Palestinian refugees separated from their home by the "green line". 1948 UNRWA photo

Via: CounterPunch.

One State, Two States, No State

Today, September 23, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas submits, to the UN the application for Palestinian statehood for the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967.

What are the implications of this effort? Does it serve the Palestinian cause? And why do Israel and the U.S. oppose this action? What’s the alternative?

Paradoxically, this month marks the eighteenth anniversary of when Abbas stood alongside Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn in a ceremony celebrating the signing of the Oslo Accords.

As one of its architects, Abbas sold the Oslo agreement to the Palestinian people as the vehicle towards the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and the restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people.

But throughout the past two decades lofty promises were offered to the Palestinians, while endless negotiations across continents took place between Israel and the PA, which Abbas has headed since the death of Arafat in 2004: Madrid (1991), Oslo (1993), Wye River (1997), Camp David (2000), Taba (2001), Quartet’s road map (2002), Annapolis (2007), bilateral negotiations (2008), Obama’s promises for settlements freeze in Cairo (2009) and declaration of statehood within one year at the UN (2010).

But despite the fact that international law and world public opinion are overwhelmingly on the side of the Palestinians, all these efforts for establishing an independent Palestinian state were futile as they confronted the hard reality of brutal military occupation on the ground and Israeli intransigence at the negotiating table.

While the millions of Palestinian refugees in the Diaspora have been shut out of this process since Oslo, the Palestinian people living in the occupied territories have been witnessing the continued expansion of Israeli settlements on their lands as well as the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem and confiscation of their sacred places.

Let’s briefly review some of the facts from the past decade alone, during which Abbas was championing negotiations under the auspices of the supposedly “honest broker,” the United States.

Almost 6500 Palestinian civilians have been killed since September 2000, including over 1500 children. Of that figure, two-thirds (over 4400) have been killed since the Roadmap in 2003. During the same period, over 45,000 Palestinians were injured, some maimed for life, 24,000 since 2003.

There are over 6,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, including over 250 females and children under the age of 16. Half of them were arrested after 2003, many with no charges and held under administrative detention. (Since 1967, over 650,000 Palestinians have been detained and imprisoned – a staggering 20 per cent of the total population or about 1 out of every 2 men has been detained at one point in his life under the occupation.)

According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, over 25,000 Palestinian homes were demolished since 1967 –  over half since 2003, including over 4300 during the Israeli military assault on Gaza in 2008-2009.

There are 236 illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem with over 650,000 settlers confiscating Palestinian land and displacing thousands of Palestinians. Israeli settlers have more than doubled in the last ten years, controlling 43 percent of the land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem with over four hundreds checkpoints and Jewish-only roads, as well as the separation Wall snaking through Palestinian territories.

Since the 2007 siege on Gaza, 95 percent of the factories and workshops in Gaza have closed and the agricultural sector and fishing industry were severely damaged, leading to over 40 per cent unemployment (more than doubling the unemployment rate of 2003). The siege has also prevented reconstruction of thousands of homes destroyed in Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2009. As a result of the continuing damage to the water system in Gaza, at least 95 per cent of the water drawn from the system is not drinkable. The unemployment rate in the West Bank is at 17 per cent. In any economy such figures lead to severe depression and abject poverty. For the past three years more than half of Gaza’s population and a quarter of the West Bank depend on charity for their daily survival.

If these facts prove anything, they conclusively lead to the implosion of the disastrous path that Abbas and his cronies have embarked on for two decades. The current application for UN Palestinian statehood by the Palestinian leadership is thus an attempt to cover up the failure of its approach that offered major concessions on fundamental Palestinian rights in exchange for promises that were never realized.

For example the Palestinian Papers exposed earlier this year by Al-Jazeera demonstrated the horrifying degree to which the current Palestinian leadership and its negotiators were willing to concede behind closed doors on fundamental issues like the right of return of Palestinian refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, borders, security, and sovereignty only to be rebuffed by the Israelis for more concessions.

In short, the whole premise of the Oslo process was that in exchange for the Palestinian leadership’s historic recognition of the Zionist state on 78 per cent of historical Palestine, Israel would in return recognize the “State of Palestine” on 22 percent of the land, namely the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. But the problem with this approach was that one party was allowed to receive all the benefits and dictate all the terms, while the other was left begging for its rights as it was stripped of all its bargaining chips.

For decades, the world has known that the contours for any political settlement in this century-old intractable problem were hovering around either a two-state solution (the 78-22 formula), one-state (bi-national, one-man one-vote), or apartheid (one people controlling the fate of another.)

Many in the world including the U.N, the U.S, the E.U, and even liberal Zionists (hoping to preserve the Jewish majority and Zionist nature of the state) have embraced the two-state solution. But successive Israeli governments have worked incessantly to shut down this option in the hope that Israel could retain East Jerusalem and as much West Bank territory and aquifers as possible, while making life difficult for the Palestinians so they could either give up and leave, or accept the hard realities of the status quo.

