Why Isaraeli jew Dri Davis joined fatah to save Palestine
The first Jewish member of the Revolutionary Council of Fatah talks about a unique political journey
By Peter Beaumont
(source: Guardian.UK – The Observer)
Uri Davis, left, at a Fatah meeting in Ramallah.
(Photograph:Abbas Momani/AFP/Getty Images)
Uri Davis is used to denunciations. A "traitor", "scum", "mentally unstable": those are just some of the condemnations that have been posted in the Israeli blogosphere in recent days. As the first person of Jewish origin to be elected to the Revolutionary Council of the Palestinian Fatah movement, an organisation once dominated by Yasser Arafat, Davis has tapped a deep reserve of Israeli resentment. Some have even called for him to be deported.
He has been here before, not least as the man who first proposed the critique of Israel as an "apartheid state" in the late 1980s. Davis’s involvement in the first UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. During a career of protest he has been described – inevitably – as a "self-hating Jew". He calls himself an "anti-Zionist". And his personal history is a fascinating testimony to the troubled history of the postwar Israeli left and forgotten trajectories in the story of Israel itself.
The man elected to the Revolutionary Council in 31st place from a field of 600 has been as much shaped by the tidal forces of recent Jewish history – not least his own family’s sufferings in the Holocaust – as any fellow citizen of Israel. But he disputes a largely manufactured account of that experience that he believes has been used deliberately "to camouflage" its "apartheid programme". Now he enjoys an extraordinary mandate to explain his own views. And he hopes, too, that just as the small number of white members of the ANC widened its legitimacy during the apartheid era in South Africa, other Jews can be attracted to participate in Fatah, transforming it into a broader-based movement that stands for equal rights for both Arabs and Jews in a federated state.
So what does Davis believe, and why? His father was a British Jew who met his mother, a Czech, in British Mandatory Palestine in the mid-1930s, where they married in 1939, four years before his birth. While his mother escaped the transports to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, many in her family did not. It is a familiar story in Israel. But the lesson that Davis learnt from it was different from the vast majority of Jews who concluded that never again could Jews depend on others to guarantee their security from persecution.
Read More »Why Isaraeli jew Dri Davis joined fatah to save Palestine
The idf Isaraels organ grinder
By Gilad Atzmon
(source:Palestine Think Tank)
In the photo, The IDF’s Chief Rabbi, OC Chaplaincy Brig. Gen. Avichai Ronzki and OC Medical Corps Brig. Gen. Nachman Ash both signed up for an organ donation card during a ceremony in the Kirya Military Headquarters in Tel Aviv. One wonders if they are aware that, if the claims are true, their very own IDF has at least on several occasions been involved in obtaining younger organs from Palestinians they have killed, returned to their families after five days and had buried in a regime of a night-time blackout under Israeli-enforced Palestinian curfew.
There is an old Jewish joke that tells the story of a dying Jewish merchant who calls his son to his sickbed just before he perishes. He tells him, “Listen to me Moisha’le, life is not just about money… you can also do gold and diamonds.”
Monitoring Israeli and Jewish news reveals a devastating fact, it is not ‘just’ about money. It may also be about human organs. A few weeks ago we learned about a ring of American Rabbis who had been arrested in New Jersey upon suspicion of human organs trafficking (amongst many other crimes). Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, we read, enticed “vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000." Not too bad, I thought to myself then. We are living in hard times, financial melt down, credit crunch, Wall Street is licking its wounds, the car industry is evaporating. Seemingly, kidney trafficking is still booming.
In fact, the ring of the Rabbi in New Jersey didn’t take me by complete surprise. For years we have been hearing about Palestinians claiming that Israel is “deep into organ trafficking.” We also learned that the family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged himself in an Israeli jail, “was forced to bring suit for his return with missing body parts."
In 2002 the Tehran Times reported: “The Zionist state has tacitly admitted that doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at Abu Kabir had extracted the vital organs of three Palestinian teenage children killed by the Israeli Army nearly ten days ago. Zionist Minister of Health Nessim Dahhan said in response to a question by Arab member of the Zionist Parliament ‘Knesset’, Ahmed Teibi, on Tuesday that he couldn’t deny that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli forces were taken out for transplants or scientific research.”
But now the news about Israeli trafficking of human organ is spreading to Western mainstream media. Ynet, the biggest Israeli online newspaper, reported that “Leading Swedish daily Aftonbladet claimed in one of its articles that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians in order to trade in their organs.”
A few weeks ago we had a debate here on PTT whether Zionism is a colonial apparatus or not. One of the Materialist arguments against the perception of Zionism as a colonial practice was that Palestine has never been too attractive economically; it lacks oil, gold or minerals. However, this may change now. People who specialise in organ theft may find Palestine to be heaven on earth. In the light of the latest vastly spreading accusations, the Jewish national project maybe is colonial after all.
Though the Israeli government denies the accusation, and I myself far from being qualified to know what the truth of the matter is, one cannot deny that we are facing here a shift of consciousness within the Western discourse. At the end of the day, after watching the Israeli army dumping great quantities of white phosphorous on a civilian population in broad daylight, after seeing Israelis gathering gleefully en masse on the hills around Gaza just to watch their military spreading death and physical suffering in a genocidal manner, after reading that 94% of the Israelis supported the IDF military campaign against the elderly, women and children, most of whom were refugees with nowhere to escape and seek further refuge, organ theft seems to be a ‘light crime’.
Whether or not the Swedish paper’s accusations are genuine is yet to be revealed. However, one fact has already been established: after so many years of Western inclination to dance to the relentless crying violin of the Jewish melancholic victim serenade, the Western media is now changing its appetite, it is willing to confront Jewish institutional crime.
Rather than talking about the rise of anti-Semitism, we better discuss the growth of Jewish institutional crime.
SA calls to boycott Isaraeli dates this ramadan
By Aisha Mouneimne – Cape Town
(source: Palestine Chronicle)
Medjool Dates produced in the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. (inminds.co.uk)
Following a campaign launched this week by Friends of Al Aqsa calling on the boycotting of Israeli dates this Ramadan, the Cape Town based Muslim Judicial Counsel (MJC) on Wednesday urged the community to heed this call.
“It is important for the community to take cognisance during this month, while dates are an important part of our culinary needs during Ramadan, dates are increasingly being imported from occupied Palestine and we need to be aware of this,” said Nabaweyah Malick, spokesperson for the MJC.
Following a campaign launched this week by Friends of Al Aqsa calling on the boycotting of Israeli dates this Ramadan, the Cape Town based Muslim Judicial Counsel (MJC) on Wednesday urged the community to heed this call.
“It is important for the community to take cognisance during this month, while dates are an important part of our culinary needs during Ramadan, dates are increasingly being imported from occupied Palestine and we need to be aware of this,” said Nabaweyah Malick, spokesperson for the MJC.
Malick said most Muslim take it for granted that dates come from the Arabian Peninsula, but she said, with Israel’s leading fruit export being dates, South Africans need to become proactive in “checking their labels”.
According to the MJC these labels include product marked with the names Israel, West Bank or Jordon Valley as well as any product that’s barcode begins with 729. She added that while she did not want to name particular supermarket chains known for stocking Israeli produce, she urged the community to become vigilant with checking labels, as “the majority of supermarkets do stock Israeli products.”