South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu. (Photo: via Wikimedia Commons)
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and veteran of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, died on Sunday at the age of 90, the South African presidency said.
“The passing of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have bequeathed us a liberated South Africa,” President Cyril Ramaphosa said.
“Desmond Tutu was a patriot without equal.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu giving a moving address at a 2014 rally for Palestine in Cape Town
The Palestine protest march, attended by over 250 000 people, was the largest that South Africa witnessed (on any issue) since the dawn of democracy.
In 1984, Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent opposition to apartheid. A decade later, he witnessed the ends of that regime and he chaired a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up to unearth atrocities committed during those dark days.
Palestine mourns the passing of Desmond Tutu, whose humanity & compassion were equalled only by his courage & principled commitment in our shared struggle for justice & freedom. His support for Palestine was an embrace of love & empathy. I’m honoured to have had him as a friend.
Tutu was a staunch supporter of the Palestinian people’s struggle against Israeli apartheid. After one of his visits to Palestine, he famously wrote an article in the Guardian under the title Apartheid in the Holy Land.
In it, he said,
“I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy land: it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”
We are so sorry to learn of the passing of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He stood up for the dispossessed his entire life, at huge personal cost. Let us never forget his work in South Africa, for Palestine, and beyond. pic.twitter.com/Arzo7d5U7J
Tutu was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the late 1990s and in recent years he was hospitalized on several occasions to treat infections associated with his cancer treatment.
The outspoken Tutu was considered the nation’s conscience, an enduring testament to his faith and spirit of reconciliation in a divided nation.
Sanaa – The Undersecretary of the Yemeni Ministry of Expatriates, Ali al-Maamari, reported on the suffering of Yemeni expatriates at land ports with Saudi Arabia, stressing that the Saudi authorities have been holding Yemeni travelers and departures under false pretexts for a long period of time with the intention of humiliation and insult.
Many of the expatriate travelers spend long days without being allowed to enter their country.
One of the most important arguments taken by the Saudi authorities is to prevent the exit of four-wheel drive vehicles under the pretext of using them on the battlefronts. Knowing that most of these vehicles are released under the Turbek system, which imposes guarantees that the vehicle will return to Saudi territory within a period of three months. However, the Saudi authorities violate the rights of the expatriate in defiance of his Yemeni nationality, which is incompatible with human rights. After a long period of suffering that sometimes extends to several months, they allow the passage of those vehicles, the majority of which carry children and women, to be regarded as “royal honors.”
Undersecretary of the Yemeni Ministry of Expatriates, Ali al-Maamari
In an exclusive interview with “Al-Ahed News”, al-Maamari explained that the Saudi authorities have deprived the Yemeni expatriate from practicing his profession, suspended the renewal of licenses of more than 28 professions, and applied “Saudization” on jobs in 12 sectors, which means that only Saudis could work there. These sectors include: car and bicycle shops, ready-to-wear shops, home and office furniture shops, home appliances shops, electrical and electronic appliances, building materials and desserts.
Given that the vast majority of Yemeni workers in Saudi Arabia work in these sectors, all of these decisions targeted Yemeni workers directly and restricted the expatriates’ livelihood. Knowing that many Yemenis in Saudi Arabia own shops of all kinds, real estate and other properties that are officially registered in the name of the Saudi sponsor, and the right-holder expatriate is merely a worker for his sponsor. This tempts many Saudis to seize the property of expatriates and fabricate malicious charges to be deported and imprisoned without taking into account any humanitarian aspects.
On the sponsorship system imposed by the Saudi regime on expatriates, al-Maamari pointed out that the sponsorship system in Saudi Arabia is an ugly form of slavery, which contradicts the most basic human rights and human and legal norms. This system allows the sponsor to be responsible and in control of the movement of the expatriate or the migrant in general, and he can exercise all kinds of injustice and persecution against the expatriate. In case of any disagreement between the sponsor and the guarantor, the expatriate is maliciously reported and imprisoned or forcibly deported to his country after seizing all of his financial rights.
Regarding the possibility of the expatriate or the migrant, in general, to resort to the courts in Saudi Arabia, al-Maamari noted that the decisions and orders issued by the Saudi authorities in this field make any case submitted to the court, doomed to failure in advance. After all, the decisions of the Saudi authorities legitimize such violations when the migrant is under the mercy of the sponsor, and all his property and rights are subjected to the sponsor’s conscience.
Al-Maamari revealed in his interview with “Al-Ahed News” that the Saudi authorities impose arbitrary fees on expatriates with the intention of ending the future of Yemeni workers in Saudi Arabia. As the Saudi authorities issued a while ago, specifically in 2017, decisions included imposing new fees on expatriate workers, so that each worker must pay an amount of 1,200 SAR in one payment and the same for each accompanying member of his family. The amount is doubled in the following, third and fourth year, so that the amount to be handed over from each individual would be 4800 SAR per year.
Although expatriates pay for to illegal fees such as renewal of sponsorship, residence, and health insurance, they still don’t have access to health services in government hospitals. This increases the suffering of the expatriate and crushing him just because he is a Yemeni.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.
The article concerns Germany but anyone reading it will see very strong parallels with what is happening in other European countries, especially the UK and France.
The same European leaders who a few years ago marched in Paris shouting “Je suis Charlie” – upholding the inalienable free speech rights of white Europeans to offend Muslims by insulting and ridiculing their Prophet – are now queuing up to outlaw free speech when it is directed against Israel, a state that refuses to end its belligerent occupation of Palestinian land. European leaders have repeatedly shown they are all too ready to crush the free speech of Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them, to avoid offending sections of the Jewish community.
The situation reduces to this: European Muslims have no right to take offense at insults about a religion they identify with, but European Jews have every right to take offense at criticism of an aggressive Middle Eastern state they identify with. Seen another way, the perverse secular priorities of European mainstream culture now place the sanctity of a militarized state, Israel, above the sanctity of a religion with a billion followers.
Guilt by Association
This isn’t even a double standard. I can’t find a word in the dictionary that conveys the scale and degree of hypocrisy and bad faith involved.
If the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a follow-up to his impassioned book The Holocaust Industry – on the cynical use of the Holocaust to enrich and empower a Jewish organizational establishment at the expense of the Holocaust’s actual survivors – he might be tempted to title it The Antisemitism Industry.
In the current climate in Europe, one that rejects any critical thinking in relation to broad areas of public life, that observation alone would enough to have one denounced as an antisemite. Which is why the Haaretz article – far braver than anything you will read in a UK or US newspaper – makes no bones about what is happening in Germany. It calls it a “witch-hunt”. That is Haaretz’s way of saying that antisemitism has been politicized and weaponized – a self-evident conclusion that will currently get you expelled from the British Labour party, even if you are Jewish.
The Haaretz story highlights two important developments in the way antisemitism has been, in the words of intellectuals and cultural leaders cited by the newspaper, “instrumentalized” in Germany.
Jewish organizations and their allies in Germany, as Haaretz reports, are openly weaponizing antisemitism not only to damage the reputation of Israel’s harsher critics but also to force out of the public and cultural domain – through a kind of “antisemitism guilt by association” – anyone who dares to entertain criticism of Israel.
Cultural associations, festivals, universities, Jewish research centers, political think-tanks, museums, and libraries are being forced to scrutinize the past of those they wish to invite in case some minor transgression against Israel can be exploited by local Jewish organizations. That has created a toxic, politically paranoid atmosphere that inevitably kills trust and creativity.
But the psychosis runs deeper still. Israel, and anything related to it, has become such a combustible subject – one that can ruin careers in an instant – that most political, academic and cultural figures in Germany now choose to avoid it entirely. Israel, as its supporters intended, is rapidly becoming untouchable.
A case study noted by Haaretz is Peter Schäfer, a respected professor of ancient Judaism and Christianity studies who was forced to resign as director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum last year. Schäfer’s crime, in the eyes of Germany’s Jewish establishment, was that he staged an exhibition on Jerusalem that recognized the city’s three religious traditions, including a Muslim one.
He was immediately accused of promoting “historical distortions” and denounced as “anti-Israel”. A reporter for Israel’s right-wing Jerusalem Post, which has been actively colluding with the Israeli government to smear critics of Israel, contacted Schäfer with a series of inciteful emails. The questions included “Did you learn the wrong lesson from the Holocaust?” and “Israeli experts told me you disseminate antisemitism – is that true?”
Schäfer observes:
“The accusation of antisemitism is a club that allows one to deal a death blow, and political elements who have an interest in this are using it, without a doubt… The museum staff gradually entered a state of panic. Then of course we also started to do background checks. Increasingly it poisoned the atmosphere and our work.”
Another prominent victim of these Jewish organizations tells Haaretz:
“Sometimes one thinks, ‘To go to that conference?’ ‘To invite this colleague?’ Afterward, it means that for three weeks, I’ll have to cope with a shitstorm, whereas I need the time for other things that I get paid for as a lecturer. There is a type of ‘anticipatory obedience’ or ‘prior self-censorship.’”
Ringing off the Hook
There is nothing unusual about what is happening in Germany. Jewish organizations are stirring up these “shitstorms” – designed to paralyze political and cultural life for anyone who engages in even the mildest criticism of Israel – at the highest levels of government. Don’t believe me? Here is Barack Obama explaining in his recent autobiography his efforts as US president to curb Israel’s expansion of its illegal settlements. Early on, he was warned to back off or face the wrath of the Israel lobby:
“Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.”
Corbyn, it seems, has found an unlikely ally in former US President Obama. In his new autobiography, he writes of the Israel lobby's power: 'Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as "anti-Israel" (and possibly anti-Semitic)' https://t.co/tKmy8q3Cws
When Obama went ahead anyway in 2009 and proposed a modest freeze on Israel’s illegal settlements:
“The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel … this sort of pressure continued for much of 2009.”
He observes further:
“The noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister – even one who presided over a fragile coalition government – exacted a political cost that didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.”
Doubtless, Obama dare not put down in writing his full thoughts about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the US lobbyists who worked on his behalf. But Obama’s remarks do show that, even a US president, supposedly the single most powerful person on the planet, ended up blanching in the face of this kind of relentless assault. For lesser mortals, the price is likely to be far graver.
No Free Speech on Israel
It was this same mobilization of Jewish organizational pressure – orchestrated, as Obama notes, by Israel and its partisans in the US and Europe – that ended up dominating Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as the leader of Britain’s leftwing Labour party, recasting a well-known anti-racism activist almost overnight as an antisemite.
It is the reason why his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has outsourced part of Labour’s organizational oversight on Jewish and Israel-related matters to the very conservative Board of Deputies of British Jews, as given expression in Starmer’s signing up to the Board’s “10 Pledges”.
It is part of the reason why Starmer recently suspended Corbyn from the party, and then defied the membership’s demands that he be properly reinstated, after Corbyn expressed concerns about the way antisemitism allegations had been “overstated for political reasons” to damage him and Labour. (The rightwing Starmer, it should be noted, was also happy to use antisemitism as a pretext to eradicate the socialist agenda Corbyn had tried to revive in Labour.) It is why Starmer has imposed a blanket ban on constituency parties discussing Corbyn’s suspension. And it is why Labour’s shadow education secretary has joined the ruling Conservative party in threatening to strip universities of their funding if they allow free speech about Israel on campus.
Disturbing to learn from this article that Labour backs threatening funding to universities to bully them into adopting the IHRA re-definition of antisemitism – a definition that protects Israel from criticism and would ban most forms of solidarity with Palestinians on campus
But the Haaretz article raises another issue critical to understanding how Israel and the Jewish establishment in Europe are politicizing antisemitism to protect Israel from criticism. The potential Achilles’ heel of their campaign are Jewish dissidents, those who break with the supposed “Jewish community” line and create a space for others – whether Palestinians or other non-Jews – to criticize Israel. These Jewish dissenters risk serving as a reminder that trenchant criticism of Israel should not result in one being tarred an antisemite.
Leading Palestinians warn: 'The fight against antisemitism has been increasingly instrumentalised by the Israeli government and its supporters in an effort to delegitimise the Palestinian cause and silence defenders of Palestinian rights' https://t.co/Shu1Z7XYM1
Israel and Jewish organizations, however, have made it their task to erode that idea by promoting a distinction – an antisemitic one, at that – between two types of Jews: good Jews (loyal to Israel), and bad Jews (disloyal to Israel).
Haaretz reports that officials in Germany, such as Felix Klein, the country’s antisemitism commissioner, and Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, are being allowed to define not only who is an antisemite, typically using support for Israel as the yardstick, but are also determining who are good Jews – those politically like them – and who are bad Jews – those who disagree with them.
Despite Germany’s horrific recent history of Jew-hatred, the German government, local authorities, the media, universities and cultural institutions have been encouraged by figures like Klein and Schuster to hound German Jews, even Israeli Jews living and working in Germany, from the country’s public and cultural space.
When, for example, a group of Israeli Jewish academics in Berlin held a series of online discussions about Zionism last year on the website of their art school, an Israeli reporter soon broke the story of a “scandal” involving boycott supporters receiving funding from the German government. Hours later the art school had pulled down the site, while the German education ministry issued a statement clarifying that it had provided no funding. The Israeli embassy officially declared the discussions held by these Israelis as “antisemitic”, and a German foundation that documents antisemitism added the group to the list of antisemitic incidents it records.
Described as ‘Kapos’
So repressive has the cultural and political atmosphere grown in Germany that there has been a small backlash among cultural leaders. Some have dared to publish a letter protesting against the role of Klein, the antisemitism commissioner. Haaretz reports:
“The antisemitism czar, the letter charged, is working ‘in synergy with the Israeli government’ in an effort ‘to discredit and silence opponents of Israel’s policies’ and is abetting the ‘instrumentalization’ that undermines the true struggle against antisemitism.
Figures like Klein have been so focused on tackling criticism of Israel from the left, including the Jewish left, that they have barely noted the “acute danger Jews in Germany face due to the surge in far-right antisemitism”, the letter argues.
Again, the same picture can be seen across Europe. In the UK, the opposition Labour party, which should be a safe space for those leading the anti-racism struggle, is purging itself of Jews critical of Israel and using antisemitism smears against prominent anti-racists, especially from other oppressed minorities.
Extraordinarily, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the founders of Jewish Voice for Labour, which supports Corbyn, recently found herself suspended by Starmer’s Labour. She had just appeared in a moving video in which she explained the ways antisemitism was being used by Jewish organizations to smear Jewish left-wingers like herself as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi points out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people”.
In suspending her, Starmer effectively endorsed this campaign by the UK’s Jewish establishment of incitement against, and vilification of, left-wing Jews.
The aggressive purge of Jews from the Labour Party under the repressive rule of @Keir_Starmer marches on.
