Palestine

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 13, 2021 3:16 pm

The construction of Israel’s Gaza concentration camp is complete

Israel announced the completion of an underground wall and maritime barrier surrounding the besieged Gaza Strip. Not a single mainstream media outlet used the term “concentration camp” to report on it but they should have.
BY HAIDAR EID DECEMBER 10, 2021

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ISRAELI SECURITY PERSONNEL GESTURE AT AN OPENING TO THE NEWLY COMPLETED UNDERGROUND BARRIER ALONG ISRAEL’S FRONTIER WITH THE GAZA STRIP IN EREZ, SOUTHERN ISRAEL DECEMBER 7, 2021. PHOTO: (REUTERS/AMMAR AWAD)

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a concentration camp as “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.” And a death camp is “a concentration camp in which large numbers of prisoners are systematically killed!”

The Gaza Strip, occupied and besieged by apartheid Israel, has been transformed into both; the difference is that it is larger than all known concentration and death camps created by the bigoted Western regimes in the 20th Century. Israel’s decision to redeploy its troops around the densely-populated coastal strip in 2005, and then impose an unprecedented, medieval siege in 2006 that has shattered all spheres of life, and then carry out four massive attacks that have killed more than four thousand civilians, including women and children, does not seem to be enough for the ruling Zionist elites of the rogue state.

Two days ago, it announced the completion of a sensor-equipped underground wall around Gaza which includes hundreds of cameras, radar and other sensors, and spans 65km. It was reported that the wall is more than six meters high and its maritime barrier includes electronic devices to detect infiltration by sea and a remote-controlled weapons system. The ministry did not disclose the depth of the underground wall. It took three and a half years to complete.

Not a single mainstream media outlet used the term “concentration camp,” or even apartheid in reference to the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip. The language used by the Israeli Occupation Forces has become the reference – no questions asked. No Gazan/Palestinian voice is permitted to say a word about the impact of this “project” on their lives. What we get to read is the statement made by Israeli war criminal, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, namely that “[t]he barrier, which is an innovative and technologically advanced project, deprives Hamas of one of the capabilities it tried to develop,” and that “[it ]places an ‘iron wall’, sensors and concrete between the terror organization and the residents of Israel’s south.” PERIOD! No questions asked!

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ISRAELI SOLDIERS STAND GUARD DURING THE UNVEILING OF A NEWLY COMPLETED UNDERGROUND BARRIER ALONG ISRAEL’S FRONTIER WITH THE GAZA STRIP IN EREZ, SOUTHERN ISRAEL DECEMBER 7, 2021. (PHOTO: REUTERS/AMMAR AWAD)

The two million residents of the Gaza Strip have to be imprisoned inside this concentration camp because they are all “Hamas supporters,” and that gives “us” the right to use a “smart wall” to encircle “them.” That is not a form of “collective punishment” only because “they” are not born to Jewish mothers, and, therefore, they do not have the “right” to be treated as full human beings. Only those with white skin and/or born to Jewish families can have that right.

Apartheid South Africa and the American South under Jim Crow Laws must have been a picnic compared to this.

The two million residents of besieged Gaza, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled and dispossessed from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to four weeks (2009), 2 weeks (2012), 51 days (2014), and 11 days (May, 2021) of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where civilians were taking shelter. This came after years of an ongoing, crippling, deadly medieval Israeli siege of Gaza, a severe form of collective punishment. But why are “they” not satisfied with what “we,” supported by the complicit West and “friendly” Arab regimes, are offering them? (Forget about The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, ratified by “us”, i.e., Israel, banning collective punishment of a civilian population.)

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THE OWNER OF A HOME DESTROYED BY AN ISRAELI AIRSTRIKE IN MAY 2021 STANDS IN THEIR HOME IN BEIT HANOUN IN THE NORTHERN OF GAZA STRIP ON DECEMBER 9, 2021. OWNERS OF HOUSES PARTIALLY OR TOTALLY DESTROYED DURING THE MAY WAR ON GAZA ARE GROWING CONCERNED ABOUT THE DELAYED RECONSTRUCTION. (PHOTO: YOUSSEF ABU WATFA/APA IMAGES)

Never before has a population been denied the basic requirements for survival as a deliberate policy of colonization, occupation and apartheid, but this is what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza, today: two million people live without a secure supply of water, food, electricity, medicines, with almost half of them being children under the age of 15.

And now we have to deal with the fact that we are literally inmates of the largest concentration camp on earth with no rights whatsoever. President Carter was not exaggerating when he visited Gaza in 2009: “[Palestinians in the Gaza Strip] are being treated more like animals than human beings…[n]ever before in history has a large community like this been savaged by bombs and missiles and then been deprived of the means to repair itself.”

Alas, Carter is no longer the president of the USA, the strategic ally of apartheid Israel. As long as world official bodies and leaders choose to say and do absolutely nothing, Israel will go on killing more Palestinians, building higher walls, tightening the siege, and will claim it is all done in “self defense!”

And yet, we, ungrateful “antisemites,” are being blamed for calling it a “concentration camp!”

https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/the-cons ... -complete/

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‘Haaretz’ publisher says Israel is ‘an apartheid state’ — as his paper continues to warn against an Israel-Iran war
BY JAMES NORTH DECEMBER 12, 2021

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AMOS SCHOCKEN, PHOTO FROM HAARETZ.

Amos Schocken is Israel’s equivalent of the latest Sulzberger to inherit control of the New York Times. Schocken, in his mid-70s, is the third generation of his family to run Haaretz, the most respected newspaper in Israel, and he speaks out regularly in columns and on social media.

Just the other day, Schocken called Israel “an apartheid state.” He was indignantly responding to a right-wing member of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. Here’s the full quotation:

The product of Zionism, the State of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic state, but has instead become an apartheid state, plain and simple.

Haaretz continues to be indispensable to understanding the vital truths about Israel/Palestine, truths the New York Times ignores and covers up. The latest example: yesterday’s Times has an analysis of the differences between the U.S. and Israel over the re-negotiations of the Iran nuclear deal. The article could have been ghost-written by hawks in the Israeli government. Its overall tone is sympathy with Israel, and a sense that American policymakers are naive. The report euphemistically mentions Israeli “covert strikes” and “sabotage operations” against Iran, but doesn’t give more details. Only in the final paragraph (the 23rd), does the Times acknowledge that the American CIA director, William Burns, says the U.S. “continues to believe that Iran has not made a decision to weaponize its nuclear program.”

Let’s turn to Haaretz. Start with its respected national security reporter, Amos Harel. He’s no radical, but he does know how to report and tell the full story, and he obviously has reliable sources within the Israeli military. He starts by raising doubts that Israel is even capable of a successful attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities, an angle the Times ignored:

Realistically, an Israeli airstrike on Iran — an inherent topic of fierce professional debate — might have been possible a decade ago. Now, with the Israel Defense Forces only beginning to refresh the operational plans, it will probably take years before that option is given serious consideration.

Harel goes on to warn that an Israel raid would risk dangerous consequences across the Mideast, another angle the Times missed:

[There is a] risk that the attack will unleash a regional war in which the Israeli home front suffers an unprecedented onslaught by Hezbollah [Iran’s ally, the political/military movement in Lebanon]. In other words, the pistol Israel is brandishing has almost no ammunition at the moment.

Harel has the good reporter’s concern for specifics and a healthy disdain for euphemism. What the Times article called “sabotage operations” against Iran turn out to be “assassinations of nuclear scientists, explosions at nuclear sites, cyberattacks, attacks on Iranian ships, extensive airstrikes against pro-Iranian militias in Syria, and a systematic assault on convoys smuggling arms from Iran to Hezbollah. . .”

Haaretz’s truth-telling didn’t stop there. A lead editorial upbraided two top Israeli security officials for “parading a stream of arrogant, boastful threats against Iran in recent days,” and warned that the current discussion should not focus on Israel’s saber-rattling but instead on “an Iran-Israel war that could erupt following such a dangerous attack.”

A decade ago, the New Yorker’s top editor, David Remnick, published an inspiring long report about Haaretz and its publisher, Amos Schocken. Remnick quoted at length from an article Schocken himself wrote back then, which argued that “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, should be changed because “its lyrics are about only Jewish aspirations.” Schocken said:

How can an Arab citizen identify with such an anthem? Hasn’t the time come to recognize that the establishment of Israel is not just the story of the Jewish people, of Zionism, of the heroism of the Israel Defense Forces and of bereavement? That it is also the story of the reflection of Zionism and the heroism of the IDF soldiers in the lives of the Arabs: the Nakba — the Palestinian “Catastrophe” as the Arabs call the events of 1948 — the loss, the families that were split up, the disruption of lives, the property that was taken away, the life under military government and other elements of the history shared by Jews and Arabs, which are presented on Independence Day, and now only on that day, in an entirely one-sided way.

https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/haaretz- ... -iran-war/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 24, 2021 3:03 pm

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ISRAELI SETTLERS FROM THE JEWISH SETTLEMENT OF YITZHAR THROW STONES DURING CLASHES WITH PALESTINIANS FROM THE VILLAGE OF ASIRA AL-QIBILIYA, SOUTH OF THE NORTHERN WEST BANK CITY OF NABLUS ON MAY 19, 2012. (PHOTO: WAGDI ESHTAYAH/APA IMAGES)

Israeli army rule allowing shooting of stone-throwers will be applied to Palestinians, not Jews

Originally published: Mondoweiss by Yossi Gurvitz (December 21, 2021 ) | - Posted Dec 23, 2021

From now on, Israel Defense Force militants may fire on Palestinians who have thrown stones or firebombs even when they no longer pose any danger. Or, in the IDF parlance, when they’re escaping. These changes in the IDF’s Rules of Engagement (RoE) were exposed by Roee Sharon of Channel 13 on Sunday (Hebrew). This change requires three comments.

First of all, the timing. Sharon notes that the RoE were changed within the last few weeks–but the IDF allowed the publishing of the information only on Sunday. Why? Because of the crisis in the illegal outpost of Homesh, situated on the land of the village of Burqa, near Nablus. Following the killing of a settler, Yehuda Dimentman, and a wave of settler violence, hundreds of settlers attempted to reach the outpost, and clashed with the army, wounding one soldier by running him over (Hebrew).

The army knows it will likely have to remove the outpost soon, so it bribes the settlers: Here, you see, we made shooting Palestinians easier!

An interjection is essential here. On Saturday, the IDF militants shot 15 Burqa residents, protesting the mass emigration of settlers to their land, with rubber-coated bullets, and caused some 50 of them to inhale CS gas; on Sunday, the IDF militants again shot eight Burqa residents with rubber-coated bullets, and again caused some 50 of them to inhale CS gas. Needless to say, the Israeli media didn’t cover those incidents.

The IDF has a record of allowing the injuring of Palestinians in order to mollify settlers. In 2015, then-Brigadier General Tamir Yadai, then the commander of the AYOSH Division (West bank, but he’s been promoted since) told (Hebrew) the settlers of Halamish that he changed the RoE, saying:

We’ve been a bit tougher with the people around here. Where we used to fire gas grenades or rubber [coated bullets], we now shoot Ruger [bullets] or live fire.

Contrary to what Yadai implied, the Ruger 0.22 fires rounds which, while less powerful than normal ammunition, are still very much lethal. Note that it was to settlers, Yadai’s true clientele, that he announced the order for the use of excessive force–so as to mollify them.

Secondly, the use of excessive force, when you know it’s excessive, is a war crime. Shooting an escaping, unarmed, person who poses no threat to you is a war crime. These war crimes are committed essentially for public relation purposes. The IDF returns to the RoE it used in Operation Doorstep Keepers, the massacre on the Gaza border in 2018-2019 during the Great March of Return. Those RoE were changed quietly afterwards, because they caused the IDF public relations damage.

But now it’s time to bribe the settlers again; the IDF has become inured to committing war crimes; and it knows no one in Israel will complain, and that if it kills children who threw stones and escaped, the Israeli media will simply not report it, or at worse will run the IDF’s Spokesman daily lie. So what’s to lose?

And thirdly, the elephant in the room: While the official RoE does not discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian stone-throwers, the rules on the ground certainly do. No IDF militant will shoot to injure, much less kill, Jewish stone throwers. A soldier will not use live ammo, Ruger bullets, rubber-coated bullets, CS grenades, or stun grenades against Jews.

He will not do so if even if the Jewish rioters personally attack him, run him over. Not only will he not shoot at them, he will not even detain them.

Stones thrown by Jews are as damaging as stones thrown by Palestinians, but the procedures–and how can that be otherwise, in an Apartheid regime?–change according to the ethnic origin of the stone thrower. And the Israeli public grows inured to that, day by day.

https://mronline.org/2021/12/23/israeli ... -not-jews/

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Dozens Injured in West Bank Clashes With Israeli Soldiers

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Palestinian protesters run to take cover from tear gas canisters fired by Israeli soldiers during clashes, in the village of Burqa, north of the West Bank city of Nablus, Dec. 23, 2021. | Photo: Nidal Eshtayeh/Xinhua

Published 23 December 2021 (16 hours 47 minutes ago)

Dozens of Palestinian protestors were injured on Thursday in clashes with Israeli soldiers in a village northwest of the West Bank city of Nablus, Palestinian medics and eyewitnesses said.


42 Palestinians, including a local journalist, were injured by rubber-coated metal gunshots and 83 others suffered from suffocation after inhaling tear gas fired by the Israeli soldiers in the village of Burqa, northwest of Nablus, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said in a statement.

Eyewitnesses in the village told Xinhua that clashes between the demonstrators and the Israeli soldiers broke out earlier on Thursday. They added that the protestors organized a demonstration against Israeli settlers' assaults and expansion of settlements.

The clashes broke out in the village shortly after hundreds of Israeli settlers, under the protection of Israeli soldiers, attempted to break into the village, the Palestinian official news agency WAFA reported.

In the past few days, the tensions between Israel and the Palestinians have been flaring in the West Bank over the Israeli measures. Two Palestinians were killed on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Saleh al-Arouri, deputy chief of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) told the pro-movement Al-Aqsa TV channel that there is a clear ascending trend of tension in the West Bank as a result of the Israeli occupation practices.

Diplomatic ties between Israel and the Palestinians were interrupted in 2014 due to the Palestinian rejection of the Israeli policies of expanding settlements and the Israeli measures against the Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

The Palestinians want to establish an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel on all the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967, including the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Doz ... -0010.html

Those of us who would succumb to despair should take inspiration from the Palestinians.

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 01, 2022 3:18 pm

The Palestinian Left Will Not Be Hijacked

Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on DECEMBER 31, 2021
Samar Al-Saleh and L.K.
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“American Imperialism is the Bitter Enemy of the Palestinian People,” from the Palestine Poster Project Archives.

A Critique of Palestine: A Socialist Introduction

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s political program, Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine (1969), emphasized the indispensable role of political thought in the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Political thought was construed as a basic condition for the Palestinian Revolution’s success and included the practice of developing a clear perspective of reactionary forces and revolutionary forces. The PFLP posed Mao’s 1926 questions, “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” and subsequently asserted “that political thinking behind any revolution commences by posing this question and replying to it.”

In this formulation, Zionism is not the only enemy of the Palestinian people and Palestinians have friends besides themselves. The PFLP insisted that “to confine the Palestinian revolution within the limits of the Palestinian people would mean failure, if we remember the nature of the enemy alliance that we are facing.” By rejecting the confinement of Palestine into a national box, and emphasizing the regional and world scales in determining Palestinians’ friends and enemies, the left developed an internationalist politics and forged alliances through a careful, scientific analysis of competing local, regional, and global forces.

At the same time, the internationalism of the PFLP was informed by their Marxist analysis of the Palestinian national question. Subject to Zionist colonization, backed by world imperialism led by the United States, the PFLP understood that their struggle necessitated a popular, national front that drew from various sectors of the Palestinian nation, with its base in the working and peasant classes.

