BENNETT'S POLITICAL THEATRE: THE DECISIVE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN FIGHT AHEAD

2 July 2021
Bennett’s Political Theater: the Decisive Israeli-Palestinian Fight Ahead
by Ramzy Baroud

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Many Palestinians believe that the May 10-21 military confrontation between Israel and the Gaza Resistance, along with the simultaneous popular revolt across Palestine, was a game-changer. Israel is doing everything in its power to prove them wrong.

Palestinians are justified to hold this viewpoint; after all, their minuscule military capabilities in a besieged and impoverished tiny stretch of land, the Gaza Strip, have managed to push back – or at least neutralize – the massive and superior Israeli military machine.

However, for Palestinians, this is not only about firepower but also about their coveted national unity. Indeed, the Palestinian revolt, which included all Palestinians regardless of their political backgrounds or geographic locations, is fostering a whole new discourse on Palestine – non-factional, assertive and forward-thinking.

The challenge for the Palestinian people is whether they will be able to translate their achievements into an actual political strategy, and finally transition past the stifling, and often tragic, post-Oslo Accords period.

Of course, it will not be so easy. After all, there are powerful forces that are keenly invested in the status quo. For them, any positive change on the path of Palestinian freedom will certainly lead to political, strategic and economic losses.

The Palestinian Authority, which operates with no democratic mandate, is more aware of its vulnerable position than at any other time in the past. Not only do ordinary Palestinians have no faith in this ‘authority’, but they see it as an obstacle in their path for liberation. It was unsurprising to see PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, and many of his corrupt inner circle, riding the wave of Palestinian popular revolt, shifting their language entirely, though fleetingly, from a discourse that was carefully designed to win the approval of ‘donor countries’, to one singing the praises of ‘resistance’ and ‘revolution’.

This corrupt clique is desperate, eager to sustain its privileges and survive at any cost.

If Palestinians carry on with their popular mobilization and upward trajectory, however, Israel is the entity that stands to lose most. A long-term Palestinian popular Intifada, uprising, with specific demands and under a unified national leadership, would represent the greatest threat to Israel’s military occupation and apartheid regime in many years.

The Israeli government, this time under the inexperienced leadership of current Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, and his coalition partner, future Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, is clearly unable to articulate a post-Gaza war strategy. If the political raucous and the bizarre power transition from former Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, to Bennett’s coalition is momentarily ignored, it feels as if Netanyahu is still holding sway.

Bennett has, thus far, followed Netanyahu’s playbook on every matter concerning the Palestinians. He, and especially his Defense Minister, Benny Gantz – Netanyahu’s former coalition partner – continue to speak of their military triumph in Gaza and the need to build on this supposed ‘victory’. On June 15, the Israeli army bombed several locations in the besieged Strip and, again, on June 18. A few more bombs, however, are unlikely to change the outcome of the May war.

It is time to convert our “military achievements (to) political gains,” Gantz said on June 20. Easier said than done; as per this logic, Israel has been scoring ‘military achievements’ in Gaza for many years, namely since its first major war on the Strip in 2008-09. Since then, thousands of Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed and many more wounded. However, Palestinian resistance continued unabated and zero ‘political gains’ have actually been achieved.

Gantz, like Bennett and Lapid, recognizes that Israel’s strategy in Gaza has been a complete failure. Since their main objective is remaining in power, they are bound to the rules of the old game which were formulated by right-wing politicians and sustained by right-wing extremists. Any deviation from that failed stratagem means a possible collapse of their shaky coalition.

Instead of mapping out a new, realistic strategy, Israel’s new government is busy sending symbolic messages. The first message is to its main target audience, Israel’s right-wing constituency, particularly Netanyahu’s disgruntled supporters, that the new government is equally committed to Israel’s ‘security’, to ensuring a demographic majority in occupied Jerusalem as in the rest of Palestine, and that no Palestinian state will ever be realized.

Another message is to the Palestinians and, by extension, to the whole region whose peoples and governments rallied behind the Palestinian revolt during the May war, that Israel remains a formidable military force, and that the fundamental military equation on the ground remains unaltered.

By continuing its escalation in and around Gaza, its violent provocations in Sheikh Jarrah and the entirety of East Jerusalem, its continued restrictions on Gaza’s urgent need for reconstruction, Bennett’s coalition is engaging in political theater. As long as attention remains fixated on Gaza and Jerusalem, as long as Bennett and Lapid continue to buy time and to distract the Israeli public from an imminent political implosion.

The Palestinians are, once more, proving to be critical players in Israeli politics. After all, it was Palestinian unity and resolve in May that humiliated Netanyahu and emboldened his enemies to finally oust him. Now, the Palestinians could potentially hold the keys to the survival of Bennet’s coalition, especially if they agree to a prisoner exchange – freeing several Israeli soldiers captured by Palestinian groups in Gaza in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held under horrific conditions in Israel.

On the day of the last prisoner exchange, in October 2011, Netanyahu delivered a televised speech, carefully tailored to present himself as Israel’s savior. Bennett and Lapid would relish a similar opportunity.

It behooves Israel’s new leaders to exercise caution in how they proceed from this point on. Palestinians are proving that they are no longer pawns in Israel’s political circus and they, too, can play politics, as the past few weeks have testified.

So far, Bennett has proven to be another Netanyahu. Yet, if Israel’s longest-running prime minister ultimately failed to convince Israelis of the merit of his political doctrine, Bennett’s charade is likely to be exposed much sooner, and the price, this time, is sure to be even heavier.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

1 June 2021

How Palestinian Resistance Altered the Equation

by Ramzy Baroud

Photograph Source: Neil Ward – CC BY 2.0

The ceasefire on May 21 has, for now, brought the Israeli war on Gaza to an end. However, this ceasefire is not permanent and constant Israeli provocations anywhere in Palestine could reignite the bloody cycle all over again. Moreover, the Israeli siege on Gaza remains in place, as well as the Israeli military occupation and the rooted system of apartheid that exists all over Palestine.

This, however, does not preclude the fact that the 11-day Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip has fundamentally altered some elements about Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians, especially the Palestinian Resistance, in all of its manifestations.

Let us examine the main actors in the latest confrontation and briefly discuss the impact of the Israeli war and the determined Palestinian resistance on their respective positions.

‘Mowing the Grass’ No More

‘Mowing the grass’ is an Israeli term used with reference to the habitual Israeli attacks and war on besieged Gaza, aimed at delineating the need for Israel to routinely eradicate or degrade the capabilities of the various Palestinian resistance groups on the street.

‘Mowing the grass’ also has political benefits, as it often neatly fit into Israel’s political agendas – for example, the need to distract from one political crisis or another in Israel or to solidify Israeli society around its leadership.

May 2021 will be remembered as the time that ‘mowing the grass’ can no longer be easily invoked as a military and political strategy by the Israeli government, as the Gaza resistance and the popular rebellion that was ignited throughout all of Palestine has raised the price by several-fold that Israel paid for its violent provocations.

While Israeli military and political strategists want to convince us, and themselves, that their relationship with Gaza and the Palestinian Resistance has not changed, it actually has and, arguably, irreversibly so.

The Altered Equation

The Palestinian fight for freedom has also been fundamentally altered, not only because of the unprecedented resilience of Palestinian resistance, but the unity of the Palestinian people, and the rise of a post-Oslo/peace process Palestinian nation that is united around a new popular discourse, one which does not differentiate between Palestinians in Jerusalem, Gaza, or anywhere else.

Palestinian unity around resistance, not peace process, is placing Israel in a new kind of quandary. For the first time in its history, Israel cannot win the war on the Palestinians. Neither can it lose the war, because conceding essentially means that Israel is ready to offer compromises – end its occupation, dismantle apartheid, and so on. This is why Israel opted for a one-sided ceasefire. Though humiliating, it preferred over-reaching a negotiated agreement, thus sending a message that the Palestinian Resistance works.

Still, the May war demonstrated that Israel is no longer the only party that sets the rules of the game. Palestinians are finally able to make an impact and force Israel to abandon its illusions that Palestinians are passive victims and that resistance is futile.

Equally important, we can no longer discuss popular resistance and armed resistance as if they are two separate notions or strategies. It would have been impossible for the armed resistance to be sustained, especially under the shocking amount of Israeli firepower, without the support of Palestinians at every level of society and regardless of their political and ideological differences.

Facing a single enemy that did not differentiate between civilians and fighters, between a Hamas or a Fatah supporter, the Palestinian people throughout Palestine moved past all of their political divisions and factional squabbles. Palestinian youth coined new terminologies, ones that were centered around resistance, liberation, solidarity and so on. This shift in the popular discourse will have important consequences that have the potential of cementing Palestinian unity for many years to come.

