Friday, October 3, 2008

Renowned Women Speak Out on Palin and the Election

Featuring exclusive remarks from Isabel Allende, Joan Blades, Eve Ensler, Melissa Etheridge, Gloria Feldt, Kim Gandy, Elizabeth Lesser, Courtney Martin, Kathy Najimy, Amy Richards, Deborah Siegel, Eleanor Smeal, Gloria Steinem, Loung Ung, Alice Walker, Jody Williams, Marie Wilson

Everyone is talking about women and the upcoming election.

As a woman, I have been feeling a bit overwhelmed and shaken by this election season, the highs and lows of it all. On the one hand, I have been feeling powerful -- everyone is talking about women and our decisive influence in this election. Even the cover of the September 22nd issue of Newsweek is asking, "What do women want?" It's a good question. So many important themes and dialogues have been raised during this election season -- about identity politics, what we expect from a woman leader, sexism in the media, diversity in the feminist movement, what masculine and feminine values are, and about Sarah Palin and the "Palin effect." It all made me want to talk to other women, to get clarity, to gain insight. I tried to think about what I, personally, could do to contribute to this dialogue.

I realized that, through my many years as a writer and as founder of the women's website and non-profit organization, Feminist.com, I possessed extensive contacts with a diverse cross-section of well-known and respected women. So, I decided to pose identical questions by e-mail to some of these dynamic women and just see what came in. Some of the responses I got were by e-mail, some by impromptu phone interviews, but, it was clear that people felt the urge to talk and vent their thoughts.

I believe that there is a cathartic benefit to all these complex issues and themes rising to the surface, as the world is being transformed, and that the transformation will continue -- no matter who ultimately winds up in office after November 4th. I join Melissa Etheridge in her optimistic attitude as she reflects:

"We, as a people, are rising up and saying, to hell with fear. To hell with the fear that an African American could never by elected President. To hell with the fear that someone who is a mixed race is somehow inferior to anybody else. To hell with the thought that a woman can't lead just as well as a man. That all of those differences that we've been circling around and finding ourselves in the middle of, are gone! They're gone. This is the future that we are all dreaming of. We're here. Here it is. Welcome to it."

So I offer the thoughts of these women and hope you benefit from reading them as much as I did.

In alphabetical order: Isabel Allende, Joan Blades, Eve Ensler, Melissa Etheridge, Gloria Feldt, Kim Gandy, Elizabeth Lesser, Courtney Martin, Kathy Najimy, Amy Richards, Deborah Siegel, Eleanor Smeal, Gloria Steinem, Loung Ung, Alice Walker, Jody Williams, Marie Wilson

Isabel Allende, author and activist whose books include Paula and The House of the Spirits, founder of the Isabel Allende Foundation.

Many women today are experiencing a conflict between wanting to see a woman in the White House and the fact that Sarah Palin's views are in complete opposition to the progressive agenda that many feminists tend to advocate. What is your reaction to this?
IA: Sarah Palin does not represent the interests of women in this place and time. Do we want to go back to the 19th century? Or maybe medieval times? I hope that no thinking woman, young or old, will fall in the gender trap. Palin may be a woman but she certainly acts like Rambo and thinks like Cheney. As a woman I demand the right to control my body, my income, and my beliefs. As a mother I want to protect my family from poverty, inequality, ignorance, racism, bigotry, fear, violence and patriotism (an excuse for war). As a citizen I support freedom of the mind, curiosity, knowledge, technology, information. As an American I embrace the world and want our country to recover the international respect and admiration that the Bush administration has squandered. McCain and Palin do not represent me and never will.

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
IA: Sisters, look at the issues, not color, gender or age of the candidates. Obama represents hope and change, he has ideals, he brings light and intelligence to a stagnant political situation that has lasted too long and has left the country economically bankrupt, trapped in a never ending war and divided. Sisters, be informed, work for the best candidate, vote and make sure that everybody around you votes too. Show up or we will all regret it. Obama is the girls in the race.

Any other comments or insights?
IA: McCain is old and sick. Can you imagine if he dies and Sarah Palin becomes the president of the United States, and the most powerful political figure in the world? If you thought Bush was bad, you haven't seen Palin in action yet.

***
Joan Blades, co-author of The Motherhood Manifesto and co-founder of MoveOn.Org and MomsRising.org

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
JB: Vote! Get your friends to vote. Talk about the issues. MomsRising.org has a MomsVote08 program complete with free bumper clingers.

Any other comments or insights?
JB: Sarah Palin is Governor in part because she has the advantages that mothers need to succeed. She has paid sick days, health care for her kids, flexible work and good child care -- her husband participates in the child rearing. We need to make sure that all families have the support they need to prosper.

***

Eve Ensler, playwright, performer and activist, author of The Vagina Monologues and founder of V-Day , a global movement to end violence against women and girls.

Eve Ensler is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo working with women on behalf of V-Day (which she described in her e-mail to me as "so very intense") and answered my query by selecting the following excerpts from Drill, Drill, Drill, her Huffington Post piece on Sarah Palin.

Many women today are experiencing a conflict between wanting to see a woman in the White House and the fact that Sarah Palin's views are in complete opposition to the progressive agenda that many feminists tend to advocate. What is your reaction to this?
EE: I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country choose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
EE: I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

***

Melissa Etheridge, Recording artist, human rights activist, www.melissaetheridge.com

The following interview was conducted by phone.

MS: Many women today are experiencing a conflict between wanting to see a woman in the White House and the fact that Sarah Palin's views are in complete opposition to the progressive agenda that many feminists tend to advocate. What is your reaction to this?
ME: Well, if we stop and think about it, then we will realize that it is not about electing a woman. It's about understanding the feminine principles, the feminine energy. And it doesn't necessarily have to come in a woman. There is a difference between the feminine and masculine energies, and the feminine and masculine body. Every human being has a different measure of each in themselves. And we're all searching for balance. So, because we're so caught up in this material world, we think that all males are male and all females are female, and the energy does not apply so. And especially if you are a homosexual, it's easier to comprehend this, because you don't fall into those male and female categories.

So it's easy for me to look at Sarah Palin and say: oh, she is only representing the masculine energy, the masculine interests. Now I'm not saying "men's" interest, I'm saying the masculine side of this energy that comes from left brain thinking - "we have to create fear, and dominate and this is the only way we can do this, and big business is what it's all about, and we have to drill for oil, and we have to go take over a country" [laughs] - those are the masculine, darker side of energy way of thinking. And she represents that. And Obama is representing the more feminine, balanced side.

If we are going to survive, we have to have peace, we have to have an Earth that will be there for our children and our children's children - which is a very feminine way of looking at this reality, at looking at life, at what we're doing, what we're creating right now. So, if you just take a step further back and go, OK, it's not about a male or female, it's about the masculine and feminine. It's not about just about getting a woman in the White House. Any old woman [laughs] is not necessarily going to make the right choices.

MS: What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
ME: I would want to say, are you starting to get it just how important we are? We have the power. I sort of thought all along that we did, and this whole election cycle I was starting to go, wow - women, they have a lot of power here! And then when I went to the Democratic convention, and I saw a majority of women, and you saw that woman saying, "representative from California tell us your..." and she's up there, and Nancy Pelosi's up there - we're not on the side, we're not the minority, we were the majority! And we were making this happen!

And then when I heard that they had picked Sarah Palin, I thought, oh, my gosh, they know that the most important thing is the women vote. And if they can confuse us, then they will keep us from coming together on this. If they can divide us, with fear, and give us this image of a woman in office and feed her the lines to say and the things to do and give her a few good jokes, and make her a celebrity that can be on the magazines and newspapers and that stuff. She's almost like from casting central, it's almost like they cast her in a movie about the first woman from Anchorage, Alaska that got to be in the White House, played by Tina Fey [laughs]. It's like, no, no! But we have the power. It is all about us right now. And whatever we do is what happens. And if we react from fear, we are going to get four more years of fear. But if we stand here and go, wait a minute, it's all about me! What do I want? I want peace, I want a healthy Earth for my kids, and myself. And it's just real simple - we have the power. No matter how they try to make it look, in the magazines and on the television, we have the power. And I can tell it! I think in ten, twenty years we are going to look back and go - wow, that is really when the feminine started to balance out.

MS: I was just reading a speech by Elizabeth Lesser, founder of Omega Institute, who observed that it feels like we are birthing a new world, and that we are going through the painful contractions, and that we should all just relax and breathe and have the courage to allow it to be born.
ME: I just had this very conversation yesterday with some mothers at the school my kids go to. And they asked me, "Tell me what it was like at the convention?" And I tell them, I say -- it was filled with hope. It was filled with a knowing that we are headed in the right direction. And they say, "Oh, but I am so afraid when I hear all the things that they say and the way that the news makes it look." And I tell them, no, no, no -- turn off the TV. And then feel it -- feel what's going on. Because it's huge and it's beautiful and it's amazing - we are right in the middle of history right now. We are the ones. We are going to be telling the story for ages to come of what happened in 2008. And enjoy it, and breathe and believe it - yeah, exactly what she said. I try to tell them because the more everyone can start stating that, the more everyone will see it.

MS: So you are hopeful.
ME: Totally. Oh, I know. Yes, I think it will be a resounding answer on November 4th. We are going to send a message out to the world that, yeah, we got really messed up, but we're on the right path now. And we can all join together. Yeah.

MS: What do you think we can take away from this whole election experience, no matter who wins? We have our first African American nominee for President...
ME: Yeah -- hello? Yeah! That we are our government. And our government is for us. And we control it. And we are actually wrestling right now, not between Republican and Democrat or conservative or liberal, not between any of those dualities - we are wrestling for our democracy right now. For it to be about the people, and not about big business and the direction that it wants to take this whole world. And that's the struggle right now at the core of all of this. And we, as a people, are rising up and saying, to hell with the fear. To hell with the fear that an African American could never be elected President. To hell with the fear that someone who is a mixed race is somehow inferior to anybody else. To hell with the thought that a woman can't lead just as well as a man. That all of those differences that we've been circling around and finding ourselves in the middle of, are gone! They're gone. This is the future that we are all dreaming of. We're here. Here it is. Welcome to it.

