Omar Barghouti, founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), and Nancy Kricorian, NYC Coordinator of CODEPINK discuss the global growth of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against the Israeli Occupation. CODEPINK is boycotting the Israeli cosmetics company, Ahava, which illegally manufactures in occupied Palestine.

This program was produced by Building Bridges for November 8, 2009.

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For more information, visit:
http://www.buildingbridgesonline.org
http://pacbi.org
http://www.codepinknyc.org

Tue, 24 Nov 2009

The South African government joined other countries on Tuesday in condemning Israel’s plans to build housing on occupied land in East Jerusalem.

“We condemn the fact that Israeli settlement expansion in East Jerusalem is coupled with Israel’s campaign to evict and displace the original Palestinian residents from the city,” chief director for public diplomacy Saul Kgomotso Molobi said in a statement..

“These actions on the part of Israel jeopardise the prospects of resuming peace talks aimed at arriving at a final settlement to the conflict. [We are] deeply concerned that these activities by Israel will only serve to deepen the cycle of violence in the region.”

Molobi said as an occupying power, Israel had clear obligations under international law.

Plans for the construction of 900 new settlement units in Gilo were announced on 17 November.

“We call upon the Israeli government to cease their activities that are reminiscent of apartheid forced removals and resume negotiations immediately,” said Molobi.

The Palestinian leadership said the expansion would result in an increase in the Israeli settler population over the next two years.

German press agency dpa reported on Tuesday that the housing units are to be built in Gilo, which Israel says is a suburb of Jerusalem, but which is located on land captured in the 1967 Middle East War and claimed by Palestinians as the capital of their future state.

The Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions Campaign National Committee (BNC)

http://bdsmovement.net/

The broad consensus among Palestinian civil society about the need for a broad and sustained Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resulted in the Palestinian Call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel that was launched in July 2005 with the initial endorsement of over 170 Palestinian organizations. The signatories to this call represent the three major components of the Palestinian people: the refugees in exile, Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the subjugated Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state.

The efforts to coordinate the BDS campaign, that began to grow rapidly since the 2005 call was made public, culminated in the first Palestinian BDS Conference held in Ramallah in November 2007. Out of this conference emerged the BDS National Committee (BNC) as a coordinating body for the BDS campaign within Palestine. The goals of the BNC are:

• To strengthen and spread the culture of Boycott as a central form of civil resistance to Israeli occupation and apartheid;
• To formulate strategies and programs of action in accordance with the 9 July 2005 Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS;
• To form the Palestinian reference point for BDS campaigns worldwide;
• To form the national reference point for the anti-normalization campaigns within Palestine;
• To coordinate the various BDS campaign efforts in all locations;
• To organize a yearly conference of the organizations and initiatives involved in the BDS campaign.

    Tomorrow there will be hearings in Ottawa on the private member-introduced bill called the Corporate Accountability of Mining, Oil and Gas Corporations in Developing Countries—Bill C-300 for short.   I have previously blogged about this bill at this link where you will find the links to many background materials and the text of the bill itself.   But today the heat was turned up by those  planning to testify before a Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development that is looking into the bill.

Here is how one news source describes the “progress” of the bill:

A proposal to regulate Canadian mining companies operating overseas is continuing to gain ground in Ottawa.  “It demonstrates Canadians have certain expectations of how companies do business around the world,” Liberal MP Michael Savage (Dartmouth-Cole Harbour) said Tuesday in an interview.  The House of Commons standing committee on foreign affairs and international development is reviewing a private member’s bill introduced by Toronto Liberal MP John McKay earlier this year. Mining companies are expected to make presentations Thursday.

   versus    

The main attack on the bill is that it is unnecessary, burdensome, may drive Canadian mining companies to move to other countries, and leaves accused mining companies to be judged by bureacrats not judges.   If passed the bill would:

Give the federal government the power to investigate complaints that Canadian mining operations overseas were not in compliance with international human rights and environmental standards. A company found not to be living up to those standards would be denied federal financial support by the Export Development Corp.

    And a whole lot more would be denied to mining companies accused and found “guilty” –  see the text of the bill itself for details.  Or read the following quote from another news source, which writes this about the bill’s impact (I edit for readability):

• The Department of Foreign Affairs would be required to investigate any alleged misdeeds by Canadian mining firms in developing countries and publish what it finds;
• Export Development Canada would then be entitled to withdraw financing from mining projects that are found to violate corporate social responsibility standards in poor states;
• Mining companies found to breach those standards would be ineligible for investment from the Canada Pension Plan.

   Fasken Matineau, a leading international business law and litigation firm that does a lot of work for Canadian mining companies abroad plans to testify tomorrow and to say:

This legislation was written in haste without input from Canada’s resource and extraction companies.  “Canadian mining and energy companies are respected as leaders worldwide, so it is a surprise to see legislation proposed in Canada that would undermine their competitive position on the world stage. Those with investments in foreign countries are very concerned about the devastating effects if this Bill passes.  Bill C-300 ignores the extensive work done by Canada’s mining industry and the federal government. On March 26, 2009, the government released Building the Canadian Advantage: A Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy for the Canadian International Extractive Sector, which embodies its corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy for Canadian extractive sector companies operating abroad. Canadian companies in the extractive sector are generally supportive of the Strategy, describing it as workable and pragmatic, and have applauded the extensive and thoughtful process through which it was created.

   The main supporting arguments for the bill are that Canadian taxpayers pay to help Canadian mining companies operate in foreign climes and hence taxpayers are entitled to see only the best behaviour by such companies.  Thus if a Canadian mining company misbehaves in a foreign country, the taxpayer should be entitled to with-hold taxpayer support from such miscreants.  A good example of what may prompt a complaint (accusation) is detailed in a report from which I quote as follows:

A former Argentine environment minister told Members of [Canada's] Parliament today that she had been personally threatened and rendered ineffective as a result of the aggressive activities of foreign mining companies who objected to the government’s efforts to clean up mining operations in that country.   Testifying by video hook-up at hearings of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, Romina Picolotti said foreign mining companies stood out from other business sectors in their resistance to Argentina’s bid to tighten up control over the environmental consequences of large-scale mining projects.  “I found, over and over again, that foreign mining interests in Argentina were extremely adept at leveraging their interests within the local political institutions, many times co-opting government officials and ministries to get their way on sensitive environmental and social issues that typically arise from large-scale mining investments,” she said.

You can find much more in favor and against the bill on the web.    With all the arguments floating around, it is difficult to comment, but my role as a blogger gives me a small leeway, so here goes. 

    The argument that the Canadian mining industry has “cleaned up its act” is sound, but irrelevant.  I am sure most Canadian mining companies do it nice in foreign countries, but the fact is that some do not.  There is always somebody who delights in playing the odds, breaking the rules, and ignoring the recommendations of the “sanctimonious” majority.  Why, I have even consulted to some of them.  They demand fast services,they fight hard, and they pay well.   Nothing that is illegal in the operating country; only hard and furious.   I myself am sometimes personally guilty of not behaving in accordance with the manuals on good manners you find in airport book stores.  And having grown up in South Africa under apartheid, I have a most healthy disrespect for laws that claim the moral high-ground.   Most of my best friends in South Africa broke the laws regularly.  We justified it on the basis of youth and idealism.  Now even some Afrikaners admit those same laws were horrendous.  I must have some sympathy with Canadian mining companies who break so-called “Canadian norms of good conduct” in places like Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Guatemala.  Damn, it is hard enough just to be nice in such countries with their peculiar laws and customs.

   The argument that because most Canadian mining companies do things properly in other countries, thus no action is needed, is a most spurious and misdirected approach.  Most people do not steal, murder, rape, or drive too fast (well maybe not the last one.)   But that is no good reason not to have laws against theft, murder, or driving too fast.  The fact is that ninety-nine percent of people are nice.  The trick in any civil society is to deal justly and effectively with the one percent who are not nice. 

Let us dispense with the argument that because there are voluntary codes of good conduct formulated by the mining industry, there is no need for a bill.   There is a vast difference between a code of conduct and a law–or regulations following from a law.  Codes of good conduct are generally formulated by the good people and generally followed by the good companies.  It gives them a basis for action, a bragging right, and higher share values.  But bad people and bad companies have no regard for codes of conduct any more than they have regard for laws.  The existence of a code of mining conduct is irrelevant verbiage to the mining company intent on bribing a corrupt foreign politician, displacing indigenous people, razing a village in the way of an ore body, or of denying that their actions had tangible results.  The lure of higher profits is too great to induce servile obedience to mere codes of conduct in most malfeasance-inclined managers.  A code of conduct is at best an expression of intention.  It is a toothless hag when it comes to enforcement.  It has no teeth, no bite, no sanction.  Even more, a code of conduct provides no avenue of recourse to the truly impacted.  What can they do?  Get their church to grouse about the mining company’s conduct?  

Only a law, which by one definition must include both a prescribed form of conduct and provide a sanction in the event of a transgression, provides an incentive to decent behaviour and a recourse for the negatively impacted.  Thus arguments that the mining industry has formulated and generally follows its own voluntary codes of conduct are flaccid and worthless:  the code of conduct is admirable; adherence by most is to be commended; but those fact are irrelevant in discussing the right of a society to act to enforce its wishes and culture.  Only by laws can a society act to set standards of conduct and punish those who fail to follow the prescribed conduct.    True, we need a debate on this law; but it must be a debate founded on logic, not red herrings. 

We could argue that the countries in which the Canadian mining companies operate should get down to doing something themselves.  I have long believed that the only way for a country to control inappropriate and irresponsible mining is to enact its own set of laws and to enforce them.  Sadly that is not about to happen.  There are simply too many examples of venial governments run by small groups of privileged and entrenched tribes and groups, who benefit from mining at the expense of the general populace, for good laws to be enacted in all mining countries.  Consider Zimbabwe as the most obvious.  Even those old men who rule Cuba to their advantage know how to manipulate Canada into controlling the populace for the benefit of the ruling tribe. 

   The are dangers associated with this law.  If I were into that sort of thing, the first case I would seek to bring would be on behalf of the people of Summitteville, Colorado against a certain big Vancouver mining company that polluted and fled and is now in bed with Rio Tinto to develop properties in Mongolia.  Surely the American taxpayer deserves some relief for the cost of cleaning up that mess and is entitled to be chagrined that the Canadian taxpayers still support operations in foreign countries by the guilty company?  No wonder my American sons-in-law are so sarcastic about Canada and its purported “goodness.”   No matter how much I argue with them over dinner and wine, they revert to the argument that Canada is a socialistic society that acts like any wicked tribe to its benefit at the expense of other countries, including the USA.  Maybe they are just neurotic?  Maybe they just delight in baiting me?

