neko interrupted

Send Segways Now

2007-09-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

Since Jewish American surfing ‘legend’ “Doc” Paskowitz teamed up with the good folks of Israel’s surfboard retail industry and their flexible friends at the Erez crossing to ensure 15 surfboards were delivered to the slavishly grateful people of the Gaza Strip last month (reported here), folks over on the West Bank have got to thinking, “those fuckers down on the strip have got it too good”. Fair play. And so begins this humble appeal on behalf of the West Bank population – send segways! Send them now. Tomorrow may be too late. Seriously. Times are tough, and segways are all but unattainable.

The harsh reality of the inequities which characterise the ongoing ethnocide here can perhaps only be fully comprehended when the stark contrast between access to surfboards and segways between the people of the gun, and the people of the ghettoes is faced head on. In Jerusalem, the overwhelming majority of the non-surfing Jewish population enjoy unfettered access to segways. In contrast, not a single segway is available to Palestinians in their capital and across the remainder of West Bank.

Gaza's Surfin' Birds Carry US-Israeli Munificence Back To The Ghettoes While Doing Their Bit To Help Surfer Kelly Slater's Corporate Empire Gain a Foothold in the Strip

Although surfboards can be attained on the black market and at considerable personal risk (these must be smuggled across the violent and (in a perverse echo of the surf itself) perpetually shifting frontiers like sick babies, students, spouses, or dialysis patients), they are a thoroughly impractical mode of transport in the West Bank and provide little if any defence from Israel’s frequent so-called “precision strikes” against athletes and children. Meanwhile, segways, with their low fuel costs, modish appearance, and zippy acceleration are well suited to the terrain; able to turn on a dime, they offer a modicum of evasive potential in the event of a missile strike, and with a top speed of 15miles an hour, are more than fast enough to carry families, merchants and medical staff alike within the small cantons they call home.

The following video, shot undercover and entirely in Israeli occupied East Jerusalem shows a group of rabid settlers (from the Barkan site in the battered and buggered Salfit governorate) brazenly flouting their segwaying skills. Only when Palestinians too, like the surfers of Gaza, can stand tall and lean into the flow of human motion, will there truly be hope for justice in the holy land. It is in this faith that we the people of the segway, call upon you, the people of the dollar, to send Segways! Send them now! Please forward this appeal on! You know it matters!

Now We're Eating!

2007-07-04T22:37:00.000-07:00

WhatJeffKilled.Com - The guy's a genius. Here's his latest:

Satire Is Dead (from letters, The Independent)

2007-06-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

Sir: Satire is dead. Under Blair's leadership, Britain has colluded
in the invasion, occupation and utter devastation of Iraq, blocked UN
action to end Israel's invasion and bombardment of Lebanon, conspired
with the EU, US and Israel to impose a crippling economic blockade on
the Palestinian people, and refused to implement the earlier wishes
of the European Parliament to suspend Israel's preferred trading
status with the EU. And now this war-mongering, hypocritical, war
criminal's apprentice is to be appointed a peace envoy to the Middle
East of all places.

CHRIS WEBSTER
ABERGAVENNY

Part of the Cat Listening to.... Series:

2007-06-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

Messiah King

2007-06-04T22:43:00.000-07:00

Van Gogh

2007-05-28T04:03:00.000-07:00

The victim, the weapon, the perpetrator. I think he's biding his time though, waiting till the old bastard dozes off.... eye on the prize.

2007-03-31T11:51:00.000-07:00

Tunnel Man - Tunnel Man Redux

2007-03-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

The sound-synch slips due to compresssion. The image is too small. And unless you're hooked up to a cranked up set of speakers, it's really a long-shot. But for anyone who can look beyond these drawbacks, or get around them - I apologise. It came out a few shades darker than intended. Nonetheless, here he is: Tunnel Man.

And his little helpers...

2007-03-06T10:46:00.000-08:00

Its Purim! Its Satan

2007-03-05T05:08:00.000-08:00

Satan over Haifa... We all sensed something was wrong, what with the fog and everything...

Know Your Status!

2007-03-01T05:18:00.000-08:00

The Great Fog Cometh!

2007-02-24T06:57:00.000-08:00

In local news: the smog's so bad you can't see the refinery! And it's closing in. I'm listening to Jamie Lee Curtis on the radio and waiting it out...