Israel’s Allies Not Ready to Change

The popular revolt in Palestine has taken many by surprise, including Israel’s allies. Historically, Israel’s Western supporters have proven to be morally bankrupt, but the latest war has proved them to be politically bankrupt as well.

Throughout the war, Washington and other Western capitals parroted the same old line about Israel’s right to defend itself, Israel’s security and the need to return to the negotiation table. This is an archaic and useless position because it did not add anything new to the old, empty discourse. If anything, it merely demonstrates their inability to evolve politically and to match the dramatic changes underway in occupied Palestine.

Needless to say, the new US Administration of Joe Biden, in particular, has missed a crucial opportunity to prove that it was different from that of the previous Donald Trump Administration. Despite, at times, guarded language and a few nuances, Biden behaved precisely as Trump would have if he was still President.

What ‘Palestinian leadership’?

The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and his circle of supporters represent a bygone era. While they are happy to claim a large share of whatever international financial support that could pour in to rebuild Gaza, they do not represent any political trend in Palestine at the moment.

Abbas’s decision to cancel Palestine’s elections scheduled for May and July left him more isolated. Palestinians are ready to look past him; in fact, they already have. This so-called leadership will not be able to galvanize upon this historic moment built on Palestinian unity and resistance.

The Palestinian Authority is corrupt and dispensable. Worse, it is an obstacle in the way of Palestinian freedom. Palestine needs a leadership that represents all Palestinian people everywhere, one that is truly capable of leading the people as they attempt to chart a clear path to their coveted freedom. Expanding the Circle of Solidarity The incredible amount of global solidarity which made headline news all over the world was a clear indication that the many years of preparedness at a grassroots level have paid off. Aside from the numerous expressions of solidarity, one particular aspect deserves further analysis: the geographic diversity of this solidarity which is no longer confined to a few cities in a few countries.

Pro-Palestine solidarity protests, vigils, conferences, webinars, art, music, poetry and many more such expressions were manifest from Kenya to South Africa, to Pakistan to the UK and dozens of countries around the world. The demographics, too, have changed, with minorities and people of color either leading or taking center stage of many of these protests, a phenomenon indicative of the rising intersectionality between Palestinians and numerous oppressed groups around the globe.

A critical fight ahead for Palestinians is the fight of delegitimizing and exposing Israeli colonialism, racism and apartheid. This fight can be won at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), UNESCO and numerous international and regional organizations, in addition to the countless civil society groups and community centers the world over.

For this to happen, every voice matters, every vote counts, from India to Brazil, from Portugal to South Africa, from China to New Zealand, and so on. Israel understands this perfectly, thus the global charm offensive that right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been leading for years. It is essential that we, too, understand this, and reach out to each UN member as part of a larger strategy to deservingly isolate Israel for ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

PALESTINE'S MOMENT OF RECKONING: ON ABBAS' DANGEROUS DECISION TO 'POSTPONE' ELECTIONS

7 May 2021

Palestine’s Moment of Reckoning: On Abbas’ Dangerous Decision to ‘Postpone’ Elections

by Ramzy Baroud

Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

The decision on April 30 by Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, to ‘postpone’ Palestinian elections, which would have been the first in 15 years, will deepen Palestinian division and could, potentially, signal the collapse of the Fatah Movement, at least in its current form.

Unlike the last Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, the big story, this time, was not the Fatah-Hamas rivalry. Many rounds of talks in recent months between representatives of Palestine’s two largest political parties had already sorted out much of the details regarding the now-canceled elections, which were scheduled to begin on May 22.

Both Fatah and Hamas have much to gain from the elections; the former relished the opportunity to restore its long-dissipated legitimacy as it has ruled over occupied Palestinians, through its dominance of the Palestinian Authority, with no democratic mandate whatsoever; Hamas, on the other hand, was desperate to break away from its long and painful isolation as exemplified in the Israeli siege on Gaza, which ironically resulted from its victory in the 2006 elections.

It was not Israeli and American pressure, either, that made Abbas betray the collective wishes of a whole nation. This pressure coming from Tel Aviv and Washington was real and widely reported, but must have also been expected. Moreover, Abbas could have easily circumvented them as his election decree, announced last January, was welcomed by Palestinians and praised by much of the international community.

Abbas’ unfortunate but, frankly, expected decision was justified by the 86-year-old leader as one which is compelled by Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinians in Jerusalem from taking part in the elections. Abbas’ explanation, however, is a mere fig leaf aimed at masking his fear of losing power with Israel’s routine obstinacy. But since when do occupied people beg their occupiers to practice their democratic rights? Since when have Palestinians sought permission from Israel to assert any form of political sovereignty in occupied East Jerusalem?

Indeed, the battle for Palestinian rights in Jerusalem takes place on a daily basis in the alleyways of the captive city. Jerusalemites are targeted in every facet of their existence, as Israeli restrictions make it nearly impossible for them to live a normal life, neither in the way they build, work, study and travel nor even marry and worship. So it would be mind-boggling if Abbas was truly sincere that he had, indeed, expected Israeli authorities to allow Palestinians in the occupied city easy access to polling stations and to exercise their political right, while those same authorities labor to erase any semblance of Palestinian political life, even mere physical presence, in Jerusalem.

The truth is Abbas canceled the elections because all credible public opinion polls showed that the May vote would have decimated the ruling clique of his Fatah party, and would have ushered in a whole new political configuration, one in which his Fatah rivals, Marwan Barghouti and Nasser al-Qudwa would have emerged as the new leaders of Fatah. If this scenario were to occur, a whole class of Palestinian millionaires who turned the Palestinian struggle into a lucrative industry, generously financed by ‘donor countries’, risk losing everything, in favor of uncharted political territories, controlled by a Palestinian prisoner, Marwan Barghouti, from his Israeli prison cell.

Worse for Abbas, Barghouti could have potentially become the new Palestinian president, as he was expected to compete in the July presidential elections. Bad for Abbas, but good for Palestinians, as Barghouti’s presidency would have proven crucial for Palestinian national unity and even international solidarity. An imprisoned Palestinian president would have been a PR disaster for Israel. Equally, it would have confronted the low-profile American diplomacy under Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, with an unprecedented challenge: How could Washington continue to preach a ‘peace process’ between Israel and the Palestinians, when the latter’s president languishes in solitary confinement, as he has since 2002?

By effectively canceling the elections, Abbas, his benefactors and supporters were hoping to delay a moment of reckoning within the Fatah Movement – in fact, within the Palestinian body politic as a whole. However, the decision is likely to have far more serious repercussions on Fatah and Palestinian politics than if the elections took place. Why?

Since Abbas’ election decree earlier this year, 36 lists have registered with the Palestinian Central Elections Commission. While Islamist and socialist parties prepared to run with unified lists, Fatah disintegrated. Aside from the official Fatah list, which is close to Abbas, two other non-official lists, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Future’, planned to compete. Various polls showed that the ‘Freedom’ list, led by late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s nephew, Nasser al-Qudwa, and Marwan Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa, headed for an election upset, and were on their way to ousting Abbas and his shrinking, though influential circle.

Yet, none of this is likely to go away simply because Abbas reneged on his commitment to restoring a semblance of Palestinian democracy. A whole new political class in Palestine is now defining itself through its allegiances to various lists, parties and leaders. The mass of Fatah supporters that were mentally ready to break away from the dominance of Abbas will not relent easily, simply because the aging leader has changed his mind. In fact, throughout Palestine, an unparalleled discussion on democracy, representation and the need to move forward beyond Abbas and his haphazard, self-serving politics is currently taking place and is impossible to contain. For the first time in many years, the conversation is no longer confined to Hamas vs. Fatah, Ramallah vs. Gaza or any other such demoralizing classifications. This is a major step in the right direction.

There is nothing that Abbas can say or do at this point to restore the people’s confidence in his authority. Arguably, he never had their confidence in the first place. By canceling the elections, he has crossed a red line that should have never been crossed, thus placing himself and few others around him as enemies of the Palestinian people, their democratic aspirations and their hope for a better future.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

THE RUSSIAN ALTERNATIVE: HOW MOSCOW IS CAPITALISING ON US RETREAT IN PALESTINE, ISRAEL

12 February 2021
The Russian Alternative: How Moscow is Capitalizing on US Retreat in Palestine, Israel
by Ramzy Baroud
Photograph Source: Mahmoud Abbas and Vladimir Putin. April 18, 2016 in Kremlin – CC BY 4.0

Israeli anxiety was palpable when it was reported that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was not contacted by the new American President, Joe Biden, for days after the latter’s inauguration. While much is being read into Biden’s decision, including Washington’s lack of enthusiasm to return to the ‘peace process’, Moscow is generating much attention as a possible alternative to the United States by hosting inner Palestinian dialogue and conversing with leaders of Palestinian political groups.

