The Balfour Declaration
So when did the Aggravation Start?

Whilst you read on,  listen to this,  Gaza Reggae/Rap - say GRR!

1917         "(Oh Gaza) New Year"         2017

Damn! - Hannah Cinthio's Reggae is a different kind of Rocket 

So, when did all the aggravation start? Probably 1917 with the insane Balfour Declaration in which Tory Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, in a letter, promised Lord Rothschild a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. He pledged assistance for the Zionist cause, totally disregarding the consequences for the Arab majority there.

Lord Sydenham warned: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

It was surely the cruellest and most idiotic foreign policy decision by a British government.

 RAP NEWS

Today there are 6.5 million dispossessed Palestinian refugees worldwide. More than 1.5 million live a miserable existence in 58 refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, waiting in vain to return to their family homes and farms. Those who still live in the shredded remnants of Palestine have been under brutal Israeli military occupation or blockade for 69 years. The Western powers’ failure to implement international law and deliver justice to the Arab communities in the Holy Land is deeply resented by Muslims worldwide.
The Holy Land has been a powder-keg since 1948 when Britain walked away from its mandate responsibility and the Israelis immediately declared statehood without defining borders. They have been stealing Palestinian lands and resources ever since. It will remain a powder-keg until the international community comes to its senses.

(Extract from an Article by Stuart Littlewood, a journalist in Nazareth)

Gaza Loss of Innocence

This is a Fifteen Minute video about Gaza, seen through the perspective of the Art Exhibition that I brought back in 2009. I hope it gives you the motivation to "do Resistance". Everything else is wasting time, don't you think?

Turkey sending ten boats to break Gaza Siege

Turkish Charity IHH is now a Joint Venture Operator with FreeGaza to send ten boats in Next Flotilla to break the siege.

The involvement of Turkish Charity IHH in becoming a joint venture partner in sending siege-breaking boats to Gaza ratchets up the pressure on Israel. Despite the bandaging of wounds following the humiliation of the Turkish Ambassador, when Turkey threatened to end diplomatic relations, Netanyahu has put his foot in it again, telling France that mediation with Syria depends on a mediator both parties can trust, such as France. This is a clear statement that Israel does not trust Turkey, since Syria plainly does. The snub is great, since Turkey were the mediators until recently, and were credited with making ground between the sides. Commentators feel that in reality Israel wants to kick Syria into the long grass, as it has done with Palestine. Prime Minister of Turkey Erdogan has, as a result, again blasted Israel, again raised Gaza as a symbol of Israeli aggression and racism.

Soon IHH will be sending Turkish boats with Turkish crews: will Turkey stand by while Israel stops and 'arrests' them, or turns them back? This is shaping up to a crucial standoff, and the stakes are very high, for if Israel loses face, Hamas will be strengthened in its belief that Israel only understands force, and never negotiates, since the UN and US and UK, come to that, have failed to negotiate any relief for Gaza as friends.

Turkey risks not only losing face, and looking weak if Israel is allowed to stop Turkish Merchant ships on a lawful activity, but if it intervenes, it must have a strong diplomatic hand to prevent the US and the UK from trying to get it out of the club of Israel Supporters called NATO, and marginalising it along with all the other Moslem states that have resisted Israel.

Below is an article from the Independent (UK) by Fisk, that shows how Israel is prepared to use the mass murder of 1.5 million people against Turkey, only when it suits it. Up to now it has supported Turkey's cover up of the Pogrom, because it wants the Holocaust of Jews to be unique. That way Jews are uniquely privileged to do things others are not. It is shocking how they put pressure on Armenian survivors of that Holocaust, that they will not even permit to be Israeli citizens, to speak out against Turkey.

My dream is that Turkey admits its Holocaust, its Shoah, its ethnic cleansing under Attaturk, bravely, and apologise, and compensate. Its recent re-establishment of relations with Armenia is a good first step. Let Turkey please show that it can settle the question of refugees displaced by ethnic cleansing fairly.

