Plight of the Unpeople: “In the Election Campaign, the Graveyards Won!”

2009-01-19

“In the Election Campaign, the Graveyards Won!”

On the third Saturday of the war, while the Israeli cabinet was in session, discussing the cease-fire proposal, 3000 Israeli citizens marched from Tel-Aviv to Jaffa in protest against the war.

The demonstrators marched from the Etzel Museum on the Tel-Aviv seashore to the center of Jaffa. A drizzle, the sound of drums and a large police force accompanied them all along the way.

“Barak, Barak, Minister of Defense / You will not buy power with blood”, “In the election campaign / the graveyards won”, “Enough is enough / Talk with Hamas” - shouted the protesters, who demanded an immediate cessation of the war, the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, the opening of the crossings between Gaza and the outside world and a dialogue with Hamas.

“A unilateral cease-fire is a stupid idea,” Gush Shalom activist Uri Avnery told the reporters, “This is an oxymoron. The very essence of a cease-fire is an agreement between the two fighting forces. The unilateral cease-fire is the idea of Olmert, Barak and Livni, and it makes sure that there will be soon another war.”

While in the earlier large demonstrations against the war the number of Jewish and Arab protesters was about equal, this time there was a marked majority of Jewish demonstrators. While in the earlier demonstrations the members of the various peace groups were dominant, this time the outstanding feature was the number of demonstrators who had come spontaneously, some for the first time, to express their horror of the events taking place in Gaza.

Among the protesters was a large group of students from Sapir College near Sderot, which is exposed to the Qassam rockets, as well as a group from Beersheva, which is also exposed to the rockets.

Israeli radio reported about “dozens of right-wing protesters” and “a protest of hundreds of supporters of (the captured soldier) Gilad Shalit,” but did not mention with a single word 3000 anti-war marchers. Haaretz devoted a few well-hidden lines to “1000 to 1500 leftist demonstrators”.

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Vietnamese

"If you really want to get a sense of “what happened” in Vietnam ... just imagine that you’re actually crouched in your basement, that your home above is ablaze, that lethal helicopters are hovering overhead, and that heavily-armed teenagers — foreigners who don’t speak your language — are out there in your yard, screaming commands you don’t understand, rolling grenades into your neighbor’s cellar, and if you run out through the flames, into the chaos, one of them might just shoot you." - Nick Turse

America

“Everywhere I go, every town I visit, you don’t see any industries. You don’t see any factories. You don’t see anything. We don’t make anything. We are really the poorest country on earth, but people refuse to see that. We are only surviving. We are only looking good because of our military might, because we are an empire. But this force cannot go on forever. It should be so obvious that we’re only chugging along, bullying people into lending us money and sending us stuff that we don’t deserve, that we haven’t earned. How can we survive? Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been reduced to living like savages in this self-proclaimed greatest country on earth.” - Linh Dinh

Chagossians

"First, they tried to shoot the dogs. Next, they tried to poison them with strychnine. When both failed as efficient killing methods, British government agents and U.S. Navy personnel used raw meat to lure the pets into a sealed shed. Locking them inside, they gassed the howling animals with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Then, setting coconut husks ablaze, they burned the dogs’ carcasses as their owners were left to watch and ponder their own fate." - David Vine writing about the ethnic cleansing of Diego Garcia

2009-01-19

“In the Election Campaign, the Graveyards Won!”

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