   Then consider the foreign country where a heap leach pad designed by a Canadian consulting company fails and causes irrepairable environmental damage (aka Bellavista in Costa Rica).  Could the local villagers bring a law suite against the consulting engineering company in terms of Bill C-300?  Afterall the culpable mining company has fled, gone bankcrupt, and/or changed its name.  There is no recourse from or punishment possible against the mining company—but wait, what about the insurance policies of all those consultants who put pen to paper?  The bill provides for no recompense to the aggrieved party other than the illusory satisfaction of seeing them held guilty by the Canadian government and barred from receiving federal financial input.    But still, it may bring some sense of closure, or retribution, won’t it?     I doubt it, but then who am I to say?

It gets scary when you start formulating possible case histories.  I, for one, am unhappy about relying on the discretion of the government to make prudent decisions in such cases–although I concur that such an attitude is American not Canadian, for we Canadians revere and respect our government and trust it to do well by us in providing a civil society.  We Americans have an inherent distrust in the ability of government to do the right thing, even though we keep demanding more of the government.  Could you imagine Bill C-300 even been considered in the USA?   Canada and the USA are indeed totally different! 

  We will need skilled lawyers to deal with the case histories of the type I postulate, not government employees in minor departments.  At least the need for more lawyers is an American mode of action and way of life. 

Perhaps I have now been in north America too long, or perhaps I have gotten too old, for now I am conservative and long for a society of peace & calm, order & civility, justice & a swift retribution.  Maybe I have been over-influenced and now think uncivil thoughts like: “If they misbehave, then damn it, sanction and punish them.”

    Or maybe this attitude is just a hang-over from those days of disobedience as a youth.  I mean the attitude that says: there is surely an uber-norm of decency, and if people do not follow it, disobey them, protest against them, or do something to make them behave decently.  Maybe I have now subscribed to the uber-norm of Canadian decency that faces the fact that one percent of people are not nice, one percent of mining companies are not nice, and as a decent and civilised society, we should put laws in place to deal civilly and justly with such deviant people and companies. 

Thus I must come out in support of the ideal of the bill, even though I have many misgivings about the workings of the bill–but those can be fixed.

Die USA haben den Vorschlag des israelischen Ministerpräsidenten Benjamin Netanjahu zum befristeten Stopp des Siedlungsbaus begrüßt. “Wir hoffen, dass dies in irgendeiner Weise zur Wiederaufnahme von Verhandlungen beitragen kann”, sagte ein Vertreter des US-Außenministeriums am Mittwoch in Washington. Er betonte, dass die USA weiterhin für einen kompletten Stopp des Siedlungsbaus im Westjordanland und in Ost-Jerusalem seien.

QUELLE

Bin ich hier im falschen Film?

The Neocon Republican Terrorist vision of a divided and segregated America, where everybody that is not a white Anglo-saxon Christian is considered cannon fodder and trash, is coming to fruition. It is reminiscent of the reaction to the new population of freed slaves that the white former slave masters had after they were soundly defeated in the Civil War by the Union army.

This is the period in our history called Reconstruction where,for a decade after the Civil War,blacks gained political power, and some attained financial wealth as well.

During Reconstruction, southern whites turned violent when they saw blacks making major gains.

 Reconstruction was followed in the South by domination by the Democratic Party and the enactment of Jim Crow laws, grandfather clauses and similar measures. The bitterness and repercussions from the heated conflicts of the era lasted well into the twentieth century.

Read more about the Reconstruction era here… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_era_of_the_United_States 

Southern state governments quickly enacted the restrictive “black codes“. However, they were abolished in 1866 and seldom had effect, because the Freedman’s Bureau (not the local courts) handled the legal affairs of freedmen.

The Black Codes indicated the plans of the southern whites for the former slaves.^[24] The freedmen would have more rights than did free blacks before the war, but they still had only a limited set of second-class civil rights, no voting rights, and, since they were not citizens, they could not own firearms, serve on a jury in a lawsuit involving whites or move about without employment.^[25] The Black Codes would limit blacks’ ability to control their own employment. The Black Codes outraged northern opinion. They were overthrown by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that gave the Freedmen full legal equality (except for the right to vote).^[26

 There were many reported murders of blacks in the south during reconstruction, but many killings of blacks went unreported, and by all accounts, millions upon millions of African-Americans were killed by the hands of bitter southerners, as reported in this account taken from Wikipedia by a soldier visiting from the North...

The number of murders and assaults perpetrated upon Negroes is very great; we can form only an approximate estimate of what is going on in those parts of the South which are not closely garrisoned, and from which no regular reports are received, by what occurs under the very eyes of our military authorities. As to my personal experience, I will only mention that during my two days sojourn at Atlanta, one Negro was stabbed with fatal effect on the street, and three were poisoned, one of whom died.

In todays modern post-racial world, we have organizations and groups that have a mission to keep track of, and to investigate the existence of, the number of racially motivated,or bias motivated crimes against minorities,religious groups, gay Americans.

Currently, America is going through another Reconstruction like era,as we are experiencing the racial backlash of hatred based on the election of our first black president,Barack Obama.

The election of Barack has caused a rise in all forms of hate crimes, as well as the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan as a force to stoke the flames of hatred and encouraging physical action of violence against blacks, Gays, and all other religious groups that are not Christian.

What is most distressing is that the tide of racial violence is being egged on and financed by the foreigner Rupert Murdoch, and the entire Republican party,that at one time represented the opposite of what they believe in now.

For a group that, centuries ago, used to be the main supporter of civil rights, they currently are the main driving force behind this increasing tide of racism and bigotry that is the rage in most of the states in America.

The racist are moving from the south, and invading the once liberal California, in order to spread their southern tradition of hatred and illiteracy. Hate crimes based on sexual orientation shot up 21 percent in Los Angeles County last year, while religious crimes increased 14 percent, because the southern bigots have moved in.

The Daily News in Los Angeles reports that...in 2008  in the Valley,James Shamp, an African-American man who worked as a janitor at a bowling alley in Canoga Park, was shot to death as he was throwing out trash. According to the report, three members of the Canoga Park Alabama gang, which has a long history of violent anti-black crimes, were arrested and charged with murder and hate crime enhancements.

The San Fernando Valley had the most amount of hate crimes in the Los Angeles area.

"Whenever I look at a map of hate crimes, I find there is a great diversity of hate crimes that occur in the San Fernando Valley," said Robin Toma, executive director of the commission. "You have anti-Semitic hate crimes, homophobic hate crimes and racially motivated hate crimes. There is also the phenomena of racialized gang violence."

Sexual orientation hate crimes rose the most last year, with more than 80 percent targeting gay men and at least nine crimes traced to Proposition 8.

A report on a sexually motivated hate crime from the Daily News... A white lesbian couple walking hand-in-hand on the beach in Malibu. The mother of a white tourist family from Arkansas told them, "You are going to burn in hell!" and dumped her water bottle on one of them and punched one in the face...

Please keep that level of ignorance in Arkansas,...and my family is from Arkansas.

The election of the first black president and hot-button issues such as abortion and gay marriage contributed to the spikes, anti-bias groups say. Public figures like Sarah Palin and Glen Beck have done a lot to cause the current racial hatred that whites are visiting on all others.

The two of them have been quite effective when it come to rallying sympathy for groups like the KKK and the Nazis.

USA TODAY is reporting that the number of attacks on blacks increased 8% to 2,876, accounting for seven of every 10 race-motivated crimes.

"There is this kind of extremism going on," says Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP Washington bureau. He says Obama's election and the recession led to a backlash against blacks as some people look for someone to blame for hard economic times. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-11-23-hate-crimes_N.htm

I say to the world, this is a good look at the so-called ''Post-Racial'' America, a country where race relations and the unity of the races has been usurped by the in vogue traditional American practice of racial bias,hatred and division.

Our country has been going through this cycle for well over a Hundred and 8o years, and by the looks of things, that sad tradition will continue.

What do we do to end this....will we come together, or will we have to resort to our primal instinct, where only the strong survive.

I think that based on 200 years of data and statistics, the tradition of racism is alive, well, and thriving in the United States, and that we are guilty of the same atrocities against humanity...our own people, that we so blatantly accuse our so-called enemies of doing to their minority populations.

We are all truly hypocrites.

Read more on this story from these trusted sources…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/23/hate-crime-on-rise-gay-re_n_368276.html

http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_13829526

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2009/11/20/LA-sees-hike-in-certain-hate-crimes/UPI-95381258737529/

SKIN is one of the most moving stories to emerge from apartheid South Africa: Sandra Laing is a black child born in the 1950s to white Afrikaners, unaware of their black ancestry. Her parents are rural shopkeepers serving the local black community, who lovingly brings her up as their ‘white’ little girl. But at the age of ten, Sandra is driven out of white society. The film follows Sandra’s thirty-year journey from rejection to acceptance, betrayal to reconciliation, as she struggles to define her place in a changing world – and triumphs against all odds.

The Electronic Intifada, November 10, 2009

Israeli Jews and the one-state solution

Anyone who rejects the two-state solution, won’t bring a one-state solution. They will instead bring one war, not one state. A bloody war with no end. — Israeli President Shimon Peres, 7 November 2009.

One of the most commonly voiced objections to a one-state solution for Palestine/Israel stems from the accurate observation that the vast majority of Israeli Jews reject it, and fear being “swamped” by a Palestinian majority. Across the political spectrum, Israeli Jews insist on maintaining a separate Jewish-majority state.

But with the total collapse of the Obama Administration’s peace efforts, and relentless Israeli colonization of the occupied West Bank, the reality is dawning rapidly that the two-state solution is no more than a slogan that has no chance of being implemented or altering the reality of a de facto binational state in Palestine/Israel.

This places an obligation on all who care about the future of Palestine/Israel to seriously consider the democratic alternatives. I have long argued that the systems in post-apartheid South Africa (a unitary democratic state), and Northern Ireland (consociational democracy) — offer hopeful, real-life models.

But does solid Israeli Jewish opposition to a one-state solution mean that a peaceful one-state outcome is so unlikely that Palestinians should not pursue it, and should instead focus only on “pragmatic” solutions that would be less fiercely resisted by Israeli Jews?

The experience in South Africa suggests otherwise. In 1994, white-minority rule — apartheid — came to a peaceful, negotiated end, and was replaced (after a transitional period of power-sharing) with a unitary democratic state with a one person, one vote system. Before this happened, how likely did this outcome look? Was there any significant constituency of whites prepared to contemplate it, and what if the African National Congress (ANC) had only advanced political solutions that whites told pollsters they would accept?

Until close to the end of apartheid, the vast majority of whites, including many of the system’s liberal critics, completely rejected a one person, one vote system, predicting that any attempt to impose it would lead to a bloodbath. As late as 1989, F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president, described a one person, one vote system as the “death knell” for South Africa.

