency. "We know who the passengers are and what they are bringing with them and so we have no problem letting them through." Israel didn't realize that the last thing we wanted was any kind of a provocation at sea. By this time, the majority of us were sea sick, and the only way we could have driven off Israeli commandos would have been to vomit on them. When we sighted the shores of Gaza that sunny Saturday afternoon, August 23, we realized we had made it. Forty thousand Palestinians were standing at the port, waving and cheering and blowing whistles as our bedraggled passengers and ramshackle boats pulled into port. We were throwing balloons into the water for little boys to grab and stuff down their wet shirts. They were climbing on the sides of the boats, and, for the first time on that trip, we considered the boats might sink with hundreds of Palestinian boys hanging on the edges. The full story of our successful trip and the challenges we met and solved is in this book, Freedom Sailors. It's 200 pages highlight our quixotic trip and joyful ending. We set a precedent that day, and no amount of Israeli spin over the past 8 years can change the fact that we successfully sailed four more times. "No matter what happens we have already achieved our goal by proving that ordinary citizens with ordinary means can mobilize a defense of human rights for Palestinians," organizer Paul Larudee told the AFP news agency. "We want people to see the Palestinian problem as one of human rights, not feeding them rice," he added. On this 8th anniversary, we would like to remember the passengers and land-crew who have died since then and have written this article as a tribute to them as well as the thousands of Palestinians who have lost their lives in Gaza since that joyous day that changed all of us for the better. Smooth sailing to Sister Ann Montgomery, Hedy Epstein, Vittorio Arrigoni, Scott Kennedy. Thank you courageous Palestinians who cheered us on that day and continued to cheer when we landed in October, November and December of 2008. We have not forgotten the joy we all had, and we will continue to sail until Gaza is free. Although no boats have been able to land since December 2008, boats are still attempting to break the illegal siege. As I write this memory, a woman's boat is getting ready to sail in September. We wish them well. - Greta Berlin is the Co-founder, Free Gaza movement. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. |
| NEWS | | Poll: Support for One-State Solution on the Rise Among Palestinians A small majority of both Palestinians and Israelis support a two-state solution despite their differing views on the terms of a permanent settlement to peace negotiations, a survey published Monday found. The survey, conducted jointly by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah and the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), showed that 51 percent of Palestinians supported the two-state solution compared to 58.5 percent of Israelis - 53 percent among Jews and 87 percent among Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. "Nonetheless, at least a quarter of the opposition to a permanent settlement on both sides is flexible and it is likely that its opinion might be changed with the right incentives," the report stated. Fewer Palestinians than Israelis supported a peace agreement based on 'compromise' - 39 percent compared to 46 percent of surveyed Israelis. The terms of the compromise included a demilitarized Palestinian state, an Israeli withdrawal to the Green Line with equal territorial exchange, family unification in Israel of 100,000 Palestinian refugees, West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and splitting sovereignty of occupied East Jerusalem's Old City between Jewish and Muslim holy sites. Meanwhile, a quarter of Israelis and 35 percent of Palestinians told the pollsters they supported a one-state solution. All past efforts towards peace negotiations have failed to end the decades-long Israeli military occupation or bring Palestinians closer to an independent contiguous state. The last spate of negotiations led by the US collapsed in April 2014. Israel claimed the process failed because the Palestinians refused to accept a US framework document outlining the way forward, while Palestinians pointed to Israel's ongoing settlement building and the government's refusal to release veteran prisoners. The binational state - termed the "one-state solution" - has increasingly gained support among Palestinians, activist groups, and intellectuals purporting it as the most reasonable way of upholding Palestinian human rights and their internationally recognized right to return to lands they were expelled from during and after the establishment of Israel in 1948. (MA'AN, PC)
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The Palestine Chronicle is an independent online newspaper that provides daily news, commentary, features, book reviews, photos, art, etc, on a variety of subjects. However, it's largely focused on Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East region. The Palestine Chronicle is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization. To contact the editor, submit an article or any other material, please write to: editor@palestinechronicle.com. For other inquiries write to: info@palestinechronicle.com. |
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