Posted on: December 12, 2014
Palestinian non-violent activists killed by Israel
Naomi Wolf posted:
“All the Western MSM have ‘”dies after clashes’ suggesting this minister was violent and the context was militarized or aggressive. Only the Guardian includes the fact that the group was a peaceful group of protesters planting olive trees, in its subhed (that is journalism speak for the explanation below the headline).
See the demonization of Palestinians and Islam almost like an organic law and the story moves from East to West?
And is that second soldier restraining the one choking Abu Ain — or restraining Abu Ain from keeping himself from being choked bythe first soldier? http://www.theguardian.com/…/palestinian-minister-dies-conf…
The Palestinian minister who died after a non-violent protest on Wednesday was a symbol the Palestinian Authority’s support for non-violent popular struggle.
Non-violent Palestinian leaders from across the West Bank talk about how Israel responds violently toward their activities.
Yael Marom published this Dec. 10, 2014
A general strike in Ramallah, three days of mourning in the Palestinian Authority and calls for increased protests and non-violent resistance to the occupation.
Those were only some of the responses to the death of Palestinian Minister Ziad Abu Ein, who died during a protest marking International Human Rights Day Wednesday.
Abu Ein, who was the Palestinian Authority official responsible for popular resistance against West Bank settlements, took part in a press conference organized by four Palestinian villages and Israeli human rights group Yesh Din Wednesday morning.
The press conference was timed to coincide with a petition to the Israeli High Court of Justice demanding that the Israeli army dismantle the illegal settlement outpost of Adei Ad, in the northern West Bank, and International Human Rights Day.
“We tried to go and plant olive tree saplings today when the soldiers attacked us,” said Abdallah Abu-Rahme, of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC). “The soldiers pushed Abu Ein; he was injured and fell to the ground. He is an older man who had various health conditions, and he died as a result of the blows he sustained.”
The type of direct action used Wednesday is an example of the way non-violent popular resistance has been organized in the West Bank since the Second Intifada. The struggle, which initially came in response to construction of the separation barrier and the ensuing land grabs, uses tools aimed at bringing resistance against injustice to the locations where they those injustices are taking place.
When the resistance is against the separation barrier — they march toward the wall, when it’s about land theft, they attempt to reach those lands and demonstrate there. In the case of today’s action, the activists set out to plant olive trees, a Palestinian symbol, on lands that were confiscated.
In recent years the Palestinian Authority has assumed a larger and larger role in that struggle. Issa Amro, one of the leaders of Youth Against Settlements, an organization that practices non-violent resistance in Hebron, spoke to +972 about Ziad Abu Eid.
“I have known him since he assumed his current role as the official responsible for popular struggle in the West Bank and against settlements,” Amro said. “He really tried to advance the non-violent struggle. He tried to organize non-violent [popular] committees, to organize the youth, political parties and students. He had a vision that 2015 would be the year of Palestinian non-violent struggle.”
Amro said of today’s events: “The army and the settlers turn the leaders of non-violent struggle into targets. That’s their way of preventing us from recruiting more people and more young people into our struggle. Look at how the army responds to non-violent struggle — with disproportionate violence toward the activists.”
Amro brought up Nariman Tamimi, one of the more prominent activists in the resistance by residents of Nabi Saleh against the confiscation of the village’s spring by settlers, who was shot in her leg last month. “They don’t want this type of struggle because if there is a non-violent movement it will weaken the occupation. They say the occupation is there for security, but if the struggle is non-violent then they can no longer justify the occupation.”
Munadir Amira, one of the PSCC’s leaders in the West Bank village of Ni’ilin, told +972: “This is a crime intended to stop these types of non-violent actions. They want us to be violent; they want us to not even open our mouths; they want us to just accept what Israel does.
But we won’t remain silent. This is another example of crimes that are committed by the occupation against non-violent activists. But this crime will not stop us from resisting the occupation. We will continue our struggle and even step it up. In the coming days there will be more actions at the same location and across the entire West Bank.”
Asked about the mood in the Palestinian street, Amira said: “Everyone is in shock, but not me. I know the way the Israeli army behaves towards us. Every small mistake by a soldier can cost us our lives. They use gas, they shoot at us. He isn’t the first to be killed in a non-violent action. They kill us — we know that we will pay a price, but that is the price of freedom.”
“Zia Abu Ein was a symbol of the Palestinian Authority’s support for the popular struggle,” said Muhammad Zawara, an activist in the PSCC from the Bethlehem-area village of al-Ma’asara. “He represented the strategy of non-violent action, of protest, and of promoting those tools as a central strategy of the Palestinian Authority.”
