Assassinations of those who represent change have marked my time in this moment of human history--Mahtama Gandhi, Dr Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Salvatore Allende, Anna Politkiovskaya, Indira Gandi, Anwar al-Sadat, Yitzah Rabin and now Benazir Bhutto. Allende, my first experience with what some governments call "targeted assassinations," political erasure through the barrel of a gun or the belly of a plane, the determined campaign to break the spirit of a people and then, our invention of mass assassinations, called "ethnic cleansing," the whole century marked by some of us slaughtering large unwanted groups of other of us. The planet warms under us, as hot as our mutual antagonisms. Surely as a species, we have set a poor example. With all the god talk and supplications, we simply cannot stop killing each other. I do not mean that our cruelties are our biological destiny, but across this shattered globe, we have done our best to make sure that most of us have the least reason to pursue joy. Hunger, untreated illness, barricades of all kinds to protect profits of all kinds, borders just porous enough to let in cheap and desperate laborers, but sound-proofed against laughter. Oh Joan, there you go again, as so many of us do now--once the subject of Swift's broken heart is raised--man's inhumanity to man--we mourn the connection between the heart and mind, the litany of cruelties is too long and to know is to weep but then always, to act. And to act if one is a Russian or Iraqi journalist or an artist or a woman or a queer or a nonbeliever or a dissenter from the scripts of corporate and national power, is to court, for some, small assassinations and for others, the bullet in the head.
How expert we have become in building prisons, walls, check points, guard posts, interrogation cubicles, how frenzied our politicians rush to assure their constituencies that foreign workers are not really human, but aliens who must never under any circumstance be allowed the trappings of decency--keep them on their knees, in the shadows, on the edges, in the fields, under the machines of commerce, in the shiny kitchens, in the children's bedrooms, on the edge of their cots where they hug their stomach pains close because any revelation of their body's needs will stop the dollar from reaching their own desperate families. Perhaps I have just been away to long, perhaps I am not reading or hearing the right news, but it seems the more punishing the candidate promises to be, the louder the populace cheers. Perhaps because I have stood frozen at a border, my lover on one side and I on the other, waiting for the man in the uniform to make his decision about our future, I over relate to the border-stricken, or perhaps it is just empathy, an imagined knowledge of our human hearts.
On December 18, I read in the New York Times, "Gays Living in Shadows of New Iraq," by Cara Buckley and I had been reading of the Muslim women killed in newly "calm" provinces and of the Saudi Arabian woman who was raped and then ordered to receive lashes for her crime--an order which rescinded and the story of the man who took it upon himself to murder many women who worked as prostitutes and bury them in his backyard and all the other stories that tell us that many women all over this heated up earth are aliens, exiles from human care. ..."Being openly gay is not an option in the new Iraq, where the rise of religious extremism has left Mohammed and his gay friends feeling especially vilified." (Buckley) As I read Buckley's short article of this small moment in a huge national tragedy, I heard again Lepa's words, her question to me, "Joan, what happens to lesbians and gay people in wartime, to their desire?" What happens to women, undomesticated and well as wives and mothers during wartime, their desires? What happens to artists with all their quirky ways and unwanted visions during wartime? Oh my queer ones, you will find ways to hide as we have always done, you will pack away your colors and perfumes and strong clothing, your longings for love in the sun, and no Friedman or Brooks will write columns about your losses, but never again will I not see your face, your bodies in the war torn streets, I will look for you at the borders, in the cubicles, at the check points, against the walls of all governments; as my friend Allan Berube did, in wars of the past, telling your stories while others never saw you. On all sides where god talk reigns, we are the hunted ones.
"One night shortly after Saddam Hussein fell, American soldiers burst into the apartment that Mohammed shared with his two brothers. They were looking for insurgents, but took one look at Mohammed, with his long hair and shapely body wrapped in a robe, and teased him, he said.
'What are you, a lady man?' He remembered them barking. 'A Boy? Or a girl?' The turned to one of Mohammed's brothers, 'Who is this?' they asked, 'Your girlfriend?"
The news raced through Mohammed's building. 'All my neighbors came to know that I was gay,' he said. 'My brother said, Mohammed, leave the house; you can't live here anymore.'"
Thank you, Cara Buckley, for seeing a human story where no one else has.