In The Dollhouse

2007-02-23T05:44:00.000-08:00

The doll museum is at the Castra Center, near the mall, Haifa. “The aim of Castra Centre is to combine arts, entertainments and shopping.” Quite a challenge then. And hence the dolls on its top floor; hundreds of them.

New Israeli Police Chief Ganot: "Give Me Head"

2007-02-21T05:38:00.001-08:00

Israel has just appointed another corrupt police chief! I caught up with him for this exclusive interview.

Real Men

2007-02-11T05:55:00.000-08:00

ain't that the truth

Herzliya Conference 2007

2007-02-01T02:27:00.000-08:00

After 4 days of the love-in that is the Herzliya Conference on the Balance of Israel's National Security I started to get the picture. Soon afterward I shot my first Iranian in the face. Anti-semitic bastard got what she deserved. Going to go kill me some Englanders too since it transpires that the 'intellectual elite' there are Nazis now... the filthy sods.

When the stormtroopers come and take me away to the camps... as they are bound to sooner or later... let this video edit of the conference highlights shine out like a beacon of truth to you all, and hopefully inspire you too to fear Iranians, Brits, and the world in general.

Stabbed in The Back

2007-01-21T12:26:00.000-08:00

Iraqi-born Jewish novelist Sami Michael comes on TV to explain to a disinterested presenter that the reason he likes the Palestinian Wadi Nisnas neighbourhood of Haifa is because, unlike other such places, “you don’t have to worry all the time that someone’s going to stab you in the back”. This is the same Sami Michael that has elsewhere questioned the powers that be for their automatic labelling of Hizbullah and Hamas as “terrorist” organisations; the same Sami Michael who has written passionately about the pressures and violences attending his personal journey from a communist Arabic home to a nationalist Hebrew culture; the same Sami Michael that has declared himself unwilling to obey the vulgar zionist logic which produces Arab and Jew as irreconcilably oppositional categories of identification. So what’s he up to? A momentary lapse of reason? Or has he finally reconciled himself in old age to the essential murderous violence of that devious Arab creeping up behind him and in doing so fully joined the zionist consensus?

Michael’s writing and public intellectual output has been critical of the zionist project of colonial nation-forming in Palestine. At times he has sought to assert and celebrate his own Arab identity against the monolithic de-Arabising mechanisms established in the absorption and subordination of other Jews of Arab origin. He has pointed accusingly at the engineered efforts to “de-socialise and re-socialise” Arab Jews as Israel’s Oriental Jewish ethno-working class, and has gone so far as to declare his ultimate cultural affinity for and identification with wider Arabic and Arab culture. But his is a “loyal opposition” limited by its adherence to (and endorsement of) the parameters of permissible dissent; rock the boat – but don’t take an axe to the hull. So far as this zionist dissent does not extend to any macro-level challenge to the domain structures of racist ideology and colonial practice, but instead limits itself to vocal outrage and indignity at certain features emanating from these structures (such as land-use discrimination or unequal access to state resources), it is not only tolerated by more conservative actors and institutions, but encouraged. It emerges as an indispensable ingredient in the generation of the fraud of Israeli democratic dynamism and political diversity, displacing more radical critiques in proudly and obediently occupying the space reserved for dissent; a space which comes therefore to determine and constrain the very limits of dissent.

"Cafe Tamar" - Tel Aviv. Gaza, Bomb: isolated for dissent, Independence Day poster: permission to dissent

The “loyal opposition” is fundamentally, passionately, vocally, and only opposed to features of the regimes, ideologies, and processes which generate Jewish supremacism and demand Palestinian oppression. As such, it remains enthusiastically involved in the perpetuation and reinforcement of the structures which demand, govern, calibrate, and command those self same features. The “loyal opposition” opposes certain isolated symptoms of contemporary zionism, such as the procedures governing the passage of medical emergency cases through checkpoints. It opposes the killing of civilians, not least minors, killed while posing no threat to Israel’s national security. It comes out in strength against the indiscriminate torture of Palestinian detainees. It tours the world, feted by activists and scholars, to declare its principled opposition to the settlement programmes and state policy of “targeted killings”. In short, this proud opposition declares itself opposed to infanticide, murder, population transfer, and torture; it does not advocate infanticide, nor murder, nor population transfer, and not torture. It has generated out of these noble commitments a popular canon of songs, poems, literature and art which express or symbolise this brave stance; it is studded with glittering celebrity scholars, novelists, poets, sculptors and – of course – ex-officers.

So since when was it a political act to oppose infanticide and torture? Since when did these small chips buy you a place at the table of progressive dissent? Symptoms are easy things to rail against. So long as you enjoy a form of self-inflicted myopia which allows you to separate and isolate symptoms from causes. So long as “tragedies” and “excesses” are all that gets your goat, you can surely protect yourself from the levels and types of contextual understanding that might point to your own implication, and to the core determinants of oppression. It gets worse though, as the “loyal opposition” goes yet further in flagging its allegiance to the zionist project. Not content with simply ignoring the wider structural processes and ideologies which underpin the selected instances of violence they elect to oppose, members of the “loyal opposition” appear compelled beyond all reason to conform to a cowardly and embarrassing logic tying their “permission to dissent” to a tribute at the altar of conformity. Thus, Sami Michael can like an “Arab” neighbourhood, and express his own “Arabic” identity, but feels compelled in expressing such a “disruptive” sentiment to signal his allegiance to the demonising Arab-hatred that marks his commitment to the rules of the game. Likewise, Israel’s Amnesty International representative prefaces a TV slot questioning the conveniently distant Guantanamo Bay by declaring – I believe in a departure from Amnesty’s mission statement – that the organisation is “first and foremost here to help in the war on terror”.

"Co-Existence" fayre, Haifa: A 2-D "Arab" construction labourer offers traditional coffee...

The “loyal opposition” is at its finest when demonstrating its “love” of “Arabs.” No opportunity is missed here. The lengths that these few brave men and women will go to in order to publicly associate with members of another nation, religion and even political persuasion is truly staggering. These remarkable souls who, as noted (and lets not forget), oppose infanticide and murder, now fill newspaper columns, galleries, and speaking tours with tales of the “Arabs” with whom, they announce like born-again evangelicals, they discover “common ground.” But here again, it is apparently not sufficient – or not sufficiently loyal – for the “loyal opposition” to merely announce their co-humanity with members of another nation. This might imply some sort of wavering vis-à-vis the hallowed nation-state purity project after all, and no one wants that. So the “loyal opposition” finds itself burdened with a task to which creative efforts have been directed – reducing the “Arab” to a 2-dimensional passive object… a form of currency exchanged internationally in return for “progressive” credentials, but constantly policed and subordinated lest it speak independently of the meagre task it is recognised as fulfilling. No algorithm need be designed to gauge how many Palestinians, after a century of oppression, impoverishment, marginalisation, and demonisation will be prepared to fill the odious post of wingman in this dynamic. At its most effective, the “loyal opposition” is able to reduce the Palestinian quite literally to two dimensions; visual backdrops for celebrations of “tolerance” broadcast around the world.

The world inhabited by academics, staffed as it is by so many of the “loyal opposition,” is meanwhile fast becoming the effective avant garde in the ongoing colonisation and eradication of Palestine and its people. Its “new historians” and “critical social scientists” package treatments of Israeli society which, a full century after the zionist organisation formed its Palestine Colonisation Association, over 75 years since the Palestinian national leadership protested colonisation in Palestine, and many decades after Palestinian and international scholarship surveyed the colonial process and ideology, today announces its “discovery” of the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, its “discovery” of colonialism… etc. Knowledge, narrative and “truth” is in this way captured to the safe confines of the “loyal opposition” and Palestinian and international dissent of a more fundamental and principled stripe is silenced, consigned to a fictive non-history. The “loyal opposition” by virtue of its loyalty to the nation-state project constitutes here a biopolitical weapon, occupying, reinscribing, containing, and finally disseminating a current and fashionable treatment of another people’s oppression.

No danger of being stabbed in the back: 2-D image replaces Palestinian vendors at this Wadi Nisnas grocers

And what are the epistemological tools employed in this creative enterprise? European advances in theory and methodology; these give purchase to the “loyal opposition” in its – successful – struggle to claim the right to speak about (and hence for) Palestinian suffering and resistance. The application of French and German theory to the colonisation of the Palestinian experience is of course, not new. It was French and German technical knowledge and expertise which guided the agro-economy of the initial colonisation and displacement processes.

Arboreal Disobedience

2007-01-19T07:14:00.000-08:00

Screams at night in the Bahai Gardens. They're a peaceful, meditative people. Or so they'd have us believe. But step out of line in their finnicity manicured gardens (which evoke not meditation so much as anal retention) and the guardians of order will soon have you in your place. This tree was apparently resisting the regimintal order... I'm hatching a plan to get it out. Will keep you posted.

A Cat Called Electricity

2007-01-05T09:02:00.000-08:00

New Years Eve

2007-01-03T14:59:00.000-08:00

Happy Christmas - Perfect Bird

2006-12-24T08:05:00.000-08:00

I found a perfect bird in the distance in a picture and have been slowly and methodically disassmbling its component pixels to varying degrees so that they can eventually be wed together in a transition from grey form to fractured colour. This says a lot about my current social life, both as indicator and explanation. But seriously, save this image, turn off all the lights and stare at it for 10 minutes or so against a black background. Then you'll be begging me for more... and I have hundreds of degrees of disintegration of this pigeon backed up.

I will shortly be posting something to do with Melanie Philips, her current trip to the Holy Land, her undoubtedly constructive intentions, and the distinguished company she's been keeping here. In the meantime. nd as you ask. Here's another variation:

Its Christmas. Its the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters Museum

2006-12-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

There is some snazzy text that accompanies these images. But I left it at home. In the meantime, and in order to conform somewhat with the spirit of the Festivities, I'll put these up anyway. A trip to the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz and museum. Brilliant lines and a chair, a weird death's head, and the box Eichmann was tried in.

Meen Erhabi? Live in Haifa!!

2006-12-23T07:47:00.000-08:00

Golden Arches of As-Sumariyya

2006-12-15T12:06:00.000-08:00

If you manage to climb through the rubble and overgrowth of As-Sumariyya, north of Akka, you can just about get under the beautiful domed arches of the destroyed mosque... and look out onto the mall that sprawls across its land. McDonalds and all.

Achzib Land

2006-12-13T10:57:00.000-08:00

The northern coastal road between the town of Akka and the Lebanon border carries you past, through and upon the remains of several Palestinian villages depopulated in the Nakba. Almost all were destroyed soon after their populations were expelled. In June 1948 the “Transfer Committee” issued a memorandum entitled ‘Retroactive Transfer: A Scheme for the Solution of the Arab Question in Israel’ in which it saw ‘preventing the Arabs from returning to their places’ as best achieved by the ‘destruction of villages as much as is possible… [and] settlement of Jews in a number of villages and towns so that no ‘vacuum’ is created.’

Destruction can be read as a pragmatic tool to consolidate expulsion. But it was also part of a wider project of re-writing the landscape in accordance with an exclusivist nationalist logic. This logic demanded the physical terrain be re-inscribed in such a way as to affirm the uncontested proprietorship of the colonising power while erasing physical evidence of the colonised and expelled. Within this destruction is a creative process of re-authoring space, appropriating and reinterpreting its features. And this creative-destructive work holds within it opportunities for the re-crafting of space to meet the symbolic requirements of nationalist claims made upon it, and in particular those that mobilise romantic tropes of continuity or organicism,

Immediately following the Nakba, state-academic organisations such as the ‘Naming Committee’ were established to re-write the map of Palestine, assigning thousands of Hebrew names to topographic features and localities throughout the country, as Arabic names for springs, rivers, hills, valleys, villages and towns were buried. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion declared at the time: ‘Just as we do not recognise the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, we also do not recognize their spatial proprietorship and their names’ (in Benvenisti 2000). Legislation demanded that only new names be used in officialdom; this had the effect of compelling even those Palestinians who had escaped the cleansing to participate in the propagation of the new zionist spatial taxonomy, as the registration of births, deaths, marriages, vehicles and even efforts to defend the confiscation of properties demanded their use of the new names. This was an effect observed with satisfaction by government officials. Minister Alexander Dotan, in 1952, noted that ‘it is possible, by being strictly formal and with adequate indoctrination… to make the Arab inhabitants of “Rami” get used to calling their village, in speech and writing, Ha-Rama…’ (in Piterberg 2001).

The ‘Naming Committee’ was keen on biblical names which granted the new map an appeal to antiquity. They were uncomfortable with names which referenced modern European zionist history, rejecting a number of proposals by newly settled zionists which reflected their recent origins in Europe. Thus, the avowedly secular regime advanced a policy of naming which conjured the mythistory of ‘return’ to the ancient biblical ‘Land of Israel.’ Hence, the formal mandate of the Committee was ‘to provide concrete substance to the unsevered thread of historical continuity from the time of Yoshua Ben Nun through to the conquest of the Negev in our generation’ (in Benvenisti 1997). The fact that the committee could find relatively little evidence capable of fabricating this trajectory posed a problem (the area of pre-1967 Israeli rule being of marginal if any relevance in the Book of Joshua). The challenge was met with creativity however, and the Committee was soon able to “discover” locations amid the debris of Palestine which, apparently overlooked by numerous and extensive archaeological explorations prior to 1948, were revealed to be remarkable examples of Jewish antiquity.

Remains of Az-Zib in the 'Achzib National Park'

Rarely supported by archaeological evidence of any description, such sites emerged from the landscape via the often tenuous ‘research’ of the state-appointed committee. Often, an Arabic name’s phonetic proximity to a biblical Hebrew locality would suffice as the basis for assertions which would later be treated with extreme skepticism by even the most nationalist of Israeli archaeologists and biblical historians. The example of Az-Zib, a Palestinian fishing port a little south of the Lebanon border is paradigmatic in this regard. Depopulated in 1948, the area was re-named Achzib (or Achziv) by the Committee, which maintained that the Arabic name derived from this biblical name listed in the book of Joshua. Although the housing, place of worship and cemetery of the Palestinian locality were destroyed, the remains were, with the name, instantly translated into markers of Jewish proprietorship, continuity, and ‘return’.

Picnic table and original wall - 'Achzib National Park'

Never taken particularly seriously by archaeologists or historians, the site’s remaining arches, domed roofs, and miscellaneous architectural remnants have since been transformed into a small national park, complete with snackshop and picnic facilities. None of the remaining structures are identified or dated. Instead a small plaque at the entrance to the site simply declares Achzib to be the site of a Jewish community in biblical times, referring the inquisitive to the book of Joshua should any further details be required.

Welcome to 'Achzib Land'

Adjacent to the national park, an entrepreneurial couple have established the bizarre ‘Achzib Land,’ a fenced enclosure wherein more of the village’s debris has been rearranged in the spirit of a rustic outdoor restaurant. For a fee, newlyweds are shuttled in to have portraits and videos taken against a mélange of curious artifacts and structures reassembled to blur any immediate national or historic recognition, and to instead convey a sort of timeless rural antiquity. The entire enclosure can be hired for catered receptions or similar events.

There was a Wedding in 'Achzib Land'

There were several

The northern perimeter fence of ‘Achzib Land’ is hidden behind a string of wooden service huts. They conceal also the littered remains of the village’s cemetery. ‘Achzib Land’ in fact is itself partially built over the destroyed graves of Az-Zib. Through a gap in the fence, it’s possible to make your way through upturned drums of coagulated chemical waste, over piles of rusted piping, discarded crates, plastic bottles, and to pick your way between the scattered stones of the cemetery. A handful of grave markers remain intact, but the overwhelming majority have been demolished; what remains is an eerie field littered with cut stones and compacted waste.

Remains of the Az-Zib Cemetary

Scattered gravestones and litter adjacent to the 'Achzib Land' fence

In re-inscribing Az-Zib as a marker of biblical continuity, zionism’s colonial technicians conducted the rapid and concentrated nationalizing work incumbent upon them at the time. The successful de-Palestinising of the physical remains of the razed village saw them loosely relocated within a vague teleology that purported to speak of primordial Jewish roots and contemporary ‘return’. At the level of its abstraction, space was simultaneously re-inscribed as the Hebrew Map (completed 1952) and Atlas of Israel (described as ‘aimed to promote national causes’ by highlighting the ‘achievements of the state’ and ‘the heritage of the fathers’) were generated as the legally mandated spatial devices through which the territory and its features were to be apprehended. But in the ensuing decades, Achzib’s predictable failure to elicit genuine recognition of its antiquity and significance combined with the emergence of new forms of national spatial practice. Where an archaeological dig might have prompted an awkward moment of reckoning, the exercise of an entirely different (and far more pervasive) form of nationalising agency can now be discerned in the treks, picnics, swimming outings, weddings and such which bring ‘Achzib National Park’ and ‘Achzib Land’ to life in its de-historicised, aesthetically rearranged and politically “neutralized” guise. Az-Zib’s reordered masonry is now safe enough to appear behind smiling newlyweds in albums across the northern Galilee. Families can picnic and swim beside the village’s domes and arches safe in the vague nationalising claims contained in the park’s name and plaque, and in the national flag that flies above it. The fact that few will peer behind the fence and recognize there the cemetery of a depopulated village is a reflection of the normalizing power of this process of reinscription when carried out in similar fashion at a macro level across the entire country.

Foreground: Az-Zib graves. In rear: 'Achzib Land' wedding 'throne' for portraits

Nahariyya Tops 'Most Depressing Town' List

2006-12-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

And nothing. Really nothing else can be said. Except this. The municipality has colour-coded the different suburbs of the town. Its unclear why, but this is announced with a degree of pride on the huge maps of the city scattered about the concrete wasteland that is its commercial hub. I left town in a hurry. But not without some morbid curiosity about the 'Disneyland' marked on these maps at the periphery of the orange zone. Another time maybe.

Streetfighting in Ramleh

2006-12-07T13:03:00.000-08:00

The town of Ramleh is 20 mins drive east from Tel Aviv and has a “mixed” population of Jews and Palestinians (ca. 80%-20% respectively). Large-scale ethnic cleansing (“Operation Dani”) in 1948 saw the majority of the indigenous Palestinian population driven out across the border into refugeedom (future Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin was there, and first PM, David Ben-Gurion, famously “lent a hand”), but a very few remained or were able to return from nearby sites of refuge [info on Ramleh in 1948]. A bit of a bugger for the architects of ethno-national purity, these remnants and their descendents have, like the rest of the Palestinian minority in Israel, since been the target of the full gamut of Israeli state programmes aimed at their marginalisation or eradication. Aside from legal, economic, and military violence, a range of spatial and commemorative practices have been brought to bear with the aim of divesting the minority of its purchase upon the historic, symbolic, and material fabric of this ancient Palestinian centre.

Reinscribing the town in order that it contribute to the development of a larger national “zionist homelandscape” has involved several complementary types of colonial spatial practice; the demolition and neglect of the remains of the sacked old town has gone hand in hand with the re-ordering of its space in accordance with markers of zionist exclusivity. The remnants of pre-1948 Ramleh are thus buried beneath parking lots and rubbish tips; street names claim the town as zionist, summoning Herzl and Weizmann to wage posthumous war upon the town’s Palestinian residents by seizing their parks and squares, roads and addresses.

OLD RAMLEH UNDER CAR PARK: LEFT - CAR STICKER = 'WE WILL WIN' (Heb.)

The town museum is combined with a memorial to its fallen Israeli soldiers (yad l’banim). Tickets in Hebrew only. A timeline diagram inside allows the town its antiquity, beginning in 705… “in the Land of Israel.” The P word is pointedly absent, leaving it hard to understand who the inhabitants of Ramleh are over the course of “history”. One thing is made clear though – these nameless people lacked gumption. Repeated references to an “abandoned” or “desolate” city and its nameless “inhabitants” seems to jar with the equally frequent attention paid to the site as a target for significant military campaigns, or with its subsequent administrative centrality for the British. Indeed the fact of the town’s location between Jerusalem and Jaffa at the coast (hence its control of trade, pilgrimage, and defence) is avoided by the authors of this history. This silence recurs however – and in so doing announces its logic – as the timeline arrives at 1948 without giving any indication as to why or how the zionist forces took such extensive measures to cleanse and claim the town on their way to the subsequent conquest of nearly 80% of the country. The vanishing of Ramleh’s Palestinian residents from history is in this way wed to an avoidance of the town’s vital geo-strategic location, its historic importance, and the pronounced, premeditated nature of the town’s de-population in July 1948. These acts of excision performed, the timeline allows one bright spot to emerge in a catalogue of flight, plagues, and earthquakes – the museum credits the town with “an impressive church” in 1141. Built by the crusaders.

TICKET TO RAMLEH MUSEUM- ARMED FORCES MEMORIAL

The timeline ends abruptly at 1948: “Operation Dani, Ramle succumbs to the Israeli defense.” The remaining exhibits might well have been put together by the teenage volunteers in the office. A model of a train station with ‘Ramle’ written on the lego-kit plastic building is in a glass box labelled “Ramle Train Station.” The word Palestine and Palestinian are entirely absent. Almost - the only crack in the façade coming due to the awkward fact the British called Palestine Palestine… and so two charts from the 1930s are labelled as such. For non English-speakers, disaster is averted however, as even here, the Hebrew signage accurately describes the map as a P.E.F. product; P.E.F. (indicating “Palestine Exploration Fund”) is then given in Hebrew as “A British Survey” of “The Land of Israel.”

Outside the museum is a sight common throughout Israel. A street sign in Hebrew, English and Arabic is defaced to eradicate the Arabic. Normally this form of public participation indicates an act of nationalist eradication, an affirmation of the state’s aspiration for Jewish domination combined with a gesture of contempt towards its Arab Palestinian citizens. Only, here in Ramleh, the municipality has already minimised the need for such performances by placing signs only in Hebrew and English throughout much of the “mixed” town. The sign outside the museum is in fact an exception, and the act of eradication constitutes a return to the norm; not so much “cleansing” as “dusting off”.

In the face of this enforced zionisation of space, Ramleh’s Palestinian population have limited opportunities for resistance. Municipal planning reflects state and nationalist objectives and so is structured wholesale against normative patterns of participation and organisation by the unwanted minority. Forced into a perverse form of complicity in their own eradication by the daily necessity of mobilising an exclusively Jewish or zionist historic-hagiographic canon to navigate in their home, Palestinian residents have sought alternative means of resistance. The poorest part of the town, home to many Palestinians (and ruined town remnants) as well as a portion of the town’s poorest Jews, is now known as “the Ghetto”. This subversive designation is so widely used amongst residents that even Israel’s establishment newscasters, with eyebrows raised for sure, are compelled to use it as a geographic reference.

In fact they did so when, recently, the matter of Ramleh’s street names gained a flicker of attention in the Israeli media. Indirectly. Ghetto residents petitioned the municipality unsuccessfully for a change in the street-naming practices and a review of current names. The head of the municipality, mayor Yoel Lavie responded to a telephone query from a local Jewish reporter on the subject:

“What? Should I change a name, because Jamal wants to change the name? Because Ahmad wants to change the name? He should change his god! They should all go fuck themselves!"

(An English language web version of a Yedioth article on the event is toned down – this is the actual quote; a streaming mp3 version of the taped conversation is up here for the moment: http://213.8.193.29/msnvideo/glz/yoel.mp3 Here Lavie goes on to ask if Jews who question his stance, such as the journalist, have “become the bitches of every ass-fucking Arab..” [Hebrew])

The Israeli supreme court – albeit in different timbre – has long backed Lavie’s view; petitioned since 1999 by Adalah (a Palestinian legal NGO in Israel) for the use of Arabic on street signs, the court, back in July 2002, ruled that municipalities were under “no binding legal obligation to post signs in Arabic” – despite its formal status as an official language. Perhaps with the knowledge of this full judicial support puffing his sails, mayor Lavie proposed that Ramleh’s Palestinians (“Arabs”) should leave the town and “go live in Jaljuliya” (a Palestinian village in Israel), somewhere he acknowledged had an “Arab name”.

ABOVE: NO ARABIC SIGNAGE IN THE GHETTO

Although unlikely to have figured in the residents’ evaluation of this offer, it ought to be noted that the village of Jaljuliya was itself the scene of recent ethnic cleansing. On January 24^th a nightime military operation was launched against the Palestinian citizens of the village. 36 women, many with children (some pregnant) were taken by force from their families and homes; 8 were eventually forced to leave to the West Bank and barred from returning to the village. No security threat cited. Rather a demographic one… indigenous-foreign bodies breeding in the Jewish state (Pappe, LRB 7-4-06). But the risk of becoming victims of this biopolitical warfare in Jaljuliya was not the issue which sparked protest this week in Ramleh.

Rather, Lavie’s latest crude demonstration that the colossal projects of cultural, material, symbolic and political violence directed against them by the state and its apparatuses had rendered them at once invisible and invalid. Their re-emergence at the level of the municipality (the state) came at the cost of their racist reduction to grotesque caricatures; the degree of contempt shown by the state for its Palestinian citizens underscoring not just their cultural and historical erasure from home, but their concomitant re-location into that invidious space reserved throughout history for the unclean, unwanted, undesirable; for the rootless, the homeless. A space outside recognition yet all too recognisable for anyone familiar with Jewish history.

ABOVE: HOMEMADE GHETTO SIGN - ARABIC AND HEBREW: "TAWFIQ ZIAD" (PALESTINIAN POET AND HISTORIC NATIONAL FIGURE)

Direct action is now being taken in the streets of the Ghetto. In some places street signs have simply been removed. And in others, new ones are being claimed with tape and paper. This is perhaps minor, gesture politics. But it is indication of a growing awareness that the politics of Palestinian rights and equality cannot reasonably be pursued in the Israeli parliament, or at the level of Israeli local government (even in “mixed” towns), but might rather be pursued without these structures of eradication, upon the streets. Any doubt about this evaporates once the municipality’s (Hebrew) sign outside the government complex is confronted: “Ramleh: Exploring the Past – Looking Ahead.” Quite staggeringly, the form of the Hebrew verb “exploring” chosen – other options are available – can also be read as “exiling” or “banishing.” The sign promises a “grass football pitch”… no likelihood of an even playing field though.

Stella Maris

2006-12-05T11:42:00.000-08:00

This is the outside of the main door to the Carmelite Monastery of Stella Maris. Back in the day the Prophet Elias made several rash promises here.

This is the floor. And this is the ceiling.

And if anyone knows of a suitable house band looking for a resi-dance....

Nice House

2006-12-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

That's all. Just a nice house.

Fantastic Cat

2006-12-02T13:28:00.000-08:00

Takako Minekawa and her cat. sorry - i've regressed.

Beit Ha-Model

2006-11-26T04:48:00.000-08:00

In the basement of the Jerusalem Municipality building, is a model of about 18km2 of the city. It's 1:500 scale, over 28 years in the making, and still being developed. City planners and policy-makers use this device as a reference point and an elevated arm allows the model unit to take precise images throughout the model for further reference. It's open to the public a couple of hours a day, although photographs are not really allowed.

"A big man is really just a small man with a good map" (Bruno Latour)

There's piped music in the corridors of the Municipality building. While I was waiting to get into model room it started to register. Soft synth and atmospheric effects. And then, in English, very gently - "and relax those knees, that's right.... and one, and two, and one..." Hmmm.

FlapJack

2006-11-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

I'm concluding with the cat-themed material today. Probably. Fittingly, I am sitting but metres away from Maneki Neko, who is surrounded by perspex swans. And some karaoke is occurring too. (Father and Son - Boyzone's version... how does that work anyway? surely in a karaoke situation, a cover looses its purchase on the material, no?).

This footage was taken randomly; its not a normal routine, so far as I know, but every time i watch it I'm impressed by Jack's total lack of conviction. Maybe someone who knows him will find it equally amusing.

Right, that's it for soft and silly stuff. From here on in, its going to get real. Til then. And if anyone knows how to get rid of those annoying white borders...?

Sheeptease

2006-11-15T05:28:00.001-08:00

I'm safely installed now within walls and under roof in my comfortably furnished salon, but outside, things remain relentlessly out of control...

And in some quarters it has come to this.....

The Roof

2006-11-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

Cool roofs are defined as roofs with both high reflectivity and high emissivity. Some building styles, for example, geodesic and A-frame, blur the distinction between wall and roofs.

The Wall

2006-11-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

Mortar is a material used in masonry to fill the gaps between blocks in construction. The blocks may be stone, brick, breeze blocks (cinder blocks), etc. Mortar is a mixture of sand, a binder such as cement or lime, and water and is applied as a paste which then sets hard.

The Chair

2006-11-10T17:05:00.000-08:00

The modern movement of the 1960s produced new forms of chairs: the butterfly chair, bean bags, the egg-shaped pod chair, and the urethane foam filled Foof chair formerly known as the "Poof chair". Technological advances led to molded plywood and laminate wood chairs, as well as chairs made of leather or polymers. Massage chairs are now sold and used in homes all over the world.