Whether Shamir, Rabin, Barak, Sharon, Olmert, or Netanyahu-Lieberman; all Israeli leaders have expanded the settlements and built a segregated system in the West Bank and Jerusalem that in essence foreclosed the two-state option.

At the same time, millions of people around the world are fed up with injustices carried out by imperialist, racist, or colonialist policies. They support the notion of racial equality, of one-person one-vote in historical Palestine that would also redress the historical injustices done to the Palestinian refugees.

In essence, Abbas, who reached a dead end, is trying to salvage his failing approach by claiming a hollow diplomatic victory. But the problem with it is that it will provide Israel with the perfect pretext to deny the Palestinian refugees right of return to their historical land enshrined in international law and UN Resolution 194.

This move will also provide Israel with the justification to reject the one-state solution that guarantees real equality, democracy, justice, and genuine peace, once it fails to subjugate the Palestinians or expel them from their land.

So with this action the Palestinians are freely giving up their only remaining card to play toward any future settlement: the dissolution of the PA and the pursuit of one-state.

The Obama administration, meanwhile, is at a loss. On the one hand, President Obama has himself called last year for the establishment of the State of Palestine within a year. He declared that the two-state solution is imperative and a vital national security interest of the U.S. But on the other hand, his administration has done everything in its power to derail this effort.

The only explanation of this myopic behavior is the depth and breadth of the influence of the Israeli lobby, especially over Congress and the Republican Party. A recent New York Times article described how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton frequently calls on Israeli politicians to lobby Republican members of Congress on Middle East issues.

In one instance the paper quotes a Republican member of Congress, who said that, “Netanyahu has more credibility in the Congress than Obama.” This statement, claiming that the majority in Congress would believe a foreign leader over their president in what constitutes the national security interest of the country, is incredible and possibly treasonous.

Many in the Palestinian leadership, including Abbas’s advisors Saeb Erekat, Nabeel Shaath and Yaser Abed Rabbo, talk openly that this call for statehood is a tactical move to force Israel back to the negotiating table with some leverage and international backing. It seems that they have no intention to change their colossal path of negotiating away –behind closed doors- fundamental Palestinian rights and to continue to provide “security cooperation” against other Palestinians in the West Bank.

If Abbas were really serious about this move, he would not have waited until today to submit the statehood application, when the U.S. could demand postponing the Security Council vote (to avoid a devastating veto damaging its credibility around the world) by using a rule that allows delays for up to five weeks. Had he applied early he could have forced the U.S. to veto the resolution this week and expose its hypocrisy, while demanding the implementation of previous UN resolutions that call for Palestinian statehood, right of return, and rejecting all Israeli settlements on Palestinian territories as well as the annexation of East Jerusalem.

In short, the struggle for justice for the Palestinian people is misplaced and should not be reduced to the question of statehood on 22 percent of their historical land. Any solution addressing the Palestinian problem must deal with the main cause of this predicament.

Thus any long-lasting and genuine resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be based on the following principles.

1) The rejection of a nineteenth century political system and ideology that bestows political and civil rights in a country based on ethnicity or religious affiliation. Zionism for over a hundred years has called for the ingathering of Jews around the world in Palestine and the expulsion and exclusion of Palestinians from their homeland.

For decades Israel has prevented the implementation of UN resolution 194 calling for the return of Palestinian refugees expelled in 1948 to their cities and villages, while simultaneously granting automatic citizenship rights and housing to millions of European and American Jews in Palestinian territories, most recently to over a million Jews from the former Soviet republics in the 1990s.

In the same fashion that America abolished the system of slavery, and South Africa did away with the apartheid regime, the world must dismantle the institutions of Zionism (Jews-only rights, immigration, employment, housing, roads, benefits, etc.) Not only because this is the root of the problem, but more importantly because it is the right and moral thing to do. But fighting a racist ideology should never be allowed to be exploited by anti-Semitic groups to attack or undermine Judaism or its adherents, a religion and culture that enriched the world for millennia.

2) The historical land of Palestine (Israel, the West Bank and Gaza) is a land that belongs to all its inhabitants including the Palestinian refugees expelled in 1948 and their descendants. They should be allowed to return to their lands if they choose to do so as well as be compensated for their unjust suffering. Each citizen of this land must enjoy equal rights in a democratic, secular, and civil state. For instance, the European Union would never invite a Jewish-only democracy to join it. To qualify for such membership in the 21^st century, such a country must be a multi-ethnic democracy guaranteeing equal rights to all its citizens.

3) Any powers that deny a just resolution rooted in racial and religious equality must be exposed and rejected. The path for this struggle must be based on the unity of the Palestinian people and their supporters across the globe including world Jewry. It is also imperative that this approach embraces the struggle of non-violent resistance, civil disobedience, mass protests, and economic boycotts.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have detailed in their book “The Israel Lobby” the reasons behind the unprecedented support the U.S. has provided to Israel throughout the years to the detriment of America’s vital national interests.

