MidEast:JustPeace Winter DVD Presentations
Wednesday January 21
Wednesday February 18
Wednesday March 18
All at 6:30 PM at the Traverse Area Public Library
60 minute DVD presentation, followed by discussion. Free/Public Invited.
January 21: The first presentation is by Anna Baltzer, a Jewish-American Columbia graduate, Fulbright scholar, and three-time volunteer with the International Women’s Peace Service, a human rights organization based in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The 60 minute DVD Life in Occupied Palestine provides critical information and documentation and encourages dialogue towards taking action on the issue. The presentation covers checkpoints, settlements, Israeli activism, censorship, the Wall, and the frequently unreported Palestinian-led nonviolent resistance movement. See www.annainthemiddleeast.com.
February 18: The second DVD forum will be with Israeli professor and author Ilan Pappe. Hear Ilan Pappe discuss his new book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Since the Holocaust, it has been almost impossible to hide large-scale crimes against humanity. In our communicative world few modern catastrophes are concealed from the public eye. And yet, Ilan Pappe unveils, one such crime has been erased from the global public memory: the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948. The pervasive denial of the Nakbah, as Palestinians call the catastrophe that befell them, is still a mystery today. But why is it denied, and by whom?
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine offers an investigation of this mystery, and Pappe puts forward a ground-breaking – if controversial – interpretation of the relationship of Nakbah to the Palestine-Israeli conflict, naming Nakbah as the conflict’s very origin. Portraying Israeli-Palestine relations in a revolutionary new light, this book is guaranteed to spark fierce debate throughout the world.
See www.IlanPappe.com
March 18: The third DVD forum will be with with American professors and authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. They discuss their new book, The Israel Lobby. For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.Hear more from Mearsheimer and Walt. See January 26, 2009 issue of American Conservative Magazine at www.amconmage.com and London Review of Books