Some Countries We'll Definitely Be Watching In the Next Round

June 26, 2014, 8:13 pm

Algeria 200/1
Algeria. Star Dunes in Algeria. The image was acquired by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite on October 27, 2012. It was made from a combination of near-infrared and visible light. In this type of false-color image, sand is tan and shadows are black or gray. The blue-tinted areas are likely mineral-rich evaporites. The image is centered at 29.8°north latitude, 7.9°east longitude, near the town of Gadamis. As is common with star dunes, some of the dunes have long interlacing arms connecting to nearby dunes: image by NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS/ U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team (NASA)

Argentina 4/1
Argentina. Paraná River Floodplain, Northern Argentina. The Paraná River is South America’s second largest, and the river and its tributaries are important transportation routes for landlocked cities in Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. This astronaut photograph shows a 29-kilometer (18 mile) stretch of the Paraná, downstream of the small city of Goya, Argentina (just off the top left of the image): image by NASA Earth Observatory (NASA), 9 April 2011

Brazil 3/1

Brazil. Sao Simao Reservoir, Brazil is featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 16 crew member on the International Space Station (ISS). The Sao Simao reservoir, near the confluence of the Rio Paranaiba and Rio Verde in Brazil, is the featured subject in a milestone image of Earth. This colorful, patchwork image is the 300,000th image of Earth downlinked from the space station. There are now over 745,000 images of Earth taken by astronaut crews, beginning with the Mercury missions in 1961 and continuing to the present day on the ISS. The Sao Simao reservoir is located on the border between the states of Goias and Minas Gerais (near the geographic coordinates of 18.7S 50.4W). Though the town of Sao Simao was founded around 1935, major growth occurred when the hydroelectric power plant and dam were built - forming the reservoir -- in 1975. The reservoir is part of a major navigation link that allows transport of goods and commerce between central Brazil, the Prata River and the South Atlantic. With 600,000 square kilometers of surface area, the reservoir also serves as a tourist destination for fishing, swimming and boating. In addition to hydroelectric power production, the economy of the region is based in agribusiness. The image highlights agricultural fields of various kinds and in different stages of cultivation. The major commodities include corn, soybeans, sesame seeds, sugarcane, beans, manioc, coffee and meat production: image by NASA/ISS, 11 June 2014 (NASA)

Chile 28/1

Chile. Lluta River, Chile. A remote plateau in far northern Chile is not a place you want to be without water. Large sections of the Atacama Desert -- often called the driest place on Earth -- receive less than a millimeter of rain per year. The town of Arica -- which lies along the Pacific coast, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) west of the area shown here -- has the lowest average precipitation of any city in the world. Arica survives on just .03 inches (0.8 millimeters) of rain per year, about 75 times less than what California’s Death Valley receives.The barren nature of the landscape was on full display on July 19, 2012, when the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite acquired this image. Although a few types of cacti and other drought-tolerant species can survive in the Atacama, surfaces appear vegetation-free from ALI’s perspective, leaving a veneer of tan to dominate the image: image by NASA Earth Observatory (NASA)

Colombia 20/1

Colombia. Eruption of Nevado Del Ruiz. Nevado del Ruiz Volcano, infamous for its deadly lahars, sprang to life in March 2012. Located in the Colombian Andes, the volcano was frequently active during the past 1,000 years, most recently in 2010. Observers first reported earthquakes near the volcano, followed by emissions of volcanic gases and small amounts of ash. By early June sulfur dioxide emissions had increased, and ash reached as far as 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the volcano. This natural-color satellite image shows a burst of ash from Nevado del Ruiz on June 6, 2012. It was acquired by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite: image by NASA Earth Observatory (NASA)

Costa Rica 50/1
Costa Rica. Unrest at Turrialba Volcano, Costa Rica. Turrialba Volcano, located in central Costa Rica, emits a translucent plume of volcanic gases in this natural-color satellite image from January 21, 2010. According to the RED Sismológica Nacional (Costa Rican National Seismological Network), activity at the volcano increased markedly on January 4, 2010. Strong, long-lasting volcanic tremors were accompanied by gas plumes over the volcano, and emissions of ash began on January 5th. The “jet-type noise” of gas and ash rushing out of fumaroles was heard several kilometers away. On January 21, Nacion.com reported that potato and carrot farmers were asked to leave fields near the volcano’s summit due to further increases in gas emissions. The barren summit region of the 3,340-meter- (10,960-foot-) high Turrialba appears gray and brown, while the volcanic plume is a hazy blue. Fields and pastures are light green, in contrast to dark green forest that covers the high-elevation ridges. Since 2007, frequent acid rain showers caused by activity at the volcano killed or damaged much of the vegetation to the southwest of the summit, leaving the area brown and orange. This image was acquired by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite: image by NASA Earth Observatory (NASA)

Mexico 33/1

Mexico. Monterrey, Mexico. In northeastern Mexico’s Nuevo Leon state, the Sierra Madre Oriental (Eastern Sierra Madres) cluster in densely packed rows of arcing ridgelines. Just to the southwest of the city of Monterrey, these west-to-east running ridges make a sharp bend toward the south. The mountains then continue southward roughly parallel to the Gulf Coast for hundreds of miles.This image of the region around Monterrey was captured by the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus sensor on NASA’s Landsat satellite on November 28, 1999. The dry terrain at lower elevations in the image appear in shades of tan and brown, while on the sharp ridges, vegetation appears dull to deep green. The urban development of Monterrey makes a gray patch at the foothills of the mountains. A river winds its way through the ridges as a tan ribbon: NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data obtained from the University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility (NASA)

Netherlands 8/1
Netherlands. Den Helder, Netherlands is featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 15 crewmember on the International Space Station. The city and harbor of Den Helder in the northern Netherlands has been the home port of the Dutch Royal Navy for over 175 years. Its favorable location provides access to the North Sea, and has made it an important commercial shipping port in addition to its strategic role. Bright red agricultural fields to the south of Den Helder indicate another noteworthy aspect of the region--commercial farming of tulips and hyacinth. This image is an oblique view--the camera is oriented at an angle relative to "straight down"--of the Den Helder region taken from the space station, which was located to the southeast, near Dulmen, Germany (approximately 225 kilometers away in terms of ground distance) when the image was acquired. In addition to the manmade structures of the Den Helder urban area (reddish gray to gray street grids) and dockyards to the east of the city, several striking geomorphic features are visible. The extensive gray mudflats, with their prominent branching pattern (top right), indicate that this image was acquired at low tide, and suggest thegeneral low elevation of the region. Parallel wave patterns along the mudflats and in the Marsdiep strait are formed as water interacts with the sea bottom between Den Helder and Texel Island during tidal flow. Some ship wakes are also visible. According to scientists, the bright white-gray triangular region at the southern tip of Texel Island (bottom center) is a dune field, consisting mainly of eolian (windborne) sands deposited during the last ice age. Subsequent sea level rise and shoreline processes have mobilized and re-deposited these sands into their current configuration -- including a new dune field island to the southwest of Texel (bottom center): image by NASA/ISS, 11 June 2014 (NASA)

Nigeria 200/1
Nigeria. Once serving as part of the floor for a much larger Lake Chad, the area now known as the Bodele Depression, located at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert in north central Africa, is slowly being transformed into a desert landscape. In the mid-1960s, Lake Chad was about the size of Lake Erie. But persistent drought conditions coupled with increased demand for freshwater for irrigation have reduced Lake Chad to about 5 percent of its former size. As the waters receded, the silts and sediments resting on the lakebed were left to dry in the scorching African sun. The small grains of the silty sand are easily swept up by the strong wind gusts that occasionally blow over the region. Once heaved aloft, the Bodele dust can be carried for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. The remnants of Lake Chad appear as the olive-green feature set amid the tan and light brown hues of the surrounding landscape where the countries of Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon all share borders. The Bodele Depression was the source of some very impressive dust storms that swept over West Africa and the Cape Verde Islands in early February. These true-color images were acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on February 7, and February 11, 2004. Numerous fires are shown as red dots in the February 7 images: image by Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC (NASA)

Switzerland 80/1

Switzerland. Bernese Alps, Switzerland is featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 13 crew member onboard the International Space Station. The formidable mountain system of the Alps stretches across much of central Europe, with seven countries claiming portions of the mountains within their borders (Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Austria, and Slovenia). The glacial landscape of the Bernese Alps, located in southwestern Switzerland, is well illustrated by this view. The image was taken by a crewmember looking north-northwest while the station was located over the Mediterranean Sea between Corsica and Italy -- this oblique viewing angle imparts a sense of perspective to the image. This type of viewing angle complements more nadir (downward)--viewing imagery of the region. Three of the higher peaks of the central Alps are visible--Jungfrau (4,158 meters), Moench (4,089 meters), and Eiger (3,970 meters). To the east and south of the Jungfrau is the Aletsch Glacier, clearly marked by dark medial moraines extending along the glacier's length parallel to the valley axis. The moraines are formed from rock and soil debris collected along the sides of three mountain glaciers located near the Jungfrau and Moench peaks -- as these flowing ice masses merge to form the Aletsch Glacier, the debris accumulates in the middle of the glacier and is carried along the flow direction. According to geologists, Lake Brienz to the northwest was formed by the actions of both glacial ice and the flowing waters of the Aare and Lutschine rivers, and has a maximum depth of 261 meters. The lake has a particularly fragile ecosystem, as demonstrated by the almost total collapse of the whitefish population in 1999. Possible causes for the collapse, according to the scientists, include increased water turbidity associated with upstream hydropower plant operations, and reduction of phosphorus (a key nutrient for lake algae, a basic element of the local food web) due to water quality concerns: image by NASA/ISS. 11 June 2014 (NASA)

Uruguay 28/1

Uruguay. This image, captured by the MODIS on the Terra satellite shows the Rio de la Plata Estuary, on August 21, 2007. The Rio de la Plata estuary is formed by both the Uruguay River and the Parana River, and is on the southeastern coastline of South America. The estuary is actually between the countries of Uruguay (top) and Argentina (bottom), and opens up into the Atlantic Ocean. The capital cities of both countries are actually right on the estuary. Buenos Aires, Argentina is visible as a semi-circular gray patch on the southwestern end of it. Montivideo, Uruguay is a smaller grayish patch near the north side of the opening of the estuary. A great deal of sediment is carried into the estuary each year, where the muddy waters are stirred up by winds and the tides. The few red dots you see are the locations of active fires: image by NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team (NASA)

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A Dance of Light and Shadow

June 27, 2014, 10:12 pm

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Jogo de Futebol entre as selecções de Portugal e Itália, Porto, Portugal: photo by Mario Novais (1899-1967), 1928 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots. In this fin-de-siècle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable. Nobody earns a thing from that crazy feeling that for a moment turns a man into a child playing with a balloon, like a cat with a ball of yarn; a ballet dancer who romps with a ball as light as a balloon or a ball of yarn, playing without even knowing he's playing, with no purpose or clock or referee.

Play has become spectacle, with few protagonists and many spectators, soccer for watching. And that spectacle has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organized not for play but rather to impede it. The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength, a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy and outlaws daring.

Luckily, on the field you can still see, even if only once in a long while, some insolent rascal who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee and the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden adventure of freedom.

Eduardo Galeano: from El fútbol a sol y sombra (Football in Sun and Shadow), 1995, English translation by Mark Fried, 1998

Jogo de Futebol entre as selecções de Portugal e Itália, Porto, Portugal: photo by Mário Novais, 1928 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Jogo de Futebol entre as selecções de Portugal e Itália, Porto, Portugal. Roquete (Guarda-redes), Jorge, A. Martins, J. Manuel, C. Alves, Pépe, Armando Marques, A. Silva, Martinho de Oliveira, Waldemar (3 golos), V. Silva (1 golo): photo by Mário Novais, 1928 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Jogo de Futebol, Lisboa, Portugal: photo by Mário Novais, c. 1920s (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Jogo amador do Pirazu Futebol Clube (Sâo Paulo): photo by Luiz Gustavo Leme, 25 April 2004

Incident in a big football match near the line between British and French forces on the Western Front in France. A large group of French troops watching from the touchline. British in black and white jerseys: photographer unknown, c. 1918 (National Library of Scotland)

Goalkeeper between the sticks. French soldier defending his goal of two wooden poles connected by a length of rope during a football match in France. Standing behind the goal is a group of mainly French soldiers: photographer unknown, c. 1918 (National Library of Scotland)

A football match. 3rd Horse versus 18th Lancers [France]: photo by H. D. Girdwood, 25 July 1915 (Girdwood Collection/British Library)

A football match. [9th] Gurkhas versus a Signal Company [St Floris, France]: photo by H. D. Girdwood, 23 July 1915 (Girdwood Collection/British Library)

A football match. [9th] Gurkhas versus a Signal Company [of the Dehra Dun Brigade, at St Floris, France]: photo by H. D. Girdwood, 23 July 1915 (Girdwood Collection/British Library)

Crianças Tukuna jogando futebol, Benjamin Constant, Amazonas (Ticuna, Alto Solimoes, Amazonia): fotografia realizada pelo Prof. Silvio Coelho dos Santos, mantendo a denominação original do documento, junho de 1962 (Museu Universitário Oswaldo Rodrigues Cabral/Acervo Silvio Coelho dos Santos)

Meninos jogando futebol en Salvador de Bahia: photo by jose angel, 1 September 2007

Futebol: photo by Victor Camilo, 8 March 2011

campo de futebol, Gonçalves, Minas Gerais: photo by Fernando Stankuns, March 2011

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Fernando Pessoa: The falling of leaves that one senses without hearing them fall

June 28, 2014, 8:39 pm

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Parque das Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. Landscape architecture by Francisco Caldeira Cabral (1908-1992): photo by Manuel Silveira Ramos, 2003 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

The further we advance in life, the more we become convinced of two contradictory truths. The first is that, confronted by the reality of life, all the fictions of literature and art pale into insignificance… They are just dreams from which one awakens, not memories or nostalgic longings with which we might later live a second life.

The second is this: every noble soul wishes to live life to the full, to experience everything and every feeling, to know every corner of the earth and, given that this is impossible, life can only be lived to the full subjectively, only lived in its entirety once renounced.

These two truths are mutually irreducible…

Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything -- whether or not it has ever existed -- satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.

To cease, to be unknown and external, the stirring of branches in remote avenues, the tenuous falling of leaves that one senses without hearing them fall, the subtle sea of distant fountains, and the whole indistinct world of gardens at night, lost in endless complexities, the natural labyrinths of the dark!

To cease, to end once and for all, yet to survive in another form, as the page of a book, a loose lock of hair, a swaying creeper outside a half-open window, insignificant footsteps on the fine gravel curve of a path, the last twist of smoke high above a village as it falls asleep, the idle whip of the waggoner stopped by the road in the morning... Absurdity, confusion, extinction -- anything but life...

Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion.

Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

Knowing clearly that who we are has nothing to do with us, that what we think or feel is always in translation, that perhaps what we want we never wanted -- to know this every moment, to feel this in every feeling, is not this what it means to be a stranger in one’s own soul, an exile from one’s own feelings?

