Posts Tagged ‘solidarity’

"HUMANITARIAN AID" AND "RECONSTRUCTION" IN GAZA: WAR BY OTHER MEANS

Posted: 03/19/2009 by editormary in Newswire, Palestine, Resistance, War, Zionism
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0
By the Qawem Coalition: In a recent interview in the Zionist newspaper Haaretz, Marc Garlasco, an American military analyst for Human Rights Watch (and former intelligence analyst for the Pentagon), could not hide his excitement regarding “Israel’s” possible use of a new weapon called TAR-21. “It is an incredible weapon,” he says, and proceeds to describe in great detail the military capabilities of the Zionist army. An interview with a human rights organization that was expected to condemn Zionist use of chemical
and test weapons like white phosphorus and DIME (dense inert metal explosives) turns into praise for the aggressors’ military might. At the same time, Garlasco condemns the Palestinian resistance for its use of “illegal weapons,” which include conventional Qassam and Grad rockets because, according to him, they are “useless” and “not accurate enough.”
The interview with Human Rights Watch sums up the role of human rights organizations in the Zionist colonization of Palestine and exposes their racism towards the colonized. The role is always to protect the colonizer’s image of military superiority, while at the same time discouraging the colonized population from joining a meaningful resistance movement aimed at liberating the people from lifetime imprisonment.
**The population of Gaza: We are not looking for handouts
The “US” has offered 0.9 billion dollars in “aid” to Gaza, while subsidizing “Israel’s” military and economic assault to the tune of 3 billion dollars a year. Our people in Gaza overwhelmingly rejected the idea of meaningless western “aid” and described it as handouts not fit for a proud population that withstood the most aggressive military campaign in modern times. The population of Gaza stands with the resistance’s only realistic and natural demand: an end to the siege and the opening of all border crossings. This would enable the population to engage in normal trade and would certainly support any serious rebuilding effort. No society can function on handouts that do not respect the right of people to live freely, work and contribute to human society.
**Rebuilding according to the population’s strategic needs
In early March, a conference at Sharm el-Sheikh raised 4.5 billion dollars for the reconstruction of Gaza. Not surprisingly, the conference insisted that most aid would be channeled through the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of Abbas, which currently acts as the administrator of the Zionist occupation. The primary representative of the Palestinian people, Hamas, was not invited to the conference to participate in the discussion. “US” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in attendance and pledged 900 million dollars of “US aid”– about $600 million dollars of which was in developmental aid to the Palestinian Authority. She made clear that none of this aid would go to Hamas, which currently controls Gaza and enjoys popular support among Gaza’s population.
The aim is clear. The invasion of Gaza failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. The Zionist army could not destroy the military capacity of the Palestinian resistance or undermine support for it through collective punishment. Quoting Haaretz, once again, “only when the IDF left [Gaza] could the results of the war be seen as limited, with almost daily [resistance] attacks near the fence, a continuing ‘drizzle’ of rockets and information on renewed arms smuggling.” “Humanitarian aid” now takes up where military action left off: it is offered on the condition that Palestinians in Gaza renounce the resistance and accept a leadership that does not represent their interests.
This comes as no surprise, as the rebuilding effort is seen by these organizations and countries as an opportunity to continue the war on the Palestinian resistance. Past experience in the Jenin refugee camp teaches us that though rebuilding needs to address the strategic needs of the  population, it was the aggressors’ future plans for colonization that guided the rebuilding of Jenin: the Jenin refugee camp was rebuilt according to Zionist specifications by donor countries. The specifications addressed the Zionist army’s future war plans and operational needs.
The rebuilding effort in Gaza must be done by the people of Gaza and for the people of Gaza.
**Gaza’s Call to Action
Gaza and Palestinian resistance groups have called upon all free people across the globe to contribute to Gaza’s rebuilding efforts and continue with their campaigns of solidarity. Ramadan Shallah, a Palestinian professor who has taught in the U.S. and is the leader of Islamic Jihad, said: “Every free person that voiced support for the resistance is part of the world’s collective victory in Gaza.”
Gaza is in immediate need for honest aid that is meant to alleviate its current wounds without a political price-tag — aid that does not ask the population to drop their weapons for a handout of food.
The Qawem Coalition

No Dancing on Gaza's Graves – Boycott and Protest Batsheva Dance Company

Posted: 02/02/2009 by editormary in Culture and Heritage, Music, Poetry, Events, Newswire, Palestine, Resistance, Zionism
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
4

WRITTEN BY Michelle J. Kinnucan

An Israeli apartheid dance troupe started its North America tour in Houston on Wednesday, January 28, 2009. Between then and March 1, 2009 it will go to fourteen more American and Canadian cities. That troupe, the Batsheva Dance Company, is currently scheduled to perform in Purchase, NY on January 30-31 and then it’s on to (in order): Princeton, NJ; Philadelphia, PA; Pittsburgh, PA; Chicago, IL; Columbus, OH; Ottawa, ON; Ann Arbor, MI; Minneapolis, MN; Vancouver, BC; Santa Barbara, CA; San Diego, CA; Los Angeles, CA; and New York, NY.

As I wrote in The Electronic Intifada last November, the Batsheva Dance Company has been a recipient of Israeli public financing since the 1990s. According to a report in The Independent of London, the dance company has no Arab performers and is “proud to be considered Israel’s leading ambassador.” As I also wrote, “Ohad Naharin, the dance company’s current Director, served in the Israeli army. In a 2005 interview with a Canadian newspaper, Naharin stated that ‘I continue to do my work, while 20 km from me people are participating in war crimes … the ability to detach oneself from the situation — that is what allows one to go on.’ Needless to say, the victims of Israeli ‘war crimes’ cannot avail themselves of the luxury of detachment.” It is particularly egregious that the Batsheva Dance Company is scheduled to perform in Vancouver, British Columbia as part of the 2009 Cultural Olympiad in the run up to the 2010 Olympic Games. Since when is polishing the image of a violent, racist state part of the Olympic spirit?

As Omar Barghouti, a Jerusalem-based freelance choreographer, cultural analyst, and founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (www.PACBI.org) said last month in The Dance Insider: No Israeli dance company “has ever taken a position calling for an end to the occupation, not to mention recognizing UN-sanctioned rights of the refugees or ending racial discrimination against the state’s ‘non-Jewish’ citizens … none of [the dance companies] has ever challenged reserve service in the occupation army, despite the fact that punishment for doing so is minimal in Israel (unlike Germany in the ’30s, say). … Those same dancers are part-time occupation soldiers, manning roadblocks, protecting colonies, evacuating homes and demolishing them, killing children and letting pregnant women die at checkpoints by preventing ambulances [from passing through], letting young bleeding youth bleed to death without medical aid, etcetera. What a bunch of liberal dancers! And what do their institutions do? Nothing.”

I urge American and Canadian Palestinian solidarity activists to use letters, petitions, leaflets, demonstrations, signs, and other nonviolent means to encourage cultural organizations and their patrons to boycott the Batsheva Dance Company and to raise awareness of Israel’s crimes and the BDS campaign to liberate the Palestinian people. Local campaigns are already well underway in Ann Arbor, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other cities, plus the newly formed U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel is spreading the word, too. As Desmond Tutu used to say during the struggle against South African apartheid–which also employed BDS, including cultural boycotts–it’s time join the winning side, the side of justice. Today, that side is the side of the Palestinian people.

For more details on the dance company’s performance schedule please go here or check the web site of their North American booking agent, H-Art Management, at www.h-artmanagement.com/calendar.html.

Michelle J. Kinnucan is a member of Middle East Task Force of Ann Arbor. Click here to contact her. Her writing has previously appeared in CommonDreams.org, Critical Moment, Palestine Chronicle, Arab American News, and elsewhere. Her 2004 investigative report on the Global Intelligence Working Group was featured in Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories (Seven Stories Pr., 2004) and she contributed a chapter to Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise (Peter Lang, 2006).

Gaza, Greece and the Meaning of Solidarity

Posted: 01/22/2009 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Grassroots Activism, Newswire, Palestine, Resistance, War, Zionism
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

WRITTEN BY Noah Cohen

As news came out recently that the United States would be sending a new shipment of bombs to “Israel” from the Greek port of Astakos at some point between the middle and end of January, Palestinians sent out an urgent call to organizers in Greece to stop the shipment. Within a day, several organizations and individuals in Greece responded to the call. Perhaps most significant in the current context was that of the Greek Anti-authoritarian Movement, centrally involved in weeks of rebellion against the repressive forces of their own government:

“The Anti-authoritarian Movement calls for a Pan-hellenic gathering on Thursday, Jan. 15th at Astakos at 1:00 p.m. to block the departure of boats with American weapons which are destined for Israel.
DON’T LET THE CARGO OF AMERICAN WEAPONS LEAVE THE PORT
SOLIDARITY WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE
RESISTANCE TO GLOBALIZED STATE TERRORISM…”
As pressure began from below, even members of the parliamentary left began to raise questions. On January 12th, the “US” announced that it had canceled the shipment of arms through Astakos because of “concerns” expressed by the Greek government.

