A few thoughts regarding the Palestinian Justice march in Berkeley

that we should behave ourselves, let the cops tell us what to do, and stand around feeling good about ourselves while innocent Palestinians are being slaughtered in cold blood with our tax money?

Let me tell you what happened when we tried to stop the Viet Nam war that way. Nothing, not a goddamn thing. Our rulers didn't give a flying rat's ass about our chants and our placards. The war dragged on and on and on and on. Millions died. When we started to actually rebel, the war ended.

Have we learned nothing from the past?

The poster is saying: let people know ahead of time what's going down. If people are led to believe it's a nice, safe march, then stick to that.

while our tax money is being used to slaughter children in Palestine?

Do you think Gaza is "nice"? Do you think the West Bank is "safe"?

see what happens when anarchists manipulate you. all of a sudden its not about ideals or beliefs. its about stories told through immature drunken lips while erections fill some basement bars with, "look how damn cool i am, i broke a window and threw a rock at a cop".
if you want to help the world, help yourself to the clarity of truth. help a starving family in appalachia or on the reservation.
stop wanting a clear conscience so bad that you hinder everything thats true and good.
what was the impact on families and business because of this march. you only hurted, not helped.
fuck a three thousand year old war. help your neighborhood or troubled family member or friend.
if you want to help palestinians, send them bomb belts, its there most glorious proudest accomplishment. they do it for the virgins.

well, the press reinforces such behavior. I don't think that people driving by in vehicles or who happened to be standing on Univ Ave were really our target because they probably mostly agreed already, and they weren't very great in number - if individually having people see our signs was the goal, we would have been more effective all going door to door with flyers like people trying to advertise their pizza restaurant. There are 'peaceful' protests *all* the time that never get any press at all. There are pacifists who sing against the war by the BART station nearly every day and I've never seen them get in the newspaper. IAC marches that go through the western addition are famous for taking all day, not getting any press, and not even marching through the business district where any powerful people are. Even after Seattle WTO, they raised the stakes for amt of violence necessary before they will report anything. At least we got 5 seconds on channel 11 yesterday, after they spent 5 minutes covering the traffic jam situation near the As stadium where Paul McCartney was singing.

That's because we didn't take the freeway.

Different protests for different people. Older people, families, etc. are going to want nice, safe protests. You want your direct action, make that clear. Is it too much to be honest?

Dandelion and Zeke wrote: "We have a responsibility to each other during protests, and we counted on the organizers to show good judgment, and keep older people, disabled, and small children safe. "

first, i don't think the organizers of the protest had planned for this to happen. and you know, sometimes in an open, public action, things happen. what did you want "the organizers" to do - rush ahead and stop people from trying to rush past the police? i wasn't there at that point, so correct me if i'm wrong, but it seems to me that if people weren't near the front, they were relatively safe, especially if they were able to leave.

this was an emergency protest. some people obviously felt that more "militancy" was needed than just chanting and waving placards. it's a shame that this kind of action grabs the media's attention more than a "peaceful" protest, but who's fault is that? the corporate media's, not ours.

this is unrelated, but one thing i'd like to see at protests is for them to go through more residential neighborhoods at some point, off the main streets for a bit. granted, it's easier to get trapped by police in these streets, but if it's a moving, "peaceful" protest i think it would be great to march past people's homes - quite a surprise, anyway, and it might get people out to see what's going on.

ah, us americans. "the right for nice and safe." "nice" - polite, liberal, bourgeois. "safe" - at the expense of others, safe behind our walls.

sorry - i shouldn't tear apart your post like that, anon. i know that's not what you mean. and i do think there should be protests where lots of people are encouraged to participate, and feel safe enough to do so, old and (very) young alike. protesting should not be available only to the young and able-bodied. however, that said, most of the protest was "safe" and "peaceful." i don't think it's a problem that as the march hit 6th, people tried to rush past. did they push other people past? not that i know of. were people able to get away who didn't want to be around it? it seems like it from what i'm aware of. so what's the problem?

people want to be safe, huh? is there safety on the streets of berkeley when too many are hit by cars? is there safety when our food and air and water are poisoned? when brutal cops harass and abuse people?

i'm not saying that we should forgo all concerns for personal security. i certainly don't. but it just bothers me that people want dissent to be so pre-packaged, pre-arranged, within the guidelines given by and permitted by the state, and scream with horror and outrage when someone takes it beyond that.

mind you, i'm speaking as someone who tries to avoid getting hurt at protests, as i'm not a young 20-something anymore. (not that these are the only people into "militant" direct action.) i don't want to get hurt by the cops. but i also don't want to see protests be so policed by our movement(s) that they're always predictable and feel like dead ritual.

as for "make(ing) it clear" that folks want direct action, well, what? make a general announcement and tell the cops as well?

To the statement of just wondering, "When we started to actually rebel, the war ended,"

nessie said, "That’s just not true. The protests at home were a sideshow at best. What really stopped the war was that the American troops started to mutiny and had to be withdrawn."