The most painful feelings, the most piercing emotions are also the most absurd ones -- the longing for impossible things precisely because they are impossible, the nostalgia for what never was, the desire for what might have been, one's bitterness that one is not someone else, or one's dissatisfaction with the very existence of the world.

I don't know if these feelings are some slow madness brought on by hopelessness, if they are recollections of some other world in which we've lived -- confused, jumbled memories, like things glimpsed in dreams, absurd as we see them now but not in their origin if we but knew what that was. I don't know if we once were other beings, whose greater completeness we sense only incompletely today, being mere shadows of what they were, beings that have lost their solidity in our feeble two-dimensional imaginings of them amongst the shadows we inhabit.

The impossibility of imagining something they might correspond to, the impossibility of finding some substitute for what in visions they embrace, all this weighs on one like a judgement given one knows not where, by whom, or why.

Everywhere I have been in my life, in every situation, wherever I've lived and worked alongside people, I've always been considered by everyone to be an intruder or, at the least, a stranger. Amongst my relatives as amongst acquaintances, I've always been considered an outsider. Not that even once have I been treated like that consciously, but the spontaneous response of others to me ensured that I was.

Everyone everywhere has always treated me kindly. Very few people, I think, have had so few raise their voice against them, or been so little frowned at, so infrequently the object of someone else's arrogance or irritability. But the kindness with which I was treated was always devoid of affection. For those who would naturally be closest to me, I was always a guest who, as such, was well treated but only with the attentiveness due to a stranger and the lack of affection which is the lot of the intruder.

I'm sure that all this, I mean other people's attitudes towards me, lies principally in some obscure intrinsic flaw in my own temperament. Perhaps I communicate a coldness that unwittingly obliges others to reflect back my own lack of feeling.

I get to know people quickly. It doesn't take long for people to grow to like me. But I never gain their affection. I've never experienced devotion. To be loved has always seemed to me an impossibility, as unlikely as a complete stranger suddenly addressing me as familiarly as 'tu' [Portuguese. Familiar second-person pronoun].

I don't know if this makes me suffer or if I simply accept it as my indifferent fate, and to which questions of suffering or acceptance do not enter.

I always wanted to please. It always hurt me that people should be indifferent towards me. As an orphan of Fortune I have, like all orphans, a need to be the object of someone's affection. I've always been starved of the realization of that need. I've grown so accustomed to this vain hunger that, at times, I'm not even sure I still feel the need to eat.

With or without it life still hurts me.

Others have someone who is devoted to them. I've never had anyone who even considered devoting themselves to me. That is for others: me, they just treat decently.

I recognize in myself the capacity to arouse respect but not affection. Unfortunately I've done nothing that in itself justifies that initial respect and so no one has ever managed fully to respect me either.

I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935): from The Book of Disquiet(O Livro do Desassossego), first published in Portuguese 1982, English translation by Margaret Jull Costa, 1991

Parque das Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. Landscape architecture by Francisco Caldeira Cabral (1908-1992): photo by Manuel Silveira Ramos. 2003 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

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Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: Eternalization (Se tanto me dói que as cosas passem)

July 1, 2014, 10:41 pm

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Cine-Teatro Império, Lisboa. Edifício projetado pelo Arq. Cassiano Branco (1897-1970) e inaugurado em 1952. Foi desativado na década de 1990 e classificado Imóvel de Interesse Público em 1996 [architectCassiano Branco(1897-1970); opened in1952; deactivatedin1990; classifieda place of Public Interestin 1996]: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), n.d. (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Se tanto me dói que as coisas passem
É porque cada instante em mim foi vivo
Na busca de um bem definitivo
Em que as coisas de Amor se eternizassem

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1919-2004): Se tanto me dói que as coisas passem

Cine-Teatro Império, Lisboa. Edifício projetado pelo Arq. Cassiano Branco (1897-1970) e inaugurado em 1952. Foi desativado na década de 1990 e classificado Imóvel de Interesse Público em 1996: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), n.d. (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Cinema, Portugal: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), n.d.(Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian

Cine-Teatro Santo António, Faro, Portugal: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), n.d. (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Cinema Lys, Portugal: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), n.d.(Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Cinearte, Lisboa, Portugal. Autor do projeto: Arquiteto Raúl Rodrigues Lima. Período de construção: 1937-1938: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), 1938 [?} (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

, Lisboa, Portugal. Autor do projeto: Arquiteto Raúl Rodrigues Lima. Período de construção: 1937-1938: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), 1938 [?} (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Cinema Éden, Lisboa, Portugal. Autor do projecto: Arquitecto Cassiano Branco, Arquitecto Carlos Florêncio Dias. Data da inauguração: 1937. Sala do Cine-Teatro "Éden", Lisboa. A primeira versão desta sala de espectáculos, foi inaugurado no dia 25 de Setembro de 1914, com a opereta “O Burro do Sr. Alcaide de Gervásio Lobato”, é o primeiro Éden, com o nome "Éden Teatro". O nome Éden não era inédito na época, conforme salienta o jornal "A Capital" de 15 de Fevereiro de 1988. De facto, um pouco mais abaixo, nos Restauradores, onde hoje encontramos o Avenida Palace Hotel, existia o "Éden Concerto" (fundado em 1899). Outra sala de espectáculos, com um nome similar foi o "Éden Cinema" que, situado em Alcântara, na Rua do Alvito, sobreviveu até aos anos 60. O novo Éden Teatro foi inaugurado no dia 1 de Abril de 1937, com a peça Bocage, interpretada por Estevão Amarante, numa cerimónia memorável presidida pelo Chefe de Estado marechal Carmona. Esta última versão, aprovada pela Câmara Municipal de Lisboa em 1933, foi assinado pelo arquitecto Carlos Dias, apesar de o projecto inicial ter sido do arquitecto Cassiano Branco, que devido a desentendimentos com o proprietário, Conde de Sucena, o impediram de ser aprovado. Apesar de sempre ter sido atribuída a autoria do projecto a Cassiano Branco, este nunca a reivindicou como sendo sua.Tinha capacidade para 1.440 espectadores. Como é referido na 26ª publicação da revista Arquivo Nacional: "Quis o conde de Sucena que o Éden se inaugurasse com peça Portuguesa,(...),e fez muito bem, porque, mais uma vez, demonstrou o seu amor à arte Nacional, como ao instalar bem o povo, no seu teatro(...)". Após a inauguração, o novo Eden apresentaria apenas mais duas revistas. Depois converteu-se definitivamente em sala de cinema sem o prestígio burguês do S. Luís ou do Tivoli (e depois do S. Jorge e do Monumental) mas com o mérito, ao longo de 50 anos de existência, de ser, no coração nobre de Lisboa, uma sala de grande cariz popular. Durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, o Eden foi o cinema mais concorrido de Lisboa. Nos anos 80 o esplendor e o brilho do Eden apagaram-se com o passar das tardes, em que as bebedeiras e as cenas de pancadaria se tornaram uma constante. Nos últimos anos passava sobretudo filmes de “western” e de artes marciais. Este cinema projectou o derradeiro filme em 31 de Janeiro de 1989. "Os Deuses Devem Estar Loucos II" fecharam as portas do Eden. Após ter sido adquirido pelo Grupo Amorim, este edifício foi transformado no "Hotel Eden", albergando também a megastore de discos britânica “Virgin”. Após o encerramento desta megastore, o espaço foi, e é actualmente, tendo sido posteriormente ocupado pela “Loja do Cidadão”: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), n.d.(Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian): photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), n.d. [1937?] (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Cinema Éden, Lisboa, Portugal. Autor do projecto: Arquitecto Cassiano Branco, Arquitecto Carlos Florêncio Dias. Data da inauguração: 1937: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), n.d. [1937?] (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Cinema Europa, Lisboa, Portugal. Sala de Projecção. Inaugurado nos anos 30 do século 20, o cinema Europa foi redesenhado de acordo com um projecto do Arquitecto Antero Ferreira em 1958. Funcionou como sala de cinema até 1981: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), n.d. (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Cinema Europa, Portugal. Cinema “Europa” situado no bairro de Campo de Ourique, inaugurado em 14 de Fevereiro de 1931, projectado pelo arquitecto Raul Martins. Em 1957 este cinema “Europa” foi demolido e no seu lugar foi construído o novo cinema “Europa”, desenhado pelo arquitecto Antero Ferreira, tendo sido inaugurado em 1958: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais ((active 1930-1980), n.d. (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Portuguese Institute of Oncology, Lisbon: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais, n.d. (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Portuguese Institute of Oncology, Lisbon: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), n.d. (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Cine-Teatro Joaquim de Almeida, Montijo, Portugal. Autor do Projecto: Arquitecto Sérgio Gomes. Data da inauguração: 1957: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais (active 1930-1980), 1957 [?} (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Hospital of Santa Maria, Lisbon. Architect: Hermann Distel. Conception of project: 1938. Period of construction: 1940-1953. Opening: 1954: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais, 1950(?)-1953 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Exposição do Mundo Português, Lisboa. Entrada: photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais, 1940 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Exposição do Mundo Português, Lisboa. Inauguração (23/06/1940). O Presidente da República (General Óscar Carmona), o Presidente do Conselho de Ministros (António de Oliveira Salazar), O Cardenal Patriarca de Lisboa (Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira): photo by Estúdio Horácio Novais, 1940 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

Fonte Luminosa, Lisboa, Portugal. Fonte monumental inaugurada em 30 de Maio de 1948, localizada na Alameda Dom Afonso Henriques. Autores do projecto: Carlos Rebelo de Andrade e Guilherme Rebelo de Andrade. Escultores: Diogo de Macedo, Maximiniano Alves. Ceramista: Jorge Barradas: photo by Horácio Novais (1910-1988), after 1948 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)

↧

Fireworks are like anything else in life, he said

July 3, 2014, 8:51 pm

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Blast 2, Crows Landing (Mysterious Camera): photo by efo, 23 June 2014

At a barren lot on the edge of Albuquerque, a team of pyro-experts with Western Enterprises Inc. was busy Wednesday dropping hundreds of shells into carefully aligned and wired launching tubes for the city's annual fireworks show. Thousands of people were expected to attend.

Across town, Nathan Farmer was setting up dozens of boxed sets of fireworks at his roadside stand. Last summer, when the drought reached unprecedented levels in New Mexico, sales were down but he's hopeful his sparklers and fountains sell this year.

Farmer said concerned citizens have in the past called the police on him, saying he shouldn't be selling fireworks given the threat of wildfire.

Fireworks are like anything else in life, he said.

"If you give a person some money, a gun, a car or alcohol, it's up to that person to be responsible with it," he said.

Western states to enjoy Fourth of July fireworks despite severe drought: Associated Press, Thursday 3 July 2014

Smoke from the Las Conchas fire turns the setting sun red over the Jemez Mountains behind the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico: photo by Jim Thompson/Albuquerque Journal via Associated Press, 28 June 2011

The bridge that separates the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, from Los Alamos National Laboratory is shrouded in smoke from the Las Conchas wildfire: photo by Craig Fritz/Reuters, 28 June 2011

(gradual dawning prescience -- through the blue smoke, in the toxic dream --)

A female character not a plausibly real woman spilling out in a female character saying "What's wrong with you, this crippling, these blistering resemblances not to worry too much about some things it's probably still a flaw, inexplicable sometimes obtrusive midwestern childhood the old material investigating the shame and fear: the shame of self-exposure, the fear of ridicule or condemnation, the fear of causing pain or harm self-analysis interlude between those two materialistic master languages a shining example of how not to approach this radioactive material -- a reminder of the pressing need to find a structure and a tone and a point of view that would ironize it enough to make it old no personality, just these various intersecting fields: that personality is socially constructed, genetically constructed, linguistically constructed, constructed by some semiconscious maskless self, underlying extremity static lives being disrupted self-deception is funny, to aggressively inflict painful knowledge in joining the characters in their dream, and experiencing it with them, scavenged materials buried in a drawer or stored in some remote, inaccessible location to the structure, too, a clear and present danger the impulse to defend but the foes change with death happening to wild birds around the world on earth however many metaphor-free days --"

(gradual dawning prescience -- absence -- the fireworks just starting --)

Alex Lopez plays baseball with his sister Sugey while smoke generated by the Las Conchas fire covers the sky in Espanola, New Mexico. As crews fight to keep the wildfire from reaching the country's premier nuclear-weapons laboratory and the surrounding community, scientists are busy sampling the air for chemicals and radiological materials: photo by Jae C. Hong/Associated Press, 29 June 2011

People gather to watch the Independence Day fireworks display in Independence, Iowa: photo by Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters, 4 July 2011

Customers walk into a Red Hot Fireworks tent in Phoenix: photo by Ross D Franklin/AP, 3 July 2014

Crews clear brush along a road near the Butts Fire in preparation for a firing operation in the Napa County.

Crews clear brush along a road near the Butts Fire in preparation for a firing operation in Napa County, California: photo by Stuart Palley/EPA, 3 July

One person was killed and at least 2 injured when a trailer holding fireworks for a July 4th show exploded at Comanche High School in Comanche, Texas: photo by WFAA-TV, 3 July 2014

fireworks: photo by shannon richardson (electrolite), 12 June 2009

fireworks 2005: photo by shannon richardson (electrolite), 24 March 2006

fireworks and flags on the fourth (Amarillo): photo by shannon richardson (electrolite), 3 July 2012

Briscoe County, Texas: photo by Charles Henry, 7 March 2010

Manda, Texas: photo by Charles Henry, 23 April 2013

Independence Day, Christmas Valley, Oregon: photo by Austin Granger, 22 July 2011

Tom Brown Park on July 4th, Tallahassee, Florida: photographer unknown, 4 July 1985 (State Library and Archives of Florida)

Dispute: photo by efo, 4 July 2013

Visual pollution along Interstate 24, Tennessee: photo by William Strode, September 1972 (U.S. National Archives)

Fireworks over Houston, Texas: photo by Carol M. Highsmith, c. 1980 (Library of Congress)

Randall County, Texas: photo by Charles Henry, 27 February 2011

↧

John Francis Keith: Oh, Yeah?

July 5, 2014, 4:31 pm

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Unidentified subjects, South Philadelphia: photo by John Frank Keith (1863-1947), between 1910 and 1940 (John Frank Keith Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia)

Unidentified subjects, South Philadelphia: photo byJohn Frank Keith (1863-1947), between 1910 and 1940 (John Frank Keith Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia)

Unidentified subjects, South Philadelphia: photo by John Frank Keith (1863-1947), between 1910 and 1940 (John Frank Keith Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia)

Unidentified subjects, South Philadelphia: photo byJohn Frank Keith (1863-1947), between 1910 and 1940 (John Frank Keith Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia)

Unidentified subjects, South Philadelphia: photo by John Frank Keith (1863-1947), between 1910 and 1940 (John Frank Keith Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia)

Unidentified subject, South Philadelphia: photo by John Frank Keith (1863-1947), between 1910 and 1940 (John Frank Keith Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia)

Unidentified subjects, South Philadelphia: photo by John Frank Keith (1863-1947), between 1910 and 1940 (John Frank Keith Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia)

↧

Pack My Trunk

July 6, 2014, 11:46 am

≫ Next: Pedestrians -- A Problem in Traffic Engineering

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Advertisement for the Pacific Coast Trunk Store: artist unknown, n.d. (California Business Ephemera Collection, California Historical Society)

Packmytrunk

with a whole lot of junk

I don't really need

in a life boat

and sink it in the ocean

without a note

said the tyke
who a minute before
had crept out

with a great sense of adventure

Trade card of C. Herrmann and Company, San Francisco: artist unknown, n.d. (California Business Ephemera Collection, California Historical Society)

↧

Pedestrians -- A Problem in Traffic Engineering

July 7, 2014, 10:34 am

≫ Next: Seeing Multiples: Ghosts of Jönköping ("We are somewhere else")

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King George V (1865-1936) accosted by a beggar at Epsom Downs on Derby Day: photographer unknown, 1920 (Spaarnestad Photo / Nationaal Archief)

They're such an awful nuisance, forever cluttering our highways, streets and roads.

Running them over might at first seem the simplest solution, but it can cause serious harm to your vehicle.

There's got to be a better way.

Car with shovel for scooping up pedestrians, Paris: photographer unknown for Het Leven, 1924 (Spaarnestad Photo / Nationaal Archief)

In the future, all our cars and roads will be kept perfectly clean!

Deutsche Autobahn.An automobile on the sweeping curves of the Deutsche Autobahn with view of the forest. The driver's experience of the forest, assigned symbolic importance in German Romanticism and particularly under the Nazis, was maximized by avoiding straightaways in forested areas so that the driver remained enclosed by the trees as long as possible: photographer unknown, from: Vier Jahren Arbeit an die Strassen Adolf Hitlers, 1937 (Het Nieuwe Instituut)

↧

Seeing Multiples: Ghosts of Jönköping ("We are somewhere else")

July 7, 2014, 9:35 pm

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Tändsticksområdet (Holga): photo by Johan Larsson, 24 February 2014

The entire universe is composed of stellar systems. In order to create them nature has only one hundred simple bodiesat its disposal. Despite the prodigious profit it knows how to make from its resources, and the incalculable number of combinations these allow its fecundity, the result is necessarily a finitenumber, like that of the elements themselves. And in order to fill the entire expanse nature must infinitely repeat each of its original or generic combinations.

Every star, whatever it might be, thus exists in infinite number in time and space, not only in one of its aspects, but as it is found in every second of its duration, from birth until death. All the beings spread across its surface, big or little, animate or inanimate, share in this privilege of perennity.

Tändsticksområdet (Holga): photo by Johan Larsson, 24 February 2014

The earth is one of these stars. Every human being is thus eternal in every second of its existence. What I write now in a cell in the fort of Taureau I wrote and will write under the same circumstances for all of eternity, on a table, with a pen, wearing clothing. And so for all.

Jönköping. Undergången på Östra Storgatan, 1886. Undergången på Östra Storgatan mot väster från Liljeholmsskolan. Denna järnvägsövergång byggdes 1863. Den byggdes senare om då mittpartiet togs bort efter en dödsolycka med en bil som körde in i fundamentet. Foto: N. B. Ögren (Jönköping Läns Museum)

Jönköping. Undergången på Östra Storgatan, 1886 (stereobild). Undergången på Östra Storgatan mot väster från Liljeholmsskolan. Denna järnvägsövergång byggdes 1863. Den byggdes senare om då mittpartiet togs bort efter en dödsolycka med en bil som körde in i fundamentet. Foto: N. B. Ögren (Jönköping Läns Museum)

One after another all these earths are submerged in renovatory flames, to be re-born there and to fall into them again, the monotonous flowing of an hourglass that eternally turns and empties itself. It is something new that is always old; something old that is always new.

Those curious about extra-terrestrial life will nevertheless smile at a mathematical conclusion that grants them not only immortality but eternity. The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space. In all conscience, we can hardly ask for more. These doubles are of flesh and blood, or in pants and coats, in crinoline and chignon. These aren’t phantoms: they are the now eternalized.

Kungsgatan med Stora Limugnen i fonden, omkring 1880). Foto: A.G. Andersson(Jönköping Läns Museum)

Kungsgatan med Stora Limugnen i fonden, omkring 1880 (stereobild). Foto: A.G. Andersson(Jönköping Läns Museum)

There is nevertheless a great defect: there is, alas, no progress! No, these are vulgar re-editions, repetitions. As it is with editions of past worlds, so it is with those of future worlds. Only the chapter of bifurcations remains open to hope. Never forget that all we could have been here, we are somewhere else.

Hotellträdgården.Här ser vi uteserveringen med Stora hotellet till vänster. (Jönköping Läns Museum)

Hotellträdgården (stereobild).Här ser vi uteserveringen med Stora hotellet till vänster. (Jönköping Läns Museum)

Progress here is only for our nephews. They are luckier than us. All the beautiful things that our globe will see our future descendants have already seen, see now, and will always see in the form of doubles who preceded them and who follow them. Children of a better humanity, they have already scoffed at us and mocked us on dead earths, passing there after us. From living earths from which we have disappeared they continue to condemn us; and on earths to be born, they will forever pursue us with their contempt.

They and we, as well as all the guests of our planet, are born over again as prisoners of the moment and place that destiny assigns us in its series of avatars. Our perennity is an appendix of its perennity. We are but partial phenomena of its resurrections. Men of the 19th Century, the hour of our apparition is forever fixed, and we are returned always the same, at best with the possibility of happy variants. There is nothing much there to satisfy the thirst for what is better. What then is to be done? I haven’t sought my happiness; I have sought after truth. You will find here neither a revelation nor a prophet, but a simple deduction from the spectral analysis and cosmogony of Laplace. These two discoveries make us eternal. Is this a godsend? We should profit from it. Is it a mystification? We should resign ourselves to it.

Jönköpings Östra kyrkogård, 1860-talet. Gång nära kapellet med äldra liggande gravhällar till vänster. Senare gravvårdar med träkors och stenar.Fotograf: okänd (Jönköping Läns Museum)

Jönköpings Östra kyrkogård, 1860-talet (stereobild). Gång nära kapellet med äldra liggande gravhällar till vänster. Senare gravvårdar med träkors och stenar.Fotograf: okänd (Jönköping Läns Museum)

But isn’t it a consolation to know ourselves to constantly be, on millions of planets, in the company of our beloved, who is today naught but a memory? Is it another, on the other hand, to think that we have tasted and will eternally taste this happiness in the shape of a double, of millions of doubles! Yet this is what we are. For many of the small minded this happiness through substitutes is somewhat lacking in rapture. They would prefer three or four supplementary years of the current edition to all the duplicates of the infinite. In our century of disillusionment and skepticism we are keen at clinging to things.

But deep down this eternity of man through the stars is melancholy, and sadder still this sequestration of brother-worlds through the barrier of space. So many identical populations that pass each other without suspecting their mutual existence! But yes! It has finally been discovered at the end of the 19th Century. But who will believe it?

Hotellträdgården. Trädgården upptog ursprungligen den norra delen av tomten, men utvidgades mot öster 1871, och förminskades i början av 1900-talet. Den bestod av planteringar med gångar, bersåer, skulpturer och musikpaviljon. Musikpaviljongen var byggd av trä och hade dekorationer i schweizerstil. (Jönköping Läns Museum)

Hotellträdgården (stereobild). Trädgården upptog ursprungligen den norra delen av tomten, men utvidgades mot öster 1871, och förminskades i början av 1900-talet. Den bestod av planteringar med gångar, bersåer, skulpturer och musikpaviljon. Musikpaviljongen var byggd av trä och hade dekorationer i schweizerstil. (Jönköping Läns Museum)

And in any event, up till now the past represented barbarism to us, and the future signified progress, science, happiness, illusion! This past has seen brilliant civilizations disappear without leaving a trace on all our double-worlds; and they will disappear without leaving anymore of them. On millions of earths the future will see the ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty of our former ages.

At the present time the entire life of our planet, from birth until death, is being detailed day by day with all its crimes and misfortunes on a myriad of brother-stars. What we call progress is imprisoned on every earth, and fades away with it. Always and everywhere in the terrestrial field the same drama, the same décor; on the same limited stage a boisterous humanity, infatuated with its greatness, believing itself to be the universe, and living in its prison as if it were immense spaces, only to soon fall along with the globe that carried -- with the greatest disdain -- the burden of its pride. The same monotony, the same immobility on foreign stars. The universe repeats itself endlessly and paws the ground in place. Eternity infinitely and imperturbably acts out the same performance.

Louis Auguste Blanqui, L'éternité par les astres, Librairie Germer Bailliére, Paris, 1872

Kungsgatan med Stora Limugnen i fonden, omkring 1880. Foto: A.G. Andersson (Jönköping Läns Museum)

Kungsgatan med Stora Limugnen i fonden, omkring 1880 (stereobild). Foto: A.G. Andersson (Jönköping Läns Museum)

Folkhemmet (Holga 120N): photo by Johan Larsson, 15 October 2013

JKPG #5 (Holga 120N): photo by Johan Larsson, 15 October 2013

JKPG Jätten (Diana -- vintage): photo by Johan Larsson, 24 March 2014

JKPG. Munksjön (Holga 120N): photo by Johan Larsson, 9 April 2014

Jönköping. Östra centrum och Kålgården (Holga 120N): photo by Johan Larsson,12 March 2014

↧

Price reductions

July 8, 2014, 10:25 pm

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≪ Previous: Seeing Multiples: Ghosts of Jönköping ("We are somewhere else")

Price reductions (Vallejo, California): photo by michaelj1998, 13 June 2014

In no sphere does a buyer who insists on cheap & nasty get anything else. Admit.

-- Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh, 21 August 1946

Cost Rite (Vallejo, California): photo by michaelj1998, 13 June 2014

Dino's (Westminster, California): photo by michaelj1998, 5 July 2014

Go Go Go (Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 27 June 2014

Orion (Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 27 June 2014

Country (Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 27 June 2014

Mattress (Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 19 June 2014

Super Farms (Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 2 June 2014

Leche (Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 2 June 2014

Jukebox Repair (Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 23 June 2014

People who care (Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 30 May 2014

Walking in L.A. (Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 30 May 2014

Dog and Cat(Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 30 May 2014

Wurlitzer (Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 23 June 2014

The walk (Crenshaw District, Los Angeles, California) : photo by michaelj1998, 12 May 2014

Oaxaca (Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, California): photo by michaelj1998, 5 May 2014

Eternal (Berkeley, California): photo by michaelj1998, 27 June 2014

↧

"Hello my name is..."

July 9, 2014, 10:44 pm

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"Hello my name is..." (school for visually impaired children, Gaza City): photo by Achim Voss, 10 June 2014

[To a killer]

If you had contemplated the victim’s face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way
To find one’s identity again.

***

The siege is a waiting period
Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008): from Under Siege in A State of Siege (2002), translation by Marjolijn De Jagered

"Who are you?" Gaza City -- school for visually impaired children: photo by Achim Voss, 10 June 2014

Netanyahu instructs Israeli military to intensify assault on Gaza

Israeli PM authorises escalation of offensive as Palestinian death toll rises and rocket attacks from Gaza target Tel Aviv

Benjamin Netanyahu has instructed the Israeli military to "intensify even further" its assault on the Gaza Strip.

-- Peter Beaumont in Gaza City, The Guardian, Wednesday 9 July 2014

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries -- for heavy ones they cannot.

-- Niccolò Macchiavelli (1469-1527): from The Prince (1513)

Laughing! Gaza Strip -- children collecting reusable material: photo by Achim Voss, 10 June 2014

Israel's missiles strike out of the blue, but rockets still rain down

Civilian victims mount as Israel's offensive against Hamas intensifies, with children and an 80-year-old woman among dead

-- Peter Beaumont in Beit Hanoun, The Guardian, Wednesday 9 July 2014

The family of Hafez Hamad, a senior member of Islamic Jihad, were sitting on a pair of low orange divans in the space between two houses when the rocket hit them a little before midnight.

Fired from a drone it slammed into the ground a foot from one of the two sofas, leaving behind a round three-feet-deep hole and five people dead, including Hafez and his 20-year-old niece. "They were just talking, sitting outside their house," says Mariam Hamad, sister-in-law of Hafez. "Usually there is a warning, but in this case the missile struck out of the blue."

She meant a practice known as the "knock on the roof" -– when small projectiles are fired to warn civilians to leave buildings. In other cases strikes have been preceded by a telephone call telling its inhabitants to flee. But such bombing sometimes injures or kills people in neighbouring houses.

In any case there was no knock on the roof for the Hamad family.

Even this early in Israel's campaign against Hamas and other militant factions in Gaza the bodies of the civilian victims are beginning to pile up, children and an 80-year-old woman among the dead from the past two days.

As the Israeli military said it struck about 200 Hamas targets on the second day of its offensive and warned of a possible ground invasion, the rockets militants from Gaza continued to fire were intermittently visible being launched in pairs, threes and even sets of four, their vapour trails climbing into the Mediterranean sky. The Israeli military said more than 60 rockets were fired at Israel on Wednesday, forcing people to take cover in public shelters as far away as Jerusalem. So far there have been no fatalities.

In all, 43 Palestinians are reported to have been killed by Israeli strikes on Gaza. Many, hospital officials claim, have been civilians. Among the total are 15 women and children, amid claims that in four air strikes only women and children were killed. According to an emergency services spokesman, Ashraf al-Qudra, in one incident a missile struck a house in Al-Maghazi, a beachside refugee camp near Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, killing a mother and her four children. Earlier, another two women and four children died in a series of raids to the north and east of Gaza City.

In addition some 370 people have been wounded in the past two days. There have been no Israeli fatalities since the operation began.

For its part Israel has long alleged that the militants "hide" among the civilian population, but what is clear is that targets have included homes and public streets as well as missile sites and buildings associated with Hamas.

Hamad's house had been destroyed before in 2012 by Israeli military forces and been rebuilt.

His family admits he was a member of Islamic Jihad, a group involved in firing rockets into Israel, but claim he had left the militant group. One of his brothers –- who was killed with him -– had cancer, they also claim. "It happened at 11.45," said a cousin, Hamad Hamad, 22, who lives nearby and was one of the first on the scene.

"I heard the bomb and found the blood and bodies. He was the target, but they also killed two of his brothers, Ibrahim and Mahdi, the wife of Hafez and Mahdi's daughter who was only 20."

As he spoke the sound of a drone was audible above.

Among the locations targeted in Gaza have been some 40 houses, many of them listed on Gaza's radio news: an apartment block in New Gaza, a house in Zaytoun, the house of Hafez Hamad in Beit Hanoun.

In truth, there is little left of the house that once belonged to Mustafa Malaka in Zaytoun. A security officer with Hamas, who had been largely unemployed since his wages stopped being paid in the midst of the group's financial crisis in the coastal enclave, he had turned to farming chickens behind his house to make money.

