Under the Radar | Israeli Ship Blocked From Unloading in Oakland for Four Days

August 19, 2014 by Styliani GP

San Francisco Bay Area activists have not allowed a vessel from Israel’s largest shipping company to unload in the Oakland Port for four consecutive mornings.
Organizers had initially planned a one-day action for 16 August, delaying the weekly, Saturday-scheduled offloading of the Zim ship by just one full work day. Saturday’s success was seamless: the Zim Pireaus avoided the Oakland Port completely, preferring to remain at sea south of Oakland rather than meet the thousands of protesters who had descended onto the docks.

But, fueled off the initial triumph, activists returned to Berth 57 at the Oakland Port the next evening, on Sunday, 17 August. On Tuesday, 19 August, at 6:45am, activists declared yet another victory against the Zim Line, which has been trying to make its way into Oakland since Saturday, 16 August.

Read the full article here | The Electronic Intifada

People Convert their Anger about Gaza into Anti-Semitism… Again | With Middle East Aside, in Europe This is Not a Surprise Either

August 5, 2014 by Styliani GP

Many news outlets, including the New York Times, are reporting that — since Israel launched its military operation against Hamas on June 8 — there have been alarming spikes in incidents of anti-Semitism across Europe.

This is true. But there’s an even scarier truth: Europe has had a growing anti-Semitism problem for years now.

There’s good reason to be worried about all this. Europe has a rich history of fascism and Nazism, and of mass murdering Jews. The governments in Germany, France, and Italy were all so collectively freaked out about recent upticks in vitriol directed at Jews that they issued a joint statement on July 22: “Anti-Semitic rhetoric and hostility against Jews, attacks on people of Jewish belief and synagogues have no place in our societies,” they said, in glorious unison.

Read the full article here | Global Post

7 Things to Consider Before Choosing Sides in the Middle East Conflict | (… to name a few)

July 31, 2014 by Styliani GP

1. Why is everything so much worse when there are Jews involved?

2. Why does everyone keep saying this is not a religious conflict?

3. Why would Israel deliberately want to kill civilians?

4. Does Hamas really use its own civilians as human shields?

5. Why are people asking for Israel to end the “occupation” in Gaza?

6. Why are there so many more casualties in Gaza than in Israel?

7. If Hamas is so bad, why isn’t everyone pro-Israel in this conflict?

Read this very interesting article here | The Huffington Post

Collective Punishment in Gaza | The New Yorker

July 31, 2014 by Styliani GP

Read the full article | The New Yorker

[… Punishing Palestinians for existing has a long history. It was Israel’s policy before Hamas and its rudimentary rockets were Israel’s boogeyman of the moment, and before Israel turned Gaza into an open-air prison, punching bag, and weapons laboratory. In 1948, Israel killed thousands of innocents, and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands more, in the name of creating a Jewish-majority state in a land that was then sixty-five per cent Arab. In 1967, it displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians again, occupying territory that it still largely controls, forty-seven years later.

In 1982, in a quest to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization and extinguish Palestinian nationalism, Israel invaded Lebanon, killing seventeen thousand people, mostly civilians. Since the late nineteen-eighties, when Palestinians under occupation rose up, mostly by throwing stones and staging general strikes, Israel has arrested tens of thousands of Palestinians: over seven hundred and fifty thousand people have spent time in Israeli prisons since 1967, a number that amounts to forty per cent of the adult male population today…]