Hands off Gaza - one state the only solution

The latest Israeli assault on Gaza is the act of a state with nothing to offer but the politics and economics of war and terror. With an election coming up in January, Netanyahu’s Likud government is killing Palestinians with the aim of creating fear at home to help them hold on to power.

Netanyahu’s regime has turned once more to state terrorism to find a distraction for an Israeli population burdened by debt and devastated by spending cuts. In July, mass protests once more erupted on the streets of Tel Aviv and two men died after setting themselves on fire in protest at social conditions.

Inequality in Israel is amongst the highest in the world, according to the OECD. One in five Israelis live in poverty, one in three children. But between 2008 and 2009, the number of millionaires increased by 43%, largely from hi-tech start-ups in the weapons, security and communications sector.  

As usual, the world’s media slavishly follows the Israeli line that increased rocket attacks from Gaza led to the current assault, but an open letter from ten leading academics, including Noam Chomsky, is eye witness to a different chronology.

On November 5, a 20-year old Gazan man with a learning disability was shot when he wandered too close to the border. It was six hours before Israeli troops would let medics reach him, so he died. On November 8, a 13-year old boy playing football in front of his house was killed when the Israeli Defence Force made an incursion into Gaza.

By November 11, five Palestinian civilians including three children had been killed in 72 hours. Four deaths occurred when shells were fired at a football match. Some 52 civilians had been wounded, including six women and 12 children.

A Canadian doctor working in Gaza reports wounded arriving at Shefa hospital with shrapnel wounds – brain, neck, throat, intestinal and bone injuries leading to “traumatic amputations”, carried out with “very little morphine for analgesia.”

These were deliberate provocations against a relatively defenceless people armed with a few home-made rockets who live in what has been dubbed the world’s biggest prison camp. Cut off from their fellow Palestinians on the West Bank, most Gazans are registered refugees dependent on help from United Nations agencies and conditions are deteriorating.

Not one Israeli civilian died before the IDF attack began – today three are dead as Hamas stepped up rocket attacks. Netanyahu has to answer for them, too.

Increasingly desperate violence is the Zionist state’s only response to the massive changes in the region. Iran has announced new advanced drones, more sophisticated than those they gave Hezbollah in Lebanon which were sending satellite pictures of Israel’s military and nuclear bases.

The Egyptian government, formerly a supine supporter of US policy in Israel, has recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv. Its border with Gaza is open and Egyptian hospitals are preparing to accept casualties. Israel has been exchanging fire with Syrian artillery batteries on the Golan Heights, where anti-Assad rebels are located.

Later this month the United Nations will discuss a request from the Palestine National Authority for observer country status, a de facto recognition of statehood. The Israeli government has warned that if this happens, they will invade the Palestinian area and topple the government of Mahmoud Abbas.

The Zionist state is in a profound, existential crisis. It has nothing to offer the Israeli people, but the same could be said of the Hamas and Fatah leaderships – and the Iranian government with its military adventurism.

The only people offering a way forward are those from both sides of the Arab/Israeli divide who propose a one-state solution in place of the doomed two-state approach which becomes more impractical each day that Israeli settlement building continues.

Surely the aim has to be remove all the walls and checkpoints and to create a single democratic, secular state with equal rights for all its citizens, whatever their religious or ethnic background. That is the only way to rally Israelis and Palestinians against their common enemy.

Penny Cole

Egyptians storm their Bastille

The storming of the headquarters of Egypt’s secret police over the weekend, while soldiers stood by, is another remarkable episode in the country’s unfolding revolution. Once the feared and hated symbol of the torture and abuse, the building was seized by thousands of protesters.

Emboldened by the removal of Mubarak-appointed prime minister Ahmed Shafiq – he was fired by way of the armed forces Facebook page – protesters gathered outside the Amn al-Dowla secret police HQ on Saturday evening because they feared documents were being shredded.

Similar actions took place in Alexandria and other cities. The agency, which ran a huge network of informants, was notorious for its use of torture. Many of those who took part in the storming were former victims. This time they entered the massive compound in a celebratory mood. Although there were no prisoners left, there was plenty of evidence.

Egyptians took their photos sitting in the chair of the agency’s hated director, General Hassan Abdel Rahman. They also pored through folders of documents, lists, photos, maps, and videotapes. Some were able to find their own files. On Sunday, Egyptians were already posting photos of the documents online, some to a Facebook group called Amn Dawla (State Security) Leaks, whose logo is an adaptation of the Wikileaks logo.

A number of “documents will soon be declassified, showing some senior Egyptian officials' connections with the country's security organisation in the repression of people and protesters,” said Ahmed al-Dowma, a member of Egypt's Youths Coalition of Revolution Rage,

Meanwhile, Habib El Adly, Mubarak’s long-time interior minister, loathed and feared in equal measure appeared in court on Saturday, charged with money laundering. From a cage in the courtroom, he pleaded not guilty. And hundreds of Egyptians are marching to the country's border with the Gaza Strip to demand that it be opened. Egypt has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took control of the territory in 2007.

The initiative to open the Gaza border is the brainchild of the Tahrir4Gaza campaign. Ahmed El-Assy, the main campaign organizer, said: “The Mubarak regime collaborated with Israel to keep the Palestinians weak, but now he's been overthrown, so there's no need to maintain the status quo.”