In a nutshell, American tax dollars have been subsidizing Israeli occupation, repression and brutality against the Palestinians for decades. Over $170 billion dollars have been given to Israel (a quarter of which since 2003) with the most sophisticated weaponry in the US arsenal. Meanwhile, the US has cast 42 vetoes to shield Israel diplomatically from any condemnation of its illegal occupation or war crimes.

Therefore any strategy of non-violent resistance against the cruel reality of military occupation and subjugation of the Palestinian people must encompass popular resistance that includes a component that challenges the huge U.S. support, especially by a blind Congress.

It is U.S. policies, after all, which enable injustice, oppression, suffering, and Israeli intransigence. Until U.S. politicians, power brokers, military leaders, corporate executives, media conglomerates, and opinion makers are forced to side with what is morally right, a heavy price must be exacted through the ballot box, sanctions, boycott, and shaming them in public.

Furthermore, as the fearless masses leading the Arab uprisings continue to be successful in deposing their dictators and challenging Israeli and American hegemony in the region, the Palestinian cause will finally regain its status as the center of regional politics and at the heart of the peoples’ passions in the pursuit for justice. As profound democratic reforms sweep the Arab world in favor of a pluralistic and more equal society, the Zionist project will begin to look more like a relic from a medieval era than an enlightened enterprise.

Eventually a state that represents all its inhabitants on the basis of equality and genuine respect and dignity for all its citizens is one that the world will some day celebrate, not a phony declaration that legitimizes the oppressive nature of one and confers false hope on the other.

Esam Al-Amin can be reached at alamin1919@gmail.com.

The Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas ,has announced his intention to apply to the United Nations Security Council for full membership for a Palestinian state on Friday, 23 September 2011…

Membership at the UN according to its charter is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in it and in the judgment of the organisation, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.

The admission of any such state will be effected by a decision of the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.

A recommendation for admission from the Security Council requires affirmative votes from at least nine of the council’s fifteen members, with none of the five permanent members voting against. The Security Council’s recommendation must then be subsequently approved in the General Assembly by a two-thirds majority vote.

Despite the long term goal of the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, many Palestinian activists are discontented with this bid and are opposing it.

According to Dr Haidar Eid from the Boycott National Committee, this bid does not take into account the plight of the 7million refugees who live in atrocious conditions outside Palestinian territories.

“This bid only pleases one third of the Palestinian people,” Eid explained. On a practical level he asked, how will Palestine be established as a sovereign independent state, when Israel has expropriated most of the land?

“64% of the West Bank is under Jewish rule and Israel has created a monstrous Apartheid wall in the centre of the West Bank,” Eid emphatically stated.

According to him, the USA is not attempting to solve the Palestinian problem but merely trying to move it out of the way. He said that this will be a repetition of the Oslo Accords, which was the first direct, face-to-face agreement between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Furthermore, Eid stated that the Oslo Accords were completely frivolous as the Palestinian people were made to believe falsely that peace was imminent. “Never in the Palestinian- Israeli conflict did Israel use phosphorous bombs and M16’s against Palestinian civilians as they did after the Oslo Accords,” Eid elucidated.

Dr. Eid said that the entire world perceives that there is a misunderstanding between two states, Israel and Palestine. Rather it is a case of human rights and democracy.

“We cannot accept the two state solution because it is a racist solution par excellence,” Eid concluded.

Lessons for Decolonisation
Horace Campbell

‘Social justice and transformation in Africa and Palestine are inextricably linked,’ writes Horace Campbell. The ‘demilitarisation of the region can only be secured by uniting the peace and justice forces in all parts of the world.’

AFRICA, PALESTINE AND THE WORLD CONFERENCE AGAINST RACISM

It was ten years ago in September 2001 at the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) when the collaboration between the anti-racist forces of the world and the anti-colonial forces came together in Durban. This WCAR brought the issues of racism, reparations and the oppression of the Palestinian peoples to the centre of the international agenda. A clear programme of action had been developed to reverse colonialism and for the repair of the harms done to humanity by colonialism, racism and all forms of oppression. Indeed, the full title of the conference was the Third World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances.

No programme of action could be carried out because very soon after the conference on 11 September 2001, the world was carried into a new period of militarism and imperial aggression. Questions of the injustice of capital and neoliberal exploitation took a back seat at UN meetings.

Now ten years later, the questions of the rights of the peoples of Palestine are again on the international agenda. This question is now being posed in the context of the recognition of the right to statehood for the Palestinian people and full UN membership. The president of the Palestinian State, Mahmoud Abbas, is at the present session of the UN General Assembly in New York pressing the historic claim by the Palestinian people to be recognised. His intention to go ahead with the request for recognition of statehood is on the basis of the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as a capital.

Palestinians currently have permanent observer entity status at the UN. The people of Palestine at home and abroad now want an upgrade so a state of Palestine has full member status at the UN. At present, the State of Palestine is recognised by 122 governments around the world (mostly from among countries in Africa, the Arab League, China and the progressive states of Latin America). For decades, those forces fighting for freedom in Africa have identified with the struggles of the Palestinian peoples. When many of these movements became governments, they fully recognised the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and opened diplomatic missions for the Palestinian peoples. This article is a statement of solidarity from the forces of the Global Pan African and peace forces in support for the right of the people of Palestine to be recognised by the United Nations.

