Monday, March 30, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea
written & directed by Justin Butcher & Ahmed Masoud
designed & co-devised by Jane Frere
film design by Zia Trench
sound design by Sebastian Frost
http://gotogaza.wordpress.com/
A vibrant and haunting theatre piece, Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea promises to transport the audience directly to Gaza to experience what happened during the recent Israeli military assault. It seeks to create a highly atmospheric fusion of moving personal testimonies with searing film images and soundscape bearing witness to the dignity, courage and suffering of the people of Gaza.
In the words of award-winning writer-director Justin Butcher it is “A ritual. A requiem. An act of mourning. A space and a moment - set aside from people’s busy email-driven, mobile phone buzzing, credit-crunch anxious daily lives - which people can enter, in which they can hear and see enacted the true stories of those in Gaza, simply staged, subtly supported with appropriate music and lighting.”
This theatre piece is an artistic collaboration between Justin Butcher (”Scaramouche Jones”, “Madness Of George Dubya”), Palestinian writer-director-choreographer Ahmed Masoud (founder of Palestinian National Dance Company Al Zaytouna, director of “Ila Haifa”), internationally renowned artist and designer Jane Frere (Return Of The Soul - The Nakbah Project) and award-winning political journalist/film-maker Zia Trench (founder of Zeitgeist Theatre Company).
Performed by a Palestinian and British cast, it comes as a response to the human slaughter which led many onlookers to despair. The performance speaks not just of that despair, and the pain and suffering inflicted on ordinary people, but of the deeper strength and courage of those who were left to cope alone, away from the world’s cameras, remote from the help of aid agencies. In spite of the constraints, people inside Gaza have contributed photos, video footage and testimonies for this production. The performance also provides a unique opportunity for the audiences to record and send personal messages of solidarity.
Supported by Amos Trust, Interpal, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
20% minimum of box-office revenue will go to the Al Ahli hospital, Gaza.
DETAILS:
Dates: 17th February – 14th March 2009
Times: 7pm Mon – Sat
Duration: 1 hour
Venue: Theatro Technis, 26 Crowndale Road, London NW1 1TT
Ticket Price: £12.50/£10 concessions on door only
Online Bookings: www.stargreen.com/ Tel: 0207 734 8932
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Israeli soldiers admit to deliberate killing of Gaza civilians
The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to “cold-blooded murder”. The revelations, compiled by the head of an Israel military academy who declared that he was “shocked” at the findings, come as international rights groups are calling for independent inquiries into the conduct of both sides in the three-week Israeli offensive against Palestinian Islamists. The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight. “That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot. "I gathered the graduate students of the course who fought in Gaza, to hear their impressions from the fighting. I wasn't prepared for any of the stuff I heard there. I was shocked,” Mr Zamir said. “I think that the writing was on the wall, but we just didn't want to see it, we didn't want to face it." One non-commissioned officer told Mr Zamir, himself a deputy battalion commander in the reserves, that the army “fired a lot of rounds and killed a lot of people in order for us not to be injured or shot at. "When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up storey by storey… I call that murder. Each storey, if we identify a person, we shoot them. I asked myself – how is this reasonable?" The same unnamed NCO said that his commanding officer ordered soldiers on to a rooftop to shoot an old woman crossing a main street during the fighting, which a Palestinian rights groups said left 1,434 people dead, 960 of them civilians. "I don't know whether she was suspicious, not suspicious, I don't know her story,” the NCO said. “I do know that my officer sent people to the roof in order to take her out… It was cold-blooded murder." Another NCO recounted a military blunder that led to a mother and her two children being shot dead by an Israeli sniper. "We had taken over the house… and the family was released and told to go right. A mother and two children got confused and went left… The sniper on the roof wasn't told that this was okay and that he shouldn't shoot… you can say he just did what he was told… he was told not to let anyone approach the left flank and he shot at them. "I don't know whether he first shot at their feet or not, but he killed them," the soldier said. The soldiers’ accounts were submitted anonymously at a meeting at the academy around a month ago. The Israel army said that it had started an investigation, but that this was the first time it had heard such testimony, despite having debriefed troops itself. Breaking The Silence, an organisation of former soldiers who gather witness accounts from troops in the Palestinian territories, said that its own investigation into Operation Cast Lead, as the war was known in Israel, had revealed a similar picture of the fighting. “It’s definitely in line with what we are hearing,” said one of the researchers. Another disturbing element reported by the soldiers was the role of military rabbis in distributing booklets that framed the fighting as a religious war. “All these articles had a clear message: we are the Jewish people, we have come to the land by miraculous means, and now we have to fight to remove the Gentiles who are getting in our way and preventing us from occupying the Holy Land… a great many soldiers had a feeling throughout this operation of a religious war,” said one soldier. There were also accounts of soldiers being ordered to throw all the furniture out of Palestinians’ homes as they were taken over. “We simply threw everything out the windows to make room and order. The entire contents of the house flew out the windows: refrigerator, plates, furniture. The order was to remove the entire contents of the house.” The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights released the names of 1,417 Gazans that it says were killed in the war, saying that 926 were civilians. The Israeli Government contends that most of those killed were combatants or legitimate targets. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5939611.ece
James Hider in Jerusalem - From
IDF: Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques
Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009
make sure from Haaretz website:
Sky News, March 20, 2009
The revelations centre on t-shirt designs made for soldiers that make light of shooting pregnant Palestinian mothers and children and include images of dead babies and destroyed mosques.
The t-shirts were printed for Israeli soldiers at the end of periods of deployment or training courses and were discovered by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
One, printed for a platoon of Israeli snipers depicts an armed Palestinian pregnant women caught in the crosshairs of a rifle, with the disturbing caption in English: "1 shot 2 kills".
Another depicts a child carrying a gun also in the centre of a target.
"The smaller, the harder," read the words on the t-shirt.
According to a soldier interviewed by the newspaper, the message has a double meaning: "It's a kid, so you've got a little more of a problem, morally and also the target is smaller."
Another shows an Israeli soldier blowing up a mosque and reads "Only God forgives".
Above a ninja figure, yet another shirt bears the slogan "Won't chill until I confirm a kill".
The revelations, coming so soon after Israel's offensive in Gaza in which hundreds of civilians were killed - many of them women and children - are causing outrage.
Perhaps the most shocking design shows a Palestinian mother weeping next to her dead baby's grave, also in the crosshairs of a rifle.
It suggests it would have been better if the child had never been born, with the slogan "Better use Durex".
The controversy follows more revelations by other soldiers about abuses and the shooting of civilians during Israel's offensive during the Gaza offensive.
Ex-soldier and campaigner with Breaking The Silence, Michael Maniken, told Sky News Online this week's revelations suggest a pattern of immoral conduct in the army.
"The army keeps on saying we're talking about a few rotten apples but it seems the army doesn't understand there's a norm in this kind of action," he explained.
"We're hearing about this time and time again and the army seems disconnected from reality."
A spokesman for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) told Sky News Online, the t-shirts were printed on the private initiative of the soldiers and their designs "are not in accordance with IDF values and are simply tasteless. This type of humour is unacceptable and should be condemned".
Commentary: this is proof some Israeli soldiers who bask in the glory of killing the innocent civilians subject to containment, blockade, inspection, et cetera are totally amoral. Not much different from American and British jingos who enjoy killing civilians by shooting and bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Racism lives on because the jingos perceive the "others" to be the weak and must be annihilated in conquest to demonstrate militant neocolonial supremacism.
Israel cannot last. It's destined for self-destruction.
Free Free Palestine..
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