position:first prime minister

  • Old Palestinian photos & films hidden in IDF archive show different history than Israeli claims

    Palestinian photos and films seized by Israeli troops have been gathering dust in the army and Defense Ministry archives until Dr. Rona Sela, a curator and art historian, exposed them. The material presents an alternative to the Zionist history that denied the Palestinians’ existence here, she says.

    The initial reaction is one of incredulity: Why is this material stored in the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Ministry Archive? The first item is labeled, in Hebrew, “The History of Palestine from 1919,” the second, “Paintings by Children Who Go to School and Live in a Refugee Camp and Aspire to Return to Palestine.” The third is, “Depiction of the IDF’s Treatment and Harsh Handling of Palestinians in the Territories.”

    Of all places, these three reels of 16-mm film are housed in the central archive that documents Israel’s military-security activities. It’s situated in Tel Hashomer, near the army’s National Induction Center, outside Tel Aviv.

    IDF archive contains 2.7 million photos, 38,000 films

    The three items are barely a drop in an ocean of some 38,000 films, 2.7 million photographs, 96,000 audio recordings and 46,000 maps and aerial photos that have been gathered into the IDF Archive since 1948, by order of Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, David Ben-Gurion. However, a closer perusal shows that this particular “drop in the ocean” is subversive, exceptional and highly significant.

    The footage in question is part of a collection – whose exact size and full details remain unknown – of “war booty films” seized by the IDF from Palestinian archives in raids over the years, though primarily in the 1982 Lebanon War.

    Recently, however, following a persistent, protracted legal battle, the films confiscated in Lebanon, which had been gathering dust for decades – instead of being screened in cinematheques or other venues in Israel – have been rescued from oblivion, along with numerous still photos. The individual responsible for this development is Dr. Rona Sela, a curator and researcher of visual history at Tel Aviv University.

    For nearly 20 years, Sela has been exploring Zionist and Palestinian visual memory. She has a number of important revelations and discoveries to her credit, which she has published in the form of books, catalogs and articles. Among the Hebrew-language titles are “Photography in Palestine/Eretz-Israel in the ‘30s and ‘40s” (2000) and “Made Public: Palestinian Photographs in Military Archives in Israel” (2009). In March, she published an article in the English-language periodical Social Semiotics on, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives.”

    Now Sela has made her first film, “Looted and Hidden: Palestinian Archives in Israel,” an English-language documentary that surveys the fate of Palestinian photographs and films that were “captured” and deposited in Israeli archives. It includes heretofore unseen segments from films seized by the IDF from Palestinian archives in Beirut. These documentary records, Sela says, “were erased from consciousness and history” for decades.

    Sela begins journey in 1998

    Getting access to the films was not easy, Sela explains. Her archival journey began in 1998, when she was researching Zionist propaganda films and photos that sought to portray the “new Jew” – muscular, proudly tilling the soil – in contradistinction, according to the Zionist perception, to the supposedly degenerate and loutish Palestinian Arab.

    “After spending a few years in the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem and in other Zionist archives, researching the history of Zionist photography and the construction of a visual propaganda apparatus supporting the Zionist idea, I started to look for Palestinian visual representation as well, in order to learn about the Palestinian narrative and trace its origins and influence,” she says.

    That task was far more complicated than anyone could have imagined. In some of the Zionist films and photos, Sela was able to discern, often incidentally, episodes from Palestinian history that had “infiltrated” them, as she puts it. For example, in Carmel Newsreels (weekly news footage screened at local cinemas) from 1951, showing the settlement of Jews in Jaffa, demolished and abandoned Arab homes are clearly visible.

    Subsequently, Sela spotted traces and remnants of a genuine Palestinian visual archive occasionally cropping up in Israeli archives. Those traces were not immediately apparent, more like an elusive treasure concealed here and there beneath layers of restrictions, erasures and revisions.

    Khalil Rassass, father of Palestinian photojournalism

    Thus, one day she noticed in the archive of the pre-state Haganah militia, stills bearing the stamp “Photo Rissas.” Digging deeper, she discovered the story of Chalil Rissas (Khalil Rassass, 1926-1974), one of the fathers of Palestinian photojournalism. He’s unknown to the general public, whether Palestinian or Israel, but according to Sela, he was a “daring, groundbreaking photographer” who, motivated by a sense of national consciousness, documented the pre-1948 Palestinian struggle.

    Subsequently she found hundreds of his photographs, accompanied by captions written by soldiers or Israeli archive staff who had tried to foist a Zionist narrative on them and disconnect them from their original context. The source of the photographs was a Jewish youth who received them from his father, an IDF officer who brought them back with him from the War of Independence as booty.

    The discovery was unprecedented. In contrast to the Zionist propaganda images that exalted the heroism of the Jewish troops and barely referred to the Palestinians, Rissas’ photographs were mainly of Palestinian fighters. Embodying a proud Palestinian stance, they focused on the national and military struggle and its outcome, including the Palestinians’ military training and deployment for battle.

    “I realized that I’d come across something significant, that I’d found a huge cache of works by one of the fathers of Palestinian photography, who had been the first to give visual expression to the Palestinian struggle,” Sela recalls. “But when I tried to learn more about Chalil Rissas, I understood that he was a forgotten photographer, that no one knew the first thing about him, either in Israel or elsewhere.”

    Sela thereupon decided to study the subject herself. In 1999, she tracked down Rissas’ brother, Wahib, who was working as a photographer of tourists on the Temple Mount / Haram a-Sharif in Jerusalem’s Old City. He told her the story of Chalil’s life. It turned out that he had accompanied Palestinian troops and leaders, visually documenting the battles fought by residents of the Jerusalem area during the 1948 War of Independence. “He was a young man who chose the camera as an instrument for changing people’s consciousness,” Sela says.

    Ali Za’arur, forgotten Palestinian photographer

    Around 2007, she discovered the archive of another forgotten Palestinian photographer, Ali Za’arur (1900-1972), from Azzariyeh, a village east of Jerusalem. About 400 of his photos were preserved in four albums. They also depicted scenes from the 1948 war, in which Za’arur accompanied the forces of Jordan’s Arab Legion and documented the battle for the Old City of Jerusalem. He photographed the dead, the ruins, the captives, the refugees and the events of the cease-fire.

    In the Six-Day War of 1967, Za’arur fled from his home for a short time. When he returned, he discovered that the photo albums had disappeared. A relative, it emerged, had given them to Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek as a gift. Afterward, the Jerusalem Foundation donated them to the IDF Archive. In 2008, in an unprecedented act, the archive returned the albums to Za’arur’s family. The reason, Sela surmises, is that the albums were captured by the army in battle. In any event, this was, as far as is known, a unique case.

    Sela took heart from the discoveries she’d made, realizing that “with systematic work, it would be possible to uncover more Palestinian archives that ended up in Israeli hands.”

    That work was three-pronged: doing archival research to locate Palestinian photographs and films that had been incorporated into Israeli archives; holding meetings with the Palestinian photographers themselves, or members of their families; and tracking down Israeli soldiers who had taken part in “seizing these visual spoils” and in bringing them to Israel.

    In the course of her research Sela met some fascinating individuals, among them Khadijeh Habashneh, a Jordan-based Palestinian filmmaker who headed the archive and cinematheque of the Palestinian Cinema Institute. That institution, which existed from the end of the 1960s until the early ‘80s, initially in Jordan and afterward in Lebanon, was founded by three pioneering Palestinian filmmakers – Sulafa Jadallah, Hani Jawhariyyeh and Mustafa Abu Ali (Habashneh’s husband) – who sought to document their people’s way of life and national struggle. Following the events of Black September in 1970, when the Jordanian army and the Palestine Liberation Organization fought a bloody internecine war, the filmmakers moved to Lebanon and reestablished the PCI in Beirut.

    Meeting with Habashneh in Amman in 2013, Sela heard the story of the Palestinian archives that disappeared, a story she included in her new documentary. “Where to begin, when so much material was destroyed, when a life project falls apart?” Habashneh said to Sela. “I can still see these young people, pioneers, bold, imbued with ideals, revolutionaries, who created pictures and films and documented the Palestinian revolution that the world doesn’t want to see. They refused to be faceless and to be without an identity.”

    The archive established by Habashneh contained forgotten works that documented the Palestinians’ suffering in refugee camps, the resistance to Israel and battles against the IDF, as well as everyday life. The archive contained the films and the raw materials of the PCI filmmakers, but also collected other early Palestinian films, from both before and after 1948.

    Spirit of liberation

    This activity reflects “a spirit of liberation and revolt and the days of the revolution,” Habashneh says in Sela’s film, referring to the early years of the Palestinian national movement. That spirit was captured in underground photographs and with a minimal budget, on film that was developed in people’s kitchens, screened in tents in refugee camps and distributed abroad. Women, children, fighters, intellectuals and cultural figures, and events of historic importance were documented, Habashneh related. “As far as is known, this was the first official Palestinian visual archive,” Sela notes.

    In her conversation with Sela, Habashneh nostalgically recalled other, better times, when the Palestinian films were screened in a Beirut cinematheque, alongside other works with a “revolutionary spirit,” from Cuba, Chile, Vietnam and elsewhere. “We were in contact with filmmakers from other countries, who saw the camera as an instrument in the hands of the revolution and the people’s struggle,” she recalled.

    “Interesting cultural cooperation developed there, centering around revolutionary cinema,” Sela points out, adding, “Beirut was alive with an unprecedented, groundbreaking cultural flowering that was absolutely astonishing in terms of its visual significance.”

    IDF confiscates film archive

    But in 1982, after the IDF entered Beirut, that archive disappeared and was never seen again. The same fate befell two films made by Habashneh herself, one about children, the other about women. In Sela’s documentary, Habashneh wonders aloud about the circumstances in which the amazing collection disappeared. “Is our fate to live a life without a past? Without a visual history?” she asks. Since then, she has managed to reconstruct a small part of the archive. Some of the films turned up in the United States, where they had been sent to be developed. Copies of a few others remained in movie theaters in various countries where they were screened. Now in her seventies, Habashneh continues to pursue her mission, even though, as she told Sela during an early conversation, “the fate of the archive remains a puzzle.”

    What Habashneh wasn’t able to accomplish beginning in 1982 as part of a worldwide quest, Sela managed to do over the course of a few years of research in Israel. She began by locating a former IDF soldier who told her about the day on which several trucks arrived at the building in Beirut that housed a number of Palestinian archives and began to empty it out. That testimony, supported by a photograph, was crucial for Sela, as it corroborated the rumors and stories about the Palestinian archives having been taken to Israel.

    The same soldier added that he had been gripped by fear when he saw, among the photos that were confiscated from the archive, some that documented Israeli soldiers in the territories. He himself appeared in one of them. “They marked us,” he said to Sela.

    Soldiers loot Nashashibi photos & possessions, take photo from corpse

    Another former soldier told Sela about an unusual photo album that was taken (or looted, depending on one’s point of view) from the home of the prominent Nashashibi family in Jerusalem, in 1948. The soldier added that his father, who had served as an IDF officer in the War of Independence, entered a photography studio and made off with its archive, while other soldiers were busy looting pianos and other expensive objects from the Nashashibis. Another ex-soldier testified to having taken a photo from the corpse of an Arab. Over time, all these images found their way to archives in Israel, in particular the IDF Archive.

    Sela discovers IDF archive

    In 2000, Sela, buoyed by her early finds, requested permission from that archive to examine the visual materials that had been seized by the army in the 1980s. The initial response was denial: The material was not in Israel’s hands, she was told.

    “But I knew what I was looking for, because I had soldiers’ testimonies,” she says now, adding that when she persisted in her request, she encountered “difficulties, various restrictions and the torpedoing of the possibility of perusing the material.”

    The breakthrough came when she enlisted the aid of attorneys Michael Sfard and Shlomi Zacharia, in 2008. To begin with, they received word, confirmed by the Defense Ministry’s legal adviser, that various spoils taken in Beirut were now part of the IDF Archive. However, Sela was subsequently informed that “the PLO’s photography archive,” as the Defense Ministry referred in general to photographic materials taken from the Palestinians, is “archival material on matters of foreign affairs and security, and as such is ‘restricted material’ as defined in Par. 7(a) of the Archives Regulations.”

    Then, one day in 2010, Sela received a fax informing her that Palestinian films had been found in the IDF Archive, without elaboration, and inviting her to view them. “There were a few dozen segments from films, and I was astonished by what I saw,” she says. “At first I was shown only a very limited amount of footage, but it was indicative of the whole. On the basis of my experience, I understood that there was more.”

    A few more years of what Sela terms “endless nagging, conversations and correspondence” passed, which resulted in her being permitted to view dozens of segments of additional films, including some that apparently came from Habashneh’s archive. Sela also discovered another Palestinian archive that had been seized by the IDF. Established under the aegis of the PLO’s Cultural Arts Section, its director in the 1970s was the Lod-born painter and historian Ismail Shammout (1930-2006).

    One of the works in that collection is Shammout’s own film “The Urgent Call,” whose theme song was written and performed by the Palestinian singer Zainab Shathat in English, accompanying herself on the guitar. “The film was thought to be lost until I found it in the IDF Archive,” says Sela, who describes “The Urgent Call” as “a cry about the condition of Palestine, its sons and its daughters.”

    Viewing it takes one back in time to the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when the cinema of the Palestinian struggle briefly connected with other international revolutionary film movements.

    Legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard

    For example, in 1969 and 1970 Jean-Luc Godard, the legendary filmmaker of the French New Wave in cinema, visited Jordan and Lebanon several times with the Dziga Vertov Group of French filmmakers (named after the Soviet pioneer documentarian of the 1920s and ‘30s), who included filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, who worked with Godard in his “radical” period. They came to shoot footage in refugee camps and in fedayeen bases for Godard’s film “Until Victory.” Habashneh told Sela that she and others had met Godard, assisted him and were of course influenced by his work. [Ed. note: Godard’s work on Palestine caused him to be accused of antisemitism by the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen and others. “In Hollywood there is no greater sin,” the Guardian reported.]

    Along with “The Urgent Call” – excerpts from which are included in her “Looted and Hidden” documentary – Sela also found another Shammout work in the IDF Archive. Titled “Memories and Fire,” it chronicles 20th-century Palestinian history, “from the days depicting the idyllic life in Palestine, via the documentation of refugeehood, to the documentation of the organizing and the resistance. To use the terms of the Palestinian cinema scholar and filmmaker George Khleifi, the aggressive fighter took the place of the ill-fated refugee,” she adds.

    Sela also found footage by the Iraqi director Kais al-Zubaidi, who worked for a time in the PLO’s Cultural Arts Section. His films from that period include “Away from Home” (1969) and “The Visit” (1970); in 2006 he published an anthology, “Palestine in the Cinema,” a history of the subject, which mentions some 800 films that deal with Palestine or the Palestinian people. [Ed. note: unfortunately it appears this book has never been translated into English.]

    IDF seals the archive for decades

    Some of the Palestinian movies in the IDF Archive bear their original titles. However, in many other cases this archival material was re-cataloged to suit the Israeli perspective, so that Palestinian “fighters” became “gangs” or “terrorists,” for example. In one case, a film of Palestinians undergoing arms training is listed as “Terrorist camp in Kuwait: Distribution of uniforms, girls crawling with weapons, terrorists marching with weapons in the hills, instruction in laying mines and in arms.”

    Sela: “These films and stills, though not made by Jewish/Israeli filmmakers or military units – which is the central criterion for depositing materials in the Israeli army archive – were transferred to the IDF Archive and subordinated to the rules of the State of Israel. The archive immediately sealed them for many decades and cataloged them according to its terminology – which is Zionist, Jewish and Israeli – and not according to the original Palestinian terminology. I saw places where the word ‘terrorists’ was written on photographs taken by Palestinians. But after all, they do not call themselves as such. It’s part of terminological camouflaging, which subordinated their creative work to the colonial process in which the occupier controls the material that’s captured.”

    Hidden Palestinian history

    Sela’s discoveries, which are of international importance, are not only a research, documentation and academic achievement: They also constitute a breakthrough in regard to the chronicling of Palestinian history. “Palestinian visual historiography lacks many chapters,” she observes. “Many photographs and archives were destroyed, were lost, taken as spoils or plundered in the various wars and in the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

    From her point of view, the systematic collecting of Palestinian visual materials in the IDF Archive “makes it possible to write an alternative history that counteracts the content created by the army and the military archive, which is impelled by ideological and political considerations.” In the material she found in the army archive, she sees “images that depict the history of the Palestinian people and its long-term ties to this soil and this place, which present an alternative to the Zionist history that denied the Palestinians’ existence here, as well as their culture and history and the protracted tragedy they endured and their national struggle of many years.”

    The result is an intriguing paradox, such as one often finds by digging deep into an archive. The extensive information that Sela found in the IDF Archive makes it possible to reconstruct elements of the pre-1948 existence of the Palestinians and to help fill in the holes of the Palestinian narrative up until the 1980s. In other words, even if Israel’s intention was to hide these items and to control the Palestinians’ historical treasures, its actions actually abet the process of preservation, and will go on doing so in the future.

    Earlier groundbreaking discovery – confiscated Palestinians books & libraries

    Sela’s research on visual archival materials was preceded by another groundbreaking study – dealing with the written word – conducted by Dr. Gish Amit, an expert on the cultural aspects of Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Amit chronicled the fate of Palestinian books and libraries that, like the photographs and films Sela found, ended up in Israeli archives – including in the National Library in Jerusalem.

    In his 2014 book, “Ex-Libris: Chronicles of Theft, Preservation, and Appropriating at the Jewish National Library” (Hebrew), Amit trenchantly analyzes the foredoomed failure of any attempt to conceal and control the history of others. According to him, “an archive remembers its forgettings and erasures,” “documents injustice, and thus makes it possible to trace its paths” and “paves a way for forgotten histories which may, one day, convict the owners” of the documents.

    However, Amit also sees the complexity of this story and presents another side of it. Describing the operation in which the Palestinian books were collected by Israeli soldiers and National Library personnel during the War of Independence, he raises the possibility that this was actually an act involving rescue, preservation and accessibility: “On the one hand, the books were collected and not burned or left in the abandoned houses in the Arab neighborhoods that had been emptied of their inhabitants. Had they not been collected their fate would have been sealed — not a trace of them would remain,” he writes, adding, that the National Library “protected the books from the war, the looting and the destruction, and from illegal trade in manuscripts.”

    According to the National Library, it is holding about 6,500 Palestinian books and manuscripts, which were taken from private homes whose owners left in 1948. The entire collection is cataloged and accessible to the general public, but is held under the responsibility of the Custodian of Absentees’ Property in the Finance Ministry. Accordingly, there is no intention, in the near future, of trying to locate the owners and returning the items.

    Israeli control over history

    Sela views the existence of these spoils of war in Israel as a direct expression of the occupation, which she defines, beyond Israel’s physical presence in the territories, as “the control of history, the writing of culture and the shaping of identity.” In her view, “Israel’s rule over the Palestinians is not only geographic but extends also to culture and consciousness. Israel wants to erase this history from the public consciousness, but it is not being successful, because the force of the resistance is stronger. Furthermore, its attempts to erase Palestinian history adversely affect Israel itself in the end.”

    At this point, Sela resorts to a charged comparison, to illustrate how visual materials contribute to the creation of personal and collective identity. “As the daughter of Holocaust survivors,” she says, “I grew up in a home without photographic historical memory. Nothing. My history starts only with the meeting of my parents, in 1953. It’s only from then that we have photos. Before that – nothing.

    “I know what it feels like when you have no idea what your grandmother or grandfather looked like, or your father’s childhood,” she continues. “This is all the more true of the history of a whole people. The construction of identity by means of visual materials is very meaningful. Many researchers have addressed this topic. The fact is that Zionist bodies made and are continuing to make extensive and rational use of [such materials too] over a period that spans decades.”

    Sela admits that there is still much to be done, but as far as she’s concerned, once a crack appeared in the wall, there was no turning back. “There is a great deal of material, including hundreds of films, that I haven’t yet got to,” she notes. “This is an amazing treasure, which contains information about the cultural, educational, rural and urban life of the Palestinian people throughout the 20th century – an erased narrative that needs to be restored to the history books,” she adds.

    Asked what she thinks should be done with the material, she asserts, “Of course it has to be returned. Just as Israel is constantly fighting to retrieve what the Nazis looted from Jews in the Holocaust. The historical story is different, but by the same criterion, practice what you preach. These are cultural and historical materials of the Palestinian people.”

    The fact that these items are being held by Israel “creates a large hole in Palestinian research and knowledge,” Sela avers. “It’s a hole for which Israel is responsible. This material does not belong to us. It has to be returned to its owners. Afterward, if we view it intelligently, we too can come to know and understand highly meaningful chapters in Palestinian history and in our own history. I think that the first and basic stage in the process of conciliation is to know the history of the Other and also your own history of controlling the Other.”

    Defense Ministry response

    A spokesperson for the Defense Ministry, which was asked to comment on the holdings in the IDF Archive, the archive contains 642 “war booty films,” most of which deal with refugees and were produced by the UNRWA (the United Nations refugee relief agency) in the 1960s and 1970s. The ministry also noted that 158 films that were seized by the IDF in the 1982 Lebanon War are listed in orderly fashion in the reading-room catalog and are available for perusal by the general public, including Arab citizens and Palestinians.

    As for the Palestinian photographs that were confiscated, the Defense Ministry stated that there is no orderly record of them. There are 127 files of photographs and negatives in the archive, each of which contains dozens of photographs, probably taken between the 1960s and the 1980s, on a variety of subjects, including visits of foreign delegations to PLO personnel, tours of PLO delegations abroad, Palestinian art and heritage, art objects, traditional attire and Palestinian folklore, factories and workshops, demonstrations, mass parades and rallies held by the PLO, portraits of Arab personalities and PLO symbols.

    The statement adds that a few months ago, crates were located that were stamped by their original owners, “PLO/Department of Information and National Guidance and Department of Information and Culture,” during the evacuation of the archive’s storerooms in the Tzrifin base.

    https://israelpalestinenews.org/old-palestinian-photos-films-hidden-idf-archive-show-different-
    #historicisation #Israël #Palestine #photographie #films #archive #histoire #Khalil_Rassass #Ali_Za’arur
    ping @reka @sinehebdo @albertocampiphoto

  • John A. Macdonald statue removed from Victoria City Hall | CBC News
    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/john-a-macdonald-statue-victoria-city-hall-lisa-helps-1.4782065

    A statue of Sir John A. Macdonald was wrapped in foam and strapped to a flat-bed truck on Saturday morning to be placed in storage. Victoria city council voted to remove the statue as a gesture of reconciliation earlier this week. (Megan Thomas/CBC)

    A statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, has been removed from the front steps of Victoria City Hall.

    The monument was taken down, wrapped in foam and strapped to a flat-bed truck on Saturday morning to be placed in storage.

    City council voted to remove the statue as a gesture of reconciliation earlier this week.

    Victoria councillors pass motion to remove John A. Macdonald statue

    More than two dozen people gathered in the drizzling rain to watch as the statue was taken away — some cheering its removal and others lamenting it.

    #grand_home #canada #peuples_premiers #peuples_autochtones

  • TOP ISRAELIS HAVE WARNED OF #APARTHEID, SO WHY THE OUTRAGE AT A UN REPORT ?
    https://theintercept.com/2017/03/22/top-israelis-have-warned-of-apartheid-so-why-the-outrage-at-a-un-repor

    IN HIS MEMOIR, the Israeli journalist Hirsh Goodman described how he returned home from the Six Day War in June 1967 to hear the country’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, speak on the radio. “Israel, he said, better rid itself of the territories and their Arab population as soon as possible,” recalled Goodman. “If it did not Israel would soon become an apartheid state.”

    Goodman was born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa. “That phrase, ‘Israel will become an apartheid state,’ resonated with me,” Goodman wrote. “In a flash I understood what he was saying.”

    In a flash. Yet fifty years later, despite an entrenched and ongoing occupation, Israel’s defenders angrily reject any invocation of the A-word. [...]

    [...] To mention the grotesque crime of apartheid in the same sentence as the democratic state of Israel, they claim, is “slander”, a “smear”, a “despicable” and “blatant lie”, a shameful act of “Israel-bashing” and a “new form of anti-Semitism.”

    So what, I wonder, does that make Ben Gurion? Dishonest or despicable? How about Yitzhak Rabin, who told a TV journalist in 1976 during the first of his two terms as Israel’s prime minister, “I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term, if we don’t want to get to apartheid, a million and a half [more] Arabs inside a Jewish state”? Was he also engaged in a smear campaign against the nation he led?

    In recent years, two more former Israeli premiers, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, have echoed their illustrious predecessors’ warnings. Olmert has predicted that “if the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished” while Barak has declared that “if this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

    Are they Israel bashers, too?

    #Israel #Israël

  • On pourrait ré-intitulé l’article “L’Arabe dans l’imaginaire israélien...”
    Ben-Gurion in 1951: Until a Jewish Soldier Is Hanged for Murdering “Arabs, Murder Won’t End
    Israel’s first prime minister argued that only the death penalty would deter Jews from gratuitous killing of Arabs.”

    http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.712125

    “I’m not the justice minister, I’m not the police minister and I don’t know all criminal acts committed here, but as defense minister I know some of the crimes, and I must say the situation is frightening in two areas: 1) acts of murder and 2) acts of rape.” So declared Prime Minister and Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1951 before dropping a bombshell: “People in the [General] Staff tell me, and it’s my view as well, that until a Jewish soldier is hanged for murdering Arabs, these acts of murder won’t end.”

    Ben-Gurion was speaking at a cabinet meeting on abolishing the death penalty. Jewish-Arab tensions were high following the 1948 War of Independence, and there was also a problem with infiltrators: Arab refugees seeking to return to the homes and fields they left during the war. Consequently, Jewish murders of Arabs had proliferated, and some ministers considered the death penalty necessary to solve this problem.

    The cabinet discussion of 66 years ago is particularly interesting in light of this week’s very different cabinet discussion about a soldier who killed a wounded Palestinian terrorist in Hebron after he no longer posed a threat.

    “In general, those who have guns use them,” Ben-Gurion asserted, adding that some Israelis “think Jews are people but Arabs aren’t, so you can do anything to them. And some think it’s a mitzvah to kill Arabs, and that everything the government says against murdering Arabs isn’t serious, that it’s just a pretense that killing Arabs is forbidden, but in fact, it’s a blessing because there will be fewer Arabs here. As long as they think that, the murders won’t stop.”

    Ben-Gurion said he, too, would prefer fewer Arabs, but not at the price of murder. “Abolishing the death penalty will increase bloodshed,” he warned, especially between Jews and Arabs. “Soon, we won’t be able to show our faces to the world. Jews meet an Arab and murder him.”

    The cabinet first discussed abolishing the death penalty – a legacy of the British Mandate – in July 1949, at the urging of Justice Minister Pinhas Rosen. Ben-Gurion was dubious even then. He said he would support the bill, but was almost certain the death penalty would ultimately be reinstated, because abolishing it “will lead to a proliferation of murders.” After intense debate, the cabinet agreed to abolish the death sentence except for treason during a state of emergency.
    The bill then went to the Knesset, where the Constitution Committee held lengthy deliberations. A year later, Rosen presented the cabinet with a problem: Seven prisoners were on death row, but their executions were being delayed until the Knesset made up its mind about the death penalty.

    As the cabinet discussed this issue, Ben-Gurion stunned his colleagues by saying he no longer supported abolishing the death penalty, primarily due to an increase in killings of Arabs by Jewish soldiers.

    Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, who in 1949 had supported abolishing the death penalty on the grounds that “Human society must aspire to a moral level at which it’s forbidden to take human life,” also unexpectedly reversed himself at this meeting.

    “With great regret I’ve become convinced that abolishing the death penalty is inconceivable,” he announced, noting that even countries “which are immeasurably more humane than we are – I’ve spent years there and I live here – maintain the death penalty.”

    The main reason for his U-turn, however, was “the crimes that have happened and are happening week after week, especially in the army,” including some that weren’t public knowledge. Sociopaths might not be deterred by the death penalty, Sharett admitted, “but that Jewish chap who kills two Arabs he met on the road, I’m not willing to say, without trying it first, that he’s a killer by nature and won’t fear the death penalty.”

    Some Jews, Sharett said, think “every Arab is a dog, a wild dog that it’s a mitzvah to kill.” And “to save them from killing human beings, it’s a mitzvah to have the death penalty here. As long as we don’t have it, these murders will continue, and we’ll be held accountable, and it will create moral corruption here.

    “I’ve giving a speech of repentance and confession here,” he continued. “I’ve learned from experience that in this country, the death penalty is necessary ... We made a mistake when we stopped hanging ... If all the crimes committed in this country were reported, terror would grip the public and lynchings would start. I’d shoot a Jewish chap who wanted to shoot an Arab passerby if that were the way to save him.”

    Sharett then described one case in which three Arabs were killed and a fourth saved only because a Jew threw him into a hut, and another case in which two Indian Jews were almost killed by fellow Jews who thought they were Arabs until they shouted “Israel.”

    Minister Dov Yosef backed Ben-Gurion and Sharett. “In principle, I’ve opposed hanging as a penalty all my life, but unfortunately, in this country and today’s situation,” it’s needed, he said.

    Minister Haim-Moshe Shapira concurred, saying he was especially horrified by group killings. He cited one in which “eight soldiers were present at the time of the murder. Surely they didn’t all murder, but they were all present at the time of the crime and not one member of this group stopped the crime.”

    “There have been worse cases,” Ben-Gurion responded.

    Ministers Golda Myerson (later Meir) and David Remez, in contrast, remained opposed to the death penalty, but agreed that much more must be done to prevent crimes against Arabs.
    In the end, the death penalty was abolished – but only three years later, in 1954.

    Gidi Weitz
    Haaretz Contributor

    #Israel #Palestine #Ben-Gurion #Arabs #Jews #Killings #Murder #death #History

  • After capturing Haifa, Ben-Gurion gave order to stop fleeing Arabs from returning
    A letter going to auction reveals that Israel’s first PM tried to thwart British attempts to resettle ’the enemy’ in Haifa. The letter contradicts a testimony by Golda Meir.
    By Ofer Aderet | May 26, 2015
    Haaretz
    http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.658179

    David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, gave an instruction aimed at preventing Haifa’s Arab residents who have fled the city during the 1948 War of Independence from returning to their homes as long as the fighting continued. This was revealed in a letter bearing Ben-Gurion’s signature, which will go on sale next week at the Kedem auction house in Jerusalem.

    The letter was sent by Ben-Gurion on June 2, 1948, a month and a half after Haifa was captured and a few weeks after Israel’s independence was declared. It was addressed to Abba Khoushy, the secretary-general of the Haifa Workers’ Council, and later the city’s mayor.

    “I hear that Mr. Marriot (Cyril Marriot, the British Consul in Haifa) is working to return the Arabs to Haifa. I don’t know how it is his business, but until the war is over we don’t want a return of the enemy. And all institutions should act accordingly” instructed Ben-Gurion.

    The contents of this letter were published in 2002 in a book about Abba Khoushy that was written by Tzadok Eshel ("Abba Khoushy – Man of Haifa"). As with many of the letters that Ben-Gurion wrote to different people and institutions, this letter fell into private hands and is now up for sale. The opening bidding price is $1,800.

    Ben-Gurion’s attitude to the Arab population that fled or was expelled from their homes during the war was not consistent. In Nazareth, he specifically instructed Israeli forces not to expel Arab residents: “Do not remove these residents from Nazareth,” he wrote. In Lod, however, there is one testimony according to which he instructed Yitzhak Rabin and other field commanders to expel the residents.

