" 'Jailhouse Rock' " Coffee Shop, Ashkelon Prison courtyard at your limited exercise times

" 'Jailhouse Rock' coffee shop," Ashkelon Prison courtyard at your limited exercise times

For years after being literally entrapped by a pretty Mosad agent in Rome, Mordekhai Vanunu was in a private cell in Ashkelon prison, the first holding prison for Palestinian kid stone-throwers who are then taken to prisons, like Ramla prison, from which they are lost to the world. Unlike Vanunu, the Israeli whistle blower, who blew the whistle on Israel's nuclear program, the Palestinian prisoners at Ashkelon are allowed occasional exercise time in the courtyard.

So the courtyard is our coffee shop today, the second day after Hamas kicked out the Palestine Authority from Gaza.

We were not really surprised that the US consul in Jerusalem was ready to make a statement even before Condoleeza Rice or the President, because the US Consul in Jerusalem has been "aiding" Gaza with CIA-aid-and-advice-to-the-PA(this seems to be the only aid the US ever gave--military aid--strange as it seems) to help with "security" for Israel since at least 1996, when Israel began the provocations at the Haram al-Sharif in order to be able to intervene brutally against the young palestinian kids, the stone throwers, who were giving Israel a bad image, and thus were "causing the situation to deteriorate" as the Israeli foreign ministry would put it.

Hamas' kicking out of the Palestine Authority from Gaza was the end result of a kind of mini civil war that began when Israel, the US, and the European Union cut off all commercial and charitable bank-liquidity-flow to Gaza and the West Bank. This was more than "a cut-off of aid." It was a kind of "economic blocade" of the type Roosevelt used against Japan at the beginning of World War II, but, in this case against a peaceful civilian population without an army or air force that could strike back. Hamas struck back as well as they could, with occasional bombs launched against the computer chip manufacturing plants north of Gaza, and Israel spent lots of jet fuel, normal Humvee-and-Caterpillar fuel, and bombs to protect its share of Intel Duo chip production,which is so cherished in the computer world now, in the industrial zones north of Gaza--Siderot, I think we came to hear its name in the news.

So, how can we explain what happened? Here in the prisons, we try to educate ourselves as best we can. Like the farmers in the Prussian prisons, all we have is the Holy Quran--the way the German farmers of young Marx's time, had only the Holy Bible.

Like Kautsky said of the New Testament, the prophet, Jesus,seems to have led a kind of anti-imperialist struggle(see Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity). The equivalent reading of the Holy Quran, I will leave to the reader. If you have defended any Palestinians in prisons in the US or Israel, for example Farouk Abdul Muhti, who died shortly after being brutalized in Pennsylvania prisons for being a radio talk show pro-Palestinian New Yorker--you will know what stories of the Prophet Mohammad and his followers are similar to Jesus' fight against the Roman occupiers of Palestine described by Kautsky.

So, we are here in Ashkelon, home of Ibn Hajar al-Ashkalani, the famous Islamic scholar of the 9th century, who, paradoxically, is called Ibn Hajar, son of the stone!! Even then, the great method of civil disobedience that symbolized the first intifada, was presaged in the mere name of Ibn Hajar, in a sense.

We are trying to discuss what causes the civil wars, like the little tiff between Hamas and Fatah?
Imperialism? Imperialism, which, in the twentiety century "opened an epoch of recurring crises, of imperialist wars, of civil wars, of wars for colonial domination, of struggles for national liberation, and of proletarian revolutions."