Indeed, a political shift is taking place on both fronts: the US away from the region and Russia back to it. If this trend continues, it could only be a matter of time before a major paradigm shift occurs.

The Israelis are rightly worried at the potential loss of the unconditional support of their American benefactors. “There are 195 countries in the world, and … Biden has not contacted 188 of them,” Herb Keinon wrote in The Jerusalem Post on February 2, adding, “but only in Israel, people are concerned about the significance of this delay”.

The concern is justified as Israel has been designated as Washington’s most prominent ally for many years, both in the Middle East and globally.

It is unclear whether the relegation of Netanyahu during Biden’s early days in office is an indicator that Israel — in fact, the entire region – is no longer an American priority or a warning message to Netanyahu who has rallied for years in support of the Republican Administration of Donald Trump.

Thanks to Netanyahu’s foreign policy miscalculation, support for Israel has, in recent years, become an unprecedented partisan issue in US politics. While the overwhelming majority of Republicans support Israel, only a minority of Democrats sympathize with Israel, as recent public opinion polls revealed.

While it is true that Netanyahu’s behavior in recent years earned him special status within Republican ranks thus making him persona non grata among Democrats, it is equally true that the US seems to be divesting from the Middle East altogether.

According to Politico, reporting on the Biden Administration’s initial days in office, a major restructuring has already taken place among the staff of the US National Security Council, flipping the previous structure “where the Middle East directorate was much bigger than it is now and the Asia portfolio was managed by a handful of more junior staffers.”

However, it is not only Washington that is shifting its geostrategic center of gravity. Russia, too, is undergoing a major restructuring in its foreign policy priorities. While Washington is retreating from the Middle East, Moscow is cementing its presence in the region, which began gradually in its calculated involvement in the Syrian conflict in 2015. Moscow is now offering itself as a political partner and a more balanced mediator between Israel and the Palestinians.

Like the US, Russia might not necessarily see its political involvement as a precursor to actually ending the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though Moscow insists, unlike Washington, on the centrality of international law and United Nations Resolutions in the quest for a just peace. Writing in the Polish Institute of International Affairs, Michał Wojnarowicz argues that Russia’s involvement in Palestine and Israel is consistent with its overall strategy in the Middle East, aimed at building “a network of influence among regional actors and boost its image as an attractive political partner.”

A variation of this view was offered in the New York Times in 2016, when Moscow began working to translate its strategic gains in Syria to political capital throughout the region. It was during this time that the American-sponsored peace process had reached a dead end, giving Russia the opportunity to float the idea of a Moscow-sponsored talk between Israel and Palestine.

“Russia’s new-found Middle East peace push, part of President Vladimir V. Putin’s reinsertion of Moscow into the region in a profound way after years of retreat, seems to be about everything but finding peace in the Middle East,” a NYT op-ed argued. “Instead, it is about Moscow’s ambitions and competition with Washington.”

At the time, Netanyahu rejected the Russian overture, in the hope that a Republican Administration would grant Israel all of its demands without making any concessions. The Palestinians, including relatively isolated movements like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, found in Moscow a welcoming environment and a crucial international power that is able to balance out Washington’s blind support for Israel.

Despite Israel’s refusal to engage with the Palestinians under Russian auspices, many Palestinian delegations visited Moscow, culminating, in January 2017, in a political breakthrough when rival Palestinian factions, Fatah, Hamas and others, held serious talks in the hope of bridging their differences. Although the round of talks did not bring about Palestinian unity, it served as Russia’s political debut in a conflict that has fallen squarely within the American geopolitical space.

Since then, Russia has remained very involved through well-structured efforts championed by Putin’s Special Envoy, Mikhail Bogdanov. These efforts are channeled through three different areas: inner Palestinian dialogue, Palestinian-Israeli dialogue and, of late, dialogue within the Fatah movement itself. The latter, especially, is indicative of the nature of Moscow’s involvement in the multi-layered conflicts at work in the region.

Even when Palestinian groups are finalizing their previous agreements in Cairo, top Palestinian officials continue to coordinate their actions with Moscow and with Bogdanov, personally.

Russia’s credibility among Palestinian groups is boosted by similar credibility among ordinary Palestinians as well, especially as it emerged in January that they will be receiving the Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, scheduled to be available in the Occupied Territories in the near future.

Moreover, while Washington publicly declared that it will not roll back any of Trump’s actions in favor of Israel, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, is pushing for an international peace conference on Palestine, to be held in the coming months.

The US now has no other option but to slowly retreat from its previous commitments to the peace process: in fact, the region as a whole. As is often the case, any American retreat means a potential opening for Russia, which is now laying claim to the role of peace broker, a seismic change that many Palestinians are already welcoming.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT FOR PALESTINE AFTER 100 YEARS

ICC clears way for war crimes probe of Israeli actions in Palestinian territories

By Josef Federman
6 February 2021

Jerusalem: Judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague have decided the court has jurisdiction over war crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, paving the way for a possible a war crimes probe into Israeli military actions.

The decision prompted swift reactions from both Israel, which is not a member of the court and rejects its jurisdiction, and the Palestinian Authority, which welcomed the ruling.

ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said her office was studying the finding and would decide what to do next “guided strictly by its independent and impartial mandate” to prosecute grave war crimes and atrocities when countries are unable or unwilling to do so themselves.

Palestinian children wait in line while holding pots to receive free meals of green pea stew cooked by Samera Abu Amra, unseen, for distribution to poor residents in Gaza City on Thursday.

The ICC judges said their decision was based on the fact that Palestine has been granted membership to the tribunal’s founding treaty, and had referred the situation to the court. The judges said the jurisdiction decision does not imply any attempt to determine Palestinian statehood, which is uncertain, or national borders.

“The court’s territorial jurisdiction in the situation in Palestine ... extends to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” they said.

Bensouda had found in December 2019 that there was a “reasonable basis” to open a probe into potential war crimes “in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip”. But she asked the court to determine whether she had territorial jurisdiction before proceeding.

Chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.Credit:AP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decried the decision and vowed to fight “this perversion of justice."

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said the ruling meant it was “historic day for [the] principle of accountability”. Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said it was a “victory for justice and humanity.”

The Palestinians, who joined the court in 2015, have pushed for an investigation. Israel has said the court has no jurisdiction because the Palestinians do not have statehood and because the borders of any future state are to be decided in peace talks. It also accuses the court of inappropriately wading into political issues.

Related Article A battle of wills is under way in the occupied West Bank, where Israel has demolished the village of Khirbet Humsu three times in as many months.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict
How a remote West Bank village became the focus of a battle of wills

The Palestinians have asked the court to look into Israeli actions during its 2014 war against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, as well as construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem.

The international community widely considers the settlements to be illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace but has done little to pressure Israel to freeze or reverse their growth.

Israel’s military has mechanisms to investigate alleged wrongdoing by its troops, and despite criticism that the system is insufficient, experts say it has a good chance of fending off ICC investigation into its wartime practices.

When it comes to settlements, however, experts say Israel could have a difficult time defending its actions. International law forbids the transfer of a civilian population into occupied territory.

Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in the 1967 war, territories the Palestinians want for their future state. Some 700,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

A boy holds a Palestinian flag after Israeli troops demolished tents and other structures of the Khirbet Humsu hamlet in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank on Wednesday.

A boy holds a Palestinian flag after Israeli troops demolished tents and other structures of the Khirbet Humsu hamlet in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank on Wednesday.Credit:AP

Israel says east Jerusalem is an indivisible part of its capital and that the West Bank is “disputed” territory whose fate should be resolved in negotiations.

While the court would have a hard time prosecuting Israelis, it could issue arrest warrants that would make it difficult for Israeli officials to travel abroad. A case in the ICC would also be deeply embarrassing to the government. Netanyahu led the 2014 war in Gaza, while current Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz was the military chief of staff at the time.

In a videotaped statement released after midnight, Netanyahu accused the court of “pure anti-Semitism” and having a double standard.

“The ICC refuses to investigate brutal dictatorships like Iran and Syria, who commit horrific atrocities almost daily,” he said. “We will fight this perversion of justice with all our might!”

Nabil Shaath, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, welcomed the decision and said it proved the Palestinians were right to go to the ICC. “This is good news, and the next step is to launch an official investigation into Israel’s crimes against our people,” he said.

The ICC could also potentially investigate crimes committed by Palestinians militants. Bensouda has said her probe would look into the actions of Hamas, which fired rockets indiscriminately into Israel during the 2014 war.

In Washington, US State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters that the Biden administration was “taking a close look” at the decision.

“However, we have serious concerns about the ICC’s attempts to exercise jurisdiction over Israeli personnel,” Price said. “We have always taken the position that the court’s jurisdiction should be reserved for those who consent to it or are referred by the UN Security Council.”

