North Africa's own Intifada

Tunisian youth, workers and professional people have drawn a line against corrupt autocracies that is having powerful repercussions from Lebanon to Libya and beyond. It is the first time since 1985 that a mass people’s movement has overthrown a regime in an Arab country.

They have defied the mantra that the Arab masses are simply passive subjects of dictatorial leaders. The majority in society are beginning to stand up and rebel. The uprising has seen tens of thousands of youth, workers and professionals, take to the streets in a country of only ten million.

The movement has been spontaneous and secular in response to sharp price increases and soaring youth unemployment, themselves a result of the economic crisis in the southern Mediterranean from Spain and Portugal to north Africa.

The revolt was sparked when an unemployed student in a central province set fire to himself when police tried to stop him selling fruit from a street cart. Unrest burst out around the country spurred on by young people using Facebook. In extraordinary scenes one soldier even embraced a demonstrator.

Small wonder that President’s Ben Ali’s first replacement, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, did not last long. Tunisians see him as the architect of the economic policies which allowed Ben Ali’s wife to accumulate vast wealth. Details of the ruling family’s corruption were revealed in US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks at the end of last year, confirming Tunisians’ own suspicions.

A state of emergency continues in the capital Tunis and around the country police loyal to the old regime and military are in armed conflict. The bursts of joy at the overthrow of a decaying, oppressive and corrupt regime are being tempered by the continuing conflict between the military factions and especially brutal reprisals in the rural interior like Kassarine and Thala.

As a writer for CNN notes, “North Africa is seeing its own Intifada”. Behind the surface differences between Tunisia and its neighbours, lies “a more profound and general set of conditions that serve as a common source of populist discontent”. The Tunisian uprising is part of a chain of events from Morocco to Egypt “directed at the institutionalized political oppression that each regime represents and the deeply corrupt ways in which power is manipulated and abused by ruling elites”.

The use of the term Intifada is significant. The Arabic word for “tremor”, the strategy was developed by Palestinian leader and Fatah founder Abu Jihad He organised youth committees in the Palestinian territories in a social and political uprising against Israeli occupation in 1987 – as opposed to individual terror and military action. Forced into exile Abu Jihad was assassinated in Tunis by a hail of bullet fire in front of his family by Israeli Mossad commandos.

The dizzying speed of events in Tunisia is a warning to governments and rulers everywhere in the region and elsewhere. New generations are not prepared to stand by while the fruits of independence from colonial power are squandered by corrupt and dictatorial regimes. Spurring people on is the impact of the global capitalist crisis, which lies behind demands and grievances in every country, including Britain.

Whilst the political parties try to rearrange the deck chairs at the top and as security forces loyal to the old regime kill innocent civilians, ordinary citizens in Tunisia are setting up barricades, arming themselves with sticks and attempting to take control of the streets. Developing people’s assemblies to take economic and political control away from the toothless establishment parties hiding behind the military is now an urgent matter.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

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

Two anniversaries, one catastrophe

Palestinians across the world tomorrow mark the 60th anniversary of the Nakba – “the day of catastrophe”. Only hours before, on the evening of May 14, 1948, a group of Zionist Jews declared themselves the independent government of a Jewish state, excluding Palestinians who had lived on the land since time immemorial. They are two very different anniversaries.

A ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion, organised by militias and terrorist groups, had created the conditions for the declaration. In April 1948, future Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s Irgun terrorist gang massacred more than 100 men, women and children in the village of Deir Yassin. Many villages outside the land allotted to Jews under the 1947 United Nations partition agreement came under artillery bombardment. Soon, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled, never to see their homes and land ever again.

And that is a tactic that has served the Israeli government well, right up until today. Whilst going along with so-called “peace talks” and international diplomacy, they use force to establish a very different reality on the ground. Of course they have only been able to do this with the support of the United States, which recognised the state of Israel just eleven minutes after the declaration. They were followed five days later by the Soviet Union – a massive betrayal of the Palestinians. Stalin had taken part in the division of the post-war world, and the Middle East was not in his “sphere of influence”. Under the Stalinist policy of peaceful co-existence, the Soviet Union abandoned the Palestinians to their fate.

And for many years their plight was largely ignored, until a new generation launched a fresh phase of resistance, with the formation in 1964 of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The PLO brought all Palestinian groups under one umbrella and gave them an international voice. At its first meeting in 1964 the PLO adopted the Palestine National Charter, which called for the establishment of a democratic and secular state in Palestine and in 1969 Yassir Arafat became its chairman and symbol of national aspirations.

The demand for a secular state is being given fresh momentum today by a new generation of Palestinians – in Israel, in exile and in the occupied territories. This vanguard are refusing to go along with the “two-state” fraud. They recognise that there is no “peace plan” and that Israel’s rulers have no intention of allowing Palestinians to form a viable state.

Settlements continue to expand and Israel exploits the resources of the occupied territories without their population having any political or economic rights. Gaza is surrounded and under siege, entirely cut off from the West Bank; Hebron is surrounded by thousands of Israeli troops, protecting a handful of crazed Zionist settlers, and 40% of the West Bank is taken up with Israeli infrastructure, according to a recent UN report. There are over 400,000 settlers who have no intention of leaving the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.

As the London One State Group, which organised a packed conference in London last year, puts it: “The birth of the non-racial democracy in South Africa and the implementation of the power sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland have strengthened the belief that partition is not the inevitable, nor the most desirable resolution to the conflict." Jewish anti-Zionist writer Joel Kovel argues that the inner contradictions of Zionism have led Israel to adopt "state-sponsored racism" and says it is urgent to “envision Israel beyond Zionism”.

The Zionists fear a movement for a one-state solution beyond anything Hamas can throw at it. Prime Minister Yehud Olmert has said: “We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want now is the right to vote’. The day they get it we will lose everything.” In 2006 the population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza taken together was: Jewish 5,393,400, Arab 5,328,949.

But Israeli Jews have more to gain than to lose from a one-state solution. Today they live in a militarised society which is far from the co-operative paradise promised by the early Zionist founders. Israel’s military spending is higher than all the countries on its borders combined, and it is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. It cannot be described as a safe haven for Jews – in fact is the most dangerous place for them on the planet.

But a new generation of leaders on both sides is needed to take this project forward. The challenge is to relaunch the Intifada along the lines of civil and economic resistance; to reject the whole two-state fraud once and for all; to find ways to make a principled appeal to Jewish Israelis and to re-establish Palestine national identity, to include Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who were excluded by “two states”.

In his 2007 book, One Country – A bold proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, Ali-Abunimah (founder of the Electronic Intifada website) writes that this is a time of profound uncertainty and risk but also of “tantalising opportunity”. And he concludes: “There is a need for urgent action on two fronts: One is in the realm of dialogue, imagination and construction of an inclusive vision. At the same time, there is a pressing need for resistance to the outcome Israel is trying to impose on the Palestinians ...”

Penny Cole

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

Kick Israeli match into touch

When it comes to trade boycotts, countries like the United States decide them on the basis of pure politics. Cuba and Iran – boycott. Israel, Saudi Arabia – sell them as many weapons as you can. But when trade unions and campaign groups propose a boycott in support of Palestinian rights, they are accused of “playing politics” and even, outrageously, of anti-Semitism. The stench of hypocrisy is positively overwhelming. But the pressure is so intense when it comes to Israel, that many cave in. For example, the National Union of Journalists’ national executive has voted unanimously to lay aside a motion passed at its annual conference to support a boycott of Israeli goods and to ask the Trades Union Congress to lead a national campaign.

A vicious backlash began as soon as the motion was adopted in April. Floods of emails from pro-Israeli groups arrived at the NUJ’s offices. Prominent members of the union organised a petition at the BBC, which attracted over 600 signatures. Over 30 members resigned from the union. The TUC then told the NUJ that it had no intention of organising a boycott on the spurious grounds that such action “would undermine our ability to act as go-betweens”. That gave the NUJ leaders a way out and the executive voted to bury the boycott campaign, with general secretary Jeremy Dear declaring: “I don’t believe it serves the interest of the union in workplaces at a time when we are facing job cuts that members should be discussing a boycott of Israeli goods.” As job cuts are routine in the industry, it means that there will never be a right time to discuss the issue. And so the Palestinians will remain isolated and have to make do with a few speeches from Dear and others in favour of their rights.

Others are not so easily cowered. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Boycott Israeli Goods Campaign, Jews for Boycott of Israeli Goods and Friends of Al Aqsa UK are calling for action against the England-Israel 2008 Euro qualifier match scheduled for Wembley on 8th September. In an open letter sent to football’s governing bodies, they point out that the Palestinian people are experiencing their 40th year of Israeli military occupation. They add: “Israel continues to build the illegal apartheid wall, annexing vast swathes of Palestinian land in the West Bank and creating Palestinian ghettos, despite the ruling of the International Court of Justice that it is illegal. Palestinians are effectively barred from international football by the extreme restrictions placed on them by the Israeli occupation. In September 2005, Palestine was in a good position in its Asian zone group in the qualifying rounds for the 2006 World Cup, but the Israeli authorities stopped five key players travelling outside Gaza and Palestine failed to qualify. In April last year, Israeli missiles destroyed the only stadium in Gaza, where 1.2 million Palestinians live. Israeli authorities admitted that the stadium was specifically targeted.”

