The opinion pages of most newspapers are dominated by male writers. Since I started reading newspapers in general and English-speaking newspapers in particular – that was when I was at high school and struggling with English – I couldn’t help but notice the scarcity of female voices and the preponderance of male ones.

This is to assert that I’m fully conscious of my problematic position in this article. I can’t speak for women at all. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t show my solidarity with women, especially in the form of paying tribute to their efforts. In this article, I’m paying tribute to Hadeel Salah al-Hashlamon.Unveiling Hadeel and Beyond

Hadeel, a 19-year-old university student, was a Hebron resident—a city that bursts with Israeli settlements. On the 22nd of September, she was shot dead by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. The Israeli narrative accuses Hadeel of attempting to stab a soldier.

But the Israeli army is used to distorting facts. Soon after her murder – described by Amnesty International as “extrajudicial execution” – the news agency PalMedia posted a video that belied the Israeli narrative. Hadeel didn’t threaten nor stab the soldier and her wounds weren’t in the extremities, as the Israeli army spokeswoman claimed. She was shot in the chest point blank.

For anybody reading about this incident without looking at Hadeel’s picture, the Israeli army’s act looks like a folly, and it might as well be. However, when one knows that Hadeel was wearing a burqa, some might “rationalize” the act.

The burqa immediately made her suspect, and it unfortunately placed her in a discourse that automatically consigns the label “terrorist” to her; a discourse that is strongly embraced in many European countries, hence the ban on the burqa in some places. Placing Hadeel’s story in that discourse made her story lose its specificity and rendered its construal only possible in the context of the universal war against terrorism.

The counter-narrative tells a much more believable and nuanced story. At the checkpoint, Hadeel refused to succumb to the Israeli soldier’s order to remove her burqa. She considered that an encroachment on her privacy (whether one is opposed to the burqa or not is really beside the point). If Hadeel had been requested to unveil by a female soldier and in a private space, she would have immediately acquiesced to removing the burqa and the veil.

What makes me so sure about it? Many Palestinian women are stopped at airports and other ports of entry controlled by Israel. They are subjected to different forms of humiliation and harassment. More often than not, they are even ordered to strip. When they reject that humiliation in the presence of male soldiers, the automatic reaction by the Israeli soldiers is criminalize them and subjugate them to further interrogations and warnings.

Why does the Israeli government endorse such policies? Because they know quite well that women, when they resist, contribute greatly to the liberation of the colonized; the Algerian woman is an example, as Frantz Fanon and historians of the Algerian Revolution show. That’s why Israel is targeting Palestinian women, especially the Muslim ones. In the aftermath of the War on Gaza, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women described what Palestinian women go through as a “grave situation.” They declared that Palestinian women are deprived of “advancement, self-reliance and integration in the development of their society.”

Palestinian women are deprived of all those rights despite the fact that Israel signed the UN Convention of the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Let’s remember that Israel is a misogynistic society in essence, and Palestinian women aren’t the only victims. Although the spokesperson for the Israeli army is a woman, the Israeli army is notorious for its misogyny. In addition, Israeli society itself is notorious for the fact that rape is rampant, as journalist David Sheen has shown.

Hadeel’s symbolic rejection of that colonial misogynistic culture–that is, her refusal to unveil her burqa—ironically unveils a system that is inherently based on oppressing a people and its women. More importantly, her act proves that Palestinian women’s “no” resounds strongly, and their resistance–including that of the Murabitat, a video of the brutal arrest of one of whom was circulated by Palestinian activists a couple of days ago–is alive and well.

– Mahmoud Zidan is a professor of English literature at the University of Jordan. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

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It has been recently announced that Arab ‘media experts’ plan to ‘celebrate’ Arab Media Day on April 21, 2016. The theme for the first day, of what is meant to be an annual tradition, is: “The Role of the (Arab) Media in Combatting Terrorism”.

The mockery is surely multi-faceted. One is the clearly politicized choice of the theme of the proposed event. The term ‘terrorism’ is a political one, and is rarely applied to violence committed by Arab regimes: it only applies to their detractors.

Another is the fact that the committee of ‘experts’ which made the decision was itself appointed by the Council of Arab foreign ministers in their Cairo meeting last May. The Council operates under the ineffectual and mostly ceremonial Arab League.

Of course, various Arab countries are enthusiastically planning to join the ‘celebrations’ with some, unscrupulously, emphasizing the importance of the ‘combatting terrorism’ theme, for obvious reasons: positioning themselves as victims of terror, never as purveyors of violence. The event – as most other common themes in Arab media – is likely to tout rulers as the saviors of nations, and condemn their detractors as terrorists, terrorism sympathizers or potential terrorists.

In reality, Arab media has little to celebrate. If anything, Arabs should lament the moral malaise afflicting their media, whether official, semi-official, independent or opposition. This is not to mention the hundreds of useless, glossy magazines that objectify women, belittle the social challenges facing Arab societies, and embrace western globalization as if Arabs only exist to consume, but not to think independently or critically.

If April 21 is to be of any value at all, it should be a day of candid discussion about urgent and practical steps required to escape the complete collapse of credibility under which most Arab media has prevailed since the so-called Arab Spring in the last four-and-a-half years.

As someone who has spent over two decades working in Arab and international media spaces, written about topics related to the Middle East, in general, and engaged in issues concerning the Arab world specifically, I wish to put forward a few suggestions for consideration by the organizers of Arab media committee:

Violence, Not Terrorism

Terms such as ‘al-irhab’ (terrorism) and ‘al-ta’asub’ (extremism) are often lobbed by Arab media in all of its platforms for a specific political end: demonizing the other. Instead, the term ‘al-‘unf’ (violence) should be used and confronted, regardless of who the party responsible for acts of violence is. While the State is often granted monopoly on violence through conveniently enacted laws, this monopoly is not meant to be used so nonchalantly and without an iota of accountability, as is currently the case.

Engaging, Challenging – Not Preaching

Arab media, in general, and commentators, in particular, tend to treat their readers with palpable pretentiousness. It is as if Arab media is the originator of wisdom and of all that is to be known. If there is any truth to that, Arab media would not be in such a poor state. Instead, owners and managers of media platforms should truly engage society: listen and learn from real people about their real life problems; understand that there exist, outside the sanctified media bubble, intellectuals and ordinary people with much wisdom and insight. Media is not meant to celebrate the seemingly endless virtues of the regime, or be celebrated for its own supposed virtues. It is a perpetual podium for ideas, challenging, difficult and rarely gratifying.

Universal Rules regarding Distortion and Fabrication

While some Arab regimes have recently enacted laws that punish journalists for promoting what certain governments perceive as fabrications and misinformation, pro-government journalists are largely exempted from such expectations. It is neither the right nor responsibility of governments to define what is true, thus permissible, and untrue, thus punishable by prison term or heavy fines. Journalists’ unions should provide moral guidance to their members, challenge those who permit themselves to serve as mouthpieces to any political party or regime and protect those who remain committed to the integrity of their profession.

Carving Space for Independent Thinking

Media is not just meant to be a platforms for opposing opinions. While this is necessary in order for the media to espouse a healthy democratic space in any society, Arab societies are hardly democratic, and opposing opinions often serve as hate fest between regimes and their enemies. Whenever possible, Arab media should open up a space for those who wish to think outside the political and ideological self-serving box. Arab intellect should not be limited to those ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ this regime or that party. There are always alternative ways of rationalizing which could, with time, offer real alternative to the status quo and conventional wisdom.

Offering Solidarity, regardless of Politics

Arab media should agree on some basic values that include standing by and defending those victimized by Arab regimes for voicing honest opinions, however critical. When a journalist suffers, is imprisoned, fined or ostracized, the entire media community loses a battle. Solidarity among journalists, regardless of personal political views or even ideological affiliation, should be enshrined into any code of conduct in any self-respecting media community anywhere.

Understanding that Women Are Not Honorary Citizens

MENA Media Monitoring has recently criticized the marginalization of Algerian women in the country’s media. According to its report, women are given 29 percent of the media space available, while men enjoy the rest. Women are often restricted, not just in space, but also in the topics to which they are meant to contribute, thus cramped only within areas related to family, food and fashion. In fact, Algeria is, perhaps, more fortunate than other Arab media where women are even more restricted, or used as token, as opposed to being active participants in discussions of serious political weight and societal impact. Engaging women in the media is not a favor to be bestowed by men, but a right – and an essential one – for any thinking society.

Setting Serious Goals, Not Celebrating Failure

One is not oblivious to the fact that no democratic media can truly function in a non-democratic society. However, it is the failure of Arab democracies that should heighten the sense of responsibility among Arab media and journalists. Arab media should set realistic but serious goals, and re-visit these goals with utmost honesty and transparency, no matter the confines and restrictions. There are many battles to be fought and won and, certainly, a price to be paid, but none of these challenges can be undertaken under the cloak of Arab foreign ministers or League.

This is not a judgement on Arab journalism itself, for the Arab world is teeming with journalistic talents that are yet to be utilized or explored. It is an attempt at an honest reading of the unfortunate reality under which Arab media is forced to operate. Until journalists and media professionals, through collective effort and after many uphill battles, redeem some respect for their tightly controlled medium, there is no reason whatsoever to celebrate.

– Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London). His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

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Bolivia’s 35-plus indigenous nations make up over 60 per cent of the country’s population and have a long history of struggle with the state. This has linked material grievances to the ethnic segregationist system, which emerged after the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century. Palestinians, who are witnessing the plundering of their natural resources, particularly water, by a military occupation with overt commercial interests, could learn much from the Bolivian indigenous movement, which defeated a move to privatise water in 2000.

Infrastructure of Dissent

The emerging feudal economy in postcolonial Bolivia centred on the mining industry and the seizure of indigenous lands by a rapacious hacienda creole class. In order to facilitate the incorporation of indigenous peasants into the emerging mining economy, rigid racial categories arose in which indigenous peoples were deemed eligible only as labourers, with no access to membership of the full citizenry. This contributed to the emergence of an indigenous class movement in Bolivia, which centred on a crystalizing infrastructure for dissent. This informal infrastructure was based upon the multi-faceted institutions of the tin-miners’ movement/indigenous agrarian class, and was informed cognitively by an Andean culture of insurrection, drawing on the memory of King Tupaj Aamuru’s gallant stand in the face of Spanish colonial forces. Radical ideologies began to blossom from this infrastructure, which drew on facets of Marxism and indigenous anarchism, fastening a renascent indigenous identity politics onto material realities. This indigenous dissent manifested itself at varying moments across the 20th century.

The Water Wars

By 1999, the neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1980s had consigned vast swathes of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples to abject penury, with 80 per cent of Quechua living in poverty. Financial accountability to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) through structural adjustment loans meant the infiltration of a market logic into Bolivia’s domestic politics. In 1999 the multi-billion dollar international corporation Bechtel drew up the Aguas del Tunari, with local Cochabamba officials. Bechtel and its co-investors were granted control of Cochabamba City’s water company for forty years and guaranteed an average profit of 16 per cent for each of those years. The resultant 43 per cent increase in water rates for the poorest families pushed the unions and indigenous peasant class over the edge. In 2000 a series of pitched battles, strikes and walkouts by trade unions and other organisations was staged which came to be known as the Cochabamba water war. The central organising actor was the Coordinadora, a coalition of irrigators, coca growers and coca cutters. One of the central tactics used by the Coordinadora was roadblocks, one which had been part of the resistance repertoire of the miners’ unions during the 1970s. After months of coordination, demonstration and state retaliation, representatives from Bechtel fled the city and then the country, and President Banzer was forced to cancel the contract. Cochabamba reacted with jubilation, with Coordinadora leaders flying back from remote prisons in Bolivia’s interior to a heroes’ welcome.

