Journalism in the dumps
By Iqbal Tamimi
Handing on the Key: Palestinians in Australia
IMMIGRATION
MUSEUM
Exhibition
21 Aug – 22 Nov 2009
This exhibition explores the identity of the Palestinian community in Australia.
For the majority of Palestinians in Australia, there is no lived experience of Palestine. Handing on the Key explores how the link to homeland is passed from one generation to the next through acts of memory. The changing identity of the Palestinian community through generations reveals the different and often emotional connections that Australians of Palestinian heritage have to Palestine.
EVENT DETAILS
Event Type: Temporary Exhibition
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM Community Gallery
Free with museum entry.
MV Members receive FREE museum entry.
Dear mum: email from an Israeli prison cell
Sarah Haynes, a volunteer with Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, recently wrote this group email to her friends and family in Australia:
Not all tours end in arrest — but mine did.
I am volunteering with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). This is an Israeli human rights group with a focus on house demolitions both in solidarity with the Palestinians who suffer the devastation of losing their home, but also to debunk the Israeli myths about actions based on security: Destroying peoples homes can have no security justification — instead it is a tool in what the convener of the group, Jeff Halper, describes as the “matrix of control”.
For a detailed account of the strategy of settlement, this article by ICAHD is pretty exhaustive.
As I mentioned in an earlier email there is a hotly contested area in East Jerusalem called Sheihk Jarrah — it has even made it on to Obama’s radar, with specific mention. There is a group of fanatical setters who want to create a new settlement complex in this neighbourhood, which means first expelling all the Palestinian residents, taking over their homes, then eventually razing the area for this new settlement.
Palestinian Child Prisoners
The systematic and institutionalised ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities
This report documents the widespread ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli army and police force. It contains the testimonies of 33 children who bear witness to the abuse they received at the hands of soldiers from the moment of arrest through to an often violent interrogation. Children report being painfully shackled for hours on end, kicked, beaten and threatened, some with death, until they provide confessions, some written in Hebrew, a language they do not speak or understand. The report finds that these illegally obtained confessions are routinely used as evidence in the military courts to convict around 700 Palestinian children every year.
Once sentenced, the children who gave these testimonies were mostly imprisoned inside Israel in breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention where they receive few family visits, and little or no education. The report concludes that this widespread and systematic abuse is occurring within a general culture of impunity where in 600 complaints made against Israeli Security Agency interrogators for alleged ill-treatment and torture, not a single criminal investigation was ever conducted.
The report also contains recent recommendations made by the UN Committee Against Torture which expressed ‘deep concern’ at reports of the abuse of Palestinian children when it reviewed Israel’s compliance with the Convention Against Torture in May 2009.