Perhaps, like Hafez Hamad, he had been involved in firing rockets. When the bomb hit his house, say relatives, it injured Malaka but killed his wife, Hana, and three-year-old son, Mohammad. All that is left of the place that they once lived is a six-metre crater, six metres (20ft) wide, filled with rubble and the remains of their possessions –- a shirt hanging from a section of concrete.

Collapsed in the blast was the chicken coop the behind the house, the pullets wandering among the bodies of those killed.

At the Shifa hospital in Gaza, corridors that a day before had been half empty have been transformed into a chaotic scene, packed with relatives, who sit in the stairwells waiting for news, and the wounded.

A youth is brought in by his friends, his head wrapped in a bloody bandage; a young girl, her face and upper body burned, is wheeled urgently past on a gurney by nurses.
In many areas, especially to the north and south of Gaza City where the scrubby fields are used as launching sites for missiles aimed at Israel, the roads have almost emptied, the only sound audible the intermittent thuds of detonations, the whoosh of the rockets and the loud hum of drones and aircraft overhead.

In Gaza City itself, people were stocking up on food, not only for the Ramadan Iftar meal, but against the fear of what might happen next if a ground incursion. Even as the Egyptian government indicated it was involved in attempting to broker a ceasefire, as it has done in the past, Israeli ministers and officials were raising the prospect of widening the campaign to an invasion.

"Despite the fact it will be hard, complicated and costly, we will have to take over Gaza temporarily, for a few weeks, to cut off the strengthening of this terror army," Yuval Steinitz, Israel's intelligence minister, told Israel Radio. "If you ask my humble opinion, a significant operation like this is approaching."

His remarks echoed that of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who said after a meeting of his Security Cabinet: "The army is ready for all possibilities. Hamas will pay a heavy price for firing toward Israeli citizens. The security of Israel's citizens comes first. The operation will expand and continue until the fire toward our towns stops and quiet returns."

The government has authorised the army to activate up to 40,000 reservists for a ground operation. An Israeli government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing Israeli tactical strategy, said the reservists would be sent to the West Bank to allow active duty troops to amass near the Gaza border.

"We will not stop," said Israel's minister of internal security, Yitzhak Aharonovitz. "They'll first receive a hard blow from air and sea, and if a ground invasion is needed, there will be a ground invasion."

But few in Gaza are in any doubt about what a ground operation would mean for civilians. While Hamas might be confident it can "absorb the pain" -- the ground invasion during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 is still fresh in the memory and its damage still visible on many buildings.

In that 22-day long offensive some 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including 300 children.

Palestinian children play outside their family's tent in a poverty-stricken quarter of the town of Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip: photo by Cubby Bear Blue, 26 June 2014

Palestinians inspect wreckage of a building destroyed by an Israeli military air attack, Gaza City: photo by Wissam Nassar / Xinhua, 8 July 2014; image by Diario Contraste, 8 July 2014

'Let him cry for his family': inside the Gaza Strip during the 26 December 2008-January 2009 Israeli invasion. Taken by the Palestinian co-ordinator of the International Campaign to end the siege on Gaza. She has titled her photographs: 'Gaza Terrorists'. 'In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends': photo by Free Gaza movement, 13 January 2009

Smart bombs murdering children (Gaza): photo by Free Gaza movement, 13 January 2009

'Some children who will never be able to terrify Israel again': Victims of Israeli air attacks on the Gaza Strip during the 26 December 2008-January 2009 Israeli invasion: photo by Free Gaza movement, 13 January 2009

Children's clothing left -- Jenny (Gaza): photo by Free Gaza movement, 7 January 2009

Israeli Attack on Gaza -- White Phosphorus. Amnesty International: "We noticed various things about this: the burn does not heal; the phosphorus may remain inside the body and goes on burning there, and the general condition of the patient deteriorates -- normally with 10-15 percent burns you would expect a cure, now many such patients die." Other strange injuries were caused by unusual weapons (possibly including Deep Inert metal Explosive – DIME weapons) which doctors did not know how to deal with. "We had eight amputations on one day -– normally, the patients should all have lived, but they all died. We don't understand it," one doctor told the team: photographer unknown; image by Haqq Rocks!, 21 January 2009

Total destruction of home -- Jenny (Gaza): photo by Free Gaza movement, 7 January 2000

There is nothing left -- Jenny (Gaza): photo by Free Gaza movement, 7 January 2009

A ball of fire is seen following an Israeli air strike in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on July 9, 2014. Israeli strikes on Gaza killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 100, emergency services said, as the military began an aerial campaign against militants in the Strip: photo by Said Khatib / AFP Photo; image by Mundo33, 9 July 2014

Israeli / Gaza border: photo by Mark Nakasone, 19 April 2014

↧

No Place Like Ohm

July 10, 2014, 10:02 pm

≫ Next: A Transparency (The word made from broken pieces): "Nobody is asleep in Gaza"

≪ Previous: "Hello my name is..."

Last Call, George's, Vernalis, California. Argus c3 with long expired (and damaged) technical pan: photo by efo, 22 June 2014

After a period of time things start to rot and crumble. Decay is always happening, even when no one's looking. And now no one's ever going to be looking any more. That movement in the tall grass, an almost imperceptible rustling, a changing of the depth of shadow, those disconnected power lines, that telephone that's never going to ring. Abandonment. No one's oiled the ferris wheel motor in living memory. Rust moves across the vacant lots with the stealth of a thief. The temporary businesses have departed. The electricity has stopped flowing. Rattlesnakes and weeds and dust, all that's left. There's no place like Ohm, and in Ohm nobody's ever going to be home any more.

Forks of Buffalo, Virginia: photo by efo, 4 July 2014

Country fair, Bustleburg, Virginia: photo by efo, 4 July 2014

Dwelt (Ohm, California): photo by efo, 22 June 2014

Dwelt vdb (Ohm, California). Selenium toned Van Dyke brown print. San Joaquin Valley, California. Shot with the indomitable Kodak No. 2 Folding Cartridge Hawk-Eye Model B with the aperture limiter removed, around f/10 : photo by efo, 7 July 2014

George's Service, Vernalis, California photo by efo, 22 June 2014

Last Call, George's, Vernalis, California. Argus c3 with long expired (and damaged) technical pan: photo by efo, 22 June 2014

Country fair, Bustleburg, Virginia: photo by efo, 4 July 2014

↧

A Transparency (The word made from broken pieces): "Nobody is asleep in Gaza"

July 12, 2014, 12:06 am

≫ Next: The meaning of world football

≪ Previous: No Place Like Ohm

1 January: Palestinians inspect the different rooms of a building that was damaged by an Israeli air strike in Rafah - Photograph: Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images - The Guardian

Palestinians inspect the different rooms of a bombed house after an Israeli air strike in Rafah, southern Gaza: photo by Said Khatib/AFP via The Guardian, 9 January 2009

I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland

Mahmoud Darwish: I Come From There

A ball of fire is seen following an Israeli air strike in Rafah, in the southern of Gaza Strip.

A ball of fire is seen following an Israeli air strike in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip: photo by Said Khatib/AFP via The Guardian, 11 July 2014

A View from Gaza: This Is a Brutal Attack, Not a "Military Operation" (8 July)

Gaza City under Israeli attack: photo by Dr. Mona El-Farra, 8 July 2014

This series of reports from ground zero in Gaza City was posted to Common Dreams on 8/9/11 July 2014 by Dr. Mona El-Farra, Director of Gaza Projects for the Middle East Children's Alliance. Dr. El-Farra is a physician by training and a human rights and women’s rights activist by practice in the occupied Gaza Strip. She was born in Khan Younis, Gaza and has dedicated herself to developing community based programs that aim to improve health quality and link health services with cultural and recreation services all over the Gaza Strip. Dr. El-Farra is also the Health Chair of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society of the Gaza Strip and a member of the Union of Health Work Committees. Dr. El-Farra has a son and two daughters.

In Gaza last night, while Israeli army forces launched military attacks against Gaza, by sea, air and via artillery shells, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children were unable to sleep inside their tin-roofed homes, clinging to their parents, crying, and terrified. The shelling last night was earth shattering, and went through the entirety of the Gaza strip. At least 100 attacks have already taken place.

In Gaza, we do not have bomb shelters to escape and hide.

These bombs fall on top of our deteriorating economic situation. Unemployment because of the Israeli blockade against civilians is almost 40%. It is Ramadan, making it more difficult to get basic foods, and thousands of government employees cannot reach banks to access their salaries. I know there are internal problems between Fatah and Hamas, but the outcome is hardship, while the bombs keep dropping on top of our heads.

In Gaza, the feeling of insecurity throws its shadow against all of the population, and the military operation continues.

With threats of expansion in the coming few days, there is no news about any ceasefire.

Prior to the attack, the local authorities warned the population against swimming in the Mediterranean sea (the only recreational outlet for 1.7 million people). The sea around Gaza has become overly polluted with sewage and wastewater, that the authority, due to lack of fuel, had to pump untreated into the sea.

In Gaza, over 90% of water is unsuitable for drinking.

Through my work at the Middle East Children's Alliance, we continue to implement the water purification systems at the schools and kindergartens, to provide over 50,000 Palestinian children with clean water. Even though it is the summer holiday, the community had accessibility to our water units in schools, but the attacks make travel dangerous.

In Gaza today, imagine choosing between your child’s thirst and your child’s safety.

Also, at MECA, because of our deep understanding of the poor recreational facilities for Palestinian children, we continue our educational, entertainment and recreational activities, inside our partners’ community centres. It will be even more important during the difficult times ahead, to help the children and distract their attention from the night shelling. Let the Children Play and Heal is an ongoing program, and I fear that there will be the need for more psycho-social programming, like we did in 2009 and 2012.

While we help these children, we take care of the mothers too, via psycho-social trainings that aim to educate women about trauma, and how to deal with family and children during times of crises.

Today, different health facilities announced a need for more emergency supplies, which were already lacking because of the closure of the borders and the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza. Just before the attacks, MECA managed to send some highly needed emergency medications to the Red Crescent Society, but more is needed.

In Gaza, MECA’s team, along with the many humanitarian and health organisations are going through a very difficult situation. We are physically unsafe, and we cannot sleep. But we work hard to support people at this very difficult time.

The streets of Gaza are empty, few cars are here and there, and Israel continues a collective punishment assassination policy demolishing homes by aerial bombardment.

These air raids fall on the majority of the population living in very crowded areas, so while they hit their targets, civilians pay a big price -- we have many causalities and the numbers are rising every hour.

In Gaza, it is not a war or a military operation though it may look so. It is collective punishment and it is a brutal attack against all Palestinian people, and mainly civilians are paying the price.

We Hug the Children As the Bombs Fall (9 July)

Israeli forces killed six children when a missile struck a residential building in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on Wednesday, July 9, 2014: photo by Defense of Children International-Palestine, 9 July 2014

GAZA -– Written Between 3 am and 4 am early Wednesday morning, July 9, 2014.

The Israeli warships continue shelling... It is dark.

I do not know what is going on and I can hear successive bombing. I am thinking of all the people I know tonight, especially my colleagues at the hospitals who are working under severe pressure and lacking basic medical supplies. Stay strong.

"I do not have any comment…
I leave it to you to comment."

I heard they bombed the area around the European hospital east of Khan Younis in Southern Gaza... Then the hospital was directly targeted. The hospital wall was damaged at 1 am due to the strong shelling. Then shelling continued with approximately 30 airstrikes.

When civilians took refuge at the hospital, they targeted it again.

The roof of the intensive care unit was damaged and the windows were blown out. Now at around 3 am, six patients inside the intensive care unit and 20 children inside the pediatric ward have had to be evacuated.

At the hospital, two injuries were reported, including one nurse.

I do not have any comment… I leave it to you to comment. For me, this is nothing new. This is normal behavior of the Israeli army.

Human rights violations against health centers and workers have always been the case when Israel invades.

On a personal level, I am thinking of all people, especially my cousins, who took refuge in the hospital.

At 4:15 am, there were explosions very close to my apartment. The Gaza port was just hit with at one least bomb. Nobody in Palestine is asleep tonight.

Oh no! It is next to my building, so loud I am on the floor with neighbors and children, who are so terrified and shocked.

Shattered windows terrify the children... These are vicious attacks... We are all on the floor.

An hour later, we hug each other while the children cling to adults... The bombs are so close.

Now, after a few minutes, I distract the neighbors' kids by showing some nice drawings sent with love and solidarity from Canada and Australia. The children laugh. I say, at this moment life is stronger than death. One day justice will prevail.

The Attacks Are Coming from Every Direction (11 July)

View from the author's window in Gaza City: photo by Dr. Mona El-Farra, 9 July 2014

GAZA –- Written on Friday, July 11, 2014 after the fourth full day of bombing.

Where shall I start? How shall I start?

Shall I start with the numbers which keep increasing and changing? 90 people killed, mainly civilians. 600 injured. 140 demolished homes. Or should I start by mentioning all the different areas of the Gaza Strip that have been constantly hit, day and night. Nonstop. If it is only about numbers, then let me tell you all about thousands of Palestinian children who are terrified night after night, day after day by the sounds of the Israeli shelling. The children have deep feelings of insecurity when it is dark. And no shelters.

Yesterday a six-story building where my relatives live in Khan Younis was hit and leveled to the ground. 106 relatives were made homeless. Even if the Israeli army’s goal was to punish one of Hamas activists, there is no justification for this cruel, brutal and collective punishment. Eight members of the Kawarea family were killed in Khan Younis when the jetfighters destroyed their home. The Israeli army spokesman said sorry it was a mistake. What a gentle, well-behaved, and civilized army.

Walking through the streets of Gaza City where I live can be a real nightmare. The drones and jetfighters are in the sky and you cannot anticipate what will happen in the next minute. Are they going to target a car behind you or in front of you? Will you be caught in the blast? Will others will be dying right that minute somewhere else? Will others will be forced to leave their home in 5 minutes only to be bombed 2 minutes later?

Yet despite the fear, I had to go to the Red Crescent Society of the Gaza Strip to be with the medical emergency team and help as much as I could. This morning we received an injured deaf young man from Jabalia. He was working in a farm that was hit. Tens of cows and sheep were killed too.

I am so tired and sleepless. I don’t feel settled outside my home despite the generosity of my friends who are hosting me. But my building, my neighborhood, are too unsafe. Nowhere is safe but with intense shelling nearby and broken windows, I had to leave.

The shelling is continuous, crazy and everywhere. Warships fire missiles against the beach in Gaza City. Rafah town is under severe missile shelling , 10 people in Rafah were killed when their home was leveled to the ground by an American-made F16.

The UN agency that runs schools and clinics for Palestinian refugees opened its schools to receive homeless people from different areas. Now larger numbers of people will drink from MECA water purification units.

Nobody is asleep in Gaza. No place is safe. The Israeli military attacks are coming from every direction.

From Gaza with love,
Mona

Palestinians carry belongings in a house after it was hit by an Israeli missile strike in Gaza City: photo by Hatem Moussa/AP via The Guardian, 11 July 2014

Palestinians take cover in a street in Gaza City during an Israeli air strike: photo by Thomas Coex/AFP via The Guardian, 11 July 2014

Palestinians look the damage of a destroyed house where five members of the Ghannam family were killed in an Israeli missile strike early morning in Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip.

Palestinians look the damage of a destroyed house where five members of the Ghannam family were killed in an Israeli missile strike early morning in Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip.

Palestinians look at a destroyed house where five members of a family were killed in an Israeli missile strike in Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip: photo by Khalil Hamra/AP via The Guardian, 11 July 2014

Palestinians search the rubble of a destroyed house where five members of the Ghannam family were killed in an Israeli missile strike early morning in Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip.

Palestinians search the rubble of a destroyed house in Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip: photo by Khalil Hamra/AP via The Guardian, 11 July 2014

A Palestinian firefighter hoses a boat hit in an missile strike at the port in Gaza City.

A Palestinian firefighter hoses a boat hit in an missile strike at the port in Gaza City.

A Palestinian firefighter hoses a boat hit by an Israeli missile strike at the port in Gaza City: photo by Hatem Moussa/AP via The Guardian, 11 July 2014

A ball of fire is seen following an early morning Israeli air strike, on Rafah in the southern of Gaza strip.

A ball of fire is seen following an Israeli air strike on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip: photo by Said Khatib/AFP via The Guardian, 11 July 2014

Black smoke acsends in the background from an Israeli air strike as Palestinians clear the rubble of the Ghanam family home after it was also targetted in an air raid on Rafah, in the southern of Gaza strip. Five Palestinians, including a woman and seven-year-old child, died when the militant's house in Rafah in southern Gaza was hit, and 15 other people were wounded, Gaza emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said.

Black smoke rises from the scene of an Israeli air strike in Rafah. Five Palestinians, including a woman and seven-year-old child, died when a house in Rafah was hit, Gaza emergency services said: photo by Said Khatib/AFP via The Guardian, 11 July 2014

A relative of killed Palestinian doctor Anas Abu al-Kas, 33, mourns over his body during his funeral in the family home in the Jabalia refugee camp, in the northern Gaza Strip.

A relative of killed Palestinian doctor Anas Abu al-Kas, 33, mourns over his body during his funeral in the family home in the Jabalia refugee camp, in the northern Gaza Strip.

A relative of Palestinian doctor Anas Abu al-Kas mourns over his body during his funeral in the family home at the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip: photo by Mahmud Hams/AFP via The Guardian, 11 July 2014

Jabalia Gaza Strip: photo by nice.robo, 24 January 2009

Gaza: photo by mmansour, 11 January 2009

↧

The meaning of world football

July 13, 2014, 12:29 am

≫ Next: While we were away at the circus of representation: Ten minutes and then no home -- no memories, no history

≪ Previous: A Transparency (The word made from broken pieces): "Nobody is asleep in Gaza"

Car in India with Lionel Messi's number and Barcelona FC colours: photo by Umeshsrinavasan, 29 August 2011

After an exciting and hectic round of group stage matches in which the persistent brave overachievement of an interesting set of unfancied sides from nations not customarily included in the rankings of global football superpowers promised a fascinating tournament, the Brazil copa has gone sideways in subsequent rounds, with tense, risk-phobic matches agonizingly drawn out through injury and extra time to inevitable grudging trumphs by the predictable favourites -- those few that remained after the entirely satisfying early culling of the once mighty European powers. The sadness and humiliation of the host nation's inglorious exit would have reduced grown adults everywhere (even outside Brazil, that is) to tears were they not aware that these fallen heroes, with their glazed my-life-is-over thousand-yard-stares, were multi-millionaires, and those ultimately most desolated the typical low end futebol faithful of this land in which futebol, along with a peculiar witchy brand of post christian voodoo, constitute the religions of popular subscription.

So it all comes down, as we knew it would, to the Mannschaft. They didn't mean to embarrass Brazil; the Brazilians did that to themselves. Germany merely demonstrated the mechanical perfection of a well oiled machine. Joy has nothing to do with machines, of course.

The German draw with Ghana in the group stages had, er, troubling aspects. We weren't suppose to find out about these. But you know how it is any more -- cameras everywhere.

Ghana's Sulley Muntari helps to assist a man from the pitch after he ran on during the group G World Cup match between Germany and Ghana at the Arena Castelao, Fortaleza, Brazil. Slogans written on the man's chest and back included "HH", signifying Heil Hitler, and "SS," referring to the Nazi paramilitary unit: photo by Matthias Schrader/AP, 21 June 2014

Germany fans with with blacked-out faces and improvised "Ghana" shirts at Germany/Ghana World Cup match, Fortaleza, Brazil, on 21 June: photographer unknown, via ONTD, 22 June 2014

After Ghana the Germans faced US coach Jürgen Klinsman and his mini-mannschaft. Nobody could figure out how the American side got this far in the first place -- not that the average American was going to let his or her total ignorance of the sport stand in the way of the opportunity to get wrecked, wave a flag, yell a bit, feel bored, be confused, get tired, and in the end feel sad... for about six seconds.

Fans in Austin, Texas react to a missed goal attempt by the United States in their World Cup game against Germany: photo by Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon/KUT News, 26 June 2014

A US fan in Austin, Texas reacts after Germany scored the single goal of their match against the United States: photo by Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon/KUT News, 26 June 2014

Fans in Austin, Texas watch the United States in their World Cup game against Germany. The US team still advances to the next round despite losing to Germany 1-0: photo by Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon/KUT News, 26 June 2014

Fans of the U.S. national soccer team celebrate their team's victory during a live broadcast of the World Cup match between the Unites States and Ghana, inside the FIFA Fan Fest area on Copacabana beach, Rio de Janeiro: photo by Leo Correa/AP. 16 June 2014

The soggy German victory over the US side of German youth recruits was painful to watch. But not so terrible as the protracted conquest of a valiant but badly undermanned Algeria, 120 minutes of pure torment. You just always knew where it was going, long before Mehmut Ozil put the tie out of its misery at 119 minutes. The upstart Algeria, only African side to make it through to the round of 16, were one of the tournament's wonders. Other African nations left in sordid quarreling over unpaid bonuses. The refreshing Algeria -- not many millionaires in the side by the way -- elected to do guess what with their $9 million tournament prize money.

Now hold it. He's not going to say they gave it to the suffering people of Gaza, surely?

Yes. Every last penny.

Algerian striker Islam Slimani said the money should go where it is needed most.“Our brothers in Gaza need help, we don’t need anyone’s money, but our Palestinian brothers need this money.”

Right there, the moral blow of the Cup.

Algeria's national team has reportedly offered to give their $ 9 million World Cup pay che

Algerian national team at the 2014 World Cup: photo by AFP, June 2014

Those crazy Muslims, always doing inexplicable stuff like that. One recalls the 2008-2009 round of Israeli genocide in Gaza. Frédéric Kanouté, a Malian striker then playing with Sevilla, did this:

Sevilla's Malian striker Frédéric Kanouté (left) celebrates with Luis Fabiano after scoring against Deportivo Coruna during their Spanish King's Cup soccer match at Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan Stadium in Seville on 7 January 2009. Kanouté's shirt supporting Palestine represents his response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza begun 26 December 2008. Kanouté was fined by FIFA for his gesture of solidarity: photo by Marcelo del Pozo / Reuters, 7 January 2009; image by nice.robo, 10 January 2009

A case of showboating, selective outrage or what you will -- the player's motives were questioned, he was fined. Few noticed -- because of course they weren't meant to notice -- Frédéric Kanouté's consistent history of philanthropic good works. A devout Muslim and native of the third poorest country on earth, he had poured millions into building a children's center and hospital in Mali. What's that you're suggesting now, then? That world football is part of world history, occasionally recognizes its responsibility as such, and sometimes actually responds?

Islam Slimani, who plays his club football for Sporting Lisbon, had a tournament to be proud of. It was his late goal against Russia two weeks ago that ensured Algeria's passage to the round of 16 -- a first for this minnow in bright green, swimming boldly among the big fish. Albert Camus would have Bogarted a smile from beyond the dusty, sandblasted playing fields of Oran. Slimani's Algeria side put up a memorable fight against the Mannschaft.

Germany's defender Per Mertesacker (L) vies with Algeria's forward Islam Slimani.

Germany defender Per Mertesacker (left) contends with Algeria forward Islam Slimani in Germany's 2-1 World Cup victory: photo by AFP, 30 June 2014

Germany's next victim was the French, who succumbed as cooperatively as they had in 1940.

The final remaining obstacle, Argentina, would seem hardly an obstacle at all. Angel di Maria, the cleverest player of the next miraculously gifted generation immediately succeeding Lionel Messi's, is a game lad with tons of nerve to go with great vision and the audacious ball skills of an artist, but he is skinny as a stick, has taken a bad knock, and may not play in this final. Still, if the soul of this Argentina side is Messi, the heartbeat is the stalwart Javier Mascherano, whose astonishing stretch to deny Arjen Robben and the Dutch made possible the albicelestial passage to the final. Then there is the one player on earth with so remarkable a history of bringing joy that even in a tournament in which he has struggled, it would be against the poetry of the thing to rule out the possibility he might yet do something to make matters interesting, even if the smart money seems to have been trending away. But do I dare to equate Gary Lineker with the smart money? The wee genius Messi. Let us pause a moment for a nod in grateful tribute, and a quick look back.

from Rob Smyth's Guardian minute-by-minute report on Barcelona/Bayer Leverkusen, Wednesday 7 March 2011

GOAL! Barcelona 1-0 Bayer Leverkusen (Messi 25) I was typing 'GOAL!' when he was 45 yards out. It's a sublime finish from Lionel Messi. With Leverkusen having a suicidally high line, almost on the halfway line in fact, Messi curved his run to get beyond the defence onto a straightforward through pass from deep by Xavi. He ran into the area, a little left of centre, and lifted a wonderful scoop over the outstretched left arm of Leno. For most players such a scoop shot would have been a risky finish, but Messi always works within the limitations of his talent. There are no limitations.

Barcelona's Lionel Messi, left, scores his first past Bayer Leverkusen's Bernd Leno during the Champions League last-16 tie: photo by Manu Fernandez/AP via the Guardian 7 March 2007

GOAL! Barcelona 2-0 Bayer Leverkusen (Messi 42) For most players this would have been a sublime goal; for Messi it is utterly routine. We've seen him score this type of goal so many times before. He was found by a perceptive angled pass by Iniesta, just outside the area to the right of centre. He ran into the box and then across the area in a straight line, the ball never more than a few millimetres from his left foot. After dummying to shoot a couple of times, he placed the ball into the far corner. He made a difficult chance look offensively easy.

File:039 men at work UEFA 2009, Rome.jpg

Lionel Messi shoots from outside the penalty area against Manchester United in the 2009 Champions League final: photo by funnydae, 27 May 2009

GOAL! Barcelona 3-0 Bayer Leverkusen (Messi 50) I'm sorry, but this is just ridiculous. It's not remotely fair. Barcelona should be handicapped, made to play with nine men, when Lionel Messi is in their side. Messi has scored his eighth hat-trick of the season – his eighth hat-trick of the season– and this might be the best goal of the three. Again he ran beyond the defence onto a through pass, this time from Busquets. His first touch on the edge of the area was exquisite, but the covering Schwaab seemed to have forced him a little wide. Then Messi produced a glorious chip with his weaker right foot that arced over the head of Leno and plopped gently into the far corner. The extent and the efficiency of his genius is totally beyond our comprehension.

Lionel Messi celebrates one of his four goals for Barcelona against Arsenal in the Champions League: photo by Darren Staples/Reuters via the Guardian 7 April 2010

GOAL! Barcelona 5-0 Bayer Leverkusen (Messi 58) Messi has four. After some more rat-a-tat passing on the edge of the area, Pedro tries to slip the ball through to Messi. He's blocked off by two defenders and Leno comes to claim, but he's at full stretch and the ball slithers from his grasp. Messi, who kept running, passes the ball in from a very tight angle on the left of the six-yard box.

59 min I am less speech.

'Just the five goals for me last night then, tha's all': photo by Gustau Nacarino/Reuters via the Guardian, 7 March 2007

GOAL! Barcelona 7-0 Bayer Leverkusen (Messi 85) Lionel Messi becomes the first man to score five goals in a Champions League match. It was another terrifyingly simple goal, passed into the corner at pace from the D. There's nothing left to say.

87 min Lionel Messi is 24 years old.

Lionel Messi became the first player to score five goals in a Champions League tie: photo by Manu Fernandez/AP

Then again: this wonderful entertainer was in fact merely a human being. And not a large one at that. And it's actually a rough game. The other guy is trying to win too. So it all had to come down, as we knew it would sooner or later, to the Germans. To bring Messi to ground. Well, metaphorically that is. In the animation below, from the devastating Argentina defeat to Germany in the 2010 World Cup, he is seen not on the ground, but standing. Perfectly still. Watching the German shot land in the back of the net. And then walking away.

In the 2010 World Cup Germany stunned the much-fancied Argentina side of Maradona and Messi with this fourth minute goal created by two of the tournament's outstanding performers, Bastian Schweinsteiger (7, providing pinpoint service from the left) and newcomer Thomas Müller (penetrating the porous Argentine back line to head home); the reeling South Americans would never recover. Germany, looking imperious at this point, would crumple before the Spanish in their semi-final: photo animation by Zunaid, 2010

There would be a great many later moments of pure joy. And of course, moments of frustration. Human. Messi's smile. Messi's bewilderment. Messi's lamentation.

Barcelona striker Lionel Messi expresses his frustration during Barcelona's 2-1 defeat by Arsenal in the first leg of their Champions League tie, Emirates Stadium, London, 16 February 2011: photo by Eloy Alonso / Reuters

Espeso 8 Messi se resbala ayer en Londres ante Koscielny, el central del Arsenal. JORDI COTRINA

Messi goes to ground before Arsenal defender Laurent Koscielny (Emirates Stadium, London, 16 February 2011): photo by Jordi Cotrina / Reuters

Arsenal hunde a poderoso Barcelona en el final del partido

The lamentation of Lio Messi (Emirates Stadium, London, 16 February 2011: photo by Eddie Keogh/ Reuters

The respect Messi has won in defeat is as impressive as that gained in victory. After the match pictured above, Cesc Fabregas of Arsenal thoughtfully suggested, speaking of Messi's Barcelona side, They are the best side in football's history, in my opinion.

Cesc would shortly be moving back to his native Catalunya, to join the little wizard Messi, acknowledged as the finest player in the world, in building a temporary dynasty at Camp Nou. Moments of joy, moments of sadness. Today Lio gets another chance to delight us. The odds on anything good happening in any situation, an expert once suggested, are 6-5 against. Could one small person, far away on a southern continent, alter those odds, for even the few seconds a moment of magic would take?

I expect a German victory. I am not totally insane. I don't believe in miracles. But I do remember that day seven years ago when an angel fell on Lio Messi... and he kissed her.

This is the meaning of world football.

