Alterar as regras de guerra

'Israel's campaign to rewrite international law to its advantage is deliberate.'

Changing the rules of War

By George Bisharat

The extent of Israel's brutality against Palestinian civilians in its 22-day pounding of the Gaza Strip is gradually surfacing. Israeli soldiers are testifying to lax rules of engagement tantamount to a license to kill. One soldier commented: "That's what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn't have to be with a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him."

What is less appreciated is how Israel is also brutalizing international law, in ways that may long outlast the demolition of Gaza.

Since 2001, Israeli military lawyers have pushed to re-classify military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from the law enforcement model mandated by the law of occupation to one of armed conflict. Under the former, soldiers of an occupying army must arrest, rather than kill, opponents, and generally must use the minimum force necessary to quell disturbances.

While in armed conflict, a military is still constrained by the laws of war - including the duty to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and the duty to avoid attacks causing disproportionate harm to civilian persons or objects - the standard permits far greater uses of force.

Israel pressed the shift to justify its assassinations of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, which clearly violated settled international law. Israel had practiced "targeted killings" since the 1970s - always denying that it did so - but had recently stepped up their frequency, by spectacular means (such as air strikes) that rendered denial futile.

President Bill Clinton charged the 2001 Mitchell Committee with investigating the causes of the second Palestinian uprising and recommending how to restore calm in the region. Israeli lawyers pleaded their case to the committee for armed conflict. The committee responded by criticizing the blanket application of the model to the uprising, but did not repudiate it altogether.

Today, most observers - including Amnesty International - tacitly accept Israel's framing of the conflict in Gaza as an armed conflict, as their criticism of Israel's actions in terms of the duties of distinction and the principle of proportionality betrays. This shift, if accepted, would encourage occupiers to follow Israel's lead, externalizing military control while shedding all responsibilities to occupied populations.

Israel's campaign to rewrite international law to its advantage is deliberate and knowing. As the former head of Israel's 20-lawyer International Law Division in the Military Advocate General's office, Daniel Reisner, recently stated: "If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries ... International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal molds. Eight years later, it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy."

In the Gaza fighting, Israel has again tried to transform international law through violations. For example, its military lawyers authorized the bombing of a police cadet graduation ceremony, killing at least 63 young Palestinian men. Under international law, such deliberate killings of civilian police are war crimes. Yet Israel treats all employees of the Hamas-led government in the Gaza Strip as terrorists, and thus combatants. Secretaries, court clerks, housing officials, judges - all were, in Israeli eyes, legitimate targets for liquidation.

Israeli jurists also instructed military commanders that any Palestinian who failed to evacuate a building or area after warnings of an impending bombardment was a "voluntary human shield" and thus a participant in combat, subject to lawful attack. One method of warning employed by Israeli gunners, dubbed "knocking on the roof," was to fire first at a building's corner, then, a few minutes later, to strike more structurally vulnerable points. To imagine that Gazan civilians - penned into the tiny Gaza Strip by Israeli troops, and surrounded by the chaos of battle - understood this signal is fanciful at best.

Israel has a lengthy history of unpunished abuses of international law - among the most flagrant its decades-long colonization of the West Bank. To its credit, much of the world has refused to ratify Israel's violations. Unfortunately, our government is an exception, having frequently provided diplomatic cover for Israel's abuses. Our diplomats have vetoed 42 U.N. Security Council resolutions to shelter Israel from the consequences of its often illegal behavior.

We must break that habit now, or see international law perverted in ways that can harm us all. Our government has already been seduced to follow, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Israel's example of targeted killings. This policy alienates civilians, innocently killed and wounded in these crude strikes, and deepens the determination of enemies to harm us by any means possible.

We do not want civilian police in the United States to be bombed, nor to have anyone "knock on our roofs." For our own sakes and for the world's, Israel's impunity must end.

- George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East. (Published with permission from the author, this article was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 1, 2009.)

fonte:Palestine Chronicle

o fósforo branco que não será esquecido em Gaza

fonte:EI


White phosphorus not forgotten in Gaza
Yousef Al-Helou writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 3 April 2009

Sabah Abu Halima holds a picture of her 15-month-old daughter, Shahad, who was killed by white phosphorus bombs during Israel's assault on Gaza. (Yousef Al-Helou)

During Israel's three-week-long offensive on Gaza launched on 27 December, the Israeli army used internationally banned weapons according to foreign military and medical experts. Israel used American-made white phosphorus shells in populated areas across the Gaza Strip.

