Featured Discussions - Peace for the Soul2024-03-28T14:54:38Zhttps://peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com/forum/topic/list?groupUrl=just-peace-for-palestine&feed=yes&xn_auth=no&featured=1Palestine's Nelson Mandelatag:peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com,2017-06-05:5143044:Topic:2459992017-06-05T22:19:01.958ZRosmarie Heusserhttps://peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com/profile/RosmarieHeusser
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<p><span style="color: #000080;"><strong>Uri Avnery's Column</strong> April 22. 2017 </span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #800080;">I HAVE a confession to make: I like Marwan Barghouti.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">I have visited him at his modest Ramallah home several times. During our conversations, we discussed Israeli-Palestinian peace.…</span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #000080;"><strong>Uri Avnery's Column</strong> April 22. 2017 </span></p>
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<p><span style="color: #800080;">I HAVE a confession to make: I like Marwan Barghouti.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">I have visited him at his modest Ramallah home several times. During our conversations, we discussed Israeli-Palestinian peace. Our ideas were the same: to create the State of Palestine next to the State of Israel, and to establish peace between the two states, based on the 1967 lines (with minor adjustments), with open borders and cooperation.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">This was not a secret agreement: Barghouti has repeated this proposal many times, both in prison and outside.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">I also like his wife, Fadwa, who was educated as a lawyer but devotes her time to fight for the release of her husband. At the crowded funeral of Yasser Arafat, I happened to stand next to her and saw her tear-streaked face.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">This week, Barghouti, together with about a thousand other Palestinian prisoners in Israel, started an unlimited hunger strike. I have just signed a petition for his release.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">MARWAN BARGHOUTI is a born leader. In spite of his small physical stature, he stands out in any gathering. Within the Fatah movement he became the leader of the youth division. (The word "Fatah" is the initials of "Palestinian Liberation Movement, in reverse),</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">The Barghoutis are a widespread clan, dominating several villages near Ramallah. Marwan himself was born in 1959 in Kobar village. An ancestor, Abd-al-Jabir al-Barghouti, led an Arab revolt in 1834. I have met Mustafa Barghouti, an activist for democracy, in many demonstrations and shared the tear gas with him. Omar Barghouti is a leader of the international anti-Israel boycott movement.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">Perhaps my sympathy for Marwan is influenced by some similarities in our youth. He joined the Palestinian resistance movement at the age of 15, the same age as I was when I joined the Hebrew underground some 35 years earlier. My friends and I considered ourselves freedom fighters, but were branded by the British authorities as "terrorists". The same has now happened to Marwan – a freedom fighter in his own eyes and in the eyes of the vast majority of the Palestinian people, a "terrorist" in the eyes of the Israeli authorities.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">When he was put on trial in the Tel Aviv District Court, my friends and I, members of the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc), tried to demonstrate our solidarity with him in the courtroom. We were expelled by armed guards. One of my friends lost a toenail in this glorious fight.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">YEARS AGO I called Barghouti the "Palestinian Mandela". Despite their difference in height and skin color, there was a basic similarity between the two: both were men of peace, but justified the use of violence against their oppressors. However, while the Apartheid regime was satisfied with one life term, Barghouti was sentenced to a ridiculous five life terms and another 40 years – for acts of violence executed by his Tanzim organization.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">(Gush Shalom published a statement this week suggesting that by the same logic, Menachem Begin should have been sentenced by the British to 91 life terms for the bombing of the King David hotel, in which 91 people – many of them Jews – lost their lives.)</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">There is another similarity between Mandela and Barghouti: when the apartheid regime was destroyed by a combination of "terrorism", violent strikes and a world-wide boycott, Mandela emerged as the natural leader of the new South Africa. Many people expect that when a Palestinian state is set up, Barghouti will become its president, after Mahmoud Abbas.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">There is something in his personality that inspires confidence, turning him into the natural arbiter of internal conflicts. Hamas people, who are the opponents of Fatah, are inclined to listen to Marwan. He is the ideal conciliator between the two movements.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">Some years ago, under the leadership of Marwan, a large number of prisoners belonging to the two organizations signed a joint appeal for national unity, setting out concrete terms. Nothing came of this.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">That, by the way, may be an additional reason for the Israeli government’s rejection of any suggestion of freeing Barghouti, even when a prisoner exchange provided a convenient opportunity. A free Barghouti could become a powerful agent for Palestinian unity, the last thing the Israeli overlords want.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">Divide et impera – "divide and rule" – since Roman times this has been a guiding principle of every regime that suppresses another people. In this the Israeli authorities have been incredibly successful. Political geography provided an ideal setting: The West Bank (of the Jordan river) is cut off from the Gaza Strip by some 50 km of Israeli territory.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">Hamas got hold of the Gaza Strip by elections and violence, and refuses to accept the leadership of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), a union of the more secular organizations which rules the West Bank.