Attorney Gabi Lasky, who represents human rights defenders and activists in the popular struggle, and who is a Tel Aviv City Council member for Meretz, said: “On one hand, in a situation of occupation the security forces defend the settlers and land thieves and implement an apartheid regime in the territories. And on the other hand they prevent the residents of that occupied territory from struggling against that [land] theft and apartheid.”
“Instead of ending the injustice they try and curb and prevent non-violent protests. In doing so, the security forces use violence against anyone who attempts to realize their most legitimate right — to protest. That’s what happened here. And this time, like in previous incidents, it ended with death.”
On the non-violent struggle, Lasky said: “The Israeli occupation has found many ways to use force against Palestinian violent struggle. But it doesn’t have an answer to non-violent struggle, aside from sending its leaders to prison.”
Related:
Palestinian minister dies after reportedly struck by Israeli troops
Yael Marom is Just Vision’s public engagement manager and a co-editor of Local Call, where this article was originally published in Hebrew.
Posted on: October 2, 2014
EXCLUSIVE IMAGES
Until the Second Intifada, the zoo was a popular attraction for families keen to see giraffes, zebras, hippopotamuses and other assorted creatures that they had previously only seen in books.
By 2002, with Qalqilya under daily Israeli attack, the zoo’s resident veterinarian Dr. Sami Khader felt compelled to add a new string to the bow of his already overloaded workload.
As tear gas and Israeli bullets filled the town’s streets, they also began to spill over in to the zoo’s compound.
One night, as Israeli soldiers entered the zoo whilst shooting, animals panicked and ‘Rudy’ the prized male giraffe hit his head against an iron bar and fell. Rudy soon died of a stroke due to a build up of blood pressure caused by the accident.
Rudy’s partner, ‘Brownie’, fell in to a deep depression after seeing her dead mate and miscarried the baby she was carrying.
When tear gas again filled the zoo’s air, Brownie suffocated and died. It was at this stage that Dr. Sami decided to become a taxidermist:
‘I spent most of my time here during and just after the intifada working on taxidermy. The first giraffe took me 6 months alone. Nothing is wasted here and this is what we have, we need to preserve everything so that people can learn about animals’.
Today, the few visitors who do reach the zoo can see an array of live animals and also visit Dr. Sami’s other ‘attractions’ including the museum of stuffed animals. Alongside the giraffes are a zebra, jungle cat and others that died during the intifada, as well as various animals that succumbed to natural causes.
This rather macabre collection does not dominate the zoo’s current life however.
In more recent years Dr. Sami has also established an animal hospital, and local people often bring him injured animals to treat.
His belief is that the educational role that the zoo can provide for Palestinian children is paramount, and he is full of big ideas:
“We care for injured animals, preserve dead animals, look after live animals and I want to create so much more for the children.
Most of my time now is spent developing educational opportunities and working with groups of school children, helping them to learn more about wildlife.
I want to create an earthquake simulator and put together a whale skeleton that people can walk inside, but all this takes time, space and money.”
Being established in 1986 – before the Oslo Accords – the zoo was built whilst Qalqilya was under full Israeli civil and military control.
Dr. Sami was once asked by an Israeli zoologist if the animals were owned by Israel or Palestine. He answered metaphorically:
“Animals don’t need borders...”
Qalqilya Zoo simultaneously educates people about animals and provides many metaphors about contemporary Palestinian realities.
Museum campus concept illustration courtesy of the Palestinian Museum.
In the hills of the occupied West Bank town of Birzeit, near the city of Ramallah, construction began earlier this year on the Palestinian Museum.
Using an innovative approach in space and exhibition design, the project breaks away from traditions in museum practice.
Besides showcasing Palestinian art and culture, the museum hopes to create a space that generates conversation and ideas for the future.
While its main hub will lie in Birzeit, the museum is building a network of partnerships and satellites abroad, with aims to extend beyond the geographic borders of Palestine, which are under restrictive Israeli control, to its expansive diaspora.
Jack Persekian, director and head curator of the museum, met with The Electronic Intifada at the office of the Palestinian Museum in June.
“The museum is the brainchild of the Welfare Association,” he said, referring to a not-for-profit organization focused on development and humanitarian projects in Palestine.
“They were thinking back in 1997 to commemorate the Nakba [the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians leading up to and after Israel’s establishment] on its 50th anniversary in 1998. And they thought of the concept of the Palestinian Museum of Memory.” (The main objective of Israel is to erase any memory of Palestinian culture)
The idea was shelved when the second intifada broke out in September 2000 but was revived in the mid-2000s, when a new team reviewed the concept of the project.