This theoretical practice of the PFLP was based on their objective and materialist analysis of the political situation that confronted the Palestinian Revolution. They held the conviction that engaging in revolutionary struggle without political thought would lead revolutionary forces down a path of error and disorganization. The theory that emerged from the PFLP’s method served and guided a concrete political practice towards the horizon of national liberation and socialism. This Marxist analysis links revolutionary theory to revolutionary practice and remains one of the most sophisticated in the Palestinian national movement to date.

One would assume, then, that Palestine: A Socialist Introduction would adopt a similar political practice and methodology, or at the very least, pay careful attention to it. The book, co-edited by Sumaya Awad and Brian Bean, argues that “the only path toward liberation for Palestine” is an international socialist movement grounded in anti-imperialism and internationalism. The collection, comprising contributions from twelve authors, is organized into three sections that address the historical and contemporary dimensions of the Palestinian question. Part one grounds the reader in the history of the British and Zionist colonization of Palestine, explains the roots of US support for Zionism, and assesses the trajectory of the Palestinian national liberation movement. Part two argues that the Israeli working class is not an ally and discusses the so-called peace process as well as Palestinian liberation in the Arab Spring. Part three includes an interview with Omar Barghouti, a perspectiv :x e of gender in the Palestinian struggle, and an historical and contemporary analysis of Black-Palestinian solidarity. The conclusion forwards Awad and Bean’s vision of Palestinian liberation while the afterward calls readers to action.

Awad and Bean situate Palestine’s publication in 2020 within a broader cultural and political climate in the United States which, they argue, has been defined by an increasing interest in socialism. Identifying shifting public opinion on Palestine alongside a post-2008 wave of “red flowering,” they write, “it is this connection between the cause of Palestine and the struggle for socialism that we deem necessary.” Shortly following Palestine’s publication, there has been a renewed interest to learn about Palestinian history and politics in the US. This summer, this interest was ignited by the uprisings across Palestine and the responsive mass mobilizations across the globe. It is in this context of the critical need for political education – in a country violently committed to Zionist myth-making – that we have seen the promotion of Palestine as a primer for socialists. As confrontations between Palestinians and the Zionist project intensified this May, Haymarket Books promoted Palestine as a free e-book so that their readers could “learn more about the history and politics of the struggle for justice in Palestine.” At the outset, this makes sense, as the aim and intention of Awad and Bean’s project is to firmly place the Palestinian cause in the struggle for socialism and to encourage socialists’ involvement in the movement for Palestine. Indeed, educating young socialists in the Global North about the political urgency of Palestinian liberation is an effort that we welcome and deem necessary, especially in the context of intenstifying Zionist and imperialist onslaught.

Regrettably, however, Awad and Bean do a serious political and intellectual disservice to their socialist readers: they undermine and dismiss the Palestinian Left tradition by evacuating it of its content and its history. This is due to Awad and Bean’s overarching theoretical, historical, and political framework. Their framing derives from ahistorical tropes about distinctive, experimental and diverse Marxist-Leninist political formations as “Stalinist,” “mechanistic” and “rigid,” and subsumes the Palestinian Left under these disingenuous, reductive categories. By adopting the framing of “Stalinism” as a “false” political tendency that places anticolonial liberation before socialism, Awad and Bean assume that they do not need to teach their socialist readers in the US about Palestinian Marxist thought or practice. This is both a lost opportunity and a great shame, since the Palestinian Left understands the struggle for socialism as part and parcel to the struggle against imperialism. Awad and Bean’s condemnation and self-imposed isolation from the revolutionary thought and practice of the Palestinian Left is not only a serious barrier to their readers’ political education, but to their own goal of providing a conceptual foundation for “shaping the future of the Palestine movement both in the US and on the ground in Palestine and the wider region.” How can one, situated in the US, shape the future of the Palestine movement without meaningfully engaging with existing traditions of Palestinian revolutionary theory and strategy? If the uprisings this summer opened a space for educating socialists about their responisbility and role in supporting Palestinian national liberation from the core of US imperial power, then it is vital to question Awad and Bean’s suppression of revolutionary thought from their readers’ education.

The historical and contemporary distancing from revolutionary practice and theory in Palestine has dangerous implications: it presents a political analysis which limits the possibility of a popular, anti-imperialist formation in the US. We find it necessary to address and critique Palestine’s ahistorical analysis of the Palestinian Left directly, not as a form of sectarianism – an accusation that is too often mobilized against critique – but as a political obligation that allows us to reconstitute the invaluable role of clear political thought in the struggle for Palestinian national liberation. The modes of analysis in Palestine reflect a larger issue that confronts the movement for Palestine in the US: the lack of a coherent theoretical framework to assist and guide political strategy. Today, the Palestinian Left tradition – which has maintained anti-imperialism, internationalism, and the national question at the heart of its politics – remains a vital source for socialist movements in the Global North to rigorously engage with in order to develop clear political thinking and to build political programs that confront Zionism and imperialism. We must ask: how can Palestine: A Socialist Introduction adopt a socialist orientation while simultaneously severing itself from existing traditions of socialist thought and practice in Palestine? How can Awad and Bean begin their book with a quote from a Palestinian communist, Ghassan Kanafani, while simultaneously denigrating the politics and strategies of his organization (PFLP)?

In the following review, we assess Palestine’s harsh treatment of the Palestinian Left by focusing in on Awad and Bean’s overarching political framework and Mostafa Omar’s chapter, “The National Liberation Struggle: A Socialist Analysis.” We do so by interrogating Awad and Bean’s internationalism as a heavily idealist conception which exists exclusively in the “ethereal realm of utopian lands.”1 Their internationalism is characterized by idealism due to the absence of a developed theory and understanding of imperialism whose presence would make clear the historical and contemporary form, substance, and stakes of Palestinian struggle. The overarching analysis of Palestine, shorn of a rigorous or materialist consideration of how anti-imperialism informs internationalist politics and strategy, allows Awad and Bean to confuse the friends and enemies of Palestinian liberation. This shaky theoretical and political framework paves the way for Palestine’s simultaneous ahistorical criticisms and revisionist histories of the Palestinian Left which we contest through a historical corrective, focusing on the regional and global scales that the Palestinian Left’s strategies cannot be abstracted from. Contesting the book’s argument that working class interests are “independent to the national project,” we adopt a Marxist analysis of the national question by situating and historicizing national liberation as one form of class struggle. Ultimately, we hope to release Palestinian leftist thought from the grasp of revisionist histories and reconstitute it as a source that illuminates both the historical trajectory of Palestinian national liberation struggle and our present moment.

Anti-Imperialism and Internationalism

In their introduction, Awad and Bean adopt anti-imperialism as “the cornerstone that upholds the principle of internationalism.” There, they define imperialism as “the unrelenting process of competition and conflict between the world’s capitalist classes of different states, who are vying for domination and exploitation of the globe’s people, wealth and resources.” Awad and Bean go on to imply that imperialism is a trait of all states with a ruling class: “If you have a ruling class integrated into the world economy, then that ruling class must compete, and it is driven into the structure of imperialism.” Although they mention the dominant US position in this global matrix and the necessity of opposing US militarism, their anti-imperialism rests on a politics of “resisting oppression and exploitation by ruling classes worldwide.”

Clearly, the authors understand anti-imperialism and internationalism as inextricably wedded together. We agree with this formulation but understand their analysis of imperialism to obscure the relationship between anti-imperialism and internationalism. Their explanation of imperialism is insufficient insofar as it fails to understand how imperialism operates as a class system on the world scale and is made possible by the consolidation of political power through global state hegemons, such as Britain historically, or contemporarily, the United States. While we understand this perspective as important for developing anti-imperialist strategy in the movement for Palestine, our intention in this review is not to rehash debates about the nature of imperialism. The intervention we prioritize here is Palestine’s position in the international class system of imperialism. Understanding Palestine’s dominated position within the world system allows us to define strategy for resisting Zionist colonization and imperialism by centering the national question and taking seriously the historical forms of national liberation struggles that operated through this lens.

For Awad and Bean, the relation between anti-imperialism and internationalism “means gaining a deep-rooted understanding of the fact that our bonds with others are not based on borders or nationalities but on the shared interest of workers and oppressed peoples in resisting oppression and exploitation by ruling classes worldwide.” They continue, “after all, our governments have taught us that they care more about profit than they do people.”

First, this conception overlooks the national question and its contemporary, ongoing endurance in Palestine and anti-imperialist movements. By the national question we refer to “the set of political problems concerning oppressed nationalities within nations, colonialism, self-determination, and national liberation,” which Max Ajl points out has historically been “a way of understanding the political topography of imperialism.”2 To give a concrete example, PFLP cadre Leila Khaled emphasizes the issue which confronts the Palestinian struggle as not only the reclamation of land, but also, imperialism and Zionism on the regional and global level. Revolutionary nationalism becomes the atomic unit for a field of analysis and antagonism that operates worldwide. In her autobiography she argues that the link between Zionist and imperialist interests makes the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonization essentially “a war against imperialism.”3 Although the national question has been “demobilised and sent into neoliberal ‘hibernation’” in the wake of the 1970s, we understand it as historically and contemporarily central to the Palestinian struggle.4 The crux of the Palestinian national question is the liberation of land from the colonial Zionist enterprise and the return of both resources and people, the majority of whom are landless and disinherited. Precisely because imperialism (in its British and American varients) is what has always made the Zionist project viable, anti-imperialism remains central to the Palestinian national question. Recentering the national question within the Palestinian struggle allows us to emphasize the necessity that Palestinians determine their future on their land, which means everything from the organization of their production processes to the organization of political structures and institutions.

As the Egyptian Marxist thinker Anouar Abdel-Malek argues, “socialist thought can only develop on the basis of a national position on the problem, and not from any a priori cosmopolitan vision under the mask of internationalism.”5 On a practical level this means that the nation is the crucible through which the besieged and dispossessed Palestinian refugee, prisoner, and worker, is able to build socialism.6 When Awad and Bean argue that “we cannot conceive of Palestine as a purely national question,” they overlook the ongoing importance of this anti-colonial Marxist analysis of the national question.

Second, by collapsing all governments as enemies of workers and oppressed people, Awad and Bean ignore the imperial theft of wealth by the core from the peripheries and the historical role of socialist states in restricting that flow, and even creating countervailing experiments in mass self-determination. They explicitly pose their definition of “socialism from below” against models like the USSR, which they describe as “Stalinist” projects that imposed “socialism from above.” Awad and Bean’s framework obscures the historical procession of capitalist accumulation through the formation of global hegemons like Holland, Britain, or the United States.7 Their analysis is a symptom and expression of what Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros identify as “a particular Marxism which has analytically obscured the centre-periphery structure of imperialism, politically submerged the national question under a formal ‘equality’ of nations and proletariats, [and] failed to recognise the validity of political questions that are specific to the periphery (especially the agrarian question).”8 Accordingly, we should be wary of positions expressed in Palestine which create a false equivalency between imperialist states and the states in which the balances of forces have shifted to the popular classes. Alternatively, we can understand the state as a terrain of struggle for the working class and popular movements to seize and make use of the powers it confers in order to reclaim sovereignty over land and resources.

Foregrounding the national question allows us to formulate an internationalism rooted in a strategy for overcoming imperialism and its destructive organization of the world. To be clear, this does not mean that all iterations of universalism are useless, but that any political program of global solidarity must face the contradictions between the global North and South which will not disappear by wishing them into nonexistence. The obfuscation of these contradictions is a serious barrier to forging internationalist politics and developing a revolutionary universalism that is capable of prioritizing the specificity of the Palestinian national question. What we mean here is that an internationalism of revolutionary capacity cannot abandon the Palestinian struggles’ specific history and contemporary dimensions. Walter Rodney formulated this relationship between the universal and the specific when he wrote: “International solidarity grows out of struggle in different localities. This is the truth so profoundly expressed by Che Guevara when he called for the creation of one, two, three – many Vietnams.”9 Unfortunately, Awad and Bean stray far away from the rich tradition of international solidarity expressed by Third World Marxists like Rodney. Awad and Bean argue that prioritizing anticolonial struggle is “mechanistic” and that socialists should instead base our political strategy on “the international rejection of capitalism.” But how do socialists engage in an international rejection of capitalism if not from specific locales, some of which, like Palestine, are defined by a class relation and mode of production which is fundamentally colonial in form? To establish the political capacity for international solidarity with Palestine from the Global North, socialists must develop and take seriously political thought which grasps the specificity of class formation and class struggle in a settler-colony.10

Awad and Bean’s theoretical and conceptual framework thus elides how anti-imperialism informs the shape of internationalist politics. Accordingly, they adopt a conception of the relationship between anti-imperialism and internationalism that is chaotic due to its looseness and anti-materialism. Their claim that “anti-imperialism is the cornerstone that upholds the principle of internationalism” unfortunately remains an idealist slogan insofar as it is distanced from concrete political thought and practice. The explicit formulation of internationalism as a principle, and not as a mode of politics, enables their villification of internationalism as it has taken shape through Palestinian history. Workers of the world (such as Iranians or Cubans starved by US sanctions) whom Awad and Bean purport as central to their socialist vision, are absent from their anti-imperialism. Of course, they are correct to assert that domestic struggles are linked to the struggles of workers globally. However, these “links” remain merely symbolic since they omit the international division of labor which is the material force that links the fates of workers in the North and South. From their perspective, then, workers of the world are not united through the force of capital as an uneven world system that transfers value from dominated to dominating nations, but through liberal cosmopolitan sentiments and feelings about “our bonds with others.” The book’s afterward, which calls readers to action, addresses how the Palestinian struggle brings to view “interconnected systems.” But an anti-imperialist, socialist movement cannot sustain itself by rehearsing the oft-repeated slogan that “our struggles are connected.” We must understand how and why this is the case. The tendency to remove slogans and political claims from materialist analysis is a reflection of both theoretical destitution and class position. The PFLP understood how vague sloganeering accompanied the Palestinian petit bourgeoisie’s interest to not adopt scientific socialist theory or commit to an organizational framework, but to instead “be bound by a general loose thought that does not go beyond general liberation slogans.”11

That anti-imperialism only functions as a slogan or a passion in Palestine, and not as a mode of analysis or politics, is symptomatic of a larger theoretical issue amongst the US left. Abdel-Malek identifies two ideological counter-offensives which are “aimed at blocking the progress of the fusion of thought and action, theory and practice, in our concrete world”: 1) “the negation of and/or offensive against the national position on the problematic of socialism” and 2) “the negation of the political position on socialist power.”12

Awad and Bean’s theoretical and conceptual limitations are all the more worrisome when we consider the author’s selective use of Palestinian leftist thought. They open with a quote from the PFLP militant and writer Ghassan Kanafani who in fact played a critical role in drafting the aforementioned Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine.13 The quote reads: “The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.” Peculiarly, the book does not mention Kanafani’s political and theoretical contributions to the development of the PFLP. Nor does it mention that the Zionist Mossad assassinated Kanafani in 1972 for his political work and growing influence on the Palestinian body politic. The omission of Zionism’s bloody history against the Palestinian Left appropriately accompanies the authors’ treatment of the Palestinian Left as either misguided, incorrect, manipulated, and subsequently anachronistic. With the political content carved out of his internationalism, Kanafani becomes an empty figure that Awad and Bean conveniently suffuse with a theoretically destitute and vague internationalism.

This perversion of Palestinian internationalism is most evident in Mostafa Omar’s chapter, “The National Liberation Struggle: A Socialist Analysis,” which equates the left’s historical “mistakes” with their strategic alliances. In the following sections we take up Omar’s criticisms of the Palestinian Left and its reading of the political dynamics within the regional and global landscape.

The Regional Scale of Palestinian National Liberation

Omar argues that in order to build a socialist alternative in the Arab world we “would have to learn from the mistakes of an older generation of radicals that looked to Stalinist Russia and certain ‘progressive’ Arab regimes, such as Syria and Iraq, as models for social change.” Among this older generation of radicals that he refers to is the PFLP. He writes: “Influenced by a combination of Maoist and Stalinist ideas, the PFLP declared itself to be a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ organization.” Omar goes on to ask why they were unable to build a revolutionary alternative to the moderate wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization. His answer to this question neglects an analysis of imperialism by relegating itself to the PFLP’s internal and political strategies. Assuming that a different political strategy would have led to better results, he faults the PFLP for creating a “false distinction” between reactionary regimes and progressive nationalist ones and for their use of airline hijackings.