A 1988 study by political scientist Pierre Hugo documented the widespread fears among South African whites that a transition to majority rule would entail not only a loss of political power and socioeconomic status, but engendered “physical dread” and fear of “violence, total collapse, expulsion and flight.” Successive surveys showed that four out of five whites thought that majority rule would threaten their “physical safety.” Such fears were frequently heightened by common racist tropes of inherently savage and violent Africans, but the departure of more than a million white colons from Algeria and the airlifting of 300,000 whites from Angola during decolonization set terrifying precedents (“Towards darkness and death: racial demonology in South Africa,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, 26(4), 1988).

Throughout the 1980s, polls showed that even as whites increasingly understood that apartheid could not last, only a small minority ever supported majority rule and a one person, one vote system. In a March 1986 survey, for example, 47 percent of whites said they would favor some form of “mixed-race” government, but 83 percent said they would opt for continued white domination of the government if they had the choice (Peter Goodspeed, “Afrikaners cling to their all-white dream,” The Toronto Star, 5 October 1986).

A 1990 nationwide survey of Afrikaner whites (native speakers of Afrikaans, as opposed to English, and who traditionally formed the backbone of the apartheid state), found just 2.2 percent were willing to accept a “universal franchise with majority rule” (Kate Manzo and Pat McGowan, “Afrikaner fears and the politics of despair: Understanding change in South Africa,” International Studies Quarterly, 36, 1992).

Perhaps an enlightened white elite was able to lead the white masses to higher ground? This was not the case either. A 1988 academic survey of more than 400 white politicians, business and media leaders, top civil servants, academics and clergy found that just 4.8 percent were prepared to accept a unitary state with a universal voting franchise and two-thirds considered such an outcome “unacceptable.” According to Manzo and McGowan, white elites reflected the sentiments and biases of the rest of the society and overwhelmingly considered whites inherently more civilized and culturally superior to black Africans. Just more than half of prominent whites were prepared to accept “a federal state in which power is shared between white and non-white groups and areas so that no one group dominates.”

During the 1980s, the white electorate in South Africa moved to the right, as Israel’s Jewish electorate is doing today. Support seeped from the National Party, which had established formal apartheid in 1948, to the even more extreme Conservative Party. Yet, “on the issue of majority rule,” Hugo observed, “supporters of the National Party and the Conservative Party, as well as most white voters to the ‘left’ of these organizations, ha[d] little quarrel with each other.”

The vast majority of whites, wracked with existential fears, were simply unable to contemplate relinquishing effective control, or at least a veto, over political decision-making in South Africa.

Yet, the African National Congress insisted firmly on a one person, one vote system with no white veto. As the township protests and strikes and international pressure mounted, The Economist observed in an extensive 1986 survey of South Africa published on 1 February of that year, that many “enlightened” whites “still fondly argue that a dramatic improvement in the quality of black life may take the revolutionary sting out of the black townships — and persuade ‘responsible’ blacks, led by the emergent black middle class, to accept some power-sharing formula.”

Schemes to stabilize the apartheid system abounded, and bear a strong resemblance to the current Israeli government’s vision of “economic peace” in which a collaborationist Palestinian Authority leadership would manage a still-subjugated Palestinian population anesthetized by consumer goods and shopping malls.

Because of the staunch opposition of whites to a unitary democratic state, the ANC heard no shortage of advice from western liberals that it should seek a “realistic” political accommodation with the apartheid regime, and that no amount of pressure could force whites to succumb to the ANC’s political demands. The ANC was warned that insistence on majority rule would force Afrikaners into the “laager” — they would retreat into a militarized garrison state and siege economy, preferring death before surrender.

Even the late Helen Suzman, one of apartheid’s fiercest liberal critics, predicted in 1987, as quoted by Hugo, “The Zimbabwe conflict took 15 years … and cost 20,000 lives and I can assure you that the South African transfer of power will take a good deal more than that, both in time and I am afraid lives.”

But as The Economist observed, the view that whites would prefer “collective suicide” was something of a caricature. The vast majority of Afrikaners were “no longer bible-thumping boers.” They were “part of a spoilt, affluent suburban society, whose economic pain threshold may prove to be rather low.”

The Economist concluded that if whites would only come so far voluntarily, then it was perfectly reasonable for the anti-apartheid movement to bring them the rest of the way through “coercion” in the form of sanctions and other forms of pressure. “The quicker the white tribe submits,” the magazine wrote, “the better its chance of a bearable future in a black-ruled South Africa.”

Ultimately, as we now know, the combination of internal resistance and international isolation did force whites to abandon political apartheid and accept majority rule. However, it is important to note that the combined strength of the anti-apartheid movement never seriously threatened the physical integrity of the white regime.

Even after the massive township uprisings of 1985-86, the South African regime was secure. “So far there is no real physical threat to white power,” The Economist noted, “so far there is little threat to white lives. … The white state is mighty, and well-equipped. It has the capacity to repress the township revolts far more bloodily. The blacks have virtually no urban or rural guerrilla capacity, practically no guns, few safe havens within South Africa or without.”

This balance never changed, and a similar equation could be written today about the relative power of a massively-armed — and much more ruthless — Israeli state, and lightly armed Palestinian resistance factions.

What did change for South Africa, and what all the weapons in the world were not able to prevent, was the complete loss of legitimacy of the apartheid regime and its practices. Once this legitimacy was gone, whites lost the will to maintain a system that relied on repression and violence and rendered them international pariahs; they negotiated a way out and lived to tell the tale. It all happened much more quickly and with considerably less violence than even the most optimistic predictions of the time. But this outcome could not have been predicted based on what whites said they were willing to accept, and it would not have occurred had the ANC been guided by opinion polls rather than the democratic principles of the Freedom Charter.

Zionism — as many Israelis openly worry — is suffering a similar, terminal loss of legitimacy as Israel is ever more isolated as a result of its actions. Israel’s self-image as a liberal “Jewish and democratic state” is proving impossible to maintain against the reality of a militarized, ultra-nationalist Jewish sectarian settler-colony that must carry out frequent and escalating massacres of “enemy” civilians (Lebanon and Gaza 2006, Gaza 2009) in a losing effort to check the resistance of the region’s indigenous people. Zionism cannot bomb, kidnap, assassinate, expel, demolish, settle and lie its way to legitimacy and acceptance.

Already difficult to disguise, the loss of legitimacy becomes impossible to conceal once Palestinians are a demographic majority ruled by a Jewish minority. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that Palestinians recognize Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state” is in effect an acknowledgement of failure: without Palestinian consent, something which is unlikely ever to be granted, the Zionist project of a Jewish ethnocracy in Palestine has grim long-term prospects.

Similarly, South African whites typically attempted to justify their opposition to democracy, not in terms of a desire to preserve their privilege and power, but using liberal arguments about protecting distinctive cultural differences. Hendrik Verwoerd Jr., the son of assassinated Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, apartheid’s founder, expressed the problem in these terms in 1986, as reported by The Toronto Star, stating that, “These two people, the Afrikaner and the black, are not capable of becoming one nation. Our differences are unique, cultural and deep. The only way a man can be happy, can live in peace, is really when he is among his own people, when he shares cultural values.”

The younger Verwoerd was on the far-right of South African politics, leading a quixotic effort to carve out a whites-only homeland in the heart of South Africa. But his reasoning sounds remarkably similar to liberal Zionist defenses of the “two-state solution” today. The Economist clarified the use of such language at the time, stating that “One of the weirder products of apartheid is the crippling of language in a maw of hypocrisy, euphemism and sociologese. You talk about the Afrikaner ‘right to self-determination’ — meaning power over everybody else.”

Zionism’s claim for “Jewish self-determination” amidst an intermixed population, is in effect a demand to preserve and legitimize a status quo in which Israeli Jews exercise power in perpetuity. But there’s little reason to expect that Israeli Jews would abandon this quest voluntarily any more than South African whites did. As in South Africa, coercion is necessary — and the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is one of the most powerful, nonviolent, legitimate and proven tools of coercion that Palestinians possess. Israel’s vulnerabilities may be different from those of apartheid South Africa, but Israel is not invulnerable to pressure.

Coercion is not enough, however; as I have long argued, and sought to do, Palestinians must also put forward a positive vision. Neither can Palestinians advocating a one-state solution simply disregard the views of Israeli Jews. We must recognize that the opposition of Israeli Jews to any solution that threatens their power and privilege stems from at least two sources. One is irrational, racist fears of black and brown hordes (in this case, Arab Muslims) stoked by decades of colonial, racist demonization. The other source — certainly heightened by the former — are normal human concerns about personal and family dislocation, loss of socioeconomic status and community security: change is scary.

But change will come. Without indulging Israeli racism or preserving undue privilege, the legitimate concerns of ordinary Israeli Jews can be addressed directly in any negotiated transition to ensure that the shift to democracy is orderly, and essential redistributive policies are carried out fairly. Inevitably, decolonization will cause some pain as Israeli Jews lose power and privilege, but there are few reasons to believe it cannot be a well-managed process, or that the vast majority of Israeli Jews, like white South Africans, would not be prepared to make the adjustment for the sake of a normality and legitimacy they cannot have any other way.

This is where the wealth of research and real-life experience about the successes, failures, difficulties and opportunities of managing such transitions at the level of national and local politics, neighborhoods, schools and universities, workplaces, state institutions and policing, emerging from South Africa and Northern Ireland, will be of enormous value.

Every situation has unique features, and although there are patterns in history, it never repeats itself exactly. But what we can conclude from studying the pasts and presents of others is that Palestinians and Israelis are no less capable of writing themselves a post-colonial future that gives everyone a chance at a life worth living in a single, democratic state.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.

Jewish Voice for Peace comments:

Ali Abunimah is a prominent defender of a single democratic state in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. In this article he makes the now quite common – though also controversial – comparison with Apartheid South Africa. Usually the question this comparison raises is whether Israeli treatment of Palestinians is really analogous to or as bad as the Apartheid regime’s treatment of its black majority, and the comparison is often used to support the use of tactics of resistance like BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) modeled on the anti-Apartheid campaigns of the 1980s.  But Abunimah instead hones narrowly in on the hostility of the white minority in South Africa to a multi-racial democratic state, a hostility that persisted until surprisingly shortly before change was initiated. It is this that he compares, in a wealth of detail, with Jewish Israeli fears of a single state solution. If change could occur in South Africa in spite of such widespread rejection in the white community, why, Abuminah argues, should change not occur in Israel despite the fears of the Jewish community? It won’t happen, he recognizes without outside pressure (and he supports BDS); but current Jewish Israeli rejection need not make it impossible.

