Author: heathlander

I’ve just returned home from the World Against War demo today in London. It was a fantastic event, with an excellent turnout (between 10-40,000, according to the BBC) and a great atmosphere. The march was called to mark five years since the invasion of Iraq, although Israel’s recent crimes in Gaza were definitely on everyone’s mind – which is excellent, of course. The march was convened by the Stop the War Coalition around three basic demands: troops out from Afghanistan and Iraq, no attack on Iran and an end to the siege of Gaza. On all three, as Tony Benn was sure to remind us, the marchers spoke for the majority of British and world public opinion.
Here are some pics from the event. Note: I mainly hung around with the “Free, Free Palestine!” crowd, so they’re probably disproportionately represented below.

People slowly filling Trafalgar Square, at around 12 noon.

“Viva, viva Palestina!”

“Occupation is a crime! Israel out of Palestine!”

“If you tremble indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”

We started with a rally in Trafalgar Square. There were the usual list of speakers – Tony Benn, George Galloway, Azzam Tamimi, Lindsey German (who is running for Mayor of London),  Andrew Murray, Caroline Lucas MEP, and so on – as well some new ones, for example a Palestinian lady from Hebron and Nick Broomfield, director of the excellent Battle for Haditha. Da yoof was represented by the head of a student anti-war group – in 2003 children throughout the country walked out of school to protest the invasion.

Hiss!

This one caused a serious shortage in chalk supplies.

Following the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in December 2006, the country is now suffering one of the worst refugee crises in the world, paralleled only by that in Iraq.

After the rally we marched across Westminster bridge, along the bank, back across Lambeth bridge and on to Parliament Square.

To give an idea of the scale of the protest, the picture above shows Westminster bridge, taken from Lambeth bridge. It’s not very clear, thanks to my rusty old four megapixel camera, but the bridge is packed with protestors. I stayed around for a while to see when it would end, but people just kept coming.

“End the siege of Gaza! Now, now, now!”

We finished in Parliament Square with a second, smaller rally. At the end, one of the leaders of the Palestinian flag group (a guy from the Palestinian Forum in Britain, who was Palestinian himself) made a very important point. He thanked everyone for coming to show solidarity with the Palestinians because, he said, they need all the help they can get. At the same time, he emphasised that it is not our place to tell Palestinians what they must or must not accept. When it comes to their rights, it is up to the Palestinians to decide for themselves. Our job as citizens of states which support and facilitate the Israeli occupation is to do what we can to force Israel to make the Palestinians a reasonable offer, and to strengthen the position of the Palestinians as much as possible through solidarity and protest.

Update: lenin has some more photos here. This one in particular is a cracker:

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Three Palestinian children aged 10, 12 and 14 were killed this evening in an Israeli air-strike in northern Gaza, bringing today’s Palestinian death toll to 12. Five members of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades were killed this morning in two targeted assassinations in Gaza, while this afternoon two Palestinian farmers were killed by Israeli tank fire.

In retaliation for the killing of its activists, Hamas fired at least 30 Qassam rockets into Israel, killing a student in Sderot and wounding several others. Olmert indicated that the campaign of assassinations will continue, declaring that “no one in Hamas, not the low-level officials nor the highest echelon, will be immune against this war.” To prove his sincerity, Israeli jets bombed the Hamas Interior Ministry (again), killing a six-month old baby and wounding at least 14 bystanders.
It is unclear whether the Israeli government intends to launch a full-scale invasion of Gaza, where the population has been reduced to boiling drinking water for lack of chlorine. What is certain is that such a move would do nothing to halt the Qassams, as previous experience has amply demonstrated. Hamas continues to offer Israel a ceasefire, as it has done for months now in the face of flat rejection from Israel. According to a Ha’aretz poll, 64% of Israelis support direct talks with Hamas towards a ceasefire and the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Sadly, public opinion has yet to translate into state policy.

In an extremely positive development, Hamas helped organise a mass non-violent protest on Monday against the Israeli siege. According to Ynet 20,000 Palestinians participated in the demonstration, forming a human-chain from Beit Hanoun in the North of the Strip to Rafah in the South. Ha’aretz reported on the IDF’s plans for dealing with the unarmed demonstrators:

`But the IDF has also carved up the area inside the Gaza Strip, at least on the army’s maps. The army intends to prevent the marchers from advancing on the fence when they are still inside the Strip, using various means for crows [sic] dispersal according to a ring system: The closer the marchers get to the fence, the harsher the response.

The army plans to fire at open areas near the demonstrators with artillery that the Artillery Corps has been moving to the area over the past couple of days. If the marchers continue and cross into the next ring, they will face tear gas. If they persist, snipers could be ordered to aim for the marchers’ legs as they approach the fence.’

In the event, confrontation was avoided. Hopefully this latest organised, non-violent direct action is the beginning of a trend. Passive resistance carries real risks for Palestinians, but I suspect that it would ultimately prove far more successful than the current strategy of violence.

As the siege of Gaza continues (.pdf) and the violence escalates (Israeli forces killed 89 Palestinians in January alone, a 44% increase on December 2007 and the highest monthly total of Palestinian deaths since November 2006), Israel naturally justifies its actions as a necessary response to the Qassam rockets, which killed all of two Israelis last year. This claim is widely accepted in the U.S. and Britain, which is not particularly surprising given that Palestinian violence is rarely contextualised in the mainstream press.

Thankfully, then, the UN last week published the latest report of John Dugard, UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories. Dugard, considered the father of modern human rights law in South Africa, is a man of impeccable integrity and principle, and his report on the human rights situation in the West Bank and Gaza provides the context that would otherwise, as I say, be sorely lacking.

Gaza

After demonstrating that Gaza remains occupied territory – the determining factor is not permanent physical presence but “effective control”, which Israel plainly has – Dugard reports that over 80% of the Gazan population lives below the official poverty line and is dependent on UNRWA food aid for survival. “[O]nly 41 per cent of Gaza’s food import needs are currently being met,” he notes. Gazans, who according to UN human rights chief Louise Arbour are surviving in the “most abhorrent conditions” where they are “systematically deprived of the enjoyment of almost all their human rights and basic needs”, have suffered a complete economic and social meltdown as a consequence of the Israeli siege. The private sector has totally collapsed (.pdf), hundreds of thousands of people have only limited access to drinking water and there are frequent power outages as a result of Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s power plant in 2006 and “subsequent damage to electricity transformers” (for instance when “on 14 November the IDF struck an electricity transformer in Beit Hanoun which knocked out power for 5,000 people in the area”) as well as the current sanctions regime.

Dugard also details the effects of the siege on Gaza’s healthcare services. Clinics are “in short supply of paediatric antibiotics” and “91 key drugs are no longer available.” Israeli border closures have severely restricted Palestinian access to healthcare. Palestinians requiring emergency treatment unavailable in the Strip must apply for a permit to cross the border to be treated in Israel or Egypt, but the percentage of permit applications rejected by Israel has decreased significantly since Hamas took control of Gaza. This, reports Dugard, “has resulted in a drastic increase in the number of patients who have died as a result of restrictions”. He cites an Israeli NGO estimate of 44 deaths due to Israeli restrictions, but other sources place the figure much higher.

A written statement (.doc) by al-Haq and Defence for Children International decried Israel’s policy towards Gaza as “an unmitigated violation of international humanitarian law”, breaking “prohibitions on collective punishment, coercion, unlawful reprisals and rendering useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.” John Dugard similarly concludes that “Israel’s siege of Gaza violates a whole range of obligations under both human rights law and humanitarian law”, particularly the prohibition on collective punishment:

“The indiscriminate and excessive use of force against civilians and civilian objects, the destruction of electricity and water supplies, the bombardment of public buildings, the restrictions on freedom of movement, the closure of crossings and the consequences that these actions have upon public health, food, family life and the psychological well-being of the Palestinian people constitute a gross form of collective punishment.”

He also makes the important point that “other States that are a party to the siege of Gaza are likewise in violation of international humanitarian law and obliged to cease their unlawful actions.” As citizens of Britain, the EU or the U.S., we are active participants in the conflict and as such have a responsibility to force our governments to stop colluding in the strangulation of Gaza. This doesn’t simply mean providing more aid to Palestinians – as Louise Arbour states, “[t]he denial of basic and fundamental rights can not be compensated for by permitting a trickle of charity.” It means pressuring Israel to end the siege, agree to a ceasefire and engage in sincere negotiations towards achieving a genuine two-state settlement.