I haven't seen a sustained campaign of overt anti-Semitism quite like the effort of Labour centrists to create lists of Good Jews & Bad Jews and purge the latter. https://t.co/wVwnu47QJP
Earlier, Marc Wadsworth, a distinguished black anti-racism campaigner, found himself similarly suspended by Labour when he exposed the efforts of Ruth Smeeth, then a Labour MP and a former Jewish official in the Israel lobby group BICOM, to recruit the media to her campaign smearing political opponents on the left as antisemites.
In keeping with the rapid erosion of critical thinking in civil society organizations designed to uphold basic freedoms, Smeeth was recently appointed director of the prestigious free speech organization Index on Censorship. There she can now work on suppressing criticism of Israel – and attack “bad Jews” – under cover of fighting censorship. In the new, inverted reality, censorship refers not to the smearing and silencing of a “bad Jew” like Wimborne-Idrissi, but to criticism of Israel over its human rights abuses, which supposedly “censors” the identification of “good Jews” with Israel – now often seen as the crime of “causing offense”.
Ok, we've now officially moved from Alice Through the Looking Glass into the Twilight Zone.
Ruth Smeeth, ex-Israel lobbyist for Bicom and a key player in outlawing solidarity for Palestinians in the Labour party, is the new CEO of free speech group Index on Censorship! https://t.co/UmHXbTQETS
The Haaretz article helps to contextualize Europe’s current antisemitism “witch-hunt”, which targets anyone who criticizes Israel or stands in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, or associates with such people. It is an expansion of the earlier campaign by the Jewish establishment against “the wrong kind of Jew”, as identified by Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry. But this time Jewish organizations are playing a much higher-stakes, and more dangerous, political game.
Haaretz rightly fears that the Jewish leadership in Europe is not only silencing ordinary Jews but degrading the meaning – the shock value – of antisemitism through the very act of politicizing it. Jewish organizations risk alienating the European left, which has historically stood with them against Jew-hatred from the right. European anti-racists suddenly find themselves equated with, and smeared as, fledgling neo-Nazis.
If those who support human rights and demand an end to the oppression of Palestinians find themselves labeled antisemitic, it will become ever harder to distinguish between bogus (weaponized) “antisemitism” on the left and real Jew-hatred from the right. The antisemitism smearers – and their fellow travelers like Keir Starmer – are likely to end up suffering their very own “boy who cried wolf” syndrome.
Or as Haaretz notes:
“The issue that is bothering the critics of the Bundestag [German parliament] resolution is whether the extension of the concept of antisemitism to encompass criticism of Israel is not actually adversely affecting the battle against antisemitism. The argument is that the ease with which the accusation is leveled could have the effect of eroding the concept itself.”
The Antisemitism Industry
It is worth noting the shared features of the new Antisemitism Industry and Finkelstein’s earlier discussions of the Holocaust Industry.
In his book, Finkelstein identifies the “wrong Jews” as people like his mother, who survived a Nazi death camp as the rest of her family perished. These surviving Jews, Finkelstein argues, were valued by the Holocaust Industry only in so far as they served as a promotional tool for the Jewish establishment to accumulate more wealth and cultural and political status. Otherwise, the victims were ignored because the actual Holocaust’s message – in contrast to the Jewish leadership’s representation of it – was universal: that we must oppose and fight all forms of racism because they lead to persecution and genocide.
Instead, the Holocaust Industry promoted a particularist, self-interested lesson that the Holocaust proves Jews are uniquely oppressed and that they, therefore, deserve a unique solution: a state, Israel, that must be given unique leeway by western states to commit crimes in violation of international law. The Holocaust Industry – very much to be distinguished from the real events of the Holocaust – is deeply entwined in, and rationalized by, the perpetuation of the racialist, colonial project of Israel.
In the case of the Antisemitism Industry, the “wrong Jew” surfaces again. This time the witch-hunt targets Jewish left-wingers, Jews critical of Israel, Jews opposed to the occupation, and Jews who support a boycott of the illegal settlements or of Israel itself. Again, the problem with these “bad Jews” is that they allude to a universal lesson, one that says Palestinians have at least as much right to self-determination, to dignity and security, in their historic homeland as Jewish immigrants who fled European persecution.
Keir Starmer needs to listen to the 'proudly pro-Israel' Americans for Peace Now. They reject the IHRA definition for 'weaponising' antisemitism and allowing 'McCarthyite witch hunts' of Israel critics. Only those living in a 'black hole' could support it https://t.co/mNCj0LqCky
In contrast to the “bad Jews”, the Antisemitism Industry demands that a particularist conclusion be drawn about Israel – just as a particularist conclusion was earlier drawn by the Holocaust Industry. It says that to deny Jews a state is to leave them defenceless against the eternal virus of antisemitism. In this conception, the Holocaust may be uniquely abhorrent but it is far from unique. Non-Jews, given the right circumstances, are only too capable of carrying out another Holocaust. Jews must therefore always be protected, always on guard, always have their weapons (or in Israel’s case, its nuclear bombs) to hand.
‘Get out of Jail’ Card
This view, of course, seeks to ignore, or marginalize, other victims of the Holocaust – Romanies, communists, gays – and other kinds of racism. It needs to create a hierarchy of racisms, a competition between them, in which hatred of Jews is at the pinnacle. This is how we arrived at an absurdity: that anti-Zionism – misrepresented as the rejection of a refuge for Jews, rather than the reality that it rejects an ethnic, colonial state oppressing Palestinians – is the same as antisemitism.
Extraordinarily, as the Haaretz article clarifies, German officials are oppressing “bad Jews”, at the instigation of Jewish organizations, to prevent, as they see it, the re-emergence of the far-right and neo-Nazis. The criticisms of Israel made by the “bad Jew” are thereby not just dismissed as ideologically unsound or delusions but become proof that these Jews are colluding with, or at least nourishing, the Jew-haters.
In this way, Germany, the UK and much of Europe have come to justify the exclusion of the “wrong Jew” – those who uphold universal principles for the benefit of all – from the public space. Which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants, because, rooted as it is in an ideology of ethnic exclusivity as a “Jewish state”, it necessarily rejects universal ethics.
What we see here is an illustration of a principle at the heart of Israel’s state ideology of Zionism: Israel needs antisemitism. Israel would quite literally have to invent antisemitism if it did not exist.
This is not hyperbole. The idea that the “virus of antisemitism” lies semi-dormant in every non-Jew waiting for a chance to overwhelm its host is the essential rationale for Israel. If the Holocaust was an exceptional historical event, if antisemitism was an ancient racism that in its modern incarnation followed the patterns of prejudice and hatred familiar in all racisms, from anti-black bigotry to Islamophobia, Israel would be not only redundant but an abomination – because it has been set up to dispossess and abuse another group, the Palestinians.
Antisemitism is Israel’s “get out of jail” card. Antisemitism serves to absolve Israel of the racism it structurally embodies and that would be impossible to overlook were Israel deprived of the misdirection weaponized antisemitism provides.
An Empty Space
The Haaretz article provides a genuine service by not only reminding us that “bad Jews” exist but in coming to their defense – something that European media is no longer willing to do. To defend “bad Jews” like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is to be contaminated with the same taint of antisemitism that justified the ejection of these Jews from the public space.
Haaretz records the effort of a few brave cultural institutions in Germany to protest, to hold the line, against this new McCarthyism. Their stand may fail. If it does, you may never become aware of it.
The fraudulent 'Labour antisemitism' controversy has empowered the most thuggish elements in the organised British Jewish community.
Case in point: the Campaign Against Antisemitism effectively calls for Professor David Feldman to keep quiet or be sacked. https://t.co/QWvNg84c2E
Once, the “bad Jews” have been smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of Israel as Jew-haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an antisemite because these “antisemites” have been disappeared; when the Jewish “community” speaks with one voice because its other voices have been eliminated; when the censorship is complete, you will not know it.
There will be no record of what was lost. There will be simply an empty space, a blank slate, where discussions of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians once existed. What you will hear instead is only what Israel and its partisans want you to hear. Your ignorance will be blissfully complete.
– Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). Visit his website www.jonathan-cook.net. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Indigenous people in Canada are giving the world a demonstration of the power of nonviolent action. The justness of their cause — defending the land from those who would destroy it for short term profit and the elimination of a habitable climate on earth — combined with their courage and the absence on their part of cruelty or hatred, has the potential to create a much larger movement, which is of course the key to success.
This is a demonstration of nothing less than a superior alternative to war, not just because the war weapons of the militarized Canadian police may be defeated by the resistance of the people who have never been conquered or surrendered, but also because the Canadian government could accomplish its aims in the wider world better by following a similar path, by abandoning the use of war for supposedly humanitarian ends and making use of humanitarian means instead. Nonviolence is simply more likely to succeed in domestic and international relations than violence. War is not a tool for preventing but for facilitating its identical twin, genocide.
Of course, the indigenous people in “British Columbia,” as around the world, are demonstrating something else as well, for those who care to see it: a way of living sustainably on earth, an alternative to earth-violence, to the raping and murdering of the planet — an activity closely linked to the use of violence against human beings.
The Canadian government, like its southern neighbor, has an unacknowledged addiction to the war-oil-genocide problem. When Donald Trump says he needs troops in Syria to steal oil, or John Bolton says Venezuela needs a coup to steal oil, it’s simply an acknowledgement of the global continuation of the never-ended operation of stealing North America.
Look at the gas-fracking invasion of unspoiled lands in Canada, or the wall on the Mexican border, or the occupation of Palestine, or the destruction of Yemen, or the “longest ever” war on Afghanistan (which is only the longest ever because the primary victims of North American militarism are still not considered real people with real nations whose destruction counts as real wars) , and what do you see? You see the same weapons, the same tools, the same senseless destruction and cruelty, and the same massive profits flowing into the same pockets of the same profiteers from blood and suffering — the corporations that will be shamelessly marketing their products at the CANSEC weapons show in Ottawa in May.
Much of the profits these days comes from distant wars fought in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, but those wars drive the technology and the contracts and the experience of war veterans that militarize the police in places like North America. The same wars (always fought for “freedom,” of course) also influence the culture toward greater acceptance of the violation of basic rights in the name of “national security” and other meaningless phrases. This process is exacerbated by the blurring of the line between war and police, as wars become endless occupations, missiles become tools of random isolated murder, and activists — antiwar activists, antipipeline activists, antigenocide activists — become categorized with terrorists and enemies.
Not only is war over 100 times more likely where there is oil or gas (and in no way more likely where there is terrorism or human rights violations or resource scarcity or any of the things people like to tell themselves cause wars) but war and war preparations are leading consumers of oil and gas. Not only is violence needed to steal the gas from indigenous lands, but that gas is highly likely to be put to use in the commission of wider violence, while in addition helping to render the earth’s climate unfit for human life. While peace and environmentalism are generally treated as separable, and militarism is left out of environmental treaties and environmental conversations, war is in fact a leading environmental destroyer. Guess who just pushed a bill through the U.S. Congress to allow both weapons and pipelines into Cyprus? Exxon-Mobil.
Solidarity of the longest victims of western imperialism with the newest ones is a source of great potential for justice in the world.
But I mentioned the war-oil-genocide problem. What does any of this have to do with genocide? Well, genocide is an act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Such an act can involve murder or kidnapping or both or neither. Such an act can “physically” harm no one. It can be any one, or more than one, of these five things:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Numerous top Canadian officials over the years have stated clearly that the intention of Canada’s child-removal program was to eliminated Indigenous cultures, to utterly remove “the Indian problem.” Proving the crime of genocide does not require the statement of intent, but in this case, as in Nazi Germany, as in today’s Palestine, and as in most if not all cases, there is no shortage of expressions of genocidal intent. Still, what matters legally is genocidal results, and that is what one can expect from stealing people’s land to frack it, to poison it, to render it uninhabitable.
When the treaty to ban genocide was being drafted in 1947, at the same time that Nazis were still being put on trial, and while U.S. government scientists were experimenting on Guatemalans with syphilis, Canadian government “educators” were performing “nutritional experiments” on Indigenous children — that is to say: starving them to death. The original draft of the new law included the crime of cultural genocide. While this was stripped out at the urging of Canada and the United States, it remained in the form of item “e” above. Canada ratified the treaty nonetheless, and despite having threatened to add reservations to its ratification, did no such thing. But Canada enacted into its domestic law only items “a” and “c” — simply omitting “b,” “d,” and “e” in the list above, despite the legal obligation to include them. Even the United States has included what Canada omitted.
Canada should be shut down (as should the United States) until it recognizes that it has a problem and begins to mend its ways. And even if Canada didn’t need to be shut down, CANSEC would need to be shut down.
CANSEC facilitates Canada’s role as a major weapons dealer to the world, and the second biggest weapons exporter to the Middle East. So does ignorance. In the late 1980s opposition to a forerunner of CANSEC called ARMX created a great deal of media coverage. The result was a new public awareness, which led to a ban on weapons shows on city property in Ottawa, which lasted 20 years.
The gap left by media silence on Canadian weapons dealing is filled with misleading claims about Canada’s supposed role as a peacekeeper and participant in supposedly humanitarian wars, as well as the non-legal justification for wars known as “the responsibility to protect.”
In reality, Canada is a major marketer and seller of weapons and components of weapons, with two of its top customers being the United States and Saudi Arabia. The United States is the world’s leading marketer and seller of weapons, some of which weapons contain Canadian parts. CANSEC’s exhibitors include weapons companies from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.
There is little overlap between the wealthy weapons-dealing nations and the nations where wars are waged. U.S. weapons are often found on both sides of a war, rendering ridiculous any pro-war moral argument for those weapons sales.
CANSEC 2020’s website boasts that 44 local, national, and international media outlets will be attending a massive promotion of weapons of war. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Canada has been a party since 1976, states that “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.”
The weapons exhibited at CANSEC are routinely used in violation of laws against war, such as the UN Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Pact — most frequently by Canada’s southern neighbor. CANSEC may also violate the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court by promoting acts of aggression. Here’s a report on Canadian exports to the United States of weapons used in the 2003-begun criminal war on Iraq. Here’s a report on Canada’s own use of weapons in that war.
The weapons exhibited at CANSEC are used not only in violation of laws against war but also in violation of numerous so-called laws of war, that is to say in the commission of particularly egregious atrocities, and in violation of the human rights of the victims of oppressive governments. Canada sells weapons to the brutal governments of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Canada may be in violation of the Rome Statute as a result of supplying weapons that are used in violation of that Statute. It is certainly in violation of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. Canadian weapons are being used in the Saudi-U.S. genocide in Yemen.
In 2015, Pope Francis remarked before a joint session of the United States Congress, “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.”
An international coalition of individuals and organizations will be converging on Ottawa in May to say No to CANSEC with a seris of events called NoWar2020.