This is surely true, but ‘not necessarily impossible’ is very far from showing that a one-state solution ought to be the aspiration of activist movements, Palestinian, Jewish or otherwise. As his banner quotation from Shimon Peres – a barely veiled threat – makes clear, it remains quite possible that a one-state ‘solution’ will involve no diminution of violence towards or oppression of Palestinians. One state is, after all, what there is now. What might make it important to explore a one state possibility is the fact, clearly motivating Abunimah, that two viable states are now impossible. Certainly he is correct to say that there is presently no political will in the Israeli or US administrations to move in the direction of a viable Palestinian state and reasonable opinions can differ on whether the current ‘facts on the ground’ make it impossible to eke out such a state. But it is also surely true that activist pressure can be brought to bear both on that political
will and even on the facts on the ground and this pressure has a natural point of application in the official commitment of Israel, the US, the PA (and even Hamas) to two states. If change is possible, as Abunimah argues, on the one state solution, then it is certainly possible for two states. But if two states can be achieved, then this removes a big chunk of the motivation for directing one’s energies to one state. Indeed, aiming for two viable states in the medium term is not inconsistent with seeking to build consensus, along the lines Abunimah suggests, for single state in the long term.

The question is by no means an obvious one to resolve, but it is important to consider where activist energies are most likely to have an effect, and avoid directions that absorb energy with little hope of result. Indeed some commentators have suggested that the one state solution has become increasingly acceptable in the mainstream US  media precisely because it is so unlikely to come about that it represents – from the point of view of the status quo – a harmless safety valve through which to discharge otherwise potentially dangerous activist pressure.

Alistair Welchman

Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse delivers the keynote address at the 2009 Campus BDS Conference at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

South African photographer Michael Wyeth sent me a link to this article about the recent reunion of anti-apartheid band Bright Blue.

“In the last years of apartheid, an unlikely group of young middle class white men sang a protest song. It became the anthem of a generation of young whites conscripted into the South African Army and ordered to fight for a regime they found they didn’t believe in. The song was called ‘Weeping’ and was about then-President PW Botha, whose response to the dying days of apartheid was to become more brutal. Political and subversive, ‘Weeping’ went to number one on state radio.” 

Read the full article here.

Read my interview with photographer Michael Wyeth here.

Calentando motores para los Oscars.

Someone asked me, just yesterday, whether or not they should go to Johannesburg and if so for how long. I’m so bad at answering these questions. Not sure why. Here’s my attempt:

I enjoyed my time in Johannesburg. But so much of what I enjoyed was made possible because one of my closest friends, S., lives there. The things that everyone would typically do in Johannesburg turned out to be very mundane. Our first full day in Johannesburg, we went to the Apartheid Museum, where we were first divided arbitrarily into racial groups to enter the museum and given a detailed history of South Africa and apartheid. Normally one who takes their time during museum visits, I seemed to speed through the exhibits compared to my friend, C’s, snail-like pace. We would have probably spent the entire day there, had the lights not gone out, forcing C. to run out of the museum, missing a little more than a quarter of the exhibit.

We also went to Soweto, the most popular township known for its role in the struggle against apartheid. We dined buffet style at Sakhumzi’s while we were serenaded by a girl with a beautiful voice, and joined by a contortionist who had been folding himself into awkward positions on the street with hope to receive tips, earlier. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from him. C., on the other hand, was not as interested. Sakhumzi’s perfect location put us right in between Bishop Desmond Tutu’s house and Nelson Mandela’s house, which is now a museum. So we visited the both, with the latter having more activity around it, particularly people selling things.

Speaking of selling, S. took us to the African Market at Rosebank to search for souvenirs. Let’s pause for a moment right here. NOTA BENE: When I say souvenirs, that is precisely what I mean. Trinkets. Magnets. Mass produced paintings. Etc. Although, I quickly fell in love with this number:

Yes, that is a real zebra hide. Yes, I saw it and was drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. Dear PETA, please don’t hate me. I loved it, up until I found out the price. 8,000 South African Rand. Please do the math on that. Yes, over $1,000. I chuckled and walked away, and it was mistaken for a negotiation tactic.

Salesman: How much do you want to pay? I give you good price.

Me: No no, honestly, I cannot afford it. The fact that you started at 8,000 rand means I shouldn’t even continue to talk to you.

Salesman: Give me 6,000 rand and you can have it.

Me: What about 6 rand?

Salesman: What you said? Six thousand? [Emphasis on thousand]

Me: I need to go find my friend.

The run-of-the-mill Johannesburg activities were fun, yes, but like most other tourist activities you may want to run quickly through them so that you can get to the real fun…

xo

J. Justine

 Vida da esposa de Nelson Mandela vai virar filme

Jennifer Hudson será Winnie Mandela nas telonas

A atriz Jennifer Hudson, premiada com um Oscar por sua performance em Dreamgirls – Em Busca de um Sonho, acaba de ser contratada como protagonista de Winnie, em que viverá Winnie Mandela, esposa do ex-presidente sul-africano Nelson Mandela.

O filme terá direção do sul-africano Darrell J. Roodt e será um drama sobre a história da controversa ativista, que lutou contra o apartheid ao lado de seu marido. O roteiro foi escrito por Roodt, Andre Pieterse e Paul L. Johnson, com base no livro biográfico Winnie Mandela: A Life, escrito por Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob.

Segundo a Variety, o filme contará a história toda – tanto o lado bom, do ativismo social, como o lado ruim, das acusações de fraude e corrupção que marcaram parte de sua carreira política. Fonte: Omelete.

The Palestinian Authority has called on the public to boycott several large supermarket chains in the West Bank that carry Israeli products.

The decision targets upscale markets in Ramallah, in an attempt to pressure the stores to discontinue the sale of fruits and vegetables grown and processed in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

According to the Palestinian authorities, customers are not aware that some of the products are produced in one of over 200 Israeli settlements, built illegally on occupied Palestinian land deemed illegal under international law.

Palestinians consider these settlements the most crucial threat to their aspirations for statehood.

As a result, the Palestinian ministry of economy has announced it will aggressively pursue an already existing law that criminalises trading in settlement products, a move that is widely popular among Palestinians.

Israeli settlement products currently enjoy an estimated 15 per cent share of the Palestinian market, according to the minister of economy.

‘Good move’

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah, says the move to ban settlement products from the shelves will take time and require awareness among Palestinian consumers.

Many products made in illegal settlements are on sale in Palestinian supermarkets!

“The government argues that it is through this boycott, that they are now striking back at the illegal settlements – product by product,” she said.

Jamal Juma, a Palestinian activist and coordinator of the Stop the Wall campaign, told Al Jazeera: “If the Palestinian Authority insists on implementing this decision, it means the authority will participate in boycotting one-third of the Israeli products that come to the West Bank.

“This is a very good step to support the Palestinian economy. It will provide the opportunity to improve Palestinians products and solve the unemployment problem.

“The decision will allow Palestinians to say: ‘No to the occupation, we are not going to pay for the bulldozers that destroy our houses and for the bullets that kill our people’.”

http://www.pi-news.net/2009/11/moishe-dankt-der-eu/

http://womblog.de/2009/11/19/richter-warnt-vor-zweiklassenjustizsystem-in-israel/

Students at the University of Florida are working to help farmworkers battle for fair wages and basic human rights.

By Kristen Abdullah and Richard Blake
November 16, 2009

Migrant worker Jorge Rodriguez plays the “quijada,” in Immokalee, Fla. Farmworkers celebrated the recent decision by Taco Bell to accede to the demands of local tomato pickers, who led a four-year boycott against the restaurant chain, and pay a penny more for each pound of Florida tomatoes. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)

As we made the four-hour journey south to tomato-town Immokalee, Fla., we ran through the itinerary for the long weekend to come and familiarized ourselves with the 40-plus pages of reading material that we were supposed to have completed three weeks before. The thick packet of literature included stories like “Immokalee family sentenced for slavery,” “Apartheid in America,” and “A more-complete definition of ‘sustainable.’” By the time we arrived in the desolate town, just after midnight, we felt confident in our school-child ability to recite the labor history of this town and felt briefed on the ultimate reason for our visit.

After becoming fed up with the impoverished condition that enslaved them, migrant workers started a grassroots organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in 1993. Consisting mostly of people from Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti, these workers had already experienced both verbal and physical abuses since their arrival in the United States. Most of them could remember a time when, back in their own countries, they survived as subsistence farmers—selling crops and living off corn, squash, beans, and, most important, their own autonomy. They weren’t rich, but they were dignified.

But after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was established among the United States, Canada, and Mexico, these small-time farmers could not compete with subsidized crops from the States. Before, Mexico was a major wheat exporter. Now, Mexico only exports cheap labor.

“I think of myself as a son of NAFTA,” CIW staff member Lucas Benitez says. Poverty and exploitation forced these people north, where they hoped conditions would improve. But in Immokalee, the reality was much different.

As we pulled up to the CIW headquarters, a man who we had previously only known through e-mails warmly greeted us. He was Marc Rodriguez, the national coordinator of the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA), and he directed us to our sleeping quarters—the Immokalee Non-Profit Housing children’s care center, about two miles away. Finally settling down among baby toys and children’s books in Spanish, it dawned on us that we had barely scratched the surface of this town.

ENCUENTRO

The next morning, about 150 people convened in an old church for the official start of the fifth annual CIW/SFA Encuentro, which means “the meeting.” These people gather to discuss campaign strategy for the upcoming year, bringing together students and activists from across the United States with the like-minded goal of working in solidarity to bring positive change to the lives of migrant farmworkers in Immokalee. After an introduction to the SFA, Benitez and several other members of the CIW filled in a few more gaps in our knowledge of the coalition’s history.

In 1995, the CIW held its first major action. After Pacific Tomato Growers threatened to cut workers’ pay from the minimum wage $4.25 an hour to $3.85 an hour, more than 3,000 farmworkers went on strike for one week without compensation, including nearby citrus workers acting in solidarity, and built alliances with local church groups, schools, and universities. The pressure was so great that the company announced it would instead increase the hourly wage to $5.25.

Unfortunately, not all growers were as responsive as Pacific Tomato Growers. In fact, after this first event, it became frustratingly difficult to convince growers to yield to the CIW’s demands of a wage increase of one penny more per pound of tomatoes and to follow a human rights code of conduct.

So the coalition began to research every link in the food supply chain and noticed a striking trend. No matter the players, the line of succession was always the same—the food suppliers pull all the strings from the top; the growers act as the strings being pulled; and the farmworkers dangle like marionettes at the bottom.

THE BATTLE WITH ARAMARK

This system is apparent within the makeup of UF’s own food supplier, Aramark Corporation.

“We strive to offer clients and customers fresh whole foods that are raised, grown, harvested, and produced locally and in a sustainable manner whenever possible. And we partner with suppliers to increase the availability of such foods,” Aramark states on its website.

However, Aramark is constantly being ridiculed for not living up to its self-mandated standards of ensuring a sustainable supply chain of workers at the ends of its own puppet cabaret: Workers like those in Florida who pick roughly 90 percent of the country’s tomato supply while reaping little, if any, of its profits.

On Martin Luther King Day in 2001, the CIW took a bold step to bring farmworkers a little closer to their suppliers. They officially threatened a nationwide Taco Bell boycott outside of the Mexican fast-food chain in Ft. Myers, Fla. Three months later, they presented a list of demands to Taco Bell: Meet with the CIW and tomato growers to discuss possible solutions to farmworkers’ problems, contribute to an immediate wage increase per pound of tomatoes picked, and join the CIW to draft wage and working conditions standards to be required of all Taco Bell tomato suppliers.

Three years and thousands of protest signs later, Taco Bell folded. The “Boot the Bell” campaign by students and farmworkers was so successful that the victory received Mother Jones’ “Campus Activism Victory of the Year” award.

Taco Bell set the bar, and the rest dropped like flies: McDonald’s, Burger King, and eventually all of Yum Brands (Burger King’s supplier). Whole Foods, Subway, and Bon Appétit also agreed to pay the people who pick their tomatoes one penny more per pound, as well as agreeing to follow a code of conduct for growers and suppliers.

These victories created an astounding precedent, proving that a group of farmworkers with few legal protections could organize, take on huge corporations, and actually see a response to their demands.

MODERN-DAY SLAVERY

Back at the Encuentro, everyone prepared for a walking tour, filling their water bottles and gathering big-brimmed hats and sunglasses. We trudged down the sad, steamy roads of the migrant housing neighborhood, stopping in the shaded areas in front of various points. The first site was a small trailer park stuffed with dinky green trailers with bright “for rent” signs shining through their dusty window panes. Our guides Silvia Perez and Melody Gonzalez explained that the dilapidated trailers—most of them lacking basic amenities like air conditioning and hot water—were owned by tomato growers in the area and rented out to migrants for a going rate of $60 per person per week. The growers have the ability to charge outlandish prices for several reasons, including proximity to pick-up points for work and the lack of a housing market demand by residents other than the workers.

A few blocks away, we stopped across the street of the next site—a house that looked like its inhabitants had been gone for several weeks. Our guides, apprehensive about getting any closer to the house, began to unfold the tale of its history.

Just one year ago, the owner of this house and several others were arrested and charged with modern-day slavery. Gonzalez, in her rustic Spanish accent, explained that about a year and a half ago a large U-haul was nestled in the driveway. The chain lock around the U-haul was not to keep people out, but to keep them in.

In a fashion similar to the years just after the American Civil War, tomato growers were holding immigrants hostage as indentured servants, working to pay off their “debt” to the growers for bringing them to the United States. In essence, the growers were smuggling people from Latin America into the States and then enslaving them—making them work long, stringent hours for little or no pay and charging outlandish prices like $5 to shower outside with a hose and bucket and even more obscene amounts for food and water.

In 2008, one enslaved worker escaped and informed the CIW of his condition. The coalition created uproar, attracting media outlets from across the country and bringing the growers to trial. The tomato farmers were sentenced to 50 years in prison by a federal court for practicing modern-day slavery.

STUDENTS ORGANIZE ON BEHALF OF WORKERS

Now, the CIW is turning its attention back to the penny-per-pound campaign. After the coalition forced so many corporations to come to the table, they were ready for something larger: The overarching food service providers, like Aramark, that organize and manage food courts and dining services on campuses, workplaces, tourist destinations, and even prisons nationwide. This newest campaign, aptly named “Dine with Dignity,” is in full swing across the country, focusing not only on Aramark, but also Sodexo and Compass food service providers, as well as corporate grocers like Publix and Kroger.

Compass has already come to the table.

The University of Florida just renewed a 10-year contract with Aramark in June of while many students were away for the summer, allowing it to pass without protest. But several groups, including the Students for a Democratic Society, The Fine Print, and the newly formed Gainesville SFA are not allowing it to go unnoticed.

Concerned students presented a resolution that strongly urges Aramark representatives at UF to enter into negotiations with the CIW. The resolution did not pass, but this hasn’t killed the campaign. In fact, “Dine with Dignity” is swiftly making its presence known on UF’s campus through fliers, petitions and collaboration with student groups on campus.

Students and community members looking to get involved are asked to send an e-mail to GainesvilleSFA@googlegroups.com, and sign the petition.

Kristen Abdullah and Richard Blake are students at the University of Florida. This article originally appeared in The Fine Print, a publication that is part of the Campus Progress Journalism Network.

Ein israelischer Richter fällte in der vergangenen Woche ein historisches Urteil, indem er entschied, dass ein arabischer Jugendlicher vor dem Justizsystem „beschützt“ werden müsse und ihn nicht verurteilte, obwohl er für schuldig befunden worden war, im Zuge eines Protestes gegen den israelischen Überfall auf Gaza im letzten Winter Steine gegen ein Polizeiauto geworfen zu haben.

Die Staatsanwaltschaft hatte gefordert, den Jugendlichen, einen Siebzehnjährigen aus Nazareth in Nordisrael, wegen Gefährdung eines Automobils auf der Straße zu verurteilen, ein Delikt, das mit Strafen bis zu 20 Jahren Gefängnis bedroht ist, um andere Mitglieder der arabischen Minderheit in Israel davon abzuhalten, ähnliche Delikte zu begehen.

Richter Yuval Shadmi sagte jedoch, dass Diskriminierung im Umgang der israelischen Justiz mit jüdischen und arabischen Jugendlichen besonders in Fällen von wie er sagte „ideologisch motivierten“ Straftaten „allgemein bekannt“ sei.

In dem Gerichtsbeschluss hielt er fest: „Ich will sagen, dass der Staat nicht berechtigt ist, mit einer Hand die jüdischen ‘ideologischen’ Täter zu streicheln und mit der anderen Hand die arabischen ‘ideologischen’ Täter zu peitschen.“

Im besonderen bezog er sich dabei auf die milde Behandlung durch Polizei und Gerichte von jugendlichen jüdischen Siedlern, die Soldaten in der West Bank angegriffen und sich 2005 mit Gewalt dem Rückzug aus dem Gazastreifen widersetzt hatten, und von religiösen Extremisten, die viele Monate lang mit der Polizei gekämpft hatten, um die Öffnung eines Parkplatzes in Jerusalem am Sabbath zu verhindern.

weiterlesen

weitere Links zum Thema:

http://www.bielertagblatt.ch/News/Ausland/159214

http://womblog.de/2009/11/19/richter-warnt-vor-zweiklassenjustizsystem-in-israel/

Sicherlich ein “Antisemit” dieser Richter.

Julie Peteet, an editor of this magazine, is professor of anthropology at the University of Louisville.

“Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming,” writes the novelist Alice Walker. “There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the bantustan. To the ‘rez.’ To the ‘colored section.’” In a poetic vein, Walker captures the confinement and marginality one senses in the Gaza Strip, and its familiarity to those who have lived in segregated spaces in the United States and South Africa. It is the latter parallel that has captured the collective imagination in the early 2000s. More and more, Israel’s system of rule over Palestinians in the lands occupied during the 1967 war is compared to South African apartheid.

Apartheid is the Afrikaans term meaning “separation” or “apartness,” and is used most commonly to refer the system of white rule over blacks in South Africa that lasted until 1994. But in international law, apartheid is a general category of state practices and it is prohibited wherever it occurs. The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines the word as acts “designed to divide the population…by the creation of separate reserves and ghettoes for the members of racial groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages…[or] the expropriation of landed property.” In South Africa, apartheid was state-sanctioned segregation governing nearly all aspects of social life. A system designed to maintain white dominion over the indigenous black population and its resources, it rested on a complex legal system that severely hindered blacks’ mobility, denied them civil and political rights, and mandated that they live in townships and bantustans—semi-rural enclaves—kept separate from white areas. The indigenous population’s resources, particularly land, were transferred to white settlers. Blacks were subjected to forcible relocation in the service of the white-dominated economy in which they participated as cheap labor.

The apartheid project in South Africa was aided by the anthropological tradition of volkekunde, or knowledge of the native, which classified populations on the basis of identifiable physical traits, mainly skin color, as well as language, tribe and ethnicity. This anthropology derived from a German-Dutch idealistic tradition that worked to identify and preserve the cultural ethos of a particular population. The formation of territorial “reserves” for blacks in the early twentieth century was grounded in this pseudo-scientific conception of difference.

It was thus no small thing when the South African Human Sciences Research Council issued a report in 2009 concluding that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip is a “colonial enterprise that implements a system of apartheid.”[1]

Why Then, Why Now?

In November 1974, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, addressed the UN General Assembly, shortly before the PLO was accorded observer status. In the previous month, the General Assembly had voted to exclude South Africa from its deliberations, and Arafat tailored his speech accordingly. He denounced the state of Israel for “bolstering the settler-colonialists in Africa” and “practicing racial discrimination more extensively than the racists of South Africa.” Here the PLO leader sought both to tar Israel by association, pointing to its economic and security ties with successive South African governments, and to aid his people by comparing their plight to that of South African blacks.

In fact, the African National Congress and the PLO were founded upon visions radically at odds with those of the South African and Israeli states. The ANC advocated a democratic South Africa that would be a state for all its citizens, blacks and whites, and initially the PLO advocated a democratic secular state in Palestine that would embrace Jews as citizens.

In 1975, the General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 declaring, “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Other organizations followed suit: The Conference of the International Women’s Year declared that international peace required the end of colonialism, occupation, apartheid and Zionism. The Organization of African Unity stated that South Africa, Rhodesia and Israel shared a common imperialist history. Israel found itself in a diplomatic bind similar to South Africa’s, though not as severe; just as the United States, Britain and France had blocked a move to expel South Africa from the UN entirely, so it was often the US veto alone that saved Israel from Security Council sanction. Resolution 3379 was revoked only in 1991, as a condition of Israel’s participation in the Madrid talks, and under pressure from Washington.