AFRICANS AND THE PAN AFRICAN MOVEMENT RECOGNISE THE STATEHOOD OF THE PEOPLES OF PALESTINE

I remember during our years of work in the Liberation Committee at the University of Dar es Salaam, the question of solidarity with Palestine was front and centre with support for the liberation movements fighting against colonialism and apartheid. Ambassador Ali Halimeh of the PLO brought to the liberation movements his experience in order to enrich the general level of debate on liberation. In 1982, with the massacre of the innocent peoples at Sabra and Shatillah, the full nature of Israeli oppression became clearer to the exploited in Africa. From the period of Sabra and Shatillah to the recent siege of Gaza in 2009, the actions of the Israeli state against the peoples of Palestine mounted crimes upon crimes. These crude experiences of death and destruction clarified the expansionist and militarist nature of the Israeli project in North Africa. Ambassador Halimeh went on to become the PLO ambassador in Zimbabwe and is currently the PLO ambassador in South Africa. He has worked tirelessly to bring progressive Africans together with the peoples of Palestine

African peoples from the progressive sections of the movement for freedom have always opposed the apartheid conditions of Palestine. Long before Uri Davis published his famous work, ‘Israel: An Apartheid State’, Pan-African revolutionaries such as Malcolm X and the civil rights activists of the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had articulated the linkages between Zionism and racism. Stokely Carmichael was demonised by those who were afraid to speak the truth about the true role of Israel in Africa as a junior partner of US imperialism. It was therefore not coincidental that the issues of Zionism and racism would split the United States and the United Nations because there is always discomfort with a serious discussion of racism. There will be discussions of prejudice and discrimination but capital does not want a systematic discussion of how racism is crucial for the exploitation of those who are deemed inferior and under the heel of capital. The Palestinian question at the UN brings back questions of institutional racism in international relations.

Palestinian affinity with the African freedom struggle did not come out of a vacuum. African and Palestinian freedom fighters were fully aware of the levels of cooperation between the Israeli state and the self-declared apartheid state of South Africa. Whether it was collaboration in the development of the apartheid nuclear capability or cooperation in biological and chemical warfare, the full gambit of the twin apartheid cooperation had come out during the anti-apartheid struggles. It was during this period when progressive sections of the Jewish community in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa came out forcefully against apartheid.

In June 2001, within the context of the intellectual and political struggles of the World Conference against Racism, Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two major Jewish freedom fighters from South Africa published a letter in a South African Newspaper comparing Israeli’s occupation of Palestine and South African apartheid. This position was supported by hundreds of prominent Jewish leaders and although the letter was written in 2001, the contents still ring true today, ten years afterwards. The statement entitled, ‘Not in My Name’, called for an immediate end to the occupation and sparked a healthy debate within the context of developing the lines of debate for the World Conference against racism.

Those who opposed the discussion of Palestine within the context of the United Nations also came out in full force to oppose the holding of a full review conference of the WCAR. After every major UN conference there is a review after five years. Because of the pressure from the Israeli lobby, there were such intense pressures from the US Congress that a watered down review was held in April 2009. It is from among the African descendants of Latin America where there is still pressure to address the questions of racism at the international level and to continue to link the issue of Palestine to global apartheid.

More recently one of the most prominent South African cartoonists Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro) has pointed out why he is opposed to the occupation of Palestinian lands. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has not only joined in speaking out against the apartheid conditions in Palestine, he has been a strong supporter of the divestment campaign within North American universities calling on universities to divest from companies that enable and profit from the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and violation of Palestinian human rights. In a letter to students at the University of California Berkeley, (who have been at the forefront of this divestment campaign) he wrote, ‘Principled stands like this, supported by a fast growing number of US civil society organizations and people of conscience, including prominent Jewish groups, are essential for a better world in the making, and it is always an inspiration when young people lead the way and speak truth to power.’

These voices are essential for a period of repair and renewal in Africa and the Middle East. The debate in the United Nations is once again bringing back attention to the mischief making of Israel in Africa. On top of the alliance with apartheid, the Israel role in imposing Idi Amin on Africa (with the long term devastating consequences) and the role of Israel in counter-revolution in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Kenya is still to be fully elaborated. Israeli’s role in the blood diamond business is also a story that requires full exposure. Nearly every mineral producing state in Africa, especially those producing precious stones and diamonds have developed exploitative relationships with Israeli business people and state personnel. The Egyptian revolution of January 2011 has reopened the entire debate on Israel in the Middle East and North Africa and no counter-revolution or war can stifle the need for a new direction in North Africa and the Middle East. Those intellectuals from Africa and the Middle East who support peace and social justice must now do the kind of work that can speed up the demilitarisation of Africa and the Middle East. Without this de-militarisation, the authors of militarism will plunge the entire region into even more bloodshed than we have witnessed in the past 30 years