The Egyptian revolution is shaking not only the region but inspiring struggles as far away as Wisconsin. A mass movement led by a new generation of professionals and workers has destroyed an autocratic regime and set about the creation of a new society. At this point, the army is playing a Bonapartist role, sitting uneasily between the country’s ruling classes and ordinary people.

Clearly, the rank-and-file of the armed forces is determined not to intervene through force. But the top ranks, who attained their positions through Mubarak, are another question. Many became rich through holding their rank, as the army has close connections to the ruling families and landowners.

The Egyptian revolution is at the democratic stage, cleaning out apparatus of repression that lasted for over 30 years. Since Mubarak's fall, a core group of eight to 16 leaders from various groups has coordinated Friday demonstrations aimed at keeping the army on track toward free and fair elections. They call themselves the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth.

For it to become a social revolution, a leadership is needed that will campaign for policies of democratic ownership and control of the country’s resources. Elections to a new parliament will in themselves not answer the questions of unemployment, inflation and poverty which are driven by the global crisis of capitalism.

Tahrir Square has become a kind of a People’s Assembly, where demands are formulated and struggled for. That’s where the new prime minister was compelled to make his first appearance. A network of popular committees created along the model of Tahrir could become the basis for a truly revolutionary transformation not only of Egyptian society but countries in every continent.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The truth behind secret diplomacy

For all Washington’s outrage at Wikileak’s publication of hundreds of thousands of hitherto secret diplomatic cables from America’s embassies around the world, they confirm much that was already known.

Who doubted that the United States has ever-so cosy relations with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians and that none of the cables published so far mention the continuing suffering in Gaza resulting from the vice-like blockade?
Or that the US spies on the United Nations?

The tittle-tattle gossip about various world leaders says more about the low level of “analysis” made by US embassy staff than anything else. No wonder the United States has been way behind just about every major international change in recent decades.

They were sleeping when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979 and failed to detect the changes in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. More recently, the absence of a coherent analysis left the United States vulnerable to the attack on the twin towers in 2001. Ironically, the latest Wikileaks releases were made possible by Washington’s decision after the 9.11 failure to pull together in digital form all diplomatic communications from its embassies and link them to the Pentagon.

Clearly there are insiders in the US State Department who believe that the public has a right to know about these cables. And they are correct. You may ask: what has secret diplomacy ever done for us? Behind closed doors, diplomats and states have prepared for war, using pretexts where necessary (before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example) and signed away the rights of smaller nations (Yalta and Potsdam at the end of World War II).

Diplomats, it is said, are sent abroad to lie for their countries. The real truth about American foreign policy will never appear in these kinds of cables. For example, to what extent is Washington involved in the current round of assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists?

Two scientists have been killed this year and others injured in highly-sophisticated attacks that have all the hallmarks of Mossad-CIA operations. These will be “deniable” attacks possibly carried out by third parties on behalf of Israel and the US. Perhaps they are the alternative to the full-scale military attack that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and others are demanding or the prelude.

The cables will certainly not reveal the illegal policy of systematic assassination of suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda personnel in the Afghan-Pakistan border area. These are carried out by unmanned drones and have resulted in “collateral damage”, including the deaths of many innocent women and children.

Nevertheless, the publication of the cables has wrong-footed Washington, in particular secretary of state Hillary Clinton. That can be no bad thing. You have to admire the courage of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. He is victim of a Swedish state frame-up and some US politicians want Wikileaks categorised as a “terrorist” website.

It is fitting that Ecuador has offered Assange "unconditional" residency in the country. Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas praised people like Assange "who are constantly investigating and trying to get light out of the dark corners of information". In the 1970s, Ecuador was destabilised by the CIA and a brutal military junta ruled until 1979. In September this year, President Rafael Correa was held hostage during an attempted coup d’état. No prizes for guessing who Ecuador’s politicians held responsible.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

For Gazans, the Nakba is a daily tragedy

This is the month when Palestinians remember their Nakba, or "catastrophe," during which millions of women, men and children were eventually pushed off their land and rendered homeless refugees during and after the founding of Israel in 1948.

For those living in the Gaza Strip, the tragedy worsens by the day. The blockade of the territory by Israel, sanctioned by the European Union and Washington, has led to a failing economy, rising unemployment and deteriorating power, sanitation and health facilities, according to a recent World Health Organization (WHO) report.

As a consequence of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, 98% of industrial operations have been shut down since 2007 and there are acute shortages of fuel, cash, cooking gas and other basic supplies. The ban on imports of building materials has prevented the rebuilding of some 6,400 homes destroyed or severely damaged by Israel’s military assault on Gaza in 2008-2009 and prevented the construction of some 7,500 homes to cater for an expanding population. Some 3,500 families are still displaced.

Water-related health problems are widespread in the Strip because of the blockade and Israel’s military operation in Gaza, which destroyed water and sanitation infrastructure, including reservoirs, wells, and thousands of kilometres of piping. “Gaza is not a refugee camp in a small remote place. It’s a city of one and a half million people with the needs of a developed urban environment that is used to certain standards. It needs certain standards of maintenance. Everybody should be worried because contaminated water has no borders,” said Filippo Grandi, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).