Grassroots mobilisation had faced down the government of a dictator, and overcome the power of one of the world’s largest corporations. It also brought the insurrectionary nature of indigenous politics into sharper focus, and more coordination. By 2002, Evo Morales, leader of the coca growers’ unions, ran for the national presidency as head of MAS (Movement towards Socialism). Linking neoliberalism to the regulation of access to resources for Bolivia’s poorest made him a standout candidate, and he was duly elected in 2005

Four years later, the long battle for equal access to natural resources secured a legislative victory with the passage of Bolivia’s “plurinational” constitution. This guaranteed the right to water on the “principles of solidarity, complementariness, reciprocity, equity, diversity and sustainability”, whilst also passing provisions relating to the equitable and sustainable use of Bolivia’s resources and the reacquisition of land for indigenous use.

Water in the West Bank

In the occupied and colonised West Bank, one manifestation of the apartheid reality for the 1.7 million Palestinians and 628,000 Israeli settler-colonists who live there is the unequal access to water. On average, a settler lives on 350 litres of water per day, whereas Palestinians live on an average of 73 litres; for the 113,000 Palestinians not hooked up to the water grid, it can be as low as 20 litres. Access to water is monitored tightly by the occupation regime, which has intertwined with the economics of occupation to limit Palestinian access.

Under Article 40 of the Oslo Accords, Israel recognised Palestinian water rights in the West Bank, but it did not take into account the excessive allocation of water to the 179 West Bank settlements, with no cap on their water supply. Oslo allocated 80 per cent of the water pumped from one of three underground water reserves to Israelis, and only 20 per cent to the Palestinians. The deal also created the Joint Water Committee (JWC), an Israeli-Palestinian body in charge of every water project (Palestinian and Israeli) in the West Bank; it is subject to the power imbalances which characterise the PA’s relationship with Israel since the former’s inception. Israel has effective veto over any water project, a veto not accorded to the Palestinians. This has resulted in a high number of Palestinian water projects being delayed and rejected between 1995 and 2010; only one Israeli project was rejected during this time.

Delays and rejections are carried out at the behest of an array of complex military orders, which have governed the West Bank since 1967. Military Order 92 transferred full authority over all water concerning issues in the West Bank from various local utilities to an Israeli official appointed by the military commander for “Judea and Samaria”. Military Order 158 introduced a permit system for all water projects; permits must be obtained when approaching the JWC. Finally, Military Order 291 declares all water resources to be the property of the State of Israel.

Privatising Water: a Free Drink for the Occupation

In 1982, Israel’s Mekorot water company took over responsibility for the water resources in the West Bank; by 2007, the company was state-owned. For Palestinians not linked to the water grid, mostly in Area C, water must be obtained from Mekorot filling stations. The most common form of dependency is through Mekorot-supplied Palestinian water institutions. The 80:20 water supply means that Palestinian water institutions have to purchase water from Mekorot in order to supply their customers; the water is often from aquafers in the West Bank. In short, Palestinians are buying their own water. “The lack of availability of Palestinian water resources has led to chronic shortages among Palestinian communities in Area C and a dependence on Mekorot” commented a UNHCR report. “Mekorot supplies almost half the water consumed by Palestinian communities.” Not surprisingly, Mekerot’s equity stands at $1.58 billion.

Infrastructure of dissent and the possibility of a “Water intifada”

Since Oslo, the infrastructure for dissent which has characterised Palestinians’ relationship with Israel has become disaggregated, with the leadership class falling in line with the occupation through micromanagement of its most egregious consequences. The impending environmental security crisis which faces Palestinians over their access to water, is unprecedented; in the Gaza Strip, the situation is even worse.

Power must be reclaimed at a grassroots level, through the resurrection of the ideals of “Sumud” (steadfastness), which drove the first intifada. Fastening these ideals onto the seizure of water by the Israeli occupation could galvanise a new movement, which brings other material realities into the forefront of contemporary Palestinian resistance. The indigenous movement in Bolivia ground the state to a halt by reacting to a new phase in their centuries-long oppression — the privatisation of their water. By resurrecting the ideals of insurrection, which has characterised contemporary Palestinian nationalism, a new phase in Palestinian resistance could emerge; one which links the occupation to the fundamentals of life in Palestine.

– Nick Rodrigo is a research associate at the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg; his writing has appeared in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. (This article was first published in Middle East Monitor)

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Israel never had it so good today and justice to the Palestinians never has been so remote. Arab regimes have no credible options that may threaten Israel strategically, or they do not care if Israel continues to defy the UN resolutions and the International Court of Justice rulings. They are either fighting their own people or fighting each other. The Palestinians are hopelessly divided and the Arab Masses are not expected to help because they are heavily burdened by their own issues.

Since the 1948 war, Israel has three strategic objectives and it has achieved all. The first is to gain time, for the longer the status quo continues, the more it would be confirmed in the possession of the occupied lands and the denial of the refugees’ right of return.

After eight decades since the cleansing of Palestine from its Arab population by its military and terrorist organizations, and almost five decades after the 1967 war and the occupation of Palestinian lands, Israel has no intention to make a just peace with its victims. If the past decades have proved anything, it is that Israel will not change course, abide by the UN resolutions and allow the refugees to return to their homes or give up the occupied lands that have been annexed or colonized. The growing divisions between the Palestinian Hamas and Fatah and the disintegration of next door Syria and Iraq play straight into Israel’s hands today.

The second objective of Israel is to neutralize Egypt politically and militarily in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Egypt is the only Arab country that has the potential to challenge Israel’s expansion policies. The Israelis want Egypt to abandon its traditional leading role in supporting the Palestinian cause. According to the Israeli historian, Avi Shalim, on many occasions, “Yitzhak Rabin repeated that the heart of the Middle East problem was the relationship between Israel and Egypt.”After the 1973 war, Israel used the withdrawal from Sinai as the price it was ready to pay for neutralizing Egypt.

The Israeli team for the negotiations on the interim agreement with Egypt consisted of the senior leaders of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, Yigal Allon and Shimon Peres. They knew more about Palestine strategic importance to Egypt today and they had more sense of Egypt’s Palestine history than their Egyptian counterparts. Palestine was a province of Egypt ruled directly or through surrogates for thousands of years since ancient times. If the Israelis claim to Palestine is based on ruling part of Palestine for few decades, Egypt ruled all of Palestine for millenniums. In the early days of Christianity, the most famous Palestinian family, the Holy Family (Virgin Mary, Joseph el-Najjar and Jesus Christ) fled into Egypt to avoid the vengeance of the Roman appointed King Herod the Great of Jerusalem because Egypt was the second home for the Palestinians. Saladin’s troops that routed the Crusaders from Palestine in the 1180s were Egyptians fighting against European invaders. And early in the nineteenth century, Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt liberated Palestine and Syria from the Turks. Israel might not even exist today if it was not for the European powers of the United Kingdom and the Austrian Empire intervention who forced the Egyptians to withdraw in the 1830s.

Israeli negotiators and the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were able to avoid the core issue of the conflict and focus on separate peace with Egypt. They offered the return of Sinai to its rightful owners for concluding a separate and full peace agreement with Egypt, and the Egyptian leadership took the offer without considering its political implications, leaving the Palestinians to fend for themselves alone. The Egyptians could have demanded the return of Sinai and the rest of the Palestinian and Syrian occupied lands in return for normalization, but they did not. Normalizations with Israel went into effect in January 1980, the boycott laws were repealed, Egypt began supplying Israel with crude oil and natural gas, and Egypt even accepted the humiliation of changing its national anthem to something less militaristic as demanded by Israel.

The agreement that was signed in 1979 has been hailed as the most important US achievement in the Middle East. Billions of dollars and military aid to Israel and Egypt became a standard item in the US annual budgets since the signing of the agreement, and the measure of Egypt’s standing in the US has been based on meeting its peace agreement’s obligations. Interestingly, the first thing Israel did after signing the agreement was invading Lebanon in 1982. The Israeli military surrounded Beirut, expelled the PLO from Lebanon, laid siege on Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps and sent the Lebanese Phalangists militias to massacre thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Egypt now supports Israel in its Gaza siege by closing the Rafah crossing gate and starving the Palestinian population. Even when Israel was bombing the Palestinians and committing massacres against innocent children that shocked the entire world, Egypt refused to open its border and receive the wounded in its hospitals.

In an interview with the Associated Press on September 27, 2015, the Egyptian President General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi called on the Arab states to unconditionally normalize relations with Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomed his proposal, but he had rejected a 2002 Saudi Arabia peace plan that offered Israel normal relations with the Arabs in exchange for a withdrawal to 1967 borders. Al-Sisi gave Israel what it wants, peace and all Palestine.

Al-Sisi gave his advice to the Arabs while the Palestinians in the occupied lands, the remainder of historic Palestine, are oppressed and abused, living in apartheid system among more than half million settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem; and in Gaza, the Palestinians are besieged and starved. Israel refuses to accept the return of even one Palestinian refugee or freeze settlement building in Palestinian lands that has been cut and swallowed in whole swaths. It has annexed Jerusalem and driven thousands of the Jerusalemites outside the separation wall and denied them residence in the city where they were born. Prayers at al-Aqsa Mosque are routinely interrupted by Jewish extremists under the protection of the Israeli police. I wonder if the Egyptian junta that rules Egypt today speaks for the majority of the Egyptian people!

The third objective of Israel is to keep the US in its corner to defend it in the international organizations and to provide it with military and financial aid to maintain its military and economic superiority in the region. Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin made it clear to Kissinger that Israel would not ratify the 1975 Sinai II agreement for withdrawing from Sinai unless it was accompanied by an American-Israeli agreement pledging long term American commitment to support Israel with the latest military equipments, and to provide it with its energy and economic needs. Israel has an alliance with the US in all but name! A simplistic view of majority of the US policy makers who support Israel is that Israel would do no wrong and the Palestinians no right.

After achieving all its strategic objectives and following decades of Arab and Muslim states apathy regarding the Palestinian rights, Jerusalem and the holy sites, be they Muslim or Christian, Israel has changed the Arab character of Jerusalem by building large settlements in the southern part of Jerusalem. Its leaders feel confident that they can do even more. In July 2015, the Israeli Minister of Housing and Construction Uri Ariel said that he wished to see “the construction of a Third Temple in place of Al-Aqsa Mosque.” He added that “Now that Israel has once again become a Jewish sovereign state, the desire to rebuild the Temple is growing stronger and stronger.” Jerusalem’s flashpoint is Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, which the Jews call the Temple Mount and consider it the most sacred place in Judaism. The Palestinians are subjected to a pandemic of religious bigotry. Only those older than 40 are allowed by the Israeli military to pray in Al-Aqsa mosque and the settler gangs have burnt scores of village mosques.

