Blog For Palestine

I love the ISM as much as I hate the Arab masses that can do nothing but fail us. The ISM is launching a Lebanon Solidarity Campaign. They are planning to organize a convoy to deliver badly needed supplies to the Lebanese South. Their courage and committment humbles all of us.

Does anybody think that Huwaida Arraf would be willing to marry me. I know she’s already married to a much better man that I can ever dream to be, but maybe she can just take me as part of her Harem. Or maybe I can just make her coffee and bake her cookies. Anything…

-Tineen

In this article on Counterpunch Virginia Tilley tells why it’s now time to make the boycott of Israel a reality.  She lays out the primary reasons, the strategies and the real goals.  I cannot agree more with everything that she says.

Until recently I have completely ignored the varying Boycott calls; for example to my own shame and to that of my family, I was seldom seen without a Starbucks cup.  This has ended there is no more Starbucks for me, besides Seattle has much better coffee than Starbucks, Cafe Vita absolutely rocks.  But beyond my relationship with Starbucks, there needs to be a serious effort around mobilizing people to join the Boycott campaign against all Israeli goods, and US companies that support Israel.  There also need to be efforts around Academic and Tourism Boycotts.  Finally Divestment needs to be worked into this whole thing.

Is everyone on board?

-Tineen

So Tuesday we have this big meeting with a bunch of people from the Arab-American community.  I’d rather not share my opinion about most of the people that were there since that will turn this post into an angry venom filled rant.  So let me tell you what happened, I put together a very reasonable document outlining a common community objective and some strategies and immediate actions that we can take in different activism arenas.  The idea was to discuss this on a small scale on Tuesday and then on a large scale on Saturday in the context of a community wide townhall style meeting.

I send the document out to the guy organizing the meeting and the first thing I hear back from him is that the document is too ambitious, the community will reject because they don’t believe we can do this, blah, blah, blah.  These people, more than anything want to play community leaders but they fail even the most basic of tests.  Usually leaders help the community rise to the occasion, this group insists on claiming that the community are a bunch of weaklings and then they go and use that as an excuse to hide behind.  This was the reasoning given for the cancellation of the protest on Saturday and we see it rearing its ugly head again.

The meeting was a bit contentious if you haven’t gotten that idea yet.  It was comedy and tragedy both rolled into one.  Still it was an important meeting to have and I found it extremely informative.  The community thinks in one of two ways.  There are those looking for immediate gratification and the opportunity to do any feel good activities.  There are then those who want to think long term and they are willing to forgo the instant gratification in return for something more substantion in the future.

This is where we left off in the meeting.  A few people managed to come over to my side and we are moving forward.  The other will organize fundraisers and banquets for a little bit and then go home to wait for the next tragedy leveled by the Israeli against the Arabs and facilitated by our government, tax dollars and our silence.

The good news is that I am more motivated than ever.  The website is coming along very nicely.  The plan is to add a lot of meet by the end of this weekend and then send out an email to the community asking them to check it out and to participate.  Then we will hold a series of meetings next week to organize and begin acting.  All of this seems to be a very delayed reaction to the events that have been taking place over many weeks now.  Still it’s better late than never.

-Tineen

Seattle Arab-Americans are weak, disorganized and incapable of doing anything. This is about to change. Working with a couple of people we have drafted a plan to pull together and act on several fronts. The document will be presented tomorrow at an organizing meeting ahead of an open community meeting to be held this saturday.

Ahead of the meeting I’ve put together a website to be ready by saturday, check it out - www.seattlearabamericans.net. I know that the name is a little bit lame, but it’s the best thing I could think of…

Another big ticket item is a humanitarian aid project. There’s going to be another meeting this week to talk about this, I’ll update…

-Tineen

On a more depressing note, my efforts to drum up some interest in doing fundraising work has had a cold reception. The fact is I’ve only contacted ten people, but out of everyone I know, these are the people that I was most expecting to respond enthusiastically. And when I say cold reception, I mean I wasn’t even acknowledged. My email was delivered into an electronic black hole.

I’m actually not too astonished that this is happening. One of the key driving principles in mobilizing people to do any kind of community work is social networks. Over the past few years I’ve allowed my connections to atrophy and in doing so I have lost much of my social leverage. I’m going to have to fix that, but it will take a little time, and it is definitely something that needs to cook on a slow fire.

In the meantime, I need to move forward with my work one way or another. I have a couple of options. First, I can work on a very small scale starting out and slowly let the work gather momentum, eventually people will come around. The second option is to cast a truly wide net in soliciting help. Contact a hundred people I don’t know through some arab/pro-palestinian mailing list and hope that a handful of people offer some geniune help. The third option is to start out by contacting other organization that have done work to help out the Palestinian cause before and figure out ways we can do something together.

I’ll consider the pros and cons of these different options and hopefully have some resolution by the end of the week.

-Tineen

I just wanted to link to a couple of articles that were on EI about the boycott campaign.

• Palestinians welcome UK vote for Israel academic boycott
• CUPE Ontario votes in Support of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Against Israeli Apartheid

I especially liked a portion of the first article regarding the ‘academic freedom’ argument made by those opposing academic boycott. ‘The persistence of academic boycott efforts proves that many academics in the UK and beyond do not buy the disingenuous claim that boycott of Israeli academic institutions conflicts with “academic freedom” … The … claim is at best hypocritical as it is based on the premise that only Israeli academic freedom counts. The fact that Israeli academic institutions themselves collude in various ways in their government’s grave violations of Palestinian human and political rights, which include the right to education, is lost on those making this claim.’