    In her new biography of Ben-Gurion (‘Ben Gurion – Father of Modern Israel," published in English by Yale University Press) historian Anita Shapira states that Lod is the only case in which there is testimony to an instruction given by Ben-Gurion to deport Arabs. Shapira describes consultations held by field commanders and Ben-Gurion concerning the fate of the city’s Arab inhabitants, after the city’s capture in Operation Danny. “Ben-Gurion listened and did not respond. He had an exceptional capacity to remain silent when he wanted to. Only at the end of the discussion, as the commanders were about to return to the battlefield, he made, according to Rabin’s account, a waving-off gesture with his hand, muttering ’expel them.’"

    David Ben-Gurion and Abba Khoushy (behind him, facing the camera). Photo by Fritz Cohen / GPO

    What about Haifa? Here things get more complicated. Out of 70,000 Arabs who lived in the city when the war broke out, tens of thousands left during the first months. On April 22, 1948, when the city was captured by the Haganah (the Yishuv’s military forces), the Grand Mufti instructed Haifa’s Arab residents to leave rather than accept the terms of surrender. Shabtai Levy, the city’s first Jewish mayor, appealed to local leaders, asking them not to leave. The British tried to do the same, but to no avail. Except for a few thousand, the majority of Haifa’s Arabs left after the city was captured.
    On May 1, after touring the area, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: “An amazing and terrible sight. a dead city… with barns, shops, small and large houses, old and new - with not a living soul except for some wandering cats… how did tens of thousands of people leave behind, in such panic, their houses and wealth?”

    “What caused this flight? Was it just orders from above? It’s inconceivable that extremely wealthy people - and there were extremely wealthy people here, those with knowledge say, the richest in the whole land - would leave all their wealth behind just because someone commanded them to. Was it fear?”

    A boat of Haifa refugees docking in Port Said, Egypt. Photo credit: Getty Images

    Despite the shock felt by Ben-Gurion, the letter that surfaced and is now up for auction indicates that a month later he called for preventing Arab residents from returning to their homes. The letter contradicts the testimony of Golda Meir, who wrote in her book “My Life” that Ben-Gurion asked her to try and prevent the flight of Haifa’s Arabs.

    “Ben-Gurion called me and said: ’I want you to immediately go to Haifa and see to it that the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated appropriately. I also want you to try and persuade the Arabs who are already on the beach to return home. You have to get it into their heads that they have nothing to fear,’ he said. And so, I went immediately. I sat on the beach there and begged them to return home… I pleaded with them until I was exhausted but it didn’t work,” she wrote.

    Meron Aran, one of the directors of the Kedem auction house, believes that Ben-Gurion ultimately preferred to prevent their return out of security considerations, but he also has another theory in mind. “It’s possible that he was already planning to house new immigrants who were already clamoring to get into the new country in the houses abandoned by the city’s Arabs.”

    Haganah men walking in the streets of Haifa after the city was captured. Photo credit: Haganah archive.

  • Newly released documents show a darker side of Ben-Gurion -
    The minutes of a 1962 discussion about education reveals another facet of the racism of Israel’s first prime minister vis-a-vis immigrants from the Arab states.
    By Gidi Weitz | Apr. 24, 2015 | Haaretz
    http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.653134

    Here’s an intriguing historical fact: Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, wanted to prepare a future leadership of people of Mizrahi origin – that is, of North African or Middle Eastern descent. His idea was to cultivate a group of Mizrahi leaders that would govern the country beginning from the end of the 1970s.

    Unfortunately, he came up with this idea for the wrong reasons.

    In July 1962, a few officials met in the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem to discuss matters relating to the Teachers Federation. Quickly, though, the seemingly bland topic generated a stormy argument about Mizrahim (then known as the “Oriental communities”) and Ashkenazim. The question that split the participants was whether children should be educated within a common, uniform school framework, or whether a differential education system should be introduced at different levels. “We have come to the most vital question,” Ben-Gurion stated. To which the head of the Teachers Federation, Shalom Levin (afterward a Labor Alignment MK), responded, “It’s true that this is the most critical question of all,” and proceeded to explain why he preferred uniform education without making distinctions between children.

    “We believe,” said Levin, “that if the children are divided according to their levels of intelligence, communication between the Oriental communities and the children of European origin will cease altogether.”

    According to the minutes of the meeting, which are preserved in the Labor Party archives, Levin told the participants about a physician from Iraq named Dr. Sasson, who was employed by the Clalit HMO.

    “He met me in a furious state and told me that his daughter’s class was divided into two groups of advanced and regular studies,” Levin related. “He thinks his daughter was placed in the regular-studies group because she is of Iraqi origin. This experiment failed in Tel Aviv, but I saw for myself how badly it wounded Dr. Sasson’s heart.”

    Ben-Gurion, who was vehemently opposed to Levin’s philosophy, also cited a rationale relating to skin color. “The danger we face is that the great majority of those children whose parents did not receive an education for generations, will descend to the level of Arab children,” the father of the nation said, revealing his real opinion of both the Oriental and Arab communities.

    He added, “In another 10-15 years they will be the nation, and we will become a Levantine nation, [unless] with a deliberate effort we raise them to [the level of] the customs you follow, as you, became used to them only among European Jewry, at a time when the Jewish nation was European. But it is not. If we [wanted to] make a joint effort to elevate talented people from those communities to [the level of] an elite who will possess values and will be able to manage the nation as we wish it to be managed – that would be impossible according to your interpretation…

    “The problem is what the character of the Oriental communities will be. They will be the majority of the nation, they have six-to-eight children and the Ashkenazim only two children… The question is whether they will lower the nation or [whether] we will succeed by artificial means and with great efforts to elevate them.”

    Ben-Gurion advocated the establishment of an institution that would cultivate the talented members of the Oriental communities, so that they would be able to take over the country’s leadership within less than a generation. “There are differences among them, too,” Ben-Gurion noted, and went on to heap praise on a Moroccan-born Tiberias teenager named Shimon Shetreet, who had won the Bible Quiz for Youth three years earlier, at the age of 13.

    “He is first in Bible,” Ben-Gurion observed. “Not only he is a smart lad – his mother is sharp and his father is a splendid Jew… If we make efforts so that children of a family like this will receive a more excellent education… we will succeed… Not all of them, not the average, [because] an average nation will mean an Arab average – that is the way they were across the generations… In my opinion, this is the nation’s central concern at this time, this will determine the nation’s character.

    “In another 15-20 years they will be the majority,” the prime minister continued. “They will not vote for people of European origin. We’re done with this business of European descent. If we do not make special efforts, the Iraqi father, too, will be angry because his son isn’t among those sent for advanced studies; we need to know that the talented children will receive more intensive education… [The nation] will not be elevated just by knowing Hebrew. All the Arabs can speak Hebrew, the way of speech itself already makes no different, all the children will speak Hebrew, that is not the worry.

    “The question is what kind of Jews they will be. Will they be the Jews we want them to be, or will they be like the Jews of Morocco the way they were? The elite of the Oriental communities should be accorded education, and a special effort needs to be made to that end. If you are talking about average uniform education, then woe betide us. The law of the average will pull and elevate the few Ashkenazim upward. Is that what we want?”

    Levin did not flinch. “It will not succeed,” he stated, “if the main effort is not aimed at their preschoolers… at the children of those communities… The preschool has to take the place of the home, the role that the home plays for Ashkenazi children.”

    “Preschool alone will not elevate them,” Ben-Gurion responded. “They have to go to high school and university.” “

    “Of course, but together with Ashkenazim,” Levin said.

    “Don’t worry about the Ashkenazim,” Ben-Gurion said, adding, “How many Ashkenazim will you have in 20 years? Very few… We have to make an effort so that the future of the nation will be as though Europe [its Jewish population] was not annihilated… What will the country be like if it becomes Levantine? Will American Jewry take pride in us?”

    Ben-Gurion’s prophecy did not come true: The Mizrahim do not constitute an overwhelming majority of Israel’s population. Individuals of European descent and their heirs have continued to hold the reins of government. The prejudices, however, are still with us. On the other hand, Shimon Shetreet, the kid from Tiberias whose singularity Ben-Gurion gloried in as compared to his inferior compatriots, became a professor of law, a Labor Party MK and a cabinet minister in the government of Yitzhak Rabin.

    In 1980, three years after the members of the Oriental communities ousted Labor from power for the first time, and a year before the violent election campaign in which an anti-Mizrahi speech by the entertainer Dudu Topaz played a starring role, an internal forum of the Labor Party met to discuss the party’s alienation from the Mizrahim.

    Shetreet told his fellow members at that time: “The negative image, which stuck with no justification to the communities that immigrated from the countries of the East, was in large measure created by the dominant group. Anyone who thinks that it started in the 1950s is wrong. I invite you to [examine] the historical files from the beginning of the century, to see the list of wages, which ranked the workers in the following order: Hebrew worker, Yemenite [Jewish] worker, Arab worker… Society here talks about people who are ‘Moroccan but nice,’ or someone who ‘was born in Iraq, but never mind.’”

    “‘Never mind’ is also said about the Yekkes [German-speaking Jews],” someone interjected. Shimon Peres, Ben-Gurion’s disciple, quipped, “Does anyone want the floor in the name of the Yekkes?”

    “People adopt the public image that others hold of them,” Shetreet continued. “When they’re asked where they were born, they reply apologetically, ‘I was born in Morocco.’ So what?”

    Thirty-five years later, along came artist Yair Garbuz and his remark during last month’s election campaign about how “amulet-kissers, idol-worshipers and people who prostrate themselves at the graves of saints” are controlling Israel.

  • Is Israel ready for the new Arab leader Ayman Odeh? - Opinion - Israel News | Haaretz
    http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.649978

    The rise of Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List of Arab parties – which became the third-largest faction in the Knesset when it garnered 13 seats in this month’s elections – presents a unique opportunity to improve Jewish-Arab relations in Israel.

    This week, Odeh led a four-day march by Bedouin of the Negev and their supporters to the Jerusalem residence of President Reuven Rivlin. In the president’s absence (he was attending the funeral of the first prime minister of Singapore) Odeh presented an alternative plan for Bedouin resettlement in the Negev to Mrs. Rivlin.

    In making the issue of unrecognized Bedouin villages his first priority since the elections, Odeh’s message was not just that he cares about Bedouin children who have no plumbing or electricity, but that under his leadership Arab Knesset members will put social issues and the needs of their constituents at the top of their agenda, rather than waving the flag of Palestinian statehood or anti-Zionist posturing. In choosing an issue involving competing land claims, Odeh also signaled that he is not afraid to tackle politically loaded subjects.

    But the transformation Odeh seeks to catalyze goes further than reprioritizing. Odeh wants genuine engagement with and by Israel’s Arab citizens in determining the course of this country and its policies. When Odeh says he will fight for equality for immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union as well as for Israel’s Palestinian citizens, and that he is willing to cross any party lines to find allies for this cause, he is arguing that a Knesset member is responsible for all Israelis, not just his ethnic camp. Implied in this discourse is a critique not only of Jewish hegemony in the Knesset, but of the longstanding practices of Arab Knesset members.

    Odeh appears to be counting on broad – if dormant – Jewish support for equality for Israel’s Arab citizens. He will have to navigate between Palestinian nationalists in Israel’s Arab communities and Jewish nationalist charges – whether stated overtly or implied – that Israel’s Arabs are a Fifth Column.

    But, like author and screenwriter Sayed Kashua, Odeh seems singularly attuned to the complexities of both Arab and Jewish identity in Israel; he gets it. Leading the Bedouin march in his baseball cap and middle-aged paunch, Odeh looked like nothing so much as a typical (Jewish) Israeli father out on a nature hike. He comes across the small screen as thoughtful and affable.

    In the Knesset, Odeh will have to overcome a history of anti-Israel grandstanding that has become a shortcut to re-election for Arab parliamentarians. Among the public, he will have to overcome the low expectations Arab voters have of their representatives’ ability to deliver tangible benefits and to transform the perceptions among many Jewish Israelis of his faction, shaped by the reputations of some of his Joint List partners. Ahmed Tibi (United Arab List-Ta’al), for example, is an effective parliamentarian, but one that is identified with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. Haneen Zoabi of the separatist Balad party, who famously took part in the Mavi Marmara flotilla to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza in an act some here consider treasonous, seems committed to outraging Jewish sensibilities.

    Jewish parliamentarians will also have to play a role, by permitting progress in their ties with their Arab counterparts. They will have to set aside the catcalls and race-baiting (means they use to rally the right-wing base), and recognize that Odeh is offering something new: genuine discourse without demagoguery. Honest engagement and discussion about the future of Jewish and Arab Israelis would benefit both populations.

    The hopes of Israel’s Arab voters were raised in this election, and while there was never an expectation that the Joint List would be a coalition partner, or even act as a cohesive unit after the election, there were expectations that voting might produce some concrete change for our Arab citizens. If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really wants to apologize for his Election Day anti-Arab incitement, he can engage Odeh and his colleagues in genuine policy discourse, addressing social services for sure, but also issues of state and identity.

    If our new government fails to seize this unique opportunity, the confidence of Israel’s Arab citizens in our democracy will be eroded and Jewish-Arab relations will sour.

