August 22, 2014
Day eight: Millions of caged ‘animals’ in the Refugee Camps
During our trip to the West Bank, we spent the whole day at the city of Jenin, visiting the Freedom Theaterand roaming along the narrow backstreets in the refugee camp.
The Freedom Theater was founded by residents of Jenin Refugee Camp, inspired by Jewish communist/activist Arna Mer-khamis and succeeded by her son Juliano Mer-Khamis in cooperation with the Palestinian, English, and Swedish activists. The Theater has been running as a community based cultural center that houses the theater, music studio, rehearsal room, and library.
The Director of Theater, Juliano Mer-Khamis, a half Arab/Jewish, (he was assassinated by anunknown/masked gunman in 2011) said: “My dream is that the Freedom Theater will be the major force, cooperating with others in generating a cultural resistance, carrying on its shoulders universal values of freedom and justice.” According to the Managing Director, Jonathan, a Swedish/Jewish living in the Theater Compound with his family, the Theater has been subjected to the destruction/harassment by both the IDF soldiers and the PA agents, and he did not rule out the allegation that either Israeli agents from Shin Bet (Internal Security Service) or the PA agents wanted to get rid of Juliano.
I have asked Jonathan during our lunch time why Palestinian males, both young and old, indulge in tobacco smoking everywhere since world know well that smoking kills people…telling him that we saw the fertile farmland in the Area C cultivating endless panorama of tobacco farm…he looked at me with his bleary eyes saying: “what else do the Palestinians have to live a life of colonial subjugation for decades no end in sight except to smoke away his endless predicaments?” he illustrated in details how Arabs in the refugee camp aredespaired to defeatism/despondency/hopelessness/fatalism…there are hundreds, thousands of youngsters who do not have a place to go…cooped up in a narrow corner of winding road…no job to earn a living cost…no hope to begin a family… only waiting something to happen…in these days, the martyr becomes unpopular/detrimental to their community…and waiting for recruiting agents from the ISIS, Syrian Freedom Fighters, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Mujahideen?
After the lunch, we were led by the tour guide into the narrow passages in the middle of the refugee camp…littered with a pile of refuse, a gaggle of chickens, forlorn cats and dogs, enfant terrible on a bike, old men dozing at the stairs to the bakery…it’s a cacophony of unsettled, disorganized, and disoriented ambience where thousands of surplus humans with no values overflowing in a cage of 0.5 square-miles that destines to explode eventually sooner or later. And they are still in competition against Jews producing as many babies as their enemy do in order to fill the gap in the demographic war.
The camp was a lock-down community of displaced/forgotten people that was the inevitable product of settler colonialism…one group of refugees from Europe invade/occupy the land and expel/kill the natives who became refugees in their own land, as in North America, European Settlers moved in to replace the native/aboriginal Indians and put them in the ‘reserve camps’ or killed them all, as if Indians were economically/politically superfluous human beings.
For every Jew who was brought in to create a state of Israel, a Palestinian was uprooted/left homeless/caged in the camp.
Many people compare the situation in the Palestine with the plights of black Africans in South Africa when the white Europeans applied the apartheid policies on the majority of black population…the apartheid analogy was partially right in that white Europeans have kept all black Africans in the cantonized communities of Bantustans in order to segregate the natives from the white communities.
But the white colonialists did not try to expel/eliminate the aboriginal blacks from their habitats but actively employed/exploited the black manpower to run the economy…the white colonialists needed the native/cheaplabor forces to run the economy.
However, in Palestine, Jews don’t need Arabs for cheap labor…Arab butlers/bar-tenders/street-cleaners can be replaced with other cheap manpower from Sudanese, Ethiopian, Thai, or Filipino that do not threaten with demographic terror, where Jews want to maintain ethnic Jewish nation in the land forever.
In order words, Jews never wanted any Arabs as their neighbors from the beginning, kicked them out from their homes/towns/farms to confiscate Arab properties, and build their exclusive Jewish-only neighborhood to achieve the decisive majority on the Arab land.
Even Israeli Jews have perceived the Israeli Citizens of Arab origin (1.5 million) as a time bomb/powder keg/the Fifth Column…by enacting the ‘Citizenship and Entry Into Israel Law’ that bans the West Bank Palestinian Arabs from obtaining citizenship if they married the Israeli citizens and also blocks them from receiving temporary residency.
