TOLERANCE AND SOLIDARITY .

An update from the Gaza children cinema

In a local library in Rafah, South of the Gaza Strip, children are busy working on a white cardboard. They are creating their cinema’s box office. Others are allocating number stickers to the seats. Another group of children are in charge of distributing popcorn in preparation of a film screening. Children then line up to get their tickets before entering the screening venue; they stay quite as their eyes gaze at the screen; but once the movie ends, they are eager to talk about what they just saw and reflect on their first cinema experience. Some talk, some sing, some dance and some draw.

A frame from the video about the Gaza children’s cinema

This is only a brief scenario of one of the 160 screenings we have managed to implement across the Gaza Strip in 2017 thanks to your generous donations. Below is an update of some of the major outcomes of the cinema’s Project activities last year.

Gaza Children Cinema:

The idea was to create a peaceful, creative space where kids could be just kids—a space where a child can live a joyful moments while surviving the bitter reality of siege loss, hardship and war. The result was the Gaza Children’s Cinema, a project was born out of a desire to create a safe haven for children, and it is evidence of the magic of cinema—of how film can relieve suffering and provide light to literally one of the darkest places in the World.

The Cinema in 2017:

In 2016 and early 2017, we managed to raise 7800 AU$ through our online fundraiser page and through other fundraising events in support of the Gaza Children Cinema project.

In April 2017, we partnered with the Tamer Institute for Community Education, Gaza, in order to facilitate the implementation of the cinema screenings and to allow the initiative to be led by the local community, especially young volunteers. This partnership was important for building on the existing community resources in reaching more children. We did not want to re-invent the wheel, no one does want!

(Article continued in the right column)

Presenting the Palestinian side of the Middle East, Is it important for a culture of peace?

(Article continued from the left column)

Besides targeting marginalised areas for the screenings, we have successfully managed to engage libraries and to promote regular screening within library settings across the Gaza Strip.

In preparation of the screenings, the Tamer Institute held two training workshops for the librarians and the young volunteers from Tamer Institute. The workshops focused on brainstorming the best ways to make the screening a successful enjoyable experience for the kids, the choice of the films and training the librarians to use arts as a tool of expression for the children to reflect on their inner thoughts and emotions.

About 160 cinema screenings were held with the children throughout 2017. We have managed to reach out to hundreds of children each month through organizing several screenings at several locations. The screenings were held across the Gaza Strip in Gaza, Rafah, Khan Younis, Maghazi Refugee camp, Jabalia refugee camp, amongst many other locations.

Gaza Children Cinema activities have been carried out across the Gaza Strip including border areas, marginalised children communities and refugee camps.
We have seen children join the cinema sessions with their parents in inclusive and entertaining settings. With the support of Gaza Children Cinema volunteer team, these children had the opportunity to engage into stimulating and interactive discussion prior and after the film screenings.

In September, and as part of our attempts to reach the most marginalized children in the most remote areas, we launched a call for proposals for initiatives around cinema and children. To our surprise, we received about twenty proposals from grassroots community groups. This has assured us that the impact of the Gaza Children Cinema is invaluable and is growing.

This project has been fully funded by charitable fundraiser events that we have voluntarily carried out here in Perth, Australia. Either through food stall markets, various movie screenings or an online fundraiser page, we have managed to raise enough funds to keep this initiative going and growing. And today we are hoping to raise funds to sustain this project for another year.

This is a message of gratitude and appreciation for making this initiative real. Without your generous donations, we wouldn’t be able to reach many of children across the Gaza Strip, and offer them some moments of peace, dialogue, and entertainment. We are determined to continue in this track, this time with more commitment and enthusiasm. We always appreciate your input and feedback. If you wish to know more, please contact us on info@gazachildrencinema.org.

Yours Sincerely,
Ayman Qwaider and Mohammed Al-Rozzi
For Gaza Children Cinema Team

(Thank you to Ayman Qwaider, the CPNN reporter for this article)

TOLERANCE AND SOLIDARITY .