In attributing the PFLP’s “mistakes” to their “false distinction” between different kinds of states, Palestine neglects the PFLP’s theoretically advanced conception of anti-imperialist strategy and obscures its approach to the Arab dimension of Palestinian struggle. Omar writes:

While it rejected, correctly, the notion that some Arab regimes were socialist, the PFLP made a false distinction between reactionary regimes that accommodated to imperialism and progressive nationalist ones that were forced to fight against it. Thus, based on this distinction, the PFLP allied itself with a number of repressive Arab governments, such as the Ba‘athist regime in Iraq and the Assad regime in Syria. Ultimately, these alliances cost the PFLP its political independence and reduced it to a tool in the hands of some Arab rulers.

First, Omar’s claim that the PFLP made a false distinction between reactionary regimes and progressive nationalist ones ignores the reality of significant differences in the political and social character of these different states, including key differences in the class character of their governments and their internal socio-political order (e.g., monarchy with semi-feudal/tribal characters versus Arab nationalist states with a dominant public sector administered through a party), which indeed conditioned the difference in approach these respective states took towards US imperialism and the Soviet bloc.14 Second, Omar’s claim that political alliances forged between the PFLP and progressive nationalist regimes on the basis of this distinction cost the PFLP its independence simplifies the relationship the PFLP held over time and place between itself and these states. Indeed, at various junctures in its history, the PFLP clashed both politically and militarily with progressive nationalist states, including centrally on the question of the independence of Palestinian decision-making on the question of Palestine.15

Further, Palestine sets up a straw man on the PFLP’s position towards petit bourgeois states, which allows them to disingenuously delegitimize the PFLP’s regional alliances and the political thinking which informed their strategic determinations. As mentioned earlier, the PFLP’s alliances were based on a scientific analysis of social and political forces, informed by their calculation of friends and enemies. If we look directly to the PFLP’s position laid out in Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, they adopt a very clear, nuanced, and materialist analysis of petit-bourgeois states. They understood that revolutionary Palestinian and Arab forces must be in alliance and conflict with petit-bourgeois states: Alliance due to these states’ antagonism towards imperialism and Israel; Conflict due to these states’ class structure which shaped their adoption of traditional war strategies instead of guerilla warfare.16 In its reading of the regional forces, the PFLP understood petit-bourgeois nationalist states, like Egypt and Syria, as playing a role in undermining the imperial legacies in the region.17 The Syrian and Iraqi states provided the conditions for material support to sustain the operations of the Palestinian Revolution – including hosting faction offices, conferences, military training/bases. Both the PFLP and DFLP were critical of the conditions and alliances they operated within regionally and attributed them to class difference that represented the interests of petit-bourgeois regimes as opposed to the interests of the Palestinian working class and peasantry.

It’s critical to emphasize that the Arab dimension cannot be divorced from the Palestinian question. The PFLP’s calculation of Zionism as a regional threat informed the alliances they made in order to secure ideological and military support to advance armed struggle as a tactic for liberation.18 With a clear view of the political landscape the PFLP wagered that the tactic of armed struggle stood defiant of the US-Zionist alliance, confronted its imperialist interest in the region (including the threat of Arab reaction), and was the only way to defend the Palestinian homeland.

In formulating this liberation strategy, their reference points drew broadly from historical and contemporaneous national liberation and socialist struggles.19 However, they did not export other revolutionary experiences onto their own context since they upheld a revolutionary understanding of Marxism “as a working guide and not as a fixed, rigid, doctrine.” While there was “no revolutionary party without revolutionary theory” – since thought and action were fused together by an “organic and reactive link” – there was similarly no revolutionary struggle without its “main curriculum:” armed struggle. The latter was not confined to militant action but included Palestinian resistance at all levels, such as the comprehensive boycott of Zionist institutions. The strategy of armed struggle could not confine itself to Palestine; the PFLP understood the political urgency of a strategy that confronts enemy forces wherever they operate: “We are fighting against the enemy in every land where the feet of his soldiers’ march. This is our historical approach – where we are going until we reach the stage where we open a wider front against the enemy and turn our land into a burning hell for the invaders.”

Of course the transformation of the land in accordance with this historical approach has its resonances with other national liberation struggles that have transformed the land itself into an unbearable space for imperialist invaders. But there is something distinct to this approach that cannot be reduced to the PFLP’s Marxist-Leninist orientation. Given the dispersion of Palestinians in refugee camps across the Arab World, the Palestinian Left’s theory of alliances was one answer to the question of how to liberate the land amidst collective estrangement and exile from it.20 We must, then, understand the PFLP’s regional alliances within this historically specific characteristic of the Palestinian national question. Omar’s criticism of the PFLP’s alliances as a “mistake” works to obscure how Palestinian liberation is contingent on resistance to Zionism on the regional and global level: it may not be won within occupied Palestine alone.

Omar cites the PFLP’s hijackings as one reason for its inability to offer an alternative to Fateh and claims that the hijackings isolated the PFLP from the Arab masses. He writes:

The PFLP’s chief tactical contribution to the growing Palestinian movement in 1968-72 was its use of airline hijackings to publicize the Palestinian cause. As a result, it substituted the actions of its small, committed membership for the mass struggle of the Arab workers and peasants it aimed to relate to. As the Palestinians faced one of the world’s chief military powers, it became apparent that guerilla tactics alone could not win. And although millions of people across the Arab world supported the Palestinians’ armed struggle, the nature of that struggle prevented them from taking part. Also, more critically, it isolated the PFLP from the mass struggles that took place against the Arab regimes and US imperialism in the late 1960s and early 1970s – especially the workers’ and students’ movement in Egypt (1968-72).

This line of argumentation is not new. In a 1972 interview Kanafani responds to and contests contemporaneous criticisms of the PFLP’s hijackings which mirror the ahistorical criticisms Omar puts forward against the Palestinian Left in the above passage. The interviewer, presumably Fred Halliday, reminded Kanafani of a criticism launched by those outside the resistance movement which said, similar to Omar, that the hijackings were “a substitute for organizing the masses.” Kanafani challenged this criticism and clarified: “I have always said that we don’t hijack planes because we love Boeing 707s. We do it for specific reasons, at a specific time and against a specific enemy.”21

Nowhere does Omar mention that the tactical use of hijackings was a response to the US attempt to destroy and liquidate the Palestinian Revolution by way of the US-designed Rogers Plan. The latter was proposed by Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State, William Rogers, in 1969 and was “centered on UN 242’s land-for-peace scheme.”22 In 1970 it was revealed to the PLO that both Nasser and the Jordanian government had accepted this backdoor plan. Correctly, the PLO understood this scheme as strengthening Israel– since it legitimated Zionist theft of land – while undermining both Arab unity and Palestinian resistance forces.23 In other words, the Rogers Plan was an attempt to destroy the legitimacy of the Palestinian Revolution and replace it with a US “peace plan” that was, as it is today, based on the outright denial of revolutionary forces to determine the future of Palestine and the Arab world. PFLP’s George Habash said that the US wanted to administer this plan “because it knows very well that the resistance movement will make the whole of this part of the world – not only Jordan or Lebanon, but the whole Arab world – a second Vietnam.”24

With this context, the PFLP’s airline hijackings in the early 1970s were a strategy against this regional and global threat to the Palestinian Revolution and a mechanism for restoring the morale of the Palestinian people. Basing his defense of the PFLP’s strategy in a materialist analysis of the historical conjuncture, Kanafani argued:

The Rogers plan presupposed the liquidation of our movement, and this was now approaching in an atmosphere of Palestinian submissiveness. Therefore, something had to be done; first of all, to tell the world that we were not going to be put on the shelf for the second time, and secondly to tell the world that the days when the US and reactionary Arabs could dictate to our people were over. Moreover there was the question of the morale, the fighting ability, of our own people. We could not let things remain like that when a massacre was on the way, even if we had sat down quietly on the steps of His Majesty’s palace, and kissed his hand.

Following Kanafani’s lead, anti-imperialism is not a slogan or ideal that can be jettisoned from assessments of historical liberation movements. Rather than assess the Left’s strategies as false or bad, as Omar does, a rigorous anti-imperialist analysis must ask why the left took up the strategies that they did in their specific historical moment. Omar’s criticism that the PFLP’s tactics led them away from “the mass struggle of the Arab workers and peasants” grossly obscures how the US attempt to destroy revolutionary forces was a threat to all Arab workers and peasants. It also, however, obscures the fact that as a popular, guerilla organization, the lifeblood of the PFLP was its social base. It is historically inaccurate and disingenuous for Omar to suggest that the hijackings, a specific tactic in a specific conjuncture, supplanted organizing.25 In other words, the hijackings were a strategy to confront imperialism and not a replacement for mass-based organizing. Similar to Kanafani, Leila Khaled emphasizes the political stakes of the PFLP’s strategies and upends the aforementioned critique, launched in particular by people disengaged from struggle. Khaled writes: “We act heroically in a cowardly world to prove that the enemy is not invincible. We act ‘violently’ in order to blow the wax out of the ears of the deaf Western liberals and to remove the straws that block their vision. We act as revolutionaries to inspire the masses and to trigger off the revolutionary upheaval in an era of counter-revolution.”26

Continued on following post.
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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 01, 2022 3:25 pm

Continued from previous post.

The Global Scale of Palestinian National Liberation

While Omar faults the PFLP for its regional alliances and strategies, his obfuscation of global forces is just as essential to the book’s degradation of the Palestinian Left. Omar’s critique of the PFLP, which relegates itself to internal strategy, has its precedent set in Awad and Bean’s introduction, where, as mentioned earlier, they oppose “socialism from above” with “socialism from below.” Presumably benign at first read, Awad and Bean’s framework proves itself to be an opportunist binary that the book adopts to delegitimize not only the PFLP, but other Marxist-Leninist and socialist traditions. For example, Omar’s risible claim that “Cuban workers and peasants did not take part in making the revolution” reduces the Cuban people to passive witnesses of revolution. Omar connects the political orientation of the PFLP to the Cuban Revolution by arguing that the PFLP’s “vision of Marxist-Leninsm was expressed in the Cuban Revolution, where a small group of guerillas defeated a US-backed dictator and, a few years later, declared a socialist society.” This allows him to assume both the Palestinian Left and the Cuban Revolution as instances of “socialism from above” and undermine their popular constitution.

The term “Stalinism” guides the book’s overarching framework and is defined by Awad and Bean in the introduction as “a political tendency based on the false notion that socialism can be established in a single country rather than through the international rejection of capitalism.” They argue that this tendency is riddled with “stagism” which has squandered Arab socialist and communist parties’ “attempts to build a socialist alternative.” In broadly construing Stalinism as everything “false,” “rigid,” and “mechanistic,” and in equating it with any strategy they don’t agree with, the stage is set for the proceeding ahistorical criticisms of the strategies taken and alliances forged by the Palestinian national liberation movement.

In fact, Omar treats the PFLP’s alliance with the Soviet Union as one of its “political weaknesses” and brazenly suggests that they were “regularly manipulated by the Soviet Union.” He writes that “the PFLP, similar to the rest of the Stalinist left in the Arab world, allied itself with what it considered to be ‘real’ socialist societies, the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc.” Relying on the tired trope of “Stalinism” as a means to delegitimize the Palestinian Left, Omar argues that building socialism “will require the rediscovery of the real Marxist tradition, which has always looked to struggles of the working class – and not to Stalinist Russia or some authoritarian Arab regime that calls itself ‘socialist’ or ‘progressive’ – as the way to change society.” To Omar, the Palestinian Left is not a part of this “real Marxist tradition.” Shamelessly, then, he completely dismisses the relevance of the Palestinian Left’s political and theoretical contributions and ends the chapter by telling his readers, “it will be critical for us to learn from the mistakes of the old Stalinist organizations and connect these lessons to the struggles of today.”

The McCarthyist invocation of the Stalinist boogeyman – as an effort to define Marxism in a narrow, sectarian cast – ultimately renders Arab socialism as incapable of applying Marxism to its own conditions. In their conclusion Awad and Bean, instead, posit Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution as an alternative strategy that accounts for the supposed shortcomings of “Stalinized communist parties” to advance working class interests. They situate the political position of Jabra Nicola – one of the only Palestinian Trotskyists that Palestine has produced – against an entire body of organizational and political thought and strategy, writing that Nicola drew from

Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which articulated the need for national liberation struggles to challenge the role of local capitalist classes as well. This is in contrast to the strategy adopted by the Stalinized communist parties as well as some of the Arab nationalist organizations of the region, who argued for an anti-imperialist front that subordinated the working class’s independent interests to the national project.

Aside from absolving the Trotskyist and social democratic currents from its historical and current relationship to imperialism, there are various issues at hand.

Firstly, the book’s critique of the PFLP’s orientation to the Soviet Union, and its alliance, obscures the fact that the PFLP (including the other Palestinian political factions) had deep objections to Arab communist parties for their political adherence to the Soviet line on Palestine. Further, in addressing the friends of the Palestinian cause, the PFLP articulated the limitations of the USSR’s position on Zionism in its adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 242, while still emphasizing the necessity of their alliance.27 Despite these reservations, the PFLP understood that maintaining its strategic alliance with the USSR would strengthen its ability to withstand the growing onslaught of imperialism and regional reaction. This was seen with the anti-colonial and socialist revolutions in Angola, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Yemen – their organizations withstood the violent offensives of imperialism and mobilized the popular classes, while they developed an alliance with the Soviet Union. Likewise, the PFLP maintained this critical internationalist alliance with the ultimate goal of advancing a national democratic revolution that provides both a material and technical base and paves the way for a socialist revolution. By subsuming the PFLP and other communist-oriented groups under the category of “the Stalinist left,” Omar construes Palestinians as puppets of supposed bureaucratic, despotic ventriloquists rather than revolutionary actors forging their own politics with the force of US-led reaction against them. Even more so, the relationship between the Soviet Union and the PFLP (or more broadly with the PLO) cannot be understood as unilateral or static. These dynamics shifted throughout the course of the revolution, and in the broader timeline of the Cold War.28

Secondly, Palestine’s anti-Soviet position obfuscates the historical effort of US imperialism to weaken the socialist bloc, as well as its growing influence over sections of the PLO. The PFLP understood that their alliance with the Soviet Union was situated in a global imperialist playing field wherein the US “established a series of pacts and defense treaties to face the socialist camp and to encircle it and limit its expansion, and also to neutralize national liberation movements.”29 As committed internationalists the Palestinian Left understood the positive effect of Soviet power for revolutionary forces in the Arab world. The editors’ refusal to address this global terrain allows for an analysis in which friends of Palestine are treated as enemies, and subsequently, the internationalist strategy of the Palestinian Revolution is reduced to categories like “false” and “incorrect.” The dichotomy of correct versus incorrect strategy is born not of a conjunctural or historical analysis of the arrangement of forces in the struggle against Zionism and imperialism, but time-honored shibboleths on the correct conduct of struggle. As a historical judgment, it overlooks how the PFLP’s positions were informed by their materialist analysis of the forces of imperialism and their understanding of the trajectory of the liberation project. The introduction of the DFLP’s “Policy of Phases” program and the PLO’s exile post-1982 from Beirut invited increased lines of communication with US administrations. Post-1982 Beirut materialized this reality when back-door channels were established with Arafat and the Reagan administration to move towards a “peace plan.”30 At this specific moment, the PFLP did not join in the policy of conciliation with the DFLP and Fateh; it maintained its analysis of the Palestinian struggle as linked to the struggle against imperialism. Ultimately, it prioritized an anti-imperialist front to secure the interest of the Palestinian movement more broadly, which includes defending the dignity of the Palestinian masses. If the ability to dynamically recalibrate one’s alliances in accordance to a changing political scene is not an example of the oft-cherished “proletarian independence,” then what is?