The apartheid analogy resurfaced with renewed relevance in the mid-1990s, when white rule in South Africa had ended. The PLO had long since accepted the idea of two states rather than one secular state, and Arafat had become president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), a non-sovereign entity with administrative powers in Gaza and patches of the West Bank, but nothing close to independence. There were striking similarities between Area A, as the districts of PA administration were known under the Oslo agreements, and bantustans: The cantons were non-contiguous, separated from each other by Israeli settlements and military bases and ubiquitous checkpoints, and travel between them or into Israel was severely restricted. Israel began building a network of roads connecting settlements in the Occupied Territories to West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and “bypassing” Palestinian population centers. These measures were adopted even as the PA, Israel and their international sponsors spoke of a comprehensive peace leading to Palestinian statehood. In reality, as Leila Farsakh writes, the Oslo process “paved the way for the ‘bantustanization of the area.’”[2]

The Oslo era closed with Arafat’s PA seemingly acquiescent in a barely autonomous Palestinian entity whose borders, waters and airspace were in the hands of Israel, whose sovereignty extended from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. With the outbreak of the second intifada in the fall of 2000, Israel tightened the closure of Gaza and West Bank towns that had been in place periodically since the early 1990s, penning in Palestinians amidst rising unemployment and poverty. The Israeli army invaded swathes of Area A, imposing days-long curfews, and checkpoints multiplied. But the parallels with apartheid began to take concrete shape, literally, when Israel broke ground on the wall being erected in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The wall starkly illustrated Israel’s logic of separation—Jews here, Palestinians there—and became a rallying point for a host of solidarity movements. Since 2003, when wall construction commenced, political activists have readily adopted the apartheid analogy. So the question becomes: What does the comparison mean and what is its utility?

Unambiguously negative in valence, apartheid in South Africa had few self-proclaimed adherents outside that country’s white community. By the late 1980s, with divestment movements in full bloom on American college campuses, almost no one would defend it or even downplay its horrors. Anti-apartheid events elicited few calls for a “balanced” approach or demands to invite pro-apartheid speakers. The same is emphatically not true of Israel’s system of control over Palestinians. “End the occupation,” though gaining currency as a slogan, does not carry anything like the same automatic moral weight as “end apartheid,” and occupation has numerous influential defenders, some who ruefully describe it as a grim necessity for Israel’s security, and others who unapologetically reframe the debate by lumping Palestinians together with al-Qaeda. Attempts to apply the word “apartheid” to Israel-Palestine run up against an additional problem of scope: Does the term apply merely to the Occupied Territories since 1967, to Israeli dispossession of Palestinians since 1948 or to the entire Zionist project? If “security” and “terrorism” are all-purpose buzzwords that mean too many things, and are applied with little precision, apartheid seems at risk of meeting the same fate.

Comparison

For Palestinians and their supporters, who have struggled for decades to advance their cause, only to suffer repeated setbacks, the impulse to compare can be overwhelming. Invoking a comparison with South African apartheid, as Arafat did before the UN, is a rhetorical device meant to make sense of enforced ethno-religious separation and mobilize action along the lines of the successful anti-apartheid movement. The comparison need not be exact. South Africa is not the benchmark against which all claims of apartheid must be measured; by the terms of the 1973 UN convention, apartheid is a crime wherever it occurs. Pinpointing differences between apartheid-era South Africa and Israel-Palestine need not render comparison an inappropriate method of inquiry. Indeed, one value of the comparative method that is often overlooked is that it throws important distinguishing characteristics into relief.

A number of prominent persons have lately echoed Palestinians in making the comparison between South Africa and Israel-Palestine. In June 2001, Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle, made it in an open letter published in a Pretoria newspaper under the heading, “Not in My Name.” The next year, Rev. Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town honored with a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending apartheid, caused a stir when he wrote: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”[3] In 2006, John Dugard, a South African lawyer and former special rapporteur on Palestine to the UN Human Rights Council, said that Israel’s wall, checkpoints, permits, bypass roads, house demolitions and destruction of agricultural lands “in severity go well beyond,” “surpass” and “far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa.”[4]

Dugard was writing partly in defense of former President Jimmy Carter, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, who had recently published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. In the US, the book was rapidly and repeatedly trashed in most newspapers of note, illustrating South African apartheid’s powerful legacy in American moral sensibilities. The furious response came, in part, because the term dramatically challenged the dominant narrative about Palestinian intransigence, “Islamic” terror and Israeli security, as well as the evangelical Christian narrative about a Chosen People with a God-given right to Palestine. In place of these familiar frames, Carter substituted a narrative of dispossession and occupation. It was equally the former president’s stature (and perhaps his own evangelical Christianity) that raised hackles. Human rights organizations had compiled and disseminated information about Israeli practices for decades. With only one paragraph on the comparison to apartheid, the book did not really make the case and, in fact, offered little that was new. But here was the man who helped broker the peace between Israel and Egypt placing Israel under a highly critical lens. The lens of “apartheid” illuminates an offensive rather than defensive posture on the part of the occupying forces and a well-designed plan of action rather than a series of hurried, situational responses to the violence of the occupied. Most significantly, it exposes the trumping of international law in the name of security.

Carter’s book supplied an object lesson in the power comparison can have. Comparison is a way of taking charge. If Israeli occupation practices are comparable to apartheid, then they must be condemned and made subject to sanctions.

The Named and the Unnamed

While South Africa was explicit about the goal of apartheid policies, Israel engages in discursive subterfuge so that the intent and effects of their policies must be seen on the ground to be fully comprehended. Shulamit Aloni, the former Israeli minister of education, relates an episode at a bypass road built for settlers in the West Bank:

On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away. ‘Why?’ I asked the soldier. ‘It’s an order—this is a Jews-only road,’ he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign indicating this fact and instructing [other] drivers not to use it. His answer was nothing short of amazing. ‘It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign here and let some anti-Semitic reporter or journalist take a photo so that can show the world apartheid exists here?’[5]

Part of the appeal of the apartheid comparison is that apartheid is a recognized name for an ideology and practice of separation. There is no similar name for what Israel has done. Neither the pre-state Zionist movement nor the state of Israel has ever spelled out an official policy of discrimination against the Palestinians, and Israel did not institute discriminatory practices in one fell swoop. Instead, it has worked in a piecemeal fashion to constrain Palestinian rights and access to resources. In other words, separation in the Occupied Territories has been a process whose legal contours are harder to discern and whose name has yet to circulate abroad.

A corollary assumption underlying the comparison is that Israeli practices cannot be condemned as discriminatory in and of themselves. They cannot stand on their own, partly because they are difficult to understand unless they are seen up close. Most people understand that Zionism, as an ideology and a project, calls for Jewish communal security, and due to centuries of pogroms and the Holocaust, this project commands considerable sympathy. But many people do not understand that Zionism, as put into practice, calls for an exclusivist state that leads to policies characteristic of apartheid, as defined by the UN.

Zionism retains a significant body of supporters in the West, particularly among Jews and evangelical Christians, but also the public at large. For numerous historical, cultural and political reasons, the American public in particular “stands with Israel,” a fact demonstrated by poll after poll and not lost on successive US administrations. Israel and its backers work constantly to cement this support, in part by equating criticism of Israel, the “Jewish state,” with anti-Semitism. Thus, drawing attention to the parallels between Israel’s occupation and apartheid has been one way to turn the tables, framing the occupation (and not criticism of Israel) as inherently racist. But the introduction of race into the conversation heats it up to the boiling point: As the Jews of Europe suffered from persecution and genocidal racism, and Jews comprised a large percentage of the white Americans who put their bodies on the line for civil rights, equating the practices of Zionism with racism is, for many, inconceivable. Rational debate shuts down.

It may be time to develop a new language. “Apartheid” cannot thoroughly explain Zionist ideology or Israeli practices. It can simply offer broad points of comparison, a framing in an already powerful concept. Yet the Afrikaans term does have a Hebrew counterpart in the term hafrada, meaning separation from and putting distance between oneself and others, in this case, the Palestinians. In Hebrew, the wall is often referred to as the “hafrada barrier.”

Components of Comparison

The similarities between South African apartheid and Israel’s control over Palestinians, indeed, are best appreciated in terms of the most prominent difference—that of demography. In apartheid South Africa, whites (English and Afrikaners) were a small minority of the population—around 16 percent. Black labor was pivotal to economic development and thus policy was designed to keep blacks impotent and docile, but in the country. Blacks and whites were socially and politically separated but economically integrated, though unequally. In Palestine, the early Zionists also came face to face with the reality of an overwhelmingly Arab population. At first, there were attempts to integrate the Arabs as workers, but as more Jews arrived and Palestinian nationalism grew in potency, the Zionists decided upon a policy of population thinning. The result is that, within the internationally recognized borders of Israel today, Jews are an estimated 78 percent of the population. If the Occupied Territories are included, the Jewish population is 48-49 percent of the total. These figures make for a markedly different colonial dynamic than what obtained in South Africa.

So where do the grounds for comparison lie? At the level of description, in apartheid South Africa, as in Israel-Palestine today, there was a striking gap between the rulers and the ruled. Israel is a First World nation, as was white-ruled South Africa, and the Palestinian population, especially in Gaza, suffers high poverty rates, as South African blacks still do. As colonial entities premised on separation and dominance, both ruling systems have forcibly expropriated natural resources, contained the native population and worked to ensure their economic dependency. Both states have pursued policies toward the local population out of step with modern, secular, democratic ways of organizing the social order (though they were hardly alone in doing so). Both states have used violent repression to squelch dissent and induce compliance. Opponents of apartheid in South Africa were labeled communists and often legally charged as such and Palestinian militants have been deemed terrorists. Apartheid South Africa routinely used torture and engaged in mass detention of militant opponents, as does Israel. Israel is a nuclear power in a region where its neighbors do not have the bomb, as was apartheid South Africa.

Both states also developed elaborate ideological justifications for how they acted. White-ruled South Africa and Israel took root, to varying degrees, with the assistance and in the service of the prerogatives of Western powers. The early Zionists and white settlers in South Africa both claimed to have found a Promised Land that was also “a land without a people” (though, in fact, both lands were densely populated). Each state assiduously defined itself as Western and thus distinct from its immediate surroundings. Thus both countries attempted to fashion, against the will and interests of the local population, ostensibly Western spaces in the heart of the Arab and African worlds.

Both states went on to draw distinctions among the population in domestic law, along racial lines in South Africa and ethno-religious lines in Israel. In South Africa, the legal system promoted, protected and reproduced white privilege over blacks. Beginning in 1913, laws were passed to deprive blacks of their resources and rights, and confine them in the “reserves” that later became bantustans. Especially after the National Party came to power after World War II, laws compelled black Africans to move to bantustans and allowed for their deportation there, forcing them to become migrant laborers. And, concomitantly, a law was passed that made resistance to deportations illegal.[6]

Israel has also enshrined privilege in law, either with the purpose of excluding Palestinians or assuming minimal responsibility for them, in line with the different colonial dynamic. The Basic Law—there is still no constitution—establishes a “Jewish state” and states that Jews across the world are eligible for citizenship. This right is denied to those Palestinians who were born in what is now Israel and became refugees in 1948, to the refugees’ descendants and to Palestinians born in the areas under occupation since 1967.

