Ready? Okay. Go!

The following is a list of fair and credible histories on Hizbullah as a religious group, political party, resistance organization, and social movement. I will continue to update the folder in the future.

• Channels of Resistance in Lebanon: Liberation Propaganda, Hezbollah and the Media by Zahera Harb
• Hezbollah: A Short History by Augustus Richard Norton
• Hezbollah: The Changing Face of Terrorism by Judith Palmer Harik
• Talking to Terrorists: Hezbollah by Mark Perry
• Hizballah: Terrorism, National Liberation, or Menace? By Sami G. Hajjar
• Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb
• Tragedy in South Lebanon: The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006 by Cathy Sultan
• The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology: Religious Ideology, Political Ideology, and Political Program by Joseph Alagha
• Hizbullah’s Identity Construction by Joseph Alagha
• Hizbullah’s Documents: From the 1985 Open Letter to the 2009 Manifesto by Joseph Alagha
• Power, NGOs and Lebanese Television: a Case Study of Al-Manar TV and the Hezbollah Women’s Association by Victoria Firmo-Fontan

I’m almost certain that Hamas, under the hand of Egypt, is now completely beholden to US interests as they fall in line with other neoliberal Sunni governments like KSA, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, and other actors. Hizbullah remains one of the last anti-imperialist forces in the region.

People really need to rise up against Tumblr’s left-to-right normative text box.

If anyone would like to recommend books on Islam that have more of a spiritual and theological base than an academic base I would really appreciate it. I want to learn more about the religion outside of the socio-political framework I have focused on thus far. I would appreciate general non-sectarian texts for now. I’m worried that my preexisting biases in favor of Shi’ites as a result of my politics will make it impossible to ever objectively study Islam as a religion. Although, that might just be an excuse not to explore. Anyway, if anyone has any idea where I am right now and willing to help it would mean a lot.

Today is the 65th anniversary of Al-Nakba, or The Catastrophe in Arabic. It marks the period in which 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were forced into exile by Zionist leaders so they could establish the State of Israel. Benny Morris believes of 330 Palestinian villages that were abandoned, 282 of them were depopulated due to direct Zionist attack. Walid Khalidi estimates that 418 villages were depopulated and 70% of them were completely destroyed, and 22% partially destroyed. The majority of Palestinians were forced out of their homes through psychological warfare and military measures. Outright ethnic cleansing was common in which 60,000 Palestinians were forcefully expelled from the cities of Lydda and Ramle alone, and this was a systematic state-policy in which when asked ‘What shall we do with the Arabs?’ the founder of Israel David Ben-Gurion said, ‘Expel them.’

Israeli historian Arieh Yitzhaki estimates that there were ten major massacres of more than 50 victims, and 100 smaller ones committed by Jewish forces during this period. He believes that there were murders in almost every Palestinian village inducing and precipitating their eventual exodus. Deir Yassin is the most notorious of these massacres. In Deir Yassin 254 unarmed Palestinian villagers, including women, the elderly, and children, were mutilated, raped, and murdered. Not only were these attacks committed by two Jewish terrorist groups led by men who would later become Prime Ministers of Israel, but the Haganah (what would later become the IDF) backed the assault, provided rifles and ammunition, gave artillery cover during the assault, and went to the village to assess the effectiveness and performance of the Irgun and Lehi terrorist forces.

Dier Yassin is but one massacre out of many. The village of al-Dawayma was also unarmed. It was captured without fight on October 29th, 1948, and approximately 100 Palestinian civilians were massacred. This was not in the heat of “war”, but after Israel was clearly victorious. IDF soldiers under the direction of Moshe Dayan liquidated civilians and threw them in pits, “The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead.” And further, “One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house and blow up the house. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clear the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby.” Mosques were destroyed in al-Dawayma and homes with elderly were blown up.

The villagers of Tantura were woken by gunfire as dead bodies of young men began to litter the streets. Soon women and children were forcefully removed from their homes and then men of the village were walked to a beach. The men were commanded by gun point to dig their own graves and then shot in the head. It is estimated that 200 villagers were murdered.

Morris estimates that hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children were killed in the village of Lydda by gunfire and grenades despite villagers waving white flags.

In the village of Safsaf civilians also raised a white flag, the soldiers separated the men from the women, tied the hands of fifty to sixty of them behind their backs, shot them, and buried them in a mass grave. Several women were raped after. In the villages of Eilabun and Farradiya the soldiers were greeted with a white flag and they ordered the villagers to leave, when they refused, they opened fire and killed some thirty people. Those who survived were forced into Lebanon. In Saliha a white flag was raised and sixty to seventy men and women were slaughtered. Yosef Nahmani, direct of the Jewish National Fund reflected on these attacks and wrote in his diary, “Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis? …Is there no more humane way of expelling the inhabitants than such methods?”

Years after the establishment of the State of Israel the expulsions continued. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were systematically removed from their homes and forced out of their homeland to make room for Jewish settlers from Europe. When civilians resisted, five to ten were shot to make a point. An official “Transfer Community” was established to ensure the future security of the state in which they decided to keep Israel Jewish they must: (1) prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes and villages, (2) destroy Arab villages, (3) settle Jews in Arab villages and town and distribute Arab lands among Jewish settlements, (4) extricate Jews from Iraq and Syria, and (5) seek ways to ensure the absorption of Palestinian refugees in Arab countries and launch a propaganda campaign to discourage Arab return. It is this plan that is still in practice today as Israel continues to deny Palestinian refugees the right to return, destroys thousands of Palestinian homes and civil society, depopulate Bedouin and Arab villages through forced transfer and continue the colonial-settler project in the West Bank to “Judaize the land”, and continues massive propaganda in Israel and abroad to maintain continued Jewish immigration and Palestinian marginalization and exclusion.

The State of Israel began with ethnic cleansing and the story of the Palestinians as of 65 years ago has been one of slow-motion genocide in which an entire people is being systematically erased. What’s worse is that from Deir Yassin to Tantura to the destruction of the Bedouin in the Negev to the siege and bombardment of Gaza much of the world’s democracies have remained silent or complicit in these crimes against an indigenous people.

Alright, The Sacred Collective has been created. I’m going to post as much as possible tonight to give it a nice solid start. I’ll then keep posts on queue so it is continually updated. I am more than happy to take requests for certain books and suggestions of content.

So I have 1000’s of ebooks on Palestine, Israel, the Middle East, Islam, and Leftist/radical theory. I want to upload them to a collective. Would you prefer that collective be on a Tumblr blog or a Blogger blog?

If you MUST compare Palestine to another genocide, the cases of the Bosnian Muslims, Armenians, and Kurds are much more similar than the Holocaust. In fact, the case of any indigenous population being subjected to colonialism is more similar. European colonization  of America, Canada, Australia, Latin America, and so on, or Apartheid South Africa… BUT EVEN THEN, these are all unique cases in history and to simply generalize any of them as being like another is very reductive and poor scholarship (not to mention incredibly offensive to not only Jewish victims, but all victims of genocide considering anyone would politicize any atrocity to score clout).

The plight of the Palestinians, the colonization of Palestine, the injustices of Zionism, the apartheid nature of Israel, the environmental racism against an indigenous people, the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, anti-black racism, the occupation of Syria and Lebanon, and so on… These are all horrible in their own right. If you want people to recognize the suffering of the Palestinians all you need to do is tell their story and hope others will listen.