Then let it defend its blockade breaking boats as they strive to do the same for the people of Palestine.

Robert Fisk’s World: ❝Israel can no longer ignore the existence of the first Holocaust

Recognition of the Armenian genocide is a paramount moral and educational act

Saturday, 30 January 2010

While Israelis commemorated the second Holocaust of the 20th century this week, I was in the Gulbenkian library in Jerusalem, holding the printed and handwritten records of the victims of the century's first Holocaust. It was a strange sensation.

The Armenians were not participating in Israel's official ceremonies to remember the six million Jewish dead, murdered by the Germans between 1939 and 1945, perhaps because Israel officially refuses to acknowledge that Armenia's million and a half dead of 1915-1923 were victims of a Turkish Holocaust. Israeli-Turkish diplomatic and military relations are more important than genocide. Or were.

George Hintlian, historian and prominent member of Jerusalem's 2,000-strong Armenian community in Jerusalem, pointed out the posters a few metres from the 1,500-year old Armenian monastery. They advertised Armenia's 24 April commemorations. All but one had been defaced, torn from the ancient walls or, in at least one case, spraypainted with graffiti in Hebrew. "Maybe they don't like it that there was another genocide," George told me. "These are things we can't explain." More than 70 members of George's family were murdered in the butchery and death marches of 1915 – when German officers witnessed the system of executions, rail-car deportations to cholera camps and asphyxiation by smoke in caves – the world's first "gas" chambers. One witness, the German vice-consul in Erzurum, Max von Scheubner-Richter, ended up as one of Hitler's closest friends and advisers. It's not as if there's no connection between the first and second Holocausts.

But the times, they are a-changing. For ever since Turkey began shouting about Israel's slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza a year ago, prominent Israeli figures have suddenly rediscovered the Armenian genocide. Who are the Turks to talk about mass murder? Has anyone forgotten 1915? For George and his compatriots – there are in all 10,000 Armenians in Israel and the occupied West Bank, 4,000 of them holding Israeli passports – they had indeed been forgotten until the Gaza war. "In 1982, the Armenians were left out of a Holocaust conference in Jerusalem," he said. "For three decades, no documentary on the Armenian genocide could be shown on Israeli television because it would offend the Turks. Then suddenly last year, important Israelis demanded that a documentary be shown. Thirty Knesset members supported us. We always had Yossi Sarid of Peace Now but now we've got right-wing Israelis."

Maariv and Yediot Ahronot began to mention the Armenian genocide and George Hintlian turned up on Israeli television with Danny Ayalon – the foreign office minister who humiliated the Turkish ambassador by forcing him to sit on a sofa below him – and Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin who said that Israel should commemorate the Armenian genocide "every year". The Israeli press now calls the Armenian genocide a "Shoah" – the same word all Israelis use for the Jewish Holocaust. As George put it with withering accuracy: "We have been upgraded!!!"

This piece of brash hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed by Yossi Sarid who has described how, a few months after Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced the Gaza war, "an important Israeli personality telephoned me and said the following: 'Now you have to hit back at the Turks, to denounce them for the crimes they committed against the Armenians You, Yossi, have the right to do so...'" Sarid was appalled. "I was filled with revulsion and my soul wanted to puke," he wrote in Haaretz. "The person who telephoned me was an example of the ugly Israeli who had disgracefully been at the forefront of those who denied the Armenian Holocaust." So now "new tunes" – Sarid's phrase – are being heard in Jerusalem: "The Turks are the last ones who have the right to teach us ethics."

The bright side to this anguished debate is that one of Israel's top Holocaust experts bravely insisted – to the fury of then-foreign minister (now president) Shimon Peres – that the Armenian massacres were undoubtedly a genocide. Tens of thousands of Israelis have always believed the same; several hundred are expected to turn up at the Armenian commemoration on 24 April, and most Israelis refer to the Armenian genocide as a "Shoah" rather than the tame "massacres" hitherto favoured by the political elite.

