Have you ever heard this term in the news and wondered what exactly an Israeli Arab is? I have, and I did. The first time I heard this term in high school, I naively assumed it was a person from the Arab World who had emmigrated to Isreal. Wrong. This is one of those misleading and colorless Orwellian euphemisms, like “collateral damage�, which, as I always like to remind my fellow Americans, really means dead non-white civilians bombed from the sky.

So what’s an Israeli Arab? An Israeli Arab is a Palestinian who lives inside the state of Israel, versus those who live outside of it in occupied Palestine, or those who fled and became refugees or exiles beyond occupied Palestine. More accurately, they should be called Israeli Palestinians. How did they end up inside of Israel? They didn’t. Israel ended up around them; and they make up 20% of Israel’s population. These are the Palestinians, and their descendants, whose existence on that land preceded the state of Israel before 1948. When the Zionists declared the state of Israel on the land the Palestinians had been living on for centuries, 84% fled as a result of coercion and intimidation. These remaining Palestinians were absorbed into this new political entity. These are today’s “Israeli Arabs�.

This term is problematic for a number of reasons. It doesn’t acknowledge their identity as Palestinians and thus overlooks that they existed there before 1948, a simple fact that cannot be denied no matter how lobbyists and PR slicksters finesse it. The Palestinians were present for centuries; and they identified themselves as such, Filistini (Palestinian), regardless of what British, French, Ottoman, Arab, or Roman administrators chose to call the area. By simply calling them “Arabs�, it conveniently decontextualizes their historical connection to The Land, el-Ard, the one, crucial and central issue! You never hear right-wing Israelis actually call them Palestinians. To do so would recognize their legitimate connection to The Land. So they simply call them the more general and indirect “Arabs�.

Clearly, as Palestinians living within Israel, their predicament is distinct from that of Palestinians in the occupied territories, in refugee camps in Lebanon, or in the exiled global diaspora. We’re always being reminded of how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Is that so? For the Jewish citizens of Israel, it’s a democracy, but not for 20% of its citizens. As a stalling tactic which allows the state of Israel to keep grabbing more land illegally, the Israeli Knesset has to this day never ratified a constitution and has never officially declared its country’s borders. In the meantime, settlements continue to be built and populated, and the defence barrier gets erected deep into Palestinian territory, far outside of Israel proper. There’s a name for this in Political Science: Imperialism. What kind of democracy is that? This would have been like saying apartheid South Africa was the only democracy in Africa. Sure, it was perfectly democratic… for the whites.

In Israel, under the Law of Return and the Nationality Law, a Jewish immigrant can move to Israel from such diverse places as Ethiopia, Poland, the Ukraine, the U.S. or anywhere else and receive full legal rights as a citizen instantly. He or she will automatically have more rights than an indigenous Palestinian. Is this healthy for a society? Is this ethical? Can we really call this democratic?

Israel’s Palestinians are legally barred from owning land, as non-Jews cannot own land in Israel. This affects both Muslim and Christian Palestinians. By the way, 20% of Israel’s Palestinian population is Christian (among the most prominent of them are Arafat’s widow, Suha, Edward Said, and Hanan Ashrawi, all associated with the cause of Palestinian nationalism. Keep that in mind next time you hear an American Evangelist unconditionally defending Israeli policy against the Palestinians. These “Christian Zionists�, as they call themselves, blindly support policies that are harmful to the direct present-day descendants of the early Christian Church. The irony would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so damn tragic and morally repulsive. Christian Palestinians suffer the same fate as their Muslim brothers.

In Israel, many social benefits, such as employment opportunities, better mortgages, partial exemptions from course fees, and preferences for public housing are dependent on your having completed military service. 9o% of Israel’s Palestinian population does not serve in the military, either by law or by discretion. This is an indirect way in which “Israeli Arabs� are discriminated against and economically marginalized. In a democracy, a citizen’s rights are not dependent on his or her having completed compulsory military service. It doesn’t work that way. In a democracy, citizens have rights simply by being born in the society.

Another indirect way Palestinians in Israel are marginalized is through the policy of “unrecognized villages�, another sanitized euphemism, which are Palestinian towns not legally acknowledged by the state as organized municipalities. What this means on the ground is that they get no funding or services whatsoever and are subject to arbitrary demolition or confiscation. Considered non-existent, they don’t appear on official Israeli maps. Palestinian families within Israel are also routinely denied building permits and have their homes demolished or confiscated when they build new ones or add on to them without the permits. Can this be called democratic? It would take quite an unhinged imagination to do so. Whoever repeats the claim that Israel is a democracy, be they journalists, lobbyists, or politicians, is either knowingly perpetuating an agenda which cannot accommodate the facts on the ground or they’re ignorant and haven’t done the research. There is no democracy and there are no “Israeli Arabs�.