West Bank

Dugard writes that far from seeing a human rights improvement in as a result of U.S./Israeli engagement with the Abbas government, the quality of life in the West Bank has actually “deteriorated further” since 2006:

“Israel has not taken steps to dismantle the infrastructure of occupation. On the contrary, it has maintained and expanded the instruments that most seriously violate human rights – military incursions, settlements, the separation wall, restrictions on freedom of movement, the Judaization of Jerusalem and the demolition of houses.”

He reports that at the time of writing (January 2008), “new construction is under way in 88 settlements and the average growth rate in the settlements is 4.5 per cent compared with the average growth rate of 1.5 per cent in Israel itself”. He describes the settlements as “a form of colonialism”, which is “contrary to international law.” Along with colonialism, Dugard also repeatedly compares aspects of Israel’s occupation to apartheid, in some instances going beyond anything seen in South Africa. For an excellent discussion of the colonialist roots of both Zionism and apartheid, see here.

The construction of the wall, “clearly illegal”, continues apace. Recalling that “Israel has abandoned its claim that the wall is a security measure only and now concedes that one of the purposes of the wall is to include settlements within Israel”, Dugard describes how “hardships experienced by Palestinians” living near the wall and in the ‘closed zone’ between the wall the Green Line have already caused the “displacement of some 15,000 persons.” This is ethnic cleansing, plain and simple. When completed, the wall will trap an estimated 60,000 Palestinians on the Israeli side and annex around 10.2% of the West Bank, including “many of the West Bank’s valuable water resources and its richest agricultural lands.” About a quarter of the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem has been cut off from the city by the wall, which limits their access to “hospitals, schools, universities, work and holy sites – particularly the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

The other main component of Israel’s ‘matrix of control’ in the West Bank is the system of checkpoints and roadblocks, which severely restricts Palestinian freedom of movement and has effectively divided the territory into numerous, isolated cantons. Israel justifies the roadblocks, which “seriously obstruct [Palestinian] freedom of movement … with disastrous [social and economic] consequences”, as – what else? – necessary security measures. Not so, says Dugard, who suggests that a far more likely explanation for the restrictions is that they serve “to facilitate the travel of settlers through the West Bank and to impress upon the Palestinian people the power and presence of the occupier.” This conclusion is shared by the World Bank, the UN OCHA (.pdf) and B’Tselem, among others.

Noting an Israeli military survey which found that a quarter of soldiers serving at checkpoints witnessed or perpetrated abuse of Palestinians, Dugard describes how the checkpoints “humiliate Palestinians” and “create feelings of deep hostility towards Israel”, which ultimately does “more to create insecurity than to achieve security.” This was precisely the reasoning proffered by 12 retired IDF generals earlier this month, when they argued for the removal of roadblocks in the West Bank:

“The feeling of humiliation and the hate the roadblocks create increase the tendency of Palestinians to join militant groups and Hamas,” Shlomo Brom, a former chief of the army’s planning division who signed the letter, said.

[…]

“You have to understand that there is damage in having the Palestinian people with its back to the wall, not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, unable to improve their economy, unable to move from place to place,” [Ilan Paz, former head of the army’s administration of Palestinian civilian affairs] told Israel Radio.

“This creates a reality that creates terror, and we have to remember that.”

After Hamas won elections in early 2006, Israel increased the number of roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank by 40%.

Israel destroys Palestinian homes almost as quickly as it constructs Israeli settlements. In January alone, 57 house demolitions were recorded (.pdf) in the West Bank, 25 of which were inhabited, and a further six residential structures were damaged. This resulted in the displacement of approximately 215 Palestinians. Dugard reports that the (illegal) practice of punitive house demolitions, formally disavowed, continues, as when the IDF demolished seven homes in Qalqiliya last August because they housed members of Hamas, making 48 Palestinians homeless in the process. Palestinian homes are most frequently destroyed on the grounds that they were built without an Israeli permit. Leaving aside the fact that it’s none of Israel’s goddamned business what Palestinians do on Palestinian land, the justification is a ruse because Israel grants permits in a discriminatory manner, almost always rejecting Palestinian applications.

Israel regularly conducts military operations in the West Bank, killing and “arresting” Palestinians suspected of involvement in military resistance, or else who simply happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Dugard writes that the IDF has “frequently failed to distinguish clearly between military targets and civilians” during such incursions.

Dugard concludes that in the West Bank, as in Gaza, there is a “serious humanitarian situation” that is “largely the result of Israel’s violations of international law”, and further that, as in Gaza, “Israel’s actions [in the West Bank] constitute an unlawful collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

The “peace process”

Dugard finishes by briefly discussing recent developments in the “peace process”, in terms of their impact on Palestinian human rights. He expresses “deep concern” at the split between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank, and calls on the ‘international community’ to encourage a process of reconciliation. Warning that this “should not take the form of support – political, economic or military – for one faction at the expense of the other”, he notes “[u]nhappily” that:

“the Quartet (which embraces the United Nations) is, at the time of writing, making little attempt to promote Palestinian national unity. On the contrary, it pursues a divisive policy of preferring one faction over the other; of speaking to one faction but not the other; of dealing with one faction while isolating the other.”

Indeed, the conflict between Hamas and Fatah was driven from the start by Israel and the U.S., who sabotaged the National Unity government of February 2007 and armed anti-Hamas Fatah militants while paralysing the Hamas government with what Dugard described as “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.” Now, Israel and the U.S. have explicitly conditioned financial aid and diplomatic engagement with Abbas on Fatah’s refusal to negotiate with Hamas. It is recognised across the board that some minimum level of intra-Palestinian cooperation is a necessary pre-requisite for any serious attempt to reach a negotiated settlement. That Israel insists on blocking any such development belies its professed interest in ‘peace’.

Dugard also criticises the “Annapolis process” on the grounds that it is premised not on the norms of international law, as outlined by the International Court of Justice in July 2004, but rather on the outdated and frankly irrelevant 2003 “road map”. He notes that, according to art. 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “persons in an occupied territory shall not be deprived of the benefits of the Convention by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territory and the occupying Power, or by the annexation by the occupying Power of part of the occupied territory.” This has serious consequences:

“[It] means that any agreement between the Palestinian authorities and the Israeli Government that recognizes settlements within the occupied Palestinian territory, or accepts the annexation by Israel of Palestinian land within the wall, will violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. This is but one example of the dangers of a peace process between unequals which has no regard to the normative framework of international law.”

It also supports Hamas’ approach of agreeing to a long-term truce on the basis of an Israeli withdrawal, after which a final settlement would be agreed.

The 40-year occupation, says Dugard, has been characterised by “[s]ettlements, checkpoints, demolition of houses, torture, closure of crossings and military incursions” – in short, by “systematic and consistent” violations of human rights over a period of several decades.

Palestinian terrorism, like all terrorism, “must be condemned and [has] been condemned.” However, it is important to recognise, as Dugard does, that Palestinian resistance, including terrorism, is an inevitable consequence of the Israeli occupation. As Dugard explains:

“Common sense … dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by Al Qaeda, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation. While such acts cannot be justified, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation.

[…]

“Acts of terror against military occupation must be seen in historical context. This is why every effort should be made to bring the occupation to a speedy end. Until this is done peace cannot be expected, and violence will continue. In other situations, for example Namibia, peace has been achieved by the ending of occupation, without setting the end of resistance as a precondition. Israel cannot expect perfect peace and the end of violence as a precondition for the ending of the occupation.”

Naturally, the idea that Palestinian “terrorists” are rational human beings acting on the basis of real grievances will reduce many to spluttering outrage. The desire of an oppressor, and those who identify with it, to deny the humanity of those it represses is of course very common, and perfectly understandable.

The fact nevertheless remains that while the Palestinian right to self-determination goes unfulfilled, the violence will continue. The solution is clear, if uncomfortable for some: namely, to end “the root cause of Palestinian violence – the occupation.”

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Here’s a nice Spitting Image sketch, from the 1980s/early 1990s:

(h/t to Jews sans frontieres)
On this topic, worth recalling are the words of Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa’s (Jewish) Minister for Intelligence Services, who said of the Israeli occupation:

“The occupation reminds me of the darkest days of apartheid, but we never saw tanks and planes firing at a civilian population. It’s a monstrousness I’d never seen before. The wall you built, the checkpoints and the roads for Jews only – it turns the stomach, even for someone who grew up under apartheid. It’s a hundred times worse…

We know from our experience that oppression motivates resistance and that the more savage the oppression, the harsher the resistance. At a certain point in time you think that the oppression is working, and that you’re controlling the other people, imprisoning its leaders and its activists, but the resistance will triumph in the end.”

