Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have taken to the streets in response to a call from Palestinian civil society in the occupied and besieged Gaza strip, and the BDS National Committee (BNC), for a day of rage.
Photos from Andrew Kadi in Call to end US Aid to Israel
The mobilisations come as grassroots pressure mounts on western governments to impose a military embargo on Israel.
On the 31st of July, Spain announced “provisional” suspension of military exports to Israel. On August 7th, Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, became the first head of state to declare his support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).
Dr Haidar Eid, a Gaza based steering committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel stated, “the masses that demonstrated their support today for Palestinian rights remind us of the demonstrations in the 80’s against Apartheid. This is our South African moment. Just as the South African anti-Apartheid movement and international support brought an end to the Apartheid regime, Palestinians, with the support of people of conscience worldwide, will bring an end to Israel’s multi-tiered system of oppression. Governments across the world must act in accordance with the will of their people and hold Israel accountable, including imposing sanctions and a military embargo on it to end its criminal impunity.”
Palestinian civil society based in Gaza said in their call:
“As we face the full might of Israel’s military arsenal, funded and supplied by the United States and the European Union, we call on civil society and people of conscience throughout the world to pressure governments to sanction Israel and implement a comprehensive arms embargo immediately. Take to the streets on Saturday 9th of August with a united demand for sanctions on Israel.”
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.”
Residents of the Bethlehem area, West Bank, gather to commemorate those lost in last years Gaza War and stand in solidarity with those still living under seige.
Children from Bethlehem read the names of the children killed last year in Gaza during the massacre and hung their names from a tree. Children sang and danced with the Palestinian key of return. Approximately 100 people attended the demonstration in solidarity with Gaza today.
At 4:30 this afternoon residents of Bethlehem and the surrounding towns gathered to commemorate the 1,500 Palestinians that lost their lives this time last year, and stand in solidarity with the residents of Gaza, who continue to live under siege from the Israeli military; a situation that has continued since June 2006. The vigil was held in Manger Square, bordered with The Church of the Nativity.
After a brief introduction given by a young girl from the town, those in attendance received a call from Dr. Haidar Eid, from inside the Gaza Strip. Dr. Eid is an associate professor in the Department of English Literature, AL-Aqsa University, Gaza Strip and also works as a grass roots activist. Dr. Eid spoke of the necessity of the ending of the siege on Gaza, and thanked those in attendance, both local residents of the Bethlehem municipality and internationals alike.
Following Dr. Eid was Dr. Victor Batarseh, mayor of Bethlehem. Dr. Batarseh spoke in a similar vein, endorsing the support of the Gazans and reminding all to keep the plight of their plight in their thoughts.
Today was a day to commiserate the loss of vast numbers of children in Gaza, but also to celebrate the beauty of youth and be hopeful for their future. Children from Al-Ruwad Centre located in Aida refugee camp treated the crowd to a performance, and then followed by a speech by spokesman for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, Awad Abu Swai.
It was again the turn of the children to take centre stage. As a local boy, no more than 11 years old read the names of those children killed by the Israeli military during the Gaza War last December and January, more children were assisted in climbing the small trees in the square, decorated still will lights from the Christmas festivities, to hang BDS movement stickers bearing the names that were simultaneously read out.
Four of the children from the earlier performance piece sang songs, as others walked amongst the crowd handing out stickers and candles for the vigil.
Dr. Abdul Fattah Abu Saror, director of Al-Ruwad Centre, gave the final speech, once again thanking all in attendance and wishing everyone a happy new year. As the music started to play five young men spontaneously broke out in dabka dancing to mark the end of the vigil.
The Palestinians have ‘realized,’ thanks to Hilary Clinton, that the US is biased towards Israel. According to the American Secretary of State, negotiations between “the two parties” should resume without preconditions. The Americans have even praised Netanyahu’s “unprecedented concessions!” Gone is the sweet talk of the American president Barak Obama; gone is the euphoria following his “ground breaking” speech in Cairo university.
We are back to square one.
The question that begs for answers is why does America hate us Palestinians? Do the American people really believe that we have no rights even though those rights are enshrined in international law? Does President Obama truly believe that we are only a nuisance?
American hegemonic political philosophy judges a belief by its effects not its causes. The emphasis is on the connection between the truth of statements and their practical applicability by one measure only: how will they work for America? This is American pragmatism. That is, White, liberal American politicians (including President Obama!) are interested in the function of ideas and statements and their effects rather than the sources and conditions of their production.
