Japan is the only country in the world ever to have experienced atomic attack – twice – in August 1945, two aerial bombing raids, one at Hiroshima and one at Nagasaki, that were intended to force Japan into unconditional surrender in World War Two.
Japan is now the second country in the world to have a disaster in its own nuclear power plants. The first, at Chernobyl on 26 April 1986, was not only a major disaster in which men made heroic efforts to entomb the structure in concrete to limit the catastrophe, with the full knowledge that they would die an agonizing death weeks later from radiation poisoning. Chernobyl was one of the precipitating factors that brought about the end of the Soviet Union (the fall of the Berlin Wall was three years later, in 1989) — after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was obliged to throw off a policy of state secrecy and release information about the scope of the danger to life on earth, which to his credit he ultimately did, though there was a period of confusion and delay.
Now, in the wake of an earthquake and devastating tsunami wave just over one month ago (on 11 March) — and several subsequent strong aftershocks — the full scale of the damage to its four nuclear power generators at Fukushima is becoming clear.
Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard (Yesh Din) told the Turkel Commission at a hearing in Jerusalem today that “conducting an investigation is not tantamount to punishment”.
The Turkel Commission is investigating the “maritime incident” of 31 May 2010, when Israeli Naval commandos intercepted Freedom Flotilla heading to the Gaza Strip and boarded the largest ship in the flotilla, the Mavi Marmara, killing eight men (one a 19-year-old Turkish-American high school student) in the process.
Sfard, who is among other things the legal adviser for Yesh Din, advised the Turkel Commission that Israel must establish an extra-military mechanism to verify if the IDF + its advisers follow international law.
It was the second time, in months of intermittant hearings, that Israeli human rights organizations have addressed the panel.
The Turkel Commission was expected to conclude its work in November 2010, but it only issued the first part of its report on 23 January, which can be read online here.
Arguments made in Sfard’s testimony to the Turkel Commission, according to an English-language summary, state that:
“Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada, a Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (MPCID) investigation is not opened in every case in which a Palestinian civilian is injured during military operations in the occupied territories, but rather is permitted to conduct a ‘command inquiry’ after which a decision will be made regarding whether to open an investigation.
Yesh Din’s Position is that:
1. A command inquiry, as the name suggests, is intended to draw operational lessons and is not a tool designed to collect evidence or to establish personal responsibility. Those who conduct the inquiry are not investigators but rather commanders and they do not possess appropriate training; what is said in the course of the inquiry is not admissible in court; the inquiry is confidential; and
for the most part accounts by those other than soldiers and officers are not heard.
2. The inquiry presents a significant and grave obstacle to the ability to conduct effective criminal investigations of shooting incidents in which Palestinian civilians have been injured. This is a violation of the obligation to investigate”.
In these days of deep morning — and there is so much to mourn here these days — here are two interviews with Juliano Mer Khamis, assassinated last Tuesday in Jenin refugee camp, buried last Thursday on a hilltop plateau in the Israeli Galilee, next to his mother in Ramot Menashe.
The first was done in the U.S by the Detroit-based Mideast Broadcast Network, MBN [Youtube posting caption: Jenin Freedom Theater director Juliano Mer-Khamis interviewed by Detroit Palestinian activist, Hasan Newash on MBN-TV – Mideast Broadcasting Network – April 4, 2005] – h/t and thanks to @imuthaffar via Twitter:
It’s interesting — you here how much he sounds like an Israeli — from his way of speaking English, the deeper and full baritone pitch of his voice, to many of his expressions, his ways of thinking.
As a Palestinian he sounds like … a Palestinian from here, from inside, who didn’t really know what it was like to be a a refugee living in very precarious and dangerous exile, who has no idea of the trauma experienced by (and also created by) the PLO in its years “outside”. “At least 150,000 Palestinians were dropped on us from Tunis … they were busy making money…”
Not totally fair — he blames these people for not preparing the Palestinians for the Israeli crack-down and reinvasion of Palestinian cities after the outbreak of the second Intifada (with snipers firing with rifles whose range could not reach the target from the edge of Bethlehem to the Israeli settlement of Gilo, and with Palestinian suicide-bombing attacks in Israeli cities)… The Tunis crowd believed that the Oslo Accords would succeed, would have to succeed, that there was no other choice — though they didn’t argue this very well. And no one ever predicted what was to follow… Though it is true that no preparations were made for such an eventuality.
This photo, of the remains of the Palestinian village of Lifta on the approach to Jerusalem from the Tel Aviv highway, was taken by the Los Angeles Times’ correspondent Ed Sanders, to illustrate his article, published here, about a controversial Israeli plan to build Israeli housing in what he called “the last intact [though vacant] pre-1948 Palestinian village in Israel. The Israelis, who call the area Mei Naftoah, want to put apartments there, but Palestinians want it preserved as an open-air museum”.
