Israel's Dangerous Turn

By Robert Parry

June 2, 2010

After Israel’s lethal attack in international waters on a civilian flotilla carrying relief supplies to Gaza, a troubling question arises: Have Israeli authorities, who possess a major nuclear arsenal, become dangerously erratic?

This question can't be posed publicly in the American mainstream news media nor in U.S. political circles, where fear of the pro-Israel lobby remains strong. But it is a concern that is being discussed quietly by foreign policy analysts around the world.

Even as America’s commentariat again generates the predictable excuses for Israeli latest actions, the political reality inside Israel is one that is shifting more and more toward a society dominated by Jewish fundamentalists, including an aggressive and racist settler bloc.

The ultra-Orthodox Shas Party is now in the Likud ruling coalition and holds important Cabinet posts such as housing. Shas leaders have made it clear that they favor a country segregated not just between Arab and Jew but between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews.

If these fundamentalist elements continue to consolidate their political power, the world could soon be facing an isolated and paranoid religious state with some 200 to 400 nuclear warheads along with a sophisticated collection of chemical and biological weapons.

One Israeli émigré, who spent his young adulthood working for the Israeli government, told me that he fears Israel is becoming like North Korea, except qualitatively more dangerous because Israel has an advanced nuclear arsenal and sits in a more strategic part of the world.

The current government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also appears excessively confident that Israel’s sophisticated propaganda network and its American neoconservative allies can overwhelm any criticism of Israeli actions in Washington and ensure eventual U.S. backing for a military strike on Iran.

Netanyahu has been dismissive toward President Barack Obama’s peace initiatives, particularly Obama’s demand that Israel stop building Jewish housing in traditionally Arab areas.

Ignoring those wishes, Netanyahu’s Shas Party allies announced new Jewish construction in Arab East Jerusalem last March as Vice President Joe Biden arrived to reaffirm U.S. solidarity with Israel.

Though Obama let his annoyance be known, Netanyahu followed up by announcing that the Jewish housing construction would go forward.

‘Kiss-and-Make-Up’

Faced with this Israeli intransigence, Obama quieted his criticism. He was reportedly looking forward to a “kiss-and-make-up” session with Netanyahu on Tuesday before Israel’s lethal assault on the “Freedom Flotilla” caused Netanyahu to cancel the meeting and rush back to Israel.

Obama also has fallen in line behind Israeli insistence that a confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program be put at the top of the international agenda and that a new Iranian offer to ship about half its low-enriched uranium out of the country be rejected.

The President had privately urged the leaders of Brazil and Turkey to draw Iran into that agreement, which they did two weeks ago. But Israel and American neocons denounced and ridiculed the deal, demanding instead stiffer sanctions and stepped-up efforts for “regime change” in Iran.

Instead of admitting that he had backed the Iran-Brazil-Turkey deal, Obama stayed silent, as he has in the wake of Israel’s middle-of-the-night commando raid on the flotilla, which left nine peace activists dead early Monday.

In a P.R. blitz on Tuesday, Israeli officials made a point of showing off knives and other hand-made weapons that some of the activists allegedly used to defend the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, when the Israeli commandos landed by ropes from helicopters.

According to Israeli accounts, the resistance from the people onboard led the commandos to open fire. The Israeli government and many U.S. commentators blamed the ship's resistance for the violence.

However, it would not be unusual – and certainly not illegal – for a ship’s crew and passengers in international waters to defend themselves from an armed assault, especially one launched in the dark of night. If the attackers were Somalis instead of Israelis, the ship’s defenders would be hailed as heroes.

In an e-mail to me, Marquette Professor of Moral Theology Daniel C. Maguire cited one important distinction between “Somali piracy and Israeli piracy – Israel kills during its piracy and then claims it does so in self-defense. That is [a] first in the history of piracy.

“Traditionally, pirates have been outlaws and admit it. It is very much like a rapist saying: ‘The victim I was raping resisted and so I killed her in self-defense.’ A defense like that would make even a mob lawyer blush.”

Act of War

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador and Foreign Office specialist on maritime law, said the Israeli commando raid was a violation of international law and the Law of the Sea, since the ship under a Turkish flag was in international waters.

If “the Israeli commandoes were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists in international waters, the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred," in this case Turkey.

"In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory. So,” Murray continued, “Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the attack by Israeli commandos falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime."

However, not surprisingly, the Israeli P.R. response to the intense international criticism worked wonders in winning over the U.S. news media.

After playing video of the Israeli assault and the efforts of some passengers to resist the attackers, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews came down decisively on the Israeli side, calling criticism of the lethal attack “an unfair shot at Israel.”

Matthews added that he agreed with the pro-Israeli position taken by the Washington Post's neoconservative editorial page, which faulted Israel for the sloppiness of its attack while siding with its purpose.

“We have no sympathy for the motives of the participants in the flotilla -- a motley collection that included European sympathizers with the Palestinian cause, Israeli Arab leaders and Turkish Islamic activists,” the Post wrote on Tuesday.

“Israel says that some of the organizers have ties to Hamas and al-Qaeda. What's plain is that the group's nominal purpose, delivering "humanitarian" supplies to Gaza, was secondary to the aim of provoking a confrontation.”

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman weighed in Wednesday with an op-ed that downplayed the human tragedy in Gaza where some 1,400 Palestinians died in an Israeli month-long offensive at the end of 2008 and the start of 2009 and where a blockade has continued for three years.

"That concern for Gaza and Israel's blockade is so out [of] balance with ... other horrific cases in the region that it is not surprising Israelis dismiss it as motivated by hatred -- not the advice of friends," Friedman wrote.

So, in the view of the mainstream U.S. news media, Israel is justified in maintaining a fierce embargo on the 1.5 million people crowded into the tiny Gaza Strip and any “motley collection” of activists that tries to run the blockade is at fault for whatever happens.

Plus, it seems, when Israel launches an attack on a ship in international waters, the people onboard must accept whatever treatment they receive at Israeli hands. They must not fight back.

By contrast, one can only imagine how the U.S. press corps would rise up in collective fury if, say, Iran sent its commandos into international waters to attack and seize vessels that were on a humanitarian mission.

Lost Objectivity

What’s striking in all this is how far the U.S. news media has veered away from its supposed commitment to objectivity, even as it pretends to continue abiding by that journalistic principle.

The U.S. media also would drip with sarcasm over some of the post-facto rationales used to justify the attack, if the attacking nation wasn’t Israel.

For instance, there’s the Israeli accusation that the cargo on the ships wasn’t packed properly.

Shuki Sagis, chief executive of the Israel port at Ashdod, complained to the Jerusalem Post that the supplies – including scooters for the handicapped, wheelchairs, stretchers, hospital beds, boxes of medicine, food products and toys – weren’t neatly stacked.

“The cargo ships were loaded haphazardly, with all of the equipment mixed up in the large holds,” Sagis said. “Ships loaded in this way would not be accepted in any port. We are loading the equipment on the trucks far more carefully than it was loaded on to the ships.”

Other Israeli officials claimed that the humanitarian supplies on the ships were not items that were needed by the Gazans.

“I can say with great assurance,” said Colonel Moshe Levi, “that none of the equipment on board is needed in Gaza. The equipment that we found is all equipment that we have regularly allowed into the Strip over the past year.”

Levi said that fact “proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the whole premise of the voyage was for propaganda and provocation and not for humanitarian purposes.”

However, the Israelis did concede that their searches of the vessels turned up no weapons being smuggled into Gaza. The only “contraband” was construction equipment, including sacks of concrete and metal rods, Levi said.

Levi explained that Israel won’t let construction equipment in to rebuild Gaza, which was devastated by a month-long Israeli offensive that ended in January 2009, because the material might be used to build fortifications for "terrorists."

The notion that bombed-out Gazans must be made to survive in makeshift shanties so some future Israeli assault won’t be complicated by the existence of buildings that might be used by Gaza’s defenders could be regarded in a different context as evidence of grotesque inhumanity.

That is, if the perpetrators were some nation or group that the U.S. media didn’t like.

The Israeli Navy also claimed that it had learned an important lesson from its assault on the Freedom Flotilla.

A top Navy commander told The Jerusalem Post that the next time, Israel will use much more military force to stop the ships.

"We boarded the ship and were attacked as if it was a war," said the officer, who wasn’t identified by name. "That will mean that we will have to come prepared in the future as if it was a war."

Combined with other recent incidents, like Israel's Jan. 20 assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room and its open threats about bombing Iran, Israel might be diagnosed as suffering from a violent form of paranoia if it were a patient in a psychiatric ward rather than a nuclear-armed state.

Yet, instead of addressing this growing threat to world peace -- that is, Israel's increasingly erratic behavior and deepening religious fervor -- the U.S. news media continues to give this favored country a free pass.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

Israel's Big and Small Apartheids The meaning of a Jewish state by Jonathan Cook

This article is the text of a talk delivered by the author to the fifth Bilin international conference for Palestinian popular resistance, held in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 21

Israel’s apologists are very exercised about the idea that Israel has been singled out for special scrutiny and criticism. I wish to argue, however, that in most discussions of Israel it actually gets off extremely lightly: that many features of the Israeli polity would be considered exceptional or extraordinary in any other democratic state.

That is not surprising because, as I will argue, Israel is neither a liberal democracy nor even a “Jewish and democratic state”, as its supporters claim. It is an apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also inside Israel proper. Today, in the occupied territories, the apartheid nature of Israeli rule is irrefutable -- if little mentioned by Western politicians or the media. But inside Israel itself, it is largely veiled and hidden. My purpose today is to try to remove the veil a little.

I say “a little”, because I would need far more than the time allotted to me to do justice to this topic. There are, for example, some 30 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews -- another way of referring to the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and supposedly enjoy full citizenship. There are also many other Israeli laws and administrative practices that lead to an outcome of ethnic-based segregation even if they do not make such discrimination explicit.

So instead of trying to rush through all these aspects of Israeli apartheid, let me concentrate instead on a few revealing features, issues I have reported on recently.

First, let us examine the nature of Israeli citizenship.

A few weeks ago I met Uzi Ornan, an 86-year-old professor from the Technion university in Haifa, who has one of the few ID cards in Israel stating a nationality of “Hebrew”. For most other Israelis, their cards and personal records state their nationality as “Jewish” or “Arab”. For immigrants whose Jewishness is accepted by the state but questioned by the rabbinical authorities, some 130 other classifications of nationality have been approved, mostly relating to a person’s religion or country of origin. The only nationality you will not find on the list is “Israeli”. That is precisely why Prof Ornan and two dozen others are fighting through the courts: they want to be registered as “Israelis”. It is a hugely important fight -- and for that reason alone they are certain to lose. Why?

Far more is at stake than an ethnic or national label. Israel excludes a nationality of “Israeli” to ensure that, in fulfilment of its self-definition as a “Jewish state”, it is able to assign superior rights of citizenship to the collective “nation” of Jews around the globe than to the body of actual citizens in its territory, which includes many Palestinians. In practice it does this by creating two main classes of citizenship: a Jewish citizenship for “Jewish nationals” and an Arab citizenship for “Arab nationals”. Both nationalities were effectively invented by Israel and have no meaning outside Israel.

This differentiation in citizenship is recognised in Israeli law: the Law of Return, for Jews, makes immigration all but automatic for any Jew around the world who wishes it; and the Citizenship Law, for non-Jews, determines on any entirely separate basis the rights of the country’s Palestinian minority to citizenship. Even more importantly, the latter law abolishes the rights of the Palestinian citizens’ relatives, who were expelled by force in 1948, to return to their homes and land. There are, in other words, two legal systems of citizenship in Israel, differentiating between the rights of citizens based on whether they are Jews or Palestinians.

That, in itself, meets the definition of apartheid, as set out by the United Nations in 1973: “Any legislative measures or other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups.” The clause includes the following rights: “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

Such separation of citizenship is absolutely essential to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state. Were all citizens to be defined uniformly as Israelis, were there to be only one law regarding citizenship, then very dramatic consequences would follow. The most significant would be that the Law of Return would either cease to apply to Jews or apply equally to Palestinian citizens, allowing them to bring their exiled relatives to Israel – the much-feared Right of Return. In either a longer or shorter period, Israel’s Jewish majority would be eroded and Israel would become a binational state, probably with a Palestinian majority.

There would be many other predictable consequences of equal citizenship. Would the Jewish settlers, for example, be able to maintain their privileged status in the West Bank if Palestinians in Jenin or Hebron had relatives inside Israel with the same rights as Jews? Would the Israeli army continue to be able to function as an occupation army in a properly democratic state? And would the courts in a state of equal citizens be able to continue turning a blind eye to the brutalities of the occupation? In all these cases, it seems extremely unlikely that the status quo could be maintained.

In other words, the whole edifice of Israel’s apartheid rule inside Israel supports and upholds its apartheid rule in the occupied territories. They stand or fall together.

Next, let us look at the matter of land control.

Last month I met an exceptional Israeli Jewish couple, the Zakais. They are exceptional chiefly because they have developed a deep friendship with a Palestinian couple inside Israel. Although I have reported on Israel and Palestine for many years, I cannot recall ever before meeting an Israeli Jew who had a Palestinian friend in quite the way the Zakais do.

True, there are many Israeli Jews who claim an “Arab” or “Palestinian” friend in the sense that they joke with the guy whose hummus shop they frequent or who fixes their car. There are also Israeli Jews -- and they are an extremely important group -- who stand with Palestinians in political battles such as those here in Bilin or in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. At these places, Israelis and Palestinians have, against the odds, managed to forge genuine friendships that are vital if Israel’s apartheid rule is to be defeated.

But the Zakais’ relationship with their Bedouin friends, the Tarabins, is not that kind of friendship. It is not based on, or shaped by, a political struggle, one that is itself framed by Israel’s occupation; it is not a self-conscious friendship; and it has no larger goal than the relationship itself. It is a friendship -- or at least it appeared that way to me -- of genuine equals. A friendship of complete intimacy. When I visited the Zakais, I realised what an incredibly unusual sight that is in Israel.

The reason for the very separate cultural and emotional worlds of Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel is not difficult to fathom: they live in entirely separate physical worlds. They live apart in segregated communities, separated not through choice but by legally enforceable rules and procedures. Even in the so-called handful of mixed cities, Jews and Palestinians usually live apart, in distinct and clearly defined neighbourhoods. And so it was not entirely surprising that the very issue that brought me to the Zakais was the question of whether a Palestinian citizen is entitled to live in a Jewish community.

The Zakais want to rent to their friends, the Tarabins, their home in the agricultural village of Nevatim in the Negev -- currently an exclusively Jewish community. The Tarabins face a serious housing problem in their own neighbouring Bedouin community. But what the Zakais have discovered is that there are overwhelming social and legal obstacles to Palestinians moving out the ghettoes in which they are supposed to live. Not only is Nevatim’s elected leadership deeply opposed to the Bedouin family entering their community, but so also are the Israeli courts.

Nevatim is not exceptional. There are more than 700 similar rural communities -- mostly kibbutzim and moshavim -- that bar non-Jews from living there. They control most of the inhabitable territory of Israel, land that once belonged to Palestinians: either refugees from the 1948 war; or Palestinian citizens who have had their lands confiscated under special laws.

Today, after these confiscations, at least 93 per cent of Israel is nationalised -- that is, it is held in trust not for Israel’s citizens but for world Jewry. (Here, once again, we should note one of those important consequences of the differentiated citizenship we have just considered.)

Access to most of this nationalised land is controlled by vetting committees, overseen by quasi-governmental but entirely unaccountable Zionist organisations like the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. Their role is to ensure that such communities remain off-limits to Palestinian citizens, precisely as the Zakais and Tarabins have discovered in the case of Nevatim. The officials there have insisted that the Palestinian family has no right even to rent, let alone buy, property in a “Jewish community”. That position has been effectively upheld by Israel’s highest court, which has agreed that the family must submit to a vetting committee whose very purpose is to exclude them.

Again, the 1973 UN Convention on the “crime of apartheid” is instructive: it includes measures “designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups … [and] the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.”

If Jewish and Palestinian citizens have been kept apart so effectively -- and a separate education system and severe limits on interconfessional marriage reinforce this emotional and physical segregation -- how did the Zakais and Tarabins become such close friends?

Their case is an interesting example of serendipity, as I discovered when I met them. Weisman Zakai is the child of Iraqi Jewish parents who immigrated to the Jewish state in its early years. When he and Ahmed Tarabin met as boys in the 1960s, hanging out in the markets of the poor neighbouring city of Beersheva, far from the centre of the country, they found that what they had in common trumped the formal divisions that were supposed to keep them apart and fearful. Both speak fluent Arabic, both were raised in an Arab culture, both are excluded from Jewish Ashkenazi society, and both share a passion for cars.

In their case, Israel’s apartheid system failed in its job of keeping them physically and emotionally apart. It failed to make them afraid of, and hostile to, each other. But as the Zakais have learnt to their cost, in refusing to live according to the rules of Israel’s apartheid system, the system has rejected them. The Zakais are denied the chance to rent to their friends, and now live as pariahs in the community of Nevatim.

Finally, let us consider the concept of “security” inside Israel.

As I have said, the apartheid nature of relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens is veiled in the legal, social and political spheres. It does not mirror the “petty apartheid” that was a feature of the South African brand: the separate toilets, park benches and buses. But in one instance it is explicit in this petty way -- and this is when Jews and Palestinians enter and leave the country through the border crossings and through Ben Gurion international airport. Here the façade is removed and the different status of citizenship enjoyed by Jews and Palestinians is fully on show.

That lesson was learnt by two middle-aged Palestinian brothers I interviewed this month. Residents of a village near Nazareth, they had been life-long supporters of the Labor party and proudly showed me a fading picture of them hosting a lunch for Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. But at our meeting they were angry and bitter, vowing they would never vote for a Zionist party again.

Their rude awakening had come three years ago when they travelled to the US on a business trip with a group of Jewish insurance agents. On the flight back, they arrived at New York’s JFK airport to see their Jewish colleagues pass through El Al’s security checks in minutes. They, meanwhile, spent two hours being interrogated and having their bags minutely inspected.

When they were finally let through, they were assigned a female guard whose job was to keep them under constant surveillance -- in front of hundreds of fellow passengers -- till they boarded the plane. When one brother went to the bathroom without first seeking permission, the guard berated him in public and her boss threatened to prevent him from boarding the plane unless he apologised. This month the court finally awarded the brothers $8,000 compensation for what it called their “abusive and unnecessary” treatment.

Two things about this case should be noted. The first is that the El Al security team admitted in court that neither brother was deemed a security risk of any sort. The only grounds for the special treatment they received was their national and ethnic belonging. It was transparently a case of racal profiling.

The second thing to note is that their experience is nothing out of the ordinary for Palestinian citizens travelling to and from Israel. Similar, and far worse, incidents occur every day during such security procedures. What was exceptional in this case was that the brothers pursued a time-consuming and costly legal action against El Al.

They did so, I suspect, because they felt so badly betrayed. They had made the mistake of believing the hasbara (propaganda) from Israeli politicians of all stripes who declare that Palestinian citizens can enjoy equal status with Jewish citizens if they are loyal to the state. They assumed that by being Zionists they could become first-class citizens. In accepting this conclusion, they had misunderstood the apartheid reality inherent in a Jewish state.

The most educated, respectable and wealthy Palestinian citizen will always fare worse at the airport security check than the most disreputable Jewish citizen, or the one who espouses extremist opinions or even the Jewish citizen with a criminal record.

Israel’s apartheid system is there to maintain Jewish privilege in a Jewish state. And at the point where that privilege is felt most viscerally by ordinary Jews to be vulnerable, in the life and death experience of flying thousands of feet above the ground, Palestinian citizens must be shown their status as outsider, as the enemy, whoever they are and whatever they have, or have not, done.

Apartheid rule, as I have argued, applies to Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories. But is not apartheid in the territories much worse than it is inside Israel? Should we not concern ourselves more with the big apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza than this weaker apartheid? Such an argument demonstrates a dangerous misconception about the indivisible nature of Israel’s apartheid towards Palestinians and about its goals.

Certainly, it is true that apartheid in the territories is much more aggressive than it is inside Israel. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the apartheid under occupation is much less closely supervised by the Israeli civilian courts than it is in Israel. You can, to put it bluntly, get away with much more here. The second, and more significant, reason, however, is that the Israeli system of apartheid in the occupied territories is forced to be more aggressive and cruel -- and that is because the battle is not yet won here. The fight of the occupying power to steal your resources -- your land, water and labour -- is in progress but the outcome is still to be decided. Israel is facing the considerable pressures of time and a fading international legitimacy as it works to take your possessions from you. Every day you resist makes that task a little harder.

In Israel, by contrast, apartheid rule is entrenched -- it achieved its victory decades ago. Palestinian citizens have third or fourth class citizenship; they have had almost all of their land taken from them; they are allowed to live only in their ghettoes; their education system is controlled by the security services; they can work in few jobs other than those Jews do not want; they have the vote but cannot participate in government or effect any political change; and so on.

Doubtless, a related fate is envisioned for you too. The veiled apartheid facing Palestinians inside Israel is the blueprint for a veiled -- and more legitimate -- kind of apartheid being planned for Palestinians in the occupied territories, at least those who are allowed to remain in their Bantustans. And for this very reason, exposing and defeating the apartheid inside Israel is vital to the success of resisting the apartheid that has taken root here.

That is why we must fight Israeli apartheid wherever it is found -- in Jaffa or Jerusalem, in Nazareth or Nablus, in Beersheva or Bilin. It is the only struggle that can bring justice to the Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

Israeli Apartheid and The Nakba [Video]

Israeli apartheid week

Doc Jazz – Undhor! Anti-wall song and video

Doc Jazz – Undhor! Anti-wall song and video

By Guest Post • Nov 14th, 2009 at 21:12 • Category: Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Grassroots Activism, Israel, Music, Poetry, Events, Newswire, Palestine, Resistance

About the song

Music: Doc Jazz
Words: Doc Jazz and Miko

This song is dedicated to Basem Abu Rahme, 29 years old, who was non-violently protesting the theft of his village's farmlands and was shot dead by the Israeli Occupation Forces. Read his story here: http://palsolidarity.org/2009/04/6273
The song expresses support for the people's struggle against the Israeli Apartheid Wall in Bil'in and Nil'in, on the West Bank in Palestine. People there are waging daily non-violent protests against the confiscation of their lands and their livelihood, while the armed forces of Israel respond with live ammunition and have injured and killed several people in this way.

Lyrics

(see below for non-rhyming English translation)
Music by Doc Jazz
Words by Doc Jazz and Miko

Undhur!
Isma3!
Lazem
Terja3
Sha3bak beddo Falasteen

Undhur!
Isma3!
Sootak
Erfa3
Min Bil3een w min Ni3leen

Lazem enhedd el jedaar
Lazem ned3am el thuwwaar
El 3ado 3am yetleq naar
Jnood 3ala madaniyyeen

Bnetla3 3ala sat7 el daar
Bnerfa3 3alam el a7raar
Bendallna 3alal madaar
Thuwwaar w feda2iyyeen

1.
Wein el naas el mehtammeen
3adadna bil malayeen
Bne7lam beeki Falasteen
Mahma taalat el seneen

Sha3bik 3endo este3daad
Yesmod raghm el i7tilaal
Mahma taal el dholm w zaad
Istiqlaalik 3ala el baal

min ajlik
ya deir yasin
w min ghazza
7atta jeneen
maghla traabik falasteen
wardet ummetna

2.
Ahel Ghazza jabbareen
Ummahaatna samideen
Filnehaaye mansooreen
3ala qawm el ghaddaareen

braghm el 7aal wel 2a7waal
E7na 3endna isti3daad
Ennaadel ded el i7tilaal
Lan7arrer quds el amjaad

(c) 2009 Doc Jazz

- – - – - – - – - – - – -

Here is the (non-rhyming, and non-literal) English translation – although when you translate something, it's bound to lose some of its luster:

Watch!

Watch!
Listen!
You have to return
Your people wants Palestine

Watch!
Listen!
Raise your voices
From Bil'in and from Ni'lin

We have to bring down the wall
We have to support the revolutionaries
The enemy is opening fire
Soldiers against civilians

We climb unto the rooftops
We raise the flag of the free
We will stay around the clock
Revolutionaries and freedom fighters

1.
Where are the people who care?
Our numbers are in the millions
We dream of you oh Palestine
No matter how long the years are

Your people have the readiness
To be steadfast despite the occupation
No matter how long the injustice lasts, and increases
Your independence is on our minds!

For your sake, oh Deir Yasin
And from Gaza to Jenin
Your soil is so precious, Palestine
The rose of our nation

2.
The people of Gaza are so brave
And our mothers so resilient
And in the end they will overcome
The treacherous people

Despite the situation and the circumstances
We have the readiness
To wage resistance against the occupation
And to free Jerusalem, city of the exalted

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=221052&content=songinfo&songID=7788173

From Tariq, (Doc Jazz) Dear friends,

My recent concert in Al Quds University in Palestine was received very well, especially my Arabic anti-wall song "Undhor"!

This song now has a music video with footage from the anti-wall protests in Ni'lin and Bil'in, including the shots of where Palestinian activists manage to bring down a section of this horrendous Apartheid edifice.

I hope a music video like this can help keep the struggle against zionism, apartheid and racism alive. If you also think it can, then please mail the (link to) the video to your friends:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BKIvQRZpzc

Another great way to help re-igniting the fire of anti-wall activism is by posting this video on your Facebook page, your website, Twitter, or publicizing it by any internet means that is available to you.

Yours sincerely,

Tariq

P.S. the concert was recorded on video, and will be made available soon!