Iron and Gold - Part One: Five Years After the Hague's Anti-Separation Barrier Ruling
I've been saying for weeks that I'll get to writing a post about my feelings towards Israel/Palestine these days. Last weekend I was telling [PKG] that I don't even know where to start with that, and she suggested that I break it up into a series. I responded that that would work if I had enough of a sense of how I want to structure the thing to break it into pieces. I still don't, really, but today seems like a good time to at least start putting pen to paper (as it were). Today is the 5 year anniversary of the International Court of Justice's ruling that Israel's separation barrier violates international law. One the one hand, construction during the past fifteen months has barely continued. One the other hand, that really doesn't help the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose livelihood is negatively impacted by the portions that have already been built. In the case of Bilin, the Israeli High Court ruled in 2007 that the barrier's route is illegal because it effectively steals Palestinian land, and yet almost two years later the barrier is still there and the IDF still prevents people, discouraged by the inefficacy of legal means, from trying to tear it down. I've posted before and no doubt will post again about people being killed by rubber bullets and tear gun canisters for their efforts. Now, it royally stinks to be one of the soldiers there; you've been put in a situation in which there are no good options. But that doesn't change the utter chutzpa of an institution that justifies killing people as an unfortunate side-effect of them daring to seek to implement its own government's ruling against robbing them. And now there's a new (cell phone company) ad effectively based on the premise that if the Palestinians would just lighten up (and give up their limited resources) so that soldiers could have some fun, then the IDF would be nice to them. It kind of makes me nauseous that my cell phone provider thinks it can make money by propagating crap like that.
EDITED TO ADD: Here's a more detailed breakdown of why the ad is problematic. The story appears to be making the news both in Israel and abroad.
Oh, right, and if you hadn't figured it out by now, when I said that I was going to write about "my feelings about Israel/Palestine"? That pretty much meant, "Why I increasingly can't imagine a context in which I'd happily move here for the long term". I'm thinking it's going to be a seven part series of which this is one part, one part will be about my (changed) feelings towards people from outside Israel/Palestine talking about the situation here, and the final part will focus on positives. EDITED TO ADD: See my addendum to this post for more about my intentions with this series.
EDITED TO ADD: Here's a more detailed breakdown of why the ad is problematic. The story appears to be making the news both in Israel and abroad.
Oh, right, and if you hadn't figured it out by now, when I said that I was going to write about "my feelings about Israel/Palestine"? That pretty much meant, "Why I increasingly can't imagine a context in which I'd happily move here for the long term". I'm thinking it's going to be a seven part series of which this is one part, one part will be about my (changed) feelings towards people from outside Israel/Palestine talking about the situation here, and the final part will focus on positives. EDITED TO ADD: See my addendum to this post for more about my intentions with this series.