Nafez Abu Shaban, head of the Burn department at Shifa hospital, Gaza's largest medical center, has treated dozens of patients who suffered sever burns. He still keeps a piece of phosphorus covered under sand in jar to prevent it from being exposed to oxygen.

Dr. Abu Shaban described the effects of white phosphorous, explaining that "At the beginning of the war, we thought it was normal burns, but then patients came back to the hospital suffering from severe pain, and even some patients died. Patients who suffer from 15 percent surface burns area should not die -- so we started to ask why? Some of the doctors who came to Gaza to help us seemed to have experience said these burns as a result of the use of white phosphorus bombs."

He added that "We need to know if uranium used, were others banned weapons used? We need to know what the long-term complications will be? Will these weapons cause cancer? It's the duty of the international community to investigate this matter. Now we hear many people are still afraid to eat vegetable planted in areas phosphorus was used because it might be contaminated with radiation."

Nearly three months have passed since Israel ended its war and while life has returned to normal for some for many others has left legacies of suffering and sad memories. Sabah Abu Halima who was burnt from head to toe and lost her husband and four children is still in pain and has weekly physiotherapy sessions at Shifa hospital. We visited her at her home in the northern Gaza Strip town of Seyafa about one km from the northern border with Israel. Sabah showed us around her house, which was also burnt as a result of white phosphorus shells that struck the roof of her family's 16 member home.

She explained that "We had a happy home, I lived in this house in security with my husband and children. I was the happiest person in the world, but all of that changed when on 4 January the Israeli army entered our village and fired two phosphorus shells [that] penetrated our roof and burnt us while we were having our lunch. The fire was like lava, my family was burnt and their bodies turned to crisps."

The mournful mother who is still unable to walk or talk properly, lost her house when it was completely engulfed in flames from the bombs. Luckily she found a photo of her youngest daughter, Shahad, who was only 15 months old when she was killed. I asked her to comment on this writing, which was left on the wall of her bedroom: "From the Israeli Defense Forces, we are sorry!" She answered that "I demand the whole world and international human rights organizations to sue the killers of my family, they killed so many innocent people who tried to rescue us, what was the guilt of my children and my baby Shahad? Their sorry will not bring back my family, I'm still physiologically and mentally in pain, I can't even pick up a cup of tea now, my life will never be the same," Sabah answered with tears in her eyes.

Recently some Israeli soldiers admitted they killed civilians under the so-called rules of engagement. Acts of vandalism, targeting medical personnel, use of human shields and indiscriminate killing of civilians were the most obvious and wide-scale violations of international law committed by Israeli forces during the invasion. The use of internationally banned weapons by Israel will leave many with long-term illnesses and it's believed that some areas will remain contaminated putting locals at risk of contracting sickness.

For a tiny territory of roughly 1.5 million people, the war changed the lives of many. With more than 1,400 Palestinians dead, most of whom were civilians including more than 300 children, and about 5,500 injured, Sabah's tragedy is just one of many documented by international lawyers and fact-finding missions to Gaza. Whether those behind these crimes will be brought to justice remains to be seen.

Yousef Al-Helou is a freelance journalist based in the Gaza Strip. He can be reached at ydamadan AT hotmail DOT com.

o casamento de mal

fonte:Palestine Chronicle

Avigdor and Netanyahu: an Evil Marriage



'The ascension of Lieberman is an expression of the suicidal irrationalism infecting Israel.'

By Mohamed El Mokhtar Sidi Haiba

Taking office as Israel's new leader Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu promised to supposedly seek 'full peace' with the Arab and Muslim world while deliberately avoiding to even mention the only word that really matters here. The word that matters the most to the Arab and Muslim world .The word without which Israel will never, ever, live in peace. The word whose continuous negations will ultimately be dearly costly to Israel's very existence: “Palestinian state."

"Under the permanent status agreement, the Palestinians will have all the authority to rule themselves, “Netanyahu said in comments echoing an old mantra of negationism and deep-seated racism at the core of the Likud political philosophy: There is no such thing as Palestine or Palestinian people.

Netanyahu's hysterical obsession to carry on his father’s racist fascisto-zionist phantasms could put him at odds with his indispensable benefactor and much of the rest of the world. His refusal to embrace the idea of Palestinian statehood and decision to appoint ultranationalist politician Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister don’t bode well for a hopeful time for peace in the Middle-East or the world for that matter.