National Liberation as Class Struggle

Palestine views the prioritization of anticolonial liberation as a “Stalinist” and “mechanistic model” which “relegates the project of fighting for socialism to something that will take place at a future – often undefined – point in time.” This separation between anticolonial liberation and class struggle emanates from two fundamental misunderstandings. First, Awad and Bean misunderstand the class composition of anticolonial struggle in Palestine. And second, they misunderstand class formation. Their introductory warning against “Stalinism” thus poses a confusing and unexplanatory binary between anticolonial struggle and class struggle. Drawing from Frantz Fanon, however, we know that we cannot segregate class struggle from anticolonial struggle in situations of colonialism since “the economic substructure is also a superstructure.”31

The authors’ misunderstanding of class struggle and class formation is most evident in Awad and Bean’s advocacy for a crude theory of class which believes that the working class has “independent interests to the national project.” It is difficult to imagine what Awad and Bean mean here. If the national project, which guarantees the liberation and return of millions of dispossessed Palestinian refugees, is not where working class Palestinian interests fundamentally rest, then where else can we excavate this working class interest they speak of?

In order to conceive of this working class interest, we must attend to the national question. However, Awad and Bean’s dismissal of the latter in Palestine, in part, rests on their aforementioned use of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci himself charged Trotsky’s theory, which sidestepped the national question, as “nothing but a generic forecast presented as a dogma, and which demolishes itself by not in fact coming true.”32 Trotsky’s obstinacy is a reflection of the fact that his theory is not based in a materialist analysis of competing social forces on the national and world scales. Gramsci writes, “One cannot choose the form of war one wants, unless from the start one has a crushing superiority over the enemy.”33

It is worth emphasizing that Gramsci’s political strategy was constituted in a Southern context of unequal development. The national was, as is the case in the Palestinian context, the scale from which to launch a national-popular alliance. Gramsci’s theorization of the latter was not one of mere preference but one that responded to the constitution of Italian society in the interwar period. Conversely, Awad and Bean undermine a Marxist analysis of the national question by assuming that “internal conflicts between classes and seeing struggle from below” is “the answer.” By posing this “answer” against national unity, they fail to recognize how political answers are not eternal or transhistorical; Rather, political answers transform alongside shifting forms of class struggles.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels emphasize the national scale of class struggles: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”34 This distinction between form and substance allows us to make sense of the PFLP’s analysis that the national form of Palestinian struggle is, in substance, an international struggle against world imperialism. Marx and Engels’ analysis of national struggle informed the Communist position and strategy they laid out, to “everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” If one adopts the logic of this position on national struggle and understands that Palestinian liberation is based on, and contingent upon, the movement of the popular classes, it becomes perfectly clear why supporting every revolutionary movement against Zionist colonization – the process which has dispossessed and proletarianized the majority of Palestinian society – is a position that uplifts Palestinian working class interests.

An alternative to Awad and Bean’s analysis of class would entail seriously grappling with national liberation and the concrete role of working and peasant classes therein. The late Marxist-Leninist philosopher Domenico Losurdo qualifies the frontist strategy taken in national liberation struggles, writing, “while the proletariat is the agency of the emancipatory process that breaks the chains of capitalist rule, the alliance required to break the shackles of national oppression is broader.”35 This is not to suggest that class oppression is distinct from national oppression. Rather, national oppression is one form of class oppression. Importantly, Losurdo points our attention to Marx and Engels’ pluralization of class struggle as taking multiple forms. The PFLP developed a related analysis that emphasized these various iterations of class struggle. They illustrated how in the Palestinian context of underdevelopment, the form of class struggle differs from the form of class struggle in an industrial society. This did not lead the PFLP to neglect the class question in Palestine, or to paper over the constitutive differences between classes, but to formulate a strategy by evaluating each class – the feudal, bourgeois, workers, peasants – in their respective relation to the Palestinian Revolution.

In committing themeslves to class analysis, the PFLP identified the position “that Israel represents a specific type of colonialism threatening the existence of all classes of the Palestinian people” as rightist thinking that obscured the class composition of revolutionary forces.36 Developing an analysis of each classes’ orientation to the Palestinian Revolution allowed them to determine “the real revolutionary class forces that constitute the pivot of the revolution.” In other words, the PFLP identified the forces behind national struggle as the popular (i.e., landless and pauperized) classes. From this perspective, national liberation is one form of class struggle. As the PFLP clarified:

National liberation battles are also class battles. They are battles between colonialism and the feudal and capitalist class whose interests are linked with those of the colonialist on the one hand, and the other classes of the people representing the greater part of the nation on the other. If the saying that national liberation battles are national battles is intended to mean that they are battles waged by the overwhelming majority of the nation’s masses, then this saying is true, but if it is intended to mean that these battles are different from the class struggle between the exploiters and the exploited, then the saying is untrue.37

When Awad and Bean suggest that working class interests are distinct from the national project they not only elide how national liberation battles are class battles, but they abandon the liberatory potential of popular resistance that takes the nation as its scale for forging revolutionary politics and building a socialist future. Ironically, Awad and Bean impose the very stagism they purport to oppose by segregating class struggle from national struggle. Losurdo writes: “Class struggle is the genus which, in determinate circumstances, takes the specific form of ‘national struggle’.”38 It is possible to come to terms with this formulation of national struggle as species and class struggle as genus only when we include the colonial theft of resources and land in our analysis of class formation and class interests. The abstraction of one form of class struggle and the universalization of it as the singular and only form is the symptom of a chauvinistic class position, both advertently and inadvertently adopted by those in the imperial core, which fails, and ultimately refuses, to take the national struggles of colonized peoples seriously. Today, it is either crude theories of class interests or liberal humanitarianism that bury from public view an otherwise obvious reality: that the Palestinian national liberation struggle is one of the most important class struggles of our history and our present.

Conclusion

The words of Ghassan Kanafani commence Awad and Bean’s book, but they forcefully degrade his life by rendering the politics and commitments he was martyred for as Stalinist and mechanistic. The confused analysis in Palestine is a reflection of its severing and isolation from historical and contemporary revolutionary theory that people like Kanafani actively developed and put into practice. Though the book importantly offers some tools and information for comprehending the Palestinian question, its lack of generosity towards the Left and its distancing from internationalist politics means that it fails to provide an analysis which clearly assesses the political stakes of Palestinian liberation for socialists in the US. If Awad and Bean believe that the Palestinian Left had it all wrong, what political formation do they consider to have it all right?

On the terrain of contemporary organizing in North America, they largely neglect uplifting grassroots organizations.39 In their conclusion, Awad and Bean mention NGOs like Adalah Justice Project and US Campaign for Palestinian Rights whose recent work, they argue, “reflects the growth of a resurgent American left that puts resistance to the US war machine at the center of a larger project of social justice.”

It is worth pointing out that NGOs play a specific and limited role in the solidarity movement for Palestine, employing strategies which are often confined to advocacy. When assessing the impact of NGOs, we must be clear about their class composition and orientation as NGOs, not movements, a clarification which Awad and Bean’s conclusion obscures. There are significant differences between grassroots organizations and NGOs, three of the foremost being funding, internal political mechanisms, and social base.

First, NGOs’ politics and strategies cannot be understood in isolation from their funding sources.40 Private donors which NGOs appeal to sustain their work and pay their salaries, no doubt come to shape their work, political vision, and class composition. Second, as opposed to NGOs, grassroots organizations have internal political mechanisms which hold them accountable to popular movements. These political mechanisms allow organizers to respond to resistance in Palestine. This summer, it was grassroots organizations who proved themselves capable of both responding to on-the-ground calls in Palestine and mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people across US, Canadian, and European cities. Lastly, the class composition and audience of the named NGOs is primarily middle class Americans. Of course, grassroots organizations are heterogeneous in their class composition and comprise these classes too. But the internal political mechanisms of grassroots organizations, and the fact that they are not constrained by the dictates of liberal and Zionist funders, means that they are able to cultivate a politics and strategy that aligns with and uplifts the vision of the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Structurally, NGOs are more committed to satisfying the needs of their private donors than they are of uplifting the demands of resistance forces in Palestine and the region.

Awad and Bean’s inclusion of NGOs within the left, paired with their failure to highlight grassroots organizations in the US, obscures the debilitating effects of NGOization. In the wake of Oslo, NGOization has been part of a larger process of liquidating the Palestinian Left.41 In fact, the US has financed the aid economy in Palestine and directly undermined popular resistance through the destruction of Palestinian institutions. The prevailing confusion in which NGOs are mistaken for popular or community organizations is a function of NGOization as it undermines existing popular movements or acts as part of a broader social, economic, and political terrain that prevents their emergence.

Given Awad and Bean’s commitment to “socialism from below” it remains unclear as to why their conclusion gives uncritical spotlight, not only to NGOs, but to members of Congress. We are not arguing that the authors should exclude the electoral sphere from their analysis, as it constitutes one terrain of struggle and a specific node in the movement for Palestine in the United States. But their positive rendering of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar for “[challenging] the status quo on Palestine” stands in confusing contrast to the book’s sectarian critiques of the Palestinian Left. We must ask why American politicians receive positive evaluation from Awad and Bean while their book offers a platform for the dismissal and belittlement of the historical contributions of Palestinian mass organizations? Critical questions remain: what is “socialism from below” to Awad and Bean? Is there any room for the Palestinian Left in their imagined political formation?

More disturbingly, the book’s vilification of revolutionary strategy severs itself from on the ground resistance in Palestine. This is not to say that they altogether neglect such forces.42 However, resistance to Zionism and imperialism in Palestine is not uplifted in a comprehensive or explicit way. This is harmful when considered alongside Awad and Bean’s dismissal of organized resistance forces who are resisting Zionism today, as “Stalinist,” “stagist,” and “mechanistic.” It should be seen as nothing less than shameful that the book treats the Palestinian Left with more criticism than they treat advocacy NGOs whose very legitimacy derives from the historical liquidation of the Palestinian Left as carried out by the US–Zionist alliance.

In this sense, the book’s misrepresentation of Palestinian history is not innocent. Its version of history complements its contemporary watering-down of the national question and the international dimensions of Palestinian struggle. Despite this, Palestinian history remains a crucial site of engagement for anyone concerned with an anti-imperialist and internationalist politics that is formulated and built from the historical and contemporary ground we exist on and not within “all these castles in the air.”43 History is a wellspring of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle. This has always been the case for the Palestinian national liberation movement which continues to draw inspiration from its forebearers, and which creatively produces and maintains its national symbols and traditions amidst the 100-plus-year-long refusal of Palestinian self-determination by colonial occupiers.

Despite the crucial role of history in the Palestinian project for liberation, often those who draw inspiration from historical revolutionary moments are charged with idealism or romanticism. We recognize this attitude in Palestine’s treatment of the Palestinian Left as stodgy and outdated, and in the assumption that its politics and strategy can be written off as false or misguided. This attitude is nothing but debilitating to the movement for Palestine in North America: it squanders the ability of socialists to build a genuine anti-imperialist movement against US and Zionist aggression. It was this iteration of bourgeois moralism that Kanafani identified as one of the causes of the Palestinian tragedy. It is then critical that we partake in acts of remembrance of those who came before us and were convinced of the enduring necessity and possibility of liberating Palestine. This is not an exercise in nostalgia or a romanticized vision of militancy. Nor is it a suggestion that the conditions of the Palestinian Revolution can be mapped onto our present. To remember, uplift, and learn from the political theory and strategy of the Palestinian Left is to struggle against Zionism’s ongoing, century-long counterinsurgency against Palestinian resistance.

During the Palestinian Revolution, the Zionist entity assassinated leaders of the Palestinian Left throughout Palestine, the Arab world, and Europe. This history reaches even further back to the era of British–Zionist collaboration (1917–1948), which saw the mass, brutal suppression of those who rejected the colonial hijacking of Palestine. There has never been closure to this repression. Our historical moment is constituted by an ideological struggle in which Zionism attempts to suppress and eradicate the memory of Palestinian and Arab revolutionaries it has transformed into martyrs. We identify this phenomenon all around us, from the contemporary desecration of Izz al Din al Qassam’s grave north of Haifa to the Israeli state’s attacks on Ghassan Kanafani’s memorial in Akka. We identify it, too, in the historical erasure of revolutionaries confined in prisons. One exemplar case is Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, a Lebanese communist and leader in the PFLP who has been imprisoned by the French state since 1984 with the support of the US and Israel.44 He remains the longest detained political prisoner in Europe.

The ongoing liquidation of the memory of the Palestinian Left is not exclusively a Zionist endeavor that takes place in Palestine. This revisionist operation proceeds right here in the US. On one level, the liquidation of revolutionary Palestinian memory and thought can be contested by recounting history through a materialist method. And on a more urgent level, we should ask what insights the Palestinian Left tradition can offer in strategizing for the liberation of Palestine and developing a robust internationalist, anti-imperialist movement in the present moment.

In 2021, the Palestinian people remain just as besieged, disinherited, proletarianized, and landless as they were in 1969, the year that the Palestinian Left theorized the forces constituting their enemies and friends – those who supported or opposed the miserable reality imposed by Zionist colonialism and world imperialism. Today, there are real, concrete enemies invested in the continuation of the indefensible reality of Palestinian dispossession. And there are real, concrete friends committed to its undoing. This undoing is a difficult feat that remains just as necessary, urgent, and possible. Yet any socialist movement in the Global North that is interested in aiding this possibility cannot avoid adopting a political theory and strategy that assesses and confronts the role of US–Zionist led imperialism in plundering the dispossessed of the world.

If anything, Awad and Bean are correct that socialists in North America must struggle for Palestinian liberation. But how can socialists in the US do this? It is clear that vague sloganeering and loose theoretical frameworks do not articulate a clear political vision and strategy that is centered on weakening the institutions of US imperialism and Zionism globally. As articulated by the Palestinian Left, a politics of internationalism and anti-imperialism must derive from clear political thinking that assesses both revolutionary and reactionary forces on the national, regional, and global scales. Accordingly, any strategy for mobilization must be based in a materialist analysis that places US-led imperialism and Zionism at the forefront and doesn’t shy away from supporting resistance on the ground in Palestine today. This analysis determines which struggles socialist movements in the Global North are obliged to support and allows them to challenge the prevailing political confusion and theoretical chaos in which all states are strategically undifferentiated, and a priori our primary enemies and antagonists – a confusion and chaos which has proved to be advantageous to US aims throughout the world. If vague sloganeering and idealist internationalism will not uplift the national liberation struggle of Palestinians being carpet-bombed, choked, and humiliated by the US-backed Zionist enterprise, what will?

Perhaps the most practical starting point is committing to the task that has been taken up by Palestinian revolutionaries and their friends for over 100 years: the unfailing readiness to identify, confront, and defeat enemy forces.

