fonte:EI
Saturday, 17 October 2009
Friday, 16 October 2009
Presidente de Comissão da ONU sofreu ameaças de extremistas judeus
fonte:Somos Todos Palestinos
Ameaças israelenses:
Israel ameaçou não retomar as negociações com os palestinos se eles insistirem na reapresentação do relatório do juiz Richard Goldstone para votação no Conselho de Direitos Humanos da ONU.
A representante israelense na ONU, Gabriela Shalev, disse que "enquanto o relatório Goldstone ainda estiver sendo discutido e há citações de apoio a ele em todo lugar, mesmo em países que consideramos amigos, não seremos capazes de fazer qualquer progresso no processo de paz".
"Não sentaremos em uma mesa para conversar com frentes ou pessoas que nos acusam de cometer crimes de guerra, isso é inaceitável", acrescentou Shalev que descreveu o relatório de “parcial e distorcido” desclassificando os membros da comissão independente de investigação da ONU.
O juiz internacional, Richard Goldstone, que presidiu a Comissão da ONU para investigar possíveis crimes de guerra cometidos durante a ofensiva israelense na Faixa de Gaza, teria sofrido ameaças de morte de extremistas judeus da áfrica do sul e de Israel segundo denúncia feita pelo coronel irlandês Desmond Travers, um dos membros da mesma Comissão.
A investigação da Comissão independente da ONU resultou na elaboração do “Relatório Goldstone” que criticou duramente a ofensiva israelense contra Gaza e apontou diversos crimes de guerra e contra a humanidade cometidos pelo estado sionista contra a população palestina. O mesmo será apresentado novamente ao conselho de direitos humanos da ONU nessa sexta-feira com a possibilidade de que sejam tomadas recomendações mais práticas e rigorosas contra Israel.
O Coronel Travers afirmou, em entrevista realizada ao programa “sem fronteiras” da al-jazeera, que a filha do Juiz também foi vítima de ameaças “inadequadas” no Canadá; e descreveu as ações israelenses na Faixa de Gaza de "crimes sobre crimes sobre crimes."
Na entrevista Travers defendeu o direito da resistência palestina Hamas de defender a Faixa de Gaza independentemente de se tratar de uma autoridade legítima ou não, já que as resoluções da ONU prevêem o direito de qualquer população se defender da maneira que puder contra agressões e a ocupação de seus territórios.
Travers afirmou que a comissão entendeu que a destruição maciça infligida por Israel durante a guerra na Faixa de Gaza ao final do ano passado e o início desse ano, foi para punir os seus habitantes por terem votado para o Hamas nas eleições legislativas no início de 2006.
Ele disse que Gaza sofreu "danos significativos na sua infra-estrutura, resultando em graves problemas nos recursos de água e alimentos, e em uma crise ambiental que deve ser tratada de imediato pela comunidade internacional" para superar as suas repercussões negativas.
Travers criticou ainda o cerco "desumano” imposto por Israel à Faixa de Gaza por quase três anos, e garantiu que Israel “não conquistou nada” em suas guerras na Faixa de Gaza e no Líbano, pois essas só aumentaram a força do Hamas e do Hezbollah que se tornaram “mais fortes do que nunca”.
O membro da Comissão Internacional de Investigação da ONU desejou que “Israel reavalie sua política de segurança e os seus planos políticos... tomando medidas ousadas para a paz e não para a guerra".
A investigação da Comissão independente da ONU resultou na elaboração do “Relatório Goldstone” que criticou duramente a ofensiva israelense contra Gaza e apontou diversos crimes de guerra e contra a humanidade cometidos pelo estado sionista contra a população palestina. O mesmo será apresentado novamente ao conselho de direitos humanos da ONU nessa sexta-feira com a possibilidade de que sejam tomadas recomendações mais práticas e rigorosas contra Israel.
O Coronel Travers afirmou, em entrevista realizada ao programa “sem fronteiras” da al-jazeera, que a filha do Juiz também foi vítima de ameaças “inadequadas” no Canadá; e descreveu as ações israelenses na Faixa de Gaza de "crimes sobre crimes sobre crimes."
Na entrevista Travers defendeu o direito da resistência palestina Hamas de defender a Faixa de Gaza independentemente de se tratar de uma autoridade legítima ou não, já que as resoluções da ONU prevêem o direito de qualquer população se defender da maneira que puder contra agressões e a ocupação de seus territórios.
Travers afirmou que a comissão entendeu que a destruição maciça infligida por Israel durante a guerra na Faixa de Gaza ao final do ano passado e o início desse ano, foi para punir os seus habitantes por terem votado para o Hamas nas eleições legislativas no início de 2006.
Ele disse que Gaza sofreu "danos significativos na sua infra-estrutura, resultando em graves problemas nos recursos de água e alimentos, e em uma crise ambiental que deve ser tratada de imediato pela comunidade internacional" para superar as suas repercussões negativas.
Travers criticou ainda o cerco "desumano” imposto por Israel à Faixa de Gaza por quase três anos, e garantiu que Israel “não conquistou nada” em suas guerras na Faixa de Gaza e no Líbano, pois essas só aumentaram a força do Hamas e do Hezbollah que se tornaram “mais fortes do que nunca”.
O membro da Comissão Internacional de Investigação da ONU desejou que “Israel reavalie sua política de segurança e os seus planos políticos... tomando medidas ousadas para a paz e não para a guerra".
Ameaças israelenses:
Israel ameaçou não retomar as negociações com os palestinos se eles insistirem na reapresentação do relatório do juiz Richard Goldstone para votação no Conselho de Direitos Humanos da ONU.
A representante israelense na ONU, Gabriela Shalev, disse que "enquanto o relatório Goldstone ainda estiver sendo discutido e há citações de apoio a ele em todo lugar, mesmo em países que consideramos amigos, não seremos capazes de fazer qualquer progresso no processo de paz".
"Não sentaremos em uma mesa para conversar com frentes ou pessoas que nos acusam de cometer crimes de guerra, isso é inaceitável", acrescentou Shalev que descreveu o relatório de “parcial e distorcido” desclassificando os membros da comissão independente de investigação da ONU.
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Abandonar 'Mulheres e Crianças "
Abandonar 'Mulheres e Crianças "
Por Nadia Hijab (tradução equipa Todos Por Gaza)
O Conselho de Segurança das Nações Unidas acaba de aprovar uma resolução - Resolução do Conselho de Segurança da ONU 1888 - que fortifica a capacidade da comunidade internacional para combater a violência sexual em tempos de guerra. Crimes de violência sexual já foram incluídas no estatuto da fundação do Tribunal Penal Internacional e, como uma resolução anterior da ONU reafirmou, podem constituir crimes de guerra, crimes contra a humanidade, ou parte de um padrão de conduta genocidal.
O assunto certamente necessita a atenção do mundo. A violação, como arma de guerra, e o uso da violência sexual tem atingido níveis terríveis. Os autores visam „mulheres alvos“,especialmente para desestabilizar as comunidades durante e após a guerra. Meio milhão de mulheres foram violadas durante o genocídio do Ruanda e 60.000 nos conflitos dos Balcãs. Em Serra Leoa, 64.000 mulheres sofreram violência sexual relacionadas com a guerra. Hoje, nas províncias do leste da República Democrática do Congo, 1.100 violações por mês são registadas, violações essas cometidas quer pelas forças de segurança quer por grupos rebeldes. Como um diplomata E.U. observou: "É muito mais perigoso ser uma mulher do que ser um soldado."
A importância de tais resoluções não é apenas pôr termo à impunidade para que comete tais crimes, os quais são frequentemente varridos para debaixo do tapete durante as negociações que surgem após o conflito. Eles também desafiam os valores culturais entrincheirados e tradicionais que vêem a violência sexual como algo menos importante do que os outros crimes, até mesmo uma coisa que as mulheres "trazem em si mesmas."
Infelizmente, enquanto os ardorosos defensores dos direitos humanos das mulheres abordam um conjunto de práticas culturais inaceitáveis, eles reforçam outro. O texto de 1888 refere-se repetidamente as "mulheres e crianças", como fizeram outros relatórios sobre a nova resolução.
A frase "mulheres e crianças" é tão problemático em tempo de paz como é em tempo da guerra.
Em tempos de paz, esta frase reafirma uma visão patriarcal ainda prevalente em muitas partes do mundo - que as mulheres são tão indefesas como as crianças e que elas não podem funcionar sem a proteção e o apoio do sexo masculino. Esta frase problemática, muitas vezes utilizadas pelos bem-intencionados organizações de desenvolvimento, reforça a negligência do potencial das mulheres nos papéis económicos. Em vez de ser integrada na corrente económica, as mulheres são muitas vezes marginalizadas e colocadas no mercado das actividades irrelevantes, como por exemplo o artesanato e a costura.
Em tempo de guerra, a frase "mulheres e crianças" comunica três ideias: que os reais ou potenciais lutadores são todos homens, e não civis; que os homens não precisam de protecção; e que as mulheres não têm nenhuma agência ou capacidade de agir. Vale a pena examinar cada um desses pontos separadamente.
A propensão a tratar todos os homens como potenciais combatentes foi mais recentemente em exposição durante a ultima ataque israelita contra Gaza. Naquela época, a imprensa sempre subestimou o número de vítimas civis, centrando-se sobre o número de mulheres e crianças mortas. Na verdade, o número total de civis mortos, de acordo com organizações de direitos humanos é de 1.172 civis desarmados, dos quais mais da metade, 719, eram homens.
E os homens precisam de uma proteção também. A suposição de que eles são lutadores potenciais significa, por exemplo, que eles são mais frequentemente mortos à vista ou prisioneiros que enfrentam condições e um tratamento desumano. Nos países que ainda têm serviço militar obrigatório, os jovens podem ser brutalizados sem qualquer recurso ou defesa. Na Arménia, por exemplo, o exército era tão horrivel que alguns jovens escolhiam o suicídio em vez da recruta.
Finalmente, não só as mulheres têm a capacidade de agir, mas muitas das vezes são elas que permitem a sobrevivência de comunidades inteiras em caso de guerra ou de conflitos armados, como observam os especialistas. No entanto, as suas capacidades de acção económica, social e cultural, ainda tem de traduzir-se num papel consentâneo na contexto político.
A resolução 1888 é muito importante para tirar vantagem da agencia nas actividades das mulheres. A resolução destaca as áreas onde as mulheres são particularmente visadas em conflito para que estes ataques podem ser tratados apropriadamente como deve ser, pondo um fim à estado de impunidade. E isso reforça resoluções anteriores que tentavam assegurar uma representação equitativa das mulheres na pós-pacificação de conflitos, bem como nas operações de paz.
Mas este mudanca importante não deve esconder o facto que - para o bem das mulheres assim como os homens -, temos de parar de usar a frase "mulheres e crianças." Quando é necessário chamar a atenção para o facto de que muitas das visadas são as meninas abaixo de 18 - o fim formal da infância na Convenção Internacional sobre os Direitos da Criança ;em seguida, o orador ou escritor deveria simplesmente definir-la assim. Caso contrário, estamos lidando apenas com uma parte do problema; estamos a reinforcar a marginalização das mulheres nos processos de desenvolvimento, e estamos a privilegiar alguns direitos humanos sobre os outros.
fonte:Counterpunch
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Mais de 330 palestinos presos em Israel sem processo
fonte:Somos Todos Palestinos
Qua, 14 Out, 09h53
JERUSALÉM (AFP) - Mais de 330 palestinos estão detidos em Israel atualmente em violação à legislação internacional, denunciam duas organizações israelenses de defesa dos direitos humanos.
Dos 335 prisioneiros em "prisão administrativa", um é menor de idade e três são mulheres, segundo as ONGs B'Tselem e Hamoked. Um palestino está detido há quase cinco anos e 28 de dois a quatro anos.
"O uso extensivo da prisão administrativa viola a legislação internacional que só autoriza a mesma em poucos casos", afirmam as ONGs.
B'Tselem e Hamoked acusam o Exército de ter criado "uma aparência de procedimento judicial, já que em muitos casos os acusados não estão informados dos detalhes".
As ONGs destacam que entre agosto de 2008 e julho de 2009 os juízes militares aprovaram 95% das ordens de prisão, emitidas pelo comando militar em virtude de uma legislação de urgência herdeda do mandato britânico de antes de 1948, que segue em vigor em Israel e nos territórios ocupados.
No total, 8.000 palestinos estão detidos por atividades anti-israelenses, que vão desde integrar uma organização ilegal até envolvimento em atentados.
fonte: http://br.noticias.yahoo.com/s/afp/israel_palestinos_conflito_dh
JERUSALÉM (AFP) - Mais de 330 palestinos estão detidos em Israel atualmente em violação à legislação internacional, denunciam duas organizações israelenses de defesa dos direitos humanos.
Dos 335 prisioneiros em "prisão administrativa", um é menor de idade e três são mulheres, segundo as ONGs B'Tselem e Hamoked. Um palestino está detido há quase cinco anos e 28 de dois a quatro anos.
"O uso extensivo da prisão administrativa viola a legislação internacional que só autoriza a mesma em poucos casos", afirmam as ONGs.
B'Tselem e Hamoked acusam o Exército de ter criado "uma aparência de procedimento judicial, já que em muitos casos os acusados não estão informados dos detalhes".
As ONGs destacam que entre agosto de 2008 e julho de 2009 os juízes militares aprovaram 95% das ordens de prisão, emitidas pelo comando militar em virtude de uma legislação de urgência herdeda do mandato britânico de antes de 1948, que segue em vigor em Israel e nos territórios ocupados.
No total, 8.000 palestinos estão detidos por atividades anti-israelenses, que vão desde integrar uma organização ilegal até envolvimento em atentados.
fonte: http://br.noticias.yahoo.com/s/afp/israel_palestinos_conflito_dh
Do boicote a Bilin: Uma entrevista com Jonathan Cook
fonte:EI
From boycotts to Bilin: An interview with Jonathan Cook
Jeff Gore, The Electronic Intifada, 9 October 2009
Jonathan Cook is a British journalist based in Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city in Israel, whose work is regularly published by The Electronic Intifada. His latest book, Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair, was published by Zed Books last October. He recently sat with Jeff Gore to discuss his work and his analysis of the current situation on the ground.
Jeff Gore: How and when did you first become interested in the Middle East, specifically the issue of Israel/Palestine?
Jonathan Cook: It was a gradual process that took over a decade. I became interested in Arab culture during a backpacking trip to Morocco in my early 20s. Later I got my first, faint taste of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Oslo years when I crossed over from Jordan for a three-day visit to Jerusalem. While I was walking along the Old City walls, I was surprised to see a group of Israeli soldiers beating two young Palestinian boys, maybe 12 years old, for no apparent reason. It certainly disturbed me, although I can't say it greatly politicized me at the time -- like most tourists, I suppose, I put it to the back of my mind.
A vague interest in the Middle East solidified into a more obvious concern while I was working in the foreign department of the Guardian. I started to sense that the paper's coverage didn't seem to be giving the whole picture of what I was seeing on my travels. Assuming the fault lay with me, I then did a two-year, part-time MA in Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. By the end I felt even more strongly that the media were failing. I chose as the topic of my MA dissertation land problems faced by Israel's Palestinian citizens in the Galilee. It was during the research that I began to conclude that much could be understood about the regional conflict from Israel's approach towards its Palestinian minority. I was surprised no one else appeared to be reaching such a conclusion, at least not at that time. Eventually, in 2001, I decided to leave my job in London and move to Nazareth to write a book about Israel's treatment of the minority at the start of the second intifada. I expected to complete it in a year. It took five -- and I am still in Nazareth eight years after my arrival.
JG: On your website you state that "There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza." This is definitely true, but the occupation has persisted for long enough that it seems there would also be some noticeable differences. How does the outlook of a Palestinian citizen of Israel differ from that of a Palestinian living in the occupied territories?
JC: The "striking similarity" is in Israel's treatment of the Palestinians inside the areas it controls. It has sought to apply a very sophisticated form of divide and rule. From the outset inside Israel, Palestinian citizens were referred to not only as Arabs, to undermine their identity as Palestinians, but also as "the minorities." Israel's primary goal was to accentuate a series of subgroup identities -- Muslim, Christian, Bedouin, and Druze. The [Druze] were officially awarded the status of a separate nationality, with its own education system and requirement to serve in the army alongside Jews.
But even within these main categories there were further separations: between those in recognized communities and those in unrecognized communities; between those who were internal refugees, and had therefore lost all rights to their property, and those who weren't; between those who lived in the "mixed cities" and those in self-contained Arab communities; and between the main geographical areas: the Galilee, the Triangle and the Negev. On top of that, Israel has accentuated political differences, cultivating a series of splits between the main Arab parties to the point where even the Islamic party has two hostile wings.
The Palestinian minority inside Israel started to wake up belatedly to this game in the late 1990s, during the Oslo process, for a variety of complicated reasons set out in my book Blood and Religion. The result is a recent unprecedented reassertion of Palestinian identity as a way to circumvent these other crippling sub-identities. Nonetheless, it is an uphill struggle and far from won.
Interestingly, just as the Palestinians inside Israel realized they needed to create unity, the Palestinians in the occupied territories succumbed to Israel's divide-and-rule game. Israel used the Oslo process in particular to foster similar kinds of division, using the carve-up of the West Bank into a series of zones -- Areas A, B and C -- to interfere in Palestinian life in different ways. That process was taken a step further with the split both between the already-heavily divided West Bank and Gaza Strip and between Fatah and Hamas.
JG: Compared to the West Bank and Gaza, the occupied Golan Heights gets scant media attention. My guess is because there is far less "action" there. When I visited the Syrian village of Majd al-Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan, I encountered no checkpoints, saw street signs in Hebrew, and found that the Syrians enjoyed substantially more liberties there than the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza. The last substantial flare-up of Syrian anger in the occupied Golan was more than a quarter-century ago (the general strike of 1981) and the intifada still remains a distinctly Palestinian struggle. What do you think are the reasons for this relative quiet in the Golan?
JC: The main reason is that the Druze in the Golan, unlike the Palestinians in the occupied territories, are not struggling for national liberation -- they are waiting for the Syrians to negotiate their return. A Druze intifada would be pointless because the small Druze community in the Golan does not want to run its own affairs. In a way, the Golan Druze are in a very similar position to the Palestinians inside Israel. Both are in a sort of political limbo, awaiting direction from the larger national group to which they belong.
Also, it should be noted that the settlement drive has been a relative failure in the Golan, most of which is empty. The settlers are hardly visible and certainly not encroaching on the Golan Druze in the way settlers are in the West Bank.
JG: I was involved in a debate about the effectiveness of the weekly protests at Israel's barrier in the West Bank villages of Nilin and Bilin, which often result in airborne stones and teargas canisters. Supporters of the protests say that it is a symbol of the indomitable resistance of the Palestinians, a sign that they will not be quieted and that Israel will never be able to rest easy as long as it remains an illegal occupier. Yet its detractors say that it gives trigger-happy Israel soldiers the perfect excuse to shoot and kill, that they look forward to it every week as some sort of military game or target practice. What's your take on these protests?
JC: The media often represent this as a battle between young hot-headed Palestinian stone-throwers and over-excited Israeli soldiers. That's largely a fiction. On the Palestinian side are to be found a cross-section of the resisting community, including its leaders and many middle-aged villagers who have families to support. It takes a great deal of bravery to stand off regularly against heavily armed Israeli teenagers, a significant number of them Jewish religious fanatics raised to believe they are fighting a holy war and many of the others raised to believe that the "Arabs" are a primitive, barbaric people. It may be true that some of the soldiers enjoy getting the chance to use their weapons (isn't it always true of some soldiers?) but again I cannot see why that should determine whether it is a good idea for the Palestinians to stage the protests.
As for the question of effectiveness, the answer is that the protests have undoubtedly been successful. The naked violence that Israel is forced to unleash against the protesters, and the subsequent raids to arrest the protest organizers, indicate just how much of a concern they are to Israel. In the case of Bilin and elsewhere the protests have successfully led to a change in the route of the wall that has restored to the villages some of their desperately needed farm land. The protests are also an important way for ordinary Palestinians to feel they have some agency in the conflict, both against Israel and in forcing a different agenda on to their corrupt national leadership. In the tearing down of the wall between Gaza and Egypt, for example, ordinary Palestinians showed what a much more concerted campaign of civil disobedience could achieve. If Israel deepens its apartheid rule in the West Bank, such campaigns of civil resistance are almost certainly the face of the future.
JG: How important do you think the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is at this stage in the conflict?
JC: It is a hugely important development in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. Certainly I think its moment has arrived.
This is a Palestinian grassroots initiative that cannot be bought off by Israel in the way the Fatah leadership was bought off by Oslo. It empowers Palestinians by allowing them to set the scope and agenda of their struggle, such as by demanding that artists respect their call not to perform in Israel. It offers a practical way for people outside the region to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle by heeding that call and thinking creatively about how to implement BDS in their own countries. In the controversy and debate it generates it offers a chance to engage and educate those who are at the moment only vaguely aware that there might be problem here. And if BDS gains more momentum, it could really harm the Israeli economy. In fact, in my view there is no way to end the occupation unless Israelis are made to see that they will pay a heavy price for its continuance. The US could do that overnight by withdrawing its huge subsidies to Israel. I'm not holding my breath. Instead BDS gives all of us the power to show Israel that the occupation does not pay.
As for the issue of wider Palestinian support, it is still early days for BDS. In my experience, many ordinary Palestinians in the occupied territories and inside Israel are not yet sufficiently aware of the campaign or its potential importance. Some may also take some persuading that the outside world, which has aided and abetted their persecutors for so long, is capable of providing a solution. But my impression is that interest in and support for BDS among Palestinians is growing all the time.
JG: Since you live in Nazareth, you're in a rather unique position as a journalist sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. Considering that the Israeli government is not reluctant to arrest, censor, or deny entry to those fundamentally opposed to its policies, how have you survived professionally in Israel for so long?
JC: There are two reasons. First, I really am no threat to Israel, so why would it risk drawing attention to my work by making an example of me? Like other journalists whose reporting challenges the official consensus on Israel, I am excluded from the mainstream media. I write either on the Internet for Western readers who already know things are bad here (hopefully I can fill in some of the details they don't fully grasp) or for the Arab media, which most Westerners regard as unreliable. Early on it looked briefly as if I might break out of this ghetto. I started writing commentaries for The International Herald Tribune, a sort of globally syndicated version of The New York Times. Israel's lobby groups in the US moved into action very quickly, getting their foot soldiers to write complaints to the newspaper on a scale the paper had apparently never seen before (nor probably since). I was soon dropped. Israel really doesn't need to exert that kind of pressure itself: there are lots of organizations doing this stuff very successfully on its behalf.
The second reason is that I am married to an Israeli citizen, even if one from the Palestinian minority, and I therefore have Israeli residency. If Israel tried to bar me from the country, I would have a right of appeal to the courts. The law would almost certainly be on my side, mainly because I am a Westerner (it would be different were I a Palestinian or Arab) and because it would be difficult to show I posed any sort of security threat.
JG: Given that you've been covering this issue for nearly a decade and have written three books regarding Israel's policies, what advice can you give to freelance journalists interested in writing about this area of the world?
JC: Well, first of all you have to make a choice: are you going to report according to a ready-made script for the mainstream, or are you going to write it as you see it but struggle to get noticed or earn a living wage? Neither option is easy.
For those choosing the first path, the problem is that this is possibly the most reported conflict in the world. There are lots of journalists out here and most are very experienced, at least at writing the same safe reports designed not to offend either Israel or their news desks back home. Just getting your foot in the door is hard.
Anyone wishing to follow the second path better be resigned to staying on the margins of the media. There is rarely money in reporting critically about Israel. At least I was lucky that I could draw on savings I had accumulated while working at the Guardian. That's a luxury most aspiring young journalists don't have.
The third way is to abandon this traditional model of journalism and blog. There are still possibilities, though rapidly diminishing ones, to locate oneself in a West Bank community (though not in Gaza, because Israel controls all access) and send back eyewitness reports. You're not going to become Seymour Hersh or Robert Fisk, but you can still make a difference as a rare witness to what is going on.
Jeff Gore is a freelance journalist based in Athens, GA. He is a frequent contributor to the Athens weekly Flagpole Magazine and has also written articles for Dissident Voice and The Comment Factory. His journal of his summer spent in Palestine can be read at holylanddispatches.blogspot.com.
From boycotts to Bilin: An interview with Jonathan Cook
Jeff Gore, The Electronic Intifada, 9 October 2009
 |
| Jonathan Cook |
Jeff Gore: How and when did you first become interested in the Middle East, specifically the issue of Israel/Palestine?
Jonathan Cook: It was a gradual process that took over a decade. I became interested in Arab culture during a backpacking trip to Morocco in my early 20s. Later I got my first, faint taste of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Oslo years when I crossed over from Jordan for a three-day visit to Jerusalem. While I was walking along the Old City walls, I was surprised to see a group of Israeli soldiers beating two young Palestinian boys, maybe 12 years old, for no apparent reason. It certainly disturbed me, although I can't say it greatly politicized me at the time -- like most tourists, I suppose, I put it to the back of my mind.
A vague interest in the Middle East solidified into a more obvious concern while I was working in the foreign department of the Guardian. I started to sense that the paper's coverage didn't seem to be giving the whole picture of what I was seeing on my travels. Assuming the fault lay with me, I then did a two-year, part-time MA in Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. By the end I felt even more strongly that the media were failing. I chose as the topic of my MA dissertation land problems faced by Israel's Palestinian citizens in the Galilee. It was during the research that I began to conclude that much could be understood about the regional conflict from Israel's approach towards its Palestinian minority. I was surprised no one else appeared to be reaching such a conclusion, at least not at that time. Eventually, in 2001, I decided to leave my job in London and move to Nazareth to write a book about Israel's treatment of the minority at the start of the second intifada. I expected to complete it in a year. It took five -- and I am still in Nazareth eight years after my arrival.
JG: On your website you state that "There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza." This is definitely true, but the occupation has persisted for long enough that it seems there would also be some noticeable differences. How does the outlook of a Palestinian citizen of Israel differ from that of a Palestinian living in the occupied territories?
JC: The "striking similarity" is in Israel's treatment of the Palestinians inside the areas it controls. It has sought to apply a very sophisticated form of divide and rule. From the outset inside Israel, Palestinian citizens were referred to not only as Arabs, to undermine their identity as Palestinians, but also as "the minorities." Israel's primary goal was to accentuate a series of subgroup identities -- Muslim, Christian, Bedouin, and Druze. The [Druze] were officially awarded the status of a separate nationality, with its own education system and requirement to serve in the army alongside Jews.
But even within these main categories there were further separations: between those in recognized communities and those in unrecognized communities; between those who were internal refugees, and had therefore lost all rights to their property, and those who weren't; between those who lived in the "mixed cities" and those in self-contained Arab communities; and between the main geographical areas: the Galilee, the Triangle and the Negev. On top of that, Israel has accentuated political differences, cultivating a series of splits between the main Arab parties to the point where even the Islamic party has two hostile wings.
The Palestinian minority inside Israel started to wake up belatedly to this game in the late 1990s, during the Oslo process, for a variety of complicated reasons set out in my book Blood and Religion. The result is a recent unprecedented reassertion of Palestinian identity as a way to circumvent these other crippling sub-identities. Nonetheless, it is an uphill struggle and far from won.
Interestingly, just as the Palestinians inside Israel realized they needed to create unity, the Palestinians in the occupied territories succumbed to Israel's divide-and-rule game. Israel used the Oslo process in particular to foster similar kinds of division, using the carve-up of the West Bank into a series of zones -- Areas A, B and C -- to interfere in Palestinian life in different ways. That process was taken a step further with the split both between the already-heavily divided West Bank and Gaza Strip and between Fatah and Hamas.
JG: Compared to the West Bank and Gaza, the occupied Golan Heights gets scant media attention. My guess is because there is far less "action" there. When I visited the Syrian village of Majd al-Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan, I encountered no checkpoints, saw street signs in Hebrew, and found that the Syrians enjoyed substantially more liberties there than the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza. The last substantial flare-up of Syrian anger in the occupied Golan was more than a quarter-century ago (the general strike of 1981) and the intifada still remains a distinctly Palestinian struggle. What do you think are the reasons for this relative quiet in the Golan?
JC: The main reason is that the Druze in the Golan, unlike the Palestinians in the occupied territories, are not struggling for national liberation -- they are waiting for the Syrians to negotiate their return. A Druze intifada would be pointless because the small Druze community in the Golan does not want to run its own affairs. In a way, the Golan Druze are in a very similar position to the Palestinians inside Israel. Both are in a sort of political limbo, awaiting direction from the larger national group to which they belong.
Also, it should be noted that the settlement drive has been a relative failure in the Golan, most of which is empty. The settlers are hardly visible and certainly not encroaching on the Golan Druze in the way settlers are in the West Bank.
JG: I was involved in a debate about the effectiveness of the weekly protests at Israel's barrier in the West Bank villages of Nilin and Bilin, which often result in airborne stones and teargas canisters. Supporters of the protests say that it is a symbol of the indomitable resistance of the Palestinians, a sign that they will not be quieted and that Israel will never be able to rest easy as long as it remains an illegal occupier. Yet its detractors say that it gives trigger-happy Israel soldiers the perfect excuse to shoot and kill, that they look forward to it every week as some sort of military game or target practice. What's your take on these protests?
JC: The media often represent this as a battle between young hot-headed Palestinian stone-throwers and over-excited Israeli soldiers. That's largely a fiction. On the Palestinian side are to be found a cross-section of the resisting community, including its leaders and many middle-aged villagers who have families to support. It takes a great deal of bravery to stand off regularly against heavily armed Israeli teenagers, a significant number of them Jewish religious fanatics raised to believe they are fighting a holy war and many of the others raised to believe that the "Arabs" are a primitive, barbaric people. It may be true that some of the soldiers enjoy getting the chance to use their weapons (isn't it always true of some soldiers?) but again I cannot see why that should determine whether it is a good idea for the Palestinians to stage the protests.
As for the question of effectiveness, the answer is that the protests have undoubtedly been successful. The naked violence that Israel is forced to unleash against the protesters, and the subsequent raids to arrest the protest organizers, indicate just how much of a concern they are to Israel. In the case of Bilin and elsewhere the protests have successfully led to a change in the route of the wall that has restored to the villages some of their desperately needed farm land. The protests are also an important way for ordinary Palestinians to feel they have some agency in the conflict, both against Israel and in forcing a different agenda on to their corrupt national leadership. In the tearing down of the wall between Gaza and Egypt, for example, ordinary Palestinians showed what a much more concerted campaign of civil disobedience could achieve. If Israel deepens its apartheid rule in the West Bank, such campaigns of civil resistance are almost certainly the face of the future.
JG: How important do you think the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is at this stage in the conflict?
JC: It is a hugely important development in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. Certainly I think its moment has arrived.
This is a Palestinian grassroots initiative that cannot be bought off by Israel in the way the Fatah leadership was bought off by Oslo. It empowers Palestinians by allowing them to set the scope and agenda of their struggle, such as by demanding that artists respect their call not to perform in Israel. It offers a practical way for people outside the region to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle by heeding that call and thinking creatively about how to implement BDS in their own countries. In the controversy and debate it generates it offers a chance to engage and educate those who are at the moment only vaguely aware that there might be problem here. And if BDS gains more momentum, it could really harm the Israeli economy. In fact, in my view there is no way to end the occupation unless Israelis are made to see that they will pay a heavy price for its continuance. The US could do that overnight by withdrawing its huge subsidies to Israel. I'm not holding my breath. Instead BDS gives all of us the power to show Israel that the occupation does not pay.
As for the issue of wider Palestinian support, it is still early days for BDS. In my experience, many ordinary Palestinians in the occupied territories and inside Israel are not yet sufficiently aware of the campaign or its potential importance. Some may also take some persuading that the outside world, which has aided and abetted their persecutors for so long, is capable of providing a solution. But my impression is that interest in and support for BDS among Palestinians is growing all the time.
JG: Since you live in Nazareth, you're in a rather unique position as a journalist sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. Considering that the Israeli government is not reluctant to arrest, censor, or deny entry to those fundamentally opposed to its policies, how have you survived professionally in Israel for so long?
JC: There are two reasons. First, I really am no threat to Israel, so why would it risk drawing attention to my work by making an example of me? Like other journalists whose reporting challenges the official consensus on Israel, I am excluded from the mainstream media. I write either on the Internet for Western readers who already know things are bad here (hopefully I can fill in some of the details they don't fully grasp) or for the Arab media, which most Westerners regard as unreliable. Early on it looked briefly as if I might break out of this ghetto. I started writing commentaries for The International Herald Tribune, a sort of globally syndicated version of The New York Times. Israel's lobby groups in the US moved into action very quickly, getting their foot soldiers to write complaints to the newspaper on a scale the paper had apparently never seen before (nor probably since). I was soon dropped. Israel really doesn't need to exert that kind of pressure itself: there are lots of organizations doing this stuff very successfully on its behalf.
The second reason is that I am married to an Israeli citizen, even if one from the Palestinian minority, and I therefore have Israeli residency. If Israel tried to bar me from the country, I would have a right of appeal to the courts. The law would almost certainly be on my side, mainly because I am a Westerner (it would be different were I a Palestinian or Arab) and because it would be difficult to show I posed any sort of security threat.
JG: Given that you've been covering this issue for nearly a decade and have written three books regarding Israel's policies, what advice can you give to freelance journalists interested in writing about this area of the world?
JC: Well, first of all you have to make a choice: are you going to report according to a ready-made script for the mainstream, or are you going to write it as you see it but struggle to get noticed or earn a living wage? Neither option is easy.
For those choosing the first path, the problem is that this is possibly the most reported conflict in the world. There are lots of journalists out here and most are very experienced, at least at writing the same safe reports designed not to offend either Israel or their news desks back home. Just getting your foot in the door is hard.
Anyone wishing to follow the second path better be resigned to staying on the margins of the media. There is rarely money in reporting critically about Israel. At least I was lucky that I could draw on savings I had accumulated while working at the Guardian. That's a luxury most aspiring young journalists don't have.
The third way is to abandon this traditional model of journalism and blog. There are still possibilities, though rapidly diminishing ones, to locate oneself in a West Bank community (though not in Gaza, because Israel controls all access) and send back eyewitness reports. You're not going to become Seymour Hersh or Robert Fisk, but you can still make a difference as a rare witness to what is going on.
Jeff Gore is a freelance journalist based in Athens, GA. He is a frequent contributor to the Athens weekly Flagpole Magazine and has also written articles for Dissident Voice and The Comment Factory. His journal of his summer spent in Palestine can be read at holylanddispatches.blogspot.com.
Sionismo: o beco do opressor
fonte: Dissident Voice
Zionism: The Dead End of the Oppressor
Review of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews
by Kim Petersen / October 13th, 2009Zionism is the ideology that dispossessed the Palestinians of their traditional territory. It is the ideology that nuclearized the Middle East. It is the ideology whose lobby gained inordinate sway over the world superpower through manipulating the US electoral process (former BBC and ITN correspondent Alan Hart says Jewish Americans account for three percent or less of the US population but nearly 50 percent of campaign funds; result: Americans have a choice between two pro-Zionist parties). It is the ideology that foments instability and wars in the Middle East. Perhaps, most importantly, Zionism is an ideology that attacks the heart and soul of justice and humanity. It is an attack that, on some level, affects all people. That is why Zionism must be met head on: to institute genuine justice and restore the humanity of all peoples.
Hart has the credentials to tackle the subject of Zionism (specifically, political Zionism: that a certain collection of non-native people has a, purportedly, God-given right to a particular piece of real estate that overrides the rights of Indigenous Palestinians) having worked for over three decades covering history unfolding in the Middle East. Much of his experience is first hand. The False Messiah is volume one of, what is planned to be, a three or four volume series Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.
Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews
Volume One: The False Messiah
By Alan Hart
Paperback: 645 pages
Publisher: Clarity Press (2009)
ISBN-10: 0932863647
ISBN-13: 9780932863645
Disseminating information that challenges the immensely influential Zionist bloc is difficult. Hart wrote, “… all in the UK were too frightened to publish this book out of fear of offending Zionism too much and being falsely accused of promoting anti-Semitism.” Here Hart exposes the absurd inversion of morality at play: Zionists accuse defenders of Palestinian human rights as being racist against the abuser of Palestinian human rights!
Hart identifies it as a smear tactic and a phony one since Arabs are Semites.
That the morality of Zionism is challengeable was keenly illustrated by an exchange between Hart and erstwhile Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Hart queried Meir on-air: “You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and even the whole world down with it?”
Meir’s prompt response: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
How do Zionists get away with crimes against humanity? Hart points to the suffering Zionists experienced in the WWII Holocaust. To this an obvious question arises: does victimization give the victims the right to victimize another people?
Paulo Freire in his opus Pedagogy of the Oppressed warned that oppression creates a recycling dynamic that dehumanizes not only the oppressed people but also the oppressor. Hart touches on this dynamic.
Zionism and Judaism
Hart has to cover a lot of ground.
He points out that Zionism is not Judaism. Hart describes Zionism as “brutal and cruel [behaviors], driven by self-righteousness of an extraordinary kind, without regard for international law and human rights conventions” which “makes a mockery of the moral values and ethical values of Judaism.”
Hart does not delve deeply into these moral and ethical values of Judaism, but he leaves this reader with the impression that Judaism is an principled faith. However, the laws and morality underlying many religions are often interpreted variously. The late Israel Shahak, a chemistry professor and social justice activist, in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years rued that classical Judaism had been subverted toward profit and Jewish supremacism. I submit that much as no people should be seen as a monolith neither should a religion be regarded as a monolith.
The Legitimacy of a Jewish Claim to the Holy Land
Hart reasons that there is no legitimacy to Israel’s claim to a “right to exist.” Moreover, the Jewish claim to the Holy Land does not hold up under scrutiny.
The bloodlines of the majority of Israeli Jews do not tie them with the Holy Land. Ashkenazim stem from eastern and central Europe and are converts to Judaism. Hart cites the work of Joseph Reinach, Alfred Lilienthal, Arthur Koestler, and Shlomo Sand in outlining this case. The refutation of Jewishness as an ethnicity is important because, quoting Sand, “…it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews” that allows Zionists to claim Israel as a Jewish state.
Furthermore, writes Hart, the Mizrahim (Semitic Jews indigenous to the Middle East) were strongly opposed to Zionism.
Hart focuses on two different sets of Jews: Haskala Jews who sought to make the place they lived their home and Zionist Jews who strive to separate Jews and Gentiles. Haskala Jews see themselves threatened by a backlash to crimes committed by Zionist Jews.
Early Zionism
Hart paints a picture of early Zionist history and the roles of early Zionist figures such as Zionism’s “founding father,” Theodr Herzl, key lobbyist, Chaim Weizmann, and the financier of Zionism, Lionel de Rothschild.
Hart details the collaboration of Britain with the Zionists from Arthur Balfour whose letter provided a pretext to dispossess Arabs. The chicanery was such that Britain reneged on its promise to recognize the sovereignty of its WWI Arab allies. Britain, writes Hart, laid the foundations for a Zionist takeover: “Without the British presence Zionism could not have entrenched itself in Palestine. On their own the Palestinians could have pushed the Zionists out.”
Britain went so far as to declare war on the Palestinians and assassinate Palestinian leaders.
All along the way, Zionist Jews were opposed by Haskala Jews who, as history shows, always lost out. After WWII, the Holocaust card was effective at backing down Haskala Jews.
Yet, Zionism has also flourished among Jews living abroad. Citing humanist Lilienthal: the migrating Jews carried a “nation complex” within them. According to Hart, this “made many of them susceptible to Zionism’s nationalist propaganda.”
Later, Zionists such as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Vladimir Jabotinsky would terrorize the British out of Mandate Palestine. Hart sources Ralph Schoenman on the Koening Memorandum that made transparent the Zionists’s plans for terrorism against Palestinians: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”
Israel today, Hart notes, defines legitimate Palestinian resistance as terrorism. The author holds, “… all peoples have the right to use all means including violence to resist occupation.”
The US and Zionism
As Imperial Britain headed into decline, Imperial USA was ascending. The US would have a greater role in the Middle East.
Hart lauds US president Woodrow Wilson, “a real, towering statesman, a true giant among men.” Woodrow was apparently hamstrung on Palestine by his lobbying for the League of Nations. Hart blames “Imperial Britain-and-Zionism and their allies in [the US] Congress and the media; with … France” for screwing Wilson on Palestine.
Hart presents many “what if” scenarios. For example, he quotes British official John Hope Simpson: “Had the Jewish authorities been content with the original object of settlement in Palestine – a Jewish life without oppression and persecution in accordance with Jewish customs – the national home would have presented no difficulty.”
Or what if president Franklin Roosevelt had not died when he did? Hart speculates that Roosevelt would have rejected a Jewish state in Palestine.
Hart identifies influential Zionist agents in the White House, among others, David K. Niles. Although Truman is depicted as a president who grappled with the Zionist lobby, he had an vulnerability exploitable by Zionists.
Biting the Hand that Feeds
Ends would justify the means for Zionists. Even though Britain had set the stage for Jewish immigration to Palestine, even though Britain was at war with Nazi Germany — Zionists sought out a possible collaboration with Britain’s wartime enemy and an enemy to Jews. Hart sources Marxist writer Lenni Brenner who disclosed the Zionist negotiations with Nazi Germany. Zionists were dedicated to thwarting Jewish immigration to elsewhere than Palestine and to even sacrifice Jewish lives to realize the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine.
And it was Jewish terrorism that forced Britain out of Palestine.
Zionism and Terrorism
The Zionist plan was to drive the British out, then drive the Palestinians out. Hart relates the strategy of the man who would become Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, for keeping all the land: creating facts-on-the-ground. The problem with this strategy is that if old facts-on-the-ground can be erased to establish new ones, what is to stop new facts-on-the-ground from being created again?
The methods for creating these facts-on-the-ground were incredibly gruesome. The massacre at Deir Yassin is a historical testament to Zionist war crimes – “in its own tiny way it was another holocaust.” The village was a “soft and easy target”; “the butchers of Deir Yassin” killed 254 victims, mainly the elderly, women, and children. One-hundred-and-forty-five women were killed, 35 of them pregnant. Many were raped before being killed.
Hart quotes Mordechai Nisan of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: “Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was.” [emphasis added by Hart]
Abdul Khader, portrayed as a respected Palestinian resistance leader, died the day after the Deir Yassin Massacre. Gloom set in on the Palestinian side. Deir Yassin had its intended effect, sowing fear in the hearts of Palestinians, and the expulsion was underway.
Arab and International Complicity with Zionism
The Palestinians did not just have to deal with British treachery, they “were at the mercy of the Arab League” who at British insistence kept the Palestinians unarmed, much as the illegal sealing of Gaza’s borders today and control of the West Bank borders keeps Palestinians unarmed under brutal occupation and creeping dispossession.
Hart wonders: what if the Arab regimes of the time had sought an alliance with Stalin to defeat Zionism? He speculates that Truman might have had to stand up to Zionism.
Hart points out that the United Nations General Assembly, in defiance of its own charter which calls for respect for the principle of self-determination, would, aided by Zionist manipulation (disinformation, bribery, threats), decree an illegal partition of Mandate Palestine. Not only was the partition illegal, he argues, it was also unfair. Jews would receive 56.4 percent of the land while being 33 percent of the population and owning only 5.67 percent of the land. The valuable coastal and fertile areas were in Jewish hands while mountainous, infertile areas were left to the Palestinians. Hart calls it “a proposal for injustice on a massive scale.”
In the end, Truman capitulated to Zionism and recognized the partition. Truman had been subjected to “a political hit-squad of 26 pro-Zionist U.S. Senators” beholden to Jewish votes and money.
Truman’s secretary of state George Marshall resisted Zionism, putting “America’s national interests first and, to the limit of the possible within that context, doing what was legally and morally right.” Joining Marshall in opposition was US secretary of defense James Vincent Forrestal who might have been the most steadfast opponent of the corrupting influence of Jewish money on the Democratic Party had he not, according to Hart, died under suspicious circumstances. Nonetheless, the Zionists had access to a more influential actor on Truman.
Hart takes a sympathetic slant toward Truman, noting he had kept the Zionist lobby at bay until it discovered his Achilles heel: his good friend Eddie Jacobson, a non-Zionist Jew. Through Jacobson, Zionists could reach Truman.
It appears that Truman, although much irked by the selfishness of the Zionist lobby, bore much of the responsibility for opening the door to the influence of money from lobbyists. Grant F. Smith in his book America’s Defense Line supports this view: “The historical record reveals how Truman’s policy on the Palestine question became heavily influenced by his need for campaign contributions…” Smith credits Truman with starting a “competition to see who was more ‘pro-Israel’” among US presidential candidates. Smith presents evidence that Truman was swayed by “massive funds” for his 1948 presidential campaign raised with the help of arch-Zionist Abraham J. Feinberg.
The Brazilian pedagogue Freire theoretically described — without referring to it –what underlies the Zionist-Palestinian dynamic: that of the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire argued that oppression and the struggle of liberation from oppression are both oppressing. Oppression, he contends, is necrophilic. “Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation that oppresses them.’”
To overcome the oppressor-oppressed dynamic, the oppressed must see themselves as agents of change. Revolution requires solidarity, and this, said Freire, is achieved through love — affirmation of one’s humanity. The act of rebellion by the oppressed is gesture of love. The desire to be human saves oppressors from their own dehumanization caused by oppressing other humans.
“It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors,” wrote Freire.
Many Haskala Jews believe that liberation for all Jews will come from Palestinians achieving their liberation.
This looks like the direction Hart is heading with his Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews series. Volume One: The False Messiah is an important reference on what has transpired in the lead up to and formation of the Jewish State by Zionists. He brings valuable first-hand perspective, such as what lay behind Meir’s statement that there were no Palestinian people.
Hart gives a human face to some of the historical protagonists, portraying them not merely as actors but delving into the character of the persons. It is as if Hart seeks to humanize some of the persons who capitulated to Zionism.
However, there is no reason that evil should always appear in the guise of a demon. Humans come in all shades. Evil acts are evil despite the appearance of the evil-doer. Yes, it is probably much easier to perpetrate evil acts in cherubic rather that demonic guise, but why play to such stereotypes?
Hart’s book is a good act, a brave act for someone from British state media. He says he has to live with himself, and it is obvious this book comes from a place of integrity. Volume One: The False Messiah augurs well for the rest of the series.
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Canadá é mais pró-Israel que os E.U.?
fonte:EI
Is Canada more pro-Israel than the US?
Yves Engler, The Electronic Intifada, 12 October 2009
In June, Israel began barring some North Americans with Palestinian-sounding names entry through Ben Gurion Airport. Forced to reroute through a land-border crossing that connects the West Bank with Jordan, their passports were stamped "Palestinian Authority only," which prevents them from entering Israel proper.
The Obama Administration objected to the move by Israel that discriminates against American citizens of Palestinian origin. However, there has been no protest from Ottawa even though Time magazine and the Israeli daily Haaretz ran lengthy articles focusing on Palestinian Canadian businessmen harmed by this new policy. A few weeks ago the Globe and Mail reported that "Although some of the most high-profile cases of individuals being turned away involve Canadian citizens, the Harper government has, so far, made no protest."
This silence bolsters claims by some commentators that under Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government, Canada has become (at least diplomatically) the most pro-Israel country in the world. Israeli officials concur. After meeting Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister, four other Conservative ministers and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in July 2009, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has openly called for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel, commented:
"It's hard to find a country friendlier to Israel than Canada these days. Members both of the coalition and the opposition are loyal friends to us, both with regard to their worldview and their estimation of the situation in everything related to the Middle East, North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Somalia. No other country in the world has demonstrated such full understanding of us."
Two days after Harper won a minority government in January 2006, Hamas won Canadian-monitored and facilitated legislative elections. Quickly after assuming power Harper made Canada the first country (after Israel) to cut its assistance to the Palestinian Authority. The aid cutoff, which was designed to sow division within Palestinian society, had devastating social effects.
Ostensibly the aid cutoff was due to Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel. Yet, Canada has not severed relations with Likud-led Israeli governments, which do not recognize the Palestinians' right to a state. Harper explained that "Future assistance to any new Palestinian government will be reviewed against that government's commitment to the principles of nonviolence, recognition of Israel and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations." But support for Israel was never made contingent on "nonviolence" or an end to settlement construction.
In March 2007, Palestinian political factions representing more than 90 percent of the Palestinian Legislative Council established a unity government. Still, the Conservatives shunned the new government all the while claiming to speak regularly (like the Israelis) with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. When the unity government's Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti traveled to Ottawa on a global peace tour, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay refused to meet him. Barghouti, who represents a secular party, explained at the time that "I think the Canadian government is the only government that is taking such a position, except for Israel." Barghouti had already met the foreign ministers of Sweden and Norway, the secretary-general of the United Nations and then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
However, once Hamas officials were ousted from the Palestinian Authority (PA), Ottawa restarted diplomatic relations and financial support. "The Government of Canada welcomes the leadership of President Abbas and Prime Minister [Salam] Fayyad in establishing a government that Canada and the rest of the international community can work with," explained MacKay after the unity government's collapse in mid-2007 and the appointment of a new government in Ramallah. "In light of the new Palestinian government's commitment to nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, and in recognition of the opportunity for a renewal of peace efforts, Canada will provide assistance to the new Palestinian government."
With Palestinian society divided and a more compliant authority in control of the West Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency contributed $8 million "in direct support to the new government." Part of this aid was directed towards creating a Palestinian police force "to ensure that the PA maintains control of the West Bank against Hamas," as Canadian ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was quoted by the Canadian Jewish News. US Lt. General Keith Dayton, in charge of organizing the Palestinian force, never admitted that he was strengthening Fatah against Hamas but to justify his program Dayton argued that Iran and Syria funded and armed Hamas. Bolstering Fatah to counteract the growing strength of Hamas was the impetus for Dayton's mission. However, the broader aim is to build a force to patrol Israel's occupation, a fact Dayton does little to dispel.
In January 2007, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay offered an immediate $1.2 million for Dayton's mission. A fifth of Dayton's initial staff was comprised of Canadians and during a press conference with MacKay in Jerusalem Condoleezza Rice said Dayton "has a Canadian counterpart with whom he works very closely." Two years later Dayton's military training force in the West Bank reportedly included nine Canadians, 16 Americans, three Brits and one Turk.
In June 2008, a Harper government press release announced that "Canada is a strong supporter of Palestinian security system reform, particularly through our contribution to the mission of Lt. General Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator, and to the European Union Police Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support."
Canada's contribution to the Dayton mission was part of a $300 million "aid" package that began in December 2007. According to the government agency Public Safety Canada, "a significant component [of the $300 million will be] devoted to security, including policing and public order capacity-building. This five year commitment will go towards the creation of a democratic, accountable, and viable Palestinian state that lives in peace and security alongside Israel."
But does anything close to a "viable Palestinian state" exist? Is Israel allowing it to be created? Growing Jewish-only settlements, Israeli bypass roads and the apartheid barrier all make a Palestinian state far from realistic in the short to medium term. Yet Canadian officials act as if Israel is working toward a Palestinian state.
In Gaza, Israel's occupation has turned into a blockade. For 27 months, Israel has reduced food and medicine from entering the tiny coastal territory to a fraction of what is needed by the besieged population. Yet, the Harper government has refused any criticism of the siege. Canada was the only country at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to vote against a January 2008 resolution that called for "urgent international action to put an immediate end to Israel's siege of Gaza." It was adopted by 30 votes with 15 abstentions.
Instead, the Conservative government has been quick to congratulate Israel for any small pause in its blockade. In January 2009 International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda proclaimed that "We commend Israel's decision to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance [to Gaza] through a temporary ceasefire." A day after Oda's announcement, Israeli forces fired on a UN convoy during a ceasefire, killing a Palestinian aid worker. There was no follow-up statement from Oda condemning Israel's actions.
Compared to Ottawa's cheerleading most of the world was hostile to Israel's attacks on Gaza last winter. In solidarity with Gaza, Venezuela expelled Israel's ambassador at the start of the bombardment and then broke off all diplomatic relations two weeks later. Israel didn't need to worry since Ottawa was prepared to help out. "Israel's interests in Caracas will now be represented by the Canadian Embassy," explained The Jerusalem Post (Ottawa had been "doing this for Israel in Cuba" since 1973). In August 2009, the Canadian embassy in Caracas also began providing visas to Venezuelans traveling to Israel.
For defining Canadian policy as "we support Israel no matter what it does," B'Nai Brith International bestowed Harper with its Presidential Gold Medallion for Humanitarianism. The first ever Canadian to receive the award, Harper joined former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, and US Presidents John F. Kennedy and Harry S. Truman. For its part, the Canadian Jewish Congress gave Harper its "prestigious Saul Hayes Human Rights award, named for a former CJC executive director, the first time it's been given to a sitting PM."
Despite the government's strident support for Israel, grassroots opposition to that country's policy has never been greater. Recent protests against the Toronto International Film Festival's spotlight on Tel Aviv were a major setback to Israeli public relations efforts. The festival embarrassment followed massive demonstrations against Israel's assault on Gaza, when many cities across the country witnessed their largest ever Palestinian solidarity demonstrations.
Alongside displays of opposition to specific Israeli policy, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is growing. Many social groups such as Independent Jewish Voices and Quebec's most active student Federation, ASSE, have joined the BDS movement, as have a number of unions, including the Canadian Union of Public Employees (Ontario), the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the teachers Federation in Quebec. Social movements in Canada have never been more critical of Israel.
Yves Engler is the author of the recently released The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy and other books. The book is available at http://blackbook.foreignpolicy.ca/.
Is Canada more pro-Israel than the US?
Yves Engler, The Electronic Intifada, 12 October 2009
 |
| Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in New York City, September 2007. (MaanImages/POOL/Omar Rashidi) |
In June, Israel began barring some North Americans with Palestinian-sounding names entry through Ben Gurion Airport. Forced to reroute through a land-border crossing that connects the West Bank with Jordan, their passports were stamped "Palestinian Authority only," which prevents them from entering Israel proper.
The Obama Administration objected to the move by Israel that discriminates against American citizens of Palestinian origin. However, there has been no protest from Ottawa even though Time magazine and the Israeli daily Haaretz ran lengthy articles focusing on Palestinian Canadian businessmen harmed by this new policy. A few weeks ago the Globe and Mail reported that "Although some of the most high-profile cases of individuals being turned away involve Canadian citizens, the Harper government has, so far, made no protest."
This silence bolsters claims by some commentators that under Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government, Canada has become (at least diplomatically) the most pro-Israel country in the world. Israeli officials concur. After meeting Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister, four other Conservative ministers and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in July 2009, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has openly called for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel, commented:
"It's hard to find a country friendlier to Israel than Canada these days. Members both of the coalition and the opposition are loyal friends to us, both with regard to their worldview and their estimation of the situation in everything related to the Middle East, North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Somalia. No other country in the world has demonstrated such full understanding of us."
Two days after Harper won a minority government in January 2006, Hamas won Canadian-monitored and facilitated legislative elections. Quickly after assuming power Harper made Canada the first country (after Israel) to cut its assistance to the Palestinian Authority. The aid cutoff, which was designed to sow division within Palestinian society, had devastating social effects.
Ostensibly the aid cutoff was due to Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel. Yet, Canada has not severed relations with Likud-led Israeli governments, which do not recognize the Palestinians' right to a state. Harper explained that "Future assistance to any new Palestinian government will be reviewed against that government's commitment to the principles of nonviolence, recognition of Israel and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations." But support for Israel was never made contingent on "nonviolence" or an end to settlement construction.
In March 2007, Palestinian political factions representing more than 90 percent of the Palestinian Legislative Council established a unity government. Still, the Conservatives shunned the new government all the while claiming to speak regularly (like the Israelis) with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. When the unity government's Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti traveled to Ottawa on a global peace tour, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay refused to meet him. Barghouti, who represents a secular party, explained at the time that "I think the Canadian government is the only government that is taking such a position, except for Israel." Barghouti had already met the foreign ministers of Sweden and Norway, the secretary-general of the United Nations and then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
However, once Hamas officials were ousted from the Palestinian Authority (PA), Ottawa restarted diplomatic relations and financial support. "The Government of Canada welcomes the leadership of President Abbas and Prime Minister [Salam] Fayyad in establishing a government that Canada and the rest of the international community can work with," explained MacKay after the unity government's collapse in mid-2007 and the appointment of a new government in Ramallah. "In light of the new Palestinian government's commitment to nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, and in recognition of the opportunity for a renewal of peace efforts, Canada will provide assistance to the new Palestinian government."
With Palestinian society divided and a more compliant authority in control of the West Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency contributed $8 million "in direct support to the new government." Part of this aid was directed towards creating a Palestinian police force "to ensure that the PA maintains control of the West Bank against Hamas," as Canadian ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was quoted by the Canadian Jewish News. US Lt. General Keith Dayton, in charge of organizing the Palestinian force, never admitted that he was strengthening Fatah against Hamas but to justify his program Dayton argued that Iran and Syria funded and armed Hamas. Bolstering Fatah to counteract the growing strength of Hamas was the impetus for Dayton's mission. However, the broader aim is to build a force to patrol Israel's occupation, a fact Dayton does little to dispel.
In January 2007, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay offered an immediate $1.2 million for Dayton's mission. A fifth of Dayton's initial staff was comprised of Canadians and during a press conference with MacKay in Jerusalem Condoleezza Rice said Dayton "has a Canadian counterpart with whom he works very closely." Two years later Dayton's military training force in the West Bank reportedly included nine Canadians, 16 Americans, three Brits and one Turk.
In June 2008, a Harper government press release announced that "Canada is a strong supporter of Palestinian security system reform, particularly through our contribution to the mission of Lt. General Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator, and to the European Union Police Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support."
Canada's contribution to the Dayton mission was part of a $300 million "aid" package that began in December 2007. According to the government agency Public Safety Canada, "a significant component [of the $300 million will be] devoted to security, including policing and public order capacity-building. This five year commitment will go towards the creation of a democratic, accountable, and viable Palestinian state that lives in peace and security alongside Israel."
But does anything close to a "viable Palestinian state" exist? Is Israel allowing it to be created? Growing Jewish-only settlements, Israeli bypass roads and the apartheid barrier all make a Palestinian state far from realistic in the short to medium term. Yet Canadian officials act as if Israel is working toward a Palestinian state.
In Gaza, Israel's occupation has turned into a blockade. For 27 months, Israel has reduced food and medicine from entering the tiny coastal territory to a fraction of what is needed by the besieged population. Yet, the Harper government has refused any criticism of the siege. Canada was the only country at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to vote against a January 2008 resolution that called for "urgent international action to put an immediate end to Israel's siege of Gaza." It was adopted by 30 votes with 15 abstentions.
Instead, the Conservative government has been quick to congratulate Israel for any small pause in its blockade. In January 2009 International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda proclaimed that "We commend Israel's decision to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance [to Gaza] through a temporary ceasefire." A day after Oda's announcement, Israeli forces fired on a UN convoy during a ceasefire, killing a Palestinian aid worker. There was no follow-up statement from Oda condemning Israel's actions.
Compared to Ottawa's cheerleading most of the world was hostile to Israel's attacks on Gaza last winter. In solidarity with Gaza, Venezuela expelled Israel's ambassador at the start of the bombardment and then broke off all diplomatic relations two weeks later. Israel didn't need to worry since Ottawa was prepared to help out. "Israel's interests in Caracas will now be represented by the Canadian Embassy," explained The Jerusalem Post (Ottawa had been "doing this for Israel in Cuba" since 1973). In August 2009, the Canadian embassy in Caracas also began providing visas to Venezuelans traveling to Israel.
For defining Canadian policy as "we support Israel no matter what it does," B'Nai Brith International bestowed Harper with its Presidential Gold Medallion for Humanitarianism. The first ever Canadian to receive the award, Harper joined former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, and US Presidents John F. Kennedy and Harry S. Truman. For its part, the Canadian Jewish Congress gave Harper its "prestigious Saul Hayes Human Rights award, named for a former CJC executive director, the first time it's been given to a sitting PM."
Despite the government's strident support for Israel, grassroots opposition to that country's policy has never been greater. Recent protests against the Toronto International Film Festival's spotlight on Tel Aviv were a major setback to Israeli public relations efforts. The festival embarrassment followed massive demonstrations against Israel's assault on Gaza, when many cities across the country witnessed their largest ever Palestinian solidarity demonstrations.
Alongside displays of opposition to specific Israeli policy, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is growing. Many social groups such as Independent Jewish Voices and Quebec's most active student Federation, ASSE, have joined the BDS movement, as have a number of unions, including the Canadian Union of Public Employees (Ontario), the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the teachers Federation in Quebec. Social movements in Canada have never been more critical of Israel.
Yves Engler is the author of the recently released The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy and other books. The book is available at http://blackbook.foreignpolicy.ca/.
PELO DIA DAS CRIANÇAS PALESTINAS
fonte:Viva a Palestina
Já existe o Dia Internacional das Crianças Vítimas Inocentes de Agressão na Palestina -4 de Junho. Mas pela gravidade desta absurda situação, convém lembrar delas neste Dia da Criança, também.
As crianças prisioneiras palestinas vivem em condições desumanos nas prisões israelenses. Encarceradas em celas abarrotadas e sujas. Frequentemente, são colocadas em solitárias, cujas celas medem 1,5 metros quadrados, praticamente um caixão. Essas celas são extremamente úmidas , sem janelas ou aberturas que permitam a entrada de luz natural. Uma lâmpada com luz brilhante é mantida acesa continuamente . Isto força os prisioneiros a permanecerem acordados por dias, em alguns casos.
Qualquer deslize e as crianças prisioneiras ficam proibidas de receberem alimento suficiente para cumprir as exigências diárias para a nutrição infantil, são impedidas de ir ao toalete de acordo com suas necessidades e de trocarem as roupas. Elas não têm praticamente nenhuma assistência médica . As autoridades israelitas violam descaradamente a lei internacional com sua notória negligência médica, não atendendo aos padrões mínimos previstos pelas Nações Unidas para tratamento de prisioneiros. Embora a Lei Internacional seja extremamente clara na exigência da continuidade dos estudos, as crianças das prisões israelenses , não têm acesso á instrução.
As crianças palestinas encarceradas são submetidas à tortura física e psicológica durante o interrogatório para forçá-las a confessarem ações que podem ou não ter praticado. A maioria das confissões e as sentenças são relacionadas ao arremesso de pedras . Sob pressão física e psicológica extrema, as crianças, às vezes, confessam as tais atividades para que os carrascos parem as torturas, assumindo atos que não praticaram. Muitas vezes, são obrigadas a assinarem confissões em hebraico, um idioma que não entendem.
Durante o interrogatório, as crianças são isoladas de suas famílias e os advogados, na maioria dos casos, não são informados sobre o lugar de sua detenção. Geralmente , não contam com um advogado durante o primeiro período de interrogatório. O desamparo sentido por esses menores é imenso quando percebem que estão sós numa sala de interrogatório, por conta do interrogador, o que representa uma pressão psicológica a mais , numa situação que já é , por si só, aterrorizante.
Esses menores são, muitas vezes, atacados por prisioneiros criminosos israelitas; estão sujeitas à perseguição sexual, física e verbal. O assédio sexual já foi praticado contra um grande número de crianças prisioneiras. Elas sofrem ameaças de agressão e pancadas na cabeça se relatarem o incidente à administração. Um menino, que apresentou queixa à administração sobre o assédio sexual , foi atacado por prisioneiros criminosos israelita com facas e ferido no pé. Além disso, esses menores ainda estão sujeitos ao roubo de pertences pessoais, incluindo cartões de telefone, sapatos e gêneros alimentícios que são comprados na cantina da prisão. Não existe nenhum tipo de atividades recreativa, nem acesso a livros ou jornais. A proibição de visitas dos familiares tem um impacto psicológico que deixa seqüelas em prisioneiros infantis. Tudo isso está em flagrante desrespeitos às leis internacionais de proteção à criança.
Como se não bastasse ser parte de um povo destituído, aterrorizado e massacrado, viverem no isolamento,no esgoto, passarem fome, sendo impedidos de terem pleno acesso à água, à luz, à assistência médica adequada; conviverem com seus pais desempregados entregues ao desespero, sofrerem constantemente o assédio do exército invasor, as crianças palestinas, muitas vezes, ainda têm que enfrentar a tortura e as privações nas cadeias de Israel, por ousarem resistir a tudo isso.
Apesar de todo seu poderio bélico e do apoio das maiores potências mundiais, Israel não está conseguindo fugir do seu destino: ser odiado pela maioria dos povos. Em breve terá que se confrontar com seu momento África do Sul do Apartheid e ver seu nome jogado na mesma lama em que foi atirado o Regime Nazista de Hitler.
Milhares de pessoas em todo o mundo vem aderindo à causa palestina. Multidões foram às ruas em quase todos os países para protestarem contra os massacres em Gaza. A campanha do BDS está em franco crescimento, impondo uma queda de mais de 40% nas exportações israelenses . Muitas empresas e bancos são obrigados, pela pressão popular, a abandonarem seus projetos em Israel.
Neste Dia da Criança, muitas são as que recebem presentes , brincam e curtem as alegrias dessa importante fase da vida. Mas a maior parte delas, não têm direito a nada disso, pois desde cedo, enfrentam as mazelas da vida impostas aos pobres e miseráveis de todos os países, pelo sistema capitalista/imperialista. Entretanto, em um só lugar no mundo, as crianças, impelidas pela dramática situação em que vivem, assumem a tarefa de lutar , ao lado dos adultos,em defesa de sua pátria e de seu povo: as crianças da Palestina ocupada. E por isso, são feitas prisioneiras pelas forças da ocupação de Israel- o único país do mundo onde existem prisioneiros políticos com menos de 16 anos, às vezes com 12 anos de idade. Seus “crimes”: atirarem pedras nos tanques do exército invasor ou outras ações semelhantes.
Já existe o Dia Internacional das Crianças Vítimas Inocentes de Agressão na Palestina -4 de Junho. Mas pela gravidade desta absurda situação, convém lembrar delas neste Dia da Criança, também.
As crianças prisioneiras palestinas vivem em condições desumanos nas prisões israelenses. Encarceradas em celas abarrotadas e sujas. Frequentemente, são colocadas em solitárias, cujas celas medem 1,5 metros quadrados, praticamente um caixão. Essas celas são extremamente úmidas , sem janelas ou aberturas que permitam a entrada de luz natural. Uma lâmpada com luz brilhante é mantida acesa continuamente . Isto força os prisioneiros a permanecerem acordados por dias, em alguns casos.
Qualquer deslize e as crianças prisioneiras ficam proibidas de receberem alimento suficiente para cumprir as exigências diárias para a nutrição infantil, são impedidas de ir ao toalete de acordo com suas necessidades e de trocarem as roupas. Elas não têm praticamente nenhuma assistência médica . As autoridades israelitas violam descaradamente a lei internacional com sua notória negligência médica, não atendendo aos padrões mínimos previstos pelas Nações Unidas para tratamento de prisioneiros. Embora a Lei Internacional seja extremamente clara na exigência da continuidade dos estudos, as crianças das prisões israelenses , não têm acesso á instrução.
As crianças palestinas encarceradas são submetidas à tortura física e psicológica durante o interrogatório para forçá-las a confessarem ações que podem ou não ter praticado. A maioria das confissões e as sentenças são relacionadas ao arremesso de pedras . Sob pressão física e psicológica extrema, as crianças, às vezes, confessam as tais atividades para que os carrascos parem as torturas, assumindo atos que não praticaram. Muitas vezes, são obrigadas a assinarem confissões em hebraico, um idioma que não entendem.
Durante o interrogatório, as crianças são isoladas de suas famílias e os advogados, na maioria dos casos, não são informados sobre o lugar de sua detenção. Geralmente , não contam com um advogado durante o primeiro período de interrogatório. O desamparo sentido por esses menores é imenso quando percebem que estão sós numa sala de interrogatório, por conta do interrogador, o que representa uma pressão psicológica a mais , numa situação que já é , por si só, aterrorizante.
Esses menores são, muitas vezes, atacados por prisioneiros criminosos israelitas; estão sujeitas à perseguição sexual, física e verbal. O assédio sexual já foi praticado contra um grande número de crianças prisioneiras. Elas sofrem ameaças de agressão e pancadas na cabeça se relatarem o incidente à administração. Um menino, que apresentou queixa à administração sobre o assédio sexual , foi atacado por prisioneiros criminosos israelita com facas e ferido no pé. Além disso, esses menores ainda estão sujeitos ao roubo de pertences pessoais, incluindo cartões de telefone, sapatos e gêneros alimentícios que são comprados na cantina da prisão. Não existe nenhum tipo de atividades recreativa, nem acesso a livros ou jornais. A proibição de visitas dos familiares tem um impacto psicológico que deixa seqüelas em prisioneiros infantis. Tudo isso está em flagrante desrespeitos às leis internacionais de proteção à criança.
Como se não bastasse ser parte de um povo destituído, aterrorizado e massacrado, viverem no isolamento,no esgoto, passarem fome, sendo impedidos de terem pleno acesso à água, à luz, à assistência médica adequada; conviverem com seus pais desempregados entregues ao desespero, sofrerem constantemente o assédio do exército invasor, as crianças palestinas, muitas vezes, ainda têm que enfrentar a tortura e as privações nas cadeias de Israel, por ousarem resistir a tudo isso.
Apesar de todo seu poderio bélico e do apoio das maiores potências mundiais, Israel não está conseguindo fugir do seu destino: ser odiado pela maioria dos povos. Em breve terá que se confrontar com seu momento África do Sul do Apartheid e ver seu nome jogado na mesma lama em que foi atirado o Regime Nazista de Hitler.
Milhares de pessoas em todo o mundo vem aderindo à causa palestina. Multidões foram às ruas em quase todos os países para protestarem contra os massacres em Gaza. A campanha do BDS está em franco crescimento, impondo uma queda de mais de 40% nas exportações israelenses . Muitas empresas e bancos são obrigados, pela pressão popular, a abandonarem seus projetos em Israel.
Mas é preciso muito mais.A África do Sul não era uma potência militar e não tinha uma coalizão dos mais poderosos exércitos do mundo dispostos a defendê-la, não tinha a importância estratégica que tem Israel para o imperialismo , pois não estava a serviço de um projeto expansionista e de dominação regional e não tinha a mídia mundial quase totalmente sob seu controle. Por isso, os esforços para barrar o criminoso regime nazi-sionista deverão ser maiores do que os realizados para destruir o odioso regime do apartheid na África do Sul. Não está sendo uma tarefa fácil. Mas, com toda a certeza, é uma tarefa possível.
Beth Monteiro
Monday, 12 October 2009
Israel deve parar de bloquear a entrada de material escolar para Gaza
fonte: Human Rights Watch-HRW
Blockade Deprives Students of Paper, Pens, Textbooks
(Jerusalem) - Israeli authorities should immediately lift restrictions that have left students in Gaza's public schools without textbooks and the most basic school supplies, such as notebooks and pens, Human Rights Watch said today. Israel severely limits imports into Gaza of a wide variety of basic goods, from food to construction materials.
More than a month into the school year, the Israeli restrictions have caused severe shortages that leave students unable to afford supplies such as notebooks. Students are obliged to share or take turns studying from used textbooks and workbooks. Some did not receive any books for this year's classes. Supplies smuggled through tunnels underneath Gaza's southern border with Egypt have failed to make up for the shortages caused by Israel's arbitrary restrictions on imports of educational materials.
"Israel's blockade affects every aspect of life in Gaza, and is even preventing students from having basic school supplies," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "What possible justification can there be for blocking school supplies, which effectively deprives children of their right to an education?"
Riyadh Lubbad, a principal at al-Karmel secondary school in Gaza City, told Human Rights Watch, "Some books from the curriculum were not printed due to the lack of ink and paper. It is particularly bad for history, geography, and English-language classes."
Salim Ayoub, an 11th-grade student at al-Karmel, said, "In our English class we have one book for every two students. When I get the workbook [with exercises] my classmate has the textbook, and we exchange them. Our class was lucky. Other English classes don't have books at all."
Ayoub said that students cannot afford notebooks: "There were no notebooks at all in the market at the beginning of school. Later, I found notebooks that came from the tunnels [from Egypt] but they were expensive. You're supposed to have three notebooks per subject, but I bought one or two."
Another 11th-grade student at al-Karmel, Mohamed Abu Karsh, said, "The curriculum needs about 20 notebooks. I only could afford to buy 10."
According to the United Nations, the armed conflict in Gaza last December and January destroyed 18 of Gaza's 641 schools, with a total of more than 440,000 students, and damaged 280 others. Because Israel has barred almost all shipments of construction materials, damaged schools have not been rebuilt or repaired, and 15,000 students whose schools were damaged during the war have been transferred to other schools. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) also had to cancel plans to build new schools because of the lack of construction materials.
Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva Convention concerning occupied territories requires the occupying power to "facilitate the proper working of all institutions devoted to the care and education of children."
Falah Lubbad is one of 20 or 30 Gaza importers who deal with stationery. "I used to get notebooks from a factory in Hebron, but we can't import from the West Bank now," he told Human Rights Watch. Notebooks smuggled from Egypt cost 70 percent more to import, he said, making them unaffordable for many students. "I didn't try to import through the tunnels because the notebooks are too expensive and poor quality, and many are torn when they arrive. I'm also out of pens, erasers, and stationery for university students." Lubbad said he was paying storage fees for 15 truckloads of stationery in Israel that had not been granted approval to enter Gaza; eight of the truckloads had been held up since September 2008.
Israel has allowed only two truckloads of stationery to enter Gaza in 2009, while nearly 120 truckloads of stationery were waiting for Israeli clearance to enter as of August 25, according to the UN's IRIN news agency. When the current school year began in late August, IRIN reported, public and private schools serving more than 240,000 students in Gaza lacked education materials. UNRWA schools have an additional 207,250 students.
Khaled Raddi, a spokesman for the Hamas education ministry, told Human Rights Watch that Gaza's schools faced a "severe shortage" of stationery, ink, and paper. UNRWA has been unable to print 10 percent of required textbooks because Israel has not approved the necessary ink and paper imports, Aidan O'Leary, an agency official who oversees school programs, told Human Rights Watch. Israel has also not approved imports of 5,000 school desks for UNRWA students, and 4,000 tables and chairs for teachers in classrooms.
"Because we don't have enough space for our students, we need to import portable container classrooms, but we are still waiting for them," O'Leary said. His agency has not been able to distribute stationery and pencils to students as planned, he said.
The United States, Israel's largest foreign donor, pledged US$300 million in humanitarian aid for Gaza in March at a donor's conference on post-war aid to Gaza in Egypt. US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said at the conference, "A child growing up in Gaza without shelter, health care, or an education has the same right to go to school, see a doctor, and live with a roof over her head as a child growing up in your country or mine." In a letter to Clinton, Human Rights Watch called on the United States, as Israel's most important political, military and financial backer, to dissociate itself from the blockade and to speak out against it.
"Children in Gaza are suffering from punitive restrictions while the United States and other allies of Israel have failed to take a firm stand against this policy, prolonging the effects of the war," Whitson said.
Under international humanitarian law, Israel remains the occupying power in Gaza, even though it withdrew its permanent military forces and settlers in 2005, because it continues to exercise effective day-to-day control over most aspects of life in Gaza. In addition to its effective control over Gaza's land, air, and sea borders, Israel controls most of the territory's electricity, water, and sewage capacity, as well as its telecommunications networks and population registry.
Israel's blockade violates its duty as an occupying power to safeguard the basic health and welfare of the occupied population, a form of collective punishment against civilians in violation of international humanitarian law. The International Committee of the Red Cross, in its authoritative commentary on the Geneva Conventions, states that "[t]he concept of collective punishment must be understood in the broadest sense: it covers not only legal sentences but sanctions and harassment of any sort."
Exportação de Israel das táticas policiais da ocupação
fonte:EI
Israel's export of occupation police tactics
Jimmy Johnson, The Electronic Intifada, 9 October 2009
Israel's specialized policing and fighting capacity, which it is currently exporting to other countries, including the US, began to take shape after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In the territories it occupied during the conflict, especially the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, the Israeli government wanted to lay claim, permanently, to specific parts of the occupied area. This desire ran into Zionism's longest-running problem, the presence of Palestinians. As Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 about indigenous resistance to colonial projects, "The native populations ... have always stubbornly resisted the colonists."
This resistance would have to be suppressed and the population pacified if the occupation of these lands was to be sustainable. Thus began an evolutionary relationship that continues to this day, that of the Palestinian resistance versus Israel's policy of permanent occupation. Architect Eyal Weizman lays out in great detail the study of urban warfare and urban police actions undertaken by the Israeli military in his book Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation. Importantly, he looks at the ways the army adapts to the dynamics on the ground, explaining that "Indeed, military attempts to adapt their practices and forms of organization has been inspired by the guerilla forms of violence that confront it. Because they adapt, mimic and learn from each other, the military and the guerillas enter a cycle of 'co-evolution.'" This reciprocal cycle of tactical evolution, and intertwined relationship of Israel's police and army, is proving politically valuable to Israel by helping to shape international norms on policing more like its own.
Israel participates significantly in areas of the international political and economic markets of arms, security and policing. It is especially renowned for having a highly developed arms industry. There are significant potential political benefits to be gained by participation in the arms trade, especially in the military interoperability that develops with using the same training and systems of war. Military interoperability often lead to the development of political alliances and close personal relationships between high level defense and commerce officials during the research, bidding and approval processes.
However, this trade rarely leads to policy change favorable to Israel by itself. Instead, the training of foreign police and security forces based upon expertise gained in 42 years of military occupation accomplishes this by creating advocates within local, regional and national security infrastructures. In Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann's book Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations, the authors detail how the United States has shaped international policing and prosecution with regards to the drug trade. They explain that "US law enforcement agencies play an especially pivotal role in shaping a transnational police community and thickening intergovernmental law enforcement networks." This occurs by either providing or advocating for technical assistance and training for many foreign police officers. In addition, the US often advocates "for more intensive and systematic bilateral and multilateral cooperation, and prompting new initiatives in both criminal procedures and criminal legislation." Although Israel cannot do this with the same coercive power as the US, it is as proactive as possible in its outreach.
Israel is renowned as the center of training in the fields of policing, homeland security and related fields. In 2005 the then-chief of police of Washington, DC, a city that has adopted Israeli-style policing to an extreme degree, told The Washington Post that Israel is "the Harvard of antiterrorism." Israel actively lauds its expertise with ministries of commerce, public security and foreign affairs, advertising it in public pronouncements and their websites and the government offers support for exporting the expertise, whether done by private firms or public entities. The "Israeli method" blends together state security policing with that of other crimes. Systems put in place in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, for example, have private businesses linking their information with the Tourist Police and City Police who in turn, link with the National Police, the General Security Service (aka, Shin Bet).
Israeli police and security forces do not separate policing related to Palestinian anti-occupation efforts from street crime. The Palestinians represent both a political and armed opposition to a military occupation, and a disenfranchised underclass with criminal elements in an apartheid state. The Israeli army, which is charged with investigating crime in Areas B and C of the West Bank -- areas designated as such during the Oslo accords of the mid-1990s -- along with its strictly military functions as an occupying army and national defense force, is engaged, along with the Israeli police's car theft bureau, with investigating car thefts by Palestinians. Palestinian car thieves often work with Israeli organized crime families or individual Israelis seeking to defraud insurance agencies and investigation and prosecution falls under the jurisdiction of both the army and the civil police. It is the Israeli police's mandate to prosecute any Israeli citizens, while the Palestinians will be tried in an Israeli military court.
The Israeli army also patrols the northern border along with the drug police looking for heroin, hashish and other items smuggled from southern Lebanon. Inspector Gal Ben Ish, referring to participation by Hizballah in the trade, told the Associated Press in April 2009, "We know that it's not just criminal activity -- here there's always the aspect of national defense. We're helping the country's security." Some of the same Sinai Bedouin tribes involved in smuggling women for Israeli organized crime, which is investigated by the police, also smuggle goods, including weapons, to Palestinians in Gaza. According to a June 2007 report in Terrorism Monitor, this has led to the army patrolling 40 kilometers from the Gaza Strip down the border with Egypt.
The training offered by Israeli police and security forces is exported all over the world. For example in India, Israel has drawn upon its experience in south Lebanon, rural West Bank and urban population centers in Gaza and the West Bank to help train Indian forces. According to a 9 September 2009 article in Defense News, the inspiration for these efforts came after New Delhi took "a keen interest in the homeland security operations, armaments and surveillance devices used by Israeli troops."
A 2008 declaration signed by then-Minister of Public Security Avi Dichter and Canadian Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day created a similar arrangement for Canada and Israel. According to the Israeli ministry's website, it allowed the countries to "share knowledge, experience, expertise, information, research, and best practices" and "facilitate technical exchange cooperation, including education, training, and exercises." In a 23 March 2008 press release, Minister Day stated that "The declaration seeks to establish a more structured framework for the continued cooperation on public safety issues between Canada and Israel."
Israeli police trained their Chinese counterparts for "possible scenarios involving terror and civil disturbances" prior to the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing. According to a 28 September 2008 article in the Israeli daily Haaretz, the commander of China's People's Armed Police Force "expressed an interest in continued cooperation between Israeli and Chinese police following the success of the course." Five years earlier Israeli police performed a similar task in Greece prior to the Athens games. The French government brought the head of the Israeli police's special forces to instruct their police in riot control.
However, no country in the world has a closer cooperation with Israeli police forces than the US. Just a sampling of US cities and institutions that have trained or are training in Israeli methods are Alameda County; Atlanta; Boston; Cambridge, MA; Commerce, GA; Detroit; Duxbury, MA; Georgia Tech University; Knoxville, TN; Los Angeles: the Maryland Department of Transportation; Miami; New York City; Pembroke Pines, FL; San Francisco; San Mateo; Santa Clara; Seattle; Stamford, CT; Sterling Heights, MI; and Suffolk County, NY. Low-level bilateral relationships between city police, sheriff's departments and other agencies of order in the US are reinforced by arrangements put in place by high-level officials like the memorandum of understanding signed by former Minister Dichter and former US Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff in 2007. A statement put out prior to the agreement and quoted by The Jerusalem Post stated "that there exists a vital need to promote operational, scientific and technological cooperation between the parties in the field of homeland security."
Israeli methods are sought out and adopted for their perceived quality, largely led by the government's marketing of them. But the relationships established between agencies of order, whether they be drug enforcement, civil policing, customs officials, tactical police units or any other, are done entirely outside the democratic realm. The citizens of Beijing did not vote for their police to study the repression of civil disturbance in Haifa's football stadium. Canadian parliament neither proposed nor endorsed the "Declaration of Intent Between the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada and the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel." The students of Georgia Tech University were not approached for their opinion about campus security adopting the tools that help sustain an illegal military occupation. This is the danger of agencies of authority going through processes of professionalization and integration with their foreign counterparts. It's often a strictly technocratic regime that can affect the public greatly but is done without its active knowledge or participation. As Andreas and Nadelmann argue, the efforts at professionalization are driven by the technocrats themselves, most often sanctioned by the governing authority, and it is this perceived technical neutrality that gives the efforts credibility.
This has been seen starkly in Washington, DC. The capitol police have long erected various checkpoints and barriers around the institutions of national government, especially the Capitol Building. In June 2008, Chief of Police Cathy Lanier, who according to The Washington Post once stated "No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel," authorized checkpoints to be set up in the troubled northeast neighborhood of Trinidad, which had seen a spike in homicides and other violent crime. There are severe quality of life problems in Trinidad, including high rates of violent crime, and the disproportionate participation in street violence and the illegal narcotics trade by residents from and visitors to the neighborhood has strong links to socioeconomic exclusion of the poor in the US, especially in communities of color. The establishment of checkpoints in Trinidad was an attempt to address the former while neglecting the latter. Alternately put, it was a method of pacification deployed against resistance to and coping mechanisms of victims of structural classism and racism in the US. The Washington Post quoted one longtime neighborhood resident stating "I knew eventually we'd be a police state. They don't talk to us, they're not community minded."
Prior to Washington, DC police leadership receiving Israeli training they had no socioeconomic desk with which to work against the root causes of street crime, nor do they now. If the US government is no longer going to attempt to integrate all its citizens into its economic and political infrastructure (see for example, the removal of suffrage from convicted felons in many parts of the country) the adoption of Israel's system of blended civil and national security policing has a compelling logic. The, in effect, surplus population in the country will be only slightly less "foreign" to the government, and only slightly more represented in local and national planning, than the Palestinians are to Israel.
The dominant method of warehousing in the US is penal incarceration leading to a nation with about five percent of the world's population containing about 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population, according to Andreas and Nadelmann. As activist Jeff Halper has written, the methods of warehousing used by Israel against its surplus population, the Palestinians, are primarily geographic and structural, such as checkpoints and separation walls and fences, and bureaucratic, such as restricting building permits and ID regimes prohibiting movements between areas.
Similarly, the training of the Beijing police in controlling civil disturbance was largely used to exclude Beijing's slum dwellers, tens of thousands of whom were displaced by the Olympic games themselves, from access to the media, global attention and economic bubble that came with the games. As Mike Davis observed in Planet of Slums, like the US's disenfranchised, the slum dwellers of Beijing, largely economic migrants from the western interior of the country, have been almost entirely written off by the municipal and national authorities in China. And like the Palestinians, they are a surplus population to the government currently controlling their fates. The training of foreign police and security forces in the methods used to pacify resistance to apartheid, military occupation and the warehousing of the Palestinians should give pause as to what these tools of Israel's pacification industry will be deployed against in countries receiving the training.
Jimmy Johnson is an researcher, analyst and organizer with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He's based in Washington, DC and can be reached at jimmy [at] icahd [dot] org.
Israel's export of occupation police tactics
Jimmy Johnson, The Electronic Intifada, 9 October 2009
 |
| Israel's urban police tactics are being exported around the globe. (Mamoun Wazwaz/MaanImages) |
Israel's specialized policing and fighting capacity, which it is currently exporting to other countries, including the US, began to take shape after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In the territories it occupied during the conflict, especially the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, the Israeli government wanted to lay claim, permanently, to specific parts of the occupied area. This desire ran into Zionism's longest-running problem, the presence of Palestinians. As Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 about indigenous resistance to colonial projects, "The native populations ... have always stubbornly resisted the colonists."
This resistance would have to be suppressed and the population pacified if the occupation of these lands was to be sustainable. Thus began an evolutionary relationship that continues to this day, that of the Palestinian resistance versus Israel's policy of permanent occupation. Architect Eyal Weizman lays out in great detail the study of urban warfare and urban police actions undertaken by the Israeli military in his book Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation. Importantly, he looks at the ways the army adapts to the dynamics on the ground, explaining that "Indeed, military attempts to adapt their practices and forms of organization has been inspired by the guerilla forms of violence that confront it. Because they adapt, mimic and learn from each other, the military and the guerillas enter a cycle of 'co-evolution.'" This reciprocal cycle of tactical evolution, and intertwined relationship of Israel's police and army, is proving politically valuable to Israel by helping to shape international norms on policing more like its own.
Israel participates significantly in areas of the international political and economic markets of arms, security and policing. It is especially renowned for having a highly developed arms industry. There are significant potential political benefits to be gained by participation in the arms trade, especially in the military interoperability that develops with using the same training and systems of war. Military interoperability often lead to the development of political alliances and close personal relationships between high level defense and commerce officials during the research, bidding and approval processes.
However, this trade rarely leads to policy change favorable to Israel by itself. Instead, the training of foreign police and security forces based upon expertise gained in 42 years of military occupation accomplishes this by creating advocates within local, regional and national security infrastructures. In Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann's book Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations, the authors detail how the United States has shaped international policing and prosecution with regards to the drug trade. They explain that "US law enforcement agencies play an especially pivotal role in shaping a transnational police community and thickening intergovernmental law enforcement networks." This occurs by either providing or advocating for technical assistance and training for many foreign police officers. In addition, the US often advocates "for more intensive and systematic bilateral and multilateral cooperation, and prompting new initiatives in both criminal procedures and criminal legislation." Although Israel cannot do this with the same coercive power as the US, it is as proactive as possible in its outreach.
Israel is renowned as the center of training in the fields of policing, homeland security and related fields. In 2005 the then-chief of police of Washington, DC, a city that has adopted Israeli-style policing to an extreme degree, told The Washington Post that Israel is "the Harvard of antiterrorism." Israel actively lauds its expertise with ministries of commerce, public security and foreign affairs, advertising it in public pronouncements and their websites and the government offers support for exporting the expertise, whether done by private firms or public entities. The "Israeli method" blends together state security policing with that of other crimes. Systems put in place in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, for example, have private businesses linking their information with the Tourist Police and City Police who in turn, link with the National Police, the General Security Service (aka, Shin Bet).
Israeli police and security forces do not separate policing related to Palestinian anti-occupation efforts from street crime. The Palestinians represent both a political and armed opposition to a military occupation, and a disenfranchised underclass with criminal elements in an apartheid state. The Israeli army, which is charged with investigating crime in Areas B and C of the West Bank -- areas designated as such during the Oslo accords of the mid-1990s -- along with its strictly military functions as an occupying army and national defense force, is engaged, along with the Israeli police's car theft bureau, with investigating car thefts by Palestinians. Palestinian car thieves often work with Israeli organized crime families or individual Israelis seeking to defraud insurance agencies and investigation and prosecution falls under the jurisdiction of both the army and the civil police. It is the Israeli police's mandate to prosecute any Israeli citizens, while the Palestinians will be tried in an Israeli military court.
The Israeli army also patrols the northern border along with the drug police looking for heroin, hashish and other items smuggled from southern Lebanon. Inspector Gal Ben Ish, referring to participation by Hizballah in the trade, told the Associated Press in April 2009, "We know that it's not just criminal activity -- here there's always the aspect of national defense. We're helping the country's security." Some of the same Sinai Bedouin tribes involved in smuggling women for Israeli organized crime, which is investigated by the police, also smuggle goods, including weapons, to Palestinians in Gaza. According to a June 2007 report in Terrorism Monitor, this has led to the army patrolling 40 kilometers from the Gaza Strip down the border with Egypt.
The training offered by Israeli police and security forces is exported all over the world. For example in India, Israel has drawn upon its experience in south Lebanon, rural West Bank and urban population centers in Gaza and the West Bank to help train Indian forces. According to a 9 September 2009 article in Defense News, the inspiration for these efforts came after New Delhi took "a keen interest in the homeland security operations, armaments and surveillance devices used by Israeli troops."
A 2008 declaration signed by then-Minister of Public Security Avi Dichter and Canadian Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day created a similar arrangement for Canada and Israel. According to the Israeli ministry's website, it allowed the countries to "share knowledge, experience, expertise, information, research, and best practices" and "facilitate technical exchange cooperation, including education, training, and exercises." In a 23 March 2008 press release, Minister Day stated that "The declaration seeks to establish a more structured framework for the continued cooperation on public safety issues between Canada and Israel."
Israeli police trained their Chinese counterparts for "possible scenarios involving terror and civil disturbances" prior to the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing. According to a 28 September 2008 article in the Israeli daily Haaretz, the commander of China's People's Armed Police Force "expressed an interest in continued cooperation between Israeli and Chinese police following the success of the course." Five years earlier Israeli police performed a similar task in Greece prior to the Athens games. The French government brought the head of the Israeli police's special forces to instruct their police in riot control.
However, no country in the world has a closer cooperation with Israeli police forces than the US. Just a sampling of US cities and institutions that have trained or are training in Israeli methods are Alameda County; Atlanta; Boston; Cambridge, MA; Commerce, GA; Detroit; Duxbury, MA; Georgia Tech University; Knoxville, TN; Los Angeles: the Maryland Department of Transportation; Miami; New York City; Pembroke Pines, FL; San Francisco; San Mateo; Santa Clara; Seattle; Stamford, CT; Sterling Heights, MI; and Suffolk County, NY. Low-level bilateral relationships between city police, sheriff's departments and other agencies of order in the US are reinforced by arrangements put in place by high-level officials like the memorandum of understanding signed by former Minister Dichter and former US Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff in 2007. A statement put out prior to the agreement and quoted by The Jerusalem Post stated "that there exists a vital need to promote operational, scientific and technological cooperation between the parties in the field of homeland security."
Israeli methods are sought out and adopted for their perceived quality, largely led by the government's marketing of them. But the relationships established between agencies of order, whether they be drug enforcement, civil policing, customs officials, tactical police units or any other, are done entirely outside the democratic realm. The citizens of Beijing did not vote for their police to study the repression of civil disturbance in Haifa's football stadium. Canadian parliament neither proposed nor endorsed the "Declaration of Intent Between the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada and the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel." The students of Georgia Tech University were not approached for their opinion about campus security adopting the tools that help sustain an illegal military occupation. This is the danger of agencies of authority going through processes of professionalization and integration with their foreign counterparts. It's often a strictly technocratic regime that can affect the public greatly but is done without its active knowledge or participation. As Andreas and Nadelmann argue, the efforts at professionalization are driven by the technocrats themselves, most often sanctioned by the governing authority, and it is this perceived technical neutrality that gives the efforts credibility.
This has been seen starkly in Washington, DC. The capitol police have long erected various checkpoints and barriers around the institutions of national government, especially the Capitol Building. In June 2008, Chief of Police Cathy Lanier, who according to The Washington Post once stated "No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel," authorized checkpoints to be set up in the troubled northeast neighborhood of Trinidad, which had seen a spike in homicides and other violent crime. There are severe quality of life problems in Trinidad, including high rates of violent crime, and the disproportionate participation in street violence and the illegal narcotics trade by residents from and visitors to the neighborhood has strong links to socioeconomic exclusion of the poor in the US, especially in communities of color. The establishment of checkpoints in Trinidad was an attempt to address the former while neglecting the latter. Alternately put, it was a method of pacification deployed against resistance to and coping mechanisms of victims of structural classism and racism in the US. The Washington Post quoted one longtime neighborhood resident stating "I knew eventually we'd be a police state. They don't talk to us, they're not community minded."
Prior to Washington, DC police leadership receiving Israeli training they had no socioeconomic desk with which to work against the root causes of street crime, nor do they now. If the US government is no longer going to attempt to integrate all its citizens into its economic and political infrastructure (see for example, the removal of suffrage from convicted felons in many parts of the country) the adoption of Israel's system of blended civil and national security policing has a compelling logic. The, in effect, surplus population in the country will be only slightly less "foreign" to the government, and only slightly more represented in local and national planning, than the Palestinians are to Israel.
The dominant method of warehousing in the US is penal incarceration leading to a nation with about five percent of the world's population containing about 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population, according to Andreas and Nadelmann. As activist Jeff Halper has written, the methods of warehousing used by Israel against its surplus population, the Palestinians, are primarily geographic and structural, such as checkpoints and separation walls and fences, and bureaucratic, such as restricting building permits and ID regimes prohibiting movements between areas.
Similarly, the training of the Beijing police in controlling civil disturbance was largely used to exclude Beijing's slum dwellers, tens of thousands of whom were displaced by the Olympic games themselves, from access to the media, global attention and economic bubble that came with the games. As Mike Davis observed in Planet of Slums, like the US's disenfranchised, the slum dwellers of Beijing, largely economic migrants from the western interior of the country, have been almost entirely written off by the municipal and national authorities in China. And like the Palestinians, they are a surplus population to the government currently controlling their fates. The training of foreign police and security forces in the methods used to pacify resistance to apartheid, military occupation and the warehousing of the Palestinians should give pause as to what these tools of Israel's pacification industry will be deployed against in countries receiving the training.
Jimmy Johnson is an researcher, analyst and organizer with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He's based in Washington, DC and can be reached at jimmy [at] icahd [dot] org.
Mais um êxito da campanha BDS
fonte:SOLIDARIEDADE COM A PALESTINA
Comunicado da AFPS - Paris, 9 de Outubro de 2009
Comunicado da AFPS - Paris, 9 de Outubro de 2009
A campanha pelo boicote, desinvestimento e sanções (BDS) contra a política de Israel, levada a cabo pelo Colectivo Nacional por uma Paz Justa e Duradoura entre Palestinianos e Israelitas, acaba de alcançar novo êxito.
A Associação France Palestine Solidarité tinha tomado conhecimento da participação na Festa das vindimas de Montmartre, este fim-de-semana, da sociedade Soda Club, que fabrica aparelhos de gaseificação da água. Acontece que esta empresa está instalada em Maale Adumim, o maior colonato israelita da Cisjordânia. As alfândegas alemãs bloquearam recentemente todos os seus produtos, no âmbito do artigo 83º do Acordo de associação União Europeia-Israel.
Após as intervenções da AFPS junto dos responsáveis da Câmara de Paris e da câmara do XVIIIº Bairro, sublinhando a responsabilidade dos governantes, a empresa ACDP, mandatada para organizar a Festa, declarou na sexta-feira que, “não desejando de maneira nenhuma que a Festa das vindimas seja perturbada por alguma desordem pública e desejando antes de mais preservar o seu carácter popular, convivial e festivo, a Soda Club não estará presente no evento”.
A AFPS congratula-se por este êxito e apela aos seus militantes que multipliquem as iniciativas para que a campanha BDS permita expressar bem alto a exigência popular de uma paz justa e duradoura, fundada sobre o direito internacional.
Al-Walajah, um símbolo da limpeza étnica em Israel
fonte: EI
Al-Walajah, a symbol of Israeli ethnic cleansing
Hasan Abu Nimah, The Electronic Intifada, 9 October 2009
While American officials continue to claim that the mission of US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell is by no means over, and that he will still pursue his efforts to convince the Israeli government to agree to some sort of settlement freeze, Israeli plans for further colonization of Palestinian land continue undisturbed. The latest Israeli plans call for the destruction of the West Bank village of al-Walajah for the second time in six decades.
According to Israeli press reports, Israel is planning a massive new settlement in the vicinity of Jerusalem, on land owned by Palestinians of al-Walajah. The project, expected to be approved by the Israeli ministry of the Interior, could become the single most populous settlement built in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967 according to the Israeli daily Maariv. The project plans prepared by the ministry of the Interior and the Jerusalem municipality call for 14,000 housing units for 40,000 settlers on 3,000 dunums of land which would require the demolition of al-Walajah residents' homes, according to the paper.
The original village of al-Walajah was located on the opposite side of its current location, on a mountain slope facing east, just about six kilometers south of Jerusalem. It was very close to Battir, the village in which I was born and brought up. The two villages were separated by a valley, with Battir on the opposite slope from al-Walajah, though a little further south and were very closely linked.
The railway from Jerusalem to the Palestinian coastal city of Jaffa ran right through that valley, which also marks the 1949 armistice line following the end of the 1948 war (also known as the "Green Line.")
During October 1948, Zionist forces attacked and occupied al-Walajah. Its roughly 1,800 inhabitants were scattered in every direction, sharing the fate of Palestinians from hundreds of other towns and villages ethnically cleansed in the same period.
I have strong memories of visiting al-Walajah as a young child, which was walking distance from my village. Often when I was dispatched by one of my parents to purchase something for the house from the only shop in our village, I was advised to try the shop in al-Walajah if the item was not to be found in Battir.
There was active social interaction and intermarriage between the small, tight-knit populations of al-Walajah and Battir. There were daily exchanges of visits and sharing of most kinds of public events. That also applied to many other villages which were within walking distance from Battir such as Beit Safafa, al-Malhah, al-Jawrah, Ain Karem, al-Qabou and Sataf; all were occupied and ethnically cleansed in that first war.
That kind of cozy relationship amongst the small populations of Palestinian villages was all but destroyed by the 1948 war. When the inhabitants of Battir returned home after several months of forced refuge elsewhere when the village during the war came under direct fire, al-Walajah, which used to bustle with life was now silent and deserted. The demarcation line delineated following the 1949 armistice had left al-Walajah just west of the line, on the Israeli side. Battir was barely saved with the barbed wire running through the village cutting most of the village agricultural land, some houses and the boys school. Later, we watched as the Israeli army started to demolish al-Walajah, house by house. We would see a cloud of smoke and dust shoot up into the air over a house, followed by the sound of an explosion, leaving nothing but a heap of rubble. Al-Walajah was completely destroyed before Israel built the settlement of Aminadav and a park where Israelis picnic on its lands.
Apparently the people of al-Walajah owned land across the hills to the east, well within the West Bank, and that is where they decided to settle temporarily for the awaited hope of justice and redemption from the United Nations, which like many Palestinians, they still thought would come.
But time passed and justice never visited them, so they started to build homes and created a new al-Walajah. This new town is the one now threatened with ethnic cleansing. Of course the standard Israeli excuse for destroying Palestinians homes is that they were built "without permission."
The irony is that the Israelis have all along permitted themselves to massacre, ethnically cleanse, occupy, confiscate, destroy and commit every sort of crime against their Palestinian victims while Palestinians are severely punished for building on their land in their country. Al-Walajah in 1948 and now, bears witness to Israel's insatiable appetite for Palestinian land.
Israel's brazen acceleration of settlement construction on occupied Palestinian land is unquestionably a result of international, and particularly American, policy failures and the refusal to hold Israel accountable under international law.
While we have constantly witnessed the so-called "international community" relentlessly tracking down alleged violations and violators in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, Kenya, Burma and among Palestinians not affiliated with US-backed Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, Israel is offered unconditional impunity.
It doesn't stop there; Israel is not only exempt from punishment but routinely rewarded for its crimes. After six months of defiant rejection of American requests to stop settlement construction, the Americans were the ones who finally dropped the demand and put pressure instead on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to drop its conditions to restart "negotiations."
Last month's New York summit of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, hosted by US President Barack Obama, was Netanyahu's first great diplomatic victory. Following the growing public outrage at the PA's shelving of the Goldstone report into Israel's war crimes in Gaza, it emerged (according to the BBC Arabic Service on 3 October) that Abbas agreed in New York to drop the Palestinian effort to have the report forwarded to the Security Council for further action. This is a second major Israeli victory. Netanyahu, it should be recalled, had dwelled heavily on the Goldstone report in his address to the UN General Assembly rejecting the report as a serious obstacle to peace. Abbas on his part ignored any mere mention of the report in his own UN speech. This indicates that Abbas had already acquiesced to public and private American and Israeli demands to shelve the Goldstone report.
Israel's third victory is the revelation that the Obama administration, like all its predecessors, has agreed to help Israel continue to hide its nuclear weapons arsenal that threatens the region and all of humanity, while the US and its allies escalate their pressure on Iran in response to Israeli incitement.
All of these events are directly linked to what happens to people in al-Walajah -- and indeed all over Palestine from Galilee to Gaza -- who from 1948 until now, continue steadfastly and stubbornly to defend their rights and existence even as they still hope for international justice that has yet to come.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and is republished with the author's permission.
Al-Walajah, a symbol of Israeli ethnic cleansing
Hasan Abu Nimah, The Electronic Intifada, 9 October 2009
 |
| Palestinians retrieve their possessions after the Israeli army demolished their home in the West Bank village of al-Walajah, near Bethlehem, December 2006. (Fadi Tanas/MaanImages) |
While American officials continue to claim that the mission of US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell is by no means over, and that he will still pursue his efforts to convince the Israeli government to agree to some sort of settlement freeze, Israeli plans for further colonization of Palestinian land continue undisturbed. The latest Israeli plans call for the destruction of the West Bank village of al-Walajah for the second time in six decades.
According to Israeli press reports, Israel is planning a massive new settlement in the vicinity of Jerusalem, on land owned by Palestinians of al-Walajah. The project, expected to be approved by the Israeli ministry of the Interior, could become the single most populous settlement built in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967 according to the Israeli daily Maariv. The project plans prepared by the ministry of the Interior and the Jerusalem municipality call for 14,000 housing units for 40,000 settlers on 3,000 dunums of land which would require the demolition of al-Walajah residents' homes, according to the paper.
The original village of al-Walajah was located on the opposite side of its current location, on a mountain slope facing east, just about six kilometers south of Jerusalem. It was very close to Battir, the village in which I was born and brought up. The two villages were separated by a valley, with Battir on the opposite slope from al-Walajah, though a little further south and were very closely linked.
The railway from Jerusalem to the Palestinian coastal city of Jaffa ran right through that valley, which also marks the 1949 armistice line following the end of the 1948 war (also known as the "Green Line.")
During October 1948, Zionist forces attacked and occupied al-Walajah. Its roughly 1,800 inhabitants were scattered in every direction, sharing the fate of Palestinians from hundreds of other towns and villages ethnically cleansed in the same period.
I have strong memories of visiting al-Walajah as a young child, which was walking distance from my village. Often when I was dispatched by one of my parents to purchase something for the house from the only shop in our village, I was advised to try the shop in al-Walajah if the item was not to be found in Battir.
There was active social interaction and intermarriage between the small, tight-knit populations of al-Walajah and Battir. There were daily exchanges of visits and sharing of most kinds of public events. That also applied to many other villages which were within walking distance from Battir such as Beit Safafa, al-Malhah, al-Jawrah, Ain Karem, al-Qabou and Sataf; all were occupied and ethnically cleansed in that first war.
That kind of cozy relationship amongst the small populations of Palestinian villages was all but destroyed by the 1948 war. When the inhabitants of Battir returned home after several months of forced refuge elsewhere when the village during the war came under direct fire, al-Walajah, which used to bustle with life was now silent and deserted. The demarcation line delineated following the 1949 armistice had left al-Walajah just west of the line, on the Israeli side. Battir was barely saved with the barbed wire running through the village cutting most of the village agricultural land, some houses and the boys school. Later, we watched as the Israeli army started to demolish al-Walajah, house by house. We would see a cloud of smoke and dust shoot up into the air over a house, followed by the sound of an explosion, leaving nothing but a heap of rubble. Al-Walajah was completely destroyed before Israel built the settlement of Aminadav and a park where Israelis picnic on its lands.
Apparently the people of al-Walajah owned land across the hills to the east, well within the West Bank, and that is where they decided to settle temporarily for the awaited hope of justice and redemption from the United Nations, which like many Palestinians, they still thought would come.
But time passed and justice never visited them, so they started to build homes and created a new al-Walajah. This new town is the one now threatened with ethnic cleansing. Of course the standard Israeli excuse for destroying Palestinians homes is that they were built "without permission."
The irony is that the Israelis have all along permitted themselves to massacre, ethnically cleanse, occupy, confiscate, destroy and commit every sort of crime against their Palestinian victims while Palestinians are severely punished for building on their land in their country. Al-Walajah in 1948 and now, bears witness to Israel's insatiable appetite for Palestinian land.
Israel's brazen acceleration of settlement construction on occupied Palestinian land is unquestionably a result of international, and particularly American, policy failures and the refusal to hold Israel accountable under international law.
While we have constantly witnessed the so-called "international community" relentlessly tracking down alleged violations and violators in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, Kenya, Burma and among Palestinians not affiliated with US-backed Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, Israel is offered unconditional impunity.
It doesn't stop there; Israel is not only exempt from punishment but routinely rewarded for its crimes. After six months of defiant rejection of American requests to stop settlement construction, the Americans were the ones who finally dropped the demand and put pressure instead on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to drop its conditions to restart "negotiations."
Last month's New York summit of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, hosted by US President Barack Obama, was Netanyahu's first great diplomatic victory. Following the growing public outrage at the PA's shelving of the Goldstone report into Israel's war crimes in Gaza, it emerged (according to the BBC Arabic Service on 3 October) that Abbas agreed in New York to drop the Palestinian effort to have the report forwarded to the Security Council for further action. This is a second major Israeli victory. Netanyahu, it should be recalled, had dwelled heavily on the Goldstone report in his address to the UN General Assembly rejecting the report as a serious obstacle to peace. Abbas on his part ignored any mere mention of the report in his own UN speech. This indicates that Abbas had already acquiesced to public and private American and Israeli demands to shelve the Goldstone report.
Israel's third victory is the revelation that the Obama administration, like all its predecessors, has agreed to help Israel continue to hide its nuclear weapons arsenal that threatens the region and all of humanity, while the US and its allies escalate their pressure on Iran in response to Israeli incitement.
All of these events are directly linked to what happens to people in al-Walajah -- and indeed all over Palestine from Galilee to Gaza -- who from 1948 until now, continue steadfastly and stubbornly to defend their rights and existence even as they still hope for international justice that has yet to come.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and is republished with the author's permission.
Sunday, 11 October 2009
as coisas que fazem a paz
fonte:EI
The things that make for peace
Timothy Seidel, The Electronic Intifada, 11 October 2009
As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes." Luke 19:41-42
Dominus Flevit on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem is the name of a church and a site of pilgrimage for many Christian travelers to the "Holy Land." Literally, Dominus Flevit means "the Lord wept" in Latin and is remembered as the site where Jesus stopped to look out over Jerusalem to weep and ask this striking question to all who would follow him.
An unavoidable question: Do we recognize the things that make for peace? Are they right in front of us, hidden from our eyes?
The language of peace often surrounds us. In a place like Palestine, the language of peace gets thrown around on a regular basis. One can see it when surveying the expanding colonization of the occupied West Bank in recent decades, in particular during those times of "peace" process. Or when one passes through an Israeli military checkpoint and is greeted with "shalom" -- the Hebrew word for peace. And one also encounters it on the International Day of Prayer for Peace, where Palestinian Christians and Muslims alike gather to resist the daily violence they experience through prayer and protest.
When I read a text such as this one from Luke's gospel, I cannot help but feel like Jesus is speaking directly to me, to us. Indeed, these words are a challenge to all of us who would make use of the language of peace.
This is a subversive text. And it reminds me of a story about what the language of peace in Palestine-Israel looks like, a story from Hedy Sawadsky, a relief worker with the Mennonite Central Committee in the Middle East in the 1960s who was challenged by a Palestinian woman: "what you're doing here is fine, but it is only band-aid work ... go home and work for peace and get at the root causes of evil and war."
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye. Matthew 7:3-5
Since my return from Palestine, I cannot help but see the linkages to the work of peace and justice here in the US. Just as that Palestinian woman told Hedy, the root causes are too often rooted here.
I continue to struggle with not being cynical about the situation in Palestine and in Gaza in particular. It is not a healthy place for me to be, spiritually or emotionally. But the Gaza Strip is a heart-breaking catastrophe in so many ways and the people there have been suffering for so long. It makes me think about the ways that we in the US are irrelevant -- in the sense that it is less about what we need to do and more about what we need to stop doing. In other words, honestly looking at the ways in which we, the US, have made Gaza into a prison: through our tax dollars, our US military aid to Israel, which includes the military hardware used in Gaza, our US veto power that obstructs United Nations Security Council responses, or our US media representations of Gaza and Palestinians that too often dehumanize.
Honesty in our self-reflection should lead us to confession and repentance of our own histories of violence and injustice on this continent. I once heard quoted a Native American who argued that the best way for people from the US to address the terrible conflict in Palestine-Israel is to deal more seriously with our own history of colonization, dispossession and displacement and work for justice for the indigenous peoples in the US. This would not only address a serious and ongoing historical sin but in the process more effectively help our Palestinian and Israeli brothers and sisters suffering in that broken land. This manner of systemic analysis recognizes that work for justice in Gaza should be part of the work for justice everywhere.
This has led me to seek a "thicker" definition of peace, one that emerges out of a deeper, more systemic analysis of violence and injustice. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about these linkages, particularly in naming the connections between racism, poverty (classism) and war (militarism). Or put another way, recognizing that our work at anti-imperialism abroad must be complemented by our anti-racism and anti-oppression work at home.
Identifying the historical trends of colonization, dispossession and displacement in a place such as the Middle East, how might an accompanying peace issue look like in our communities? How might we identify these linkages? I would argue that immigration is such an issue, an issue all-too-invisible, or at least invisible to some. In fact, wherever you may be right now you would likely not have to look too far to uncover the plight of undocumented neighbors and discover opportunities to recognize "the things that make for peace" particularly as it relates to the biblical call to welcome the stranger (Lev. 19:33-34; Eph. 2:17-20).
Newcomers to the United States continue to encounter an unwelcoming hostility shaped by racism and xenophobia. They are too often met with suspicion, intimidation, isolation, militarized borders, raids and migratory documentation backlogs. In recent years, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) conducted some of the largest workplace raids in the history of the United States, causing fear, separating and terrorizing families, and disrupting entire communities and the lives of immigrants and US citizens. The ongoing construction of the US-Mexico border wall materializes this anti-immigrant sentiment. There are an estimated 12 to 16 million persons in the US with undocumented immigrant status. And the US immigration system continues to be dysfunctional, lacking programs for guest workers and increasing documentation backlogs, and proposing futile programs that do not address the root causes of immigration.
In this context, many Christian communities continue to be ambivalent about how it should respond to immigrants, and in its majority the church remains uneducated on the political, economic and social issues that cause immigration. For example, when coming to the United States individuals are looking for economic opportunities, means for survival for themselves and their families, and fleeing the dire situations that their countries are facing -- many of which are directly connected to foreign policies of the United States, including trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that could be understood to lead to the "colonization" of local economies resulting in a displacement that dispossesses whole communities and uproots persons. The economies of neighboring countries, such as Mexico, have been seriously affected by trade policies that promote economic disparity and dependence.
A genuine peace that speaks to all of these forms of violence and injustice is our challenge. This takes us beyond the all-too-familiar and omnipresent language of peace, recognizing that what is required is more than a word. More than holding another peace summit that provides the opportunity for another high profile photo-op. More than another gathering around a peace agency or a peace church.
Indeed, peace in its deepest, thickest, most holistic form always challenges the status quo that maintains the structures of violence that benefit the powerful and privileged. And so, a "thicker" definition of peace requires a thicker, more systemic analysis and approach to peace, accompanied by engaged and engaging theological reflection.
And this is one of the ways that we can engage this issue -- seeking a thicker definition of peace through biblical and theological reflection that is life-giving. Challenging nationalistic and chauvinistic biblical theologies such as Christian Zionism that legitimize the violence and oppression of these structures of dispossession and occupation that create a status quo of suffering for Palestinians, Native Americans, or the undocumented immigrant in our midst is crucial.
This sort of reflection and systemic analysis must lead to action and engagement -- whether in terms of education, political advocacy, boycott, divestment, or sanctions -- whose authenticity will be measured by the ways in which they challenge our lifestyles in a manner that requires we change, transform and heed the calls to confession and repentance that continue to echo from Palestine, Pine Ridge, and across the Global South.
Whether it is seeking a just peace in Palestine-Israel or radical hospitality for the stranger in our midst, how do we look with open eyes and listen with open ears and hearts so that we might see, that we might recognize on this day the things that make for peace?
Timothy Seidel works as Director for Peace and Justice Ministries with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) US He was a peace development worker with MCC in the Occupied Palestinian Territories from 2004-2007 and a contributing author to Under Vine and Fig Tree: Biblical Theologies of Land and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Cascadia Publishing, 2007).
The things that make for peace
Timothy Seidel, The Electronic Intifada, 11 October 2009
 |
| A Palm Sunday procession on the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, April 2006. (Inbal Rose/MaanImages) |
As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes." Luke 19:41-42
Dominus Flevit on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem is the name of a church and a site of pilgrimage for many Christian travelers to the "Holy Land." Literally, Dominus Flevit means "the Lord wept" in Latin and is remembered as the site where Jesus stopped to look out over Jerusalem to weep and ask this striking question to all who would follow him.
An unavoidable question: Do we recognize the things that make for peace? Are they right in front of us, hidden from our eyes?
The language of peace often surrounds us. In a place like Palestine, the language of peace gets thrown around on a regular basis. One can see it when surveying the expanding colonization of the occupied West Bank in recent decades, in particular during those times of "peace" process. Or when one passes through an Israeli military checkpoint and is greeted with "shalom" -- the Hebrew word for peace. And one also encounters it on the International Day of Prayer for Peace, where Palestinian Christians and Muslims alike gather to resist the daily violence they experience through prayer and protest.
When I read a text such as this one from Luke's gospel, I cannot help but feel like Jesus is speaking directly to me, to us. Indeed, these words are a challenge to all of us who would make use of the language of peace.
This is a subversive text. And it reminds me of a story about what the language of peace in Palestine-Israel looks like, a story from Hedy Sawadsky, a relief worker with the Mennonite Central Committee in the Middle East in the 1960s who was challenged by a Palestinian woman: "what you're doing here is fine, but it is only band-aid work ... go home and work for peace and get at the root causes of evil and war."
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye. Matthew 7:3-5
Since my return from Palestine, I cannot help but see the linkages to the work of peace and justice here in the US. Just as that Palestinian woman told Hedy, the root causes are too often rooted here.
I continue to struggle with not being cynical about the situation in Palestine and in Gaza in particular. It is not a healthy place for me to be, spiritually or emotionally. But the Gaza Strip is a heart-breaking catastrophe in so many ways and the people there have been suffering for so long. It makes me think about the ways that we in the US are irrelevant -- in the sense that it is less about what we need to do and more about what we need to stop doing. In other words, honestly looking at the ways in which we, the US, have made Gaza into a prison: through our tax dollars, our US military aid to Israel, which includes the military hardware used in Gaza, our US veto power that obstructs United Nations Security Council responses, or our US media representations of Gaza and Palestinians that too often dehumanize.
Honesty in our self-reflection should lead us to confession and repentance of our own histories of violence and injustice on this continent. I once heard quoted a Native American who argued that the best way for people from the US to address the terrible conflict in Palestine-Israel is to deal more seriously with our own history of colonization, dispossession and displacement and work for justice for the indigenous peoples in the US. This would not only address a serious and ongoing historical sin but in the process more effectively help our Palestinian and Israeli brothers and sisters suffering in that broken land. This manner of systemic analysis recognizes that work for justice in Gaza should be part of the work for justice everywhere.
This has led me to seek a "thicker" definition of peace, one that emerges out of a deeper, more systemic analysis of violence and injustice. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about these linkages, particularly in naming the connections between racism, poverty (classism) and war (militarism). Or put another way, recognizing that our work at anti-imperialism abroad must be complemented by our anti-racism and anti-oppression work at home.
Identifying the historical trends of colonization, dispossession and displacement in a place such as the Middle East, how might an accompanying peace issue look like in our communities? How might we identify these linkages? I would argue that immigration is such an issue, an issue all-too-invisible, or at least invisible to some. In fact, wherever you may be right now you would likely not have to look too far to uncover the plight of undocumented neighbors and discover opportunities to recognize "the things that make for peace" particularly as it relates to the biblical call to welcome the stranger (Lev. 19:33-34; Eph. 2:17-20).
Newcomers to the United States continue to encounter an unwelcoming hostility shaped by racism and xenophobia. They are too often met with suspicion, intimidation, isolation, militarized borders, raids and migratory documentation backlogs. In recent years, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) conducted some of the largest workplace raids in the history of the United States, causing fear, separating and terrorizing families, and disrupting entire communities and the lives of immigrants and US citizens. The ongoing construction of the US-Mexico border wall materializes this anti-immigrant sentiment. There are an estimated 12 to 16 million persons in the US with undocumented immigrant status. And the US immigration system continues to be dysfunctional, lacking programs for guest workers and increasing documentation backlogs, and proposing futile programs that do not address the root causes of immigration.
In this context, many Christian communities continue to be ambivalent about how it should respond to immigrants, and in its majority the church remains uneducated on the political, economic and social issues that cause immigration. For example, when coming to the United States individuals are looking for economic opportunities, means for survival for themselves and their families, and fleeing the dire situations that their countries are facing -- many of which are directly connected to foreign policies of the United States, including trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that could be understood to lead to the "colonization" of local economies resulting in a displacement that dispossesses whole communities and uproots persons. The economies of neighboring countries, such as Mexico, have been seriously affected by trade policies that promote economic disparity and dependence.
A genuine peace that speaks to all of these forms of violence and injustice is our challenge. This takes us beyond the all-too-familiar and omnipresent language of peace, recognizing that what is required is more than a word. More than holding another peace summit that provides the opportunity for another high profile photo-op. More than another gathering around a peace agency or a peace church.
Indeed, peace in its deepest, thickest, most holistic form always challenges the status quo that maintains the structures of violence that benefit the powerful and privileged. And so, a "thicker" definition of peace requires a thicker, more systemic analysis and approach to peace, accompanied by engaged and engaging theological reflection.
And this is one of the ways that we can engage this issue -- seeking a thicker definition of peace through biblical and theological reflection that is life-giving. Challenging nationalistic and chauvinistic biblical theologies such as Christian Zionism that legitimize the violence and oppression of these structures of dispossession and occupation that create a status quo of suffering for Palestinians, Native Americans, or the undocumented immigrant in our midst is crucial.
This sort of reflection and systemic analysis must lead to action and engagement -- whether in terms of education, political advocacy, boycott, divestment, or sanctions -- whose authenticity will be measured by the ways in which they challenge our lifestyles in a manner that requires we change, transform and heed the calls to confession and repentance that continue to echo from Palestine, Pine Ridge, and across the Global South.
Whether it is seeking a just peace in Palestine-Israel or radical hospitality for the stranger in our midst, how do we look with open eyes and listen with open ears and hearts so that we might see, that we might recognize on this day the things that make for peace?
Timothy Seidel works as Director for Peace and Justice Ministries with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) US He was a peace development worker with MCC in the Occupied Palestinian Territories from 2004-2007 and a contributing author to Under Vine and Fig Tree: Biblical Theologies of Land and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Cascadia Publishing, 2007).
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