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Israel Intercepts Boat Bound for Gaza |
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Friday, 03 July 2009 |
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Israel Intercepts Boat Bound for Gaza
By The Pulse The Free Gaza Movement, an organization committed to breaking the siege of Gaza, has been dispatching boats from Cyprus and sailing them, or attempting to sail them, to the Gaza Strip since August 2008. Usually, the purpose of their missions has been to bring observers from the international community to Gaza to witness the conditions therein. Yesterday, one of the organization's boats, a Greek vessel "Arion" that was renamed "The Spirit of Humanity," embarked on a mission to sail humanitarian aid to Gaza, and was seized by the Israeli navy for doing so. The Associated Press [1] reports: The Israeli navy intercepted a ship carrying foreign peace activists trying to break a blockade of Gaza on Tuesday and forced it to sail to an Israeli port, the military said. A statement said the Greek-registered freighter Arion ignored a radio message from the Israeli military saying it would not be allowed to enter Gaza waters and ordering it to turn back. |
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Israel's Man of Conscience |
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Friday, 03 July 2009 |
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Israel's Man of Conscience By Ezra Nawi
Source: The Nation [The author is going to prison--for peacefully resisting settler and army violence against West Bank Palestinians and the illegal expropriation of their land.] My name is Ezra Nawi. I am a Jewish citizen of Israel. I will be sentenced on the first of July after being found guilty of assaulting two police officers in 2007 while struggling against the demolition of a Palestinian house in Um El Hir, located in the southern part of the West Bank. Of course the policemen who accused me of assaulting them are lying. Indeed, lying has become common within the Israeli police force, military and among the Jewish settlers. After close to 140,000 letters were sent to Israeli officials in support of my activities in the occupied West Bank, the Ministry of Justice responded that I "provoke local residents." This response reflects the culture of deceit that has taken over all official discourse relating to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. After all, was I the one who poisoned and destroyed Palestinian water wells? Was I the one who beat young Palestinian children? Did I hit the elderly? Did I poison the Palestinian residents' sheep? Did I demolish homes and destroy tractors? Did I block roads and restrict movement? Was I the one who prevented people from connecting their homes to running water and electricity? Did I forbid Palestinians from building homes? |
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"Embers and Ashes:" An intellectual's exile, struggle and success |
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Friday, 03 July 2009 |
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"Embers and Ashes:" An intellectual's exile, struggle and success Atef Alshaer, The Electronic Intifada, 30 June 2009
"My homeland, you have spurned me ... I shall never return to you ... I shall never ever return to you ..."
So ends Hisham Sharabi's compelling autobiography, Embers and Ashes: Memoirs of an Arab Intellectual. Sharabi, a leading Palestinian intellectual who died in 2005, uttered these words to himself on board a plane from Amman, Jordan to the United States in 1949. He studied and taught in the US for the rest of his life, retiring as a professor of history at Georgetown University in 1998. Ably translated from Arabic by Issa J. Boullata, Embers and Ashes is a poignant story of an intellectual's exile and struggle.
Sharabi transports the reader seamlessly from his early life in Palestine, where he was born in 1927, to his studies at the American University of Beirut, and finally his own American experience and life as a university professor at Georgetown. While it occasionally lacks cohesion, the book is unmistakably personal and insightful.
Sharabi's departure from Amman was preceded by tumultuous events in Lebanon where he was a prominent activist in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), led by Antun Saadeh. Perhaps more than anyone else, it was Saadeh who influenced Sharabi's intellectual trajectory. Saadeh's political line and that of the SSNP was premised on unity between Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. Sharabi depicts Saadeh sympathetically as a man of deep human values: courageous, inspirational and subtly intellectual. But he also shows other aspects of Saadeh's personality:
"He used to speak of the party as if it were an actual government on the verge of taking power. In his personal behavior and public stance, he acted like a man of state. The party in his view was the only political force that stood up to colonialism and could achieve independence. It was the only force that could liberate Palestine. I think that Saadeh underestimated the depth of sectarian, tribal, and feudal feelings in [Lebanon]" (150-151).
There are two issues regarding Saadeh's approach to which Sharabi submitted uncritically, and on which he later seems to renege. Firstly, he did not oppose Saadah's grandiose vision of the Syrian homeland, which shifted from being confined to Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Transjordan, to include Iraq, Kuwait and Cyprus. Secondly, Sharabi embraced Saadah's view that "the individual was a mere means that society used to achieve its aims; and that society represented a firm and abiding 'truth,' whereas individuals fell away like autumn leaves," thereby "ascribing a universality to society and considering society an ultimate ideal in itself" (59-60). However, Sharabi developed a more nuanced and critical view of these matters, particularly in his attribution of a more central and visible role to the individual in society.
Sharabi was also influenced by German philosopher Nicolai Hartmaan, who "considered moral values as justice, courage, love, and friendship to be objective and timeless. For him, those values enjoyed an eternal existence, like Plato's ideals" (129).
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