Chicago

While pro-Palestinian activists and supporters of Israel lined opposite sides of South LaSalle Street outside the Northern Trust Building in Chicago on 9 June, James Owens, the outgoing CEO and Chairman of Caterpillar Inc., told a room full of shareholders the company was not responsible for the way Israel uses the bulldozers the company manufactures in the United States. Kristin Szremski reports for The Electronic Intifada.

Suppose that the US weapon makers had to use a tunnel to deliver weapons to Israel. The US would have to build a mighty big tunnel to accommodate the weapons that Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Caterpillar have supplied to Israel. The size of such a tunnel would be an eighth wonder of the world, a Grand Canyon of a tunnel, an engineering feat of the ages. Kathy Kelly writes from Chicago, the United States after returning from Gaza.

Yesterday I wrote a piece entitled “Israel’s House of Horrors” about the openly murderous statements of Israeli cabinet ministers. Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, I read a news article on the website of The Jerusalem Post that Israel’s former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu – one of the most senior theocrats in the Jewish State “ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.” EI’s Ali Abunimah comments.

Reading an account of an Israeli cabinet meeting in Ha’aretz is like a trip through a House of Horrors. Here is a choice excerpt: “Ministers Meir Sheetrit and Rafi Eitan proposed Wednesday that Israel produce its own version of the Qassam rocket to be fired at targets inside the Gaza Strip in response to Palestinian rocket fire on its southern communities.” EI’s Ali Abunimah asks: Which other government could openly hold such discussions to such overwhelming silence from the so-called “international community”?

On Friday, December 8, six gunshots pierced the afternoon calm and six children started screaming. The cousins had been playing together with their usual gusto on the third-story veranda of their home in Aida Refugee Camp in the West Bank. A bullet tore through the slender body of one of them, a thirteen-year-old boy named Miras Al-Azzah. Several more bullets hit the stone house, and splinters of debris sliced into the bodies of the other children: Athal (10) and Rowaid (8), Miras’s younger sister and brother, and Maysan (12), Zaid (7), and Ansam (3).

If I could stop time I would, stop everything from moving forward, not for long, just for a few moments, just long enough to let out the scream that is growing in my lungs making it difficult to breathe. Here I am in Chicago on the hottest day of the year so far, an overcast day where the air is like a swimming pool, where the humidity is so thick you can smell it, feel it wrap around your skin as soon as you step outside. This morning I walked outside into the humid air and thought, immediately: Beirut.

“ ‘Arafat is filthy swine, there is no Palestine,’ and ‘Thank you for killing my cousins in Israel,’ were some of the more polite slogans shouted at Al-Awda activist Benjamin Doherty and me as we protested silently at the annual “Walk With Israel” on Chicago’s lakefront,” writes Ali Abunimah after a not so pleasant walk in Chicago’s beautiful lakefront park.

Only those who want the conflict to continue will maintain the lie about Palestinian textbooks and find in them non-existent excuses to continue the oppression and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people while what little is left of their country is stolen from under their feet.

It ought to be possible to find a way to resolve political conflicts peacefully so that no more Palestinian or Israeli parents are left to grieve. But the callous indifference and irresponsibility of the world’s great powers, the intransigence of Israel’s leaders and the weakness and divisions in the Arab world ensure that the Palestinian struggle — the last great anti-colonial struggle of the twentieth century — will continue well into the twenty-first.