Why Memory Matters: Gaza, Recent History & the Campaign Against Truth

Marikana, Gaza, Ferguson

Richard Pithouse, The Con

In colonial wars the occupying power invariably reaches a point where it has to acknowledge that its true enemy is not a minority – devil worshipers, communists, fanatics or terrorists – subject to external and evil manipulation, but the people as a whole. Once this point is reached every colonised person is taken as a potential combatant and the neighbourhood and the home are cast as legitimate sites of combat.

This is the moment when liberal paternalism breaks down.

Gaza vigil - Rhodes University 8/8/2014

Grahamstown Vigil for Children Killed in Gaza

An Israeli Soldier's Story - Eran Efrati

Motion on Israel Adopted by the Faculty of Humanities, Rhodes University, 4 August 2014

Motion to the Faculty of Humanities concerning the abuse of Human Rights in Palestine and the Occupied Territories

Noting the United Nations Security Councils specifically call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, respect for humanitarian law and protection of civilians in Gaza; the general worldwide condemnation of the Israeli government’s sustained airborne assault and ground force military incursion into Gaza, which has resulted in over 1,035 deaths of Palestinians (of which 218 deaths have been children); the deaths of 3 Israeli civilians; the injuring of 6,200 Palestinian people and the displacement of 100 000 Palestinian individuals by the 27th of July 2014;

Religions & Peace in an age of invasions, occupations, and emppire

Open Letter from Concerned Individuals in the Rhodes University Community on the Israeli Attacks on Gaza

During apartheid academics and students around the world took a strong stand against injustice in South Africa. Their demands for the international isolation of the South African state were an important contribution to the struggle against apartheid.

The attack on Gaza by the Israeli state violates the most basic human rights of the men, women and children in the area who continue to live in fear of the destruction of their homes, injury and death. The escalating catastrophe is not an isolated incident but part of a persistent and systemic oppression of the Palestinian people.  In light of this, we take the view that solidarity with the people in Gaza needs to move from expressions of moral outrage and towards effective political action.

As staff, students Honorary Graduates and alumni at Rhodes University we feel a moral obligation to take a clear public position against the ongoing violence of the Israeli state. We would like to add our voices to the growing demand that the South African Government sever all links with Israel, including trade and investment, and expel Israel’s Ambassador and recall ours.

Poetry for Palestine

Nine Butler, The Con

The street is empty

as a monk’s memory,

and faces explode in the flames

like acorns –

and the dead crowd the horizon

and doorways.

No vein can bleed

more than it already has,

no scream will rise

higher than it has already risen.

We will not leave!

-       Exodus, Taha Muhammad Ali

Gaza: Words and Weapons

Richard Pithouse, The Con

Words are the raw materials for building a house. Words are a country.

-       Mahmoud Darwish, Absent Presence

In The Jerusalem Post, articles on Gaza report that Israeli “soldiers” have engaged Palestinian “terrorists” in battle. In our colonial historiography, “soldiers” were often reported to have fought “warriors”. In the 1980s, “soldiers” were reported, much like in Israel today, to have been deployed against “terrorists”. Today, as state murder is increasingly normalised as an acceptable tool of social control in our deeply compromised democracy, the police are, we are often told, at war with “criminals”.

Gaza conflict: Lives that matter

Gabeba Baderoon and Nadia Davids, Letter to the Editor, Mail & Guardian

The reality of war is bitter.  A Vietnamese writer once confided that, for her, nighttime and its peaceful silence was a time of visceral fear because when she was a child, the silence of night was when the bombs would fall. Now, silence took her back to the moment before the explosions and so she could not rest. This is how the fear and destruction – the reality – of war enters our bodies immediately and forever.

Yet it seems we weigh realities differently.

Gaza Under Attack: Public Discussion in Grahamstown, 24 July

Open Letter on the Israeli Attacks on Gaza

We, as South Africans of Jewish descent, strongly condemn the Israeli bombing of the Palestinian Gaza Strip which has already resulted in over 200 fatalities (including over 40 children) and thousands injured. This operation is in gross violation of international law, including international humanitarian law and the relevant provisions on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, and of the prohibition of reprisals and collective punishment of a civilian population under occupation.