MS: You attended and performed at the Democratic convention -- anything in particular strike you from that experience? Did you get to meet Obama?
ME: I didn't get to meet him at the convention -- I had met him before, but I didn't get to meet him there. He was like the cherry on top of the whole thing. And it wasn't so much about a man, it was about a movement. It was about the people. I sat there with tears in my eyes when they did the roll call from state to state. And the diversity -- from women, to people of color, to different ethnic origins... As I watched the tape of me singing "Born in the USA," they flashed to all these people in the audience, and there were Hasidic Jews, and there's a guy in a turban [laughs] and it was like -- this is what we are, man! We represent everybody, we really do. Because the dream is what it's all about. It's not about the skin color or a certain religious dogma or anything -- it's about an idea. And that's what our country is. And I think that's what I think was the biggest change that I saw. It wasn't about Obama -- it was about all of us.

MS: What do you think of the achievement of Hillary Clinton's "18 million cracks in the ceiling" -- the overall significance of her run?
ME: I think it's brilliant! I think it's wonderful, that we had a choice between a woman and a black man. That we had that choice! And that we as women thought about it, and didn't just automatically go one way, but thought about the choice! And haven't we been fighting for choice for 30, 40 years? And now we know we can never go back. It is like she said, 18 million cracks in the ceiling. We're not going back. There will be a woman President and she will be the one who speaks truthfully and honestly and brings amazing balance to the world.

****
Gloria Feldt, author of The War on Choice, Heartfeldt Politics blog, and former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Many women today are experiencing a conflict between wanting to see a woman in the White House and the fact that Sarah Palin's views are in complete opposition to the progressive agenda that many feminists tend to advocate. What is your reaction to this?
GF: There's no conflict in voting against a ticket that includes Sarah Palin. While it makes my feminist heart sing that even the Republican right knows women are the key to the 2008 elections, Sarah Palin is to women's rights what Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly are to civil rights: the antithesis of the struggle for social justice and equality. Palin's selection would be a giant leap backward from real hope and true change for women and the most important issues facing our country.

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
GF: If you want better health care access, if you value your human right to reproductive justice, if you want a stronger economy and a safer nation, you'll vote for Obama. If you prefer going back to the days when women were barefoot and pregnant, you'll vote for McCain. Simple as that.

Any other comments or insights?
GF: I was and remain a Hillary Clinton supporter. Obama-Biden isn't a perfect ticket, but there is no question it's the better ticket for women. Let's get them elected and then get more feminist women running for office at every level of government. That's the best way to honor and continue Hillary Clinton's legacy.

***

Kim Gandy, President of the National Organization for Women (NOW).

Many women today are experiencing a conflict between wanting to see a woman in the White House and the fact that Sarah Palin's views are in complete opposition to the progressive agenda that many feminists tend to advocate. What is your reaction to this?
KG: McCain's choice of Palin was a cynical effort to appeal simultaneously to disappointed Hillary Clinton voters and his party's right wing base. Fortunately, only the latter seems to be working.

What he does not understand is that women supported Hillary Clinton not just because she was a woman, but because she was a champion on their issues. They will not find Sarah Palin to be an advocate for women.

There's no question that a lot of women think it's a great thing for a woman to be running for vice president, but they are completely dismayed when they find out her positions. The idea that she opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest -- that as mayor of Wasilla she made rape survivors pay for processing the police evidence in order to obtain justice -- positions like that are completely out of step with American women and once they find out about those positions, they get a little less excited about a woman running for vice president.

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
KG: For more than a decade, Barack Obama has said 'yes' to women's rights, while John McCain has consistently said 'no' -- NO to pay equity, NO to contraceptive access and reproductive rights, NO to appointing Supreme Court judges who will uphold women's rights and civil rights, NO to funding shelters and other anti-violence programs, and NO to supporting working moms and dads with policies that support work/life balance.

Any other comments or insights?
KG: NOW supported Sen. Hillary Clinton in the primary, and now we join with her in saying "NO" -- No Way, No How, No McCain! And we proudly stand arm-in-arm with her in putting our hopes and our dreams, our hard work and our hard-earned money, behind the next President of the United States -- Barack Obama, and his running mate, longtime friend and ally of women, Sen. Joe Biden.

***
Elizabeth Lesser, author of The Seeker's Guide and Broken Open co-founder Omega Institute.

Elizabeth Lesser was in Vienna speaking at a conference, so she e-mailed me this customized excerpt from her recent speech at Omega's Women & Courage conference.

EL: I started the year excited that a woman was running for president. Now I am terrified that a woman might BE president. As George Carlin said, "Just when I found out the meaning of life, they changed it." Just when I got all excited about a woman becoming president of the United States, enter Sarah Palin. But this confusion was setting in for me even before Sarah Palin entered the scene. I became disillusioned with Hillary Clinton's campaign when its tactics mutated in order to function within the dominant power structure. Early on I started to work for Obama. It hurt to do this. I had dreams where Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth and Betty Friedan and my dearly deceased mother were coming after me. But I had to follow my inner compass.

I'm looking for new language now to describe what I mean about women and power. I don't want the woman I saw on the cover of Time Magazine shouldering a semi-automatic rifle to lead my country. I don't want a woman in power who has not done the research about Iraq, global warming, Russian foreign policy, or sex education. I don't want a woman in power who cherishes the life of a human baby, but seems not to understand that the very web supporting all life is in grave danger. I guess what I want in a leader is a woman (or a man) who values the feminine values of tenderness, cooperation, courage, and wisdom. I want someone in power who will stand for, elevate, and dignify love as the guiding principle for human society. I don't want words like share and care to stay stuck in kindergarten. I want leaders who wear their woman's heart and soul on their sleeves, with pride and power.

***

Courtney Martin, writer, blogger and author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, www.courtneyemartin.com

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
CM: Many women identify with Palin's fierceness, her sense of humor, her multitasking life, but this is not a personality contest. It is a presidential election. We have to think about the ways in which Palin's policy positions will affect our lives.

***

Kathy Najimy, actress, human rights activist, www.kathynajimy.com

Kathy Najimy simply e-mailed me the following concise response:

KN: I would love a woman in the White House. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sarah Palin is dangerous and not meant for any public position.

***
Amy Richards, author of Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism, Manifesta: Young Women Feminism and the Future , and Opting In: Having A Child Without Losing Yourself. She is also the co-founder of Third Wave Foundation and Feminist.com.

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
AR: You are voting for McCain or Obama; not Palin or Obama -- and while I recognize that neither candidate is without their flaws, each voter has to decide who will best represent their issues. I am confident that most women will conclude that is Obama because his priority seems to be making the government work for the majority of Americans, not making it work a few and against the majority. And more than focusing on the presidential election, I really urge voters to consider the issues at stake in their own states -- what ballot initiatives, what local candidates -- these local issues are always more compelling reasons to vote than the presidency.

Any other comments or insights?
AR: I have an instinct to defend Palin -- mostly because she is a mother of young children and some people are questioning her ability to do the job based on that. I am also charmed by Palin -- she's funny, human, personable. And I also think her vagueness makes her relatable -- in all honesty most of us can find faults between our "beliefs" and our "actions." I note this because even with all that I can't even bring myself to consider her as a candidate because it's not her that's running it's McCain and he is the one signing legislation not her.

***
Deborah Siegel, writer and author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, creator of Girl With Pen blog.

Many women today are experiencing a conflict between wanting to see a woman in the White House and the fact that Sarah Palin's views are in complete opposition to the progressive agenda that many feminists tend to advocate. What is your reaction to this?
DS: I firmly believe that Palin is unprepared and find McCain's choice, and logic, insulting to any Clinton supporter worth her salt. That said, I'm having a hard time reconciling my antipathy to the "Women Against Palin" rhetoric with my antipathy toward Palin. Now, Polar Bear Moms against Palin, that's something I can get behind.

What message would you most want to get out to women about the
upcoming election?
DS: A woman candidate is not the same as a woman's candidate, to quote a feministing t-shirt. Don't be duped. Look at Palin's position on issues, look past the lipstick, see the woman who opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence only," a woman who runs alongside a man who opposes the Fair Pay Act. To any Clinton supporters even thinking about it, Gloria Steinem said it best: "To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, 'Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs.'"

Other comments or insights:
DS: As a Hillary-supporter turned Obamanista, Palin's initial popularity terrified me. But on the issues, she's all hat and no cattle, and in the end, I think American women are far smarter than that. May history prove me right.

***

Eleanor Smeal, President, Feminist Majority Foundation

The following interview was conducted by phone.

But it goes beyond that -- because she's on a ticket that is opposed to pay equity legislation for women, paid family leave, paid sick leave, funding violence against women, even funding breast cancer research! All these things. McCain, who is the head of that ticket, has a 26 year record of voting against women's rights. So it would be a staggering loss. Not to mention the stacking of the court with anti-women's rights jurists. Not just the Supreme Court, but the entire bench! I mean, we would go backwards on Title 9, Title 7, Violence Against Women -- you name it!

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
ES: We can't afford the election of McCain! It would cost women their rights, economic opportunities, and the ability to make a decision about their very lives, in the area of reproductive rights. And not to mention the war. I mean, there's so much! We have gone through a huge amount of information in his voting record. It's staggering his negative votes. This man even voted against funding for breast cancer research! It's subject upon subject he is a zero. He was the worst Senator on voting for child programs in 2007 according to the Children's Defense Fund. It just blows you away! He voted against S-CHIP -- how can you vote against insurance for poor kids? It's everything.

We have to create awareness for the depth and breadth of the negative votes and negative positions he has on women. On women's economic opportunities, on women's reproductive rights, on educational opportunities.

