10,000 Protest Closure of ‘Greek BBC’; Carnival Against Capitalism; Brazilians Fight Fare Hikes

Closure of “Greek BBC” Sparks Mass Protests: More than 10,000 protesters are rallying today outside the headquarters of Hellenic Broadcasting Corp (ERT), Greece’s public broadcasting station, in protest of government plans to close the station. Workers at the station have been occupying the building since the government pulled ERT off the air late Tuesday. Nearly 2,700 jobs will be lost. Greece’s two largest unions have staged a 24-hour general strike in protest, and thousands of citizens have rallied in cities around the crisis-torn country. Left-wing political parties have decried the government’s decision to close public television, while the government claims its cost-cutting measures are necessary, and that the channels will reopen later with a smaller staff.

Anti-G8 Demonstrators Stage “Carnival Against Capitalism”: Thirty-two protesters were arrested in London on Tuesday as demonstrators took to the streets to protest the world’s largest corporations in preparation for next week’s G8 summit in Ireland. Rallies outside of the headquarters of BP and Lockheed Martin coincided with a “Carnival Against Capitalism,” which saw protesters take the streets in a city-wide day of action. On June 15, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions will gather a coalition of organizations together for a “Fairer World Festival” in Belfast, featuring cultural and political events calling for an end to tax evasion for multinational corporations, food, housing and land justice, and more.

Brazilians Fights Fair Hikes: On June 12, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Sao Paulo, Brazil to protest planned increases in public transportation fares. Twenty-five demonstrators were arrested in the action planned by Free Fare, a group which advocated for free or cheaper public transportation. Police in riot gear set off tear gas in Brazil’s largest city, in the third and most violent demonstration held so far by Free Fare.

Occupy the Port: Demonstrators Confront Ship Carrying Walmart Goods

from In These Times

Hundreds of workers, activists and community members rallied yesterday at the Port of Newark, New Jersey to protest the arrival of a cargo ship carrying Walmart products manufactured in Bangladesh. The demonstrators were seeking to hold Walmart accountable for a factory fire in which 112 workers burned to death last month.

As they attempted to ‘Occupy the Port,’ protesters from Occupy Wall Street and workers’ center New Labor gathered at the entrance to Newark’s docks, chanting ‘Block the Boat! Shut It Down! Turn Walmart’s Smile Upside Down!’ Ultimately, Homeland Security and port police prevented the ralliers from entering the docks, and the cargo ship, the Maersk Carolina, arrived from Oman and unloaded its freight as scheduled. The action concluded without arrests.

On November 24, a devastating fire at the Tazreen Fashions garment factory in Bangladesh left 112 workers dead. Workers on the upper floors of the eight-story building found themselves trapped as managers prevented hundreds from leaving sewing machines even after the fire alarm sounded. Labor activists touring the burned-out building afterwards found shorts emblazoned with Walmart’s “Faded Glory” logo in the wreckage. In the ensuing weeks, it was confirmed that the factory, which had failed fire safety inspections earlier in the year, was indeed subcontracted to produce goods for suppliers of major American corporations like Sears and Walmart. Wal-Mart has maintained that one of its suppliers had subcontracted work at Tazreen Fashions “in direct violation of our policies.” But reports from Bloomberg and the New York Times revealed that Walmart, in an effort to keep costs low, had played a key role in blocking improvements to fire safety standards at factories like Tazreen.

By targeting the Port of Newark, protesters also sought to sway already tense negotiationsbetween port operators and workers of the International Longshoremen’s Association, who have threatened to walk off the job on December 29th if employers do not agree to a new contract guaranteeing increased compensation, job protections, and shift guarantees for loading and unloading crews. Though protesters hoped to inspire workers to refuse to report for work, Homeland Security and port police blockaded the entrance to the port.

In a statement written for the event, leaders from the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF) and the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity (BCWS) expressed solidarity with the port occupation. “We hope that this action will help paint a new picture and a new future, one where the deaths of mothers, husbands, brothers and sisters will not be quickly forgotten. This action proves that carelessness and death in the workplace have repercussions—especially to those companies that expect their goods to be moved as usual despite the deaths of their own workers.”

Though it could not be verified that the Maersk Carolina was carrying goods produced at the Tazreen factory, organizers of ‘Occupy The Port’ sought to draw attention to the interconnected nature of the global supply chain. The port occupation builds on a mounting wave of struggle against Walmart throughout its distribution network, from successful strikes at warehouses in California and Illinois this fall to the massive walk-outs of hundreds of retail workers at stores nationwide on Black Friday. These worker-led actions called attention to the unsafe conditions, unfair practices, illegal retaliation, and unsustainable employment that plagues workers throughout Walmart’s supply chain.

“I’m glad people came out to hold Walmart accountable,” Walmart warehouse worker Mike Compton, who went on strike with 30 other workers at a major Walmart distribution center in Illinois in September, told In These Times. “Whether it’s a factory fire in Bangladesh, or a low-wage temp job with no security or respect in America, this is what happens when major corporations like Walmart choose maximum profit over minimum levels of safety and dignity for their workers. Those products from Bangladesh that are coming off that ship today, and that will hit the shelves of America’s stores tomorrow, were made at a terrible price, and Walmart has the blood of Bangladeshi workers on its hands.”

The Army and the People are NOT One Hand: Neoliberal Hegemony and the Armed Forces in the Arab Spring

(paper delivered at DePaul University’s ‘Revolution: Past and Present’ conference, March 31, 2012)

In 1982, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent England’s national military overseas to wrest from Argentina ownership over the largely insignificant Falkland Islands, and, with her population distracted by wartime nationalist sentiment, imposed drastic neo-liberal structural adjustments upon England’s economy. Two years later, when the miners’ trade union called a widespread strike to protest the disastrous effects of market deregulation upon the working class, Thatcher’s response combined strike breakers, informants, infiltrators and police brutality with all the gusto of a military operation, and she justified her crackdown with the now-infamous saying- “We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty” (Wilenius).

In every country touched by the Arab Spring, the national military is called away from its traditional defense of the country’s borders against the ‘enemy without’, and deployed on the streets, alongside the national police force, to crush the ‘enemy within’. This peculiar contradiction- that an armed body, whose supposed purpose is to protect the freedoms of its people, is suddenly pitted against the democratic will of the people in a life-or-death struggle- exposes, behind its veil of patriotic nationalism, the true function of the army as an instrument of class warfare, integral to the solidity of the hegemonic fabric of the nation-state. This torsion in the body of the armed forces- from national borders to city streets, from national bodyguard to public enemy- echoes and reflects the trembling fault lines of a more fundamental political confrontation between the entrenched authority of the State and a popular uprising which asserts a new political voice, and confirms the assertion of Mao Zedong, found in the Little Red Book, that “according to the Marxist theory of the State, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army.”

The army’s authority over the general public, in every country touched by the Arab Spring, is ultimately autonomous of the whims or commands of the executive sovereign. Whether it decides to suppress or to support the popular uprising- whether it stands beside, or turns against, the country’s dictator- the national military in each case yields an exceptional monopoly of force, extending, under the banner of martial law, above and beyond the executive sovereign, to seize and determine the articulated contours of the balance of power that popular protest seeks to re-negotiate. Thus on November 19, 2011, a day when more than 400 military troops defected from Yemen’s Republican Guard, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, anxious, in the face of fragmenting national loyalties, to ward off a military coup, visited, along with senior government officials, thousands of stationed Republican Guard troops, assuring the soldiers that the country’s leaders are “willing to sacrifice [themselves] for the sake of the country, but you will stay. You will remain here even if we let go of authority because you are the authority…Yemen will not collapse. Yemen is steadfast due to its people and military” (Almasmari).

Faced with variegated torrents of popular unrest, the national military, in every country touched by the Arab Spring, is entrusted, as much by the particular commands of their dictator as by the general interests of the international community, with the stabilizing role of maintaining order in the midst of chaos, protecting citizens from the security vacuum, and preserving public and private property relations within their country. Should the dictator’s regime crumble, a transitional military government is then charged, in the November 2011 words of Yezid Sayigh, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, with the crucial task of “‘holding the stick in the middle’” so as to “balance emerging political currents and social forces”, and assuring, through the gradual withering away of military rule, an “orderly transition” into a secure, democratic process. However, as the Second Egyptian Revolution demonstrates, behind the transitional military regime’s facade of disinterested, democratic preservation of the functions of administrative governmentality, there often lurk the familiar puppet-strings of the old regime, which mask in turn the imperial interests of global capital.

In the final instance, the success or failure of each Arab Spring revolution hinges on the political mood of the army. In Tunisia, it was not the widespread strikes and demonstrations that ultimately forced 24-year dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to resign on January 14, but the refusal, a day earlier, of Army Chief Rachid Ammar to obey Ben Ali’s orders to shoot civilian protesters. In Egypt, when dictator Hosni Mubarak, amidst mounting tensions and rumours of a military coup, left without comment for his home by the Red Sea in Sharm el Sheik on February 11, appointing military leader Mohamed Hussein Tantawi as prime minister in his place, protesters, who throughout much of the 18-day revolution were protected from riot police violence by army forces, celebrated side by side with military soldiers on the streets of Cairo, chanting ‘The Army and the People are One Hand’. As long as he has the backing of the armed forces, the dictator’s seat is secure. Without the strong arm of the military, he finds himself powerless and empty-handed.

In his history of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, who led the insurrectionist Bolshevik Red Army through both its overthrow of Tsarist dictatorship and its establishment of a post-revolutionary military regime, speaks of this centrality of the political mood of the army to the revolutionary process, calling it

that great unknown of every revolution…[which] can be determined only in the process of a clash between the soldiers and the people…the mass of the army will be swayed in favor of the revolutionary class only when it is convinced that this class is not merely demonstrating or protesting, but is actually fighting for power and has a chance of winning…only when the soldiers become convinced that the people have come out into the streets for a life-and-death struggle- not to demonstrate against the government but to overthrow it- does it become psychologically possible for them to ‘cross over’ to the side of the people.

At a certain tipping point in the ‘clash between the soldiers and the people’, when the latter made irrevocably clear their demand, not for reform, but for fundamental regime change, the military commanders of Egypt and Tunisia, inspired by a mixture of sympathetic identification with the protesters and their own desire for power, decided to facilitate this regime change, to complete rather than to resist, to co-opt rather than to combat, to translate and transubstantiate the passions of the uprising into the foundation of their own military regime. On the other hand, the uprisings in countries such as  Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain split the army’s allegiance along tribal, religious and economic fault lines, plunging the country, torn between the preservation of the old and the destructive creation of the new regime, into total civil war.

While many troops, officers and entire regiments of each country’s armed forces deserted their dictator and created organizations, such as the Free Syrian Army or Libya’s National Liberation Army, dedicated to revolutionary regime change, many other segments of national armies remained loyal to their ruler, anxious to preserve their favored position in long-entrenched relations of economic, political or tribal dominance. In these cases, the tension between those forces that seek to perpetuate, and those that seek to supersede, the old regime’s monopoly on power, degenerates into a struggle over power itself, where the fission of the once-unitary armed forces replicates, and re-articulates itself over, the battle contours of  the greater societal rupture. Trotsky outlines this chaotic process-

The army’s crossing over to the camp of the revolution is a moral process; but it cannot be brought about by moral means alone. Different motives and attitudes combine and intersect within the army…Guerrilla fighting on the basis of a revolutionary strike cannot in itself lead to victory. But it creates the possibility of sounding the mood of the army, and after a first important victory- that is, once a part of the garrison has joined the insurrection- the guerrilla struggle can be transformed into a mass struggle in which a part of the troops, supported by the armed and unarmed population, will fight another part, which will find itself in a ring of universal hatred…when the class, moral, and political heterogeneity of the army causes troops to cross over to the side of the people, this must, in the first instance, mean a struggle between two opposing camps within the army….thus an insurrection is, in essence, not so much a struggle against the army as a struggle for the army.