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">This is not an unusual situation in national liberation organizations. They often split into more and less extreme wings, to the great delight of the oppressor. The last thing the Israeli authorities are willing to do is release Barghouti and allow him to restore Palestinian national unity. God forbid.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">THE HUNGER strikers do not demand their own release, but demand better prison conditions. They demand, inter alia, more frequent and longer visits by wives and family, an end to torture, decent food, and such. They also remind us that under international law an "occupying power" is forbidden to move prisoners from an occupied territory to the home country of the occupier. Exactly this happens to almost all Palestinian "security prisoners".</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">Last week Barghouti set out these demands in an op-ed article published by the New York Times, an act that shows the newspaper's better side. The editorial note described the author as a Palestinian politician and Member of Parliament. It was a courageous act by the paper (which somewhat restored its standing in my eyes after it condemned Bashar al-Assad for using poison gas, without a sliver of evidence.)</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">But courage has its limits. The very next day the NYT published an editor's note stating that Barghouti was convicted for murder. It was an abject surrender to Zionist pressure.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">The man who claimed this victory was an individual I find particularly obnoxious. He calls himself Michael Oren and is now a deputy minister in Israel, but he was born in the USA and belongs to the subgroup of American Jews who are super-super-patriots of Israel. He adopted Israeli citizenship and an Israeli name in order to serve as Israel's ambassador to the USA. In this capacity he attracted attention by using particularly virulent anti-Arab rhetoric, so extreme as to make even Binyamin Netanyahu look moderate.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">I doubt that this person has ever sacrificed anything for his patriotism, indeed, he has made quite a career of it. Yet he speaks with contempt about Barghouti, who has spent much of his life in prison and exile. He describes Barghouti’s article in the New York Times as a "journalistic terror act". Look who's talking.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">A HUNGER STRIKE is a very courageous act. It is the last weapon of the least protected people on earth – the prisoners. The abominable Margaret Thatcher let the Irish hunger strikers starve to death.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">The Israeli authorities wanted to force-feed Palestinian hunger strikers. The Israeli Physicians Association, much to its credit, refused to cooperate, since such acts have led in the past to the deaths of the victims. That put an end to this kind of torture.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">Barghouti demands that Palestinian political prisoners be treated as prisoners-of-war. No chance of that.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">However, one should demand that prisoners of any kind be treated humanely. This means that deprivation of liberty is the only punishment imposed, and that within the prisons the maximum of decent conditions should be accorded.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">In some Israeli prisons, a kind of modus vivendi between the prison authorities and the Palestinian prisoners seems to have been established. Not so in others. One gets the impression that the prison service is the enemy of the prisoners, making their life as miserable as possible. This has worsened now, in response to the strike.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">This policy is cruel, illegal and counter-productive. There is no way to win against a hunger-strike. The prisoners are bound to win, especially when decent people all over the world are watching. Perhaps even the NYT.</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #800080;">I am waiting for the day when I can visit Marwan again as a free man in his home in Ramallah. Even more so if Ramallah is, by that time, a town in the free State of Palestine. </span></p>
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<p>Fadwa Barghouti at a press conference in Ramallah </p>
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<p></p> Martin Luther King Jr. In Palestinetag:peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com,2011-08-08:5143044:Topic:1136032011-08-08T17:58:26.163ZEva Librehttps://peaceformeandtheworld.ning.com/profile/Eva
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/589078128/martin-luther-king-jr-in-palestine" target="_blank">A Documentary</a> project in <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/cities/berkeley-ca?ref=project">Berkeley, CA</a> by <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/589078128">Connie Field</a></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/589078128/martin-luther-king-jr-in-palestine">A Documentary</a> project in <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/cities/berkeley-ca?ref=project">Berkeley, CA</a> by <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/589078128">Connie Field</a></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><strong><span class="font-size-3">NON-VIOLENCE IN A CHANGING PALESTINIAN LANDSCAPE NOTE: IF YOU "LIKE" THIS PAGE,</span></strong></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="font-size-3"><span style="color: #808080;">PLEASE SHARE IT WITH YOUR NETWORKS! (And..consider donating, even just $1!)</span></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;">In March of 2011 I went to Palestine with Clay Carson, who runs the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute, to film his play about King performed by the Palestinian National Theater and an African-American gospel choir. It was presented to audiences all over the West Bank and it was an incredible journey! This is a great story that can reach new audiences who would not necessarily come see a film about Palestine, incorporating the inherent drama of the theatre and propelled by the foot-stomping rhythms of gospel music. It was an intense cultural exchange between two peoples encompassing the joy of new friendships, creative collaborations and eye opening experiences. No one who participated remained unchanged.