Posted on Tuesday, 31 January, 2006 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Or at least the Academy Awards has decided to start following its own rules for foreign films. Paradise Now nominated for best foreign language film. I’m sure it had to do with the January 14 post.
Still, it’s a marked change from the Academy’s previous stance. From a MIFTA.org article about Cannes winner Divine Intervention:
When the producer of [Divine Intervention], Hmbert Balsam, spoke with (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) AMPAS’ executive director Davis Bruce in October 2002, he was told that the film from Palestine would not be eligible to compete in the Academy Awards. “As the producer of Divine Intervention, he [Balsan] asked the Academy if the film could run for best foreign language picture. The answer of the Academy was no, Palestine is not a state we recognize in our rules.” However, AMPAS’ published rules make no mention of the requirement that a country needs a particular status to qualify, and there is little doubt that the rejection of the film by the Academy was politically motivated.
You can still see it before Oscar night, by ordering it here. I keep a penny jar at Amazon’s corporate heaquarters and everytime somoene buys something from a link off this site, Jeff Bezos drops some change in when he walks by. That’s the power of the interweb!
Here’s a story about the filmmaker on nomination day.
Posted on Monday, 30 January, 2006 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Congress Threatening to Cut Off Palestinian Aid: February “Washington Wednesday” Action Alert
START DATE: Immediately
END DATE: To be determined
BACKGROUND: Prior to the Palestinian legislative election, both Houses of Congress threatened to reevaluate relations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) if Hamas were to participate in the next Palestinian government.
The House of Representatives passed a resolution (H.Res.575) on Dec. 16 in which it stated that Hamas’ participation in the PA government “will inevitably raise serious questions for the United States about the commitment of the Palestinian Authority and its leadership to making peace with Israel and will potentially undermine the ability of the United States to have a constructive relationship with, or provide further assistance to, the Palestinian Authority.” [Emphasis added]
On Dec. 21, 73 Senators sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to President Bush stating that “if terrorist groups gain a substantial foothold in the Palestinian legislature, it will make it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for there to be any progress on the roadmap or on the road to achieving a two state solution. There would be even more severe policy implications if any such groups were then brought into the Palestinian Authority. The United States—and no doubt other countries as well—would have little choice but to reevaluate all aspects of our relations with the Palestinian Authority.” [Emphasis added]
Now that Hamas has won the Palestinian legislative election and will be asked to form the next PA government, Members of Congress have started to make good on these threats. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) introduced a concurrent resolution on Jan. 26 stating that “no United States assistance should be provided to the Palestinian Authority if any representative political party holding a majority of parliamentary seats within the Palestinian Authority maintains a position calling for the destruction of Israel.”
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the lead sponsor of H.Res.575, went further than Sen. Thune, threatening to cut of all aid to the Palestinians. According to Rep. Cantor, “If Hamas does not join the peaceful nations of the world at the table of cooperation and peace, the consequences will be the loss of America’s support and funding for the Palestinians.” (Source)
ACTION REQUESTED: Click here to email your Members of Congress and tell them that reevaluating relations with the PA and threatening to cut off aid is not the proper response to Hamas’ victory.
If you would prefer to call or fax your Member of Congress, contact information can be found at our Congressional Report Card.
TALKING POINTS:
- Palestinians should be congratulated, not admonished and threatened with diplomatic isolation and a cut off of aid, for conducting a free and fair, competitive, multi-party legislative election under harsh conditions of Israeli military occupation and besiegement, restrictions on their freedom of movement and ability to campaign freely, and other human rights violations.
- The United States professes to promote democracy abroad. Supporting democracy means supporting the results of free and fair elections as an expression of the self-determination of the people who cast ballots, even when the United States and its allies are not pleased with the outcome.
- There are indications that Hamas’ participation in the political process is having a moderating influence on its policies. Recently, Hamas has observed a PA-brokered cease-fire and pledged to maintain it as long as Israel does likewise, raised the possibility of accepting a two-state solution, and removed calls for the destruction of Israel from its election platform. If the United States were to boycott, sanction, or cut off aid to a Hamas-led PA, it could reverse this trend and exacerbate tensions.
- The United States provides virtually no direct assistance to the PA; almost all US aid projects to Palestinians are implemented by non-governmental organizations through contracts awarded and overseen by the US Agency for International Development. These humanitarian programs are important to the social and economic well-being of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories whose ability to earn a livelihood is drastically curtailed by Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian lands and water resources for illegal settlements, curtailment of freedom of movement by constructing a wall intended to annex Palestinian land to Israel, and other human rights violations. Cutting off this humanitarian aid would only cruelly punish people for exercising their right to vote.
