Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, August 14, 2014:
“If you add together all the people who gathered over the past weekend to demand justice in Israel and Palestine – in Cape Town, Washington, D.C., New York, New Delhi, London, Dublin, Sydney, and all the other cities – this was arguably the largest active outcry by citizens around a single cause ever in the history of the world.”
In case you joined this blog in the past few days, and have not received notice of the previous post (From inside Gaza…), here’s an update:
July 17, Day 10 of the Israeli military assault continues against Gaza, the world’s largest prison.
Palestinians killed: 211, including 179 civilians, 32 of them women, 45 of them children.
Palestinians wounded: 1458, mostly civilians, including 253 women, 432 children.
Source: Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Gaza, which has a good reputation for accuracy.
Photo: Ted Majdosz
Many of us feel enraged but helpless in the face of Israel’s war crimes, and the active complicity of elected governments across Europe and North America. The rage is justified, but we are not helpless. There is something we can do.
Here is American journalist Max Blumenthal’s deeply perceptive, moving account of his recent travels through the Negev Desert, where the Israeli government is poised to implement a plan for the expulsion of 40,000 indigenous Bedouin citizens of Israel from their ancestral Negev Desert communities and “concentrate” them in state-run, reservation-style townships.
Former Bedouin homes, Negev Desert. Image: Occupied Palestine.
The Prawer Plan will extend to Bedouin Israeli citizens the same treatment that Palestinians have endured for decades. It is grimly reminiscent of South Africa in the depths of apartheid, and North America through several centuries of ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples.
Max Blumenthal: “The Prawer Plan is only one element of the government’s emerging program to dominate all space and the lives of all people between the river (the Jordan) and the sea (the Mediterranean).” This from the state that claims to be ‘the only democracy in the Middle East.’ Hence Blumenthal’s choice of title: The desert of Israeli democracy.
Gaza rally, London, July 2014
Michael Riordon 