References


↑1 Anouar Abdel-Malek, Nation and Revolution: Volume 2 of Social Dialectics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 166.
↑2 Max Ajl, A People’s Green New Deal (London: Pluto Books, 2021), 146.
↑3 Her position is worth quoting at length: “The link between the interests of imperialism and the continued existence of Israel will make our war against the latter basically a war against imperialism.” Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live (1971), 51.
↑4 Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, “Intervention: The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts,” Historical Materialism 15 (2007): 171-204.
↑5 Abdel-Malek, Nation and Revolution, 166.
↑6 Abdel-Malek, Nation and Revolution, Part I.
↑7 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2010).
↑8 Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, “Intervention: The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts,” 173.
↑9 Walter Rodney, “George Jackson: Black Revolutionary,” November 1971.
↑10 See our section below: National Liberation as Class Struggle.
↑11 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP (Utrecht: Foreign Language Press, 2017), 63.
↑12 To Anouar Abdel-Malek, “the combined effect of [these] two tendencies … leads to a global disqualification of socialism, with some minor and temporary exceptions. The USSR is condemned as bureaucratic and conservative; China as chauvinist, with racialist undertones; the European socialist states as bureaucratic satellites; Yugoslavia and Romania as right, or left, opportunists; Korea as dogmatic; Cambodia as erratic; Vietnam, after its victory, as conservative; Cuba as a bureaucratic satellite in its declining romantic phase. What remains, we may ask, of socialism? If every single country is subject to the same treatment, only one haven is left: the self-styled ‘new’ left, the defenders, apologists, and epigones of neo-Marxist epistemology, socialist reductionism, a dogmatic, supposedly ethical purity.” Abdel-Malek, Nation and Revolution, 165.
↑13 “PFLP: Introduction to this Edition” in Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP , 11.
↑14 These differences in approach are in reference to the US imperialist interventions that we have witnessed over decades, such as with the multiple invasions of Iraq and the wars waged on Syria and Libya through proxies.
↑15 For example, the PFLP repeatedly maintained the position that Palestinian decision-making should remain independent of Arab states, including ally states such as Libya, Iraq, and Syria. Indeed, the PFLP contradicted the Syrian states’ desires to overthrow Yasser Arafat as leader of the PLO, despite its own opposition to his leadership. Additionally, the PFLP often positioned itself in contradiction to Syria’s interest in Lebanon, including through its involvement with the Lebanese National Movement. There are various other moments where the PFLP diverged from its state allies despite its alignment on broader strategic considerations.
↑16 In the aftermath of the 1967 Naksa, the PFLP’s critique of the regional forces’ role was centered on the class composition of the political leadership of petit bourgeois states citing Egypt as an example. By reason of their class structure, these states were not, and could not be, the leading force of Palestinian liberation. Despite remaining antagonistic towards Western imperialism and Zionism, the PFLP understood that petit bourgeois states have the capacity of adopting “compromising non-radical programs in the face of the enemy.” Thus, the PFLP understood both the constraints of petit bourgeois states and the necessity of allying with them to struggle against imperialism, Zionism, and reactionary regimes. It is worth quoting them at length: “These regimes struck at the interests of feudalism and capitalism and their exploitation of the masses, but they preserved the petit bourgeoisie and its interests in the industrial, agricultural and commercial sectors, at the same time producing a new class of military men, politicians and administrative personnel whose interests became interlocked with those of the petit bourgeoisie, thus forming with it, the upper class in these communities. The interests of this upper class required the maintenance of the experiment within limits that do not conflict with its interests or with its thinking and view of the battle. This class is antagonistic to colonialism and reaction but at the same time wants to keep the privileges that it enjoys. It is this state of affairs that has defined the nature of the political, economic, military and ideological programs of these regimes.” For more on the PFLP’s approach to this question, see pages 81-84 of Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine.
↑17 For the PFLP’s deputy head of political relations’ understanding of the question of Syria in the Palestinian struggle, see Taysir Qubba, “Palestinians in Damascus,” Middle East Research and Information Project 134 (1985).
↑18 The PFLP’s 1969 booklet “The Military Strategy of the PFLP” explains that their military thought “proceeds directly from the ideological, class and organizational undertaking which forms the foundation of the commitment of the Popular Front as expressed in [A Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine (1969)].”
↑19 The PFLP wrote: “It is not a mere coincidence that the October Revolution and the revolutions in China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and the socialist countries of Europe have succeeded and stood firm in the face of imperialism and in overcoming or beginning to overcome their state of underdevelopment, against the quasi-paralysis or infirmity characterizing the countries of the Third World which are not committed scientifically to scientific socialist theory as their guideline for planning all their policies and defining their programs.” Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine , 112.
↑20 Revolutionary Palestinian strategy has creatively responded to the predicament of exile. As Nasser Abourahme explains, the Palestinian anticolonial experience was revolutionary precisely due to its “capacity to make territory.” Other Arab revolutionaries struggling against Zionist colonization and imperialism have had to adopt strategies for confronting, undermining, and transforming colonial space. The Lebanese communist and revolutionary freedom fighter, Souha Bechara, discusses how resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon continued through its capacity to “abolish distance.” The problem of liberating something that one is physically severed from (i.e.: recovering one’s land from the refugee camp of exile, or fighting for one’s homeland from the prison of torture), continues to confront Palestinians. Nasser Abourahme, “Revolution after Revolution: The Commune as Line of Flight in Palestinian Anticolonialism,” Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, May 2021.
↑21 Ghassan Kannafani, “On the PFLP and the September Crisis,” New Left Review I/67 (May/June 1971), 50-57.
↑22 Paul Thomas Chamberlain, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85.
↑23 Chamberlain, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order.
↑24 Chamberlain, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order.
↑25 In their document “Hands off the Militia!” the PFLP describes organizing their social base in preparation against reactionary repression: “Thus PFLP and other progressive groups strengthened their ties with the people, widened their militia bases, and intensified training and arming of the militia so that they would be prepared to carry their responsibilities of facing the enemy.”
↑26 Khaled, My People Shall Live, 58.
↑27 For more details on the USSR’s adoption of UNSCR 242 see, chapter 4 of Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live, titled “The Road to Haifa.”
↑28 In its 4th Congress, the PFLP speaks to Lenin’s policy of “peaceful coexistence” exercised by the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. The USSR’s practice of Lenin’s thesis meant securing the conditions necessary for the growth of socialist construction. The PFLP admits to not advocating for the USSR to undertake direct military confrontation against imperialist forces, or to export revolution. The PFLP’s anxiety was centered around the socialist bloc reducing support to national liberation movements. This speaks directly to the USSR’s push for political settlement based on UNSCR 242 which heightened the PFLP’s apprehension. The PFLP, in this report, state that they later reevaluated their position and understood the policy of peaceful coexistence to be essential for the “growth of the socialist economy, and the deepening of capitalism’s crisis, and intensifying contradictions among the imperial power.” Despite this policy, various other nations won their battle for national liberation with the support of the socialist bloc.
↑29 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, 88.
↑30 Despite voting on the 10-point program at the 1988 PNC meeting in Algiers, the PFLP maintained its position against normalization with the Zionist entity through the formation of the Rejection Front in 1974, and later, with the formation of the Palestinian National Salvation Front in response to the Amman Accord. See Anders Strindberg, “The Future of the Palestinian National Movement and The Damascus-Based Alliance of Palestinian Forces: A Primer,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 60-76.
↑31 Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 5.
↑32 Antonio Gramsci, “Internationalism and National Policy,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans.. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 241.
↑33 Antonio Gramsci, “Political Struggle and Military War,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks,” 234.
↑34 Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), in Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 495.
↑35 Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 9.
↑36 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, 42.
↑37 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, 44.
↑38 Losurdo, Class Struggle, 14.
↑39 There are exceptions: the book briefly mentions Students for Justice in Palestine and the Red Nation. Also, they importantly argue for the need to expand anti-Zionism within the US labor movement, mentioning historical movements such as Block the Boat. However, nowhere do Awad and Bean make their readers aware of critical organizations and networks that are mobilizing for Palestinian liberation in the US and/or articulating sharp anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist politics. Some of the organizations that are excluded from their assessment of the terrain of organizing in the US are the following: The Palestinian Youth Movement, Within Our Lifetime, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Existence is Resistance, Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, U.S. Palestinian Community Network.
↑40 On May 25 2021, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund awarded the Tides Center a $150,000 grant for Adalah Justice Project. In 2018, they were awarded $160,000 and in 2020, they were awarded 100,000. This information is publicly available on the Grants Search section of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund website.
↑41 Adel Samara, “The NGOization of the Palestinian Left” in Imprisoned Ideas: A Discussion of Palestinian, Arab, Israeli, and International Issues (Ramallah: al-Mashriq/al-A’amil for Cultural and Development Studies, 1988).
↑42 Daphna Thier’s chapter briefly suggests the necessity of developing “real connections to the Palestinian national liberation struggle wherever it arises” and Toufic Haddad recognizes that the Palestinian movement is not defeated. The book refers, at various moments, to Gaza’s heroic Great March of Return.
↑43 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 516.
↑44 In 2013, Hillary Clinton blocked his release. See Fedayin.

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 20, 2022 2:53 pm

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands in front of a portrait of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. (Photo: Kobi Gideon/GPO)

State archive glitch reaffirms Israel’s genocidal intent
Originally published: Mondoweiss by Zubayr Alikhan (January 19, 2022 ) | - Posted Jan 20, 2022

A technical glitch in Israel’s State Archives has revealed quotations from Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion and Israel’s first agricultural minister Aharon Zisling stating that “we must wipe them [Palestinian villages] out” and that forgiveness was to be offered to Jewish forces found to have committed “instances of rape” against Palestinian women. These long-censored writings illustrate the brutal reality Palestinians have testified to, and been subjected to, since Al Nakba, or The Catastrophe, in 1947-48.

While the quotations are intensely disturbing, even more so is the apparent shock with which they have been received. Such reactions are only due to blatant disregard for the Palestinians’ powerful indigenous testimony, and ignoring the long history of statements from Israeli leaders themselves that reveal similar genocidal intent.

It is fact, beyond the realm of reasonable doubt, that the acts described in the United Nation’s definition of Genocide were committed en masse during the Nakba and continue today. During the Nakba, Zionist forces violently expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their native lands, razed over 530 villages, cities, and towns, conducted numerous massacres (often hundreds of women, children, and men, per massacre), and raped countless native women—which Aharon Zisling, of course, would “forgive”. Thus, the only remaining factor to constitute genocide is intent. Here, Ben-Gurion’s uncovered statement is sufficient proof. What else does a written statement of the desire and perceived necessity to “wipe them [Palestinian villages] out” constitute, besides the intent to eradicate an ethnic, racial group?

Ben-Gurion answers such a question quite aptly, writing in a letter to his son in 1937, “we must expel the Arabs and take their place”. It was to be the complete annihilation and purging of a native people from their historic homeland, and the superimposition of what Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, termed “alien settlers”, therein.

Ben-Gurion was not alone. The outed documents are perhaps the most recent exposition of Israel’s crimes, but are by no means, unique. Any objective reading of history—be it the diaries of Theodore Herzl (the father of Zionism), the drafting of the Balfour Declaration, or the works of Israel Zangwill (a primary proponent of cultural Zionism)—evidences the conclusion that the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestine in 1947-48 was deeply premeditated. The Zionist movement and its allies considered expelling the natives a fundamental necessity, for the aim of establishing an exclusively Jewish nation-state in Palestine. When proposed, the targeted land was extensively populated and nurtured by an indigenous Arab people. Hence, the establishment of an exclusively Jewish national state—even a state of Jewish dominance—required, necessarily, the expulsion of the land’s native inhabitants.

Theodore Herzl—in a typically colonial fashion—envisioned the genocidal regime that was to come as “representatives of Western civilization”, bringing “cleanliness, order, and well-established customs to this plague-ridden, blighted corner of the Orient”.1 For Herzl, and the Zionist movement at large, these armies—which would carry out atrocities such as the massacre of Deir Yassin among many other villages—represented “a vanguard of culture against barbarism”.2 Such sentiments lend insight into the ideological environment revealed by the leak—one nurturing the acceptance of rape and genocide against anyone deemed foreign.

Israel Zangwill took an equally devious approach, designating Palestine—a land then inhabited by over 700,000 Arab natives—to be “a country without a people”. Interestingly, this specific phrasing was first used by Christian Restorationists, who believed that Jewish dominance and control of the Holy Land was in accordance with biblical prophecy. The non-existence of the Arab natives was not based on the misconception that the land was truly vacant, but rather, that its residents were lesser beings, so incomplete in their ethnic and cultural makeup that they were not entirely human, if at all. The natives’ presence was hence irrelevant—an inconsequential obstacle in the path of European expansionism and colonization. Palestine, in Zangwill’s words, “was not so much occupied by the Arabs as overrun by them”. While still nauseating and obscene, the prospect of a once oppressed people forgiving “instances of rape” and wiping out entire populations becomes slightly more sanitized, when one strips the victims of their humanity. This dehumanization is precisely what the leaked documents exemplify.

The ensuing brutality would alter the course of Palestinian history irreparably. The vast majority of the indigenous, Palestinian populations were exiled, replaced by a regime defined by hatred, pre-eminence, and self-supremacy. In 1969, Moshe Dayan, Israel’s former Defense Minister and one of Ben Gurion’s generals, described the genocide:
we came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing… a Jewish state… You do not even know the names of these Arab villages… because the geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either… There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.
The abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians by the foreign-backed, invading Zionist forces—currently identifying themselves as, the state of Israel—was, in the views of countless Palestinians, as well as Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and even Aharon Zisling himself, something mirroring the demonic horrors of National Socialism which had gripped Germany only a few years prior.

Unsurprisingly, the perpetrators would attempt to conceal their crimes, however this crucial information—albeit hidden and downplayed—has long been available to the public. Hence, any shock evoked by Ben-Gurion and Aharon Zislings’ quotes, is unjustified. Rather, the exposed documents should only serve to further substantiate and bolster the already well-established history and pre-existing Palestinian narrative on Israel’s ongoing reign of terror, and particularly, its violent settler-colonial birth through the Nakba—an atrocity which continues to this very day.

Notes:
1.↩ Herzl, Theodor, Raphael Patai, and Harry Zohn. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. New York: Herzl Press, 1960. Print.
2.↩ Segev, Tom. (1999). One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. New York: Metropolitan Books.

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Pro-Settler Group Demands Israeli Army, Shin Bet to Stop Protests in Negev
January 19, 2022

Last Thursday, Janurary 13, extremist Jewish pro-settler group Regavim demanded the Israeli army and the Shin Bet security service to suppress protests by Palestinian Bedouin residents of the Naqab (Negev) desert region against planting trees on Palestinian land.

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“During the events of May 2021, the army’s response was slow and late, roads and cities were burned, life was disrupted, and it took a long time for security to return, and these scenes should not be repeated, and we demand action now,” Israel’s Channel 7 reported Regavim Director-General, Meir Deutsch, as saying.

“The events that took place yesterday [January 12] and today [January 14] in the Negev are a direct result of the government’s failure in the issue of agriculture, as we had previously warned that surrender by the Prime Minister would directly lead to an increase in confrontations in the streets,” Deutsch added.

Deutsch claimed that the statements of elected officials, led by Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defence Forces and an MK for Meretz, Yair Golan, were the fuel that led to the ignition of the Negev, and that responsibility must be taken and lessons learned.

Many Palestinian residents in the Naqab, despite having Israeli citizenship, live in unrecognized townships scattered across the southern desert. Last week, one such region, Al-Atrash, erupted in protest as Jewish National Fund started demolishing Palestinian homes with the aim of confiscating the land.

On January 11, Israeli occupation forces arrested 16 civilians, including a minor and three women, from Al-Atrash.

The Palestinian government has condemned the demolitions and arrests and accused Israel of committing crimes against Palestinians in the Negev region. “The crimes of the occupying state in Negev are an extension of its war on the Palestinian Arab presence,” denounced the Palestinian Foreign Ministry through a statement.

The Jewish National Fund, a Zionist non-profit, was established in 1901 to collect money from Jews all over the world to purchase land in Palestine. At present, it works closely with the Israeli authorities in their ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 03, 2022 2:52 pm

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The Act of Theatre that Shows Israel’s Contempt for Gaza
February 2, 2022
By Eva Bartlett – Jan 30, 2022

Israel has apparently reprimanded a soldier for firing rounds into Gaza. That’s all very well, but what about the countless other soldiers who have done the same for years, maiming and killing Palestinian civilians?

The soldier, who posted his bravado video to TikTok, reportedly got 10 days in military prison. According to an Israeli army statement, “The soldier’s behavior in the video does not conform with the norms expected of soldiers and commanders.”

His sentencing and the media reporting around the incident is pure theatre, given the reality of how the Israeli army routinely targets Palestinians working on land in Gaza’s east and northern regions. While this one particular soldier received a mild punishment, many others who attack unarmed civilians are not held accountable.

Since pulling the illegal settlers out of Gaza in 2005, Israel has implemented a kill zone—dubbed the “buffer zone” or “no go zone”—where, on a regular basis, its soldiers shoot at Palestinian civilians. Ostensibly, it comprises a band of land 300 metres from the fence encaging Palestinians in Gaza. In reality, Israeli soldiers fire upon civilians well over a kilometre away, or even further, as I have experienced myself.

