How To Teach The Children-and US-The Way To Peace

by Eileen Fleming

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Rich Siegel’s six-year-old daughter Emily Gu Siegel created the cover art for her Poet, Musician, Activist and Spiritual Progressive Father’s CD “The Way to Peace”

Emily’s art work immediately put me in mind of John Lennon who was inspired to write “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” by his son’s artwork- and also this John Lennon print that hangs above my bathtub:

The first listen through of Rich’s twelve songs also put me in mind of Jesus/AKA The Prince of Peace and THE WAY, who began a movement with twelve ordinary men with the message that the One God Loves All People Equally.

Rich’s religious views are “One God=One Love.”

Jesus was born lived and died a Palestinian Jew under a brutal military occupation.

Rich grew up in a Zionist home and lived in Israel before he learned he had been “lied to” about the “original sin” of national Zionism that continues to wreck havoc on the Holy Land.

Rich dedicates his most haunting song, “In Palestine” to the children of Gaza and in particular to Abir Aramin.

“In Palestine” as Rich pleads to God for all of US to STOP the killing, I imagined what a wonderful world it could be IF only this song were sung in every Christian Church throughout America as the faces of the children of Palestine flashed on a screen:

All because of a photo first published by The Florida Catholic in 2000, my life was irrevocably changed.

Photographer Debbie Hill captured three-year-old George [it is his photo that adorns the banner of my website] of Beit Jala, which is less than a five-minute car ride from downtown Bethlehem.
The photo was shot the morning after the Israeli military forces retaliated against a few hopeless militants who had infiltrated George’s neighborhood to snipe across the way into the illegal settlement/colony of Gilo, which lies about a mile as the crow flies from the top of the hill around the corner from George’s home.
The shrapnel that blew apart the wall of George’s bedroom read ‘Made in USA’ and was delivered via American made Apache helicopters.

The second I saw George’s eyes, in that photo, my heart said “DO SOMETHING!”
And that was the moment that I began to wake up from my comfortable Christianity to the brutal military occupation of Palestine and see ALL the children of that troubled land as my children too.
George’s face has adorned the banner of my website since I established it in 2005 after my first of seven trips to the State of Israel and Land of Palestine.

Abir’s face has adorned the left margin of my website ever since I learned that on 16 January 2007, the ten year old was walking with her sister and two friends to buy some sweet treats during a break between classes in the West Bank village of Anata, which is about four miles from Jerusalem.
While standing beside her sister at a kiosk, Abir was shot in the head with a rubber bullet fired from the rifle of a Border Guard soldier who was sitting in his well armored jeep.

After three days on life support Abir’s struggle ended- but not the struggle for justice her parents and all people of conscience seek-to STOP the KILLING in the Land of Palestine and State of Israel.

Israeli and Palestinian Children Killed September 29, 2000 – Present
126 Israeli childrenhave been killed by Palestinians and 1,476 Palestinian childrenhave been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000. (View Sources & More Information)