VOICES AGAINST OCCUPATION IN NORTH AMERICA

At the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001 there were calls for a rigorous examination of the apartheid conditions in Palestine. The supporters of Israel vigorously opposed this designation of Israel as an apartheid state occupying the lands of the people of Palestine but the resistance of the Palestinian peoples kept the question of apartheid firmly on the international agenda. Former president of the United States, Jimmy Carter who during his presidency worked hard to bring peace in the Middle East was one of the most senior persons in the US political establishment to highlight the truth about the Israeli expropriation of Palestine and brutalisation of the Palestinian people. His book, ‘Palestine, Peace not Apartheid’ was a modest effort by a US leader dedicated to peace to bring to the Christian community in the world the unchristian and militaristic behaviour of the Israeli state.

President Jimmy Carter who is a supporter of the state of Israel was seeking to win those in the US political establishment to the view that Israeli sovereignty and security can coexist permanently and peacefully with Palestinian nationhood. The militaristic forces in the US establishment would not want to hear and Jimmy Carter was vilified. The US media and cultural institutions wanted to cover up the real ugly facts of confiscations, jailing, group punishment, economic strangulation, systematic colonization, extraordinary PR, expulsions, killing, land theft, water theft, religious fanaticism, gradual takeover of the whole country and the attempts to imprison an entire peoples. This information is known all over Africa and the Middle East but we are again confronted with the realities of Palestine with the discussions of statehood at the United Nations.

The Palestinian peoples are using the forum of the United Nations to bring to the fore the questions of decolonisation. The United States, a country that fought for its independence against British colonialism, is taking the lead to block the application of the Palestinians for full recognition. Those who have written extensively on the Israeli lobby in the United States have clarified the merging of interests between the militarists and imperial forces in the United States and the militarists in Israel. In the book, ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’, the authors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, outlined the negative impact of this lobby on the foreign policy of the United States. The authors asked a question that many academics in the US did not want to pose, why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?

The authors noted that:

‘Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.’

Although the writers correctly spelt out the negative influence of the conservative Israeli lobby and the deformed discussions within the US body politic, these writers did not have an operational understanding of modern imperialism and the deep integration between the barons of Wall Street and the military/financial/military complex. The reality is that the interests of Israel and the USA are identical when it comes to colonialism. In 1948 when the state of Israel was implanted in Palestine there had been residual sympathy for Israel in the wake of the crimes against humanity committed against the Jews during the Holocaust. Yet, the same peoples who suffered under the Nazis have allowed social forces with Nazi ideas to come to dominate the politics of the state of Israel. These social forces within Israel have become so dominant that their alliance with neo-conservatives in the United States and Europe provide a social base for militarists and the modern crusaders.

The forces within the peace and social justice movement in the United States have for decades understood the convergence of interests between the militarists in the USA and the militarists in Israeli. Oil companies have also understood the usefulness of support for Israel as a police for international capital in the Middle East. Today, in the moment of revolutionary uprisings when the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East are fighting to throw off the yoke of dictatorship and oppression, the question of the rights of the Palestinian people is central to the question of the rights to self-determination of all peoples. Decolonisation is also linked to popular control over national resources. The recolonisation of Africa by imperial armies is now concentrating the minds of democratic forces internationally.

Currently, there are close to 35 remaining colonies in the world. Just as how the United States is energetically blocking the statehood of the Palestinian peoples, it is also blocking the question of self-determination of other colonial peoples. Whether it is the question of Puerto Rico or the issue of the decolonisation of the Western Sahara, the US uses its diplomatic clout to support colonial oppression. In fact, this convergence of militarism has been so extensive that for the past 40 years the conservatism of the Israeli militarists became more and more extreme at the same moment when neoconservativism was taking hold of the US body politic.

The War on Terror supported these conservatives and all over Africa governments and security services became de facto allies of the US and Israel. Leaders such as Ben Ali of Tunisia and Mubarak of Egypt who used the War on Terror as the basis of their alliance with Israel and the United States have been removed. It is the new political reality that has emboldened the leaders of the Palestinian authority to again seek to rally the Palestinian people to press their claims on the world. The question of the debate of the statehood of the Palestinian people is bringing back to the centre stage questions of colonialism and illegal settlements. African peoples are seeing the full impact of land grab from the Palestinian people as there is a new land grab going on in Africa.

Peace and justice forces will have to intensify work to ensure that the militarists do not use this moment of crisis to push the Middle East and North Africa into another period of war. The questions of decolonisation, reparations, peace and justice are interwoven and the global Pan-African movement must vigorously support the statehood claim of the Palestinians. Some may claim that statehood will not change the reality and others will point to the reality that some sections of the Palestinian authority are as backward as some nationalist leaders in Africa. However, the issues of the colonial occupation of Palestine are more important than any section of the leadership of Palestine. What is urgent is for all the experiences of the anti-apartheid struggles and the struggles for peace to be rekindled with the new techniques of political organising in the 21st century.