Any other comments or insights:
ES: I have spent 40 years fighting for women's rights. This man spent 26 years in the Senate blocking women's rights and women's programs. He wasn't a leader for women in the 20th century, let alone the 21st. And I just feel that if American women understood that for us to go forward, for us to close the wage gap, we need an even playing field. He wants to keep the playing field uneven.

The stakes are devastatingly high. And you've got an economic crisis and you have a war without end. You know, they call themselves mavericks and reformers. These are not mavericks, and they're not reformers, they're straight right wing votes.

I mean, the thing that just gets me is -- not only is Palin against reproductive rights, no abortion, not even rape or incest -- she's charging for the rape kit!. Who's for that? [laughs] What kind of reform is that? There's no reform record here. And I don't know how we get that out. I mean, we all are saying it, but he keeps calling himself a maverick - not on anything I see. He's a straight Bush vote! Has been -- for the last 8 years and then before that he had 26 years of voting no against women's rights.

We're going to do a site called Feminists for Obama, and we just know that we want our conscience clear that everybody knows the difference in these tickets. I have been working on party platforms since '76, trying to get more progressive platforms for women. This is the best platform of a major party in history. And it isn't that it just happened because women are finally strong in the democratic party, it's also -- I don't think people know this, or feminists know this -- but Obama has amazingly strong women in his team, feminists on his team. He has a really strong, informed team of women in his core.

We all feel so strongly -- they have depth inside. And there's no question where they stand. And the stark differences in their positions are startling. Not imperfect, but it's so strong in comparison to anything in the past, and it's really like setting a higher bar in the 21st century. And instead of setting a higher bar in the 21st century, the other ticket is representing pre-1960's positions on women -- I mean think about that. Isn't that ridiculous?

****

Gloria Steinem, feminist activist and writer, author of
Revolution From Within,Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Moving Beyond Words and co-founder of Ms. Magazine and the Women's Media Center.

Many women today are experiencing a conflict between wanting to see a woman in the White House and the fact that Sarah Palin's views are in complete opposition to the progressive agenda that many feminists tend to advocate. What is your reaction to this?
GS: The more women learn about her, the less there is any conflict. Palin is more popular with men than with women. She is the candidate of Rush Limbaugh, who started promoting her last February, and she was chosen by McCain to please the extreme religious right-wing that shares her belief in Creationism, disbelief in the human causes of global warming, and opposition to pretty much everything that the majority of women say they want and need, from the Equal Pay Act and the Violence Against Women Act that McCain opposes to sex education in the schools and reproductive freedom as a human right.

For example, Palin's state has a rate of sexual assault, child sexual abuse and women murdered by men that is far above the national average, yet she tried to make rape survivors pay the cost of their own of rape kits, and to replace a conscientious public safety commissioner with one who was himself facing charges of sexually harassing a female employee. She also tried to fire or harass out of their jobs a disproportionate number of women, from the librarian in Wasilla who wouldn't censor the library to Lyda Green, a conservative Republican herself and the president of the Alaska state Senate, who says about Palin, "She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"

Even for extreme right-wing women who share Palin's views that sex discrimination doesn't exist or isn't important -- that every woman can be Superwoman -- there is her character problem. Palin has misrepresented everything from her sale of the state plane on eBay and her record on the Bridge to Nowhere to the fact that she left her small town in first-ever debt with a major law suit and a polluted lake. If elected governor, she promised her husband would leave his $100,000 a year job with an oil company -- but he still has it -- and she has misused her expense account to pay her for staying at home. Indeed, she is so absentee from the governor's office that state legislators have taken to wearing buttons that say, "Where's Sarah?"

As social justice movements have learned the hard way, having someone who looks like you and behaves like them -- who looks like a friend but behaves like an adversary -- is worse than having no one. It's parallel to the anti-semitic Jewish person, or the African American who acts against civil rights. I have friends who supported Clarence Thomas in order to have an African Amercan on the Supreme Court -- and he was more qualified than Palin -- but every one of them is now sorry. It seems that Sarah Palin is the classic Mean Girl -- the unqualified woman the sexist boss hires to put down other women -- and that's the last thing we need in the White House.

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
GS: The fault for selecting Palin lies with John McCain. Given the choice between a vice president who actually could be President and one who might help him get elected by pleasing religious extremists, he took the selfish and unpatriotic path. This alone should disqualify him for the Presidency, especially in this life-and-death election. This is the most crucial in my lifetime for every reason from the purity of food and water to the cost in lives of armed conflict and irreversible damage to the environment. The life and health of men and women -- disproportionately the female half of the world -- literally depend on electing Obama and Biden.

By lowering qualifications for vice president for his own selfish reasons, and giving us a woman who would set back women by her policies, and embarrass us by being obviously out of her depth, McCain has practiced a classic form of sexism. His campaign has kept her from the usual press questioning and lowered the standards of the vice presidential debate in order to protect the unqualified Palin. More and more women are feeling embarrassed and angered by McCain's cynical and self-interested effort to confuse and pander by selecting the wrong woman.

Any other comments or insights?
GS: The country's economic meltdown is due to the de-regulation policy of McCain and Bush. Obama and Biden understand that Wall Street needs law and order just as much as Main Street. However, Palin knows so little about economics that she failed to get title to the land on which she built a sports stadium in Wasila, thus leaving law suits and a continuing source of big debts behind. If there were a contest for the politician least qualified to lead this country -- male or female -- it might be the one thing that Sarah Palin should win.

****

Loung Ung, author of First They Killed My Father and Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites With the Sister She Left Behind, human rights activist, www.loungung.com.

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
LU: When I was watching Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the RNC convention, my prevalent thought was, "what do our global friends and foreign leaders think?" We are living in the age of the global world, where for a few dollars we can cross boundaries, cultures, and countries; with the click of a mouse, we can connect with friends, allies, and supporters in the four corners of the earth. What happens in the global world effects us here at home, and vice versa. This is our time to be inclusive, to elect leaders who understand, celebrate, and are genuinely, passionately, aggressively interested with their hearts and minds about foreign policies and the global world. We need leaders who can work with foreign leaders and who foreign leaders respect and want to work with. We need leaders who not only move the hearts and minds of American women, but women all over the world, who make up over 50% of the world's population, and have enormous power to create true change.

Any other comments or insights?
LU: In his 1961 Inaugural Address; President F. Kennedy urged Americans everywhere to get involved and be of service to our country; "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." That speech was made many years before I was born but I heard the call and followed. Together, we make up over 1,000,000 registered charitable organizations in the U.S. today, and do the daily work of changing and altering lives through grassroots community activism. I stand proudly with many others who believe that together, through grass root activism, we can create change and make a difference in our world.

***
Alice Walker, author of many books including The Color Purple and We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness.

Alice Walker submitted the following response adapted from her recent piece in The Guardian:

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
AW: When we are offered a John McCain, who is too old for the job (and I cherish old age and old men but not to lead the world when it is ailing) or a George Bush, or a Sarah Palin, how unloved we are as Americans becomes painfully plain. McCain talks of war with the nostalgia and forgetfulness of the very elderly; Palin talks of forcing the young to have offspring they neither want nor can sustain; both of them feel at ease, apparently, with the game in which their candidacy becomes more of a topic of discussion than whether the planet has a future under their leadership.

Where does this leave us, average Americans who feel the chill of Global warming, the devastation of war, the terror of the food crisis, the horror of advancing diseases? Hopefully with a sense of awakening: that we have had few opportunities to be led by those who have the capacity to care for us, to love us, and that we, in our lack of love for ourselves, have, too often, not chosen them. Perhaps with the certainty that though we are as we are and sorely imperfect, we still deserve someone in leadership who "gets" us, and that this self-defeating habit of accepting our leaders' contempt is one we need not continue. Maybe with the realization that we, the people, are truly the leaders, and that we are the ones we have been waiting for.

***

Jody Williams, Nobel Laureate (honored in 1997 with the Nobel Peace Prize for her work against anti-personnel mines), co-founder Nobel Women's Initiative.

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
JW: Personally, I think the choice is simple -- do you want four more years (at
least) of Bush-Cheney governance, this time in the guise of McCain-Palin or do you want the possibility of real change in a country desperate for change. Vote for what course you want our country to take. Weigh the candidates' ideology, not anatomy.

Any other comments or insights?
JW: I do not believe that this country can stand four more years of the disastrous policies of Bush-Cheney: They have brought low American leadership and esteem in the world. They have brought down the economy and supported and promoted rapacious greed in the "great free market economy" (not!). They have shattered the hopes and dreams of middle-class Americans. They have left the nation impoverished with debt so huge I cannot really contemplate the figure. As long as they and their cronies are enriched, they do not give a damn about the fate of Americans, our environment, our world. How anyone can seriously consider a vote for more of this is beyond my comprehension.

****

Marie Wilson, author of Closing the Leadership Gap: Add Women, Change Everything and president of The White House Project .

Many women today are experiencing a conflict between wanting to see a woman in the White House and the fact that Sarah Palin's views are in complete opposition to the progressive agenda that many feminists tend to advocate. What is your reaction to this?
MW: Our work at The White House Project has always been about getting enough women into the political pipeline, at all levels, so that choices made about candidates are based on agenda, not gender. In his book Megatrends, John Naisbitt observed that the railroads in America failed because they thought they were still in the railroad business; what they didn't understand was that they were now in the transportation business. It's an apt metaphor for the work we do. We are not in the "gender" business, but in the transformation business. We want women in power who are agents of transformation -- the kind of transformations that benefit women and our democracy.

What message would you most want to get out to women about the upcoming election?
MW: In regard to the upcoming election, we need to realize that the future is really hinging on the women's vote. It has for years, but now both the parties and the press are finally, finally talking about women -- and both Clinton and Palin share credit for this. But since the country is paying attention now and can see that more women vote than men and that what women do will determine the outcome of this election, we had better vote in great numbers and vote well. At this time of domestic and international crisis, it's likely that women will be held responsible for not just the outcome of this election, but also the actions of the administration that ensue.

