Gaza Roundup 19: Teh Awesome

Who haz it?

Protesters in Oakland, California! They held up the unloading of a Zim cargo ship from Israel to raise awareness of the Freedom Flotilla and the apartheid Palestinians must face every day as they are being driven from their lands and homes to make room for more Israeli occupiers. (Here’s Mondoweiss’s take on the story, and here’s that of the local paper, the Oakland Tribune.)

Let’s quit using the word “settlers”, while we’re at it, unless we understand it to be a genocidal settling, the same as the slaughter of Native Americans was when the “pioneers” came to whiten up the Americas. Let an awesome Jewish Native American, Phil Rockstroh, tell you all about it from his unique perspective, as he looks out over the two strikingly similar worlds that combined to make him.

Roseanne Barr also has Teh Awesome; as an observant Jew (surprise!) and a Kabalist, she finds plenty of ethical reasons to object to what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and their supporters. Awesome Roseanne quotes:

Every Shabbat, Jews pray for the peace of the Shekkinah, to descend on Jerusalem/the world. Our traditions tell us that the highest level of G-d is female, that She is the Sabbath bride, and She brings peace, beauty, and judgment tempered by mercy into our circle every seventh day. Right now, She is pretty upset with the way we have poisoned her foundation, Malchut, which is the Earth. She is belching and getting over-heated, and we had better look out. This is our last warning, I think.

[…]

I hold to nothing but envisioning international peace and utopia. We all have many more things in common than not. I’ve tried to get to the very bottom of the whole subject, and I say it’s the entire world’s fault, not just Israel’s and not just the Jews’, for allowing the terrible crimes against humanity, the ethnic cleansing that is happening in Gaza right now. No government in the Middle East is innocent. Wars make the stock market go up, so no one in America is innocent either, nor anyone anywhere where capitalism reigns.

Occupation is wrong, collective punishment is wrong, and the use of white phosphorous on a captive population is wrong. Zionists are wrong, Hamas is wrong, Bibi is wrong, Obama is wrong, Saudi Arabia is wrong, Egypt is wrong, Jordan is wrong, Russia is wrong, Turkey is wrong, as are the Pope and the evangelicals, and all who do nothing about this terrible failure of humanity. To me, the only hope at all is the power of grandmothers crossing cultural and religious lines to make peace together.

So, you thought Roseanne was just a funny woman on TV? Ha. I defy anyone to find fault with what she said there.

And while we’re on the topic of awesome women speaking truth to power, how’s this for an awakening? A formerly conservative New York resident is now a pro-Palestinian progressive activist. Hats off to Debbie Mardon.

Further afield in the world of awesometude, you know Israel has an apartheid problem when even South African labor leaders are protesting and boycotting, along with the Oakland longshoremen. And you know Israel also has a fascism problem when the always awesome Norman Finkelstein does an interesting side-by-side.

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