‘Workability’ and ‘practicability’ are the basis of the justification of positions taken by the American establishment. However that does not take into account the circumstances under which these positions are ‘workable,’ neither historically nor socially. Whatever ‘we’, white liberal Americans, want is justifiable and thus legitimate since it is ‘workable’ and ‘practical’ regardless of the means through which it is achieved. Thus Apartheid, Nazism, Zionism, American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan can be “easily” justified and sold to CNNized citizens.
Mr. Obama’s policy, and that of his Secretary of State, is a remodeling of the ideas of old American pragmatism re-theorized to suit the requirements and outlooks of the liberal middle-class politicians of the late-capitalist American society—albeit in a black mask this time.
Undoubtedly, this American pragmatism is grounded in a Eurocentric understanding of liberal democracy, which exploits the consideration that Western democracies themselves are full of people who can be persuaded to vote in ways quite opposed to their own real long-term interests, if they can be deceived by liberal rhetoric to opt for short-term goals. Put differently, people can easily be manipulated into ‘choosing freely’ what is clearly contrary to their own real interests. Otherwise, Hitler would never have established the Third Reich. The Israelis would not have voted Netanyahu and Lieberman into power. Thus bourgeois liberalism and neo-liberalism in their pragmatic forms homogenize and hegemonize the society with patchwork expedients while evading the more profound radical critique required for genuine social, and hence political, change.
Socio-historical analyses of such societies reveal that the rich are powerful, and have invented ways of legitimizing what they own, and how they legally hire and abuse the labor of the working class and poorer countries. They legitimize such unjust gains by means of laws protected by institutions, laws that ostensibly appeal to the common good, laws that persuade a big sector of the society to vote against their own interests. Bush was elected twice in spite of the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by his administration in Afghanistan and Iraq. As some critical thinkers argue, votes in contemporary liberal society are not conferred on each person, as they are supposed to be, but on each dollar, which guarantees an undemocratic outcome. To take the matter further, voting in elections does not guarantee one’s freedom to choose one’s representative in terms of one’s interests. Rather, it is a fundamental part of a system whose rules have been determined by the powerful bourgeois class in its attempts to assimilate its antagonistic class, i.e. the working class. Colonized peoples were never guaranteed the ‘human right’ to choose freely their representatives under the ‘liberal’ colonial system. Many white South Africans participated ‘freely’ in choosing an oppressive racist regime legitimated by the participation of ‘Liberals’ in the parliament. The same applies to apartheid Israel.
An important question arises: how could each individual have such rights when all social primary goods — including income and wealth — are distributed unequally? Liberal bourgeois freedom based on ‘peace’, ‘wealth’, and ‘freedom’ — exploitation is never mentioned — is the answer America has for us, an answer that precludes historical awareness; or rather, an answer that requires historical and political amnesia. It is an answer that incorporates two ideologies: capitalism and liberal democracy.
Can we, however, ignore the historical fact that the basis of the contemporary liberal society was a bloody revolution, i.e. the French Revolution? What about the American revolutions itself? Is there real ‘free press’ and ‘enlightened public opinion’ to which we Palestinians can appeal to recognize the horror and suffering that have been inflicted on us? Put differently, did not US main-stream media mislead public opinion around issues like apartheid in South Africa, Nicaragua, Chile, the assassination of Lumumba and Allende, the support given to Mobutu and other reactionary regimes in Africa and the Middle East? And now the Palestinian cause?
‘Persuasion’, from a pragmatic point of view, then, plays a fundamental role in the creation of the liberal society. Technically, persuasion is the means through which one gets to ‘pluralism’ in which there is no exclusion of ideas whatsoever. However, from this perspective, any opposing or radical points of view should work from within the bourgeois liberal system as the only existing ‘legitimate’ one. Rejecting the system and its ideological basis by revealing and opposing its exploitative features leads to ‘illegitimacy’ and exclusion. If one, in other words, is not ‘persuaded’ by the logic of the American intervention in the Arab World and Afghanistan, one still has to accept it; otherwise, one is considered ‘undemocratic’ even if hundreds of thousands of civilians are being killed by such intervention.
Liberal ‘persuasion’, then, is nothing but a ‘distorted communication’—as Jurgen Habermas would call it— and implies the acceptance of the views of those who have the power to hegemonize and ‘persuade’ in the realm of knowledge/power. This argument is not a rejection of democracy as such, but rather a rejection of the exploitative basis of liberalism and pragmatism which insist on reducing any other radical opinion to ‘one of us’ within the realm of ‘pluralism.’
