#Haifa city

[palestiniansilk]

What Is Home? Falasteen on 08 March ´24

For years, I believed that home was simply where family dwelled—a truth, yet incomplete. I never imagined that home could transform until I first glimpsed Palestine. There, I felt the echoes of longing from those who were torn away from this land. A veil of sorrow draped over me, mingled with an unexpected warmth, as if the earth itself whispered, “Welcome.” I found myself home… Was I a voice for those who could never return? Or was it my soul that ached for this place, yearning for a home it had never known?

[wgm-beautiful-world]

H A I F A

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Migrations Subscription Box: Summer Edition! Very excited for all four of these--THE NIGHT, THE NIGHT looks wild, especially!

[a-typical]

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappé (2006)

[jontycrane]

Haifa, Rosh Hanikra, Akko, and Caesarea

A post covering Israel’s north coast, home to its third largest city, Crusader fortifications, a Roman city, and natural beauty on the border with Lebanon. To start with Haifa, Israel’s main port, a bustling place that spreads up the 546m high Mt Carmel, becoming less industrial and more desirable with altitude. By far its most famous sight are the incredible Baha’i Gardens, some of the most…

[chainofclovers]

text: Israeli Jews and Palestinian Israelis come together to demand an end to the war on #Gaza.

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Peace activists have taken part in a protest in Israel's third-largest city, Haifa, demanding a ceasefire in the war on Gaza and the exchange of captives and prisoners between Hamas and #Israel.

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Currently, they [the protestors] are chanting 'refuse to kill, refuse to fight, refuse to murder' - this is our call," says Omri Evron, a member of the Communist Party of Israel, who helped organise the anti-war protest.

(x)

[salty-goldfinch]

Haifa today #sketch #haifa #pencil #drawing #sketchbook #city https://www.instagram.com/p/CjpnPDIqVqm/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[allthegeopolitics]

Despite months of oppression and aggression, Palestinian citizens of Israel are regularly holding protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, demonstrations that have been met with police brutality. On Thursday (May 30) evening, dozens gathered in Haifa, a northern port city with a mixed Jewish-Palestinian population. Moments after a protest began, police attacked demonstrators, claiming they were acting illegally. Eight people were forcibly arrested by police, who protesters say beat and insulted them.

Continue Reading

[zvaigzdelasas]

Major coordinated demonstrations took place across the world on Saturday to mark the 100th day of Israel's bombardment and military assault on the people of the Gaza Strip that have now claimed the lives of nearly 24,000 Palestinians, a large majority of them innocent men, women, and children who had nothing to do with the attacks orchestrated by Hamas on October 7 of last year.

In London, as many as 500,000 people marched on Parliament Square to demand an immediate cease-fire Gaza, condemn their own U.K. government's support of Israel's disproportionate and "genocidal" onslaught, and warn against a wider regional war that experts warn is creeping closer by the day.[...]

In Dublin, organizers of a march that saw more than 100,000 march through city streets called it the largest rally for Palestinian rights in Irish history.[...]

The crowd was filled with Palestinian flags, posters calling for an "End to the Gaza genocide" as well as makeshift washing lines, with baby clothes hanging from it, representing the many young lives lost in the conflict.

At the front of the march, four people held mock corpses in bloody body bags to represent the growing number of civilian casualties.

In the United States, tens of thousands marched in Washington, D.C. to denounce the Israeli onslaught—which has claimed over 23,000 lives, including more than 10,000 children—as well as their own government's complicity in the carnage. President Joe Biden was on the tip of many demonstrators' tongues and polls in the U.S. have shown very little support across the political spectrum for how he is handling the situation.[...]

Following the march, demonstrators left a pile of bloodied baby dolls, including severe parts, in a pile outside the White House as a message to Biden. "The blood of the over 10,000 murdered children in Gaza is on his hands," said CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans.