Jews, both left and right wings, were two cheeks of the same derriere that wanted to maintain/preserve adecisive Jewish majority in every aspect of the Israeli society…they only need just one goyim or Arab in town to fix their electrical gadgets in repair on a Saturday.
The Jews claim that Palestine is actually the site of the ancient land of Judea and Samaria, which was, according to the Hebrew Bible, promised to the Jews by God, and also propose that Jews living today are the descendants of those who lived in Palestine thousands years ago. Both biblical claim and ‘historical right’ are at best a hypothesis that requires other proof or evidence to justify the Jewish acts of colonialism in the region.
As Christianity has been a bastard child of Judaism, the Western civilisation always support/help Jewish claims…supplying arms, finances, assistance, and a salvo of media campaign to drum up the Jewishness in the Palestinian territories.
The Balfore Declaration in 1917 was a concrete manifestation of the Western settler colonialism that British Empire promised Jewish Baron Rothschild, a leader of Jewish community in Britain, the establishment of Jewish homeland in Palestine land, “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
The above slogan of the Zionists connotes that early Zionists propagated the Palestine was empty/desolate/primitive in demographic/cultural ambiences in order to entice world Jewry to the national homeland…meaning that from the beginning the Zionists intended to carry out a program of ethnic cleansing of the Arab population from the land…a program called ‘transfer’, an Orwellian euphemism for a violent removal of the natives, to achieve the policy of Zionist obsession about Jew-only state.
The Israeli authority in the West Bank now tactically use their administrative powers to induce Arab residents to relocate from the fertile and Israeli-controlled Area C into the Area A overseen by the PA…the‘silent transfer’ of Arab population through home demolitions, denial of new building and work permit, etc.
The modernday Zionists know well that the world opinion would not tolerate a massive scale of human transfer by forces…so that the Israeli Jews periodically harass/beat/jail/kill and make the Palestinian life as much miserable/unbearable in order for the Arabs to pack and leave voluntarily for other imagined wonderland or squeeze into the Area A zone.
One of the extreme tactics has been periodical Israeli incursion/bombardment on the people in the Gaza Strip, a field test site/laboratory for both Israeli control system in the West Bank region and the new war gadgets of the US Military Industrial Complex.
First, the Israeli tactics are dubbed as ‘Mowing the Lawn’ by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)…you can’texterminate or remove all 1.8 million Gazans in toto, but you kill them periodically as if you cut the grass on your lawn and see how it looks like…weighing, balancing, and making comparison with the future possible strategy for the West Bank control, as the West Bank has been gradually/steadily divided into a noncontiguous archipelago of densely populated cities/towns/villages separated by checkpoints/separation walls/bypass roads.
Secondly, the advanced military weaponry and crowd-control mechanism produced by the American companies have been field-tested/applied to the people/structures/landscape in the Gaza Strip and sold to the foreign countries and the local police forces in the US as field tested/certified in active combat scenes…that is, the Gazans became a guinea pig for the weapons test by the US and Israeli arms industry that sell the military hardwares around the world.
An Israeli historian solemnly declared: there is a wild animal that has to be locked up in one way or another…a cage should be built for the Arabs.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39470.htm
Featuring Professor Norm Finkelstein: Mowing the Lawn in the Gaza Strip
“Something like an iron cage should be built for Palestinian animals”
Day Nine: You can’t create a nation with a silk glove.
Returning from the three-day trip to the West Bank, we gathered in the conference room at the Hotel at 7:30pm after a hearty meal of supper…we were scheduled to have a free-for-all debate with the three-panel Jewish University students on the contemporary issues in Israel.
The panel consists of one 30-ish male and two females studying journalism/philosophy PhD course…all of them were not a Sabra (an Israel-born Jew)…but emigrated from Russia (an Ashkenazi Jew) when they were kids and finished the compulsory military services just a year ago.
Armed with on-site experiences/knowledge/contacts with the Palestinians in the occupied land for a week, we discharged a salvo of critique/accusation/condemnation with no-hold-barred intensity against the Settler Colonial Policies of the Israeli Government to the panelists…
Do you agree with us that Israel has been occupying the Palestinian Land of Arabs against the UN Resolutions?