What is always pushed to the back of any serious argument with main-stream American ideologues is that the foundation of contemporary liberal capitalist societies has literally been achieved through the exploitation of millions of workers, the deaths of millions of indigenous peoples, and the brutal murder of some other millions in two world wars. So why insist on the right of return of 6 million Palestinian refugees? Why lament the death of more than 1500 civilians, including 434 children, during the Gaza massacre? Obama never offered a single word of sympathy for those children.
By contrasting what he calls ‘situational consciousness’ of ‘First and Third Worlds’ in terms of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson argues that “the slave knows what reality and the resistance of matter really are whereas [the] master is condemned to idealism.” Drawing on this Hegelian analysis, Jameson concludes:
“It strikes me that we Americans, we masters of the world, are in something of that very same position. The view from the top is epistemologically crippling, and reduces its subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented subjectivities, to the poverty of the individual experience of isolated nomads … This placeless individuality, this structural idealism which affords us the luxury of the Sartrean blink, offers a welcome escape from the ‘nightmare of history,’ but at the same time it condemns our culture to psychologism and the ‘projections’ of private subjectivity. All of this is denied to third world culture, which must be situational and materialist ….”
This is exactly what American policy is all about – a policy of domination and interests. That is, it is a reflection of an ideology of a particular class with particular interests represented in specific perspectives, i.e. White, neo-liberal pragmatism.
American “strong political discourse,” to use Bourdieu’s words, coincides with neo-liberalism. Their strength is due to the fact that they have on their side all of the forces of a world of relations of power, a world that they contribute to making what it is. The Palestinians, like native Americans, are a “surplus population,” like Black South Africans, “powerless and useless savages”. Give them a Bantustan, surrounded by walls (The Wall), where “our allies (us)” do not have to see them; a Bantustan they will be allowed to call an independent, viable state. After all, which American citizen knows the difference between Palestine and Pakistan!
No need, then, to wonder why Mr. Obama, and his Secretary of State, hate us. We are no match for the macho, powerful, White Ashkenazis. During the 1967 war, Edward Said noted that Americans kept asking “how are we doing?” We, Arabs and Palestinians, are not part of that WE. We are the “THEM;” the “Other.” We occupy a part of what Fredric Jameson would call American “political unconscious.” Our death is never counted; the death of half a million Iraqi children from sanctions, like the death of 434 Palestinian children during the Gaza massacre, is “collateral damage,” whereas the 9/11 victims are individuals with families, names, and “powerful narratives.”
Dr. Haidar Eid is an independent political commentator based in Gaza. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
Barack and Michelle Obama dine with Edward and Mariam Said at a 1998 Arab community event in Chicago
Dear Mr President,
You will probably not read this letter due to your busy schedule and the huge number of messages you receive from presidents, kings, princes, sheiks, and prime ministers. Who is a Palestinian academic from Gaza, after all, to have the guts and write an open letter to the president of the United States of America?
What has triggered this letter is a picture of your excellency sitting with the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. That, of course, happened before 2004, i.e. before you underwent a process of metamorphosis which I personally think is unprecedented in history. Seeing you with Edward Said, I must say, surprised me. Said, a true public intellectual must have said something to you about the suffering of the Palestinian people. In the picture, you and your wife seem to be listening attentively, and admiringly, to him. But the point remains; did you really understand his eloquent, passionate defense of the rights of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine? Judging from your recent policy shifts, I very much doubt it. It is precisely the incongruity between the photograph and these policy shifts that has prompted this letter.
Mr President,
The whole world celebrated your election as the first African-American president of the US. I did not. Neither did the inhabitants of the concentration camp where I live. Your sympathetic visit to Sderot—an Israeli town which was the Palestinian village of Najd until 1948 when its people were ethnically cleansed—three years after your first visit to a Kibbutz in northern Israel in support of its residents, and after your pledge to be committed to the security of the State of Israel and its “right” to retain unified Jerusalem as the capital city of the Jewish people—to give but few examples—were all clear indications of where your heart lies.
