Tzipi Livni: “The national solution for Israel’s Arabs lies elsewhere: in order to maintain a Jewish-Democratic state we must constitute two nation-states with clear red-lines. Once this happens, I will be able to come to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, whom we label Israel’s Arabs, and tell them that their national solution is elsewhere.”
Peled-Elhanan
Nurit Peled-Elhanan: “People don’t really know what their children are reading in textbooks. One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. People ask how can these nice Jewish boys and girls become monsters once they put on a uniform. I think the major reason for that is education. So I wanted to see how school books represent Palestinians.”
We must gather up our courage and teach our children to refuse. Refuse to take part in an organization that is led by war criminals, murderers of children. An organization like that cannot be anything but a crime organization. Avoid it like you would avoid live fire, we should tell them, and think of other ways to contribute to the society in which you live.
A boat carrying aid for Gaza’s population and organized by Jewish groups worldwide has set sail from Cyprus today [26 Sept 2010] at 13:32 local time. The boat, Irene, is sailing under a British flag and is carrying ten passengers and crew, including Jews from the US, the UK, Germany and Israel as well as an Israeli journalist. Among the passengers are Israeli peace activists Rami Elhanan and Yonatan Shapira.
At the end of this month, my brother Bassam Aramin, the persistent Combatant for Peace, was meant to … go with his family to Bradford University in the UK, to complete his masters in Conflict Resolution. … Unfortunately, there is still £20,000 needed, despite considerable efforts.
[T]he line that separates the two sides today is not between Arabs and
Israelis or Jews and Muslims. Today the line is between those who want peace
and are ready to pay the price for it, and all the rest. They are the other
side! And today, that other side, to my dismay, is the corrupt group of
politicians and generals that leads us and behaves like a bunch of mafia
dons, war criminals, who play ping-pong in blood among themselves, who sow
hatred and reap death.
I will mourn on Nakba Day. And also on the day that precedes it which we call Remembrance Day and which is nothing but a day dedicated to the cult of dead flesh, at the end of which everyone goes out and grills another kind of dead flesh on open flames, sings, dances, overeats and gets drunk. I will mourn for our Independence Day that is nothing but a celebration of the triumph of closure and subjugation.
John Pilger reminds us of the struggle by an extraordinary few in Israel against the repression and lawlessness of the occupation of Palestine. They are the inspiration to break the loud silence in the Jewish diaspora.
It seems that the only value which we still have the power and means to instill is the value of refusal. To learn to say no. To teach our children who have not been poisoned yet to resist the brainwashing, to reject the viruses with which their brains are being injected. It is a hard and sysiphic task, but it is the only way of reasserting our humanity. To say no to evil, no to deceit and deception, no to trade in human beings, no to the racism which is spreading over here like wildfire… We stand here today as an alien and alienated minority, hated and persecuted. But together with our peace-seeking friends beyond the Wall, beyond the barbed wires, we might become a majority. Only the refusal to surrender to walls and checkpoints can open the gates of our ghetto so that we could pull down the walls of their ghetto. To see at last that there is an outside world, that there are regions around which the Jewish National Fund had not destroyed.
IOA Editor: Outstanding.
On Wednesday we – members of the Combatants for Peace movement, women of Machsom Watch, members of the Forum of Bereaved Families for Peace and writer David Grossman – attended a hearing at the [Israeli] High Court of Justice on the matter of the closing, due to lack of evidence, of the investigatory file on the killing of ten-year-old Abir Aramin about three years ago.
IOA Editor: Reported by Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli peace activist and professor at Hebrew University, among the founders of the Bereaved Families for Peace. After the death of Elhanan’s 13 year-old daughter in a 1997 suicide bombing attack she became an outspoken critic of the Israeli Occupation.