The decision, detailed in a 60-page legal brief, was released late on Friday (Saturday AEDT), after Israel had shut down for the weekly Jewish Sabbath.

Human Rights Watch welcomed the decision, saying it “finally offers victims of serious crimes some real hope for justice after a half century of impunity.”

“It’s high time that Israeli and Palestinian perpetrators of the gravest abuses — whether war crimes committed during hostilities or the expansion of unlawful settlements — face justice,” said Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at the New York-based group.

The three-judge pretrial chamber ruled that Palestine is a state party to the Rome Statute establishing the ICC. With one judge dissenting, it ruled that Palestine qualifies as the state on the territory in which the “conduct in question” occurred and that the court’s jurisdiction extends to east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

Last year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions against ICC officials, after earlier revoking Bensouda’s entry visa, in response to the court’s attempts to prosecute American troops for actions in Afghanistan.

The US, like Israel, does not recognise the court’s jurisdiction. At the time, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the steps were meant as retribution for investigations into the United States and its allies, a reference to Israel.

The Biden administration has said it will review those sanctions.

AP, Reuters

January 12, 2021

Defending Apartheid

by Lawrence Davidson
12 January 2021

In 2017 the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) issued a report on the conditions of Palestinians under Israeli rule. The report covered the situations of both Palestinian citizens of Israel and the subject population in the Occupied Territories. The report concluded “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”

Though U.S. and Israeli pressure managed to suppress the report, evidence for this charge of apartheid is clear-cut. More recently, the facts have been brought together in a succinct presentation by the noted journalist Jonathan Cook. In a 2018 issue of The Link, a publication of Americans for Middle East Understanding, he wrote an expose` entitled “Apartheid Israel.” Some of the particulars Cook looks at are citizenship inequality, nationality inequality, marriage inequality, legal inequality, and residential inequality. The predictable Palestinian struggle seeking equality and the end of apartheid is seen as a subversive movement by both Israel’s Jewish majority and its increasingly rightwing governments.

Of course, some Israeli Jews do understand that the country has a serious problem with racism. For instance, this comes through in the June 2020 Haaretz report that indicates that as “world sensitivity to racism and oppression” increases “historical injustice in Israel is … only getting worse.”

The “Nation-State” Law

One of the ways things are getting worse in Israel is through the enshrining of Zionist-inspired apartheid in law. On 18 July 2018 the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) enacted a “Nation-State” Law. It defines the State of Israel as the nation-state “of the Jewish people only.” In other words, only Jews can hold “nationality rights” in Israel.

MK (member of the Knesset) Yariv Levin dubbed the law “Zionism’s flagship bill … that will put Israel back on the right path. A country that is different from all others in one way, that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people.” MK Amir Ohana, who chaired the special committee that shaped the bill, stated: “This is the law of all laws. It is the most important law in the history of the State of Israel, which says that everyone has human rights, but national rights in Israel belong only to the Jewish people.” The absurdity of this proposition is exposed by the fact that the Palestinian minority has been denied significant aspects of its human rights for over 70 years. As it turns out, the two categories of rights, national and human, have been interdependent ever since the development of the sovereign state.

Hannah Arendt’s Insight

Acting on the claim that one can separate out human rights, much less civil rights, from “national rights” has proven disastrous in the modern political era. Significantly, it was a brilliant Jewish intellectual, Hannah Arendt, who pointed this out following the horror of the Holocaust and on the occasion of the U.N. pronouncement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Arendt pointed out that, in the era of the nation-state, rights are defined and enforced within state entities claiming sovereignty over both territory and population. If a state decides that for racial, ethnic, religious, or any other reason, that only one portion of its population is worthy of first-class citizenship, it can proceed to deny to all those who do not qualify any and all rights. This is, of course, what the Nazis did to the Jews, and more recently is reflected in how Myanmar treats its ethnic minorities, how China treats its Uyghur population, and Saudi Arabia discriminates against its Shia religious minority, and so.

The United Nations has proven unable to effectively challenge this perversion of sovereignty. Keep in mind that the United Nations is itself made up of nation-states which reserve the power to discriminate as a consequence of sovereignty. This has made it difficult for the U.N., as an organization, to enforce a “universal” and “inalienable” conception of rights. In truth, the only way to achieve universal rights is to replace the nation-state’s claim that its sovereignty allows it alone to grant rights—replace it with enforceable international law that assures equitable application of rights.

Israel’s High Court of Justice Defends Apartheid

Israel is now acting out the scenario Arendt identified. There were many complaints against the nation-state bill, coming not only from the Palestinian Arabs, but also from the Druze community and even elements of the Mizrachi Jewish population. Thus, on 22 December 2020, fully two and a half years after the passage of the bill, the High Court of Justice held a public review of the law.

Two sections of the law drew particular objection from those appearing before the court. First was the objection to the bill’s official designation of “Jewish settlement as a value that the state is obligated to promote.” Considering the fact that such settlements most often lead to eviction of Palestinians from their land and homes, and the steady segregation of populations based on ethnicity and religion, it can’t help but be seen as an important historical factor in Zionist apartheid. The second was the law’s purposeful demotion of Arabic—it will no longer be an official language of Israel. The implication here is that loss of recognition of the language spoken by the Palestinians, Druze, and at least the first generation of Mizrachi Jews is equivalent to their loss of equal social and political status with those who speak Hebrew.

Throughout the ensuing debate the eleven High Court judges could not, or would not, recognize that giving elite legal and social status in law to one group of religiously identified citizens must have detrimental legal consequences for other non-elite citizens and subjects. That it would was a point made by Attorney Hassan Jabareen, the director of Adalah—the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights.

The rejoinder of the judges made in reference to the emphasis on “Jewish settlement” was that “the fact that Jewish settlement is perceived as a national value does not mean that there should be no equal allocation and legitimate civil rights for others.” As observers noted, this reply is ahistorical. It simply ignores Israel’s history of “over 70 years of discrimination, in which hundreds of towns, cities, and villages were established for Jews while not a single new locale was built for Palestinian citizens. As if Palestinian land was not expropriated for constructing Jewish communities.”

The same obtuseness was displayed when it came to the demotion of the Arabic language. The judges just could not see why losing its status as an official language was so painful for Arabic speakers. They were not moved when one of the plaintiffs pointed out, “there is a violation of convention here. The rules of the game have changed. My language, at least formally, has maintained its status from the time of the Ottomans until the 20th Knesset. Language was the only collective right [afforded to] the indigenous minority in its homeland.”

The cultural divide between Jews and non-Jews in Israel/Palestine that has been evolving into apartheid since before 1948 reached a tragic legal climax in the decision-making of these eleven judges. They confirmed in law a process that condemns non-Jews to a legal no-man’s-land. As the Druze lawyer told the court, “There is not a word on minority rights; it is a badge of shame for the State of Israel. … It is doubtful whether Jewish students who are educated on this law will be willing to accept Arab citizens at all in the future.”

“The Desired Reality”

Why were the eleven Israeli High Court judges so obtuse? Perhaps it is because they have been acculturated to see Zionist Israel as an exceptional place—a justification unto itself. As Yariv Levin described it above, Israel is “a country that is different from all others in one way, that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people.” This exclusiveness is the raison d’être of the Zionist project—it is its ultimate “noble” goal. For those within the exclusive Zionist tent, assigning the term apartheid to their accomplishment is to judge a special case by supposedly non-applicable generic rules. To persist in doing so is regarded as a sign of anti-Semitism rather than facing the facts.

This situation has been addressed by the Haaretz journalist Amira Haas. Haas is “the daughter of Holocaust survivors and resides in Ramallah, where she is the only Jewish Israeli journalist living in the West Bank.” She was in the United States in June 2019 and gave an interview to Mari Cohen for the publication Jewish Currents.

Haas explains the current situation this way: “The current reality is actually one state, which is an apartheid state. This means there are two separate laws: one for Palestinians and one for Israeli Jews. The Palestinian population is subdivided into groups and subgroups like the nonwhite population of [former apartheid] South Africa. They’re disconnected from each other. They are treated differently by Israel, while Israeli Jews live in the entire country, like one people, with full rights.”

The apartheid nature of Israel is a developmental plan of the state. Haas explains that Israel’s main goal is “to get more land, and to manipulate the Palestinian demography. … You see that this is really a plan. [Israeli leaders] sit and they think about how to implement it, and what regulations will achieve this goal. … One by one, step by step.” And, one has to conclude after seventy years that Israeli apartheid is sustainable because most of the world’s governments accept it. That, of course, could change, but there is no sign that it will in the near future.

