In a strange outburst of ignorance, Bono, of Dublin U2 fame and a purported international human rights advocate, recently chastised the Palestinians in the New York Times no less, because they had no Gandhi, no ML King or Aung San Suu Kyi, a leader of nonviolent protest of their movement to attain freedom and self-determination. As Phil Weiss noted, it was curious how Bono failed to mention Nelson Mandela or Bishop Desmond Tutu, who helped to take down South African Apartheid, and have been advocates for Palestinian freedom for years. Apparently Bono needed some cover because he agreed to perform in Israel, a nation that has keep Palestinians under occupation for over 40 years for the sole purpose of taking their lands. By contrast, the singer Santana has recently canceled his planned engagement in Israel next summer as a result of Israel’s continuing subjugation of the Palestinian people while it expands settlements on Palestinian lands.
The Palestinians replied that they, the Gandhis, are all under arrest or in prison, a common practice of Israel’s attempt to silence nonviolent protest by arresting its leaders.
Bono’s ignorance (or exceptionalism) probably extends to recent incidents involving arrests of Palestinian leaders of nonviolent peace activism, but also the latest incident, in which Israeli soldiers raided the offices of the most venerable peace organization in the West Bank, the International Solidarity Movement, which also has offices all over the United States and in numerous countries around the world. ISM is run by its co-founder, Ghassan Andoni, who was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Bono knows what’s going on but appears too timid or fearful of confronting the state of Israel and/or perhaps its supporters in the music industry.
IDF twice raids Ramallah office of pro-Palestinian group
Israel Defense Forces soldiers raided the International Solidarity Movement’s Ramallah office Wednesday for the second time this week, confiscating computers, T-shirts and bracelets engraved with the word “Palestine.”
On Sunday, soldiers arrested Ariadna Jove Marti of Spain and Bridgette Chappell of Australia at the Ramallah office. The High Court of Justice ordered the two women freed on Monday.
Yesterday’s raid took place at 3 A.M. Hours later, the ISM held a press conference, in conjunction with other pro-Palestinian organizations, at which they lashed out at the IDF’s behavior. According to the ISM, the army launched an organized campaign in mid-December, the goal of which was to break up the popular protests against the separation fence in the West Bank villages of Bili’in and Na’alin. This campaign has included arrests and other forms of harassment, the activists charged.
Chappell said the IDF apparently sees the ISM as a “challenge” to Israel, and is therefore taking action against it. She added that the army would not find anything incriminating in the group’s computers, as all its activities are strictly legal.
According to the Israeli organization Anarchists Against the Wall, the IDF has conducted no fewer than 18 nighttime raids in Na’alin alone since December, during which time it has arrested 25 people. Bili’in was subject to five raids and eight arrests.
“I don’t think there were even that many army raids in Nablus in 2002, at the height of the intifada,” claimed Jonathan Pollack of the anarchist group.
In addition to its two raids on the ISM office, the IDF also raided the offices of two other groups – Stop the Wall and the Palestinian Communist Party – this week. The activists claim that none of these groups are involved in terrorist activities; they merely organize demonstrations.
ISM, founded soon after the second intifada began in September 2000, is a very small group. It usually has less than 20 activists in the West Bank at any one time. Nevertheless, it has been heavily involved in anti-Israel protests, and is currently active in the demonstrations against house demolitions in East Jerusalem as well as the protests in Bili’in and Na’alin. It also has four activists located in the Gaza Strip.
Two ISM activists have been killed while protesting, Rachel Corrie in 2003 and Tom Hurndall in 2004; two others have been seriously wounded, one brain damaged.
We have to wonder what the world is coming to when exceptionalism attaches to human rights and the cause of freedom. It’s good for some but not for others.
Earlier this week: Al Jezeera reporting,
“Rights group targeted
….Israeli military officials raided offices of Stop the Wall, a human-rights group that campaigns against the construction of the West Bank separation barrier.
Stop the Wall released a statement on Monday saying that at least 10 military vehicles invaded the city of Ramallah before officials searched through the offices, “confiscating computer hard disks, laptops, and video cameras along with paper documents, CDs, and video cassettes”.
Arrest campaign
In recent months, Israel has intensified its arrest campaign against those involved in the anti-barrier protests. Two pro-Palestinian foreigners were arrested on Sunday.
The activists were employed with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), one from Spain and the other from Australia.”
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RAMALLAH – The Israeli courts ordered the release this week of two foreign women arrested by the army in the West Bank in what human-rights lawyers warn has become a wide-ranging clampdown by Israel on non-violent protest from international, Israeli and Palestinian activists.
The arrest of the two women during a nighttime raid on the Palestinian city of Ramallah has highlighted a new tactic by Israeli officials: using immigration police to try to deport foreign supporters of the Palestinian cause.
A Czech woman was deported last month after she was seized from Ramallah by a special unit known as Oz, originally established to arrest migrant labourers working illegally inside Israel.
Human rights lawyers say Israel’s new offensive is intended to undermine a joint non-violent struggle by international activists and Palestinian villagers challenging a land grab by Israel as it builds the separation wall on farmland in the West Bank.
[Bilin Friday protesters score small victory – Oui]
Israel’s daily Haaretz called it a “war on protest”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I always suspected that the nonviolent movement, which would take off internationally, would be perceived by Israel as more dangerous than violent reactions or retaliations.
“the Gandhis, are all under arrest or in prison, a common practice of Israel’s attempt to silence nonviolent protest by arresting its leaders.“
Or exiling them, or in some cases murdering them.
I suppose these practices go back a long way, but is only culminating today in their expansion.
Needless to say, Israel prefers violent “terrorist-“like reactions from the Palestinians that it can then use to defame the freedom movement, and to also project a hostile state were Palestine ever to come into being.
The retaliatory suicide bombings during the second Intifada did more to justify Israeli colonialism than anything before or since.
Palestinian non-violent resistance against Zionism goes back decades before Israeli statehood and has taken many forms, from diplomacy to public demonstrations to civil disobedience. The First Intifada was primarily a non-violent movement that involved a lot of civil disobedience, a lot of it intended to break Palestinian economic dependence on Israel. The Israelis quietly squashed as many parts of it as they could.
Yes, Israel prefers violent resistance and always has. They have a lifelong history of provocation not only of the Palestinians, but of neighboring countries, particularly Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, much of which in the early years was documented by UN observers.
Here’s more, this time from a Jewish Voice for Peace (Cecile Surasky) email:
So why is Bono going to Israel?
I believe that his group is scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv as part of a tour. So was Carlos Santana, but he canceled. Elton John is also scheduled for a performance in Israel this summer.
Something I wasn’t aware of, Bono did cancel a concert in Israel in the past under pressure from an Israel boycott organization centered in Britain, if I’m not mistaken.
Bono only cares about two things: money and his own ego
Well, in truth, Bono has done a lot of charity work in his career.
http://www.looktothestars.org/celebrity/26-bono
The question that is troublesome is why he is acting to make an exception of the Palestinians, and actually going to Israel to do a concert this summer, just a year and a half after the Gaza massacre, and writing comments in the New York Times that clearly display ignorance about the Palestinian situation. But I don’t think he is really as ignorant as his remarks suggest. On one occasion in the past, he did cancel an Israel concert on account of the Palestinian cause for freedom. What has changed? it’s anyone’s guess.
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“Another fucking Bono op-ed,” a tipster astutely notes! The U2 frontman has Ten Ideas to Change the World, and they’re in the Times’ Op-Ed section “in the spirit of rock star excess.” So how ’bout ten ideas to change Bono?
IDEA 8. If you’re going to write an Op-Ed, write it for the Las Vegas Sun. Do I think it’s ridiculous that you have an Op-Ed page in the New York Times? For fuck’s sake, absolutely. But do I think it’ll get some people who didn’t read the New York Times yesterday to read it today? Yes. That’s not a terrible thing. Hell, write for the Las Vegas Sun. They won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism this year and had to lay off the editor who oversaw the reporting on the prize-winning piece. If you can’t, get The Edge to do it. What’s he doing right now, eating bananas? Call his ass.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I wish I could give you extra 4s for posting this.
Oui is so much on top of things, I often consult his posts for current information about what is happening in the Middle East, among other things.
Thanks Oui.
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Bassam (not his real name), who lives in a village west of Ramallah, deciding to visit his aunt who lives in another village 14 kilometers away. It took place in the afternoon hours of Monday, December 21, 2009. Bassam’s home is some 10 kilometers north of Route 443 and his aunt’s home to the south. A narrow, winding path links the villages located along the way. Bassam took two taxis, then began walking the rest of the way. At the suggestion of another boy he met on the path, he took a shortcut through a valley and headed for the little tunnel that runs below the road which is closed off to Palestinians, but built on their land.
Several hundred meters from the elevated road, some Israel Defense Forces soldiers popped out from in between the olive trees. According to the boy, they called him over, saying “Come, come.” “I was afraid and fled,” Bassam says. But the soldiers grabbed him.
“They boxed me a little on my ears, covered my eyes and put plastic handcuffs on my wrists. Then they lifted me and threw me into a jeep,” he says. An Arabic speaker, he says, told him: “If they ask you, say that you threw stones.”
… With his eyes covered and hands cuffed, Bassam was taken from place to place. At the first stop, he was kept about two hours. They offered him water, but he said he did not want any. Then they drove to another place where a police interrogator asked him if he “had ever thrown stones on 443,” Bassam relates. “I said yes – because that’s what the soldier in the jeep told me – but I didn’t know what 443 was. At the third stop, Bassam was seen by a doctor who spoke some Arabic. “He asked me if I had had any operations and I said no. Then they covered my eyes again, handcuffed me and we went off,” he says. By then it was already dark; they next arrived at the Ofer Prison. In the Prison Service records, Bassam is registered as prisoner number 1336183.
The inmates in the cell he was taken to immediately calmed him down, gave him something to eat, and explained that he would appear in court the next day. “I knew about Shabak [the Shin Bet security service] but I didn’t know what the court was,” he says.
‘But I am standing’
At around 3 P.M. on December 22, in the caravan which houses the court, Iyad Misk, an attorney with DCI (Defence for Children International), spotted Bassam, whom he did not know, huddled among the other prisoners. When the judge, Major Shimon Leibo, entered, Misk thought Bassam didn’t realize he had to stand. “Get up, get up,” he said in a stage whisper from the attorney’s stand. Bassam stared at him in amazement. “But I am standing,” he said. Judge Leibo heard, looked and began to smile.
Bassam, just 12-years-old, caused the Israelis to smile.
… Meanwhile, Bassam’s parents were beside themselves with worry. When he did not return home in the morning from his aunt’s home, they started searching for him throughout the surrounding areas – in the orchards, at the checkpoints, on the roads, at army posts. “I walked through the mountains looking for him and crying,” his father, who is a welder, recalls. In the evening, one of Misk’s friends found the father and informed him that Bassam would be spending a second night in detention. The following day, December 23, the father appeared at the military tribunal.
He held back his tears as he watched his son enter the caravan. The jacket reached his knees and his hands were buried inside the long sleeves. “Take a look at him,” the father told the judge, Major Sharon Rivlin-Ahai, in fluent Hebrew. “Is this what the great Israel Defense Forces are needed for – to arrest this boy?”
A summary of the role of the detention and interrogation phase in the prosecution of Palestinian juveniles in the Israeli Military Courts
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."