↧

While we were away at the circus of representation: Ten minutes and then no home -- no memories, no history

July 14, 2014, 2:45 am

≫ Next: Rebuilding the House of Stones: A Meditation Outside the Fertile Grounds Cafe

≪ Previous: The meaning of world football

Right-wing Israelis burn a Palestinian flag and shout racist slogans during an anti-Palestinian protest at the Gush Etzion junction, next to the Palestinian town of Bethlehem, following the disappearance of three Israeli teenagers four days earlier: photo by Oren Ziv / ActiveStills, 16 June 2014

Israel has launched more than 1,300 air strikes since its offensive began, and Palestinian militants have launched more than 800 rockets at Israel, the Israeli military has said. Gaza's health ministry said 166 Palestinians had been killed. There have been no Israeli fatalities.

-- The Guardian, 13 July 2014

Ilan Pappe: Israel’s incremental genocide in the Gaza ghetto

In a September 2006 article for The Electronic Intifada, I defined the Israeli policy towards the Gaza Strip as an incremental genocide.

Israel’s present assault on Gaza alas indicates that this policy continues unabated. The term is important since it appropriately locates Israel’s barbaric action -- then and now -- within a wider historical context.

This context should be insisted upon, since the Israeli propaganda machine attempts again and again to narrate its policies as out of context and turns the pretext it found for every new wave of destruction into the main justification for another spree of indiscriminate slaughter in the killing fields of Palestine.

Medics bring a young girl injured in an Israeli strike to a Gaza City hospital: photo by Yasser Qudih / APA Images, 8 July 2014

The context

The Zionist strategy of branding its brutal policies as an ad hoc response to this or that Palestinian action is as old as the Zionist presence in Palestine itself. It was used repeatedly as a justification for implementing the Zionist vision of a future Palestine that has in it very few, if any, native Palestinians.

The means for achieving this goal changed with the years, but the formula has remained the same: whatever the Zionist vision of a Jewish State might be, it can only materialize without any significant number of Palestinians in it. And nowadays the vision is of an Israel stretching over almost the whole of historic Palestine where millions of Palestinians still live.

The present genocidal wave has, like all the previous ones, also a more immediate background. It has been born out of an attempt to foil the Palestinian decision to form a unity government that even the United States could not object to.

Palestinians search the for survivors amongst the remains of a family home in Gaza City.

Palestinians search for survivors in the remains of a family home which was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City: photo by APA Images/REX, 13 July 2014

The collapse of US Secretary of State John Kerry's desperate “peace” initiative legitimized the Palestinian appeal to international organizations to stop the occupation. At the same time, Palestinians gained wide international blessing for the cautious attempt represented by the unity government to strategize once again a coordinated policy among the various Palestinian groups and agendas.

Ever since June 1967, Israel has searched for a way to keep the territories it occupied that year without incorporating their indigenous Palestinian population into its rights-bearing citizenry. All the while it participated in a “peace process” charade to cover up or buy time for its unilateral colonization policies on the ground.

Palestinians mourn in the morgue of Shifa hospital in Gaza City: photo by Khalil Hamra/AP, 13 July 2014

With the decades, Israel differentiated between areas it wished to control directly and those it would manage indirectly, with the aim in the long run of downsizing the Palestinian population to a minimum with, among other means, ethnic cleansing and economic and geographic strangulation.

The geopolitical location of the West Bank creates the impression in Israel, at least, that it is possible to achieve this without anticipating a third uprising or too much international condemnation.

A youth examines damage to a centre for the handicapped, which was reported to have caused by an Israeli air-strike killing two disabled women and wounding four.

A youth examines damage to a centre for disabled people, caused by an Israeli air strike: photo by REX, 13 July 2014

The Gaza Strip, due to its unique geopolitical location, did not lend itself that easily to such a strategy. Ever since 1994, and even more so when Ariel Sharon came to power as prime minister in the early 2000s, the strategy has been to ghettoize Gaza and somehow hope that the people there -- 1.8 million as of today -- would be dropped into eternal oblivion.

People search for their belongings in the rubble of a house destroyed in the northern Gaza Strip: photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters, 10 July 2012

But the Ghetto proved to be rebellious and unwilling to live under conditions of strangulation, isolation, starvation and economic collapse. So resending it to oblivion necessitates the continuation of genocidal policies.

A mother hugs her adolescent son in a bombed-out living room

In Gaza, the implementation of the Zionist vision takes its most inhuman form: photo by Ezz Zanoun / APA Images, 13 July 2014

The pretext

On 15 May, Israeli forces killed two Palestinian youths in the West Bank town of Beitunia, their cold-blooded slayings by a sniper’s bullet captured on video. Their names -- Nadim Nuwara and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir -- were added to a long list of such killings in recent months and years.

The killing of three Israeli teenagers, two of them minors, abducted in the occupied West Bank in June, was perhaps in reprisal for killings of Palestinian children. But for all the depredations of the oppressive occupation, it provided the pretext first and foremost for destroying the delicate unity in the West Bank but also for the implementation of the old dream of wiping out Hamas from Gaza so that the Ghetto could be quiet again.

Palestinians inspect the rubble of a house after it was hit by an Israeli missile strike in Gaza City: photo by Hatem Moussa/AP, 10 July 2012

Since 1994, even before the rise of Hamas to power in the Gaza Strip, the very particular geopolitical location of the Strip made it clear that any collective punitive action, such as the one inflicted now, could only be an operation of massive killings and destruction. In other words, of a continued genocide.

This recognition never inhibited the generals who give the orders to bomb the people from the air, the sea and the ground. Downsizing the number of Palestinians all over historic Palestine is still the Zionist vision. In Gaza, its implementation takes its most inhuman form.

Smoke billows from buildings in Gaza City: photo by Mahmud Hams/AFP, 10 July 2012

The particular timing of this wave is determined, as in the past, by additional considerations. The domestic social unrest of 2011 is still simmering and for a while there was a public demand to cut military expenditures and move money from the inflated “defense” budget to social services. The army branded this possibility as suicidal.

Palestinians stand on the rubble of a house in Gaza City: photo by Hatem Moussa/AP, 10 July 2012

There is nothing like a military operation to stifle any voices calling on the government to cut its military expenses.

Israelis watch the fighting between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants from a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip: photo by Menahem Kahana/AFP, 13 July 2014

Typical hallmarks of the previous stages in this incremental genocide reappear in this wave as well. One can witness again consensual Israeli Jewish support for the massacre of civilians in the Gaza Strip, without one significant voice of dissent. In Tel Aviv, the few who dared to demonstrate against it were beaten by Jewish hooligans, while the police stood by and watched.

Palestinians gather around the remains of a car which police said was targeted in an Israeli airstrike in the northern Gaza Strip.

Palestinians gather around the remains of a car hit by an airstrike in Gaza City: photo by Ahmed Zakot/Reuters, 10 July 2012

Academia, as always, becomes part of the machinery. The prestigious private university, the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, has established “a civilian headquarters" where students volunteer to serve as mouthpieces in the propaganda campaign abroad.

The media is loyally recruited, showing no pictures of the human catastrophe Israel has wreaked and informing its public that this time, “the world understands us and is behind us.”

Smoke rises following Israeli strikes on Gaza, seen from the Israel-Gaza border.

Smoke rises after Israeli strikes on Gaza, seen from the Israel-Gaza border: photo by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP, 13 July 2014

That statement is valid to a point as the political elites in the West continue to provide the old immunity to the “Jewish state.” However, the media have not provided Israel with quite the level of legitimacy it was seeking for its criminal policies.

Obvious exceptions have included French media, especially France 24 and the BBC, that continue to shamefully parrot Israeli propaganda.

This is not surprising, since pro-Israel lobby groups continue to work tirelessly to press Israel’s case in France and the rest of Europe as they do in the United States.

Palestinians stand looking at a destroyed building hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. The Israeli air force launched raids on more than 300 targets in attacks against Hamas in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to rocket fire.

Onlookers stand near a destroyed building and vehicles in Gaza City: photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP, 10 July 2012

The way forward

Whether it is burning alive a Palestinian youth from Jerusalem, or the fatal shooting of two others, just for the fun of it in Beitunia, or slaying whole families in Gaza, these are all acts that can only be perpetrated if the victim is dehumanized.

I will concede that all over the Middle East there are now horrific cases where dehumanization has reaped unimaginable horrors as it does in Gaza today. But there is one crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality: the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved by the president of the United States, the leaders of the EU and Israel’s other friends in the world.

Relatives and friends of the al-Kaware family carry one of the bodies to the mosque during their funeral in Khan Yunis: photo by Abed Khatib/Pacific Press/Barcroft India, 10 July 2012

The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers.

Those who commit atrocities in the Arab world against oppressed minorities and helpless communities, as well as the Israelis who commit these crimes against the Palestinian people, should all be judged by the same moral and ethical standards. They are all war criminals, though in the case of Palestine they have been at work longer than anyone else.

Israeli soldiers use a self-propelled howitzer fire a shell towards Gaza at a position in Southern Israel.

Israeli soldiers fire a shell towards Gaza: photo by Imago/Barcroft Media, 13 July 2014

It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way.

A member of the civil defence reacts after what police said was an Israeli air strike on a house.

A member of the civil defence reacts after an airstrike on a house in Gaza: photo by Ahmed Zakot/Reuters, 10 July 2012

A world that would stop employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes elsewhere in the world.
Cessation of the incremental genocide in Gaza and the restitution of the basic human and civil rights of Palestinians wherever they are, including the right of return, is the only way to open a new vista for a productive international intervention in the Middle East as a whole.

Ilan Pappe: Israel’s incremental genocide in the Gaza ghetto, via Electronic Intifada, 13 July 2014

The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter

Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli air strike in the central Gaza Strip: photo by Ashraf Amra / APA images, 25 June 2014

Dr. Mona El-Farra: Two Things

The number of the injured has reached 659 up to this minute, the number keeps increasing. The number of killed is 105. At least forty are women and children. Hospitals are working under great pressure because of a severe shortage of medication and supplies, especially the emergency needs for the operating theaters. And of course the problem of the electricity continues. We don’t have power. We don’t have internet and power most of the time. A feeling of insecurity is the case. No place is safe.

I’d like to share something with you -- two things. First thing, on a personal level, I have had to leave my apartment because all the windows were shattered, and my place is just in front of the sea and it was very very unsafe. I was too close to the bombardment. So I moved to a friend’s house to see if it was safer than our place. No place is safe. This is one thing.

Today, in Gaza, the drones are still in the sky, the jet fighters are still in the sky, gunboats or warships are still hitting Gaza with missiles. The streets of Gaza are really empty -- people are afraid to leave their homes because of the intensity of the shelling. Hundreds of thousands of children are in their homes, terrified, tired, skittish, anxious, clinging to their parents because they are afraid of the shelling. And as you know, we don’t have shelters in Gaza, so just people are trying to be in their homes, trying to be in the safest place inside their homes. This is one thing.

Another thing -- Israel has destroyed more than 210 homes until this minute and the number is increasing. And they give very short notice -- just ten minutes to the family to leave their home. Those ten minutes and then no home -- no memories, no history, nothing. Just get out of the house even without any papers, documents to see who you are, any official documents.

Dr. Mona El-Farra, leader of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and director of Gaza projects with the Middle East Children’s Alliance, in Gaza City, 11 July 2014

A Palestinian man inspects his Gaza City house which witnesses said was damaged in an Israeli air strike: photo by Ashraf Amra / APA images, 16 June 2014

Palestinian children in a bedroom ransacked by Israeli forces who invaded their family’s home in Salem village east of the West Bank city of Nablus: photo by Nedal Eshtayah / APA images, 21 June 2014

Thousands flee Gaza homes after Israeli warning of large-scale bombing

Israel to hit Beit Lahia area, home to at least 100,000 people, targeting what it says are rocket-launching sites

Thousands of Gazans fled their homes in two northern areas of the coastal strip on Sunday after Israel warned that it would "strike with might" against what it says are rocket-launching sites.

The exodus from Beit Lahia and Attatra came after Israel dropped leaflets and sent text messages warning civilians to evacuate northern Gaza by midday on Sunday in advance of a large-scale bombing campaign. The area is home to at least 100,000 people.

A senior Israeli military officer, in a telephone briefing with foreign reporters, said Israel would strike the Beit Lahia area from the late evening on Sunday. "The enemy has built rocket infrastructure in between the houses [in Beit Lahia]," the officer said. "He wants to trap me into an attack and into hurting civilians."

The leaflet warned: "Those who fail to comply with the instructions will endanger their lives and the lives of their families. Beware."

As the ultimatum drew near, large numbers raced by in pickup trucks or on donkey carts, waving white flags, with many heading to UN-run schools that were taking in refugees.

"They are sending warning messages," said one resident, Mohammad Abu Halemah. "Once we received the message, we felt scared to stay in our homes. We want to leave."

Palestinian evacuees seek shelter at a UN school in Gaza City.

Palestinian evacuees leave their home in Gaza City to seek shelter at a UN school: photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP, 13 July 2014

Outside one UN school, there were rows of horses tied up by families anxious to protect their animals.

During a visit to Beit Lahia after the deadline had expired, the Guardian saw that most residents, had opted to stay in their homes. Some shops were open and hospitals called for volunteers from medical schools to help treat an expected influx of casualties.

The warning was issued hours after Israeli commandos launched an early morning raid on a beach in the Sudaniya neighbourhood in the north of Gaza City, targeting another rocket-launching site. On Saturday the coastal enclave suffered the bloodiest day of the six-day Israeli assault, with 54 Palestinians reported killed.

There has been speculation that Israel may launch a ground offensive into Gaza, a move likely to sharply increase the number of civilian casualties. So far 166 people have been killed, including 30 children, according to Gaza's health ministry. There have been several Israeli injuries but no fatalities.

In the worst single incident of the conflict so far, at least 17 people were killed and 45 injured when two large Israeli bombs hit a house in the Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City where the city's chief of police, Tayseer al-Batsh, was sheltering. Five other people were missing, presumed dead.

Most of the injured were returning home from a mosque when they were caught by shrapnel from the blast.

Palestinians stand in the rubble of Tayseer Batsh's family house in Gaza City, which police said was destroyed in an Israeli air strike: photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters, 13 July 2014

Israel has been massing tanks and soldiers at Gaza's borders, which some fear could signal a wider ground offensive that would cause heavy casualties. "We don't know when the operation will end," the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, told a cabinet meeting on Sunday. "It might take a long time."

The beach raid by several dozen commandos at 2am on Sunday was the first time Israeli forces have set foot on the ground in Gaza since the beginning of the current campaign. Four commandos were reportedly lightly injured after apparently being spotted approaching and being engaged by waiting Palestinian fighters.

Saad al-Dawla, the night watchman of the al-Mathaf hotel, said he was sleeping when the commandos came to the beach. "I was sleeping in the lobby with a friend. At the beginning we heard shooting from the Palestinian side. I got up and looked out the window and saw that there were people shooting from the water. Almost immediately an [Israeli] helicopter came and started shooting at the water as well," he said. "Later I heard shelling from the sea and the sounded of a warship's siren. The whole thing last about two hours."

Asked whether Hamas or other groups had watchers near the beach, Dawla said he did not know. Ladders at a mosque overlooking the beachfront and leading to its tower strongly suggested that a sentry had been posted there.

Another local resident, who would only give his nickname, Abu Adam, said he was woken by the sound of fighting coming from the beach. "I was lying on the floor with my children. We could hear the sounds of shelling and gunfire and see the windows lit up by the explosions and the flares," he said.

Earlier in the evening two bombs demolished a house belonging to Majid Batsh, a cousin of the Hamas chief of police Tayseer. All that remained of the substantial building on Sunday morning were a few concrete stumps of the pillars that had supported it. A girl aged three was among those killed in the bombing.

A boy mourns after the funeral for relatives of the Gaza police chief Tayseer al-Batsh, who officials said were killed in an Israeli air strike: photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters, 13 July 2014

'They were my cousins," said Mohammad al-Batsh 20, a civil engineering student. "I was coming home from mosque when I heard a huge explosion. At first I didn't know where the sound was coming from. The air was full of dust and smoke. It felt like an earthquake.

"When I got here, I saw destruction everywhere. The bodies were so badly burned I could not recognise anyone. Thirteen of the dead came from my cousin Majid's family. He was just a driver. There are five still missing including a pregnant woman."

On Sunday, Palestinians with foreign passports began leaving Gaza through the Erez border crossing. Israel, which is cooperating in the evacuation, says 800 Palestinians living in Gaza have passports from countries including the UK, US and Australia.

Ahmed Mohana, a US citizen, said he had mixed feelings about leaving friends and family behind in the Gaza Strip. "It is very hard, it is very tough," he said. "We are leaving our family, our relatives and brothers and sisters in this horrible situation we have to do what we have to do."

Israel has launched more than 1,300 air strikes since the offensive began, the military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner said. Palestinian militants have launched more than 800 rockets at Israel, including 130 in the last 24 hours, the Israeli military.

Israel has said it is acting in self-defence against rockets that have disrupted life across much of the country. It also accuses Hamas of using Gaza's civilians as human shields.

Critics say Israel's heavy bombardment of one of the most densely populated territories in the world is the main factor putting civilians at risk.

Thousands flee Gaza homes after Israeli warning of large-scale bombing: Peter Beaumont in Beit Lahia, The Guardian, 13 July 2014

Relatives of Imad Salem mourn during the fisherman’s funeral in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, 8 June. Salem, 51, died of his injuries that morning two weeks after the Israeli navy fired at him while he was fishing off Gaza’s shores: photo by Ashraf Amra / APA images

Anne Paq: Generations of Palestinian Exile

Al-Amari refugee camp, near Ramallah. A major problem with most refugee camps is the severe overcrowding and lack of infrastructure. There are usually no sidewalks and no green space, only small walkways formed by rows and rows of concrete buildings: photo by Anne Paq, via Electrionic Intifada, 27 June 2014

Israel’s wall in Aida refugee camp near the West Bank city of Bethlehem is built only a few meters away from the homes of the refugees and prevents them from accessing the olive grove where they used to go for recreation: photo by Anne Paq, via Electrionic Intifada, 27 June 2014

Balata camp near the city of Nablus was established in 1950 and has become the largest West Bank camp in terms of inhabitants, with more than 23,000 registered refugees: photo by Anne Paq, via Electrionic Intifada, 27 June 2014

Ahmad, sixteen years old, lives in Aida refugee camp and wants to work as a DJ: “I am proud of being refugee but I hate where I live. I hope to return to my homeland.” His grandmother, 70 years old, says: “I was twelve years old when the soldiers arrived. My house was very beautiful and we grew many things on our land. There were a lot of shootings at the houses. I am a refugee and I got married under the tent, can you imagine? I want to say to the world: do not forget Palestine.": photo by Anne Paq, via Electrionic Intifada, 27 June 2014

Hakma, 75 years old, lives in Dheisheh refugee camp: “I was seventeen years old, I was pregnant and had a two-month-old baby. When we heard about Deir Yassin [a massacre in a village near Jerusalem], we got afraid and left. One day in my original village equals one life in this camp.”: photo by Anne Paq, via Electrionic Intifada, 27 June 2014

Ibrahim, 83 years old, lives in Dheisheh refugee camp near the West Bank city of Bethlehem: “I was around twenty years old and I had a wife and a son. Our family owned 1,000 dunums [a dunum is the equivalent of 1,000 square meters]. We had fifty goats, twenty-five cows, two camels and fifty hens. When the Israeli soldiers entered the Palestinian villages, they shot everywhere and we were afraid. When I heard that my friend and his wife were killed, I became even more afraid and I hid myself and my family in a well for one night. For two years we had been going from one place to another. Once I was able to return to my village, five years after we left. Everything was destroyed, including my home. I just found two dogs that I knew before and they recognized me. I was very sad when I saw all the destruction.”: photo by Anne Paq, via Electrionic Intifada, 27 June 2014

Mohammad, 83 years old, lives in al-Azzeh camp, the smallest in the West Bank and where the unemployment rate is high. “I cannot explain my feelings with one sentence,” he says. “Those who have no country have no dignity. I have no dignity. I always think of the past. Life was better then. We had our land. Now if you don’t work, you don’t eat. I feel angry. I was a fighter against the British and the Zionists. If I had the strength to fight, I will fight the Palestinian leaders.” photo by Anne Paq, via Electrionic Intifada, 27 June 2014

Mahmoud, eighteen years old, lives in Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem. “There is something missing in my life,” he says. Abed, his 75-year-old grandfather, says: “I feel miserable because my village is gone. I was fourteen years old when we had to leave our land. We had a small house and land. It was a simple life but we did not need any help from other people or institutions. I could go back once to Beit Jibrin, and when I saw that everything was destroyed I felt very sad.”: photo by Anne Paq, via Electrionic Intifada, 27 June 2014

Abed, ninety years old, lives in al-Aroub refugee camp: “I used to own a lot of land. I had animals, and trees. I want to go back there to die. I want to finish my life there.”: photo by Anne Paq, via Electrionic Intifada, 27 June 2014

There are more than five million Palestinian refugees registered with the United Nations, making up the largest group of refugees in the world. The Palestinian refugee advocacy group BADIL estimates there are an additional 2.7 million unregistered Palestinian refugees, making up 66 percent of the Palestinian population worldwide.

They have been waiting more than sixty years to exercise their right to return since their first mass forced displacement with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948, what Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe, during the establishment of the State of Israel.

Five generations since then, many Palestinian refugees today live in poor conditions in crowded camps. The stateless are among the most vulnerable, as their plight in Syria continues to show.

With the conviction that the right of return is not a side issue but is at the core of the so-called conflict, this series depicts a Palestinian refugee child with a grandparent, a first-generation refugee. Through it I hope to emphasize not only the duration of the plight of Palestinian refugees, but also to visualize the extraordinary bond and solidarity that Palestinian refugees share across generations, preserving their dignity and determination during the long wait and fight for justice.

I first worked on this series in 2008 but I had left it buried and unfinished in my archive. Although I have worked for years in these camps and know how central the issues of Palestinian refugees are, I put it aside as there were always developments in Palestine that seemed more urgent.

This series questions the way the “conflict” is portrayed and how a core issue remains largely left out of the story, leaving the plight of millions of Palestinians in a perpetual state of uncertainty and invisibility.

As the first generation of refugees and the immediate survivors of the Nakba become fewer in number, it is more urgent than ever to bring their histories back to the center of the discourse on Palestine.

Text and photos by Anne Paq, via Electronic Intifada, 27 June 2014

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 31 percent of Palestinian refugees in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip live below the poverty line: photo by Anne Paq, via Electrionic Intifada, 27 June 2014

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Rebuilding the House of Stones: A Meditation Outside the Fertile Grounds Cafe

July 14, 2014, 9:18 pm

≫ Next: Emily Dickinson: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

≪ Previous: While we were away at the circus of representation: Ten minutes and then no home -- no memories, no history

Fertile Grounds Cafe: photo by Ayman Morrar, 2008

Ayman just came back from his family
Home in the West Bank. How's the spirit there?
I asked. "Good. Nobody's giving up."
Ayman paused, wiping down the spotless glass top
Of the pastry case one more careful time
Without looking up. Thinking to himself.
"After all, all they want's a little justice."
On the map of the West Bank, that blank space
Just to the left of the town of Bhiddu
Is the village where Ayman's father, one
Of twenty children, was born and raised.
The name of the village means House of Stones
"Because there's a quarry there," but still
It's too small to rate a spot on the map in
The Economist, alongside this story
On the fresh welling up of blood and anger
In my friend's home land, that blank space
Filled with blood and stones. Ayman loves
His trade; in six years he's built from nothing
The coolest little coffee shop on the street;
People like him, he likes them; he makes
Great coffee, his sandwiches are famed, justly;
It's the old American Horatio
Alger Dream, and America's his country.
Every day he gets hundreds of calls
On his cell phone. "But know how many
Calls from people here I take when I'm back
Home?"he smiles. "None. I talk to people
There."And when he goes back home to Beit
Duqqu, America feels far away.
That's the way it feels to me too, but I have
No other home. The photo of the olive tree,
Its roots exposed from the bulldozer cut,
That was up on Ayman's wall last autumn --
Is that a photo of a broken home
Or is it that one's home's always intact
In one's mind as long as one's heart is
Full? I wouldn't begin to know. Tacked
On a phone pole out front of Fertile Grounds
In drifting night mist, a tattered poster
With a picture of a cat's face on it, lost
Near Delaware and Shattuck. It's Momo.
And what's become of poor Momo, now a week
Gone? Tonight, caning into the fog,
I hallucinated a Momo
Sighting downtown. No, just another feral.
Over ferals few sentimental
Tears are shed. A shelter's not a home.
A sanctuary's what everybody needs
These days -- the ferals, the street and doorway
People, the drifters in the mist, the bums.
On my way back, as I passed, I saw that
A young Arab girl in headscarf sat weeping
At a table outside Fertile Grounds. Ayman
In his counterman's apron, spick and span,
And Mohamed stood huddled in conference,
Mo holding a cell phone. "She's just lost
Her family, everything," Mo said softly.
"She doesn't have people here. I am
Going to help her." Ayman was talking
To the girl in Arabic, serious, hushed.
Then too Mo, in Arabic, reassuring.
"Don't worry, it will be okay," said Mo --
Switching back to Shattuck Avenue English
For me, the infidel. God is great. May
God bring Momo home if it is His will,
And everybody else along with him,
Whomever that may include -- we, living --
And we'll abide in that, and till then hope
That Momo too, pilfering out of the trash
Bins behind the Shattuck eateries,
Will abide likewise. He'll not lack competition.

TC: A Meditation Outside the Fertile Grounds Cafe, 2008, from The New World (2009)

Fertile Grounds Cafe: photo by Rob W., 1 November 2013

↧

Emily Dickinson: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

July 16, 2014, 1:10 am

≫ Next: Mahmoud Darwish: Silence for Gaza

≪ Previous: Rebuilding the House of Stones: A Meditation Outside the Fertile Grounds Cafe

Palestinian boys inspect the rubble of a destroyed governmental prison after an Israeli air strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip: photo by Eyad Al Baba / APA Images / Zuma, 15 July 2014

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), "Tell all the truth but tell it slant", n.d.

Children playing with toy guns on the second day of Eid al-Fitr in Rafah in the Gaza Strip: photo by Eyad Al Baba / APA Images / Zuma, 20 August 2012

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

-- Nadine Gordimer 20 November 1923-13 July 2014

Nadine Gordimer visiting Alexandra, the black township near Johannesburg, to lay wreaths at the grave of victims of political unrest: photo by Reuters, 18 May 1986

Staff at al-Shifa Hospital treat a victim of Israel’s current attack on Gaza: photo by Basel Yazouri / Active Stils, 15 July 2014

Right-wing nationalists attack activists in central Tel Aviv protesting Israel’s air strikes on Gaza: photo by Oren Ziv / Active Stills, 12 July 2014

Israel -Gaza conflic

Israelis gather to watch air strikes in the Gaza Strip from a hilltop near the southern town of Sderot: photo by Baz Ratner/Reuters, 15 July 2014

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Gaza: photo by Eyad Al Baba / APA images, 14 July 2014

↧

Mahmoud Darwish: Silence for Gaza

July 17, 2014, 1:28 am

≫ Next: Another stunning sunset: Ilan Pappe: Israel's righteous fury and its victims in Gaza

≪ Previous: Emily Dickinson: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Palestinians at Rafah crossing await permission to transport people wounded in the ongoing offensive against the Gaza Strip to Egypt for treatment: photo by Eyad Al Baba / APA Images, 12 July 2014

Gaza is far from its relatives and close to its enemies, because whenever Gaza explodes, it becomes an island and it never stops exploding. It scratched the enemy’s face, broke his dreams and stopped his satisfaction with time.

Because in Gaza time is something different.

Because in Gaza time is not a neutral element.

It does not compel people to cool contemplation, but rather to explosion and a collision with reality.

Time there does not take children from childhood to old age, but rather makes them men in their first confrontation with the enemy.

Time in Gaza is not relaxation, but storming the burning noon. Because in Gaza values are different, different, different.

The only value for the occupied is the extent of his resistance to occupation.

That is the only competition there. Gaza has been addicted to knowing this cruel, noble value. It did not learn it from books, hasty school seminars, loud propaganda megaphones, or songs. It learned it through experience alone and through work that is not done for advertisement and image.

Gaza has no throat. Its pores are the ones that speak in sweat, blood, and fires. Hence the enemy hates it to death and fears it to criminality, and tries to sink it into the sea, the desert, or blood. And hence its relatives and friends love it with a coyness that amounts to jealousy and fear at times, because Gaza is the brutal lesson and the shining example for enemies and friends alike.

Gaza is not the most beautiful city.

Its shore is not bluer than the shores of Arab cities.

Its oranges are not the most beautiful in the Mediterranean basin.

Gaza is not the richest city.

It is not the most elegant or the biggest, but it equals the history of an entire homeland, because it is more ugly, impoverished, miserable, and vicious in the eyes of enemies. Because it is the most capable, among us, of disturbing the enemy’s mood and his comfort. Because it is his nightmare. Because it is mined oranges, children without a childhood, old men without old age and women without desires. Because of all this it is the most beautiful, the purest and richest among us and the one most worthy of love.

We do injustice to Gaza when we look for its poems, so let us not disfigure Gaza’s beauty. What is most beautiful in it is that it is devoid of poetry at a time when we tried to triumph over the enemy with poems, so we believed ourselves and were overjoyed to see the enemy letting us sing. We let him triumph, then when we dried our lips of poems we saw that the enemy had finished building cities, forts and streets. We do injustice to Gaza when we turn it into a myth, because we will hate it when we discover that it is no more than a small poor city that resists.