If, in these cases, the fabric of society is further rent by a national army fallen short of a complete ‘crossing over to the camp of the revolution’ and unable to effect a full upheaval of the old regime, then surely the ripping-away of dictatorial rule, and the restitution of social cohesiveness by a transitional military regime, in early-2011 Egypt and Tunisia represents the successful fulfillment of this process. The Second Egyptian Revolution of 2011, in contrast, offers the unique and paradoxical instance of a popular revolutionary impulse that, after first toppling a dictator, re-turns against the transitional military regime that stepped in to fill the power vacuum, raising its fist anew against the very army with which it used to declare itself united as ‘one hand’. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, realized those protesters who returned to Tahrir Square, did not ‘cross over to the camp of the revolution’ as part of any ‘moral process’, but to maintain the oppressive structures of the old regime. Here, the enemy is no mere dictator; rather, long-entrenched dictatorial rule is peeled away, to reveal a teeming underbelly of long-cultivated, institutionalized hegemony atop which such dictatorial rule was mere surface puppetry. The revolutionary impulse thereby re-articulates itself in a purer and finer expression, directed not merely against the Master-Signifier who sits as sovereign atop the chain of power, but against the hegemonic system in its entirety, a system in which the national army shows itself to be intrinsically embedded.

To understand that military-political hegemonic nexus against which the  Second Egyptian Revolution struggles- a timely task of vital importance for any revolutionary praxis seeking to trace the contemporary contours of global Empire- we must examine the historical genesis of the Egyptian Army in the context of the power structures of the Egyptian nation-state. Like most post-imperial Third World nation-states, Egypt won its freedom of self-determination through military struggle. Since 1952, when the nationalist, pan-Arabic, anti-imperialist Gamal Abdel Nasser led the Free Officer’s Movement in a military coup against King Farouk’s Britain-backed regime, the Egyptian army has been firmly inscribed in the pride of the origin, indissolubly wed to the fabric of the body politic, secure in its national role as founder and guarantor of the independent, modern Egypt. Until the mid-1970s, the Egyptian military was the strongest institution in a nation that, up to the present day, has seen all its presidents, and many cabinet and senior governmental representatives, descend from military officer ranks.

LTC Stephen H. Gotowicki of the U.S. Army, in his 1994 paper ‘The Role of the Egyptian Military in Domestic Society’, explains that “as Egypt has democratized, the Egyptian military’s involvement in matters of national politics has declined, as has its direct involvement in matters of state”, while “at the same time, its involvement in Egypt’s national life and economy has expanded.” Beginning in the late 1970s, the Egyptian military, descending from the political into the civic sector, gained control of anywhere from 10 to 40% of the economy through heavy investments in burgeoning security, defense and civilian industries,  national infrastructure, and agricultural production, and proved itself to epitomize what MIT Comparative Politics professor Lucian Pye, in his 1961 essay ‘Armies in the Process of Political Modernization’, called the natural role of a modern military establishment- to come “as close as any human organization can to the ideal type for an industrialized and secularized enterprise”.

This domesticization and corporatization of the Egyptian military, says opinion columnist Walter Armbrust In a February 24 piece for Al-Jazeera entitled ‘A Revolution Against Neoliberalism?’, went hand in hand with the “crony capitalism of the Mubarak era”, where the “unfettering of markets and an agenda of privatization”, though considered by the developed world “to be at the forefront of instituting neoliberal policies in the Middle East” and “lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success”, exacerbated Egypt’s structural and systematic inequalities, and brought to its population “stagnant or falling wages relative to inflation”, widespread unemployment, the fierce suppression of organized labor, and the gutting of “the public education and the health care system…by a combination of neglect and privatization”. As the Egyptian population suffered, military commanders were awarded lucrative positions at the head of major national corporations and important seats  in the higher echelons of government administration, occupying a central decision-making role in the corporate-political nexus.

Elizabeth Jelin, in her essay ‘Memories of State Violence: The Past in the Present’, traces a similar institutionalization of the armed forces in the developmentalist military juntas that ruled the Southern Cone countries of Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina throughout the 60s and 70s. After seizing power, these transitional military regimes “stressed their ‘heroic’ role, as…eternal defenders of the fatherland…and the ultimate guarantors of the continuity of the nation”. Later, transitions into civilian governments from the 1980s onwards “involved the retreat of the military, and thus their Salvationist discourse lost ground (perhaps with the partial exception of Chile). The military receded into their own institutional spaces, to reaffirm their identities and justifications there”.

Like the post-revolutionary neoliberal dictatorships of the Southern Cone, Mubarak’s Egypt, along with its army, became a regional favorite, not only of the IMF, but of the U.S., from whom it received, second only to Israel, over $1.3 billion dollars of aid annually. In 2008, U.S. ambassador to Egypt Francis Ricciardone favorably described both dictator Hosni Mubarak and Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi- leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, a close friend of Mubarak and Egypt’s Defense Minister since 1991- as men “focused on regime stability and maintaining the status quo through the end of their time”, who “simply do not have the energy, inclination or world view to do anything differently” (CBC News). Since the 1970s, domestic corporate, military and dictatorial power structures, intermingled with global imperial interests, have come to striate the Egyptian body politic as indissoluble, metonymic links of a diffuse chain of hegemony.

Doctoral researcher at the Middle East and North Africa Research Group Keonraad Bogaert, in an essay entitled ‘Global Dimensions of the Arab Spring and the Potential for Anti-Hegemonic Politics’,  links this trend in Egypt to the deepening neoliberal reforms of the larger Arab world.

Neoliberal politics in the Arab region meant an attack on the achievements of the developmental state that experienced its heyday in the 1950s and the 1960s…the systematic rollback of the developmental state through structural adjustments, austerity measures, and privatization meant that the middle and labor classes in the Arab region came increasingly under pressure, mainly due to the cutback of income redistribution mechanisms and rising job insecurity…these neoliberal reforms were at the basis of the motivations of ordinary people to come out into the streets en masse in 2011 and overthrow authoritarian leaders…what started in Tunisia has now created space on a global scale to question and contest neoliberal hegemony.

The evolution of the modern Egyptian nation-state, characterized by the deepening interpenetration of Egypt’s military into its civil and economic sectors, can be read as a metaphor for the modernization process of developing countries worldwide during a 20th century in which, as Paul Virilio says in Speed and Politics, “history progresse[d] at the speed of its weapons systems”. As the military-industrial complex became the driving socio-economic engine of development and self-determination for a nation-state fabric rife with military coups, the armies of developing nations, possessing an  organizational structure sufficiently capable to conduct the affairs of state, manage national projects and resolve political chaos, spurred on the process of national modernization at the political, civic and economic levels.

The army of the developing nation-state enforced and maintained sovereignty through a sometimes-deployed, but always-threatened, monopoly over the unilateral use of violence, inscribing upon the body politic the spectral fist of martial law epitomized in the dictum of Carl Schmitt- ‘sovereign is he who decides on the exception’. This omnipresent state of emergency, effective in Egypt since 1967, served the interests of developing and developed nation-states with equal efficiency, and proved itself, as Irish scholar and human rights advocate John Reynolds says in his essay Emergency, Governmentality and The Arab Spring, to be “a constant presence through shifting contextual sands of Third World liberation movements and decolonisation, ideological Cold War totalitarianism, military dictatorships, separatist conflicts, economic shock policies and national security doctrine”.

As Woodrow Wilson said in The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics, “the authority of all governors, directly or indirectly, rests in all cases ultimately on force…government, in its last analysis, is organized force.” Throughout the modernization process of First, Second and Third World countries alike, the national army and police force, as the backbone and guarantor of the law-making and law-preserving violence proper to the state, helped guard, gird and facilitate the growth of what Michel Foucault called ‘governmentality’- a “triangle- sovereignty, discipline, government- which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security”, an “ensemble…formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of [a] very specific albeit complex form of power”. The weaving of the political, economic and military web of globalized governmentality into a rosary of First, Second and Third World countries proceeded, throughout the last 150 years of the nation-state world system, not evenly and equitably, but through the dominance of the First over the Third World, a dominance exercised- first through political imperialism, and then through its surrogate, economic neoliberalism- in the name of global capital.

For capital, the army and the state-form are inseparable, and developed of necessity alongside each other. Friedrich Engels, in his 1884 treatise The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, emphasizes that a decaying pre-capitalist feudal social body, already striated by irreconcilable class antagonisms, could not possibly accommodate a freely self-acting, self-organized and self-armed population without such a population annihilating itself in open class warfare. The capitalist state, therefore, secures its hegemony through “the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force”, a public power which “exists in every state” and “consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing”.

In his 1917 State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin develops Engels’ concept of a “special, public” state power, which through the  “development, perfection, and strengthening of the bureaucratic and military apparatus…arose from society but place[d] itself above it and alienate[d] itself more and more from it” as a surplus of striated control, an institutionalized and normalized parasite. “Two institutions most characteristic of this state machine,” says Lenin, “are the bureaucracy and the standing army”, and the bourgeoisie are connected with these institutions “by thousands of threads”.

Secured by the national army’s monopoly over lawmaking and -preserving violence, this administrative apparatus of capture was able not only to guard and expand physical territory but also to foster national pride, all the while encasing and nurturing, within the body of the State, the budding mechanisms of capital accumulation. As Opello and Rosow explain in ‘The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics’,

the organizational and technological innovations in warfare during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave a war-making advantage to the form of politico-military rule that had access to large volumes of men (for soldiers)…capital (money to pay, equip, and arm them)…[and] a coherent collective identity (i.e., a sense of nationhood) that overrode regional, class, and tribal loyalties.

Out of the soil of the economic and bureaucratic structures of capitalist accumulation and technological modernization, arose the gleaming image of a strong, proud and loyal army as sign, seal and signet of national identity, a rigidly organized, bureaucratic, hierarchical microcosm, within the State, of the ordered beauty of the State-form itself. Hans Von Seeckt, military officer and organizer of the Reichswehr-the Weimar-era German Army which, through the suppression of Spartacist Bolshevism and the fusion of the country’s military and civilian sectors into a totalitarian military state, formed, according to volume 3 of Purnell’s monumental History of the Twentieth Century, “the only consistent bedrock element on, and above all behind, the German political scene” after the devastation of the First World War- expresses this nationalist military ideal with his guiding principle that “the Army should become a State within the State, but it should be merged in the State through service; in fact it should become the purest image of the State’” (Finer). This transcendental perch befits an army which, in a revolutionary crisis, returns to the barracks when it has successfully secured public order, an army which, in the words of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, conservative Prime Minister and dictator of colonialist Portugal from 1932 to 1968, “lives apart from politics, subjected to a hierarchy and discipline, serene and firm as a guarantee of public order and national security” (Finer).

Since the fall of Mubarak, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has manipulated popular motifs of a nationalist, a-political and civically responsible standing army as a means to consolidate imperial, neoliberal and, ultimately, dictatorial hegemony over the will of the Egyptian people. For example, on February 14, two days after the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s transitional Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), in response to a general strike held by thousands of state employees demanding better pay and conditions, re-imposed martial law and issued a statement urging all citizens, in the interests of “the legitimate demands [of the people] for a true democratic environment…[to] work together to stabilize the country” and to end strikes and protests that, blocking the “positive progress and the efforts of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to realize the ambitions and aspirations of the people”, were “harming national security by disturbing all the institutions and the agencies…[of the] production and operations” of the state. This marked the first divergence of interests between SCAF and the revolting people, and the latter would soon realize that, far from intending to facilitate a ‘civil democratic process’, the military junta, like Mubarak’s regime, would not hesitate, in the words of Egyptian-American Cairo-based activist Sarah Hawas, to “rapidly devolve” Egyptian society “into a hotbed of naked fascism” under “the deafening silence of the international ‘community’ that continues to tolerate- indeed, goes out of its way to legitimize– the status quo”.