From Machsom Watch, photo taken by Yehudit Levin, farmers after a day’ work, bringing back chamomile from their fields, waiting to be inspected by Israeli soldiers at the Israeli military checkpoint at Habla, in the West Bank:
Why was Juliano Mer Khamis angry (as the Israeli press has apparently reported)?
He had good reasons to be.
A good insight into his reasons can be found in these excepts from a just-published interview [which was made in the USA in 2006] with the late Juliano Mer-Khamis, by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, which was published here in The Electronic Intifada on 5 April 2011:
From the introduction to the interview: “Julian had tried to get his film Arna’s Children, which documents his mother’s extraordinary transformation from a young settler in 1948 to a drama teacher in the Jenin refugee camp, shown widely. As he discusses in the previously unpublished interview which follows, the film was met with little success the first time. In 2006, he returned as indefatigably as ever, and I met him for the first time at a screening of his film at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
…
Though Arna’s Children is a documentary, the time markers of the film relegate it closer to a work of fiction. Like other works of art centered on the loss of historic Palestine, most notably the characters who return to their pre-1948 homes in Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa, Juliano constructed a narrative that is almost impossible to recreate or imagine from any other point of view.
In one shot of the film, the sequencing of events binds a shot of Juliano alongside his mother’s wrapped body at a hospital [n.b. – she died in 1995] with a subsequent shot of the Israeli army bulldozing Arna’s Stone Theatre in April 2002. The Stone Theatre was part of Arna’s larger cultural project, Care and Learning, founded to allow the children of Jenin — faced with a
crushing and seemingly inescapable military occupation — a creative outlet for their chronic trauma. The theater was leveled by the Israeli incursion, which Juliano captured on film. The historical date of both these events align almost miraculously, but the
montages of destruction — his mother’s corpse and the ruins of the beloved theatre — are superimposed as mutually ravaged bodies.
I interviewed Juliano at Boston’s South Station on 4 April 2006 just before he caught a train to the New York screening — exactly five years before he was killed just outside the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, the locus of his life’s most notable work.
… Maryam Monalist Gharavi: How long was Arna’s Children banned in Israel?
Juliano Mer-Khamis: It was not really banned. It was silenced. Journalists who wanted to write about the film could not get through the editorial decisions. There were two TV programs made about the film and cancelled at the last moment. We could not find a distributor in Israel for the film or cinemas to screen it…
… MMG: In the scene of your mother’s body at the mortuary, you comment somewhat half-heartedly that the only place that would bury her was the kibbutz. What happened after she died?
JMK: My mother could not be buried because she refused to be buried in a religious ceremony or funeral. Israel is not a democracy; it’s a theocracy. The religion is not separated from the state so all issues concerning the privacy of life — marriage, burial and many other aspects — are controlled by the religious authorities, so you cannot be buried in a civilian funeral. The only way to do it is buy a piece of land in some kibbutzim, which refused to sell us a piece of land because of the politics of my mother. It’s not a very popular thing in a civilian, non-religious way. And then I had to take the coffin home. And it stayed in my house for three days and I could not find a place to bury her. So I announced in a press conference that she was going to be buried in the garden of my house. There was a big scandal, police came, a lot of TV and media [came], violent warnings were issued against me. There were big demonstrations around the house, till I got a phone call from friends from a kibbutz, Ramot Menashe, who are from the left side of the map, and they came from Argentina. Nice Zionist Israelis, maybe post-Zionist. They offered a piece of land there. And the funny thing is that while we were looking for a place to bury my mother, there were discussions in Jenin to offer me to bring her for burial there, in the shahid’s [martyr’s] graveyard. They told me there was one Fatah leader, who was humorously saying, “Well, guys, look, it’s an honor to have Arna with us here, a great honor, the only thing is maybe in about fifty years’ time some Jewish archaeologists will come here and say there are some Jewish bones here and they’re going to confiscate the land of Jenin.” [Laughs] They do it. Even if they find the Jewish bones of a dog, they take the place. That’s the place they do it. Every place they confiscate they find the bones of a Jew and that’s how they justify the ownership of the land, by finding bones.
… Continue reading Insights from the past – why was Juliano Mer Khamis angry?
Juliano Mer Khamis was buried today in Kibbutz Ramot Menashe, in sudden sunshine after days of rain, on a plateau at the top of a hill in the Galilee region of Israel, two days after he was assassinated by one or more masked gunmen in front of the Freedom Theatre he directed and operated in the Jenin Refugee Camp.
The funeral was completely secular — there was no religious figure officiating, there were no religious symbols or references, and there were no prayers — but it was in a Jewish cemetery, where Juliano was buried near his mother, Arna (Orna) Mer. who was described in an article published on Israel’s YNet website tonight as a “relentless idealist”.