We do injustice when we wonder: What made it into a myth? If we had dignity, we would break all our mirrors and cry or curse it if we refuse to revolt against ourselves. We do injustice to Gaza if we glorify it, because being enchanted by it will take us to the edge of waiting and Gaza doesn’t come to us. Gaza does not liberate us. Gaza has no horses, airplanes, magic wands, or offices in capital cities. Gaza liberates itself from our attributes and liberates our language from its Gazas at the same time. When we meet it -- in a dream -- perhaps it won’t recognize us, because Gaza was born out of fire, while we were born out of waiting and crying over abandoned homes.

It is true that Gaza has its special circumstances and its own revolutionary traditions. But its secret is not a mystery: Its resistance is popular and firmly joined together and knows what it wants (it wants to expel the enemy out of its clothes). The relationship of resistance to the people is that of skin to bones and not a teacher to students. Resistance in Gaza did not turn into a profession or an institution.

It did not accept anyone’s tutelage and did not leave its fate hinging on anyone’s signature or stamp.

It does not care that much if we know its name, picture, or eloquence. It did not believe that it was material for media. It did not prepare for cameras and did not put smiling paste on its face.

Neither does it want that, nor we.

Hence, Gaza is bad business for merchants and hence it is an incomparable moral treasure for Arabs.

What is beautiful about Gaza is that our voices do not reach it. Nothing distracts it; nothing takes its fist away from the enemy’s face. Not the forms of the Palestinian state we will establish whether on the eastern side of the moon, or the western side of Mars when it is explored. Gaza is devoted to rejection… hunger and rejection, thirst and rejection, displacement and rejection, torture and rejection, siege and rejection, death and rejection.

Enemies might triumph over Gaza (the storming sea might triumph over an island… they might chop down all its trees).

They might break its bones.

They might implant tanks on the insides of its children and women. They might throw it into the sea, sand, or blood.

But it will not repeat lies and say “Yes” to invaders.

It will continue to explode.

It is neither death, nor suicide. It is Gaza’s way of declaring that it deserves to live. It will continue to explode.

It is neither death, nor suicide. It is Gaza’s way of declaring that it deserves to live.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008): Silence for Gaza, English translation by Sinan Antoon, from Hayrat al-`A’id (The Returnee’s Perplexity), Riyad al-Rayyis, 2007 (via Mondoweiss)

Gaza from the Hill Muntar. Image Description from historic lecture booklet: "This picture is taken two miles southwest of Gaza on the Hill Muntar. Gaza was the southern-most and strongest of five Royal Cities of Philistines. It has been made famous by the exploits of Samson. Tradition points out a place on the southwest side of town toward the left of the picture as the place where stood the gates of the Philistine city which Samson carried off (Judges 13). It is claimed by some that this is the hill whither Samson carried the gates. Gaza is about 100 feet high and stands in the midst of orchards. There is an abundance of figs, dates and olives. The soil is irrigated by well water and yields abundantly. Gaza is very closely connected with Old Testament history, being mentioned in almost every book. It was a town even before the call of Abraham, and now is the largest city close to the seacoast in Palestine. In the conquest of Joshua the territory of Gaza is mentioned as one which he was not able to subdue (Josh. 15:47). But it apparently continued through the times of Samuel, Saul, and David to be a Philistine city.": photographer unknown, c. 1910 (Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives)

Kids in Gaza. Photographed near Jabaliya Refugee Camp. Drinking water is limited in the Strip, and I am not sure how clean this water was: photo by Shabtai Gold, July 2005; image by velvetart, 6 September 2005

Palestinians at Rafah crossing await permission to transport people wounded in the ongoing offensive against the Gaza Strip to Egypt for treatment: photo by Eyad Al Baba / APA Images, 12 July 2014

Palestinian youth keeping warm during winter with "hatab" fire in Gaza refugee camp, Jerash, Jordan. In the Gaza refugee camp where most homes lack indoor plumbing and heating, the time-honored Arab tradition of gathering around a "hatab" fire is frequently practiced during the winter season. The youth who often complain of being cramped up in their small homes, are particularly fond of making outdoor fires with scrap wood and shrubs located throughout the camp: photo by Einkarem1948, 18 January 2009

Children playing near overground sewage in Gaza refugee camp, Jerash, Jordan. Suffering and deprivation is apparent throughout the Gaza refugee camp where the vast majority of families live on less than $40 USD per month. The putrid odor from overground sewage, coupled with the dusty deserts surrounding the refugee camp make living a daily challenge for residents of the camp. Sewage and waste water accumulates in the overground sewage systems shown above. These sewage "lines" in the camp collect from holes in the floors of the homes or dumped directly into ditches that run beneath each home in the camp. Despite being plagued by severe poverty, residents of this refugee camp are regularly forced to pay Jordanian authorities exorbitant amounts to have the excreta/sewage pumped out of their homes into special septic tanks. The Gaza refugee camp in Jerash, Jordan is home to 24,000-34,000 Palestinian refugees who fled from Gaza, Palestine in 1948 and 1967. Unlike Palestinian refugees from other districts of Palestine, the Palestinians in the Gaza refugee camp are considered persona non grata in Jordan (i.e. they are denied an identity, not granted identification papers and, therefore, denied the right to work and travel freely throughout the country). Most Jordanians and Palestinians living in the capital of Amman remain unaware of the Palestinians in the Gaza refugee camp, prompting many experts to describe these refugees as the "Forgotten Ones": photo by Einkarem1948, 18 January 2009

Typical homes in Gaza refugee camp, Jerash, Jordan: photo by Einkarem1948, 18 January 2009

Narrow alley in the Gaza refugee camp: photo by Einkarem1948, 10 June 2009

Narrow alleys in the Gaza refugee camp: photo by Einkarem1948, 10 June 2009

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Another stunning sunset: Ilan Pappe: Israel's righteous fury and its victims in Gaza

July 18, 2014, 12:43 am

≫ Next: Naomi Shihab Nye: For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15

≪ Previous: Mahmoud Darwish: Silence for Gaza

Israelis sat on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip as smoke rose from the scene of an airstrike.

Israelis sit on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip as smoke rises from the scene of an airstrike: photo by Jim Hollander / EPA, 17 July 2014

My visit back home to the Galilee coincided with the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza. The state, through its media and with the help of its academia, broadcast one unanimous voice -- even louder than the one heard during the criminal attack against Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israel is engulfed once more with righteous fury that translates into destructive policies in the Gaza Strip. This appalling self-justification for the inhumanity and impunity is not just annoying, it is a subject worth dwelling on, if one wants to understand the international immunity for the massacre that rages on in Gaza.

It is based first and foremost on sheer lies transmitted with a newspeak reminiscent of darker days in 1930s Europe. Every half an hour a news bulletin on the radio and television describes the victims of Gaza as terrorists and Israel’s massive killings of them as an act of self-defense. Israel presents itself to its own people as the righteous victim that defends itself against a great evil. The academic world is recruited to explain how demonic and monstrous is the Palestinian struggle, if it is led by Hamas. These are the same scholars who demonized the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in an earlier era and delegitimized his Fatah movement during the second Palestinian intifada.

Israel announced Thursday it was launching a ground operation into Gaza after more than a week of airstrikes and rockets between it and Hamas. Pictured: Israeli tanks headed toward the Gaza border.

Israeli tanks head toward the Gaza border as the IDF ground operation begins: photo by EPA, 17 July 2014

But the lies and distorted representations are not the worst part of it. It is the direct attack on the last vestiges of humanity and dignity of the Palestinian people that is most enraging. The Palestinians in Israel who have shown their solidarity with the people of Gaza and are now branded as a fifth column in the Jewish state; their right to remain in their homeland cast as doubtful given their lack of support for the Israeli aggression.

Those among them who agree -- wrongly, in my opinion -- to appear in the local media are interrogated, and not interviewed, as if they were inmates in the Shin Bet’s prison. Their appearance is prefaced and followed by humiliating racist remarks and they are met with accusations of being a fifth column, an irrational and fanatical people. And yet this is not the basest practice. There are a few Palestinian children from the occupied territories treated for cancer in Israeli hospitals. God knows what price their families have paid for them to be admitted there. The Israel Radio daily goes to the hospital to demand the poor parents tell the Israeli audience how right Israel is in its attack and how evil is Hamas in its defense.

There are no boundaries to the hypocrisy that a righteous fury produces. The discourse of the generals and the politicians is moving erratically between self-compliments of the humanity the army displays in its “surgical” operations on the one hand, and the need to destroy Gaza for once and for all, in a humane way of course, on the other.

Abdallah Abu Rahmeh lies in the road after he was purposefully hit by a car driven by an Israeli settler (pictured) during a peaceful protest against Israel’s attacks on Gaza on Route 60 outside Ofra settlement: photo by Issam Rimawi / APA images, 19 November 2012

This righteous fury is a constant phenomenon in the Israeli, and before that Zionist, dispossession of Palestine. Every act whether it was ethnic cleansing, occupation, massacre or destruction was always portrayed as morally just and as a pure act of self-defense reluctantly perpetrated by Israel in its war against the worst kind of human beings. In his excellent book The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel, Gabi Piterberg explores the ideological origins and historical progression of this righteous fury. Today in Israel, from Left to Right, from Likud to Kadima, from the academia to the media, one can hear this righteous fury of a state that is more busy than any other state in the world in destroying and dispossessing an indigenous population.

It is crucial to explore the ideological origins of this attitude and derive the necessary political conclusions from its prevalence. This righteous fury shields the society and politicians in Israel from any external rebuke or criticism. But far worse, it is translated always into destructive policies against the Palestinians. With no internal mechanism of criticism and no external pressure, every Palestinian becomes a potential target of this fury. Given the firepower of the Jewish state it can inevitably only end in more massive killings, massacres and ethnic cleansing.

Two Israeli flares loose their light power as two others light up the sky over the northern part of the Gaza Strip. (Jim Hollander/EPA)

Two Israeli flares lose their light power as two others light up the sky over the northern part of the Gaza Strip: photo by Jim Hollander / EPA, 17 July 2014

The self-righteousness is a powerful act of self-denial and justification. It explains why the Israeli Jewish society would not be moved by words of wisdom, logical persuasion or diplomatic dialogue. And if one does not want to endorse violence as the means of opposing it, there is only one way forward: challenging head-on this righteousness as an evil ideology meant to cover human atrocities. Another name for this ideology is Zionism and an international rebuke for Zionism, not just for particular Israeli policies, is the only way of countering this self-righteousness. We have to try and explain not only to the world, but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation of the present massacre but also delegitimization of the ideology that produced that policy and justifies it morally and politically. Let us hope that significant voices in the world will tell the Jewish state that this ideology and the overall conduct of the state are intolerable and unacceptable and as long as they persist, Israel will be boycotted and subject to sanctions.

Israeli rocket is fired into the Gaza Strip after Binyamin Netanyahu instructed the military to begin a ground offensive: photo by Amir Cohen/Reuters, 17 June 2014

But I am not naive. I know that even the killing of hundreds of innocent Palestinians would not be enough to produce such a shift in the Western public opinion; it is even more unlikely that the crimes committed in Gaza would move the European governments to change their policy towards Palestine.

And yet, we cannot allow 2009 to be just another year, less significant than 2008, the commemorative year of the Nakba, that did not fulfill the great hopes we all had for its potential to dramatically transform the Western world’s attitude to Palestine and the Palestinians.

Smoke rises after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip: photo by Eyad Al Baba / APA images, 19 November 2012

It seems that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system. In this new year, we have to try to realign the public opinion to the history of Palestine and to the evils of the Zionist ideology as the best means of both explaining genocidal operations such as the current one in Gaza and as a way of pre-empting worse things to come.

Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike on a Palestinian house in al-Shojaya in the east of Gaza City: photo by Ashraf Amra / APA Images, 18 November 2012

Academically, this has already been done. Our main challenge is to find an efficient way to explain the connection between the Zionist ideology and the past policies of destruction, to the present crisis. It may be easier to do it while, under the most terrible circumstances, the world’s attention is directed to Palestine once more. It would be even more difficult at times when the situation seems to be “calmer” and less dramatic. In such “relaxed” moments, the short attention span of the Western media would marginalize once more the Palestinian tragedy and neglect it either because of horrific genocides in Africa or the economic crisis and ecological doomsday scenarios in the rest of the world. While the Western media is not likely to be interested in any historical stockpiling, it is only through a historical evaluation that the magnitude of the crimes committed against the Palestinian people throughout the past 60 years can be exposed. Therefore, it is the role of an activist academia and an alternative media to insist on this historical context. These agents should not scoff at the opportunity to educate the public opinion and hopefully even influence the more conscientious politicians to view events in a wider historical perspective.

A Palestinian inspects the damage to a football stadium after an Israeli air strike in Gaza City: photo by Ahmed Zakot / Reuters, 19 November 2012

Similarly, we may be able to find the popular, as distinct from the high brow academic, way of explaining clearly that Israel’s policy -- in the last 60 years -- stems from a racist hegemonic ideology called Zionism, shielded by endless layers of righteous fury. Despite the predictable accusation of anti-Semitism and what have you, it is time to associate in the public mind the Zionist ideology with the by now familiar historical landmarks of the land: the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the oppression of the Palestinians in Israel during the days of the military rule, the brutal occupation of the West Bank and now the massacre of Gaza. Very much as the Apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology -- in its most consensual and simplistic variety -- allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern that cannot only be discussed in the academic ivory towers, but has to be part of the political discourse on the contemporary reality in Palestine today.

Smoke from flares rises in the sky in Gaza City: photo by Lefteris Pitarakis/AP, 17 July 2014

Some of us, namely those committed to justice and peace in Palestine, unwittingly evade this debate by focusing, and this is understandable, on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) — the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Struggling against the criminal policies there is an urgent mission. But this should not convey the message that the powers that be in the West adopted gladly by a cue from Israel, that Palestine is only in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and that the Palestinians are only the people living in those territories. We should expand the representation of Palestine geographically and demographically by telling the historical narrative of the events in 1948 and ever since and demand equal human and civil rights to all the people who live, or used to live, in what today is Israel and the OPT.

Palestinians gather around a destroyed house after an Israeli air strike in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip: photo by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / Reuters, 19 November 2012

By connecting the Zionist ideology and the policies of the past with the present atrocities, we will be able to provide a clear and logical explanation for the campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions. Challenging by nonviolent means a self-righteous ideological state that allows itself, aided by a mute world, to dispossess and destroy the indigenous people of Palestine, is a just and moral cause. It is also an effective way of galvanizing the public opinion not only against the present genocidal policies in Gaza, but hopefully one that would prevent future atrocities. But more importantly than anything else it will puncture the balloon of self-righteous fury that suffocates the Palestinians every times it inflates. It will help end the Western immunity to Israel’s impunity. Without that immunity, one hopes more and more people in Israel will begin to see the real nature of the crimes committed in their name and their fury would be directed against those who trapped them and the Palestinians in this unnecessary cycle of bloodshed and violence.

Ilan Pappe is chair in the Department of History at the University of Exeter

Israel’s righteous fury and its victims in Gaza: Ilan Pappe, from The Electronic Intifada, 2 January 2009

Israeli soldiers take part in a drill simulating a possible ground invasion into the Gaza Strip at a base south of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron: photo by Amir Cohen / Reuters, 17 November 2012

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