Israeli and Palestinian Children Killed September 29, 2000 – Present

In 2007, Avichay Sharon, of Combatants for Peace explained, “Over the past 2 years, the Israeli Border Police and IDF forces have been creating provocations near the school district of Anata [which] has become a part of the daily routine for the children. Ever since construction started on the separation barrier surrounding Anata, the jeeps have been roaming the streets especially near the schools and shooting grenades and tear gas along with rubber bullets.”
Bassam Aramin, Abir’s father and co-founder of Combatants for Peace said, “I’m not going to lose my common sense, my direction, only because I’ve lost my heart, my child. I will do all I can to protect her friends, both Palestinian and Israeli. They are all our children.”
In March of 2006, I visited Anata and have been tormented by my memories ever since. The thirty-foot high concrete Wall that surrounds the boys high school where 780 Palestinian adolescents, only ‘playground’ is a slab of cement about the square footage of a basket ball court.
A resident refugee informed me that on a daily basis, “The Israeli Occupation Forces show up when the children gather in the morning or after classes. They throw percussion bombs or gas bombs into the school nearly every day! The world is sleeping; the world is hibernating and is allowing this misery to continue.”
A moment later, a teenage boy approached me as I was taking photos and asked me my name and where I was from. I cringed admitting I was American, for “financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile, the Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families’ sole livelihood for generations.” [Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Jan/Feb. 2007]
On July 9, 2004, the International Court of Justice/ICJ, ruled 14-1 that The Wall was illegal and it must come down and also that compensation should be paid to all who had been affected.
The ICJ Judges also decided 13-2 that signatories to the Geneva Convention were obliged to enforce “compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law” and the U.N. General Assembly also passed a resolution 150-6 supporting the ICJ’s call to dismantle the wall.” [Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2009]
Less than five minutes by car from Anata, one can enter into the Orwellian Disney Land of lush green grounds called the Pizgat Ze’ev settlement.
All the settlements/colonies in the West Bank are illegal under international law.
I was sick at heart as I traveled through the colony and counted three playgrounds and a swimming pool.
I wondered how many USA tax dollars helped to build them, and outraged over the injustices of Walls and military occupation that American money provides against the indigenous people of that land.
Within fifteen minutes after leaving Anata, as I stood next to a playground in Pizgat Ze’ev, a barrage of gunshots issued from the refugee camp and my guide informed me that the Israeli soldiers were showering the refugees with gunfire and terror- another normal daily occurrence for them.
I lost it completely then and sobbed uncontrollably, as I imagined the Magdalena when she could not find her Lord.
And then I thought of how Jesus cried buckets of tears over Jerusalem when he “saw the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If you had only known what would bring you peace but it is hidden from your eyes.’”- Luke 19:42

Lady Justice, the Roman Goddess of Justice, an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems, is depicted wearing a blindfold to indicate that justice should be meted out objectively, not based in favor of- or against- ethnicity, power, or weakness, but on blind impartiality.
How Do We Teach The Children- and ourselves- The Way to Peace?
“There is no way to peace-peace is the way”-A.J. Muste
But Rich Siegel’s CD offers us some wonderful ways to imagine it as we teach our children through music what a what a wonderful world it should and can be; and
“What a Wonderful World” with Gilad Atzom on sax will blow you away and is also another highlight on “The Way To Peace”
To order and learn more visit http://www.richsiegel.com/
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

The Palestinians as an “Invented People”

by Rich Siegel

Saturday, May 12th, 2012

Palestinians protesting about hunger strikes

The name “Palestine” has been around for a long time. “Peleset”, transliterated from Egyptian hieroglyphics as “P-l-s-t”, is found in numerous Egyptian documents referring to a neighboring people or land starting from around 1150 BC. The “Philistine” States existed concurrently with the ancient Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, making up the coastal plain below Jaffa and south to Gaza. In the 5th Century BC Herodutus wrote of a “district of Syria, called Palestine”. About a century later, Aristotle described the Dead Sea in Meteorology and located it in Palestine:

Again if, as is fabled, there is a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink, this would bear out what we have said. They say that this lake is so bitter and salty that no fish live in it and that if you soak clothes in it and shake them it cleans them.

This writer has had the misfortunate of frequently engaging in debates with Zionists (a bad habit I need to kick!) who often tend to seize on small ideas. “When did the Palestinians ever have their own country?” In order to win such an argument one would have to reduce oneself to their terms, and produce a map that shows a country and borders: “Palestinian Kingdom, 1587- 1702”, and then let them present their map of ancient Israel and Judea, and then get into a wrestling match the winner of which would claim the territory for their own. Or perhaps the issue would be better settled the way the New York colony won Staten Island from New Jersey: with a boat race. If the goal is exclusivity, as it always has been with Zionism, then the only criterion in achieving it is winning, whether a war or a race.

There was no 17th century Palestinian Kingdom, or 18th or 19th. There were, prior to Allied victory in World War One and the League of Nations “mandates” which granted European powers control of the region, various provinces in a larger Ottoman empire, ruled from Istanbul (previously known as Constantinople, and before that, Byzantium), much as there are today various American states governed from Washington. Objectors will cry “Foul!”, as Americans are governed by Americans in Washington, whereas Arabs were governed by Turks, a different ethnic group with a different language. Fine. So I modify my comparison to the Spanish speaking Puerto Ricans governed from Washington, or the French speaking Quebecois governed from Ottawa. Neither the Puerto Ricans nor the French Canadians are being ethnically cleansed.

Prior to Zionism, there was no need for the Arabs of Palestine to focus on Palestinian identity. They were citizens of the Ottoman Empire. When, during the mandate years the British made contradictory promises to the Zionists and the Arabs, and the Arabs expected, and had the right to expect, eventual self-rule, it was certainly not a foregone conclusion that there was going to be an independent Palestine. Palestinians might well have been a part of a larger South Syria, or of a Greater Syria, and happily so. They certainly would not have been ethnically cleansed under those circumstances. The Arabs of Palestine have always had their own distinct Arabic dialect, and various other cultural attributes that set them apart from other regional Arab cultures, but that was never particularly relevant. Many various subcultures existed within the Ottoman Empire, and continued to exist within British and French mandates.

Interestingly, during the years of the Yishuv, the pre-Israeli-statehood Zionist community in Palestine, Jewish-Zionist settlers called themselves “Palestinians”. In this way, the Zionists ironically affirmed the thing that many of them wish now to deny: Palestinian identity.

In 1948, amid the massacres and military forced mass expulsions of the “nakba” (Arabic for catastrophe, the name commonly given to the events of 1948), when the state of “Israel” was declared, all of the Jews who had been calling themselves Palestinians became “Israelis”, and when the dust cleared, the Arabs who remained within the green line became “Arab Israelis”, like it or not. (It was not known until the state of “Israel” was declared, what it was to be named. “Zion” was considered as a possibility, but rejected, as the result would have necessitated referring to “Arab Israelis”, the Arab citizens of Israel, as “Arab Zionists”.)

The designation “Palestinian” was more actively embraced beginning in 1964, with the forming of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), this out of necessity, because a people who had been ethnically cleansed, who were in a state of shock and humiliation, and who were desperate to recover and regain what was rightfully theirs, found it useful to rally around symbols representing themselves: A name and a flag are two of the basics.

Golda Meir famously said in 1969, during her tenure as Israeli prime minister;

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

Golda is actually right on this point and that point. I would not have been able to show her a map that says “Kingdom of Palestine” or “Grand Duchy of Palestine” or any of dozens of designations that might have satisfied her. But this I can say for sure:

There were human beings on that land, and they had been there all their lives, and their families for many generations before them down through the centuries. And many of them were actually descended from ancient Jews who later converted to Christianity and Islam, while our ancestors, Golda’s and mine- the Ashkenazi Jews, were converting to Judaism in the Khazar Kingdom on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Golda actually knew when making this statement, the information which has become available to the general public in the decades since:

We Jews did come and throw them out and take their country away from them. It’s been thoroughly documented. It wasn’t when she made this statement in 1969. She was able to get away with it then. But since then an entire generation of Jewish-Israeli scholars, (and many others, but we Jews need to hear it from Jews first!) has carefully documented the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and presented the history that she personally knew, but actively hid and denied. She and her colleagues concealed the truth from Jewish supporters of Israel all over the world including my family, who taught me lies quite innocently, because they didn’t know any better.

In 1984 a book written by Joan Peters, entitled From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine, was released to the world. The book claimed that the Palestinians were not resident in Palestine long-term, but were recent arrivals, having come to take advantage of economic opportunities in Palestine which were largely the result of Zionist Jewish settlement. What a perfect way for us Zionist Jews to massage ourselves (I was one at the time!) and drive a wedge between ourselves and the growing awareness about Palestine in the world around us! So it really was a “land without people for a people without a land”! Those Arabs were all immigrants! And how ungrateful that they hate us after all the opportunity we gave them! A wave of related claims surfaced among the Zionist community. An essay by Mark Twain describing his touring of a sparsely populated 19th century Palestine, was offered up into the mix of “Palestinian-denier” evidence. Twain, whose writing was full of humorous and ironic opposition to human bullshit, was no doubt rolling in his grave over this. And claims were often heard that prominent Palestinians, from Edward Said to Yassir Arafat, were “not really Palestinian”.

Enter another book, in 2003, The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz. In case 19 intervening years had given anyone a memory lapse since the publication of Peters’s book, Dershowitz borrowed heavily from same, giving the same statistics and making the same conclusions.

Enter yet another book, but this one very different: In Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, published in 2005, Norman G. Finkelstein exposed Peters’s statistics as fraudulent, and with that revelation both her argument and that of Dershowitz, collapsed.

However, the damage is done among those who wish to ignore Finkelstein, and there are many! “Isn’t he a holocaust denier?”, I’ve been asked. I respond: “No. His parents were holocaust survivors.” Zionists have long used a familiar tactic against those who challenge their propaganda: Defamation. And so the lies persist. This writer still has people putting From Time Immemorial in his face to prove their argument. They refuse to be embarrassed.

"Native" Gingrich and the "invented" Palestine

At the time of this writing (January 2012), the American public is being treated to an entertainment we get every four years: the run up to our presidential election. As the Democratic candidate will obviously be the incumbent, we are witnessing the Republican candidates claw at each other in their striving to win support for the Republican nomination. Enter a billionaire Jewish American Zionist named Sheldon Adelson, casino magnate and the 8th wealthiest American alive, who along with his wife has donated $10 million to candidate Newt Gingrich. Adelson, whose holdings include the Israeli newspaper Israel HaYom (Israel Today) made some interesting statements while in Israel at an Israel Media Watch event in 2010:

I am not Israeli. The uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform. It was an American uniform, although my wife was in the IDF and one of my daughters was in the IDF … our two little boys, one of whom will be bar mitzvahed tomorrow, hopefully he’ll come back– his hobby is shooting – and he’ll come back and be a sniper for the IDF.

And:

All we (the Adelson family) care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart.

Does it sound like this guy has “divided loyalties?” Maybe like the Jewish neocons in the Bush administration who got us to fight a proxy war for Israel in Iraq? No- you can’t say that! It would be “anti-Semitic”!

So is it any wonder that Newt Gingrich has made the utterly incorrect and profoundly idiotic statement that he has made about the Palestinians being an “invented” people? It has nothing to do with any education on the subject of the history, or any awareness of the current situation. It’s simply a question of wanting to win, and of reiterating nonsense he has heard in conversations with a very rich and generous supporter, nonsense which jives with the general impressions that Americans get from our Zionist-controlled media, and that no doubt circulate in Gingrich’s Republican circles. Does anyone think Gingrich has read Finkelstein? I doubt it! And if he did, would he turn down $10 million in favor of truth and justice?

The people native to the land of Palestine were not “invented”. It is indeed unfortunate that someone who is supposedly educated, and who has achieved position in life where he is poised to potentially become the next president of the United States, is putting forth such foolishness.

Beit Ommar West Bank - Ocuppied Palestine

RICH SIEGEL’S CD “THE WAY TO PEACE” IS AVAILABLE AT Amazon (UK & US), CD
Baby,I-Tunes, AND Palestine Online Store.
(This essay was originally published on inconvenienthistory.com)


River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

My Pro-Palestine CD Reviewed & then ‘Un-reviewed’

 

Introduction by Gilad Atzmon: Rich Siegel is now subject to Zionist abuse and smear campaign. Jazz writer Brent Black of criticaljazz.com who reviewed Rich’s peace seeking album favorably has now changed his mind due to Jewish pressure. Black wrote on facebook:

my humble apologies to my jewish friends for reviewing rich sigel (sic) an anti-zionist peace activist that supports the destruction of israel. had i know (sic) who he was and what he was all about i never would have given him 30 seconds of my time. his review is pulled and e mail blocked. again my apologies i stand with israel NEVER against her but firmly against her enemies.”

In my entire musical career I have never heard of a review being deleted. Needless to say that there is not a drop of truth in anything Black attributes to Siegel above. Siegel is a humanist. He searches for peace and reconciliation through artistic expression.
Please support Rich, buy his album and follow his public performances.
Beauty is liberation
Gilad.
———————————————————————————————————–
The path that my new CD, “The Way to Peace”, has taken to arrive at completion has really been my personal path, a long and circuitous one. I’ve had a career as a work-a-day musician, something which is becoming a rarity today as live music is all but disappearing from so many venues. I’ve been a “99% musician”, not rich or famous from it, but making a living, piano bars, elegant hotel lounges, up-scale restaurants, corporate and private events, musical director for shows, accompanying singers, some famous ones. I’ve been in some shows as well, Off Broadway, a singing pianist on-stage accompanying the cast, and getting a few solo numbers. I’ve also done a fair amount of traveling, jazz clubs in Canada, hostess bars in Japan, music festivals in France, even a piano bar gig in West Africa.

One gig that I tend to leave off my resume is a steady job I had for awhile playing at a luxury hotel in Israel. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I support Israel. I don’t. At the time I worked there, in my early 20′s, I was totally the product of where I came from, deep inside the Zionist cult, in the American Jewish community. Raised in a suburb of New York, I was the teenage president of a Zionist youth group. Many years later I came to the shocking realization that I had been lied to all my life. I came to understand that we Jews had not arrived in Palestine desiring to be friendly neighbors to vicious Arab hordes who hated us for no reason and wanted to “drive us into the sea”. The fact is, we Jews committed atrocities against innocent people who were just living their lives on land that had been theirs for many generations. We committed massacres and military forced mass expulsions. We committed an ethnic cleansing, one that continues today.

I became aware of my people’s crimes, and also aware that I had been used by my people, to support something I would never have supported had I been told anything resembling the truth. I also got married and became a father, grateful to live in a place where I can keep my daughter safe, and horrified that often Palestinian fathers can’t keep their children safe because of the crimes of my people. I started to care a whole lot less about music, and a whole lot more about human rights, especially children’s rights. But music is what I do well. How to use it?

The first thing I did was to team up with lyricist Dave Lippman, another American Jew with sympathies for the Palestinians. Together we wrote a song called “In Palestine”. I produced a little video featuring a performance of that song along with talks given by Dave and myself, and a dedication to Abir Aramin, a beautiful little Palestinian girl who was shot and killed by Israeli Border Police in 2007. The video has been widely viewed and I hope it’s started some conversations.
Then I decided to produce a CD. I visualized a marriage of spirituality and peace activism and began compiling material, some originals, some covers. Fortuitously at this time I got a call to play a couple of concerts with Gilad Atzmon, the Israeli ex-pat jazz saxophonist and author who is so outspoken on the Palestine issue. We had a great time together and really hit it off. In choosing personnel for the CD Gilad was an obvious choice. I added into the mix some great New York musicians, cellist Eugene Moye, guitarist Gary Ciuci, bassist Cameron Brown, drummer Anthony Pinciotti. In the studio the magic was worked by engineer Manfred Knoop, who has since tragically left us, and by engineer Chris Sulit, and mastering engineer Ed Littman. The cover art was created by my daughter Emily Gu Siegel, who is seven, the design by Frank Dain, with a great photo taken by Xiaosen Ge. The final result of all this creative collaboration by some really amazing talent: People seem to like it.

One of the people who liked it was Brent Black, a jazz writer who runs a website that features his reviews called criticaljazz.com. His review, which he published on March 23, 2012, was actually quite humorous in its irony, making no bones about the fact that he disagreed with my politics, but liked my music- a lot. He wrote:

Had someone told me two years ago I would have been reviewing the work of an anti-Zionist peace activist, a request that this individual be drug tested would be the expected response from those few that travel in my inner circle.”

But then he wrote: “From a purely musical perspective, Siegel is a gifted instrumentalist with rich vocals that glide effortlessly along with his playing.” And: “The Way To Peace is a stellar recording.” He concluded: “You can respect an opinion and disagree with it. To oversimplify Siegel’s music as that of the ‘peace movement’ would be disingenuous at best. Instead Siegel presents us with an eloquently stated, musically pristine offering of himself and shares a piece of what is in his heart….Isn’t that what art is all about?” Obviously I was pleased with the review.

I received an e mail this morning from Seattle-based pianist/composer Bill Doerrfeld, who, incidentally, shares my views on Palestine. Bill had some news to share with me. He had viewed the following, which reviewer Brent Black had posted on the Facebook page that acts as a companion page to his website (in lower case here, just as Brent wrote it):

my humble apologies to my jewish friends for reviewing rich sigel (sic) an anti-zionist peace activist that supports the destruction of israel. had i know (sic) who he was and what he was all about i never would have given him 30 seconds of my time. his review is pulled and e mail blocked. again my apologies i stand with israel NEVER against her but firmly against her enemies.” (caps on “NEVER” Brent’s) Obviously a bit different from his review, which had, in fact, been pulled.

The claim that I support the destruction of Israel is pure libel. I have never made any statements advocating the destruction of Israel, or the destruction of anyone or anything. The irony here is that in his review Black made it a point to separate his disagreement with my politics from his assessment of the music I brought to the world in this new recording. He obviously flushed that integrity down the toilet with his libelous pronouncement and decision to pull the review. Who got to him in the less than two weeks the review was up? I don’t know.

Bill Doerrfeld shared an interesting story with me, which has some parallels. Back in the late 80′s when Bill was a graduate composition student at Yale, he entered a competition offered by Fontana Concert Society in Michigan. This competition offered a cash award and a commission to the “up and coming” young composer chosen as winner. Bill won, and decided to dedicate his piece to the young Palestinian men he saw in the daily news coverage of the first intifada. They represented to Bill a real “David and Goliath” story. The piece Bill wrote, for four strings and harp, was somber and dramatic, a tribute to their struggle, entitled, “Rock Throwers”.

After Bill’s piece was performed in Michigan, the Fontana Concert Society mailed him a program and a cassette recording of the concert. He was taken aback to discover that the title had been changed to “Quintet for Strings and Harp”. He called the organization and spoke with a representative who reported that some influential people in the organization, and additionally, one of the musicians performing the piece, had required the change. Somehow the courtesy of consulting Bill about the change had not occurred to them.

The neurotic and desperate passion by which the forces that wish to “Zionize” the world are requiring that Palestinians accept their politically mandated non-existence is astonishing. Humus and felafel are considered “Israeli” food. I have even seen offered for sale a new blue and white kuffiyeh featuring interwoven Stars of David. (I won’t be buying one.)

But music? It has always been a major feature of political dissent. Woody Guthrie sang about unions and decades later Country Joe and the Fish gave us their “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” in objection to the war in Vietnam. Pete Seeger has been singing about various issues for over half a century and he’s still going strong. The Beatles wanted us to “Give Peace a Chance” and John Lennon “Imagine(d)” a different world and sang about it. Can anyone “imagine” their titles being changed, or a review being deliberately evaporated after second thoughts by the writer (no doubt influenced by parties unknown)? Even avowed Anti-Semite Richard Wagner, hero to Adolf Hitler, has been performed by Jews, so it’s not about “Anti-Semitism”, or only about “Anti-Semitism”. There is something fundamentally different about Zionism; different from any political agenda that has gone before. There is something positively demonic about the determination of those who wish to squash Palestine. They simply have no rules.

http://www.richsiegel.com

RICH SIEGEL’S CD “THE WAY TO PEACE” IS AVAILABLE AT Amazon (UK & US), CD
Baby, I-Tunes, AND Palestine Online STore.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
by Rich Siegel
Thursday, April 5th, 2012