It is also sustainable because it is what Israeli Jews want. “For Israel, this is the desired reality: that Palestinians live in their enclaves, deprived of any ability to develop their economy, and that the world gives them donations so that they can sustain themselves. And that’s it. There is no desire on the part of Israel to reach a different reality. There has been a kind of an illusion among Jews [in the diaspora] that Israel wants a solution. But [Israeli Jews] don’t see that this is a problem.”

Can it get worse? Yes, it can. Religious fanaticism can make it worse. Haas goes on to explain, “The question is, will the Israeli messianic religious right-wing segment of the population that has gained a lot of power in Israeli politics—will it succeed in accomplishing its aims: the mass expulsion of Palestinians and annexation of the great majority of the West Bank? It’s not enough for them to have Palestinians living in enclaves. They want more.”

It is this overall attitude that explains the ability of Israeli Jews to feel little or no obligation to help Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to maintain their health care systems or provide Covid-19 vaccinations. The act of official segregation has not diminished Israeli control, only any acceptance of Israeli responsibility.

Conclusion

History is full of tragic irony. At the end of the 19th century Germany was considered one of the most civilized nations on the planet. One world war and a Great Depression later, many Germans were electing Nazis and gearing up for the Holocaust. Up until the mid-20th century, the Jewish people were considered peace-loving and a reservoir of brilliant minds. One Holocaust later, many of them, both survivors and those in the diaspora, had joined a Zionist movement determined to create a racist warrior state.

Over time we become products of our local environment. That environment narrows our range of thought and choice. When the environment changes, those who endure change with it, not always for the best. The Holocaust traumatized its survivors, and some of them went on to produce “a nation-state for the Jewish people.” They might have pulled this off benignly if they had done so on some unpopulated planet. However, they chose Palestine in an allusion to biblical Israel—a disingenuous choice given that most Zionists were atheists. Palestine was not an unpopulated place, and thus, today, over 20 percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish.

The fact that Palestinians have no nationality rights means, historically, that their possession of any other sort of rights is precarious. They are like the Jews in any number of anti-Semitic historical circumstances—a fact that seems to have escaped our modern-day Hebrews.

It didn’t have to be this way. As a species we have a very wide range of experience, and with the proper historical awareness we can broaden out our current decision-making beyond the dictates of our local environment. In fact, after World War II some Jews tried to do just this. Even through the trauma of the Holocaust, they could see that the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine meant war with the indigenous population. Their own sense of the Jewish past told them that there were alternatives. These people were known as “cultural Zionists,” and they sought a democratic, equalitarian Palestine as a shared, multicultural home that guaranteed the protection and continuing development of Jewish cultural heritage, alongside those of Muslims and Christians. Palestine could have become a “spiritual” home for the Jews, with generous though controlled immigration opportunities. It was a possible peaceful route to Jewish recovery after the Holocaust.

Whatever one might think of this alternative, it was never seriously considered by those “political” Zionists convinced by persistent anti-Semitism that the survival of the Jews could only come through having their own nation-state. This path combined an evolving Jewish nationalism with a racist exclusiveness (the “chosen people” claim) that also ran through Jewish history. Zionists ignored that part of their historical reality, and today’s Apartheid Israel, along with its insistence that Judaism and Zionism are synonymous, is the result. As you sow, so shall you reap.

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.

HOW ISRAEL WAGES WAR ON PALESTINIAN HISTORY

From CounterPunch 21 August 2020

HOW ISRAEL WAGES WAS ON PALESTINIAN HISTORY

By Jonathan Cook 

Photograph Source: A street in Jenin, 2011 – Almonroth – Template:Hey – CC BY-SA 3.0

When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute Palestinian youth.

Jenin had been sealed off from the world for nearly three weeks as the Israeli army razed the neighbouring refugee camp and terrorised its population.

Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin shows the young man hurrying silently between wrecked buildings, using his nervous body to illustrate where Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians and where bulldozers collapsed homes, sometimes on their inhabitants.

It was not hard to infer Bakri’s larger meaning: when it comes to their own story, Palestinians are denied a voice. They are silent witnesses to their own and their people’s suffering and abuse.

The irony is that Bakri has faced just such a fate himself since Jenin, Jenin was released 18 years ago. Today, little is remembered of his film, or the shocking crimes it recorded, except for the endless legal battles to keep it off screens.

Bakri has been tied up in Israel’s courts ever since, accused of defaming the soldiers who carried out the attack. He has paid a high personal price. Deaths threats, loss of work and endless legal bills that have near-bankrupted him. A verdict in the latest suit against him – this time backed by the Israeli attorney general – is expected in the next few weeks.

Bakri is a particularly prominent victim of Israel’s long-running war on Palestinian history. But there are innumerable other examples.

For decades many hundreds of Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank have been fighting their expulsion as Israeli officials characterise them as “squatters”. According to Israel, the Palestinians are nomads who recklessly built homes on land they seized inside an army firing zone.

The villagers’ counter-claims were ignored until the truth was unearthed recently in Israel’s archives.

These Palestinian communities are, in fact, marked on maps predating Israel. Official Israeli documents presented in court last month show that Ariel Sharon, a general-turned-politician, devised a policy of establishing firing zones in the occupied territories to justify mass evictions of Palestinians like these communities in the Hebron Hills.

The residents are fortunate that their claims have been officially verified, even if they still depend on uncertain justice from an Israeli occupiers’ court.

Israel’s archives are being hurriedly sealed up precisely to prevent any danger that records might confirm long-sidelined and discounted Palestinian history.

Last month Israel’s state comptroller, a watchdog body, revealed that more than one million archived documents were still inaccessible, even though they had passed their declassification date. Nonetheless, some have slipped through the net.

The archives have, for example, confirmed some of the large-scale massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out in 1948 – the year Israel was established by dispossessing Palestinians of their homeland.

In one such massacre at Dawaymeh, near where Palestinians are today fighting against their expulsion from the firing zone, hundreds were executed, even as they offered no resistance, to encourage the wider population to flee.

Other files have corroborated Palestinian claims that Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages during a wave of mass expulsions that same year to dissuade the refugees from trying to return.

Official documents have disproved, too, Israel’s claim that it pleaded with the 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return home. In fact, as the archives reveal, Israel obscured its role in the ethnic cleansing of 1948 by inventing a cover story that it was Arab leaders who commanded Palestinians to leave.

The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.

A new study by Avner Ben-Amos, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, shows that Israeli pupils learn almost nothing truthful about the occupation, even though many will soon enforce it as soldiers in a supposedly “moral” army that rules over Palestinians.

Maps in geography textbooks strip out the so-called “Green Line” – the borders demarcating the occupied territories – to present a Greater Israel long desired by the settlers. History and civics classes evade all discussion of the occupation, human rights violations, the role of international law, or apartheid-like local laws that treat Palestinians differently from Jewish settlers living illegally next door.

Instead, the West Bank is known by the Biblical names of “Judea and Samaria”, and its occupation in 1967 is referred to as a “liberation”.

Sadly, Israel’s erasure of Palestinians and their history is echoed outside by digital behemoths such as Google and Apple.

Palestinian solidarity activists have spent years battling to get both platforms to include hundreds of Palestinian communities in the West Bank missed off their maps, under the hashtag #HeresMyVillage. Illegal Jewish settlements, meanwhile, are prioritised on these digital maps.

Another campaign, #ShowTheWall, has lobbied the tech giants to mark on their maps the path of Israel’s 700-kilometre-long steel and concrete barrier, effectively used by Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law.

And last month Palestinian groups launched yet another campaign, #GoogleMapsPalestine, demanding that the occupied territories be labelled “Palestine”, not just the West Bank and Gaza. The UN recognised the state of Palestine back in 2012, but Google and Apple refused to follow suit.

Palestinians rightly argue that these firms are replicating the kind of disappearance of Palestinians familiar from Israeli textbooks, and that they uphold “mapping segregation” that mirrors Israel’s apartheid laws in the occupied territories.

Today’s crimes of occupation – house demolitions, arrests of activists and children, violence from soldiers, and settlement expansion – are being documented by Israel, just as its earlier crimes were.

Future historians may one day unearth those papers from the Israeli archives and learn the truth. That Israeli policies were not driven, as Israel claims now, by security concerns, but by a colonial desire to destroy Palestinian society and pressure Palestinians to leave their homeland, to be replaced by Jews.

The lessons for future researchers will be no different from the lessons learnt by their predecessors, who discovered the 1948 documents.

But in truth, we do not need to wait all those years hence. We can understand what is happening to Palestinians right now – simply by refusing to conspire in their silencing. It is time to listen.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

More articles by:Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

CounterPunch 31 July  2020

List of Israeli Targets Leaked: Tel Aviv Fears the Worst in ICC Investigation of War Crimes

by Ramzy Baroud

When International Court of Justice (ICC) Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, confirmed last December that the Court has ample evidence to pursue a war crimes investigation in occupied Palestine, the Israeli government responded with the usual rhetoric, accusing the international community of bias and insisting on Israel’s ‘right to defend itself.’