The Second Egyptian Revolution of 2011 shows that the myth of a benevolent, politically neutral military force is shattered when the army is deployed, not on the borders of the people it is sworn to protect, but on the city streets to suppress the resistance of a broad-based, rhizomatic body of citizens united against the sovereign power of ruler and regime alike. Where once the emperor’s army stood proudly before their people in royal battle garb, here what Lenin calls “the naked class struggle” becomes clear as day, as “the ruling class strives to restore the special bodies of armed men which serve it”, and “the oppressed class strives to create a new organization…capable of serving the exploited instead of the exploiters”.

Against an oppressive apparatus of governmentality indistinguishable from neo-imperial hegemony; against the unilateral re-instatement of a three-decades old martial law which the military junta had promised to abolish; against, in the December 22, 2011 words of the Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt, “a state which has looted and stolen from the poor to increase the wealth of the rich…a state for whom the power of capital is more important than the authority of the judiciary”- against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the Second Egyptian Revolution is, in the final instance, a revolution against neoliberalism as such. Herein can be found the universal value of an uprising that, bringing the domestic politics of Egypt to their logical conclusion, reaches beyond national borders and challenges a global fabric of power. The international hegemonic apparatus of late capitalism, in the face of the worldwide Arab Spring and Occupy movements, takes on the variegated forms of fascist dictatorship and repressive military-police apparatus, struggling to maintain its hold on power as the human multitude awakens.

Works Cited

Almasmari, Hakim. “Hundreds Defect from Yemen’s Military.” Featured Articles from CNN. CNN,

19 Nov. 2011. Web. 28 Jan. 2012. <http://articles.cnn.com/2011-11-19/middleeast/world_meast_yemen-unrest_1_unarmed-youth-protests-government-troops?_s=PM:MIDDLEEAST&gt;.

Armbrust, Walter. “A Revolution against Neoliberalism?” Al Jazeera English. Al Jazeera, 24 Feb.

2011. Web. 20 Jan. 2012. <http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201122414315249621.html&gt;.

Boegaert, Koenraad. “Global Dimensions of the Arab Spring and the Potential for

Anti-Hegemonic Politics.” Jadaliyya. Arab Studies Institute, 21 Dec. 2011. Web. 10 Jan.   2012. <http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3638/global-dimensions-of-the-arab-spring-and-the-poten&gt;.

CBC News. “Egypt’s Military Flexes Its Muscle.” CBC News. 11 Feb. 2011. Web. 16 Jan. 2012.

<http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/02/11/f-egypt-military-tantawi.html&gt;.

Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in the Light of the

Researches of Lewis H. Morgan,. New York: International, 1942. Print.

Finer, S. E. The Man on Horseback; the Role of the Military in Politics. New York: Praeger, 1962.

Print.

Foucault, Michel, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. The Foucault Effect: Studies

in Governmentality : With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991. Print.

Gotowicki, Stephen H. “The Role of the Egyptian Military in Domestic Society.” Foreign Military

Studies Office. U.S. Army, 1994. Web. 28 Jan. 2012. <http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/egypt/egypt.htm&gt;.

Hawas, Sarah. “Please Bear Witness to the Unceasing Violence against Unarmed Egyptian

Revolutionaries.” Mondoweiss. 22 Dec. 2011. Web. 21 Jan. 2012. <http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/at-holiday-dinners-bear-witness-to-the-unceasing-violence-against-unarmed-egyptian-revolutionaries.html&gt;.

Jelin, Elizabeth. “Memories of State Violence: The Past in the Present”. Human Rights Institute,

University of Connecticut. 2006. Web. 15 Jan. 2012. <http://humanrights.uconn.edu/documents/papers/ElizabethJelinStateViolence.pdf>.

Lenin, Vladimir I. “The State and Revolution.” Marxists Internet Archive. 1999. Web. 15 Jan.

2012. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/&gt;.

Opello, Walter C., and Stephen J. Rosow. The Nation-state and Global Order: A Historical

Introduction to Contemporary Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999. Print.

Pye, Lucian W. “Armies in the Process of Political Modernization.” European Journal of

Sociology (1961). Print.

Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt. “Yes … We Do Want the Downfall of the State of Tyranny,

Poverty and Dependency.” Jadaliyya. Arab Studies Institute, 21 Dec. 2011. Web. 20 Jan. 2012. <http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3701/yes-…-we-do-want-the-downfall-of-the-state-of-ty&gt;.

Reynolds, John. “Emergency, Governmentality and the Arab Spring.” Jadaliyya. Arab Studies

Institute, 10 Aug. 2011. Web. 11 Dec. 2011. <http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2357/emergency-governmentality-and-the-arab-spring&gt;.

Sayigh, Yezid. “Armies and Civilians in the Arab Awakening: An Inevitable Compromise?”

Carnegie Middle East Center. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 27 Oct. 2011. Web. 25 Dec. 2011. <http://carnegie-mec.org/publications/?fa=45839&gt;.

Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. MIT, 1988. Print.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. “Statement of the Supreme Council of the Armed

Forces.” Egypt State Information Service. 14 Feb. 2011. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. <http://www.sis.gov.eg/En/Story.aspx?sid=53727&gt;.

Taylor, A. J. P., and J. M. Roberts. Purnell’s History of the 20th Century. Vol. 3. New York:

Purnell, 1971. Print.

Trotsky, Leon. 1905. New York: Random House, 1971. Print.

Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York, NY, USA: Columbia

University, 1986. Print.

Wilenius, Paul. “Enemies Within: Thatcher and the Unions.” News.bbc.co.uk. BBC News, 5 Mar.

2004. Web. 28 Dec. 2011. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3067563.stm&gt;.

Wilson, Woodrow. The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. D.C. Heath &, 1918.

Print.

Remembrance

(poem [my first- forgive me if it’s terrible] published in the Journal of Interdimensional Poetry, a poetry journal affiliated with the ‘Psychedemia’ conference held at the University of Pennsylvania, September 2012.)

 

REMEMBRANCE

 

On the eighteenth day,

Of the eighteenth month,

On the banks of the river of accumulated knowledge,

Where lay scattered in scraps

The sharpened instruments of scholars, tried and tattered-

We reached you.

Amidst traces and remnants

Of living endeavors

Our mothers, and fathers,

And their mothers’ mothers

Had weathered-

We reached you.

We cast our bodies to the ground,

And battered our heads,

And standing, stood beside ourselves-

And wept.

 

What hides behind the eye, that gives it sight?

What nestles in the crevice of the ear, that we may hear?

What flickers before the thought,

What cradles the tongue to speak?

Oh gasp, that thickens in time-

How can our breath give thanks to the wind that quickens the breath?

 

On the eighteenth day,

Of the eighteenth month,

We arrived,

Hands heavy with seeking.

We placed our senses before you,

And you said-

Speak to me not of repetition,

But of that which has not begun.

There,

Before the origin,

It eclipses, it remembers itself.

It trickles through our hands.

It spits out bones,

It carves wrinkles into trembling skin.

It sows us into speech, it points beyond; our tongues clatter.

 

On the eighteenth day, of the eighteenth month,

We reached you,

Hands heavy with seeking,

And you said-

Speak to me of the human being who shrivels in skin.

Sing me the creature, help me remember

The teeth of the lover whose shivering skin,

To forget itself,

Repeats itself.

Speak to me not of beyond,

But of the being

Who lives, and breathes,

And moves in time.

Sing the beginning which completes itself.

Take no offering,

Know no temple,

No place.

But time–

Give me time to unwind the generations.

Time, in which, to speak,

I speak again.

Sing for me these knotted hands,

This gasp of flesh.

Speak to me of remembrance.

Listen.

 

It occurred! There, in history!

We saw it with our own eyes!

Branch of no planting,

Work of no hands,

Spring from no source!

Where we write, it glows!

Where we speak, it sparks!

Oh gasp, that quickens in time-

 

On the eighteenth day,

Of the eighteenth month,

We left you,

And you said-

There is something that remains.

 

New Jewish Agenda(s): An Interview with Rabbi Arthur Waskow

(published in Tikkun Magazine’s ‘Tikkun Daily’ blog, http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2012/08/27/new-jewish-agendas-an-interview-with-rabbi-arthur-waskow/ )

 

When I sat down to speak with radical civil rights activist Rabbi Arthur Waskow at the Shalom Center in Philadelphia this July, I wanted to talk about the hopes and promises of twenty-first century Jewish activism, Occupy Judaism, and the American Jewish progressive movement. But most of all, I wanted to discuss Ezra Berkley Nepon’s recently published book ‘Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue: A History of New Jewish Agenda.’ This book represents the first serious attempt to comprehensively document the 1980s progressive organization New Jewish Agenda (NJA).

Book cover: Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue

Considering itself “a Jewish voice among progressives and a progressive voice among Jews,” NJA was a national, multi-issue membership organization that worked throughout the 1980s and early 1990s to advocate for Middle East peace, worldwide nuclear disarmament, rights for LGBTQ Jews, economic and social justice, peace in Latin America, Jewish feminism, and a variety of other issues in a climate of increasing Reagan-era neoliberalism and Cold War conservatism. Today, twenty years after the group’s dissolution, the book seeks to draw inspiration from NJA’s dedication “to participatory (grassroots) democracy and civil rights for all people, especially those marginalized within the mainstream Jewish community,” at a time when the progressive American Jewish movement is seeking a new voice.

As we reflected on the contemporary legacy of Jewish radicalism in America, we found that we could not talk about the New Jewish Agenda of the past without talking about the new(er) Jewish agenda(s) of the present. We could not talk about progressive Jewish identity and spirituality without also talking about “the heart of the matter- the prophetic vision embodied in Judaism, ancient and modern.” We could not talk about Occupy Wall Street without also talking about “the heart of the Freedom Seder…[the] debate between violence and non-violence.” We could not talk about the diversity of contemporary progressive Jewish activism without also talking about the issue of Zionism, an issue that “becomes legitimate when the society around it discovers it has to live with a spectrum of organizations, people, etc. raising the issue.” We found that to speak of a movement as multi-faceted as New Jewish Agenda, one must also give voice the complexities of the present moment.

We also discussed the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s recent conference, entitled ‘Jews and the Left.’ There, voices of lamentation repeated the well-worn mantra that, as Ezra Mendelsohn said, “the Left in general is in eclipse, and the Jewish left is dead in the U.S., an expired product of a past historical epoch … a good chapter in our history, but one which is gone.”

When I repeated this quote to Arthur Waskow, he interrupted me with a bemused look of incredulity…

 

New Jewish Agenda: Jews for Peace march.

Arthur Waskow: Did they invite anybody who was a Jew on the left?

Ben Lorber: One of the criticisms voiced by many was that the conference was mainly an affair of historians and academics, devoid of past or present Jewish activists.

AW: Well, there’s Tikkun, there’s the Shalom Center, and a bunch of different organizations!

BL: Throughout ‘Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue,’ Nepon celebrates that NJA upheld itself for over a decade as a multi-issue organization, tackling problems of sexism, racism, and classism both inside and outside the Jewish community, along with a critique of Israel, and presenting a united front of Jewish opposition to the mainstream. Today, progressive American Jewish organizations exist across the left spectrum as single-issue advocacy groups, often competing with one another for funds, attention and a seat at the table, and struggling to try to influence the mainstream. Do you see this multiplicity of organizations as a weakness of the contemporary Jewish American left?

AW: There are two images we use about ourselves: one is a tugboat that moves the big ocean liner. The big ocean liner can barely change direction, and to change direction at all it needs a tugboat that can change direction, nudging, nudging, pushing up against it. I think we accomplished that metaphor with the Reform movement during the Iraq war. The Iraq war was historically a total disaster, but it also took some nudging for people to get off their habit of total deference towards any President of the United States, and we did help the Reform movement do that. And the other metaphor we use is the seedbed. We can drop tiny seeds that are very small and don’t require much money, and some of them grow big. We see ourselves that way too.

BL: And in many ways NJA throughout the 1980s and early 1990s conceived of itself as a tugboat and a seedbed, steering the tone of mainstream American Jewish discourse towards the left and sowing seeds of dissent on many critical issues well ahead of their time. Today, the seeds that NJA helped plant–the movement of Jewish feminism, and the movement of Jewish-Palestinian solidarity, to name two examples–have blossomed into the decisive political debates of our community.

AW: The difference is that NJA wanted to be a mass organization. We tried, and we succeeded briefly. We were enormously helped by Ronald Reagan’s election. Our first convention was held in the fall after November 1980, after the election, which Reagan won, and thousands more people showed up then we expected. Part of the reason for that was that people were shocked and horrified by Reagan’s victory in the election.

BL: Has the progressive Jewish movement experienced a similar revitalization since the early 2000s, with the rise of Bush and the American neoconservative movement?

AW: Not the same way in the American Jewish community. I think maybe Occupy is the first stage of re-energizing the American and Jewish progressive movement.

BL: But today, two decades after the dissolution of NJA, do you see a hole or a void in the community of progressive Jewish organizations that NJA used to fill? Across the diverse spectrum of groups, is there a lack of a unifying thread, an absence of a ‘We?’

AW: There are some interesting things beginning to happen. There’s the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable and Green Havurah. There’s a serious attempt to create the beginnings, but the one thing it ain’t is a mass movement. It deliberately is an amalgam of organizations, not of people, so that puts limits on it.

BL: An especially powerful legacy of NJA, to me, is its structural emphasis on democratic, horizontal, non-hierarchical decision-making, and organization. These dynamics, with all their pluses and minuses, have re-emerged today most vigorously in the Occupy movement. What does NJA have to teach the present-day Jewish American progressive community in this regard?

AW: I hope, but I’m not convinced, that the Green Havurah model is the most interesting model. It’s kind of a version of NJA’s decentralization, though NJA’s decentralization was geographic, and Green Havurah’s model isn’t geographic as much as it is functional. I don’t know if it makes vigorous action possible. But it is a different version to preserve a kind of united national body, and to encourage participation and debate.

BL: One of the inspiring things for me about the Jewish Occupy events, such as Occupy Kol Nidre, is this tradition of performing Jewish ritual in public as political action. NJA explored this too–as Nepon relates in ‘Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue,’ during Tisha B’av in 1981, which fell on the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki by the U.S. during WWII, NJA held a public ceremony near the White House and the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., calling for nuclear disarmament.

AW: And we addressed universal issues, not only Jewish issues. Interestingly, two summers ago we did Tisha B’Av on the steps of the capital again, but this time it was to focus on the oil spill that had just happened in the Gulf. We asked, “What is the temple today?” Today the temple is the whole Earth. Every culture and every species has the sacred temple of Earth itself, and the Pharaohs of the human race, like the emperors who destroyed the First and Second Temples, are in the process of destroying our temple. And we did this with about 300 people, maybe half of them Jewish, a whole bunch of secular people, and some Christians and Muslims. It was amazing! We chanted, mainly in English, a new version of Lamentations to the melody of Eicha, of Lamentations.

There was a crucial discussion in Green Havurah a few days ago: what does it mean to take inspiration from theology and challenge people into acting? A bunch of us going off and making Shabbot by ourselves has no impact on society. What if we sat down on Shabbot and somehow interfered with work? I haven’t yet been struck with a spark of how to do that. Martin Buber said, “Life is not really in the I, life is not really in the Thou. Life is in the hyphen.’ Between me and Daniel Sieradski (American Jewish writer and activist), life was in the hyphen! I called him up and asked: “What do you think about doing Kol Nidre at Zuccotti Park?’ He said “Arthur, Kol Nidre! We did Erev Shabbot there last week! But Kol Nidre? I gotta think about it.” And he calls me up the next day and says, “Well, I put it on Twitter and there are 500 people that wanna come!” I couldn’t do it alone, and he couldn’t do it alone.

Occupy Kol Nidre, November 2011. Credit: Damon Dahlen/AOL.

BL: As NJA sought to be “a Jewish voice among progressives and a progressive voice among Jews,” Occupy Judaism’s motto today is “bringing the Jews to Occupy Wall Street and bringing Occupy Wall Street to the Jews.” What are the parallels between the two? Is it inspiring to you today that in the midst of the rising of a broad-based American social movement, this tradition of Jewish ritual as public protest has re-emerged?

AW: Absolutely inspiring to me, totally! NJA taught us that you can interweave prophetic religious folk and leftist secular folk. I try not to use the ‘left’ label for myself because it has come to mean almost entirely a secular, sometimes even anti-religious outlook on the world. So I use ‘prophetic’ because for me it embodies both a profound religious sense of contact with God–not at all necessarily according to the structures or the strictures of the prayer book,–and vigorous and radical political action.

During most of its history, NJA was able to weave those strands of thought and action together. I think one of the reasons it collapsed was that some mostly secularist folks thought they couldn’t bear working with people who used ‘God’ language. There was a lot of anger and contempt aimed at religious folk, which ended up in the dismantling of the office and the organization. This did not come from any grassroots decision-making; it was made by people in the steering committee. I think that if there had been a consultation of the national membership, people would’ve opposed abolishing the organization. I thought the closure was a serious ethical and political mistake- none of which I think is in the book.

BL: A few years after NJA was founded, Michael Lerner founded Tikkun, and there was a return to spirituality in the American Jewish progressive movement that was, in many ways, a continuation of the Fabrangen and radical Havurah movements begun a decade earlier. Do you think this schism between secular and spiritual currents within NJA reflected the larger tensions between a secular humanist Jewish movement and a Jewish renewal movement?

AW: Yes, I think that’s right. And both trends have survived. The heart of the matter for me is the prophetic vision embodied in Judaism, ancient and modern, all the way to Buber and Heschel and Judith Plaskow. So that strand for me is the point, and acting on that strand for me is not bringing Occupy Wall Street to the Jews, it is bringing Isaiah and Heschel and Lerner and Waskow to the Jews. Here’s an example of the problem and the gift. Occupy Wall Street breaks through in American consciousness to get the notion of the 99% and the 1% across. Brilliant! Terrific! Now, for twenty years the Shalom Center has been talking about the pharaohs of our generation, which I think is the 1% in Jewish clothes (and I don’t mean only governments, but corporations as well). So it’s true that Occupy broke through in a way that, inside the Jewish community, the Freedom Seder did break through- in an unexpected way. [The Freedom Seder] told everyone that we can all create our own liberating seders! And that changed the attitude of lots of Jews towards the existing liturgy.

BL: Reading the Freedom Seder today, I was drawn to the debate between violence and non-violence as a tactic for social change. Pacifist quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. are back-to-back with celebrations of the race riot, and quotes by Malcolm X advocating change ‘by any means necessary.’ This seems to be especially pertinent today, as popular unrest in America and worldwide straddles the border between non-violent and violent resistance.

AW: And when I said that the race riots were about the confrontation between the Israelites in the streets and Pharaoh in the army, sure! The heart of the Freedom Seder should be a debate between violence and non-violence. I have since become convinced that King-ian, Gandhian non-violence is far better. I’m not an absolute pacifist, but I think it’s far better except in a very few situations, where there is such a tyrannical thing that the only way to resist is physically. But at the time of the Freedom Seder I was saying: “Let’s have the argument, because we can only gain wisdom from the argument.”

BL: The issue of Zionism has obviously had a huge and polarizing influence of the progressive Jewish Left since the 1960s. How has the discourse on Palestine changed from the 1970s to today on the Jewish Left?

AW: There’s more of a spectrum now. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) can exist alongside J Street, and both of them can exist. I think there is a big majority for at the J Street outlook, but it’s interesting- organizations don’t like to confront even small minorities, especially organizations that are feeling that they are barely treated as legitimate anyway. There are two ways to behave if you think you are being treated by the big boys as barely legitimate. One is to say ‘fuck you!’ and do whatever really bold and trouble making stuff you wanna do. The other one is to be very careful not to annoy people. JVP has done the first, and I sort of feel attracted to its tone and method, but I see a problem with its unwillingness to affirm the right of the Israeli people to make their decision about having an Israeli state, and therefore to reaffirm that we can only go beyond a two-state solution if each of the two people says they’re ready to go beyond it. As of now, Israeli society is not willing to go beyond a two-state solution. For me, JVP doesn’t have to say: “We support a two state solution,” but it does have to say: “We support a solution in which the existing state of Israel and its people agree.” And they don’t quite do that. So that’s one of my problems with it, and I think it’s probably a problem with a lot of people who would otherwise feel attracted to JVP. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who do feel attracted to JVP, because they say ‘fuck you’ to the Federation world and all that.

So, the very fact of a more diverse spectrum means that the repression has not been able to succeed as much. In a way, an issue becomes legitimate when the society around it discovers it has to live with a spectrum of organizations, people, etc. raising the issue. It’s easy to polarize and expel, to excommunicate so long as there is a clear separation between viewpoints. But most Americans from Peace Now and J Street bridge the gap enough that it’s clearly impossible now to wipe out that kind of energy, and the greater spectrum means that there are enough Jews who are connected with official Judaism.

I’m not so happy with J Street either, by the way. J Street established this metaphor of itself that it was going to watch Obama’s back. And I ask, “What about his front? What about confronting him when he doesn’t do what makes sense?” Their whole description of their role was that whenever people were beating up on Obama for being too pro-peace or of Israel, J Street would hold his back and argue that he’s okay. But when he insisted on vetoing Abbas’ bid for recognition at the U.N., for instance, J Street was not prepared to say, “Oh, that was a bad mistake.” So I didn’t go to the last convention. If I could wave my wand and there would be an organization that carried out BDS on the products created in the West Bank, period, I would do it. Peter Beinart (an influential American Jewish journalist), Lerner and I are not just liberal Zionists; we’re something more than that. Lerner does try to organize around it and has done more to unite the two than most anybody, including the Shalom Center.

BL: In 2009, you cited five American ‘pro-Israel, pro-Peace’ Jewish organizations that were worth supporting in a context of increasing polarization within the American Jewish community: Meretz USA, Americans for Peace Now, Rabbis for Human Rights, J Street, and Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace (Brit Tzedek v’Shalom). Daniel Lang/Levitsky stated that since 2009, “U.S. Zionist ‘peace’-oriented groups like Brit Tzedek-v-Shalom, J Street, and the Tikkun Community have continued to decline in influence, visibility, and effectiveness, while non- and anti-Zionist projects from JVP to Jews Say No to the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAZN) have steadily grown in both size and strength.” Do you see this trend? Why?

AW: Yes, because people are getting more and more fed up with the ever more disgusting behavior of the Israeli government. The worse it gets, the more people that say I’m not even interested in J Street. So J Street tries to walk this very difficult line, but I don’t think the line has to be as wishy-washy as they make it.

BL: What, to sum up, can Jewish occupiers, and the entire Occupy movement, draw from prophetic Judaism? What can the prophetic Jewish heritage teach us about this imperative to resist, to speak the truth to power?

AW: I know I sort of got imprinted on the Pharaoh model by the Freedom Seder, and you might say I’ve just been reworking that metaphor for forty some years, and in some ways that’s true. And my most recent book with Phyllis Berman, my wife, is about the Exodus and the wilderness at a far deeper level than the Freedom Seder. But I think that’s the master Jewish story, whether its fiction or history. We begin that book, Freedom Journeys, with these three lines: “If the Pharaoh fell in the Red Sea and nobody told the story, did it happen? No. If no Pharaoh fell in the Red Sea but we told the story for three thousand years, did it happen? Yes. Is it still happening? Yes.”

BL: I love Sieradski’s quote, in an article for the Forward in November 2011, where he asserts the direct identity between the values of Judaism and those of Occupy- “In retelling our story (“We are the 99%”), recounting our values (“social and economic justice for all”) and carrying forth our tradition unto the four corners of the Earth (“Occupy Everywhere”) we are empowered to bring the spirit of the occupation into every facet of our lives.”

AW: Exactly!

The Jewish National Fund: Israel’s Environmental Colonialism and Eco-Apartheid

(from LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal- http://links.org.au/node/2956)

(Palestinian village of ‘Imwas, 1958)

((Palestinian village of ‘Imwas after destruction by Israeli army, 1968)

(Ruins of Palestinian village of ‘Imwas, site of Jewish National Fund’s ‘Canada Park’, 1978)

Since the idea of Zionism first gripped the minds of a few intellectuals and the limbs of many agrarian pioneers in the early 20th century, the state of Israel has presented its settlement of the land of Palestine, and its uprooting of the Palestinian people, as a rejuvenation of the earth. By “greenwashing” the occupation, Israel hides its apartheid behind an environmentalist mirage, and distracts public attention not only from its brutal oppression of the Palestinian people, but from its large-scale degradation of the earth upon which these tragedies unfold.

Determined to “make the desert bloom”, an international organisation — the Jewish National Fund-Keren Kayemet LeYisrael (JNF-KKL, or JNF) planted forests, recreational parks and nature reserves to cover over the ruins of Palestinian villages, as refugees were scattered far from, or worse, a few hilltops away from, the land upon which they and their ancestors had based their lives and livelihoods.

Today, as Israel portrays itself as a “green democracy”’, an eco-friendly pioneer in agricultural techniques such as drip irrigation, dairy farming, desert ecology, water management and solar energy, Israeli factories drain toxic waste and industrial pollutants down from occupied West Bank hilltops into Palestinian villages, and over-pumping of groundwater aquifers denies Palestinians access to vital water sources in a context of increasing water scarcity and pollution.

Jewish National Fund

The Jewish National Fund (JNF), perhaps the first transnational environmental NGO, was established in 1901, as the first wave of Jewish immigrants were settling in Palestine under the banner of Zionism. Throughout the 20th century, as the indigenous Arab population of Palestine found itself either expelled from its homeland or oppressed under the hand of a foreign invader, the JNF succeeded in raising enormous amounts of money to acquire and develop land throughout the territory that, in 1948, would become known as the State of Israel. Distinct from other transnational Zionist fundraising and advocacy organisations, such as the Jewish Agency, the JNF portrayed itself, from the beginning, as an environmental organisation, serving, according to its website, to “protect the land, green the landscape and preserve vital ecosystems” by “planting seedlings, maintaining forest health, combating desertification, protecting watersheds and managing water flow … [and] balancing the phenomenal growth and development Israel has experienced in the last decade with the maintenance of an ecologically sound environment”.

Proud that “Israel is the only country in the world that will enter the 21st century with a net gain in numbers of trees”, the JNF credits itself with planting 250 million trees, building more than 210 reservoirs and dams, developing more than 250,000 acres of land, creating more than 1000 parks and providing the infrastructure for more than 1000 communities throughout Israel. Suiting a state constructed for a single cultural-religious group, the JNF promotes an exclusionary, discriminatory brand of environmentalism. From its inception in 1901 — when the JNF controlled but a single olive grove in a land where 94% of its neighbours were Arab — to today, working closely with the Israel government, the JNF directly owns 13% of Israel’s land and effectively controls another 80%. The JNF’s constitution has explicitly stated that its land cannot be rented, leased, sold to or worked by non-Jews.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the JNF– helping to exile hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families, bulldoze their homes and clear the land to make way for Jewish settlement — bought large tracts of land from absentee landowners, evicted local Arab tenant farmers, uprooted natural vegetation of olive, carob and pistachio trees, and planted throughout the land, in place of indigenous arboreta, vast swaths of Europeanpinera (conifers) and eucalyptus trees.

Forests, parks and recreational facilities were strategically placed atop the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages, so that the fast-growing pines would erase the history of Palestinian existence and prevent refugees from ever returning to their homes. In addition, pine forests were planted to guard and expand settlements built atop stolen land and, after 1967, to seize and divide Palestinian territory within east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

The pines helped evoke images of a European wilderness, creating a familiar “natural” environment for the mostly European Jewish settlers, so much so that settlers affectionately nicknamed Carmel National Park, planted partially over the destroyed Palestinian village of al-Tira, “little Switzerland” for its resemblance to the Swiss Alps. Foreign species, these pine forests, then and now, often fail to adapt to the local soil and require frequent re-planting. As they age, they demand more water and become more prone to problems like pests, disease and conflagrations, such as the 2010 Carmel wildfire, deemed the worst in Israel’s history. As their fast-growing acidic pine needles fall to the ground, they destroy all other surrounding small plants, thus ruining the livelihood of Palestinian shepherds, whose animals depend on grazing land.

Clear-felling Palestinian villages

The JNF’s time-tested method of ethnically cleansing and then “greening” the desert continues to this day. An ongoing $600 million, 10-year JNF program called Blueprint Negev seeks to develop reservoirs, pine afforestation and water conservation programs in the Negev desert at the expense of more than 150,000 Palestinian Bedouin, whose “unrecognised” villages, as a direct result of Israel’s policies, already lack electricity, running water and sewage disposal.

Since 2010, the JNF has attempted to “green” the Negev by planting the 1 million-pine “GOD TV Forest” over the Palestinian village of Al-Araqib, which, as it steadfastly resists extinction, has been demolished eight times. GOD TV Forest is named after its proud sponsor, a far-right, pro-settler Evangelical Christian organisation whose stated purpose is “to plant a million trees to prepare the land for the return of [God’s] son”. As GOD TV Forest and Blueprint Negev seek to flood the semi-arid Negev with the invasive European pine trees, Israel seeks to tear the historically semi-nomadic Bedouin from their ancestral grazing lands, and to herd them into unnatural, sedentary lifestyles in impoverished and isolated townships. Social strife and decay of traditional values inevitably accompany this forced acculturation process.

Growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., my family, along with the larger middle-class Jewish community, was, knowingly or not, complicit in the JNF’s environmental colonialism. Nearly every room of our local synagogue and Hebrew School displayed the iconic blue, tin JNF donation box, where, by simply dropping a coin, one could affirm one’s ethnic nationalism by helping “plant a tree in Israel”. Throughout my early childhood, my mother worked at a local JNF donation office, helping US Jewish families “plant a tree in Israel” to commemorate the death of a loved one.

Today, after a century of expulsion, settlement, development and rapid industrialisation, indigenous arboreta make up only 11% of Israeli forests, and pre-1948 growth accounts for only 10% of Israel’s greenery. Jewish National Fund pine forests, parks and recreation areas blanket the hills of Israel, and tour guides, in the midst of a hike, dread the inevitable moment when someone asks “what is that old abandoned mosque doing in the middle of this forest?” The parallels with European colonisation of the American continent are obvious, and in a cruel twist of historical irony, the construction, by JNF Canada, of Israel’s Canada National Park, covering over the destroyed Palestinian village of ‘Imwas in the mid-1980s, was initiated as a simultaneous twinning project along with Toronto’s Downsview Park, which sits atop unacknowledged First Nations territory.

Zionist image

The actions of the JNF fulfil the Zionist desire to transform and control the land of Palestine, to shape its hills in the Zionist image. When the pioneer Zionist movement arrived from Europe in the late 1800s, they found themselves dissatisfied with the rocky, semi-arid eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and they sought to “make the desert bloom” as proof that the Jewish people, and not the indigenous Arabs, were the destined cultivators of “a land without people for a people without land”.

Bringing little agricultural experience from their mostly lower-middle class urban backgrounds, these pioneers first adopted local Arab small-scale dryland subsistence farming methods, producing mainly unirrigated wheat, barley, potatoes, grapes, olives and figs for domestic consumption. Soon, however, they dismissed centuries-old sustainable Palestinian agricultural practices as “undeveloped”, and, funded by French banker-philanthropist Baron de Rothschild, used sophisticated European steam engines, mechanised ploughs, reapers and threshers to develop capital-intensive vineyards and cash-crop plantations for commercial marketing.

The passionate attachment to the land evinced by these Zionist pioneers often concealed an anthropocentric kernel. Many of the first European Jewish immigrants struck the soil of Palestine with a devout and even mystical appreciation of nature, driven to escape the economic, industrial and social alienation of European society and, through the sweat of agricultural labour, to birth themselves, and the Jewish people, anew as an ecologically integrated, utopian socialist community. Living in collectivist communes called kibbutzim, their sense of destiny magnified by the redemptive, exalted status that the land beneath their feet held for thousands of years of Jewish cultural mythology, they filled their journals with passionate, sensual, ecstatic, mystical and sometimes erotic descriptions of the joys of the earth and agricultural labour. As Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann observed, “it seems as if God had covered the soil of Palestine with rocks and marshes and sand, so that its beauty can only be brought out by those who love it and will devote their lives to healing its wounds”.

At the same time, their ecological zeal betrayed a deeply colonial, anthropocentric desire, not to respect and adapt to the land, but to subjugate and transform it, to conquer it through the machinations of human development. “Where we modern ones appear with our auxiliaries”, announced Zionist prophet Theodore Herzl at the turn of the century, “we turn the desert into a garden”. The motif of “making the desert bloom” emphasises not the desert rocks, but the human agency which controls nature for its own purposes. In one fell swoop, the land of Palestine would be cleared, along with its people, the Arab Palestinians, who, Weizmann maintained, were no different than “the rocks of Judea … obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path”.

Green, racist capitalism

Today, thanks to decades of largely US aid, the old kibbutzim have become factory suburbs, and the small, start-up socialist Zionist experiment has ballooned into the fourth-largest arms exporter in the world, the privatised, globally competitive, hyper-militarised Israel that markets itself abroad as a model for 21st century green capitalism, while perpetuating widespread ecological devastation and blatant environmental racism on the ground. “What country would not experience environmental woes”, says Jewish eco-socialist Joel Kovel in his book, Overcoming Zionism, “with a sixfold population increase in half a century in a context of rapid industrialization?” Kovel describes the steady expansion of Israel’s infrastructure of occupation, and the irreversible build-up of its desert war machine, as an “eco-destructive accelerant”, wedding coloniser and colonised together in a “parasitic order” that “builds parallel systems, of roads, water and sewage, electrical networks… [that] both colonize and destroy the land of the Palestinians, while creating, necessarily, a myriad of spaces … chaotically thrown up and turning into sites of a proliferating set of ecological degradations”.

Today, Israel covertly transports waste products from its own country into dumps and quarries throughout the occupied West Bank, polluting the Palestinian earth and water supply, while Israeli settlers in the West Bank — who produce similar amounts of wastewater to the Palestinian population, despite being outnumbered more than six to one — deliberately poison the water, land and livestock of nearby Palestinian villages. Solid wastes from Israeli settlements and military camps throughout the West Bank are dumped without restriction on Palestinian land, fields and side roads, and industry regularly moves from Israel to the West Bank, where labour is cheaper, environmental regulations are lenient and waste products, generated from the production of aluminium, leather tanning, textile dyeing, batteries, fiberglass, plastics and other chemicals, can flow freely down to Palestinian villages in surrounding valleys.

At least seven industrial zones, and at least 200 factories, have either moved from Israel into the West Bank, or have been constructed by the Israel government, inside the West Bank, a blatant violation of international law.

After one such factory, Geshuri Industries, moved its pesticide, insecticide and fertiliser production from Israel, where it was declared a health hazard, into the West Bank in 1982, the owner began the courteous practice of closing the factory for the one month every year that a change in wind direction would blow its pollutants towards Israel.

The construction, beginning in 2002, of Israel’s mammoth separation/apartheid wall, while separating Palestinian farmers from their fields, has destroyed Palestinian legally owned fertile agricultural land, and has brought with it all the extensive contamination of natural habitats associated with the use of heavy machinery and millions of tons of concrete. The wall has isolated Palestinian communities from vital water sources, and has interfered with natural drainage systems in the West Bank, causing flooding and substantial environmental and agricultural damage in times of high rainfall.