The prefect of Aitoloakarnania (where the port lies) announced that they would be sending instead a ship with material aid to Palestinians and expressed the sentiments of the local people:

“The people of Aitoloakarnania do not accept that Greek ports, and especially this port of Platygiali, constitute places for the transfer of weapons and ammunition which are used in belligerent circumstances and in the slaughter of the peoples of our region. … we are sending medicines and medical material to the beseiged people of Gaza instead of weapons [to Israel]…”

Resistance to Globalized State Terrorism

“Resistance to globalized state terrorism” is a call that relates the rebellion of youth and anti-authoritarians in Greece over the last several weeks to the slaughter of people in Gaza. Their opposition moves beyond the usual limits of “solidarity:” stopping a “US” arms shipment to “Israel” becomes a part of their own struggle.

State terrorism is globalized. The “US,” Greece and “Israel” collaborate not just against Palestinians, but against Greeks. It was the “US” that set up Greece’s repressive police structures: the MAT (Monades Apokatastasis Taxis)–“riot” police–are a special branch of political police that have their origins in “US” police training programs. Through the “Public Safety Program” in the 1960s and 1970s, the “US” supplied Greece with weapons and trained police in methods of repression–including torture–as part of the global “war against communism.” Just before Christmas, it was revealed that “Israel” was supplying Greece with a new harsher form of tear-gas to use against demonstrators. Protestors have described it as “asphyxiating.”

People in rebellion find their solidarity in a struggle against injustice which they know directly. It is solidarity in resistance. One can see this reading the statement of high-school students from the Coordinated Struggle of High-Schools in Athens, who chose to re-organize their national mobilization on education rights in Greece on January 9 into a mobilization for solidarity with Gaza:

“…Everyone must take a position:

–either with the victim or the executioner
–either with the Palestinians or with their murderers
–either with the peoples who fight or with the imperialists

…We are on the side of our student comrades in Palestine who have been murdered over these last days by Israeli fire.
Victory to the Palestinian people!”
Fighting zionism

The ties are concrete that link the police murder of Alexis Grigoropulos in Greece, the murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, and the genocidal zionist assault on Gaza. The central role of the “US” and “Israel” in developing a global system of police repression has everything to do with their common history as colonial settler-states. As Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon and others have written, it’s in the colonies that the methods, apparatus, and ideology of fascism developed. Concentration camps, special laws that expropriate whole populations based on “race,” and the systematic annihilation of peoples: Europe did this to Africa, the Arab world, and the Americas before turning to the interior. It’s in the settler colonies that whole new classes emerge whose livelihood depends on repression: the various military and paramilitary formations of the settler garrison become the police, mercenaries and prison guards of the totalitarian state. Germany, Italy and Spain recruited their own repressive forces from the colonies. The Algerian settlers became the most fascistic bloc of political power within France and threatened to seize control of the country and impose a military dictatorship as France began to back away from its colony.

Wherever the “pioneering frontier” is most active so also is the development of genocidal repressive power. The “US” contracts zionist mercenaries and companies to develop its own domestic security state. Elbit Systems–the “Israeli” company that designed and built the wall that is intended to starve communities in Palestine–was contracted to develop the “US” border wall with Mexico and flight security systems in airlines. Instinctive Shooting International–now renamed Security Systems International–provided “Israeli” mercenaries for “security” in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, and now regularly organizes trainings in “Israel” for “US” police and Homeland Security. Repression is now “Israel’s” most important global industry–all it really has to export.

The failure to confront zionism as ideology and as material power is a failure to confront a bloc of repressive, white-supremacist power within our own society. This has been a major weak point of social justice, anti-racist and anti-war organizing. To take the most obvious example, the strength of zionism within labor unions has been a major force for turning them into pro-imperialist institutions.

Solidarity

The Greeks have understood that solidarity means recognizing the concrete points of intersection where the fight becomes serious.

The US is dead center of the system of genocide and global repression. The physical apparatus is here in every major city and across the country in small towns: munitions factories, military bases, recruiting centers. Virtually every major university has its research institutions to develop instruments of mass murder, and its theoretical institutes to develop strategies of repressive power.

But this extensiveness is also its weakness. The main strategy of security is depoliticization: there is simply no way to defend so many nodes of violence from a movement that is serious about intefering with them.

The Greeks have given a small example of what such a movement might look like. Let’s stop the flow of weapons at the source.