A broad alliance of Palestinian civil society groups has called for an international movement of boycott and sanctions against Israel. This movement is partly based on the boycott movement against apartheid South Africa. South Africa was barred from the Olympic Games as well as international cricket and rugby until 1992. The sporting boycott played an part in isolating the regime and helping to bring about its demise. We should support the campaign against the England-Israel match and in doing so demonstrate that actions speak louder than words.

Paul Feldman, AWTW communications editor

Palestine: One state the only solution

Two new books published this week by Palestinian writers offer a way forward for those currently locked in struggle in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Both argue the need for a democratic, secular state on all the land currently occupied by Israel. In his book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American writer and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website, argues that the "conventional wisdom" of the two-state, land-for-peace equation needs to be rethought. Partition, he argues, is a flawed idea that is doomed to fail. The only viable choice is a return to the proposal of one country with equal rights and votes for both Israelis and Palestinians. And in her book Married to another Man, launched in London last night, Palestinian-English doctor and writer Ghada Karmi reaches the same conclusion. What has prevented a solution to the conflict over the years, she argues, is "the original and unresolved Zionist dilemma of how to create and maintain a Jewish state in a land inhabited by another people". The only solution in the long term, she argues, is a one state solution.

As an editorial on Electronic Intifada argues, what is needed is a new approach, an anti-apartheid struggle for the dismantling of the network of walls and checkpoints, for a single democracy in historic Palestine. Ali Abunimah says between a quarter and a third of Palestinians in the West Bank already support a bi-national state or a secular democratic state, and an even larger number of Arab-Israelis. "Not an Islamic state, but a state for Palestinians and Jews with equal rights," he said in an interview with Al-Jazeera. "It’s remarkable that support for a two-state solution is so tepid even in the West Bank and Gaza when there is… a multi-billion-dollar industry… to promote it. I also think it is remarkable that support for a one-state solution is so high and increasing given the fact that there is no official leadership that is advocating it." Fatah has allowed itself to become totally identified with the failed peace process and cannot see a way beyond it; Hamas of course wants an Islamic state, not democracy or secularism.

As Ghada Karmi says, from where we begin, it may seem like totally Utopian idea, but it is nonetheless an idea whose time has come and which is worth fighting for. After all, what do the Palestinians have now? Gaza resembles a ghetto. It is surrounded by a wall, its coast and airspace are controlled by the Israeli army. Gaza has no public finance, no international aid, no functioning economy and this week Israeli bombing raids killed seven people. West Bank farmers are separated from their land by a giant wall, and there is no viable economic life or civil society. In effect the leading Palestinian factions are now fighting over two poverty-stricken, unsustainable Bantustans where they are herded together in such a way as to be politically powerless. The decision to elect a Palestinian authority, on the basis that Israel was committed to a two-state solution was perhaps understandable, even unavoidable, at the time. But from the Oslo Accords onwards, Israel has used its military might, and the acquiescence of the major powers, to keep control over every aspect of Palestinian life and economy and repackage the occupation. The Palestinians urgently need to develop a leadership that looks beyond Oslo and which can appeal to Israeli Jews, offering them a way out from the Zionist trap in the shape of a single, democratic, secular state.

Penny Cole

Double standards over Israel boycott

The denial of education, of work, of any possibility of a future lies behind the communal fighting raging in Gaza today. The Israeli, US and British governments are guilty of fomenting these tragic events by refusing to recognise the democratically-elected Hamas government, cutting off vital aid to the Palestinian territories, while funding and arming rival Fatah forces. To criticise the Israeli government, however, is to risk bringing down the wrath of Zionism on your head, as the University and College Union (UCU) has found out. UCU members at their conference last month, instructed their (unwilling) leaders to circulate a call for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions to UK universities and colleges. Dr Sue Blackwell, a linguistics lecturer at the University of Birmingham, is a key supporter of the resolution, and told the conference: "We have voted to discuss how best to help our Palestinian brothers and sisters who often are not allowed to get to college or university and that is what we will do."

Timed to coincide with the UCU resolution, four Israeli university presidents and a number of prominent authors including Amos Oz and David Grossman, called on their government to lift all restrictions on Palestinian students. Palestinian students in Gaza are banned from travelling to universities on the West Bank. The Birzeit university is calling for a worldwide campaign to "break the siege" of education. The university is battling to survive under pressure of the occupation. It usually receives $1.5m a year from the Palestinian Authority. But since the economic blockade of Palestine that followed the election of the Hamas government, they have received just barely a fifth of that. Staff go unpaid and courses are suffering. Some 3,000 students have not been able to pay their fees – 43% of the student body.

Since the UCU conference, Zionists have launched a vicious campaign against Dr Blackwell and her supporters, hurling the ludicrous charge of anti-Semitism at them. As a linguistics professor Dr Blackwell will no doubt be struck by the astonishing double standards around the phrase "academic freedom". Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, has been recruited to a legal campaign by British lawyer Anthony Julius against any boycott. Dershowitz says that if the union goes ahead with this "immoral petition", it will "destroy British academia" and warns he has recruited "100 lawyers to break the boycott". Julius claims that British Jews are appalled by the UCU decision and believe there are "double standards when it comes to Israel". What about double standards when it comes to Palestinian academic freedom? Not an issue for him and his 100 lawyers, clearly. And what about double standards when it comes to the academic freedom of Jews who do not support his position. Julius must know that Dershowitz has successfully orchestrated a campaign to have an American Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein sacked from his post at De Paul university in Chicago. Finkelstein was subjected to a vicious campaign to prevent him being offered tenure, The reasons are simple. His books, including The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, have shown how the accusation of anti-Semitism is used to prevent any criticism of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, has condemned the decision to deny him tenure as an act of political aggression. He had the support of his own department, but the De Paul board caved in under external pressure. He will lose his job at the end of the academic year but says: "They can deny me tenure, deny me the right to teach. But they will never stop me from saying what I believe."

Penny Cole

It's more than a game to Palestinians

When England fans arrive in Tel Aviv to watch tomorrow’s Euro 2008 qualifier with Israel, they’ll be entering a country in political turmoil. The Olmert government is mired in corruption and facing a devastating report into last year’s attack on Lebanon, which will show that although it was planned well in advance, it was a disastrous adventure. Israel’s government is increasingly isolated and facing organisations like the Boycott Israeli Goods campaign, which will hold a vigil in London to coincide with the England match. The vigil will commemorate those Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces while playing football. From September 2000 to December 2006, 869 Palestinian children have been killed, a quarter of those were under twelve. Every month an average of fourteen will die. Many have been killed just kicking a ball around.

Meanwhile, observers inside and outside Israel – including former US president Jimmy Carter, whose new book is called Palestine Peace Not Apartheid - are attacking the regime, which is desperately trying to maintain the diplomatic boycott and economic strangulation of the new Palestinian unity government. This was imposed by the major powers following the election which swept Hamas to power in January 2006. Carter lays the blame for the crisis squarely on past and present Israeli leaders. Inside Israel, a major study of Israeli settlement practices by the respected Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem concluded: "Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality" A recent publication on the road system Israel has established in the West Bank again concluded that it "bears striking similarities to the racist apartheid regime," and even "entails a greater degree of arbitrariness than was the case with the regime that existed in South Africa". Discrimination is also applied internally to so-called Israeli Arabs, Palestinians who live inside the country. For example, the education system spends on an Arab child one fifth of what it spends on a Jewish one. The health system spends on an Arab citizen much less than on a Jew. Almost all Arab local councils are bankrupt, one of the reasons being that the government pays them per capita much less than Jewish councils. An Arab citizen cannot get land from the Land Authority, which holds almost all the land in Israel.

Though the new Palestinian government is ready to recognise the state of Israel - within the boundaries existing before the 1967 war, Olmert has flatly refused the offer of a total bilateral ceasefire involving a mutual cessation of violence. For 15 months Israel has denied the Palestinian Authority $60 million dollars a month raised in taxes on trade in Palestinian goods which can only pass through Israeli-held docks, airports and borders. This was the main source of income for more than one million of the 3.8 million population, and has deepened the strangulation of the economy which suffers millions of working hours lost through delays imposed at the military checkpoints which encircle the West Bank and the Gaza strip. Olmert’s wretched policies are supported by the United States and Britain, which bizarrely say will only talk to non-Hamas ministers in the new Palestinian government and have still not resumed the aid cut off when Hamas won the 2006 elections. Ultimately, most Israeli politicians will always try to find an excuse to deny the Palestinians their right to statehood. But their policies have created a dead-end in Israel itself. Olmert has the support of only 3% of the electorate and faced a general strike this week. Most Israelis simply want peace. The case for a single, secular state in the area in which Jews and Palestinians can live together grows stronger by the day.

Gerry Gold, economics editor