The verdict of history will regard the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the occupation, the apartheid system, the settlements, the checkpoints, and forcing millions of Palestinians to live in squalor in Gaza and refugee camps without hope as a black mark in Jewish history.

– Hasan Afif El-Hasan, Ph.D. is a political analyst. His latest book, Is The Two-State Solution Already Dead? (Algora Publishing, New York), now available on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

The post Israel Has Achieved All Its Objectives appeared first on Palestine Chronicle.

Abbas’s actions in recent weeks have spurred speculation ranging from whether the 80-year-old’s retirement is imminent to whether he intends to take the drastic step of dismantling the Palestinian Authority to reenergize the push for statehood.

A recent poll found that Palestinians are increasingly exasperated with his leadership and Israel’s right-wing government. A majority favour a return to armed uprising in the absence of peace talks and two-thirds want Abbas to resign.

Clashes in recent weeks between Israeli police and Palestinians at the sensitive Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem have raised tensions further and prompted Abbas to warn of the risk of a third intifada if the volatility worsens.

If that were not enough, the Palestinian president’s speech to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday comes with much of the world’s attention having drifted toward other concerns, such as combating Islamic State jihadists.

“Mahmoud Abbas is going to tell everyone that the current situation is no longer tenable, that the Authority has authority in name only while Israel is destroying any idea of a two-state solution,” a Palestinian official told AFP, declining to provide further details.

In the runup to the speech, there have been reports that Abbas would use the opportunity to drop a “bombshell.”

Suggestions of what that could mean have included a complete withdrawal from the Oslo accords of the 1990s or the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority that those agreements created.

While such an announcement could potentially have a major impact, many analysts question whether Abbas would truly press ahead with it.

‘Who will Make Concessions?’

Some speculate that suggestions ahead of the speech may have been in the hope of gaining concessions from those in the international community who would not want him to take those steps.

“I think he would like everyone to pressure him not to do it, then see what he will get out of it,” said Yossi Mekelberg of the London-based Chatham House think tank’s Middle East program.

“Even in the corridors of the United Nations, use it as effectively as he can to get some concessions. But the question is, who will make these concessions?”

The Palestinian Authority was intended to be a temporary arrangement to serve as a governing administration over five years before negotiations leading to a final status, two-state settlement.

That of course did not happen, and peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians have been stalled for more than a year.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sent mixed signals, ruling out the establishment of a Palestinian state while campaigning for March elections before later backtracking.

There is also a lack of trust between the two sides with the formation of one of Israel’s most right-wing governments in its history after the March vote, and Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank has continued.

Polls Reflect Disillusion

Organisers of a recent poll by the respected Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research said for the first time in its surveys a majority called for the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority.

It also showed 57 percent of Palestinians support a return to an armed intifada in the absence of peace negotiations, up from 49 percent three months ago.

The poll organisers said the figure was similar to numbers seen ahead of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000.

A recent leak of documents alleging corruption among Palestinian officials has not helped matters.

Two decades after the Oslo accords, the Palestinian public sees the political process as having “failed,” with statehood far from being achieved, said Palestinian political scientist George Giacaman.

“For them, Oslo promised the delivery of a two-state solution,” he said.

Abbas’s Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority based in the occupied West Bank, also remains deeply divided from Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip, the coastal enclave still badly reeling from last summer’s war with Israel.

Amid the turbulence, Abbas has raised the possibility of resigning as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation while remaining Palestinian Authority president.

Abbas’s allies say such moves are part of efforts to inject new blood into the Palestinian leadership.

Critics however argue that Abbas is manoeuvring to empower his allies and marginalise opponents ahead of his eventual retirement.

(Agencies Via Ma’an)

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Peace in Yemen will continue to be elusive unless the United Nations shifts its mission from sponsoring an inter-Yemeni dialogue to mediating ceasefire negotiations between the actual warring parties, namely Saudi Arabia & allies and the de facto representatives of Yemenis who are fighting to defend their country’s territorial integrity and independent free will, i.e. the Huthi – Saleh & allies.

Convening its 70th session while celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, the United Nations is unlikely to reconsider its stand on Yemen, but it must do, at least to provide a face – saving exit strategy for Saudi Arabia if not to stop a snowballing severe humanitarian crisis in the country.

The United Nations Mauritanian special envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed will sooner than later face the fate of his predecessor Jamal Benomar, who resigned his mission last March acknowledging its failure.

The Saudi insistence on dictating a fait accompli on Yemen is undermining the UN efforts to bring about a political solution, which was made impossible by the Saudi – led war on Yemen.

The Legitimacy Controversy

The UN sponsored Yemeni – Yemeni talks in the capital of the Sultanate of Oman, Muscat, and elsewhere will continue to be deadlocked. They are a non-starter. The Saudis have held their Yemeni allies captives of their dependence on Saudi financial, political and military support without which they could not survive internally.

The UN and Arab League recognition of them as the legitimate representatives of Yemen was counterproductive. They are viewed by most Yemenis more as Saudi puppets than legitimate delegates of their people.

Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who is recognised by the UN and the Saudi – led coalition as the legitimate president of Yemen, arrived in Aden last week aboard a Saudi military aircraft and his safety was secured during his three – day stay there by military bodyguards from the United Arab Emirates. The arrival of his prime minister Khaled Bahah a week earlier was not different.

Conferring UN and Arab League legitimacy on them serves only to turn both organisations into biased parties to the conflict if not partners to it or at least accomplices and compromises their credentials as mediators.

The Huthis are portrayed by the Saudi – led propaganda as a sectarian fanatic and violent intruders into the Yemeni society or as agents of Iran who are waging a proxy war in Yemen, but the Huthis are not aliens. Their ancestors ruled Yemen for some one thousand years. They represent more than one third of the country’s population. Their role could have been strengthened by Iranian support and weakened by their religious speech, but nonetheless they are uncontroversial native integral component of Yemen’s national history and society.

Similarly, their ally in fighting off the Saudi – led war on Yemen, ex – president Ali Abdullah Saleh, is part and parcel of Yemeni political infrastructure. More than a three – decade ally of Saudi Arabia, when Saleh resisted a Saudi transition plan he hardly survived a bombing of his Friday prayers. Despite his individual ruling style and a wide spread corruption of his governance, he is credited with building a state infrastructure, a national army, a tolerable pluralistic political life and a relatively civil freedoms that were the envy of his Arab compatriots in the north who are still living under the Middle Ages systems of government and, more importantly, making the unity of Yemen a fact of life. When his representative credentials are questioned by his former Saudi allies it is noteworthy to remind them that his “al-Mutamar” party still controls the majority of the last democratically elected Yemeni parliament.

The “external” Iranian interference in Yemen and Iran’s sectarian support for “Shiite” Yemenis, in addition to a self – proclaimed role in defence of a controversial legitimacy of a Yemeni president, are the main raison d’être cited by Riyadh as the casus belli of the Saudi ongoing six – month old war on Yemen.

However history and realpolitik facts refute such Saudi claims and render them as merely thinly – veiled justification for installing a puppet regime in Sanaa by the brutal and inhumane force of an external invasion.

The current Saudi war on Yemen could be a “rite of passage” for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), particularly the United Arab Emirates (UAE), but not the Saudi Arabia as claimed by Rami G. Khouri (1).

Long History of Saudi Military Intervention

Long before there was an “Iran threat” or a “Shiite threat,” the Saudi ruling family never hesitated to interfere in Yemen militarily or otherwise whenever Yemenis showed signs of breaking away from Saudi hegemony towards a free will to determine their lives independently.

In the 1930s the Saudis engaged in a war on the Mutawakkilite Imamate of Yemen and succeeded in annexing the Yemeni provinces of Asir, Jizan and Najran to their kingdom, thus creating a border dispute that was not settled until 2000, but the current Saudi war on Yemen seems to reignite it.

Then, they occupied the Yemeni port of Hodeida on the Red Sea and attacked the Yemeni capital Sanaa. Yemen at the time was a similar conservative “kingdom” bound, like the Saudis, by treaties with the British colonial power.

From 1962 to 1970 the Saudis interfered militarily on the side of the “Shiite” Yemeni “royalists” whom they fought in the 1930s against republican revolutionaries who sought to usher Yemen into the twentieth century out of the Middle Ages. The Saudi military intervention led the Pan – Arab leader of Egypt Gamal Abd al-Nasir to rush to the rescue of the Yemeni republicans, thus regionalising a Yemeni internal affair into an Egyptian – Saudi war among the “Sunnis.”

History it seems is repeating itself nowadays, but the Saudis have so far failed to embroil Iran in Yemen as they did with Egypt then. Instead, the kingdom is itself plunging deeper into the Yemeni quicksand.

“In 1977, then, Saudi Arabia conspired (together with Salih) to the assassination of modernist President Ibrahim al-Hamdi, who was determined to loosen the stranglehold of the kingdom over Yemeni politics,” Tobias Thiel (2) of The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) wrote on last April 2.

In the aftermath of the emergence of the Islamic Republic of Iran into the regional scene, “the House of Saud expelled around 800,000 Yemeni guest workers to punish the newly united republic for its stance in the 1991 Gulf War (Kuwait war), plunging the country into an economic crisis” and “the kingdom simultaneously supported both sides – Sunni Islamists and Marxist separatists – in the 1994 war of secession,” Thiel added. Both those events had nothing to do with the so –called “Iran threat” or the “Shiite – Sunni” sectarian rivalry; both were inter – Arab and inter Yemeni conflicts.

“Finally,” according to Thiel, “Riyadh has backed the Salih regime against the mass protests in 2011 and has – as elsewhere – tried to stifle the democratic opening.”

Launching the Saudi war on Yemen last March had regionalised a Yemeni internal conflict, undercut short a Yemeni successful national dialogue sponsored by the United Nations, undermined the territorial unity of the country, which was then compromised only by the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) that was isolated in the far south eastern part of Yemen, destroyed the infrastructure of the Yemeni state, created a snowballing severe humanitarian crisis and rendered the possibility of a Yemeni – Yemeni political solution a mission made impossible by both the mutual bloodshed and the Saudi insistence on shaping by brutal force the future ruling regime in Yemen on Saudi terms.

Riyadh intervened militarily in Yemen when the Saudi – led GCC initiative for a “transition” on their terms in Yemen broke down in 2014. The Saudis planned the “transition” in Yemen to be a show case that could be replayed in Syria where they have been arming and financing a similar “regime change” for the past five years. The failure of their “show case” in Yemen doomed their plan for Syria.

Historically, Sanaa and the northern rough mountainous provinces failed all Arab and non-Arab invaders. The Ottoman Empire at its zenith could not subjugate it. It is the bedrock of Yemen’s independence and self determination. There the hardcore of the Yemeni anti-Saudi invasion is entrenched and there this invasion will most likely meet it defeat.

The so – called “liberation” of Aden by Saudi and UAE military intervention could serve only as a recipe for a perpetuated civil war and regional capital of a divided Yemen. Hadi is unlikely to deliver in Aden what he failed to achieve when he was in Sana’a.

On last March 22, the former UN special envoy Jamal Benomar, addressing the UN Security Council via video conference, warned that, “the situation is on a rapid downward spiral” that is “leading the country away from political settlement and to the edge of civil war”. The status quo is “inviting a protracted conflict in the vein of an Iraq-Libya-Syria combined scenario,” he told an emergency UNSC session. Benomar resigned his UN mission acknowledging its failure. His successor is more likely to come to the same conclusion sooner than later.