From the outset, he announced the true nature of his colors when he painted a grim picture of the future in the region by putting the onus exclusively on radical Islam and Iran which he describes in his acceptance speech as “the gravest threat to our existence since the war of independence.” A danger therefore that needs to be dealt with, swiftly and militarily, before it is too late for a nuclear weapon is a critical threshold.

That will be the focal point of his agenda. Not peace. In other words a settlement with the Palestinians based on the two-state solution which, not so long ago, he compared to a danger akin to the Nazis will be the last preoccupation of Bibi.

But Netanyahu’s "basic" extremism is somewhat overshadowed these days by the Nazi-like fascism of his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberma, the leader of the ultranationalist party, Yisrael Beiteinu.

The political ascension of this hawkish racist, ex-nightclub bouncer from Russia and former member of the party Kach who espoused overtly the idea of forced mass expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel and has even recently suggested, as final solution, that Gaza be nuked, constitutes an eloquent expression of the moral decay and suicidal irrationalism infecting the Israeli society at large. It is a wake-up call, a warning sign. It is an invitation for reflection on the reality of Israel and the pervasive nature of Zionism. Better, a clear indication of the direction the country is hurriedly taking. A trend so visible in the upwardly shift toward the right of Israel entire political spectrum.

After all, what could be a greater lesson of existential philosophy for mankind to contemplate than this abject spectacle of moral decadence: the miraculous descendents of the so-called Immaculate Victims, the iconic survivors of the Holocaust, sinking fast and deep, after just a little bit more than a half century of their near-extermination, in the abysses of moral insanity, exuding the same venom of hysterical racism, blind arrogance and illusionary superiority that once galvanized, to the point of madness, their Nazi butchers and enticed them to seek their total annihilation.

The sight of Tsahal’s young sharpshooters targeting to death, and with an almost lewd amusement, children and women in the streets of Gaza, their crude laughter at check-points when holding medications or humiliating women and elderly people is a tragic rehearsal of history, an ironic reminder of another setting where a similar, albeit more graphic, process of dehumanization was taking place: The Nazi camps of death where their grand-parents were mercilessly packed like vulgar cattle, spat at and trampled upon continuously, without regard for their dignity, frozen with fear, unable to defend their honor, and slowly stripped naked of their humanity before being savagely gazed or baked alive. That was only some 60 years ago and yet no lesson is being drawn from that most dreadful history.

Unlike their ancestors, the cultured and wise Hebrews, the heirs of Zionism seem not only morally short-sighted but forgetful as well. They appear to naively assume that the American support is never-ending, that the Muslim brothers will never conquer power in Egypt, that Turkey’s friendly Generals will hold sway forever in their country and that Arab’s disunity is an everlasting reality.

Another sign that the new government is a bad omen: both Avigdor and Netanyahu quarreled in 2005 with Ariel Sharon over his disengagement plan. Netanyahu had even resigned in protest of the unilateral "withdrawal" and subsequently called for the elimination of Gaza’s Hamas-led elected government.

The accession to power of these two dangerous extremists is by all means a bad news for they are the main political beneficiary of an election profoundly tainted by the innocent blood of Palestinian women and children held in the gloomy shadow of 23-day blitzkrieg against the largest open prison in the entire world, Gaza, where 1,300 human beings perished.

- Mohamed El Mokhtar Sidi Haiba political analyst. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

mudar as regras de guerra

fonte:EI


Changing the rules of war
George Bisharat, The Electronic Intifada, 2 April 2009

Palestinians pray next to the bodies of seven members of the Salha family who were killed during Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip, 9 January. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

The extent of Israel's brutality against Palestinian civilians in its 22-day pounding of the Gaza Strip is gradually surfacing. Israeli soldiers are testifying to lax rules of engagement tantamount to a license to kill. One soldier commented: "That's what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn't have to be with a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him."

What is less appreciated is how Israel is also brutalizing international law, in ways that may long outlast the demolition of Gaza.

Since 2001, Israeli military lawyers have pushed to reclassify military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from the law enforcement model mandated by the law of occupation to one of armed conflict. Under the former, soldiers of an occupying army must arrest, rather than kill, opponents, and generally must use the minimum force necessary to quell disturbances.

While in armed conflict, a military is still constrained by the laws of war -- including the duty to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and the duty to avoid attacks causing disproportionate harm to civilian persons or objects -- the standard permits far greater uses of force.

Israel pressed the shift to justify its assassinations of Palestinians in the occupied territories, which clearly violated settled international law. Israel had practiced "targeted killings" since the 1970s -- always denying that it did so -- but had recently stepped up their frequency, by spectacular means (such as air strikes) that rendered denial futile.

Former US President Bill Clinton charged the 2001 Mitchell Committee with investigating the causes of the second Palestinian uprising and recommending how to restore calm in the region. Israeli lawyers pleaded their case to the committee for armed conflict. The committee responded by criticizing the blanket application of the model to the uprising, but did not repudiate it altogether.

Today, most observers -- including Amnesty International -- tacitly accept Israel's framing of the conflict in Gaza as an armed conflict, as their criticism of Israel's actions in terms of the duties of distinction and the principle of proportionality betrays. This shift, if accepted, would encourage occupiers to follow Israel's lead, externalizing military control while shedding all responsibilities to occupied populations.

Israel's campaign to rewrite international law to its advantage is deliberate and knowing. As the former head of Israel's 20-lawyer International Law Division in the Military Advocate General's office, Daniel Reisner, recently stated: "If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries ... International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal molds. Eight years later, it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy."

In the Gaza fighting, Israel has again tried to transform international law through violations. For example, its military lawyers authorized the bombing of a police cadet graduation ceremony, killing at least 63 young Palestinian men. Under international law, such deliberate killings of civilian police are war crimes. Yet Israel treats all employees of the Hamas-led government in the Gaza Strip as terrorists, and thus combatants. Secretaries, court clerks, housing officials, judges -- all were, in Israeli eyes, legitimate targets for liquidation.

Israeli jurists also instructed military commanders that any Palestinian who failed to evacuate a building or area after warnings of an impending bombardment was a "voluntary human shield" and thus a participant in combat, subject to lawful attack. One method of warning employed by Israeli gunners, dubbed "knocking on the roof," was to fire first at a building's corner, then, a few minutes later, to strike more structurally vulnerable points. To imagine that Gazan civilians -- penned into the tiny Gaza Strip by Israeli troops, and surrounded by the chaos of battle -- understood this signal is fanciful at best.

Israel has a lengthy history of unpunished abuses of international law -- among the most flagrant its decades-long colonization of the West Bank. To its credit, much of the world has refused to ratify Israel's violations. Unfortunately, our government is an exception, having frequently provided diplomatic cover for Israel's abuses. Our diplomats have vetoed 42 UN Security Council resolutions to shelter Israel from the consequences of its often illegal behavior.

We must break that habit now, or see international law perverted in ways that can harm us all. Our government has already been seduced to follow, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Israel's example of targeted killings. This policy alienates civilians, innocently killed and wounded in these crude strikes, and deepens the determination of enemies to harm us by any means possible.

We do not want civilian police in the United States to be bombed, nor to have anyone "knock on our roofs." For our own sakes and for the world's, Israel's impunity must end.

George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East. This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and is republished with the author's permission.

os crimes de Israel: o ataque à equipe médica

fonte: The Guardian

Israel e os crimes do apartheid

fonte:EI


Not an analogy: Israel and the crime of apartheid
Hazem Jamjoum, The Electronic Intifada, 3 April 2009

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron demonstrate against Israeli "apartheid," 30 March 2009. (Mamoun Wazwaz/MaanImages)

In recent years, increasing numbers of individuals around the world have begun adopting and developing an analysis of Israel as an apartheid regime. This can be seen in the ways that the global movement in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle is taking on a pointedly anti-apartheid character, as evidenced by the growth of Israeli Apartheid Week ( http://apartheidweek.org/). Further, much of the recent international diplomatic support for Israel has increasingly taken on the form of denying that racial discrimination is a root cause of the oppression of Palestinians. This has taken on new levels of absurdity in Western responses to the April 2009 Durban Review Conference, a follow-up to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in which Palestinians were identified as victims of racism (the US, Israel, Canada and Italy have already announced that they will not participate because of the potential for criticism of Israel).

Many of the writings stemming from this analysis work to detail levels of similarity and difference with apartheid South Africa, rather than looking at apartheid as a system that can be practiced by any state. To some extent, this strong emphasis on historical comparisons is understandable given that boycott, divestment and sanctions is the central campaign called for by Palestinian civil society for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and is modeled on the one that helped end South African apartheid. However, an over-emphasis on similarities and differences confines the use of the term to narrow limits. With the expanding agreement that the term "apartheid" is useful in describing the level and layout of Israel's crimes, it is important that our understanding of the "apartheid label" be deepened, both as a means of informing activism in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, and in order to most effectively make use of comparisons with other struggles.

The apartheid analogy

It is perhaps understandable that some advocates of Palestinian rights look at the "apartheid label," in its comparative sense, as a politically useful tool. The struggle of the South African people for justice and equality reached a certain sacred status in the 1980s and '90s when the anti-apartheid struggle reached its zenith. The reverence with which activists and non-activists alike look to the righteousness of the South African struggle, and the ignominy of the colonial apartheid regime, are well placed. Black South Africans fought against both Dutch and British colonization for centuries, endured countless hardships including imprisonment and death, and were labeled terrorists as the powers of the world stood by the racist apartheid regime. They remained steadfast in their struggle, raising the cost of maintaining the apartheid system until South African capital found it no longer profitable and white political elites found it impossible to maintain. The comparison is further enhanced due to the relationship between the respective Palestinian and South African liberation movements, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the African National Congress, as well as the unabashed alliance between Israel and the South African apartheid regime, which remained strong even at the height of the international boycott against South Africa.

A further impetus for confining the "apartheid label" to a comparison with South Africa is that the commonalities and similarities between the liberation struggles of South Africa and Palestine are quite stark. Both cases involved a process of settler-colonialism involving the forced displacement of the indigenous population from most of their ancestral lands and concentrating them in townships and reservations, dividing the colonized community into different groups with differing rights, strict mobility restrictions that suffocated the colonized, and the use of brutal military force to repress any actual or potential resistance against the racist colonial regime.

Both regimes have enjoyed the impunity that results from full US and European support. Accompanying these and countless other similarities are a host of uncanny details common to both cases: both regimes were formally established in the same year -- 1948 -- following decades of British rule; approximately 87 percent of the land was off limits to most of the colonized population without special permission, and so on. While we speak here in the past tense for South Africa, this still applies to present-day Palestine.

As the Israeli apartheid label has gained ground, some have adopted the approach of describing the differences between the two regimes, albeit for various purposes. In general, Israel has not legislated petty apartheid -- the segregation of spaces such as bathrooms and beaches -- as was the case in South Africa. However, Israeli laws form the basis of systematic racial discrimination against Palestinians. The 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (approximately 20 percent of Israel's citizens) do indeed have the right to vote and run in Israeli elections while the Black community in South Africa, for the most part, did not. The South African version of apartheid's central tenet was to facilitate the exploitation of as many Black laborers as possible, whereas the Israeli version, although exploiting Palestinian workers, prioritizes the forced displacement of as many Palestinians as possible beyond the borders of the state with the aim of eradicating Palestinian presence within historic Palestine. South African visitors to Palestine have often commented on the fact that Israeli use of force is more brutal than that witnessed in the heyday of apartheid, thus leading several commentators to adopt the position that Israel's practices are worse than apartheid and that the apartheid label does not go far enough.

Israel and the crime of apartheid

In terms of law, describing Israel as an apartheid state does not revolve around levels of difference and similarity with the policies and practices of the South African apartheid regime, and where Israel is an apartheid state only insofar as similarities outweigh differences. In 1973, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (General Assembly resolution 3068 entered into force on 18 July 1976 -- the year of the Soweto uprising in South Africa and the Land Day uprising in Palestine). The resolution set forth that the definition of the crime of apartheid was not limited to the borders of South Africa. The fact that apartheid is defined as a crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002 -- long after the apartheid regime was defeated in South Africa -- attests to the universality of the crime.

While the wording of the definition of the crime of apartheid varies between legal instruments, the substance is the same: a regime commits apartheid when it institutionalizes discrimination to create and maintain the domination of one "racial" group over another. Karine Mac Allister, among others, has provided a cogent legal analysis of the applicability of the crime of apartheid to the Israeli regime (see "Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel," al-Majdal #38, Summer 2008). The main point is that like genocide and slavery, apartheid is a crime that any state can commit, and institutions, organizations and/or individuals acting on behalf of the state that commit it or support its commission are to face trial in any state that is a signatory to the Convention, or in the International Criminal Court. It is therefore a fallacy to ground the Israeli apartheid label on comparisons of the policies of the South African apartheid regime, with the resulting descriptions of Israel as being "apartheid-like" and characterizations of an apartheid analysis of Israel as an "apartheid analogy."

Recognition by the international community of such universal crimes is often the result of a particular case, so heinous that it forces the rusty wheels of international decision-making into motion. The Transatlantic Slave Trade is an example where the mass enslavement of peoples from the African continent to work as the privately owned property of European settlers formed an important part of the framework in which the drafters of the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery thought and acted. An even clearer example is the Genocide Convention (adopted in 1948, entered into force in 1951) in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust in which millions of Jews, communists, Roma and disabled were systematically murdered with the intention to end their existence. We do not describe modern day enslavement as "slavery-like," nor do we examine the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of mainly Tutsi Rwandans through a Rwandan "genocide analogy."

Two points made by Mac Allister in her legal analysis of Israeli apartheid deserve to be reiterated because they are often confused or misconstrued even by advocates of Palestinian human rights. First, Israel's crimes and violations are not limited to the crime of apartheid. Rather, Israel's regime over the Palestinian people combines apartheid, military occupation and colonization in a unique manner. It deserves notice that the relationship between these three components requires further research and investigation. Also noteworthy is the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign National Committee's "United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation: Dignity & Justice for the Palestinian People" position paper, which outlines and, to some extent, details the various aspects of Israel's commission of the crime of apartheid, and begins to trace the interaction between Israeli apartheid, colonialism and occupation from the perspective of Palestinian civil society. [1]

The second point worth reiterating is that Israel's regime of apartheid is not limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In fact, the core of Israel's apartheid regime is guided by discriminatory legislation in the fields of nationality, citizenship and land ownership. This discriminatory legislation was primarily employed to oppress and dispossess those Palestinians (refugees and internally displaced) who were forced from their land and property during the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, as well as the minority who managed to remain within the 1949 armistice line (referred to as the "green line"), who later became Israeli citizens. Israel's apartheid regime was extended into the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the 1967 occupation of those territories for the purpose of colonization and military control over the Palestinians who came under occupation. Using again the example of South Africa, the crime of apartheid was not limited to the Bantustans -- the whole regime was implicated and not one or another of its racist manifestations.

The analysis of Israel as an apartheid state has proven to be very important in several respects. First, it correctly highlights racial discrimination as a root cause of Israel's oppression of Palestinians. Second, one of the main effects of Israeli apartheid is that it has separated Palestinians -- conceptually, legally and physically -- into different groupings (refugees, West Bank, Gaza, within the "green line" and a host of other divisions within each), resulting in the fragmentation of the Palestinian liberation movement, including the solidarity movement. The apartheid analysis enables us to provide a legal and conceptual framework under which we can understand, convey and take action in support of the Palestinian people and their struggle as a unified whole. Third, and of particular significance to the solidarity movement, this legal and conceptual framework takes on the prescriptive role underpinning the growing global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law.

Colonialism and the role of comparison

I have argued that the question of whether apartheid applies cannot be determined by means of comparison with South Africa, but rather by legal analysis. This, however, does not mean that comparative study is not useful. Comparison is in fact essential to the process of learning historical lessons for those involved in struggle. A central point of comparison with South Africa is the fact that it was, and for the indigenous people of Palestine and the Americas, continues to be a struggle against colonialism.

Focusing on the colonial dimension of Israeli apartheid and the Zionist project enables us to maintain our focus on the issues that really matter, such as land acquisition, demographic engineering and methods of political and economic control exercised by one racial group over another. Comparison with other anti-colonial struggles provides the main resource for understanding this colonial dimension of Israeli oppression, and for deriving some of the lessons needed to fight it.

One of the key lessons for Palestinians from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa was the pressure placed on the African National Congress leadership to compromise on its economic demands such as land restitution. Only a tiny proportion of white-controlled land in South Africa was redistributed to Blacks after 1994. As such, while the struggle of the South African people defeated the system of political apartheid, the struggle against economic apartheid continues in various forms including anti-poverty and landless peoples' movements today. The centrality of the demand for land restitution should be highlighted as part of the demand for refugee return as Palestinians and those struggling with them work to reconstruct a political strategy and consensus on how to overcome the political challenges that have emerged since the launching of the peace process and the transformation of the Palestinian liberation movement leadership into a non-sovereign authority dependent on Israel for its international legitimacy and financial solvency.

A second key lesson is in response to the paradigm currently guiding most mainstream accounts of how to achieve the elusive "peace in the Middle East," which is the idea of partition often referred to as the "two-state solution." In the 1970s, South Africa tried to deal with its "demographic problem" -- the fact that the vast majority of its population was Black but did not have the right to vote. The apartheid regime reconstructed South Africa as a formal democracy by reinventing the British-established reservations (the Bantustans) as independent states (British rule in South Africa established reserves in 1913 and 1936 on approximately 87 percent of the land of South Africa for the purpose of segregating the Black population from the settlers). These 10 "homelands" were each assigned to an ethnicity decided by Pretoria, and indigenous South Africans who did not fit into one of the ethnicities were forced to make themselves fit in order to become nationals of one of the homelands. Through this measure, members of the indigenous population were reclassified as nationals of a homeland, and between 1976 and 1981 the regime tried to pass the homelands off as independent states: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981.

Each of these Bantustans was given a flag and a government made up of indigenous intermediaries on the Pretoria payroll, and all the trappings of a sovereign government including responsibility over municipal services and a police force to protect the apartheid regime, but without actual sovereignty. The idea was that by getting international recognition for each of these homelands as states, the apartheid regime would transform South Africa from a country with a 10 percent white minority, to one with a 100 percent white majority. Since it was a democratic regime within the confines of the dominant community, the state's democratic nature would be beyond reproach. No one was fooled. The African National Congress launched a powerful campaign to counter any international recognition of the Bantustans as independent states, and the plot failed miserably at the international level -- with the notable, but perhaps unsurprising, exception that a lone "embassy" for Bophuthatswana was opened in Tel Aviv.

Israel has employed similar strategies in Palestine. For example, Israel recognized 18 Palestinian Bedouin tribes and appointed a loyal sheikh for each in the Naqab (Negev) desert during the 1950s as a means of controlling these southern Palestinians, forcing those who did not belong to one of the tribes to affiliate to one in order to get Israeli citizenship (see Hazem Jamjoum, "al-Naqab: The Ongoing Displacement of Palestine's Southern Bedouin," al-Majdal #39-40, Autumn 2008/Winter 2009). In the late 1970s, the Israeli regime tried to invent Palestinian governing bodies for the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the form of "village leagues" intended to evolve into similar non-sovereign governments -- glorified municipalities of a sort. As with apartheid's Homelands, the scheme failed miserably, both because the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had established itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and because Palestinians largely understood the plot and opposed it with all means at their disposal. The main lesson for Israel was that the PLO would have to either be completely destroyed or would have to be transformed into Israeli apartheid's indigenous intermediary. Israel launched a massive campaign to destroy the PLO throughout the 1980s and early '90s. With the demise of the PLO's main backers in the Soviet bloc at the end of the Cold War and its strained relations with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the first Gulf War, Israel capitalized on the opportunity, and worked to transform the PLO from a liberation movement to a "state-building" project that was launched by the signing of the Oslo Accords, seven months before South Africa's first free election.

The push for the establishment and international recognition of an independent Palestinian state within the Palestinian Bantustan is no different from the South African apartheid regime's campaign to gain international recognition of Transkei or Ciskei. This is the core of the "two-state solution" idea. The major and crucial difference is that in the current Palestinian case, it is the world's superpower and its adjutants in Europe and the Arab world pushing as well, and armed with the active acceptance of Palestine's indigenous intermediaries.

Hazem Jamjoum is the editor of al-Majdal, the English language quarterly magazine of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, Palestine.


Endnotes
[1] This is the Palestinian civil society position paper for the April 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva, and can be downloaded at: http://bdsmovement.net/files/English-BNC_Position_Paper-Durban_Review.pdf (accessed 29 March 2009).

O Problema é o Sionismo

O Ideal Sionista de um Estado Judeu está a impedir Israelitas e Palestinianos de viverem em paz.

Por Bem Ehrenreich (trad. Sofia Gomes)

15 de Março de 2009

Agora é difícil imaginar, mas em 1944, seis anos depois da Kristallnacht, o Presidente do Conselho Americano para o Judaísmo, Lessin J. Rosenwald, sentiui-se confortável em comparar o Ideal Sionista de um Estado Judeu com “o conceito de um estado racial – o conceito hitleriano”. Durante a maior parte do século passado, a corrente principal dentro do judaísmo americano era uma recta oposição ao Sionismo.

Mesmo depois da fundação de Israel, anti-sionismo não era uma posição particularmente herética. Reformados judeus assimilados como Rosenwald, acreditavam que o Judaísmo deveria manter-se uma questão religiosa em vez de lealdade política, os ultra-ortodoxos viam o Estado Judaico como uma tentativa ímpia de “forçar a mão de Deus” e os judeus marxistas – entre eles, os meus avós – viam o Sionismo e todos os nacionalismos, como uma distracção da luta entre classes entendida como mais essencial.

Ser judeu, fui educado a acreditar, significa compreender-se a si próprio como membro de uma tribo que foi sucessivamente discriminada, maltratada, massacrada. Os milénios de opressão que haviam precedido, não nos tinham dado direito a uma nação ou a um direito de auto-defesa que se sobrepusesse ao de qualquer outro. Se nos ofereciam algo de excepcional, era uma perspectiva de opressão e uma obrigação nascida da tradição profética: agir em nome do oprimido e denunciar o opressor.

No entanto, durante as últimas décadas, tem sido tudo tem sido possível menos denunciar o Estado de Israel sem se chamado de anti-semita ou pior. Questionar não só as acções israelitas, mas também os alicerces sionistas em que o Estado se fundou, tem sido vista desde há muito tempo como uma blasfémia indizível.

Contudo, já não é possível acreditar honestamente que as condições deploráveis em que os palestinianos vivem e morrem em Gaza e na Cisjordânia, são o resultado de políticas específicas, lideres ou partidos de ambos os lados do impasse. O problema é elementar: fundar um estado moderno numa única etnia ou identidade religiosa num território que é etnica e religiosamente diversificado, conduz inexoravelmente a políticas de exclusão (pensem na prisão de 139 milhas quadradas que Gaza se tornou) ou à limpeza étnica. Numa palavra, o problema é o Sionismo.

Tem sido dito que o Sionismo é um anacronismo, uma ideologia de sobra da era dos nacionalismos românticos do século XIX apanhada na geopolítica do século XXI. Mas o Sionismo não está meramente ultrapassado. Ainda antes de 1948, uma das sua visões básicas (…) : a presença de palestinianos na Palestina. Isto levou alguns dos mais proeminente pensadores judeus do século passado, muitos deles sionistas, a apoiar a idea de um estado judeu. O movimento Brit Shalom – fundado em 1925 e apoiado várias vezes por Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt e Gershom Scholem – defendiam um estado secular e binacional na Palestina onde os judeus e árabes gozariam de um estatuto igual. As suas preocupações eram simultanemante morais e pragmáticas. O estabelecimento de um estado judeu, receava Buber, significaria “suicídio nacional premeditado.”

O destino que Buber previu está sobre nós: uma nação que viveu em estado de guerra desde há décadas, 250 000 árabes que vivem com um estatuto de segunda classe e mais de cinco milhões de palestinianos impedidos de ter mais os mais básicos direitos políticos e humanos. Se há duas décadas, a comparação com o regime do apartheid na África do Sul seria exageradas, hoje, são caridosas. O regime branco da África do Sul com todos os seus crimes, nunca atacou Bantustões com um poder tão destrutivo como o de Israel quando visitou Gaza em Dezembro e Janeiro, onde quase 1300 palestinianos foram mortos, um terço dos quais eram crianças.

As políticas de Israel tornaram a outrora realizável solução de dois estados, cada menos possível. Anos de construções de colonatos na Cisjordânia e Jerusalém Oriental, diminuíram metodicamente a viabilidade de um Estado Palestiniano. O novo primeiro-ministro de Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, chegou a recusar a ideia de um Estado Palestiniano independente o que sugere um futuro imediato de mais e mais colonatos e ataques punitivos.

Tudo isto levou a um revitalização da ideia de Brit Shalom, a ideia de um estado único, secular e binacional no qual judeus e áraves têm direitos políticos iguais. Evidentemente, os obstáculos são enormes. Incluem não apenas o apego israelita à ideia de um estado exclusivamente judeu mas a sua analogia palestiniana: o ideal do Hamas de regime islâmico. Ambos os lados teriam de ter a garantia de que a sua segurança estava a assegurada. Qual o modelo preciso que o estado devia tomar – um democracia estrita, voto por voto ou um sistema federal mais complexo – envolveriam anos de negociações difíceis, líderes mais sensatos que os actuais e um verdadeiro compromisso do resto do mundo, particularmente dos Estados Unidos.

Entretanto, a caracterzação do Sionismo como “epidemia” mais perigosa que o anti-Semitismo revela apenas a insustentabilidade da posição para a qual os apologistas de Israel foram forçados. Confrontados com a condenação internacional, procuram limitar o discurso, erguer muros que delineiam o que pode e o que não pode ser dito.

Não está a funcionar. Oposição ao Sionismo não é nem anti.semita nem particularmente radical. Requer apenas que levemos os nossos valores a sério, como o livro de Amos o fez, “torna justiça

It's not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, "turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground."

Estabelecer um governo democrático, pluralista e secular em Israel e na Palestina significaria o abandono do sonho Sionista e também a única salvação para os ideiais judeus de justiça que remontam a Jeremias.

Bem Ehrenreich é o autor do romance “The Suitor”.

fonte:The Independent