This month two nations, Iraq and the Philippines, have told the United States military to get out. This happens more often than you might think. These actions are part of the same movement that tells the Canadian militarized police to get out of lands they have no rights in. All actions in this movement can inspire and inform all others.Join the debate on FacebookMore articles by:DAVID SWANSON
The Oxford definition of ‘terrorism’ is: “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” Although the term could apply to the belligerents in many wars, the term ‘terrorism’ takes on its everyday meaning when violence is perpetuated by the weak in resistance to the powerful.
What other form of resistance is available to an oppressed people? One does not have to search hard to find a Jewish source begging for the peaceful resistance of a Palestinian Gandhi or King.
The request itself is odd, it invites a comparison to the conditions Gandhi and King fought, and is an implicit, although perhaps unintended, admission that Israel represents another oppressive racist regime.
It takes chutzpah to complain about the form of resistance employed by the people you are oppressing. Why are the Palestinians obliged to meet violence with nonviolence? Certainly you have to take your victims as they are.
Gandhi wrote about the uses of nonviolent resistance and King referred to Gandhi’s writings. For Gandhi and King nonviolence was not an end in itself, it was a strategy, a means to achieve a goal. Despite later deifications, neither Gandhi nor King was a saint, they were leaders who employed non violent resistance because it was effective under their circumstances.
Both men were vastly outpowered by the brutal regimes they opposed. Nonviolence did not allow them or their followers to escape injury or death, their battles required at least as much physical bravery as for any soldiers.
Both Gandhi and King deliberately provoked their enemies and then refused either to back down or to physically fight back. The decision to meet violence with nonviolent resistance was a powerful tool used to expose the brutality of the regime. The march to Selma would have amounted to little without the press. What they ‘achieved’ was an unforgettably painful display of violence. To the extent nonviolence succeeded for King, it was because the ‘soldiers’ on the other side gave Americans a clear picture of the savagery to which blacks were subjected. It became increasingly difficult for those who had long averted their eyes to claim ignorance.
One reason the Palestinians are portrayed as ‘failing’ to meet the standard set by Gandhi or King is that their use of the tactic of nonviolence has not attracted sympathetic coverage, it has not been effective enough in exposing Israel’s brutality. There are, of course, numerous examples of peaceful Palestinian resistance. One example is commemorated on ‘Land Day’ remembering the day in 1976 that Israel killed peaceful Palestinian protesters. Another occurred during the first intifada, as Neve Gordon writes in 972, when the “Palestinians adopted massive civil disobedience strategies, including daily protests” against Israel’s occupation. Israel responded with violence and mass incarcerations. While they could easily provoke violence through peaceful protest, the Palestinians could not win the media nor shame the Israelis into change.
This, of course, begs the question of control of the media. King was extensively covered in the media. Do the Palestinians have access to the same? At best, Haaretz might decry the proportionality of Israel’s violence, but will it explore the true meaning of Palestinian protest, both the original and the ongoing taking of their property and destruction of their society? Would the international press do any better?
As I was writing this I realized that Palestinian nonviolent protests in Gaza have had perhaps a small effect on public opinion. The mainstream media in the US is universally favorable to Israel, but although they tried, the media was not entirely successful in creating sympathy for the Israeli snipers. For example, The Guardian, in reporting that one year into the protest, the Israelis had killed 190 and wounded 28,000, noted that, “Children, journalists and medics have been killed, even when they were standing far back from the fence.” Spin that one. Here’s an attempt by Eric Yoffe, a self-described ‘liberal’ American Jew, to justify killing protestors who had not killed a single Israeli. “If 100 Jewish bodies were strewn across southern Israel, would the American left more readily forgive Israel’s defensive actions against an angry mob of tens of thousands propelled by the murderous, anti-Semitic terrorists of Hamas?” This is simply a variation on the “I thought he was going to hit me so I hit him back first” defense. Perhaps the need to resort to such a feeble rationale helps explain why we finally have a tiny Congressional support group for the Palestinians. Seventeen were so daring as to vote against an anti BDS bill.
Further, Israel has shown little sign that it is willing to change its basic oppressive policies in response to any actions or restraint by the Palestinians. This is an interesting video in which Israeli ‘settlers’ are asked if they would move if told to do so by their government and knowing the move would mean peace in the region. Their responses are variations on “No, I would not, it is my land.” Perhaps they are merely following the lessons of their religion.
In the story of Exodus, recounted annually even by many secular Jews at Passover, Moses unsuccessfully begs the Pharaoh for his peoples’ freedom. The lesson to be learned: Jewish liberation comes only after Egyptian civilians are subjected to terrible brutality.
In the US House of Representatives on 23 July there was an overwhelming vote condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement which has the objective of encouraging the government of Israel to meet “its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully comply with the precepts of international law by:
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”
There is nothing morally or legally questionable in any of these aims. But the United States Congress does not concern itself with morality or legality if these are inconsistent with its policy concerning Israel, which, as enunciated by Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, is based on the conviction that “Israel is our best ally in the Mid East; a beacon of hope, freedom & liberty, surrounded by existential threats.” Fox News reported that the condemnatory resolution “has been pushed by AIPAC, the influential Israel lobby in Washington,” which explains a great deal, as AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is a very powerful organisation, with deep pockets and wide-spreading hands.
In February 2019 The Intercept noted that “AIPAC, on its own website, recruits members to join its ‘Congressional Club,’ and commit to give at least $5,000 per election cycle.” In a film called The Lobby “Eric Gallagher, a top official at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015, tells an Al Jazeera reporter that AIPAC gets results.” A secret recording revealed that “Getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did. Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress.”
And AIPAC influences Congress and other agencies extremely efficiently, even to the extent of managing to have Al Jazeera refrain from broadcasting the US-focused version of The Lobby.The Director of Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, Clayton Swisher, said that pressure included “pro-Israel lobbyists in Washington threatening to convince Congress to register the network as ‘foreign agents,’ and false accusations of anti-Semitism against the producers of the documentary.” That’s all you need: the mere mention of anti-Semitism makes everyone suck their teeth, roll their eyes, and leap out of the way.
It so happened that the day before Congress condemned an initiative aimed at having Israel recognise the rights of Palestinians and abide by international law, the Israelis carried out an operation of destruction that was specifically aimed against the rights of Palestinians and was contrary to international law. As the BBC reported, it involved 200 Israeli soldiers and 700 police, weapons at the ready, deploying to the Palestinian village of Wadi Hummus at 4 in the morning of July 22, along with bulldozers and excavators that proceeded to destroy Palestinian homes.
There wasn’t a word of objection from the US Administration whose Tweeter-in-Chief had made his views on Israel crystal-clear on 16 July when he announced that the four non-white female Members of Congress whom he loathes to the point of psychosis are “a bunch of Communists [who] hate Israel.” Moreover, they “talk about Israel like they’re a bunch of thugs, not victims of the entire region.” On the other hand, the European Union stated that “Israel’s settlement policy, including actions taken in that context, such as forced transfers, evictions, demolitions and confiscations of homes, is illegal under international law. In line with the EU’s long-standing position, we expect the Israeli authorities to immediately halt the ongoing demolitions.” Fat chance of that — just as there is no possibility that the United states or the United Kingdom will support pursuit of international law when it is violated by Israel.
Britain is on its way out of the European Union, so has no say in EU policy, but in any case it wouldn’t agree about criticism of Israel because the governing Conservative Party fosters an organisation called ‘Conservative Friends of Israel’ (CFI) whose members constitute some eighty per cent of Conservative Members of Parliament.
Boris Johnson, Britain’s Trump-loving new prime minister, is a fervid supporter of CFI which supported him in his bid to be head of the Conservative party. On 23 July, after his selection to be leader and thus prime minister, the CFI’s Chairmen, Stephen Crabb MP and Lord Pickles, and Honorary President Lord Polak declared that “From his refusal to boycott Israeli goods in his time as Mayor of London through to his instrumental role as Foreign Secretary… Boris has a long history of standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel and the Jewish community. Mr Johnson continued to display his resolute support… reiterating his deep support for Israel and pledging to be a champion for Jews in Britain and around the world.”
One of Johnson’s first ministerial appointments was of Ms Priti Patel to be Home Secretary. She had resigned from the Cabinet of PM Theresa May in November 2017 because it had been discovered that she had been telling lies, which wasn’t in itself unusual, but the circumstances were intriguing. As the BBC headlined about the then head of International Development : “Priti Patel quits cabinet over Israel meetings row” which involved her apologising to the prime minister “after unauthorised meetings in August with Israeli politicians — including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — came to light. But it later emerged she had two further meetings without government officials present in September.” Not only that, but in a media interview “she gave the false impression that the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, and the Foreign Office knew about her meetings in Israel.”
It’s one of these irregular verbs which were met with much laughter during the marvellous BBC series ‘Yes Minister’ and ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ — ‘I make a misstatement; she gives a false impression; he is in prison for telling lies.’
And it was decidedly strange that the egregious Lord Polak, he of the statement that Boris Johnson stands “shoulder to shoulder with Israel” accompanied Patel at 13 of her 14 meetings with Israeli officials during August and September. What on earth could have been going on?
Of course she had no reason to worry about having to resign for telling lies, because at the time of her disgrace Boris Johnson told the BBC that “Priti Patel has been a very good colleague and friend for a long time and a first class secretary of state for international development. It’s been a real pleasure working with her and I’m sure she has a great future ahead of her.” The man has the gift of prophecy.
Then Johnson appointed Michael Gove to his Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which is a weird appointment that gives a lot of power and very little responsibility. Gove had been demonstrably disloyal to Johnson during the first leadership struggle, in what the Daily Telegraph called a “spectacular act of treachery” but all was forgiven because, as recorded approvingly by the Conservative Friends of Israel he believes that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are “two sides of the same coin”, which means that anybody who criticises Israel’s nationalistic persecution of Palestinians is an anti-Semite. He believes that “the test for any civilised society is whether it stands with the Jewish people, and whether it stands with Israel. It is a pleasure to stand with the Jewish people. It is a duty to stand with Israel.”
The Palestinians are not going to get one tiny bit of support from either the United States or Britain when their houses are bulldozed to rubble. They can expect no criticism from Washington or London when their children are killed in Gaza by Israeli soldiers.
The West Bank of the Jordan River, between Israel and Jordan, was captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Then it annexed East Jerusalem. Both areas are defined in international law as occupied territory. Although this is ignored by the US and Britain it was intriguing that in a minor but telling legal finding in Canada on 30 July, a judge ruled that wines made in Jewish settlements in the West Bank should not carry labels that say “Product of Israel” because of course the settlements are built on Palestinian land.
But there’s no point in telling that to the Israeli-supporting wine connoisseur Donald Trump or the US Congress or any member of Britain’s governing Conservative party, because international law means nothing when there are other priorities.
Hatem Bazian, a veteran pro-Palestinian activist in his fifties, lives with his family on a quiet street in North Berkeley, near the campus of the University of California, where he lectures. Early on the morning of May 10, 2017, as Bazian was about to drive his teen-age daughter to school, he noticed fliers on the windshields of cars parked on his block. At first, Bazian assumed that they were advertisements for a new movie or restaurant. When he looked more closely at the flier that had been left on his BMW sedan, he realized that it featured a photograph of his face, below a tagline that read, “He supports terror.” Bazian quickly folded up the flier so his daughter wouldn’t see it.
Born in Jordan to a father from the West Bank city of Nablus and a mother from al-Quds, Bazian has long been an outspoken champion of Palestinian causes. For decades, staunch supporters of ‘Israel’ have criticized Bazian’s activism. The incident with the fliers, though, was particularly unnerving, he told me. He rented his house and did not publicize the address. His opponents, he thought, must be following him. Later that day, Bazian, who describes himself as a proponent of nonviolent protest, reported what happened to the Berkeley police. He said that officers told him they could do nothing about the harassment.
Although it is unclear who left the fliers, internal documents from a private ‘Israeli’ intelligence firm called Psy-Group show that, at the time of the incident, the company, and possibly other private investigators, were targeting Bazian because of his leadership role in promoting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, known as BDS Supporters of BDS urge corporations, universities, and local governments to impose economic, academic, and cultural boycotts on ‘Israel’ to protest its treatment of the Palestinians. Opponents say that the BDS movement aims to delegitimize ‘Israel’ and hobble its economy. On its Web site, the movement states that it does not advocate for or against a resolution in which ‘Israel’ continues to exist.
Psy-Group’s intelligence and influence operations, which included a failed attempt in the summer of 2017 to sway a local election in central California, were detailed in a New Yorker investigation that I co-wrote earlier this month. Before it went out of business, last year, Psy-Group was part of a new wave of private-intelligence firms that recruited from the ranks of ‘Israel’s’ secret services and described themselves as “private Mossads.” Psy-Group initially stood out among its rivals because it didn’t just gather intelligence; its operatives used false identities, or avatars, to covertly spread messages in an attempt to influence what people believed and how they behaved. In 2016, Psy-Group held discussions with the Trump campaign and others about conducting covert “influence” operations to benefit the candidate. Psy-Group’s founder and C.E.O., Royi Burstien, a veteran ‘Israeli’ intelligence officer who established the firm in 2014, told me that his talks with the Trump campaign went nowhere. The company’s posturing, however, attracted the attention of Robert Mueller, the special counsel, who has been investigating interference in the 2016 Presidential race.
Psy-Group’s operations against BDS activists on US college campuses began in February, 2016, according to internal documents describing the campaign. The company raised money in New York from Jewish-American donors and pro-‘Israel’ groups, and assured them that their identities would be kept secret. Psy-Group told them that its goal was to make it appear as though the donors were not involved in any way.
The campaign, code-named Project Butterfly, initially targeted BDS activists on college campuses in “a single US state,” which former Psy-Group employees have told me was New York. The company said that its operatives drew up lists of individuals and organizations to target. The operatives then gathered derogatory information on them from social media and the “deep” Web, areas of the Internet that are not indexed by search engines such as Google. In some cases, Psy-Group operatives conducted on-the-ground covert human-intelligence, or HUMINT, operations against their targets. ‘Israeli’ intelligence officials insist that they do not spy on Americans, a claim that is disputed by their US counterparts. ‘Israeli’ officials said, however, that this prohibition does not apply to private companies such as Psy-Group, which use discharged ‘Israel’ Occupation Forces soldiers and former members of elite intelligence units, rather than active-duty members, in operations targeting Americans.