The right wing government in Israel has turned its back on peaceful negotiations and is continuing the expansion of settlements. The recent uprisings all over North Africa and the Middle East have exposed the objective alliances between the dictators, monarchs, the settlers in Israel and the militarists in Israel. Recently sections of the population of Israel have come out in demonstrations against the conservative and ultra conservative political leadership in Israel. President Obama and those in the US who are opposing statehood for the Palestinians are also opposing those who want peace in Israel.

The grovelling of President Barack Obama before the Israeli lobby has diminished his standing in the world and is forcing progressives to take the peace question into their own hands to mobilise and organise to end this obscene era of wars and militarism. Obama has promised to use the veto power of the United States to block the application for statehood of the Palestinians and it is more than likely that the imperial position will prevail, but it should be on the record that the Pan-African movement supports the right of the peoples of Palestine to be fully represented at the United Nations.

Additionally, progressives must intensify their efforts to work within and outside the organs of the United Nations such as UNESCO, the ILO, WHO and UN Human Rights agencies to support the exposure of Israeli crimes of occupation and illegal settlement. In the aftermath of September 11, many Arabs faced rejuvenated discrimination and the realities of racism and Islamophobia. Today, some of those who call themselves Arabs in Libya are killing and butchering innocent black Africans in Libya. Others who support a racist Pan Arab project are supporting war, chauvinism and instability in Sudan. The progressive Pan-African forces support the statehood of the Peoples of Palestine and want to link the cause of Palestine solidarity with the global struggles against racism and colonialism.

It is not only peace with the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbours that is incompatible with support for the militarism. Peace is also incompatible with the work of religous fundamentalists (Christians, Jewish and Islamic) who use religion to promote war. The opposition to the statehood for the people of Palestine is also opposition to those who want peace in Israel. Social justice and transformation in Africa and Palestine are inextricably linked and the demilitarisation of the region can only be secured by uniting the peace and justice forces in all parts of the world.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Horace Campbell is professor of African-American studies and political science at Syracuse University. He is the author of ‘Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA’. See www.horacecampbell.net.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Via: WSWS.

President Obama delivered an empty and arrogant sermon to the United Nations Wednesday, laced with platitudes about “peace” that were designed to mask Washington’s predatory policies.

The American president received a tepid response from the assembled heads of state, foreign ministers and UN delegates. Not a single line in his speech evoked applause. The novelty of two years ago, when Obama made his first appearance before the body posing as the champion of multilateralism in contrast to Bush, has long since worn off. As the world quickly learned, changing the occupant of the White House did little to shift the direction of American foreign policy or curb the spread of American militarism.

The immediate purpose of Obama’s 47-minute address was to supplement a behind-the-scenes campaign of bullying and intimidation aimed at forcing the Palestinian Authority to drop its plan to seek a UN Security Council vote on recognition of Palestine as a sovereign member state.

Washington has vowed to veto any bid for Palestinian statehood if it comes to the Security Council, a move that would only underscore the real character of US imperialist policy in the Middle East and the hypocrisy of its claims to identify with the revolutionary upheavals of the Arab masses.

The speech and Obama’s defense of the veto threat served to accomplish the same purpose, further diminishing the US president’s popularity in the Arab world. According to a recent poll, his favorable rating in the region has fallen from roughly 50 percent when he took office to barely 10 percent, even lower than George W. Bush in his second term.

Obama rushed from the podium at the General Assembly hall to a meeting and joint appearance with Benyamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister praised Obama’s remarks and made it clear that the two are working on a joint strategy to muscle Palestine Authority head Mahmoud Abbas into dropping the statehood bid. It was reported Thursday that there were efforts to get the Palestinian delegation to make an entirely symbolic plea for recognition, while agreeing to postpone any vote until after the resumption of US-brokered negotiations with Israel.

There have been two decades of such talks, which have achieved nothing, while Israel has relentlessly expanded Zionist settlements in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. Since the onset of negotiations in 1991, the number of settlers has more than doubled, while the West Bank has been internally divided by settlements, security roads and checkpoints as well as the apartheid security wall separating it from Israel.

Obama’s remarks in the UN speech represented an even further accommodation to Israel compared to his proposal in May for a resumption of talks, which he then said should be based upon pre-1967 borders with “mutually agreed swaps.” That statement, which implicitly supported Israel’s demand to retain existing settlements, merely reiterated the official policy of the US government since the Clinton administration. Nonetheless, the mere reference to borders provoked a storm of criticism from Netanyahu, the Israeli right and the Republican Party.

In his speech to the UN, Obama mentioned neither the 1967 borders nor any proposal to halt the expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Instead, he presented the basis for proposed negotiations as: “Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security. Palestinians deserve to know the territorial basis of their state.” As the rest of the US president’s remarks made clear, both those conditions are to be dictated by Israel.

