Tag Archives ⇒ palestine

UK Quakers will not profit from the occupation of Palestine

November 20, 2018
· Martin Kelley

British Friends become first church in UK to pull invest­ments in com­pa­nies prof­it­ing from the occu­pa­tion of Pales­tine. From record­ing clerk Paul Parker:

As Quak­ers, we seek to live out our faith through every­day actions, includ­ing the choic­es we make about where to put our mon­ey. We believe strong­ly in the pow­er of legit­i­mate, non­vi­o­lent, demo­c­ra­t­ic tools such as moral­ly respon­si­ble invest­ment to realise pos­i­tive change in the world. We want to make sure our mon­ey and ener­gies are instead put into places which sup­port our com­mit­ments to peace, equal­i­ty and justice. 

As you’d might expect, there’s been back­lash. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has con­demned Britain Year­ly Meet­ing’s deci­sion as a “biased and petu­lant act.”.


Quakers will not profit from the occupation of Palestine

Quak­ers will not prof­it from the occu­pa­tion of Palestine 

Quak­ers in Britain has today become the first church in the UK to announce it will not invest…

Quakers Quakers 

New neofascist conspiracy targets Quakers

October 24, 2018
· Martin Kelley

I won’t link to the rightwing Dai­ly Caller web­site on prin­ci­ple but in a week in which some of their favorite tar­gets are being served with explo­sives (the homes of the Oba­mas, Clin­tons, and George Soros have been tar­get­ed with IEDs), an opin­ion piece by Raheem Kas­sam, a Bre­it­bart alum and assis­tant to UKIP leader Nigel Farage, tries to cook up a Quak­er conspiracy.

It’s hog­wash top to bot­tom, thin­ly con­nect­ed dots meant to look like an evil plot. Appar­ent­ly some peo­ple who were involved in Casa de los Ami­gos in Mex­i­co City lat­er donat­ed to Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paigns and Casa lat­er rent­ed office space to a migrant rights orga­ni­za­tion in 2012 and… well, that’s pret­ty much it. Proof that the “inter­na­tion­al Quak­er move­ment” is the orga­niz­ers of the refugee car­a­vans aimed at the “destruc­tion of U.S. borders.”

The lan­guage is florid in the man­ner of rightwing con­spir­a­cies. They specif­i­cal­ly call out Brigid Moix, a for­mer Casa de los Ami­gos direc­tor and well-respected Quak­er peace advo­cate who Friends Jour­nal pub­lished just last month. She was at Casa the same time as some guy who wrote some­thing rather obvi­ous about immi­gra­tion that sounds like some­thing rather obvi­ous oth­er peo­ple have since wrote about immi­gra­tion. Oh and the one guy is now a Mex­i­can ambas­sador to Greece. And some­one was on a con­fer­ence call. And there’s a group in San Diego. Seri­ous­ly, there’s not even an attempt to draw a coher­ent thread. It’s just one non sequitur after anoth­er bridg­ing togeth­er ran­dom­ly Googled triv­ia, all care­less­ly run togeth­er because the author obvi­ous­ly assumes Dai­ly Caller read­ers don’t read past the headline.

This would all be laugh­ably obtuse in its over­reach except that these con­spir­a­cies are get­ting less and less fun­ny every day. The AFSC reg­u­lar­ly gets con­spir­a­cy webs spun around its work in Pales­tine but I haven’t seen much try­ing to tie Friends to the bian­nu­al con­spir­a­cies around immi­gra­tion. Hope­ful­ly it will fade away and Kas­sam will find some oth­er bogey­man. The only stitch of truth can be found in the com­ments. There, buried near the bot­tom of all the knee-jerk crap you’d expect, is this, left un-ironically I suspect:

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The real world’s competition this week is on the streets of Georgia

August 11, 2008
· Martin Kelley

To Amer­i­can eyes the news of the esca­lat­ing war in the Cau­ca­sus nation of Geor­gia almost reads as farce: a break­away region of a break­away region, tanks rolling to main­tain con­trol of… well, not that much real­ly. We won­der how it could be in either Rus­sia or Geor­gia’s inter­ests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Rus­si­a’s de fac­to leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fight­ing the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Geor­gia’s Pres­i­dent Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunt­ing the giant to its north?
But the farce turns to weari­ness as we real­ize just how famil­iar this all is. Tiny eth­nic enclaves with cen­turies of ani­mosi­ties and well rehearsed sto­ries of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by the oth­er set fight­ing by the break­down of an empire that had uneasi­ly unit­ed them in repres­sion. Change a few details and we could be talk­ing recent con­flicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwan­da, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood mon­ey from the drug trade, from oil bil­lions and human traf­fick­ing add fuel to the fire. We’ve been fight­ing these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven’t we learned how to stop them?
Seri­ous­ly: oth­er­wise strong economies col­lapse under the chaos that these ter­ri­to­r­i­al wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in mar­gin­al areas and all sides would be bet­ter off if the politi­cians stopped wor­ry­ing about these con­test­ed ter­ri­to­ries and just focused on build­ing a econ­o­my attrac­tive to inter­na­tion­al trade.
Why has­n’t the world learned the mech­a­nisms to end these con­flicts before they erupt into open war­fare? Where is the polit­i­cal will to end this class of war once and for all? Dis­ease and ter­ror­ism are the invari­able fruits of these con­flicts and strike us all across nation­al bound­aries. The “inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty” needs to be mean more than impres­sive chore­og­ra­phy and a few thou­sand ath­letes in Bei­jing. This week’s real gold met­al will go to the lead­ers that can tran­scend macho pos­tur­ing and weak-willed apol­o­giz­ing and get those Russ­ian tanks out of Georgia.