Beneath the platitudes and typical Israeli discourse, the Israeli government knew too well that an ICC investigation into war crimes in Palestine could be quite costly. An investigation, in itself, represents an indictment of sorts. If Israeli individuals were to be indicted for war crimes, that is a different story, as it becomes a legal obligation of ICC members to apprehend the criminals and hand them over to the Court.

Israel remained publicly composed, even after Bensouda, last April, elaborated on her December decision with a 60-page legal report, titled: “Situation in the State of Palestine: Prosecution Response to the Observations of Amici Curiae, Legal Representatives of Victims, and States.”

In the report, the ICC addressed many of the questions, doubts and reports submitted or raised in the four months that followed her earlier decision. Countries such as Germany and Austria, among others, had used their position as amici curiae – ‘friends of the court’ – to question the ICC jurisdiction and the status of Palestine as a country.

Bensouda insisted that “the Prosecutor is satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to initiate an investigation into the situation in Palestine under article 53(1) of the Rome Statute, and that the scope of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction comprises the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza (“Occupied Palestinian Territory”).”

However, Bensouda did not provide definitive timelines to the investigation; instead, she requested that the ICC’S Pre-Trial Chamber “confirm the scope of the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in Palestine,” an additional step that is hardly required since the State of Palestine, a signatory of the Rome Statute, is the one that actually referred the case directly to the Prosecutor’s office.

The April report, in particular, was the wake-up call for Tel Aviv. Between the initial decision in December till the release of the latter report, Israel lobbied on many fronts, enlisting the help of ICC members and recruiting its greatest benefactor, Washington – which is not an ICC member – to bully the Court so it may reverse its decision.

On May 15, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, warned the ICC against pursuing the investigation, targeting Bensouda, in particular, for her decision to hold war criminals in Palestine accountable.

The US slapped unprecedented sanctions against the ICC on June 11, with President Donald Trump issuing an ‘executive order’ that authorizes the freezing of assets and a travel ban against ICC officials and their families. The order also allows for the punishing of other individuals or entities that assist the ICC in its investigation.

Washington’s decision to carry out punitive measures against the very Court that was established for the sole purpose of holding war criminals accountable is both outrageous and abhorrent. It also exposes Washington’s hypocrisy – the country that claims to defend human rights is attempting to prevent legal accountability by those who have violated human rights.

Upon its failure to halt the ICC legal procedures regarding its investigation of war crimes, Israel began to prepare for the worst. On July 15, Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, reported about a ‘secret list’ that was drawn up by the Israeli government. The list includes “between 200 and 300 officials”, ranging from politicians to military and intelligence officials, who are subject to arrest abroad, should the ICC officially open the war crimes investigation.


Names begin at the top of the Israeli political pyramid, among them Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his current coalition partner, Benny Gantz.
The sheer number of Israeli officials on the list is indicative of the scope of the ICC’s investigation, and, somehow, is a self-indictment, as the names include former Israeli Defense Ministers – Moshe Ya’alon, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett; current and former army chiefs of staffs – Aviv Kochavi, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot and current and former heads of internal intelligence, the Shin Bet – Nadav Argaman and Yoram Cohen.

Respected international human rights organizations have already, repeatedly, accused all these individuals of serious human rights abuses during Israel’s lethal wars on the besieged Gaza Strip, starting with the so-called ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008-9.

But the list is far more extensive, as it covers “people in much more junior positions, including lower-ranking military officers and, perhaps, even officials involved in issuing various types of permits to settlements and settlement outposts.”

Israel, thus, fully appreciates the fact that the international community still insists that the construction of illegal colonies in occupied Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the transfer of Israeli citizens to occupied land are all inadmissible under international law and tantamount to war crimes.

 Netanyahu must be disappointed to learn that all of Washington’s concessions to Israel under Trump’s presidency have failed to alter the position of the international community and the applicability of international law in any way.

Furthermore, it would not be an exaggeration to argue that Tel Aviv’s postponement of its plan to illegally annex nearly a third of the West Bank is directly linked to the ICC’s investigation, for the annexation would have completely thwarted Israel’s friends’ efforts aimed at preventing the investigation from ever taking place.

While the whole world, especially Palestinians, Arabs and their allies, still anxiously await the final decision by the Pre-Trial Chamber, Israel will continue its overt and covert campaign to intimidate the ICC and any other entity that aims to expose Israeli war crimes and to try Israeli war criminals.

Washington, too, will continue to strive to ensure Netanyahu, Gantz, and the “200 to 300” other Israeli officials never see their day in court.

However, the fact that a “secret list” exists is an indication that Tel Aviv understands that this era is different and that international law, which has failed Palestinians for over 70 years, may, for once, deliver, however a small measure of justice.

More articles by:Ramzy Baroud

 

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

BRITISH JUSTICE IS BLIND - OR NON-EXISTANT: JULIAN ASSANGE'S POLITICAL INDICTMENT: OLD WINE IN OLDER BOTTLES

.......and the Australian government has done nothing to help its citizen who it is leaving to rot in hell, so Australians overseas should know how its government looks after those citizens who have no significance for them politically. 

From CounterPunch 31 July 2020

Julian Assange's Political Indictment: Old Wine in Older Bottles

By Binoy Kampmark

The book of hours on Julian Assange is now being written. But the scribes are far from original. Repeated rituals of administrative hearings that have no common purpose other than to string things out before the axe are being enacted. Of late, the man most commonly associated with WikiLeaks’ publication project cannot participate in any meaningful way, largely because of his frail health and the dangers posed to him by the coronavirus. Having already made an effort to attend court proceedings in person, Assange has come across as judicial exotica, freak show fodder for Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s harsh version of Judge Judy. He was refused an application to escape his glass commode when he could still attend in person, as permitting him to descend and consult his defence team in a court room would constitute a bail application of some risk. This reading by the judicial head was so innovative it even puzzled the prosecutors.

What we know to date is that restrictions and shackles on Assange’s case are the order of the day. Restricted processes that do nothing to enable him to see counsel and enable a good brief to be exercised are typical. Most of all, the ceremonial circus that we have come to expect of British justice in the menacing shadow of US intimidation has become gloomily extensive. On July 27, that circus was given yet another act, another limping performance. As before, the venue was the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London.

During the proceeding, Assange did appear via video link from Belmarsh Prison, albeit it an hour late, and only at the insistence of his legal team. The Guardian report on his presence reads like an account of a sporting engagement. “Wearing a beige sweater and a pink shirt, Assange eventually appeared from Belmarsh prison after an earlier attempt was aborted.”

Others were alarmed. During his call-over hearing, noted Martin Silk of the Australian Associated Press, “neither the Australian, nor his guards, were wearing face masks. I don’t understand the reason for that given we have to wear them inside shops.” This point was also made by Assange’s partner, Stella Moris: “Belmarsh hasn’t provided Julian with a face mask throughout this #covid crisis. The prison guards he interacts with don’t wear them either.” WikiLeaks supporter Juan Passarelli also felt that Assange “was having trouble following the proceedings due to the Judge and lawyers not speaking loud enough and into the microphones.”

Arrangements for the hearing for observers proved characteristically sloppy. Freelance journalist Stefania Maurizi was unimpressed by being on the phone for two hours during which she “couldn’t understand more than 20 percent of what has been discussed.” She was adamant that “UK authorities don’t care at all about international reporters covering” the Assange proceedings. “Dial in system is, as usual,” agreed Passarelli, “a shambles!”

The topic of discussion during this administrative hearing was what was announced by the US Department of Justice on June 24, namely the second superseding indictment. That document proved to be a naked exercise of political overreach, adding no further charges to the already heavy complement of eighteen, seventeen of which centre on the US Espionage Act. The scope of interest, however, was widened, notably on the issue of “hacking” and conferencing. Assange is painted as devilish recruiter and saboteur of the international secret order, a man of the conference circuit keen to open up clandestine governments and make various reasons for doing so. “According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks.”

Edward Fitzgerald QC, in representing Assange, fulfilled his norm, submitting that the recently revised document did little to inspire confidence in the nature of clarified justice. “We are concerned about a fresh request being made at this stage with the potential consequences of derailing proceedings and that the US attorney-general is doing this for political reasons.” Fitzgerald reminded the court that US President Donald Trump had “described the defence case as a plot by the Democrats.”