As I reported some years ago, “According to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the 300 metres off-limits area extends in areas to at least 1.5 km. PCHR [the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights] has documented the Israeli army targeting of Palestinian civilians as far as 2 km from the border.

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Israeli soldiers in sniper position. Photo: Eva Bartlett

Between 2008 and 2013, I regularly accompanied farmers and other civilians in border areas, and on many of the occasions that we came under fire, we were 500 metres or more from the fence. Among the disturbing incidents was an attack one morning in February 2009, when I came under prolonged Israeli gunfire while accompanying a group of farm labourers on land roughly 500 metres from the fence. By then, I was accustomed to the routine—I would walk with farmers on their land, the Israeli soldiers would arrive in jeeps, assume sniper position and begin firing at us.

On this occasion, the young men had finished their parsley harvest and were pushing a stalled pickup truck when the Israeli gunfire began. The incident was captured on video, as I was there to document such attacks, and as I wrote at the time, “The lightly-dressed, unarmed farmers were clearly visible to… the several Israeli army jeeps and the Hummer which had patrolled the border fence, stopping for long intervals to watch the farmers work, then moving on.” I noted that the soldiers had observed us for a good half hour before shooting, choosing to fire at precisely the time when the farmers were leaving.

Shooting just beyond where I stood in a fluorescent vest, an Israeli soldier hit 20-year-old Mohammad al-Buraim in his leg, and continued to fire at us for a further 15 minutes. Some weeks prior, an Israeli soldier shot his cousin Anwar in the neck, killing him and leaving his wife, young children, and extended family without a breadwinner. Anwar had been on land 600 metres from the fence, also doing farm labour work.

When someone gets injured in these areas, the injury is compounded by the fact that ambulances cannot reach them, as they are targeted by the Israeli army. So, locals need to somehow get the injured to a point where an ambulance can safely reach them. If this is not done quickly enough, the injured risks bleeding to death.

On another occasion, again with farm workers in Gaza’s southeast, I came under intense Israeli fire lasting over 40 minutes from soldiers roughly 500 metres away. Bullets flew within metres of our hands, heads, and bodies. This proved to be an especially interesting case, as a representative from the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv—who had been informed of the shooting by other volunteers—called me to express concern for my safety.

This dissipated as soon as she realized I was being fired on by an Israeli soldier, and not a Palestinian. Her superior, the then-attaché in the Tel Aviv office, had the gall to state quite clearly that they were fine with Israel’s “security measures”—firing on an unarmed Canadian and unarmed Palestinians and internationals, who in no way posed any threat to the heavily armed Israeli soldiers—and that we should be aware of the risks.

In another example, in February 2009, also in the southeast on land 550 metres from the fence, I accompanied elderly farmers and their families who intended to harvest some of their meagre crops. Shortly after we had arrived on the land, Israeli soldiers started firing very close to us, less than a metre from where we stood.

As I wrote at the time, “We could almost taste Tuesday’s firing, and the distinct ping-whizz sound they make was somehow impossibly loud, so close the shots were. One of the older women was having trouble walking away, stumbling in her fear. As the shots dug in around her she fell to the ground in terror. Positioning ourselves between the elderly farmers and the Israeli snipers, we accompanied them off the field. A few hundred metres away, the Israeli snipers continued to shoot. Another elderly woman had dived in terror behind a rock and adamantly wouldn’t get up. ‘They’ll kill me, they’ll kill me,’ she cried in fear…”

Thankfully we did make it away that day in one piece. But this was just one of many examples of the terror Palestinian farmers face on a daily basis. And it’s not just farmers—at around the same time, a 17-year-old girl standing around 800 metres from the fence, near the ruins of her home (destroyed in the war just a month previously), was shot in the kneecap by an Israeli sniper.

Children going to school in the eastern village of Khoza’a were, at the time, being fired upon by Israeli soldiers at the fence 1km away. Teens and young men gathering scrap metal from demolished homes routinely come under Israeli fire. One example was 15-year-old Said Abdel Aziz Hamdan, who went to an area in Gaza’s north with his 13-year-old brother, to try to earn money for their large family. After finishing his work, an Israeli soldier fired at him, hitting his leg, without warning.

“People go there every day to gather bits of metal and concrete. The Israelis see us and know we are just working, it’s normal,” he told me when I visited him in hospital.

Palestinians don’t only face Israeli sniper fire, but also flechette shelling—dart bombs—which Israel has indiscriminately used against civilians and medics. One victim was 17-year-old Saleh Ahmad al-Medani, whose shoulder and neck were punctured by the two-inch-long, razor-like, dart-shaped bits of metal packed by the thousands into a single shell. He was attacked while walking home after midnight in June 2009, in northwestern Gaza, over 1km from the wall.

As I wrote at the time, “Due to their design, flechettes dig deeply into their target, with their ‘tails’ frequently breaking off, leaving multiple injuries and rendering them nearly impossible to extract without inflicting more injury in the surgical search. In most cases, doctors opt against surgery, leaving the darts inside the victim’s body.”

The routine and very dangerous Israeli policy of harassment, which risks maiming or killing targets, also means farmers frequently stay off their land, meaning plants don’t get watered, and crops don’t get harvested. These are not isolated and random instances. They are part of a policy that aims to cut off any means of self-sufficiency the Palestinians try to engage in. Other Israeli army tactics include burning Palestinian crops, destroying wells and cisterns, and demolishing homes, livestock farms, and trees throughout the border regions.

So, please, let’s not get carried away with the fact that Israel has thrown one soldier in prison for unacceptable behaviour. It is quite clear that Israel doesn’t hold its own soldiers accountable for their crimes, including killing children or firing white phosphorus on heavily populated civilian areas. Neither does the United Nations nor anybody else appear willing to make Israel take responsibility for its decades of crimes against Palestinians.

One headline about one soldier being reprimanded for posting his tough-guy video on TikTok should not fool anyone.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-act-of-t ... -for-gaza/

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Can Israel stop the world from saying ‘apartheid’? Concealing the suffering in Palestine

Israel attempts to improve its public image to counter efforts by human rights organizations that reveal the nature of Israeli apartheid

February 02, 2022 by Vijay Prashad

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Human rights organizations decry apartheid conditions in Israel (Photo: Ingmar Zahorsky)

On January 27, 2022, the Hebrew-language news site Walla published part of the text from a telegram sent by Amir Weissbrod—who is part of the Israeli Foreign Ministry—to Israeli embassies around the world. The telegram warned the Israeli diplomats that in the upcoming 49th regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which is expected to begin on February 28, a report will be tabled regarding Israel’s 2021 bombing of Gaza. This report will apparently use the word “apartheid” to refer to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, according to the telegram.

Weissbrod relayed Tel Aviv’s instructions regarding the report prepared by a UNHRC-appointed committee to the Israeli diplomats through this telegram: “The main goal [for Israel] is to delegitimize the committee, its members and products” and “To prevent or delay further decisions.”

After a four year investigation, on February 1, 2022, Amnesty International released a 280-page report with a sharp headline, “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians.” Amnesty “concluded that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public international law wherever it imposes this system. It has assessed that almost all of Israel’s civilian administration and military authorities, as well as governmental and quasigovernmental institutions, are involved in the enforcement of the system of apartheid against Palestinians across Israel and the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territory] and against Palestinian refugees and their descendants outside the territory.” Amnesty further said that these acts “amount to the crime against humanity of apartheid under both the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute.” Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid retaliated by accusing Amnesty of quoting “lies shared by terrorist organizations.” As if on cue, Israel’s government accused Amnesty of anti-Semitism. The Amnesty report will provide key material for the UNHRC investigation.

One of the immediate issues that will be the focus of attention for the UNHRC session is Israel’s Operation Guardian of the Walls against the Palestinians in Gaza in May 2021. According to a July 2021 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which looked at three Israeli strikes that were part of the operation “that killed 62 Palestinians,” there were “no evident military targets in the vicinity.” In its report, HRW used the term “war crimes” to describe attacks by “Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups.” When the firing stopped after 11 days, the UNHRC passed a resolution in late May 2021 to establish an “ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry” to investigate various crimes in the OPT, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel. Navi Pillay, the former UN high commissioner for human rights and a former South African judge, was appointed to chair the three-person commission, which also included Miloon Kothari, an Indian architect; and Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer. The commission is expected to present its first report to the UNHRC in June.

The commission chaired by Pillay is the ninth commission established by the UNHRC to investigate Israeli actions against the Palestinians. It has a very broad mandate that includes to study violations of international humanitarian law, according to the “four Geneva Conventions of 1949,” which both Israel and Palestine are party to, and to continue to investigate these crimes into the future. It is widely expected that Pillay’s report will use the word “apartheid” to define Israeli policy in the OPT. This would not be the first time that a United Nations report has used this term to define Israeli actions against the Palestinians. In 2017, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) released a report prepared by Richard Falk, “a former United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” and Virginia Tilley, “a researcher and professor of political science at Southern Illinois University.” The report defined Israeli policy against the Palestinians as “apartheid” as understood under international law (in his 2014 report, Falk had already used the term “apartheid”). The release of that 2017 report led to the resignation of ESCWA head Rima Khalaf, a distinguished Jordanian diplomat, after she faced “pressure from the [UN] secretary-general to withdraw the report.”

Hasbara 2.0

In 2006, the Israeli government set up a Ministry of Strategic Affairs to essentially run two campaigns, one against Iran and the other against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This hasbara (explaining or, more specifically, propaganda) ministry operated an information war that sought to delegitimize BDS activists and to paint anyone who supported the movement as an anti-Semite. Largely due to criticisms of its heavy-handedness, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs was shut down in July 2021 and some of its functions were shifted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Amir Weissbrod’s telegram from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is essentially Hasbara 2.0.

On January 23, 2022, the Israeli government set up a new project—Concert—inside the Foreign Ministry. This well-funded project will carry forward the mission of Solomon’s Sling—“a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) but controlled by government representatives,”—to burnish Israel’s image around the world, particularly in the West. Concert will be the means through which the Israeli government plans to transfer millions of dollars to non-government organizations and media houses to ensure that the reporting about Israel is positive. “Delegitimization” of any critics of Israel is part of the agenda this project aims to achieve.

The telegram sent by Weissbrod is part and parcel of Hasbara 2.0. Weissbrod is an experienced hand, having served Israel at the United Nations in New York and as an ambassador in Jordan, besides working in various ministries in Tel Aviv. In 2011, he told Haaretz that the diplomats from most countries understand Israel’s position relating to the “Palestinian Authority” “behind closed doors” but they “are not willing to state publicly what they readily say in a private meeting with Israeli representatives, which is often infuriating.” What such duplicity reveals is that these foreign representatives, who agree with Israel “behind closed doors,” recognize that public opinion in their countries is against Israeli policy, but these representatives know that they must not annoy the Israelis or the US diplomats, who would otherwise make life difficult for their countries. (A senior Indian diplomat told me plainly that India normalized relations with Israel in 1992 because the United States told New Delhi that the “road to Washington had to go through Tel Aviv.”)

Israel recognizes that few of the countries in the UNHRC will vote against the report that is expected to brand it as an “apartheid state.” It will try to do two things to prevent the report from coming out: delegitimize the commissioners, notably Pillay, and ask the United States to use its membership on the UNHRC to delay the release of the report.

War Crimes

In March 2021, Fatou Bensouda, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), confirmed that her office had opened an investigation relating to “Rome Statute crimes” by Israel against the Palestinians. There are effectively four Rome Statute crimes: crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. Each of these crimes is horrendous.

What Israel fears is that a negative report in the UNHRC might provide evidence for the ICC investigation. On January 3, 2022, Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid told Israeli journalists that his government fears that this year a set of international institutions will try to portray Israel as an “apartheid state.” These institutions include the UNHRC, the ICC, the International Court of Justice, and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

In the press conference, Lapid called the characterization of Israel as an apartheid state “a despicable lie.” Two years ago, in June 2020, however, one of Israel’s most respected human rights organizations—Yesh Din—published a report with a startling conclusion: “It is a difficult statement to make, but the conclusion of this opinion is that the crime against humanity of apartheid is being committed in the West Bank. The perpetrators are Israelis, and the victims are Palestinians.” Such statements are anathema to Lapid and Weissbrod, but—according to Israeli human rights groups (including B’Tselem) and Palestinian human rights groups (including Al-Haq and Addameer) as well as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—are a reflection of the facts witnessed on the ground, and no amount of Hasbara 2.0 can erase these facts.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/02/02/ ... palestine/
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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 07, 2022 2:44 pm

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Bedouin protesters clash with Israeli forces following a protest against an afforestation project by the Jewish National Fund in the Negev Desert, Jan. 13, 2022. (Photo: Tsafrir Abayov | AP)

How Israel’s occupation of Palestine intensifies climate change

Originally published: MintPress News by Jessica Buxbaum (February 3, 2022 ) | - Posted Feb 06, 2022

On Sunday, roughly 200 activists demonstrated outside Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s office in Jerusalem against the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) tree-planting project in al-Naqab, maintaining the forestation is an attempt to displace the indigenous Bedouin population.

Contracted by the Israeli government, the JNF razed fruit trees and seeded fields in al-Naqab in January to “make the desert bloom” with non-native plants. The purported environmental project has been met with fierce protest from the local villagers, with more than 60 Bedouin arrested in the last few weeks.

JNF maintains that its actions in al-Naqab encourage sustainability, but other organizations disagree. The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel took the JNF to the Supreme Court ]ast year after its research found that JNF’s afforestation will harm the area’s biodiversity. The High Court sided with the JNF.

Greenwashing is a cornerstone of the Zionist movement, in which Israel tries to paint Palestine as a desolate wasteland in need of a Jewish green thumb. While these environmental projects might appear well-intentioned in an area warming faster than the global average, experts and activists agree that Israel’s occupation is making climate change worse.

The environmental issue in Palestine

Palestine is particularly vulnerable to climate change. ClimaSouth, a European Union-funded project supporting climate-change mitigation in Mediterranean countries, predicts annual rainfall will drop by 30% in the eastern Mediterranean region by the end of the 21st century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the southern and eastern Mediterranean areas will warm at a higher rate than the rest of the world over the next century. According to the United Nations Environment Program, Palestine may see an increase in temperature of more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Sea levels are also expected to rise by 1.2 to 3.3 feet by 2100.

Zena Agha, Palestinian-Iraqi writer and non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute, explained that these climate change effects translate to significant political consequences for Palestinians:

Although Palestinians and Israelis inhabit the same territory–whether they’re settlers living in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian citizens of Israel living on the seafront, or Palestinians living in Gaza–Palestinians will always suffer the effects of climate change more starkly as a direct response to Israeli policy.

Israel wrecking Palestinians’ climate resilience

Palestine’s location makes it particularly susceptible to global warming, but for a people under military occupation the threat of climate catastrophe is multiplied and their ability to adapt to it is severely impacted.

Climate-related hazards have already manifested as a result of Israeli policy. Research from Visualizing Palestine, an organization developing data-driven tools to better understand Palestine, found that Palestinians are experiencing food insecurity, land and soil degradation, and water scarcity owing to the occupation. According to figures cited in their “Environmental Justice in Palestine” visual series, 85% of the West Bank’s water resources are controlled by Israel, and 69% of Gaza and 33% of West Bank households are food insecure.

In mid-January, Gaza’s streets were ravaged by flooding after several days of heavy rainfall. The municipality of Gaza City blamed Israel’s assault on the Strip in May for damaging its infrastructure, making it more prone to flooding.

During a webinar hosted by Visualizing Palestine, Asmaa Abu Mezied, an economic-development and social-inclusion specialist working with Oxfam, explained how Israel’s 14-year blockade on Gaza–in which the state controls what goes in and out of Gaza–has also dramatically affected the besieged Strip’s resilience to climate change. “What the Palestinians are witnessing in Gaza is their adaptive capacity has already been exhausted financially, socially, and economically over the past decade because of the blockade, and that would leave them much more vulnerable to floods,” Abu Mezied said.

Natasha Westheimer, a water-management specialist, explained to MintPress News how Israeli policy restricts Palestine’s ability to develop sustainable and reliable water resources:

The occupation makes it really difficult for Palestinians to build resilience to the climate crisis because it essentially removes capacity for self-determination and for building out resources that can support in building preparedness to adapt to the impacts of climate change. And you see that pretty acutely with the water sector.

Westheimer explained that this injustice is demonstrated on both the local scale and on the national level. In the southern West Bank, communities don’t have access to a continuous supply of water and so rely on expensive water trucks or rainwater collection. Yet their water infrastructure is often targeted and destroyed by the Israeli military and settlers.

Nationally, 97% of Gaza’s coastal aquifer–the area’s main water supply–is unfit for drinking. The Strip’s efforts to expand its water access through a desalination plant are hampered, moreover, by the Israeli blockade. Westheimer explained that most materials needed for a desalination plant are considered dual-use materials by Israel, meaning they can be used for civilian and military purposes, and so the state puts restrictions on these materials’ import into Gaza. “The project faces a number of what Israel calls bureaucratic obstacles, but is mainly a system of blockade, seizure, and control, and it’s eliminating Gaza’s ability to meet the basic needs of its population,” Westheimer said.

In addition to harming its adaptive capabilities, Israel’s near 74-year occupation has also drastically deteriorated Palestine’s environment. Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, founder and director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability of Bethlehem University, detailed the myriad of ways Israeli control has damaged ecosystems.

He cited the razing of native trees to plant European pine trees; diversion of the Jordan Valley’s water; draining of wetlands; how the building of the apartheid wall uprooted more than 2 million trees; and how industrial settlements have turned the West Bank into a toxic waste dumpsite. “All of this has damaged the Palestinian environment and transformed the landscape and transformed the communities,” Qumsiyeh told MintPress News.

As explained in Visualizing Palestine’s webinar and illustrated in its Environmental Justice in Palestine infographics, Israel’s environmental racism and green colonialism has made the land almost uninhabitable for Palestinians.

Israel uses parks and nature reserves to hide the ruins of Palestinian villages depopulated during the Nakba, Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign of Palestine in 1947-48. These green spaces also act as a way to further displace Palestinians and restrict their development.

Fifteen Israeli facilities process waste in the West Bank, in violation of international law. Settlement industrial zones in the West Bank also adhere to less rigorous environmental standards. Israeli control of building permits in Area C of the West Bank has stunted the area’s ability to develop proper waste infrastructure. How Israel treats waste here has then turned the West Bank into a land plagued by garbage.

Israel is a militarized and industrialized society. These two factors, Qumsiyeh explained, have increased its greenhouse gas emissions. “Like the United States, [Israel] has a very big military compared to its GDP. And the military is one of the largest producers of greenhouse gas emissions,” Qumsiyeh said.

The Palestinian areas being dedeveloped and deindustrialized contribute very little to the global greenhouse gases, but we are more impacted by climate change.

Greenwashing apartheid

According to the most recently available data, Israel released more than 56 million tons of fossil CO2 gasses in 2020. By comparison, Palestine released 2.9 million tons of CO2 gasses in 2020. Israel’s ecological footprint stood at 5.5 global hectares per person in 2017, as reported by the Global Footprint Network, while Palestine’s was 1.8.

Jessica Anderson, deputy director at Visualizing Palestine, stressed how this environmental measurement illustrates the extreme inequality produced by occupation and oppression.

“Israel is not unique in its contributions to climate change,” Anderson said.

It’s part of this global cadre of governments and corporations that exacerbate the climate crisis through their heavy military investments, resource hoarding, overconsumption, and extractive economies.

Last year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (or COP26) exemplifies how the international community is approaching the climate issue, Anderson said, in a way that ignores indigenous populations. While Israel was able to send 120 delegates to the conference, Palestinians from the occupied territories couldn’t participate because their vaccines weren’t recognized.

“Platforms like this are marginalizing people that are on the frontlines of the climate crisis while providing a platform for governments and corporations to greenwash their image,” Anderson said.

So, there’s a failure to grapple with the systemic and political dimensions of the climate crisis that leaves Palestinians out and allows Israel to be highlighted.

During Visualizing Palestine’s webinar, Agha stated the relationship between the international community and the Palestinian Authority (PA) warrants scrutiny. She emphasized what she labeled the paradox of the PA, whereby the international community is applying the same metrics to Palestine and Israel in assessing their environmental progress.“ The PA has little sovereign jurisdiction over its natural resources nor over large swathes of its territory,” Agha told MintPress News.

It wields no independent political will over how to manage climate change, yet it’s still tasked with addressing climate change.

Palestine’s fragmented political landscape, in which Gaza is ruled by the political party Hamas and the West Bank by the political party Fatah, also weakens its ability to manage a crisis of this magnitude.

For Agha, the international and donor communities’ treatment of the climate crisis in Palestine as a socioeconomic catastrophe and not a political catastrophe is part of the problem and creates unproductive solutions. But from her perspective, it’s important to remember the real culprit here: occupation. “Israel’s actions over the last almost 75 years demonstrate that there is very little regard for the indigenous landscape, the indigenous flora and fauna, the wildlife population, and the indigenous people,” she said.

https://mronline.org/2022/02/06/how-isr ... te-change/
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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:33 pm

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The Persecution of Palestine: Normalizing the Abnormal Zionist war Crimes
February 22, 2022
By Fra Hughes – Feb 19, 2022

“Israel” was birthed in the blood of the Palestinian people in 1948 under a UN mandate that gave Zionists who were a minority in the country, more than 52% of the land of Palestine.

In order to see where we are today sometimes it is necessary to review the past.

While some may claim the past is a country we should not visit, when it comes to Palestine it seems only the past exists.

A past filled with occupation exploitation and deception.

From the Romans via the Ottomans to the British, Palestine has a history of colonial conquest and military occupation which continues today under the Zionist Israeli apartheid regime.

During the first World War, while Britain and her allies fought the German Austro-Hungarian Turkish alliance, the British promised all the countries and people under Ottoman rule freedom, if they rose up and fought against the Turks. An Arab army was raised and those people fought for their independence.

Yet independence they were denied: Under the Sykes Pico agreement of 1916, the Ottoman empire was to be broken up into its constituent parts and reconfigured in the image and interests of British and French imperialism. New kingdoms were created, new countries formed, and sectarianism was used to place those now forced to live in these new territories under imperialist military dominance at each other’s throats.

New regimes, friendly, subordinate and subservient to western capitalist designs came into being.

The scene was set for civil unrest, community tensions, sectarian division, and conflict for decades to come.

Most if not all of the violence, destruction, death, misery, hurt, pain, poverty, and despair that we witness today in West Asia is a direct result of Britain and France with their exploitation of the resources the land and the people of the region.

The war between Iraq and Iran can be traced to the US and Britain encouraging Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in a proxy war to destabilize the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which was itself a response to the coup led by the British and the Americans, a coup by which they installed the Shah in 1952 in power in order to protect Britain’s continued exploitation of the Iranian oil fields. From 1980 until the end of the Iraq-Iran war, 1 million died in the conflict, with “Israel” the main beneficiaries as two of its regional opponents bled both men and military assets in a war encouraged by the West.

The Balfour declaration of 1917 was a secret communique between Lord Balfour, on behalf of the British government, to Lord Rothschild and the representatives of Zionism, in which he declared Britain’s willingness to create a Jewish homeland in the country of Palestine.

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

While Palestinians fought alongside the British on the promise of attaining their freedom, the British had secretly negotiated the surrender of Palestine to Zionism.

It has been claimed Zionists have assured the British government they could bring America into the war on the side of the allies?

So here we have the treachery of the British government who sold out the Palestinian right to self-determination when they simply replaced the Ottoman empire covering vast areas of West Asia with an Anglo-French empire of military and financial occupation.

“Israel” was birthed in the blood of the Palestinian people in 1948 under a UN mandate that gave Zionists who were a minority in the country, more than 52% of the land of Palestine.

In reality, Zionists had been emigrating to Palestine from as early as 1880, and in 1901, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) – which still exists today – began buying land in Palestine from absentee Turkish landlords.

The JNF stands accused today of secretly buying land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank for Zionist settlements.

They brought European Jews onto the land of Palestine displacing the indigenous farmers and laborers. In effect, it was the beginning of the Nakba. The colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine dunum by dunum. First by stealth and latterly by violent expulsion.

Many Europeans believe the exodus of Jews from Europe to Palestine began as a response to the violence of the second world war and the Holocaust.

In reality, Zionists had been expropriating land for almost 50 years prior to the ending of the Second World War and the birth of “Israel”.

Riots between Palestinian Christians and Muslims against Jewish immigrants erupted in Al-Quds in 1926, as the demographics between indigenous and immigrant began to converge in the city.

This was not anti-Semitism, as Palestinians are Semitic people born in the land of Sham. These were riots between the indigenous people who were being marginalized, replaced, losing their homes jobs, economic wealth, and place in society, who were being systematically expunged from their land.

The interloper was replacing the indigenous people with the full acquiescence of the British authorities.

The growing resistance in Palestine to both unregulated Jewish immigration and Britain’s continued military and financial occupation was brutally repressed at the point of British guns.

Anti-Semitism in Europe was the driving force behind Jewish migration to Palestine.

It is the people of West Asia, and especially the people of Palestine, who have paid the price for European anti-Semitism.

From national wars of liberation against British and French colonial occupation of their countries in decades past, to the war on Yemen by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the destruction of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the confessional sectarian fuelled state of Lebanon, all can be placed on the altar of British French EU and now American capitalist Imperialism.

The partition of Palestine in 1948 led to 800,000 Palestinians being forced to flee.

The diaspora living in refugees camps today in neighboring countries is counted in the millions.

The colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine continue daily in the 21st century as this European project in West Asia unfolds.

The house demolitions, the house possessions, the land theft, the illegal settlement building program, the murder, imprisonment, torture, and brutalization of Palestinians civil society continues apace.

“Israel” is in the final phase of its desire to fully colonise Palestine.

It refuses to define its borders as it may very well have further military colonial desires to occupy neighboring lands, notably since it already does illegally in the occupied Golan and the occupied Shebaa farms of Lebanon.

The history of “Israel’s” existence in West Asia as part of an Anglo-American European colonization project has brought nothing but war death disaster destabilization and destruction to the entire region.

The response from the world should be one of complete abhorrence. The world should boycott divest and sanction “Israel” much like it did the apartheid pariah state of South Africa. Yet instead, the US subsidizes “Israel” financially and offers it a shield politically.

Every bomb “Israel” drops on Gaza or Syria or Lebanon is replaced by its surrogate father the US.

Indeed, while millions of Americans are homeless and tens of millions cannot afford health care, “Israel” receives nearly 4 billion dollars annually from the American taxpayer. While many US citizens hold down two jobs and avail of food banks, Israelis in comparison live a life of comparative luxury.

Instead of the US punishing Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people with sanctions, the US under Trump trumpeted the “Deal of the Century” and the so-called “Abraham Accords.”

A series of policies – most likely agreed upon between American and Israeli policymakers – is to encourage the further entrenchment of “Israel” within West Asia, through a process of normalization of diplomatic, economic, and military ties between the colonial regime and some of its Arab neighbors. Namely, those pro-western Gulf kingdoms established under the Sykes Pico Agreement of 1916.

It must be remembered that former President Trump is first and foremost a businessman, not a politician.

He sees policy as a business deal and money is the key to resolving issues.

This proposal was unveiled by Trump and Netanyahu on January 28 2020 and was dubbed at the time: “Peace to Prosperity : A Vision to Improve the Lives of Palestinian and Israeli People.”

“The Deal of the Century” was the name given to a process agreed between “Israel” and the US without any Palestinian consent. It was proposed as the latest inclusive peace settlement between Palestinians and Israelis. It was described by many, including US democrats, as a thinly disguised blueprint for the further expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank.

It is dead in the water as a peace deal, yet the illegal settlements are still being built at pace.

What appears to have succeeded is a policy of normalization between “Israel” and some of its regional allies.

The “Deal of the Century” was meant to be a vehicle through which normalization could be negotiated, a fig leaf of respectability whereby some West Asian monarchies could normalize relations with “Israel” while hiding behind the new “Peace and Prosperity” initiative as cover for their betrayal of the Palestinian right to self-determination.

The plan was to offer a deal to the Palestinians in order to allow others to complete diplomatic economic and military ties with “Israel”.

Both the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the normalization agreements, thereby legitimising the Israeli apartheid entity and selling out the Palestinian birthright to self-determination and the right of return enshrined in international law.

What is in this for “Israel”?

Well that’s obvious: Money, new markets to exploit.

The Accords pave the way for sales of medicine technology arms food and military support from “Israel” to their new regional allies. It further weakens the cause of Palestine, ensuring more censure of the public calls for peace and justice for Palestine which emanates from the populace of these nations. In the wider context of the geopolitical chess game, it will further isolate Syria Iran and Yemen, the axis of resistance, and may lead to an Israeli-Saudi Arabian-Emirati-Bahraini military alliance in opposition to the resistance.

This is all manna from heaven to the apartheid regime.

While the governments and leaders of the Gulf kingdoms may be in thrall to “Israel”, the people are not.

What is in this for the new friends of “Israel”?

I would say nothing. “Israel” will bleed them dry of their oil wealth.

Already Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and latterly Bahrain have been seduced into a war with Yemen.

One of the poorest countries in the world is being bombed into oblivion by a group of some of the richest nations on the planet.

With technical aid and military arms sales from “Israel”, the US, and Britain, these rich countries will soon find all their wealth in Israeli, American, and British arms dealers bank accounts.

The countries will edge towards financial difficulties inspired by their foolish slavish subservience to American, British, and Israeli foreign policy which they so fervently adhere to.

Ultimately Yemen will win the war against its aggressors.

Saudi Arabia and the Emirates will be defeated. “Israel”, the US, and Britain will continue to foment war in the region while laughing all the way to the bank.

Meanwhile, Palestinians will become homeless, again, and suffer Zionist imprisonment. Yemenis will die under a sanction-induced famine. Syrians and Iranians will die due to a lack of medicines and the continued destabilization of their economies while under siege. Libyans and Iraqi’s will die under failed western exploitation.

While western citizens sleep soundly under their blanket of white exploitative supremacist military superiority, millions in the east cry out for justice while sleeping under the fog of War.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-persecut ... ar-crimes/

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Palestine: Boycott in Ofer Prison by Administrative Prisoners

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Administrative prisoners boycott medications in Ofer Prison. Feb. 22, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@mikopeled

Published 22 February 2022

Ill administrative prisoners in Ofer Prison have boycotted medications from the Israeli occupation Prisons Authority.

On Tuesday, the Palestinian Prisoner's Club reported a boycott gestated by ill administrative detainees in Ofer Prison concerning medications given to them by the Israeli occupation prisons authority. According to reports, the prisoners protested against their administrative detention and demanded release immediately.

The Prisoner's Club considered that this step forms part of an action plan that will include all prisons protesting over the administrative detention policy.

The Administrative Prisoners Committee in Occupation Prisons demanded the support of all Palestinians by means of popular activities in order to prop up prisoners in general and administrative prisoners in particular. The Committee also called on the attention of all prisoners' institutions and concerned official bodies over their case.

According to Al Mayadeen's reports, Palestinian detained in Israeli occupation prisons locked down all their blocks amid their resistance to the latest measures decreed by the Prisons Authority.


The escalation of the measures occurs in the context of new penalties imposed on Palestinian prisoners by the Israeli occupation's prison system. Despite prior agreements between Palestinian prisoners and the Israeli occupation's authorities, the time and number of prisoners allowed for yard time have been reduced.

The Israeli occupation issued a total of 200 administrative detention orders until May 2021.

Hunger strikes have been held against administrative detentions. Four male minors and one female are among the administrative prisoners.

