Tag: Apartheid

Most Arabs can’t buy most homes in West Jerusalem

Nir Hasson | Ha’aretz

21 July 2009

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed this week that Jerusalem is an “open city” that permits all its inhabitants, Jewish and Palestinian, to purchase homes in both its eastern and western parts.

“Our policy is that Jerusalem residents can purchase apartments anywhere in the city. There is no ban on Arabs buying apartments in the west of the city, and there is no ban on Jews building or buying in the city’s east,” Netanyahu said in response to the U.S. request to halt a Jewish construction project in East Jerusalem.

An examination by Haaretz, however, presented a rather different situation on the ground. According to Israel Lands Administration rules, residents of East Jerusalem cannot take ownership of the vast majority of Jerusalem homes.

When an Israeli citizen purchases an apartment or house, ownership of the land remains with the ILA, which leases it to the purchaser for a period of 49 years, enabling the registration of the home (“tabu”). Article 19 of the ILA lease specifies that a foreign national cannot lease – much less own – ILA land.

Attorney Yael Azoulay, of Zeev and Naomi Weil Lawyers and Notary Office, explains that if a foreign national purchases an apartment they must show the ILA proof of eligibility to immigrate to Israel in accordance with the Law of Return. Non-Jewish foreigners cannot purchase apartments. This group includes Palestinians from the east of the city, who have Israeli identity cards but are residents rather than citizens of Israel.

Most residences in West Jerusalem and in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem are built on ILA land. All the neighborhoods built after 1967 – Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev, Ramot, French Hill and Armon Hanatziv – are built on ILA land. Even in the older neighborhoods of Kiryat Hayovel, Katamonim and Beit Hakerem, tens of thousands of apartments are built on ILA land and cannot be sold to Palestinians. In the ultra-Orthodox central Jerusalem neighborhoods of Geula and Mea Shearim, as well as in Rehavia and Talbieh, there are homes built on private land – mainly owned by one of the churches or purchased in the past by Jews.

It goes without saying that a Palestinian seeking to purchase an apartment in a Haredi area would be rejected out of hand, and Rehavia or Talbieh would in any event be out of the range of most East Jerusalemites’ budget.

Nevertheless, dozens of Palestinian families have moved into Jewish neighborhoods, mainly French Hill and Pisgat Ze’ev. Most are renting, while a few buy apartments without registering them. Lawyers in the field say the law is not always applied, and that if a resident of East Jerusalem were to apply to register the apartment at the ILA, they would not have problems doing so.

If the amendment to the Israel Lands Administration Law is passed – the bill is in an advanced stage – an Israeli apartment owner would be able to take ownership of the land and could then sell it to anyone, including foreign nationals and Palestinians.

Israel’s wall still deepening the divide

Ben White | The Guardian

9 July 2009

Five years ago today, the international court of justice in The Hague published its advisory opinion on Israel’s separation wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The keenly awaited verdict, requested by the UN’s general assembly, was clear: Israel’s wall is illegal, it must be removed and adequate compensation paid.

The wall’s illegality, and Israel’s obligation to dismantle the structure and pay damages for the consequences of the wall thus far, were all agreed by the judges by a margin of 14-1. (The ICJ also accepted the use of the term “wall”, since “other expressions” are “no more accurate”.) There was also confirmation that Israel’s settlements were “a flagrant violation” of the convention, established “in breach of international law” (contrast this with the mealy-mouthed nitpicking over outposts and “freezes” by Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu). Overall, the court found that the route of the wall threatened to create “de facto annexation”, with the wall itself described as severely impeding “the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination”.

At the time, the ICJ decision was hailed by Palestinians and dismissed by the Israeli government. As Yasser Arafat described it as a “victory for the Palestinian people”, a spokesman for the then prime minister Ariel Sharon, Raanan Gissin, opined that “after all the rancour dies, this resolution will find its place in the garbage can of history”.

Both the US and UK had opposed the entire process, on the odd grounds that the UN’s main judicial body for settling legal disputes was not “the appropriate forum to resolve what is a political issue”. In the words of Jack Straw, it was better not to “embroil” the ICJ “in a heavily political bilateral dispute”.

This opposition was rare – later that same month, the general assembly voted by 150 to six in support of the ICJ opinion. The decision was also welcomed by the likes of Oxfam and Amnesty International, with Oxfam’s director adding that the ruling was a “step in the right direction” but needed “further action” by the international community.