This should have been obvious, but Baraitser’s court would have none of it. To admit at this point that Assange is wanted for political reasons would make it that much harder to extradite him to the United States, given that bar noted in the US-UK Extradition Treaty. Whilst it was good of Fitzgerald to make this point, he should know by now that his audience is resolutely constipated and indifferent to such prodding. Assange is to be given the sharpest, rather than the most balanced, of hearings. Accordingly, Baraitser insisted that Fitzgerald “reserve his comments” – she, in the true tradition of such processes, had not been supplied, as yet, with the US indictment. This made the entire presence of all the parties at the Westminster Magistrates’ not merely meaningless but decidedly absurd.

Assange’s defence team could draw some cold comfort from Baraitser’s comments that July 27 was the deadline for any further evidence to be adduced by the prosecution before the September extradition hearing. One exception was permitted: psychiatric reports.

The current chief publisher of WikiLeaks Kristinn Hrafnsson had a few choice words for the prosecutors of Wikileaks. “All the alleged events have been known to the prosecution for years. It contains no new charges. What’s really happening here is that despite its decade start the prosecution are still unable to build a coherent case.” The scrapping of the previous indictments suggested that they were “flagrantly disregarding proper process.”

Assange is facing one of the most disturbing confections put together by any state that claims itself to be free. Should this stratagem work, the publisher will find himself facing the legal proceedings of a country that boasts of having a free press amendment but is keen on excluding him from it. What is even more troubling is the desire to expand the tent of culpability, one that will include press outlets and those who disseminate classified information.

To the next circus instalment we go: a final call-over hearing in Westminster Magistrates’ Court on August 14, then the September 7 extradition hearing, to be held at the Central Criminal Court most of us know as the Old Bailey. Will justice prove blind, or merely blinded?

More articles by:Binoy Kampmark

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

PALESTINIAN FREEDOM IS POSSIBLE NOW

PALESTINIAN FREEDOM IS POSSIBLE - Article by Ramzy Baroud - in CounterPunch 21 July 2020

In a recent TV discussion, a respected pro-Palestine journalist declared that if any positive change or transformation ever occurs in the tragic Palestinian saga, it would not happen now, but that it would take a whole new generation to bring about such a paradigm shift.

As innocuous as the declaration may have seemed, it troubled me greatly.
I have heard this line over and over again, often reiterated by well-intentioned intellectuals, whose experiences in researching and writing on the so-called ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’ may have driven some of them to pessimism, if not despair.

The ‘hopelessness discourse’ is, perhaps, understandable if one is to examine the off-putting, tangible reality on the ground: the ever-entrenched Israeli occupation, the planned annexation of occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, the shameful Arab normalization with Israel, the deafening silence of the international community and the futility of the quisling Palestinian leadership.
Subscribing to this logic is not only self-defeating, but ahistorical as well. Throughout history, every great achievement that brought about freedom and a measure of justice to any nation was realized despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

Indeed, who would have thought that the Algerian people were capable of defeating French colonialism when their tools of liberation were so rudimentary as compared with the awesome powers of the French military and its allies?
The same notion applies to many other modern historic experiences, from Vietnam to South Africa and from India to Cuba.

Palestine is not the exception.

However, the ‘hopelessness discourse’ is not as innocent as it may seem. It is propelled by the persisting failure to appreciate the centrality of the Palestinian people – or any other people, for that matter – in their own history. Additionally, it assumes that the Palestinian people are, frankly, ineffectual.

Interestingly, when many nations were still grappling with the concept of national identity, the Palestinian people had already developed a refined sense of modern collective identity and national consciousness. General mass strikes and civil disobedience challenging British imperialism and Zionist settlements in Palestine began nearly a century ago, culminating in the six-month-long general strike of 1936.

Since then, popular resistance, which is linked to a defined sense of national identity, has been a staple in Palestinian history. It was a prominent feature of the First Intifada, the popular uprising of 1987.

The fact that the Palestinian homeland was lost, despite the heightened consciousness of the Palestinian masses at the time, is hardly indicative of the Palestinian people’s ability to affect political outcomes.

Time and again, Palestinians have rebelled and, with each rebellion, they forced all parties, including Israel and the United States, to reconsider and overhaul their strategies altogether.

A case in point was the First Intifada.

When, on December 8, 1987, thousands took to the streets of the Jabaliya Refugee Camp, the Gaza Strip’s most crowded and poorest camp, the timing and the location of their uprising was most fitting, rational and necessary. Earlier that day, an Israeli truck had run over a convoy of cars carrying Palestinian laborers, killing four young men. For Jabaliya, as with the rest of Palestine, it was the last straw.

Responding to the chants and pleas of the Jabaliya mourners, Gaza was, within days, the breeding ground for a real revolution that was self-propelled and unwavering. The chants of Palestinians in the Strip were answered in the West Bank, and echoed just as loudly in Palestinian towns, including those located in Israel.

The contagious energy was emblematic of children and young adults wanting to reclaim the identities of their ancestors, which had been horribly disfigured and divided among regions, countries and refugee camps.

The Intifada – literally meaning the “shake off” – sent a powerful message to Israel that the Palestinian people are alive, and are still capable of upsetting all of Israel’s colonial endeavors. The Intifada also confronted the failure of the Palestinian and Arab leaderships, as they persisted in their factional and self-seeking politics.

In fact, the Madrid Talks in 1991 between Palestinians and Israelis were meant as an Israeli- American political compromise, aimed at ending the Intifada in exchange for acknowledging the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a representative of the Palestinian people.

The Oslo Accords, signed by Yasser Arafat and Israel in 1993, squandered the gains of the Intifada and, ultimately, replaced the more democratically representative PLO with the corrupt Palestinian Authority.

But even then, the Palestinian people kept coming back, reclaiming, in their own way, their importance and centrality in the struggle. Gaza’s Great March of Return is but one of many such people-driven initiatives.

Palestine’s biggest challenge in the movement is not the failure of the people to register as a factor in the liberation of their own land, but their quisling leadership’s inability to appreciate the immense potential of harnessing the energies of Palestinians everywhere to stage a focused and strategic, anti-colonial, liberation campaign.

This lack of vision dates back to the late 1970s, when the Palestinian leadership labored to engage politically with Washington and other Western capitals, culminating in the pervading sense that, without US political validation, Palestinians would always remain marginal and irrelevant.

The Palestinian leadership’s calculations at the time proved disastrous. After decades of catering to Washington’s expectations and diktats, the Palestinian leadership, ultimately, returned empty-handed, as the current Donald Trump administration’s ‘Deal of the Century’ has finally proven.

I have recently spoken with two young Palestinian female activists: one is based in besieged Gaza and the other in the city of Seattle. Their forward-thinking discourse is, itself, a testament that the pessimism of some intellectuals does not define the thinking of this young Palestinian generation, and there would be no need to dismiss the collective efforts of this budding generation in anticipation of the rise of a ‘better’ one.

Malak Shalabi, a Seattle-based law student, does not convey a message of despair, but that of action. “It’s really important for every Palestinian and every human rights activist to champion the Palestinian cause regardless of where they are, and it is important especially now, ” she told me.

“There are currently waves of social movements here in the United States, around civil rights for Black people and other issues that are (becoming) pressing topics – equality and justice – in the mainstream. As Palestinians, it’s important that we (take the Palestinian cause) to the mainstream as well,” she added.

“There is a lot of work happening among Palestinian activists here in the United States, on the ground, at a social, economic, and political level, to make sure that the link between Black Lives Matter and Palestine happens,” she added.
On her part, Wafaa Aludaini in Gaza spoke about her organization’s – 16th October Group – relentless efforts to engage communities all over the world, to play their part in exposing Israeli war crimes in Gaza and ending the protracted siege on the impoverished Strip.

“Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists outside are important because they make our voices heard outside Palestine, as mainstream media does not report (the truth of) what is taking place here,” she told me.

For these efforts to succeed, “we all need to be united,” she asserted, referring to the Palestinian people at home and in the diaspora, and the entire pro-Palestinian solidarity movement everywhere, as well.

The words of Malak and Wafaa are validated by the growing solidarity with Palestine in the BLM movement, as well as with numerous other justice movements the world over.

On June 28, the UK chapter of the BLM tweeted that it “proudly” stands in solidarity with Palestinians and rejects Israel’s plans to annex large areas of the West Bank.
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BLM went further, criticizing British politics for being “gagged of the right to critique Zionism and Israel’s settler-colonial pursuits”.
Repeating the claim that a whole new generation needs to replace the current one for any change to occur in Palestine is an insult – although, at times, unintended – to generations of Palestinians, whose struggle and sacrifices are present in every aspect of Palestinian lives.

Simply because the odds stacked against Palestinian freedom seem too great at the moment, does not justify the discounting of an entire nation, which has lived through many wars, protracted sieges and untold hardship. Moreover, the next generation is but a mere evolution of the consciousness of the current one. They cannot be delinked or analyzed separately.