So what have we done to them
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/936024.html

Hebrew: http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/935973.html
By Nehemia Shtrasler

An old Jewish joke tells of a devoted mother who briefs her son before he sets out to battle: "Kill a Turk and rest," she advises. But the son asks: "And what happens if in fact the Turk tries to kill me?" She opens her eyes wide in surprise: "Why would he want to kill you? What have you done to him?" This is exactly the kind of self-righteousness that accompanies our attitude toward the Palestinians. It is evident in the reports on the television, radio and in the newspapers - which paint only a partial picture of the conflict. Because when considerations of ratings and just plain cowardice determine coverage, the information the public gets is biased. In this way an extremist public opinion is created, which believes that all of the justice is on our side only, because "what have we done to them?" Last Wednesday, the media reported the severe rocket attack on Sderot. Twenty rockets landed on the city and Mayor Eli Moyal resigned on live radio. The broadcasts, on all three television channels, were dramatic. Reporters interviewed furious residents who demanded immediate and harsh military action in the Gaza Strip. One of the Qassams hit the home of Aliza Amar, and she was taken in moderate condition to Barzilai Medical center in Ashkelon. It is clear that the situation in Sderot and the Gaza-envelope locales is very difficult and is deserving of comprehensive coverage. However, the story also has other angles - which the television channels are not presenting at all. None of the channels saw fit to remind its viewers that several days prior to the attack on Sderot, the Israel Defense Forces had begun an extensive action in Gaza, the second largest since the disengagement. Last Tuesday, the day before the barrage on Sderot, three people were killed in Gaza by a tank shell fired into a house southeast of Khan Yunis. Two more were killed by a bomb dropped by a plane on their car and another "met his death" in the area of Beit Hanoun. According to the IDF, all of the dead were terror activists, members of the Islamic Jihad. A total of 13 people were killed in the action and 40 were arrested for interrogation. The Islamic Jihad announced that it would take revenge and the following day the barrage of rockets landed on Sderot. The connection is clear. But it doesn't film well. To talk about Arabs "avenging" their dead really does not serve the ratings. It is much easier and popular to show only one side of the story, the suffering of Sderot's inhabitants. That way the story becomes simple: bad and irrational Arabs who are firing on us for no reason. The discussion of the withdrawal from Gaza suffers from the same one-sided superficiality. We are told that we have withdrawn from Gaza and for some reason they are still shooting. But we pulled out of Gaza in the worst possible way. Former prime minister Ariel Sharon did not want to talk with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and did not coordinate the withdrawal with him. He did not want to grant the moderate leader any achievements. Therefore he withdrew unilaterally. Is it any wonder then that Abbas was thrown out of Gaza by Hamas? Immediately after the withdrawal, quiet was in fact maintained. But who remembers and who is prepared to remind us? Qassams were not fired and the truce was honored. But then Israel said that although it had indeed withdrawn from Gaza, in the West Bank it would continue to pursue Islamic Jihad activists. The IDF embarked on extensive assassination operations in the West Bank, and then the Jihad in Gaza declared that it would not abandon its people there and would retaliate where it could. Thus the firing on Sderot was renewed, at a greater pace, and the IDF responded with assassinations in Gaza. From there the action-reprisal wheel spun and could not stop - including the latest daily incidents, which are leading to further escalation. There is a lot of talk here about the withdrawal from Gaza, but nobody mentions that Gaza is surrounded and starved. The situation there has been degenerating ever since the withdrawal. Unemployment stands at 60 percent. Of 1.5 million Palestinians, 1.1 million are alive thanks to the food they receive from United Nations organizations - the highest proportion in the world. Israel recently reduced the transfer of goods, including food, and the supply of fuel to the Gaza Strip. All this is leading to extreme shortage, tremendous despair and a feeling that there is nothing to lose. It is clear that in a situation like this, hatred wins out and the desire to avenge is the only hope. But here, all they are talking about is the suffering of Sderot. Just like that Jewish mother - "What have we done to them?" --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~