But meaningful “further action” was not forthcoming, and Israel pressed on with the wall. Five years on, the wall loops around the West Bank and cuts through East Jerusalem, isolating Palestinian communities and devastating lives, and has become an integral part of Israel’s apartheid regime in the territories. About two-thirds of the 700km+ route, featuring a 8m-high wall, electric fences, sniper towers and “buffer zones” up to 100m wide, is completed or under construction. Of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 8.5% will be on the “wrong” side of the wall. In terms of size as well as significance, this would be comparable to the UK losing Greater London and south-east England.

For Israel to consolidate its hold on the illegal colonies in the OPT, many Palestinians find themselves hemmed in and surrounded by the wall’s contortions (pdf). About 35,000 Palestinians with West Bank IDs are to be caught between the wall and the Green Line – if you add (pdf) the East Jerusalem Palestinians in the same position, this figure increases to about 260,000.

These are the bare facts five years on from the ICJ opinion. Israel has ignored the judges’ decision, but that’s not a surprise. However, has the Palestinian leadership sufficiently exploited the opinion? Speaking to Palestinians involved in monitoring the wall’s progress, or in directly resisting it on the ground, there is a feeling that Palestinian diplomats have not done as much with the ICJ result as they could have.

Palestinians in communities directly affected by the wall continue to put up resistance, sometimes at their cost of their lives: 18 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces during anti-wall protests, the youngest victim a 10-year-old boy. While they fight for survival, the wall has also played a key role in changing the big picture, delineating the borders of the Palestinian enclaves Israel will grant “statehood”.

In 1994, the then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin said that “we have to decide on separation as a philosophy”. However, this is not separation on equal terms – the following year Rabin also made it clear that the Palestinian “entity” would be “less than a state”. There is a term for unequal separation in international law – apartheid. The wall urgently needs dismantling; but it is only one part of a bigger whole.

Gaza 2009: the moment of truth

Haidar Eid | The Palestine Chronicle

8 May 2009

'Israel's fascist foreign minister is of the opinion that Gaza should've been nuked.'
'Israel's fascist foreign minister is of the opinion that Gaza should've been nuked.'

Gaza has returned to its pre-massacre state of siege, confronted with the usual, conspiratorial, “international” indifference after 22 long days and dark nights, during which its brave people were left alone to face one of the strongest armies in the world — an army that has hundreds of nuclear warheads, thousands of trigger-happy soldiers armed with Merkava tanks, F-16s, Apache helicopters, naval gunships and phosphorous bombs. Gaza now does not make news. It’s people die slowly, its children malnourished, its water contaminated, its nights dark, and yet it is deprived even of a word of sympathy from the likes of Ban Ki Moon and the president of “Change; Yes We Can.”

Israel could not have carried out its genocidal war, preceded and followed by a medieval, hermetic siege, without a green light from the international community. During the massacre, one Israeli soldier commented: “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him.”

When apartheid Israel decided to attack the northern part of the Gaza Strip in late February, early March of 2008, we were threatened with a greater shoah (Holocaust) by the deputy minister of war, then, Matan Vilnaii. Around 164 Palestinians, including 64 children were killed. What was the reaction of the international community? Absolutely nothing. In fact, the EU decided to reward the oppressor by issuing declarations of intentions to upgrade their trade agreements with Israel, which, needless to say, served as a green light for the current atrocities. On Sunday 18 January, Israel’s Prime Minister Olmert, a war criminal by all standards, expressed his pleasure to six European leaders, over their “extraordinary support for the state of Israel and their concern about its security”. In retrospect, the upgrading of relations between the EU and Israel in early December 2008 was a green light for the larger Gaza massacre of 2009. In spite of the war crimes committed by the IOF, and in spite of the obvious fascist make-up of the current government, the EU will continue to strengthen bilateral relations with Tel Aviv.

Within this context, the anti-apartheid freedom fighter Ronnie Kasrils says:

What [Hendrik] Verwoerd [the architect of apartheid] admired too was the impunity with which Israel exercised state violence and terror to get its way, without hindrance from its Western allies, increasingly key among them the USA. What Verwoerd and his ilk came to admire in Israel.., was the way the Western powers permitted an imperialist Israel to use its unbridled military with impunity in expanding its territory and holding back the rising tide of Arab nationalism in its neighborhood.