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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 01, 2022 2:13 pm

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My Day in Palestine: The Stunning Beauty and Cruel Reality of an Occupied Land
February 27, 2022
By Miko Peled – Feb 21, 2022

Walking through the low hills of the Naqab as the sun sets and the moon comes up is an experience that allows us to imagine what Palestine was like before it was torn apart by Zionists and what can still be saved if we act fast.

The ruins of the Palestinian village of Sataf sit on the slope of a beautiful hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Today the area is a Jewish National Foundation (JNF) park called “Har Eitan,” or Mount Eitan. It is covered in pine trees that were planted by the JNF to hide the Zionist crime of ethnic cleansing, a crime that has been designated as a crime against humanity.

In 2021, massive fires broke out on the hills surrounding Jerusalem and countless pines were burned, including the ones around Sataf. There is an 8 kilometer trail that goes around the mountain and people use it to hike and jog and sometimes ride mountain bikes. Parts of this trail are very steep and in some cases these steep parts go on for a good mile.

When I am in Jerusalem, Sataf is where I like to run, and the day after my arrival here in mid-February I went on a run. I don’t always run the full 8 kilometer circle because those steep hills are a killer, but this time I did. Running through the mountain I saw burnt towering pine trees, standing like a monument to the arrogance and stupidity of British and Zionist settlers and colonizers who think they know what’s good for the “colony.”

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Trees planted by the Jewish National Fund engulf the ruins of Palestinian homes in Sataf. Photo: Zochrot

As I ran, I saw laborers, mostly Palestinians, cutting down these tall burnt matchsticks and I could see for the first time that the ground was visible. The plain earth under the trees was visible after all these years, and there was Palestinian landscape right there alive and well.

The terraces that were built and cultivated by Palestinian farmers throughout the centuries are still there, as are the olive trees, the occasional fig, and countless almonds that are now in full bloom. It is cold and rainy in Jerusalem now and so the ground is covered with small pink cyclamens and tall pancratium with white flowers that grow everywhere this time of year.

Reality confronts nature

The Northern Naqab is also green this time of year. Vast green spaces that have not yet been spoiled by Zionist encroachment allow for a truly wonderful getaway for an afternoon. Walking through the low hills of the Naqab as the sun sets and the moon comes up is an experience that allows us to imagine what Palestine was like before it was torn apart by Zionists and what can still be saved if we act fast. The reality of life in Palestine could hardly be more frightening and less inspiring than the natural phenomena I was describing.

Better still to do this with young Palestinian Bedouins from the Naqab who know the land and appreciate its value and beauty in ways that privileged settlers could never comprehend. I had an opportunity to have a chat with some young Palestinian Bedouins in Bi’r Al-Saba. It was a small gathering organized ad-hoc by activist friends who reject Zionism, stand up to defend their lands, and demand their right to maintain their way of life.

An Israeli woman who happened to be present when I spoke stormed out of the meeting. She said that I and the organizers were poisoning the young minds of these Palestinians. This arrogance, which is sadly characteristic among Zionists, leads many to believe that the problem is not the crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Palestinians in the Naqab but rather their peers and people like me talking to them about it.

Sheikh Jarrah

In a moment of caring in the midst of madness and violence, like a lotus flower rising from the mud, a clown was walking among the crowd at the Sheikh Jarrah protest. I had seen her before many times; she gives out little heart-shaped stickers and in the summer she has a little spray bottle and she sprays people with cold water. The police brutalize her as they do anyone who dares to challenge them, even a clown.

In the protest that took place on Friday, February 18 she was there. The police acted with hate and brutality that matched the Amnesty International definition of Israeli crimes as Crimes against Humanity. At one point the clown, whose name I don’t know, stood in a row with other protesters facing the Israeli terror squads. They wanted the protesters to back off and immediately began to push.

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Israeli riot police officers scuffle with protesters in Sheikh Jarrah, east Jerusalem, February 18, 2022. Photo: Mahmoud Illean/AP

When these guys push, they do it with the brutality of a herd of mad buffalos. The clown was pushed so hard it looked as though her entire torso was going to snap off. When the pushing and shoving begins, everyone runs or gets trampled. The violence was unprovoked, inexcusable and certainly unnecessary. The only violence during these protests comes from the police.

Sometimes empathy is all we have

Later in the evening, before I left the scene, I walked over to the clown to say thank you and see if she was alright. She was standing next to one of the older gentlemen, who lives in Sheikh Jarrah. Just as many of the other veteran residents of this neighborhood, he cannot wrap his mind around the reality that is unfolding around him. One cannot blame him, since it is a madness that no healthy mind can understand.

This gentleman was venting; then he went from venting to lecturing, then to expressing his rage and frustration, and then again confusion. The whole time I stood there she was present, listening to the man go on and on. She reached her hand out to me for a moment to say, “I know you’re here,” and she kept listening with her heart open to this man whose life is being terrorized by maniacal, racist, violent gangs who have the full weight of the Israeli state behind them. He clearly needed to speak out, even if it was to a clown.

The enormity of the process that is unfolding in Sheikh Jarrah is hard for people to grasp. Those of us who show up to express solidarity and to stand with the Palestinians who are victims of this crime against humanity cannot possibly feel the pain and fear that the Palestinians, who live through it and whose lives are being ruined, experience. To see this Palestinian gentleman stand before a clown and vent his feelings, and to see the heartfelt way in which she was listening, was a great way to end a very difficult day.

A stun grenade
About 10 minutes after I had left, while I was walking to my car, I heard two loud explosions. It was strange because the protest had ended, the police were just casually standing around and all that remained were people from the neighborhood singing and dancing. But that too needed to stop so they threw two stun grenades into the crowd.

The battle for Sheikh Jarrah could not be more important. The only way we can prevent the total destruction of the lives of the Palestinians in Jerusalem—and the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, in particular—is by demanding that governments and nongovernmental organizations around the world apply the recommendations of Amnesty International’s report on Israeli apartheid, including compelling Israel to grant Palestanians their human rights, guarantee their right of return, and provide them with reparation for the loss of land and property they have endured under Israeli occupation.



Miko Peled is MintPress News contributing writer, published author and human rights activist born in Jerusalem. His latest books are The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, and Injustice, the Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five.

Featured image: Israeli security forces walk through the streets of Shuafat refugee camp in Jerusalem after the demolition of the family home of Palestinian militant Fadi Abu Shkhaidem, February 1, 2022. Photo: Mahmoud Illean/AP

(MintPress News)


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Re: Palestine

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 10, 2022 2:14 pm

The west doesn’t care about the people it kills
The media reserves its rage for the crimes of our enemies.
BY DONALD JOHNSON MARCH 9, 2022 1

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A YEMENI CHILD IN THE RUBBLE OF HOMES DESTROYED BY SAUDI-LED AIRSTRIKES. (PHOTO: AP / HANI MOHAMMED)

The west doesn’t care about the people it kills. Part of the evidence for this has been on the front pages of every newspaper and on every news show since Russia launched the Ukrainian invasion. The rest of the evidence is what has been missing on the front pages of the newspapers and TV shows. The contrast makes the point.

You see no universal Western outrage over the US support for the Saudi blockade on Yemen. The war had killed an estimated 377,000 by the end of 2021, the majority of them children dead of famine. We see an occasional story but nothing remotely like the moral outrage over the Ukrainian invasion. The children are Arabs and we are supporting the ones most responsible for killing them.

And then there are our sanctions on Afghanistan and the American theft of their money. In that link, Ezra Klein in the New York Times attributes good intentions to Biden officials but makes it clear what the obvious results will be—immense suffering and death. He suggests they might be blinded by their ideology, unable to zoom out from it.

And then there are the sanctions we are imposing on various countries such as Iran, Syria and Venezuela. These sanctions are designed precisely to pressure governments by causing suffering and in the end, increased mortality rates among the population. Richard Nephew who designed the sanctions imposed on Iran during the Obama Administration explicitly admits that sanctions are meant to cause pain in his book “The Art of Sanctions”. (The “look inside” feature on Amazon shows enough to see Nephew’s declaration about the purpose of sanctions being the inflicting of pain.)

And of course there is the ongoing American support for the apartheid state of Israel, with photos of brutality against Palestinians which people have falsely attributed to the Russian invasion.

All of these things are happening right now and the Yemen and Afghanistan crises involve mass death, with a child dying of war-caused famine every nine minutes in Yemen and the possibility of worse in Afghanistan.

There hasn’t been anything close to the level of outrage or calls for action on these issues as there has been for the Ukraine invasion. The Russian invasion has its own uniquely dangerous and terrifying feature because there is the very real danger of a nuclear war breaking out due to escalation and miscalculation. But most of the outrage has been directed towards the war itself and Putin’s responsibility for the suffering. If this outrage were motivated by genuine universal concern for human life, we would be seeing daily photos or at least references to the children dying in Yemen and this would be linked to our support for the Saudis, but we don’t.

The recent Atlantic profile of Mohammed bin Salman refers to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, but says nothing about the Saudi blockade. It only references US attempts to cut back on Saudi bombing of civilians, implying that we are the good guys– but the Saudis are using American planes dropping American bombs. The Houthis are not innocents either, but there is a liberal coating of whitewash given to American responsibility in Yemen.

That said, over the past 20 years no American who has paid attention to the news and becomes exercised over political issues can legitimately claim ignorance. As bad as the mainstream press usually is, as laced with bias and jingoism as it tends to be, there has been enough accurate reporting for people to know that the US commits war crimes or supports others who do, and these are not simply the excesses of the occasional soldier but are in fact policy.

Sanctions are policy. Blockades are policy. Massive bombing of civilians in Raqqa and Mosul was policy. Support for Israel no matter what it does to Palestinians is policy.

And yet little of this knowledge is reflected in our political culture, and European countries are no better. People act as though Putin’s brutality is some uniquely awful thing that “civilized” people would never do to other “civilized” people in our enlightened era. And all of these attitudes become part of everyday life. On my daily commute I just started seeing a church with a big blue and yellow banner saying “Pray for Ukraine”. In the many years I have driven past that church I don’t recall ever seeing a banner about Yemen or Gaza.

Why are we so brutally callous towards our own victims? The question partly answers itself. People don’t like to admit that the politicians they support, both Democrats and Republicans, are implicated in war crimes. So they ignore them or worse, justify them. It is easy to criticize, Democratic partisans will say. Republicans barely even bother to care (with a few exceptions).

The rest of the explanation, of course, is a mixture of racism and ethnocentrism. There is an explicit admission by some reporters and others that they care about Ukrainians because they look like “us” ( white people are “us”, apparently), and Ukraine is a “civilized” (white) place. At other times I have seen people state in so many words that our actions that plunge other countries into chaos are not so bad because they would be killing each other anyway.

But most important is the role of the press. As stated before, the Western press sometimes does report on Western atrocities, but with nothing like the level and quantity of moral outrage they reserve for the crimes of our enemies. People may think they can rise above this, but observation suggests this is largely false. If there isn’t a constant drumbeat of stories about our atrocities as there is for Putin’s, and pundits aren’t constantly agonizing over our need to do something, the unspoken message is that our crimes simply aren’t that important or bad. And there is always the social pressure to conform. And people absorb this message. They are embarrassed by the wrong kind of moral outrage. It isn’t normal and not the sort of thing you see serious people doing. That said, an explanation is not an excuse.

In the current climate of extreme stupidity the standard reaction to my argument would be that it is an example of “whataboutism.” Yes, that is exactly what it is, and only a moral imbecile would think there is something wrong with it because of that.

When people are behaving like hypocrites, denouncing one set of crimes committed by their enemies and ignoring, excusing or actually advocating the crimes committed by their own country or its allies, you should say to those people “what about the crimes your country supports”? And we aren’t even comparing past crimes committed by the US with current crimes committed by Putin. All of these crimes are occurring now.

Two more points. There are several pieces published recently where people try to outline a morally consistent anti-war position, where lefties oppose both American imperialism and imperialism by other countries such as Russia. This is a fine goal, and do it because it is right, but don’t do it because you think it will gain you more credibility with mainstream liberals. The ideology of mainstream liberalism requires them to see themselves as “civilized”. They may make tragic mistakes but always with good intentions. It can’t be that they are supporters of a system that has them making the same types of “tragic mistakes” over and over again. They are nice people. They can’t possibly be as guilty as someone like Putin. I am not being sarcastic. People in the Western world who make the decisions or identify with those who make the decisions are not going to accept a truly principled anti war critique. They will see the equation of their crimes with Putin’s as “whataboutism” and therefore not serious. Ezra Klein bumped up against that attitude ( we are the good guys doing our best) in the officials he questioned when writing his post on our Afghanistan policy. If these people accepted the anti war critique they would have to resign and speak out. Fundamentally Western liberals who consider themselves serious people cannot admit to themselves that Western leaders might be morally as responsible for war crimes as someone like Putin. It can’t be accepted. It also means that even when they do admit something is wrong, like Yemen or Afghanistan, it has to be seen as a tragic mistake by well intentioned people and not the result of an ideology and attitudes which keep leading to such “mistakes”. Tony Blinken is this nice soft-spoken guy but I gather he was in favor of both the Iraq invasion and the decision to support the Saudi war in Yemen. All liberals care about is that he is a nice guy (which I think he is), like them.

And finally, having condemned brutal sanctions, including the ones we may level on Russia (Russians are considered “them”, btw), how could I support BDS? Speaking only for myself, it is because BDS is largely symbolic and not remotely lethal. The reaction of Israel and its supporters demonstrates this. On the one hand they laugh off the effects as trivial economically, which they are, but on the other hand they react with near hysterical accusations of antisemitism if some musician or author refuses to perform in Israel or have a book translated by some Israeli firm. The symbolism frightens them.

It is impossible to imagine that the “civilized” West would ever allow “civilized” Israel to be subjected to the sorts of brutal sanctions that “civilized” nations inflict on “uncivilized” nations. So I don’t have to face the moral dilemma but what if it happened? One could decide based on what Palestinians themselves actually living there would say, because they as the people with no power are the ones who would suffer the most. Perhaps they would be united in favor of sanctions that would hit them hard. I would still not want to be responsible for killing people.

Meanwhile, in the real world, being a citizen of the US, I already am responsible for killing people. We are doing exactly that to various countries, and Gazans are living in a giant prison camp, so the preceding paragraph amounted to moral posturing regarding a situation that Western nations would never allow to happen to one of their own. Westerners inflict sanctions that hurt people living under authoritarian governments, hoping to see people suffer so much they might rebel or at least pressure their respective government to change course.

But somehow affluent citizens of democratic countries are never seen as suitable subjects for targeted sanctions even though they should have far more control over their own country’s actions. One can’t easily target only the guilty classes on a large scale (you can hit individual oligarchs or dictators or in theory American politicians) which is why sanctions in practice, the ones imposed on an entire country, generally hit the poor the hardest. And Westerners are fine with that.

Two concluding notes.

1. There are very early examples of the validity of whataboutism in the Bible. Notably in the famous line from the Sermon on the Mount, where Matthew quotes Jesus: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

2. Here is a later example of a hypocrite objecting to a legitimate question regarding accountability.

Last June Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership issued a statement rejecting Rep. Ilhan Omar’s criticisms of American and Israeli actions. “[D]rawing false equivalencies between democracies like the U.S. and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all,” the leaders said.

What triggered the hypocrites? Omar questioned Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the International Criminal Court prosecuting war crimes:

I know you opposed the court’s investigation in both Palestine and in Afghanistan. I haven’t seen any evidence in either cases that domestic courts both can and will prosecute alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. And I would emphasize that in Israel and Palestine, this includes crimes committed by both the Israeli Security Forces and Hamas. In Afghanistan, it includes crimes committed by the Afghan national government and the Taliban.

Blinken responded to Omar that the US and Israel are accountable. This is ludicrous. And as someone who was part of the decision to give the Saudis the green light on bombing Yemen, he shouldn’t be speaking about accountability.

https://mondoweiss.net/2022/03/the-west ... -it-kills/
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