In their joint propaganda, the Israeli regime and its western backers manage an astonishing feat.  While relentlessly projecting an image of Israelis/Jews as eternal victims, simultaneously they project exactly the opposite image: brutal, invincible power.

A woman of Nabi Saleh argues with Israeli border policemen after they invaded her house, December 30, 2011.  Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills

All tyrants – aka the 1% – devote vast energy and resources to keeping the rest of us convinced that they are invincible, and therefore resistance is futile.  The longer they can keep us under this illusion, the longer they can hold power over us, aka the 99%.  When tyrants fall, nearly always the collapse begins when they can no longer sustain these two illusions, that they are invincible and that we are powerless.

To that end, a very handy power tool has just been released:  ‘Targeting Israeli Apartheid: a BDS handbook.’

It comes from the highly respected UK-based research group, Corporate Watch.  Their mandate is to expose socially and environmentally destructive corporate actions, as well as corrupt links between business and power, economics and politics.  They’ve probed the oil industry, globalisation, genetic engineering, the food industry, toxic chemicals, migration, privatisation and other areas, cataloguing corporate crimes and mapping the often hidden machinery of economic and political power.

‘Targeting Israeli Apartheid: a BDS handbook’ is a lively, meticulously researched, well organized, richly illustrated guide to who exactly is doing what to whom, where, and how we can effectively rebuke those who profit from crime.

Under a Creative Commons licence, the handbook can be downloaded free in pdf format.

As a useful companion resource, I recommend the excellent Who Profits.  They do similar in-depth research from inside Israel.  (Check them out in chapter 17, Our Way to Fight.)

Israel and its backers have at their disposal the most powerful weapons of mass destruction on the planet.  What do we have?  Each other, and a few handy tools.

‘Targeting Israeli Apartheid: a BDS handbook.’  383 pages, downloadable as pdf, or consult it online.

An essential power tool for anyone who cares about a just peace in Palestine-Israel and wants to do something about it but doesn’t know where to begin.

One of many stolen rights that Palestinians are struggling to reclaim is freedom of movement, which most of us take for granted.  An intriguing new example of creative non-violent protest follows below.  First, a little context:

Israel’s growing system of apartheid roads severely limits the free movement of people and goods into, out of, and even within occupied Palestine.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that as of September 2011:

• there were 522 roadblocks and checkpoints throughout the West Bank
• four of the five roads that lead into the Jordan Valley are not accessible to Palestinian vehicles
• an additional 495 ad-hoc ‘flying’ checkpoints obstruct movement around the West Bank each month (on average), compared to 351 in the past two years
• at least 200,000 people from 70 villages are forced to use detours which take two to five times longer than the direct route to their closest city
• in ten of the eleven major West Bank cities, one or more of the main entrances are blocked to Palestinian traffic.

Not surprisingly, in the same spirit as the recent Freedom Rides in Palestine:  Palestinian ‘car protest’ in West Bank challenges road segregation.

The news of this protest arrived today from Israeli-American journalist Mairav Zonszein, via +972 Magazine and Mondoweiss:

“Palestinians attempted to set out in a motorcade of about 50 cars from Jericho en route to Ramallah this morning, to protest and challenge the system of Israeli-only roads throughout the West Bank….”

Follow the story here.  The article includes photos, video, and links to Twitter updates, with the hashtag #carprotest.

Souad Amiri has, and needs, a sublime sense of humour.

A Palestinian architect and internationally acclaimed writer, she lives in Ramallah.

In humour Souad Amiri has found the basis for survival and sanity under Israeli military occupation.

Last year she gave the closing talk at a conference live-streamed from Ramallah.  Two options:

The final giddy 12 minutes of her talk are here.

The whole inspiring talk, about 22 minutes, is here.

Enjoy.

The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem provides video cameras to young people in “high-conflict areas” of occupied Palestine.

The goal is to bring “the reality of their lives under occupation to the attention of the Israeli and international public.”

Given the shameful silence and/or misinformation on Palestine from governments and the mainstream media in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe, how else would we ever know?  And the less we know, the easier it is for the Israeli regime to do as it wishes, and get away with it.

Recording the dirty work of the soldiers is dangerous work.  Not surprisingly, they are inclined to target those who would expose their crimes.

Still, for young Palestinians, this is one of very few opportunities they have to let us know what it’s really like on the ever-shrinking ground where they live.

From more than 500 hours of video recorded in 2011, B’tselem assembled this 3-minute video.  Please give it a look.  It’s the least we can do.

For Palestinians there is nothing unusual about these images.  They see and experience worse.  What these brave young videographers share with us are the routines of day-to-day survival under an illegal military occupation.

Can you imagine?

Just posted online, a new review of Our Way to Fight, in Illume magazine, published in California.