An article by By Iqbal Jassat for the Palestine Chronicle (the author is an Executive Member of the South Africa-based Media Review Network)

In a remarkably fresh approach in resistance to Israel’s seven decades of colonialism, Palestinians have geared up to mobilize en masse in what has been dubbed as Great March of Return.

Starting Friday 30th March 2018, thousands upon thousands head towards homes and lands from which they were forcibly expelled. Victims of evictions and ethnic cleansing whose losses have never been admitted by Israel despite being acknowledged by the United Nations, have every right under International Law to reclaim the theft of their land.

Palestinians taking part in the Great March of Return. (Photo: ActiveStills.org)

Though month of March each year since 1976 has been commemorated as Land Day, this year sees it expanded in a very creative way.

The popular sentiment shared amongst Palestinians in the diaspora as indeed within the suffocating occupied territories is “Returning to our stolen lands and homes is legal under International Law and UN resolutions”.

The Great March of Return is thus an affirmation of this inalienable right guaranteed by a substantial number of international conventions.

Reports from the colonial regime reveal an aggressive and hostile military reaction is underway. Leaks from Netanyahu’s war-room point to threats to kill any and all  Palestinians who dare to approach the apartheid barriers or “fences” which bar the indigenous population from their homes and lands.

To the dismay of Israel, the Great March of Return is not planned to be a short lived one-day event. And to add to Israel’s PR nightmare, media coverage will in all likelihood revisit core issues at the heart of this March via extensive analysis and historic footage.

Expressing its displeasure at mainstream media and throwing tantrums alongside wailing and howling  – as Israel is accustomed to doing, will not assist the regime’s Hasbara (propaganda) campaigns. In fact it will be entirely counterproductive as the old Nats in apartheid’s heydays in South Africa learnt.

(Article continued in the right column)

Presenting the Palestinian side of the Middle East, Is it important for a culture of peace?

(Article continued from the left column)

Concealing the ugly reality of Zionism’s imposition of a foreign entity (Israel) and the consequences of the Nakba (catastrophe) which to date are eminently visible throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories OPT, Palestine ’48 and refugee camps dotted across Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and elsewhere is not only not possible, but morally repugnant.

Equally it would be outrageous and utterly disgraceful for any media platform to ignore or downplay the enormous burden faced by Palestinians to free themselves from oppression and reclaim justice. The Great March of Return is thus a challenge to media to dislodge themselves from false Israeli narratives fed to them by highly resourced Hasbara campaigns.

It requires a return to an understanding of the enormity of losses suffered by the Palestinians at the hands of a racist colonial entity supported and facilitated by the British government a century ago. It means revisiting notorious historical details which certainly will be unflattering for those European powers who played central roles In the dispossession of Palestine.

The Great March of Return is a challenge to those in the media who’ve been cowed by intimidating threats of economic sabotage and fear being unfairly smeared as “antisemitic”, to get off their fences and jump into the fray. Robust introspection and fearless courageous reports on the reasons why Palestinians have embarked on this momentous peaceful defiance campaign should be par for the course for journalists who value integrity.

In keeping with its irrational conduct, Israel has imposed a “closure” on the Palestinian areas for the so called “Passover holidays”. In addition the settler colonial regime has enforced a “no go” zone on land adjacent to Gaza’s border.  Chief of staff of the military’s occupation forces has admitted that “more than 100 sharpshooters” primarily from elite special forces, have been deployed with permission to “open fire”.

B’Tselem, known for fearlessly challenging Israel’s violations of human rights, is justifiably concerned about threats by the regime to unleash lethal force on the demonstrators.

“Completely ignoring the humanitarian disaster in Gaza and Israel’s responsibility for it, they are couching the planned protest in terms of a security risk, framing the demonstrators as terrorists and referring to Gaza as a ‘combat zone.”

As the March unfolds, reports come through about injuries and deaths caused by the Occupation forces’ deadly weapons. As B’Tselem and other humanitarian organisations have warned, Israel’s war mongering displays blatant disregard for the sanctity of Palestinian life. Nor for any of its obligations under International Law.