The presence now of reportedly between 5 – 10 thousand ground GCC troops in Yemen is proof that the aerial onslaught had failed and that the so-called pro-government forces are merely a Yemeni make – believe address for the thinly – veiled Saudi – led external invasion.

The introduction of GCC ground troops into Yemen is more a show of the failure of the so – called Yemeni pro – legitimacy and pro – Saudi forces than a display of GCC military prowess.

Quoted by the Qatari News Agency (QNA) on September 18, the Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, tacitly acknowledging his country’s failure in Yemen, said that he “personally … suggested Israeli help as our only hope to end the status quo … His Highness King Salman put this proposal forward for further consideration.”

Ruling out any open Israeli contribution to the US-led war on Iraqi forces in Kuwait in 1991, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the US “leading from behind” in the ongoing war on Syria is an instructive strong reminder that any Israeli role in the Saudi – led war on Yemen will most likely be ruled out as well, at least in public, because it would be definitely counterproductive.

It is high time that the UN moves to facilitate an exit strategy for Saudi Arabia from Yemen.

– Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: nassernicola@ymail.com.

(1) http://america.aljazeera.com/, September 16, 2015. Rami G. Khouri is a senior public policy fellow at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut and a senior fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School.

(2) Tobias Thiel is a PhD Candidate at the LSE’s Department of International History. His dissertation is about contentious politics, collective memory and violence in post-unification Yemen. He has spent the past three years in Yemen conducting field research.

The post Time for UN to Shift Mission in Yemen appeared first on Palestine Chronicle.

Any attempt to provide a coherent account of the political strife afflicting Yemen is bound to fail. The country is crucible of contradictions that defy normal categories of rational analysis. If we look beyond the political fog that envelops the conflict the tragic circumstances of acute suffering imposed on the civilian population do emerge with stark clarity. Long before the outbreak of civil warfare, Yemen was known to be the poorest country in the region, faced with looming food and water scarcities. The UN estimates 80% of the population is in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, 40% live on less than $2 per day. Further there are high risks of mass famine and epidemic outbreaks of disease will occur, while continuing chaos is a near certainty, with the prospect of yet another wave of desperate migrants swept ashore in Europe.

Against this background, the UN Security Council seems shockingly supportive of a major Saudi military intervention via sustained air attacks that started in March 2015, severely aggravating the overall situation by unanimously adopting a one-sided anti-Houthi Resolution 2216. This Saudi use of force is contrary to international law, violates the core principle of the UN Charter, and magnifies the violent disruption of Yemeni society. The success of the Houthi insurgency from the north that swept the Yemeni leadership from power, taking over the capital city of Sanaa, was perversely treated by the Security Council as a military coup somehow justifying the intervention by a Saudi led coalition of Gulf countries pledged to restore the ‘legitimate’ government to power. To grasp the geopolitics at play it is clarifying to recall that the 2013 blatant military coup in Egypt, with much bloodier reprisals against the displaced elected rulers, aroused not a murmur of protest in the halls of the UN. Once more the primacy of geopolitics is showcased in the Middle East. It’s not what you do, but who does it, that matters when it comes to a UN response.

What makes it even more difficult to make sense of developments in Yemen is the geopolitical tendency, as abetted by the media, to reduce incredibly complex national histories and the interplay of multiple contending forces to a simplistic story of Sunni versus Shia rivalry for the control of the country. Such a prism of interpretation, above all, allows Saudi Arabia to portray once again the strife in Yemen as another theater of the wider region proxy war pitting Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies against Iran, which is a guaranteed way of securing U.S. and Israeli backing. The same rationale has served the Kingdom well (and the world badly) in explaining why it supports anti-Assad forces in Syria during the last several years. It also was the pretext for intervening in Bahrain in 2011 to crush a popular pro-democracy uprising. If considered more objectively we begin to understand that this sectarian optic obscures more than it reveals, and not accidentally.

For instance, when it came to Egypt, however, the sectarian template was completely discarded, and the Saudis immediately used their financial muscle to help the anti-Muslim Brotherhood coup in 2012 led by General Sisi to consolidate its control over the country. Even when Israel attacked Gaza a year ago, seeking to destroy Hamas, a Sunni Islamic version of the Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia made no secret of the startling fact that it gave Tel Aviv a green light. What emerges, then, is not a regional politics based on sectarian priorities, but rather a pathological preoccupation with regime stability in the Saudi monarchy, with anxieties arising whenever political tendencies emerge in the region that elude its control, and are perceived as threatening. Part of the truer explanation of Saudi pattern of behavior also has to do with the Faustian Bargain struck with the powerful Wahabi establishment, which has allowed the Saud royal clan to flourish at home while spending billions to spread the most repressive version of Islam far and wide to madrassas throughout Asia. The fact that the application of Wahabism at home, including more than 100 beheadings already this year and confinement of women to an extent that makes the Islamic Republic of Iran appear liberal by comparison, is a further sign that international clamor of human rights is selective to put it mildly.

The people of Yemen are paying a huge price for this brand of Saudi violent security politics. Whether it is paranoia at work or a healthy respect for the mass unpopularity of its policies, or some mixture, is difficult to assess. Yet what seems clear is that much of the world is lulled to sleep, not taking the trouble to peer below this sectarian cover story. Only scant account taken of the fact that the real threats to regional order in Yemen do not come from a reasonable Houthi insistence on power-sharing political arrangements, but mainly arise from the presence in Yemen of Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS that have been long targeted by American drones as part of the war of the terror ever since 2007. So while the West supports the Saudi fight against the Shia Houthis at the same time it does its best to weaken their most formidable domestic opposition, and in the process further alienates the Yemeni civilian population by its military tactics, which recruits more extremists committed to fighting against this second form of external intervention that finds no basis in international law and enjoys the tacit support of the UN Security Council.

If this was not enough to make the Yemeni crystal ball opaque, there is the internal alignment of forces. On the one side, the 2012 successor regime to the corrupt dictatorial rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh that is headed by its equally corrupt former vice president, Abd Rabbaah Mansour Hadi, now apparently ‘governing’ from exile, although rumored to be seeking a return to Aden. On the anti-regime side, in addition to the Houthis, are the main military and police forces that still respond to the authority of the ousted leader, Saleh, who has returned to the Yemen struggle to oppose the Saudi intervention and have helped turn the tide of battle on the ground against the Hadi-led government. Despite this adverse battlefield reality, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Adel al-Jubeir, was quoted as saying “We will do whatever it takes to protect the legitimate government of Yemen from falling.” Tragically, what this seems to mean, is reducing the country to a shambles that brings starvation and disease to the population, and possibly escalating at some future point of frustration by the launch of a ground offensive. There are confirmed reports of a massing of Saudi troops close to the Yemen border.

At this point, it is difficult to know what would bring some kind of peace and stability to Yemen. What we do know is that both the sectarian optic, Saudi intervention, and American drone warfare are dead end options. The beginning of a constructive approach is to take root causes of the current conflict into account. Several need to be considered. There is a long experience of division in the country between the north and the south, and this means that any unity government for the whole of Yemen can only be sustained by an iron-fisted dictator like Saleh or through a genuine power-sharing federalist kind of arrangement based on decentralized autonomy and a weak central governmental structure. Beyond this, the country bears the scars of Ottoman rule intermixed with a British presence in Aden and the surrounding area, vital to earlier colonial priorities of controlling the Suez and the trade routes to the East.

Additionally, and often forgotten and ignored, Yemen remains a composite of tribes that still command the major loyalty of people and reign supreme in many locales. The modern European insistence on sovereign states in the Middle East never succeeded in overcoming the primacy of Yemeni tribal identities. Any possibility of political stability requires subsidizing and respecting Yemen’s tribes as Saudi Arabia did during Saleh’s dictatorship (1990-2012) or creating a multi-colored quilt of autonomous tribal polities. When the background of the north/south split and persisting tribalism are taken into account recourse to the Shia/Sunni divide or the Riyadh/Tehran rivalry as an explanation of Yemen’s strife-ridden country is more than a simplistic evasion of a far more complicated reality. It is a cruel and futile fantasy.

What should be done, given this overall situation? One potential key to achieving some kind of peace in Yemen is held by policymakers in Washington. So long as the U.S. Government remains beholden to the rulers in Saudi monarchy, to the extremists running Israel, and insistent on striking at AQAP targets with drone missiles, this key is unusable. This combination of factors is what makes the wider political turmoil in the Middle East stuck on a lethal fast moving treadmill. How to get off the treadmill, that is the question for which there answers, but as yet no relevant political will.

There are two obvious moves, neither ideal, but with the modest goal of a first step in creating a new political order: first, negotiate a ceasefire that includes an end to the Saudi intervention; secondly, establish a more credible revival of the National Dialogue Conference that two years ago made a failed attempt at Gulf initiative in Sanaa to find a power-sharing arrangement. It did not help matters then that two successive Houthi representatives at the diplomatic discussions were assassinated on their way to participate. What is needed is establishing a political transition sensitive both to the north/south split and the strength of Yemeni tribes coupled with massive economic assistance from outside, as well as the establishment of a UN peacekeeping presence tasked with implementation and the termination of all forms of external armed intervention. Nothing less has any chance of working.

Such a rational path is currently blocked, especially by the intense militancy of the aggressive Saudi leadership of King Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, and his son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Secretary of Defense, the apparent champion of military intervention. The United States, with its special relationship to Israel, its strong ties to Saudi Arabia, and faith in drone led counterterrorism seems to be swallowing the central contradiction between opposing both its real adversaries, AQAP and ISIS, and its implicit ally, the Houthis. Instead of treating the enemy of their enemy as a friend, Washington has reversed the proverb. This Gordian Knot is strangling the people of Yemen. Cutting it will require a drastic break with current policy. The way forward is evident, but how to get there is not, in the meantime the bodies pile up in what has long been considered the poorest country in the region severely stressed by the prospect of severe water scarcities.

– Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He is also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. Visit his blog.

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“Walled Garden – Declaration of Closed Areas in the West Bank” is published by Israeli non-profit NGO Kerem Navot, and authored by long-time activist and settlements monitor Dror Etkes.

The report, now available here on Middle East Monitor, reveals the ways in which the Israeli authorities have designated more than 1.7 million dunams as closed military zones.

Although Israel’s policies are carried out in the name of ‘security’, the land closure mechanisms are being used to advance the colonisation of the West Bank. For example, 78 percent of the land closed for military manoeuvres is not being used for that purpose.

Furthermore, the Israeli military has declared all the settlement jurisdictions to be military zones closed to Palestinians, an area of around 540,000 dunams, or 9.7 percent of the West Bank.

– Read the full detailed report here.

The post New Report Documents How Israel Keeps Palestinians off Third of West Bank Land appeared first on Palestine Chronicle.

In the Middle East and Africa there are two striking parallels to the Palestinian experience. The first is Algeria, where invasion and occupation began in 1830 and did not end until 1962. Until the implantation of the Zionist state in Palestine, Algeria was the worst example of colonialism in the late imperial world, but while the French took the land, introduced a racist two-tier legal system and eventually resettled large numbers of ‘rebellious’ Algerians, they did not drive them out of their own country.

