al-Nakba: the Palestinian "Catastrophe"

Ironic, how quickly innocent victims can become ruthless victimizers

Home

Why focus on Israel?

Do Jews need a state?

Index of topics

Who are we?

Our directors

Our methods

Community actions

Sponsored events

Community television

Using the internet

News & Views

Our ongoing commentaries

Palestine: Just Justice!

Balfour Declaration

UN partition resolution

UN Charter

Universal Human Rights

VFP resolutions

The Zionist project

Origins: 1948

UN terrorism chronology

UN resolution 194

Israel founding document

US recognition

Admission to UN

"A land without a people"

Pix of Arab life before

Pix of Arab life after

Jewish refugees

1967 war

Admission of deceit

USS Liberty

UN Resolution 242

1973 Yom Kippur War

The Samson Option

Arab oil embargo

Invasions of Lebanon

1982

2006

al-Nakba continuing

Memoricide

Cultural strangulation

Land theft & destruction

Jewish National Fund

Israeli massacres

Extrajudicial actions

Killing the children

4th Geneva Convention

UN resolutions

US enabling

The Lobby

The soft lobby

duplicitous media

Resistance

Palestinian terrorism

1st intifada

2nd intifada

Jenin

Spirit of resistance

Attacks on internationals

an Apartheid state

Israeli racism

Israeli laws

Occupied Palestine

Israeli self-destruction

Solutions

Counter-Zionism

2-state model

The "peace process"

Peace process products

1-state model

a 2-stage model

a 12-step model

Right of Return

Arab Peace Initiative

Beyond Zionism

non-violent force fields

The MLK method

local activism

Sources & resources

web sites

books and videos

We live in a university community where the "peace" and other "progressive" organizations have been largely co-opted or intimidated by pro-Israel influences and no Palestinian perspective had been visible before our project.  The university community had been kept in hand by Hillel, Stand With Us, Campus Watch and AIPAC interns ever watchful for faculty and students unfriendly toward Israel.  This has increased with the growing effectiveness of the BDS movement, with university campuses specifically targeted by the pro-Israel propaganda machine.
 
We use numerous methods to break up this McCarthyesque perversion of the educational environment, including op-eds and letters-to-the-editor in both community and student newspapers and co-sponsorship with student organizations of educational events on Palestine, Palestinian rights and Israeli abuses of human rights. This has included numerous Israeli and other Jewish presenters.

In order to address evolving current events and issues in the Israel/Palestine dynamic, our public display from April through October changes over time as we incorporate what we consider the most honest and salient writings on recent events by journalists, authors, historians, international legal authorities, and other highly qualified commentators. 

We opportunistically use events in the community and the news to raise community awareness. For example, following the Israeli attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters and massacre of nine Turkish humanitarian workers on the Turkish-flagged vessel Mavi Marmara on Memorial Day 2010, we petitioned the Eugene Human Rights Commission to issue a letter of condemnation against Israel for their illegal attack in international waters, multiple murders, piracy, kidnapping, property theft, and false imprisonment of passengers and crew of all flotilla vessels. We invoked legal standing as citizens of a country that supports Israeli abuses financially and protects them from justice through UN Security Council vetoes, and identified nine U.S.-made weapons systems used in the Israeli attack.  

Like our other actions, this met with vigorous resistance from the pro-Israel Jewish organizations in our county and deliberate disinformation about us and our objectives.  Although the commission was initially favorable, massive protest at a subsequent meeting by Jewish Federation members scuttled the project through flagrant intimidation. A Jewish speaker said, "Please keep silent on this matter or send a letter of honor to Israel, lest you be tagged with the label of anti-Semitism and limit the good work you could do at home in Eugene."  (Imagine, a letter of honor for murder, piracy, grand theft, kidnapping and false imprisonment!  Now that's supreme chutzpah!)
 
But win or lose, these public challenges serve an important function, creating opportunities to raise public awareness by flushing them into the open where they are forced into a public debate they cannot ultimately win.

The Israel defense network and lobby is dedicated, relentless, intensive and unscrupulous at the national, regional and local levels.  We aren't sure to what depths of perfidy they will stoop, but this uncertainty is intrinsic to their strategies of intimidation, following Moshe Dayan's prescription for Israel to "be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." 
 
Was the example above merely a threat of name-calling or something more sinister?  That is the doubt that skilled intimidators attempt to implant. It is nothing less than non-specific extortion.  But based as it is upon a crumbling foundation of injustice and lies, it is doomed to ultimately fail and self-destruct through its own arrogant and alienating hubris. 

Demand Freedom, Justice and Equality in the Holy Land