Project Butterfly called for Psy-Group operatives to disseminate negative information about BDS activists in ways that could not be traced back to the company or its donors. The goal, according to a Psy-Group summary of the campaign, from May, 2017, was to create “a new reality in which anti-‘Israeli’ activists are exposed and forced to confront the consequences of their actions.” The campaign’s messages were designed to convince Americans that “anti-‘Israeli’ activity” equated to “terrorism,” the company told donors. A former Psy-Group employee said these so-called name-and-shame tactics were often effective at silencing individual BDS activists. “They would disappear,” the employee told me, claiming that some activists appeared to become less engaged after derogatory information about them was publicized. If an activist claimed to be a pious Muslim, operatives would look for evidence that he had behaved in ways unacceptable to many observant Muslims, such as drinking alcohol or having an affair, a former employee said. BDS leaders, however, seemed to recruit new activists quickly. The former employee likened Psy-Group’s campaign to the war on terrorism, saying, “It’s never-ending.”
During the period when Psy-Group mounted its anti-BDS campaign, several Web sites, including the now-defunct outlawbds.com, published information on the movement’s leaders and supporters. Definitively determining who was behind the sites is difficult because Psy-Group and other organizations involved in anti-BDS work used avatars and other tactics to disguise their involvement.
In an example of the deceptive practices employed by operatives involved in the campaign, an avatar who identified himself as “Alex Walker” sent an unsolicited e-mail on August 15, 2017, to an advertising-sales broker who represented several New York-based national Jewish publications. Walker claimed that a friend referred him to the broker and said that he was impressed with his services. When the broker asked for the friend’s name, Walker dodged the question. At that point, the broker, who asked not to be named, said he suspected that Walker wasn’t who he claimed to be. Walker said that he was upset about BDS and wanted the broker to place advertisements promoting outlawbds.com in the New York area. Walker said that his assistant would pay the eight-hundred-dollar fee via PayPal. The broker told me that he placed the ads and took the money despite his suspicions about Walker. “In my mind, I’m not doing anything wrong,” he said.
The outlawbds.com Web site featured short profiles of BDS activists, one of whom was Peter Moskowitz, a Jewish-American supporter of the movement. His profile contained misspellings, and, at one point, referred to him as “she.” But the site contained a piece of information that surprised Moskowitz: outlawbds.com had somehow uncovered his membership in a left-wing Jewish organization critical of ‘Israeli’ treatment of Palestinians, even though Moskowitz had not disclosed his involvement online or to many friends.
Project Butterfly was overseen by an advisory board composed of “senior ex-officials and experts from the government, security and legal sectors,” according to Psy-Group documents. The most senior of those ex-officials was Yaakov Amidror, who became Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national-security adviser after leading a military-intelligence analysis division within the Amidror told me that before joining the board he spoke to Daniel Reisner, one of ‘Israel’s’ most prominent lawyers, and a partner at Herzog Fox & Neeman, which was Psy-Group’s outside counsel. He said that Reisner told him Psy-Group’s operations in the US against BDS activists were legal. Amidror said that he advised Psy-Group executives to insure that their operatives didn’t breach any US laws or norms while targeting American activists. “Don’t beat them. Don’t go into their houses,” Amidror said.
Amidror said that he supported the central goal of the Psy-Group operation: to “expose” BDS leaders on American university campuses and collect intelligence about any connections they might have to Palestinian organizations and other groups. “The ‘Israeli’ government was not there, and I thought that, if private people are ready to do it, it can be helped,” Amidror said. “It should be known who is behind them. It’s not known. We don’t know where the money is coming from, how far it is connected to Ramallah or Hamas.” He defended the propriety of a private ‘Israeli’ intelligence firm collecting and disseminating information on American citizens who supported BDS “If it is in the public domain, why not? I don’t see any problem,” he told me. “If someone doesn’t want it to be leaked publicly, he shouldn’t put it” on the Internet or on social media, Amidror said.
After Amidror joined the effort, Psy-Group recruited Ram Ben-Barak, who stepped down as the deputy director of Mossad in late 2011, to help as a paid strategic adviser on Project Butterfly. He worked one day a week out of Psy-Group’s offices near Tel Aviv. Ben-Barak said he believed that supporters of ‘Israel’ had no choice but to counter BDS forces in the United States. “You need to do it,” he told me. “They’re fighting against us, so we need to fight against them.”
In 2017, Psy-Group planned to expand Project Butterfly to target up to ten college campuses and other “venues,” according to the documents. In addition, the company said that its operatives would focus on between fifteen and twenty “national level individual targets.” Donors were told that Psy-Group had “mapped anti-‘Israel’ hubs” across the entity and had “executed 5 rapid-response operations nationwide,” without explaining what those operations entailed and whom they targeted.
The names of Psy-Group’s targets weren’t included in the May, 2017, summary of Project Butterfly, which was marked “confidential.” But a few days after the incident outside Bazian’s home, Burstien, Psy-Group’s founder and C.E.O, provided a report to researchers at a Washington think tank called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, or F.D.D., which included the names of some of the BDS activists whom the ‘Israeli’ firm had targeted or planned to target. According to the Psy-Group report, the company had prepared “dossiers” on Bazian and eight other individuals. Psy-Group told the foundation that Bazian “got our full attention,” and that his dossier included “criminal background records” and other documents “obtained via HUMINT capabilities,” using the abbreviation for human-intelligence gathering. (When asked about the report, Bazian said he wasn’t sure what “criminal background records” Psy-Group was referring to. He said that he had received speeding tickets on occasion over the years, and was arrested in San Francisco, in 1991, for helping organize a student protest.)
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Psy-Group appeared to share a particular interest in the role of a pro-BDS organization that Bazian had founded, American Muslims for Palestine, or A.M.P. At a congressional hearing in 2016, F.D.D.’s vice-president for research, Jonathan Schanzer, alleged that Bazian and others working for or on behalf of A.M.P. had ties to organizations that Schanzer said have been accused of providing money to Hamas. (Bazian said that the foundation’s accusations were part of “a smear campaign that attempts to discredit anyone that deals with Palestine.” He added, “I have no ties whatsoever to any Palestinian group, faction, or organization inside occupied Palestine.”)
Psy-Group told the foundation that it planned to investigate “organizations and companies” that sponsor A.M.P.’s conferences, and singled out a Wisconsin-based Palestinian activist named Salah Sarsour, who has been in charge of organizing the conferences since 2015, as a planned target. Psy-Group alleged that Sarsour had “involvement with Hamas.” (Sarsour said that he had no relationship with the group.) Sarsour, who moved to the US from the West Bank in 1993, told me about two incidents since the summer of 2017 that made him suspect people were spying on him—although, he acknowledged, he had no hard evidence.
An F.D.D. official confirmed that the think tank met with Psy-Group, but she said the foundation “did not end up contracting with them, and their research did little to advance our own.” Psy-Group went out of business in February, 2018, as F.B.I. agents began to investigate its work. Other counter-BDS organizations have continued to operate against activists. Bazian’s page at CanaryMission.org accuses him of spreading “classic anti-Semitism,” and features several videos, including one titled “The Most Dangerous Professor in America?” “I am concerned and do take stock of the intimidation tactics,” Bazian told me. “But I am not deterred.”
Amid further mass casualties on the third consecutive Friday of the “Great Return March” protests, health workers were put under yet further considerable strain and a number of them were injured.
Today, a Palestine Red Crescent Society medic in Rafah was shot in the knee with live ammunition, and a further 10 paramedics had to evacuate their medical point near Khan Younis after inhaling tear gas.
Even before Israel’s violent response the protests, health workers in Gaza were under huge strain due to the cumulative effects of a decade of blockade, which has degraded health and other essential services as well as the economy and living conditions, in addition to previous mass casualty events. Burnout and emotional exhaustion was already a significant feature among Palestine’s medical workforce. Now, they are once again experiencing the most difficult conditions, working long hours in tense situations and assisting casualties with often horrifying and life-changing injuries.
Last Friday, the World Health Organisation reported that five ambulances were damaged in attacks, three paramedics were injured by direct fire to the lower limbs, one by a tear gas cartridge to the head and that 29 healthcare staff suffered from tear gas inhalation.
Attacks on Palestinian health workers, facilities and ambulances by Israeli forces have been a painfully regular and repeated feature of the past decade, as MAP has emphasised in its publications and advocacy.
“Regretfully, no one has been held to account for any of the multiple attacks on protected medical personnel and facilities, and this impunity makes recurrence much more likely,” added Aimee Shalan.
“The prolonged and often traumatic stressors endured by health workers in Gaza are almost inconceivable for people not trapped there. On an almost daily level, they see and suffer what many of us won’t in a lifetime,” said Aimee Shalan, CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Today, at least 969 injuries have been reported by the Ministry of Health. More than 1,200 were reported to have been shot in the last fortnight. At least 26 protesters are reported to have been killed.
A medic treating severely injured protesters in a hospital in Gaza told MAP that the types and numbers of injuries “would overwhelm any European hospital and be classified as a “major incident”, let alone a local hospital in Gaza with a shortage of disposables and man power for this kind of injury. This is happening every Friday.”
With the sheer number of casualties threatening to overwhelm available services, communities in Gaza are stepping up to support them. In Khan Younis in the south of Gaza, for example, MAP has learned of groups of students of healthcare subjects banding together to form “rescue teams” to offer treatment and support the work of professional responders.
Those inside hospitals and clinics are working long hours to keep essential services running alongside caring for thousands of new patients. The physical health of unarmed protesters is clearly under threat in Gaza, but so too is the mental wellbeing of those who are once again bravely striving to save lives and limbs.
As we celebrate the steadfastness and resolve of Gaza’s medics, we are also outraged that their safety is once again endangered as they carry out their vital humanitarian functions.
MAP repeats its call on the UK government and the international community to support the demand of UN Secretary General for there to be independent investigations into the violence at the Gaza perimeter protests.
تمثّل الـNGOs جسماً موازياً بجانب السلطة والفصائل والقطاع الخاص و«الأونروا» (محمد عبد ــ أ ف ب)
يُبحث عادة في دور السلطة الفلسطينية على صعيد التنسيق الأمني والسياسات الاقتصادية، بجانب الإجراءات الإسرائيلية القاسية، لفهم انخفاض وتيرة المواجهات في الضفة المحتلة، لكن مسألة المؤسسات الممولة أجنبياً (NGOs)، المنتشرة في المناطق الفلسطينية منذ بداية التسعينيات مع قدوم السلطة حتى اليوم، تلعب دوراً لا يقل خطورة عمّن سبق. فهي رغم أنها تمثل مصدر دخلٍ لآلاف الفلسطينيين، في ظل البطالة وسوء الوضع الاقتصادي، لكنها تخضع لشروط الممول الأجنبي، بما فيها التوقيع على «وثيقة نبذ المقاومة وعدم التحريض»، أو رفض «معاداة إسرائيل»
رام الله | بفعل تواصل الانتفاضة على مدى العقود الثلاثة الماضية في فلسطين، والتدمير الإسرائيلي المتواصل لمقدرات الشعب الفلسطيني، تردّى الوضع الاقتصادي أكثر فأكثر، وقلت فرص العمل أمام الشباب، في وقت استمر فيه انتشار الفساد في غالبية المؤسسات الرسمية، ما أدى ضمن عوامل أخرى إلى انزياح عدد كبير من الشباب عن الانتماء والعمل الفصائلي، أو إهمال متطلباته ومحاولة الدمج بين التبيعة لتنظيم ما والعمل ضمن مشاريع لمؤسسات دولية.
شيئاً فشيئاً، وجد عدد كبير أنفسهم منخرطين في هذه المؤسسات التي يتحكم بها الأجنبي عبر شروط التمويل، وهو ما وفّر للعدو الإسرائيلي خدماتٍ كبيرة، تتلخص في تحييد أعدادٍ كبيرة من الشباب عن ساحة الصراع معه، وانشغالهم في هذه المشاريع. جراء ذلك، تلقى الصف الثاني ــ الحاضنة الشعبية للفصائل ــ ضربة قاسية تركت فراغاً كبيراً وشرخاً بين الفصائل والمجتمع الفلسطيني.
هذا إلى حدا ما يمثل أحد أسباب ضعف المشاركة الجماهيرية الشبابية في المواجهات عقب إعلان الرئيس الأميركي، دونالد ترامب، قراره نهاية العام الماضي، رغم حالة الغليان التي شهدها الشارع، فالمواجهات أخذت سمة المد والجزر عقب أسبوعين من القرار، ثم بدأت تبهت تدريجياً، بفعل الشرخ والفراغ الواسع وأزمة الثقة بين قسم كبير من الشعب ومعظم فصائله السياسية والقيادات الحزبية. وبذلك، بدت المواجهات خجولةً ومكشوفة الظهر مع غياب بنية تنظيمية للفصائل أو ما يمكن أن يقابلها على صورة مبادرة شبابية واضحة للإمساك بدفة المواجهات الميدانية. ووفق إحصاءات، حصلت عليها «الأخبار»، فإن أكثر عددٍ لنقاط التماس مع العدو سجّلته الجمعة الأولى عقب قرار ترامب بواقع 78 نقطة مواجهة، ثم تراجع منسوب المواجهات تدريجياً وأصبح يصل إلى 33 نقطة في أفضل الحالات منذ بداية العام الجاري.
المؤسسات الممولة أجنبياً، التي باتت تمثل الذراع الثالثة في احتواء الغضب الفلسطيني بعد إجراءات الاحتلال والسلطة، كانت قد بدأت تضخّمها ــ لجهة الميزانية والبنية والموارد ــ بعد انتهاء الانتفاضة الثانية، ومثلت في مرحلة قريبة (2002 ــ 2010) جسماً اقتصادياً يوازي القطاع الخاص، بل يضاهي قدرات «وكالة غوث وتشغيل اللاجئين الفلسطينيين ــ الأونروا» (تصنف الأونروا أنها مؤسسة INGO)، لكنها سجلت بعد حرب 2012 في غزة انسحاباً تدريجياً ــ بدأ بالمؤسسات الأميركية ثم الأوروبية ثم الخليجية ــ من القطاع الذي تختلف ظروفه سياسياً وأمنياً عن الضفة بصورة كاملة. وكانت مرحلة انتعاشها تحديداً خلال حكم رئيس الوزراء السابق سلام فياض (2007 ــ 2013)، إذ تضخمت وزاد عددها بحجة «المساعدة في بناء مؤسسات الدولة الفلسطينية»، خاصة أن فياض كان يعمل في البنك الدولي ويحظى بالقبول الأميركي، وبذلك غضت حكومته الطرف أكثر فأكثر عن كل ما يتعلق بهذه المؤسسات.