Just as the First World War brought about the collapse of three empires (Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian), so the Second World War foreshadowed the end of two more. Bankrupted by the war, Britain could no longer afford to run an empire. It retreated from Palestine and the Indian subcontinent before Suez finally shattered imperial delusions in 1956. France was in no better shape. Its defeat at the hands of a Vietnamese guerilla army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 encouraged liberation movements around the world. Meanwhile, a savage war fought between French troops and the National Liberation Front in Algeria was reaching its peak. At great personal risk to himself, Charles de Gaulle acknowledged that the game was up by announcing the end of the French presence. Given the liberation movement’s choice between the ‘suitcase and the coffin’, close to a million French settlers (pieds noirs) headed for a country, France, which they scarcely knew but now had to regard as home.

The second relevant case study is Rhodesia. Protectorates and chartered companies were integral to imperial best practice up to the 19th century and beyond. When Theodor Herzl approached the Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II, in the 1890s, it was to ask for his consent to the formation of a chartered company for the settlement of Jews in Palestine. In return he would mobilize Jews around the world to pay off the Ottoman public debt. As Zionism had little support from Jews at the time there was virtually no likelihood that Herzl could make good on his promise but the sultan said no anyway. In Rhodesia settlement began under the aegis of a chartered company. From 1889 to 1923 Southern Rhodesia was developed as a British colony by Cecil Rhodes’ British South African Company. The first settlers arrived in 1890. The exclusionary nature of white settlement in Southern Rhodesia was similar to Zionist settlement of Palestine. First of all, the white settlers were in a tiny minority, even smaller than the Jewish (and largely non-Zionist) population of Palestine at the time, growing from 1500 in 1891 to about 75,000 by the end of the Second World War. At no time did the white settlers amount to more than 5.4 per cent of the total population.

Just as the Palestinians were to be shrunk wherever and whenever possible, even during the British mandate, through their eviction from land bought by the Jewish National Fund and other agencies and their denial of work by the Histadrut, the Jewish labor federation, so the ground rules for white settlement in Southern Rhodesia were clearly set out. The first principle was to maintain absolute minority control over the majority. Under the 1923 constitution, property ownership and education were the principal determinants of who could vote, immediately disenfranchising almost all Africans: no Africans were ever elected under this constitution and by 1953 only 450 Africans were on the electoral rolls (with an African population at the time of close to four million people). Colonial legislation specifically provided for discrimination against Africans – ‘the natives may be liable to conditions, disabilities or restrictions not applied to Europeans’. Pass laws were introduced and even a law banning Africans from walking on footpaths: they were to walk only on the road. The segregation was similar to South Africa and the racist regulations governing life under occupation in Palestine.

Rhodesia went through numerous constitutional changes up to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by the white-minority regime Prime Minister Ian Smith in 1965. In 1953 a federated state was formed, joining Southern Rhodesia and the protectorates of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (now Malawi). Federation disturbed the white minority because their numbers were now even more severely diluted amongst the African population. From the beginning of white settlement Britain’s African colonies were ordained to remain forever under white control as part of the empire and as part of ‘western civilization.’ The depth to which these ideas took root explains why Ian Smith remained unrepentant even when independence was being canvassed even by the British government. There should be ‘no independence before majority rule’ but as the electoral system was still based on the notion of property and ‘one taxpayer one vote’, then independence with majority rule was destined never to come.

Again there is a twisted parallel with Palestine: the attitude of the British government was that Palestine could not be granted independence until such time as the Jews became the majority. ‘The white man is master of Rhodesia’, Smith said. ‘He has built it and intends to keep it’. On other occasions he declared that ‘I don’t believe in majority rule ever’, while denying, at a time liberation movements were engaged in armed struggle, that he was against Africans: it was Marxism he was fighting and ‘western civilization’ that he was defending. Here again is an echo of Palestine in the declarations by early Zionist settlers that Jewish Palestine would act as a rampart of civilization against barbarism in the east.

On November 11 1965 Smith ended negotiations with the British government over the future of Rhodesia (the southern part) by issuing his UDI. No-one recognized it and within 24 hours it was subjected to condemnation and sanctions by both the UN General Assembly and the Security Council. As a country rich in minerals but lacking oil, Rhodesia would have suffered severely but for a loophole which the British government refused to close, allowing oil to reach Rhodesia from South African ports. However, with the collapse of Portugal’s African colonies in the 1970s, even South Africa was beginning to read the writing on the wall and was anxious not to be seen as giving too much open support to the Smith government. The end came in 1979 when Smith finally had no option but to bow to the combination of internal and external pressures and accept the result of elections which gave the country a new name – Zimbabwe – and African majority rule.

Smith’s UDI must be regarded as standing in close relationship to David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of the independence of the state of Israel in May, 1948. In both cases a minority had seized power, and in the case of Israel, was in the process of driving hundreds of thousands of people out of their homeland. Just as Rhodesia was to remain a white-settler dominated enclave forever, so Palestine was to be transformed into a Jewish state forever. From an estimated (non-Zionist) Jewish population of about four per cent in 1850, the Jewish presence had grown to about six per cent by 1912, to about 10 per cent by the end of the First World War and to about 31 per cent in 1940, while still owning only a tiny fraction of the land.

When declaring Israel’s independence, David-Ben Gurion pledged that it would remain ‘loyal to the principles of the UN Charter.’ On May 11, 1949, strongly supported by the US government, which had effectively pushed through the partition plan of 1947, and with the Norwegian Trygvie Lie, the UN Secretary-General, an ardent pro-Zionist, lobbying strongly from behind the scenes, Israel was admitted to UN membership, the UN having received assurances that it was a peace-loving state and ‘is able and willing to carry out the obligations contained in the [UN] Charter’. Israel also ‘unreservedly accepts the obligations of the UN Charter and undertakes to honor them when it becomes a member of the United Nations’. On December 5, 1949, speaking before the Knesset Constituent Assembly, Ben-Gurion declared that Israel was a member of the UN ‘not because of political convenience but because of its traditional, deep-seated commitment to the vision of world peace and the brotherhood of nations, as preached by our prophets and accepted by our prophets’.

In fact Ben-Gurion regarded the UN with contempt. He had been dissembling all along. It was important to get the partition resolution through the General Assembly, and important for Israel to be accepted as a UN member but Israel’s commitment on these occasions was tactical and completely devoid of any commitment to the UN’s ideals. Once the partition resolution had served Israel’s purposes it was abandoned. The UN commission on Palestine, established to oversee the partition of the territory into two states, never moved beyond words on the page. Israel seized as much of Palestine as it could and had no intention of respecting the clause in the partition resolution setting Jerusalem aside as a corpus separatum. Its seizure of West Jerusalem was followed by ethnic cleansing and the looting of Palestinian homes, but this was no more than part of a pattern followed across all of Palestine. The stone houses that were the pride and joy of Palestinian families were stolen by military commanders and politicians. Diplomats close to the Israeli leadership knew what was going on. Ralph Bunche, the UN emissary arbitrating armistice talks between Israel and Egypt on the island of Rhodes early in 1949, left them deeply disturbed by Israeli behavior. William C. Burdett, the US consul-general in Jerusalem, in the wake of recent Israeli military assaults in the Naqab, Galilee and against Syria, saw little to justify Israel’s claim that it was a peace-loving nation. It also showed ‘little respect for the organization she is now seeking to join.’

This was evident not just from Israel’s continuing military assaults but its continual stonewalling and/or evasion on all important issues. It refused to accept General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948) on the grounds that Palestinians could not be shown to be willing to live at peace with their ‘neighbors’ until there was peace. It caviled endlessly on the status of Jerusalem and borders. It refused to come clean on the assassination of the UN envoy, Count Folke Bernadotte. Although the names of the murderers were known, no-one was ever charged with the killing.

The numerous statements of Zionist leaders from the very beginning of colonization showed that they had no interest other than sequestering all of Palestine as a Jewish state. Their actions during the war of 1948 showed that they intended to destroy everything that was Palestinian in Palestine, with the living presence of the Palestinian people the foremost target. Despite the mountain of evidence showing that Israel already had no intention of abiding by the UN Charter, by international law or by anything that stood in the way of its ideological and territorial imperatives, it was still given UN membership. In May, 1948, Chaim Weizmann had worked on Truman to recognize Israel and in May, 1949, Truman again responded to Weizmann’s overtures by doing his best to ensure that Israel was admitted to the UN, irrespective of the reservations of his own diplomats and the belief within other governments (Britain’s for one) that Israel had no intention of complying with UN resolutions that did not suit its interests.

At the same time as Ben-Gurion was re-asserting Israel’s loyalty to the UN Charter in December, 1949, he and other members of the Knesset were making statements that openly challenged the peace the UN was trying to achieve in Palestine (having first breached its own charter by granting the ‘right’ of self-determination to a settler minority and creating the anomaly of a colonial settler state being established at the beginning of the era of decolonization). On the question of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion said that ‘at the same time’ as his statement of fidelity to UN principles, ‘Jerusalem is an organic part of the state of Israel’. Menahim Begin, representing Herut, declared that ‘the world must be told that Jerusalem is ours, all of it, the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, Jerusalem inside and outside, and that it is our capital both in practice and theory.’ For others, also, Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was an ‘established fact’ that no-one had any right to question.

From the very beginning of the Zionist venture up to the present day Israel has been faithful to its own ‘principles’. In no way do they confirm to the principles of international law and indeed, Israel can only remain what it is by living permanently in breach of international law. In 1948 and again in 1967 it did its best to convert a land with people into a land without people so other people could settle it. Its barbaric treatment of Palestinians who managed to cling to their homeland has continued up to the killing of Hadeel al Hashlamun in Hebron on September 22: barbaric not just in the firing of ten bullets into her body but in the way she was left lying on the ground gravely wounded for half an hour and then literally dragged away from the scene by her feet like a piece of offal; and barbaric in the way settler onlookers grinned when they came upon the scene. Her murder follows the arson murder of three members of the Dawabshe family, an infant and both parents, by Jewish settlers whom the state refuses to arrest although it clearly knows who they are and where they live.

These are not anomalies but are rather entirely consistent with ‘practice and theory’ and twisted Zionist notions of law, justice and morality that have prevailed since the beginning of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Ian Smith was punished for declaring UDI by having his country subjected to international condemnation, isolation and sanctions. If comparisons can be made, nothing Smith did even remotely compares with the gross crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians over the past seven decades. Yet, whereas the full force of international law was applied against Rhodesia, Israel was admitted to the UN even though it had made it plain long beforehand that it had no intention of abiding by any law that did not suit it. Thus encouraged, this is the way it has behaved ever since.

– Jeremy Salt is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

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‘The soldiers overreacted to an incident that could have ended without casualties. The establishment automatically backs them up.’

On Tuesday, 22 September 2015, at around 7:45 A.M., Israeli soldiers shot and fatally wounded Hadil al-Hashlamun, 18, at the “Shoter” checkpoint (also known as checkpoint 56). al-Hashlamun used the checkpoint to cross from H1, the part of Hebron that is under Palestinian control to H2, the part of the city that is under Israeli control. She was taken to Shaare Zedek hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries. The hospital spokesperson told the press that al-Hashlamun had been shot in the chest, abdomen and legs.

The military’s account of the incident, as reported in the media, is that “a metal detector went off when the Palestinian woman walked through the checkpoint. The soldiers called on her to stop and fired a few warning rounds toward the ground after she continued”. Then, the soldiers claim, “she pulled out a knife, and that’s when they fired shots at her legs. The soldiers said they opened fire for a second time after the woman tried again to raise the knife”.

B’Tselem’s investigation raises doubts as to the veracity of this description. According to B’Tselem’s information, al-Hashlamun approached the checkpoint from the direction of the neighborhood of Bab a-Zawiya in H1. She was wearing a Niqab, which covers the entire body, and holding a concealed knife. She aroused suspicion among the soldiers and they told her to open her purse. For an unknown reason, al-Hashlamun froze and did not respond to their calls. One soldier shot at the ground, next to her. Fawaz Abu ‘Easheh, a resident of the neighborhood of Tel Rumaidah, who arrived at the scene, thought the young woman did not understand the soldiers’ instructions and tried to help her leave. As she was leaving the checkpoint, with a 1.2 meter metal barrier between her and the soldiers, a soldier called her to stop as he was shooting at the ground next to her, and then at her leg. According to Abu ‘Easheh’s testimony Al-Hashlamum fell, and as she was falling, her right hand was revealed to be holding a knife. She did not get up, but the soldier shot her again, in the other leg, and seconds later in the torso. Some of the incident was caught on camera by an international volunteer who was at the scene.

The circumstances of the incident indicate that the soldiers at the checkpoint acted disproportionately. They did not try to subdue al-Hashlamun and take her into custody without resorting to live fire. The claim that al-Hashlamun tried to stab soldiers, repeated by the media, cannot be reconciled with the fact that there was a metal barrier between her and the soldiers at the time of the shooting. Furthermore, the soldier who opened fire continued shooting after she had been hit in the legs and no longer posed a danger. The military has video documentation of the incident from the checkpoint’s security cameras, and should publish it in if it stands behind the soldiers’ version of events.

The military command’s knee jerk defense of the soldiers, as expressed in the military’s response to the incident, sends soldiers on the ground a clear message that when it comes to using force, including lethal force, against Palestinian civilians – there are very little limitations.

– Read more: B’Tselem Investigation: No Justification for Multiple Bullets that Killed Hadil al-Hashlamun in Hebron – B’Tselem

The post B’Tselem Investigation: No Justification for Multiple Bullets that Killed Hadil al-Hashlamun in Hebron appeared first on Palestine Chronicle.

A mural supporting the Palestinian prisoner Muhammad Allan while he was on hunger strike; Allan was arrested once again by Israel yesterday. Ahsraf Amra APA images

More than 200 trade unions and campaign groups from 23 countries have called on the UN to cancel its contracts with G4S over the security firm’s track participation in human rights abuses against Palestinians. The call comes at a time when Israel has stepped up its ill-treatment of hunger strikers, some of whom are held in G4S-equipped prisons.

G4S is a British private security company that acts as a key contractor for Israel’s apartheid regime, providing services and equipment to the police force and prison service, as well as military checkpoints and settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Palestinian political prisoners have in recent years held a series of hunger strikes to resist the use of arbitrary detention and torture in the prisons that G4S helps Israel to run.

A letter sent to Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations’ secretary-general, by campaigners details how G4S also has a long and documented track record of participation in human rights and workers’ rights abuses elsewhere in the world, especially in prisons and migrant detention centres it has run in the US, the UK and South Africa.

The UN’s own data shows it has spent more than $22 million on services provided by G4S in 2014.

That included 37 separate contracts to provide guards and other security services in Jordan — more than in any other country — and security services for UN projects and offices in Morocco, Lebanon, Austria and the UK.

As the letter sent to Ban notes, such extensive cooperation with G4S seems to be completely out of step with the UN’s own procurement guidelines, which state that “the UN expects its suppliers to support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights and to ensure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses.”

A report by Richard Falk, then a UN special rapporteur on Palestine, calling for a boycott of G4S over its role in Israeli human rights violations was approved by the UN General Assembly in 2012.

Broad support

Palestinian signatories to the letter include the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council and the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), both of which bring together a wide variety of groups demanding basic justice.

Among the 215 international signatories to the letter are leading Jordanian trade unions. They also include British groups, campaigning against G4S’s ghastly role in helping the UK authorities detain refugees and deny them adequate shelter.

Six organizations which endorsed the recent Black Solidarity with Palestine statement have also supported the call to Ban. That statement describes Palestinian liberation as a “key matter of our time” and calls for action against G4S given its role in both the US and Israeli prison systems.

The broad support for the campaign urging the UN to cut its ties with G4S indicates that it’s likely further pressure will be brought to bear if the UN fails to address the issue.

Solitary confinement

Palestinian political prisoners have held a series of mass hunger strikes in recent years to protest the use of administrative detention — imprisonment without charge or trial — and torture in the prisons that G4S helps Israel to run.

Yesterday, Israel arrested Muhammad Allan, less than one month after his detention was suspended. Allan had undergone a 64-day hunger strike. He has been placed under administrative detention.

Allan has gone on hunger strike again.

At least six other Palestinian political prisoners are currently on hunger strike to protest their administrative detention. Some of them have have been going without food for more than 25 days.

Many of the seven are being in detained in Israeli prisons equipped and serviced by G4S.

The Palestinian prisoner support group Addameer stated today that the Israeli Prison Service is denying cold drinking water to three of the hunger strikers and restricting their access to clothes, books, blankets and fresh air.

The three — Munir Abu Sharar, Badr al-Ruzza and Shadi Maali — are all in Naqab prison in southern Israel. They had already being held in solidarity confinement before a new set of puntitive measures was imposed on them.

Addameer reported last week that another two Palestinians held under administrative detention were also placed in isolation when they started their hunger strikes.

Pressure needed

The inspiring international campaign against G4S over its role in Israeli apartheid and human rights violations across the world has seen it lose contracts with universities, trade unions and banks. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is among the investors to have sold their shares in the company.

Crucially, the G4S campaign has provided an important way for the Palestine solidarity movement to communicate with a broader audience about the struggle of Palestinian political prisoners. It has given the movement an opportunity to highlight how the Palestinian struggle is inherently connected to other struggles for justice.

Having lost contracts worth millions of dollars and seen its image seriously tarnished in the media, G4S stated in June last year that it “does not intend” to renew its main commercial agreement with the Israeli Prison Service when it expires in 2017.

Yet G4S has so far failed to end any of its numerous contracts with the Israeli government or military.

In 2012, G4S stated it would terminate its contracts to help Israel run the Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank, as well as military checkpoints, by 2015 at the latest. That promise has not been kept.

Further pressure is needed to make G4S live up to its commitments.

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-deas/israel-denies-water-fresh-air-hunger-strikers

The motion was approved by 9 votes to 5 after being proposed by Björk Vilhelmsdóttir, a city councilor from the Social Democratic Alliance (Samfylkingin). The motion states that Reykjavík will boycott “as long as the occupation of Palestinian territories continues.”

The news was welcomed by Riya Hassan, the Europe campaigns officer with the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, the coalition of Palestinian organisations that leads the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement:

“This motion to exclude Israeli products from the city’s procurement system is an impressive victory for human rights and the Palestinian people in its struggle for justice, equality and freedom.”

“The fact that Israel is already gearing up to use all means to overturn this decision proves that this is a significant decision that challenges Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”

“Whatever Israel and its supporters throw at the city council, nothing can undo the moral stand taken by the Reykjavik council, which has made a democratic decision to hold up human rights principles in the city’s procurement policies.”

“We particularly welcome that the motion uses the word apartheid to describe Israel’s regime. There’s a growing realization that Israel’s system of oppression meets the definition of apartheid as set out in international law.”

Dozens of councils across Sweden, Spain, the UK, France and Norway have passed similar motions in recent years.

The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement has recently celebrated the decision of French multinational Veolia to divest completely from the Israeli market following an international campaign that saw local councils across Europe and the US boycott the company, costing it billions of dollars of lost contracts.

Controversial Israeli company SodaStream recently closed its factory in an illegal Israeli settlement in response to the boycott campaign against it.

More than 150 organizations from across Europe are vowing to resist efforts by the United States to stifle campaigns for Palestinian rights by means of a controversial trade deal.

The trade unions, civil society and solidarity groups say in a letter published this week by the campaign groupWar on Want that they “oppose the dangerous Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations and the related attempts by some US politicians to use the TTIP process to restrict freedom of political expression and campaigning in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom, justice and equality.”

The TTIP talks – which follow an agenda prepared by corporate lobby groups – are an attempt to harmonize many environmental and social regulations between the US and the European Union. Green and labor rights campaigners fear it will lead to a weakening of standards on such issues as food safety, public health and pollution.

In June, US President Barack Obama signed into law a bill that makes it one of his country’s “principal negotiating objectives” for TTIP “to discourage politically motivated actions to boycott, divest from or sanction Israel and to seek the elimination of politically motivated non-tariff barriers on Israeli goods, services, or other commerce imposed on the State of Israel.”

Protecting settlements

The law specifically extends this US discouragement of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) to include “Israeli-controlled territories,” a ploy to dissuade the EU from steps under consideration to label products fromIsraeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

After Obama signed the bill into law, however, his administration indicated that it would do nothing to protect settlement products from boycotts.

The State Department argued that by “conflating Israel and ‘Israeli-controlled territories,’” the anti-BDS provision “runs counter to longstanding US policy.”

“This does mark something of a shift,” Josh Ruebner, policy director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, noted in an analysis for The Electronic Intifada.

Previously, the State Department had been adamant that the US unequivocally opposed any and all boycotts, even of goods from Israeli settlements.

Nonetheless, there is no doubting the Obama administration’s commitment to fight BDS in general, which is likely only to increase in its final year in office.

As Obama seeks to placate critics of the agreement over Iran’s nuclear energy program, he has given ever more concessions to the Israel lobby over Palestinian rights.

Hillary Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic Party nomination for next year’s presidential election, has alsovowed to fight BDS.

“Attack on democracy”

Several EU governments have expressed an equally firm commitment to stand against efforts by Palestinians to win their rights.

But grassroots groups in Europe are ready to push back.

The signatories to the letter declare: “In the wake of Israel’s 2014 attack on the Gaza Strip, which killed more than 2,200 people and included deliberate attacks on civilians that amounted to war crimes according to the UN and other bodies, people around the world came out in numbers to express support for the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality. We will not accept any legislative attempt to silence these expressions of solidarity.”

In addition to dozens of Palestine solidarity groups, the signatories include such organizations as Friends of the Earth International, Stop TTIP Ireland and the Italian Forum for Water Movements.

Signatories from the labor movement include Scotland’s Dundee Trades Union Council, Spain’s 120,000-strong Unión Sindical Obrera and the UK’s 1.4-million strong Unite trade union.

As the letter notes, TTIP is generating opposition not only because of its implications for Palestine but because it would see “an unprecedented transfer of power to corporate interests and represents a serious attack on democracy, social standards, workers’ rights and environmental regulations.”

The letter and full list of signatories are published at War on Want’s website.

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/eu-us-trade-deal-mustnt-stifle-calls-israel-boycott-say-unions

Dear Kanye West,

We most urgently ask you to respect the growing international movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) by canceling your September 30 concert in Israel, a racist regime that Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and other veteran freedom fighters have described as worse than apartheid South Africa.

