Resisting 60 years of apartheid
Breaking the crippling siege by the Israeli Occupational Forces (IOF) on Gaza, the Viva Palestina aid convoy entered Gaza via the Rafah Crossing.
As George Galloway put it, “we had to walk through the Rafah crossing and leave the brand new vehicles we bought with our own money, in Egypt, behind!”
Ehud Olmert officially tenders his resignation as Prime Minister of Israel and Tzipi Livni is expected to take his place. The “Butcher of Lebanon” is no more.
Olmert told his Cabinet yesterday morning that he would resign and followed that with a visit to the official Jerusalem residence of President Shimon Peres — both formalities in a process that began in late July, when Olmert caved under the pressure of multiple corruption probes and announced he would step down after the Kadima primary election.
“This decision was not easy, it was not simple, and it was not taken in an offhanded way,” Olmert said before the start of yesterday’s Cabinet meeting. He pledged to help Livni, a longtime rival, form a new government.
“Prime Minister Ehud Olmert presented to me this evening his resignation as head of the government,” Peres said after the two met. Peres thanked him for his service. Olmert did not talk to reporters.
An article in a leading Norwegian newspaper last weekend lambasted Israel and Judaism and said Israel has lost its right to exist in its present form. Entitled “God’s chosen people,” the article by author Jostein Gaarder in Aftenposten is raising a storm in Norway. Gaarder, author of the book “Sophie’s World,” links the Israel Defense Forces’ acts in Lebanon to Jewish history and foresees the coming dismantling of the state as it exists today, with the Jews becoming refugees.
In an interview with Haaretz, Gaarder said Thursday that he was misunderstood. “As John Kennedy declared in Germany ‘I am a Berliner’ I say now ‘I am a Jew,’” he said.
The article compares Israel’s government, the Afghan Taliban regime and South African apartheid, and states, “We no longer recognize the State of Israel” and “the State of Israel in its current form is history. We call child murderers ‘child murderers,’ and will never accept that they have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages,” Gaarder writes.
“Shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hezbollah or the State of Israel!”
Continue reading ‘“Israel has lost the right to exist”, Norwegian article’
A reading in the history could be useful for the future.
Mohamed S. Kamel
Most of us remember 1948’s catastrophe, The Nakbah; the days when almost 900,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes and become refugees, the worst refugee crisis in history. Citizens, that should have been refugees for a few days ended up being so for 60 years and amount to more than 4 millions.
But this Nakbah did not start in 1948 it started long before; and it is well known to many of us but not to all.
The Nakbah really started in 1825, in Arrarat, when Mordechai Emanuel Noah[i] purchased the Grand Island, near Buffalo New York, as a homeland for demoralized Jews.
The Nakbah was renewed in 1890, with the scandal known as “The Dreyfus Affair” [ii]. That political scandal, with anti-Semitic overtones, is what divided France from the 1890s to the early 1900s. It involved the wrongful conviction for treason, in 1894, and the degradation and imprisonment on Devil’s Island, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young and promising French artillery officer who was in advanced training with the Army’s General Staff.