Gaza today has become less a Bantustan and more an “animal pen whose denizens cannot be domesticated and so must be quarantined.” The 1.4 million Palestinians surviving in Gaza, over half of whom are children, have been “intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution” by relentless siege and bombing, which has caused “widespread deterioration of health services, industries and private sector” with a “grave [humanitarian] impact”.

Israeli repression in Gaza and the West Bank continues –  As’ad Abukhalil notes that while Olmert was meeting with Abbas yesterday to indulge in more meaningless meta-talks, three Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces – purportedly in reponse to the firing of Qassams into Israel by Palestinian militant groups. The reality is that the Qassams are primarily a reaction to Israeli incursions, an attempt to create a deterrent to Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip. In any case, Hamas has repeatedly offered Israel a ceasefire in exchange for an end to the siege. Israel has flatly rejected the idea, consistent with its frankly stated policy to overthrow the Hamas government (as outlined, for example, by Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh on last week’s HARDtalk). The reason for this hostility towards Hamas is not because it is involved in terrorism against Israel: the Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades have claimed responsibility for far more attacks than Hamas, which until recently had largely refrained from military action against Israel. Neither is it the result of Hamas’ political rejectionism: quite the opposite, in fact, as Henry Siegman explains:

“The siege of Gaza was imposed by Israel because Israel’s government and the US administration intended to undo the results of Hamas’s victory in the elections of 2006. Initially, they thought they could achieve this by arming Fatah’s security forces and encouraging them to promote anarchy in Gaza in a way that would discredit Hamas. When Hamas ousted Fatah security forces, Israel blockaded Gaza in the hope that its population would overthrow Hamas. The Qassam rockets were the consequence, not the cause of these misguided Israeli and US manoeuvres…

Hamas had announced its willingness to submit to a popular referendum any agreement that resulted from permanent status talks between Fatah and Israel. Israel boycotted Hamas because it did not want Hamas to play any role in a peace process, fearing that this would exact a far greater price than negotiations with Fatah from which Hamas was excluded.”

In other words, Israel fears the threat of a Hamas “peace offensive” far more than it does the pathetically inept Qassams.

And in the background to it all, the construction in the settlements continues as inexorably as ever. People often point to the ongoing settlement as being somehow incongruous with the “peace process”, but in fact the two are indivisibly linked. As Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir explained of his participation in the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference,

“I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years and meanwhile we would have reached a half million people in Judea and Samaria.” (via)

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

I refer, of course, to the recent encounter between President Bush’s derrière and Matt Frei, butt-kisser extraordinaire. Not for Frei are half-measures and almost-there’s, like standard BBC reporting which, while undoubtedly deferrential to power, typically affects at least a pretense of concern about ‘balance’ and ‘impartiality’. No: Frei is content with nothing less than total and utter servility to power, and by God no amount of ethical standards or (perish the thought!) residual journalistic integrity will stand in his way.
This is the man who, in April 2003, informed BBC viewers that:

“There’s no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East… is now increasingly tied up with military power”,

and who, following the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. marines in Haditha, dared to ask:

“How and why have the liberators ended up killing the liberated?”

But in his most recent interview, with President Bush to be broadcast on ‘Newsnight’ tonight, Frei took obsequiousness to new and grotesque levels. In the spirit of St. Valentine’s day, Frei boldly began the first BBC interview with the U.S. President for seven years by flirtatiously informing him of his high approval ratings in African states. After a bit of fluff from Bush (“mine is a mission of mercy and a mission of the cold realism of the world in which we live”), he got down to the nitty-gritty:

“Frei: Your administration has given $15bn to treat Aids in Africa?

Mr Bush: Yeah.

Frei: Which is an unprecedented amount of money, and you want to double that amount yet again?

Mr Bush: Yeah.

Frei: This is a huge commitment. And, yet, the administration and you, personally, don’t seem to be getting a lot of credit for it.

Mr Bush: Yeah – you know, this is kind of tied to your first question about polls. Polls are nothing more than just, like, a puff of air. What matters is results. And, ultimately, people will be able to make, you know, an objective judgment of a president and his administration and, in this case, a country’s commitment. And so I care really about is the results of the programmes. I hope by now people have learned that I’m not one of these guys that – really gives a darn about elite opinion. What I really care about is, are we saving lives? And in this case, we are. As I mentioned in my speech that you kindly listened to – when I first went to Sub-Saharan Africa, 50,000 were receiving antiretrovirals. Today, 1.3 million. And that’s a lot in a very quick period of time. But, there’s so much more suffering. And that’s why I’ve called for a doubling of aid. The good news is, it’s not just America. As I mentioned in my speech, the G8 nations also are supporting this very important initiative. And, you know, it’s… like an effort of mercy.

Frei: But, it has made a huge difference, hasn’t it? So…

Mr Bush: Yeah.

Frei: Why not take some credit for it?

Mr Bush: Because it’s just not my nature, you know?”

You can feel Frei’s heart melt at this point: the man’s in love. Bush the Saviour of Africa safely established, Frei moved on to the next item on Bush’s agenda: Darfur. Why, he demanded, are you refusing to send troops to stop the “genocide”? This whole line of questioning implies that Bush’s failing, should one exist, is that he has been too reluctant to conduct military interventions abroad, a “criticism” which suits the establishment just fine. Feeling extra generous, Frei fearlessly proceeded to present Bush with an opportunity to criticise China:

“Yesterday, Steven Spielberg – the Hollywood director – pulled out of the Beijing Olympics over Darfur. He said the Chinese aren’t doing enough to stop the killing in Darfur. Do you applaud his move?”

How courageous! A lesser journalist might have taken the opportunity of an interview with the President of the United States of America to challenge American policies, but not Frei. He is not afraid to ask Bush exactly what Bush wants to be asked.

After allowing Bush to blather on (unchallenged, of course) for a bit about how “America’s soul is enriched” and her “spirit…enhanced when we help people who suffer”, Frei teased the President that “there’s only one country, really, that the wider world will associate with you”: Iraq. “Are you happy about that?” This absurd question is the journalistic equivalent of saying: ‘go on, just talk about what you want to talk about while I sit back and get lost in your eyes.’ But how’s this for stinging criticism?:

“But, do you regret, rather, I should say that you didn’t listen to your – some of your commanders earlier, to send more troops to Iraq to achieve the kind of results that we’re seeing now?”

That one must have had Bush trembling in his boots. You can hear Frei struggling to force even this mild attempt at “criticism” from his enraptured face. ‘Why, Mister President, did you wait so long to escalate the occupation of Iraq to current levels, when the peace and happiness that has resulted from the surge could have been achieved so much earlier?’ ‘I did follow advice from my commanders’, sez Bush, and on we move. In a frankly heroic display of single-minded determination, Frei studiously avoided mentioning any other possible criticisms of the invasion and occupation – the staggering death toll, the campaign of flagrant lies on which the war was based, the fundamental illegality of the whole enterprise, and so on. Such topics are not fit for polite conversation.

The rest of the interview continued in this vein, with Frei questioning whether Bush’s confessed sanctioning of torture might “send the wrong signal to the world”, clearly grasping the fact that the big problem with torture is its potential to damage America’s PR.

And then it was over. Frei left with Bush’s number in his pocket, a second date sure to follow, and the BBC once again covered for a war criminal with the blood of over a million Iraqis on his hands. And counting.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

There is a debate currently raging in official Israeli circles on how to deal with the Qassam rockets from Gaza. At the dovish end of the spectrum, we have Vice Premier Haim Ramon, former Minister of Justice, arguing against a full-scale military assault on the grounds that it “would cost many IDF casualties” and advocating instead that Israel collectively punish the entire population of Gaza by reducing their supply of electricity, necessary for the operation of such luxuries as hospitals and sewage treatment. “If they fire a rocket, then there should be no electricity, or water or fuel” that day, he said.
At the hawkish end, we have Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit calling for overt state terrorism against Gaza:

“[A]ny other country would have already gone in and level the area, which is exactly what I think the IDF should do – decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it.”

Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal explained the rationale:

“We did it in Lebanon in 2006; we wiped out a whole neighborhood, the Dachya, including tall buildings, sometimes with people in it, and – what can you do? It worked! We have had nearly two years of quiet from Lebanon since then.”