Do you acknowledge that the Occupied Arabs have been living under the colonial subjugation by the Israeli Government?
How do you think about the colonial policies of the Israel Government, such as increased buildup of the Settler Communities in the West Bank, cantonization of the Palestinian territories and segregation of their villages with the concrete walls/Jews-only highways and roads/settlement blocks?
Do you believe that so-called ‘two-state solution’ is still viable/workable in this ambience of oppressive/choke-hold policies of the Israeli Government against the Palestinian Arabs?
From the get-go, I did not anticipate any significant/meaningful/truthful explanation about the overallsituation in the Palestine from the panelists, since they have been indoctrinated and trained from their school years to the mandatory military services that “Arabs are an existential threat to the Jewish State ofIsrael and they will come to kill Jews at any moment as the Nazi did at the Auschwitz”…the Holocaust(Shoah) has been a central feature of Jewish identity that was planted in their brain from their adolescent age. And I’ve already had an enough experiences with a bunch of pig-headed/disrespectful teenage IDF soldiers at the Qalandia Checkpoint.
The panelists exhibits quite a clear/succinct/determined talking point on the legitimacy of Jewish existence in the land of Palestine…they have made aliya to their two-thousands years old ancestral land to claim their rights to live and to create a Jewish-only nation…and you simply cannot do a tough job of establishing ethnically cleansed society without an iron fist…they, in unison, defended the fascistic/colonial treatments of Palestinian Arabs as an inevitable procedure in the implementation of the Israeli policies.
A one-eye-patched Israeli General Moshe Dayan declared in 1953 that violence is the only solution: “We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a house. This is the fate of our generation, the choice of our life—to be prepared/armed/strong/tough or otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist and our life would be snuffed out”—no compromises, no political solution, but only the fist.
The trouble is the Israeli society in general now appears to become much more intolerable toward the dissident opinion that condemns the oppressive/excessive suppression on Arabs in general and indiscriminate killings of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip in particular.
Book of Numbers (23:9) prophesizes: “lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations” The State of Israel is one and only democracy (?) in the Middle East
Even the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) wants to gather/corral all Arabs in Gaza into the concentration camp as fascist Nazi did to the European Jews…a top player in the ruling political party was giving the political voices to the right-wing mobs that shout “Death to the Arabs” and beat JewishPeaceniks to a pulp.
Few years ago Natan Sharansky, former Soviet dissident, suggested a “Town Square Test”… “If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society.”
And Israel is becoming slowly/steadily on the trajectory to be a fear (fascist) society of hyper-nationalistic/deeply racist country, feeling that Holocaust gives a license to do whatever it wants and the international rules cannot be applied to their conducts and any criticism of Israeli state policy is ipso facto anti-Semitic and another holocaust to the Jews.
During my two-week journey to the Palestinian Land, I have witnessed/experienced/encountered in numerous occasions that I was dead wrong in an imagined two-state solution…and the three panelists hit the final nails on the coffin of the two-state solution…I can’t help but thinking that trying to satisfy both Jews and Arabs is like to put a square in a circle and realizing how deceitful/fraudulent/arbitrary the ‘Peace Processing’ managed/coordinated/solicited by the United State of America has been for over multiple decades with no peace but the endless series of butchery/bloodbath/destruction in the region.
I left the conference room before the panelists finalized their belligerent argument that I have been hearing via the Western establishment media days and nights…I wanted to hit the hay in preparation for earlymorning departure to Tel Aviv…the Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Victims of Holocaust.
Mr. Dale Han who’s one of the frequent contributors for The 4th Media is a free-lance journalist living in Canada for four decades since he was exiled from the Military regime of Dictator, Park CH in South Korea in the 70s. He was born, raised, and educated in South Korea and worked as a journalist for the mainstream media in the midst of the turbulent era of 4.19/5.16 revolutionary events. The turning point in his life has arrived at the Z Media Institute workshop in Mass. USA in the 90s when he was tutored by Emeritus Professor Avram Noam Chomsky. Since then, he became a lifetime contrarian, who travels around the world and reports back the real stories that the mainstream media rarely pay any attention about. He has written many articles on the unification issues in the Korean peninsula after his visit to the North Korea in 2012, and the Middle East conflicts have been his focal point in writing the real stories that the establishment media ignores.