Bulletin N°276
Subject : ON EROS vs.THANATOS (DEMOCRACY
AGAINST GENOCIDE).
7 December 2006
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Our century of industrial-scale violence --the 20th century-- has
continued into the first decade of the following century. A history
will be written one day of this era describing how the nature of the
mass violence changed and how pacifist responses changed accordingly.
Meanwhile, we are still living in an incredibly numbing environment,
where social democracy is not working and capitalisme
sauvage is at the door. It would seem to many that capitalist
regulations do not protect the public effectively from
environmental and personal damage, that public ownership and
democratic control of the means of production is the
only practical alternative to the ravages brought about by the
private profit motive.
The present technological revolution has not been completely
appropriated by capitalist interests, and democratic movements are able
to use the scientific knowledge necessary to "think globally and act
locally". While giant corporate interests are staking out their claims
to the sources of global wealth, indigenous people everywhere are
beginning to envision a better collective future and are learning how
to organize against the forces of the private profit motive, which
would enslave them with the assistance of an army of "hired guns".
It has been estimated that more than 178 million people have been
murdered by states between 1900 and 1999. These state murders,
represent the work of a molar action [see Giles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus],
which once set in motion has a momentum virtually impossible to halt
until it reaches its destination. How to prevent the initial movement
toward mass destruction is a question at the level of strategy and
would require the dismantling of the arms industries of the entire
world, all of which have a vested interest in promoting warfare.
The arms industries, like all capitalist enterprises, are governed by
the private profit motive, and with this narrow interest they are
prepared to destroy the environment and even the market economy to
attain their goals of short-term maximum profits.
Here are descriptions of a few of the consequences of the arms
industries' profit motive at work in the 20th Century :
- Testimonies on Genocides :
- http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/testimonies/
- From Genocide in Guatemala :
- http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2003/discoveringdominga/
- Form Genocide in Cambodia :
- http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/3women1.htm
- From Genocide in Sudan :
- http://www.judgmentongenocide.org/testimonies.html
- On the 85th Anniversary of Armenian genocide :
- http://www.geocities.com/vsvaz333/7Haytsegh.html
- On the 64th Anniversary of the Nazi Holocaust :
- http://www.auschwitz.dk/docs/
- On genocide in Rwanda :
- http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,444361,00.html
- On Kurdish genocide in Iraq :
- http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/kurdish/htdocs/his/Khaledtext.html
- On a Palestinian genocide in process ?
- http://www.protection-palestine.org/impression3574.html
- http://www.harlemlive.org/international/middle_east/palestiniangenocide/palgenocide.html
Below are 8 articles which CEIMSA recently
received describing this economy of death and the social movements now
growing in the wastelands.
Item A., sent to us by Stendhal University Professor Hélène
Palma, is an address by international pacifist, Judea
Pearl, which was delivered before the United Nations'
Non-governmental Organizations Briefing on 26 January, as part of
the International Day of Holocaust Remembrance.
Item B. is an article by Israeli anti-war activist, Gideon
Levy, analyzing why the Lebanese cease fire is likely to "go up
in flames" in the coming months.
Item C. is an article by Mike Whitney suggesting
that unless anti-war interventions occur, another blood bath is likely
in Lebanon.
Item D. is an audio interview with Noam Chomsky speaking with Robert McChesney on Media Matters,
about "The Death of a Nation".
Item E. is an article by Bashir Abu-Manneh, member of
the English Department Faculty at Barnard College reviewing two books
on Palestine :The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian
Struggle for Statehood by Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah's new book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to
End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
Item F. is an article by Adel Safty, in which he
observes how it is getting increasingly difficult for the U.S. media to
ignore the Israeli massacres and starvation tactics used against the
people of Palestine.
Item G. is an announcement from Academics for Justice,
publicizing the news that “Israel came in at the bottom of the
ranking in almost every question, even among Americans!”
And finally, item H. is an article from Alexander Cockburn,
reminding us of the virtual reality of neo-conservatives and how the correspondence
theory of Truth has raised its ugly head once again, challenging
their performative theory which recognizes Truth as
simply an act of speech, or a concession with what has been stated,
again and again.
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Dircector of Research
Université Stendhal Grenoble 3
http://www.ceimsa.org/
_________________
A.
from Hélène Palma :
4 December 2006
Dear Francis,
here is the script of a speech delivered by Dr. Judea Pearl (Daniel
Pearl Foundation, www.danielpearl.org) which he kindly sent to me
yesterday.
Best regards,
Hélène
Thank you Mr. Sommereyns, Ambassador Gillerman,
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
On this solemn day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust, I
am grateful for the opportunity to highlight the memory of my
grandparents, who perished in Auschwitz in 1942, and that of my son,
Daniel Pearl, who was murdered 60 years later, in Karachi, Pakistan.
Situated thousands of miles apart, and executed under totally different
circumstances, by people of a different faith, language and purpose,
the two murders nevertheless illuminate each other as well as the topic
under discussion.
This speech was webcast alive and can be viewed on : http://www.un.org/dpi/ngosection/brief-calendars/brief-jan26.htm
_______________
B.
from Gideon Levy :
5 December 2006
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) is not
interested in the cease-fire. One can assume that neither is the Shin
Bet. Reports on how the cease-fire is already being exploited for
redeployment on the other side are flooding the media.
________________
C.
from ICH :
5 December 2006
Information Clearing
House
The
Lebanese government has nearly doubled the size of its security forces
in recent months by adding about 11,000 mostly Sunnis and Christian
troops, and has armed them with weapons and vehicles donated by the
UAE, a Sunni state.” (“Lebanon Builds Up Security Forces, Megan Stack,
LA Times) “The army’s conclusion is that a war in the near future is a
reasonable possibility….the IDF’s operative assumption is that during
the coming summer months, a war will break out against Hezbollah and
perhaps against Syria as well.” Ha’aretz editorial
When Hezbollah puts a million people on the streets of Beirut, it
doesn’t appear on the front page of the New York Times. That spot is
reserved for Bush’s “made-in-Washington” extravaganzas like the Cedar,
Orange or Rose revolutions. Those bogus revolutions were cooked up in
American think tanks and engineered by US NGOs; that’s why they got
headline coverage in the Times. The Beirut demonstrations don’t promote
the political agenda of the America’s ruling elite, so they’re stuck on
page 8 where they’ll be ignored.
Some things never change.
But the demonstrations are an important part of the drama which is
currently unfolding in the region. They signal the shifting of power
away from Washington and Tel Aviv to a new Shiite-dominated Middle
East. The American-backed government of Fouad Siniora is the next
domino on the list which could fall in a matter of weeks. Time appears
to be running out for Siniora and there’s nothing Bush or Olmert can do
about it.
Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is moving Lebanon towards
"democratization" by demanding greater representation for the country’s
majority, the Shi’ites. So far, he’s decided to take the peaceful
route, but the massive protests are an impressive “show of force” that
could be a sign of things to come. If the situation deteriorates,
Hezbollah will do what is necessary to defend its people and its
interests. Siniora knows that Nasrallah has the power to bring down the
government or to plunge the country into civil war. So, it's all a
matter of who blinks first.
