Reuters Cameraman killed by tank shell

Fadal Shana, a 23-year-old TV cameraman with the Reuters news agency, was among 20 Palestinians killed in fighting Wednesday — the bloodiest day in Gaza in more than a month. Shana was struck, along with two bystanders, as he filmed Israeli tank movements off in the distance. Three Israeli soldiers had been ambushed and killed earlier that day.

Thousands of Palestinians, including journalists and members of rival political movements, marched Thursday through the streets of Gaza City at the funeral procession of a cameraman killed covering an Israeli-Palestinian battle.

Shana’s body was wrapped in a bloodied Palestinian flag as fellow journalists marched alongside carrying his broken camera and bloodstained flak jacket. The marchers waved Palestinian flags and carried small posters of Shana posing with his camera.

“Fadal Shana, goodbye, the victim of the truth,” the posters said.

Click here to see Fadal's final footage. It's sobering.

Footage released by Reuters shows Mr Shana filming a tank positioned a few hundred yards away in the distance, over the Israeli border.

The film shows a tank firing its shell, which explodes causing the picture to go blank as the camera is thrown from Mr Shana's hand.

It then cuts away to a film made by another cameraman positioned nearby, which shows the devastation left by the shell, including two youths who had been passing the scene lying dead in the road. The IDF has not confirmed that they were resonsible for the young journalist's death. The foreign press association in Jerualem is pressing for an investigation.

(cross posted on Feral Beast)

New Yorker digs up Biblical archaeology controversy which rankled academia

Here's an abstract from the current New Yorker magazine, about academic politics and old-fashioned blacklisting. Jane Kramer, in "The Petition,"recaps

the controversy over anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj of Barnard College. Writer discusses Abu El-Haj’s doctoral dissertation, which was revised and published in 2001 under the title “Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.” The book looked at the role of archeology in what was essentially a political project: the Biblical validation for Jewish claims to what is now Israel. After teaching at the University of Chicago and spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Abu El-Haj moved to New York and joined the faculty of Barnard College. In April of 2006, she came up for tenure there. No one in her department doubted she would get it. Over the next year, her tenure file passed the scrutiny of three committees, which recommended her for tenure. By the spring of 2007, all that remained was the approval of a fourth committee.
In August of 2007, a petition entitled “Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure” was posted on the Internet. It found its way onto a number of email lists and Web sites. The author of the petition was a Barnard alumna named Paula Stern. Writer notes that Stern’s complaints against Abu El-Haj’s work were inaccurate. Stern later predicted that Barnard and Columbia were going to lose a lot of alumni money if Abu El-Haj got tenure. Writer discusses the legacy of the late Columbia professor Edward Said. Many of the attacks on Abu El-Haj made pointed reference to his influence. Tells about Rashid Khalidi, who came under attack for accepting the chair named after Said. Mentions Columbia president Lee Bollinger’s stinging introduction of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who spoke at the university last year. Gives biographical information about Abu El-Haj, who was born in New York and raised in Iran and Lebanon. She attended Bryn Mawr and later Duke, where her dissertation adviser, Virginia Dominguez, helped her focus her research on how Israel’s Jewish national “self” came to be constructed. Discusses Abu El-Haj’s work on the subject. Tells about “Columbia Unbecoming,” a film about the alleged intimidation of Jewish students by three Middle Eastern professors. A university committee that investigated the claims found no evidence of harassment, but two professors were cited for “episodes” three years earlier. One of these men, Joseph Massad, is currently awaiting word on tenure. Mentions the activities of pro-Israel advocacy groups led by David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and Charles Jacobs. Tells about criticism of Abu El-Haj by Professor Alan Segal and others during her tenure process. On November 1, 2007, Abu El-Haj was informed that she had received tenure.
“What happened last year—it wasn’t about me. I was a cog in the big wheel of the issue of the Middle East and Israel,” she says.

Jewish mother's burdens and a talent for multi-tasking with a grin

Talk about grin and bear it. The sweet smile is astonishing under the circumstances! This powerful young mother in the snapshot above had just mounted a long steep hill in Jerusalem's Liberty Bell Park on a sunny Saturday. There's a baby strapped on her front, another strapped on her back, while a curly-haired toddler grasps her left hand, and she holds a plastic bag bulging with 'necessities' in her right. Her friend pushes a pram with all the spare sweaters and the like. Oy vey. She didn't even break a sweat. Surely it's a sign of the superb frontierswomen's genes leftover from the folks who founded this country.

That strange ridged citrus fruit that she's holding beneath is a delectable Jericho orange, which some claim to be the tastiest fruit in the whole Middle East. An admiring mom in the park wanted to share it with her. It resembles a California Navel orange, but has more unpredictable bumps on its thick skin. It appears thick skins are something that come with the territory. Israelity Bites.