Meanwhile, in Indonesia, thousands gathered outside the U.S. embassy in Jakarta to condemn the ongoing "genocide" in Gaza perpetrated by Israel with the backing of the U.S. government and other Western allies.

Large protests were also held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as well as in the South African cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg. [...]

Cities in Israel were not among those holding large-scale demonstrations against the government's ongoing military campaign in Gaza. One application by Israelis for a rally in Haifa to denounce the onslaught was rejected.

13 Jan 24

[opencommunion]

"The Israeli occupation forces have since Thursday dawn continued their aggression against the city of Jenin and its camp, conducting street sweeps and engaging in sabotage and destruction of citizens' property. In response, Resistance fighters are confronting these attacks with bullets and bombs. ... Our correspondent added that the occupation forces declared Jenin a closed military zone.

According to local media reports, the occupation forces also targeted medical teams and ambulances, prevented citizens from entering or leaving the city, raided several homes, and destroyed vehicles, fruit and vegetable stands, as well as house fences.

The occupation forces also conducted extensive bulldozing operations in al-Nassera and Haifa Streets at the Jabriyat and al-Zahraa neighborhoods, the al-Jalbouni roundabout, Wadi Burqin, and the vegetable market on Abu Bakr Street. These operations resulted in a power outage in several neighborhoods and destroyed the Martyrs' Monument. Additionally, they conducted a raid on the Turkish mosque in Jabriyat.

The occupation forces bombed a motorcycle in the Jabriyat neighborhood using a drone and also shot a young man directly before arresting him. They further arrested two other young men and a woman, reportedly to pressure her son to surrender to the occupation forces. Mustafa Hamarsheh, Deputy Director of Jenin Governmental Hospital, informed the Wafa Agency that the occupation army imposed a strict siege on the entrances to the camp. This siege has effectively blocked access to the hospital, preventing both entry and exit and severely restricting the movement of ambulances."

14 June 24

[odinsblog]

Land and Housing

As a result of decades of land confiscations and discriminatory land policies, Israeli authorities have hemmed in Palestinian towns and villages, while nurturing the growth and expansion of Jewish communities, many of which in practice exclude Palestinians. The majority of Palestinians in Israel live in these communities, while some live in “mixed cities” like Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa.

Ninety-three percent of all land in Israel constitutes state land, directly controlled by the Israeli government. Israeli authorities confiscated much of this land, several million dunams, from Palestinians through several different legal instruments, as documented in a later chapter of this report. A government agency, the Israel Land Authority (ILA), manages and allocates state lands. Almost half the members of its governing body belong to the JNF, whose explicit mandate is to develop and lease land for Jews and not any other segment of the population. The fund owns 13 percent of Israel’s land, which the state is mandated to use “for the purpose of settling Jews.”

Israeli authorities have almost exclusively allocated state lands for the development and expansion of Jewish communities. Since 1948, the government has authorized the creation of more than 900 “Jewish localities” in Israel, but none for Palestinians except for a handful of government-planned townships and villages in the Negev and Galilee, created largely to concentrate previously displaced Bedouin communities. Less than 3 percent of all land in Israel falls under the jurisdiction of Palestinian municipalities, where the majority of Palestinian citizens live, according to a 2017 estimate by Israeli and Palestinian groups.

Even inside Palestinian towns and villages within Israel, Israeli authorities discriminatorily restrict the land available for residential growth. The authorities have zoned large sections of Palestinian towns and villages for “agricultural” use or as “green” areas, prohibited residential building in them, and built roads and other infrastructure projects that impede expansion. A 2003 Israeli government-commissioned report found that “many Arab towns and villages were surrounded by land designated for purposes such as security zones, Jewish regional councils, national parks and nature reserves or highways, which prevent or impede the possibility of their expansion in the future.”

While increasing focus in recent years on these issues has resulted in more state-approved residential development, they have done little to date to change the reality of hemmed-in Palestinian towns and villages. By contrast, in case studies documented by Human Rights Watch in each of Israel’s six districts, planning authorities provided sufficient land and zoning permissions to predominantly Jewish communities to facilitate their growth.