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First I want to make clear that many many lesbian feminists and queer people of all kinds, in America, in Israel, in the occupied territories, around the world, are working very hard to stop the violence against Palestinians in Gaza and in Israel, to stop the use of violence by militias or state military on either side. In an earlier post, I expressed my anger at friends who were not doing enough as American Jews to lessen the suffering of Palestinian civilians and by so doing ensuring the greater possiblity of what they claim to want--safety.
I want to thank Sherril and Dorothy and all the others who keep me in the loop of every day events in Palestine/Israel and always Hannah and Dalia. Here I offer you two more moments of a people's bravery, thanking Dorothy N. who forces us to see with different eyes as do the dissenting journalists of Haaretz.

Call for Solidarity - Please Forward!

Silencing and Violence Against Students Protesting at an International Political Conference - the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Tuesday, December 18

This evening (18//12/07) the Hebrew University held a public conference entitled " Can Democracy Overcome Terror? Democracy Fights Terror With One Hand Tied Behind It's Back. When, Why and How Must This Hand Be Untied ", with the participation of the former President of the High Court of Justice Prof. Aharon Barak, President of the Hebrew University Prof. Menachem Megidor, and Efraim Halevi, former Head of the Mossad and the Head of the Center for Strategic Studies. Flayer distributed in the audience stated: " Democracy's hands are "tied" by international humanitarian law. Untying this hand means legitimizing violations of basic human rights in the form of torture, collective punishments, and war crimes. " and further: "Presenting international humanitarian law as restrictions to military effectiveness endangers us all". We protest the fact that the university provides a stage for legitimization of sever violations of human rights and academic protection to torture and collective punishment. As Aharon Barak spoke of the "balance" between "security" and "international humanitarian law" in Israel, including in his rulings on the Separation Wall and separation of families, it was our moral duty to protest against the daily violations of human rights and security, often backed by the rulings of Aharon Barak.
We insist on our right to protest against anti-democratic conferences in a public university, sponsored by education budgets. Conferences discussing democracy cannot give stage to white men of the ruling elite, while completely excluding people whose rights are being actively violated.
We protest against the verbal and physical violence inflicted on us when university's security officers dragged us outside the conference hall by force, refused to identify themselves and held us illegally, even though we had asked to leave the campus.
We are dismayed at the violence of the public who demanded to activate force even before the security officers did so. As women were dragged on the floor, the public was applauding.
We demand accountability from the President of the Hebrew University Prof. Menachem Megidor and the former President of the High Court of Justice Prof. Aharon Barak, as in their presence verbal and physical violence was activated against women who expressed their protest in a democratic manner. They continued speaking of democracy. Unlike the version of some news services, we did not "leave the hall quietly" but the security officers dragged us by force, at the sound of the crowd's applause. This conduct reflected fairly the reason to our protest: the false "balance" between security and human rights is in fact a deliberate and systematic crushing of elementary human rights, from the freedom of speech to the right to life. Today, 5 students are at risk of the disciplinary committee and sanctions of the university.Please forward this call.

To join radical activity at the Hebrew University: students5justice@gmail.com

What does a change of worlds bring you. "No matter how long, I am here," says Mr. P. "I still long for Saigon...like you, for New York." The night is dark and Mr. P has to get up at the crack of dawn so he can reach the Vietnamese restaurant in which he works early enough to get the food ready. We laugh, this small wiry man who so loves his family and his God that he barely has time for his other passion, music, and me--old enough to be his mother, riding through the streets of Sunshine, home of newly arriving Vietnamese families. In the darkness, we long for bustling cities while we drive through the dark empty streets. And when he says the word, "Saigon," I am flooded with memories I have no right to have--the intrigues of a war torn city, the sounds of a cosmopolitan humid city fighting for its life, thin work worn farmers and laughing frightened soldiers. How close I feel to this man.

