Posts Tagged ‘“Chroniques de Gaza”’
First Anniversary: I married wordpress.com
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 17, 2009
First Anniversary: I married wordpress.com; (September 18, 2009)
Thursday, September 18, 2008. The weather is mostly cloudy. I borrowed “Chroniques de Gaza” by Caroline Mangez at a private library. I removed to my study around 3 pm and saw my niece Joanna working on her portable. I reminded her that she promised to aid me open a blog; she selected wordpress.com on account that it is the most visited site. I sat by her side and we went through the queries. My site is adonis49.wordpress.com; the affix 49 is the year of my birthyear since Adonis was already taken.
I tried to start publishing articles on my blog of wordpress.com but the internet was acting up as I clicked on “publish”. I was wondering: “This might turn out to be a time consuming process of publishing what I have written”. It took me over an hour just for one article to go. Once I had ironed out the process I spent a hectic week publishing over five years of unpublished pieces of articles, book reviews, short stories, and novels. The published materials amounted to 600 posts: I had subdivided chapters of my novels to quicken the process.
I learned later that I should have subdivided even further so that readers won’t have to suffer more than two pages at a time. I also learned much later that it is preferable to assign a new title to every post and not the easy alternative of patching up part 1, part 2, or continue 1, continue 2, and the sort. Thinking up new titles are fun and a great learning processes. I discovered the value of assigning new titles for posts that did not generate hits: people have so many choices of posts to read that they prefer catchy titles.
In this year I added over 600 new posts to the ones I had written previously and generated 16,000 hits. Laws do not fail very often: maybe 20% of my posts generated 80% of hits even if I disagree with my readers on the value of their choices. Laws do not fail very often but when they do it is catastrophic; scientists, and especially financial analysts, fail to consider seriously the rare events and their dangerous potential consequences. They just take the easy way out by focusing on the average or most likely events. The latest financial crash is a striking example; it is not as if the financial analysts didn’t know about rare events: they preferred not to be considered the black sheep of doom. It is so much nicer to collect easy bonuses and let others suffer.
Actually, I am under the impression that a dozen of posts or 1% are generating a fourth of the total hits. Thus, I may retire for a whole year and still generate a substantial number of hits; that is not my purpose: I want people to read good stuff.
By and by I increased the number of categories to reach 25; if it were feasible to edit and re-shuffle the names of my categories I would have gladly invested time of this important factor. I would appreciate some aid in that domain.
Nick was very helpful in sending me a link to widgets when I asked for his advice to simplify navigating my cumbersome blog. So far, widgets have been great for my own navigation; I do not doubt that they’ll be helpful for my readers. So far, my posts do not include pictures or video: I lack the equipments and the patience for this important improvement. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; I am not so sure; it might be correct for the lazy minds or those who are more inclined to visual information. Anyway, rest assured that in due time my pictures would not be “stand-alone” dumb medium such as “No Comment”. Expressing your feelings, ideas, and opinions in words are great exercises for your own benefit: you refresh your memory and re-structure your ideas for better explanation and exposition.
I received a new release on life this fabulous year; discovering a free publishing site is like receiving grace. I need to read more so that I can publish at least one post a day; usually, I publish 10 posts per week. I learned to be concise and not surpass 1,000 words per posts. Thus, long articles are divided into parts with new titles. Every now and then, I regroup the parts into one lengthy article with a new title: it is beneficial to me to re-edit the main topic and present a comprehensive article for later use.
An excited reader was overwhelmed by the diversity and wealth of my book reviews in topics and in foreign sources (I do read and write in three languages Arabic, French, and then English); she encouraged me to patronize her site; she failed to know that I am a novice navigator and that I have no patience whatsoever for net navigation. I like hard cover materials. Bref, I sent her a message telling her that all that I have is a word processor; all that I know to do is to store my pieces on a USB and then locate an internet provider to publish my posts. I hope that I finally nailed down this troublesome acronym USB: I kept saying UBS until my nieces and nephews got bored of correcting me. I sometimes insist on UBS to express my displeasure for their behaviors.
Yes, all that I do is read a lot and then jot down sentences and ideas on a sheet of paper: public power is out over 12 hours a day in this part of a country. Once the electricity is on then my article is done within half an hour. I quickly store my piece on a USB for fear that the power does not fail me again, as it so often do. It is not so hard publishing but the public power hardly will improve in the foreseeable future. I firmly believe that if I enjoyed better amenities in electricity and equipments then my productivity might suffer accordingly. It does not mean that those patronizing my blog should pray for my situation to last: that would be cruel and inhuman. You might pray that I win big on the lotto or a publisher contacts me: I have so much to publish on hard covers: the medium that I cherish so much and that generates money.
WordPress.com board of directors must start thinking seriously how to help us bloggers make money for our hard and consistent work.
“Chronicles from Gaza”
Posted by: adonis49 on: October 24, 2008
“Chroniques de Gaza” by Caroline Manger (September 29, 2008)
Caroline Manger, a correspondent to weekly French magazine Paris Match, wrote “Chroniques de Gaza. Sous les bombes, la vie”, a documentary of the lives of the Israelis and Palestinians in the Gaza district. The manuscript is of 270 pages and divided into 24 chapters spanning from February 2004 before the Israeli colonies in and around Gaza were dismantled to August 2007 after the Islamists party of Hamas displaced the security services of the Fateh authority from Gaza.
During the second Palestinian “intifada” there were frequent skirmishes between the Palestinians and the Israelis living in the colonies in and around Gaza; the security conditions on both sides became untenable. Israel tried to bring security in Gaza by military force and by target assassinations of the Palestinian faction leaders but it failed.
Before former Israel Ariel Sharon PM decided to withdraw the colonies from the Gaza strip, no more than 360 square kilometers and surrounded by Israel from all sides, there were 21 Israeli colonies in this crowded and most dense location on earth. The colonies were established after 1967 when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt at the instigation and strong support of Arial Sharon; they claimed that practically most of the houses and makeshift residences belonged to Ariel Sharon.
The Israeli colons were ultra-extremists on two counts politically and religiously; politically they wanted to push the borders of Eretz Israel as far as they could and they were as strict religiously as the Islamist Hamas Palestinians faction. The colons prohibited the establishment of movie theaters in their colonies and the households refused to install TV on account of impure display of images; the women washed fully closed, were hidden from male visitors by a partition and the beaches were separated by gender. The pre-fabricated apartments and houses were mostly trailers ready to move out on short notice. The colons adored Sharon they nicknamed him Arik. All the palm and olive trees in the fields separating the colonies from the nearby Palestinian villages were cut down so that the colons could have a clear view of any Palestinian infiltration! The families were mostly freshly arrived adventurous immigrants from France and ultra US conservative Christian-Jews. Many US billionaires contributed to building bypass bridges so that the colons would not drive through Palestinian villages.
One colony needed 600 soldiers to protect 50 families and the Palestinian inefficient homemade missiles drove the Israeli government for frequent reprisals to the angst of the European Union. Sharon then decided to vacate the colonies from Gaza because as he declared “Gaza was anyway never mentioned as belonging to the promised land”
Israel was not serious about any peace plan after the Oslo agreement in 1993 for offering a viable and sustainable Palestinian State and continued to impoverish the Palestinian newly formed Authority in Ramallah and Gaza and endeavored to destroy whatever new facilities and infrastructure that the European Union contributed to. In May 2004 Israel launched operation “Rainbow and cloud” and sealed off Gaza and pounded it for 5 days and demolished the infrastructure and razed houses for a corridor before the final withdrawal of the colonies in August 22, 2005. On the fifth day of the war when all the guns went silent the Israeli snipers killed many children less than 10 years old to keep the reign of terror. The author gives horrid detailed account of the Palestinian victims and the situation in these makeshift clinics, transformed into hospitals, during Israeli military incursions.
For a year when Mahmoud Abbas was elected President the Palestinians wanted to believe in a peace process but it failed and Israel resumed its targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders such as its blind and paraplegic leader Cheikh Yassine and then his successor the pediatric Al Rantissi; thus Hamas gained supporters. In the meantime, the colons who had pledged to fight the fight against any eviction left voluntarily two days before the ultimatum; the hefty compensations were a serious factor (obviously paid for by the US tax payers).
As soon as the Israeli colons departed then the Palestinian resistance fighters ventured into Gaza City; they were hiding for over six months in their dug out and undergrounds resisting Israel frequent incursions in Gaza and then they were awestruck to discover the luxurious trend that the cronies of the Abbas’ Authority were carrying on. These fighters were not even merged into the Authority internal security forces because President Abbas decided to hire only young people of less than 22 of age to secure their loyalty. The fighters found out that they were out of employment and their dedication and sacrifices not appreciated.
When a democratic election that the western States insisted on carrying in Gaza took place then Hamas ended up winning the parliamentary election by a land slide. The Abbas’ Authority refused to cooperate with Hamas in the re-shuffling of the security services that harassed, imprisoned, tortured and even killed Hamas members since 1998. Maybe Hamas prematurely agreed to form a majority government because the Western States cut off all financial aid to the new Hamas government and the civil servants were not paid for over 4 months. The States of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia didn’t appreciate the coming into power of a radical Islamic party and did their best to put the squeeze even more.
Finally, Hamas evicted the Fateh forces, headed by strongman Dahlan, from Gaza when it realized that the US is funding the Authority’s preventive security services with over 60 million dollars for cracking down on Hamas. The offensive didn’t last 5 days before the Fateh forces fled Gaza; many of the high paid and corrupt officers bribed heavily to have passages through the underground tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt. The inhabitants of Gaza are living in wretched misery on $2 a day and over 60% of the work force is out of employment because this kind of democratic outcome does not suit the western nations.
Personal note: In the mid eighties Israel transferred Islamic Palestinians to the southern borders of Lebanon hoping that Lebanon would welcome them as refugees; this did not happen. The transferred Palestinians lived in makeshift tents for over six months before Israel was forced by the international community to re-transfer them to Gaza. Thus, a new Islamic fundamentalist party was instituted called Hamas. Many claim that Israel created Hamas, as the USA administrations created the Afghan Mujahideens to face the Soviet invasion, in order to destabilize the concept of a democratic bi-partisan government with Israel. The Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (OLP) was lead by the Palestinian secular main faction of Fateh and headed by Arafat. Israel would not accept this political structure for fear of demographic imbalance in the near future and wanted a purely Jewish State.
Adonis Diaries 