<br/><br/>We traveled through the Holy Land that the Christian choir were so passionately excited to see, as they were introduced to the other side of the land where Jesus once walked: a man whose front yard has been bisected by the Security Wall and whose children have to play in the dust of its continued construction; the ease with which they as foreigners were able to pass through checkpoints while their Palestinian counterparts took hours to navigate the same distance; a home which had no water because a settlement had taken over their well, where Palestinian women teach them songs in Arabic and join them in singing American gospel songs. And yet, amidst the hardships of occupied life, the choir is greeted with food, humor, and generosity, a mixture that brought some of them to tears.<br/><br/></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.clarityfilms.org/MLK/images/DSC00799-72.jpg"/></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><br/><br/>Firas Frah played Malcolm X in the play. September Penn from the choir.<br/><br/>We also captured the growing non-violent movement of young people in Palestine, who are much like their peers in Egypt and Tunisia -- bright, well-educated, social media savvy and deeply committed. They are on the move, changing hearts and minds.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.clarityfilms.org/MLK/images/DSC00519-72.jpg"/></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">In March, Hamsa (center) and his friends were on a hunger strike camped out in a tent in the central square of Ramallah.<br/><br/><br/>Our film can be an effective way to bring a fresh approach to opening minds to the realities of Palestinian life under occupation and introducing people to the young Palestinians who are changing the landscape non-violently.<br/><br/>We feel this film needs to get done now. We need to go back to Palestine for one short final shoot and then edit the film. Your help can make this happen. We will then be able to complete the project sooner, getting the film out to the public as quick as we can.<br/><br/>Changes are sweeping across the Middle East! Can this be a time when a peaceful resolution can come to one of the most emotionally charged regions of the world? Can a story such as ours, told from a completely different perspective than has been told before, open hearts and minds? We think it can. So please join us.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><br/><span class="font-size-4"><strong>FROM THE FILM</strong></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.clarityfilms.org/MLK/images/fadi-272.jpg"/></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">Fadi Quran and playwright Clay Carson.<br/><br/><br/><span class="font-size-3"><strong>Fadi Quran:</strong></span> I first came across Martin Luther King when I was in high school. We had a professor who was volunteering here to teach us English and he gave us a text to a Martin Luther King speech. And I was like ‘wow is he speaking to people in the U.S. or is he speaking to us?’</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.clarityfilms.org/MLK/images/DSC00763-72.jpg"/></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><br/><span class="font-size-3"><strong>September Penn:</strong></span> When I would see pictures of Palestinians on television in the States there would be this look in their eye and I said, “Oh they’re just angry people". And then I get here, and the first person that I met I saw that look in her eye. But I came to discover that that look was not anger. That look was this deep, deep sorrow. A deep-seated sorrow that couldn’t be washed away.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.clarityfilms.org/MLK/images/DSC00603-crop.jpg"/></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">Ramzi Maqdisi, who plays Martin Luther King Jr., and Aleta Hayes in Hebron.<br/><br/><br/><span class="font-size-3"><strong>Aleta Hayes:</strong></span> I was very hurt about that family in Hebron. Just to see the army there, and the settlers with M-16's, like they could've shot me. Or you. Or anybody right there. And how brave the family was to be there. I'm still worried about them, because it seems like, won't they be punished, that they bring these people to show that their water tank has been shot full of holes?<br/><br/><strong><span class="font-size-4">HOW DOES KICKSTARTER WORK?</span></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><br/><span class="font-size-3" style="color: #808080;"><strong>MAKE A DONATION AND GET A REWARD</strong></span><br/><br/>We set a goal and a deadline. You choose an amount you'd like to donate, and the gift you want to receive. After our funding goal is reached we will send out rewards. Those rewards that require the completion of the film will be sent out after it is finished.<br/><br/><strong><span class="font-size-3" style="color: #808080;">IF OUR GOAL IS NOT MET BY THE DEADLINE THEN WE DON'T GET ANYTHING</span></strong><br/><br/>If we fall short of our goal by any amount then we won't get any of the money. Even if it's only by $5. That's why your help spreading the word about the film and Kickstarter campaign is so important.<br/><br/><span class="font-size-3"><strong><span style="color: #808080;">IF WE MEET OR SURPASS OUR GOAL BEFORE THE DEADLINE THEN WE GET TO KEEP THE WHOLE AMOUNT</span></strong></span><br/><br/>All the donations will go to our production company Clarity Films, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, to help towards finishing the film. Many folks raise much more than their goal, so the more you help us do that the sooner the film will be finished! <br/><br/><span style="color: #808080;"><strong><span class="font-size-3">*****TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATIONS******</span></strong></span><br/><br/>A portion of every donation over $100 is tax deductible. You will receive a letter confirming your donation as well as the amount that you can deduct (the donation amount minus the $25 film value of the reward).<br/><br/><strong><span class="font-size-3" style="color: #808080;">I AM INTERESTED IN YOUR PROJECT, CAN I HELP?</span></strong><br/><br/>YES! You can help by getting the word out and encouraging others to donate. Tell your friends and family about the film. Link to our Kickstarter campaign on your Facebook profile or Twitter feed. Embed our video or widget on your web page or blog. It's a word of mouth campaign and its success relies on people being aware of the Kickstarter campaign. The more you can help us find new folks the closer we are to making our campaign a success.<br/><br/></p>
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<a target="_blank" href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/589078128/martin-luther-king-jr-in-palestine">A Documentary</a> project in Berkeley, CA by <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/589078128">Connie Field</a><br/>
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