Blair's Middle-East muddling and double standards

Chris Patten, co-chairman of International Crisis Group and chancellor of Oxford U, is no slouch on international affairs. His recent comments on the distracted performance of Middle East envoy Tony Blair in the performance of his "initial day job" are frank and cut close to the bone. The goal is "a peaceful Palestinian state next door to a secure Israel in a region united in prosperity and stability." How to achieve this remains a conundrum, and Blair's own brand of shuttle diplomacy, spending only a few days a month on this daunting task, will not yield any Northern Ireland-style breakthroughs. An excerpt follows:

... Blair has just made a useful comment on Palestine and Israel, which deserves to be taken seriously. Throughout the long years of this bloody tragedy, we have tried to inch our way to a settlement through confidence-building measures or, in the case of the long dead "road map," through pushing both parties to take parallel steps toward an agreement. Some observers, not least hard-headed Israeli peace campaigners, have suggested a different approach.

You will never succeed, they say, if you try to bob and weave your way slowly toward an end game. Instead, you should jump straight into a final deal. And, since you won't get the two sides to agree to it, you'll have to impose it from the outside.

But that ambitious outcome is easier described than achieved. While Israeli public opinion has usually appeared to run well ahead of its political leaders in the approach to peace, it is difficult to see how one could act over their heads. They need to be pushed and shoved into a successful negotiation. What would it mean to go straight to Palestinian statehood?

Presumably, Blair is not proposing to the Palestinians the creation of a state before an agreement is reached on final borders. There cannot be a Palestinian state without dealing with West Bank settlements. If you don't believe me, just visit the West Bank and see, for example, how the proposed suburban Israeli development of East Jerusalem stabs through the heart of Palestinian territory toward the Dead Sea. How can you have a viable state carved up by fences, military roads, and barbed wire?

Any Palestinian state should be within the 1967 borders (as adjusted through negotiation). Peace activists on both sides solved that in the Geneva initiative. Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak came close to doing so at Camp David almost eight years ago.

Moreover, a Palestinian state would not only comprise the West Bank and Gaza, but presumably would also have to accommodate the principal political parties in each area. Attempts to destroy Hamas — whether politically or physically — have not worked and cannot work. The Americans and Europeans committed a major error in conspiring to destroy the Fatah-Hamas national unity government, which was created largely thanks to the diplomacy of Saudi Arabia and other Arab League countries.

I hope that Blair is saying that to his American friends. His greatest achievement was the peace deal in Northern Ireland. That historic triumph depended on bringing in Sinn Fein politicians — leaders of the Irish Republican movement who in many cases could not be distinguished from the IRA, which bombed, shot, and maimed civilians in pursuit of its political goals.

Why should what worked in Northern Ireland — indeed, what was pressed on Britain by the United States — be unthinkable in the Middle East? Are we in the West guilty of double standards yet again?

I abhor any and every terrorist act, by Hamas or anyone else. I have had friends killed by terrorists. But since when were sentiment and moral denunciation sufficient ingredients of a policy? And when did a disproportionate military response to terrorism ever work?

The third challenge in establishing a Palestinian state is to create the institutions of statehood: Hospitals, ports, airports, roads, courts, police stations, tax offices, and government archives. When I was a European commissioner, we provided funds from European taxpayers to pay for these things. Then we saw them systematically trashed by Israel's response to the second Intifada.

How did destroying driving licenses in Palestine preserve Israeli security? How was it preserved by digging up runways, uprooting olive trees, and fouling wells?

A Palestinian state will need to be built from the bottom up. And what is built should not be destroyed.

Gettin' on for Armageddon, Pastor Hagee says

The luxury coaches are crammed with White Bread Americans, and the name of Pastor John Hagee,of Texas mega-church fame, is emblazoned on the side like a multinational brand. The vehicles have been crisscrossing Israel in the past few days, basically following in the footsteps of Jesus-- except for the omission of Palestinian Bethlehem. The itinerary stops at Armageddon, as Time magazine reports:

An Evangelical at Armageddon
By TIM MCGIRK/TEL MEGGIDO


It's quiet at Armageddon, these days, with only the wind racing like invisible war chariots across its grassy plains. But lately, the northern Israeli site — also known as Tel Meggido — designated in the New Testament as the field of the final battle has become a popular tourist destination. Christians arrive by the busload eager to see the battleground where the world as we know it will end. At the souvenir shop, they flock to buy maps of where Jesus walked, and tiny vials of water from the Jordan River. The river may now be mostly a murky rivulet, but thousands of Evangelical Christians insist on being re-baptized in its waters.

Armageddon was a brief stopover a few days ago for a contingent of Christians led by the Texas televangelist Pastor John Hagee, who believes that doomsday is nigh. In his recent book Jerusalem Countdown, which sold 1.4 million copies, Hagee uses contemporary news events, such as the threat of a nuclear Iran, to describe the lead-up to a war in which the Russian and Arab armies invade Israel and are destroyed by God in a terrible battle on this very spot.

Hagee, whose views on Catholicism caused controversy for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain when he endorsed the Arizona senator, didn't charm many Palestinians, either — not even the Christians among them — when he said that "turning all or part of Jerusalem over to the Palestinians would be tantamount to turning it over to the Taliban." So much for the fate of Jerusalem being on the agenda of the Bush Administration's peace initiative.

Hagee's remarks, however, have certainly endeared him to Israel's hawks. Ex-Premier and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at Hagee's rally in Jerusalem, calling the American Christian Zionists Israel's best friends.

Other Jews, in Israel and in the U.S., are less comfortable in the embrace of the American Evangelicals. They cite a verse from Revelations claiming that Jesus will return only after two-thirds of the Jews are killed and the rest are converted to Christianity. "They are not supporting us out of love," says one opponent, Rabbi Shalom Dov Lifshitz from the anti-missionary group Yad La'achim, "but because they believe that if we convert out of Judaism to Christianity, it will bring on the Apocalypse." And that, he says, is "a danger to the people of Israel."

One pastor in Jerusalem from a mainstream church expressed skepticism about the motives of the Christian Zionists — and of the cynicism of Israelis who play along. "It's the worst kind of anti-Semitism," says the cleric, who asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the issue. "At the end, these Evangelicals say that all the Jews will be dead except those who become Christians. But in the meantime, the Israelis are happy to fill their hotels with them and use their help to get American weapons."

Shortly before Hagee's tour, American Rabbi Eric Yoffie from the liberal Reform Jewish Movement denounced the friendship between Israel and Christian Evangelicals, not only because Hagee and his like-minded brethren reject the two-state solution (with East Jerusalem as capital of a future Palestinian state) but because they are often at odds with liberal Jews in the U.S. over such incendiary topics as abortion and gay rights.

America's Evangelical movement is vast and diverse, and so are the reasons why Evangelicals rally to Israel. They range from the simple Sunday school teaching — God loves the Jews and abhors their enemies — to a belief that the Jews' return to their ancestral lands, and the "miraculous" victory of the Israelis over the Arabs in the 1967 war, is a harbinger of the Apocalypse and the Messiah's return. In a 2006 poll conducted by Pew Research Center, 35% of all Americans say that the creation of Israel is a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy about Jesus' second coming. And also that Armageddon is just around the corner. But for now, the only legions arriving on the battlefield are those traveling on tour buses.

Izzy Bee has learned that the good Pastor spurned a scheduled Q & A with the American newsweekly last week. Was this perhaps because it featured Pope Benedict on the cover? (The pontiff, he has implied, plays Eliot Spitzer to the Whore of Babylon.) Meanwhile, Hagee's congregation sent a $6m donation to Israel (and West Bank Jewish settlers in Ariel, Samaria) which has assured an open-armed welcome.

Shell Shock. Gazans slaughter rare sea turtle for folk medicine remedies

Impoverished fishermen snared a rare leatherback sea turtle on the main beach at Gaza and slit its throat so its blood could be drunk as a tradiitonal treatment for asthma or back pains. Environmentalists may want to shield their eyes from this video, made by a Reuters crew inside the enclave. That's 600 kilos of meat!

No pay. No Sex. No Kvetching, guys.

The Jerusalem Post today reports on Israel's "Murky Waters" (a rather distasteful headline for a report on why an Orthodox feminist group urges wives to stop sex with their husbands unless state-employees at their ritual mikve purification baths get back pay.)

According to Jewish law, a woman must immerse herself in a mikve after menstruation before she can have sexual relations with her husband. Abstaining from going to the mikve is tantamount to abstinence from sex.

Attorney Batia Kahana-Dror, a leading member of Kolech, a feminist Orthodox organization, sent out a "no pay, no sex" message in an opinion piece on the organization's Web site this week calling on women to stop going to the mikve in protest against delays in paying salaries to hundreds of mikve attendants.

"Let's drive them crazy, all those who wait restlessly for the night that their woman to go to the mikve. All those who make up the majority in the religious councils, the Treasury, the Religious Services Ministry and the Knesset, the rabbis and the leaders. Stop. No more sex. Let's face it, no one is going to die from it."

However, rabbis and the mikve attendants said that it was forbidden by Jewish law for a married couple to refrain from sex as a means of protest....opponents of the call for celibacy said it was inappropriate and immodest for women to publicize the fact that they were not going to the mikve.

A mikve attendant in Jerusalem who preferred to remain anonymous said she had not been paid for two months. Nevertheless, she said she opposed striking in protest.
"We do sacred work and it cannot be interrupted," the attendant said."If we were to strike some of these women would be with their husbands without going to the mikve. I can't have that on my conscience.

...there are at least 400 mikve attendants and pensioners in Jerusalem who have not been paid for two to three months.Cash-strapped municipalities regularly default on their payments to the religious councils, which receive 40 percent of their budgets from the Religious Services Ministry and 60% from the local government.

As a result, mikve attendants, rabbis, kosher supervisors and clerks have suffered chronic salary payment delays. Kahana-Dror is hopeful that promises to pay salaries before Pessah will be honoured.

"But if attendants don't get paid, I'm not going to the mikve. And don't ask me what my husband thinks about that."

In the mikve's chest high water, a woman immerses until water covers every last hair and then recites the blessing after she emerges. An attendant watches carefully to ensure that each immersion is complete according to Halacha (Jewish law). She pronounces each immersion "Kosher", and a woman departs renewed and purified ritually, ready for marital relations.