Just that

Free Palestine! 

Stop playing with teams representing a genocide state!

A gift for peace

Yesterday, I received by post an amazing book - I started reading it this morning.

The sender was a friend but I don't know who. One way or another, I am grateful for the beautiful gift.

The book is about Rami and Bassam; two fathers who live in Jerusalem but on the other sides of the eternal war...

They are both fathers.

They are both fathers of daughters.

They have both lost their daughters.

The first pages of this book bring this in mind.

It was aired at BBC2 last Monday and it is strong, detailed, cruel and realistic. 

At this documentary, we follow the Gaza war through the eyes of three Palestinian children.

And now?

What the future holds for Rami and Bassam?

What the future holds for the three children of the documentary?

What the future holds for Palestinians and Israelis who have lost sons, daughters, husbands or wifes?

What the future holds for all the innocent people in Gaza, in Israel, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Iraq, in Armenia, in Russia, in Ukraine?

These words come to mind:

“Government is the Entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.” ― Frank Zappa

 
 

Log posts (Λ' : 30)

Ποια πράγματα μπορούν να αγγίξουν όλους τους ανθρώπους;

Ποιες έννοιες είναι πανανθρώπινες;

Ποια μουσική μπορεί να αγγίξει όλες τις ψυχές;     

Τι σημαίνει σήμερα Ειρήνη;

Αγάπη;

Πόλεμος;

Φόβος;

Πόνος;

'Ηθος;

Συναίσθηση;

Σήμερα...

που παιδιά σκοτώνονται στη Γάζα,

και όπου υπάρχει πόλεμος,

τι μπορούμε να ελπίζουμε από τους πολιτικούς;

Αυτούς τους διεφθαρμένους ηγέτες που έχουν διαπράξει και τα 7 θανάσιμα αμαρτήματα;

Πώς θα ακουγόταν σήμερα η "Ωδή στη Χαρά" αν την έπαιζε μια συμφωνική ορχήστρα

στα ερείπια της Παλεστίνης;

 

 

 

[Log posts on this blog are short texts/poems that I started writing in Oct 2018, I chose this name for these posts as Georgios Seferis has written poems using this title]

[Τα Log Posts σε αυτό το ιστολόγιο είναι σύντομα ποιήματα που ξεκίνησα να γράφω τον Οκτώβρη του 2018, διάλεξα αυτό το όνομα μιας και ο Γιώργος Σεφέρης έχει γράψει ποιητικές συλλογές με τίτλο "Ημερολόγια Καταστρώματος"]

Gary Lineker’s moderate views somehow seen by the right as subversive

The former England captain and Match of the Day host has again aroused the ire of Conservative Party politicians and media outlets

 

from the Irish Times

 

= = = 

 

Pile-on weeks like this are becoming more frequent for Gary Lineker, host of the BBC’s flagship football programme, Match of the Day. The player, who was famously never shown a card during a 16-year professional football career, has again faced calls to be removed from the field of play.

The most recent perceived transgression was not unlike the last. It was a Tweet, this time a re-Tweet calling for Israel to be banned from international football “until it ends its grave violations of international law”.

To a certain segment of the right, there is nothing more egregious, more irritating, more treacherous than an uppity former footballer, a footballer that thinks and has opinions, a footballer who is articulate.

“Gary Lineker is an ill-informed, ignorant commentator on the Middle East,” Tory MP Andrew Percy told The Telegraph.

“When is the BBC going to say enough is enough. Gary, get off the air. Shut up and enjoy your taxpayer funded salary,” said political commentator Alex Armstrong on GB News.

Stephen Crabb, a former cabinet minister and the parliamentary chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel, said: “This is a deeply inappropriate tweet for any BBC figure to endorse, and especially for someone of Lineker’s prominence.”

UK defence secretary Grant Shapps condemned the posts and called for Lineker to “stick to football”. He added that the world would be a “better place” if Lineker didn’t air his views on social media.

Lineker took more flak back in December when he signed a letter calling for the end of the government’s Rwanda scheme. He called the migrant policy “immeasurably cruel” and compared the language around it to 1930s Germany. The net result was a triggering of politicians, pundits and people on the X (formerly Twitter) platform into another tailspin.

A trusted commentator and the highest paid presenter in the BBC, Lineker has 8.9 million followers, more than the last three UK Prime ministers – Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson – combined. Sunak has 2.3 million followers on X, Johnson 4.6 million and Truss 671,000.

Another aspect to Lineker that his detractors cannot diminish is that he isn’t just an ex-footballer but a generational player, a revered England captain, a winner of the Golden Boot award at the 1986 World Cup. He also did something that English players of that time rarely did – he went to play the game in foreign countries, mainly Spain and Japan.

As the Football365 website put it, in unvarnished fashion, Lineker “is proving as ruthless at taking down shitehawk Tories as he was around the six-yard box . . . he has become something of a national treasure, at least to everyone who isn’t an absolute bastard”.

It is no coincidence that amongst the many Lineker has successfully provoked, are some of the same characters who were untruthful about Brexit, immigration, Covid and Europe.

His persona on Match of the Day comes across as effortless with a self-deprecating, understated charm. He has always been the boy you could bring home and know your mother would like because he is “other era” reasonable, even a little straight.

Just how he has become a lightning rod for the right is a cultural phenomenon, as Lineker’s views are far from chum in the water and no more than commonly held and moderate. Even through the most partisan prism he is no malcontent firebrand. At the heart of his outpouring is a decency shared by people who do not have his platform. This week, in The Daily Mail and GB News, that was construed as an affront.

Lineker makes himself an easy target for the shut-up-and-keep-dribbling-brigade and many of those who have recently attacked him have done so falsely under the anti-Semitic banner rather than engage with what Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC outlined when she recently presented to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

“On average, 247 Palestinians are being killed and are at risk of being killed each day, many of them literally blown to pieces. They include 48 mothers each day. Two every hour. And over 117 children each day, leading Unicef to call Israel’s actions a war on children. Entire multigenerational families would be obliterated.”

Politicians don’t like to go there, go to the heart of the matter. It’s far easier to have a dig at a famous BBC presenter.

“They’ve borrowed from Lineker’s playbook. Labour are a party of goalhangers and left-wing strikers. That doesn’t work in politics. The country needs centre forwards, people who are prepared to put the hard work in and create opportunities. And it needs a team captain with a plan,” said Conservative politician Penny Mordaunt.

“Thank you for mentioning me in your clumsy analogy. I’m just happy to have been better in the 6-yard box than you are at the dispatch box. Best wishes,” replied Lineker.

On whatever side people fall, the chain of Tweets and the spittle-flecked reaction to them shows how far the cultural dial has moved and what a strangely alien place it has become, when the moderate views of a former footballer are considered subversive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Scars on every street’: the refugee camp where generations of Palestinians have lost their futures

 On the grim present and the grimmer future for millions of Palestine people.

Violence against them creates only violent reactions from the suppressed ones...

and this is a vicious cycle with no ending...

 

from the Guardian

Last year, Kamal took his eldest son, Hassan, to meet a people smuggler. Kamal had made up his mind: he had to find a way to get his son, who was 21, out of Shatila refugee camp in southern Beirut, where three generations of his family had now spent their whole lives. “I wanted him to leave not because of the financial situation – thank God we are doing OK – but I sent him away to escape life in this camp,” Kamal told me recently. “There is no future here for the young.”

Kamal, a man in his late 40s, with broad shoulders, an angular jaw and dark curly hair, is a marginally well-to-do businessman within the impoverished confines of Shatila. He owns a small shop that sells mobile phones and cosmetics. Even so, to come up with the $5,000 demanded by the smuggler, he had to borrow a hefty sum, in addition to spending all his savings. Recounting the story, Kamal spoke quickly, jamming sentences together. His face was gaunt and dark circles framed his eyes. He looked exhausted.

Hassan set off on his journey to Europe in May 2023. First he flew to Cairo, then he was driven through the desert into Libya. At that point, Hassan called his father and told him that he and his fellow migrants were being held in a barn, while they waited for the boat to take them across the Mediterranean. “I called the smuggler and told him to move my son into a hotel and I will pay extra,” Kamal recalled. After 10 days in the hotel, the smuggler loaded the refugees on to a fishing trawler heading to Italy.

As we talked, Kamal sat with a couple of friends, perched uneasily on small plastic stools in a dark alleyway so narrow that every time a scooter whizzed past, the men had to bring their knees to their chests and turn sideways. The sun shone over Beirut, but little light trickled down to where Kamal sat. No walls surround the Shatila refugee camp. No barbed wires, watchtowers or checkpoints, at least not any more, prevent people from entering or leaving. But a mix of draconian laws, discrimination and prejudice has ensured that Shatila feels as claustrophobic as any camp enclosed by high concrete walls.

For Kamal, his son’s journey was just another episode in a displacement saga that had begun nearly eight decades ago. Like his parents before, and his children after, Kamal is a stateless Palestinian refugee whose life has withered away in the alleyways of Shatila. The same was true of the friends seated with Kamal.

On the walls around these men, layers and layers of history were visible: in graffitied slogans, the stencilled image of the Dome of the Rock, and in the hundreds of portraits of old leaders, from Yasser Arafat and the 1970s militants with their long sideburns, to a younger generation of fighters in combat fatigues – all slain, and celebrated as “heroes and martyrs” to be emulated by the next generation – to the pictures of Abu Ubaida, the current military spokesperson for Hamas.

In a time when far-right members of Israel’s government openly call for the people of Gaza to be displaced, sent into neighbouring countries or further afield, we do not need to imagine what life would be like for most of these Palestinians forced into exile. We already know. This displacement has happened once before. To see what that grim future might be like, just look at Shatila.

---

The words “refugee camp” conjure an image of a few hundred tents, something temporary to house a population in need. Shatila, with its population of more than 14,000 – some estimates go as high as 30,000 – is more like a small city within a city, and it has been here for more than 70 years. In the last decade, its population has rocketed. Syrians fleeing the civil war, as well as poverty-stricken Lebanese, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Bangladeshi migrant workers have all found shelter in the camp, which is now a densely populated slum. Squeezed between a major highway and a stadium not far from the centre of Beirut, it has nowhere to expand but vertically. New flats have been stacked precariously on top of each other, each slightly bigger than the one below, forming multistorey buildings whose top-floor windows kiss those on the other side of the alleyway. Stairs sprout from balconies, and beams stretch out, creating underpasses below.

For most of its history, Palestinian residents of the camp were segregated from the rest of Beirut. But the recent economic meltdown in Lebanon has brought the city to the doorsteps of Shatila. The main thoroughfare, where stalls sell fruit and vegetables, shoes, clothes and kitchenware, is cheaper than anywhere else in Beirut. On a recent visit, it seemed as if every available nook between buildings at street level had been turned into a grocery shop or a place for carts selling sweets to schoolchildren, who shouted and laughed as they manoeuvred between mopeds, their Unicef school bags bobbing up and down on their shoulders.

The camp’s origins go back to 1949, when a group of Palestinian refugees pitched their tent on a piece of wasteland on the outskirts of Beirut. Within weeks, more families, mainly from the Galilee, had settled there, and the International Committee of the Red Cross recognised it as one of the 17 camps housing about 100,000 Palestinian refugees who had fled to Lebanon, drifting through the villages of the south or arriving by boat in Beirut.

A small minority of the newcomers – middle-class or well-connected – were offered Lebanese citizenship; the rest, poor peasants like Kamal’s grandfather, were dispersed into camps. By then, the state of Israel was secure in most of historical Palestine, having defeated the ramshackle Arab armies who opposed Israel’s creation and completed the expulsion of more than 700,000 people in an exodus that became known to Arabs as the Nakba, or catastrophe. The images of the long caravans of people, driven from their ancestral towns and villages by the nascent Israeli state, marching towards their destiny as stateless refugees, carrying bundles and clutching the hands of children, would be seared on the collective memory not only of the Palestinians, but the region as a whole.

At first, clusters of tents, and sometimes whole camps, formed around traditional leaders and village elders. As much as the conditions of displacement and exile permitted, these camps recreated the communities back home. Over time, as these refugee camps expanded, they became ghettoes and shantytowns. Their continued existence was testimony to the historical injustice inflicted on their inhabitants. Yet, as such, the camps became a repository of memory, which conserved and perpetuated a Palestine national identity in exile.

When the first wave of Palestinian refugees arrived, they constituted about 10% of the entire population of Lebanon, and the Lebanese political and security establishment feared that the new arrivals would disturb the balance of power in the sectarian state, and challenge the Maronite Christian dominance. The army’s intelligence department was tasked with controlling the refugee camps through harsh surveillance, intimidation and repression.

For nearly two decades, most Palestinian refugees in Lebanon lived in wretched hovels of stones and wooden boards, with corrugated zinc sheeting and canvas roofs. Initially some of the refugees were suspicious of any permanent structure built by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), firm in their belief that their exile was temporary. But even when they were disabused of this idea, the Lebanese authorities prevented crucial building materials, such as cement, from entering the camps. They would not allow the refugees to construct anything that looked too permanent. This policy was ostensibly to “encourage the refugees to return” – as if they could simply do so by choice. Lebanon also imposed, and continues to impose, severe restrictions on the refugees’ basic rights to work. The only available employment outside the camps was casual menial labour, where exploitation was common.

In the 60s – and especially after 1967, when Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the six-day war – the struggle for “the liberation of Palestine” shifted from the corrupt and ineffective Arab regimes to Palestinian revolutionary organisations such as Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These factions, ostensibly working together under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, but often bickering and doing the bidding of their corrupt Arab regime sponsors, found in a new generation of refugees born in the shanties of exile – shunned, despised and segregated from the society around them – an eager youth ready to reverse the injustices of the Nakba and yearning for a return to a homeland they had never seen.

In Lebanon’s refugee camps, these factions replaced traditional relationships with patronage networks based on party loyalty, and gradually the Palestinians – who were perhaps the least sectarian of all Arab people – were sucked into the quagmire of sectarian Lebanese politics. Naturally they found themselves aligned to the leftists and mainly Muslim parties who challenged Maronite Christian dominance. Meanwhile, the Maronite Christian Phalange party and other rightwing Christian organisations found an ally in the Israelis. In the Lebanese civil war, which lasted from 1975 until 1990, the Palestinians became just another armed faction, albeit the strongest one. And it was during this period that the name of Shatila – and neighbouring Sabra – became synonymous with one of the worst atrocities of the war.

---

On my visit to Shatila in November last year, I met a woman, Suhaila, who vividly recalled the events of September 1982, when militias linked to the Phalange party, under the watchful eye of their Israeli military allies, rampaged through the alleyways of the camp for three days, slaughtering and raping hundreds of civilians, many of them women and children, while the Israeli soldiers stood by. (By then Palestinian fighters under the leadership of Yasser Arafat had left the city, under the terms of a US-sponsored deal that brought an end to months of Israeli bombardment of Beirut.)

“We were sitting at home when we heard people screaming, ‘They are here, they have entered the camp,’” recalled Suhaila, as she sat in a her small and tidy living room. A whiff of detergent and fresh Turkish coffee filled the room.

“My mother-in-law, who was staying with us, told my husband to go and see what was happening. The screaming became louder and I followed him outside. I saw a woman running towards us and dragging a child behind her. She was shouting, ‘They burned my husband in a barrel and shot his cousin.’ The child was screaming, and then I saw she was holding her intestines in her hand – her stomach was slashed open.”

Suhaila and her family fled, finding safety in an adjacent neighbourhood. When they returned to the camp a few days later, journalists and the Red Cross were uncovering the scale of the massacre. “When I came back to our house I saw knives on the floor. They were clean, but I became hysterical and started screaming, even though they were just our kitchen knives,” Suhaila said, laughing. She volunteered with the Red Cross and spent days going from house to house collecting corpses and limbs.

She poured coffee, and continued her war stories of bombardments and sieges by the Christians, the Shia, the Syrians and even by other Palestinian factions. She laughed again, and said that all her sons and daughters had been born in underground shelters during one battle or another.

One such battle occurred in 1986, at the start of a six-month siege by Amal Shia forces at the instigation of their Syrian masters. During a heavy bombardment of shelling, Suhaila’s eldest son, who was nine, was torn to pieces by an artillery shell.