The problem, Sheetrit ventured, is that “[w]e are trying to talk in English to a population that only understands Arabic”. And thus the colonialist racism underpinning so much of Israeli political discourse surfaces once again.

Is it any wonder so many Israeli politicians and generals find themselves having to cancel trips abroad fearing arrest for war crimes?

Returning to sanity, what is behind Hamas’ decision to resume the launching of Qassams into Israel? Ha’aretz explains:

‘One of the main reasons for the escalation stems from the attempt by Hamas to establish a new deterrent against Israel.

Since mid-January, Hamas has operated differently in the Strip. It no longer uses short-term and irrational responses to IDF ground raids or air attacks.

For each Israeli operation, especially if it involves a large number of casualties from the ranks of the organization, Hamas responds with a drawn-out rocket barrage of three to four days.

At its completion, Hamas lowers the intensity, until the next round of violence.

The latest example of this occurred last week. On Tuesday, nine members of Hamas were killed in an IDF operation.

Two days later, seven more Palestinians were killed, six gunmen and a civilian. Hamas fired, according to its press release, no less than 135 Qassam rockets and mortars between Tuesday and Saturday night, in addition to shooting from various smaller groups. On Sunday, Hamas stopped shooting.

The message: henceforth, every Israeli operation will result in a similar response. Hamas is hoping that Israel will agree, after repeated bombing of Sderot, to a tahdiye (calm) in the territories, and even believe they can bring about an end to the arrests that the IDF is carrying out in the West Bank.’

That is, the Qassams are motivated by rational military calculations and are typically a response to Israeli military action. Hamas is trying to force Israel into a ceasefire by raising the costs of military confrontation. It isn’t working because Hamas’ ability to inflict damage on Israeli society is extremely limited. The Qassams are far too inept to force Israel to the negotiating table.

(Incidentally, check out the latest Israeli military euphemism: it’s not an “assassination”, it’s a “focused prevention”, don’tcha know?)

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Over half the population of the Gaza Strip has left for Egypt in the past three days, a stark illustration of the extent of the deprivation imposed on them by the Israeli government and the “international community”. When Palestinians smashed through the wall separating Gaza from Egypt earlier this week, liberating themselves from Israel’s brutal siege, the reactions around the world were quite interesting. Far from expressing joy and exhilaration at the sight of hundreds of thousands of starved Palestinians flooding out of the Gaza prison camp, enjoying what for many of them was the first taste of freedom in their lives, one could instead sense a tangible whiff of fear and even panic underlying much commentary on the breakout.
To take the most execrable example, the Washington Post interpreted the Palestinians’ heroic efforts as merely another illustration of Hamas’ “ability to disrupt any movement toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians.” Resorting to flat-out fraud in its apology for Israel’s collective punishment, the Post‘s editorial board maintained that there was never a “real humanitarian crisis” in Gaza – “no one is starving”, we are told, Gazans just have to pay a little more for “food, fuel and cigarettes”. Thus, for the Washington Post, the Palestinians’ desperate scramble to load up on food and fuel supplies after the wall was breached was akin to Brits who take the ferry to France to stock up on cheap booze – an attempt to save a bit of cash, nothing more. Needless to say, even the briefest look at the facts is sufficient to dispel such claims as dishonest, callous propaganda (.pdf). “This is how pathetic the situation has become that people have to literally break out of Gaza just to get food and fuel,” said John Ging, the director of the United Nations refugee agency (UNRWA). “There is no dignity for anybody.”

The reaction of the Washington Post and others to this brief moment of humanitarian respite for the relentlessly pummeled population of Gaza revealed a lot about their priorities, but it wasn’t completely unfounded. The successful breach of the wall, apparently under preparation for months by activists in Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees, has indeed dealt a severe blow to Israel’s explicit policy of collectively punishing the civilian population of Gaza to turn them against Hamas. Put simply, the siege of Gaza has failed. The Palestinians have not been crushed into submission and Hamas is going nowhere.

Whether the ‘biggest jail break in history‘ will prove to be anything more than a deep breath before the siege is renewed and Gaza goes under again depends to a large extent on Egypt’s response. After Palestinian militants blew up the wall in at least 17 different places in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Egyptian border police stood aside while floods of desperate Gazans travelled to Rafah and El Arish to stockpile supplies and re-unite with relatives. Although Mubarak has cooperated with the U.S./Israeli blockade by keeping the Rafah crossing shut, on this occasion the immense public sympathy for the Palestinians’ plight together with increasing domestic political tensions meant that initially it would have been impossible for him to do anything other than let the Gazans through. However, Egypt has made clear that it wants the border rebuilt, and yesterday began efforts to close the breaches and turn back the tide of incoming Palestinians. Despite deploying water cannons and riot gear, Egypt’s ‘clampdown’ has so far proved unsuccessful – even as a few border openings were being closed, Palestinians used a bulldozer to destroy another section of the wall.

There’s little doubt that Mubarak wants to see Gaza re-sealed. Whether that will be possible is another matter entirely. Either way, the destruction of the wall has effectively killed the ‘Annapolis process‘, which was at its core about isolating and weakening Hamas. Recent events have clearly demonstrated that Hamas isn’t going away, Gaza can’t simply be ignored and the Palestinians will not be starved into submission. The prison break was a dramatic reminder that if any progress is to be made, Hamas and the people of Gaza will need to be given a stake.

It is therefore unfortunate that Hamas’ recent offer to share control of the Rafah border with Fatah and Egypt’s proposal, accepted by Hamas, for talks in Cairo to end the inter-factional conflict met with flat rejection from Ramallah. Abbas’ rejectionism is primarily motivated by the U.S. and Israel’s explicit conditioning of aid and diplomatic engagement with the PA on his continued refusal to negotiate with Hamas. Essentially, the message we’re sending to Abbas is: cooperate with the isolation of Hamas or the West Bank will become another Gaza.

This is a real problem because without a minimum level of Palestinian unity the prospects for any significant political progress are bleak, to say the least. As veteran observers of the conflict Robert Malley and Hussein Agha write,

“There can be neither Israeli-Palestinian stability nor a peace accord without Hamas’s acquiescence. Intra-Palestinian reconciliation will not last without Israel’s unspoken assent and willingness to lift its siege.”

The Financial Times agrees. Describing Israel’s siege as not only “illegal” but also “almost wholly counterproductive”, the radical left-wing journal noted that the attempt by Israel, the U.S., their allies in the Gulf and Fatah nationalists to “isolate and topple Hamas after its 2006 election victory” has failed, and concluded by calling for a ceasefire, an end to the blockade and a return to the government of national unity:

“Arab and international mediators should immediately seek an armistice from Hamas and an end to the Gaza blockade from Israel.

They should then seek to revive the year-old Hamas and Fatah unity agreement and set up a joint caretaker government prior to eventual new elections. The Islamists should be brought into talks – on condition they are ready to work for a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza with east Jerusalem as its capital. Only when that is achieved should Hamas, and all Arab countries, be required to recognise Israel – an Israel with fixed borders, not the moving frontiers it keeps pushing into occupied Palestinian land.”

Hamas has been pushing for precisely this for months. The only obstacle blocking the way is U.S./Israeli rejectionism, in collusion with the Fatah leadership. This approach looks like unlikely to change in the near future, unfortunately, and it is certainly possible that the blockade of Gaza will be resumed. The humanitarian consequences of this would be atrocious. According to the ICRC’s Head of Operations for the Middle East, Béatrice Megevand-Roggo, “the humanitarian situation [in Gaza] remains critical” and the “infrastructure is close to collapse”. Amnesty International comments,

“The 1.5 million Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip have been virtually imprisoned there since June, most of them in abject poverty as fuel, food and medicinal supplies run out as a result of the Israeli blockade. They must not be left to live in the same conditions after the re-closure of the border…

More than 40 deaths have occurred in recent months because patients in need of urgent medical treatment not available inside Gaza, were refused passage out. Hospitals in Gaza lack specialised staff and equipment, power cuts mean they’re having to rely on generators, and the blockade has made it difficult or impossible to get parts to repair them when they break down. In the meantime Gazans continue to die and this is unacceptable.”