An electricity crisis continues in Gaza with the network only able to meet 70% of demand due to insufficient money to buy fuel for the Gaza power plant, and a lack of spare parts which is causing technical failures. Unemployment in occupied Palestinian territory is over 30%, rising to 67% among young people, according to the WHO report. Seven out of ten families were living on less than $1 a day in May 2008. Chronic malnutrition has risen in Gaza over the past few years to reach 10.2 percent.

Israel’s 2008-2009 military campaign damaged 15 of the Strip’s 27 hospitals and damaged or destroyed 43 of its 110 primary health care facilities, none of which have been repaired or rebuilt because of the construction materials ban. Some 15-20% of essential medicines are commonly out of stock and there are shortages of essential spare parts for many items of medical equipment, the WHO report said. As a result, the steady decline in the infant mortality rate in recent decades has stalled.

Israel’s blockade is ostensibly aimed at the Hamas government, which it and its allies refuse to recognise despite its election victory in 2007. In practice, however, the intention is to demoralise the Palestinians and deny them their right to self-determination. In this the Zionists have the support of Egypt’s authoritarian regime. It has blockaded Gaza’s border with Egypt, even driving a steel barrier deep into the ground to prevent Palestinians from using tunnels to bring in goods.

Gazans, however, continue to smuggle everything from fridges to fans, sheep to shampoo and even cars through the tunnels. The UN estimates that as much as 80% of imports into Gaza come through the tunnels. But the head of operations in Gaza for the UNRWA John Ging, says: "Everything is expensive because people are hostage to the dynamics of a black market."

For ordinary Palestinians, the blockade and deprivation imposed by the racist Israeli state are continuing reminders of the tragedy of the Nakba.

Paul Feldman

Communications

Back the boycott of Israel

Some say it was bad timing or that one half of the Israeli government didn’t know what the other half was doing. In effect, however, the American government had its bluff called by a regime that has no intention of agreeing a deal with the Palestinians. Not now. Not ever.

Waiting until US vice-president Joe Biden was actually in Israel on a mission to restart stalled peace talks before announcing provocatively that 1,600 new homes would be built in East Jerusalem, was a calculated insult to the country’s main benefactor. America gives Israel more than $3 billion a year as well as the latest, cutting-edge military hardware.

Did Biden or President Obama respond by suspending aid? No way. With mid-term elections coming up and Obama’s popularity in free fall, the White House put the Israel lobby first and instead accepted humiliation at the hands of the Netanyahu government.

Palestinian leaders who had hoped that Obama’s election would bring change were equally humiliated. What now? Will the Palestinian Authority under the discredited Mahmoud Abbas unilaterally declare a independent state now that the prospects of negotiations with the Israelis are dim to non-existent?

Will the PA support the new Intifada or popular uprising that is beginning throughout the West Bank as ordinary people march on a weekly basis against the Jewish settlements and the wall that Israel has built to enforce its policy of apartheid? The protests are in fact so far receiving more help from Israeli activists than Palestinian officials.

For example, almost 130 supporters of Anarchists Against the Wall have been arrested inside the West Bank on joint protests with Palestinians. AATW say: “We believe that it is possible to do more than demonstrate inside Israel or participate in humanitarian relief actions. Israeli apartheid and occupation isn't going to end by itself - it will end when it becomes ungovernable and unmanageable. It is time to physically oppose the bulldozers, the army and the occupation.”

Other Israeli groups, notably Woman Against the Occupation and for Human Rights
and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions also oppose Israeli policies. But they are lone voices in a country where official Zionist propaganda paints Palestinians as natural enemies of Jews and treats those living in Israeli as second-class citizens in a distinct form of apartheid.

A two-state settlement is more and more a practical impossibility, even if the Israelis were ever prepared to negotiate. Nearly 300,000 settlers live in the West Bank, in addition to 180,000 Israelis residing in Jewish neighbourhoods built in east Jerusalem. The West Bank is criss-crossed by Israeli roads and checkpoints. The settlers would rather die than leave.

Gaza, home to another 1.5 million Palestinians, is under siege, its population living in horrific conditions as a result of sanctions imposed by the European Union and enforced by the Israeli and Egyptian authorities. Of course, it has no geographic connection to the West Bank. A single state for Jews and Palestinians is therefore a more progressive and even practical solution. It would have to be established on a secular basis to succeed and the collapse of “peace talks” gives added impetus to the policy.

Meanwhile, there is something practical we can all do. The global boycott, disinvestment and sanctions movement has called a second day of action on March 30 in the campaign against Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. The success of the first BDS action sent the Israeli government into a spin. That’s a good enough reason to back this year’s.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The biggest prison camp in the world

The deportation of Respect MP George Galloway from Egypt today is only the latest in a series of anti-Palestinian actions by the country’s president, Hosni Mubarak which have helped Israel enforce a blockade of Gaza.

Mubarak’s despotic regime is as hostile to the Hamas administration in Gaza as the Israelis are. Some opposition figures in Egypt even go so far as to claim that Mubarak gave the Israelis the green light to launch their murderous attack on Gaza at the end of 2008, which claimed 1,500 lives and led to accusations of war crimes. Foreign minister Tzipi Livni was in Cairo shortly before the air strikes and ground invasion were launched and opposition MPs say Mubarak gave his blessing to the assault.