Any other comments or insights?
MW: We are at our new "Seneca Falls" -- a time where women gathered and expressed their intention to be full citizens of this country by demanding the right to vote. Women now have to step up and take on the full responsibility that was engendered in suffrage: women's active participation in democracy was fomented by suffragettes with the anticipation that women would use their citizenship not just to vote but also to run and lead. Now is the moment that women must commit to voting, running and leading in greater numbers than ever before. It's a tough time to be stepping up -- but women stepping up and bringing new solutions to the table is the only intervention our country has not tried.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

This trash is real...

I Just Got Push-Polled on Obama and Israel

My caller ID said "CENTRAL RESEARC 212-777-1645." Ugh, I figured. Another telemarketer. It was 6:43 pm and, under normal circumstances, I would have let it go to voice mail.

But it came on my home office line and I happened to be expecting a call from New York. So I answered.

It turned out to be a political poll. And not just any old poll.

It started off in the usual way. Am I registered to vote? Do I plan to vote on election day? How do I label myself politically?

A few seemingly innocuous questions about religion followed. What was my faith? What was my denomination? How often did I attend services? From there, the focus became more explicitly political--and, again, perfectly typical. Was I Democrat or Republican? Etc.

The caller ran through a list of politicians, to ask whether I viewed them favorably or unfavorably. All the people you'd expect were on the list: George W. Bush. Barack Obama. John McCain. Sarah Palin. Hillary Clinton. Joe Biden. Joe Lieberman.

But then there was an odd inclusion: Jimmy Carter.

I can't say I made much of it at the time. To be quite honest--and this won't surprise my regular readers--I was more worked up over the fact that, when asked about the broad issues that concerned me most, the poll categorized health care as a social concern rather than an economic one. (I asked if I could change the categories; the caller said I couldn't.)

But soon enough I understood why they were asking about Carter. After going over some more issues and confirming the fact that I was likely to vote for Obama, the caller made a series of rather pointed inquiries. Would it affect my vote, he said, if I knew that

Obama has had a decade long relationship with pro-Palestinian leaders in Chicago
the leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yousef, expressed support for Obama and his hope for Obama's victory
the church Barack Obama has attended is known for its anti-Israel and anti-American remarks
Jimmy Carter's anti-Israel national security advisor is one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisors
Barack Obama was the member of a board (sic) that funded a pro-Palestinian chartiable organization

Barack Obama called for holding a summit of Muslim nations exlcuding Israel if elected president

My notes are pretty close to verbatim. (I started typing as soon as I realized I was getting polled.) When the caller was finished, I got a supervisor on the phone and asked if he would tell me who was sponsoring the survey. He said he couldn't reveal that information.

All he would tell me was that he was calling from Central Marketing Research Inc. in New York City. And that makes sense. It seems that the same organization has been involved in these sorts of efforts before.

Update: Ben Smith at Politico reports that other Jewish voters are getting these calls, too. Based on his reporting and a comment from TNR reader "amstern," it sounds like the calls are going out to Jews in Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (which is where I live).

Also, I corrected the improper use of "exorcised" in my original item.

Update 2: Over at Talking Points Memo, David Kurtz suggests these calls are too long to be true push polls. Instead, he says, they are testing negative messages against Obama.

--Jonathan Cohn

More trash is real...

GOP Jewish Group Calling Jewish Voters with Questions Some Find Meshugah

September 16, 2008 9:36 PM

A Jewish Republican organization has polled 750 Jewish voters in five key battleground states -- Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania -- to test messages that would cause them not to vote for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

Matthew Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told ABC News Tuesday evening that despite complaints by some liberal Jewish organizations that the calls were part of a "push poll" -- that is, designed to spread salacious information as opposed to collect views of voters -- this was a "traditional poll of issues," with 82 questions using "standard polling methodology."

The point of the calls were to explore "why Obama continues to have significant problems with Jewish voters," Brooks said.

The calls have caused some outrage among members of the Jewish community and have been reported as far away as Israel. The fact that the RJC is behind the calls was first reported this evening by Ben Smith of the Politico.

Ben Cohen, a 37-year-old lawyer in Ohio received one of the calls last night and he was clearly offended.

"It was evocative of a time and a kind of politics that I would never want to see rise in America," Cohen told ABC News. "You shouldn't scare people to get elected -- Jewish people have experienced that before really horrifically."

Cohen received the call at his Cleveland Heights home Monday night. The third question, he recalled, was what religion he is. After telling the woman polling him he's Jewish, Cohen was asked how often he attends synagogue -- daily, frequently, or only on the High Holidays.

"That was a little odd," Cohen said. But then the poll turned into more standard questions such as which issue was most important to him.

After Cohen said he was leaning towards voting for Obama -- he was undecided until McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee, Cohen said -- the questions took what he called an "inflammatory" turn.

"Would you still vote for Barack Obama if you knew he'd been endorsed by Hamas?" Cohen said the questioner asked.

"Would you still vote for Barack Obama if you knew he had given money to the PLO?" Cohen said the question asked.

"Would you still vote for Barack Obama if you knew he supported a divided Jerusalem?" the questioner asked, Cohen recalled.

Recalled Cohen, "as the questions became a little more untoward," he reminded the pollster that she'd said the call would be brief.

"She said she was half done," Cohen said. "And I waited because I wanted to see if she would ask the same questions about McCain that they did with Obama."

She didn't.

"Then someone else gets on the phone," Cohen said. "And he said, 'I just wanted to check: Are you Jewish?' That was one of first questions the poll asked but at that point I felt uncomfortable answering it. it was odd. I felt like I was being targeted in the poll."

Brooks would not share the list of 82 questions from the RJC poll, but he said the three questions as Cohen recalled them were not precisely the ones asked.

Instead, Brooks said, those being polled were asked how their support for Obama would be affected if they knew that a leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yousef, had expressed support for Obama.

Yousef, a political adviser to Hamas in Gaza, said in April, "We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the election," but after Obama delivered a pro-Israel speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said the group had changed its mind: "Hamas does not differentiate between the two presidential candidates, Obama and McCain, because their policies regarding the Arab-Israel conflict are the same and are hostile to us, therefore we do have no preference and are not wishing for either of them to win."

Brooks said the poll "absolutely did not" say Obama gave money to the PLO, but he said a question may have addressed that when Obama was on the board of the Woods Fund, the philanthropic group gave a grant to an Arab-American community organization in Chicago that Brooks characterized as anti-Israel.

After initially declaring before the AIPAC audience that Israel's capital must remained an undivided Jerusalem, Obama backed off that pronouncement, saying it's a matter to be decided by the Israelis and Palestinians in the final stages of a peace process. Brooks insisted his poll stated merely that Obama had flip flopped on the issue.

Obama supporter Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Florida, in a statement, said that "the fact that the Republican Jewish Coalition is targeting Jewish Americans with these disgraceful and deceitful tactics fits in perfectly with the dishonorable campaign that John McCain has chosen to run. Peddling lies and hateful distortions to scare Jewish voters is reprehensible and deeply disrespectful to Jewish Americans."

Said Brooks, "What's really interesting is the reaction from Jews who are supporting Obama. The questions we asked are all legitimate. Why don’t they like us asking these questions? Because they don't like the answers."

Brooks acknowledged that much of the leadership of the RJC has ties to the McCain campaign, but he said his organization does not coordinate in any way with the McCain campaign and anyone who "has a title" in the McCain campaign who is also active with his organization "has taken a leave of absence from the RJC so there's no question whatsoever of any integration or any overlap."

But even though Brooks stands by his poll and says it's no different from any other poll of the Jewish community, it has rubbed many voters the wrong way.

"I lived in New Orleans for nine or ten years," Cohen said, "and I would often get polls with salacious or inflammatory information. This one made the hair on the back of my neck stand up."

- jpt

Monday, September 15, 2008

International Jewish Solidarity Network: opposing Zionism, racism and colonism

Dear friends,

The International Jewish Solidarity Network is a growing international coalition of anti-Zionist Jews. After two years of hard work, the Interntional Jewish Solidarity Network will be launched internationally on September 29.

According to IJSN Vision statement (on their website):
The International Jewish Solidarity Network (IJSN) envisions the building of just societies in historic Palestine, the larger region, and other places in which we live. In these societies, safety is sought in joint liberation, not in isolation. We seek to contribute to the global struggles for justice in accordance with our locations and ally ourselves with other liberation and social justice movements. This participation is first and foremost an uncompromising commitment to the liberation of Palestine. We also seek to extricate Jewish identities, histories, cultural and religious practices and politics from Zionism, thus allowing for Jewish plurality and the reemergence of broader Jewish participation in emancipation struggles. The next generation of people of Jewish descent will build continuity with this commitment to justice for all people, in Palestine and beyond.

Please find below the newsletter issued by the IJSN about their upcoming launch and activities including their call for 10 days of solidarity actions with resistance to Zionism and imperialism in Palestine between Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur: September 30 through October 8, 2008

For more information on IJSN you can visit their website at http://www.ijsn.net/en/

ps: the wonderful photographs are from the NO TIME TO CELEBRATE: Jews remember the Nakba website: www.notimetocelebrate.org

***

from: www.notimetocelebrate.org

International Jewish Solidarity Network
Jews Honor Resistance to Zionism, Racism, Colonialism Network will launch
internationally on 29 September, 2008 with the release of our Charter and our Week of Action: Confront Zionism - Divest from Israel

In This Newsletter

+ Who is the International Jewish Solidarity Network?

+ International building

+ Activities moving forward

+ GET INVOLVED

+ Work-to-Date

+ "International Resistance to Zionism"

+ The LAUNCH - Give input and join us!

+ Developing a new structure

+ Finding a symbolic name and logo

+ Contact Information

***

Join us in launching the network!

IJSN will officially launch over the 2008 High Holidays: 1 - 7 October

Launch will begin with the release of our founding Charter and week of actions in support of Boycott, Divestment and Sanction against Israel and confronting Zionism.

Please click here to see an excerpt of the Charter and join us from 10 - 17 September to give your input.

***

from: www.notimetocelebrate.org

International Organizing Update

September 2008

WE WELCOME YOUR PARTICIPATION AND PARTNERSHIP!

Who is the International Jewish Solidarity Network?

This a growing international network of Jews whose identities are not based on Jewish nationalism but on long histories of Jewish participation in liberation struggles from Eastern Europe and Iraq to Brooklyn and Mississippi. In this year of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the colonial State of Israel, we pledge to struggle against both the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the designation of Israel as a Jewish State.

For the past two years, the network has been building an international network of anti-Zionist Jews to support existing and seed new Jewish anti-Zionist organizing in solidarity with Palestinian resistance. As with any other struggle for justice, working locally or even nationally is not enough.

The enemy we face is international, and what we can do is limited unless we find ways to work together across boundaries and regions. We are building an international voice which challenges Zionism and its claim to speak on behalf of Jews worldwide. As an international force, we can contribute to the movement to defeat US-backed Israeli imperialism.

We do this through the following strategies: 1) solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian self-determination, 2) participation in broader anti-imperialist movements, and 3) the extrication of Jewish history, politics, community, and culture from Zionism.

To read more about the network, go to www.ijsn.net.

from: www.notimetocelebrate.org

***
International building

From July 31 to August 3, 2008, in Berkeley, California, IJSN gathered anti-Zionist activists from continental Europe and the UK, India, Israel, the US and Canada. This first international organizing meeting was preparation for the public launch of the network over the 2008 Jewish high holidays. To read more about the meeting, go to www.ijsn.net/en/ijsn/first_international/M36.

Since the international meeting we have engaged activists in Morocco and Argentina. The network seeks to expand its work to other parts of the US, Europe, Canada, South and West Asia, South America, South Africa, Australia, and Eastern Europe.

If you are interested in building the work of the network in your city or region, please email us at ijsn@ijsn.net.

***

We hope you will join us in the following activities moving forward...

To join us in any of this work, or if you have other ideas for the role and work of the network, please email ijsn@ijsn.net to share your interest, input and thoughts.

* Charter release and Week of Action: On 29 September, 2008, the network will put out its founding Charter with a clear anti-Zionist Jewish analysis and a call for a Week of Action. See sidebar for more information and click here to read more about the Week of Action and add your ideas.

* Popular Tribunals: Over the next 2-3 years the network will organize tribunals that gather testimony in order to expose the tactics of and demand accountability from Zionist institutions and individuals. Visit www.ijsn.net/en/ijsn/popular_tribunals/M36 to read more.

* Consciousness Raising: We will continue to engage in public education including forums, art exhibits, digital stories and workshops to the increase visibility of anti-Zionist narratives.

* Cross-movement building: Through supporting an anti-Zionist politic in the movements our members already participate in for racial, economic and gender justice, IJSN seeks to broaden support for the Palestinian struggle for justice.

* North American Organizing Meeting: At this gathering, activists from the US and Canada will develop long-term strategy, campaigns, and programs for partnership with broader Palestine solidarity work in the region.

* Education and Leadership Development: Through Unlearning Zionism workshops, Organizing Institutes, mentorship systems, and our Study to Action curriculum, study group program and educational resource website, the network will build the collective analysis, strategy and capacity of anti-Zionist Jewish participation in Palestine solidarity organizing. Read more about the Study to Action program at www.ijsn.net/en/ijsn/study_to_action/M16.

* Participation in existing Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) campaigns and other efforts to challenge Zionism: The network will not lead BDS efforts, but will encourage and support participation of its members in local, national and international campaigns.

* Supporting joint struggle between Jews of Arab, Persian and Asian descent and Palestinians: IJSN activists in Israel are developing relationships of joint struggle against Zionism and Israeli apartheid.

* Building of Academic, Jews of Color and Jews of Arab descent, Student, Cultural/Artist, Youth, Spiritual/Religious Sector Networks.

from: www.notimetocelebrate.org

***

Participate and partner with us as we launch!

We need your participation and partnership in launching and evolving the programs and infrastructure of the network

Give input into the charter, week of action, symbolic name, logo and structure by clicking on the following links:

* Charter
* Week of Action
* Symbolic name and logo
* Structure

Visit www.ijsn.net/en/ijsn/C15/ to sign up for updates on the Charter release and Week of Action.

***

Previous Work

To read about the network's previous activities - including the Study to Action program, Nakba at 60 organizing, and participation in the Palestinian Popular Conference, the Cairo Conference and Liberation Forum and the US Social Forum - please visit www.ijsn.net/en/ijsn/C31/.

****

"International Resistance to Zionism"

Leading up to our first international meeting, IJSN held forums in London, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. These events were very well received, with 120, 100 and 40 attendees respectively. Watch footage of the forum in London. Read and view photos from the forum in San Francisco. Listen to radio broadcasts from Los Angeles.

from: www.notimetocelebrate.org

***

Please join us in a week of action from
1 - 7 October: Confront Zionism - Divest from Israel

Confront Zionism: Support the Palestinian call for boycotting Zionist and Israeli cultural, educational, sporting and political events and the academic boycott. Confront Zionist organizations that support Israeli Apartheid, censor and target individuals and organizations for criticism of Israel, and collaborate in US-European Islamophobia. Expose Jewish organizations that confuse support of Israel with defense of Jews and disguise economic and political support for Israel and Zionism as Jewish cultural and community work.

Divest from Israel: Support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israelthrough actions that target Israeli goods.

*Put the Charter out into the World:
Use the founding Charter as an opportunity to voice and bring visibility to anti-Zionist politics through educational, cultural and spiritual events and creative action.

*Please click here to see a full description of the Week of Action.

*Help us develop a new structure

*Toward preparing for broader participation in the network, IJSN is developing a representative structure for coordination, consultation and communication across and between local, regional and international organizing.

*Over the next year we hope to evolve and practice this representative structure to support and increase the connections across local and regional self-organizing, while continuing to grow our capacity for internationally coordinated actions and campaigns (initiated at any level of the network).We need your help as we figure out how to do this.

*Finding a symbolic name and logo for the network

In the coming month we will be searching for a symbolic name and logo for the network.

Join us in an online brainstorm and discussion of possible symbolic names and logos for the network.

Contact Information

You can reach the network at: Email - ijsn@ijsn.net, Web - www.ijsn.net.

Thank you for your contributions and support in building this network!

Thursday, September 11, 2008

All the hearts of the people are my identity: the life and death of a poet

Mahmoud Darwish - the voice of a dispossessed people

By Kim Bullimore, September 2008
www.directaction.org.au

In 1964, a 22-year-old Palestinian poet named Mahmoud Darwish shared the struggle of his people with the world, writing: “Record!/ I am an Arab/ And my identity card is number fifty thousand/ I have eight children/ And the ninth is coming after a summer/ Will you be angry? … Record! I am an Arab/ I have a name without a title/ ... My roots/ Were entrenched before the birth of time/ And before the opening of the eras/ Before the pines, and the olive trees/ And before the grass grew ... Record!/ I am an Arab/ You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors/ And the land which I cultivated/ Along with my children/ And you left nothing for us/ Except for these rocks./ ... Record on the top of the first page: I do not hate people/ Nor do I encroach/ But if I become hungry/ The usurper’s flesh will be my food/ Beware/ Beware/ Of my hunger/ And my anger!”

The poem, “Identity Card”, was to become one of Darwish’s most famous, a symbol of cultural and political resistance to Israel’s forced dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their homeland. Darwish’s poetry, filled with Arab romanticism, political insight and protest, and often transformed into song, spoke to millions of Palestinians and Arabs around the world, resulting in him becoming the most well known and loved of Palestinian poets.

Darwish died in Houston, Texas, on August 9, age 67, as a result of complications from heart surgery. Like many of his generation, he was not a spectator but an active participant in the modern history of Palestine. His poetry recorded the losses of the Palestinian people as well as their resistance and refusal to bow to the calamity that befell them in 1948. His death therefore has come as a shock to millions of Palestinians worldwide. More than 10,000 turned out to pay their respects to their poet on August 14, when his body was brought home to be buried within the grounds of Ramallah Cultural Palace in the Occupied West Bank.
Refugee childhood

Born in 1941 in the village of al-Birwa in northern Palestine, Darwish became a refugee in 1948, when his family was forced to flee Zionist terror gangs that attacked and destroyed their village. In 1949, Darwish and his family returned from Lebanon to live “illegally” as “internally displaced” refugees in the new Israeli state. In an interview with the British Guardian daily in 2002, he recounted: “We lived again as refugees, this time in our own country. It’s a collective experience. This wound I’ll never forget.”

Along with more than 150,000 other internally displaced Palestinians, Darwish experienced the harshness of Israeli military rule from 1948 to 1966. Palestinians with Israeli residency or citizenship endured harsh restrictions on their movements, including being forced to obtain special permits to travel to and from their villages, limitations on where they could work, restrictions on their political and civil rights to freedom of speech and to organise politically. During this period, more than 80% of Palestinian-owned land within Israel was confiscated and placed under exclusive Jewish control and use.

In 1960, at the age of 19, Darwish published his first collection of poems, Asafir Bil Ajniha (Wingless Birds). The following year, he joined the Israeli Communist Party and began to publish his poetry in a range of leftist newspapers. In 1964, his second anthology of poetry, Awraq Al Zaytun (Leaves of Olives) was published; it included the celebrated “Identity Card”. As a result of his poetry and political activity from 1961 to 1970, Darwish was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned. When “Identity Card” was transformed into a protest song in 1967, becoming a collective cry of defiance against the Israeli oppressor, Darwish was again arrested.
First intifada

In 1970, he travelled to the USSR to study political economy. A year later, however, he left Moscow for Egypt. In 1973, he joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation, resulting in Israel banning him from re-entering his homeland for more than 26 years. Darwish served on the PLO executive committee from 1987 to 1993 and wrote the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which was announced by Yasser Arafat in Algeria.