West Bank and Gaza

The JNF’s “greening” of Israel does not extend to the West Bank and Gaza, where the infrastructure of occupation breeds widespread deforestation. While the JNF made the hilltops within the internationally recognised borders of Israel bloom with forests, parks, playgrounds and recreation areas so that, to quote its website, “the heroic men and women of the Israel Defense Forces can share precious time with their loved ones”, 95% of the forests of Gaza have disappeared between 1971 and 1999, due to the extensive spread of settlements and military bases alongside Israel’s pervasive bombing. Contrary to the JNF’s commitment to “combat desertification”, the threat of permanent desertification looms over the West Bank, as increasing illegal settlement expansion, facilitated by the JNF, steals large tracts of land traditionally used by Palestinian villages for grazing, leaving the few remaining grazing areas available to Palestinian pastoralists threatened by overgrazing.

For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the monitoring, maintenance and protection of natural ecosystems becomes impossible, as the Israeli occupation paralyses their sovereign ability to regulate usage of a contiguous piece of land. Restrictions on freedom of movement, such as road closures, checkpoints and permanent roadblocks, impede the collection, processing, treatment and disposal of waste products, which, when released into residential areas, agricultural land and groundwater aquifers, cause soil contamination and potentially irreversible ground water pollution.

Water

Israel’s discriminatory distribution of water is an instance of environmental racism at its worst. “Presently”, writes Joel Kovel, Israel “faces both an absolute shortage of water owing to persistent overconsumption, as well as persistent contamination of the existing water thanks to rampant ‘development’ and industrialization”. As population growth, combined with a rising standard of living, has led to an over-utilisation of renewable water sources, Israel embarks on costly cloud-seeding and desalination experiments to increase its water supply, while destroying the rain-water cisterns and wells of agrarian Palestinian villages.

The Jordan River, an international river basin unilaterally monopolised by Israel, has seen its average flow decrease from 1250 million cubic metres (mcm)/year in 1953 to 152-203 mcm due to two enormous reservoirs, and has become so polluted by Israeli settlement and industry run-off that, to the dismay of Christian pilgrims worldwide, the environmental group Friends of the Earth Middle East decreed it unsafe for baptism in 2010. As the Jordan River is drained to a trickle, the Dead Sea, also polluted, has shrunk into two separate, and rapidly drying, seas further downstream, as its salts are pumped by Israeli companies to flood the global market with exotic cosmetic products.

As over-pumping of regional underground aquifers, all monopolised by Israel, has lowered the groundwater table below sea level and caused saline water intrusion in many areas, growing water scarcity is used by Israel as a tool of oppression against the Palestinians. In the Jordan Valley, an oppressive matrix of checkpoints, closed military zones, army training grounds, nature reserves, settlements and settler-only roads striates the desert with the infrastructure of environmental racism, isolating Palestinian Bedouin villages from access to water sources.

Impoverished communities — 40% of whom consume less water than the minimum global standard set by the World Health Organization — must travel across a desert, criss-crossed with Israeli checkpoints, to bring overpriced and often unsanitary water tankers home to scattered villages of makeshift shacks and mud-brick houses. While the 56,000 Palestinian Bedouin in the Jordan Valley consume an average of 37 million cubic metres (mcm) of water per year, the 9400 Israeli settlers consume an average of 41 mcm.

Sustainable agricultural practices are made difficult because of water scarcity, and perishable produce, delayed for hours at Israeli checkpoints, often spoils on its way to market. While “unrecognised” Bedouin villages live in dire poverty, cut off from basic services such as health care, education and employment, and barred by Israel’s laws from building any permanent structure, be it a water well, an animal pen, a storage shed or a family home, 36 Israeli Jordan Valley agricultural settlements utilise state-of-the-art technology, along with an unlimited water supply, to grow a wide variety of genetically modified fruit and vegetable produce, propelling Israel into the international agribusiness industry as the world’s sixth-largest cultivator of genetically modified crops.

While Bedouin families see their makeshift structures demolished by Israeli bulldozers on a daily basis, every Israeli settler family in the Jordan Valley is given, in addition to an unlimited water supply, a free house, US$20,000, 70 dunnams (km2) of land, free health care and a 75% discount on electricity, utilities and transportation.

Lake Hula

The ethnic cleansing and ecological degradation of Lake Hula in 1950 provides a perfect example of the JNF’s catastrophic failure as an environmental organisation, and cruel success as a colonial enterprise. In 1933 the Palestine Land Development Corporation, using JNF and private funds, forcibly evicted the Ghawarani tribe from one of the oldest documented lakes and wetlands in history, the Huleh Valley in the eastern Galilee near Syria. Descendants of deserters from the invading Egyptian army in the 1830s, and Algerian refugees from the failed 1847 revolt against French rule, the Ghawarani had lived for two centuries in reed huts, mud-brick shacks and woollen tents, practicing reed basket and mat weaving, seasonal agriculture, fishing and the raising of livestock such as chicken, geese and water buffalo.

Echoing founder of Israel David Ben-Gurion’s 1944 proclamation that “we must conquer the sea and the desert, for those will provide us with room for new settlers and will serve as a laboratory for the development of new forms of economic and agricultural endeavor”, the JNF, anxious to form a buffer of agricultural expansion between Israel and Syria, drained Lake Hula in 1950 without a study of its ecological impact, ignoring the warnings of scientists that the peat soil under the swamps would not make fertile land.

Agricultural development of the exposed peat soils, weathered and eroded by wind without their vegetation cover, proved unsuccessful, and the reckless experiment destroyed a rich, diverse ecosystem of aquatic biota, flora and fauna unique to the region. Despite one JNF hydrologist’s certainty that “our peat is Zionist peat … our peat will not do damage”, the decomposing peat soils released nutrients and ground pollutants into the Jordan River and the entropic Lake Tiberius, creating crop-damaging black dust and making large tracts of land susceptible to damaging underground fires. The Hula Valley was left stagnant and largely depopulated, until a $23 million JNF re-flooding in 1996 created the smaller and shallower Lake Agmon, restoring a meagre portion of the area’s now-extinct wildlife.

Justice

As the dependence of the imperial West on Gulf oil increases precipitously, Israel’s occupation of Palestine becomes a crucial focal point for the global dominance of Empire, and a concentrated site of its cruellest eco-genocidal machinations. In Israel’s occupation of Palestine, we see how environmental devastation coincides with ethnic cleansing, and how the former is used to deepen the latter. The quest for justice in Palestine lies at the heart of anti-imperialist struggle worldwide, a struggle in defence of the Earth, and the dispossessed who wander upon it.

In the words of Coya White Hat-Artichoker, member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and founding member of the LGBTQ Two Spirit First Nations Collective:

I see what is happening in Palestine as an indigenous struggle for sovereignty, at times, even the right to exist. It is also one of genocide… I see Israel’s systemic and intentional destruction and removal of Palestinian lives, homes, and communities as very similar to the destruction of communities, lives, and removal of Native people from their traditional lands. I no longer see terrorists there anymore; I see people resisting and fighting extinction… I believe that as people in the US who make these connections, it’s important to be thoughtful about what is happening, in our names and with the US government’s money.

The Daily Ordeal of Getting to School in Hebron

copied from my Electronic Intifada article here

 

Palestinian children in Hebron are forced to pass through Israeli military checkpoints in order to get to school.

(Osama Qawasmi/APA images)

The Qurduba School in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron is once again a target for harassment by Israeli occupation forces, as new restrictions on freedom of movement bring a wave of settler attacks and soldier violence.

Established in 1984, the Qurduba School sits surrounded by five Israeli settlements on a hilltop in central Hebron. To get to school every morning, pupils between the ages of 6 and 13 — and their women teachers — must navigate a maze of checkpoints and dangerous settler-inhabited streets.

Curfews, checkpoints, land confiscation, home demolitions, army and settler harassment, and other aspects of occupation within Palestinian life in Hebron intensified after February 1994 when extremist Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein, from the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba, gunned down 24 Muslim worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the center of Hebron.

In the years following the massacre, the mosque was split into two parts, becoming half-mosque, half-synagogue. In 1997, the settler-populated area around the religious compound was cordoned off by Israel as H2, designating full Israeli military control, while the rest of Hebron was designated as H1, and remains under administration of thePalestinian Authority.

Since 2005, teachers with the Qudruba school coming into the Israeli-controlled H2 district from the H1 area of the Old City had secured the right, through demonstrations, to bypass the daily metal detector scans and bag inspections at the checkpoint. Instead, they were able to pass through a side gate to reach their school.

On Tuesday, 11 October, the army revoked this right for no apparent reason. “Through this special teachers-only gate,” school principal Ibtesam al-Jondy told The Electronic Intifada, “we were able to reach our school easily. It took only five minutes from the checkpoint to the school. Then suddenly, we were stopped for nothing. So all the teachers refused this order, because it’s our right [to pass through].”

In response to this injustice, teachers refused to submit to inspection, and held a demonstration with more than one hundred of their students, who left their empty classrooms to join their teachers at the checkpoint. In a shocking display of brutality, Israeli soldiers sent nine children to the hospital with injuries.

Eleven-year-old Yazan Sharbati, who was injured that Tuesday, told the International Solidarity Movement that “the army told us to go back to school, and we told them that without teachers there is no school … I was so afraid that something bad was going to happen. The soldier pushed me very hard” (“Hebron school demonstrates for third day: “Without teachers there is no school,” 13 October 2011).

Protest struck a chord

The brutal repression of the 11 October checkpoint protest struck a chord in the Hebron community, and inspired an outburst of support in a city all too accustomed to violations of the right to freedom of movement. Over the next two days, community members and representatives from the Hebron governor’s office, along with the director of education in Hebron, stood in solidarity outside of the checkpoint with the students and teachers of the Qurduba School, who held the school day’s lessons outside of the checkpoint. On the third day of demonstrations, soldiers projected the high-LRAD sound cannon, nicknamed “the scream,” and fired rounds of tear gas to forcibly scatter the crowd. One teacher was arrested, and five students and demonstrators were injured.

Students, teachers and demonstrators returned to the checkpoint — Checkpoint 56 — every morning for two weeks. “During this period,” said al-Jondy, “many establishments tried to help us, but we got only promises, without solutions to our problem.” Though settlers had little to do with the events, the protests also inspired many settler attacks, as Palestinian news agency WAFA reported (“Settlers, soldiers continue attacks on Hebron schools,” 20 October 2011).

Inside the Israeli settlement of Tel Rumeida, said al-Jondy, “the settlers began to warn us … that they will settle in the empty school, and keep us away.” To save the school, coveted by settlers for its strategic hilltop location, the few teachers who lived inside H2, and did not encounter the checkpoint during their commute, reopened the school, while the other 13 Qurduba School teachers kept up a daily vigil outside the checkpoint.

Eventually, when all attempts to reason with the authorities failed, the teachers began using a much longer alternate route to bypass the checkpoint every morning. “Except for the Israeli soldiers,” lamented al-Jondy, “nobody has any power. The Ministry of Education spoke with the commander, but there is no solution. The Israeli army claimed they closed the checkpoint because of security. But every day for five years the same teachers come to the checkpoint. They have their names and identity numbers. They are on a list. They are not a security threat.”

Constant physical and psychological assaults

The students and teachers of Qurduba School are no strangers to the travails of occupation. The school sits atop a hill in the middle of downtown Hebron, within ample view of the Beit Hadassah, Tel Rumeida and Admot Yishai settlements, each of which consists of a few buildings and a handful of settler families. Across the street from the entrance to the Qurduba School, a door has long been adorned with graffiti reading “Gas The Arabs!JDL [Jewish Defense League].”

The building and its inhabitants are constantly physically and psychologically assaulted by settlers and soldiers. “There were about 450 pupils in the 1980s,” said al-Jondy. “Because of the occupation, because of the settlers and the bad situation here, this number began to decrease. This year we have only 149 pupils.”

Defence for Children International-Palestine Section (DCI-PS) stated in a 2008 report about the situation in Hebron that the area around the school and the settlements “is often the scene of violent confrontations” between Israeli settlers and Palestinian schoolchildren. “Settler schoolchildren … routinely verbally harass, chase, hit and throw stones at Palestinian schoolchildren under the watchful eyes of Israeli soldiers. Their parents and other adults engage in similar behavior, blocking the school steps with their cars to make it difficult for students to pass or setting their dogs loose to chase and terrorize young children” (“Under Attack: Settler Violence Against Palestinian Children in the Occupied Territory,” November 2008 [PDF]).

Hebron has been under occupation since 1969, when the first religious settlers, who had barricaded themselves in a downtown hotel room and refused to leave, were coaxed out by the Israeli military and given the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba. Ten years later, the act was repeated in an abandoned hospital, and this time Israel allowed the squatters to settle in downtown Hebron.

Restrictions on Palestinian life in Hebron accelerated after the 1994 massacre, and the expulsion of Palestinians and their livelihoods from the heart of Hebron’s Old City became an institutionalized process after the area became Israeli-controlled H2 in 1997.

Now, at least 500 settlers and at least 2,000 soldiers have shut down Shuhada Street, the economic heart of both Hebron and the entire southern West Bank. The gradual takeover of Shuhada Street, beginning in the 1980s and culminating after the second intifada, has turned the once-bustling marketplace into a ghost town, and has caused the (often forced) abandonment of over 1,000 housing units and over 1,800 shops and storefronts — which now, in a cruel and ironic twist of history, are graffitied with the same Stars of David that once marred Jewish storefronts in 1930s Germany.

“Sometimes many students come to the school very late,” said al-Jondy. “When I ask them, ‘Why are you late?’ they tell me, ‘Last night I didn’t sleep, because the settlers threw empty bottles and stones at my house.’ So they come here drowsy and sleepy, and they can’t concentrate on any subjects during the day because of what happened during the night. Most of the students’ houses are close to the houses of the settlers, so they are very vulnerable .. sometimes as head teacher I come early to the school, and the settlers chase me with dogs, and I have to run from their dogs.”

The DCI-PS report cites the testimony of Raghad Hashim Younis al-Azza, a ten-year-old student of the Qurtuba School:

“About a year ago, I was going to school with my classmate Ruwand who lives on Shuhada Street. I was with my cousin Ahmad and our neighbour’s daughter, Abrar. On the road, we came across a group of settlers, about 10 of them. They were about the same age as me except two girls who were around 18 years old. The two (older) girls attacked me and hit me. They asked the boys to make a circle around me and beat me. My cousin and the neighbor’s daughter ran to the checkpoint to inform the [Israeli] soldier. When the soldier approached us, the settlers ran away. He asked me what happened. I told him everything, but he did not respond to me.”

Settlers also frequently attack the school itself. To cite one of myriad examples, Ma’an News Agency reported in November 2007 that “right wing Israeli settlers broke into the courtyard of the Qurduba school … attempted to set fire to the building … attempted to rip the doors off the building and succeeded in knocking over walls, trampling flower beds and blocking the path to the school with rocks … a group of children, armed with axes, attempted to break the water pipes that supply the school. They were urged on by their teacher” (“Israeli settlers attack girls’ school in Hebron,” 26 November 2007).

In 2008, a previous director of the Qurduba School, Reem al-Shareef, moved the school’s start time from 8:00 to 7:30am, so the students would not be harassed by the settler children as the latter headed to daily study at their yeshiva. Today, because teachers and administrators must take a long route to avoid Checkpoint 56, “it takes about 45 minutes to reach the school,” said al-Jondy, “so most of the teachers come here late. Three of the teachers have injured themselves because of the new route. One of them hurt her leg, one hurt her back.” Because teachers are late, it is harder to enforce the 7:30 start time, leaving teachers and students once again vulnerable to early morning settler attacks.

Various challenges to education

“It’s very hard to have education in H2,” explained Mohammed Abuthereim, Hebron Municipality Director of Education, referring to the Israeli settlement district of Hebron. “The occupation affects [the children’s] social health. The students suffer from fear, worry and sadness. How to get an education, how to learn to read when you are attacked by settlers on the way to school? The same for the teachers … we need students to learn in safety, and not to have to worry about these things.”

Now that school has reopened, students and teachers are greeted with almost daily settler attacks. “In October, I filed a complaint with the Israeli police at the [nearby settlement of] Kiryat Arba, and they promised that in the future they would stop the settlers, because they don’t have the right to do these things,” al-Jondy told The Electronic Intifada. “But so far, the police have done nothing for us … [On 7 November,] the school’s guard phoned me at nine in the morning and told me there were settlers around the school, throwing empty bottles and big stones on the school and on the garden. So I quickly phoned the police, and they eventually came, but they did nothing.”

For now, the Qurduba School is pushing the Hebron municipality, as well as organizations like the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, to demand that the Israeli military ease its draconian restrictions of freedom of movement, not only for teachers but for all residents of Hebron.

In the meantime, resilience, steadfastness and hope remain the driving forces, in spite of the occupation, that keep the Qurduba School open day after day.

Badia Dwaik, a Hebron resident and the deputy coordinator of the local activism groupYouth Against Settlements, told The Electronic Intifada that the students and teachers of the Qurduba School have begun peaceful protests against the new closure policy.

“Over the years they have struggled for freedom of education and for the right to education enjoyed by all other children in the world, and this continues today,” she said. “They will not give up.”

West Bank Village Steps Up Protests Against Israel’s Thefts of Land

copied from my Electronic Intifada article here

Palestinians in Kufr Qaddoum demand access to their farmland, October 2011.

(Wagdi Eshtayah / APAimages )

For approximately five months, the residents of Kufr Qaddoum have united to demonstrate against the illegal Israeli settlement of Kedumim and the Israeli military’s closure of their village’s main road. Kufr Qaddoum, a West Bank village so old that, according to legend, Abraham was circumcised there with an axe, has since 1976 been plagued by Kedumim, a 3,000-inhabitant Israeli settlement that now surrounds the village on five hilltops. Kufr Qaddoum’s main road, which passes through Kedumim to link the village to Nablus, was closed by the Israeli military in 2003.

“The people of Kufr Qaddoum used this road long before the settlements came,” said Murad Shttaiwa, spokesman for the demonstrators. “Before 2003, we could drive through the settlement with no problems. Between 2004 and 2005, after the road was closed to cars, we walked through the settlement with no problems.”

In 2005, the road became closed to foot traffic as well. Before the new, indirect route to Nablus was constructed in 2008, “we used to walk and drive down unpaved dirt roads around Kedumim, but the settlers would still throw stones at cars and people,” Shttaiwa explained. “We would not react to it … for three years, we used to travel on a road made for animals.”

Now that Kufr Qaddoum’s main road is closed to villagers, a 13-kilometer straight journey to Nablus has turned into a 26-kilometer detour through a busy West Bank artery. “Three people have actually died trying to get through the main road,” Shttaiwa said, “because they were ill in ambulances, and the soldiers wouldn’t let the ambulance through.”

Taking the closures to court

When the road was first closed in 2003, villagers organized a single demonstration. “It was very peaceful,” Shttaiwa said. “The people left work and came, took their cars to where the barrier is [on the road], and then just sat and talked. We spoke with the soldiers and the soldiers stated to us that the road will eventually be opened.”

When the soldiers’ promise failed to materialize, however, villagers took the issue to court in 2004. After five years of waiting, in November 2010 Kufr Qaddoum finally received a positive response from the Israeli court system, authorizing its Palestinian villagers to use the road again. At that time, however, the Israeli military groundlessly claimed that the road is “unsuitable” and “unsafe” for human traffic. After all legal appeals failed, villagers decided to organize weekly demonstrations in July 2011.

Since then, Kufr Qaddoum has consistently held one of the most tight-knit, well-organized and well-attended Palestinian-led demonstrations against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank.

Hundreds of villagers, united with international activists and flanked by gas-masked media teams, walk down the main road towards Kedumim week after week, demanding the right to movement. “I’m very happy that a lot of people from the village are coming out for the demonstrations,” said Shttaiwa. “Even during Ramadan we thought people would fall back from protesting, but they still came out in numbers. Even during harvesting, they did not fall back, they still came out in numbers — after the harvest, they would put away their equipment and come out for the demonstrations.”

Funeral for the occupation

At the front line of the demonstration, villagers often stage a telling spectacle. A week before Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority’s president, gave a speech to the UNin September, villagers held a mock funeral for the occupation on 16 September, carrying a coffin draped with an Israeli flag.

A video of the demonstration, produced by the International Solidarity Movement, shows villagers setting the coffin ablaze moments before a phalanx of Israeli soldiers opened fire with tear gas (“Kafr Qaddoum September 16 2011,” 16 September 2011).

Later in September, villagers burnt an effigy of Benjamin Netanyahu after holding a mock trial condemning the Israeli prime minister for war crimes (“Kufr Qaddoum demands access,” International Solidarity Movement, 30 September 2011).

Demonstrations in Kufr Qaddoum have been accompanied by everything from a donkey painted with an Israeli flag to a live band from the Netherlands.

As demonstrations show no signs of losing steam, the Israeli military has escalated its attacks on Kufr Qaddoum. A recent report by the Palestinian news agency WAFAindicated that 12 persons — including five Palestinian children — were attacked with heavy tear gas and stun grenades during a weekly demonstration (“Israeli soldiers suppress Kufr Qaddoum weekly anti-settlements march,” 4 November 2011).

“Even though the demonstrations and the barriers are 500 meters away” from the village, explained Shttaiwa, “the soldiers will get closer and closer … [on 11 November], the soldiers got so close they were right outside my house, and the tear gas got inside the house, so my two-year-old son smelled it, and came up to me and said ‘Daddy, my eyes hurt!’”

Aggression gets worse

The military enters the village, in Shttaiwa’s words, because “the protests are getting stronger and stronger, and they want to stop the protests, so they are becoming more violent and more aggressive.” The Israeli military is also conducting frequent night raids into the village. Four days before a protest on 21 October, the army entered the village at night and arrested nine people (“Permission to enter their own lands: Kufr Qaddoum rampaged again by military,” International Solidarity Movement, 21 October 2011).

Though protests focus on the closure of their main road, the villagers of Kufr Qaddoum resist an occupation which touches on all aspects of their lives. More than half of the village’s land, approximately 11,800 dunams (one dunam equals 1,000 square meters), is situated in Area C of the West Bank — an area under the full administration of the Israeli army. Under the carve-up of the West Bank made by the 1993 Oslo accords, Area C includes all Israeli settlements and most of the Jordan Valley.

That means villagers need permission to access their own land from the Israeli District Coordinating Office. Olive harvesters, therefore, are unable to prepare their trees for the harvest throughout the year, and are only given a few days to complete the harvest itself.

Eyal Ha-Leuveni, a researcher with Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, told The Electronic Intifada that it is “very difficult” for Palestinians who own land around the Kedumim settlement to go through the permit process. “First you have to prove your ownership of the land, and this depends on your family history — if one family member was involved in a crime, likely no family member will get a permit,” Ha-Leuveni said. “The permit process can take years, and in the meantime you get a temporary permit, which is very insecure.”

In addition, Palestinian farmlands in Area C are often stolen by settlers. In March 2008, a legal battle, waged by lawyers from Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din on behalf of Kufr Qaddoum residents, helped expose the method of land takeover characteristic of Kedumim and other settlements across the West Bank (“Court case reveals how settlers illegally grab West Bank lands,” Haaretz, 17 March 2008).

Kedumim’s local council members would map the “abandoned lands” around the settlements, even if they were outside the council’s jurisdiction, with the aim of taking them over. The council would “allocate” the lands to settlers, who would sign an official form stating that they have no ownership claim; and that the council is entitled to evict them whenever it sees fit, in return for compensating them solely for their investment in cultivating the land.

Kedumim’s former security chief, Michael Bar-Neder, testified that the land “allocation” was followed by an effort to expand the settlement. Bar-Neder said that once the settlers seized the lands, an application would be made to the military commander to declare them as owned by the State of Israel, since under an Israeli “law” covering the West Bank, anyone who does not cultivate his land for three years forfeits ownership of it (“Court case reveals how settlers illegally grab West Bank lands,” Haaretz, 17 March 2008).

It is important to emphasize that Israel’s “laws” regarding the West Bank lack any legitimacy as all Israeli settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. In violation of international law, Israel has seized West Bank land, in the words of Ha-Leuveni, “first by military orders, then by state land, then by private acquisition.”

The area where Kedumim now sits, said Ha-Leuveni, “is land that was first taken by military orders, where the army claimed the land was needed for military needs. Israel abandoned this justification in the 1980s, but it did not return any of this land to Palestinian owners.”

In a process that accelerated throughout the 1980s, West Bank land transferred from military to state ownership. “All the policy of declaring state land,” added Ha-Nuevi, “is an Israeli invention. There are large parts of the ‘state land’ of Qedumim that were owned or at least cultivated by Palestinians before Israel called it state land.”

According to a July 2010 report on Kedumim by B’Tselem, “construction of approximately 59 [Kedumim] units deviated from the ‘state lands’ allotted to the settlement; two permanent structures and 12 caravans were erected on private Palestinian land; and a new neighborhood, comprising some 30 caravans, was built west of the settlement, deviating from the allotted ‘state land.’” (“By Hook and By Crook: Israeli Settlement Policy in the West Bank,” B’Tselem, July 2010).

In addition, Israel plans to erect a wall between Kedumim and Kufr Qaddoum, which, according to a 2005 report by The Economist, would grab another 5,000 dunams more than the 5,000 Kufr Qaddoum has already lost (“Life in the armpits of Palestine,” 7 April 2005).

Shttaiwa estimated that Kufr Qaddoum has already lost 58 percent of its land to Kedumim, and will lose 80 percent upon completion of the wall. Contrary to the Kedumim security officer’s statement, quoted in The Economist, that “not one centimeter of Qedumim is built on land known for sure to be private,” a 2009 B’Tselem map details that much of Qedumim is built entirely on privately-owned Palestinian land (“Private Palestinian land in the built-up and municipal area of Kedumim,” B’Tselem, 2009).

Illegal appropriation of Kufr Qaddoum land to the settlement

This process of illegal appropriation has plagued Kufr Qaddoum since the establishment of Kedumim in 1976. “Every year the settlement has expanded,” Shttaiwa told The Electronic Intifada. “Since the settlement came it has been expanding, as well as stealing more and more land. Over the years they have also attacked people harvesting their olives, thrown stones at them, and stolen their olives. It has gotten worse in recent years.”

Settler violence, Shttaiwa explained, increased after the first intifada, in which Kufr Qaddoum played a minimal role. “At the beginning we had no problems … [but] now these settlers are known to be pretty violent,” he said. “In the first intifada they killed a male from here and injured another one as well. After the second intifada, they began attacking olive trees.”

Two years ago, settlers spray-painted “This is Israel” and other graffiti upon the burial stones of a Kufr Qaddoum cemetery.

In testimony given to B’Tselem last year, farmer ‘Abd a-Latif ‘Obeid said that over the years, Kedumim settlers have intentionally sabotaged his olive harvest, dumped burning refuse onto his land, and stolen more than fifty dunams to build greenhouses and a park (“Testimony: Israel seizes land and hampers access for farmers near the Kedumim settlement,” B’Tselem, 21 June 2010).

“We’ve been suffering from this situation since 1984,” he states in the report. “All the land seizures, the settler attacks, and the need to coordinate entry are aimed at expanding the Kedumim settlement, which already has a large amount of land, and at taking, little by little, the rest of our land. They force us to neglect our land so it will be easier for them to annex it to the settlement.”

In addition, Kufr Qaddoum suffers from the socio-economic effects of occupation. A 2007 report by the Jerusalem-based Land Research Center estimates that, since 2002, 75 percent of Kufr Qaddoum’s residents became unemployed after construction ofIsrael’s wall in the West Bank and closure of Kufr Qaddoum’s main road shut out many possibilities for income generation in Israel and Nablus (“Closing of Israeli roads in Kafr Qaddum village,” Land Research Center, 7 February 2007).

Now, almost half of Kufr Qaddoum’s residents depend on foreign aid for living, and emigration has reached a record high of 10-15 percent of the total population.

“Everyone is affected”

The demonstrations in Kufr Qaddoum are a long-overdue response to the suffering the village has endured for decades. The whole village comes out to demonstrate — college students who are tired of paying 20 shekels ($5) a day to get to take an extended detour to school in Nablus; farmers who are tired of living in fear, tired of seeing their olive trees burnt, their land stolen, their livelihoods ruined; villagers who demand the right to move freely down a road that is their own.

“In Kufr Qaddoum and throughout Palestine,” Shttaiwa explained, “we do not have demonstrations for the sake of the demonstration itself. None of us likes to be dead, or likes to smell tear gas, or likes to damage his house. We only want our rights. We always say to the Israeli army, ‘give us our rights and we will not go for demonstrations. Leave our land and we will not go to demonstrations.’ That is our message in Palestine.”

Words From The Man Who Stood Next to Mustafa Tamimi as He Was Shot

copied from my +972mag article here

Ibrahim Bornat, artist and activist from Bil’in, was standing next to Mustafa Tamimi when Tamimi was shot in the head with a tear gas canister at close range by an Israeli soldier (Bornat can be seen standing directly next to Tamimi in these now-iconic photos). Ibrahim is himself no stranger to the resistance. Since 2000, he has been in the hospital 83 times for injuries sustained by the Israeli military during demonstrations, and has been arrested five times. Here is his testimony about his experiences when Mustafa was critically injured on Friday, December 10.

Mustafa and I were alone, it was just the two of us, with the rest of the protesters quite far behind, and we were chasing the jeep and telling it to leave. We got separated from the rest, because the soldiers threw almost 50 tear gas canisters at once, so the whole protest was pushed back. The tear gas went over our heads and we got closer to the soldiers, shouting at them that they had thrown enough. The jeeps turned around to leave as they were shooting gas behind us. One jeep, however, lingered and seemed to be waiting for us to get closer. As we reached the jeep, the soldier opened the door and shot two rounds of tear gas. I think I saw this soldier’s face, but Mustafa definitely saw and whoever he is, Mustafa knows best.

 Mustafa pushed me down, and one canister that was aimed for me flew over my head. The second one hit Mustafa, but I didn’t know it hit him at first because I thought ‘for sure they wont shoot at us from so close’. I thought he had just ducked down, and then I thought that maybe he had just passed out from the gas, because there was gas all around him. I went to him, laying face down on the road, and I turned him over and pulled the cloth off his face.

Of what I can say about it, it is worse than words can say. The whole half of his face was blown off, and his eye was hanging out, and I tried to push his eye back up. I could see pieces of the inside of his head, and there was a pool of blood gathering under him. His whole body was trembling. It started from his feet, then up to his arms, then it reached his chest, and then his head, and then a gasp came out and I’m sure at that moment he died. He gasped, and let out a bunch of air, and I knew at that moment his soul had left. I have seen many people, not a few, die in front of me, and I know death. Maybe later on they revived his heart, but I knew that his soul had left.

 I ran back to get people, because we were far away, but there was no ambulance around, so the people around gathered him and put him in a service [a communal taxi] and tried to leave. The soldiers stopped the service and tried to arrest Mustafa, but when they saw that he was on the brink of death, they began to act as if they were humanitarian, to revive his heart. But what is ‘humanitarian’, to shoot someone to kill, and then to try to help him? These were the same soldiers from the jeep that shot him. They shot him, then say they want to help him. What they really did is prevent him from leaving. The body lay on the ground for half an hour. They wanted Mustafa’s ID, and they also wanted the ID of his mother, of another family member, and of Bassem Tamimi’s wife, because these people wanted to go out with him too. But I don’t know why they wanted the passport of a dead person! They were doing some kind of medical treatment while he was lying on the ground, but this was no hospital, and what he needed was to be taken to a hospital. He should have been flown out in that moment! There is nothing you can do for him on the street there.

I was with the family the whole night afterwards, especially with his father, who is very sick and on kidney dialysis. Mustafa’s family believed there was still some hope, so I did not want to tell them that I knew he was already dead. His father is very sick, and kept falling asleep and waking up again, and we didn’t tell him much at first, only that Mustafa had been shot but that, God willing, he would be okay. There are some things that are hard and give you no hope, and then there are some things that are hard, but there is something nice about them. Martyrdom is something that is hard, but it is also honorable, and that gave his family a lot of comfort.

I knew Mustafa as a brother in the resistance. We were close in the resistance to the occupation. Anyone who comes out with me in our resistance to the occupation is close to me, as close as my mother, brother, or father, whether they be Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, or international. He was free, and a person who is free fights the occupation. That’s the thing I can most say about him- he was freedom.

We defend ourselves through strength, through courage, through our right to this land, through steadfastness. The occupation, to defend itself, has to kill people. But we defend ourselves with our right. This is my philosophy.

Football in Burin

copied from my MondoWeiss article here

The Burin football team (All Photos: Ben Lorber)

On the 7th of December, a windy Wednesday morning behind the boys’ school in the Palestinian village of Burin, 15 teenagers, dressed in red uniform, took to the football field under the coach’s whistle. As the team began its warm-up exercises, another youth team arrived from the neighboring village of Huwwara, led by its determined coach. Under the morning sun, the football game began. As fans, coaches and players cheered and yelled from the sidelines, a Burin teenager scored a goal in the first ten seconds, setting the tone for the rest of the match. Two hours and two injuries later, Burin came out on top 4-0 against Huwwara, bringing the season’s record to 8 wins for Burin, 1 win for Huwwara, and 2 draws. As the boys walked away sweaty and satisfied, the school bell rang and children poured outside for recess.

The Huwwara football team

In occupied Palestine, the youth football league becomes, not a routine taken for granted, but a rare blessing. “We love to practice and to play,” said the Burin goalie, “but usually we cannot play on this field, because we are afraid of the settlers or the army. And there is nowhere else to play.” Overlooking the boy’s football field on all hilltops, the illegal Israeli settlements of Yitzhar (birthplace of the extremist ‘price-tag’ campaign of violence), Bracha, and a Bracha outpost loom menacingly.

“When times are good”, says Ghassan Najjar, co-coach and former Burin football player, “when there are no attacks, we can play. When times are bad, we cannot get together and have games.” At 21 years old, Najjar’s memories of his own days on the field are still fresh in his mind. “Children here have no outlet. They are lost. They cannot play on the streets because it is too violent, but they do not want to sit at home…my outlet, when I could play, was football.”

Playing in the shadow of the Yitzhar settlement.

Though the last month has spared the village of settler attacks, Israeli soldiers arrive at the school almost on a daily basis. “The boys’ school,” says Ghassan, “is right by a settler military road that heads up to the settlement. Sometimes the army comes into the principal’s office and says that he cannot let the boys outside of the school to play, for no reason. There is a 24 hour presence of the army outside the school, and the boys are frequently forbidden from leaving.” A football game, like outdoor recess, is a precious window of opportunity for children accustomed to living in fear.

Football- of which the Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, a devoted football goalkeeper before turning to intellectual pursuits, once said “all I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”- has long cemented Palestinian culture and spirit. Time and again, it appears on the scene as a potent weapon in the resistance struggle, as on October 11, when a football game erupted on the front lines of a hunger strike solidarity protest outside of Ofer Prison in Ramallah.

Once a locus of national consciousness, Palestinian football was deliberately denied international recognition until the Palestine Football Association was recognized by FIFA in 1998. “Prior to 1948”, says Issam Khalidi in ‘Body and Ideology- Early Athletics in Palestine (1900-1948)’, an excellent study of the politics of sport in Palestine,

“there were some 65 athletic clubs in Palestine…these clubs had a tremendous impact on the lives of Palestinian young people, shaping their character and preparing them for social and political involvement…these athletics teams provided a social, national and institutional base for Palestine’s political organization in the first half of the twenty-first century. They developed alongside and in response to Jewish immigration and the Arab-Zionist confrontation. Athletic clubs were important in evoking the Palestinian national consciousness, [and] sustaining connections between villages and cities…the advancement of organized sports in Palestine was closely linked to the development of education. Even though education officials did not emphasize physical education programs in schools, most institutions had competitive football teams.”