March 2008 was, then, a rehearsal for Gaza 2009. Israel knew that it could go on committing war crimes fully equipped with an international conspiracy of silence. The international community did not react in March 2008: why would it do otherwise in 2009? That was the Israeli logic, and so it remains. Mind you, Israel’s fascist foreign minister is of the opinion that Gaza should’ve been nuked. No wonder Adolf Hitler once said: “What luck for rulers that men do not think!”

For those who accuse us of subscribing to conspiracy theories, we have this reminder: in 2004 the Israeli Professor Arnon Soffer, Head of the IOF’s National Defense College, and an advisor to Ariel Sharon, spelled out the desired results of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in an interview with the Jerusalem Post:

… when 1.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today,… The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist…Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee “peace” – it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews…

Then, there is the view bluntly expressed in 2002 by Israel’s then chief of staff, General Moshe Yaalon, and which I think sums up the objective of the hermetic medieval siege and the massacre:

The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.

Now, this is a total dehumanization of the Palestinians of Gaza. And West Bankers, here is the message for you: you’d better accept your fate as cockroaches, ready to be crushed willingly under the boot of a zealot Israeli soldier, or else.

The resemblance of Israel’s campaign of tribalistic racist hate both to that of apartheid SA and to Hitler’s murderous regime has recently been articulated by Comrade Kasrils:

Certainly we South Africans can identify the pathological cause, fuelling the hate, of Israel’s political-military elite and public in general. Neither is this difficult for anyone acquainted with colonial history to understand the way in which deliberately cultivated race hate inculcates a justification for the most atrocious and inhumane actions against even defenseless civilians – women, children, the elderly amongst them. In fact was this not the pathological racist ideology that fuelled Hitler’s war lust and implementation of the Holocaust?

In actual fact, if there is something to learn from Gaza 2009, it is that the world was absolutely wrong to think that Nazism was defeated in 1945. Nazism has won because it has finally managed to Nazify the consciousness of its own victims! Just think about the soldiers’ T-shirts episodes. The courageous Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has written that Israel today looks very much like Germany in 1933.

But now the urgent question is how to hold Israel accountable to international law and basic principles of human rights in order to forestall the imminent escalation? The most immediate and pressing questions within this context are: what the nature of international solidarity should be and how it can best support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

The South African apartheid regime came under repeated pressure from the international community and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations Security Council which passed countless resolutions against it because of its inhumane treatment of blacks. This gave much-needed succor to the oppressed, while we today are bereft of even this tiny comfort because the United States continues to use its veto to ensure that Israel escapes censure from the world body.

Grassroots opposition to a brutal apartheid finally forced the US and UK and other governments around the world to isolate apartheid South Africa. They would not have done so without the pressure exerted on them by their own people. Israel needs to be isolated in exactly the same way as apartheid South Africa. Today, there is a growing mass-based struggle inside Palestine, as well as other forms of struggle, exactly as there was inside apartheid South Africa. An intensified international solidarity movement with a common agenda can make the struggle for Palestine resonate in every country in the world, thus closing off the world to Israelis until they open the world to Palestinians. Our goal now, as civil society organizations, is to lift the deadly hermetic siege imposed on Gaza causing slow motion genocide; marching towards the six gates of the Gaza prison has been tried and must intensify. This is what many activists, Palestinian and international, are planning to do. Our BDS campaign modeled on the South African anti-apartheid global campaign is gaining momentum as a democratic movement based on the struggle for human rights and implementation of international law. Our struggle is NOT religious, nor ethnic, nor racial, but rather universalistic: one that guarantees the rehumanization of our people in the face of a genocidal machine run by what Moshe Dayan would have called “a mad dog.”

The Palestinians of Gaza have lost faith in the failed “peace process” and the two-state solution; hence, the desperate need for a new national program that can mobilize the masses; a program that is necessarily democratic in its nature; one that respects resistance in its different forms and, ultimately, guarantees peace with justice. The new, much-needed program, however, must make the necessary link between all Palestinian struggles: the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s ethnically-based discrimination and rights violations of more than one million Palestinian citizens, as well as the 1948 externally displaced refugees.

What we are constantly told, is either accept Israeli occupation in its ugliest form — i.e. the ongoing presence of the apartheid wall, colonies, checkpoints, zigzag roads, color-coded number plates, house demolitions and security coordination supervised by a retired American general — or have a hermetic medieval siege imposed on us, but still die with dignity.