The next time you hear “Israeli Arabsâ€?, know that you’re being fed a term which is essentially a political weapon to deny a people their identity and history. It’s racist spin and it’s insulting to your common sense and intelligence. You need only consume Western mainstream media and you’ll hear it soon enough. It’s become legitimate because of its constant repetition by U.S. and Israeli government officials and public relations firms. It’s a tragic irony that the first master propagandist to use this tactic and prove its effectiveness was none other then Joseph Goebbels. Known as the Big Lie, or argumentum ad nauseam, the name given to a policy of repeating a lie until it is taken to be the truth. If you live in the U.S., this should sound familiar to you. So now, in this obese land of shortcuts and convenience, the media smugly and unconsciously perpetuate the terms “Israeli Arabs” and “Israeli democracy”. Sadly, like so many other terms, these have taken on mindless lives of their own. Analysis and accuracy have been sacrificed. We’re participants by our complicit acceptance. This stops when we stop listening. Two reasonable actions you can take right now: 1.) Stop consuming news from mainstream corporate media! 2.) Tell the others! You can’t peddle shitty hack journalism if there is no audience left to consume it.

I also have a name and it’s not about working it’s about doing nothing when you’re supposed to be working but yer doing nothing and when u finally think that u might be actually working you’re really not because you’re reading the internet so much that eventually u think yer working and thus not working becomes the same as working and then the days drag on and blend together like indigo and violet do when you drip them side to side drooling down a canvas on an easle standing in an empty room with just one window which is just high enough on the wall so that u can only see the sky which is a little cloudy but the sun and sky show in the bottom right corner and so you stare at that corner hoping words will scroll across it saying five o’clock pee em so the bell sounds and you are released from your one window empty prison called work and fly through freedom high in the sky only for about three and a half hours until you become unconscious for the rest of what seems like seven seconds and then you realize you’re back in the prison again typing random phrases into google hoping it will bring you an ounce of happiness as you read on and on and on about nothing when you’re supposed to be working but you’re doing absolutely nothing which they pay you for to support your three and a half hours and seven seconds of freedom until you have to return to repeat the same day over and over like a rerun of some old program on TV Land that you only watch parts of while surfing through a monotonous pile of crappy stations wasting fifty-three minutes of your freedom after work during dinner while you stuff your face with microwaved mush that tastes like chicken and mashed potatoes but smells like fumes from burnt plastic or styrofoam but you inhale the entire plate after which becomes part of an intricate masterpiece in the sink made of dishes and cups filled with

…breath…

java code that you’ve been writing for five years and you take a 30 minute chunk to figure out that you only remember 14.5914 percent of the last five years which turns out to be .7296 years of memory taken up on your internal head drive and if the human brain can hold about 100 million megabites of memory and recording a digital video at a resolution of 320 pixels by 240 pixels creates a file that is 112k per second recorded and if I could actually record video in my head then .7296 years would take up about two million five hundred sixteen thousand four hundred and seventy five megabites which leaves about 97.483525 percent free but my head doesn’t feel as empty as that because I’m sitting here filling my head all day after day pressing buttons watching letters appear inside a box which is inside another box on a screen that flickers at 75 Hertz which is inside another box and all these boxes make my eyes wander around the room taking in everything glancing at 68 year old Joan who sits right there so close I could smack her if I wanted to and my name tag sits right below her head on my separating wall and it looks like Joan’s name is actually DENNIS PALMER but it’s not because that is my name because it is on my name tag and she has her own name tag so she has her own name which in turn proves that I also have a name… but it’s not about working.

Well, the first of 3… err i mean 2 debates is tonight. I wonder what the headlines will be tomorrow. I’m sure some fumble that either Kerry or Bush made, that has little impact on how fit they are to run the country. Maybe it will even be about Kerry’s makeup.

I found this silly article on BBC analyzing his body language while he was under trial, or pre-trial or whatever…

full story

[16:34] yaminchev: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-un-rights-elections.html
[16:35] redvision4: i got into an interesting argument with Nameless German and Nameless Cuban about the UN and the EU the other night
[16:35] redvision4: basically, the boiled down version is i was saying that Germany, France, etc should put up or shut up in regards to counter-weighting the US
[16:35] yaminchev: What was the gist
[16:36] redvision4: and they were saying it’s not their problem
[16:36] redvision4: and my point was, that that’s the self -serving attitude that got the US here
[16:36] yaminchev: well I think the UN is a crock of shit
[16:36] yaminchev: It’s just another way to waste money and resources
[16:36] redvision4: yes, but that’s for 2 reasons 1 the permanent security council members
[16:36] redvision4: and 2, only the US funds the fucker
[16:37] yaminchev: yep
[16:37] redvision4: it’s like if Texas was in charge of the US.
[16:37] yaminchev: but no one else has power in the UN
[16:37] redvision4: wait a sec
[16:37] redvision4: Texas… I think i just realized something
[16:37] yaminchev: hehe
[16:37] redvision4: shit, i’m posting this log
[16:37] redvision4: to IP
[16:37] yaminchev: totally

We went to Caesars Palace in AC for Eric’s birthday (if you weren’t invited complain to him not me) Daryl raked up the money at the black jack table as usual and the rest of us lost money on slots.

I’ve been running into this new bit of bullshit on eBay lately. I’ll try searching for one of those cool phones that aren’t out in the States yet, like the Nokia 6600.

it seems like half of the results on ebay are these bullshit auctions. They look like they are selling the phone you want. they have its picture and all its specs…

…but, at the bottom or maybe even hidden in some huge block of text, though, it says something like:

you are not bidding on the actual phone, but on a piece of information that will tell you how to get this phone really cheap. once you win I will send you a URL

I’ve seen them sell for up to $300, and it seems that the better that disclosure is hidden the higher they go.