In the Occupied Territories, two legal systems are operative: Israeli civil law, which applies extra-territorially to Jewish settlers, and military courts for the Palestinians. The South African Human Sciences Research Council said of these courts that their procedures “violate international standards for the prosecution of justice.”[7] The 1993 Oslo accords spawned still a third legal system that, together with the second, bears some resemblance to what obtained in the bantustans. The PA built a court system with nominal jurisdiction over Area A—Gaza and the main West Bank towns—while in Area B, authority is shared with the Israeli army and in Area C the military holds unfettered sway. Palestinian jurisdiction over Area A is nominal, because the Israeli army moves into these districts at will to arrest and extrajudicially execute Palestinians. From 1967 to the present day, settlements, checkpoints, barriers and bypass roads have been erected in breach of international law, and occasionally overriding Israeli civil law. In 2004, the International Court of Justice called upon Israel to “cease forthwith the works of construction” upon the wall, while the Israeli Supreme Court has repeatedly ordered the wall rerouted so as to infringe less upon Palestinian lands and livelihoods. At the same time, Israel is spared the mundane tasks of law enforcement in Area A; the PA stops motorists for speeding and collects the garbage.

Land and Space

The most striking parallel between white rule in South Africa and Israeli rule over the Palestinians is land policy. Both of these settler-colonial formations sought to transfer land ownership to members of the dominant society and then prevent its alienation. Over time, blacks and Palestinians were dispossessed and confined to smaller and smaller areas. Blacks could not own land in white areas. Until very recently in Israel, once the Jewish National Fund owned a plot of land, it could not revert to Arab ownership, and Palestinians who are citizens of the state still face various restrictions on building. Palestinians in the Occupied Territories cannot buy land in a Jewish settlement.

But the different demographics required different means of physically separating the dominant and dominated populations. Blacks in South Africa were forcibly removed to the bantustans, assigned on the basis of an official tribal classification. In the white imagination, each bantustan correlated with a cultural identity such that Swaziland, for example, was home to the Swazi, Ndebele to the Ndebele and Kwazula to the Xhosa. Most significantly, with the bantustans classified as “independent” by the state, their residents were no longer citizens of South Africa. Yet control over defense, security, economic policy and activity and the monetary system was in the hands of the South African government. Interestingly, on the diplomatic front, only Israel and South Africa recognized the bantustans. The bantustans tended to be located in resource-poor rural areas that could not support sustained agriculture. Thus did the white rulers maintain a pool of readily available labor.

The Zionist movement did not desire to integrate the indigenous population into a new political entity. Thus expulsion became a mode of dealing with demography. In 1948, the fledgling state of Israel expelled or engineered the flight of the bulk of the Palestinian population, with many of the refugees and native Gazans and West Bankers winding up under the rule of Egypt or Jordan. In 1967, Israel conquered the areas occupied by Egypt and Jordan, and since then it has tried in various ways to compel voluntary migration. The interlocking system of permits, bypass roads, the wall, checkpoints and settlements is a policy of territorial control but also one of immiseration.

After 1993, the resemblance of the Occupied Territories to apartheid South Africa increased. Officially, the Oslo accords fragmented the West Bank and Gaza into Areas A, B and C, which already rendered the Palestinian polity non-contiguous and subject to varying systems of law. The PA was accorded control over civilian functions in the areas under its nominal control. Israel continues to control the borders, trade and the civil registry. In effect, the PA has limited jurisdiction over the population and little over the bulk of the land. Security is in the hands of the Israel military as well as joint Palestinian-Israeli committees in which Israel retains overall control. Unofficially, but intentionally, the zones allotted to the Palestinians have been further disaggregated by settlements, bypass roads and checkpoints. Three main settlement blocs jut eastward into the West Bank, effectively chopping this zone into three parts. But the lattice of settlements and roads means the three parts are really an archipelago of enclaves corresponding loosely to Palestinian towns or regions: Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Jericho, Bethlehem, Hebron and South Hebron. After 2003, the wall sliced the land into still more pieces.

The West Bank enclaves are self-contained to varying degrees, with Qalqilya at the extreme end being surrounded on three sides by the wall with only a narrow aperture on the fourth. Whereas the bantustans were legislated and named, in the West Bank the spaces of confinement are still emergent and unnamed. People have not been assigned to them. As Israel has circulated no plan to carve out enclaves, they constitute a sort of gray area, with ambiguous and shifting borders in contrast to the tidiness, as it were, of the bantustans. But they also correspond to Area A—the districts given over to PA administration under Oslo and intended to be the kernels of an eventual Palestinian state. Thus Israeli leaders can speak about Palestinian independence and statehood while at the same time building settlements and further obstructing any possibility that this state could be contiguous.

And then there is Gaza, the enclave that, in the post-Oslo era, probably comes closest to resembling an actual bantustan.[8] Like the bantustans, Gaza has scant hope of economic growth, with its population reduced to penury and, despite the coastal strip’s “takeover” by Hamas in 2007, near total dependence on Israel for everything from hard currency to electricity. There is little pretense in Israeli discourse today that Gaza—“Hamastan” in the parlance of Israeli wags—is part of a proto-state for the Palestinians. Its main function, like the bantustans, is to enforce segregation and contain the dislocated. And yet there is a key difference, again resulting from Israel’s demographic imperative: Palestinians in Gaza resemble a surplus population, abandoned because they no longer provide labor and are no longer a major market for Israeli goods.

In the era of apartheid, black and white South Africans lived and worked in some proximity. Blacks worked the mines and factories, labored on farms, cleaned white houses and reared white children. With an economy highly dependent on black labor, black-white interaction was hardly uncommon. Indeed, it was so common that it had to be strictly regulated by law lest apartheid be corroded from within. For example, mixed marriages were outlawed and blacks could not reside in white areas. It has been decades since Jews and Palestinians had such interaction, with poignant exceptions like anti-wall activist groups and Palestinian work gangs in settlements proving the rule. Israeli Jews are increasingly so distant from the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories that laws prohibiting meaningful contact may not be needed.

Labor

The realm of labor illustrates some of the most significant differences between South African apartheid and Israeli practices. White South Africans envisioned an integrated economy but one oriented toward white ownership and low-wage black labor. That South Africa’s economy was sustained by cheap black labor seems inevitable given the lopsided demography. Work in the industrial and agricultural sectors, as well as the mines, compelled black workers to spend months away from their families living in dormitories.

From the beginnings of the Zionist project in Palestine, the quest for separation—for exclusive Jewish land and labor—was paramount. Jewish farmers weaned themselves of the Arab helpers who knew how to grow crops in the dry climate, and the pre-state Zionist movement made a priority of acquiring the most fertile land. Massive Jewish immigration after World War II meant that Israel could easily staff its nascent industrial and service sectors with Jews. Palestinian labor was appealing, however, because it was available and less expensive than Jewish labor. After 1967, Israel began to import cheap Palestinian labor across the Green Line. It was a colonial measure, because Israel simultaneously stymied the growth of Palestinian agriculture and industry through land expropriation and structural obstacles. Thus was labor freed for work in Israel and the settlements; passage into Israel was regulated by the state, through the permit system. Palestinians were made “dependent on Israeli demand and regulations.”[9] In the mid-1980s, 45 percent of the Gaza labor force and 32 percent of West Bank workers were employed in Israel. By the mid-1990s, Israel was replacing the Palestinians with Thais, Filipinos, Romanians and Russians. At the same time, the Israeli economy began a discernible shift toward the high-tech security industry and exporting on a global scale.

In short, “security” aside, black and Palestinian mobility beyond their bantustans or enclaves has been largely a function of the dominant economy’s demand, or lack of it, for their labor. South Africans spoke openly about the surplus population, that is, those not working in the white-dominated economy. They were to be confined to the bantustans. In Israel-Palestine, those still needed for work are given permits to move about and those not needed find themselves increasingly cooped up in their cantons. Again, Gaza is the most powerful case in point.

Mobility

Colonial regimes impose controls upon mobility in order to organize labor, to maintain designated spaces free of the colonized, to the extent of literally preventing their visibility, and to obstruct political organizing. Apartheid in South Africa mandated that blacks carry on their persons at all times a passbook containing a photograph, fingerprints and employment history. The passbook made it easy to classify each black person and allow him to move from one place to another—or not.

Comparisons to South Africa’s notorious passbooks sprung up in Israel-Palestine after the Oslo accords, which lent a veneer of legality to draconian controls over Palestinian mobility. Until the early 1990s, human movement across the Green Line was fairly open. In the late 1980s, Israel began to issue permits to workers from Gaza. After Oslo, the permit system was extended and gradually tightened to where it is today, such that one needs a permit to enter Israel but also to move from place to place in the West Bank, often to reside in one’s own village or town, and to enter Jerusalem. Palestinian farmers living near the wall often need permits to go to their fields on the “Israeli” side of the barrier, which cuts through the hinterlands of their villages. The permit system not only regulates the movement of labor, it also acts as a form of punishment and disciplining of the native population. In this regard, it appears analogous to the South African passbook system. The permits also serve as a mechanism for depriving Palestinians of access to their land. If one’s land is left uncultivated because a gate in the wall is closed, the land can be more easily expropriated.

With replacement workers from abroad, there was no longer much need for a supply of Palestinian labor. A Palestinian desiring a permit to enter Israel, particularly a man, was increasingly seen as a potential suicide bomber rather than a strong back. Thus the permit system was recast under the rubric of security, and permits became more and more difficult to acquire. Israeli controls on Palestinian mobility are arguably worse than the passbook system, because they are capricious and random. A trucker headed from Ramallah to Hebron never knows which checkpoint along the way will be backed up for hours and where on the road a “flying checkpoint”—one or two army jeeps and a cement block—will appear. The constant and arbitrary changing of the rules renders daily life for Palestinians in the West Bank unpredictable. Apartheid in South Africa was highly regulated and predictable.

Historically, South Africa and Israel have induced high levels of forced migration. The white South Africans engaged in mass deportations of blacks from one area to another, especially during the 1960s, when the government was attempting to consolidate the bantustans and draw boundaries in response to white farmers’ desire for more land. In these years, nearly 2 million blacks were removed from their homes to another area.[10] Half the Palestinian population of about 8 million is made up of refugees, most from the fighting in 1948 and some from the war in 1967. Today Palestinians are being displaced through of a policy of immiseration designed to induce ostensibly voluntary migration from rural areas to urban areas and abroad.