But, the lesson we learn from Gaza 2009, exactly like Sharpville 1960, is to harness all effort to fight the outcome of the Oslo Accords, and to form a United Front on a platform of resistance and reforms. This cannot be achieved without realizing that ministries, premierships, and presidencies in Gaza and Ramallah are a façade not unlike those inauthentic structures in the South African Independent Homelands. In a short story by SA writer, Najbuolu Ndebel, a young black woman comments on the generous offer given by the racist white government: “That’s how it is planned. That we be given a little of everything, and so prize the little we have that we forget about FREEDOM.”

This is exactly what Steve Biko, the hero of anti-apartheid struggle–who paid his life for the freedom of all South Africans– meant when he said:

Not only have the whites been guilty of being on the offensive, but by some skilful manoeuvres, they have managed to control the responses of the blacks to the provocation. Not only have they kicked the black, but they have also told him how to react to the kick. For a long time the black has been listening with patience to the advice he has been receiving on how best to respond to the kick. With painful slowness he is now beginning to show signs that it is his right and duty to respond to the kick in the way he sees fit.

And we, Palestinians, have decided to respond to the Zionist kick in the way we see fit. In Ndebel’s story quoted earlier, a black intellectual makes it clear that “[he’d] rather be a hungry dog that runs freely in the streets , than a fat, chained dog burdened with itself and the weight of the chain.” These examples used again and again in the anti-Apartheid literature sum up the lessons we learn from Gaza 2009. In a word it is resilience.

Archbishop Desmund Tutu of South Africa said, in a much quoted wisdom: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” And as I said in an earlier article, while IOF were bombing my neighborhood, the UN, EU, Arab League and the international community by and large have remained silent in the face of atrocities committed by Apartheid Israel. They are therefore on the side of Israel. Hundreds of dead corpses of children and women have failed to convince them to intervene.

We are, therefore, left with one option, an option that does not wait for the United Nations Security Council or Arab Summits: the option of people’s power, as we have been repeatedly saying. This remains the only power capable of counteracting the massive power imbalance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The horror of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa was challenged with a sustained campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions initiated in 1958 and given new urgency in 1960 after the Sharpeville Massacre. This campaign led ultimately to the collapse of white rule in 1994 and the establishment of a multi-racial, democratic state.

Similarly, the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions has been gathering momentum since 2005. Gaza 2009, like Sharpeville 1960, cannot be ignored: it demands a response from all who believe in a common humanity. Now is the time to boycott the apartheid Israeli state, to divest and to impose sanctions against it. This is the only way to ensure the creation of a secular, democratic state for all in historic Palestine regardless of race, sect and ethnicity. The Australian journalist John Pilger has this to say:

What happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the power to speak out.

Gaza 2009, with mass mobilization and international solidarity, is, therefore, becoming the guiding torch, not only for the Palestinian people, but also for the Arab world, towards a new Middle East, one that is, unlike Condoleezza Rice’s ME, characterized by democracy and freedom. This is the least our resistance to religious exclusivism, xenophobia, and tribalistic world view should lead to.

– Based on a speech delivered via video link at a panel on “Promoting a Culture of Resistance” at the 4th Bil’in International Conference on Grassroots Popular Resistance.

– Dr. Haidar Eid is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza Strip, Palestine. Dr. Eid is a founding member of the One Democratic State Group (ODSG) and a member of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

The complicit silence continues

Haidar Eid | The Palestine Telegraph

1 May 2009

Millions of people looked forward to Barack Obama’s presidency with a sense of pride and hope. But Obama’s first 100 days have raised critical questions about the limits of what we can expect from a Democrat in the White House–and what it will take to get the change we want.

What do you think of Obama’s 100 days? And what does the left need to do now to move the struggle forward? We asked a group of writers and activists for their answers to these questions. This commentary is from Haidar Eid, a professor, a resident of Gaza City, and a leading activist in the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel’s apartheid.

I NEVER had high expectations for Barack Obama, because he still represents the Democratic Party, which is a part of the American establishment. Obama’s victory in the presidential elections did not produce a change in the nature of American imperialism.

I think the difference between the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. is similar to the difference between Likud and the Labor Party in Palestine.

I thought, even prior to his taking office, that Obama’s role would be to bring about a new fiction–or rather renew the of fiction–of a two-state solution in Palestine-Israel. That is, to breathe new life into the idea that one state for Jews and another state for Palestinians will bring peace to the region.