While behind the scenes US officials are reportedly threatening the Palestinian Authority with cutting off all US aid if it goes ahead with the request for recognition, in his speech Obama described a turn to the UN as a “short cut” that would accomplish nothing.

Dismissing the role of the institution that he had rhetorically praised at the outset of his remarks, Obama said, “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the UN—if it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now.” Indeed, scores of UN resolutions on the plight of the Palestinians have been repudiated and ignored by both Israel and Washington. The US has used its veto in the Security Council to kill scores more.

Evidently responding to the right-wing criticism of Republican presidential hopefuls, who have denounced him for “throwing Israel under the bus” with his 1967 borders remark last May, Obama went out of his way to dismiss the historical grievances of the Palestinian people, while identifying unconditionally with Israel.

Of the Palestinians, he said only that they deserved a “sovereign state of their own” and they “have seen that vision delayed for too long.”

This was followed by a declaration that “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakable, and our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring.” He continued by describing Israel as a country “surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it,” whose “citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses.” He referred to Israel as a “small country” in a world “where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map.” And he wound up by invoking the Holocaust.

“These facts cannot be denied,” he said. One would never guess from this selection of “facts” that some 4 million Palestinians live under the oppression and constant violence of Israeli occupation, and that another 5 million are refugees, driven from their homeland.

Nor for that matter, would one have any inkling of the constant wars that “little Israel,” with its elastic borders, has waged against its neighbors. Among the more recent are the 2006 war against Lebanon, which left 1,200 civilians dead and much of the country’s infrastructure in ruins, and the 2008 “Operation Cast Lead,” against Gaza, which claimed the lives of nearly 1,500 Palestinians, compared to 13 Israelis.

With a tone of exasperation, Obama acknowledged that “for many in this hall” the Palestinian question was the issue that “stands as a test” for Washington’s claims to champion human rights and democracy.

In reality, however, the rest of the speech proved just as revealing in terms of the hypocrisy and imperialist interests that pervade Washington’s policies all over the world.

The pretense laid out at the beginning of Obama’s speech was that the US government is engaged in “the pursuit of peace in an imperfect world.” The address included a trite refrain, repeated three times: “peace is hard.”

Fleshing out this theme, Obama pointed to the partial troop withdrawals from the eight-and-a-half-year-old war and occupation in Iraq and the decade-old war in Afghanistan. He bragged that by the end of the year, only 90,000 US troops will be deployed in these wars.

Washington’s aim, he said, was to forge an “equal partnership” with Iraq “strengthened by our support for Iraq—for its government and its security forces,” and an “enduring partnership” with “the people of Afghanistan.” He claimed that these changes proved that “the tide of war is receding.”

The rhetoric about “partnership”, however, refers to the plans being pursued by the White House and the Pentagon to keep US troops, CIA operatives and American bases in both countries, long past the dates set for US withdrawal. US imperialism is determined to continue pursuing the goal that underlay the wars from the outset: hegemonic control over the strategic energy reserves of the Caspian Basin and the Persian Gulf.

Obama then proceeded to extol the “Arab Spring,” declaring: “One year ago, the hopes of the people of Tunisia were suppressed…One year ago, Egypt had known one president for nearly thirty years.”

Needless to say, the American president made no reference as to whose support had kept the dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak in power for so long, nor to the current attempts by Washington to salvage the regimes they headed and suppress the mass popular movements that forced their ouster.

From there, he proceeded to praise the NATO war in Libya, declaring that by authorizing this imperialist intervention, “the United Nations lived up to its charter.”

In reality, the war represented a fundamental violation of the tenets of this charter, which proclaims the “sovereign equality” of all member states, demanded that all disputes be settled peacefully and insisted that member states “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

In the case of Libya, the US and its NATO allies, citing the threat of an imminent massacre in Benghazi, procured a resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. It utilized this resolution as a cover for a war for regime-change. The NATO powers carried out thousands of air strikes and sent in special forces troops to organize, train and arm a “rebel” force for a war that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Libyans. The aim of this war, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq before it, is domination of strategic energy reserves, as well as inserting Western military power in the midst of a region facing revolutionary turmoil.

“This is how the international community is supposed to work,” Obama declared in relation to the Libyan operation, calling to mind Lenin’s description of the League of Nations, the UN’s predecessor, as a “thieves’ kitchen.”

Turning to uncompleted business and potential imperialist interventions yet to come, Obama condemned Iran for failing “to recognize the rights of its own people” and called for the UN impose new sanctions against Syria. “Will we stand with the Syrian people, or with their oppressors?” he demanded.

Given the bloody events in Yemen, where over 100 civilians have been massacred over the past three days, Obama could not completely ignore the upheavals against US-backed regimes in the region. In Yemen, however, there was no invocation to stand against oppressors, merely a call to “seek a path that allows for a peaceful transition.”

Even more tepid was his reference to Bahrain, the headquarters of the US 5th Fleet. “America is a close friend of Bahrain,” he declared. Here, where thousands have been killed, tortured, imprisoned, beaten and fired from their jobs for demanding democratic rights, he proposed merely a “meaningful dialogue,” while justifying the repression by suggesting that Bahrainis were confronting “sectarian forces that would tear them apart.”