Yet the most extraordinary irony of all occurred when the Armenian and Turkish governments last year agreed to reopen diplomatic relations and consign the Armenian Holocaust to a joint academic enquiry which would decide "if" there had been a genocide. As Israeli Professor Yair Oron of the Open University of Israel said, "I am afraid that countries will now hesitate to recognise the (Armenian) genocide. They will say: 'Why should we grant recognition if the Armenians yielded?' Recognition of the Armenian genocide is a paramount moral and educational act. We in Israel are obliged to recognise it." And American-Armenian UCLA Professor Richard Hovannisian asked: "Would the Jewish people be willing to forgo the memory of the Holocaust for the sake of good relations with Germany, if Germany were to make that demand?" George Hintlian described the Armenian-Turkish agreement – which in fact may not now be ratified by either side – as "like an earthquake".

We walked together in the cold afternoon through the darkened interior of the great Armenian monastery of Jerusalem with its icons and candles. George opened a cabinet to reveal a hidden staircase up which priests would creep for a secret week when invaders passed through Jerusalem. In this dank, pious place, Ronald Henry Amhurst Storrs, governor of British Mandate Jerusalem, would often sit to ponder what he called "the glory and the misery of a people".

Miserable it has been for thousands of Armenians here. Up to 15,000 lived in Palestine until 1948, many of them survivors of the first Holocaust. But 10,000 of these Armenians shared the same fate as the Palestinian Arabs, fleeing or driven from their homes by the army of the new Israeli state. Most lost their businesses in Haifa and Jaffa, many of them seeking refuge – for the second time – in Jerusalem. A few set out for Cyprus where they were dispossessed for the third time by the 1974 Turkish invasion. As George put it bleakly, "Today, 6,000 Armenians are residents of Jerusalem and the West Bank. They cannot travel and they are counted as Armenian Palestinians. For Israeli bureaucracy, they are Palestinians."

George himself is the son of Garbis Hintlian who, as a 17-year-old, survived the death march from his home at Talas in Cappadocia. "We lost my uncle – my grandfather was axed to death in front of him." After the 1918 armistice, he worked for the British, carrying files of evidence to the initial (but quickly abandoned) Constantinople trials of Turkish war criminals. To no avail.

And glory be, if the tables haven't changed again! Turkey and Israel have made up and become good friends again. Yossi Sarid anticipated this. "Let us assume that Turkey will renew its ties with Israel. Then what? What then? Will we also renew our contribution to the denial of the Armenian Holocaust?❞

.

International Movement to Open the Rafah Border (in three languages)

The following statement received from the Facebook group of the International Movement to Open the Rafah border. In three languages. Sign up to the Facebook petition here.

International Movement to Open Rafah Border.
Global Help Initiative for Palestine ''HI'' Gaza StripPalestine
http://www.help-initiative.org/
info@help-initiative.org
بيان صحفى

تعلن الحركة الشعبية الدولية لفتح معبر رفح، مقاطعة كافة أشكال التطبيع مع (اسرائيل)، وتدعو الجميع ليحذوا حذوها، خاصة الحكومات العربية.
مجزرة تلو أخرى على مدى ستون عام و(اسرائيل) ومازالت تمارس الاحتلال العنصرى الاستيطانى وعدوانها ضد السكان الاصليين الفلسطينيين وجيرانهم العرب، تحت سمع وبصر العالم أجمع دون ان يحرك العالم ساكنا لايقافها، بل كثير من الدول والحكومات تدعمها!
الان على كافة الشعوب الارض مقاطعتها اقتصاديا وسياسيا وثقافيا، اعلانا لرفضهم الاحتلال والظلم والعدوان والعنصرية.
فمحرقة غزة ليست الاولى، ولن تكون الاخيرة اذا لم نتحرك الان..كم من محرقة قد يتحملها ضمير البشرية!

الحركة الشعبية الدولية لفتح معبر رفح


COMMUNIQUÉ DE PRESSE

Le Mouvement international pour l’ouverture du passage de Rafah, proclame la rupture de toutes formes de normalisation avec Israël et appelle le monde entier à suivre son exemple, notamment les États arabes.

Les massacres perpétrés par Israël contre les habitants autochtones palestiniens et leurs voisins arabes, n’ont connu de cesse au cours des derniers soixante ans, et l’occupation d’implantation raciste se poursuit, au vu et au su du monde entier, sans que nul ne remue un petit doigt, et qui plus est avec le soutien de nombre d’États et de gouvernements.

Maintenant, l’ensemble des peuples de cette terre se doivent de boycotter Israël, à tous les niveaux, économique, politique et culturel, afin de crier leur rejet catégorique de l’occupation, de l’injustice, de l’agression et du racisme.

L’holocauste de Gaza n’est pas le premier de la série et n’en sera pas le dernier si nous ne réagissons pas maintenant… Combien d’holocaustes la conscience humaine devra-t-elle donc supporter?


Le Mouvement international pour

L’ouverture du passage de Rafah



PRESS STATEMENT

International Movement to Open Rafah Gate states the severance of all forms of normalization with Israel and calls the world to follow his example, particularly the Arab states. The massacres perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian natives and their Arab neighbours never stopped over the past sixty years, and the racist occupation and colonization is continuing in the light at the knowledge of the world, with nobody moving a finger, and most importantly with the support of many states and governments.

Now, all the peoples of the world need to boycott Israel, at all levels, economic, political and cultural, to shout their rejection of the occupation, injustice, aggression and racism. The Gaza holocaust Gaza is not the first of the series and will not be the last one if we do not act now ... How many holocausts the human consciousness should be accept?

The International Movement to Open Rafah Gate

-- In Solidarity from all International Movement to Open Rafah Border
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9986479902

Press release posted by Frances Laing

Bittersweet

My first night in Gaza and I keep waking up thinking of Arif & Asim who were prevented from entering by Egypt. We should have stayed with them but believed Egyptian officials who said that they would be allowed in later. They were seperated because they had not entered Egypt with the convoy but flew in to Cairo. Several so called 'celebrities' had done the same, some being with Galloway the first to go through the gates betraying those who had driven 6000 miles & were still denied top billing.

Arif & Asim's names were given to convoy officials in accordance with the rules but these officials now wash their hands of the matter and will not assist them.

Our reception by the Palestinians has been overwhelming, the vehicles being mobbed by ecstatic people all the way from Rafah to Gaza City, but it sticks in my throat, this adulation wasted on those who don't deserve it while Arif & Asim face an uncertain future.

Waiting & Politics

The convoy did not pass through at noon yesterday as planned. Here are Rod's texts (British time):

Sunday 12.34pm
A problem is developing here. Riot police deployed to stop convoy leaving as a single unit. Libyan secret police & trucks involved. New negotiations mean that vehicles which are not staying in Gaza will not be allowed to enter and that would mean I cannot load up in Gaza.

Sunday 7.23pm
George Galloway announced after negotiations with the Governor of Sinai that medical aid and all UK vehicles which are staying in Gaza will enter through Rafah. All Libyan aid and all our non-medical aid will go by Israeli-controlled crossings but in the hands of the Red Crescent. This is (almost) in accordance with international agreements & was the position when we left the UK. We have not forced any changes on Israel. Our aid will be transhipped to Red Crescent trucks tonight & we leave for the border at 6am tomorrow. However the convoy is adamant that they will enter together and not through any Israeli-controlled crossing.

Monday 4.50am
Our aid unloaded to Red Crescent last night but 50% still waiting to unload. Police asking us to start engines but convoy refusing to move until all can travel.

Monday 6.58am
1st section of convoy now moving in groups of 20, but will wait to consolidate at fuel stop ahead. I think it will be slow.

Monday 7.39am
1st (our) section of convoy now 30kms from Rafah moving at 35kph, with refuelling stop ahead. Tail end still not authorised to start.

Pauline Thompson