Another reason for the writing of this letter is shock at the indifference and arrogance with which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dismissed Palestinian concerns about Israel’s illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank. Only a few weeks ago you made the admirable statement that all Jewish settlement must halt, and you made it clear that this included expansion of existing settlements as well as the construction of new settlements. However, when Netanyahu let it be known that he had no intention of stopping settlements, you missed an historic opportunity to draw a line: no more billions and no more weapons for Israel unless and until this condition is met. Now Clinton has the Herculean task of pretending that your position on Jewish settlements has not changed, although it is clear you have chosen not to use the very real power at your disposal to bring Israeli policy into line.
About six months after your election, you gave a speech in Cairo, addressed to the Arab and Islamic worlds; which some people found impressive. I found it impressive in form, but not in substance because your actions have not matched your rhetoric. Why did I not buy the new language of the new American administration? Because while you were giving your speech, we were burying my neighbor, a terminally ill patient, who needed treatment in a hospital abroad, since, thanks to the siege imposed by your own administration and Israel on the Gaza Strip, the facilities that would have saved his life are not available in Gaza. Like more than 400 terminally ill people in Gaza, my neighbor lost his life. In spite of the fine Arabic words of peace, “salaam aleikum,” you made it crystal clear that the point of reference in any negotiations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israel’s security. By doing that, Mr President, you are effectively marginalizing the whole issue of Palestine, and unfortunately setting the stage for renewed Israeli assaults against a starving Gaza, an entity that has, thanks to your “unbreakable” ties with Israel, been transformed into the largest concentration camp on earth.
Your failure to support the Goldstone report, your indifference, not to say your contribution, to Palestinian suffering and the process of “politicide” against the Palestinian people of Gaza is, to say the least, unfathomable, coming from a man who listened so earnestly to Edward Said. Your advisors must have told you about the cutting off of medicine, food and fuel to the concentration camp where I live. Patients in need of dialysis and other urgent medical treatment are dying every single day. A majority of our children, many the same age as your two beautiful daughters, are badly undernourished.
You must have skimmed through the executive summary of the Goldstone report detailing the horror inflicted on 1.5 million civilians for 22 days, horror caused by F16s, Apache helicopters, and phosphorus bombs made in American factories. Hundreds of children were burnt to death by phosphorus bombs; pregnant women were brutally targeted in what Israeli soldiers boasted of on their T-Shirts: “One bullet, Two kills.” And yet, not a single word of sympathy, Mr President! Edward Said had this to say upon his first visit to Gaza: “It’s the most terrifying place I’ve ever been in… it’s a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa.” This was back in 1993, Mr President, before conditions dramatically deteriorated. Gaza has now become, as the leading Israeli human rights organization B’tselem describes it, “the largest prison on Earth.”
Mr Obama,
Unlike your predecessor, you seem to be a smart man. You must have realized that a two-state solution has been rendered impossible by Israeli colonization of the West Bank, by the war on Gaza, by the construction of the apartheid wall, by the expansion of so-called Greater Jerusalem, and by the increase in the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. You must have realized also that there are six million refugees, most of whom live in miserable conditions waiting for courageous, visionary leaders committed to true democracy, human rights and international law to implement UN resolution 194. And yet, you and your secretary of state, like every US president since 1967, have decided to support Israel in creating conditions that made the two-state solution impossible, impractical and unjust.
Were you a supporter of the bantustan system in South Africa under the apartheid system? Are you opposed to equal rights and the transformation of Israel/Palestine into a state for all its citizens? The two-state solution means the bantustanization of Palestine, a solution you, to our knowledge, never supported for South Africa. Are you, Mr President, opposed to civic democracy, which is the demand of most Palestinian civil society and grassroots organizations? This is what your role models, Martin Luther King Jr and Steve Biko, died for. Was Nelson Mandela wrong to spend 27 years of his life in pursuit of justice by demanding equality for the indigenous people of South Africa? Do you realize that what you are supporting in the Middle East is a racist solution par excellence? A solution based on ethnic nationalism. Your secretary of state and envoy to the Middle East, unashamedly, stood with beaming smiles next to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who not only defends openly the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but also calls for a new genocide in Gaza. Do you realize, Mr President, that this Hitlerite fascist might become Israel’s next prime minister, thanks to your administration’s complacency and support?
Our only immediate demand is that your administration ensures that Israel fulfills its obligations in terms of international law. Is that too much to ask?
Mr President Barack Hussein Obama,
We, the Palestinian people, are fed up!
Sincerely,
Professor Haidar Eid
Gaza, Palestine
The author is an independent political commentator and professor in the Department of English Literature at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.