أما ما بعد عملية «السور الواقي» عام 2002، التي تغيرت جراءها خريطة الانتفاضة والمقاومة في الضفة، فأصبحت المؤسسات الممولة دولياً تسارع إلى سد الفراغ الذي تركته الفصائل بعدما تراجع دورها. واستمر بذلك تدفق التمويل دون رقابة فعالة من السلطة التي تعتمد هي الأخرى على أموال الجهات المانحة في قسمٍ كبير من موازنتها السنوية، فكيف كان دور هذه المؤسسات في تقويض المفهوم الجمعي للمقاومة في فلسطين خاصة بين فئة الشباب؟
تكشف آخر التقديرات التي نشرها «ديوان الرقابة المالية والادارية»، وهو الجهاز الأعلى للرقابة في فلسطين، في نهاية 2016 أن عدد المنظمات غير الحكومية بلغ نحو 4010، فيما تقدر أرقام شبه رسمية أنها توفر للفلسطينيين نحو 41 ألف وظيفة، فيما يصلها تمويل خارجي يزيد عن مليار و500 مليون دولار سنوياً. وتشمل هذه الإحصائية المؤسسات غير الربحية كافة، الممولة محلياً أو أجنبياً، علماً أن الأخيرة تشكل ثلثي العدد المذكور (4010)، ويشمل ذلك التي تحظى بتمويل أجنبي كامل، أو يغطي هذا التمويل النسبة الكبرى من مشاريعها.
كيف بدأ الاختراق؟
شكّلت الانتفاضة الأولى (1987 ــ 1993) تجربة وطنية بامتياز عزّزت اعتماد الفلسطينيين على أنفسهم وتكاتفهم على الأصعدة كافة ــ بعد التغلب على ظاهرة «روابط القرى» ــ وهو ما عُرف آنذاك باسم «تجربة الاقتصاد المنزلي»، حينما طرحت «القيادة الوطنية الموحدة» واللجان المتفرعة عنها بديلاً عن كل المسميات والمؤسسات التي تعمل اليوم، إضافة إلى لجان مختلفة بدأت تتبلور تدريجياً مع انطلاقة حركتي «الجهاد الإسلامي» و«حماس»، إذ كان للفصائل القول الفصل في المجتمع المتماسك الذي لم يكن يعاني آنذاك حالة فراغٍ سياسي واجتماعي واقتصادي مثل اليوم.
ببساطة، كان الناس يتقاسمون ما يتوافر لهم. حتى على الصعيد التعليمي، ظهر دور الفصائل في خلق مدارس وجامعات من لا شيء في ظل إغلاق العدو المؤسسات التعليمية، إلى حدّ تحولت فيه البيوت والمقاهي والمساجد إلى قاعات للحصص والمحاضرات.
لكن قدوم السلطة بعد اتفاق أوسلو وغياب دور الفصائل وتماهي جزء منها في عملية التسوية مثّلت عوامل فتحت الباب لمؤسسات المجتمع المدني أو المنظمات الخارجية التي تعمل في فلسطين تحت حجة سد الفراغ ودعم الشعب الفلسطيني وتحسين بنيته التحتية! كانت هذه المؤسسات في البداية لا تشمل وظائف وأجوراً لعامليها إلا بصورة محدودة، إذ لم يتلق الرواتب سوى كبار المديرين، فيما يحصل بقية الموظفين أو المتطوعين من الشباب والفتيات على الفتات. هكذا كانت المرحلة الأولى لبدء عمل المؤسسات الممولة أجنبياً تحت شعار «المجتمع المدني» الناشئ حتى نهاية 1999.
بعد ذلك، قبيل اندلاع انتفاضة الأقصى الثانية، بدأت المرحلة اللاحقة لعمل هذه المؤسسات، إذ مثلت الانتفاضة التي انطلقت عام 2000 مرحلة «العزّ». وهنا يوصّف متابعون للشأن السياسي هذه المرحلة بـ«الأكثر خطورة»، عازين ذلك إلى ثلاثة أسباب: الأول انسداد أفق التسوية السياسية، الأمر الذي جعل التمويل الأجنبي يبحث عن فلسطينيين للضخ في مؤسساتهم في الوقت الذي كان فيه العدو يقصف مقرات السلطة ويجتاح كامل الأراضي المحتلة عام 1967، والثاني ضعف دور الفصائل وعجزها عن مجاراة الوضع ومحاكاة تجربة الانتفاضة الأولى مجدداً نظراً إلى عوامل متعددة أبرزها انضواء معظمها تحت لواء «منظمة التحرير» والشح الذي كانت تعانيه «حماس» و«الجهاد الإسلامي» في ظل الملاحقة الأمنية والسياسية. أما السبب الثالث، فهو السابقة التاريخية بدخول البنك الدولي على خط التمويل المباشر للمؤسسات في فلسطين، وفي مرحلة لاحقة (بعد الانتفاضة الثانية) تعامل البنك مع مؤسسسات على علاقة بـ«حماس» في غزة لكن بصورة محدودة.
من جانبٍ آخر، أظهر بعض مسؤولي المؤسسات الممولة أجنبياً «جسارةً» في الانتهازية السياسية، إذ سارعوا ــ بناء على جملة من العلاقات السابقة التي فعلوها في ذلك الوقت ــ إلى فتح خطوط اتصال مباشرة مع الحكومات الأجنبية، وذلك في تجاوز واضح للفصائل وللسلطة نفسها خلال الانتفاضة الثانية، ومن ثمَّ بدأ ضخ المال إلى مؤسسات فرّخت أضعاف عددها بسرعة. وتكفي الإشارة إلى البيان الذي نشره مجموعة من المطبّعين عبر صحيفة «القدس» المحلية في 20 حزيران 2002، وتحديداً في صفحة رقم 16 ــ وعبر وسائل إعلام أخرى ــ بتمويل من الاتحاد الأوروبي، وفحواه ترويجهم لمحاربة العمليات الاستشهادية، وكان ذلك تزامناً مع استمرار العمليات الفدائية في ظل انعقاد «مؤتمر شرم الشيخ للسلام» في مصر، في إشارة إلى القمة العربية المنعقدة هناك آنذاك.
مرحلة «التفريخ»
يوماً بعد يوم وكل مؤسسة تولّد أخرى تابعة لها، مرة بحجة «التشبيك والتنسيق»، وأخرى بحجة «خطط التنمية الشاملة»، ما أدى إلى زيادة عدد المشاريع الممولة خارجياً، ثم تضخمت الميزانيات، وهنا عمّت الفوضى حتى في هذه المؤسسات نفسها التي بدأ العاملون فيها يخوضون صراعات أسوأ من صراعات الفصائل، بل تعددت الاختصاصات بصورة كبيرة، ومن ذلك مثلاً وجود مؤسسة أو جمعية تختص بالمجال الصحي، وأخرى تابعة لها تنفذ دراساتٍ وبحوثاً في مسألة المرأة والجندر، فيما تكون هناك «مؤسسة أمّ» أوجدت الاثنتين.
بطريقة ما، تحولت الـNGOs إلى «وزارة» إضافية لا تملك السلطة حقيبتها، أو «لوبي لا يسيطر عليه أحد»، إذ يكدّ الشباب في تجهيز مقترحات مشاريعهم بما يوافق أهواء الممول، والأخير يمتلك القرار. ووفق كثيرين ممن عملوا في تلك المرحلة داخل هذه المؤسسات، كان «الراتب الشهري مربوطاً مباشرة بمدى قدرة الموظف على الاستجابة لشروط الممول أو رؤيته، وأي حيادٍ من الشباب عن الطريق المرسوم يعني حكمهم على ذاتهم بإنهاء خدماتهم وإيقاف رواتبهم إذا كانوا موظفين دائمين، أو يحصلون على مشاريع بين مدة وأخرى».
التوقيع على «وثيقة نبذ العنف»
«وثيقة نبذ العنف» هي المسمّى الأكثر تداولاً لما تشترطه كثيرٌ من الجهات الأجنبية المانحة. يوضح يوضح «أبو أحمد» (اسم مستعار)، الذي كان يعمل في مؤسسات تتلقى تمويلاً خارجياً، أن مؤسسات «ford» ،»Rockefeller»، «USAID» لا توافق على التمويل دون التوقيع على هذه الوثيقة التي يرد فيها نص يؤكد ضرورة عدم الدعوة إلى «أي مجموعة تدعو أو تولد التعصب أو العنف أو تمثل تهديداً لوجود وشرعية وجود دول شرعية وسيادية مثل إسرائيل». ويضيف «أبو أحمد» أن المؤسسات الفلسطينية الممولة تقدم كشوفاً دورية بأسماء العاملين فيها، وتخضع للرقابة المالية الأميركية، في حين أن «USAID» هي الجهة المانحة الأكثر نشاطاً في فلسطين، لكنها ليست وحدها التي تطلب توقيع وثيقة نبذ العنف (راجع «هكذا تقتل الـUSAID بذور المقاومة الشعبية لفلسطين»: العدد ٢١٠٦ في ١٧ أيلول ٢٠١٣).
أبو أحمد يقول إنه عمل متطوعاً في الأنشطة الاجتماعية وعدة مؤسسات على مدار نحو 15 عاماً، ويؤكد من خبرته أن «من يرفض توقيع وثيقة نبذ العنف، يحكم على مؤسسته غالباً بالتهميش والاندثار تدريجياً، وتقلص أنشطتها وخدماتها المقدمة إلى الجمهور، بسبب نقص التمويل وضعف الميزانية المرصودة». في المقابل، يعني التوقيع على الوثيقة أن «تحظى المؤسسة بدعمٍ كبير، وينال موظفوها رواتب عالية أو مقبولة نسبياً مقارنةً مع الوظائف والمشاريع والمؤسسات الأخرى».
ثمة أمرٍ لا يدركه كثيرون وهو غياب النتائج الملموسة على الأرض لغالبية المشاريع التي تقدمها بعض الدول المانحة، فمنها ما يدمره العدو الإسرائيلي ضمن حملة «الأرض المحروقة»، كما أن القسم الأكبر من أنشطة هذه المشاريع يبدو «تنظيرياً» ويعتمد على تنفيذ ورش العمل والمؤتمرات، وإجراء الأبحاث والدراسات رغم خطورتها على الوعي الفلسطيني. واللافت أن مديري هذه المؤسسات لا يقدمون التقارير المالية والإدارية الدورية إلّا إلى الممول حصراً، وبذلك من الصعب تشديد أي رقابة عليهم، إذ تتصرف هذه المؤسسات كأنها مستقلة ويمكنها أن تفعل ما تشاء لأن تمويلها أجنبي. أما ما يدور في الخفاء، بين الممول والشخصيات الفلسطينية، فهذا لا يبوح به أحد.
ساحة استرزاق وصراعات وفساد
كيف تُقدّم المشاريع إلى الممول؟ بداية يجب أن يكون المتقدم صاحب «ملف أمني نظيف»، وعلى خبرة بـ«لعبة التمويل» من أجل تحضير أوراق المقترح، وقد يستعين بمؤسسات وسيطة تؤدي هذا الدور بحرفية مقابل نسبة من التمويل المتوقع. وبعدما يشمل المقترح أسباب المشروع وأهدافه وخططه الزمانية والمكانية، ثم نقاط الضعف والقوة، وأخيراً الجدوى الاقتصادية، يُرفع إلى المموّل المطموح إليه، فيطلب تصحيحات أو إضافات، فيما قد يستثنى المشروع إذا رفضت المؤسسة أو الشخص التوقيع على «وثيقة نبذ العنف»، أو كان صاحبه يحمل «خلفياتٍ تعادي الاحتلال»، أو صاحب عمل وطني سابق.
رغم ثبوت الفساد في الـNGOs لا تتدخل السلطة والفصائل غالباً
هذه السلاسة في طرح المشاريع والحصول على التمويل، إضافة إلى عمر التمويل الأجنبي الذي بدأ يطول نسبياً، أدت إلى نقل التجربة إلى شبكاتٍ واسعة من الأفراد، كما عزّزت البطالة وضعف سوق العمل الزيادة في عدد المنتفعين منها، وصارت سوق عمل وحدها، بما تعنيه السوق من كلمة، إذ يتهم كثير من العاملين في الـ«NGOs» نظراءهم من بقية المؤسسات بالفساد وسوء الإدارة، وتصل الاتهامات حد «التباهي بقوة التمويل الأجنبي وحسن إداراته». لكن إفادات كثيرين من داخل هذه المؤسسات تشي بالعكس، لأن ما ينسحب على المؤسسات الفاسدة محلياً يطاول الكثير من المؤسسات الممولة أجنبياً، خاصة التي تم تأسيسها في ظروفٍ استثنائية مثل السنوات العشر الأخيرة، وهي تفاصيل غالباً تغيب عن العامة لأنها بعيدة عنهم، كما أنه مال «أجنبي» وسرقته لن تؤذي أحداً!
من الأمثلة البارزة على الفساد في هذا المجال أن الموظفين في المشاريع يتقاضون مبالغ أقل من المخصصة لهم على الأوراق، ويوقعون على الأخيرة جبراً، فضلاً عن سلسلة مصاريف مسجلة بفواتير وهمية بالاتفاق بين مصدّر الفاتورة والمنفذ المحلي، ليتقاسم الاثنان الزائد من المبلغ.
ويبدو أن بعض هذه المؤسسات تحوّلت إلى جهاتٍ محترفة في التحايل على القانون وحتى على الممول نفسه، فمثلاً باتفاق عدد من أصحاب الصلاحيات في مشروع ما قد يجري تقاسم مبالغ مقابل التغطية على سوء إدارة الجميع، وأيضاً استغلال الموظفين والمتطوعين في انتهاكٍ واضح لقانون العمل، إضافة إلى توظيف الأقرباء وأفراد العائلة والأصدقاء، رغم أن المادة 16 من «قانون الجمعيات والمؤسسات لسنة 2001» تنصّ على «أن يكون لكل جمعية أو هيئة مجلس إدارة يتكون من عدد لا يقل عن سبعة أعضاء، ولا يزيد على ثلاثة عشر عضواً، وتحدد طريقة تشكيله وكيفية اختيار أعضائه وإنهاء عضويتهم في النظام الأساسي للجمعية أو الهيئة… ولا يجوز أن يضم مجلس الإدارة عضوين أو أكثر يجمع بينهما صلة قرابة من الدرجتين الأولى والثانية».
كل هذه التجاوزات مثبتة رسمياً، وتذكرها بوضوح معطيات التقارير السنوية لـ«ديوان الرقابة المالية والإدارية»، إذ لم تتغير حال هذه المنظمات أو المؤسسات في التقرير الرقابية السنوية منذ عام 2013 حتى 2016. ويبيّن تقرير 2015 أن المبلغ الذي يمكن استرداده لخزينة الدولة من المؤسسات والمنظمات غير الحكومية تبلغ قيمته نحو مليون وثمانمئة ألف دولار على أقل تقدير. مع ذلك، لا تعمل السلطة أو الفصائل على تشكيل عوائق أمام التمويل الأجنبي، علماً أن الأرقام شبه الرسمية تفيد بأن نحو ثلثي الميزانية الإجمالية السنوية لهذه المؤسسسات تصرف على العاملين فيها كأجور ورواتب. ووفق أحدث الإحصاءات، ثمة منظمة واحدة لكل ألف فلسطيني، في حين أن عدد موظفي الرقابة الحكومية لا يتعدى عشرة موظفين لكل 5500 مؤسسة!