Galloway was in Egypt as part of an international delegation of the Gaza Freedom March. This originally planned to arrive in Gaza on 29 December 2009 to join a march against the Israeli blockade together with residents of Gaza two days later. Instead, most of its delegates remained in Cairo, having been blocked from going to the Rafah border by the Egyptian government, and instead marched against the Egyptian blockade on Gaza.

An aid convoy bringing medical and other supplies was also held up and the Egyptian authorities attacked people trying to cross into Gaza. Earlier this week, Gazans threw stones at Egyptian soldiers in protest at the delay and one was killed. The convoy finally made it into Gaza yesterday.

The 1.5 million people of Gaza have lacked vital medicine and food supplies for over a year following the Israeli assault. Tunnels used to smuggle supplies in from Egypt have been sealed up by the Mubarak regime. Just before Christmas, international aid groups in a report condemned world governments for betraying the people of Gaza by doing nothing to lift the blockade.

Gaza has become the largest prison camp in the world, not that you would know that from the conspiracy of silence from London to Washington, where the concern is to break Hamas whatever the cost to the Palestinian people. It’s just as well that rapper/poet/playwright Lowkey’s track “Long Live Palestine” is doing so well in alerting people to what’s happening.

Almost 1,500 delegates from 43 countries converged on Cairo in December believing they had permission to go through the Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossing into Gaza. But under pressure from the Israelis the border was closed on December 29. The very same day Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu and Mubarak held talks in Cairo. It was a cosy affair. Netanyahu said he was "very encouraged" by the meeting, while Cairo said it had been "very positive". Earlier that week, the Israelis announced a new programme of settlement building in the West Bank.

A series of protests by delegates were broken up by the authorities although the Syndicate of Journalists invited the marchers to join their members at their trade union headquarters for a rally. Delegates also convened an ad hoc convention to ratify the "Cairo Declaration". An international working committee drafted a document setting out a plan of action for boycott, divestment and sanctions against the Israeli regime.

Meanwhile, the Egyptians are constructing a steel wall deep into the earth at the Rafah border, making it even harder to get in or out of Gaza.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Support the boycott of Israeli goods

First “they” sit back and watch the destruction of homes, offices, universities, hospitals and the wanton killing of civilians by Israeli forces in Gaza. Then, when the dust has settled, “they” turn up in Egypt and offer billions for “reconstruction”. Hypocrisy doesn’t come more blatant than this.

The “they” in this instance is the so-called “international community” – the major powers and their hangers on like the Mubarak regime in Egypt, led by the United States and Britain. They gave the green light to Israel’s murderous war on Gaza, with its targeting of civilians and the use of banned weapons. So outrageous were the attacks that the Israeli state could face war crimes charges.

Even the promises of aid made in Egypt are hedged with conditions that, together with Israel’s refusal to open border crossings, undermines the pledges as quickly as they are made. For example, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has offered $1 billion – so long as it is channelled in a way that bypasses the Hamas government in Gaza.

At present, the United Nations says that only a quarter of food and medical supplies needed in Gaza are allowed in. Israeli border guards routinely make lorry drivers unload their entire cargo for inspection. The imminent arrival of a new extreme right-wing Israeli government will intensify the crisis. Certain to be prominent in the new government is Avigdor Lieberman, who advocates the expulsion of Palestinians who actually live inside Israel.

Waiting for the blessed “international community” to act against Israel is simply a non-starter. The Israelis occupied the West Bank and Gaza over 40 years ago and have since peppered the area with illegal settlements. In recent years, Gaza has become like a giant prison camp, its population trapped in the most crowded space on earth.

In these circumstances, it is important to support the many calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, both in Britain and throughout the world. In occupied Palestine, 180 organisation have joined together to back a boycott.

All major UK retailers sell Israeli goods, and most of them sell produce from illegal settlements in the West Bank. Details of how this is done are contained in a special report by Corporate Watch. Many goods are channelled through the Israeli exporter Carmel-Agrexco.

In a stomach-churning move, on 12th February, two days prior to Valentine's Day, the Israeli army allowed 25,000 carnation flowers grown by Palestinian growers in the Gaza Strip to cross the border into Israel, for export by Carmel-Agrexco to Holland. By then, about 70% of Gaza's carnation crop had already been lost due to the Israeli siege. The losses in flower sales suffered by growers in Gaza, who used to export 37 to 40 million carnations a year, are estimated to have already reached $4 million.

Many Agrexco flowers grown in Israel or the Occupied Territories are sold on or packed in Holland and labelled accordingly. In a court case in November 2004, the general manager of Agrexco UK at that time, Amos Orr, testified that his company markets 60%- 70% of the agricultural produce grown in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Also on 12th February, a group of 15 women locked themselves to the gates of Carmel-Agrexco's depot in Hayes, Middlesex, to stop the delivery of Valentines roses. Carmel's offices have been subject to extensive damage by protesters over recent years and their depot occupied. Yet, the company has not been willing to take prosecutions against campaigners for fear of having their business practices exposed and questioned in court.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

'Mass murder' in Gaza

It is not often that you find yourself in agreement with the maverick Labour MP Gerald Kaufman. Today, however, I find myself supporting his remarks in the House of Commons during the brief debate yesterday on Israel’s war on Gaza. 

He asked David Miliband, the foreign secretary “what the international reaction would be if Hamas had slaughtered nearly 900 Israelis and subjected nearly 1.5 million Israelis to degradation and deprivation?” 

Kaufman added, amid interruptions: “Is it not an incontrovertible fact that Olmert, Livni and Barak [Israel’s prime minister, foreign and defence ministers] are mass-murderers and war criminals … And they bring shame on the Jewish people whose star of David they use  they use as a flag in Gaza, but whose ethos and morals go completely against what this Israeli Government are doing.” 

The MP for Manchester, Gorton, is absolutely right. Slaughtering nearly a 1,000 people (to date), a third of them women and children, smashing hospitals and universities, shelling schools, deliberately killing non-combatants like police officers, using Gazans as human shields, deploying the banned phosphorous weapons – these are just some of the atrocities and war crimes that the Israeli government is guilty of. 

This is a carefully planned attempt to destroy Gaza. Indications are that the assault was planned as long as 18 months ago, coinciding with Hamas’s rise to power. A blockade was instituted, with the support of the European Union and the United States, to demoralise the population and try to turn them against Hamas. Shortly afterwards, the deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai, made his now infamous comment that, should the rocket fire continue, Gazans would face a "shoah" -  the Hebrew word for holocaust. 

The present offensive is designed to "send Gaza decades into the past," according to the head of the army command in Gaza, Yoav Galant. As to foreign minister Livni, tipped to be the next prime minster, she said yesterday that Israel was deliberately "going wild" in its use of military force in order to restore its deterrence capability. This is indeed the language of war criminals, who essentially view the Palestinians as Untermenschen, just as the Nazis did the Jews of Europe. 

Meanwhile, the UN's human rights body approved a resolution yesterday condemning the Israeli offensive for "massive violations of human rights" and indicated that it was compiling evidence of war crimes. Amnesty International says hitting residential streets with shells that send blast and shrapnel over a wide area constitutes "prima facie evidence of war crimes". 

None of this could happen without the tacit approval of the major powers, including Britain. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has pointedly refused to condemn the bombing and shelling by Israel. Yesterday he trotted out the Israeli line once more, condemning Hamas, whose “motif is 'resistance” with methods that include terrorism. By contrast, he insisted, "Israel is meanwhile a thriving, democratic state”. 

Is this the same country that yesterday banned two Arab parties from contesting next month’s general election?  Arab members of the Central Elections Committee (CEC) walked out of the hall before the vote, shouting, "this is a fascist, racist state”. The vote to ban the parties was overwhelming, with one of the charges being that the parties were anti-Zionist.

 Which brings us back to Kaufman. He is right to denounce the Israeli government’s claims to be acting and speaking for Jews in Israel and elsewhere. What gives them the right? The Zionists who rule the country have, in fact, by their actions usurped the voice of Jews throughout the world and used it to inflict horrors on the Palestinians for more than 60 years. The only right they have is to be put on trial for war crimes. 

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

One solution - one secular state

Outrage and shock is growing around the world as the Israeli war on Gaza takes its toll on a defenceless civilian population. The slaughter of women and children at a United Nations school compound yesterday prompted Venezuela to expel diplomatic staff from the country and angry demonstrations are taking place in many countries against the US-backed attacks.

The atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli military are war crimes on a large scale. Of that there is no doubt. John Ging, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) in Gaza says bluntly that Palestinians are being terrorised, adding: “There is no place safe in Gaza for ordinary people. One million are without electricity, 750,000 have no water, hospitals are overwhelmed, with heroic staff working around the clock.”

He confirmed that UNWRA had provided the Israeli military with the exact GPS co-ordinates of all UN facilities, which are clearly marked with UN flags, brightly lit at night. In fact the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) spokesman did not deny knowing it was a UN facility, simply claiming that Hamas was using the building to launch rockets. Yet another lie to justify the latest atrocity.

As politicians and diplomats at the UN try to patch together a ceasefire/truce, we might ask: what does Israel actually seek to achieve with this ferocious assault on people, most of whom are defenceless civilians? The IDF claims that it plans to root out Hamas fighters who are launching puny rockets at southern Israel. But despite its vastly superior firepower – and the powerful backing of the US - it can never achieve a lasting victory, as some military experts are already noting.

More and more observers are increasingly seeing the Gaza offensive as “tragic and self-defeating”. Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute, questions whether the Israeli defence chiefs are pursuing the correct overall strategy. "In terms of day-to-day tactics they [Israeli defence chiefs] know what they are doing, but it's not clear they know what the strategic goal of this operation really is," he says. "You can't go into a territory like this and eradicate Hamas in any meaningful sense.”

Veteran observers like Robert Fisk are noting what should be crystal clear to all but the most blinkered. The latest bloodbath perpetrated by Israeli forces is stoking up more hatred against what is seen as “The West” around the Arab and Muslim world. The question is: does the United States and the rest really give a damn? After all, they need some reason to carry on with their “war on terror”.

In fact, the rise of Hamas, much like the Taleban, is a case of the big-power sorcerers’ apprentice. As Stephen Zunes has pointed out,“if it were not for misguided Israeli and American policies, Hamas would not be in control of the territory in the first place”. He explains how Israel initially encouraged the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counter to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the secular coalition composed of Fatah and various leftist and nationalist movements.

