zaterdag 27 augustus 2022

Who made the desert bloom?

Fri 12 Aug 2022

JVL Introduction

Who made the desert bloom? We all know it was the early Zionist colonisers – except that it wasn’t…

All nationalisms are constructed on myths about national origins and great deeds, none more so than Zionism.

They have all been comprehensively deconstructed but for the true believers their mythical power remains undimmed. So they are worth exposing again from time to time.

Diana Mason was in good form when she took apart this central myths of Zionism.

This article was originally published by Lawrence of Cyberia on Fri 19 Mar 2010. Read the original here.

Tell Me Again, Who Made The Desert Bloom?

by Diane Mason, Lawrence of Cyberia

In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine, in support of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The results were published in the Survey of Palestine, which has been scanned and made available online by Palestine Remembered; all 1300 pages can be read here.

One of the subjects investigated in the Survey of Palestine is land use; specifically, which crops were Palestine’s leading agricultural products at the end of the British Mandate, and whose farms were producing them.

So, according to the Survey of Palestine, who really made the barley fields of Beersheba bloom?

The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 210,000 tons of grain.

About 193,400 tons of that grain were cultivated on Palestinian farms; about 16,600 tons were cultivated on Jewish farms.

See the precise numbers, from a scan of the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine, here.

Who made the melon patches of Jaffa bloom?

The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 143,000 tons of melons.

About 136,000 tons of those melons were cultivated on Palestinian farms; a little over 7,000 tons were cultivated on Jewish farms.

See the precise numbers, from a scan of the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine, here.

Who made the tobacco fields of Safad bloom?

The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 1,683 tons of tobacco, on 28,169 dunams of land. Virtually all the land under tobacco cultivation was Palestinian.

Who made the vineyards of Hebron bloom?

The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 40-50,000 tons of grapes, and between 3-4 million litres of wine. About 86% of the land that produced these products was owned and cultivated by Palestinians.

See a scan of the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine here.

Who made the olive groves of Tulkarm bloom?

The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 79,000 tons of olives.

About 78,000 tons of those olives were cultivated on Palestinian farms; a little over 1,000 tons were cultivated on Jewish farms.

See the precise numbers, from a scan of the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine, here and here.

Who made the banana groves of Tiberias bloom?

The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 8,000 tons of bananas.

About 60% of the land that produced these bananas was owned and cultivated by Palestinians.

See the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine, here.

Who made the vegetable fields of the coastal plain bloom?

The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 245,000 tons of vegetables.

About 189,000 tons of those vegetables were cultivated by Palestinian farmers; about 56,000 tons were cultivated by Jewish farmers.

See the precise numbers, from a scan of the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine, here.

So, on the eve of the partition resolution, in which the United Nations proposed to allocate 55 percent of the land to Jewish Palestine (including those parts that produced most of Palestine’s leading crops, with the sole exception of the olive crop), and 45% to Arab Palestine, Palestinian Arabs were producing:

92% of Palestine’s grain

86% of its grapes

99% of its olives

77 % of its vegetables

95% of its melons

more than 99% of its tobacco

and 60% of its bananas.

Palestine’s agricultural produce at that time had an annual value of approximately 21.8 million pounds sterling; 17.1 million of which was produced by Arab cultivation, and 4.7 million by Jewish cultivation. (See the exact numbers here).

So, who made the desert bloom? The Palestinians made the desert bloom.

Photos: All the photographs of Palestinian farmers cultivating their crops in Palestine under the British Mandate are from Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History Of The Palestinians 1876 – 1948, by Walid Khalidi.

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My Comment :

Robert Bleeker

20th August 2022 at 23:10

My sincere compliments for your effort to fight one of the central myths regarding the justification by Jewish Zionists for colonizing Palestine. At the same time however I do greatly regret, that you did abstract hereby from the historic fact, that Palestine had been the subject of a different form of colonisation, before the Jewish Zionists inundated the region with their fanatic followers. After all, it had been the sect of the German Templers, that from 1868 onwards did found a considerable number of settlements in Palestine.

These Templers did have a profound and lasting influence on many aspects of then Palestine. By transforming many swamps into fertile territory and by introducing modern agricultural methods, their contribution to stimulating the productivity of the land, can be hard to overestimate. By furthermore upgrading the quality of the road-infrastructure and drastically improving harbour facilities – which both did stimulate commerce and tourism – and by implementing the fruits of the European industrial revolution, their imprint on the Palestinian society of that time (both on the indigenous Arab-Palestinians as on the indigenous Yishuv) had been rather overwhelming.

The motivation for the German religious sectarians behind spending so much time and effort in transforming then Palestine, partly can be explained by their messianic conviction of so-called millennialism. The latter did mean in fact, that the “Promised” Holy Land had to be prepared for the arrival of “the Chosen People”, in order to facilitate (and accelerate) the “second coming of Jesus”. What they did not mention on this subject at the time, is that the Jewish believers had first to be converted to Christianity before redemption could be delivered.

The Christian-Zionist German sect did however disappear rather abruptly from the Palestinian scenery, when it became increasingly susceptible for the murderous nazi concept during the thirties.

From the mid-seventies of the 20th century another group of Christian Zionists did arrive at that region, with rather similar religious convictions and intentions as their predecessors, which until this very day, have been gratefully exploited by many Jewish Zionist regime.

https://www.yumpu.com/de/document/read/21676404/die-deutschen-templerkolonien-in-palestina-arbeitskreis-stadt-

https://tempelgesellschaft.de/media/geschichte/footprints_of_the_templers.pdf
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22276494

https://lib.haifa.ac.il/systems/etexts/1102075.pdf

From the river to the sea – where is the green line?

Sat 27 Aug 2022

JVL Introduction

The Palestine solidarity movement is routinely accused of antisemitism because its maps show a single country stretching from the river to the sea.

By the same token Israel must be culpable because its maps show precisely the same terrain!

Indeed, they even add on a little by including the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel.

So the issue highlighted in the Haaretz article below is not new: the green line, the only recognised international border between Israel and the rest of the world, is not portrayed on Israeli maps.

Indeed, the decision not to print it dates back to an instruction from Yigal Allon on 30 October 1967, to the government’s Survey Department not to print the pre-war boundaries.

So the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality’s decision to issue maps to all it schools showing the Green Line is a substantial challenge to the decades long conventional denialism that such a thing could exist – pre-war boundaries indeed!

A few days later Haaretz published an editorial statement, including these words: “We must not accept the cowardly response of the Education Ministry. Other municipalities must adopt Tel Aviv’s initiative and hang the map in schools in their cities in order to promote an open discussion about Israel, the country’s borders and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the millions of Palestinians lacking rights living over the Green Line.’

It will be interesting to watch its clash with the Education Ministry unfold.

This article was originally published by Haaretz on Tue 23 Aug 2022. Read the original here.

Tel Aviv and the Israeli Government Spar Over School Maps Showing 1967 Borders

by Or Kashti, Haaretz

The Tel Aviv municipality is spearheading a rare initiative: teaching students about the Green Line. But the Education Ministry is barring the use of maps depicting occupied territories, ‘not even as a poster on the wall’

With the new school year about to open, the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality sent its schools maps showing the Green Line, which was Israel’s pre-1967 border. But the Education Ministry told the municipality on Monday that it can’t use the map – “not even as a poster on the wall.”

Most religious public schools have also opposed use of the map. But other schools plan to hang the maps in some 2,000 classrooms around the city on Tuesday.

On Tuesday morning, Deputy Mayor Chen Arieli said that the city will post the maps in classrooms in defiance of the Education Ministry. In a tweet she published, Arieli said that students “deserve to be raised in a realistic space, and not a censured one.”

“Today, maps with the green line will be hung in all classrooms in our city. The response of the Ministry of Education is disgraceful and we will continue as planned. Boys and girls deserve to grow up with a realistic and uncensored realm. It’s a project that we’ve been working on for two years, and I’m excited,” the deputy mayor tweeted.

“It’s important to us that students know Israel’s sovereign borders and the complex reality in areas where Jewish citizens of Israel and Arabs under the Palestinian Authority’s control live side by side,” Mayor Ron Huldai wrote in a letter to school principals.

In most schools, there is almost no discussion of Israel’s borders. Commercially produced maps are hung in classrooms only at the initiative of local governments or individual schools, and they generally don’t show the Green Line.

The map that will be placed in classrooms across Tel Aviv.

Textbooks, which require ministry approval, also barely address this issue. And no official Israeli map shows the Green Line, under a cabinet decision made back in 1967.

Consequently, Tel Aviv’s initiative is exceptional.

The kit it sent to schools contains three maps – a map of Tel Aviv-Jaffa; a map of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip that shows both the Green Line and Israel’s current political borders (which aren’t identical); and a map of the eastern Mediterranean Basin. The middle map also shows the areas transferred to Palestinian Authority control under the Oslo Accords. Arab schools received the same three maps in Arabic.

In most places, Israel’s current borders are similar to the Green Line, which is where the cease-fire line ran following the 1948 War of Independence. But it annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, both areas beyond the Green Line, after 1967. In contrast, it never annexed the West Bank or Gaza.

In his letter to schools, Huldai said that familiarity with “the state, its landscapes and its borders is essential for producing an involved citizen,” and the map should be used as a “necessary accessory in almost every subject in the curriculum,” including history, geography, language arts and current events.

‘Censoring reality’

No green line on map of national parks.

The city began preparing the maps two years ago at the initiative of Deputy Mayor Chen Arieli, who cosigned the letter to principals, and the head of the city’s education department, Shirley Rimon.

“Instead of censoring reality, the map allows it to be discussed,” Arieli said. “To raise active citizens, they have to understand the region – which includes the Green Line.” The map, she added, “will enable students to better understand the reality we live in; that should be in everyone’s interest.”

But the letter to principals also acknowledged that discussing Israel’s borders involves some “complexity,” since Israel’s situation is “sometimes controversial, sometimes changeable and sometimes does change in accordance with government policy.”

In 2007, then-Education Minister Yuli Tamir ordered school maps to show the Green Line. Rightists were furious, and the decision hadn’t yet been implemented when Tamir was replaced by Gideon Sa’ar two years later.

A study conducted by Prof. Avner Ben-Amos of Tel Aviv University two years ago concluded that history, civics and geography textbooks, with only a few exceptions, treat “Jewish control and the Palestinians’ inferior position as almost natural and self-evident developments that don’t need to be thought about.” He acknowledged that the Green Line appears on historical maps, but otherwise, he said, all Israeli governments have sought to obscure its existence.

The Education Ministry said that Tel Aviv’s map was “unprofessional and amateurish” in both its cartography and “its tendentious use of the term ‘sovereignty line.’” Moreover, the ministry never approved it, so it can’t be “taught or even used as a poster on the walls.”

The only party authorized to draw Israel’s maps, it added, is the Survey of Israel. But in the past, that government agency has reportedly refused to reveal where the Green Line runs, saying this information “would endanger Israel’s foreign relations.”

https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/from-the-river-to-the-sea-where-is-the-green-line/

Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach lawsuit ends in 11th hour settlement

Dramatic move shows Mark Zuckerberg ‘desperate to avoid being questioned over cover-up’, says Observer journalist who exposed scandal

Facebook chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a financial services committee hearing in Washington in 2019. Photograph: Erin Scott/Reuters

Facebook has dramatically agreed to settle a lawsuit seeking damages for allowing Cambridge Analytica access to the private data of tens of millions of users, four years after the Observer exposed the scandal that mired the tech giant in repeated controversy.

A court filing reveals that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has in principle settled for an undisclosed sum a long-running lawsuit that claimed Facebook illegally shared user data with the UK analysis firm.

It follows revelations of mass data misuse made by a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower to the Observer in 2018, an exposé that forced chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress and led to the social media firm receiving a multibillion-pound fine. Days after the story was published, Facebook’s share price fell by the equivalent of more than $100bn.

However, some expressed dismay that the timing of the potential settlement would prevent Zuckerberg and Meta’s outgoing chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, being made to testify during up to six hours of questioning by plaintiffs’ lawyers next month.

Carole Cadwalladr, the Observer journalist whose investigations into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica also helped inspire the Netflix film The Great Hack, said: “It is a measure of how desperate Zuckerberg is to avoid answering questions about Facebook’s cover-up of the Cambridge Analytica data breach that Facebook has settled this case just days away from him being cross-examined under oath for six hours.”

It emerged that Zuckerberg and Sandberg, who recently announced she would be stepping down in the autumn, would face questioning, with the depositions scheduled to take place from 20 September.

The latest developments follow a separate lawsuit last year that claimed Facebook paid $4.9bn more than necessary to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a settlement over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in order to protect Zuckerberg.

The lawsuit alleged that the size of the $5bn settlement was motivated by a desire to prevent Facebook’s founder from being named in the FTC complaint.

Cadwalladr added: “Facebook has proved that they are prepared to pay almost any sum of money to avoid their executives answering these questions. This settlement comes on top of the $5bn they already paid the FTC.

“The truth will come out one day – but today is not that day.”

In the new court filing, disclosed late on Friday, financial terms or details of the preliminary settlement are not given.

The Observer asked Facebook and its lawyers to share more details of the in-principle settlement but it declined to respond.

However, the filing does ask the judge in the San Francisco federal court to put the class action lawsuit on hold for 60 days until the lawyers for both plaintiffs and Facebook finalise a written settlement.

The four-year-old lawsuit, brought by a group of Facebook users, alleged that Facebook violated consumer privacy laws by sharing personal data of users with other firms such as Cambridge Analytica, which declared itself bankrupt two months after the Observer exposé.

Facebook users sued the company in 2018 after it emerged the British analytics firm connected to former US president Donald Trump’s successful 2016 campaign for the White House gained access to the data of as many as 87 million of the social media network’s subscribers.

It was thought that Meta could have been made to pay hundreds of millions of dollars had it lost the case.

Facebook has previously said its privacy practices are consistent with its disclosures and “do not support any legal claims”.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/27/facebook-cambridge-analytica-data-breach-lawsuit-ends-in-11th-hour-settlement

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My Comment :

1. This massive and highly secretive abuse (by the secret exploitation) of Facebook-data by both the UK Brexit lobby and the USA Trump lobby, did much - if not all - to respectively gain a majority for the leave (the EU) voters in the 2016 (advisory) referendum, as well as to hand Trump the victory of the 2016 USA presidential election.

2. The central role of hardly to be publicly controlled, mostly shamelessly fraudulously operating privately owned social media concerns, like Facebook / Meta in our modern society, in many ways does seriously undermine our most precious democratic institutions of public governance..

3. Enterprises like Facebook are also very susceptible for abuse by lots of malicious stakeholders, including many secret services in our world.

4. Do not forget in this respect, that Cambridge Analytica (now defunct) had been a subsidiary of the UK based firm the SLC, which still has regular customers in the branch of wholesale election manipulation in many foreign countries.