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Israel: more disengagement reactions

Rachel Barenblat · 16:48 · Middle East & North Africa

Here are a few additions to Haitham's excellent round-up of reactions to the disengagement:

Allison talks about how many Israelis are focusing their attention elsewhere: “My point: this is a huge, historic big deal, this disengagement. But in order to really feel that it's happening, you have to be paying attention. And a lot of people are deciding not to pay attention. Which, considering how painful it is to watch, may not be such a bad decision.”

In contrast, though, Imshin asserts that “No Israeli has the right to turn his head away, to turn off the television, to pretend it isn’t happening. We must see it all. See without judgment.”

Lisa of On the Face tells a vivid story about going into Bethlehem for an art exhibition, and the politics of choosing what language to speak to Palestinian cab drivers:

“On the way up, he asked us if we were Israelis. Upon hearing our confirmation he started to speak broken Hebrew, assuring us that it had been fluent once, before the checkpoints and the separation barrier were erected and Israelis could no longer visit the West Bank. I haven't spoken Hebrew for five years, he said, So I'm out of practice. He added that he had heard a few people speaking Hebrew very softly in the Bethlehem market. They're with your group, right? he said. Yes, I thought so. But they were afraid to be identified as Israelis, he said, laughing. Why are you all so afraid of us?”

Flickr has a ton of photos tagged with “disengagement,” among them this one of people praying beside their car, this one of the official roadblock closing the road into Gaza, and this one of a scene from a bus of settlers en route to a protest.

Orthodox Anarchist writes on being simultaneously pro- and anti-disengagement:

“what's going on right now is painful. i feel for the families yet find it difficult to fathom their shock and suprise as it's been shown in the news. this has been a year in the coming; they're acting like they didn't believe the day would come. their disbelief is staggering. israel's been terrorizing arabs, knocking down their houses, razing their villages, suppressing their rights, brutalizing and dehumanizing them for decades. they didn't think the government would do the same to them when they they no longer served the government's interests?”

Sha! writes about cognitive dissonance: “one of the most common sights in Neve Dekalim today is a house with a sign on the front door reading ‘We won't Move From this Place' and a whole lot of packed boxes inside.”

Out of Step Jew writes “Israel is life – it is not a toy or a game that you play with when you feel like it. It is not a vacation spot, not a place to find yourself, not a place to work out your life's problems and not a place to build your own utopia. Living in Israel is living reality. And reality demands compromise and ugliness.”

Bert (a.k.a. Yonathan) of Dutchblog Israel posts about settlers' acts of violence and why these acts actually make the soldiers' jobs easier, arguing that it is “less difficult for soldiers and policemen and -women to deal with violent than with truly non-violent resistance.”

Karen (of Karen Alkalay-Gut's Tel Aviv Journal) writes: “There is no way to see these days as joyous. Even though i have never ever believed in the justification of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, from the time of my own visits to Gaza in the early seventies, I could not help but feel today as a day of amputation.”

Ben (of Ben Chorin) asks “Where is the line between legitimate protest and illegitimate havoc-wreaking? Not a simple question. If you believe, as I do, that the withdrawal from Azza will bring only harm and that, moreover, the process by which it has been carried out is not only flawed but corrupt (the individuals involved most directly in the decision-making process all have direct or indirect financial interests in the withdrawal), you might be inclined to push the boundary pretty far out there.”

On Jewschool, a post about Amnesty International criticizing Israel for holding anti-disengagement activists without officially charging them with anything (and in the comments to that post, a debate about whether or not Amnesty is biased for or against Israel.)

And on a lighter note, Brian of This Normal Life tells a sweet story about eyeglasses, optometrists, and romance in A Different Disengagement.

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Blog Maps

David Sasaki · 15:33 · Americas

eGrupos, an online social networking site based in Sunnyvale, California has developed El BlogoMapa Hispano, an online directory of weblogs in Spanish, which shows the bloggers' locations using the Google Maps API. If you have a weblog written in Spanish and it is not included on the map, you may submit it. There is also a plugin for Google Earth.

This is an exciting addition to other efforts of mapping out bloggers by location. Gustavo Diaz Salazar of Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico has made a similar blog map which focuses on Mexico. GeoURL is probably the most well known and largest database of bloggers' locations and offers RSS feeds of new blogs in specific regions. Mikel Maron, who has created a free Google Maps-alternative for making blog maps, developed The World as a Blog, which synidacates feeds based on location in real time. Blogwise is also trying to collect geo data to map out bloggers and Chandu Thota is hard at work on feedmap, which so far, organizes blogs using tags and offers local blogrolls based on location.

These are great visual tools to explore other countries and cultures without ever leaving your laptop.

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Gaza disengagement first reaction

Haitham Sabbah · 08:55 · Middle East & North Africa

A day since the disengagement from Gaza started, this is some of what is going on the Israeli/Palestinian Blogsphere:

On the Israeli side:

Smooth Stone writes a A message to the world and says:

Well, sadly, the evil deed is done. The Jewish men, women and children of Gush Katif have been deported from their homes. Their fate is sealed. And, mind you, so is everyone else's. This is a message to the Arabs, to Arab government leaders, and to Arab supporters and their apologists who are orgiastic that Jews have been deported from their homes. No nation, other than the ancient nation of Israel and later again with the rebirth of the nation of Israel, has ever ruled as a sovereign national entity on what you claim to be “Palestinian” land. Jews are indigenous to this land that your greed and terror has gained you. Arabs are not indigenous to the land. Palestinian Arabs are not indigenous to Palestine. They are leftover Arabs, residual of another age…

Chayyei Sarah posts this photo under the title No Words Required and writes:

This picture, which I downloaded from Reuters via Haaretz.com, will stay in my mind for a long time. It is a photo of a resident of Nissanit and two Israeli soldiers weeping as the community's synagogue is dismantled. May Hashem cause our strength as a nation to grow in proportion to the pain we feel at this moment.

Mystical Politics post titled The Other Uprooting is quoting Danny Rubinstein of Haaretz, writes:

While many Jews today are mourning the evacuation from Gaza, we should remember that during the course of the bloody conflicts of recent years, approximately 30,000 inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have been uprooted from their homes. Entire Palestinian neighborhoods along the Philadelphi route in Rafah, at the edges of the Khan Yunis refugee camp, along the route to Netzarim and in the north on the edges of Beit Hanun have been turned into heaps of ruins by the Israel Defense Forces. The reason was an Israeli security need.

On the Palestinian side:

umkhalil says War Criminal Gaza Colonists Compensated/Palestinians Ignored:

the illegal colonists will receive from 150,000- 400,000 in compensation from the Israeli government. Unfortunately, the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine don't receive any where near the amount of coverage, of, for example, fifty-nine year old Anita Tucker, the Brooklyn, New York native, and darling of the BBC's Hard Talk, also oft quoted in the prolific and sympathetic news stories about the war criminals. If only the fate of the indigenous people were portrayed on CNN and BBC, perhaps US taxpayers wouldn't be so quick to subsidize Israel's ongoing war crimes to the tune of three billion dollars annually.

While Laila (of A Mother from Gaza blog) publish this photo with title Leave my land:

“A young boy from the Siyafa village looks towards the soon-to-be evacuated settlement of Dugit”

She also writes under the title Disen-what-ment?:

I don't know how many times I've said that word today. What does that mean anyway…and have you ever though of how many sentenes you can use some derivative of it in…we no longer want to engage with you…you are not engaging enough for our company..er..occupation….sorry, but the line is engaged with protester's calls at the moment…and I got engaged to all this madness while covering disengagement. I feel like my speech has a become a series of edited and re-edited sentences with all the same buzzwords.

Disengagement…freedom…access…prison..anxiety…hope.

Under the title Disengagement Riddled with Uncertainty Rafah Note says:

Jedallah Al Haut explains how he bought the machinery from the clothing factory where he used to work in the Gush Katif settlement. He plans to establish his own business in Gaza once the Israeli withdrawal is completed.

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