BDS demands an end to the occupation of Palestinian land, full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and right of return for refugees throughout historic Palestine.

Roger Waters, Lauryn Hill, Snoop Dogg, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Elvis Costello, Sinead O’Connor, Brian Eno, Carlos Santana, Gil Scott-Heron, Yasiin Bey, and many other artists have honored BDS by refusing to perform for apartheid Israel. Hundreds of other cultural workers have endorsed the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

The need is more urgent than ever. In 2014, 2,200 people (including 551 children) were murdered in Israel’s 51-day assault on Gaza. This past July, Ali Dawabsheh, 18-months old, was burnt alive in an arson attack on his home in Douma in the occupied West Bank. Hours later, 14-year-old Laith Khalidi died when Israeli occupation forces shot at civilians protesting baby Ali’s death.

Such injustice is but the latest chapter in more than a century of Zionist colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleaning, and genocide—including Israel’s very establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba (Catastrophe). Indeed, eighty percent of the 1.8 million people sealed into Gaza are refugees.

For these reasons, more than 1,000 Black activists, artists, and scholars—including Angela Davis, Cornel West, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Talib Kweli, The Dream Defenders, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the Organization for Black Struggle-St. Louis—have signed the 2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine, which embraces BDS and “urge[s] people of conscience to recognize the struggle for Palestinian liberation as a key matter of our time.”

You spoke truth to power in 2005 by declaring, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Won’t you stand up for justice today by showing you care about the Palestinian people?

Sign the petition here. 

The press briefing by EU Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini followed the meeting of the foreign ministers of the EU’s 28 member states in Luxembourg. The growing European consensus around labelling Israel’s settlement products reflected mounting public pressure in Europe on policymakers to end the profound European complicity in Israel’s violations international law and Palestinian human rights.

Dr. Rafeef Ziadah, member of the BNC Secretariat commented, “If the EU is serious in implementing its own policy of non-recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the occupied Arab territories of 1967, why doesn’t it implement a ban on the import of products of Israeli companies that illegally operate in the occupied territories? Merely labelling, rather than banning, illegal settlement goods indicates political hypocrisy par excellence.”

Ziadah added, “The BDS movement’s pressure must continue at the grassroots level across Europe to compel decision-makers to comprehensively fulfil European states’ obligations under international law.”

“At a minimum, they must impose a two-way military embargo on Israel, as was done against apartheid South Africa, and implement the European Council on Foreign Relations’ recommendation to halt all financial transactions with Israeli banks that finance Israel’s occupation, including the wall and settlements.”

Mahmoud Nawajaa, BNC General Coordinator, explained, “One year after Israel’s 2014 massacre in Gaza, the least the EU should do is not to reward and sustain relations with entities that profit from serious Israeli violations of international law. Failing to do so would make a mockery of the EU’s stated commitment to human rights. It would also enhance Israel’s impunity, effectively encouraging it to commit new massacres against the Palestinian people.”

The BNC’s European Campaigns Officer, Riya Hassan, concluded, “The EU is legally obliged, in accordance with its charters and principles, to cease
to cease its collusion in Israel’s grave violations of international law. Aside from banning goods produced by Israeli companies operating in the occupied territories, this requires suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement, based on Israel’s persistent breach of the agreement’s second clause which pertains to respecting human rights.”

More than 300 trade unions, NGOs and other civil society organizations from across Europe have called on the EU to end its support for Israel’s crimes, including by suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement. The call was supported by more than 60 MEPs.

Following public pressure and lobbying by Palestinian and European organizations, the EU introduced a policy stating it must not provide funding for or allow Israeli participation in EU projects if such participation amounts to recognition of Israeli sovereignty over occupied Palestinian and Syrian territory.

However, the EU continues to provide funding to Israeli military companies such as Elbit Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries, and also to Hebrew University, which is partially based in occupied East Jerusalem.

The global BDS movement, which saw unprecedented traction lately, seeks to isolate Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid academically, culturally, economically and militarily until the Palestinian people can exercise their inalienable right to self-determination. At a minimum, this entails an end to the 1967 occupation and to Israel’s apartheid system, and the return of Palestinian refugees to the homes and lands from which they have been displaced during and since the 1948 Nakba.

BNC

Occupied Palestine, 1 September 2015 — The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and its worldwide partners are celebrating the withdrawal of the huge French corporation Veolia from the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR), an illegal rail system built to facilitate the growth and expansion of Israeli colonial settlements on occupied Palestinian territory.

The sale of its stake in the JLR project ends all of Veolia’s involvement in the Israeli market, including all projects that violate international law and the human rights of the Palestinian people.

The sale follows an extensive 7-year boycott campaign against Veolia, due to its complicity in the Israeli occupation, which cost it tenders around the world estimated to be worth over $20 billion.

Veolia sold nearly all of its business operations in Israel in April 2015 but had until now remained a 5% shareholder in the JLR project. On Thursday evening, the human rights research group Who Profits reported that Veolia had liquidated its 5% share in the JLR project.

Under BDS pressure, Veolia has failed to win massive contracts with local authorities across Europe, the US and Kuwait. City councils across Europe have passed resolutions excluding the firm from tenders due to its involvement in Israeli human rights violations.

Following Israel’s massacre in Gaza in the summer of 2014, for instance, Kuwait’s city council excluded Veolia from a tender for the treatment of solid waste worth $750 million.

Veolia executives have admitted that the campaign has cost the company “important contracts”, and financial analysts have repeatedly spoken about the financial cost of the campaign to Veolia.

By the end of 2013, Veolia’s investment rating was reduced to “junk” status as a result of its reported massive debt of over $20 billion –almost equal to the total value of tenders lost by Veolia by then.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) General Coordinator, Mahmoud Nawajaa, described Veolia’s complete withdrawal from illegal Israeli projects as a victory for all human rights campaigners who have pressured the company:

“Strategic and dedicated campaigning by the BDS movement has forced one of Europe’s biggest companies to abandon the Israeli market.”

“Veolia’s withdrawal from Israel sets an example to all companies that are complicit in Israel’s human rights violations. This is a victory for the BDS movement and all our partners from other rights movements who have helped in pressuring the company.”

Nawajaa added, “We call for legal action, by specialized organizations, against Veolia to compel it to pay reparations to the Palestinian communities adversely affected by its infringements of international law.”

The JLR is considered one of the most infamous colonial Israeli attempts to normalize and strengthen Israel’s hold on occupied East Jerusalem and tie the city’s settlements even more firmly into the state of Israel. The United Nations Human Rights Council considered the project a service to Israel’s illegal colonies in the OPT. Veolia’s involvement in it, among other similarly illegal Israeli operations, had rendered the company complicit in Israel’s violations of international law.

The BDS campaign against Veolia was launched in Bilbao, the Basque region, in November 2008, to pressure the company to end its involvement in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights.

In 2007, French solidarity group AFPS and the Palestine Liberation Organization took the company to court in France to compel it to end its complicity in Israel’s violations of international law.

As well as its involvement in the JLR, Veolia had also been targeted for its role in waste, water and bus services for illegal Israeli settlements. Veolia transferred control of these projects to other companies as the campaign pressure on it mounted.

Riya Hassan, the BNC’s Europe coordinator, said, “Veolia is still a target for union activists, environmentalists and anti-privatization campaigners, due to its record of anti-labour policies and involvement in the privatization of public water. All those still being affected by Veolia’s policies and struggling for accountability and reparations can continue to count on our solidarity. The BDS movement takes cross-struggle solidarity to heart.”

BNC

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America – known as UE – has voted to back the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel.

This makes it only the second national union in the United States, and the largest so far, to take such a step.

Palestinian trade unionists and activists are warmly welcoming the move.

UE represents more than 30,000 workers across the country in a range of private and public sector occupations.

“Breaking point”

“We reached a breaking point when Israel launched the war on Gaza in 2014, killing over 2,000 people including 500 children,” Carl Rosen, president of UE’s Western Region and a member of the national executive board, said in an emailed statement from the union, explaining why the resolution came at this year’s UE national convention in Baltimore in mid-August.

Rosen added that backing BDS “is a necessary step for labor to take in order to bring about a peaceful end to the conflicts there.”

UE notes that the resolution “points to Israel’s long history of violating the human rights of the Palestinians, starting with the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1947-48 that turned most of Palestine into the State of Israel.”

The resolution calls on the US to end all military aid to Israel and for pressure on Israel “to end the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the siege of Gaza and negotiate a peace agreement on the basis of equality, democracy and human rights for the Palestinian and Israeli people, including Palestinian self-determination and the right of return for refugees.”

It “endorses the BDS movement and urges the union at all levels to become engaged in BDS and the movement for peace, justice and equality between the Palestinians and Israelis.”

Among the delegates who spoke in support of the resolution was Autumn Martinez of Local 255 in Vermont.

Martinez said she had met Palestinian trade unionists at the World Social Forum in Tunisia earlier this year and learned from them of conditions in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. “It’s absolutely disgusting what is going on. Free Palestine!” she said, according to the blog Portside.

Founded in 1936, UE is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the major US labor federation that worked closely with the US Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War to subvert left-wing movements and governments around the world.

Palestinian-Black solidarity

Angaza Laughinghouse, vice president of North Carolina Public Service Workers Union UE Local 150, told The Electronic Intifada that he saw parallels in his state’s total prohibition of collective bargaining for public workers and some of the conditions faced by Palestinians.

Laughinghouse, whose local was one of several that sponsored the resolution, also said support for BDS was rooted in a tradition of Black solidarity with Palestinians and other peoples fighting for liberation.

“Some of our members are Palestinian,” Laughinghouse said. “Many are immigrants from other nations. Many are African Americans and Latinos. We can identify with this question of the right to self-determination, the right to sovereignty.”

“We as Black people also know the long history of colonial settlements, whether it is apartheid South Africa or Palestine,” Laughinghouse added.

He said he learned about the Palestinian struggle when he worked alongside Palestinians on New York construction sites decades ago.

“Many African Americans began to identify with Palestinians because we were struggling against racist, apartheid Jim Crow segregation,” Laughinghouse recalled. “We saw commonality as the US has historically supported the settler state of Israel, just like many Americans in the 1950s and 1960s supported Jim Crow and segregation.”

Today, Laughinghouse sees this solidarity continuing.

“Palestinians should be a part of Black Lives Matter, because Palestinian lives matter,” he said, referring to the protests across the United States against police killings of African Americans.

“We attended the rallies against the recent Israeli bombings in Gaza and we welcome Palestinians in our rallies,” he added.

Laughinghouse is among more than 1,000 people who signed the recent Black for Palestine solidarity statement.

“Courageous”

“UE’s endorsement of BDS shows that, despite the extreme intimidation, bullying and/or cooptation practiced by Israel and its powerful lobbying groups in the US against critics, let alone advocates of a boycott, BDS is spreading the fastest in the US,” Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian human rights activist and co-founder of the BDS movement, wrote to The Electronic Intifada.

“It is inspiring to see growing support from US trade unions, including the Industrial Workers of the World, which endorsed BDS in 2010, and UAW 2865, the California-wide union of teaching assistants that earlier this year adopted divestment from the Israeli occupation with a two-thirds majority vote,” Barghouti added.