The rest of the speech consisted of a hollow and unconvincing recitation of the usual platitudes. These included the elimination of nuclear weapons—with Washington, sitting on the greatest nuclear arsenal in the world and the only state ever to use such weapons, lecturing North Korea and Iran. He inveighed

against poverty and disease and insisted on the need “not to put off action that “a changing climate demands.” Thrown in were calls for the rights of women as well as gays and lesbians.

On the decisive issue facing millions of working people in the US and across the globe, Obama acknowledged that economic “recovery is fragile,” that “too many people are out of work” and that “too many are struggling to get by.” Referring to the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the banks, he boasted, “We acted together to avert a depression in 2009” and insisted that “We must take urgent and coordinated action once more.”

But as with all the other issues raised in the speech, the American president had no “coordinated action,” no program and no policy to propose. In the final analysis, Obama’s empty rhetoric is an expression of the profound crisis gripping American capitalism and its ruling financial elite as it confronts economic collapse and the threat of revolutionary upheaval.

By Susan Abulhawa

‘Tears of Gaza’ by Vibeke Lokkeberg is a documentary film that should be watched by every American, to see how Israel spends our taxes. Every European should watch it, to see the true face of Israel. It should be viewed by every Arab, to renew our resolve not to allow a racist nation to wipe Palestine and her children from the map and from history.

I had read the stories from Gaza after Israel’s so called “operation cast lead”. I had read the reports. I thought I had cried enough then not to cry again. But this film went to my heart, stirred everything up, made the tears fall and fall and here I am now, with a hollow, spooned out hole in my gut because bombs were dropped on sleeping children, helicopters rained the death and disfigurement of white phosphorous on terrified civilians huddling at a UN school for shelter… and no one is doing anything about it.Tears of Gaza lays bare the lies, the cover ups and Richard Goldstone’s moral flip flopping. It takes you into the heart of Gaza’s tormented landscape to show the truth behind craven and mendacious headlines with words that describe Israel’s slaughter as an “incursion” or “self defense”. This film shows us these truths through the luminous spirits of children. It is not to be missed!

I first heard of “Tears of Gaza”, or “Gaza Traer” as the original Norwegian title is called, when Bernard Henri-Levi launched an attack against Lokkeberg and me in major newspapers throughout Europe. She and I were in touch after that and I was finally just able to get hold of the film to watch it. It is a monumentally important work. It is beautiful and painful and honest and devastating.

Vibeke Lokkeberg gives us the names, faces, and stories of three ordinary Gaza children with extraordinary spirits. We first fall in love with Yehya, a 12-year-old boy who wants to become a doctor so he can heal people who are shot by Israelis. We see him on a small motorboat, lost in the magic of childhood as he is taught to steer the boat. His beautiful eyes and brilliant smile during these moments make his tears all the harder to bear when he talks about his beloved father. The losses that follow in his life are incomprehensible and overwhelming merely to hear about.

Until you meet Amira, 14 years old, and walk through her world.

Amira is beautiful. It’s the kind of beauty that holds an ineffable pain not often seen in the young. Her life, too, is marred by death and destruction and disfigurement of her body by ammunition. She tells us that she wants to become a lawyer so she can take the Israelis to court for the crimes they’ve committed. Then, recalling her father and brothers, she admits wishing she had just “gone with them”.

Like Amira, Rasmia is far beyond her 11 years. Arabic speakers might detect things about her that non-Arabic speakers will not. This is largely because of the translation; and this is my only criticism of the film. When Rasmia goes into what seems like a waking trance, her mother tells us in Arabic that she is “imagining”. The translation says “memorizing”, which doesn’t make sense and it distracts from an important subtlety. Her mother explains that she sometimes just “imagines” things from the attacks. I suspect that most psychologists witnessing those scenes and hearing her mother’s explanation would agree that she was experiencing flashbacks and exhibiting clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another example where the wrong translation obscures important nuances is when Yehya is telling us about losing his father. He is, in fact, speaking in the third person: “when someone loses their father, it’s like they’ve lost the whole world” etc. But his words are translated as if in the first person: “when my father died, it’s like I lost the whole world.” The distinction might not seem important, until you realize that he cannot get the words out without breaking down when he speaks in the first person. It’s a faint distinction, but one that makes your heart break even more.
And we should all allow our hearts be broken over Gaza. It’s the least we can do. To hear these three children and ask others to hear them is the very least we can do. Vibeke Lokkeberg has given us a monumentally important record of what happened in December 2009 to January 2010; so no one can ever say “I didn’t know”.

Lest we forget, lest our tears dry or outrage subside, and lest our hearts heal before Palestine is free, I hope this film will be shown throughout the world, across university campuses, communities, organizations and living rooms. Take this not just as a review, but a call to action.

- Susan Abulhawa is the author of Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury 2010) and the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine.

Source.