[A-List] Fwd: [R-G] The pharaoh of Jerusalem

Thu Sep 16 08:16:16 MDT 2010

I loved it because it'so large.Look at the first sentence.
Suzanne is wonderful in  her details,in things in between  but also in texts like this--when she is large,so huge like a brilliant philosopher
of our time and more.
Nadja
----------------------------------------
> Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:30:37 +0200
> From: suzannedk at gmail.com
> To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu
> Subject: [A-List] Fwd: [R-G] The pharaoh of Jerusalem
>
> The time of hate has been constructed by us, whose passivity to hate's
> needs are the building blocks of mass inhumanity as a Spector Sport,
> true also in the Middle Ages. The dissent distroyed by
> dictatorships contains the wealth of human reality. Choice for it's
> expression is not an optiion. That is what The European Union
> International Human Rights Laws state in structured, enforcable form.
> These are the Laws that, by allowing Israel and the U.S to continue
> the genocide of Pakistan, are all being destroyed.
>
> Funny thing though, once those laws are gone, neither do the rulers of
> such systems have any rights but with unusable weapons. Once they use
> them, and they do and have, they damn themselves in the eyes of
> everyone, necessitating even more atrocities. Unsustainable? The
> Crusades can give one answer. Dissent gives others. Suzanne
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Steven Robinson 
> Date: Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 7:19 AM
> Subject: [R-G] The pharaoh of Jerusalem
> To: Suzanne de Kuyper 
> Cc: Jeffrey 
>
>
> The pharaoh of Jerusalem
>
> by Philip Weiss
> Mondoweiss
> September 15, 2010
>
> In the last two days two guides have taken me through the geography of the
> Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, and I'm staggered. I wonder why this
> monstrous structure is not better known, even to people like me, who study
> the conflict. I wonder how it is that American reporters are not describing
> the racist devouring of Jerusalem every day in our newspapers and showing it
> every night on our television news. I wonder why our politicians, or our
> liberal Democratic ones anyway, are not holding angry press conferences in
> front of the repulsive separation wall as it lunges to separate a
> Palestinian village from virtually all its connections to the outside world,
> so as to privilege the lifestyle, and short commute, of Jews in the new
> development on the hilltop above them.
>
> I wonder why Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who calls for boycotting the "pharaoh" of
> BP as a response to the destruction in the Gulf, cannot see the Pharaoh's
> works right here and call for boycott. I wonder how it is that Ethan Bronner
> of the New York Times, who lives in West Jerusalem, could give lectures back
> home about covering the story and lament the (remote) possibility of
> Palestinians moving back into Arab houses in West Jerusalem when the only
> real movement and dispossession, eastward, is in front of his eyes; and
> millions of Palestinian ambitions are blighted by lack of freedom of
> movement and constant insults to their human rights. And believe me, if a
> fraction of what the Palestinians are experiencing were happening to Jews,
> it is all we would hear about.
>
> But let me try to be a little more reportorial.
>
> What I'm seeing is the result of 40 years of Jewish colonization of one of
> the jewels of world civilization. During the 43-year occupation, the
> Israelis have essentially constructed a system of spears radiating out from
> Jewish West Jerusalem into Palestinian East Jerusalem, and on into the West
> Bank. These new Jewish neighborhoods are designed to solidify Israeli
> control over greater Jerusalem in the event of any possible division of the
> place in a two-state solution, but more important, to make Jerusalem into a
> Jewish city by choking off the Palestinian life of this international city.
>
> And yes, I imagine, there is a security component to the thinking too. They
> want to kill us, we have to keep them behind fences.
>
> The choking-off is what I saw in my tours. As this colonization progresses,
> it takes more and more village land around the city and throws out more
> infrastructure to serve the colonists, special roads and high barbed wire
> fences and walls to protect the drivers and their communities. The
> infrastructure isolates more and more Palestinians from one another. You can
> tell Palestinian villages from the black water vessels dotting the
> rooftops-because their water is shut off for days at a time. So when Jeffrey
> Goldberg, pushing the Israeli side in the U.S., says that Gilo is just a
> neighborhood in Jerusalem, well it is actually a white stucco
> fortress/colony built on the outskirts of southern Jerusalem on Palestinian
> village land, and now requiring more of that land so as to expand, with
> plans to build a wall right through the neighboring village to protect the
> colonists from the farmers in the valley. And again, all of this on land
> that international law says is Palestine's.
>
> Homes are routinely demolished in that village facing Gilo, so as not to
> prevent the colony's growth; and as you travel through Greater East
> Jerusalem you often see the rubble of Palestinian buildings, Palestinians
> who dared to try and develop their communities. The Israeli authorities come
> in and destroy the houses or businesses. Even as the Israelis expand a
> colony nearby. Rubble and palaces. In a word, systemic racism.
>
> Maybe the most pitiable sight I saw yesterday, inside the West Bank but
> close to the north Jerusalem colonies of Ramot and Ramat Shlomo, is the
> hilltop tomb of the prophet Samuel, which is worshiped by Jews and Muslims.
