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The Palestinian letter behind the nixed Argentina-Israel soccer match

Argentinian forward Lionel Messi looks on as Jibril Rajoub speaks in Bethlehem, Aug 2013. (photo: Ahmad Gharabli / AFP)

Palestine Football Association chief Jibril Rajoub asked his Argentine counterpart to call off the game following “political pressure” by the Israeli government.

By Noa Landau and Jack Khoury | Haaretz | Jun 6, 2018

“The match itself is to take place in a stadium built on one of the at least 418 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel 70 years ago, Al Malha.”
— Jibril Rajoub in his May 28th letter to the Argentian Football Association

The head of the Palestine Football Association appealed last month before his Argentine counterpart to cancel the match against Israel slated for Saturday in Jerusalem. On Tuesday night, the Argentine Football Association cancelled the game, which was to take place in Jerusalem.

In the letter, the Palestinian soccer official stressed what prompted his protest was the Israeli government’s decision to move the game from Haifa, where it was originally planned to take place, to Jerusalem.

“The original field of the match was Haifa,” said the letter penned by Jibril Rajoub. “However and after political pressure took place from the Israeli government, as it was openly said by Israel’s Minister of Culture and Sports Miri Regev, the match was moved to Jerusalem. This is a decision that, given the current context, the Palestine Football Association utterly rejects and condemns.”

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Killing of Gaza nurse shows how cheap our blood is to Israel

 

Razan Al Najjar resuscitates a patient in a medical field tent in Gaza. (photo: Getty Images)

We are neither more nor less resilient and steadfast than any other human people in this world. We too feel pain and suffering. We too have a breaking point.

By Muhammad Shehada | Forward | Jun 4, 2018

We Gazans are caught between a rock and an unlivable, uninhabitable place, where the water we drink and the soil in which we plant are poisoning us and our children. Our air, land and sea are completely sealed off by Israel and Egypt’s military might. We Gazans endure humanitarian disaster, generation after generation, and are denied even the most basic right to escape a slow death. We are two million civilian prisoners, caged in a toxic slum from birth to death.

On June 1, 21-year-old volunteer paramedic Razan al-Najjar was shot dead at the Gaza protests while rescuing injured protestors near the separation fence.

Anyone with the smallest modicum of moral decency should be shattered, devastated and overwhelmed by her death, just as they should be devastated by the horrendous improvised projectile that hit a kindergarten in Israel. Both incidents deserve unequivocal condemnation, at the very least, though only one resulted in death (thank God, none of the children were hurt).

But al-Najjar’s murder shows us something else, something horrific that transcends the border shootings. For the systematic dehumanization of the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza, happens not only at the hands of the Israeli guns and policies but in the media afterwards, in the framing by Israel’s supporters.

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Who needs BDS? Israel scores Spectacular own goal in Argentina soccer fiasco

Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev; Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi (photos: Emil Salman and Sergio Perez / Reuters)

The Argentines didn’t want to play an exhibition match in Israel in the first place, but would have come to Haifa. Then Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev moved in.

By Uzi Dann | Haaretz | Jun 6, 2018

The move to Jerusalem and marking the game as part of Israel’s 70th-birthday celebrations gave legitimization to Israel’s opponents. They didn’t score a single goal but Regev did — an own goal, perhaps the most spectacular one in Israeli soccer history.

Argentine President Mauricio Macri is a friend of Israel, and of the large Jewish community in Buenos Aires. But even he, a former president of the Argentine soccer club Boca Juniors, knows that in any properly run country politicians don’t meddle with national soccer. (Not that Argentina is entirely a properly run country, but Israel is even less so.)

Such meddling would also break the rules of FIFA, the soccer world’s governing body. That’s why Macri politely declined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request to intervene in the decision to call off the exhibition match set for Jerusalem.

Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev not only doesn’t get this, but she’s the main culprit for legitimizing Argentina’s decision not to come. If there’s one thing that Israeli governments have been scrupulous about over the years, it has been not to mix politics and sports.

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The Palestinians who never left

Displacement: with the 1948 expulsions most Palestinians became homeless refugees; some, as in Jaffa, stayed on. (photo: Bettmann / Getty)

While Gaza rages, a visitor to Jaffa discovers how many remained after the great expulsions of 1948, continuing to live and work in something like the diverse society they remembered.

By Stuart Braun | Le Monde Diplomatique | Jun 2018

As former citrus grove worker Ismail Abu Shehadeh reminded me, “you must wipe 1948 from your mind. Four thousand bombs were dropped on Jaffa — and it was a small place. Forgetting is a blessing from God.” Better for the old not to bring up the past, not to remember.

Sixty unarmed protestors were killed last month by Israeli military on the Gaza border, on the day that the US inaugurated its new embassy in Jerusalem, outraging the world; the Palestinians had been, in part, commemorating the Nakba, the catastrophe of the displacement of so many from the new state of Israel 70 years ago. The Great March of Return movement argues for the refugees’ right to come back to their ancestral lands. Yet some communities never left.

Staying in an Arab area south of Tel Aviv, I realized that Christian and Muslim Arabs and Jewish Israelis were, despite the divisive policies and rightward march of the Israeli government, still living together in a microcosm of what was once a very diverse part of the world. I’d been uneasy about travelling to Israel, and my pregnant wife and I were worried when, on our first afternoon, we heard that a Palestinian man had driven a truck into a crowd in Jerusalem and killed four young Israeli soldiers. We had found our apartment, which was in Ajami, a rundown district near the port of Jaffa, and our host, who lived next door with four generations of her Arab Christian family, welcomed us kindly with coffee in a sunny courtyard amid citrus trees in fruit. She was over 70, and had probably been a small child when her homeland ceased to exist. I had not expected to find anyone like her in modern Israel.

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US Ambassador Friedman slams American reporters for critical coverage of Gaza deaths

US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman speaks during a reception hosted by the Orthodox Union in Jerusalem, May 14, 2018 (photo: Ammar Awad / Reuters)

Friedman says criticism of recent Palestinian death toll in the Strip is aimed mainly at “my friends in the United States and one Israeli newspaper I’ve been known to criticize here” — a seeming reference to Haaretz.

By Judy Maltz | Haaretz | Jun 4, 2018

“I find it curious that an ambassador who repeatedly refuses requests to speak to the media is now criticizing the media. The international media is not a monolithic entity, and for him to generalize like this is simplistic, inaccurate and misinformed.”
— Joe Federman, chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Israel

US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman on Monday accused the media of major bias against Israel in its coverage of the recent violence on the Gaza border, telling reporters to “keep your mouths shut until you figure it out.”

Speaking in Jerusalem, Friedman said his criticism was aimed mainly at “my friends in the United States and one Israeli newspaper I’ve been known to criticize here” –—seemingly a reference to Haaretz, which the ambassador slammed in February after Gideon Levy published a piece criticizing him and his donation of an ambulance to a West Bank settlement.

Friedman claimed that most journalists covering the clashes in recent weeks had never bothered investigating whether Israel had other viable alternatives for defending its border besides using live fire. . . .

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In a victory for BDS, Argentina’s national soccer team cancels a game in Israel

 

Argentina’s Lionel Messi, center, hugs teammates after scoring his hat trick during a friendly soccer match between Argentina and Haiti in Buenos Aires on May 29, 2018. (photo: Victor Caivano / AP)

In a mammoth victory for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, the squad of Lionel Messi will not be playing in Jerusalem.

By Dave Zirin | The Nation | Jun 6, 2018

“This is major. Though it may not be the first sports boycott . . . one of the most visible teams and renowned players in global futbol has refused to normalize Israel’s national institutions at a critical political juncture.”
— Noura Erakat, human rights attorney and professor at George Mason University

he group Jewish Voice for Peace called it “a watershed moment“ and “the biggest victory for BDS [the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement].” Israeli defense minister Avignor Lieberman seethed that this week has seen a win for “Israeli-hating inciters.”

What spurred such an impassioned reaction on both sides? It wasn’t Lorde canceling a concert and it wasn’t Natalie Portman refusing an award. This time it is the Argentina National Soccer Team saying no to the Israeli state. With three days notice, the renowned squad has canceled a friendly World Cup warm-up match in Jerusalem, a game that sold out last month within 20 minutes of tickets’ going on sale. Now no one will be watching anything.

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Doctor recalls slain Palestine paramedic’s bravery

Dr. Marc Sinclair with volunteers and Razan Al Najjar (third from left) in Gaza. (photo: Marc Sinclair / Khaleej Times)

Razan is remembered for her speech and the way she always talked about her determination.

By Sherouk Zakaria |Khaleej Times | Jun 4, 2018

 “On one side, you have kids with slingshots and people who burn tires, and on other side, there’s sophisticated army of snipers and soldiers.”
— Dr. Marc Sinclair

 

Along the fence dividing the Gaza Strip from Israel lie a bunch of tents of volunteers who drag injured demonstrators away from the danger zone to provide necessary help using basic medical tools.

One of the young women in white paramedic’s uniform was Razan Al Najjar, the 21-year-old volunteer emergency medical worker who was recently shot dead as she tried to aid a demonstrator, during the ongoing Palestinian protest campaign.

“Razan was a very outspoken and proud woman. She was sure of her role and what she could do to contribute on ground,” said Dr Marc Sinclair, a Dubai-based pediatric orthopedic surgeon who founded the Little Wings Foundation charity that treats children in Palestine.

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Boycott is best response to illegal Israeli killings

A sign at a pro-Palestinian protest in Paris on May 12, 2018. (photo: Etienne Laurent / The Irish Times

The EU is complicit in the enabling of Israel’s violation of Palestinians’ rights.

By Omar Barghouti | The Irish Times | May 15, 2018

Despite Israel’s descent into unmasked, right-wing extremism and its decades-old military occupation and oppression of Palestinians, the EU continues to treat it as if it were above international law.

Today, Palestinians everywhere will commemorate the 1947–1949 Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) — the ethnic cleansing of the majority of indigenous Palestinians from our homeland and the systematic destruction of hundreds of our villages and towns to establish Israel as an exclusionary state.

In 1948, when Zionist paramilitaries forced the family of my late grandmother, Rasmiyyah, out of their spacious home in the picturesque city of Safad at gunpoint, the seminal process of settler-colonialism that was enabled by the Balfour Declaration became personal to my family. The Nakba has shaped my identity and the identity of millions of other Palestinian descendants of refugees.

To suppress the massive peaceful demonstrations in Gaza, where the majority are Nakba refugees and their descendants, demanding an end to the 12-year-old siege and refugees’ rights, Israel has enacted a shoot-to-kill-or-maim policy, killing dozens and injuring thousands, many with live ammunition. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has condemned these crimes, while Amnesty International has called on world governments “to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel” as an effective measure of accountability.

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Young evangelicals waver in support for Israel

evangelicals
US evangelical Christians march in the Sukkot holiday parade in Jerusalem on Octc20, 2016. (photo: Abir Sultan / EPA)

Generational split reflects concern over Palestinians, spurring outreach by some churches and groups.

By Ian Lovett | The Wall Street Journal | Jun 3, 2018

“The New Testament, I think, would be in favor of human rights.”
— Jackie Westeren, a rising senior at the evangelical Wheaton College

Growing up in evangelical Christian churches, Caleb Fitzpatrick learned quickly to be a steadfast supporter of Israel. From a young age, Mr. Fitzpatrick said, he was taught that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, “was a hero” and that “Christians are supposed to back Israel on everything.”

But the Tampa, FL, native, who just finished his junior year at Liberty University, an evangelical school, has become critical of Israel for what he says is its mistreatment of Palestinians.

“Human rights is a core issue to me,” Mr. Fitzpatrick, 21, said. “It’s less important to me who has dominion over the northern part of historical Israel.”

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The Arab world needs to move beyond the liberation of Palestine

A Palestinian demonstrator covers her face with the colors of the Palestinian flag during clashes with Israeli security forces following a protest on the Gaza-Israel border, Apr 6, 2018. (photo: Mohammed Abed / AFP)

Israel is going nowhere, and we in the Arab world have to deal with it. That means offering Israelis prosperity, security and friendship; all Israel needs to do is overcome their prejudices and give Palestinians their rights.

By Khalaf Al Habtoor | Haaretz | Jun 4, 2018

Israelis and Palestinians should revolt against the useless old leadership and outdated playbooks keeping them on different sides of the fence. Tear down those figurative and material walls. People power could be a game changer. The men in suits bent on consolidating power have let you down. Peace engendered by the very people who have the most to gain (and to lose) could work where all else has failed.

For the people caught in the enduring Israeli-Palestinian conflict, their own leaders and Western intermediaries have failed.

Summits, conferences, accords and a roadmap going nowhere have been a waste of time and effort. Earlier attempts at finding solutions brokered by US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were genuine — but were stymied. Those that followed were either fig leaves or half-hearted.

Today, there is not only “nothing on the table,” there is no table. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced there would never be a Palestinian state on his watch — a statement he later retracted for international consumption — he meant every word. Just days ago, his government announced it would consider approving the construction of 2,000 more settler homes on the West Bank.

And, quite frankly, I am beginning to think President Donald Trump’s blueprint for peace is a figment of his imagination.

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