(continue reading)

[palestiniansilk]

Jaffa - Falasteen on 04 March ´23

Sitting by the old port, watching the waves lap against the shore, I was reminded of a quote by Ghassan Kanafani:

"The land and the sea are the most beautiful things that I could wish to live by."

Jaffa’s soul is felt in every wave and cobblestone ... a reminder of how deeply places can speak to us, even in the simplest moments.

[girlactionfigure]

Why are there Palestinian refugees?

In the months before the British abandoned its mandate & Israel declared independence, civil war raged as Arab factions tried to prevent the Jewish state from being born.

Of course, had the Arabs agreed to the UN's partition plan, they would have had yet another state & there would have been no war in 1948. 

But their goal was not another Arab state; it was to ensure there would be no Jewish state. 

Meanwhile, 5 #Arab armies amassed on the borders & waited for the British to leave so they could push the Jews into the #Mediterranean Sea.

As Secretary-General of the Arab League Azzam Pasha put it on the day of the Arab #invasion: 

"This will be a war of extermination & momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

Or as the then war #criminal & fugitive #Nazi Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini put it during the invasion:

"Murder the #Jews. Murder them all!"

But before the invasion began, & starting as early as Dec 1947, Arab officers began ordering Arab residents of specific villages to flee. 

Their reasoning? Arab citizens not involved in active fighting could only: (1) "treacherously" abide the creation of a the Jewish state &/or even become citizens of same; or (2) be in the way of Arab #military deployments & potentially get caught in the crossfire.

And so, for example, on this day (March 8) in 1948, the Arab Higher Committee ordered all Arab women, children & elderly to leave Jerusalem. The order continued, "Any opposition to this order ... is an obstacle to the holy war ... & will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts.” 

In fact, the Arab Higher Committee ordered the evacuation of dozens of Arab villages between April & July of 1948 (see photo of Arab citizens fleeing below).

Meanwhile, on April 19, 1948, Jewish forces secured Tiberias, which had a population of ~6,000 #Arabs - all of whom chose to leave. In fact, they left under British military supervision.

The Jewish Community Council immediately issued a statement regarding Tiberias' Arabs: 

"We did not dispossess them; they themselves chose this course ... Let no citizen touch their property."

At around this same time, in early & mid-April of 1948, an Arab faction led by Fawzi al-Qawukji was attacking Haifa & attempting to take the city. Then, rumors spread among Haifa's Arab community that Arab air forces were about to bomb the city & ~25,000 of Haifa's Arabs fled.

As U.S. Consul-General in Haifa Aubrey Lippincott noted on April 22, 1948: "local mufti-dominated Arab leaders ... [urged] all Arabs to leave the city, & large numbers did so."

On April 23, 1948, however, #Jewish forces fought back the Arab attack & retook Haifa.

Three days later, on April 26, 1948, a British police report from Haifa noted: 

"[E]very effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe."

What were some of those "efforts?"

Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, sent future Prime Minister Golda Meir to Haifa with the direct instructions to "persuade the Arabs to stay." 

Ms. Meir was unsuccessful, however, as Haifa's Arabs told her they feared that if they stayed, they would be branded "#traitors." 

And so, another ~25,000 of Haifa's Arabs fled. 

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but despite facts on the ground, Arab leaders at the #UN began demanding the end to a fake "#massacre." 

Specifically, #Syria's UN Ambassador Faris al-Kouri, said the Jewish victory at Haifa was a "massacre" that provided "evidence that the '#Zionist program' is to annihilate Arabs within the Jewish state if partition is effected."

The #British were still on the ground, however, & the British Ambassador to the UN, Sir Alexander Cadogan, told the UN the very next day both that the fighting in Haifa had only begun as a result of "continuous attacks by Arabs against Jews" & that the "reports of massacres & deportations [were] erroneous." 

Meanwhile, after Israel declared its independence & was invaded by five Arab armies, the newly established #IDF issued an Order on July 6, 1948, making it clear that non-combatant Arab civilians were not to be harassed or expelled, nor their villages touched. 

But the Arabs were being given a very different message.

#Iraqi #PrimeMinister Nuri Said announced:

"We will smash the country with our guns & obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives & children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."

This used to be known. In fact, Arab leaders for years after the war had no qualms about repeating it.

For example, Syrian Prime Minister Haled al Azm later wrote:

"Since 1948, we have been demanding the return of the #refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave & our appeal to the UN to resolve on their return."

Similarly, #Jordan's King Abdullah wrote: 

"The tragedy of the #Palestinians was that most of their leaders had paralyzed them with false & unsubstantiated promises that they were not alone; that 80 million Arabs & 400 million #Muslims would instantly & miraculously come to their rescue."

Similarly, Edward Atiyah, Secretary of the Arab League Office in #London wrote: 

"This wholesale #exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic #Arabic press & the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States & the #Palestinian Arabs enabled to re­enter & retake possession of their country.”

Even as the war still raged on Aug 16, 1948, the Arab #Greek Orthodox Catholic Bishop of the Galilee told #Beirut newspaper Sada al-Janub: 

“The refugees were confident their absence would not last long, & that they would return within a week or two ... Their leaders had promised them that the Arab Armies would crush the ’Zionist gangs’ very quickly & that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile.”

A few months later, on Feb 19, 1949, the Jordanian newspaper Filastin confirmed: 

"The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies."

Even many of the Palestinian Arab refugees themselves admitted their reasons for leaving.

For example, on June 8, 1951, Habib Issa admitted to #NewYork Lebanese newspaper Al Hoda:

"Azzam Pasha assured the Arab peoples that the #occupation of Palestine & #TelAviv would be ... simple ... He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers & that all the millions the Jews had spent on land & economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean ... Arabs of Palestine [were told] to leave their land, homes & property & to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.”

Similarly, Asmaa Jabir Balasimah recalled being told by Arab leaders to "evacuate the village & return after the battle is over," & that she & others in her village left all their possessions behind "based on the assumption that we would return after a few hours." 

Again, however (& most importantly), had the Arabs agreed to Partition or even agreed to negotiate different borders with Zionist leaders who begged Azzam Pasha to make any counteroffer instead of invading with #genocidal intent, there would never have been a single Palestinian #refugee.

[tamamita]

hey sal feel free to ignore this but i got into an argument with a zionist who claimed that arabs sold their lands to them, is this true

This is interesting, because it ignores a lot of context. Keywords to remember is the Ottoman capitulation, the Felaheen, the Sursock purchase and the eviction of Palestinians that inhabited the area at that time.

The Sursock family was a family of Aristocratic landlords with strong ties to the Turkish and European nobility dating back to the 19th century. The Sursocks were known to have mass purchased land in Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. While they were absentee landlords, they hired Arab labours who inhabited the purchased land at that time. When the Turks capitulated following WW1, the Turks were pressured into allowing the land to be sold to the PLDC, the Palestinan (later Israeli) Land Development Company. The PLDC sought to purchase the Jezreel valley, which consisted of 20-25 Arab villages, from the Sursock. . Keep in mind that the Jezreel valley was the most fertile land of Palestine and close to the economic city of Haifa. Following the mass purchase of land by the PLDC, the Jewish landbuyers expelled Arab tenants and depopulated the Arab villages despite their usufruct, and right to toll on the land. This all came as a surprise to the Arab inhabitants. This was all part of the idea that cheap Arab labour should be replaced with Jewish labour, this despite the fact that Arab labourers had greater expertise on the agricultural field; the settlers were unfamiliar with the land. Keep in mind that according to JNF, the Jewish national fund, only 3% of the Palestinian land were uncultivated, destroying the myth that the land bloomed as a result of its settler colonizers. The Hashomer Hatzaeer would come to be the center of these kibbutzim and would establish over 30 kibbutzim built ontop of the Arab villages before 1948. As a result, the Arabs, or Felaheen (The Arab peasant class) put up a resistance against the JNF out of concrete material reasons and attempted to fight back against the expansion of these kibbutzim. This was the first instance of Arab resistance against Zionism.

All of these lands were purchased before 1948 and the Arabs were expelled and depopulated only for the kibbutzim to be established with the help of the money provided by the Jewish Colonization association and its organs. However, the British mandate did not require the landowners to compensate for the expelled Arab tenants. The Arabs were forced to migrate to slums and towns. In one of these towns, a notable Syrian resistance fighter would rise up, namely, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, and declare jihad on the British. When the Arabs resisted their dispossession by every means necessary, even violence, the Zionists used this as an excuse to fortify their colonizers and expand them due to "escalating security needs". Since the colonizers were too weak to face the resistance, they turned themselves to the British to gain their support in an attempt to expand their lands as means of security for the Kibbutzim. In a memondarium written by the Kibbutz Hazora (a settlement in Jezreel) to the Jewish Agency in 1936: "Our basic demand is for our own instutions to help us ugently in getting the British authorities to expand our territory--this is a vital issue for us.". A similar pretext is used whenever the colonized put up resistance against their colonizers, in which the same excuse is used to further expand and colonize the lands. This is the logic of the oppressor in any context, whether it is colonial or in the class struggle.

[a-queer-seminarian]

As the Israeli government continues to commit war crimes against the people of Gaza, it’s important to remember how all struggles for justice are interconnected. For instance, the movement to Stop Cop a City here in Atlanta is also a movement to stop US police from collaborating with the Israeli military.

A delegation of Georgia law enforcement representatives pose with members of the Haifa, Israel, Police Department in August 2023. USAmerican and Israeli flags wave above them.

Through the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE), Israeli soldiers come to train right here in Georgia, and US police travel to Israel to learn their tactics…which is, frankly, terrifying, and a ludicrously literal example of the militarization of US police.

This relationship between Georgia and Israel has been going on for three decades, since 1992.

(Note that GILEE isn’t the only program in which US police collaborate with the IDF. This article from 2018 goes into more details about what tactics cops from various city police departments across the US have picked up from Israel.)

If Cop City opens, Israeli soldiers will be invited to come train there. Both sides will be able to hone their tactics for brutally stomping out even the most peaceful of protests.

STOP COP CITY. FREE PALESTINE. Here and there, settler-colonialist states target Indigenous lives, Black lives, and other POC.

Our struggles are interwoven. None are free till all, all are free from this imperialist horror.

[sayruq]

There has been gradual coordinated escalation on all fronts

Reminder that a lot of their tanks are being tied up in the border to Lebanon right now.

Can't say I blame them. Israel can only claim victory over nameless Hamas commanders for so long before the settlers begin to question the lack of progress.

The Biden administration continues to prepare itself for a regional war.

Meanwhile, things continue to escalate in the West Bank

Meanwhile on the other fronts of the war

Yemen has taken credit for this attack. Israeli defense systems are failing - a missile reached Haifa for the first time, the Iron Dome misfiring at Tel Aviv, and now this

Just like how Hezbollah has forced Israel to keep 1/3 of its forces in Northern Israel (including 100 warplanes), Yemen is now taking away precious military resources that could be further to further destroy Gaza

Around the world and in America, the Biden administration continues to face pressure due to it's unabashed support for Israel. To save face, it announces useless gestures such as this. If nothing else, this proves that they've lost the propaganda war decisively in the Global South and at home because no one buys the 'Israel has a right to defend itself' mantra anymore. Even European nations, with the exception of Germany, are no longer gung-ho. They show their support quietly with only their citizens noticing, compared to October when they would make countless statements and openly suppress pro Palestine protests.