Emerging India-Israel - Us axis?

[Iqbol]

Wedding and War in Galilee (http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=231)

A view of the emerging India-Israel-US axis, from a wedding in Palestine with Israeli helicopters whirring above, to Indian towns filled with Israeli soldiers looking for Shanti, to deportations and surveillance in the U.S.

By Sunaina Maira

This piece originally appeared in Samar 25, published online January 14th, 2007.

I arrived in northern Israel during the second week of the Israel-Lebanon war in the summer of 2006. My husband is from a Palestinian village in Galilee and there was a big wedding in his family to which we had been looking forward for a year. So we went to visit his family anyway, hoping the skirmishes on the border would subside in a week or two. Instead, Israel used the pretext of the soldier captured by Hezbollah to launch its all-out war against southern Lebanon, bombing the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon to smithereens, killing at least 1200 Lebanese—most of them civilians and one-third of them children, and displacing about one million civilians.

While staying in Galilee during the Lebanon war, I found that Palestinians inside Israel continued their lives as normally as they could. This is not surprising, since they have lived through so many wars since Israel was created on their lands in 1948 and many were displaced from their homes. As we heard the fighter jets roaring overhead on their way to bomb Lebanon, and the dull thud of rockets through the day on Israeli military areas, Palestinians probably heard echoes of the other Arab Israeli wars of 1956 and 1967, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982—before Hezbollah even existed. When Israeli soldiers massacred women and children in Kana, Lebanon, sorrow gushed from Palestinians over this horror and the repetition of horror that brought back memories of the Israeli massacre in Kana in 1996.

This summer we did not travel to the Israeli Jewish coastal towns such as Nahariyya, where Israeli soldiers in uniform usually hang out at beaches and cafes with rifles slung over their shoulders, for the cafes and seaside bars were all closed due to the attacks. All Jewish Israeli civilians at some point are, have been, or will be in the Israeli occupying forces. I realized that because Israel is a heavily militarized state, where the occupation is next door and not far away in Iraq, the boundary between civilian society and military life is very thin. Being in Israel during an official war, not just the routine attacks of the military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, was not that much different, it seemed.


Palestinians in the village were tense, understandably, but life went on and so did the family wedding. The venue for the final celebration was changed to a safer location, but the nightly parties, the dancing and henna, deejays and drinking and feasting continued as they usually would have—except for the background thud of Katyushas and the whirring of Israeli helicopters overhead. Guests at the wedding festivities occasionally looked up at the night sky to guess where the rockets were headed, and some mothers nervously looked over their shoulders to keep an eye on children playing outside. But there was also a palpable exhilaration; a hope that the occupation of the Arab lands just over the hills might indeed finally end, that the brutal Israeli military might indeed be defeated, that a just peace might indeed be won.

Palestinians in Israel, who constitute twenty percent of Israel, are Israeli citizens but do not have the full civil, economic, and political rights of Israeli citizenship since these are afforded only to Jewish citizens. They live in segregated Palestinian villages that are crowded and sometimes dirty, without parks, libraries, or recreational facilities. Palestinian villages in Israel do not get the same social services and funding as Jewish towns, which are spotlessly clean much like American suburbs, with lush green streets and flowers blooming in the desert. Apartheid in Israel is a visible fact of daily life. The indigenous Palestinians, like the native blacks who suffered under South African apartheid, go to segregated schools and have to struggle to get acceptance into Israeli colleges and find employment. Many young Palestinians end up leaving the country to study elsewhere. People around the world increasingly come to know that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live under military occupation with separate roads, concrete checkpoints, and a 35-foot high prison wall. However, I realized that Palestinians within the 1948 borders of Israel live with invisible checkpoints and within what some call a "glass wall" of policies that discriminate against them, because they are not Jewish.............


PS. I had read another presque-scholar article on India Israel relations which I am attaching here

[Black]

“You cannot oppose the war and fund it at the same time” (http://islamonline.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=12985)

Interview with Anthony Arnove

By: Kevin Zeese

Kevin Zeese: I see two broad types of groups that need to be convinced that we should get out of Iraq. The first are people who believe that the war was wrong, but now that we are there we have to finish the job, stabilize the country, make things better. These folks believe that if we leave things will certainly get worse. What do you say to these folks?

Anthony Arnove: I'd make the same points to both groups. More than 3,000 U.S. soldiers are dead and more than 22,000 wounded, many grievously. Every day that toll mounts. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died. The Haditha massacre, the Mahmoudiya rape-murder, and the torture at Abu Ghraib are not aberrations but reflections of the brutality of a colonial occupation. The social and economic costs of this war grow every day in communities across the country as money is diverted from schools, health care, jobs, and other vital social programs to fuel this unjust occupation. The war abroad has gone hand in hand with a war on our civil liberties at home, with a massive expansion of the government's power to detain people without trial, to use secret evidence, and to use torture. Meanwhile, every day that the United States is in Iraq, the situation gets worse and civil war becomes more -- not less -- likely. The U.S. occupation is distorting every aspect of Iraqi society and is the root of the problem.

In terms of how things will be once the U.S. withdraws, each day longer the United States stays, the possibilities of a livable outcome diminish. Which is why, in addition to pushing for immediate withdrawal, we also need to call on the United States and its allies to pay reparations to the Iraqi people (not just for the destruction caused by the most recent illegal invasion and occupation but before that the devastating sanctions, the toxic legacy and destruction of the 1991 Gulf War, and all the years that the U.S. armed and supported Saddam Hussein as he carried out his worst crimes). They can do a far better job rebuilding their country than the corporate looters and thugs of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater can.

KZ: The other group are people who think that the U.S. went in for good reasons -- to overthrow a tyrant -- and issues like WMD or link to 9/11 are no longer all that important, since the U.S. made the world better by getting rid of Saddam Hussein. What do you say to these people?

AA: The invasion of Iraq has made the world a far more dangerous place, increasing anger at the United States, encouraging other states such as Russia, Israel, China, and Pakistan to assert the right to launch so-called preemptive strikes, and fueling a renewed global arms race, including a nuclear arms race that threatens the extinction of the human species.

Iraqis are far more likely to die violently in Iraq today than they were under the dictatorship. They have less electricity and less access to safe drinking water than before the occupation, when they were still subjected to comprehensive sanctions. Unemployment has skyrocketed (while contractors hire foreign workers rather than Iraqis). Iraqis are afraid to send their children to school or to leave their homes or to live in formerly integrated neighborhoods. Inflation has put basic necessities beyond the reach of Iraqis. Iraq is the world’s worst refugee crisis, with, according to the U.S. government, 2 million external and 1.7 million internal refugees. Large sections of Baghdad have been ethnically cleansed.

It's important to remember that the worst crimes of Saddam Hussein were enabled and defended by the United States and other Western powers. And today the United States continues to support a range of brutal dictatorships throughout Western and Central Asia and the Middle East.

The invasion of Iraq did not occur because members of the Bush administration could not sleep at night thinking about human rights abuses in Iraq, but because, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, Washington planners saw an opportunity to advance an agenda of dominating the energy resource of the Middle east and using that regional hegemony to project U.S. power globally.

Much more needs to be done, however, to raise the costs of this war. Much more is at stake for the United States in Iraq today than was at stake in Vietnam. Iraq is far more strategic a prize. Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves and in a region with the majority of oil and natural gas reserves, as well as access to crucial trade routes. Iraqi crude is also of very high quality, is easy to extract, and is exceptionally profitable -- at a time when each barrel of oil is getting more costly and difficult to extract from the earth than the ones before.