Israel has taken the upper hand in a new kind of Mideast conflict, one in which bullets are replaced by chickpeas (aka garbanzo beans). Using a satellite dish on loan from a nearby broadcast station, chefs in the town of Abu Ghosh whipped up 4,090 kg (about 9,000 lb) of hummus on January 8, adding a Guinness world record to the Arab town’s reputation for hospitality and harmony. More than 50 Arab and Jewish chefs from restaurants within Abu Ghosh put their own competitive spirits aside to make the hummus at a nearby factory early in the morning, before bringing it to the Abu Ghosh Restaurant. The cooks nearly doubled the previous record for the world’s biggest serving of hummus, 2,056 kg, set on October 24 by cooks in Lebanon. That record broke an earlier Israeli record and briefly put Lebanon ahead.
Hundreds of jubilant Israelis, a mix of Arabs and Jews, gathered around the giant dish, many of them dancing as a singer performed an Arabic love song to the beige chickpea paste. Jack Brockbank, an adjudicator sent from London by Guinness World Records, confirmed that the Israeli chefs now held the record. “I made sure that they used only the traditional ingredients, which are chickpeas, lemon, tahini (a paste of ground sesame seeds), garlic, salt and olive oil,” Brockbank said. Half-a-billion sesame seeds were used to make the tahini in the hummus, in addition to four tons of chickpeas.
Abu Ghosh Restaurant owner Jowdat Ibrahim, who oversaw the record-breaking event, said, “Abu Ghosh is a small, 7,000-person town, and this is very special for us and all of Israel. I’d be happy to welcome ... Lebanon to celebrate with us. Next time, we’ll do 10,000 kg. together.” But Lebanese Tourism Minister Fadi Abboud said that his country plans to beat the new record in the spring with an even bigger plate of hummus, to be prepared on the border with Israel.
Lebanese officials have complained that Israel has stolen the food and the name “hummus” from Lebanon. A group of Lebanese businessmen announced plans in 2008 to sue Israel to stop it from marketing hummus and other regional dishes as Israeli. And when the Lebanese chefs prepared their record-breaking dish three months ago, they called it a move to reaffirm ownership of a Lebanese food that had been appropriated by Israelis.
Abu Ghosh Restaurant manager Ibrahim Hamis responded, “Hummus is an international food, and it’s a special and healthy food as well. If only this were the only thing we fought over with Lebanon.”
Tzahi Hanegbi, chairman of the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, was in Abu Ghosh for the celebration. “It’s good for this to happen in Abu Ghosh,” Hanegbi said. “Abu Ghosh is a place where coexistence really permeates. You have Jews, Arabs, Christians, everyone together here. And with an event like this, when we’re focusing on this sort of competition, we’re adding to life. We’re not taking away from life.”
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edited from The Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2010
PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2010
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Israeli police arrest whistleblower Vanunu again
Mordechai Vanunu, the man who blew the whistle on Israel’s nuclear arsenal more than 20 years ago, was arrested again by Jerusalem police on December 29. Vanunu, a former technician at the secret Israeli nuclear weapon facilities at Dimona in the Negev Desert, was charged with violating his parole by speaking to a foreign national — his Norwegian girlfriend — and ordered to be kept under house arrest for two days.
Mr. Vanunu, 59, was jailed in 1986 after being abducted in Rome by Israeli secret service agents for disclosing details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to The Sunday Times of London. He served 18 years — 11 of them in solitary confinement — and was released in 2004. Since then he has been kept under close watch by the Shin Bet internal security agency and forbidden from leaving the country or meeting foreigners.
Israel has never acknowledged that it has a nuclear arsenal. From the materials divulged by Mr Vanunu, experts ascertained that it has about 200 nuclear warheads. Israeli authorities fear that Mr Vanunu, a persistent critic of nuclear weapons, may have other confidential information that he intends to divulge.
In past court appearances Mr Vanunu has lashed out at the restrictions imposed on his life. “All I want is freedom. I have no freedom of speech and no freedom of movement,” he said.
– edited from The Times
(London), December 30, 2009
PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2010
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
GAZA - In the days leading up to Eid al-Adha, Zaid Khadar would usually be buying new clothes for his children and stocking up on traditional foods to celebrate one of the most important dates on the Muslim calendar. Instead, he struggles to shield them from the winter rain dripping through the roof of the shelter that has housed his family since they were made homeless by Israel’s three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip almost a year ago.
For Khadar, 45, the result of the Israeli attack was the destruction of his apartment building and the ground-floor grocery store which had been his main source of income. His family, including seven children, now lives on the rubble of their former home in a shelter made of plastic sheets and blankets.
International donors pledged $4.5 billion in March to help rebuild Gaza, but much of the money has not been dispersed due to the Israeli blockade and the Fatah-Hamas split that has led to rival Palestinian governments. U.N. officials have expressed concern about the added hardship the homeless will face as winter sets in.
The sense that Gaza has been forgotten by the international community only increased at Eid al-Adha, which fell the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving. Khadar said, “The governments do not take care of us, neither the Hamas government nor the Ramallah (Fatah) government.” He lamented, “My children are saying ‘Why aren’t you bringing us clothes?’”
– edited from Reuters, 26 November 2009PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2009
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
U.N. rights envoy sees Israeli war crimes in Gaza
GENEVA - A United Nations human rights investigator said on March 19 that Israel’s three-week military assault on Gaza in December and January, aimed at Hamas, appeared to constitute a grave war crime. Richard Falk, an American law professor and U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said the Geneva Conventions make it inherently unlawful to launch attacks if it is not possible to distinguish between military targets and surrounding civilians.
On the basis of the preliminary evidence, there is reason to conclude this was the case in densely populated Gaza, Falk stated in an annual report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council, a 47-member forum which neither Israel nor its chief ally the United States has joined. On April 3, the Council named Richard Goldstone, the former U.N. chief prosecutor for war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to lead a high-level mission to investigate the allegations. Violations included Israel’s “targeting of schools, mosques and ambulances” during the offensive, as well as Hamas’s firing of rockets at civilian targets in southern Israel.
Falk’s report called the Israeli attacks a “massive assault on a densely populated, urbanized setting” in which the entire civilian population had been subjected to “an inhumane form of warfare.” He added, “As all borders were sealed, civilians could not escape from the orbit of harm.” This denial of people’s right to flee the war zone as refugees may also constitute a crime against humanity, he said.
Falk, who is Jewish, was denied entry to Israel two weeks before the assault started, forcing him to abort a planned mission to Gaza. In his report, he said that the refusal had set an “unfortunate precedent” for treatment of a special rapporteur.
Goldstone, a widely respected South African judge, is also Jewish and a trustee of Hebrew University. He said his team would investigate “all violations of international humanitarian law” before, during and after the conflict.
The war destroyed some 5,000 homes in Gaza and killed 1,434 Palestinians, including 960 civilians, according to the Palestinian human rights center. Israel lost 13 people during the war, making the Palestinian-to-Israeli fatality ratio 110-to-1. Israel disputes the figures.
Israel has rejected any participation in previous investigations by the U.N. Human Rights Council, including one led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu, calling them biased. It refused to say if it would cooperate with this investigation.
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edited from Reuters, March 19 & April 3, 2009
PeaceMeal, March/April 2009
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
David Lloyd, Professor of English, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland in what it termed initially a “defensive war”. The invasion was in part justified by the Nazi desire to reunify what it considered historic German territory and to claim Lebensraum for a race that considered itself superior to those that surrounded it in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only the Jews, but the Slavic races, were considered inferior, less than human, and regarded as populations that could be transferred to make room for Aryans.
It was, of course, the Jews who bore the brunt of Nazi racism. By 1940, the Nazis had begun to concentrate Poland’s Jewish population into ghettos in the main cities prior to their planned transport to the camps. In Warsaw, the largest of these ghettoes, three or four hundred thousand Jews were enclosed in less than 5% of the city, walled in by a 10-20 foot high wall, and gradually strangled by starvation and the shortage of all goods, including fuel and power. Malnutrition and disease was rampant and the exits and entrances of the ghetto were closely controlled. Resistance was subject to collective punishment: tens of Jews could be murdered in retaliation for the least act of defiance.
In 1943, in the face of imminent transportation and annihilation of the Jewish population, the remaining Jews in Warsaw organized combat brigades. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. Despite the overwhelming force of the German Army and the utter inadequacy of their own weaponry, they fought a desperate struggle in the name not only of the Jews of Poland but of Poland’s right to resist fascism and occupation. “It is a fight”, they proclaimed to the Poles beyond the ghetto walls, “for our freedom, as well as yours; for our human dignity and national honor, as well as yours….”
Though crushed by German armor and military power in hand-to-hand and street-to-street fighting, the Jewish resistance in Warsaw stands as a symbol of the right of an oppressed people to resist occupation, collective punishment, genocide and ethnocide. ...
Gaza too is a ghetto. One and a half million Palestinians, most of them refugees dispossessed of the lands and homes that were theirs for centuries, inhabit the most densely populated square miles of the Middle East, if not the world. They are hemmed in by security walls and barbed wire fences, unable to move in or out without the permission of Israel, the occupying power. They have lived in a permanent state of siege, unable to conduct free trade with the rest of the world, virtually unable to visit the West Bank, unable even to fish in the sea off their coasts, subject to perpetual surveillance and control by land, sea and air. Their hospitals lack even the most essential medicines. Power and water are controlled by the Israeli government. All goods that enter or leave this virtual prison camp do so by permission of the occupying power.
The siege of Gaza has been one long collective punishment inflicted upon the population for their temerity in having elected, in free and open elections, a party, Hamas, that Israel and their allies, the United States and European Union, condemn as terrorists. Their principal crime is to deny the right to exist of a state that has dispossessed their people, occupied their lands, denied their historical existence, subjected them to ethnic cleansing, torture and collective imprisonment, destroyed their olive groves, walled them in behind a “security fence” designed to impede movement and access to farm land, schools, universities and places of work. And all these measures have been openly declared, by an Israeli minister in government, to be designed to suffocate Gaza into submission.
All this ... was ongoing before the current Israeli assault on the population of Gaza — its police force as well as old people and school children, infants and invalids. This is not an act of “defense” on the part of Israel, but a bloody continuation of a war of offense, differing only in the intensity and publicness of its brutality and in its abrupt, bloody and systematic nature. It is a war of collective punishment against a population whose resistance is less in its occasional and mostly harmless retaliatory rocket attacks than in its simple refusal to give in. It is an offensive war ... against a people whose right to resist occupation is inscribed in international law.
It is a war whose crimes, once again, include the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, including infants and children, attacks on non-military institutions including mosques, a university and a television station, and the deliberate planning of an assault whose proclaimed ends far exceed the suppression of the purported casus belli, the rocket launching sites. It is a war designed to destroy the civil infrastructure of Hamas and to break the will of the Palestinians in Gaza to continue their resistance.
The right of the Palestinian people to resist is as indubitable as the right of the Jews of Warsaw to resist the Nazis, or of the Polish or French people to fight against their occupation by the Nazis. Israel is not the West’s proxy in the so-called global war against terrorism. It is a state that itself inflicts terror, and does so with a force and brutality far exceeding anything available to the most violent of terrorist organizations. It is a state whose colonial aim, to occupy and to settle land historically occupied by another people in order to provide unlimited Lebensraum for its own ethnic group, is evidenced every day in the continuing expansion of the illegal settlements on the West Bank. It is an apartheid state, whose self-declared constitution as a “Jewish State for a Jewish People” should have no more international legitimacy than South Africa’s “white state for a white people” or Northern Ireland’s “Protestant State for a Protestant people”, both of which finally fell to a combination of military and civil resistance and international opprobrium.
It is long beyond time for Israel ... be held accountable to the norms of international law. It is time for Israel to be subjected to the same scrutiny as any other state that bases its polity on sectarianism and racism, that has established one set of laws for one ethnic group and another for the rest. It is time for Israel to by judged by the international law that everywhere condemns extended occupation, condemns collective punishment, war against civilians, population transfers or ethnic cleansing, dispossession of the occupied people and the settlement of their lands. It is time for us to name Israel what it is ... a colonial, apartheid state with neither legitimacy nor a deserved place among the community of democratic nations.
It is time for us to cease the appeasement of Israel. Even the most ardent of appeasers of Nazi Germany never supplied Germany with arms or foreign aid, with fighter planes with which to bomb civilians, never labeled the resistance to Nazism “terrorism”, never actively participated in the German stranglehold on the ghettoes where it confined its subject populations. ...
Numerous U.N. General Assembly resolutions that have expressed the virtually unanimous international condemnation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its wars against its neighbors have not worked. It is time for the truth about Israel to be disseminated, even against the most effective control of the western media by Israel’s lobbyists. It is time for all who care about justice and peace, for human rights, for the fate of the innocent and the oppressed, the stateless and the dispossessed, to make our voices heard. Let it not be said that in their most extreme hour of need, the Palestinian people were abandoned by the world, as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were abandoned in 1943.
Professor Lloyd has
published primarily in the field of Irish literature and culture and on colonialism and
nationalism.
– PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2009
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)