I agree halfway. just wondering *was* completely wrong regarding protesting ending the war. The other half was that the kids of middle and upper-middle Americans started coming home in bodybags. People with money don't put up w/ their kids dieing for something that doesn't even effect our country. Kids of people with money start dieing, change will surely come.

I, too, was a bit disappointed in the way the protest played out -- but it is something to learn from. We clearly need to think hard about goals and then about the best strategies fo r achieving them. I was a visitor to Berkeley for this and am admittedly uninformed about the specific goals of this protest. I offer my
observations as someone who is pleased to see people willing to organize such events and wants them to be successful. A few of my uneducated thoughts:

Media coverage is one potentially important goal. I would argue that mainstream television news coverage is one of the most important steps to enacting any real change. This is difficult.
Arrests don't seem to increase the odds of media coverage -- the US can sentence 96-year-old nuns for protesting School of the Americas with barely any coverage. Media contacts are important
here. Alerting media about an event, etc. Having some sort of 'catch' is useful. For example, given the dominant view in the US that this an Arab-Jew religious conflict and not a colonial war, groups such as Jews for Peace should be visible as they were in
this protest. This isn't to be cynical, but if media attention is a goal, I believe we need to think a bit like PR folks. This is obviously different here than in Europe were the terms of the debate are not so one-sided.

Fox news was on Berkeley campus yesterday interviewing people about the cancellation of the Israel student exchange program. They clearly wanted a human interest story and decided that the one viewers would identify with was Israeli fear. The section
included a short interview with Jewish American student who claimed he was itching to get over to Israel to join up with the IDF and 'defend democracy.' Given the number of Americans living in the occupied territories with relatives here, it may be possible to redirect this media obsession with Israeli subjectivity to other compelling human-interest tidbits about the
horrors of the Occupation.

Educating bystanders is another possible goal. I can understand the protesters' desire to get near the freeway given that protesting in Berkeley seems a bit like preaching to the choir, but given that they were unable to reach the freeway, a standoff with the police seemed counter-productive. Direct action can be effective -- but it seems to me that it is important to make it more difficult to marginalize our message. The crown by the traffic blocking stage was not large.

As to arguments that there is no need to be 'safe' because Palestine isn't 'safe', etc -- sacrifice that isn't effective is stupid. We are clearly fighting huge media and US cultural biases in this cause -- let's figure out what will be effective.

Dylan

Free Israel Religious Freedom Free Israel Religious Freedom Free Israel Religious Freedom Free Israel Religious Freedom Free Israel Religious Freedom Free Israel Religious Freedom Free Israel Religious Freedom Stop hate crimes against Jews Stop hate crimes against Jews Stop hate crimes against Jews Stop hate crimes against Jews Stop hate crimes against Jews Stop hate crimes against Jews Stop hate crimes against Jews

HOLED UP in his besieged and battered Ramallah headquarters, Yasser Arafat has called for “millions of martyrs to march to Jerusalem…this is our destiny….this is the path I have chosen.” With these words he announced his real agenda for anyone who did not understand it before. As the Arab Muslims of the Palestine Mandate and their successors had previously announced through suicide bombings that target Jewish babies; through maps that erase the state of Israel; through the 1999 rejection of a peace plan that included 95% of their negotiating demands; through the never-abandoned 1964 liberation manifesto that calls for the obliteration of Israel as the “Zionist entity;” through their spiritual leaders the Grand Muftis of Jerusalem – the one who today calls for the destruction of America and the Jews and the one who yesterday, in the midst of the Nazi Holocaust, was a disciple and ally of Adolf Hitler; -- the real agenda of Arafat and the Palestinian leadership is now, and has always been, the elimination of Jewry from the Middle East.


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The seed of the Palestinians’ genocidal mania is rooted in Islam and began its metastasis more than 100 years ago when the first Zionist settlements signaled that an oppressed people, huddled on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire, was about to assert itself. Jews, in fact, had been living continuously in the region for 3,000 years but only as a stateless minority, easily and therefore frequently abused. Once the Jews began to assert and defend their presence in a world that regarded them as infidels and therefore damned, they immediately became the targets of an Islamic jihad – a permanent holy war whose goal was their destruction.

The struggle in the Middle East is not now and has never been about land. Israel occupies a miniscule 1% of the Arab Middle East and less than 10% of the entire Palestine Mandate, which was not even a political entity – let alone a nation, when the Jews’ rights were granted. It was just a “mandate” carved by the British out of the Turkish empire after the First World War, and then allotted 90% to the Palestinian Arabs and 10% to the Jews.

Today the land called Jordan – a nation wholly created by Britain – occupies 80% of the landmass that made up the original Palestine Mandate. Nearly 70% of its inhabitants are still Palestinian Arabs, yet Jordan is not the target of a Palestine liberation movement. How is this possible? It is possible because the Hashemites who rule Palestinian Jordan and are a minority within Jordan, are Muslims not Jews. The Middle East War is not about land and not about injustice. It is a religious war – a jihad -- against the Jews.

In 1949, Jordan annexed the West Bank – that is, the entire territory that is allegedly in dispute -- and held it for 18 long years up to, and until, the 1967 Arab war against Israel. Jordan and the other Arab states lost this war, and the Jews retained control of the West Bank because the Arab states refused to make peace and recognize Israel, and Israel refused to return land to declared enemies, lest they use it as a staging area for war against Israel a third time. Not once in all those 18 years was there complaint from the Palestinians or their “liberation” organization or the other Arab states about the injustice done to the inhabitants of the West Bank. Not once was there an outcry that Jordan had annexed the Palestine “nation.” That is because the Palestinians consider themselves Arabs and Muslims first and foremost, and because being “Palestinian” is a remote afterthought inspired by their hatred of the Jews.

Zionist settlers first began arriving in the already existing Jewish communities of Palestine in the 1880s. They were hoping to end the persecution of the Jews, which was a result of their stateless condition and their expulsion 2000 years ago from Judea and Samaria, which is today known as the West Bank. At the time of the Zionists arrival, Palestine was a sparsely occupied, barren desert, controlled by Turkey as it had been for nearly 400 years. Not only was there no Palestinian nation in the region, there were hardly any Arabs at all. This is the way the American writer Mark Twain described what he saw when, in the 1880s, he visited the place that is the site of such bloodshed today:

“Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren …. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent….It is a hopeless dreary heartbroken land….Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes…Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies …. Nazareth is forlorn; … Jericho… accursed…Jerusalem …a pauper village…Palestine is desolate ... A silent, mournful expanse. We never saw a human being on the whole route…. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”

In this barren place the Jews were granted a sliver amounting to 10% of the land. More than half of this land was the Negev desert. Within a generation the Jews made their sliver bloom. Even today – 120 years later -- the boundary between Israel and Syria is still referred to as the “green line,” symbolizing the difference between the Israeli side, which under the care of the Jews has become fertile ground, and the Arabs’ side, which is still a desert. On their sliver of land the Jews also built the only industrial and democratic nation in the entire Middle East.

The productivity and tolerance of the Jews in the state they created have given birth to an Arab citizenry inside Israel of more than one million people. Unlike their Arab brethren, these Arab citizens of Israel vote in free elections and are themselves elected to the Israeli parliament. Their status provides an eloquent contrast to the intolerant and hate-filled world that surrounds and threatens the Jewish state.

As Israelis citizens, Arabs have more rights, privileges and opportunities than the inhabitants of any Arab state in the Middle East. At the same time, the so-called Palestinian refugees of the West Bank are barred even from becoming citizens in 21 of the 22 Arab nations. That’s why they are “refugees.” Because the Arabs want them to be miserable and destitute, and available as cannon fodder for their suicide wars against Israel. In contrast, the 600,000 Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries after the 1948 war have been fully resettled in Israel where they are productive citizens who desperately want peace.

What is the crime of the Jews that they should not have been welcomed into this unpromising desert -- a tiny sliver of the Turkish Empire -- from the very beginning? What is the crime of the Jews that their infant state should have been attacked by five Arab armies on the day of its creation? What is the crime of the Jews that these Arab states should have continued their war for fifty years without a peace in sight? What is the crime of the Jews that these Arabs should make Jewish women and children the targets of their suicide bombers, and that their leader should call for millions of “martyrs” to plow into the heart of the Jewish sliver to blow up its inhabitants once and for all?

Their crime is that they are Jews. Their crime is that they are heathens in the empire of Islam. Islam divides the world into Dar al Islam, the “house of Islam,” and Dar al Harb, the “house of war,” which is the house of infidels who -- if they do not convert – could or should be put to the sword. Perhaps there is a moderate Islam that rejects this alternative and has found a way to live peacefully with unbelievers who are its neighbors. But such an Islam does not exist as a political force in the Arab Middle East today.

That is why even a barren sliver was too much to allow the Jews. That is why the creation of a miniscule state in the middle of a desert provoked a genocidal war. Israel is Dar al Harb. That is why the annexation of the entire West Bank by the Kingdom of Jordan meant nothing to the Palestinian Muslims who inhabited it. Jordan is Dar al Islam. That is why peace cannot be made with the Jews. They are infidels who live in the house of war.

The Palestinian terrorists -- Arafat, the Palestine Authority, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aksa Martyrs -- along with the governments in Saudia Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Iran who support their terror and their genocidal agendas are the Nazis of the Middle East. There will be no peace until they are defeated or destroyed.

Free Israel, from their responsibility to keep Gods' laws. Judah has curropted religion for most of mankind.
Stop hate crimes,towards mankind.
Hear , O Israel, you have broken the covenant you made in Horeb in the day of the assembly.
F.N.