A Strategic Question

By the terms of international law, there is apartheid in the Palestinian lands occupied by Israel in 1967. The Israeli system of rule over Palestinians can be credibly described, and to some extent analyzed, as something akin to apartheid as it was practiced in South Africa until 1994. But as a framework for activism and advocacy, the language of apartheid is heavily freighted with history, to wit, its indelible association with one particular historical experience. The international community eventually rejected and sanctioned apartheid in South Africa, whereas it has been difficult to mobilize international support for Palestinian rights. Apartheid South Africa had little external support comparable to Israel’s and defenders of its ideology and practices were precious few.

Another critical difference is that the UN and the international community gave South African apartheid the cold shoulder; the world body and other nations (except, again, Israel) refused to recognize the bantustans as independent political entities. In Israel-Palestine, there is a long history of warm world support for the concepts of territorial partition and ethno-religious separation. The UN formally endorsed partition in 1947, and today every major effort to bring peace to Israel-Palestine or engender amity between its peoples is predicated upon the two-state solution. More to the point, the international community, led by the US, has thrown its weight behind the untenable two-state vision associated with the Oslo accords and their successor, the “road map” drawn up on the watch of President George W. Bush. The “Quartet” of the US, the European Union, Russia and the UN secretariat is promoting a peace process that calls for neither a complete Israeli withdrawal from all territories captured in 1967 nor the dismantlement of the bulk of the settlements built since then. The international community has given its blessing to the idea of a non-contiguous Palestinian entity.

The international community, or at least the precincts of it that call the shots, also continues to view the apartheid-like practices of Israel in the Occupied Territories through the prism of security. The US harshly rejected the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice against the wall in East Jerusalem and the West Bank (and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, then on the presidential campaign trail, hastened to concur, lest anyone find partisan daylight between him and Bush on this score). The US sees the wall as a legitimate means of deterring Palestinian attacks on Israel, a defense it extends to checkpoints, restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement, home demolitions, extrajudicial executions and other violations of international law. Most dramatically, the US, with the tacit backing of European and Arab allies, has eagerly enforced the years-long siege on Gaza and acquiesced in several Israeli assaults upon the territory, including the egregious Operation Cast Lead over the winter of 2008-2009. The international community appears to see no contradiction between its simultaneous support for a “viable Palestinian state” and the physical and virtual amputation of Gaza from the Palestinian body politic. The siege of Gaza is an apartheid measure, if ever there was one.

All this suggests that there is long, hard work ahead in the effort to mobilize international support for Palestinian rights. The question of what language to use in that effort is therefore strategic, not tactical. Ferreting out the parameters of the analogy to apartheid in South Africa suggests a new direction, the local language of separation. It may be time to question the use of the analogy seriously and explore the terminology used by the Israeli state to frame its own actions, just as activists adopted the word white South Africans used for their system of rule. Perhaps the Hebrew hafrada can one day become a rallying cry as powerful as “apartheid” was in its day.

Endnotes

[1] Human Sciences Research Council, Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A Reassessment of Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Under International Law (Cape Town, May 2009), p. 13.

[2] Leila Farsakh, “Independence, Cantons or Bantustans: Whither the Palestinian State?” Middle East Journal 59/2 (Spring 2008), p. 238.

[3] Desmond Tutu, “Apartheid in the Holy Land,” Guardian, April 29, 2002.

[4] John Dugard, “Israel Adopts What South Africa Dropped,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 29, 2006.

[5] Shulamit Aloni, “This Road Is for Jews Only. Yes, There Is Apartheid in Israel,” Counterpunch, January 8, 2007.

[6] Barbara Rogers, Divide and Rule: South Africa’s Bantustans (London: International Defense and Aid Fund, 1976), pp. 9, 17-24.

[7] Human Sciences Research Council, p. 17.

[8] See Darryl Li, “Disengagement and the Frontiers of Zionism,” Middle East Report Online, February 16, 2008.

[9] Leila Farsakh, “The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation: What Is Colonial About It?” MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 8 (Spring 2008), p. 48.

[10] Rogers, pp. 26-27.

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• Posted by Iqbal Tamimi on November 20, 2009 at 4:30am
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• Posted by Iqbal Tamimi on November 20, 2009 at 4:30am
• View Iqbal Tamimi’s blog

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Sam Jadallah

Illustration: Carlos Latuff

November 3 marked, in the words of political blogger Philip Weiss, a “historically dark day” in the U.S. Congress. House Republicans and Democrats lined up to vote against the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission carried out by Justice Richard Goldstone and to bash Goldstone, a committed Zionist, because he had the temerity to detail Israel’s war crimes in Gaza this past winter. Expressing not a word of concern regarding the over 300 Palestinian children killed in Israel’s attacks, the disappointing resolution places our Congress on the front lines of denying documented war crimes.

Congressional rhetoric continues to place blame on Palestinians, insisting to a large extent that they are responsible for their own misery. But it is absurd to think that Palestinians will simply surrender to life under permanent discrimination and iron-fisted military rule.

Freedom and equality must be centerpieces of American efforts to secure peace in the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects this with misleading words and ongoing colonization of Palestinian territory. He offers caveats, limitations and conditions to ensure Palestinians will not realize fundamental aspirations and dreams.

His newest condition demands that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state, despite 20 percent of Israel’s population being Palestinian. This demand is akin to George Wallace insisting Martin Luther King Jr. recognize the U.S. as a white state. Yet, American leaders, who would never support the United States as a white state, uphold this in Israel despite such language implicitly relegating Palestinian citizens to inferior status.

Already, over 20 Israeli laws favor Jewish citizens and discriminate against Palestinians. And in the Israeli-controlled West Bank, Palestinians face segregated roads, unequal distribution of water and a dual system of law.

The question is how to break the impasse. I look to guidance Nelson Mandela offered from his prison cell. He asked, “What freedom am I being offered when I must ask permission to live in an urban area? What freedom am I being offered when I need a stamp in my pass to seek work?”

I have profound doubts as to Netanyahu’s intentions when days ago a university student in Bethlehem was transferred back to Gaza because she was in the occupied West Bank “illegally.” Israel’s pass stamps for this young woman, Berlanty Azzam, are just as noxious as in apartheid South Africa.

Palestinian lives are increasingly shaped by stunting discrimination and despair. The time is long past for “economic progress,” “easing

A view of Israel’s separation wall that separates occupied East Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank. (Magnus Johansson, Maan Images)

travel restrictions” and other baby steps for Palestinians that avoid a just and legally based solution. Only a focus on the prize — freedom and equality, neither of which can be concessions — will prevent the situation from dramatically worsening, and rapidly.

Americans who fought Jim Crow or apartheid must reject today’s version in the occupied Palestinian territories. America’s leadership is based on promoting freedom and equality around the world, and we must start with our allies.

South Africa achieved freedom only when President F.W. de Klerk released Mandela and legalized his “terrorist” ANC organization under external boycotts and political pressure. Clearly, Israel’s leaders are incapable of providing freedom and equality without a clear and strong message from the U.S. And the longer we support military rule and discrimination, the more we erode our leadership.

It’s time for our leadership to step up for our values and call on Israeli leaders to follow the South African path to peace. Any solution starts with a clear and immediate commitment to delivering freedom and equality.

American and Israeli leaders need to replace rhetoric with tangible freedom and equality for all people in a land so overdue these blessings.

Freedom can’t wait.

SOURCE: Mercurynews.com

Sam Jadallah

SAM JADALLAH is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, former Microsoft executive and co-founder and chairman of the board of the Institute for Middle East Understanding. He wrote this article for the Mercury News.

November 19, 2009 Posted by Elias

Link

Sam Jadallah

Illustration: Carlos Latuff

November 3 marked, in the words of political blogger Philip Weiss, a “historically dark day” in the U.S. Congress. House Republicans and Democrats lined up to vote against the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission carried out by Justice Richard Goldstone and to bash Goldstone, a committed Zionist, because he had the temerity to detail Israel’s war crimes in Gaza this past winter. Expressing not a word of concern regarding the over 300 Palestinian children killed in Israel’s attacks, the disappointing resolution places our Congress on the front lines of denying documented war crimes.

Congressional rhetoric continues to place blame on Palestinians, insisting to a large extent that they are responsible for their own misery. But it is absurd to think that Palestinians will simply surrender to life under permanent discrimination and iron-fisted military rule.

Freedom and equality must be centerpieces of American efforts to secure peace in the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects this with misleading words and ongoing colonization of Palestinian territory. He offers caveats, limitations and conditions to ensure Palestinians will not realize fundamental aspirations and dreams.

His newest condition demands that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state, despite 20 percent of Israel’s population being Palestinian. This demand is akin to George Wallace insisting Martin Luther King Jr. recognize the U.S. as a white state. Yet, American leaders, who would never support the United States as a white state, uphold this in Israel despite such language implicitly relegating Palestinian citizens to inferior status.

Already, over 20 Israeli laws favor Jewish citizens and discriminate against Palestinians. And in the Israeli-controlled West Bank, Palestinians face segregated roads, unequal distribution of water and a dual system of law.

The question is how to break the impasse. I look to guidance Nelson Mandela offered from his prison cell. He asked, “What freedom am I being offered when I must ask permission to live in an urban area? What freedom am I being offered when I need a stamp in my pass to seek work?”

I have profound doubts as to Netanyahu’s intentions when days ago a university student in Bethlehem was transferred back to Gaza because she was in the occupied West Bank “illegally.” Israel’s pass stamps for this young woman, Berlanty Azzam, are just as noxious as in apartheid South Africa.

Palestinian lives are increasingly shaped by stunting discrimination and despair. The time is long past for “economic progress,” “easing

A view of Israel’s separation wall that separates occupied East Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank. (Magnus Johansson, Maan Images)

travel restrictions” and other baby steps for Palestinians that avoid a just and legally based solution. Only a focus on the prize — freedom and equality, neither of which can be concessions — will prevent the situation from dramatically worsening, and rapidly.

Americans who fought Jim Crow or apartheid must reject today’s version in the occupied Palestinian territories. America’s leadership is based on promoting freedom and equality around the world, and we must start with our allies.

South Africa achieved freedom only when President F.W. de Klerk released Mandela and legalized his “terrorist” ANC organization under external boycotts and political pressure. Clearly, Israel’s leaders are incapable of providing freedom and equality without a clear and strong message from the U.S. And the longer we support military rule and discrimination, the more we erode our leadership.

It’s time for our leadership to step up for our values and call on Israeli leaders to follow the South African path to peace. Any solution starts with a clear and immediate commitment to delivering freedom and equality.

American and Israeli leaders need to replace rhetoric with tangible freedom and equality for all people in a land so overdue these blessings.

Freedom can’t wait.

SOURCE: Mercurynews.com

Sam Jadallah

SAM JADALLAH is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, former Microsoft executive and co-founder and chairman of the board of the Institute for Middle East Understanding. He wrote this article for the Mercury News.

November 19, 2009 Posted by Elias