In 1988, at the height of the first Palestinian intifada, Darwish wrote a poem that shook Israeli society to its core. The poem, “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words”, aimed at Israel’s occupation army, which was violently putting down the unarmed Palestinian intifada. It was direct and uncompromising: “O those who pass between fleeting words/ Carry your names, and be gone/ Rid our time of your hours, and be gone/ Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea/ And the sand of memory/ Take what pictures you will, so that you understand/ That which you never will:/ How a stone from our land builds the ceiling of our sky/”

Darwish concluded: “It is time for you to be gone/ Live wherever you like, but do not live among us/ It is time for you to be gone/ Die wherever you like, but do not die among us/ For we have work to do on our land/ We have a past here/ We have the first cry of life/ We the present, the present and a future/ We have the world here and the hereafter/ So leave our country/ Our land, our sea/ Our wheat, our salt, our wounds/ Everything, and leave/ The memories of memory/ Those who pass between fleeting words!”

Although Darwish was later to say the poem was not one of his best, he was amazed at the fear the poem aroused in both the Israeli “left” and those in control of the Zionist state. In the grip of the intifada, Israel’s then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, quoted the poem in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) to “prove” that the PLO posed a threat to existence of the Zionist state. In response, Darwish said that he found it “difficult to believe that the most militarily powerful country in the Middle East is threatened by a poem”.
Oslo

The first intifada forced Israel to the negotiating table. However, the resultant Oslo Accords signed by PLO leader Yasser Arafat in 1993 caused Darwish to resign from the PLO executive committee in protest. In the 2002 interview with the Guardian, he stated that with the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian people “woke up to find that they had no past”. Oslo, Darwish believed, would do little to bring justice, peace or a national homeland to the Palestinian people. In the wake of the failure of the accords, Darwish later said: “I hoped I was wrong. I am very sad that I was right!”

He returned to live in his homeland finally in the late 1990s, continuing to be a voice of his people, giving expression to their pain, yearnings and joys. The words within his 30 collections of poetry and prose, published in 35 languages, reflected the experience of millions of his countrymen and women and were their collective memory.

When Darwish wrote in the poem “Passport” that he carried within his identity, “All the wheat fields/ All the prisons/ All the white tombstones/ All the barbed boundaries/ All the waving handkerchiefs” and that “all the hearts of the people are my identity”, he spoke in the collective voice of his people. And while death has claimed him, his words of struggle and resistance will live on among his people, giving them a voice that can never be taken from them.

To listen to Mahmoud Darwish reading his poetry visit his official website at:
http://www.mahmouddarwish.com/english/audio.htm

Israeli soldiers stop a Palestinian man after Israel settlers attacked two Palestinian villages near the West Bank city of Nablus, 15 September 2008. (Rami Swidan/MaanImages)

For years, Israeli authorities have both barred Palestinian access to rings of land surrounding settlements, and have not acted to eliminate settlers' piratical closing of lands adjacent to settlements and blocking of Palestinian access to them. Blocking access is one of the many ways used to expand settlements. In recent years, Israel has institutionalized the closing of such lands in an attempt to retroactively sanction the unauthorized placement of barriers far from the houses at the edge of the settlements.

Settlers pave patrol roads and place physical obstructions on Palestinian lands adjacent to settlements, at times with the authorities' approval, at others not. Settlers also forcibly remove Palestinians, primarily farmers, from their lands. B'Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has documented cases of gunfire, threats of gunfire and killing, beatings, stone throwing, use of attack dogs, attempts to run over Palestinians, destruction of farming equipment and crops, theft of crops, killing and theft of livestock and animals used in farming, unauthorized demands to see identification cards, and theft of documents.

The authorities entrusted with enforcing the law not only fail to take sufficient action to end the violence and prosecute lawbreakers, they join them and block Palestinian access themselves. Soldiers regularly expel Palestinians from their farmland, often under the direction of settlers. Israel has also established a physical system of barriers -- barbed-wire fences, patrol roads, illumination and electronic sensory devices -- far from the homes at the edge of the settlements, in effect annexing large swaths of land to the settlements.

Especially blatant in this context is the "Special Security Area" (SSA) plan, in which framework Israel surrounded 12 settlements east of the Separation Barrier with rings of land that are closed as a rule to Palestinian entry. As a result of the plan, the overall area of these settlements is 2.4 times larger, having increased from 3,325 dunams (a dunam is the equivalent of 1,000 square meters) to 7,793 dunams. More than half of this ring land is under private Palestinian ownership. The amount of land attached to settlements other than through the SSA plan is much larger, given there are no official limitations and less supervision of the piratical closing of land by settlers. B'Tselem estimates that such piratical closing has blocked Palestinian entry to tens of thousands of dunams, thus annexing them de facto to the settlements. Experience shows that this land grab will be perpetuated and become part of official policy to the extent that the plan is implemented at additional settlements.

Palestinian farmers seeking access to their lands must cope with a complex bureaucracy and meet a number of conditions. First and foremost, they must prove ownership of the land. They also have to "pressure" the Civil Administration time and again to set times for them to enter. Also, the defense establishment subjects Palestinian access to the good will and caprice of the settlers. On this background, many farmers give up and stop trying to gain access and to work their land.

Official spokespersons justify some of the closing of land, primarily the land closed as a result of the SSA plan, on security needs. They contend that, after Israel's wall was built in the West Bank, settlements east of it were left exposed to violent attacks by Palestinians, and that rings of land could provide a warning area. Indeed, in 2002-2004, Palestinians killed 31 Israeli citizens and injured many others inside settlements in the West Bank. But Israel allows settlers to enter freely, without supervision, the land, which ostensibly was meant to serve as a warning area free of people, but is, in effect, closed only to Palestinians. As a result, settlers move about on the Palestinian land regularly, steal their crops, and even live on and work the land. This practice breaches both the logic of a "warning zone" and the military orders closing the area.

The land adjacent to the settlement is part of a long list of areas that Israel closes to Palestinians in the West Bank: the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem, military-training areas, the settlement areas themselves, and others. Every piece of land that Israel closes to Palestinians joins those areas previously taken, and together they limit the possibilities of millions of persons, principal harm being suffered by farmers and those who rely of farming for a living. In this context, it should be recalled that the poverty level of Palestinians in the West Bank is extremely high, and that agriculture is the main sector of the Palestinian economy. Blocking access also impedes urban development and limits recreation in the form of nature hikes and enjoyment of land resources.

Blocking Palestinian access to land adjacent to settlements is the direct result, and an integral part, of the illegal settlement enterprise. This enterprise continuously violates the absolute prohibition specified in international humanitarian law on settlements in occupied territory. Consequently, Israel is obligated to evacuate the settlers and return them to sovereign Israeli soil. If the settlers are not evacuated, there are ways, which are presented in the report, to protect them in ways that will harm Palestinians to a lesser extent. But the government of Israel is obligated to evacuate them in any case, and evacuation is the only legal way to meet the security need that stands, according to official spokespersons, at the basis of the regulated closing of the land.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Palestinian children play on the beach in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip

By Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

The Egyptian-mediated ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is, ostensibly at least, a wise, dignified and expedient step for several reasons.

To begin with, the ceasefire deal would suspend the daily acts of murder and terror carried out by the Israeli occupation forces against the nearly totally unprotected people of the Gaza Strip.

For years, the Gestapo-like Israeli army used excessive force, including tanks, warplanes, heavy artillery and other lethal machines of death to wreak death, havoc and terror on the civilian population of Gaza, resulting in the murder and maiming of thousands of innocent people.

Thus, the latest arrangement would give the thoroughly tormented Gazans a certain respite, however uncertain, from Israeli terror and criminality.

Moreover, the arrangement, which is due to go into effect Thursday morning, is also supposed to lead to the gradual lifting of the 18-month-old harsh and callous blockade Israel has been imposing on 1.5 million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.

This alone should be viewed as a worthy achievement if only because Gaza was being decimated by a genocidal siege unprecedented since the Nazi blockade of Ghetto Warsaw in 1943.

It is therefore hoped that the gradual dissipation of the nefarious blockade, which really reflects the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mentality, will allow Gaza to revive and rehabilitate itself and bring a smile back on the faces of its tormented children and savaged men and women.

Needless to say, the decision by Hamas to accept the ceasefire is a strong proof that Hamas is not a nihilistic organization, e.g. like al Qaeda, as Israeli and Zionist hasbara has been trying to portray the Palestinian-Islamic movement.

In fact, Hamas had always called for a cessation of violence in Gaza whereby both sides would refrain from targeting innocent civilians. However, it was always Israel, not Hamas, that rejected such calls by keeping up murderous attacks on Palestinian civilians.

Israel, especially when addressing western audiences, repeatedly but mendaciously claimed that its army didn’t deliberately target innocent Palestinians civilians.

However, that fact that hundreds of Palestinian children and other civilians continued to be killed and maimed throughout the Gaza Strip, and else where, eviscerated the Israeli pretensions of innocence of any veracity and credibility. In the final analysis, Israel was not only a brutal murderer, but a big a liar as well.

After all, killing knowingly is killing deliberately, and when the number of innocent victims is so high, even intent becomes irrelevant.

There is no doubt that Hamas’s heroic steadfastness, resilience and patience are being vindicated.

Thus, the enduring vigor of Hamas and the people of Gaza, who defied death and clang to life, should serve as a lesson for the Palestinian people that steadfastness in the face of brute power eventually pays off.

This is also a lesson for the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) that the stubbornness of justice can eventually triumph over the arrogance of oppression.

Winners and losers

There is no doubt that the forces of peace and reason on all sides have won against the forces of bellicosity, hatred and terror, especially in Washington and Tel Aviv and some other regional capitals as well.

The people of Gaza, the victims of American-Israeli criminality, are undoubtedly the biggest winners of this deal. At least, they can breathe again, following 18 nightmarish months of unimagined brutality and ruthlessness.

In addition to the gung-ho neocons in Washington and war-drummers in Tel Aviv who wanted to exterminate Hamas, not a small amount of consternation is also likely to be permeating now in Ramallah where a Zionized group within Fatah had been hoping to see the Israeli army overrun Gaza, murder hundreds, and then hand Gaza over to the Fatah leadership on a silver platter.

On this occasion, one feels prompted to call on Fatah to eject these traitors from their midst for the sake of Fatah itself and for the sake of Palestine.

Vigilance

Nonetheless, it would be naïve, even stupid, to be carried away or give Israel the benefit of the doubt by thinking that the Zionist regime is going to abide by the agreement and terminate its murderous aggressions on our people.

Israel, after all, has repeatedly proven itself to be a venomous snake which must never be trusted.

Hence, Palestinians, especially Hamas, ought to be constantly vigilant and ready to repulse any Israeli aggression.

However, Hamas should make meticulous efforts to preserve the ceasefire since doing so is first and foremost a supreme and paramount Palestinian interest.

Hamas should also make it abundantly clear to the military wings of other Palestinian factions that the security and safety of the people of Gaza must not be subject to the whims of this or that faction.

In fact, preserving the ceasefire would send a positive message to the international community that Hamas is responsible organization with which “business can be made.”

Moreover, a careful abidance by the agreement on Hamas’s part would show good- will toward Egypt whose support and backing is essential for the survival of the Gaza Strip, at least at this juncture of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation from Zionism.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Palestine Inside Out – An Everyday Occupation. Saree Makdisi. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2008.

This has been one of the most difficult books that I have ever read. It removed me from my academic detachment with which I read the majority of books and took me into emotions ranging from frustration, sadness, melancholy through to anger and belligerence. A compelling read, yet at the same time I had to put it down every so many pages in order to contemplate, digest, or simply escape what in sum could be called the constant inhuman brutality of one human against another. It is a brutality that is as much psychological as physical, as much emotional as bodily. While the media presents a relatively constant stream of news violence from Israel-Palestine, with the Israelis purportedly “responding” to Palestinian “terrorists”, the truth of life for the average Palestinian is not just this asymmetrical violence, but the daily violence perpetrated by the occupation, a collective punishment on the Palestinian population that “because the destruction is routine, it generally takes place out of the view of the global media.” It is death, destruction, eviction, genocide by a million cuts, applied over and over and over with full control of the geographical and cultural landscapes under the rule of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

Demographics

The underlying theme of the book is of demographics, the Israeli project to empty the land of Palestinians and not allow the right of return under any circumstances. This is accomplished by using not only pure physical force, but also by using cultural, social, and economic disenfranchisement using a “complex series of bureaucratic and administrative hurdles”, the main one being to prove that one has land in the first place.

Saree Makdisi’s conclusion to her first section of the book is that the whole extended Peace Process “has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land,” with the result that “the Israeli occupation has slowly and methodically accomplished precisely what it set out to do forty-one years ago.” As the oft quoted Dov Weisglass stated, “this whole package [of Palestine] has been removed from our agenda indefinitely…with authority and permission...with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

Those are not the statements that raise my emotions – rather they rile my intellect at the culpability and ignorance of the political elites in all parties involved, Palestinian included as Makdisi treats the PA and Fateh harshly. What does raise the emotions is the writing that relates the daily trials and tribulations that the Palestinians suffer under the occupation of the IDF, the ever-changing rules and regulations, the whim of any Israeli who can do whatever to a Palestinian and suffer no consequences for that action. The daily frustrations of life under occupation are immense as presented in the anecdotal accounts and the summary statistics of each section of this book.

Attending school, growing food, tending one’s gardens and fields, getting married, visiting a neighbour, a market, a business, going to university, a hospital, travelling to another country, are all under the combination of strict and confusing regulations combined with the whim of the IDF soldiers and commanding officers in the field (always a Palestinian field at that). Nightly raids, curfews, harassment by settlers, home invasions, tear gas attacks, rubber coated metal bullets, sonic boom attacks at night to disrupt sleep, legalized torture, arrests, human shields, beatings, bulldozers smashing homes with or without occupants, uprooting and burning of agricultural production, machine guns, tanks, armoured vehicles and tanks invading streets, helicopters and jets patrolling overhead – there does not appear to be a moment that the Palestinian people are not subject to some form of humiliation, deprivation, and cruelty from the Israeli occupiers. “The double process of Jewish settlement and Palestinian unsettlement, is played out on an intimately small scale, and on a daily basis throughout the West Bank.” [italics added] As for Gaza, “it is a controlled strangulation that apparently falls within the generous limits of international toleration,” a toleration abetted by a compliant media that does not put it all into the context of a ‘Washington consensus’, occupation, and international law.

International war crimes

As a secondary but very strong theme the above all come under international war crimes. While Makdisi does not state it, it could be said the whole of the Israeli State is guilty of war crimes, either under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, the UN Charter with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva conventions, and other international resolutions, conventions, and agreements. These agreements are abrogated unilaterally, constantly, and with the current full approval of the United States government, and the European governments who all buy into the “terrorist” war either through their own ignorance or their own unstated hidden benefits.

It does not help that they are aided and abetted in this by other countries in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is no more than a quisling state under the influence of the U.S., seeking its own influential advantage in the area. Egypt, having settled on “peace” with its former opponent, also receives large sums of American money and does not seem terribly interested at the governmental level in the situation if Palestine. They had a tremendous opportunity when Hamas forced open the Rafah gates to allow humanitarian assistance of basic food stuffs and medicines and energy supplies into Gaza, instead opting to kowtow to the wishes of the Israelis and Americans in continuing the oppression and illegality of the occupation (Abbas is also implicated in supporting the closing as it “also punished Hamas”). (Okay, Gaza is not “occupied” but is still under full concentration camp style control of the IDF). Jordan has always sought its own betterment in its ongoing engagement with Israel, securing its own position in the West Bank during the nakba, and combating its large internal displaced Palestinian population after the 1967 war.

Finally, the United States provides a generous $3 billion in aid a year, money that releases other money to help subsidize the settlements that have caused the disintegration of a contiguous Palestinian state. This is an error of omission by Makdisi that may or may not be purposeful for several possible reasons, but is not included in her historical and foreign policy discussions. Following on that is the fleeting mention of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, probably the most influential lobby group in the world today, effectively keeping the U.S. congress in captivity to Israel’s own viewpoint. My reading coincided with the finale of the American primaries ending with Obama’s speech to AIPAC (how timely is that!) stating his unwavering support for Israel and the status quo, with his sights set further out towards Iran. I do not have the audacity to hope that any significant change will occur with Obama as president. The United States remains culpable of war crimes along with Israel.

More ethnic cleansing

Makdisi covers many other sub-topics and themes throughout the work. The wall, the nature and processes of the settlements, the concept of “equality” in relation to the concept of Jewishness and a Jewish state, the use of the military as ‘global’ torture on the whole population are all covered throughout the work, both in anecdotal form and in essay-documentary form.

The idea of “voluntary transfer” occurs throughout the book, supported mainly from quotes from Israeli sources, with the concept described such that the Palestinians “will not be able to continue living under these sorts of conditions. They will abandon their homes and go to the big cities at which point it will be possible to expand the borders of the State of Israel without paying the demographic price.” It is not terribly “voluntary” when such extreme asymmetrical pressure is applied by one group on another.

This latter idea leads into the nakba and its current historical revisions with more modern historians accessing information from the IDF archives and using Israeli sources that clearly outline the intent to clear much of Palestine of its population, even before the Israeli declaration of itself as a state. All these topics are related under the overall idea of the demographic problem, and other discussions focus on the goals of Zionism as being integrated with that of imperialism, occupation, and settlement, all necessitating the use of force in order to achieve the given goals. Another way of defining the demographic pursuits of the Israeli government is as expressed by an Israeli school director, Yair Farjun who stated, “Anyone who tells you that there was no ethnic cleansing here will be lying.”

Context and solutions

Hamas and Hezbollah enter the discussion most forcefully in the “Coda” the books final section discussing possible solutions. With a great assist from the Washington consensus media, both groups are identified out of context as terrorist groups that hate us for what we are and thus use fanatical suicide bomb terrorists to destroy innocent civilians, without considering in context the “aerial and artillery bombings, fuel-air explosives, flechette rounds, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, phosphorous and napalm” as well as new experimental weapons including the “dense inert metal explosive” by Israel that are equally as indiscriminate but hugely more powerful and destructive. The Israeli weapons are used over a much broader section of the Palestinian population without any real concern for civilian deaths. Within context, suicide bombers can be viewed as “an almost inevitable product of forty years of military occupation.”

As for the solution itself, Makdisi views the one state solution as the most realistic. In a de facto manner, there already is one state, Israel, with many little prison like cantons scattered in parts of the West Bank, segregated by the wall, the bypass roads, and the settlements along with the associated rules and regulations that trap the Palestinians in an ever decreasing realm of violent non-mobility. Different authors have different opinions on the best solution to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, some supporting the two state solution, others identifying the one state solution as the best. Somehow under current circumstances, neither seems practicable or achievable without a major dynamic shift in either the Israeli viewpoint or that of the United States and its European allies. The status quo of forty years of “negotiations” has served Israel well as it slowly and criminally cut away at the Palestinian landscape: the current lack of any united Palestinian governmental structure and over-whelming American support for Israel would indicate that this process will only continue.