ديموقراطية وحرية في فلسطين!
رغم اختلاف الوضع السياسي في فلسطين عن غيرها من الدول العربية، نجحت المؤسسات الممولة أجنبياً في تكرار نماذج المناداة بـ«الحرية، الديموقراطية، حقوق الإنسان، الحرّيات، المساواة»، ومفاهيم أخرى شبيهة تتعلق بحقوق النساء والجندر وصولاً إلى الحديث عن «التعايش المشترك»، معرّجة أيضاً على مجالات أخرى مثل الرياضة والفنون، إذ صارت هذه المفاهيم كأنها البديل عن المقاومة دون اعتبار للسياق الفلسطيني ودور الاحتلال في تقويض الحريات.
وبينما كانت «حماس» تبادر في غزة إلى إغلاق أي مؤسسة تحمل عناوين «التعايش والسلام»، أو تجبر عدداً آخر على تقديم «كشف مفصل» عن حساباتها المالية، كان الوضع مختلفاً في الضفة، حيث كانت «الإدارة المدنية الإسرائيلية»، عندما تحاول تسويق نفسها كبديلٍ عن السلطة عبر التواصل مع الفلسطينيين مباشرة، تستعمل الـNGOs سبيلاً إلى ذلك، خاصة أن الطرفين يشتركان في أهداف منها تكوين صورة لدى الفلسطينيين عن أنهما يقدمان ما لا تقدمه السلطة.
أما عن الطرق، فكانت تتنوع بين الندوات وورش العمل، والمؤتمرات الداخلية والخارجية، والمخيمات الصيفية، ثم تطور الوضع إلى أن شارك عدد من هذه المؤسسات في تنفيذ مشاريع بالتعاون مع الإسرائيليين، أخطرها التي تستهدف الأطفال والفتية الفلسطينيين تحت عنوان «التعايش»، وذلك لكسر الحاجز النفسي بين العدو والشعب الواقع تحت الاحتلال، وخلق أجيالٍ جديدة بشخصية منفصمة تتخلى عن قضيتها الوطنية.
ومن أمثلة ذلك مشاركة أطفال من مستوطنة «سديروت» ومن بلدة يطا الفلسطينية جنوب الخليل، بعد حرب غزة الأخيرة عام 2014، في خوض مباراة كرة قدم مشتركة ضمن مشروع خاص بـ«مركز بيريس للسلام»، في أيلول من ذلك العام، وأقيمت المباراة في «كيبوتس دوروت» القريب من غزة.
وقبل ذلك، أُشرك وفد من أطفال شهداء حرب 2008 من غزة، كان عددهم 37، اختارتهم «منظمة بذور السلام» كعينة في معسكر مختلط مع أطفال إسرائيليين وجنود لمدة أسبوع في أواخر 2011، بغرض «التبادل الثقافي والتعايش المشترك والسلام»، علماً أن هذه المخيمات صارت تعقد سنوياً وأحياناً في الولايات المتحدة ودول أوروبية.
عناوين أخطر من التطبيع
وفق آخر الإحصاءات، ثمة مؤسسة مقابل كل 10 آلاف فلسطيني (أشرف أبو عمرة ــ آي بي ايه)
يدافع كثيرون من مديري المؤسسات الممولة أجنياً عن أنفسهم، تارةً بأن المشاريع لا تحمل أي أجندة سياسية ولا تتدخل في قضية الصراع، وأن خدماتهم المقدمة إلى المواطنين لا تقدم باشتراطات عليهم، وتارة أخرى يعرضون السلطة كمثالٍ على التنسيق مع الإسرائيليين أو كونها تتلقى منحاً أجنبية. شكلياً من الصعب إنكار أن هذه المؤسسات قدمت مشاريع مهمة خاصة في المناطق المهملة أو مناطق «ج» وفق تصنيف أوسلو، كما من الصعب اتهام الجميع بأنهم ينفذون أجندات مرسومة وبصورة مباشرة، لكن الصورة العامة لعمل هذه المؤسسات ككل تعطي نتيجة مغايرة.
ووفق التعريف العام لـ«المجتمع المدني»، يكون الأخير كل ما ليس دولة وليس قطاعاً خاصاً، لكن في الحالة الفلسطينية تُستثنى الفصائل لأنها تمتلك نية للوصول للسلطة والمشاركة السياسية، ويمكن أن ينسحب الأمر على بعض القواعد الشعبية للفصائل في الجامعات والمناطق الريفية. وبالتعريف نفسه، نستبعد البنوك والمؤسسات المالية كونها ضمن القطاع الخاص، لكن الأمر قد يكون مغايراً بشأن الغرف التجارية والمؤسسات والجمعيات الخاصة برجال البنوك والأعمال التي تتعلق بمصالح السوق.
أما المؤسسات الممولة أجنبياً، فتُركّز على القضايا الجزئية على حساب الكلّية، ونجدها تتحدث عن «الطفل، الشباب، البيئة…» كمسائل مستقلة عن المجتمع، ومثلاً تناقش موضوع المرأة انطلاقاً من المنظور الغربي إلى المرأة الشرقية، وتعزلها عن حيزها المجتمعي والثقافي، ولا تورد إجراءات الاحتلال بحق النساء الفلسطينيات سوى كعامل إضافي مقابل مشكلة «عنف الرجل» الفلسطيني! بذلك، يُفصل المشارك عن مجتمعه ووضعه الوطني بحجة تجنب التدخل في السياسة، وتصير مهمة هذه المؤسسات محصورة في إدارة المشكلات التي أفرزها الاحتلال، دون طرح المسبب الرئيسي لهذه المشكلات وللتبعية وللتفرقة، ودون التطرق حتى إلى الفساد في المؤسسات الفلسطينية.
بالمقارنة مع قضية «التطبيع» مع العدو، فإن الـ«NGOs» في فلسطين، التي لا يمكن أن تتعامل مع أي شخص على «اللائحة السوداء لإسرائيل»، لا تعمل غالباً إلا عبر تنسيق إسرائيلي، أو على الأقل رضا من العدو على أدائها، خاصة في حال وجود إدارة أجنبية قائمة على الإدارة المحلية، وذلك في ظل أن المبالغ التي تضخ عبر هذه المؤسسات كبيرة ومن غير المنطقي ألا تكون موجهة الأهداف.
The Syrian Arab Army is preparing to launch its long-awaited Operation Damascus Steel in the Eastern Ghouta. The operation’s goal is to capture entire militant-held pocket (+100 km²) and to secure the Syrian capital and the Damascus-Homs highway (M5).
Right now, Damascus is under a constrant threat of shelling by Tahrir Al-Sham, Ahrar al-Sham, the Free Syrian Army and other militant groups.
A success in Eastern Ghouta will also allow to free a large number of SAA troops for further operations against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the province of Idlib.
Forces
The advance in Eastern Ghouta will be spearheaded by the SAA’s Tiger Forces, the Republican Guard, the 14th Division (SF) and the 4th Armoured Division (Ghiath Forces – 42nd Brigade).
These units will be backed by the National Defense Forces, Tribal Forces and Galilee Forces. According to reports these factions will be mainly involved in defensive operations and fortification tasks. The 1st Armored Division, the 7th Mechanized Division and the 9th Armoured Division have also sent reinforcements to the area.
In total, the operation will involve 10,000 – 15,000 pro-government fighters, backed by the Syrian Air Force and the Russian Aeroosapce Forces.
On the other hand, Jaish al-Islam, Ahrar Al-Sham, Tahrir Al-Sham and Faylaq Al-Rahman have been involved in a series of internal tensions since the middle of 2017. The new SAA operation in Eastern Ghouta will likely force them to unite efforts against the Syrian government and its allies.
Possible scenario
There are a high urban density, a large number of underground tunnels and many fortified sites of militants in the western part of Eastern Ghouta. On the other hand, the eastern part of the pocket is mostly a farm land.
Most likely, the SAA and its allies will make an attempt to isolate the urban area from Jobar to Duma. If government forces seek to do this, they will have to capture the farm lands controlled by Jash al-Islam.
However, this does not exclude possible attacks on the western front, especially if militants send reinforcements to the eastern part of the pocket. The SAA may use its advantage in manpower and firepower to open a new front against militants and to use their lack of the coordination.
According to reports, government forces will attempt to divide the militant-held area into few spearated parts and to force local groups of militants to reconcile with the government one by one. The similar strategy was used during the Battle of Qaboun in 2017.
Ed Note: What happenned to Mazin is a message for all “Palestinian” Activist, especially, BDS activist funded by Soros, debating the right to BDS and Sharing the Holly Land, instead of talking about the Palestinian right of return. Your American citizenship will never protect you in United States of Isteal,
At the beginning of the the so-called Syrian Spring, I exchanged few mails with mazin, and discovered his true face. For Mazin, Hezbollah, liberated Lebanon from the Israeli Occupation and the the Arz Revolution liberated Lebanon from the “Syrian Occupation”
Prof Mazin forget that, until Sykes-Picot, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine were parts of the Lavent (Greater Syria), consequently, he is ready to share the Land of Canaan. I wonder if Prof Mazin is aware the the Land of Canan is nothing but the Lavent.
Please compare our Ex-Palestinian Activists, such as , Ali Abunimah, holding western passports with the Ex-Jew, Ex-Istael, Hebrew Speaking Palestinian, Gilad Atzmon born in Occupied Palestine who decided to join the UPROOTED PALESTINIANS in their struggle for RETURN,
Mazin Qumsiyeh is author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History. He will be speaking in Albuquerque, New Mexico on June 20; in Austin, Texas June 21-23; New Orleans on June 24-25; and Houston June 26-27 (see full schedule here.) The following was posted on Facebook by Jeff Blankfort:
Israel Occupied USA. Mazin Qumsiyeh, latest adventure in Israel’s most important occupied territory where he is now on a speaking tour (see link to his schedule below).
I think, after reading this (and admittedly did before) that the issue of US control over our Congress as it relates to the Middle East which has cost, from a US perspective, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives and permanent injuries, is what needs to be taken to the American people, and the exclusive focus on the BDS campaign (in the US as opposed to Europe and elsewhere) has been, on reflection, a diversion from doing the work that needs to be done in the US. With that as an intro, here’s Mazin Qumsiyeh:
From: Mazin Qumsiyeh <mazin@qumsiyeh.org> [
Cc: Human Rights Newsletter <humanrights@lists.qumsiyeh.org>
Subject: [HumanRights] Israeli occupied USA
Date: Jun 17, 2017 9:09 PM
I spent 40 hours on grueling travel between Palestine and the USA and my documents (and luggage) were checked 15-20 times along the way. The Israeli occupied United States is not much different from Israeli occupied Palestine. I will not bore you with details of going from Bethlehem to Jordan. I do want to tell you that US security agents were at the exit from the Amman-Chicago flight waiting for me checking IDs and when the one checking my ID announced “we got him” loud enough for the other passenger to hear, four of them escorted me to get my checked-in luggage and then to a special security area where agents went through everything I had thoroughly.
They looked through my note book/diary and also copied my speaking schedule. When I got my boarding pass for Chicago to Denver I noted with dread the SSSSS marked on it for extra checks and so between that special examination and the gate I had to undergo two more examinations and rifling through my luggage beyond the already tight security checks of all other passengers.
I took it as an opportunity to lecture the agents about how they are being used not in the service of the US but in the service of a foreign country (Israel). I told them that it seems I have left one Israeli occupied territory to arrive at another one.
US interests are not served by obeying dictates of Zionists who do not want a professor (who happens to be a US citizen) from speaking the truth. Trying to shoot the messenger will not kill the message!
This harassment happened to me repeatedly even after I was told by the USgovernment in 2002 it would not happen again (see http://qumsiyeh.org/thecaseisclosed/ ). It happened to me again in 2011 and 2013. I do have more flights in the US coming up.
I am a US citizen and I would appreciate it if anyone on this list has advise how to sue or go after the US government (e.g. freedom of information act) for harassment to stop them from doing this. In the meantime such harassment only adds to my determination to work even harder for human rights, peace, and justice.
By comparison, the last 17 hours in Denver area so far were very pleasant as I recovered from the ordeal (though not the jet lag) and reveals the disconnect between the government of the US and the people of the US. I saw the good people of Colorado who are lighting candles instead of cursing the darkness or as the Israeli controlled US agents trying to snuff out the candles. I already gave two talks; one at Longmont library and one at Posner Center.
The latter was shared with Joseph Medicine Robe who spoke on Environmental and Justice matters from Native American perspectives. We both connected the dots as to how wars, conflict, militarization of society and corporate profit are connected at the expense of native people from North Dakota to Palestine. We both agreed that weapons were manufactured to be used in wars before but now wars are manufactured and not just to sell weapons to make money in other ways (pipelines etc.). We also agree that the governments use false flags, lies and distortions and capitalize on these key areas to push their anti-nature, anti-people agenda: fear, distraction, racism (divide and conquer), and consumerism.
Two weeks ago I wrote about looking for goodness & emphasizing the positive rather than focusing on opposing the negative energy. This was emphasized to me also by a fellow panelist Iman Jodeh, spokeswoman of the Muslim community who spoke of leading groups to Palestine to learn objectively about what is going on. It was emphasized to me last night by my host in Denver Joann and tonight by the other host in Lafayette Richard Forer. Rich incidentally published a remarkable book called “Breakthrough: Transforming fear into compassion” describing his own transformation from a Zionist to a compassionate caring human being (see http://www.richardforer.com/ ).
The only other reading I want to list for this message is for those of you who did not read it is a chapter in my book that deals with violence: http://qumsiyeh.org/chapter8/
Again please look at my schedule posted here: http://qumsiyeh.org/upcomingevents/ and do contact people you know in those cities, ask them to attend and help. Those who cannot help in this tour, can donate and/or support our efforts via our website:
Barcelona City Council passed a historic declaration on Wednesday upholding the right to boycott the “Israeli” entity over its violations of Palestinian rights.
The motion condemns the apartheid entity’s occupation of Palestinian land, calls for the immediate end to the decade-long Gaza blockade and ensures that the city’s public procurement policies exclude companies that profit from “Israel’s” human rights abuses.
It also admonishes the “Israeli” entity for its intransigence in the face of repeated warnings from the international community to stop its illegal colonization of Palestinian land, according to the Catalan daily Ara.
The council recognizes “nonviolent campaigns promoted by Palestinian and international civil society for defending international and human rights law in Palestine” – a clear nod to the BDS movement.
The city joins dozens of Spanish municipalities which have declared themselves “free of ‘Israeli’ apartheid.”
A coalition of Spanish and Catalan boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] groups welcomed the vote.
“We celebrate this victory because we believe it to be a great step forward in raising the awareness of the role of local government in the defense of human rights and in breaking the complicity that inherently bolsters apartheid and the occupation of Palestine,” the groups state.
“This resolution is an institutional recognition of civil society demands for an end to complicity in violations of international law through nonviolent struggle, as practiced by the BDS movement,” the groups add.
The city’s recognition of the right to engage in “Israel” boycott activism, at a time when more European governments move to protect such activism, “is a triumph for free speech and democratic rights in Europe,” said Rafeef Ziadah of the Palestinian BDS National Committee.
“It gives further recognition to BDS as an inclusive, inspiring, anti-racist movement rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that upholds the basic principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity,” Ziadah added.
For years, Spanish and Catalan activists had engaged in direct action against academic and cultural partnerships with “Israeli”-backed institutions.
In 2014, dozens of activists occupied the offices of Catalan government representatives to protest a wave of newly signed academic collaboration deals between the autonomous region and the “Israeli” entity.
The action forced the representatives to agree to examine proposals aimed at ensuring the new deals do not benefit institutions and companies that participate in the entity’s occupation.
More than 350 Catalan academics and university staff backed the action, calling for the boycott of “Israeli” academic institutions.
The “Israeli” regime, meanwhile, has expressed worry over the growing popularity of BDS activism in Spain, especially as larger cities such as Barcelona, led by left-wing mayor Ada Colau, vote to support Palestinian rights.
A 2016 cable from the “Israeli” embassy in Spain described “the phenomenon of anti-‘Israeli’ activity in Spain” as “bothersome and worrisome, but in the past was centered in small cities.”
But the cable warned that Barcelona city council members were considering canceling a sister-city agreement with Tel Aviv, according to The Jerusalem Post.
After Wednesday’s city Council Vote, David Bondia Garcia, a professor of international law and president of the Institut de Drets Humans de Catalunya, a human rights organization, asserted in the newspaper el Periódico that a break in the twinning agreement with Tel Aviv would be the next logical step.
The Barcelona motion comes just two months after pro-“Israel” groups in Spain filed charges against Palestine solidarity activists for calling on a music festival two years ago to cancel a performer who had used his celebrity to fundraise for the “Israeli” army and to support anti-Palestinian causes.
Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian human rights activist and co-founder of the BDS movement, called the charges “legal intimidation.”
israel | barcelona | bds | spain | israeli apartheid
A call to action from the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (NCNR):
As people of conscience and nonviolence we go to the Pentagon, the seat of the United States military might, to call for an end to the ongoing wars and occupations waged and supported by the US. War is directly linked to poverty and the destruction of the Earth’s habitat. The preparations for more war and a new US nuclear arsenal are a threat to all life on the planet.
This September as we observe the United Nations International Day of Peace, the great many actions around the country for Campaign Nonviolence, and the “No War 2016” conference in Washington, DC we call upon our political leaders, and those at the Pentagon to stop the planning and waging of war.
September 11, 2016 marked 15 years since the Bush regime used the criminal terrorist attacks as an excuse to wage a series of unending wars and occupations continuing still under President Obama. These wars and occupations waged by the US are in fact illegal and immoral and must end.
We demand that the planning and production for a new nuclear arsenal stop. As the first and only country to use nuclear weapons on civilians, we call upon the US to take the lead in real and meaningful nuclear disarmament initiatives so that one day all nuclear weapons will be abolished.
We demand an end to NATO and other military war-games around the world. NATO must be disbanded as it is clearly hostile to Russia thus threatening world peace. Military plans commonly referred to as the US’ “Asian Pivot” are provoking and creating ill will with China. Instead we call for real diplomatic efforts to address conflict with both China and Russia.
We demand that the US immediately start closing its military bases abroad. The US has hundreds of military bases and installations around the world. There is no need for the US to continue to have bases and military installations in Europe, Asia, and Africa while expanding its military alliances with India and the Philippines. All of this does nothing to create a secure and peaceful world.
We demand an end to environmental ecocide resulting from war. The Pentagon is the largest single polluter of fossil fuels in the world. Our dependence on fossil fuels is destroying Mother Earth. Resource wars are a reality we must avoid. An end to war and occupation will lead us on a path to saving our planet.
We demand an end to US military and foreign aid and support for proxy wars. Saudi Arabia is waging an illegal war against the people of Yemen. The US is supplying weapons and military intelligence to this corrupt undemocratic country ruled by a despotic and extremist royal family which oppresses women, LGBT people, other minorities, and dissidents within Saudi Arabia. The US gives billions of dollars in military aid to Israel where the Palestinian people have faced decades of oppression and dispossession. Israel has continuously used its military might on the unarmed Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. It imposes an Apartheid state and prison camp conditions on the Palestinian people. We call on the US to cut off all foreign and military aid to these countries violating international law and human rights.
We demand the US government renounce regime change as a policy against the Assad government of Syria. It must cease funding Islamic extremists and other groups attempting to overthrow the Syrian government. Supporting groups fighting to overthrow Assad does nothing for peace and even justice for the people of Syria.
We demand the US government support refugees fleeing from war-torn countries. The unending wars and occupations have created the largest refugee crisis since the last world war. Our wars and occupations are causing human misery by forcing people to leave their homes. If the US cannot bring about peace in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and the Middle East then it must withdraw, end military funding for proxy wars and occupations, and allow others to work towards stability and peace.
Since September 11, 2001 US society has seen its local police forces become militarized, civil liberties attacked, mass surveillance by the government, the rise in Islamophobia, all while our children are still recruited in the schools by the military. The path to war since that day has not made us safer or the world more secure. The path to war has been an utter failure for almost all on the planet except for those who profit from war and the economic system which impoverishes us all in so many ways. We don’t have to live in a world like this. This is not sustainable.
Therefore, we go to the Pentagon where the empire’s wars are planned and waged. We demand an end to this madness. We call for a new beginning where Mother Earth is protected and where poverty will be eradicated because we will all share our resources and redirect our economy towards a world without war.
The event at the Pentagon at 9 a.m. Monday, September 26, follows a three day conference, with a planning and training session at 2 p.m. on Sunday, September 25. See the full agenda: http://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2016agenda
“The Nigger accomplished his Job, the Nigger is free to go.”
By Gilad Atzmon
“The Nigger accomplished his job, the Nigger is free to go,*” is a common racist Israeli adage. This is how the Israeli elite now treats Omar Barghouti. It is appalling, but not unusual.
Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri told Ynet yesterday; “Omar Barghouti uses rights given to him by Israel to act against it around the world.”
Deri was one of four government ministers to participate in an afternoon question and answer at an anti-BDS conference in Jerusalem.
By law, Palestinians cannot return to Palestine. But Omar Barghouti accomplished the impossible. “Omar Barghouti,” Deri said, “was born in Qatar and received resident status in 1994 after marrying an Israeli woman from Acre and claiming his life is in Israel.”
It seems Barghouti enjoyed liberties other Palestinians and even Israeli citizens can only dream of. Not only was he allowed to return to Palestine, he lived in Ramallah and was entitled to travel freely between Israel and the PA. He travelled all around the world campaigning against the Israeli occupation. He studied at Tel Aviv University then called upon the rest of the world to boycott that university. Bizarrely, Omar Barghouti proved that Israel is a tolerant country.
Minister Deri said, “he (Barghouti) was given rights similar to those of a citizen and he took advantage of our enlightened state to portray us as the most horrible state in the world.”
The truth is obvious. Right wing Israeli politicians knew about Omar Barghouti’s activities all along. Israel allowed Omar Barghouti to travel around the globe and condemn the occupation. Israel allowed it because from a very early stage BDS was an Israeli controlled opposition maneuver.
For Israel, BDS presented the ideal front on which to fight. Instead of battling for a Palestinian Right Of Return,that is ethically solid and backed by UN resolutions, the solidarity movement was reduced to an internal Jewish debate over the “Right to BDS.” Instead of dealing with the acute Palestinian refugee crisis in Syria and Lebanon, our devoted solidarity campaigners gathered around their local food store to protest against gefilte fish made in Israel.
But what did Barghouti give in return? Pretty much everything.
In 2005, the BDS’s first goal demanded that Israel“End[ing] its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantl[ing] the Wall” (http://www.bdsmovement.net/call)
This represented a clear and brave challenge to the legitimacy of the Jewish State,
At some point BDS’s primary goal was changed significantly, it now reads: “Ending [its] occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall.” (http://www.bdsmovement.net/bdsintro).
How was this change adopted? Where is the protocol for such a detrimental shift of position to compromise on the most precious Palestinian principle, i.e. 1948? Who made the BDS into an instrument of legitimisation of pre ‘67 Israel? Those well versed in the ins and out of the BDS movement point to Omar Barghouti and the evidence is undeniable.
The first record of BDS’s revised and diluted goal statement appeared publicly on page 6 of Omar Barghouti’s book, “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions,” published 26 May 2011.
Boycott Divestment Sanctions by Omar-Barghouti. page 6
In 2011-2012, at the time the call for the Right of Return was gaining momentum,Omar Barghouti changed the BDS goal statement into a Zio-friendly text. Why? Why did the Palestinians allow him to get away with it? In fact, the BDS’s goal statement was only changed in English to appease so called ‘anti’ Zionist Jews. It was never translated into Arabic. It was done behind the backs of the Palestinian people and against their interests.
Then what is the Israeli fuss about now? Why threaten to revoke Omar Barghouti’s residency status. “The Nigger accomplished his Job, the Nigger is free to go.” The Israelis have precedent on that front; they never look after their collaborators and partners. The Southern Lebanese Maronite militias were left to their fate once the IDF withdrew from Lebanon. Israel often exposes its Palestinian collaborators. This demoralises the Palestinians and leaves them feeling vulnerable and infiltrated.
For Israel Barghouti, has been a win win situation. They tell the world, ‘we let this Palestinian in and he turned against us.’ So Israel threatens to revoke Barghouti’s status. Let’s assume that such an action leads to widespread international condemnation and Israel reconsiders its move and retains Barghouti’s residency status. By doing so, Israel can prove to the world how ‘enlightened’ and ‘tolerant’ it is.
I wish the Palestinian liberation movement would be left to fierce tacticians and freedom fighters rather than trusting the clumsy hands of ethnic activists who are incapable of thinking past the notion of a picket.
* In the the Israeli offensive adage “הכושי עשה את שלו, הכושי יכול ללכת” the word ‘nigger’ (כושי) refers precisely to a black slave.
On the 13th of March, 2009, at around 4:30pm, Tristan Anderson, an ISM volunteer from the US, was critically wounded by the occupying Israeli forces while peacefully demonstrating against the ongoing occupation of the West Bank village of Ni’lin.
03/13/16 | International Solidarity Movement | Al-Khalil Team
The wounds he sustained were from a high velocity/long range tear gas canister that was used against him at a distance of around 50-60 meters.
Sunday, the 13th of March, will mark 7 years since the attack and represents the ongoing struggle for justice that Tristan, his family and friends, and the people of Palestine face against the occupying forces and their tactics to pervert the course of justice.
Tristan was 38 years old in 2009, when he was severely injured. Tristan’s girlfriend, Gabrielle Silverman, an American-Israeli who witnessed the ordeal was quoted as saying:
“We were at a demonstration against the wall, against the Israeli apartheid wall in the West Bank village of Ni’lin, which is about twenty-six kilometers west of Ramallah. I was very close to him when he was shot. I was only a few feet away. The demonstration had been going for several hours. It was wrapping up; it was almost over. Most people had already gone home. We were standing on some grass nearby a village mosque, and Tristan was taking pictures [when] he was shot in the head with the extended range tear gas canister.”
Jonathan Pollack, an Israeli activist with the group “Anarchists against the Wall” who was also at the demonstration in Ni’lin said Tristan was hit at around 4:30pm, inside the village, at least 1km from the barrier. However, as is often the case at many of the protests, there had been stone-throwing. He said Tristan had never thrown any stones or taken any violent action towards the soldiers {engaging in any form of violence is strictly forbidden within the codes of conduct for ISM volunteers}.
It is reported that, for hours before he was shot, Tristan was nowhere near the annexation wall. The weapon used on Anderson, at the time, had only recently begun being used by Israeli forces against West Bank demonstrators. It comes in a black canister labelled, in Hebrew: “40mm bullet special/long range”, and is silent when fired, according to demonstrators. The instructions of use for tear-gas are for it to be fired in a bow, above – and not directly at – protestors. It is reported that Anderson was hit from a distance of around 60 meters, well short of the parameters for ‘long range’, which has the capacity to be fired around 400 meters.
Tristan was rushed to the Tel Hashomer hospital in Israel. The injuries he sustained caused the loss of sight in Anderson’s right eye, whilst doctors had to remove portions of his frontal lobe and shattered bone from the skull. At the time it was not clear if Anderson would survive, or how much brain damage he would incur from the large scale of injuries that he sustained from the attack.
Years later, Tristan continues to require around the clock care because of cognitive impairment and physical disability. He is also paralyzed throughout half of his body, and uses a wheelchair.
Whilst initially there were no charges laid against the Israeli military, new evidence has emerged which shows the officer responsible for incident. “Sergeant Jackie” is named as the border patrol officer who shot Anderson in a clip filmed by a Palestinian activist from Ni’lin. An Israeli state attorney was then able to identify Jackie, whose face is not clear in the clip, by applying facial recognition software.
Just as important as identifying Anderson’s shooter, the video also shows that border patrol unit Sgt. Jackie was at a distance much less than the distance stated in the testimony given during the military investigation. The video also displays a clear example of how far the Israeli military is willing to go to lie, cover up and try to protect their story.
The Israeli military described the protest as a “violent riot”, saying that “approximately 400 rioters threw a massive number of rocks at security forces.”
“Israel regrets that the Israeli and foreign nationals co-operate with violent rioters against the building of the security fence, whose purpose is saving the lives of Israeli citizens,” it said. “As such, any Israeli, Palestinian, or foreign national who illegally participates in a violent demonstration takes upon himself the risk of personal harm during the dispersal of these disturbances.”
Supporters of Anderson hope that the new evidence will be instrumental to both his current civil suit, as well as re-opening a criminal investigation against the Israeli military. “Both sides,” said Silverman (Anderson’s girlfriend), “have a political point to make in the courtroom,” explaining the case is, in part, about negligence, and, in part, about Israeli’s systematic use of violence against Palestinians.
Just one month after the shooting of Tristan Anderson, 30-year-old Bassem Abu Rahme was killed by a tear gas canister that was shot directly at his chest, at close range, by an Israeli soldier. The Israeli military insists on not indicting the security officer who killed Bassem, despite being provided with enough details to find him.
The silence that ensues the actions and lack of justice brought upon the Israeli forces, the so called ‘most moral army in the world’, is deafening.
One must question the international community’s role in negligence, and ponder why the excessive use of force, the continuous cover ups and the criminal actions of Israeli military actions remain unquestioned on an international level, and are being allowed to continue without serious investigation or global condemnation.
I wonder how Israel’s paid Internet trolls will spin this one? Manal Tamimi, mother and nonviolent activist for Palestinian human rights is arrested–on International Women’s Day, no less. Tamimi is from Nabi Saleh, the same West Bank village I highlighted in a post yesterday. Do check it out if you haven’t seen it.
That post focused on one of Nabi Saleh’s younger residents, Ahmed Tamimi, but Manal Tamimi, as you can see, is a bit older. Moreover, she has a nice habit of documenting events in Occupied Palestine, and particularly in her home village, on her Twitter page. In the video below, you can see her discussing the role of women in the Palestinian resistance.
So my question is–why would the Israelis arrest a woman like this, and on International Women’s Day, of all days of the year? Is it an expression of contempt? Are they trying to send a message? And could the news item below possibly have something to do with it?
It seems the Israelis are mad at the UN again and throwing another tantrum. Let’s hope Ms. Tamimi is freed and that she makes it safely back to her home and family.
A Palestinian TV cameraman was injured, and many protesters suffered the effects of tear gas inhalation, Friday, after dozens of Israeli soldiers attacked the weekly nonviolent protest against the Wall and colonies, in Kafr Qaddoum town, near the northern West Bank city of Qalqilia.
Photo By Kafr Qaddoum Solidarity
The Popular Committee in Kafr Qaddoum said this week’s protests also marked the 51st anniversary of the establishment of Fateh movement, and commemorated the third anniversary of the death of Sheikh Sa’id Jasser, who died of severe effects of tear gas inhalation.
The Committee stated that dozens of residents marched from the center of the village, carrying Palestinian flags, posters and chanting for ending the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine and the escalating violations.
Morad Eshteiwy, coordinator of the Popular Committee in Kafr Qaddoum, said dozens of soldiers, accompanied by an armored bulldozer, invaded the village and fired live rounds, rubber-coated steel bullets and gas bombs.
Eshteiwy added that Palestinian cameraman Enaal al-Jada’ was shot with a rubber-coated steel bullet in his leg, and received the required treatment by Red Crescent medics. Many Palestinians also suffered the effects of tear gas inhalation.
The soldiers surrounded Kafr Qaddoum since early morning hours, and tried to hide between trees and various areas, but the protesters managed to uncover the ambush attempts, before clashing with the soldiers.
Iraqis were attempting the nonviolent overthrow of their dictator prior to his violent overthrow by the United States in 2003. When U.S. troops began to ease up on their liberating and democracy-spreading in 2008, and during the Arab Spring of 2011 and the years that followed, nonviolent Iraqi protest movements grew again, working for change, including the overthrow of their new Green Zone dictator. He would eventually step down, but not before imprisoning, torturing, and murdering activists — with U.S. weapons, of course.
There have been and are Iraqi movements for women’s rights, labor rights, to stop dam construction on the Tigris in Turkey, to throw the last U.S. troop out of the country, to free the government from Iranian influence, and to protect Iraqi oil from foreign corporate control. Central to much of the activism, however, has been a movement against the sectarianism that the U.S. occupation brought. Over here in the United States we don’t hear much about that. How would it fit with the lie we’re told over and over that Shi’a-Sunni fighting has been going on for centuries?
Ali Issa’s new book,Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq, collects interviews he’s done of key Iraqi activists, and public statements made by Iraqi activist movements, including a letter to the U.S. Occupy Movement and similar messages of global solidarity. The voices are hard to hear because we haven’t been hearing them all these years, and because they don’t fit with lies we’ve been told or even with overly simplistic truths we’ve been told.
Did you know that, at the time of the Occupy Movement in the United States, there was a larger, more active, nonviolent, inclusive, principled, revolutionary movement holding major demonstrations, protests, permanent sit-ins, and general strikes in Iraq — planning actions on Facebook and by writing times and places on paper currency? Did you know there were sit-ins in front of every U.S. military base demanding that the occupiers leave?
When U.S. troops eventually and temporarily and incompletely departed Iraq, that was due, most Americans imagine, to President Barack Obama’s peaceful ways. Other Americans, aware that Obama had long since broken his withdrawal campaign promise, had done everything possible to extend the occupation, had left behind thousands of State Department troops, and would be back in with the military as soon as possible, give credit to Chelsea Manning for having leaked the video and documents that persuaded Iraq to stick with the Bush-Maliki deadline. Few note the efforts of Iraqis on the ground who made the occupation untenable.
The Iraqi media has been shut down when it has covered protests. Journalists in Iraq have been beaten, arrested, or killed. The U.S. media, of course, behaves itself without much prodding.
When an Iraqi threw his shoes at President Bush the Lesser, American liberals giggled but made clear their opposition to shoe-throwing. Yet the fame the act created allowed the shoe-thrower and his brothers to build popular organizations. And future actions included throwing shoes at a U.S. helicopter that was apparently trying to intimidate a demonstration.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with opposing throwing shoes in most contexts. Certainly I do. But knowing that the shoe throwing helped to build what we always claim to want, nonviolent resistance to the empire, adds some perspective.
Iraqi activists have regularly been kidnapped/arrested, tortured, warned, threatened, and released. When Thurgham al-Zaidi, brother of shoe-thrower Muntadhar al-Zaidi, was picked up, tortured, and released, his brother Uday al-Zaidi posted on Facebook: “Thurgham has assured me that he is coming out to the protestthis Fridayalong with his little son Haydar to say to Maliki, ‘If you kill the big ones, the little ones are coming after you!’”
Mistreatment of a child? Or proper education, far superior to indoctrination into violence? We shouldn’t rush to judgment. I’d guesstimate there have been perhaps 18 million U.S. Congressional hearings lamenting the failure of Iraqis to “step up” and help out in the killing of Iraqis. Among Iraqi activists there seems to have been a great deal of stepping up for a better purpose.
When a nonviolent movement against Assad in Syria still had hope, the “Youth of the Great Iraqi Revolution” wrote to “the Heroic Syrian Revolution” offering support, encouraging nonviolence, and warning against co-option. One has to set aside years of U.S. neocon propaganda for the violent overthrow of the Syrian government, in order to hear this support for what it was.
The letter also urges a “national” agenda. Some of us see nationalism as a root cause of the wars and sanctions and abuse that created the disaster that now exists in Iraq, Libya, and other liberated lands. But here “national” is apparently being used to mean non-divisive, non-sectarian.
We talk about the nations of Iraq and Syria as having been destroyed, just as we talk about various other peoples and states, back to the nations of the Native Americans, having been destroyed. And we’re not wrong. But it can’t sound right in the ears of living Native Americans. So, for Iraqis, talk of their “nation” also seems to be a way to talk about returning to normalcy or preparing for a future not torn apart by ethnicity and religious sectarianism.
“If not for the occupation,” wrote the president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, in 2011, “the people of Iraq would have ousted Saddam Hussein through the struggles of Tahrir Square. Nevertheless, U.S. troops empower and protect the new Saddamists of the so-called democracy who repress dissent with detainments and torture.”
“With us or against us” idiocy doesn’t work in observing Iraqi activism. Look at these four points in a statement made in June 2014 by Falah Alwan of the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unionists in Iraq:
“We reject U.S. intervention and protest President Obama’s inappropriate speech in which he expressed concern over oil and not over people. We also stand firmly against the brazen meddling of Iran.
“We stand against the intervention of Gulf regimes and their funding of armed groups, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
“We reject Nouri al-Maliki’s sectarian and reactionary policies.
“We also reject armed terrorist gangs and militias’ control of Mosul and other cities. We agree with and support the demands of people in these cities against discrimination and sectarianism.”
But, wait, how can you oppose ISIS after you’ve already opposed U.S. intervention? One is the devil and the other the savior. You must choose . . . if, that is, you live thousands of miles away, own a television, and really — let’s be honest — can’t tell your ass from your elbow. The Iraqis in Issa’s book understand the U.S. sanctions, invasion, occupation, and puppet government as having created ISIS. They’ve clearly had as much help from the U.S. government as they can stand. “I’m from the government and I’m hear to help” is supposed to be a terrifying threat, according to fans of Ronald Reagan who resent anyone trying to give them healthcare or an education. Why they think Iraqis and Libyans hear those U.S. words differently they don’t explain — and don’t really have to.
Iraq is a different world, one the U.S. government would have to work to understand if it ever attempted to understand it. The same goes for U.S. activists. InAgainst All Odds,I read calls for “retaliation” framed as calls for peace and democracy. I read Iraqi protesters wanting to make clear that their protests are not all about oil, but principally about dignity and freedom. It’s funny, but I think some of the U.S. war’s backers claimed the war wasn’t all about oil for the similar reason that it was about global domination, power, “credibility.” Nobody wants to be accused of greed or materialism; everyone wants to be standing on principle, whether that principle is human rights or a sociopathic power grab.
But, as Issa’s book makes clear, the war and the “surge” and its aftermath have been very much about oil. The “benchmark” of a “hydrocarbon law” in Iraq was Bush’s top priority, year after year, and it never passed because of public pressure and because of ethnic divisions. Dividing people, it turns out, may be a better way to kill them off than to steal their oil.
We also read about oil workers taking pride in controlling their own industry, despite its being — you know — an industry that is destroying the earth’s climate. Of course, we may all die from war before the climate gets us, especially if we fail to even begin to understand the death and misery our wars inflict. I read this line inAgainst All Odds:
“My brother was one of those taken in by the U.S. occupation.”
Yeah, I thought, and my neighbor, and lots of Fox and CNN viewers. Many people fell for the lies.
Then I read the next sentence and began to grasp what “taken in” meant:
“They took him around 2008, and they interrogated him for an entire week, repeating one question over and over: Are you Sunni or Shi’a? . . . And he would say ‘I am Iraqi.’”
I’m also struck by the struggles recounted by advocates for women’s rights. They see a long multi-generational struggle and great suffering ahead. And yet we hear very little from Washington about the need to help them. When it comes to dropping bombs, women’s rights always seems to appear as a great concern. Yet when women are organizing efforts to obtain rights, and to resist the radical removal of their rights by the post-liberation government: nothing but silence.
Posted on February 17, 2015 by uprootedpalestinians
A young Bahraini boy holds a poster portraying Sheikh Ali Salman, head of the main opposition movement al-Wefaq, during a demonstration against his arrest in his home village of Bilad al-Qadeem, on the outskirts of the capital Manama on February 6, 2015. AFP/Mohammed al-Shaikh
Published Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Bahrain has opened a criminal investigation of the country’s main opposition group, the Interior Ministry said on Tuesday, accusing the al-Wefaq group of trying to undermine national security.
The Interior Ministry said on its website that its General Directorate of Anti-corruption and Economic and Electronic Security had referred al-Wefaq to the public prosecutor after it documented violations that represent “criminal offences” under Bahraini laws.
It said these violations, published on al-Wefaq’s Twitter account and on its website, included “incitement to hatred against the ruling system and circulating false news to undermine civil peace and national security.”
An al-Wefaq spokesman said the group had no details about the case.
“No one has been contacted or notified about a case against the society,” Sayyed Taher al-Musawi, head of al-Wefaq’s media department, told Reuters.
A rights activist said the move was motivated by political considerations.
“We do not believe at all that such actions have any basis rather than political grounds,” said Nader al-Salatna, acting president of Bahrain Youth Society, a local rights group.
The news come two days after a Bahrain appeals court upheld a six-month prison sentence against Jamil Kazem, a former parliament member and president of al-Wefaq’s consultative council, handed down last month over tweets about election financing.
Kazem was also fined 500 dinars ($1,350) on charges of making false allegations that undermined national elections, more specifically that some candidates were paid money to run in last November’s parliamentary elections which were boycotted by the opposition.
He is one of several opposition figures to have been jailed for tweets or public remarks in recent months, in what opposition officials say is a campaign by authorities to crack down on the opposition which is demanding political and economic reforms.
Political activists have been prosecuted by Bahraini authorities for attempting to voice out and expose gross human rights violations by the al-Khalifa ruling family, which has been in power for over 200 years.
Crackdown on dissent has spiked in the past years in the country where insulting the king is a felony. In April, Bahrain’s cabinet endorsed an amendment to article 214 of the penal code to increase from two to five years the maximum sentence for such a “crime.”
Last month, al-Wefaq’s head, Sheikh Ali Salman, regarded as the country’s most senior opposition leader, went on trial on charges of promoting the violent overthrow of the political system, a case that has riled his followers and inflamed unrest in the Gulf Arab state.
Salman had denied all the charges and said he had been calling for reforms in Bahrain through legal and peaceful means.
Al-Wefaq said in January the charges against Salman lack credibility, “as he is known to be a prominent advocate of peace and reform.”
Salman’s “continued detention will only deepen the gap between the regime and the people. It demonstrates the regime’s inability to coexist with its people, who have continued to call for their universal political rights under a security fist, for decades,” the statement added.
Al-Wefaq boycotted a parliamentary election last year partly because it said voting districts favored the Sunni minority in power in the majority Shia kingdom.
Bahrain, where the US Fifth Fleet is based, has been in turmoil since mass protests in 2011 called for a “real” constitutional monarchy with an elected prime minister who is independent of the ruling royal family and demanded reforms and a bigger share in government.
With the help of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf neighbors, authorities crushed the peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations that began on February 14, 2011, in a crackdown that led to accusations of serious human rights violations.
At least 93 people are estimated to have been killed and hundreds have been arrested and tried since the uprising erupted.
Bahrain says it has implemented wide reforms and accuses the opposition of making unreasonable demands.
Over the weekend that marked the fourth anniversary of the uprising, protesters took to the streets as police fired tear gas and sound bombs and beefed up security around several villages and along major roads across the country.
According to the weekly statistics of Bahrain Center for Human Rights, a total of 113 citizens were arrested from February 9 to 15, including 19 children. Twenty five detained were released later.
In its 2014 annual report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that the ombudsman’s office established in Bahrain since 2011 in the Ministry of Interior and the Special Investigations Unit in the Public Prosecution Office that have been almost useless so far.
Neither of these offices have taken any measures to hold senior officials accountable for human rights abuses or address what the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) characterized as a “culture of impunity.”
For Israel, BDS presented the ideal front on which to fight. Instead of battling for a 
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 