In essence, that isn’t different from what George W. Bush and, before him, Bill Clinton stood for. The only difference that I see is that the Bush administration saw the annihilation of the Palestinian resistance as part of what Bush called the “war on terror.” In his words, “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

Because most of us belonging to Palestinian resistance and civil society organizations were not with George Bush, we were defined as terrorists–indeed, as all resistance to imperialism is throughout history.

The Bush administration enabled Israeli crimes in Palestine and Lebanon through financial, military and moral support. The first 100 days of Obama have witnessed the same thing. I don’t see any difference, in fact, between what Israel is committing in Palestine, and in particular in the Gaza Strip, and what the American military has been doing in Iraq.

I would expect Barack Obama, for example, to immediately withdraw American troops from Iraq. We know that this is not going to happen. He made it very clear that he is going to keep some 50,000 troops in Iraq.

Israel is still using Apache helicopters made in the U.S. Israel is still using F-16 jet fighters. Only yesterday, on April 18, there was an aerial strike on the neighborhood of Deir El Balah in the Gaza Strip.

Although the Bush administration allowed Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak to undermine the Annapolis meeting by focusing only on Israeli security, the same thing is happening with Barack Obama and George Mitchell, his envoy to the Middle East.

The point of reference in any negotiations or any statements made by the American administration about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israel’s security. By doing that, Obama and his administration are effectively marginalizing the whole issue of Palestine, and unfortunately setting the stage for renewed Israeli assaults against a starving Gaza. Gaza has already been transformed into the largest concentration camp on Earth.

BARACK OBAMA visited one of the northern Israeli settlements in 2006, shortly before Israel attacked Lebanon and killed more than 1,200 people. Obama stayed for more than a week. Later, he made a visit to Ramallah, where he spent just 45 minutes with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas–afterward, he refused to attend a press conference with Abbas.

Then he visited the Israeli town of Sderot. He had a lot to say in sympathy with the Israelis of Sderot. Sderot was a Palestinian village before 1948, the people of which were ethnically cleansed. Of course, he never mentioned that–or said a single word of sympathy with the Palestinians of Gaza.

The Obama administration, including George Mitchell, are filled with nothing but empty rhetoric when it comes to addressing the illegal settlements policy of Israel in the West Bank. They know very well that Olmert, after the Annapolis meeting, immediately authorized a massive building program for new Jewish housing units in eastern Jerusalem and the expansion of other settlements in the West Bank.

This is a violation, of course, of the letter and the spirit of the so-called two-state solution, which I personally call the two-prison solution.

What we need from Obama is to show seriousness in dealing with the newly elected Israeli government, which is a fascist government and which proves that Israeli society by and large is lurching ever further rightward. It is what Israeli professor Israel Shahak has referred to as the Nazification of Israeli society.

Obama needs to adopt the same attitude toward Israel that the U.S. administration adopted toward apartheid South Africa at the end of the 1980s. In spite of the massacres, the war crimes and the crimes against humanity that have been committed in the Gaza Strip, there has been no serious condemnation of Israel issued from the White House.

On April 17, there was an incident in Bil’in, in which a Palestinian youngster was shot dead. On the same day, another Palestinian was shot dead in Hebron. That was at the same time Mitchell was visiting Tel Aviv.

But unfortunately, the complicit silence from Obama’s White House continues. This has accompanied the cutoff of medicine, food and fuel to a starving Gaza. Patients in need of dialysis and other urgent medical treatment are dying every single day. A majority of us here in Gaza are badly undernourished. But not a single word of condemnation from the Obama administration.

Every single person who is a little bit familiar with Middle East issues must realize now–and Barack Obama seems to be a smart guy–how cynical it is to wait until a two-state solution has been rendered impossible by Israeli colonization of the West Bank, by the looting and pillaging of Gaza, by the construction of the apartheid wall, and by the expansion of so-called Greater Jerusalem to say the time has come for peace.

Like every U.S. president since 1967, Obama has supported and is still supporting Israel in creating conditions that made the two-state solution impossible, impractical and unjust.

If Obama hopes to gain any credibility as a peacemaker, he needs to reverse the policies of George Bush and strongly oppose the policies of the fascist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman.

He should take the lead of Venezuelan President Huge Chavez, with whom he shook hands in Trinidad. Venezuela and Bolivia both severed diplomatic ties with Israel after its assault on Gaza earlier this year. But so far, these first 100 days have been a great disappointment to us Palestinians.