> The tomb is both a mosque with a minaret and a Jewish place of worship. Well
> when we visited, busloads of Jewish schoolchildren were arriving and Israeli
> soldiers were in the tomb davening and Hasidic boys were descending, too. A
> moving sight. We must have seen 150 religious Israelis.
>
> And meantime the Islamic portion of the tomb is dead. The door is chained,
> pigeons fly into the outer rooms, the Palestinian who runs a store there
> told us that the authorities had shut down the minaret. There are no
> Palestinian worshipers.
>
> Alongside the tomb is a Palestinian village in the West Bank, but the
> occupation has now cut this village off from the rest of Palestinian life in
> the West Bank. The school serving the village-that is the photograph at the
> top of this post-is a one-room building. At this point in our travels, my
> wife walked away for a few minutes so that our Palestinian friend who lives
> under these conditions all the time would not see her feelings.
>
> And this is a National Park. An Israeli National Park for the tomb of
> Samuel, inside Palestinian territory! Do you think the Israelis are ever
> going to part with this colony? Of course not. We are in the West Bank, the
> home of the Palestinian state, and these Jews will be here forever.
>
> Now let me remind you that the Israeli settlement nearby, Ramat Shlomo, is
> the one that pissed off Joe Biden in the spring, when he blew up at
> Netanyahu over the latest construction orders. Biden got really angry. He
> said you're endangering American lives. There was a showdown, and in the end
> what happened, Obama swallowed it.
>
> Still, you can see why Biden was pissed off. This situation is monstrous and
> racist. If our politicians were not hogtied by the Israel lobby, they would
> be bringing reporters with them to the tomb of Samuel and saying, Is this
> right? This is happening with our tax dollars? They are making a National
> Park inside Palestinian territory and choking off all Palestinian access to
> the place! Are you crazy?
>
> Our politicians would declare that the road to peace in Jerusalem doesn't
> lead through Baghdad or Tehran-- no the road is right here in Jerusalem, and
> it is blocked by Israeli bulldozers.
>
> Now I mentioned a minute ago that my wife hid her feelings from our
> Palestinian friend, and I want to unpack this somewhat. The Palestinians
> live with this all the time. They have the boot stuffed down their throat at
> every turn. Even the educated professionals, their horizons are blocked off,
> their aspirations. Academics can't travel, even into Jerusalem; and when I
> say, Oh they can't sustain this, my friend responds, They have sustained it
> as long as I can remember. You cannot normalize this oppressive situation.
> The polticians talk about all the businesses thriving. Well the Palestinian
> people are always trying. The Palestinians are not defeatable, and they are
> always struggling for this and that. You see beautiful restaurants inside
> the occupation, lovely hotels, good book stories. But it is not a
> flourishing life. It is not the life that these people would make for
> themselves if they had any real freedom. If they were able to compete and
> cooperate as equals with the Israelis, you would see something entirely
> different.
>
> So they live with this daily humiliation and they stuff their souls down
> inside their chest somewhere and one day they bring in friends from the
> United States and show them around, and a visitor is so overwhelmed by the
> oppression that she starts crying and has to walk away. Well you understand
> that it is a little rude to show your friend just how pitiable life here
> seems to us.
>
> I don't know how they live with this, my wife said later, and of course you
> ask that question. The other day we met a man who works in Sheikh Jarrah,
> right up from the house evictions that happened last winter, a funny
> Palestinian, my wife and he were joking around a lot, when I said to him,
> "Are they still living in the tent down there?" I meant the Palestinians who
> had been thrown out of their houses in Sheikh Jarrah and were living in a
> tent in the road.
>
> The man's smile disappeared. "I don't know."
>
>
> "Well it's just a block away."
>
> "I've never been there. It would make me sick. And then I would have to walk
> away and there would be nothing I could do about it. So I've never seen it."
>
> Imagine feeling so helpless, and feeling that powerless over your own fate
> and the life of your society that you avoid knowledge of the fierce
> conditions. Jews were like this during the advance of anti-Semitism in
> eastern European cities, they tried to ignore it.
>
> And that's why my wife walked away, she didn't want to seem a complete
> tourist of someone else's suffering.
>
> My rage at this situation is directed at my own community, American Jews,
> who have allowed this to develop. I can think of only a few responses to
> Jerusalem that I can honor. Earlier this year Michael Ratner of the Center
> for Constitutional Rights visited Jerusalem and came back and gave speeches
> about the colonization and said the two-state solution is finished. Jeff
> Halper came to the States more recently and described the endless process of
> house demolition. And Charney Bromberg came back and told a Columbia
> University audience that this situation reminds him of apartheid.
>
> These are exceptional statements. Liberal Zionists generally can't face this
> reality; and our politicians are mute and even the fairly-good piece that
> Isabel Kershner did on the colonization of East Jerusalem a couple of months
> back in the Times didn't convey the monstrous reality. No, liberal Zionsts
> are are concerned with preserving Israel against the "demographic threat"--
> a possible Palestinian majority. When you see what Jewish control has meant
> for non-Jewish residents of Jerusalem, that seems a particularly filthy
> euphemism.
>
>
> http://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/the-pharaoh-of-jerusalem.html
>
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