The Great March of Return has the support of all the Palestinian factions – Hamas, Fatah, the PFLP and Islamic Jihad. Expected to continue until 15 May to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, it’s demands will hopefully resonate across all corners of the world: Right of Return to their pre-1948 homes!

TOLERANCE AND SOLIDARITY .

An article by Uri Avnery in Transcend.org

14 Apr 2018 – Write down: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief.

A frame from the video of the sniper shooting a demonstrator

We don’t belong to the same army, or to the same state. We hardly belong to the same human race.

IS MY government committing “war crimes” along the border of the Gaza Strip?

I don’t know. I am not a jurist.

It seems that officials of the International Criminal Court believe that the acts of our soldiers do constitute war crimes. They demand an international investigation.

To prevent that, our army command proposes an Israeli military investigation. That is manifestly ridiculous – an army investigating itself about acts committed on direct orders of the Chief of Staff.

As was published in advance, sharpshooters were posted along the border fence and ordered to kill “ringleaders” of the unarmed protesters on the other side of the fence. The Gaza leadership had announced that these unarmed protests were to take place every week, after Friday prayers, until Naqba Day.

During the first two Fridays, 29 unarmed people were shot dead and more than a thousand wounded by sharpshooters.

For me this is not a judicial question. It is a crime, not only against the unarmed protesters. It is also a crime against the State of Israel, against the people of Israel and against the Israeli army.

Since I was a member of that army on the day of its foundation, I think that it is also a crime against my comrades and me.

THIS WEEK a short video, recorded by a soldier at the time of such an action, was widely seen in Israel [See link to video above].

It shows the action from the angle of a soldier who was obviously standing next to a sharpshooter. The sharpshooter sees the demonstrators from a distance of hundreds of yards. The hairs of his sights move at random, than settle on an individual. He shoots. The person drops on the spot.

A joyous cry “Yesh” is heard all around from unseen soldiers who have been watching. “Yesh” means “got him”, a jubilant yell, such as would accompany a hunter’s success in killing a rabbit.

Many hundreds of thousands of Israelis have seen this film by now, since it was shown for the first time on TV. Except for a few articles and letters to the editor (in Haaretz), there has been no protest.

This did not happen overseas, in some remote colony. It happened right next to us, 45 minute’s drive from my home.

The killer was not a hardened mercenary. He – and the joyous soldiers around him – were just ordinary youngsters, drafted at the age of 18 like most Jewish Israelis.

All of them were just “following orders”. (Remember?) We have not heard of one single case of a soldier refusing orders.

UNTIL TWO weeks ago, I had the highest respect for our highest officer, the Chief of Staff, Gadi Eizenkot. Surrounded by officers who are mere military technicians, he seemed an officer who, in spite of his unmilitary appearance, was well capable of upholding the dignity of the army against the punk who serves as Minister of Defense.

No more. Eizenkot has given the murderous orders. Why, for heavens sake?

(Article continued in the right column)

Presenting the Palestinian side of the Middle East, Is it important for a culture of peace?

(Article continued from the left column)

Like the British in India and the white racists in the US, the Israeli government does not know how to deal with unarmed protest. It has never encountered it. It does not exist in Arab tradition.

By chance this week I saw the classic movie about Mahatma Gandhi. The British tried everything – they beat him and myriads of others into pulp, they shot thousands of others. When Gandhi and his followers suffered this torment and did not hit back, the British eventually admitted defeat and went away.

So did the white racist opponents of Martin Luther King in Alabama. A Palestinian follower of his came to this country at the beginning of the occupation and tried to convince his countrymen to try this method. The Israel army opened fire, and the Palestinians reverted to the armed struggle.

Not this time. The (violent) Islamic Hamas in the Gaza Strip calls on the population to try unarmed protest, tens of thousands follow. This can lead to unforeseen results. One of them is the sharpshooters’ order to kill more or less at random.

WHEN I stated publicly that I am ashamed, a reader accused me of hypocrisy. He cited from my two books about our (1948) War of Independence, in which I had described atrocities to which I was a witness.

Sure, there were atrocities (as in every war). The perpetrators were soldiers of all ethnic and social groups. But they were denounced by some of their comrades (also of all ethnic and social groups). Most soldiers were in the middle, following the most persuasive.

Now the picture is different. Not only is the shooting of the unarmed protesters, far from the fence, done by order, but there seem to be no other voices. The military and political leadership is united. Even in civilian society, voices against the mass murder are very few.

HOW DO the Israeli media react? Well, they don’t. This momentous event in Israel’s history is almost ignored.

Fortunately for the perpetrators, there are plenty of events to take our minds off them and their actions. President Bashar al-Assad has apparently used chemical weapons against his rebels. The Israeli media are having a feast. How awful! How barbarous! How Arab!

Then there is the problem of the 36,000 “illegal” (meaning non-Jewish) African workers who have entered Israel. The government wants to throw them out. Decent Israelis very properly want to prevent this. That is a full-time job. No time for the Gaza Strip.

And there is, of course, Holocaust Memorial Day, which happens conveniently this week. One can write endlessly about this awful chapter in our history. What is Gaza compared to this horrible event?

WHAT ABOUT our media?

The sorrowful fact is that the Israeli media have reverted to what they were in the early days of the state: an instrument of the government. It took my news magazine dozens of years to break that habit. For many years we had a decent press, with some wonderful journalists and broadcasters.

No more. A few are left, but the great majority of the press is now coordinated with the regime (“gleichgeschaltet” in German). Two minutes on Gaza. 20 minutes on what’s happening in Syria. 10 minutes for the latest (imaginary) outbreak of anti-Semitism in the British Labor Party.

Most of the journalists and broadcasters, honest and well-meaning people all, are not even conscious of what they are doing (or not doing). They are innocent of any other thoughts.

WHERE IS the “Left”? Where is the so-called “Center”?

They have not disappeared, as some lament. Far from it. A shift of some percent or a move of one of the small parties would suffice to topple Binyamin Netanyahu.

But they all seem to be paralyzed. Nobody dares to speak out against the killing, apart from some faint whispers. Even the many admirable groups of youngsters who fight against the occupation, each on some special sector, are silent about the Gaza killings.

No mass demonstrations. No huge protests. Nothing.

So we, too, are to blame. And perhaps more than others.

Please write down: I am guilty!

TOLERANCE AND SOLIDARITY .

An article by Dana Visalli for Global Research

The trial of Ahed Tamimi—the sixteen year old Palestinian girl who slapped a fully-armed Israeli soldier who was standing in her front yard looking for Palestinian demonstrators to shoot—is supposed to reconvene in a few days. (Editor’s note: Her request that the trial should be public has been denied.) Israeli military courts have a 100% conviction rate, even of children. Ahed is one of several Palestinian youth who have become symbolic throughout the world for the 70-year old Palestinian struggle to regain and retain their own land and their basic rights as human beings. She has already been in prison for three months for attempting to protect her home and family from Israeli soldier-intruders. Her mother Nariman, who went to visit Ahed the day after she was taken to prison, was arrested upon her arrival and has also spent the last three months in jail. (See earlier CPNN article).

I traveled to Ahed’s village of Nabi Saleh a week ago, to learn more about problems confronting the village as Israelis appropriate their fields and water supplies for an ever-growing illegal (according to the United Nations) Israeli settlement nearby, and in hopes of meeting Ahed’s father Bassem and her cousin Janna Jihad Ayyad. Upon arrival no one was home so I took a seat on the front porch. Soon various people were coming and going, and one of them told me Bassem was away, but that Janna was around. We phoned her and she showed up a few minutes later.

Janna is a precocious eleven year-old who speaks English fluently and has been filming and reporting on the abuses of her people by the Israelis since she was seven. The deaths of two men in her village—her cousin, Mustafa Tamimi, and another uncle, Rushdie Tamimi—served as a trigger for her to begin documenting what was happening in Nabi Saleh. Mustafa was killed by an Israeli gas canister and Rushdie was fatally shot in his groin.