Lebanon and Syria

March 5, 2005
· Martin Kelley

The res­ig­na­tion of the gov­ern­ment is Lebanon is being hailed as a “boost for democ­ra­cy” Reports describe Beirut as “a sea of excitement”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,13031,1428151,00.html. ABC News and oth­ers are report­ing that “Syr­ia is about to announce its with­drawl from Lebanon”:http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=553479. How won­der­ful it would be if “Beirut could emerge”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beirut from its thir­ty years of chaos with the start of the “1975 civ­il war”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_Civil_War.
Even good change can cause tur­moil. David Hirst, writ­ing in the guardian, won­ders whether the upheaval threa­t­ends to “desta­bi­lize Syr­ia and turn it into anoth­er iraq”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,13031,1430243,00.html: “After the exam­ple of elec­tions, how­ev­er flawed, in occu­pied iraq and Pales­tine, has come this new, unsched­uled out­break of pop­u­lar self-assertion in a coun­try [Lebanon] where a sis­ter Arab state, not an alien occu­pi­er, is in charge.”
For the lat­est news, you can turn to the “Guardian’s spe­cial report on Syr­ia and iraq”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/0,13031,928812,00.html. To jump in the fray, you can turn to the Non­vi­o­lence Board­’s thread on the “res­ig­na­tion of the Lebanese government”:http://www.nonviolence.org/comment/viewtopic.php?t=3297

Zunes on the Geneva Initiative

December 8, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Stephen Zunes is a care­ful and bal­anced com­men­ta­tor on Mid east issues, some­one I turn to help sort out con­flict­ing claims. No where is this need­ed more than in the ever-changing rela­tion­ship between Israel and Pales­tine, with its con­stant suces­sion of hopes born and shattered.
The “every Church a Peace Church” site has a good arti­cle from Zunes on the lat­est hope, the so-called “Gene­va Ini­tia­tive for peace between Israel and Palestine”:www.ecapc.org/newspage_detail.asp?control=849. Zunes gives the con­text of the pro­posed accord and then explains its major points. For example:
bq. In con­trast to Washington’s insis­tence on focus­ing upon the thus far unsuc­cess­ful confidence-building mea­sures described in the Roadmap, the archi­tects of the Gene­va Ini­tia­tive went direct­ly to the issues at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict and devel­oped a detailed out­line for a permanent-status agreement.

Insuring Violence Never ends

August 22, 2003
· Martin Kelley

“Bill Hobbs”:http://hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106139209827725521 chal­lenged Non​vi​o​lence​.org about the recent lack of con­dem­na­tions of Pales­tin­ian vio­lence. It’s a fair cri­tique and a good ques­tion. For the record, Non​vi​o​lence​.org agrees with you that bomb­ing bus­es is wrong. Hamas should be con­demned, thank you. Of course, Israelis build­ing in the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries is also wrong and should also be con­demned. The zealots in the con­flict there demand that every­one take sides, but to be paci­fist means nev­er tak­ing the side of evil and always demand­ing that the third way of non­vi­o­lence be found.
The Israelis and Pales­tini­ans have so much in com­mon. Both are a historically-persecuted peo­ple with con­test­ed claim to the land. The war between them has been large­ly fund­ed and egged on by out­side par­ties who seem to have a vest­ed inter­est in the vio­lence con­tin­u­ing ad infini­tum. Both sides chron­i­cle every bus bombed and bul­let fired, using the out­rage to ral­ly the faith­ful to fresh atroc­i­ties. Blogs like Bill Hobbs’ and orga­ni­za­tions like the Inter­na­tion­al Sol­i­dar­i­ty Move­ment help insure that the bomb­ings will nev­er stop. Caught in the mid­dle are a lot of naive kids: sui­cide bombers, sol­diers, and activists who think just one more act of over-the-top brav­ery will stop the violence.
The war in Israel and Pales­tine will only stop when enough Israelis and Pales­tini­ans declare them­selves trai­tors to the chants of nation­al­is­tic jin­go­ism. We are all Israelis, we are all Pales­tini­ans. There but for the grace of God go all of us: our hous­es bull­dozed, our loved ones killed on the way to work.
Once upon a time we in Amer­i­ca could think that we were immune to it all; the idea that we’re all Israelis and Pales­tini­ans seemed a rhetor­i­cal stretch. But I was one of the mil­lions who spent the night of 9/11/01 call­ing New York friends to see if they were safe (I was on my hon­ey­moon and was so shak­en that one of my calls was to an ex-girlfriend’s par­ents; my wife grace­ful­ly for­gave me). On that day, we Amer­i­cans were deliv­ered the mes­sage that we too are com­plic­it. We too must also declare our­selves trai­tors to our coun­try’s war mytholo­gies and start being hon­est about our his­toric com­plic­i­ty with war. As a peo­ple, Amer­i­cans weren’t inno­cent vic­tims at either Pearl Har­bor or the World Trade Cen­ter tow­ers (though as indi­vid­u­als we were, which is the point of non­vi­o­lent out­rage of nation­al­is­tic vio­lence). every blog post com­mem­o­rat­ing a vic­tim­hood, whether in New York City or Tel Aviv, sup­ports the cause of war. I will not con­demn every act of vio­lence but I will con­demn the cause of vio­lence and I will expose the mytholo­gies of war.

Dick Cheney’s Rambo Complex

March 12, 2002
· Martin Kelley

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney is tour­ing Eng­land this week, try­ing to find co-producers on Gulf War II, the sequel to the dis­ap­point­ing minor hit of 1991. You remem­ber the orig­i­nal: it was briefly pop­u­lar until Bill Clin­ton’s “Peace and Proper­i­ty” broke all pre­vi­ous records for an unprece­dent­ed run.
In Gulf War II, Dick Cheney is play­ing Ram­bo. It’s twelve years lat­er and he and his side­kick George Bush Jr. are going to re-fight the war against Iraq sin­gle­hand­ed­ly. No oth­er coun­tries will join them this time in their fight for justice.

Like all shot-em-up movies, this one needs a con­vinc­ing vil­lain. There’s no con­nec­tion between Iraq’s Sad­dam Hus­sein and Osama bin Laden but so what? They’re both shifty Arabs with facial hair. Throw in a spicy sub­plot if you want – “Dash­ing Amer­i­can pilots secret­ly held pris­on­er since 1991.” Amer­i­cans bare­ly notice plot and moti­va­tions. After 9/11 the White House is bet­ting that the audi­ence wants more war and retribution.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this isn’t a Hol­ly­wood movie. Dick Cheney and the sec­ond Pres­i­dent Bush are indeed try­ing to start a sec­ond war against Iraq. There’s no new provo­ca­tion from Sad­dam Hus­sein. There’s no con­nec­tion between him and Osama bin Laden or the 9/11 ter­ror­ist attacks. None of our allies from the first Gulf War want to join us in a second.

But Cheney and Bush want a fight any­way. It’s hard not to con­clude this is some sort of “Ram­bo Com­plex.” The U.S. is led by two men fight­ing lega­cies that won’t let them put 1991 behind them. One is the son of the pres­i­dent accused of pre­ma­ture­ly stop­ping the 1991 war before U.S. troops got to Bagh­dad. The oth­er is the dying aide to both father and son, who has wait­ed almost twelve years for a chance to prove he was right.

This week rumors of an Amer­i­can pilot sup­pos­ed­ly held for eleven years have appeared out of nowhere. Pres­i­dent Bush has been divert­ing atten­tion to Sad­dam Hus­sein even while Osama bin Laden runs free. And Dick Cheney is indeed in Eng­land try­ing to drum up sup­port for a new Gulf War.

While the Vice Pres­i­dent is off wan­der­ing the mar­gins of stage right, real tragedy and dra­ma are hold­ing the world’s atten­tion cen­ter stage. Pales­tine and Israel are close to an all-out war. The mount­ing vio­lence has wor­ried impor­tant coun­tries like Sau­di Ara­bia and Syr­ia so much that they’re propos­ing new peace plans. So much of the Mideast­’s anger against the U.S. revolves around the Pales­tin­ian ques­tion. A war there could top­ple friend­ly Mus­lim gov­ern­ments and rip apart our cur­rent alliances.

This is where the world’s atten­tion is focused. But Pres­i­dent Bush and Cheney are ignor­ing the sit­u­a­tion. They have not fol­lowed past Pres­i­dents’ lead in lead­ing peace nego­ti­a­tions. Amer­i­can pres­sure and involve­ment is cer­tain­ly need­ed to craft real peace between Pales­tine and Israel.

But Bush and Cheney are snor­ing in the bleach­er seats when it comes to the world’s most press­ing and intractable con­flict. They’re dream­ing of cin­e­mat­ic glo­ry. It’s 2002 and two lone G.I.‘s are para­troop­ing into Iraq, knives clenched in teeth, machine guns at the ready. One dreams of aveng­ing the cow­ardice and fail­ure of his father. The oth­er of win­ning just one more war before the cur­tains close in on him.