The night is long and I miss my Professora. I haven't heard her voice for 9 days and I worry about her. I am used to her calling me from far away places--Beijing, Cuba, KL, London--but for some reason Mumbai has defeated her. In her last letter, she wrote of not feeling well, and so an uneasiness sits with me tonight. To comfort myself, I want to write a memory to you all--how odd--but so it is. A moment of my times.
The year, perhaps, is 1965. I was living on the lower East side in a tenement on 9th street--the bathroom in the hall, dank and well used; the bathtub in the kitchen, its porcelain top camouflaging it during the day, the old sink and then the small stove out of which one day jumped a small rat, as scared as I was. 37$ a month was the rent--for this three room railroad flat in a condemned building--but oh what joy I found there. Dinah and Nancy on the top floor, my comrades from the march on Selma, Steven across from them, a handsome Black folksinger, under whom I would lie from time to time, and outside on the tenement lined street, the whole flow of the 1960s. I would sit on my steep stoop and smile at the layered life before me. One morning a group of bearded young men passed before me carrying their version of Jesus on a cross, heading for Tompkins Park. I nodded my head at them as if every day I saw gods carried by. And this takes me to where I wanted go on this lonely night. Gods walking the streets.

Often I would walk to Second Avenue to get my bagels, and one early morning, with the sun already brightly shining, I fell into step behind a tall man who had come out of a corner building with a garden on its second floor and as I passed him, I realized who the possessor of that craggy face and shambling walk was, W. H. Auden. I had discovered his poetry in my 20th century literature course in Queens College--the education that gave me all my mother could not--and made my anthem for those many-lover-days his
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on your faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
....
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary power,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
......
(January, 1937)

You see, queer lezzie youth knew its voices when it found them, even though we were invisible as erotic forces even then. I thought of Candy and Rachel and Merril, all of whom shared my bed in that tenement flat and the men, Steven, Ajax, Vincent, and one whose name I cannot remember. But most of all, I think now of Carol, the moppy golden haired woman who melted me with her brave kisses, she who had all to loose, her Jamaica Estates family, her fiance, gaining only eternal damnation according to her therapist--"if you let a lesbian kiss you," she said, the star therapist of the Ackerman Family Foundation,"you will be lost forever." Perhaps it was because I had nothing to loose and loved the poets we both studied, Carol bent over me, her lips a never-ending gift. We read the poets in the old girl's reform school that now passed as a college and made love in her tiny red car in the Queens College parking lot, our books thrown to the floor. We began our affair in 1960 perhaps and by 1964, Carol of the crooked smile and broad shoulders was dead from a careless big shot doctor and ovarian cancer. She was perhaps, 23, and I was 24. I sleep here in a small bedroom and on the book shelves the Professora has built for me, is a fading colored photograph of Carol, with low mountains behind her, she is in a boat, I think, wearing a blue polka dotted shirt, with its sleeves rolled up, her hair, with those golden tints, frosted, I think they called it then, a close lipped smile and a hazy satisfied look in her now fading corn-flower blue eyes, and on the back these words: Joan, This is one of my favorite pictures--I always think of myself as big enough for this world in this picture because I can stand up to anything. And since you make me feel "big enough for this world," I want you to have this. No symbols, no mush, just plain old honesty--C.L. Here in a Melbourne night, when I feel mortality all around me, when I rail at my world that so desires killing certainties, is so sure in its hatreds, I wrap myself in Auden's words, the warmth of the human faithless touch, and all these years away, I feel Carol's kiss upon my lips. This is what I had to tell you this night.
.....
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards fortell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Nor a kiss nor look be lost.
......
from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. by Edward Mendelson, 1994