“We have no grave for him, because he was buried with others in a mass grave, in the main mosque,” Suhaila said. “Whenever I pass by that mosque I hold the door and pray for him.”

By the end of the siege, nearly every building in Shatila was levelled. Suhaila could only identify her own house from a section of the kitchen wall that she had painted blue.

---

Sitting in the living room listening to Suhaila narrate her war memories was a friend of her youngest son, who was in his mid-20s. Afterwards, downstairs in the alleyway in front of the building, he lowered his head, pressing his long bushy beard against chest, and said in a low, almost inaudible tone, as if Suhaila could hear him from her sixth-floor apartment: “The old people keep talking about the history of the war. Fine, they suffered, but what is happening now in the camp is worse than any war. Young men are dying from drugs. A whole generation is wasting their lives because of the drugs and the poverty.” He was thin and slightly built with tired eyes. He said he spent his days shuffling three menial jobs, and still could not make ends meet.

He lit a cigarette and, as if to prove his point, he led the way down a maze of dark alleyways, barely wide enough for one person, and came to a stop in front of a shop with a large bare window. A row of half a dozen hookah pipes lined the door like a guard of honour.

Inside, two sofas were arranged in one corner, and a large TV screen hung on the grimy wall opposite. On one sofa sat three teenage boys, dressed in black, trying to look tough. On the other sat a very thin young man. His face was sallow under the bright neon light. Most of his teeth were missing, and the rest were black and rotten. He sank a bit deeper into the threadbare sofa, spreading his two emaciated arms, and leaning his head forward, he told me: “I am 23 and I have already spent two years in prison,” before adding with pride: “My name is on the wanted list at very single checkpoint from here and all the way to the Beqaa [valley].”

The boys, who were between 13 and 17 years old, looked at him with awe.

“We can get you any kind of drugs here in the camp, and they are much cheaper than in Beirut,” the man continued: coke, MDMA, heroin, hash and all kinds of pills. The more expensive varieties were for the people who lived in the city. The poor kids in the camps limited themselves to the cheaper and more potent synthetics. “What else can we do? There are no jobs here. Look at those boys – the minute they leave the camp they will be harassed by the army and police, so we just sit here,” the dealer told me.

He said he was a just mid-level dealer, and only did business with friends and acquaintances, and that it was mostly to pay for his own drugs. “A friend comes to me, says I want coke or hash, I get it to him and I get myself a bit extra.” He said he made about $1,000 a week. $500 was his capital, and $500 his profit, which he then split with one of the “factions”. “They take half of my profit as their cut, $250 for them and $250 for me.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“The armed factions ruling the camp. You must work with a faction for protection, no matter which one. Without their protection you can’t do business here. And it’s not only the Palestinians who are involved in this. The Lebanese security forces are all in this business. How do you think the drugs come here all the way from the Beqaa or Syria? There are dozens of checkpoints along the road. We even get things delivered through the airport.”

He laid his merchandise beside him: a few plastic sachets filled with white powder. “We have as much hashish as you want,” he said. From a pocket inside his jacket he pulled a small paper cone, opened it to reveal a small amount of a pale green, herb-like drug called salvia, and started rolling a joint. “That’s what we smoke in here – it’s cheap and makes you forget everything around you.”

Not far from the shop, a few men – mostly old, with greying beards, wearing ammunition webbings tight over their paunchy bellies and carrying old Kalashnikovs – stood guard outside their faction’s headquarters: which were decorated with the faction’s flag, and its once-idolised martyrs. Collectively these factions run the security of the camps, which lie outside the jurisdiction of the Lebanese state. Like their guns, they men were relics of the old struggle. Today, they seem to exist solely to collect protection money.

---

In Shatila, the signs of misery were everywhere. In a small ground-floor room, a grieving old mother dressed in black sat upright on her bed, staring at a bare wall. A neighbour told me that her only son, who was 25, had died two weeks ago. He had developed complications from a botched appendectomy, but no hospital would admit him, I was told, because he and his mother had no money to pay. Nearby, another older woman sat in her tiny room, crowded with two bunk beds, where a small brood of children shivered under thin blankets. They were the children of her son, who was killed by rebels in Syria a few years ago.

On the main road, two cows and a few sheep, their fleeces blackened with dirt, were slowly grazing on heaps of rubbish while two small children played quietly, having discovered a small plastic toy in one of the rubbish bags. In the distance, a man sifted through the rubbish, looking for food.

 

Amid the camp’s dejection and squalor, there were also pockets of hope. In one basement, a young girl with her hair raised in a bun was walking between the rows of two dozen children, going over their homework with them. “The UNRWA schools are so packed that the children don’t get a proper education. We volunteer here to help them study,” she said, adding that she was in her last year studying social sciences at university. “We have no option but to study.”

The scars of past wars could be glimpsed on every street – from the missing arm of the old fighter selling tomatoes to the facades of buildings hacked away by heavy gunfire. These scars had never healed, and the residents’ traumas never addressed, instead merely rekindled generation after generation – more atrocities, more oppression, new pictures of “martyrs” added to the old ones. These new martyrs belonged to a younger generation of men, killed not in the camps or in wars of Lebanon, but in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel.

Next to some graffiti depicting the last words of 18-year-old Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, a fighter killed in Nablus in an Israeli raid two years ago – “No one should leave the gun” – a group of young schoolchildren dumped their school bags and stood in line. One of them wore oversized military boots and khaki pants and wrapped his face with a keffiyeh. He gave an order, marching his troop of little boys up and down the alley. The days when the camps had significant military strength are long gone. But among the names of fallen Hezbollah fighters in the ongoing clashes along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel are a few Palestinians belonging to Hamas, who were recruited from the camps. “They are trained by Hezbollah and follow their military command,” a Hamas official told me in Beirut.

There were other pictures of dead young men around the camp, too, but these ones did not depict those who had died fighting against Israel. A few hung between buildings, flying over vegetable stands. They showed the faces of those who had fled the camps to seek a new life, but drowned as their boats sank in the Mediterranean.

Kamal’s son, Hassan, was one of these men. His last call to his father came on the night of 13 June. He told Kamal that they were being loaded on the fishing trawlers. The boat, which was supposed to head to Italy, capsized in Greek territorial waters. Greek coastal guards rescued dozens of those onboard, but 79 men and women died, and many more are missing.

Hassan’s body was never found, and Kamal believes he is still alive somewhere. “His friend who was with him told me he saw him swim all night, and I am sure he is somewhere in Greece. As long as I don’t see his body, I will continue to believe he is alive and he will come back to us one day.”

The smuggler, whose boat capsized, is still running his business from the same apartment in Beirut.

Some names have been changed

Follow the Long Read on X at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

 

 

 

 

 

Wix employee sacked over criticism of Israel files unfair dismissal claim

 from the Irish Times.

Courtney Carey, Irish employee of software company, fired after calling Israel a ‘terrorist state’ on social media

 

An Irish employee of Israeli tech company Wix who was sacked after calling Israel a “terrorist state”, has filed a claim seeking compensation for unfair dismissal to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).

Courtney Carey (26), from Clondalkin, southwest Dublin, was told she was being dismissed with immediate effect over her statements criticising Israel on social media last October.

Ms Carey, who had worked in the Dublin office of Wix for four and a half years, was fired following backlash from Israeli colleagues over comments she made following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Wix, a software company that provides a platform for people to build websites, employs about 500 people in its Dublin office.

In posts and comments on LinkedIn, Ms Carey had described Israel as a “terrorist state” and criticised the “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces.

Ms Carey wrote that Israel had “cut off food, water and electricity” to the Gaza Strip, as well as devastated infrastructure such as hospitals and schools. She said the “root cause of this violence is a Zionist ideology”, which “denies Palestinian identity”.

In a statement on social media, Wix president Nir Zohar said the company had “decided to part ways” with Ms Carey.

[ Internal Wix chat encouraged staff to support Israel’s ‘narrative’ in Hamas conflict ]

It is understood Wix decided internally to terminate Ms Carey’s employment following the backlash to her comments from other employees and customers.

Mr Zohar, who is also chief operations officer, said her comments had harmed “our Israeli team’s spirit” and threatened the “great connection” between its Dublin office and other Israeli colleagues.

His statement said Ms Carey had been asked “to be sensitive” after an initial social media post, but she later made further comments which pointed “a blaming finger at the victims of horrific terrorism”.

In an October 27th filing to the WRC, Ms Carey said she was seeking compensation due to her alleged unfair dismissal for “making negative comments about Israel”.

The claim stated she was fired “without due process and fair procedure” on foot of her comments. Wix did not respond to requests for comment on the WRC case.

Barry Crushell, a solicitor who specialises in employment law at Crushell & Co, is representing Ms Carey in the case.

Commenting on the filing, Mr Crushell said both he and Ms Carey were “looking forward” to securing an adjudication date at the WRC in the coming months. “In light of the very public manner in which her employment was terminated, we are exploring other legal avenues available,” he said.

Separately, internal messages show Wix staff worked to take down “pro-Hamas” websites in the days after the October 7th attacks, where Hamas militants crossed into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking around 240 others hostage.

Messages from a company Slack messaging channel show these efforts included plans to screen for images such as “Palestinian flags”, which one post said could indicate a website had “potential” to be linked to Hamas.

One internal message said Mr Zohar had approved a policy to remove websites “supporting terrorism in the context of the conflict with Israel”. The message added that “websites aimed at collecting food and donations for Palestinian citizens should not be removed”.

Another message said the Israel-headquartered company had received a request “from the prime minister’s office” providing Wix with “lists of new keywords” to search. The post said that, in response, Wix would provide “a list of websites”, including “all the info that exists about the user”, including their email, IP address, as well as any data Wix had about payments made through the website.

Wix did not respond to requests for comment about the internal Slack messages.

 

 

 

 

 

Israel can take Gaza. But it cannot leave it

 Fintan O'Toole writes in the Irish Times

What will remain after Israel’s fury is spent? Collective punishment is not justice. Scorched earth is not security. Desolation is not peace

 

In his history of a Roman invasion of northern Britain, Tacitus gives the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus a famous speech. Of the Romans, he says “They make a desert and call it ‘peace’.”

This is not meant to be an instruction manual. But Israel seems to be treating it as one. It will, after many thousands more civilians have died, eventually declare peace in a blood-soaked wasteland of rubble and dust.

There is, however, an obvious difference. The Romans, when they invaded the Highlands, were very far from home. They did not need to live beside a devastated Scotland. They could take it or leave it.

Israel can take Gaza. But it cannot leave it.

It has no exit strategy – not just in the immediate political and military sense, but in the plain, banal facts of geography. The terrible atrocities inflicted by Hamas on Israelis on October 7th dramatised a simple and inescapable truth: proximity. The Supernova festival, where young people were dancing through the night to trance music, was going on just five kilometres from the Gaza border fence.

It’s about a four-minute drive. WB Yeats’s grim phrase about Ireland during the Troubles – “Great hatred, little room” – recurs for a reason. There is no breathing space here. The toxic dust from a pulverised Gaza floats on Israel’s air too.

[ Israel-Hamas conflict: Thousands loot aid warehouses in Gaza as Israeli offensive widens ]

[ Labyrinth of Hamas tunnels poses greatest threat to Israeli offensive in Gaza ]

We know that dire intimacy all too well from our own very recent history. We know the terror of a tribalised topography, where a bend in the road is a sudden plunge into peril. We too, on our island, still have those tautologous structures: peace walls.

We know too well how familiarity can breed contempt, how physical closeness to the tribal enemy has to be negated by psychological distance. So near and yet so far: the more obvious the need to share a space, the more powerful the urge to erect supposedly impenetrable barriers. The daily evidence of common humanity feeds a desire to dehumanise.

In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture of 1994, the then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – soon to be murdered by a far-right Jewish extremist whose political heirs now serve in Binyamin Netanyahu’s government – evoked the haunted silence that follows a decision to launch an attack. Rabin knew what he was talking about: he commanded Israel’s armed forces in the Six Day War of 1967.

Rabin recalled “the hush when the hands of the clock seem to be spinning forward, when time is running out and in another hour, another minute, the inferno will erupt. In that moment of great tension just before the finger pulls the trigger, just before the fuse begins to burn; in the terrible quiet of that moment, there’s still time to wonder, alone: is it really imperative to act? Is there no other choice? No other way?”

The answer to those questions depends on what you mean by peace. Rabin, who was very good at the business of killing, knew what it did not mean. He understood that body counts are not victories and that there is no real security in mere superiority of arms.

“We invest,” Rabin said, “huge sums in planes, and tanks, in armored plating and concrete fortifications. Yet despite it all, we fail to protect the lives of our citizens and soldiers. Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life. There is only one radical means of sanctifying human lives. Not armoured plating, or tanks, or planes, or concrete fortifications. The one radical solution is peace.”

[ Thousands march through Dublin in support of Palestine amid conflict in Gaza ]

[ Israel-Hamas conflict: Israeli forces face a ‘moral dilemma from hell’ ]

This is not hippy-dippy peacenik piety. It is tough realism. Rabin’s prediction that bomber planes and tanks and fortifications would “fail to protect the lives of our citizens” was horrifically vindicated on October 7th. It is Rabin’s murderers, and their political progeny on Israel’s far right, who are the fantasists.

If you create a moral and literal wasteland on your doorstep, you can call it whatever you like – even peace. But it’s really just a vast, open-air radioactive dump that will continue to emit deadly particles of rage and hatred.

You cannot sanctify the lives of your own citizens by dehumanising those they are fated to live beside and among. You cannot overcome your own traumas by traumatising a whole population. You cannot immerse another generation of children in butchery and expect the future to be secure.

The hands of the clock have been spinning forward and there seems to be no one in power asking the questions about what comes after vengeance. How much revenge is enough? What remains after the fury is spent? Who is going to rule the wasteland?

Much as some of Netanyahu’s allies would like to do it, ethnic cleansing is not possible. Israel cannot drive the Palestinian populations into the Sinai or across the Jordan. Trying to do so would set the world ablaze and the world, however pitiful its current failings, cannot abide that conflagration.

If the Palestinians cannot be made to disappear, close proximity remains Israel’s destiny. It has to decide what kind of neighbours it wants. It has to decide what peace looks like.

At the moment, there seems to be no clue. There is, apparently, some make-believe world in which, after Gaza is levelled, somebody else sails in to take charge of the ruins, pay for reconstruction and make the shattered survivors behave themselves meekly and humbly. And meanwhile, five kilometres away, all-night dance festivals can resume in perfect safety.

It’s not going to happen. The abyss that Israel has to live beside will just get deeper and deeper. Israel’s own democracy, already on the edge, will, as the costs of war rise, become ever more tenuous. The “self” in “self-defence” will become more fractured and uncertain. The capacity to make a real peace will be further eroded.

Razing a city is not realism. Collective punishment is not justice. Scorched earth is not security. Desolation is not peace. Bloodshed is not irrigation. Human deserts, unlike physical ones, cannot be made to blossom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Το Ισραήλ, ο Bregovic, ο Πούτιν και ο Μπέος…

 Ο πόνος για τους νεκρούς στην Γάζα είναι ανείπωτος. Το Ισραήλ δέχεται οργανωμένη επίθεση…

Απορία όμως: όταν κάνει συστηματικούς επικοισμούς το Ισραήλ στην λωρίδα της Γάζας, αυτό δεν είναι πόλεμος; Οέο

Ας κάνουμε λοιπόν ένα μουσικό διάλειμμα με τον ανεπανάληπτο Goran Bregovic που έχει γράψει το πανέμορφο Bella Ciao (αντίο όμορφη, όμορφη η κοπέλα του αντάρτη που φεύγει στο μέτωπο αλλά όμορφη και η ζωή του που θα χάσει σε λίγο στον πόλεμο, υπερασπιζόμενος την Πατρίδα του).

Υποσημείωση: ο Goran είναι ανοικτά υπέρ της Ρωσίας στον πόλεμο στην Ουκρανία…και ως εκ τούτου οι πολιτισμένοι της Δύσης του αρνήθηκαν να εκφράσει την τέχνη του. Όπως είχαμε κάνει και εμείς οι πολιτισμένοι στα Ρωσικά μπαλέτα όταν ο Πούτιν έκανε ντου στην Ουκρανία.

Αλλά εμείς… είμαστε πολιτισμένοι! Έχουμε Μπέο και Αρίστους…