Middle East: a blind spot for liberals

Steven Friedman, Business Day

IT IS hard to convince many in the Middle East that liberal democracy can work for them when the headlines from Israel and Palestine signal that liberalism now insists that all people should enjoy equal rights — unless they are Palestinian.

The Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians has been a blind spot for liberals here and abroad for years. Liberals, who believe in the right of all to vote in free elections, did not protest when the winners of Palestinian elections were rewarded with Israeli and US sanctions and military action, a signal that Palestinians can elect who they like as long as the Israelis like them too.

The Long History of Liberal Brutality

Richard Pithouse, The Con

As the Israeli state rains its murder on the people of Gaza we are confronted with a stark demonstration of the ways in which there is, in so many quarters, official sanction for according radically different values to human lives. Some of us are taken as sacrosanct, others as disposable. It has often been suggested that in the case of Israel and Palestine the inequality in the value ascribed to human life can be rendered as a mathematical ratio. In this calculus there is no such thing as a life for a life, or a prisoner for a prisoner, or a set amount invested in the education of each child.

For Those We Cannot Grieve

Nina Butler, The Con

There has been a Hebrew Facebook page circulating that demands the murder of one Palestinian every hour that the three Israeli teenagers, who disappeared on June 12 while hitchhiking late at night in the West Bank, are missing. The dead bodies of the three teens were found two nights ago near Hebron. Although evidence is yet to be publically released, the Israeli government claims that Hamas is responsible, and it would seem as though the Israeli military is set on carrying out the desire of the 20 000-plus facebookers who ‘liked’ this page. The social media page is premised upon the assumption that ‘Palestinians’ (the entire populace) are behind this, and so has been the Israeli Defence Forces’ campaign of collective punishment – Operation Brother’s Keeper – over the past 18 days that has resulted in the imprisonment of more than 500 Palestinians, the death of six mostly male youths of the same age as the missing Israeli teens, and the destruction and invasion of more than 1 000 homes, offices and buildings. Now that the inexcusable and disgraceful crime of the abduction and killing of three Israeli lives has come to a head, all indications are that the ‘operation’ of collective punishment will evolve into a large-scale mission in multiple forms of vengeance – aimed at harming yet more innocent young lives.

HARDtalk Speaks to Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe

A Week of Events in Solidarity with Palestine

MONDAY 10TH MARCH: EVENING MOVIE SCREENING - LEMON TREE, EDEN GROVE SEMINAR ROOM, 18:30 

About the Film:  LEMON TREE is a 2008 Israeli drama film directed by Eran Riklis and co-directed by his cousin Ira Riklis. The film describes the legal efforts of a Palestinian widow to stop the Israeli Defense Minister, her next door neighbor, from destroying the lemon trees in her family farm. At the same time, she develops a human bond with the minister's wife.  It was released in Israel on 27 March 2008, and it received a tepid response from Israeli audiences. It was released internationally through IFC Films on 17 April 2009. From there, the film has achieved critical success and it has received nominations for several awards such as 'Best Actress' and 'Best Screenwriter' at the EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS

Ilan Pappe address the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra

Statement of Opposition to the Failure of BDS South Africa to Condemn the Singing of "dubula e juda" ("shoot the Jew")

RHODES UNIVERSITY PALESTINIAN SOLIDARITY FORUM (RUPSF)

Statement of Opposition to the Failure of BDS South Africa to Condemn the Singing of "dubula e juda" ("shoot the Jew")

On 28 August 2013 protesters gathered at the Daniel Zamir concert at Wits University as part of BDS South Africa’s campaign and sang songs containing the slogan "dubula e juda" ("shoot the Jew").

RUPSF supports the broad principles of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the Israeli state’s continued illegal occupation of Palestine precisely because we reject racism in any form. It therefore goes without saying that we are equally and unequivocally opposed to any expression of Anti-Semitism.