-Tineen

So the Academic Boycott against Israel that was being debated in Britain has been voted on and passed. A number of British ministers were quick to express dismay over the vote, but that’s expected. I am very happy about this vote. The boycott efforts, whether they be academic, economic, cutural, or anything else, are greatly important. Israel is a moral anomaly, and as such it needs to be isolated from the rest of the world in every possible fashion. Good job guys.

There is a mini-storm in Israel happening around some efforts in Britian to organize a very limited boycott of Israeli educational institutions who do not publicly renounce “apartheid and discrimination in education”. There is tremendous mobilization in Israel, in Britain, across Europe and in the US by all those that support Israel to stop the boycott from being voted on. Letters are flying all over the place, pressure is being applied, outrage is being expressed, and suprise suprise the anti-semitism card has been brought out in full force.

There are a few important lessons here that we need to take note of. First there is the very healthy Israeli attitude that there is no issue that is too small to fight. Looking at the limited scope of the boycott being planned, the Israeli reaction might seem completely out of proportion. The fact is they are right to react so fiercely. A boycott such as this sets a precedent, no matter how small, and that represents a slipperly slope. Once one group is willing to express their moral outrage at the occupation, racism, oppression of the Zionist state, then other might be empowered to do the same. When I was reading about this I thought back to the law suit that was brought in American courts against the Palestinian Authority by victims of suicide bombings in Israel. The dumbasses at the Palestinian Authority didn’t even bother to send a defense lawyer.

The second lesson lies in the sheer scale of the mobilization. As much as we would like to hope that the justice of our cause will enable individuals of conscious to hold their ground in the face of such opposition, as some point the stakes become too high. If the boycott doesn’t make it through, I don’t think it will be because those professors will have changed their minds and believed that the arguments being made by the pro-Israel camp are right. It will because they will have been cowed by the sheer mass of opposition. To be honest with you, I wouldn’t blame them, I’m not sure if I were in their shoes I would be able to deal with all that hate being spewed at me for a cause that doesn’t affect me directly.

The third lesson lies in the approach taken by the Israelis to argue against the boycott. It isn’t just a single refrain by everyone saying ‘this is wrong in principle’. There are a dozen arguments on the table. Some people are talking about why aren’t the boycotts being imposed on other countries, some people are saying that politics should be separate from academics, other are doing the anti-semitism thing, etc, etc… The point is that by diversify the arguments they are appealing to people with completely different sensibilities and more important they’re appealing to the differing sensibilities that we each have.

I really hope that the boycott makes it through. I really hope that despite all this effort that the pro-Zionist forces are going though that they fall flat on their face. But more than anything I hope that in the future there will be a lot of pro-Zionist blogs out there enumerating the lessons that can be extracted from the work that the pro-Palestinian activist are doing to push boycotts against Israel forward. That would be sweet…

-Tineen

So I sat with a couple of people tonight and we went though a mini brainstorming session as to what would be good ways to fundraise for the Palestinian people at this time. We came up with a lot of good ideas, and some not so good ones (one proposal was to entrap wealthy arab-americans in “compromising” situations and blackmail them with some pictures). I still like that idea, but the consensus was that it was logistically difficult.

One interesting idea that came up was to throw a large and hopefully very profitable Arabic party, and have all the proceeds go to a Palestinian charity. The idea was a little hard to swallow at first. The Palestinian crisis is a somber issue and throwing a party where people are dancing and having fun feels strange and somehow sacrilegious. But after overcoming the initial hesitation, we realized that it is an idea worth exploring. The way I see it is people are going to go out, have fun and spend their money one way or another. Why not give them the opportunity to shake their asses, watch me shake mine (which is definitely something worth paying for), and have all the money go to something that will make them feel good? This is not unprecedented, people throw charity balls all the time and they do it for good reason: it generates a lot of money.

The idea is still really undercooked and I’ve yet to get the input of a lot of people. I’m going to try to get a bunch of people together sometime over the next week or so and see if we can explore this idea as well as some of the other ones that we had hastily drafted.

Still, Party For Palestine has a cool ring to it, and I for one would be standing in line to buy the tickets.
-Tineen

I don’t understand it. Every day I read scores of articles talking about how bad the situation in Palestine is becoming. Today I saw this piece in Haaretz talking about people dying because hospitals are forced to stop providing critical treatment like dialysis and cancer treatment. The American government is doing this, they have adopted a policy of collective punishment in order to impose their political will on the Palestinians. The American government is committing murder.

The question here is what are WE doing? I don’t ever remember a crisis of this scale being met with such silence on our part. What happened? Has the Bush administration been this successful in putting fear into the hearts of those who would speak out against injustice? Have we lost our zeal for this cause? It terrifies me to think that we might be forgetting who we are and what we stand for.

I truly believe that Israel is setting up the pieces to finally acheive its goal of erasing Palestine and the Palestinians. The silencing of the Palestinian Diaspora is part of this equation. The formula has always been Israeli terror against Palestinian steadfastness. Israel is now in the process of making a final push to break the Palestinian people’s will to remain and continue their struggle. They need us to not intervene, to stay quiet, to ignore what they are doing. Ben Gurion said ‘the old will die and the young will forget’. Is his prophecy coming true?

The Palestinians need immediate medical and economic relief. How can we, those living in the west, intervene directly in order to support them? I’m going to be thinking about this moving forward and sharing what I come up. If you have ideas or want to share what you are doing feel free to post a comment.

Tineen