Click here to email your Members of Congress and tell them that reevaluating relations with the PA and threatening to cut off aid is not the proper response to Hamas’ victory.
Make a tax-deductible contribution to the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
European Union Aid
- 1: World Bank $85m
- 2: Isr/Pal integration $12m
- 3: UN relief (UNRWA) $77m
- 4: Food aid $35m
- 5: Humanitarian aid $33m
- 6: Special projects $24m
- 7: Infrastructure $72m
- 8: Member states $262m
- EU TOTAL: $600m
United States Aid
- 1: 2003/04 rollover $175m
- 2: PA debts $20m
- 3: Gaza infrastructure $50m
- 4: USAID projects $155m
- US TOTAL: $400m
Sources: EU, US
Posted on Monday, 30 January, 2006 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
By Samia Khoury
Witness Magazine
On January 25 — ten years after the first elections, which the Palestinians held in 1996 under the terms of the Oslo Accords — the Palestinians held their second elections for the legislative council. All went well, and 77% of the people who had the right to vote went to the polls. The Elections Central Committee was commended on its professional and transparent work, which guaranteed a smooth election day. The results were announced twenty-four hours after the closure of the polling stations with a landslide victory for Hamas, which won 76 seats out of 132. That Hamas would score highly in the elections was no surprise, but that Fateh, the ruling faction of the PLO and of the Palestinian Authority since its establishment in 1993, should get only 43 seats was shocking to many Palestinians, and certainly to Fateh itself.
Those results reflect voters’ frustration at Fatah’s failure to arrive at a political solution for Palestine’s problems and disappointment in the performance of the Palestinian Authority. They furthermore reflect the will of the people to maintain their threatened identity amidst an onslaught of foreign hegemony. Religion, being an integral part of the ethos of any community, becomes a natural refuge under these circumstances.
Read the rest at Witness Magazine.
Posted on Monday, 30 January, 2006 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
By Hannah
January 27, 2006
(via the International Solidarity Movement)
Finally, after several years of wanting to go to Gaza, Dunya and I managed to spend two days there under the auspices of election observation. It didn’t take very long for Dunya to observe that the elections in Gaza City were far cleaner than those in Ohio in 2004, where she was working at the time. Lack of democracy is not Palestine’s problem.
We stayed in Gaza City with Khaled Nasrallah and his family, one of the two families who had been living in the house in Rafah that Rachel Corrie was killed defending in March 2003. They now live in an apartment in Gaza City while a new house is being built, with the help of the ‘Building Alliance’. Most of the people in Gaza who have been displaced by home demolition have been displaced at least once before – in 1948 – and some of them more than once. They’ve lived in a constant state of terror for the past five years, and according to some, it got worse after the “disengagement”. Israeli shelling is not uncommon, not to mention the sonic booms that only started since the settlers have left. A 9-year-old girl was shot and killed by the Israeli army on Thursday in Gaza, probably just a few miles from where we were.
The Gaza International Airport is really something else, like any other airport, but with more beautiful design. And it is deserted. The control towers have been bombed by Israeli Apaches. The runways have been bulldozed every couple hundred meters. According to security at the airport, the only employees currently working, it was opened in 2000, and was forced by Israel to close early in 2001. Israel still forbids Palestinians from even beginning to reconstruct the runway. Palestinian Airlines only flies now between Egypt and Amman.
And then there’s Rafah. The row of houses along the border of Gaza and Egypt, are shot up thousands and thousands of times. That is, the houses that are still standing. More of them are in rubble. With bullet holes through the windows, doors and walls… it looks more like war than anything I’ve ever seen. Our hosts described to us some of the terror of their last two years in Rafah: never knowing which rooms were safe to be in, Israeli bullets flying through their windows at all hours, the young daughters waking up in the middle of the night and screaming. The girls are still affected, their mother Samah told us. The oldest, now five years old, remembers a story from Rafah. The family had been sleeping in the garden because it was safer than the house. At one point they were all in different places, someone in the garden, someone in the house, someone on the stairs. The shooting started, and young Mariam remembers the bullets flying towards their house, hitting a tree, and watching a guava fall off a tree and hit her father on the head. Her mother told the story laughing, saying “alhamdulillah” – thank god we weren’t hurt any more than we were.
Hope looks different, too, as Dunya pointed out during our visit to the former settlements. At every turn our driver explained that the Israelis used to be here, and here, and here. This is where this person was killed, this is a school that was bombed, this is an old checkpoint. And then we entered the old settlement of Netzarim. The scene looked remarkably similar to me to demolished Palestinian homes. The Israelis are good at destroying things, we joked to each other. They destroy Palestinian homes, and they also destroyed the settlers’ homes. This is hope, I suppose. Can rubble be hopeful?