She has risked her own safety many times to document Israeli behavior in Palestine, which over the last 70 years includes driving a million Palestinians off of their land and from their homes, and appropriating for themselves the vast majority of what prior to 1947-48 had been the Palestinian homeland. To some degree she has an advantage over adult reporters, because as she puts it, “The soldiers catch the big journalists and take their cameras….The camera is stronger than the gun. I can send my message to many people, and they can send it to others.”

At this point she has a Facebook page with 280,000 followers and her own Youtube channel, well worth visiting. Children in Palestine are forced to grow up early and fast. Janna’s uncle Bilal explained, “We must teach our children not to accept humiliation and not be cowards. We are under occupation. We cannot teach our children silence; they must fight for their freedom.”

On the day I visited our conversation took a different direction. After briefly talking about life under occupation and how much she missed her best friend Ahed, I showed her a book I had brought with me, Wildflowers of the Mediterranean. She was quickly transformed from a serious journalist reporting on the disaster that has befallen her people into an animated, enthusiastic student of the natural world. She dashed around Ahed’s yard, bringing in the many spring blooms, searching in the book for the ones she did not recognize, and pointing out the ones she already knew.

(Article continued in the right column)

Presenting the Palestinian side of the Middle East, Is it important for a culture of peace?

(Article continued from the left column)

At one point she stood in the very spot in the entryway to the Tamimi household (see image on the right) where Ahed had confronted the Israeli soldiers three months before. Where Ahed had found young Israeli men armed with machine guns bent of perpetuating violence against Palestinians on Palestinian land, Janna was for that moment immersed in the beauty of the good earth. The contrast could not have been more stark. Foreigners arriving with guns and bombs are resisted. Arriving with peaceful intentions one is met with a cup of tea.

I spent two hours with Janna, wandering the hills above the village, identifying flowers and enjoying the impressive limestone geology. The ground everywhere is littered with tear gas canisters, spent concussion grenades and smoke bombs. The Israelis have been harassing the people of Nabi Saleh for 70 years, plenty of time for the spent ammunition to form windrows among the fields of flowers.

The cruelty exhibited by the Israelis in their hungering to imprison the young Ahed Tamimi, whose only wish was to protect her people and her home from intruders and whose only weapon was a mere slap—the inherent cruelty of those hungering to put her in a prison cell for years, or even forever, with some government officials calling for rape and further darker abuse—this display of pathological cruelty by an entire society has people throughout the world wondering what curse has befallen the people of Israel.

One possible answer is that they are obsessed with the hallucination that they are somehow a ‘chosen people,’ that they are somehow better than the rest of humanity, even that they are the preferred favorites of some mythological god. As prime minister Menachem Begin exulted after the Zionist slaughter of Palestinians at the village of Deir Yassin prior to the 1948 war, “God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.” According to the Israel Democracy Institute, approximately two thirds of Israeli Jews believe that Jews are the “chosen people”.

This sense of superiority over others is in fact a common human trait, mixed though it always is with a countervailing feeling of inferiority and fear. Albert Einstein in the wisdom of his old age addressed this pathology when he observed, “A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.”

The obvious deeper truth made clear in our time through scientific inquiry is that all humans have the same long, deep and difficult history. All humans evolved together in Africa for 200,000 years before any left that continent. All human beings share 99.9% the exact same genetic code and 99.9% the same long, traumatic evolutionary journey.

The human family faces pressing ecological challenges at this particular locus along the course of our Big History, shared by all people, such as, for example, overshoot of the human population and diminution of the richness, beauty and diversity life on earth. None of our challenges are mitigated or even addressed by the mythologies spun by the human mind over the course of our our short-term, 3000-year Little History. Those working for a viable future for all of people and for the biosphere as a whole look forward to the Zionists and the Jews and all Israelis maturing out of their mythological hallucination of separateness and rejoining the family of humanity and the community of life on the journey towards a viable future.

The author, Dana Visalli, is an ecologist living in Washington State. He is currently volunteering in Palestine for a month. He can be reached at jdanavisalli@gmail.com, www.methownaturalist.com