As pessimistic as that view is (and it is mine, not the authors), books such as Saree Makdisi’s Palestine Inside Out will add to the growing list of works that nibble away at the American-Israeli decontextualized and international criminal actions that sustain the repression of the Palestinian people. It should not be an easy read – it is more than history and current events, but should reach the soul of the reader, awakening or revitalizing a basic revulsion of man’s incomprehensibly stupid emotional, physical and spiritual brutality against other humans.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Blue sky, toxic sea
Nora Barrows-Friedman writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 9 June 2008

Palestinian fishing boats in a Gaza City port, May 2008. (Wissam Nassar/ MaanImages)

For the three days I've been in Gaza I've heard nothing but horror stories. My friends, the journalists, the health workers, the students, the taxi drivers, the intellectuals, they all speak with a certain heaviness and a guttural frustration that gets trapped in the back of throats, in the smoke they exhale from chain-smoked cigarettes, over and over and over.

Last night I saw a friend, Mohammed, whom I haven't seen in three years and sadly lost touch with in between. Since I was here last, he got married, had a baby, and now has one more on the way. After a week-long trip to Europe last year as a part of his work with an international aid organization, he was held first for five days at the Cairo airport, in a small room with ten other Palestinians from Gaza, before they were transfered to a detention center and held for 60 days in al-Arish, in the seam zone between Egypt and Rafah crossing in southern Gaza. The Egyptians did this in an act of collaboration with the Israelis. With friends in the West Bank, the Jordanians use the same tactics of interrogation and humiliation at the border, but detention without reason doesn't happen. Yet.

But Mohammed said that he'd do it again, just to get out. He told me between cigarettes that he'd be happy to spend three days out in the world even if it meant another 60 days in an Egyptian detention center.

On a massive and wide-ranging scale, every single aspect of life in Gaza is punctuated by the Israeli occupation and the blockade. There are 1.5 million people here, trapped and hermetically sealed, in this 22-mile by 6-mile strip of devastated open-air prison compound. Fuel is scarce and the streets are thick with the soupy smoke of cooking gas, falafel oil and benzene as Israel's collective punishment policies force people to fill their cars with their families' gas rations.

This trickles down. Hospitals, grocery stores, butcheries, fishing boats, administrative centers, schools, factories, clinics, they all either run on generators or have been forced to quit operations altogether because of the fuel crisis. In the sewage treatment facilities, the fuel shortages mean that sewage plants can't operate at full capacity -- and remember, there are 1.5 million people here -- so millions of gallons of raw sewage are being dumped into the sea, untreated, making the ocean extremely toxic.

Giardia, dysentery, cholera -- diseases not known just five miles up the beach, in the cities of historic Palestine (some call it Israel), where toilets flush and water is safe to drink, where people lay in the mid-day sun getting tan and drinking pina coladas and speaking a language resurrected just in the last hundred years, unknown to the indigenous and dispossessed here in Gaza -- are now common. And once Palestinians get really sick, hospitals try to do all they can to alleviate the pain and eradicate the disease, but, as my friend told me, since the blockade began last summer, there are 95 medicines on the "blacklist" -- prohibited from entering Gaza.

The number one medicine that is becoming scarce? Try to guess.

I visited al-Awda hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. The pharmacist took me into his small supply warehouse and showed me around. He took me to the small shelf where they store all the anesthesia medications, and said that they have only a two-week supply left. Israel is banning anesthetics from reaching patients in Gaza, as well as chemotherapy and heart medications.

Banning anesthetics -- a sadistic, wretched, unbearable policy. It's clear that the Zionists want the Palestinians in Gaza to feel as much pain as possible, literally. "We can't even live month-to-month," the doctor told me. "We have to just live day by day, hour by hour."

We honor the doctors and medical workers at al-Awda. We praise their work. We pray that their ambulance, a donation from the Spanish government, has enough fuel to reach the injured in the next Israeli air strike or gunship attack or sniper assault.

It's hard not to lose sight. It's hard being here. It's painful to see friends and colleagues suffer like this, uncontrollably and unmitigated.

People can't hang on much longer. There is a collective buzzing in the bones. This is an untenable situation. Human beings should never have to live like this, oppressed and sickened and terrified and malnourished and imprisoned in the eastern Mediterranean, while up the beach a nuclear-saddled military occupier state congratulates itself for possessing the "most moral army in the world." Shame on Barack Obama for slithering up to Israel and its financial enablers.

So Palestinians in Gaza, 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them dependent on foreign aid, 60 percent unemployed and 100 percent depressed and traumatized in one way or another, keep struggling and looking up toward the endless sky. Even though the sea is toxic, they still swim and fish and fly kites above the waves. I am trying to figure out what it is that sustains them. Every time I ask someone how they cope, they smile and say, "Because I have to -- for my children, my spouse, myself."

A resilience, a steadfastness -- sumoud -- that we westerners can't even fathom.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Musa Keilani

Despite any level of objectivity it may have and of understanding American politics, it is difficult to find fault with the Palestinian Hamas’ assertion that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has confirmed US “hostility” to Arabs and Muslims in a speech to the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington. That “confirmation”, if you will, underlines the reality that prospects for Middle East peace remain as grim as ever even if Obama makes history by becoming the next president of the US.

Indeed, Obama was only reaffirming the steady and consistent political line adopted by almost every US presidential candidate, whether Democrat or Republican, when he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Wednesday that he supported Israel and that occupied Jerusalem should “remain” the “undivided” capital of the Jewish state. It was only expected of him to say so, particularly at a forum like AIPAC, without whose support no presidential candidate stands any chance of making his way to the White House, as past elections have shown.

However, it was disappointing to see and hear Obama, the first black American to secure nomination as presidential candidate representing one of the two major parties in the US, follow the same line, given the assumption of many that he has his own mind when it comes to dealing with foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.

Hamas responded immediately, saying it considered Obama’s statements “to be further evidence of the hostility of the American administration to Arabs and Muslims”.

Hamas leader Sami Abu Zuhri said Obama’s statements on Jerusalem “confirm the consensus of the two American political parties on unlimited aid to the (Israeli) occupation at the expense of Palestinians and Arabs”. The speech, he said, “destroys any hope for change in American policies towards the Arab-Israeli conflict”.

Such thoughts are of course shared by a majority in the Middle East. The Arab world is resigned to the reality that nothing the Arabs do - short of blindly accepting Israel’s terms and give up most of their legitimate rights - would ever lead to any shift in the present US approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Of course, Hamas could not claim it has offered anything new and has met the minimum requirements of any hope in a change in the US policy. That was underlined when Obama reiterated that he would not deal with Hamas until it recognises Israel and renounces “violence” - read armed resistance against the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands. He added that engaging Hamas would only take place at a time and location chosen by the United States, and would only go forward if it served US foreign policy goals.

Well, the rest of the world is wondering about what US foreign policy goals are and whether those goals have any relevance to the foundations for international conduct and the rights of people and countries.

It was also a stock phrase that Obama used when he said he would push for a negotiated settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict if he were elected to the White House in November and declared that “Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable”.

The catch here is rather simple: Israel’s security is not determined by whatever parameters the international community considers as the basis for any country’s security. Israel has set its own “security” parameters and considerations and refuses to budge, a position that is wholeheartedly endorsed and supported without question by the US.

Reason, logic, fairness, objectivity and international legitimacy are not applied to question Israel’s insistence that occupation of Arab territories is vital to its “security”. Indeed, Hamas is only strengthening Israel’s argument by repeatedly declaring that it is not ready to enter a permanent peace agreement with the Jewish state and that the best it would accept is a long-term truce.

To be fair to Obama, he displayed a clear understanding of the situation on the ground in the Middle East in one part of his AIPAC speech.

He said: “Hamas now controls Gaza. Hizbollah has tightened its grip on southern Lebanon, and is flexing its muscles in Beirut. Because of the war in Iraq, Iran - which always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq - is emboldened, and poses the greatest strategic challenge to the United States and Israel in the Middle East in a generation. Iraq is unstable, and Al Qaeda has stepped up its recruitment....”

Obama blamed the Bush administration’s policy and approach for the setbacks Washington suffered in the Middle East. However, he used it as a weapon to attack his Republican rival John McCain, who is known to be an ardent supporter of the Bush administration’s policy and approach in the Middle East.

We in Jordan and elsewhere in the Arab world would have been elated had Obama referred to the fundamental flaws in the decades-old US approach to the Middle East and pledged to address them in a just and fair manner so that his country could regain the trust, respect and admiration it once enjoyed as the “leader of the free world”. Nowhere in his statements have we found any such hint, and that only adds to the pessimism over prospects for fair and just peace in the Middle East under a possible Obama administration.

* Published in the JORDAN TIMES on June 8, 2008.

Blood and blood, blood in your country,
in my name and in yours,
in the almond flower, in the banana skin,
in the baby's milk, in light and shadow,
in the grain of wheat, in salt
Adept snipers, hitting their target with maximum proficiency.

Blood and blood and blood.
This land is smaller than the blood of its children
standing on the threshold of doomsday like
sacrificial offerings.
Is this land truly blessed, or is it baptised
in blood and blood and blood
which neither prayer, nor sand can dry.
There is not enough justice in the Sacred Book
to make martyrs rejoice in their freedom
to walk on cloud.

Blood in daylight, blood in darkness. Blood in speech.
He says: The poem could host loss, a thread of light shining
at the heart of a guitar;
or a Christ on a horse pierced through with beautiful metaphors.
For the aesthetic is but the presence of the real in form

In a world without a sky, the earth
becomes an abyss.
The poem, a consolation, an attribute
of the wind, southern or northern.

Do not describe what the camera can see
of your wounds.
And scream that you may hear yourself,
and scream that you may know you're still alive,
and alive, and that life on this earth is possible.
Invent a hope for speech,
invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope.

And sing, for the aesthetic is freedom

I say: The life which cannot be defined except by death is not a life.

I Come From There... (by Mahmoud Darwish)

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave snatched by seagulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of words,
And the bounty of birds
And the immortal olive tree.

I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.

I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known,
To a returning cloud.
I learned all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learned all the words and broke them up
To make a single word...

Homeland