The U.S. and the EU have thus far backed the Israeli siege to the hilt. Those of us wishing to avoid a return to the humanitarian disaster described above have a responsibility to do what we can to change this. Meanwhile, the Palestinians will continue to resist. The Gaza breakout dealt a dramatic blow to the U.S./Israeli policy of isolating Hamas whilst engaging, at least superficially, with Abbas. Annapolis is dead, and a good thing too.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Suppose I were to argue that, given Israel’s numerous and gross war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the international community should impose sanctions on Israel of such severity that 80% of the Israeli population would be reduced to reliance upon UN food aid for mere survival, and over 65% of Israeli households would be forced to live in ‘deep poverty’ (i.e. on less than $474 per month). The blockade would be so tight that only 41% of Israel’s food import needs would be met, and supplies of 91 out of 416 essential drugs and about a third of essential medical supplies (including most children’s antibiotics) would run out.
As a result of the worsening poverty, violence and despair, a growing proportion of Israel’s population would experience psychological problems, with some 40% (.pdf) of Israeli children suffering from insomnia and 34% from anxiety. Thousands of psychiatric patients would have their treatment stopped because over half the medicines required would no longer be available, and nearly half of Israel’s incubators would cease to function.

The siege would involve a significant reduction in the supply of fuel to Israel, which would receive less than half the amount it needs. This would cause a 60-70% shortage of fuel required to operate mobile health units. Spare parts for critical medical equipment would be blocked, which would cause the majority of diagnostic laboratory equipment in Israel, including MRI and X-ray equipment, to stop working. The proportion of deaths among hospitalized neonates at Israel’s pediatric hospitals would increase from 5.6% to 6.9% within a year. Patients requiring urgent or life-saving medical treatment would not be allowed to leave the country, causing many to go blind or simply die.

Restrictions on the import of fuel and spare parts would also severely hamper the operation of Israel’s water system, with the result (.pdf) that approximately 15% of the population would receive just 1-2 hours of water supply per day.

Israeli society would be squeezed so relentlessly that unemployment would sky-rocket to 37.6% and around a fifth of the population would experience a drop in income. A majority of households would be forced to reduce spending, primarily on food and clothing (for example, the purchase of meat would decrease by 98%, and the purchase of dairy products by 86%).

Nearly 90% of Israel’s industrial establishments would shut down, and those industries which remained operational would operate well below full capacity. Major Israeli industries (such as agriculture and construction) would be completely ‘paralysed’, leading to massive unemployment and reduction in income.

In short, then, suppose I were to advocate the calculated and systematic destruction of Israeli society as a response to the crimes and disagreeable ideology of the Israeli government. What response would I get? Likely as not, the idea would be greeted with horrified outrage and the men in white coats would be called before I finished the first sentence.

Yet, this is precisely what is being done to the residents of Gaza as we speak. Israel, backed by the ‘international community’, is openly and brazenly strangling 1.5 million Palestinians, over half of whom are children, to within an inch of their lives. The International Committee of the Red Cross recently published an unusually blunt report (.pdf) calling for immediate political action to resolve the “deep crisis” in the Occupied Territories. Warning that Gaza’s “vital services are in danger of complete collapse” as a result of Israeli policy, the ICRC concluded:

“The dignity of the Palestinians is being trampled underfoot day after day, both in the West Bank and in Gaza.

Israel’s harsh security measures come at an enormous humanitarian cost, leaving those living under occupation with just enough to survive, but not enough to live normal and dignified lives…

The 1.4 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip continue to pay for conflict and economic containment with their health and livelihoods. Cutting power and fuel further compounds their hardship and is contrary to fundamental humanitarian principles.”

In fact, the analogy presented above is quite unfair. It ignores the fact that the current sanctions regime, the cause of so much devastation and humanitarian suffering in the Gaza Strip, is being imposed on a population that has already suffered well over a year of sustained collective punishment, in which 683 Palestinians were killed, much vital infrastructure (the Interior Ministry, Gaza’s only power plant, etc.) was destroyed, unemployment shot up to unprecedented levels, the number of Palestinian households living in poverty increased by 30%, food consumption fell by 8% (.pdf), the Palestinian economy shrank by 21% in the fourth quarter of 2006 alone and the number of families unable to get enough food increased by 14%. These sanctions, initiated in response to the election of a government unfavourable to the U.S. and Israel, were in turn inflicted upon an occupied people who were already experiencing what the World Bank described as “the worst economic depression in modern history” and who were already suffering malnutrition rates comparable to those of sub-Saharan Africa.

As noted above, if I were to propose the politicide of Israel and the killing of hundreds of Israelis as an acceptable response to the crimes of the Israeli government, which by any objective measure are of a far greater scale than those of Palestinian militant organisations, I would be booed off the stage as an anti-Semite within seconds. Similarly, if I were to advocate the collective starvation of the American/British public and the murder of thousands of American/British citizens in response to U.S./UK crimes in Iraq – which, again, are just totally incomparable to those of Hamas and co. in terms of scale – I’d be reported to the government immediately as a probable al-Qaeda sympathiser. This would not be an unreasonable accusation – after all, “collective responsibility” and the consequent legitimacy of collective punishment is precisely the doctrine organisations like al-Qaeda employ to justify atrocities like the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

And yet Israel’s vicious collective punishment of Gaza is largely condoned or justified in Western political discourse. Certainly, it evokes none of the strident and emotional condemnation elicited by Palestinian attempts to collectively punish Israelis, through means such as suicide bombings and Qassam rocket attacks. (Again, the analogy is somewhat unfair, since Palestinian suicide bombers surely have a stronger justification for their actions than does the occupying Israeli state). Why the double-standard? Racism surely plays a part, as does simple ignorance of the realities on the ground. Either way, international law is clear on the matter, as is basic morality (al-Qaeda-lovers aside): collective punishment is forbidden. The U.S. and the EU, far from intervening in defence of basic Palestinian rights, have thus far been fully complicit in the criminal destruction of Gaza, which demonstrates clearly their profound contempt for human rights and the law, and is frankly nothing short of psychopathic.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Hugo Chavez’ defeat in the recent Venezuelan referendum on a package of 69 proposed reforms to the constitution was probably a healthy development for the revolution, although that will largely depend upon how the government deals with it.
The reform package consisted largely of progressive measures that would increased the power of communal councils, extended social security to the self-employed and informal sectors of the workforce (which account for some 40% of the total labour force), introduced the right to free university education for all, introduced the “right to the city” which would have guaranteed citizens equal access to a city’s services, recognised the importance of Venezuelans of African descent to Venezuelan culture, lowered the minimum voting age to 16, prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender, and so on. As journalist Greg Wilpert points out, “[t]hese are all forms of social and political inclusion that, if realized, would place Venezuela at the forefront in the world in this regard.”

Additionally, there were a small number of articles that served to further centralise power and increase the authority of the President. For example, the reforms would have allowed the President to run for re-election an indefinite number of times, increased presidential term lengths from six to seven years and made it more difficult for citizens to initiate referenda to recall the President (as occurred in 2004; Chavez won the referendum).

This apparent contradiction between moves to further decentralise power while at the same time increasing the authority of the state stems in part from what Wilpert calls the “slightly contradictory trajectory of the Chavez years”, whereby “greater democracy and greater citizen participation is introduced from the top, by the president”, albeit as a result of a widespread popular movement. “Strengthening the presidency thus, in this process, is also supposed to mean strengthening participatory democracy.”

Many people, including Chavez supporters, have expressed decidedly mixed views of the reforms – unsurprising, given that there are 69 of them. It is a shame that so many diverse initiatives were lumped into two “blocks”, with people having to either vote for all of them or none of them. The drafting process was also rushed – the national assembly was entitled to take up to two years to assess and debate the proposals – which meant that a) people became more susceptible to opposition spin and distortions (because, after all, it takes a lot longer to correct a lie than to spread one), and b) many people felt, understandably, that they had not been given an adequate say in what would have been a significant and lasting change to the country (although the consultation process was massive).

All these concerns resulted in a high level of abstention among Chavez supporters (voter turnout was only around 55%), resulting in a narrow defeat for the reform, by a vote of roughly 51%-49%. Seamus Milne comments,

“Crucially, it was the abstention of three million voters who backed Chávez in last year’s presidential election that lost the vote, rather than any significant advance by the opposition, which stayed stuck at roughly the same level of support.”

The defeat will hopefully result in a bit of “introspection in the Chavez movement and a critical debate which is long overdue for them”. As Tariq Ali writes,

“One of the weaknesses of the movement in Venezuela has been the over-dependence on one person. It is dangerous for the person (one bullet can be enough) and it is unhealthy for the Bolivarian process. There will be a great deal of soul-searching taking place in Caracas, but the key now is an open debate analysing the causes of the setback”.

Oil Wars has a good summary of what an honest look in the mirror might reveal for Chavez, and points out that this defeat (Chavez’ first) is in no sense a major blow for the revolution generally. Chavez remains very popular and, encouragingly, the opposition failed to gain significant support even in the face of a plainly flawed piece of legislation.

In any event, these are all basically internal Venezuelan issues. The reforms were put to a national vote, the Venezuelan people chose to reject them and the government accepted the result. That’s democracy in action, and it’s a good sign that the Venezuelan people are determined to remain in control of the revolution. It should also serve as a reminder that the revolution represents a widespread, grassroots social movement, far broader than a single person.

International media coverage of the campaign was predictably appalling. The weeks leading up to the referendum saw countless insinuations and accusations of Chavez being a “strongman” and a “dictator” – all standard media fare. Repeatedly, Chavez’ reforms were characterised as an attempt to “become president for life“. The Boston Globe informed its readers that the reforms, which would have allowed the President to be re-elected indefinitely, just as in Britain, France, Australia, Canada, and so on, “could have made him dictator for life”, while the Washington Post warned that they “could complete Venezuela’s transformation into a dictatorship.” When the Spanish King told Chavez to “shut up“, it was widely covered and received a generally positive reception in Western media – the unelected monarch’s desire to silence the elected President of Venezuela is evidently widely shared. The opposition’s campaign of violence and intimidation was not only ignored, but often inversed, with Chavistas being blamed for abuse that was clearly directed at them.

Those professing to be concerned about Venezuelan democracy should recall that, whatever one thinks of Chavez, the greatest threat to liberty in Venezuela undoubtedly comes from the U.S.-backed right-wing opposition. Indeed, one of the reasons why so many Venezuelans abstained or voted “yes” in the referendum, despite clear concerns about some of the proposed reforms, was undoubtedly a fear that to vote against it would strengthen the fascist opposition. Unlike Chavez, who accepted his first national electoral defeat with grace, the opposition was seen handing out blue “fraud” t-shirts before the results were even announced. This latest example of the opposition’s traditional tactic of attempting to discredit elections instead of trying to win it them was consistent with a video presented a few days earlier by the Venezuelan government, which showed opposition leaders calling on supporters to reject the results of the referendum and to take part in nation-wide protests to overturn the constitutional reform. It was also consistent with “Operation Pliers“, an alleged CIA document leaked shortly before the referendum, which outlined a plan to cooperate with “international press agencies”, Venezuelan opposition groups and opposition-aligned polling agencies to mount a “psyops” campaign to defeat the constitutional reforms. Whether the document is genuine or not is unclear, although the methods it outlines to subvert Venezuelan democracy are standard CIA practice, deployed in Latin America many times before. Needless to say, the revelation went virtually unreported in the international press (I could find only one mention of it in a mainstream article).

As the vote drew closer, the media became increasingly desperate in its attempts to demonise Chavez. The Washington Post resorted to parading out Donald Rumsfeld to accuse the “anti-American firebrand” of being a “tyrant” and call for “swift decisions by the United States” to defeat him (since, clearly, the Venezuelan people cannot be trusted to do so themselves in a free election), while the New York Times gave Chavez-defector and former Defense Minister Raúl Baduel an op-ed to characterise the reforms as undemocratic and, er, anti-Christian. Needless to say, Gen. Baduel was never given an op-ed in the Times when he was a Chavez supporter (and saying things like this). The day before the referendum, the NYT launched a last ditch attempt to sway the result. After dismissing Chavez’ “popular support” as a mere consequence of him “exploiting [Venezuela’s] oil wealth” (by, like, using it to help the majority of the population – outrageous, I know), the Times called on Venezuelans to “take a stand” against Chavez and “vote no”, for the sake of “Venezuela’s battered democracy”. Readers will recall that the Times demonstrated the extent of its profound concern for Venezuelan “democracy” in April 2002 when it, along with much of the American press, came out in favour of a fascist, U.S.-backed coup against Chavez, in which the first actions of the coup leaders were to dissolve the constitution, the National Assembly and the judiciary.

Chavez’ defeat in the referendum naturally sparked much jubilation in the press, accompanied, of course, by more distortions and absurd insinuations about Venezuela being a dictatorship (the New York Times, for example, called on the “international community” to “keep up the pressure” on Chavez, who “clearly hasn’t suddenly become a democrat.”) The Wall Street Journal went so far as to accuse (sub req.) the government of trying to “fudge” the results, implying that Chavez may well have manipulated the vote count to make the defeat look closer than it really was. Certainly, if the opposition had lost by such a small margin, we would currently be drowning in cries of “fraud” – the unevidenced accusations that Chavez has “massaged” the vote are a perfect example of what psychologists call ‘projection’.

The demonisation of Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution is unsurprising, and has little to do with concerns over Venezuelan democracy. The reality is that the revolution has been at its core a democratic one, driven by mass popular political participation of a kind that should put us in the West to shame. As Brazilian President Lula da Silva (one of the “moderates”) recently put it,

“You can invent anything you want to criticise Chavez, but not for lack of democracy.”

This sentiment was echoed by leaders from across Latin America, who yesterday praised Chavez for his “democratic posture” after losing the referendum. Chavez is a “great democrat”, declared Argentinean President Nestor Kirchner. “If only that could happen in Argentina, where there is a candidate that lost by 23 points and now says that we cheated.” Bolivian President Evo Morales agreed, as did the President of Paraguay Nicanor Duarte, who stated that Chavez’ posture “demonstrates that he is a great democrat and it puts to death the impression that he is authoritarian.” Even the Peruvian President and the Spanish government, both of whom have had disputes with Chavez, praised his handling of the defeat. According to the Spanish Foreign Minister, “the free expression of the people’s will has been accepted by all sides, and that shows the good operation of a democratic system.”

Rather, what Western elites and the corporate press find so offensive about Chavez is the fact that under him Venezuela is daring to follow its own path, independent of the U.S. His government is using Venezuela’s natural wealth not to enrich U.S. corporations and a small, light-skinned elite, as has been the historical norm, but to improve the lives of the majority of the population. Worse still, Chavez is helping other countries to become independent of the U.S. as well, trying to integrate Latin American states in a regional bloc and using Venezuelan resources to help poor countries free themselves from the control of the U.S. treasury (via the IMF and the World Bank). Projects like Telesur and the Bank of the South fill U.S. planners with dread, because they challenge American hegemony in what the U.S. has long considered to be its “backyard”. The Western beef with the revolution is, then, not that Chavez is an undemocratic authoritarian, but precisely the opposite: the concern is that Venezuela is now being run according to the wishes of the majority of its population, which run counter to U.S. elite interests in the region. In short, the problem for the West is not that Chavez is a “dictator”, but that he isn’t one.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Further reading:

• ‘Down but not out in Caracas’, Seamus Milne
• ‘Deterring Democracy in Venezuela’, The Heathlander
• ‘Interview: Venezuela–tensions within the process’, Mike Gonzales
• ‘Spinning Chávez’, Hugh O’Shaughnessy

• ‘Keep the record straight’, John Pilger

The problem with the Annapolis ‘peace conference’ was that a) it had nothing to do with peace, and b) it was barely even a conference.
Lasting a single day, what the Bush administration and its dependents in the Middle East managed to achieve at the Annapolis “get together” was a photo-op and a re-affirmation of the 2003 “roadmap” as the framework for resolving the conflict. For Israel and the U.S., this was a significant success – effectively, the Palestinian delegation led by President Mahmoud Abbas was pressured into submitting to every Israeli demand, receiving virtually nothing in return. This was no mean feat, requiring over a year of brutal collective punishment and the killing of nearly 700 Palestinians to first remove Hamas from office and destroy the Palestinian National Unity government and then to browbeat Abbas to the point where he is now effectively a collaborator with the occupation. For those concerned with reaching a just resolution of the conflict, however, the Annapolis summit was at best worthless, and most likely positively harmful, at least to the extent that Israel and the U.S. improved their image as “peacemakers” even as they did precisely nothing towards ending the occupation or the conflict.