Ironically, Nasrallah’s tactics mirror those that were used during the
so-called Cedar Revolution which put Siniora in office and forced the
Syrian troops out of Lebanon. Now, the situation has reversed itself
and tens of thousands of mostly poor Shi’ites have set up camp in
Bierut’s main square, the Riad el Soloh, and are hunkering-down for the
long haul. There defiance is as much an indication of class struggle as
it is a rejection of the Siniora government. Megan Stack of the LA
Times clarifies this point:
“Some of the poorest and most marginalized people in the country,
Shiite Muslims, have abandoned their homes in suburban slums to camp
out on the nation's priciest bit of real estate. Though they often have
trudged through Lebanese history as war refugees, now they have managed
to displace Lebanon's wealthiest shop owners. They also have surrounded
Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, barricaded in his office.”
“Class struggle” is a big part of the present confrontation. The media
has tried to emphasize the religious differences to promote their
theory of a “clash of civilizations”; the ongoing struggle between
modernity and Arab reactionaries. It’s all the same gibberish Americans
read every day in op-ed columns by Tom Friedman, David Brooks or the
other neocon scribes.
The “clash of civilizations” theory is a great boon to those who would
like see war in the Middle East continue into perpetuity or at least
until every Arab country is broken up into little defenseless statlets.
But the truth is that the Shiites are mostly poor and underrepresented
and are entitled to a bigger place at the political table. Does that
mean they would have the right to “veto” legislation? (which seems to
be the main bone of contention)
Yes, of course, if they are in the majority, but that doesn’t imply
that the Lebanon is destined to become an Islamic theocracy. Nasrallah
has already dismissed the idea of an Iranian-type “Mullahocracy”, run
by Ayatollahs who strictly apply Sharia Law. Nasrallah is fiercely
nationalistic despite his clerical robes. His main objective is to
remove the US-Israeli agents, like Siniora, from the government and
reestablish Lebanese sovereignty. Remember, Siniora refused to even
deploy the Lebanese army to fight the Israelis when they invaded his
country and killed 1300 Lebanese nationals. For the hundreds of
thousands of victims in the south, there’s no doubt as to where
Siniora’s true loyalties lie.
Siniora is Washington’s man. In fact, he even kept the lines of
communication open with Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, while his
country was being bombed with American ordinance dropped from Israeli
planes. After the war he quickly reopened the US embassy even though
his country’s infrastructure was still in ruins from Israel’s 34 Day
rampage. He has been a great asset to US-Israeli plans to create a “New
Middle East”, but utterly useless for the great body of
poverty-stricken and homeless Lebanese civilians.
Michel Chossudovsky summarized the administration’s goals in Lebanon
this way:
“Washington’s objective is to transform Lebanon into a US
protectorate. The Lebanese people are demanding the resignation of a
government which is acting on behalf of the US and Israeli invaders of
their country. They are demanding the formation of a national unity
government which will defend the Lebanese homeland against US-Israeli
aggression.”
Chossudovsky adds:
“The Beirut government is taking orders directly from the US
embassy. The Siniora government has allowed the deployment of NATO
forces on Lebanese territory under the pretext of UN-sponsored
peace-keeping operation. NATO warships under German command are
stationed off the country’s eastern Mediterranean coastline. NATO has a
military cooperation agreement with Israel.” (“Mass Demonstrations
against the US-backed Lebanese Government” Michel Chossudovsky; Global
Research)
The US and Israel are working feverishly behind the scenes to
destabilize Lebanon as part of their broader plans for the entire
region. The assassination of Lebanese Industry Minister, Pierre Gemayel
can only be understood in this larger context. The assassination
strengthened the US-Israel position vis a vis Syria and increased the
likelihood of a confrontation between Hezbollah and government forces.
This is precisely what Israel wants. It allows Tel Aviv to stay
uninvolved while their 34 Day War resumes via their Lebanese proxies.
Megan Stack of the LA Times reports that, “The Lebanese government has
nearly DOUBLED the size of its security forces in recent months by
adding about 11,000 mostly Sunnis and Christian troops, and has armed
them with weapons and vehicles donated by the UAE, a Sunni state.”
(“Lebanon Builds Up Security Forces, LA Times)
The dramatic increase in the Interior Ministry troops, including the
creation of a controversial intelligence unit and the expansion of a
commando force, is meant to counter the growing influence of Iran and
Hezbollah, its Shiite ally in Lebanon….The quiet, speedy buildup
indicates that Lebanon’s anti-Syria ruling majority, has been bracing
for armed sectarian conflict since the withdrawal of Syrian forces in
the spring of 2005. It also reflects growing tensions across the region
between US-allied Sunnis Muslims who hold power in most Arab nations
and the increasingly Shiite-ruled Iran and Hezbollah.” (LA Times)
The Siniora government has actually moved troops out of the army into
the Internal Security Forces (ISF). The implication is clear. Siniora
has no interest in defending his country from foreign (Israeli)
invasion; he’s simply getting ready to fight his own people. Clearly,
the weapons from the United Arab Emirates are being provided under
Bush’s authority to help Siniora in a future confrontation with
Hezbollah.
Mark Mackinnon of the Globe and Mail confirms much of what appeared in
the LA Times. Mackinnon says, “Since the Syrian army’s departure from
Lebanon in early 2005, the US and France have been providing money and
training to the Internal Security Forces (ISF). With the political
situation souring further in recent weeks, the UAE stepped in to
provide the unit with an emergency “gift” of thousands of rifles and
dozens of police vehicles.” (“West helps Lebanon build Militia to fight
Hezbollah”; Globe and Mail)
Even though Siniora’s troops have been armed and trained by western
powers, Israel is still not confident that they can prevail. In fact,
Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported:
“The mounting crisis threatening the Siniora government in Lebanon,
and the specter of a Hezbollah takeover, have spurred senior Israeli
government officials in Jerusalem to raise several proposals in recent
days aimed at strengthening Siniora….(They are) increasingly concerned
that Siniora’s government will fall, resulting in a Hezbollah takeover
that would turn the country into what an Israeli government official
source termed ‘the first Arab state to become an Iranian
protectorate’”.
But Israeli fears may be unwarranted. While Hezbollah receives military
assistance from Iran, it certainly does not compare to the high-tech
weaponry and foreign aid that Israel gets from the US. Nor is there any
indication that Hezbollah is merely a puppet of the Iranian Mullahs.
This is just more baseless scaremongering. In fact, a strong
nationalist government in Beirut could serve to stabilize the region by
developing a more credible deterrent to Israeli aggression. (Israel has
invaded Lebanon 4 times in 25 years) That might undermine Israel’s
regional ambitions but, it would be infinitely better for the Israeli
citizens who simply want peace and security.
Nevertheless, Israel is preparing for any eventuality; especially
since it is unlikely that Bush will be able to commit any American
troops if war breaks out. Ha’aretz summarized the somber mood of the
Israeli high-command in an editorial earlier in the week:
“The army’s conclusion is that a war in the near future is a
reasonable possibility. As Amir Oren reported several weeks ago, the
IDF’s operative assumption is that during the coming summer months, a
war will break out against Hezbollah and perhaps against Syria as
well.”
But there is room for optimism. By summer, the Bush administration
should be winding down in Iraq. This is bound to have a profound effect
on the entire region. Israel will be less likely to restart its war
with Lebanon if the administration is engaged in fragile negotiations
with the neighboring states. And, who knows; a phased withdrawal of
troops in Iraq might force a compromise in the Israel-Palestine
standoff? (Olmert has already begun talking to Saudi Arabia about a
comprehensive peace plan modeled on the Road Map)
So far, only one thing seems certain; that US-Israeli influence will
steadily decline just as Shiite power continues to rise. Another
bloodbath in Lebanon won’t change that reality.
_______________
D.
from Noam Chomsky :
2 December 2006
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
The Palestinians committed a major crime in
January (2006) There was a free election, closely monitored, declared
to be free and fair and they voted the wrong way. That is absolutely
criminal.
___________
E.
from The Nation Magazine :
5 December 2006
ZMAG
In Palestine, a Dream Deferred
by Bashir Abu-Manneh
[A review of The Iron Cage: The Story of the
Palestinian Struggle for Statehood by Rashid Khalidi and One Country: A
Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse by Ali Abunimah]
Since
occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has been the only
sovereign state in British Mandate Palestine. Palestinians have been
living either as second-class citizens in the Jewish state; or as
colonized residents of the West Bank and Gaza with no human or
political rights; or as refugees dispersed and stranded in neighboring
Arab countries, in often extremely difficult conditions. The chances of
Palestinians overcoming exile and exercising their right of return seem
as far away as ever. Hardly more promising are the immediate prospects
for ending the Israeli occupation and establishing an independent
Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in accordance with the
international and Arab consensus, in place since at least 1976 and
rejected by the United States and Israel.
Neither armed struggle from bordering Arab countries and the
occupied territories nor popular mobilization and political struggle
have brought liberation and decolonization. The defeat or containment
of one intifada after another has only strengthened the Israeli
colonial presence in the West Bank. Despite the withdrawal of 8,000
settlers from Gaza, the area's 1.3 million Palestinians are under
intensified blockade and siege. Since the summer nearly 400
Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians, as in the recent
Beit Hanoun massacre. Haughtily told by the United States that the lack
of Palestinian "democracy" was the main obstacle to peace, Palestinians
freely cast their ballots in the legislative elections in January, only
to be punished for their democratic choice: threatened by Israel with
"starvation" and denied the funds needed to pay the salaries of civil
servants, the breadwinners for much of Palestinian society. Walls,
checkpoints, closures, collective punishments, roadblocks, Jewish-only
roads, massacres by shelling, assassinations, mass imprisonment and a
poverty rate of 70 percent have come to define the Palestinian
condition under occupation.
The diplomacy of the Oslo period has also failed to restitute--even
some--Palestinian national rights. In fact, as far as the Israeli elite
were concerned, the Oslo framework was never intended to end the
occupation or to bring about withdrawal to the 1967 borders. Oslo has
proved to be yet another version of the Allon Plan, first presented
after the 1967 war by Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon to
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. The Allon Plan proposed a truncated
autonomy for Palestinians in the West Bank (Allon suggested that
Arab-majority areas be placed under Jordanian jurisdiction), with
substantial quantities of their land annexed to Israel, which would
control all borders and entry points to the territory as a whole.
Since 1993, under the guise of peacemaking, Israel has doubled the
number of settlements and settlers (around 400,000) in the occupied
territories. For Israel "peace" and "security" have come to mean a
Palestinian population cut off from Israel yet at the same time totally
dependent on it--a recipe for continuing Palestinian subjugation and
Israeli domination. Palestinians have, as a result, been undergoing
their worst ordeal since their dispossession and expulsion from most of
Palestine in 1948 and their occupation by Israel in 1967. As John
Dugard, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied
territories, put it in his recent report, Palestinians are the first
occupied people in history on whom international sanctions have been
imposed--sanctions that are "possibly the most rigorous form...imposed
in modern times." Palestinian democracy, he concludes, is as curtailed
by the international community as Palestinian freedom of movement is by
Israel.
This bleak picture is compounded by grave internal divisions between
Fatah and Hamas, which in the past year have spilled over into street
confrontations and killings. For the first time in Palestinian history
there looms the possibility of civil war. The political contradictions
between those who seem ready to accept whatever Israel offers
(Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah elite) and
those who seek the complete decolonization of the 1967 lands (Hamas,
grassroots elements in Fatah and the majority of Palestinians) are
rapidly sharpening. Though the Palestinians' steadfastness is intact,
living under near permanent siege and without hope of immediate real
change could intensify the tendency toward self-destruction, a prospect
that Israel's leaders are happy to encourage.
How then to respond to this deepening Palestinian crisis and to
Israel's relentless drive toward consolidating and expanding the
settlement project? Thus far, there has been no collective or national
Palestinian self-reckoning. But conversations are beginning to take
place in Palestinian communities all over the world. Activists and
intellectuals are beginning to ask the central questions: What is the
nature of the Palestinian crisis today, and how can it be overcome?
The new books by Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah are important in
this regard. Both writers have longstanding records of engagement with
the Palestinian question: Khalidi holds the Edward Said Chair in Arab
Studies at Columbia University, has published several fine books on
Palestinian nationalism and advised the Palestinian delegation at the
1991 Madrid talks; Abunimah is a founding editor of and frequent
contributor to http://www.electronicintifada.net, an
indispensable online source of alternative information on the
occupation. Both men seek, in their different ways, to ignite more
focused debate and discussion about fundamental Palestinian and Israeli
concerns. Khalidi's The Iron Cage examines the causes of the
Palestinian failure to achieve statehood, from the British Mandate in
1922 to Hamas's recent electoral victory, while Abunimah's One
Country makes the case for the creation of one state for Arabs and
Jews in all of Israel-Palestine.
Why did the Palestinians fail to achieve statehood before 1948,
and what impact did their defeat have on their national prospects
thereafter? This is the main question that Khalidi tackles in The
Iron Cage, a work of forceful historical analysis written in a
spirit of self-examination. If the Palestinians take center stage in
this critical survey of their leadership, it's not because Khalidi is
"blaming the victims." Rather, he is holding them "accountable for
their actions and decisions," as he puts it. Ridiculing Palestinian
leadership has long been a veritable pastime in the West, from Abba
Eban's oft-quoted line "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to
miss an opportunity" to the myth that Arafat consigned his people to
continuing occupation by rejecting Ehud Barak's "generous offer" at
Camp David. Khalidi, in contrast, never loses sight of the fact that
the Palestinians had few good choices, and that the odds against their
struggle for self-determination may have been insurmountable. Those
odds are well suggested by a remark made in 1919 by British Foreign
Secretary Arthur James Balfour, author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration
supporting a Jewish "national home" in Palestine: "Zionism, be it right
or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present
needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and
prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
Since then, denial of Palestinian national aspirations has been a
constant of Western and Zionist policy in the region, and Khalidi
emphasizes its crucial significance. He minces no words appraising the
US record: "In practice the United States is, and for over sixty years
has been, one of the most determined opponents of Palestinian
self-determination and independence."
As Khalidi underscores, it is these British and American commitments to
Zionism that are centrally responsible for continuing Palestinian
statelessness and dispossession. It has long been argued that
Palestinians--alone among Arab nations--failed to establish their
independence because of their internal weaknesses: the petty quarrels
and betrayals of their elites, their lack of social development, even
an absence of genuine national consciousness. In fact, Khalidi shows,
Palestinian society compared favorably, economically and socially, to
other Arab societies that had emerged from Ottoman rule. Indeed, it
"was manifestly as advanced as any other society in the region, and
considerably more so than several."
Palestine's history diverged from its neighbors' because of the
external interest that no other territory in the Arab world attracted:
Zionism's desire to create a Jewish state and Britain's sponsorship of
its settler-colonial project. Indeed, without Britain no Jewish state
would have been possible. Britain did everything in its power to
nurture Jewish state institutions and to prevent Palestinian ones from
taking shape, creating, in Khalidi's words, "a kind of iron cage for
the Palestinians, from which they never succeeded in escaping."
Fundamental inequalities of policy defined British imperialism in
Palestine. For most of the Mandate period, Britain facilitated and
supported Jewish immigration from Europe against the wishes of the
Palestinian majority. Although the British and the Zionist movement
came to blows over the 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration and
land purchase, Britain's colonial policies ultimately led to Zionist
control of most of Palestine in 1948, when Jews still constituted only
a third of its population and owned around 6 percent of its land.
But why, Khalidi asks, were the British able to achieve their
objectives against the obvious desires of Palestine's Arab majority? At
times, his answer skirts dangerously close to circularity--the
Palestinians didn't achieve statehood because they failed to build
state structures that would contest the British Mandate. But what
accounts for this failure? Khalidi's answer is tough-minded and
unsparing. Rather than establish "alternative sources of legitimacy"
and fight the Mandate, the notables who led Palestinian society were
all too trusting of the British as intermediaries, with whom they
engaged in "ineffectual beseeching." Thus did they deprive themselves
of political leverage to substantially affect, much less reverse, the
British policy of supporting the creation of a Jewish national home. If
Palestinian leaders were co-opted and contained by the Mandate's iron
cage, Khalidi suggests, it was in part because they lacked any real
willingness to move against British imperialism until it was far too
late. (The Palestinian elite's tendency to entrust their people's fate
to imperial powers would re-emerge during the Oslo period.)
Even more than this dependence on the Mandatory system, what set the
Palestinian leadership apart from other Arab nationalist elites was its
specifically religious character. These were, in fact, intertwined, as
Khalidi demonstrates in a striking discussion of the role played by Haj
Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Palestine. The British created his
office--raising his stature in order to help them administer the
Mandate--and invested it with powers that no mufti had ever enjoyed in
the history of Islamic religious institutions. This put the Palestinian
national movement at a severe disadvantage: "Lacking effective vehicles
for building toward statehood, either pre-existing, provided by the
British, or developed by the Palestinians themselves, the Arab
population of Palestine was instead granted a religious leadership,
authorized, encouraged, legitimated, subsidized, and always in the end
controlled by the British."
It was only in the early 1930s, with the rise of the Hizb al-Istiqlal
al-Arabi (the Arab Independence Party), that Palestinians turned to
mass resistance to the Zionist project and its British patrons. In
contrast to the mufti and other Palestinian leaders who denounced the
British in speeches while quietly cooperating with them behind the
scenes, Istiqlal advocated Palestinian independence and Arab unity and
denounced cooperation with the Mandate authorities. Istiqlal quickly
aroused opposition from the British, the Zionist movement and from the
mufti, who would tolerate no challenges to his charismatic leadership.
(As Khalidi ruefully observes, "The Palestinians were to suffer again
many decades later from this damaging conflation of the national cause
with the personality of an overweening leader in the twilight era of
Yasser 'Arafat's dominance of the Palestinian national movement.")
Under the weight of these pressures, the party disintegrated within two
years of its founding. Yet its brief existence indicated a growing
middle-class disenchantment with elite capitulation and a rising mood
of popular militancy, particularly with regard to the deepening plight
of Palestinian peasants and their increasing dispossession by Zionists.
And in identifying the British as the main enemy of Palestinian
national aspirations, Istiqlalists laid the groundwork for the armed
struggle led by Sheikh Iz al-Din al-Qassam and for the general strike
and violent rebellion of 1936-39.
For Khalidi "the crushing of the 1936-39 revolt largely
determined the outcome of the 1948 war...for the Palestinians." He is
aware that the anticolonial mobilization may well have been doomed to
defeat, pointing out that no such revolt was successful in the interwar
years and that Britain deployed more than 20,000 troops and the Royal
Air Force against the Arab rebellion. But the revolt led the British to
issue the White Paper, a small and ambiguous concession that the mufti
rejected. Thus, writes Khalidi, the leadership "failed to take
advantage of the momentary weakness of the British position or to win
any political gains from the sacrifices that had been made by the
rebels." Although the odds were stacked against them, he insists, "the
Palestinians did have choices, and some of them may have been less bad
than others," including mass organization, non-cooperation with the
British and tactical concessions.
Khalidi rightly underscores the issue of leadership, which plays
an important, at times decisive, role in the success or failure of
political movements. But why does it always come back to haunt the
Palestinians? The self-interest of the elite and their propensity to
cooperate with the British are part of what needs to be explained. Was
there something about the conditions of Palestinian life under the
Mandate that accounts for the persistently bad choices of the
leadership? Or were there more deep-seated social causes?
Palestinian writer and PFLP leader Ghassan Kanafani made a
powerful case for the latter in his 1972 study on the 1936-39 revolt.
According to Kanafani, the nature of the Zionist colonial project
forced Palestinian society to undergo "an extremely violent
transformation from an Arab agricultural society into a Jewish
industrial one." This, combined with British colonial policy, produced
a weak Palestinian bourgeoisie and a weak industrial working class and
labor movement, neither of which could mount an effective challenge to
the Palestinian elite's political hegemony. As a result, the resistance
to Zionism was led by the peasantry--dispossessed, nationally
disorganized, geographically dispersed and ultimately powerless. As
Mona Younis writes in her excellent Liberation and Democratization:
The South African and Palestinian National Movements: "Indeed,
while peasant and migrant workers could wreak havoc through rioting,
they lacked leverage with which to force either the British or the
Zionists into aborting their colonization designs."
Crushed by the British and the Zionist movement, and unable either to
reorganize or to gain support from Arab governments that were more
concerned with maintaining friendly relations with the British than
with defending Palestinian national rights, the mass rebellion of
1936-39 ultimately degenerated into incoherence and infighting. The
road to the 1948 catastrophe was open. The Palestinians might have
compensated for their lack of leverage with a more coherent
anticolonial nationalism that combined principled mass mobilization of
peasants and workers with violent insurrection. The Palestine Communist
Party might have led such a struggle, as did other Communist parties in
underdeveloped countries like China and Vietnam. However, the
predominantly Jewish PCP was too weak among Palestinians to challenge
the leadership of the notables. And when Stalin decided that partition
was the best solution to the Palestine question, the party adhered to
the new line.
The Palestinian defeat in 1948 dramatically altered the political
landscape, resulting in the expulsion of more than half the Arab
population and the creation of Israel on the ruins of most of
historical Palestine. This left the Palestinians stateless and
dispersed, and with even less leverage to recover their lands and
achieve their independence. Palestinians in exile faced the challenge
of transforming Israel from outside its borders, while those still in
Israel were placed under Israeli military rule until 1966. From 1948
through the mid-1960s, Khalidi argues, Palestinians "paid scant
attention to the problem of what form of state was appropriate for
Palestine" and generally did little more than project the imagined past
into the future.... In thus attempting to turn back the clock,
Palestinians once again appear to have given little serious thought to
the nature of the relationship between them and Israeli Jews who would
remain in such a projected Palestinian Arab state, just as during the
Mandate period, there was no appreciation of Zionism as anything more
than a colonial movement that had dispossessed the Palestinians.
Clearly, the fact that Zionism had also functioned as a national
movement, and had founded a national state, Israel, was still not
something that the traumatized Palestinians could bring themselves to
accept, since these things had happened at their expense.
What difference such an "appreciation" of Zionism as both a colonial
and a national movement would have made, when it was obviously bent on
displacing Palestinians and expropriating their country, is not made
clear. Indeed, Khalidi shows that an accommodation with Zionism was
never a real option precisely because of its exclusivism and unwavering
rejection of the Palestinian right of national self-determination.
While it may be true that Palestinians between 1948 and 1967 lacked
sufficient realism in their understanding of Israel, much more evidence
than the Palestinian National Charter of 1964 is needed to substantiate
such a strong claim. It certainly doesn't ring true of those
Palestinians who suddenly found themselves a besieged minority in a
Jewish state, or of exiled Palestinians like Kanafani, whose novella Men
in the Sun (1963) offered a powerful critique of Palestinian
nostalgia for the world they'd lost.
It is important to recognize, nevertheless, that a qualitative shift in
Palestinian political history did occur with the emergence of Fatah and
the PLO from the mid-1960s onward--a story that has been told in
exhaustive detail by Yezid Sayigh in his study Armed Struggle and
the Search for State. For Sayigh and most historians of the
Palestinian national movement, the PLO has served in effect as a state
in exile, seeking a territory to rule. Pointing to the Palestinian
Authority's abject failure to achieve even the semblance of
independence and sovereignty, Khalidi suggests that "this entire
teleology, and the narrative about the PLO that is based on it, is very
much open to question." He finds too much "clear evidence that it was
not seriously preparing to build the Palestinian state that had been
its formal objective for several decades," including contradictions
between rhetoric and practice, armed struggle and diplomacy. Again and
again, Khalidi attributes the PLO's failure to its lack of preparation.
While he accepts the notion that the PLO was bureaucratized and that it
had become "more and more of a quasi-state and less and less of a
national liberation movement," he argues that this process never
deepened into "regularization and organization on a legal basis of the
organs of the PLO, their democratization, and their preparation for a
move into the occupied territories."
But if there was too little "regularization and organization," as
Khalidi puts it, there was also far too much bureaucratization,
authoritarian leadership and lack of accountability. The only way to
overcome these impediments would have been to foster, not undermine,
mass mobilization and democratic participation. But Fatah elites were
always averse to participatory democracy. In such a milieu,
self-deception all too easily took root in the leadership. Thus Arafat
was capable, in 1972, of characterizing the Palestinian revolution as
"a succession of temporary setbacks until final victory." Never mind
that in 1970-71, the Palestinian resistance had been brutally crushed
in Jordan (in the events of "Black September") and expelled to Lebanon.
But how can such extraordinary defeats bring about victory? How can
worsening conditions of operation lead to transformation without any
thoroughgoing reassessment of the causes of failure and without
devising more successful strategies of resistance?
Arafat's thinking has been far too prevalent in the Palestinian
movement. It came into its own politically, as Gilbert Achcar has shown
in Eastern Cauldron, after what he describes as the
"catastrophic" liquidation of the Palestinian left's most progressive
and committed cadres. This defeat led to a policy of increasing
dependence on Arab dictatorships and the petrodollars of Gulf
monarchies and to the deepening bureaucratization and corruption of the
PLO, whose purse strings were controlled by Arafat.
Why did Arafat's conservative nationalist policies prevail after 1970?
The reasons behind such developments were subject to considerable
debate in the movement itself in that period, particularly on the
Palestinian left; one wishes that Khalidi had examined more closely the
period between Black September and the PLO's expulsion from Beirut in
1982, which he too quickly brushes aside in phrases like "the futility
of exile politics." For it was precisely during the exile period in the
early '70s, and after Black September, that a serious and democratic
critique of the PLO developed. Within Fatah it was voiced by Husam
al-Khatib, a member of the central committee who recognized that the
defeat of the resistance in Jordan was not just about "the question of
leaderships" (masalat al-qiyadat) but about revolutionary
clarity, organizational structure and political form. What Khatib
championed was "revolution within the revolution," an internal
transformation of the PLO's structures that would foster popular
participation and advance the organization's ends more effectively.
Interestingly, Khatib referred to this process as an "internal
intifada."
A similar critique of the PLO was advanced by Syrian Marxist
philosopher Sadek Jalal al-Azm, who attributed the defeat of Black
September to Fatah's capitulation to King Hussein and its policy of
"non-interference" in Arab authoritarian regimes. For the PLO to
achieve its desired objectives, he argued, it needed to assume the
mantle of democracy and revolution in the whole Arab world. Only then
could the Palestinians establish the political leverage that they
lacked as a nation-in-exile. This would help them correct the balance
of forces and push Israel and the West to recognize Palestinian
self-determination. This road was arguably available to the
Palestinians; at the very least it should have been considered among
their historical options. Such a revolutionary road may well have been
blocked and defeated by Israel and the United States. But it remained a
road not taken, and it marks a possible alternative in the Middle East
of the 1970s, destroyed by Arab authoritarian brutality, with the
backing of Israel and the West. By re-examining this radical period in
Palestinian history, Khalidi may well have recognized that bad
leadership after 1948, as in the Mandate period, is a symptom of deeper
causes. Nevertheless, The Iron Cage compels us to reflect more
deeply on the problems that continue to bedevil the Palestinian
movement.
Focused on the sources of the Palestinians' failure to build a state of
their own, Khalidi does not explicitly advocate a particular solution
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (although a longstanding supporter
of a two-state solution, he expresses doubts about whether even this
will come to pass, given the enormous odds Palestine now faces). Since
the 1967 war, the Palestinian national movement has formally adopted
two main solutions to end the conflict with Israel: from the late '60s
to the early '70s, a single democratic state in Palestine, which would
incorporate all religious groups and existing populations; and, since
1974, a commitment to building a state on any liberated part of
Palestine, formalized at the Palestinian National Council's 1988
meeting in Algiers into a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders
with East Jerusalem as its capital, in accordance with the
international consensus. Contrary to conventional wisdom in the West,
the two-state solution has long been the dominant program of the
Palestinian movement, still supported by a majority of Palestinians and
their representatives, including, implicitly, by Hamas, despite its
maximalist rhetoric. Though most Palestinians have never regarded the
creation of a state in 22 percent of their land to be a just resolution
of the conflict, they have also viewed the end of the occupation as a
necessary condition before other issues, such as the right of return
and Israel's status as a Jewish state, can be discussed.
Ali Abunimah's principal argument in One Country is that
Israelis and Palestinians are so deeply "intertwined" geographically
and economically, and the occupation so deeply entrenched, that
binationalism, or a single democratic state with equality and
self-determination for both peoples, is "the only viable solution."
(Similar arguments have been made in recent years by, among others,
Tony Judt, Virginia Tilley, Meron Benvenisti and the late Edward Said.)
For Abunimah, binationalism resolves many inherent problems with
Zionism: its exclusivism; its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians
(which is becoming increasingly popular in Israel, where Russian-born
settler Avigdor Lieberman, an advocate of "transfer," recently joined
Ehud Olmert's Cabinet); and its racist obsession with demography. It
would also crucially allow the Palestinians to return to their usurped
lands and to live in peace with Israelis on an equal basis.
What's missing in his account, however, is an appreciation of immediate
Palestinian needs and strategies. Although Abunimah draws on a number
of examples to support his proposal, including Northern Ireland and
South Africa, the creation of a single democratic state is not a
pressing demand for most Palestinians. Indeed, he concedes that today
neither Palestinians nor Israelis want to live together in one state.
What is more, if Palestinians have been struggling to no avail to
implement the much less demanding two-state solution with international
laws and resolutions solidly on their side, how can they be expected to
work toward an end that is even less feasible than it was thirty years
ago, namely ending political Zionism? Abunimah consoles us with the
assertion that Israelis "do aspire to progressive values." It's hard to
share his faith, however, with the erosion of the Israeli peace camp
and a society permanently lurching to the right. So one cannot help but
wonder: Is it fair to ask 3.5 million occupied Palestinians to wait for
redress of their daily sufferings and national humiliation until there
is sufficient support among both peoples for a binational solution?
When Palestinian and Jewish socialists, notably Noam Chomsky and the
Israeli Matzpen group, advocated a binational state in the 1970s (an
issue ignored by Abunimah), its realization was premised on large-scale
social and political transformation: Radical movements on both sides,
with strong and capable constituencies, would pull toward each other
and end their separation. When that option evaporated with the
deepening colonial expansion of Israel and the rise of Jewish
fundamentalism, many socialists shifted toward advocating a two-state
solution, while remaining hostile to political Zionism. With the global
retreat of radical politics since the mid-'70s, there is even less
reason to believe a binational constituency exists in Israel-Palestine
today. "Binationalism without social, political agents on the ground is
an idea: an interview here, an article there," says Azmi Bishara, the
Palestinian leader of the National Democratic Assembly in the Israeli
Knesset, who, as a supporter of a state for "all its citizens," can
hardly be accused of hostility to binationalism. "Are there
masses--social movements--that are raising binationalism? I say no.
There are not.... Among the Palestinian masses, the mood is still
national. National-Islamic. Not binational." And if the binational idea
remains largely divorced from politics, it has no legs to stand on.
Bishara is hardly mentioned by Abunimah, who ignores much of the
literature on binationalism. The binational idea has a history in both
societies, and it cannot be encompassed in a few passing references to
PLO documents and to Martin Buber's writings. Unlike Khalidi, Abunimah
overlooks Towards a Democratic State in Palestine (1970), the
only one-state proposal ever produced by Fatah, written in English by a
group of Palestinian intellectuals at the American University of
Beirut. (Written for foreign consumption under the aegis of PLO
official Nabil Shaath, the document mainly sought to convince a Western
audience that Palestinians accepted the Jewish presence in Palestine.)
Abunimah's discussion of the PLO amounts to two paragraphs, one of
which is a long quote. He ends with this: "But if a single state was
unthinkable in the past, many of the conditions that made it so have
changed. Perhaps the most important is that the majority of Israelis
and Palestinians now understand that the other community is here to
stay."
But the fact that they know this doesn't mean that the conditions for
binationalism are emerging. Nor does it make sense to describe the
Israeli-Palestinian relationship as "intertwined," as Abunimah often
puts it. One can make that claim only about either Palestinians living
inside Israel, however unequal their access to power and social goods
may be, or about occupied Palestinians between 1967 and 1991, when
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin started instituting his policy of closure
and separation. Only then was Israel significantly dependent on
Palestinians and their migrant labor. As Mona Younis argues, only then
did Zionism make a partial exception to its exclusionary logic of
expulsion and incorporate the Palestinians into the Israeli polity as
subordinate laborers. And this, in turn, gave the occupied Palestinians
some leverage to pursue certain forms of mobilization. The first
intifada is a great example of what such inclusionary dynamics can
generate, and it's the closest Palestinians have ever come to
decolonizing Gaza and the West Bank. Even then their democratizing
force was checkmated by an exiled PLO bureaucracy that feared losing
its authority--and crushed by severe Israeli repression. Today the
situation in the occupied territories is totally different, and much
worse, leaving Palestinians with even fewer options for change and
transformation than before. Israel has unilaterally cut Palestinians
off and excluded them from access to its territory and settlements,
even to their own surrounding areas. How can walls and closures be
described as intertwining? In fact, Israel is no longer and in no way
dependent on occupied Palestinians, while Palestinians remain dependent
on Israel in every way. And this, incidentally, may well explain why
Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli civilians (shelved by Hamas
for the past eighteen months, while Israel's deliberate targeting of
civilians continues) were prevalent as a resistance tactic after Oslo
and its institutionalization of closure. However morally indefensible
and politically counterproductive, suicide bombings were the only way
desperate Palestinians felt they could "get at" their occupiers.
Notions of interdependence, then, are simply wrong, and miss what is
fundamental about Zionist colonization since 1991: its powerful
exclusionary form. Comparisons with American settler-colonialism and
its treatment of Native Americans are, therefore, much more apt than
comparisons with inclusionary settler-colonialisms like apartheid. One
hopes that the Palestinian solidarity movement doesn't get too
distracted by the surface similarities between South Africa and
Palestine, like the question of violence or boycott, to understand
their crucial differences--and that it aspires to be as
uncompromisingly realist as it is hostile to political Zionism.
Palestinians are entering a critical stage in their history. More
oppressive structures are firmly established now, raising the
possibility of permanent dispossession and national disintegration.
Geographically and politically divided, Palestinians around the world
know neither their immediate goals nor their long-term objectives. Such
a deep crisis requires widespread collective engagement and effort. It
may be useful to take the recent Palestinian Prisoners' Document of
National Conciliation, amended and agreed upon by both Fatah and Hamas
on June 27, as a launching pad for emerging debates and discussions.
The prisoners clearly call for the end of the occupation, dismantling
of all settlements and realization of Palestinian national rights.
Their position is supported by a majority of Palestinians in the
occupied territories, who realize that it may well prove to be the
strongest basis for national unity today. A national liberation
movement can achieve success only if it is based on values of
self-organization, independence, democracy and active mass
participation, including women and workers. A new anticolonial national
movement is still possible and ever more necessary. And if the outcome
of decolonization also produces a constituency in Israel happy to live
in peace and equality with the Palestinians without walls and borders,
so much the better. But there's no shortcut around the struggle against
the occupation.
______________
Bashir Abu-Manneh teaches English at Barnard College. This
article was published in the December 18, 2006 issue of The Nation.
______________
F.
from Z Magazine :
4 December 2006
http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm
Palestne
Getting Difficult to Ignor
by Adel Safty
American
influential opinion makers, who generally managed to remain indifferent
to the plight of the Palestinian people, are finding that ignoring
Palestine is getting harder everyday.
This is largely the result, not of a fundamental change in how the
influential media in the US views the Palestine tragedy, but of the
unease produced by the remarkable insensitivity of the Bush
administration and the political establishment, republicans and
democrats alike, in the face of sustained and growing Israeli
violations of Palestinian human rights and distressing disregard for
Palestinian lives.
In a November report about Jewish settlements, the Israeli Peace Now
movement showed how “Israel has effectively stolen privately owned
Palestinian lands for the purpose of construction settlements…”
The report also demonstrated with maps and figures leaked to it by an
Israeli official, that “nearly 40 percent of the total area on which
the settlement sit is privately owned by Palestinians.” The data, said
the report, “has been hidden by the State for many years.”
On a moral note, the Peace Now movement concludes, the report shows
“the Israeli state acting in ‘daylight robbery’ of Palestinian land and
handing it over to Israeli settlers.”
There is nothing remarkable about the report, except possibly its
graphic details and its official Israeli source, making it an admission
of immoral and illegal conduct.
The reality of dispossession has been known and documented for quite
sometime, but largely ignored in the West, and particularly in
Washington. Sabri Jiyris’s classic book The Arabs in Israel, documented
the process of dispossession in Israel proper, the late Ibrahim Abu
Lughod’s classic book the Transformation of Palestine presented similar
facts about the process of confiscation of land and demographic and
geographic transformation of Palestine into a Jewish state.
Israeli writer and leading dissident Israel Shahak documented a similar
process by which Israeli authorities erased some 450 Palestinian
villages from the face of the earth.
As Israeli writer Yossi Melman put it, the Peace Now report provided
“the basic database for what we -- journalists, human rights
organizations, liberal minded Israelis, and every Israeli with a grain
of moral and ethical values -- have known for many years.” (Washington
Post. Nov 22)
Although the facts have been known for many years, the New York Times
published the story of the Peace Now Report as front page news.
It treated the report tentatively, introducing a key paragraph with the
conditional and referred to Israeli occupation as mere “presence.”
Still, the paper highlighted the implication of the report’s finding
that 40% of settlement land is privately owned by Palestinians, namely
that Israeli leaders had been lying: “Israel has long asserted that it
fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and only
takes land there legally or, for security reasons, temporarily.”
(NYT.Nov 21.06)
The Washington Post also published an article by Israeli writer Yossi
Melman discussing the Peace Now report.
Melman repeats some standard propaganda lines which presumably made his
piece more appealing to the Washington Post, claiming for instance that
the Palestinians could have had their state if Yasser Arafat had
accepted the ‘generous offer’ made by then Israeli Prime Minister Yahud
Barak at the Camp David Summit hosted by Bill Clinton in July 2000.
He argues that peace depended on Hamas if it renounced violence,
recognized Israel and honored agreements signed by previous Palestinian
governments. (Nov 22.06). This argument of course ignores the fact that
Israeli leaders have not only violated their own commitments to the
roadmap for peace, they have publicly bragged about freezing the
political process. Sharon’s own advisor Dov Weissglas admitted that
this whole package of the roadmap “has been removed from our agenda
indefinitely.” (Haaretz, Oct 8, 04)
Melman’s argument is the same propaganda previously used by Israeli
leaders to justify their refusal to deal with the Palestine Liberation
Organization. When Yasser Arafat gave in to Israeli conditions and
signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, various Israeli governments only
intensified the repression and accelerated the dispossession of the
Palestinians, while ignoring Oslo.
Still, it is remarkable that the Washington Post would publish an
article under the headline “Israel’s West Bank Theft.” The very title
challenges the established and long dominant view in American corporate
media of a democratic Israeli state where rule of law and respect for
human rights guide Israel’s treatment of its Arab population and of the
Palestinians over whom it rules in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Suggesting that Israel is less than a rule of law-state when it comes
to the Palestinians, and that it engaged systematically in immoral and
illegal conduct –beyond the systematic repression of Palestinians
graphically shown on television screens- and actually printing the
words ‘theft’ is a remarkable development for the influential media in
the USA.
The New York Times story also mentioned another fact known to most of
the world but not frequently mentioned to the NYT’s readers. It
highlighted the prevailing status in law of East Jerusalem as occupied
territory and of the settlements as illegal: “… much of the world
regards East Jerusalem as occupied. Much of the world also considers
Israeli settlements on occupied land to be illegal under international
law.” (NYT, Nov. 21, 06)
Even more remarkable, the New York Times quotes a certain Avi Teksler,
an official of the council of the settlement of Migron, built on
private Palestinian land, who, with refreshing candor, admits that his
settlement enjoyed the support of every Israeli government. In effect,
he brags that the government-sponsored theft of Palestinian land “is
how the state of Israel was created. And this is all the land of
Israel. We’re like the kibbutzim. The only real difference is that
we’re after 1967, not before.”
_____________
Prof. Adel Safty is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Siberian
Academy of Public Administration, Russia. His latest book, Leadership
and Democracy, is published in New York.
____________
G.
From : Academics for Justice :
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Subject: Nation Brand Index ranks Israel near the bottom
AcademicsforJustice@yahoogroups.com
Forwarded from: Scottish Palestine
Solidarity Campaign
Sent: 12/5/2006 6:15:11 AM
Subject: "Israel is ranked last by every country, including the
Americans" - Pariah state vulnerable to boycott campaigns
-
- “Israel came in at the bottom of
the ranking in almost every question, even among Americans!”
- The Nation Brand Index surveys a regular list of
35 nations, with Israel added to the list for the first time for this
survey and analysis. Israel came in at the bottom of the ranking
in almost every question.
- For example, respondents around the world were
asked:
- "How strongly do you agree with the statement that
this country behaves responsibly in the areas of international peace
and security?" Israel scored the lowest of all 36 countries surveyed.
Even Americans placed Israel 35th out of 36, with China last.
- The UK panel's rankings were typical of the
majority of countries: it gave Israel the bottom score on every
dimension of the index apart from exports where Israel came 27th.
- Get the original report, a must-read for all
supporters of Palestine: go to www.nationbrandindex.com and download NBI Q3 2006 Report. See such gems as: Israel’s
government recently announced it would undertake a branding campaign
- *The most negative brand ever measured by NBI
- *Comes in at the bottom of the ranking on almost
every question
- *Israel is ranked last by every (country) panel,
including the Americans…on how willing people are to live and work
there
- Now is the time for assertive
boycott campaigns on behalf of Palestine.
- For a fuller analysis of the implications of
Israel’s pariah status for successful boycott campaigns, mail secretary@scottishpsc.org.uk
- For solidarity updates www.scottishpsc.org.uk
__._,_.___
Visit http://academicsforjustice.org
Contact your representatives and elected officials: use
http://cflweb.org/congress_merge_.htm
For other ways to help, see http://BoycottIsraeliGoods.org
Views are those of their owners and not reflective of the group or any
organization unless indicated otherwise. No racism, intolerance,
or bigotry is allowed. Posting is limited to no more than three
messages per week from human rights advocates. All messages are
moderated.
SPONSORED
LINKS
Colleges and universities
Colleges and universities in
College and university information
College and university search
engine
School education
_______________
H.
From Alexander Cockburn :
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Subject: Gaza and Darfur
When Will Kristof Visit the
Occupied Territories?
Gaza and Darfur
by Alexander Cockburn
As a zone of ongoing, large-scale bloodletting
Darfur in the western Sudan has big appeal for US news editors.
Americans are not doing the killing, or paying for others to do it. So
there's no need to minimize the vast slaughter with the usual drizzle
of "allegations." There's no political risk here in sounding off about
genocide in Darfur. The crisis in Darfur is also very photogenic.
When the RENAMO gangs, backed by
Ronald Reagan and the apartheid regime in South Africa were butchering
Mozambican peasants, the news stories were sparse and the tone usually
tentative in any blame-laying. Not so with Darfur, where moral outrage
on the editorial pages acquires the robust edge endemic to sermons
about inter-ethnic slaughter where white people, and specifically the
US government, aren't obviously involved.
Since March 1 the New York Times
has run seventy news stories on Darfur (including sixteen pieces from
wire services), fifteen editorials and twenty-one signed columns, all
but one by Nicholas Kristof. Darfur is primarily a "feel good" subject
for people here who want to agonize publicly about injustices in the
world but who don't really want to do anything about them. After all,
it's Arabs who are the perpetrators and there is ultimately little that
people in this country can do to effect real change in the policy of
the government in Khartoum.
Now, Gaza is an entirely different
story. The American public as well as the US government have a great
deal of control over what is happening there. And it is Israel,
America's prime ally in the Middle East that is, on a day-to-day basis,
with America's full support, inflicting appalling brutalities on a
civilian population. To report in any detail on what's going on in Gaza
means accusing the United States of active complicity in terrible
crimes wrought by Israel, as it methodically lays waste a society of
1.5 million Palestinians. Of course the death rate is a fraction of
what's alleged about Darfur, but all the same, we are talking here
about a determined bid by Israel, backed by the U.S. and E.U. to
destroy an entire society.
I wan't at all surprised there was
a sharp swerve in emphasis towards Darfur at about the time of the
Kerem Shalom attack and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit in Gaza in June
of this year. By the time Israel's campaign of destroying Lebanon got
under way this summer (a campaign intricately linked to the Palestine
issue), Darfur was hotter still as a distracting topic.
Where is Kristof? Couldn't he
trade at least one of his Darfur columns for one on Gaza's suffering?
Maybe he is deferring to Thomas Friedman, who owns the Middle Eastern
turf on the NYT op-ed page the way Kristof owns chunks of Africa.
Israel's soldiers are not going to
march into Gaza and truck all the inhabitants away. The strategy is
simply to make the place into a garbage dump picked over by destitute
people. The current ceasefire will do nothing to relieve the siege
imposed physically, financially, commercially by Israel, the U.S. and
the E.U. Israel and its accomplices are sentencing Gaza's occupants to
a living death in situ, with actual death meted out each day to
"terrorists" and those unfortunate enough to be in the line of fire,
like the family in Beit Hanoun or the school teacher by the minibus
filled with children (a near miss).
As Gideon Levy wrote in one of his
many searing reports in Ha'aretz, the Israeli army "has been rampaging
through Gaza-there's no other word to describe it-killing and
demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately". When my brother
Patrick was there in September he reported in The Independent that
"Israeli troops and tanks come and go at will. In the northern district
of Shajhayeh they took over several houses last week and stayed five
days. By the time they withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three
houses were destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had
been bulldozed. Fuad al-Tuba, the 61-year-old farmer who owned a farm
here, said: 'they even destroyed 22 of my bee-hives and killed four
sheep.' His son Baher al-Tuba described how for five days Israeli
soldiers confined him and his relatives to one room in his house where
they survived by drinking water from a fish pond. 'Snipers took up
positions in the windows and shot at anybody who came near," he said.
"They killed one of my neighbors called Fathi Abu Gumbuz who was 56
years old and just went out to get water.'"
The sound that Palestinians most
dread, Patrick wrote, "is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying
they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or
missiles. There is no appeal."
The Israelis have destroyed 70 percent of the orange groves; stopped
the fishermen from going out in their boats, destroyed the central
power station. More than 50 percent of the population is out of work,
and per capita income is less than $2 a day.
Jennifer Loewenstein, of the
Middle Eastern studies program at the Unversity of Wisconsin at
Madison, has visited Gaza many times and written powerfully about it on
the CounterPunch website. She wrote to me last week, "If people
received genuine information about Gaza they would also be appalled-and
that's of course why they don't get any real information about it from
getting out. In addition, if the Israeli blockade of virtually all
human traffic into Gaza were to end and more visitors could actually
get in, more people-including freelance journalists-would be outraged,
or stunned into disbelief at what Israel with US and EU backing has
done to that miserable strip of land. Again, that's why the
Israeli-imposed human blockade persists. And while diplomats, UN and
international aid workers and a few others do get in, the fact that
most of them utter not a peep about this ongoing crime against humanity
suggests in the most sinister way that they will continue not to utter
a peep when things get worse.
As Loewenstein concluded:
"Servility to power doesn't get more insidious or malignant than this."
Hitchens Study
Group Probes Policy Options for Bedraggled Warmonger
We hear indirectly that
Christopher Hitchens, as seemingly impervious to reality as his hero
George Bush, is at last beginning to ponder how to extract himself from
the Iraq mess. The usual unreliable sources claim a plaintive phone
call from Hitchens to his friend Martin Amis, brooding on his dilemma.
Others have already fled the
burning deck of Bush's Mission Iraq. The Neocons are trying to regroup,
amid plaintive squeals that George Bush had not the intellectual mettle
nor moral fiber for the great task they charged him with. The thousands
of liberal intellectuals who either openly or tacitly backed the
venture have long since sidled towards the exits, albeit without a word
of remorse or self criticism.
Hitchens has been a full-bore
supporter of the war, summoned to the White House days before the
invasion to preach the morality and assured success of the cause. Since
those days he has stumbled from one fox hole to the next. The early
howls of triumph and exultant paragraphs about troops being garlanded
with flowers have given way to more sterterous rationales, before a
final stand on Kurdish soil. His recent book on Tom Paine (which
according to a devastating review in the London Review of
Books (is extensively plagiar ... --er-- indebted to an earlier
work by John Keane) is dedicated "by permission" to the Kurdish
president Jalal Talabani). No more talk from Hitchens of democracy and
freedom further south amidst the Shia and the Sunni.
But defiant wagging of the Kurdish
flag won't suffice for long. A special Hitchens Study Group is being
convened to evolve policy options for the beleagured scrivener. Among
the options on the table:
Hitchens should redeploy
immediately over the horizon to the United Kingdom, be recommended for
a peerage by the expiring Blair and take his seat in the House of Lords.
Hitchens should publish a vast
essay of plaintive self-justification in Vanity Fair and then retire
for a period of seclusion in the Betty Ford Clinic.
Hitchens should approach Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, ask for
his column back and carry on.
_______________
Note: An earlier version of
first item in this column ran in the print edition of The Nation that
went to press last Wednesday.