THE WAY civil society organizations in the U.S. opposed apartheid South Africa and pressured their own government to sever its diplomatic with South Africa is the model that the U.S. left should now pursue with respect to Israel. Join hands with us in besieged Gaza and demand the immediate withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from Gaza and the West Bank.

We must also demand that Israel abide by international humanitarian and human rights law, and refrain from imposing collective punishment on Palestinian civilians, as per numerous covenants of international law and United Nations resolutions.

We should demand that Israel release all detained Palestinian ministers, legislators and political prisoners. There are more than 12,000 Palestinian political prisoners. Because of the mainstream media coverage, I know that every single American knows the name of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, but I don’t think many know the name of a single Palestinian prisoner among the thousands–which, by the way, includes hundreds of women and children.

We should demand the implementation of the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Israel’s apartheid wall–to cease building it and make reparations for any damage caused during its construction. We should also demand that the United Nations insure that Israel fulfills its obligations in terms of international law.

After the experience of the genocidal war against the civilians of Gaza, in which more than 1,500 Palestinians were killed, 90 percent of whom were civilians, including 443 children and 120 women, we need an international protection of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

This is an urgent task. We cannot wait. Every single day, we hear of people dying. Just yesterday, my own cousin, who is 42 years old and has been suffering from leukemia, was not given a permit for an Israeli, Egyptian or Jordanian hospital. She passed away yesterday, leaving seven children.

It is time for the American left to demand that Israeli generals, Israeli officers and Israeli soldiers be indicted for war crimes before the ICJ, for using phosphorous bombs against civilians and for other atrocities.

If Barack Obama wants to show his liberal world view and understanding of racism, I think he should sympathize with the suffering of Palestinians. He must realize it is time for us to have civic democracy in historic Palestine after the return of more than 6 million Palestinian refugees living in the diaspora in miserable conditions.

The kind of strategy and tactics used by the American left during 1970s and ’80s against apartheid South Africa are essential for pushing for these demands. Our allies are all oppressed people in the U.S. and around the world. When it comes to the U.S., this is a society that has suffered racism in the 20th century, that has many marginalized groups, but that is also multiethnic and multicultural.

The same tools that were used in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in order to obtain rights for the African American community in the U.S. should be used to support the Palestinian cause. We need to approach churches, mosques and other kinds of associations to promote a culture of resistance.

We should demand the economic, political and cultural isolation of Israel. I know that this won’t happen immediately–exactly like in the case of white South Africans, who were welcomed in the U.S. for a long time. But through an international movement, they were eventually ostracized, especially in the realms of sports and culture.

Israel needs to feel that it is paying a price for its war crimes against Palestinians, especially during the Gaza massacre. The American left needs to understand this, to start changing its understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–from a conflict over territory and Palestinian independence to a conflict about Palestinian liberation.

That is why the American left should adopt as its platform support for the one-state solution, support for equal rights and support for making Israel/Palestine into a state for all its citizens. The two-state solution means racism–the Bantustanization of Palestine.
I have had discussions with American liberals and leftists who still believe that a two-state solution is the only viable solution.

But the lessons we learned from Gaza 2009 are the same lessons we learned from Sharpeville 1960–that this struggle is a struggle for liberation, it’s a struggle for civic democracy, it’s a struggle for the transformation of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine into a true and real democracy, which ultimately means the return of Palestinian refugees.

This currently does not constitute a fundamental part of discourse on the American left. But this is essential for the transformation of Israel into a state for all of its citizens, regardless of race and religion.

Haidar Eid is a grassroots activist and professor based in the Gaza Strip

Boycott this Israeli settlement builder

Abe Hayeem | The Guardian

28 April 2009

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office must be commended for its decision to cancel renting premises for the UK embassy in Tel Aviv from the company Africa-Israel, owned by Israeli businessman and settlement builder Lev Leviev. This is an encouraging step that should now be backed by stronger sanctions against the building of the separation wall and the building of illegal settlements by Israel. Furthermore, the governments of Norway and Dubai should emulate the example set by the UK and sever their relationships with Leviev’s companies.

The Israeli paper Ha’aretz reported on 3 March 2009 that “Due to the public pressure” several months ago in a special debate in parliament, Kim Howells of the Foreign Office was asked to explain plans to rent the embassy from Leviev.

This pressure, by a letters campaign to the FCO, was initiated by Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine with human rights organisation Adalah-New York, followed by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, former BBC correspondent Tim Llewellyn and hundreds of others.

Further voices included Daniel Machover of Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, Palestinian notables including Hanan Ashrawi, Mustafa Barghouti and Luisa Morgantini, vice president of the European parliament.

The move was frozen after ambassador Tom Phillips requested details from Africa-Israel about its activities in the settlements.

Subsequently, on 5 March, the BBC reported the FCO’s Karen Kaufman saying that: “We looked into the issue of Africa-Israel and settlements and settlement holdings and we asked for clarification …. The UK government has always regarded settlements as illegal, but what has happened in recent months is that we are looking for ways to make a difference on this issue.”

Still, despite the FCO decision, Leviev’s companies persist in their goal, backed by the Land Redemption Fund to which Leviev is one the largest donors, of “blurring the Green Line” and connecting the illegally built Zufim settlement with Israeli communities inside the Green Line, retaining 6,000 dunams of the village Jayyous’s land sequestered by the wall. This land grab is being facilitated by the enforced construction of the apartheid wall, which the International Court of Justice firmly judged to be illegal under international law in 2004, and demanded its removal.

There are weekly non-violent protests by the Jayyous villagers, Israeli and international peace groups, together with Bil’in to stop their precious land from being taken to expand settlements and build the wall. These are being suppressed by Israeli forces on a terror rampage with live fire, beatings, tear gassings, mass arrests, house occupations and, more recently, threats of home demolitions, and pogroms.

Following an Israeli supreme court ruling that the route of the wall in Jayyous should be moved slightly, Israeli authorities are trying to blackmail Jayyous’s mayor, saying if he doesn’t accept the new wall route, there will be no gates in it for the village’s farmers to access their lands. The mayor has refused to sign. Without international intervention, Jayyous will not be able to hold on to its lands behind the wall, which contain their four vital agricultural wells and most of their greenhouses. Leviev will then be able to freely expand Zufim on to Jayyous’s stolen lands. Currently, Leviev is building 35 new housing units in Zufim.

At Bil’in, where Leviev companies are also building settlements, mainstream media failed to cover the 17 April murder of Bil’in non-violent protester Bassem Abu Rahmeh, 29, by Israeli forces. A soldier shot him with the same new type of “rocket” tear gas round, as fast and lethal as live ammunition that left US activist Tristan Anderson in critical condition.

The brutal crackdown in Bil’in continues despite three Israeli supreme court orders to move the wall in Bil’in closer to the Matityahu East settlement “outpost” where Leviev’s Danya Cebus built about 30% of the units. Israel’s court has shown itself to be the accessory of this land grab. Israel’s architects, designing these settlements, are also in breach of professional ethics, and will be held to account by their international peers.

While the US, UK and the EU seem to be keen to join Israel, the perpetrator of war crimes, in boycotting the Palestinians who are the victims of crippling sieges, deadly incursions and a prison-like occupation, they are reluctant to take any positive action to stop Israel’s breaches of international law. For instance, the Norwegian government has invested €875m in 2008 in Africa-Israel. By investing its populace’s pension fund in a company at the heart of illegal Israeli settlement building, the country that sponsored the Oslo accords violates its spirit. Norway should follow the precedent set by the UK’s FCO, in one of the latter’s few bold moves, and divest from this company.

The United Arab Emirates is also shamefully equivocating after a year-long campaign against Leviev selling his diamonds in the emirate of Dubai. Dubai’s government, despite repeated assurances that Leviev would not be allowed to open two diamond boutiques in the emirate, has allowed Leviev to open stores under another name while his website advertises a Leviev store-in-store at one of the “Levant” shops of his Dubai partner, Arif bin Khadra. A second Levant store in Dubai’s Atlantis hotel boldly touts the Leviev brand.

If Dubai does not wish to be become known as the “emirate that supports settlements”, it should take immediate action, and follow the UK’s lead and demonstrate it will not allow Leviev to profit from this indirect funding of his settlement building, that steals the future of Jayyous’s children who are growing up in the shadow of Leviev’s ever-expanding Zufim settlement.

While the new Netanyahu/Leiberman government is doing all it can to obfuscate the issue of a proper peace settlement to establish a viable Palestinian state, a clear message must be sent to Israel. The sanctions against Leviev should be the start of a wider boycott of all who profit from the enforced acquisition of Palestinian land.