First, let’s look at Annapolis on its own terms. Originally conceived in the aftermath of Hamas’ takeover of Gaza (.pdf) in June, the “principal motivation” behind the ‘Annapolis process’ was to strengthen Abbas at the expense of Hamas (it also served to boost the U.S.’ image in the Middle East and to provide “the necessary political cover to permit the Arab states to cooperate quietly with Israel on the Iranian front”). This was openly acknowledged at the time, and manifested itself at the summit through President Bush’s “war on terror” rhetoric – a “battle is under way for the future of the Middle East”, with “responsible Palestinian leaders” facing off against the “dark vision” of the “extremists”, and so on.

In this goal, the Annapolis process has so far proved fairly successful. As part of the broader U.S./Israeli policy of “improv[ing] life in the West Bank while making it miserable in Gaza” in an effort to coerce the Palestinians into support for Fatah over Hamas, the year of negotiations on Palestinian statehood promised at Annapolis could well be “an additional, perhaps crucial, way of boosting Mr Abbas”. Faced with the prospect, however unlikely, of a “political horizon” and an end to the conflict should they support Abbas, and the threat of brutal collective punishment should they stand behind Hamas, Palestinians would, so the reasoning goes, back Abbas. The logic is understandable, if shockingly callous in its treatment of human life. The ultimate aim of the process is to groom a leadership that would accept the kind of bantustan solution Israel is prepared to offer, and in the meantime to stretch out the “peace process” indefinitely, maintaining the status quo and further colonising the West Bank while preserving Israel’s image as a civilised, peace-seeking state abroad (particularly amongst the populations the matter, principally that of the United States).

Unfortunately, some basic level of cooperation between Hamas and Fatah is an unavoidable pre-requisite for any serious attempt at peace. As the International Crisis Group puts it, “Fatah/Hamas reconciliation and reunification of Palestinian territory ultimately are necessary for successful peacemaking”. Or as Daniel Levy, former Israeli peace negotiator and advisor to the governments of Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, explains,

“To the extent to which this process is about re-making Palestinian politics and defeating the bad guys, it is a misconceived process. Hamas will need to be part of the equation and until key actors accept and act upon that truth, actionable progress will remain painfully out of reach.”

The fact that the U.S. and Israel have explicitly conditioned political engagement with Abbas on the continued isolation of Hamas, despite the critical importance of intra-Palestinian unity to the success of any genuine attempt to solve the conflict, suggests an obvious conclusion: Annapolis was not a sincere attempt to end the conflict. In the words of Israeli journalist Zvi Bar’el,

“If Israel refuses to incorporate Gaza and include Hamas in the talks, there is no chance of reaching a solution – certainly not within a year. In such a case, it will keep clinging to the road map as a shield against reaching a deal.”

As Ha’aretz diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn explained in the run-up to the summit, Israel’s policy at Annapolis was to “march in the no-man’s-land between talk and action”, conceding just enough to appease the U.S. and world opinion while not actually making any positive changes on the ground.

Essentially, there were two things that came out of Annapolis: a re-affirmation of the “roadmap” as the framework for resolving the conflict, and a much vaunted one year deadline for reaching a final settlement. The latter was nothing more than a gimmick: as Yitzhak Rabin once said, when it comes to the ‘peace process’, “no date is sacred“. The roadmap was itself scheduled for completion in 2005, over two years ago. The Annapolis summit was supposed to mark the half-way point towards a final-status agreement – Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams were meant to have produced a pre-summit declaration outlining the basic parameters for a final settlement to the conflict. They failed to do so, prompting the question:

“If the two teams could not agree, in the course of nearly two months, upon a short statement of the most basic parameters for a resolution…why would another eight months (as the Palestinian team wanted) or 14 (as Olmert suggested) help? After 15 years of on-again, off-again negotiations, why would time be the salient variable?”

The one-year ‘deadline’ is practically meaningless: a year is sufficiently distant to allow Olmert to keep the far-right hounds in his coalition at bay and to give his government an agenda, while his repeated insistence that any progress be conditional upon compliance with the roadmap gives him an escape clause to justify the inevitable failure to stick to the timetable: ‘it’s Israel’s fault that Annapolis wasn’t kept to, because the Palestinians didn’t abide by the terms of the roadmap.’

As mentioned above, the final document desperately agreed upon less than half an hour before the conference ended was effectively a re-affirmation of the roadmap. The final three paragraphs of the 437-word statement were devoted to it, and concluded:

“Unless otherwise agreed by the parties, implementation of the future peace treaty will be subject to the implementation of the road map, as judged by the United States.”

This probably signals the demise of the “Quartet”, handing authority over the Middle East “peace process” directly to the United States, which will of course treat both sides fairly and impartially. This is not, however, a particularly big deal, since the “Quartet” was dominated by the U.S. already.

The first phase of the roadmap requires Israel to freeze “all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)” and dismantle all outposts, while the Palestinian leadership must “undertake visible efforts on the ground” and begin “sustained, targeted and effective operations” to thwart terrorist operations and dismantle “terrorist…infrastructure”.

These developments are supposed to happen in parallel, but Israel has never viewed it this way. As Tzipi Livny explained a few weeks ago, “the Palestinians will carry out their security responsibilities in the road map, and only then can Israel fulfill its part of the understandings”. Nothing seems to have changed since then – a draft (.pdf) of the pre-summit declaration (which was, as mentioned above, never completed) was leaked to Ha’aretz in the run-up to the conference. In it, the Israeli team objected to the American suggestion that “[t]he parties commit to immediate and parallel implementation of the Roadmap”, proposing that the phrase “immediate and parallel” be removed. Additionally, Israel has always interpreted the roadmap as calling for a complete end to Palestinian terrorism before anything is required of itself, despite the fact that, as The Economist notes, “the first stage calls on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to begin this process, not complete it.” Immediately after signing the roadmap in April 2003, Israel entered 14 reservations rendering it effectively meaningless. One of them stipulated that, “as a condition for progress to the second phase” (that is, a “transitional state”, possessing only some of the features of sovereignty), the Palestinians,

“will complete the dismantling of terrorist organizations (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front, Al-Aqsa Brigades and other apparatuses) and their infrastructure; collection of all illegal weapons and their transfer to a third party for the sake of being removed from the area and destroyed; cessation of weapons smuggling and weapons production inside the Palestinian Authority; activation of the full prevention apparatus and cessation of incitement.”

Israel emphasised that  “[t]here will be no progress to the second phase without the fulfillment of all above-mentioned conditions”, and that “[t]he first condition for progress will be the complete cessation of terror, violence and incitement”. It was careful to add that “the road map will not state that Israel must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians”. Finally, it insisted that “[a]ttention will be paid not to time lines, but to performance benchmarks (time lines will serve only as reference points).”

What this all amounts to, then, is a demand that the Palestinians provide Israel with complete security while remaining under occupation. This is absurd – as a British MP recently put it, the Israeli position is akin to “that of somebody who stands on somebody else’s toes and says that they will get off only when that person stops screaming.” The idea that the Palestinian Authority – which, as the International Crisis Group points out, Israel has “all but destroyed” in the past seven years, to the point where it can barely move a hundred policemen from one town to another because of Israeli checkpoints – can provide Israel with security under conditions of occupation when the IDF, the fourth ranking military on the planet, is unable to do so is, as Daniel Levy puts it, “a nonsense”. It is an impossible demand, and deliberately so. It is designed to be unachievable in order to provide Israel with an excuse to string out negotiations indefinitely while continuing its colonial policies on the ground.

Aside from the perversity of focusing so heavily on how the occupied Palestinians must provide Israel with security even as Israel is in the process of destroying the Gaza Strip, it is particularly offensive to revert back to the roadmap like this given that Israel has been violating the agreement from day one. As already noted, the day after signing the document, the Israeli government announced a series of “reservations” that effectively ripped it to shreds. Even setting that aside, Israel has never kept to even the most basic provisions of the roadmap, despite promising to do so on numerous occasions. Far from freezing all settlement construction, construction has never ceased – indeed, it continues as we speak. While Olmert did recently promise to halt all settlement-building in the West Bank, he was in fact referring only to the construction of new settlements (which is already non-existent). Expansion of existing settlements is set to continue – in Olmert’s words: “[w]e have no intention of strangling the existing settlements”. This is an explicit violation of the roadmap, which commits Israel to freezing all settlement construction, “including natural growth”.

The roadmap also prohibits Israel from the “confiscation and/or demolition of Palestinian homes and property, as a punitive measure or to facilitate Israeli construction”. Just last month, the Israeli army forced more than 200 Palestinians from their homes in the Hebron District and destroyed their village, refusing even to give the residents (most of whom are now homeless) leave to recover their belongings. A few weeks earlier, the IDF issued an order expropriating over 1,100 dunams of land from four Palestinian villages on the outskirts of East Jerusalem to enable Israeli development in the E-1 area, between East Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. These are just two recent examples that illustrate a wider point: Israel never intended to abide by the roadmap, it never has done and it shows absolutely no sign of doing so in the future.

It is for these reasons that the roadmap was recently described by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee as “an irrelevance” and why the Arab League last year insisted that the roadmap was “dead“. Even Ehud Olmert gave it a “much less than 50%” chance of success when it was launched (though, one suspects, for rather different reasons). That the Palestinian Authority and the Arab regimes have signed on to a process which ratifies the roadmap as the only framework for resolving the conflict in return for an agreement which addresses none of the core issues and which gives Israel a free hand to continue its oppressive and colonial policies in the Occupied Territories is nothing short of a betrayal of the Palestinian cause.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander

Further reading:

• ‘Shaking hands and stealing land‘, The Heathlander
• ‘In Annapolis, Conflict by Other Means‘, MERIP

• ‘Cinderella at Annapolis‘, The Economist

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) last week published a report (.pdf) examining the humanitarian impact of Israel’s “security fence” on 67 Palestinian communities in the northern West Bank, representing a combined population of nearly 220,000 Palestinians. 15 of the communities surveyed, with a total population of 10,000, are located west of the wall, confined in a “closed area” between the barrier and the Green Line.
The wall, declared “illegal” by the International Court of Justice in July 2004 and described by the OCHA as a “de facto border”, follows a route more than twice the length of the Green Line, 80% of which cuts through Palestinian land. When completed, it will annex to Israel roughly 8.6% of the West Bank, including “some of the most agriculturally productive land and richest water resources in the West Bank”, and trap approximately 60,000 Palestinians west of the barrier.

Many Palestinians living in communities east of the wall have been separated from their farms, which lie on the other side of the barrier. To access them, they must apply for Israeli permission, in the form of a perversely named “visitor’s permit”, to cross through one of the designated gates in the wall. The OCHA counted 67 such gates in the 200km section of the wall it surveyed. However, only 19 of these gates are open on a daily basis – a further 19 are open on a weekly/seasonal basis and 29 never allow Palestinians access to the closed area at all. Even those gates that do allow some degree of Palestinian access are subject to additional restrictions:

“Gates can be closed without warning on Saturdays, for major Israeli holidays, and for security reasons. There are also restrictions on vehicles and materials crossing through the gates, affecting tractors and cars; agricultural equipment and materials; construction materials; pack animals such as donkeys and horses; and livestock.

Ten communities are not allowed to take agricultural vehicles through the gates and 31 are prohibited from taking private vehicles across. The irregular pacing of crossing points means that farmers and labourers have to travel greater distances on the east side of the Barrier to reach designated gates. In addition, once through the gates, movement is also impeded and delayed by the Barrier’s severing of traditional agricultural roads, particularly as an individual’s land may be located a long distance from the gate over difficult terrain. In all, 57 of the communities surveyed reported that such traditional roads have been cut in their communities.”

The OCHA found that the eligibility requirements set by Israel for approving Palestinian applications for “visitor’s permits” have become “increasingly stringent”, with the result that “[o]nly 18% of the approximately 30,000 people who used to work land in the closed area before completion of the Barrier receive `visitor’ permits today”. Furthermore,

“[a]pproximately 3,000 people have stopped applying for permits, discouraged because of repeated refusal. Permits are not always issued to the most appropriate family member and the survey revealed that approximately 1,800 families do not have an able-bodied member with a permit.”

The impact of this enforced separation of farmers from their fields is particularly severe, given that the “majority” of the affected communities are “rural and highly dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods”.

The situation for those stuck on the “Israeli” side of the wall is even worse. In 14 of the 15 communities trapped between Israel and the barrier, Palestinians over 16 are required to obtain “permanent resident” permits from Israel. According to community officials, dozens of residents have not been provided with one, and thus risk being blocked from returning to their homes every time they leave the enclave to visit the rest of the West Bank.

The communities in the “closed area” rely on services located on the other side of the wall, with the result that many Palestinians have been isolated from schools, workplaces and health facilities. The OCHA found that seven communities east of the barrier have “no access to local primary health care”, with only one community enjoying “access to 24-hour-emergency healthcare.” Restricted gate openings have resulted in medical emergencies in seven communities – the situation is so bad that “expectant mothers leave the closed area weeks before delivery to ensure access to proper care.”

The wall has also had a profound social impact, “severing…social relations” between Palestinians living on different sides of the barrier. All 15 closed area communities reported that “proposed marriages have been prevented or married couples separated because of the Barrier and attendant permit regime.”

What makes this situation particularly galling is the fact that the route of the wall, the cause of so much humanitarian suffering, has been plainly drawn for the sole purpose of annexing to Israel the major settlement blocs, all of which are illegal under international law. As the OCHA noted in a previous report (linked below), “[t]he Barrier route is largely determined by the location of settlements”. Or, as veteran Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar and Israeli historian Idith Zertal put it somewhat less delicately in their recent history of the settlement enterprise, the wall is being “constructed with no reckoning and no logic other than the purpose of enclosing as many settlements as possible on the western, Israeli, side and dividing up and seizing Palestinian lands.”

As well as the inherent humiliation of having to depend upon the arbitrary approval of a foreign occupier to exercise rights as basic as freedom of movement, a majority of the communities surveyed also reported suffering additional abuse at the gates, ranging from “verbal abuse” and “regular harassment” to “physical violence” and “destruction of produce”. Perhaps this is the kind of thing they mean:

“With every Arab I see, I see Hani [Hani Abramov, a female Border Police officer killed by Palestinians during a military operation in October 2001] in my mind. In one shift, there were as many as 70 or 80 people whom I delayed. I stood them in a line and decided that they would stay with me for the whole 12- to 14-hour shift, in the sun, in the heat. I made them stand there with me and had them do all kinds of exercises. I stood them in threes, as if they were my soldiers. I started shouting at them and asked them `Why did you do that to Hani? What did she do to deserve it?’ No one else was around except my fighters, and they accepted this; it didn’t seem strange to them.”

One night Abramov was sitting alone in an armored vehicle and saw an Arab staring at her. “I stared right back and he started making obscene gestures. I took a good look at him. I wanted to remember what he was wearing and how he looked. And I can still remember: He was wearing three-quarter-length red pants, a white shirt and short black hair. As soon as he saw that my soldiers were coming back, he ran away. As soon as they got in the vehicle, I was ready to go. I drove really fast. When we found and caught him he realized who I was and what was happening. We took him to one of the alleyways and I started screaming at him. I made him look me in the eye and repeat in words what he’d done, and he of course tried to ignore me. He kept his eyes down. We stripped him until he was only in his underwear and just abused him.” (testimony of Libi Abramov, who served as Border Police officer at an IDF checkpoint).

In all, the conditions described above have convinced many Palestinians that they have no choice but to leave:

“Some 29 communities reported that households have left because of the Barrier, representing about 1,200 households, or three percent of the population surveyed. As reported by respondents in 36 communities, heads of households have also left to seek employment elsewhere in the West Bank, representing about 1,100 additional individuals.”

Expect to see more of this ethnic cleansing in the future. Unless Israel is forced dismantle the wall and withdraw to the Green Line – in short, to comply with the law – the future for those Palestinians living near the barrier, on either side, looks very grim indeed.

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For a detailed study of the effects of the wall as a whole on Palestinians in the West Bank, see this July 2007 OCHA report (.pdf). It reached similar conclusions to the report above:

• Palestinians from the West Bank require permits to visit the six specialist hospitals inside Jerusalem. The time and difficulty this entails has resulted in an up to 50% drop in the number of patients visiting these hospitals.
• Entire families have been divided by the Barrier. Husbands and wives are separated from each other, their children and other relatives.
• Palestinian Muslims and Christians can no longer freely visit religious sites in Jerusalem. Permits are needed and are increasingly difficult to obtain.
• School and university students struggle each day through checkpoints to reach institutions that are located on the other side of the Barrier.
• Entire communities, such as the 15,000 people in the villages of the Bir Nabala enclave, are totally surrounded by the Barrier. Movement in and out is through a tunnel to Ramallah which passes under a motorway restricted for Israeli vehicles only.

It also made the important point that, along with its significant humanitarian implications, the completion of the wall along the current route would also rule out any chance for a two-state settlement, since it would effectively sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander