The Bullet, the Ballot and the Boycott: A Talk by David Sheen
PRODUCER AND HOST: Mark Hage
CO-PRODUCER AND TECHNICAL DIRECTOR: Danny Weiss
Sponsored by Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel (www.vtjp.org)
This edition closes our series, which began in July, examining the devastating human, environmental, economic, social, and infrastructural consequences of Israel’s most recent, full-scale assault—Operation Protective Edge (OPE)—on Gaza in 2014. It led to the deaths of 2,215 Palestinians, the majority civilians, including 299 women and 551 children. 18,000 homes and civilian structures were destroyed, and 11,000 Palestinians were injured. This program offers commentary as well on a report released jointly in August by Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza on Israel’s refusal to thoroughly investigate or prosecute charges of war crimes in the wake of OPE.
There are documentaries from the Thomas Reuter’s Foundation on the use of forensic architecture research by analysts in London to painstakingly reconstruct Israel’s campaign of destruction in Gaza; from the Al Mezan Center on the killing of four brothers from the Bakr family, who were playing soccer on the beach when a missile targeted them (“The Beach”); from the We Are Not Numbers Project in Gaza, featuring an open letter from a 21-year-old woman to Hillary Clinton; and from Doctors Without Borders.
The second half of the program is the second installment of a new series centered on the research and activism of David Sheen, a Jewish citizen of Israel, who for years has been exposing and challenging the pervasive, institutional and systematic racism in Israel that flows from Zionist ideology. A state that defines itself as “Jewish” cannot be truly “democratic”, except in respect to basic forms and protocols. As Sheen has shown again and again in his research, Israel is now and always has been a state dedicated to the preservation of Jewish political, legal, economic and cultural supremacy, and this has disastrous and long-term consequences for its non-Jewish citizens—Palestinians and Africans, notably—as well as for Palestinians under military occupation.
Finally, this program includes a short report from Al Jazeera about a Palestinian citizen of Israel subjected to house detention for writing a poem, and closes with a biting satirical piece from Apartheid Adventures.
Produced with facilities provided by Vermont Community Access Media (VCAM).