The group began to approach “the idea of the museum from a broader perspective,” Persekian explained, “not necessarily start or stop at the Nakba, even though the Nakba is a major turning point in the life of Palestine and Palestinians. But nevertheless to look at Palestinians before that and after that … take that history and that memory as a means to reflect on what’s happening today and as a way to think through ideas, concepts and propositions for the future.”
The team also began to re-conceptualize the museum site itself. It was decided that a main hub would be built in Birzeit in two stages, the first to house rotating exhibitions and the second, larger building to feature a permanent collection.
But the team also re-imagined how a museum might connect with other installments beyond Palestine.
Gradually the idea started evolving and one major component was to not just think about the museum as a location and a building, but to think about this museum as an institution that can serve Palestinians wherever they are,” Persekian said.
“We know that more than half of the Palestinians are outside of Palestine. So we started thinking of the museum as a hub with branches and partnerships in other places, particularly in places where Palestinians themselves cannot access this site in Birzeit,” including Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon, Persekian explained.
The museum began establishing partnerships abroad and connecting to existing institutions and projects to create satellites to house its exhibitions.
It has begun plans for its first show, titled Never Part, which tells the stories of Palestinians all over the world and the objects they cherish. This exhibition, Persekian hopes, can travel abroad through satellites.
“[It] won’t be this one body of work, but it will move and transform as it travels from one place to another,” he explained. “The whole exhibition will embody the state that Palestinians are living in, and the objects and stories inside will reflect that as it moves from one area to another and different people get involved.”
Besides making connections abroad, the museum has begun to build a network between museums inside geographic Palestine itself, where Palestinian communities are cut off from each other and isolated from the outside world by Israel’s regime of closure and checkpoints.
“We mapped the museums in Palestine. We looked at what’s out there and discovered there are 51 museums,” Persekian explained.
“Not all of them functioning — some closed, some [are] not as visible as others. Nonetheless, we decided that we’re part of this community and we would like to create a network amongst these museums so we can help each other,” he said.
“This will help us integrate and help all of us to raise the capacity and the performance of museum work in Palestine. So we started now on a series of workshops; we brought in some specialists in particular areas: archiving, collections, IT [information technology], all sorts of different practical technical issues of concern to the museum community,” Persekian added.
The term “museum community” is something that the team is trying to develop, he added, “because this field — if I can call it a field — is so fragmented, and each entity, each museum is totally separate from the rest. There is no communication. So what we’re trying to do is find this common ground where we can all meet and share and find synergies amongst ourselves.”
From the In the Presence of the Holy See series: UNRWA photo archive image of Dheisheh refugee camp after the 1948 partition justaposed with Tanya Habjouqa’s 2012 photo of Israel’s wall near Beit Hanina, Jerusalem.
From the In the Presence of the Holy See series: “Christ healing the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda” (c.1670) by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, juxtaposed with Alexandra Boulat’s 2006 photo of Palestinian at Erez checkpoint in Gaza.
Embodying the museum’s unique approach, its first exhibition in May 2014 was displayed not in the museum’s physical site (which was still under construction at the time), but in public space, through partnerships and on postcards.
Titled In the Presence of the Holy See, the exhibition featured images of present-day Palestine collaged and interlaced with traditional Christian imagery and archive photos. Prints of the images were displayed in Bethlehem’s Manger Square during the Pope’s visit earlier this year, as well as in nearby Dheisheh refugee camp. The images were later printed as a set of postcards.
Persekian said that the project “was about taking something, the image of Palestinian struggle, and suffering, and all of that, which has become a little bit worn out in the media as people have seen it over and over again — I wanted people outside to look at this again, to discover it again.”
The Palestinian Museum describes itself as “A safe place for unsafe ideas,” calling attention to its innovative approach to the function of the museum.
The museum’s refreshingly experimental yet comprehensive approach does not neglect that approximately seven million exiled Palestinian refugees live across the world, the vast majority of them prevented by Israel from returning to Palestine, even just to visit.
“In a state like ours where there is a lot of fragmentation and people can’t reach each other, we started thinking about how can we make these linkages,” Persekian said. “How can we talk about concepts and ideas and how can we engage with Palestinians who do not share the same geographical area as we do?”
The team is inviting Palestinians to participate in its opening show, Never Part, through the museum’s website, where people can submit stories about the objects they have kept and cherished.
Promising to be a compelling experience, the Palestinian Museum’s physical space is planned to open by the end of 2015.
Daryl Meador is a graduate student studying media at The New School who recently lived and volunteered in Nablus. Follow her on Twitter: @yalladaryl.
Adonis Diaries 