"Privatising Zionism--Increasingly, Israel is Handing over its ‘Judaisation’ Project to Private Firms - Leading to a Corrosion of Accountability" by Neve Gorden and Erez Tsfaida

from The Guardian/UK, Friday, December 14, 2007

For less than four dollars an hour, the Jewish teenagers removed furniture, clothes, kitchenware and toys from the homes and loaded them on to trucks. As they worked diligently alongside the many policemen who had come to secure the destruction of 30 houses in two unrecognised Bedouin villages, Bedouin teenagers stood by watching their homes being emptied.When all the belongings had been removed, the bulldozers rapidly destroyed the homes. All those present, Jews and Bedouins, were Israeli citizens; together they learned an important lesson in the discrimination characterising civic life in the Jewish state.
The current demolitions are part of a strategy that began with the foundation of the state of Israel. Its ultimate objective is the Judaisation of space. In this case, the demolitions were carried out in order to establish two new Jewish villages. Their establishment, though, is part of a much larger plan that includes the construction of about 30 new Jewish settlements in the Israeli Negev, the seizure of Bedouin land for military needs, and the creation of dozens of single-family farms on land that has been inhabited by Bedouins since they were relocated to the region by the state in the early 1950s.
After witnessing the demolitions, a Bedouin activist asked one of the Jewish teenagers why he had agreed to participate in the eviction. Without hesitating, the teenager replied: “I am a Zionist and what we are doing here today is Zionism.” The teenager was not wrong. And yet he was probably too young to recognise that even though Zionism’s major goals have not changed, the methods deployed to realise them have been undergoing a radical transformation. While, traditionally, the state itself performed the task of Judiasing space, over the years the government has been outsourcing more and more of its responsibilities to private firms.
The teenager himself was hired by a personnel agency, which was employed by the state to carry out the job of expelling Bedouins from their homes.The process of privatising Zionism has been slow. For over five decades the state was the sole agent responsible for all planning of new villages, towns and cities, and only the construction was carried out by private contractors. Now, land from which the Bedouins are being expelled is sold at rock bottom prices to big real estate moguls, who are then responsible not only for building Jewish villages and towns, but also for planning them. The private contractors manage to garner larger returns than ever before, since the difference in price between “unplanned” land and land that has undergone “planning” is enormous.
The personnel agencies and contractors are, however, not the only heroes in the crusade to privatise Zionism. A five-minute drive separates the two unrecognised Bedouin villages whose houses were demolished from a number of single-family Jewish farms established in the last few years. The state gives these Jewish farmers large plots of land and connects them to basic infrastructure like water and electricity, and, in return, expects them to be part of an apparatus whose role is to contract and restrict Bedouin movement and development and to help the security forces keep an eye on the Negev’s indigenous population.
If one drives a few kilometres further and crosses the Green Line into the occupied Palestinian territories, one may notice that military checkpoints are also being privatised. In the past year, at least five such checkpoints have been handed over to subcontractors and are currently managed by corporate warriors. The difference between IDF soldiers and corporate warriors is that the latter operate within the gray areas of the law. They are Israel’s Blackwater. Thus, as this privatising trend continues the checkpoints in the West Bank, which have already earned notoriety under the management of the Israeli military, will surely become sites of more misery for Palestinians trying to pass through.
The checkpoints, though, are just a recent development in a process that has been going on for several years in the occupied territories. In the early 1980s, the Israeli government allowed private contractors to appropriate land within the occupied territories and sell it at great profits, while the military created settler militias to help it police the Palestinian inhabitants. These civilian militias were given military-issue personnel carriers, weapons, and communications equipment and were asked to patrol around their settlements, which, in practice, often meant policing nearby Palestinian villages.
Zionism’s privatisation does not symbolise a strategic change but rather a tactical one. The state has been shedding some of its responsibility, while private entities have been taking on the tasks that until recently had been carried out by the government. The major difference is that the private firms are even less liable than the state. Hence, the use of teenagers to evict Bedouins from their homes is not only a reflection of this insidious process of privatisation, but also the unrelenting corrosion of moral accountability.

Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He is the author of From the Margins of Globalization. His book Israel’s Occupation will appear in 2008 (University of California Press). Erez Tzfadia teaches public policy at Sapir College in Israel.
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"Corrosion of moral accountablity." To my American Jewish feminist lesbian friends who dismissed my politics of concern as the usual words of the left, as the words of a self-hating Jew, I ask you, how long will you be silent, how long will you not risk your comforts, how long will you allow all questions to be silenced because once we suffered from the hatred of nations , from that "corrosion of moral accountability" that made the Holocaust possible?