Gaza City is bustling. We arrived our first evening, met the family, ate dinner, and then Khaled asked, “Do you want to walk around the city?” We were shocked that he would go out at night, especially with two female internationals, but it was completely normal to him. The shops were open, everyone was buying ice cream at the local ice cream parlor, last minute campaigning was subtle (campaigning is banned for 24 hours before election day, but nobody can be prevented from driving their cars, vegetable trucks, or donkeys with party flags on them). Apparently Gaza City is the Ramallah of Gaza, a thriving city where poverty is somewhat less apparent than other parts of Gaza.
Gaza is beautiful. I’ve heard about it being the most crowded place on earth, so I wasn’t prepared for the open space, the parks of palm trees, the plazas with monuments and wide roads that are pedestrian friendly. In contrast, while driving south along the road with the Mediterranean to the right, we could look left and see refugee camps that look more like I expected refugee camps to look before coming to Palestine. The camps in the West Bank have slightly narrower streets than cities and villages, and a few more visible signs of poverty. Some of these camps in Gaza are different, and with their tiny buildings and narrowest of streets they certainly look like they could be described as the most crowded places on earth.
You couldn’t be in Palestine and not be doing some sort of “election observing” during these past couple weeks. In an American context where civic engagement is among the lowest in the world, it excites me to be somewhere where even with such difficulty living under occupation, at least 75% of eligible voters voted. I know too that 8,000 Palestinian political prisoners can’t vote from Israeli prisons, that the Israeli government only permitted 6% of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to vote in the Palestinian elections, and that the 2/3 of the Palestinian population that lives outside of Palestine, do not have any say in who will be representing them and potentially negotiating away their right to return to their land. Not that negotiations will be happening any time soon here, since Israel refuses to negotiate with a Hamas that doesn’t disarm. I wish Hamas would refuse to negotiate with an Israel that doesn’t disarm.
The most common joke I’ve heard made in the past couple days, if it can be called a joke, is that I’ll have to start covering myself fully. A man joked today that he’s already starting to grow his beard. I was in Dheisheh refugee camp yesterday where the kids were discussing the election, and the teenage girls unanimously decided they would never wear hijab, even if Hamas legislated for it. We had a vote on the title of the exhibit that we’re putting together with the children about the trips we took them on, with suggestions like “Life Within Two Days,” “New Life”, and “Destroyed Villages”. At the end of the voting one of the kids suggested, “Hamas won!”.
And there is still occupation. I was able to meet my friend Fatima’s mother in Rafah, who hasn’t seen her daughter since 1997 because people in Gaza can’t get out and people in the West Bank can’t get to Gaza. A 20-year-old man we spent some time with in Gaza did not go an hour without saying, “Take me with you to the West Bank.” He’s never been there. Our crossing out of Gaza showed us firsthand for the first time what can only be described as indentured servitude. Thousands of Palestinian workers – those lucky enough to have permits – were standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting for hours to be allowed to cross back home to Gaza after a long day at work in the fields or building construction.
The occupation and injustice goes on in all of Palestine, regardless of its status. In Gaza, in the West Bank, and in Israel, Palestinians do not have equal rights. Someone tried to convince us yesterday that while Palestinians inside Israel don’t have equal rights, at least they have some rights. Unequal rights are not rights, Dunya pointed out. I know the Gaza “disengagement” caused people around the world to start thinking that occupation is over and everything is okay but Palestine still needs all the support it can get.
Posted on Monday, 30 January, 2006 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
A Call for Donations
This is a call for donations to the legal fund of anarchists against the wall (AATW).
This group is actively supporting the Palestinian popular resistance to the so called Israeli “separation wall”. This wall constitutes a theft of much of the land that Israel has not yet taken away from Palestinians and will create a situation where Palestinians are effectively enclosed in small unlivable cantons.
AATW has been active both through direct action and demonstrations against the wall. It insists on a joint struggle of Palestinians and Israelis and its contribution to the struggle has been recognized by all those involved in the struggle.(see the above link for letters of support).
The group’s work has also been recognized by the Israeli authorities which have rewarded it with violent repression, hundreds of arrests and dozens of indictments. The legal costs of defending against these charges is around $20,000 and counting. AATW is now calling for donations its legal fund in order to fight back against the legal persecution and continue its part in the fight against the wall.
For more details and for instructions on how to donate please see www dot awalls dot org.
For more information please contact ksnitz.
I advocate revolutionary changes…an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty.