After Israel cut off negotiations with the Palestinians in 2001 and carried out a devastating military offensive as well as undermining the Palestinian economy, support for Hamas grew from 15 percent in 1993 to 44% of the vote in the January 2006 elections. Hamas was seen as the only force opposing Israeli occupation.

No wonder that the Middle East peace process is getting nowhere. It is not intended to. The present crisis makes the campaign for a unified secular state that guarantees rights and freedoms to Palestinians and Jews alike the only viable long-term solution. So Hugo Chavez’s call to the people of Israel to deal with their leaders, who launched the offensive in no small part to get themselves re-elected, is not a pipe-dream but a realistic proposal.

Corinna Lotz

AWTW secretary

Gaza - a crime against humanity

The war against the defenceless people of Gaza by one of the most powerful military machines in the world is another crime against humanity to add to the existing lengthy indictment of the reactionary and racist rulers of Israel. 

Here is a population of 1.5 million crowded into a tiny strip of land without water or electricity and desperately short of food and medical supplies. They are isolated in a Palestinian ghetto, surrounded by Israeli armour on the one side and Egyptian border troops on the other. There is no escape for them from the artillery, tank fire or bombs. While children in Britain prepare to return to school after the holidays, their counterparts in Gaza are being blown to pieces by American-supplied and financed weaponry. 

Of course, many others apart from the Israelis are complicit in the barbaric treatment of the Palestinian people. For there is no doubt that the aerial bombardment followed by a ground invasion could not have taken place without the explicit approval of Washington and the tacit agreement of European governments, alongside those of Egypt and Jordan who blame Hamas for the violence. 

Talk of a “ceasefire” by politicians like Gordon Brown is particularly sickening. New Labour helped make the war on Gaza possible by agreeing to characterise the Hamas regime as a “terrorist” organisation and blocking any contact with it following that organisation’s victory in democratic elections in 2006. Gazans are thus paying the price for the deranged “war on terror”, under which all opponents of major power policies are targets, up to and including governments. 

There are other even more cynical factors behind the present war on Gaza. Sporadic rocket attacks from Gaza have taken place for 18 months or so with few casualties. Now, however, the present Israeli coalition government has collapsed, brought down by corruption allegations. So the timing of the war on Gaza is an attempt to show how tough it can be in a bid to outflank the rival Likud party, which is even further to the right, at the elections scheduled for February.

While most of the British trade union movement remains silent, to their credit the transport union RMT has denounced the slaughter in Gaza, which has claimed over 500 lives. General secretary Bob Crow said: “It has been the failure of governments such as our own to demand an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967 that has encouraged horrific acts such as those we have witnessed in recent days.”

Crow is right but we need to go further. Unions like the RMT should launch a campaign for a trade and cultural boycott campaign of Israel as part of the struggle for a new perspective for the long-standing conflict. Negotiations for a two-state “solution” are doomed because Israel’s leaders have not the slightest intention of allowing it to happen, now or in the future because it runs contrary to their Zionist nationalist dogma which has served ordinary Jews so badly. 

The only viable alternative, therefore, is a single, secular revolutionary state in the area where Jew and Palestinian can live together. Building support for this project will pose the political defeat of reactionary regimes throughout the region. It’s a tall order but all other roads are closed off. 

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor   

The tragedy of the Palestinians

One thing in this turbulent world is always certain - the hypocrisy of the major powers when it comes to the slaughter of innocent Palestinians by Israeli bombs and rockets. Do we ever hear a word of condemnation from Washington and London as the bodies pile up? Never! 

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, today pointedly restricted himself to a call for an “urgent ceasefire”, as if two armies of fairly equal strength were battling it out somewhere. Nothing could be more inappropriate. Israel has the latest US-supplied warplanes and missiles (and atomic weapons) while the Palestinians in Gaza have a few primitive rockets. So the not-so-brave Israeli fighter pilots can bomb and kill at will, which is what they have done. 

Gazans are living in a giant prison camp, surrounded by Israeli forces, denied adequate food, water and medical supplies. Few have jobs and most Palestinians live in abject poverty. Now they are burying their children, killed by an act of state terror while Israel’s principal sponsors turn a blind eye. 

So when Miliband says that "we are now paying a terrible price for the slow and faltering pace of negotiations not just over the last year, probably not just over the last 15 years”, he of course fails to acknowledge his government’s responsibility. The elected Hamas government may not be everyone’s cup of tea but it was the democratic choice of the Palestinians in Gaza. 

What was their reward for a rare display of ballot box democracy in the Middle East? To be isolated by the US and Britain, along with the rest of the European Union because the voters had made the wrong choice! Bit difficult to negotiate in circumstances where the other side ignores you. 

Hamas this year declared a six-month ceasefire with Israel but the Zionists only intensified their attempts to create a Palestinian ghetto inside Gaza. As John Ging, the head of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, said in November: "The people of Gaza did not benefit; they did not have any restoration of a dignified existence ... at the UN, our supplies were also restricted during the period of the ceasefire, to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position and with a few days of closure we ran out of food."

Israel provoked Hamas until they got what they wanted – a resumption by frustrated and starving Gazans of rocket attacks. The response was an entirely disproportionate series of air raids on civilians and infrastructure which has left hundreds dead. A ground invasion will probably follow to “change the realities on the ground”, as the Israeli leaders chillingly put it, just before president-elect Obama takes office. 

Others are also culpable for the tragic plight of the Palestinians. "Arab silence is behind the bombings," read a banner held by one of several thousand people who turned out in the Sunni Arab city of Samarra north of Baghdad. The largest demonstration in the Arab world was in Egypt where 50,000 demonstrated in cities throughout the country. Egypt’s president Mubarak, a Washington stooge, ordered his border guards to shoot Gazans trying to cross into Egypt to escape Israeli air attacks. 

So for the Palestinians, 2008 ends as it began back in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared by rabid Zionist nationalists. They claimed falsely to speak for oppressed Jews everywhere and offered them a place to live at the expense of millions of Palestinians whose tragedy is still unfolding. As Marx once put it, a nation that oppresses another can never be free itself. Such is Israel today. 

Paul Feldman

AWTW communications editor

Nadine Gordimer and Gaza's dismay

This year Israel is marking the 60th anniversary of its declaration of independence in May 1948, which for the Palestinians immediately became a continuing disaster. Yesterday, for example, Israeli shells killed four children and their mother at their home in Ezbet Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip. Now former anti-apartheid activist and Nobel-prize winning author Nadine Gordimer is accused of lending her support to the oppression of Palestinians by joining in “Israel at 60” events. Gaza lecturer Dr Haider Eid, has written Gordimer an open letter.

I am a Palestinian lecturer in cultural studies living in Gaza. I happen to also have South African citizenship as a result of my marriage to a citizen of that beloved country. I spent more than five years in Johannesburg, the city in which I earned my PhD and lectured at both traditionally black and white universities. At Vista in Soweto, I taught your anti-apartheid novels My Son's Story, July's People and The Late Bourgeois World. I have been teaching the same novels, in addition to The Pick Up and Selected Stories, to my Palestinian students in Gaza at Al-Aqsa University. This course is called "Resistance, Anti-Racism and Xenophobia." I deliberately chose to teach your novels because, as an anti-apartheid writer, you defied racial stereotypes by calling for resistance against all forms of oppression, be they racial or religious. Your support of sanctions against apartheid South Africa has, to say the least, impressed my Gazan students.

The news of your conscious decision to take part in the "Israel at 60" celebrations has reached us, students and citizens of Gaza, as both a painful surprise, and a glaring example of a hypocritical intellectual double standard. My students, psychologically and emotionally traumatized and already showing early signs of malnutrition as a result of the genocidal policy of the country whose birth you will be celebrating, demand an explanation.

They wonder in amazement, as do I, that you might have missed Archbishop Desmond Tutu's contention that conditions in Israeli-occupied Palestine are worse than those under apartheid? They ask how you can ignore UN human rights observer John Dugard's dispassionate and insightful report on the dismal state of human rights in the occupied territories? Surely, you have not been unaware of South African minister Ronnie Kasrils' writings following his latest visit to Gaza and the West Bank? Like you, these three men, all South Africans, were also active in the fight against racism and apartheid. Dugard's words on Palestine are very significant: "I certainly have a sense of deja vu ... The sad thing is that Israel is unwilling to learn from the South African precedent." In an article titled "Apartheid: Israelis adopt what South Africa dropped", Dugard observed that the human rights situation in the occupied territories continues to deteriorate and called the conditions "intolerable, appalling, and tragic for ordinary Palestinians." Significantly, Dugard made shocking parallels between the situation in Palestine and your country South Africa under apartheid: "Many aspects of Israel's occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, levelling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa."

Moreover, in its final declaration, the World Conference against Racism non-governmental organization forum, held in Durban in 2001, stated that: "We declare Israel as a racist, apartheid state in which Israel's brand of apartheid as a crime against humanity has been characterized by separation and segregation, dispossession, restricted land access, denationalization, 'bantustanization' and inhumane acts."

You are no doubt aware of Israel's deep ties with apartheid South Africa, during which Israel, breaking the international embargo, supplied South Africa with hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons. Apartheid South Africa relied on apartheid Israel to persuade Western governments to lift the embargo. How did you relate to Israel during that period and what was your position regarding countries and individuals that did not support the policy of isolating apartheid South Africa? You were surely critical of the infamous policy of "constructive engagement" led by then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan at the height of the struggle in the 1980s. And today, inexplicably, you have joined the ranks of sanctions busters.

The eminent Palestinian scholar Edward Said, who gave you his friendship, would have been dismayed by your decision. He named you as a model for what he called "oppositional intellectuals." It was his strong belief that, with regard to Israel, "[it] only takes a few bold spirits to speak out and start challenging a status quo that gets worse and more dissembling each day." Little did he know that you would fail the oppressed in Palestine.

My cold and hungry students have divided themselves into two groups, with one group adamant that you, like many of your courageous characters, will reconsider your participation in an Israeli festival that aims to celebrate the annihilation of Palestine and Palestinians. The other group believes that you have already crossed over to the side of the oppressor, negating every word you have ever written. We all wait for your next action.

A murderous smokescreen

The Israelis have done this so many times before that it’s hard to find the appropriate words to describe their latest murderous onslaught in occupied Palestine. More than 100 Palestinians dead in Gaza, including many women and children, is just the cold statistic of a military action that cannot hide a deep political crisis inside Israel itself.

The Israeli attacks were said to be in response for rocket attacks from Gaza, which are fired as an act of resistance from people living in what is effectively a large-scale prison camp, surrounded by massive military might. Gazans are deprived of basic supplies like food, medicine and power and isolated from the rest of the world, as well as fellow Palestinians on the West Bank.

Behind all this is a crude attempt to create a smokescreen to smother Israeli public opinion in nationalism and outright racist attitudes. The cat was let out of the bag last week when deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip with a "holocaust", a term rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi genocide during World War II.

While Israeli leaders escalate the violence and threats, some other top officials and a vast majority of the Israeli public support direct talks with Hamas to achieve a mutual ceasefire, something Hamas leaders in Gaza have repeatedly offered for months. "Sixty-four percent of Israelis say the government must hold direct talks with the Hamas government in Gaza toward a cease-fire and the release of captive soldier Gilad Shalit," the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on 27 February citing a Tel Aviv University poll. The report noted that half of Likud supporters and large majorities of Kadima and Labour party voters support such talks and only 28% of Israelis still oppose them.

Knesset Member Yossi Beilin, leader of the left-Zionist Meretz-Yahad party, called for an agreed ceasefire with Hamas, noting that "there have been at least two requests from Hamas, via a third party, to accept a cease-fire, Haaretz reported on 29 February. Israel's public security minister, Avi Dichter, visiting Sderot [where many rockets have landed] the previous day, criticized Israel's military escalation, saying: "Whoever talks about entering and occupying the Gaza Strip, these are populist ideas which I don't connect to, and in my opinion, no intelligent person does either."

And, in an interview with the American magazine Mother Jones, published on 19 February, the former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, Efraim Halevy, repeated calls for Israel and the US to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas. Dismissing lurid rhetoric about the group, Halevy stated that "Hamas is not al-Qaida," and "is not subservient to Tehran".

Ali Abunimah co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, asks: “The question remains as to why when the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians, some senior Israeli officials, and Hamas leaders are all talking about a ceasefire, the Israeli government refuses to accept one and the US refuses to call for one ...The Palestinian and Israeli populations are exhausted by the relentless bloodshed, however unequal its toll. They are paying the price of a failed policy, pushed by Washington and its local clients, which attempts to demonise, isolate and destroy any movement that resists the order that the United States seeks to impose on the region.”

He is right. Now is the time for bold initiatives by Palestinian leaders to break the deadlock and expose the Israeli government. The two-state plan for the region is defunct and should be abandoned. Palestinians should campaign for a single, secular state for all the people of the area. Whether Hamas or Fatah have the capacity to alter course in this direction is another matter.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

War crimes in Gaza

The Israelis are not the first to practice collective punishment against a subjugated people. In 1857, the British slaughtered thousands indiscriminately after putting down an uprising in India, while American troops destroyed entire villages in Vietnam if they suspected a sympathiser of the National Liberation Front had lived there.

Israel’s barbaric treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza - where the area’s only power station shut down yesterday because of an economic blockade – has its own shocking aspect. The Israeli state draws its legitimacy largely from the horrific crimes inflicted on Jews by the Nazis. In World War II, Nazis also carried out forms of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there.

As a result, under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, collective punishments were made a war crime. Article 33 of the Fourth Convention states: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed,” and “collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” Yet what is taking place in Gaza is exactly this.

The Israeli government does not like the Hamas regime in Gaza. It took part in isolating the Hamas government internationally after it fairly won the January 2006 elections in Gaza and the West Bank. Britain and the US joined Israel in favouring democracy only if it produced the right result. Aid to Palestine was cut by the European Union and the Israelis began a systematic attempt destroy the economy in Gaza. Driven into a corner by the major powers, Hamas staged its own coup in Gaza last year and its militants took to firing rockets into Israeli territory in response to air strikes and military incursions.

All this entirely suits the interests of Israel’s Zionist rulers, who have no intention whatsoever of reaching a settlement with the Palestinians despite all the hot air spoken during the recent visit by President Bush. With their nonsensical Old Testament exclusive claims to the area, the Zionists view the Palestinians as essentially inferior, and treat those who live inside Israel itself as second-class citizens. In carrying out their arrogant oppression of Palestinians, they also reinforce every anti-Semite on the planet while doing great disservice to another, humanist, progressive history of the Jews.

That is personified in people like the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, who has accepted Palestinian citizenship and an honorary Palestinian passport. “I hope that my new status will be an example of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence,” he said after a concert in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Saturday. The Argentine-born conductor is the first Israeli to be granted citizenship by the Palestinian Authority. Along with the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, Barenboim formed the West-Eastern Diwan Workshop, which brings together young Israeli and Arab musicians. Barenboim appears regularly in the Palestinian territories.

In December, he called off a concert at a Gaza Strip church after Israeli authorities refused to allow a Palestinian musician to enter. Predictably, there are now calls for Barenboim to be stripped of his Israeli citizenship. Meanwhile, in Gaza there is no power supply and a blockade that makes the territory a prison camp for its 1.4 million souls. A war crime if there ever was one.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor