After a long absence, Maggie Schmitt and I are back updating our Gaza Kitchens blog, which will serve to both keep our readers up to date on the progress of our book (The Gaza Kitchen) and help us tweak the recipes we’ve collected. So please-check it out, test the recipes, give us your feedback! We’re happy to report we now have a publisher (Just World Books in partnership with OR books) and we hope the book will be out by mid 2012!
Israel’s ongoing siege: in their own words
New documents obtained by Israeli NGOs HaMoked, Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, and GISHA under the Freedom of Information Act reveal further details about how Israel’s COGAT decides-on a weekly basis-what items to allow in and out of Gaza, and what items to ban.
The big takeaway from this for those not already aware: That the Israeli siege on Gaza is a siege of the mind and soul, a siege that is starving people of their basic freedoms and of mental sustenance, not of food.
By way of example, Gaza is still closed off from the West Bank, where many people focus exclusively on the Rafah Crossing; the newly obtained documents reveal that while soccer players have been given the green light to travel from Gaza to the West Bank, students are specifically singled out for the ban. So, in fact, are books, textbooks, printing ink, and writing instruments…all subject o individual approval by COGAT. Yes, you read that right. Books and students are banned.
Chilling, isn’t it?
Dumb and dumber…
I intended this to be a post about Abbas’s statehood bid, the confusion surrounding it, how Palestinians have largely been left in the dark about it, the implications, the strategy, indeed the futility and stupidity, but how could anyone listen to what Obama had to say and not want to respond? He gave his much anticipated speech to the United Nation’s General Assembly Friday, in which he lambasted the forthcoming bid for Palestinian Statehood by the Palestinian Authority. And short of standing up on the podium and waving the Israeli flag and singing Hatkivah and calling for the transfer of the Palestinians, he did everything the pro-Zionist right could have hoped for.
“Quite an achievement for Obama to take up a position on the spectrum to the right of Ariel Sharon’s man Olmert” tweeted Ali Abunimah.
“Introducing President Barak Netanyau” joked Akiva Eldar.
Indeed, it was an I love Israel fest. And listening to the speech, you would have thought it was Israel who was under occupation (but that word was never mentioned; neither, for that matter, were settlements, which encroach ever deeper into Palestinians lands as we speak).
As far as Obama was concerned, Israel is our bestest fwend in the whole wide world and nothing, I mean nothing, is going to change that (in case we had any doubts). Heck, Israel could have been stashing a secret stockpile of nuclear weapons (their supposed vulnerability notwithstanding), could have been responsible for the largest rate of political incarceration in the world, for attacking its neighbors multiple times (that they are the ones “dedicated to Israel’s destruction” is another story) for violently colonizing and subjecting millions of people to apartheid policies for decades, for besieging and bombing a defenseless population and depriving them of their basic rights… Oh wait. They are responsible for all these things. Sometimes I wonder if Israel just decided to obliterate us all at once and spare us the slow, painful death of the past few decades if it would make any difference to the United States. But then we would only be blamed for forcing them to this point, for not cooperating, for not being civil when Jim Crow came to visit. One thing’s for sure, even if Israelis themselves eventually protested, American leadership will still be singing the praises of the racist friends that rule over them.
Hunger Strike for Palestinian Prisoners
On Sept 27, several hundred Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails started a hunger strike to protest the conditions of their incarceration. They have made several key demands, including an end to abusive isolation, restrictions on higher education in prisons, denial of books and newspapers, shackling, excessive fines, and most importantly, an end to all forms of collective punishment, including the refusal of family visits, night searches of prisoners’ cells, and the denial of basic health treatment.
All freedom supporters around the world are called to join the prisoners with one day hunger strike, on Wednesday October 12th, when they will have entered their 16th day of hunger strike.
If you are joining, declare it: “On 12.10.11, I will be on hunger strike in support of Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike since September, 27th”
يوم 12.10.11 انا مضرب\ة عن الطعام دعماً للأسرى الفلسطينيين، المضربين عن الطعام منذ 27 أيلول
Hashtag on twitter: #HS4Palestine
Some 8000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons or detention centers by the Israeli army, including 370 minors and 103 Palestinian women, according to the Palestinian prisoner’s rights and support group, Addammeer.
Over 750 are held without charge or trial.
These are not hardened criminals we’re talking about folks. The overwhelming majority of Palestinian prisoners are regarded as political captives who have been arbitrarily imprisoned or detained under the broad banner of “security”, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem.
“If these same standards were applied inside Israel, half of the Likud party would be in administrative detention,” noted the group in a report.
Palestinians have been subjected to the highest rate of incarceration in the world-since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, over 650,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel-constituting some 20% of the total Palestinian population, and 40% of all Palestinian men.
According to Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and B’tselem, their conditions of detention are extremely poor, with many prisoners suffering from medical negligence, routine beatings, position torture and strip searches.Since the beginning of this Intifada in September 2000, over 2500 children have been arrested.
Fore more information regarding Palestinian Prisoners, please see this IMEU fact sheet.
Israel to legalize outposts as prisoner swap deal signed
The airwaves are abuzz with news of the Gilad Shalit/Palestinian prisoner swap, in which 1027 Palestinian prisoners will be released over two stages and several months in exchange for the release of soldier Gilad Shalit.
Among those to be released are prisoners serving life sentences, and all Palestinian women prisoners, as well as big names like PFLP’s Ahmed Saadat, and Marwan Barghouthi.
AJE analyst Marwan Bishara refers to many of those being released as the “lost faces of this conflict” because of the sheer length of time they have been serving sentences-some from before the signing of the Oslo Accord.
5000 or more Palestinian prisoners will remain in Israeli detention of course, many without charge, and conditions conditions continue to deteriorate on the ground. Criticism of the deal aside-the distraction it is causing from ongoing Israeli colonization and apartheid etc., the deal is being celebrated by at least some people: children have grown up without ever knowing their fathers. For the first time in decades, they will re-unite. Tactically, this deal was one both Hamas, and Netanyahu, badly needed. It was Hamas’s power play answer to Abbas’s UN statehood bid, though Hamas’s Meshal emphasized in a televised speech earlier today that this was not a factional, but a national, accomplishment.
Also today, overshadowed by news of the prisoner swap, was this bit of less headline making news: Netanyahu today announced has decided to form a spin committee that would find a way to legalize the construction of illegal settlement outposts on private Palestinian land.
In response, B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, stated that the move will “render the Israeli government an active accomplice in the private land theft and dispossession of Palestinians” and labeled the committee a merely more blatant version of an already existing Israeli occupation policies: “manipulation of the law in order to lend a guise of legality to the settlement project. Until now, the government aided the theft of Palestinian land by turning a blind eye, by lack of law enforcement and, in some cases, by funding construction in outposts. ”
The formation of the committee means that the government will now become an active accomplice in the private land theft and dispossession of Palestinians: until now, the government aided the theft of Palestinian land by turning a blind eye, by lack of law enforcement and, in some cases, by funding construction in outposts.
Gaza’s Food Heritage-in Saudi Aramco World
A bit tardy of me to only post this now-but have been insanely busy putting the finishing touches on the first draft of our book! If you happen to live near Madrid or DC, stop by for some of the fruits of our kitchen-testing! In the meantime, enjoy this article-the product of many months of hard work, published in Saudi Aramco World magazine. Consider it a prelude to our book!
As home to the largest concentration of refugees within historic Palestine, Gaza is an extraordinary place to encounter culinary traditions, not only from hundreds of towns and villages that now exist only in memory—depopulated and destroyed during the Palestinian exodus of 1948—but also from the rest of Gaza’s long history.
Through decades of conflict, families in Gaza have held to recipes and foodways as sources of comfort, pleasure and pride. Unable to control much else in their lives, Gazans are renowned for lavishing care and attention on food and family. Visiting kitchens up and down the Gaza Strip, talking to women about cooking and about life, offers lessons in the vital art of getting by with grace.
More here: