20th November 2013 | Corporate Watch, Tom Anderson and Therezia Cooper | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
Palestinians demonstrate outside UNSCO – 20/11/13. (Photo by Corporate Watch)
On 20th November 2013, hundreds of farmers and fisherfolk gathered outside the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East (UNSCO) in Gaza City to demand that the international community take action to prevent the Israeli military’s attacks against them and to end the occupation.
One fisherman told Corporate Watch, “We are only looking for our daily food and a livelihood. We want to ask the UN to pressure the Israeli occupation not to attack us. We are just trying to earn a living for our families.”
(Photo by Corporate Watch)
Saad El-Deen Ziada, Farmer and Fishermen Coordinator for the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, said, “This demonstration was the start of a Palestinian and international campaign to access our lands and control our water. To achieve what we call food sovereignty.
“We want to send a message to the international community and the General Secretary of the United Nations that it is time to stop the Israeli attacks against Palestinian farmers and to activate human rights law. International human rights law gives us the chance to sanction the occupation government and to support the Palestinians to stay on their land. The international community must deal with the situation as a political issue and not a humanitarian one. First of all we need to end the Israeli occupation. We condemn the international community’s silence at the crimes we are subjected to.”
A delegation from the demonstration delivered a letter to a representative of Ban Ki-moon articulating the protesters’ demands.
(Photo by Corporate Watch)(Photo by Corporate Watch)Palestinians and internationals deliver a message to the international community – 20/11/13. (Photo by Corporate Watch)(Photo by Corporate Watch)
17th November 2013 | Corporate Watch, Tom Anderson and Therezia Cooper | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
Palestinians demonstrate in the buffer zone East of Gaza City on the anniversary of the signing of the Balfour Declaration. (Photo by ISM – Gaza team)
On 2nd November 2013 Israeli forces fired tear gas at Palestinians demonstrating in the Gaza buffer zone East of Gaza City, by the Nahal Oz checkpoint. A report of the demonstration by an eyewitness can be viewed here. Pictures of one of the canisters fired at the activists are shown below.
Corporate Watch has written several articles about Israel’s use of tear gas in the West Bank. Some of our previous work can be found here and here.
This canister looks a little different to the ones that we have seen in the West Bank, particularly because it is encased in a hard plastic shell. We do not have any evidence to determine which company supplied these canisters to the Israeli military. However, we know that tear gas canisters manufactured by Combined Systems (CSI) in the US and Defense Technologies, previously owned by the British arms giant BAE systems and now owned by the US firm Safariland, have been used by the Israeli police and army in the past.
It is imperative that BDS campaigners take action against companies selling tear gas to Israel.
Combined Systems can be contacted at:
388 Kinsman Road, Jamestown, PA 16134
Safariland can be contacted at:
Ontario Headquaters:
Safariland
3120 E. Mission Blvd.
Ontario, CA 91761
Jacksonville Headquarters:
Safariland
13386 International Parkway
Jacksonville, FL 32218
Gas canister fired at Palestinian demonstrators in the buffer zone on 2/11/13. (Photo by Corporate Watch)The three separate pieces of the canister fired at Palestinian demonstrators in the buffer zone – 2/11/13. (Photo by Corporate Watch)
Recording the testimony of Nakba survivors is essential for educating future generations of Palestinians, say oral historians. (APA images)
Tucked into a quiet basement suite in the main building of the immaculate Islamic University of Gaza campus, the Oral History Center could at first be mistaken for a bursar or registrar’s office.
But its stacks of metal filing cabinets may contain more memories per square meter than any other place in the occupied Gaza Strip.
Researcher Nermin Habib said that the center conducted interviews with those who had witnessed the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the ethnic cleansing ahead of Israel’s foundation in 1948, as well as the Naksa (setback), Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai in 1967.
“We have already conducted 1,500 oral interviews and archived audio files from them,” Habib added. “A meeting can last anywhere from half an hour, to two or three hours. We can also have follow-up meetings.
“We have also published 120 [interviews] in written form. In the future, we plan video interviews. We hope to use them to produce a documentary film about the history of Palestine.”
Launched as part of the university’s faculty of arts in 1998, the Oral History Center has a staff of experienced field researchers and recent graduates from the university’s departments of history, press and media, and social studies.
“It is by experience, by relationships,” said Habib. “We built the archive from scratch. There is no systematic reference center for such information in Gaza.”
The Oral History Center researches a number of fields. Beyond displacement and refugee life, it has programs on Palestinian regions, folklore, politics and culture, as well as Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.
“We are trying our best to maintain our Palestinian identity and Palestinian heritage, customs and traditions, like food and dress, after the Nakba,” said Habib. “Oral history has links with all fields of knowledge, like folk medicine. It’s part of our work as historical researchers to convey this information.
“We seek to document the history of the Palestinian people and the main events that have shaped the Palestinian cause.”
The Gaza Strip has the highest proportion of refugees of any territory in the world. Few aspects of life, from the economy and politics, to the broad range of local foods and dialects from elsewhere in Palestine, are unaffected by the Nakba, during which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were displaced by Zionist forces and hundreds of villages and cities depopulated.
The Israeli army expelled 400,000 to 450,000 more Palestinians during the Naksa in 1967, according to the Palestinian refugee advocacy group BADIL.
By the end of 2011, at least 7.4 million Palestinians had been displaced, 66 percent of a global Palestinian population of 11.2 million, making them the world’s largest and longest-standing group of refugees, according to a recent survey by BADIL.
But with the 1948 ethnic cleansing more than 65 years in the past, the ranks of those who witnessed it firsthand, in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere, are quickly declining.
“We started thinking about how the generation that survived the Nakba are leaving us,” said Haidar Eid of the Oral History Project, another effort to collect accounts of 1948.
The project team has recorded 64 hours of interviews, Eid said. Time to complete the rest is running out.
“Most of these people are dying. For the project, they are supposed to have been at least ten when the Nakba happened. So we are talking about people in their seventies and eighties.”
“One of the major demands of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is the implementation of United Nations Resolution 194, which clearly calls for the return of all Palestinian refugees to the lands, villages and towns from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and their compensation,” Eid said. “With the Oral History Project, we are supporting this demand and making it real. We move from ethnic cleansing as an abstract term into the practicality, the life itself.
“An interesting question we sometimes ask is whether they would accept any solution that would compromise their right of return. There is a consensus among all the refugees we’ve interviewed that no compromise on the right of return would be accepted. For them, that is not a solution.”
Gaza’s Oral History Project works in cooperation with Palestine Remembered, an online archive of information on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the Israeli organization Zochrot, which advocates the return of Palestinian refugees. Eid called this “a form of co-resistance” as opposed to projects which normalize Israel’s ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine.
“The onslaught of normalization projects has taken place at the expense of two-thirds of the Palestinian people who are refugees,” he added, drawing a distinction with other kinds of cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis. “1948 is the original sin, rather than 1967, on which these projects are all based.”
Young volunteers conduct most of the Oral History Project’s interviews. Many belong to the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel, PACBI’s youth affiliate.
“Revisiting the trauma”
“It’s tiring, I must tell you,” Eid said. “I have been avoiding recording with people myself, because it’s extremely difficult. Revisiting the trauma is not easy. But they would be very happy to talk about everything before 1948.”
Oral History Project interviews consist of three sections: Palestine before 1948, its ethnic cleansing and refugee life.
“We ask about mundane things, the daily life of people in the village or city, weddings, funerals and coffee shops,” Eid said. “We ask if the people still have a thobe [a traditional garment] or anything from the village. They usually love it.
“When they come closer to the moment of truth, when the person was forced from their village, it’s heartbreaking. Many start crying. They can give you minute details about the strangest things.”
Accounts can be not only emotional, but brutal as well. “Those Palestinians who refused to leave Palestine were basically massacred,” Eid said.
“This is the embodiment of the Zionist dream of creating a state with a Jewish majority. To guarantee that, you need to have a process of either ethnic cleansing or genocide.”
A refugee himself, Eid cited his own background to illustrate the importance of oral history to the Palestinian narrative.
“I’m from a village called Zarnuga, which is on the outskirts of Ramle [in present-day Israel],” he said. “I found only three pictures of Zarnuga. Only three.”
“The history of the Tantura massacre relies heavily on oral history. Now people know that a massacre took place in the Tantura village, about 30 meters south of Haifa, based on recorded oral history,” Eid added.
Oral history also has an important role in the continuity of Palestinian culture. “This work has a lot of benefit for new Palestinian generations,” said Nermid Habib. “It allows them to know that what their grandparents were doing,”
Israel “trying to whitewash”
On 12 August, a number of Palestine solidarity groups issued an open letter protesting an international conference on oral history planned by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for June 2014, calling for oral historians to boycott it.
PACBI endorsed the letter, and Eid and more than 350 others working in the field of oral history have signed it.
“Israel is trying to whitewash and beautify its image,” Eid said. “One of the questions that we want to raise here in Palestine, as academics and also as refugees, is whether the Nakba will be part of the conference, whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 will be addressed. I think this is a rhetorical question, the answer to which we know.”
Participation in the conference by oral historians from the Gaza Strip is out of the question. Most Palestinians are banned from entering present-day Israel. The 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law even criminalizes the presence of Palestinian refugees in Israel.
But through these longstanding exclusions, Israel may inadvertently highlight the relevance of the work on refugees, as well as the darker elements of its history and society.
“The Zionist narrative has been the recognized narrative in the West,” Eid said. “Before 1948, there was nothing. There was a gap between 1948 and 2,000 years before that.
“We are helping to provide an alternative to it. It’s part of what we call the counter-narrative.”
“The stories of the old are more confident than the history books,” Habib said. “They witnessed the events themselves. There are written histories as well. It’s essential to add a new kind of reference.”
In July 2013, the European Commission announced new guidelines that aim to prevent Israeli projects in illegal Israeli settlements from receiving research grant funding and prevent Israeli companies and institutions that operate inside illegal Israeli settlements from participating in financial instruments such as loans. The new guidelines were broadly welcomed by Palestinian and European civil society organisations.
But now Israel and its supporters are pressuring the EU to drop the new guidelines. There is a very real risk that the Commission will cave in to Israeli pressure and decide to continue the funding of, and support for, Israeli projects and organisations based in occupied Palestinian Territory. This would send a dangerous message that the EU lacks the political will to pressure Israel to end its war crimes and comply with international law.
Please use our simple e-tool to send a message to your members of the European Parliament and ask them to take action to support the new guidelines and make sure that the EU stops funding Israeli war crimes.
Take Action! Send this message to your members of the European Parliament!
18th June 2013 | International Solidarity Movement | Haifa
Ilan Pappé is an Israeli academic and activist. He is currently a professor at the University of Exeter (UK) and is well known for being one of the Israeli “new historians” – re-writing the Zionist narrative of the Palestinian Israeli situation. He has publicly spoken out against Israel’s policies of ethnic cleansing of Palestine and condemned the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime. He has also supported the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, calling for the international community to take action against Israel’s Zionist policies.
Activists from the International Solidarity Movement had the opportunity to talk to Professor Pappé about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Israeli politics and society and the role of the international community and solidarity activists in Palestine, resulting in a three part series of interviews which will be released on the ISM website in the coming weeks.
This is the final section; the role international community and solidarity activism in Palestine. Find part one on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine here and part two on Israeli society and politics here.
International Solidarity Movement: If, as you said in the previous interview (Israeli politics & society), support from the European Union (EU) and the USA is not going to stop, what could the international community do or what should change in order to force Israel to implement and respect international standards?
Ilan Pappé: We need a European spring. In the sense that we all know that if the European political leaders would only reflect what the European people want, the policy of European countries would be much tougher on Israel. Today, governments do not reflect what the people want or think. So the question is how do we transfer the pro-Palestinian sentiments of the people of Europe to the governments of Europe. By the way, this situation is the same in the USA.
I don’t think that Americans are more pro-Palestinian than Europeans, but they are starting to have enough of Israel and they would like the USA to concentrate on their own growing internal issues. But again, political leaders do not represent this wish. We had the same problem in South Africa; it took 21 years for the first European civil act against South African apartheid, which came in the form of economic sanctions. So it’s a very long process. What the international community must do is find ways of convincing their political leaders that it is both ethically and politically better to adopt a much tougher policy against the illegal Israeli occupation. The EU is a good example here because they have strong connections and relations with Israel, they essentially treat them like a member of the EU. When the boycott campaign started, it was the EU who first tried to get Israel to act in a different manner. That was just a small beginning, there is still a lot to be done, but for me, this is the right direction: a process from below towards the political elites.
ISM: There are many European politicians that would like Israel to be a member of the EU. Do you think this is possible, and if so, what will that lead to?
IP: Maybe is a good idea because then Israel would need to change its entire governmental policy, which is currently violating many EU laws. On the other hand, that could be a problem because it may just lead the different governments of the EU to accept Israel’s cruelty and violations. I still think that the best strategy is to explain to these pro-Israel politicians that history will judge them really badly because of their positions. The problem is that politicians don’t have the tendency to look beyond tomorrow. The only way is to explain to them that when this situation changes (in our case, when the occupation ends and when Palestine will be free), they will be on the wrong side in the history books, because they were the politicians that were supporting a state of apartheid.
It is similar for those politicians who were supporting Benito Mussolini. If politicians feel comfortable with being on the wrong side, that’s okay. But if they want to be portrayed in the history books as people who were working for peace and justice, they need to change their positions and friendships before it is too late. Israel has been kept alive because it serves a lot of strategic and military functions for the West, not because of its morality. Reality isn’t how the Christian Zionists see the world; thinking that Israel should be supported because it represents some kind of moral value. This kind of support has been overcome today, and this is also thanks to the work of the BDS campaign, it is one of the few victories we had.
ISM: In which way is international solidarity useful? What is or what should be the role of international activists in Palestine?
IP: I think that international aid, which is a bit different from solidarity movements, is often problematic. On one hand, it allows the Palestinians some level of existence, but on the other it kind of pays for the occupation and for Israel’s mistakes and violations. But the International Solidarity Movement is different: it is not about money but about people coming to help other people. As long as this injustice is happening, I think it is really important that ISM keep coming. All international activists that come to Palestine should be VIP’s. I mean they should Visit, they should Inform and they should Protest. ISM is doing all these three together, but maybe sometimes one less than another, because of particular circumstances or because of the lack of resources, and this is a pity. I think it’s essential to do them all together.
I think that ISM’s main role is to be the ISM’ers of the outside world. I once visited the Basque country, and I noticed that there was a distance between ISM and the boycott movement there, which is a shame because they should definitely work together. What ISM sees in Palestine is the result of the BDS movement’s work outside Palestine, and it works. It is not only about solidarity on the ground, which is very important, but also solidarity from outside.
You cannot replace the liberation movement – the Palestinians have to liberate themselves, nobody can help them with that, not even I, but we can and we must show solidarity with their liberation. This solidarity can be shown on the ground, but mostly by acting in the country that activists come from. It is about finding the right balance. I remember one of the first ISM groups that came to Jenin, after the terrible massacre of 2002. The fact that somebody came, was interested and sympathetic and supportive, meant a lot to the people.
We can see how much effort the Israelis are putting into preventing you from coming here, and I think that’s a good indication – proof that you are doing something right. I would be worried if tomorrow Israel said all ISMers are welcome – that would mean you’re not doing something right.
Protest against the construction of the wall in Al Walaja
ISM: What about the BDS campaign, do you think that an academic and cultural boycott could be an effective instrument against the Israeli occupation?
IP: I was always a great supporter of the BDS movement. As it did in South Africa, it will also play an important role in changing the reality on the ground here. But it is a long process and we need to be patient.
In the case of Israel, the academic and cultural boycott is particularly important, because Israel sees itself as a European and democratic country in the middle of the Arab world. ‘European’ not because of the economic relations it has with Europe, or because it sells tomatoes in Holland – among others it also has strong economic relations with China, Russia and Africa – but because it is part of the European cultural and academic elite. If European academic and cultural institutions say that they do not want to work with Israeli institutions because of Israel’s behaviour, I think it would send a very strong message.
The cultural and academic boycott (unlike the economic one, which only affects the occupied territories) makes a huge and direct impact on Israeli society, and it is only when that happens that Israelis will talk about what is happening in Palestine. For example, the only time that the Israeli press – and sometimes international media as well – talks about the occupation is when someone like Stephen Hawking says he is going to boycott an event organized by Israeli personalities. Before the spread of the boycott movement, it was only when there were bomb attacks in Israel that Israelis remembered that there is an occupation. Now this issue is brought up more regularly, when a famous pop group or author refuses to come, or when an important university in the USA says that they do not want to work with Israeli universities. This type of boycott is really important, and it is the main thing that the international community can do.
Pro-Palestinian activists hold a boycott protest during a football match between Scotland and Israel
International solidarity movements sometimes think that they should have an opinion regarding, for example, the one-state or two-state solutions, but this is actually not their business. It is up to the Palestinians and Israelis to decide how they are going to live. What international movements can do is to create the conditions for a reasonable dialogue. But we need to end the occupation before starting to speak about peace. The Israeli trick has for many years been to try to convince the world that peace will end the occupation. But we know that actually this goes the other way around: we end the occupation and then we will start to talk about peace. I think that ISM, the BDS movement and the Palestinian solidarity movements are all grassroots organizations that do not accept the Israeli diktat “Peace will end the occupation”. These organizations are not part of the peace talks but instead they work on ending the occupation and the apartheid.
ISM: What would you say to people that believe that cultural and sport events should not be politicized?
IP: Well, it was very effective in the case of South Africa. In fact white South Africans only began to think about apartheid when the big sports teams of South Africa were not invited to international sporting events. Moreover, I think that sport is political. For example, Israel is going to host the UEFA Under-21 football tournament, and the Palestinian football team has not been invited. Palestinian players from Gaza will not even be able to go to Israel and see the tournament. Sport is political if it is not free for everyone to participate.
Academia as well is clearly political. Israeli academics, when they are abroad, think they are Israel’s ambassadors. Synagogues abroad see themselves as Israel’s embassies. When Israeli academics see themselves as ambassadors, and represent something that most decent people abroad will see as unacceptable, then people have the right to show their rejection.
And nobody tells these people that they represent Israel, they say it themselves. There was a big debate in the Basque country about the Israeli singer Noah – whether people should boycott her concert or not. People went to her website and saw she had written that she represents Israel on her tour. So she wasn’t coming just as a singer, but as a representative of Israel. We are in 2013 and if you say that, it means you represent what Israel represents, and what Israel is doing today. Therefore you are a legitimate target of the boycott.
This is the last of a three part interview series: Ilan Pappé in conversation with the International Solidarity Movement.