The Palestinian Postal Workers Union has written to UE in response to the resolution.

“We would like to express our deepest appreciation for the courageous resolution … in support of our right as Palestinians to live in peace and dignity as equals on our lands,” the Palestinian union said, according to UE’s statement. “We sincerely hope that other national unions in the US and many other countries will follow in your footsteps.”

Palestinian activists have since welcomed the statement.

On the anniversary of last summer’s Gaza massacre, in the 48th year of Israeli occupation, the 67th year of Palestinians’ ongoing Nakba (the Arabic word for Israel’s ethnic cleansing)–and in the fourth century of Black oppression in the present-day United States–we, the undersigned Black activists, artists, scholars, writers, and political prisoners offer this letter of reaffirmed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and commitment to the liberation of Palestine’s land and people.

We can neither forgive nor forget last summer’s violence. We remain outraged at the brutality Israel unleashed on Gaza through its siege by land, sea and air, and three military offensives in six years. We remain sickened by Israel’s targeting of homes, schools, UN shelters, mosques, ambulances, and hospitals. We remain heartbroken and repulsed by the number of children Israel killed in an operation it called “defensive.” We reject Israel’s framing of itself as a victim. Anyone who takes an honest look at the destruction to life and property in Gaza can see Israel committed a one-sided slaughter. With 100,000 people still homeless in Gaza, the massacre’s effects continue to devastate Gaza today and will for years to come.

Israel’s injustice and cruelty toward Palestinians is not limited to Gaza and its problem is not with any particular Palestinian party. The oppression of Palestinians extends throughout the occupied territories, within Israel’s 1948 borders, and into neighboring countries. The Israeli Occupation Forces continue to kill protesters—including children—conduct night raids on civilians, hold hundreds of people under indefinite detention, and demolish homes while expanding illegal Jewish-only settlements. Israeli politicians, including Benjamin Netanyahu, incite against Palestinian citizens within Israel’s recognized borders, where over 50 laws discriminate against non-Jewish people.

Our support extends to those living under occupation and siege, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the 7 million Palestinian refugees exiled in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. The refugees’ right to return to their homeland in present-day Israel is the most important aspect of justice for Palestinians.

Palestinian liberation represents an inherent threat to Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid, an apparatus built and sustained on ethnic cleansing, land theft, and the denial of Palestinian humanity and sovereignty. While we acknowledge that the apartheid configuration in Israel/Palestine is unique from the United States (and South Africa), we continue to see connections between the situation of Palestinians and Black people.

Israel’s widespread use of detention and imprisonment against Palestinians evokes the mass incarceration of Black people in the US, including the political imprisonment of our own revolutionaries. Soldiers, police, and courts justify lethal force against us and our children who pose no imminent threat. And while the US and Israel would continue to oppress us without collaborating with each other, we have witnessed police and soldiers from the two countries train side-by-side.

US and Israeli officials and media criminalize our existence, portray violence against us as “isolated incidents,” and call our resistance “illegitimate” or “terrorism.” These narratives ignore decades and centuries of anti-Palestinian and anti-Black violence that have always been at the core of Israel and the US. We recognize the racism that characterizes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is also directed against others in the region, including intolerance, police brutality, and violence against Israel’s African population. Israeli officials call asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea “infiltrators” and detain them in the desert, while the state has sterilized Ethiopian Israelis without their knowledge or consent. These issues call for unified action against anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and Zionism.

We know Israel’s violence toward Palestinians would be impossible without the US defending Israel on the world stage and funding its violence with over $3 billion annually. We call on the US government to end economic and diplomatic aid to Israel. We wholeheartedly endorse Palestinian civil society’s 2005 call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel and call on Black and US institutions and organizations to do the same. We urge people of conscience to recognize the struggle for Palestinian liberation as a key matter of our time.

As the BDS movement grows, we offer G4S, the world’s largest private security company, as a target for further joint struggle. G4S harms thousands of Palestinian political prisoners illegally held in Israel and hundreds of Black and brown youth held in its privatized juvenile prisons in the US. The corporation profits from incarceration and deportation from the US and Palestine, to the UK, South Africa, and Australia. We reject notions of “security” that make any of our groups unsafe and insist no one is free until all of us are.

We offer this statement first and foremost to Palestinians, whose suffering does not go unnoticed and whose resistance and resilience under racism and colonialism inspires us. It is to Palestinians, as well as the Israeli and US governments, that we declare our commitment to working through cultural, economic, and political means to ensure Palestinian liberation at the same time as we work towards our own. We encourage activists to use this statement to advance solidarity with Palestine and we also pressure our own Black political figures to finally take action on this issue. As we continue these transnational conversations and interactions, we aim to sharpen our practice of joint struggle against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and the various racisms embedded in and around our societies.

Towards liberation,

List of signatories: http://www.blackforpalestine.com/view-the-signatories.html

http://www.blackforpalestine.com/read-the-statement.html

Occupied Palestine, August 25, 2015 — Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activists have today welcomed the statement issued by more than 1,000 African American activists, artists and scholars in solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom, justice and equality and in support of BDS.

The statement unequivocally calls for BDS and places an emphasis on the right of Palestinian refugees to “return to their homeland in present-day Israel” as “the most important aspect of justice for Palestinians.”

Mahmoud Nawajaa, the general coordinator of the Palestinian BDS National Committee, the broad Palestinian civil society coalition that leads the BDS movement, welcomed the declaration by saying, “The statement’s support for BDS against Israel’s regime of occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid is particularly inspiring as it translates principled positions into morally-consistent actions that are capable of righting injustices.”

“The US civil rights movement has always been a key inspiration for us in the BDS movement. We are deeply moved by this powerful proclamation that evokes the spirit of that heroic civil rights struggle and the inspirational Black Lives Matter movement and epitomises speaking truth to power,” Nawajaa added.

Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS movement, reacted to the statement, “This deeply moving and noble declaration by our Black brothers and sisters in the US and elsewhere is not just a genuine expression of effective, altruistic international solidarity. It is a poignant testament to the organic links that connect the Palestinian struggle for self-determination with the struggle of the oppressed around the world, including ongoing struggles for racial and economic justice by black people in the US and across the world.”

Barghouti added, “Despite the obvious differences, there are compelling similarities between the forms of oppression that both Palestinians and African-Americans live under. Dehumanization, dispossession, racial injustice and discrimination, state violence, criminalization of entire communities and impunity are all key characteristics are of the oppression faced by black Americans and Palestinians.”

The leading Black activists, scholars and artists’ call for boycotts and divestment against the private security company G4S is especially noteworthy. “G4S harms thousands of Palestinian political prisoners illegally held in Israel and hundreds of Black and brown youth held in its privatized juvenile prisons in the US,” their statement said. It profits from “incarceration and deportation from the US and Palestine, to the UK, South Africa, and Australia,” the statement added, rejecting notions of “security” that “make any of our groups unsafe” and insisting that “no one is free until all of us are.”

In 2012, the BNC was one of several Palestinian human rights and civil society organisations that launched a large international BDS campaign against G4S, the British-Danish private security company that is deeply involved in Israel’s violations of prisoners’ rights and international law.

The boycott campaign has cost G4S many contracts around the world, including in the US, Ireland, Norway, South Africa, among others.

Under this intense pressure from the BDS movement, G4S has announced that it will not renew its contract with the Israeli Prison Service when it lapses in 2017. However, G4S has not yet made any written confirmation of this decision or ended any of its contracts supporting Israeli settlements, prisons, checkpoints and military bases, so Palestinian organisations are calling for the G4S campaign to continue.

BNC secretariat member Rafeef Ziadah said, “The BDS movement joins hands with the 1,000 Black activists that have issued this statement and with communities across the world in calling for the intensification of campaigns against G4S. Let us resist the role the company plays in human rights violations across the world, from Florida to Jerusalem and everywhere in between.”

“The current surge of mass Black activism for justice rekindles the whole world’s hope for a more peaceful, just and dignified world,” Ziadah added.

Israel’s systematic use of torture, a crime against humanity under international law, as a policy against Palestinian prisoners, including child prisoners, has recently seen a sharp rise.

Israel, which remains one of few countries in the world that legalizes torture under circumstances deemed as “necessary,” has passed at the end of July a law allowing the force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners who have resorted to hunger strikes as a last ditch attempt to achieve their basic rights and dignity.

The Israeli prison authorities’ attempt to implement the new force-feeding law against 31-year-old Palestinian lawyer and current administrative detainee, Muhammed Allan, has triggered wide Palestinian protests and international condemnation by the UN and numerous human rights organizations.

The BNC calls upon Palestinian and international human rights organization to document the names of Israeli political, military, intelligence and medical figures who are implicated in the systematic and decades-old policy of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian and other Arab prisoners, in order to bring them to trial at the International Criminal Court.

The national leadership of Palestinian prisoners sent a letter last week to the global BDS movement through the BNC asking for prioritizing the cause of the prisoners and intensifying BDS campaigning against Israeli and international corporations that are most complicit in the crimes committed by Israel against them.  The letter read:

“The international [BDS] campaign that you are leading, and that is increasing in effectiveness and outreach day after day, constitutes today a wave of pressure on the [Israeli] occupation government and its institutions. It has become the most important carrier of the voice of the oppressed in the land of Palestine.”

In 2012, the BNC, along with many Palestinian human rights organizations, launched a large international BDS campaign against G4S, the British-Danish private security company that is deeply involved in Israel’s violations of prisoners’ rights and international law.

The boycott campaign has cost G4S many contracts around the world, including in the US, Ireland, Norway, South Africa, among others.

In 2014, the campaign resulted in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s divestment of all its stock in the company, estimated at more than $180m. Around the same time, one of the largest protestant churches in the US, the United Methodist Church, also withdrew its investment from the company.

A large number of trade unions, organizations and student councils around the world have also announced their refusal to contract G4S until it ends its collusion in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

Under this intense pressure from the BDS movement, G4S executives announced in June 2014, at their general shareholders meeting, their intention not to renew the company’s contract with the Israeli prison authority when it lapses in 2017. The decision was confirmed in the shareholders’ meeting this year.

The BDS movement considered the company’s decision an insufficient first step in the right direction. Accordingly, it called for an escalation in the boycott campaign against G4S to compel it to immediately cancel all its contracts with Israel that violate international law and human rights.

Today, with the bloody escalation of Israel’s repressive and criminal measures against Palestinian prisoners, the BNC calls for intensifying boycott and divestment campaigns against the following corporations that are most deeply involved in Israel’s violations of our prisoners’ rights:

1. G4S: provides protection and security systems to the following Israeli prisons and detention centers: Ketziot, Megiddo, Damoun, Ofer, Russian Compound, Abu Kabir and Jalamah.

2. HP: provides electronic equipment and hardware maintenance services to the Israeli prison authority.

3. Volvo, which owns 26% ofMerkavim, provides buses used in transferring prisoners. Torture and ill-treatment of prisoners is rife during these transfers.

4. Siemens: provides security and fire-extinguishing systems to Israeli prisons, including Gilboa.

5. Ashtrom: responsible for building Hasharon prison (where female Palestinian prisoners are detained). It also provided pre-fabricated units for Ofer and Ramon prisons.

6. Shamrad: provides security devices for Ramla, Beersheba, Ayalon, Ketziot and Hasharon prisons.