    Don Futterman is the program director for Israel of the Moriah Fund, a private American Foundation working to strengthen civil society in Israel. He can be heard weekly on TLV1’s The Promised Podcast.

  • The story of one of the Cold War’s greatest unsolved mysteries — and the new effort to solve it - The Washington Post
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/12/30/the-u-n-wants-a-new-investigation-into-one-of-the-cold-wars-greatest

    Frustrated by the U.N.’s inability to deal with the Belgian-backed forces, Congo’s first prime minister, the charismatic socialist and African nationalist Patrice #Lumumba, appealed to Moscow for aid. He was soon ousted by forces loyal to Congolese army chief Joseph #Mobutu, whom, it later emerged, was the beneficiary of what was then one of the CIA’s most lavishly funded support operations. Lumumba was murdered in 1961 while in the custody of Katangese troops.

    #Hammarskjold, who was no friend of Lumumba, still cared deeply about backing Africa’s newly decolonized states. This was a time when the West looked warily at the emerging “third world” of independent nations, many of which were once subservient colonies but now, at least in the Western imagination, risked becoming Soviet proxies. African countries still ruled by white-supremacist governments supported Katanga’s breakaway — seeing it as a bulwark against African nationalism — but Hammarskjold sought a unified #Congo.

    The flight he took to Ndola to meet with Katangese representatives left under the cover of darkness to avoid being tracked or intercepted by Katanga’s air force. As the report of the Hammarskjold Commission details, there are still many questions over what happened aboard the flight and during its attempted descent. The crash site was sealed off and likely tampered with by North Rhodesian authorities before its discovery was even announced. Some investigators who have examined the case in recent decades are now convinced that the plane was shot down by a second aircraft, piloted possibly by a Belgian mercenary.

    One of the most intriguing revelations discussed by the 2013 commission is the testimony of Charles Southall, an American official with the National Security Agency then stationed at a listening post in Cyprus. Southall, now retired, told the commission that a few hours before Hammarskjold’s death, he received a communique from a supervisor telling him “something interesting is going to happen.” Upon arriving at the U.S. facility, he heard over loudspeaker what seemed to be the voice of a mercenary announcing his attack on a transport plane.

    Southall told the Wall Street Journal that the intercept was overheard through CIA, not NSA, circuit. “The #CIA refused to confirm or deny the existence of any intercept following a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request by The Journal. The agency upheld its decision after The Journal appealed it,” the Journal reports.

    Following the General Assembly’s vote this week, though, the Obama administration may be obliged to declassify relevant documents.

    For the Congolese people, Hammarskjold’s death was a footnote to decades of war and misery. While #Katanga ended its secession in 1963 (and its leader served briefly as Congolese prime minister), pro-Lumumba forces launched a rebellion. To quash it, white mercenaries and Western-backed forces rushed in. As an article in Foreign Affairs details, the United States, mostly through the CIA, spent tens of millions of dollars backing pro-Western figures in the Congo. It paid off massive bribes to other factions and even supplied “an instant airforce,” piloted by Cuban exiles:

    Washington was joining a particularly bloody conflict. When they seized rebel-held areas, the white mercenaries and government forces indiscriminately slaughtered the rebels and civilians they found there. Although there was no systematic counting of the casualties, it is estimated that at least 100,000 Congolese perished during this phase of the war.

    By 1965, Mobutu, with American support, was in full control. He would go on to become one of the continent’s most heinous tyrants, an “African #Caligula.” The legacy of his rule, and decades of fractious politics and weak governance, has left Congo a mess of warring militias and a society traumatized by mass violence.

    Hammarskjold may not have prevented that, but a new investigation into his death will shine light on a very dark corner of the Cold War’s history.

    La #guerre_froide a bon dos quand même.

  • #Iraqi_parliament elects #Kurdish politician president
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/iraqi-parliament-elects-kurdish-politician-president

    Iraq’s parliament on Thursday elected veteran Kurdish politician Fuad Masum as federal president, a move that paves the way for the much-delayed formation of a new government. Parliament Speaker Salim al-Juburi announced that Masum, who was born in 1938 and became the first prime minister of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan more than two decades ago, had won the most votes. (AFP)

    #Iraq

  • #Ariel_Sharon, the “Butcher of Beirut,” is dead
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/former-israeli-pm-ariel-sharon-85-dies

    This fil photo shows then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon waving to the audience as he arrives to participate in a memorial ceremony for #Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, in Sde Boker in the Negev desert on December 7, 2005. (Photo: AFP - Menahem Kahana)

    Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whose legacy includes the killing of tens of thousands of Arabs over his six-decade military and political career, is dead. He took his final breath on Saturday at the age of 85 after lying comatose for eight years following a stroke on 4 January 2006. His death marks the end of a bullish Israeli leader who commanded the respect of his subordinates, amassed loyal partisans, and struck fear in the hearts of his enemies. Natural Born Killer (...)

    #Top_News

  • Robin Lustig : Ironies de l’histoire : la dernière fois qu’un Premier ministre a été défait sur une motion de guerre, c’était en 1782, lorsque les députés ont voté pour arrêter de combattre dans la guerre d’indépendance américaine.
    https://twitter.com/robinlustig/status/373224191526313985

    Ironies of history: last time a UK PM was defeated on a war motion was 1782, when MPs voted to stop fighting American war of independence.

  • “The old will die and the young will forget” - Did Ben-Gurion say it?
    http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/old-will-die-and-young-will-forget-did-ben-gurion-say-it

    You’ve likely seen or heard the famous words attributed to Israel’s first prime minister.

    But while “the old will die and the young will forget” is likely an accurate summary of David Ben-Gurion’s hope that the Palestinian refugees would disappear, it is almost certainly not his wording.

    Yet research by The Electronic Intifada has also shown that Ben-Gurion did once write to his son: “We must expel Arabs and take their place.”

    Pro-Israel propaganda group CAMERA last year challenged the validity of this second quotation as part of a campaign against the Journal of Palestine Studies and anti-Zionist academic Ilan Pappe.

    Le négationnisme sioniste, encore une fois.

  • Britain’s involvement in assassination of Congo’s Lumumba confirmed - World Socialist Web Site

    http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/18/lumu-a18.html

    A senior British politician has revealed Britain’s involvement in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first prime minister.

    The leader of the Congolese independence struggle from Belgium was brutally murdered just seven months after taking office on the direct orders of the US and Belgium. Britain, whose involvement had long been suspected, also had a hand in it.

    #afrique #lumumba #royaume-uni #royaume-unafrique