His father, a Christian Arab, Saliba Khamis — described in the same article as an “intellectual” – is buried in a cemetery in Haifa.
The YNet article, posted here, noted that “Nothing was ever conventional in the lives of the Mer-Khamis brothers, from their dual identity to their unique names”.
Both parents were activists in the communist party, which is the only political grouping in Israel to have both Jewish and Arab members.
Juliano once said in an interview — and this has been widely quoted since his assassination — that he was “100 percent Jewish, and 100 percent Palestinian”.
In today’s funeral, Israeli film director Udi Aloni, who had agreed to work with Juliano in the Freedom Theatre, remembered Juliano’s words: “I am from here, and I am who I am”.
Arna founded the Freedom Theater in Jenin Refugee Camp in 1988 during the first Palestinian Intifada. [CORR: she apparently called her theater the Stone Theatre.] It was destroyed in the second Palestinian Intifada, during the 2002 Israeli invasion of the Jenin Refugee Camp to eradicate suicide bomb cells.
Juliano, who had previously worked with his mother, re-built it as the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin Refugee Camp in 2006. Juliano made former Aqsa Brigades fighter Zakaria Zubeidi (a former theater student of Arna’s) the Freedom Theatre’s co-director, apparently in part because of the political protection Zubeidi could provide in a tense and tumultuous environment.
Freedom. The Freedom Theatre — in the Jenin Refugee Camp, the northern West Bank.
Before he was gunned down today in Jenin outside his Freedom Theatre — shot by five bullets, in what was described as a professional assassination — Nazareth-born producer and actor Juliano Mar Khamis lived for most of the last decade in the Jenin Refugee Camp.
[Who else has been assassinated by five bullets? Naim Khader, for example, the former PLO representative to the European Commission in Brussels, shot down outside his house one morning in the spring of 1981. Five bullets, in those days, was iconic… of a whole list of Palestinian assassinations, blamed depending on politics alternatively or simultaneously on renegade Palestinian mercenary Abu Nidal, or on the Israeli Mossad, for which no one has ever been brought to justice.]
Juliano was the founder and Director of the Freedom Theatre, alongside amnestied former Al-Aqsa brigades Zakaria Zubeidi (who eapparently joined the Freedom Theatre in order to protect it).
Juliano explained his goals in this video (h/t to a Tweet from @RachShabi):
“This place never had a theater … Don’t let this view deceive you. We are sitting in the midst of the most attacked and poor refugee camp in Palestine, the refugee camp of Jenin”…
“We are talking about almost 3,000 children under the age of 15 suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It means they pee in their pants when they’re 11, it means they cannot concentrate, they cannot deal with each other without violence … This camp, and look around, is sieged by electric fence all around it, people cannot go out, or in, unless they have a permit. We have two gates, like a big prison, and we are in the midst, trying to serve this population, trying to bring some normality, some sanity, to some people here” …
UPDATE: In a longer version of the film, posted by Yusef Munayyer here. Juliano says “Our duty, as artists, is to rebuild this destruction”.
The film he did about his mother’s work with children in Jenin, Arna’s Children — part of which showed vintage footage of young children in Jenin describing the destruction of their homes, and then participating in theater workshops, before reporting on their later militancy and deaths during the second Intifada — is posted on Youtube here, or in nine parts, starting here.
NOTE: Juliano’s mother, Arna [Orna] Mer, is a Jewish woman born in Rosh Pina now in Israel’s Galilee, who apparently fought in the Palmach for Israel’s independence, then married a Palestinian Christian from Nazareth, Juliano’s father. [They were both communists, Avner Cohen noted in a post on Facebook.] In 1988, during the first Palestinian Intifada, she moved to Jenin (not far from Nazareth, though the “border” is now very difficult to cross) to set up a theater company and work with traumatized Palestinian children. Her theatre was destroyed during the second Palestinian Intifada that broke out in late September 2000. The IDF invaded Jenin Refugee Camp in 2002, looking for suicide bombers. Arna died of cancer. Julian — who fulfilled his obligatory Israeli military service and served with the IDF paratroopers — followed in his mother’s footsteps, moving to the Jenin Refugee Camp during the second Intifada, though he apparently also kept a home base in the Israeli city of Haifa, and rebuilding the Freedom Theatre in 2006…
Despite all the denials that he is not and was not ever a member of Hamas, and was nothing more than a simple electrical power plant engineer, the Gaza Plant’s Power Deputy Director of Operations, Dirar Abu Sisi — who was abducted from a train in the Ukraine on 18-19 February and flown to Israel within hours in the custody of Israeli Mossad agents — was indicted today on shockingly serious charges of developing missiles to fire at Israel.
The indictment was filed Monday, as had been predicted last week, and in a Beersheva court. Abu Sisi has been held for a month in Ashkelon’s Shikma Prison, apparently after nearly two weeks of interrogation by Israel’s General Security Services (GSS or Shin Bet or Shabak) near Petach Tikva.
Haaretz reported today that “Ukraine says Abu Sisi’s disappearance is under investigation. Israel has not provided details on how the Palestinian came into its custody, although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week it was a ‘legal arrest’.” This report is posted here. The Haaretz report notes that Hamas has said that Abu Sisi is not a member of the organization — which is banned in Israel as a terrorist organization.
Israel’s belligerent military occupation of West Bank land and Palestinian lives continues in full force, with all its terrible arbitrariness.
Arbitrariness is one of the main characteristics of the Israeli occupation, as is often said by the Israeli women who do the volunteer reporting that is the work of their organization, Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch
It often comes down to one lower-mid-ranking Israeli soldier, with his personal mood on that day and at that particular moment, and a sense that he is in power, that the Palestinians are dangerous but annoying children who definitely have less status and almost no rights, and anything can happen — as Machsom Watch shows in a brand-new report:
Last Sunday [27 March] at Jaba (or Jaba’a) checkpoint – between the cul-de-sac that Qalandia checkpoint has become for Palestinian residents of this tiny corner of the earth in the West Bank, and the intersection straddled by the Israeli settlement of Adam:
“The transcript of Roni’s conversation with the checkpoint commander:
– “Why is the young man sitting here in handcuffs?”
– “He is a suspect.”
– “What is he suspected of?”
– “I’ll send him off in a moment”.
– “So he isn’t a suspected anymore?”
– “No, he is a suspect!”
– “Then how do you know that he isn’t suspected of anything anymore?”
– “I get my orders from above”.
– “Did you send his ID number to some sort of an institution for examination?”
– “No. I’ll send him off home in a moment…”
Sitting near the checkpoint was a man, he was leaning against the wall, his eyes were covered by cloth and his hands were pulled back, strapped tightly in plastic handcuffs.
From the evidence we gathered it seems that the arrest of this person was a local initiative and not an order from above. There was no ‘bingo’ and we also didn’t hear the most common alibi, which can never be confirmed: ‘The suspect is requeste’ for interrogation by the GSS’ [Israel’s General Security Services, or Shin Bet or Shabak]. The evidence to the fact that the soldier didn’t really have a reason to keep this person at the checkpoint is that the young man’s ID wasn’t there and his personal background wasn’t checked. It was probably an incidental arrest, the victim was taken from his home that afternoon by the Nahal soldiers who man the checkpoint. What for, and why? – Was it just for their plain amusement? – For the sake of the actual abuse? Or perhaps, they did it out of boredom, of which the soldiers at the checkpoints regularly complain?
It was clear from the person’s pose that he was in agony.
He stood with his back arched in an attempt to ease the pressure. The overly tight plastic handcuffs cut into his flesh, causing a swelling that made it hard to release him. The soldiers tried to insert a knife between the cuffs and his flesh for over ten minutes, but there wasn’t a crack to be found, as if they were of one flesh.
The soldiers wanted the man to be quiet, and quiet he was. He just stomped his feet as the pain from the insertion of the knife became hard to bear. When he was finally released and sent off, he was told not to speak to us. The young man exposed his hands before our cameras, mumbled a couple of words and ran away down the hill towards the village
Because of two Jewish women who had arrived there by chance at the right time, the man had been released on this occasion. Who will protect him and the many others like him on other occasions, other days, and who will be there at the dead of night?”
Report by Machsom Watch – the full original is posted on the Machsom Watch website here.
Since 12 March — three days before the protest on 15 March calling for national unity and elections to the Palestine National Council — a group of young men has been on hunger strike in Ramallah’s central Manara Square (which is really a circle).
On March 15, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyah in Gaza endorsed the call for reconciliation and called for a meeting. The next day, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in Ramallah said he was willing to go to Gaza if it would bring reconciliation. So, the hunger strikers broke their fast, which initially lasted four days.
They waited patiently, but nothing happened.
So, they resumed their fast a few days later — and about four have been fasting for about two weeks continuously now.
On Saturday, one of them required medical attention.
This is the account published by Ma’an News Agency:
“Alaa Qdimat, 21, fainted late Saturday and was taken to the Red Crescent hospital, activists said.
Protesters said Palestinian Authority police went to the hospital and took Qdimat to an investigation room to question him, despite his deteriorating health.
Qdimat said police interrogated him for over an hour, questioning him about the purpose of the hunger strike and threatening to arrest him as a ‘security risk’.
He said police also asked him who was behind the protests, and who was paying the strikers.
‘The 21 days that we have been here prove that no-one is behind us and no-one is paying us’, Qdimat said. ‘We are still committed to go all the way’, he added.
After his interrogation, Qdimat was released from the hospital and he returned to the protest tent in Ramallah’s Al-Manara square “.