In his “Prison Notebooks”, anti-fascist intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, coined the term “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

While logical analysis of a situation may lead the intellect to despair, the potential for social and political revolutions and transformations must keep us all motivated to keep the struggle going, no matter the odds.

More articles by:Ramzy Baroud

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Article from Overland

 

Palestine

Fighting against a racist’s peace: what it means to oppose annexation

• By Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak

With few exceptions, politicians in Australia and across the western world have recently expressed concern that the two-state solution is under threat by Netanyahu’s now-postponed annexation plans (which are perhaps best understood by examining Trump’s ‘conceptual map’). These positions may reflect the growing popular support for the Palestinian struggle across the world, one expression of which is the protest statement signed by hundreds of Australian academics and artists published last week in Overland.

However, calls by politicians to uphold international law can also be interpreted as an attempt to maintain the West’s sense of moral superiority without investing in racial justice for Palestinians, for they do not disturb the Israeli settler-colonial project. The rhetorical commitment to the two-state solution works as an ideological weapon that serves Israel’s criminal impunity while legitimating Zionism as a settler-colonial, ethno-nationalist project.

Unconditional support for the Israeli state, regardless of its apartheid practices and ongoing colonial project, has been a long-standing bipartisan position in Australia that protects Israel from censure. As Ben Saul reminded us last week in a piece urging Australia to join global condemnation of Israel’s annexation plans, Australian and Israeli forces train together. Australian citizens who are also Israeli citizens serve legally in the Israeli army and have joined military operations that breach international and human rights.

It wasn’t long ago, in December of 2018, that Scott Morrison recognised West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital while holding back on moving the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv (my colonised home city of Yaffa) to West Jerusalem. The move made Australia the only western nation to follow the United States in in supporting the expansion of the Zionist settler-colonial project across internationally-recognised Palestinian land. The recognition, alongside Australia’s consistent opposition to United Nations resolutions condemning Israeli international law violations, points to a perverse kinship between the two nations.

No mainstream Australian party questions this kinship, even as illegal settlements continue to be built and extrajudicial killings by Israeli soldiers remain common, such as recent the killings of Ahmed Erekat and Eyad Hallaq. Between April 2011 and May 2020, Israeli security forces have killed 3,408 Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories and within Israel according to B’Tselem. Israel further violated international law as it killed 189 people and shot more than 6,100 Gaza March of Return protestors with live ammunition and indiscriminately shelled UN sites, schools and mosques, and massacred Palestinians in Gaza in 2014, 2012 and the summer of 2009.

In 2009, as an undergraduate with Students for Palestine, I led protests against the Rudd government’s disgraceful support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. In refusing to demand an end to the siege, Rudd stated that ‘Australia recognises Israel’s right to self-defence’ as over 500 Palestinians were massacred. This anti-Palestinian discourse was reproduced under the guise of multilateralism, alongside calls for ‘the absolute importance of bringing about an effective diplomatic solution.’ Now, Rudd is urging Morrison to condemn annexation, arguing that ‘Australia has consistently taken the lead when this most basic of our international norms had been breached.’ It is the same violent discourse that equalises relations, distorting the relationship from being one of coloniser and colonised, victimiser and victimised: ‘Both sides have legitimate concerns that need to be addressed in order for both states to exist side-by-side with equal rights and peace and security for their citizens.’

In 1993, the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said astutely warned the Olso Accords would institute ‘an instrument of Palestinian surrender.’ This event was a turning point in the history of Palestinian struggle. After decades of guerrilla struggle, the leading Palestinian organisation, the PLO, made peace with our colonisers. The process formally presented Palestinians and Israelis as equal negotiators on the world stage, serving to transform Israel – one of the most violent nations on Earth – into brokers of peace and, in Said’s words, ‘temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation.’

Since the Accords, the Israeli settler population in occupied East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley in the West Bank has boomed thanks to the intervention of the Israeli army and international inaction, and now stands at 620,000. These settlements are a product of a long-held consensus in Israel: that Jerusalem, large parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley rightfully belong to the Israeli state. Netanyahu’s annexation extending sovereignty over the Jordan Valley would merely formalise a de-facto reality on the ground.

As a Palestinian, I consider it an insult that Western politicians summon the two-state solution in our support as though it were anything but a position of forced surrender. Palestinians in the homeland and in their diasporas have a long history of demonstrating against Israeli oppression that has been left unchallenged by the so-called peace agreements. Meanwhile, those same politicians condemn or criminalise Palestinian resistance, including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

This lip-service to two-state solution is the premise for opposing the annexation across political parties in Australia. This includes the Greens, in spite of their more sympathetic record to Palestinian rights. In a recent media release, Adam Bandt states that the annexation ‘thwarts Palestinians’ right to self-determination, destabilises the entire region and further jeopardises the prospects of a two-state solution.’ This is the same position taken by foreign minister Marise Payne last week, when she stated that ‘the Australian Government is a longstanding supporter of a two-state solution, in which Israel and a future Palestinian state coexist, in peace and security, within internationally recognised borders.’ Like all other mainstream political parties in Australia, the Greens express their qualified sympathy while formally opposing the BDS movement.

This rhetoric has aided Israel’s image as a cooperative and moral international player while continuing its illegal settlements and land grabs, as well as the siege of Gaza, which began as collective punishment on the Palestinian population for democratically electing the wrong party, Hamas. It is another iteration of the colonial logic that speaks over and for Palestinians without any respect for widespread Palestinian dissent against this ‘solution’.
Mark Muhannad Ayyash has put forward a similar critique earlier this week:

These words do not carry any consequence that can give them meaning, depth, and force. They are part of the diplomatic routine, which gives the feeling that something is being done, that the world is watching closely and that the world is concerned for Palestine.

This chimera of an act ends up sustaining the status quo and ensures that nothing consequential is ever undertaken. The very emptiness of these words thus becomes another weapon that enables annexation.

Many ordinary Palestinians have understood this situation for some time: the cavalry is not coming – not from the Arab world, not from the UN and not from international law. And in their absence, those international institutions and states show themselves as part of the problem, not the solution.

While Netanyahu has explained that Palestinians in the potential annexed areas would not be granted Israeli citizenship, as reported in The Times of Israel in May, some anti-annexation liberals in the West and centrist Israeli activists have been responding to this goal-post shifting by the far right to enter into a discussion of what should happen to the Palestinians after annexation. While this discussion will become necessary if the annexation goes ahead, when the conversation is not held on Palestinian terms it can stifle our ability to centre resistance and articulate just alternatives to occupation and expanded Israeli settler-colonisation. It has not been liberal positions but Palestinian disillusionment with ‘what’s on the table’ that has generated waves of struggle throughout Palestinian history.

If the current Bla(c)k Lives Matter moment against anti-Black police brutality reiterates anything for us Palestinians, it is the limits of liberal government reformist visions. Liberal multiculturalism and the pretence of colour-blindness have been the dominant ideologies of the past few decades in ‘post-racial’ societies such as the United States and Australia, and it is they, along with the police, that are being put on trial. Demands for abolishing, defunding and demilitarising the police push against right-wing and liberal efforts to maintain the status quo of systemic racism: that is, a way of organising and distributing mobility, wealth, opportunity and safety through an economy of advantage and disadvantage. As Palestinians, we learn from this history as we now bear witness to the ways in which the New Jim Crow policies – as described by Michelle Alexander – have enabled police impunity and mass incarceration.

The Palestinian struggle is connected to the global BLM movement through an interlinked vision to dismantle racist settler-colonial structures and systems. Within our shared fight for racial justice, it is crucial to challenge Israel’s Zionist supremacy at the same time as we are seeing white supremacy fiercely challenged in protests across this country against Aboriginal deaths in police custody. In drawing these links, we also build support towards our efforts at challenging Israeli white-washing initiatives that seek to blackout colonisation and paint Israel as a progressive model of democracy.

As Palestinians, we have suffered the consequences of the legitimisation of Zionism as a settler-colonial, ethno-nationalist project. The current moment crucially offers opportunities to strengthen global solidarity against racist state apparatus wherever they operate, which would boost support for the demands of BDS, given these demands are premised upon ending the same kind of state impunity targeted by the uprisings in the United States. Yannick Giovanni Marshall’s reflections in ‘The racists’ peace’ are relevant here:

To order that our protests must be peaceful is to demand that when we ask to be injured less, it is in a tone that is respectful and polite. To praise the peacefulness of a protest is to assert the right of those resisted to determine the ethics of resistance – their right to command and to direct it, their right to lay out how resistance must be conducted.

We should demand that our global protest against annexation be tied to our imaginaries of a Free Palestine. Committing to anything less is a racist’s peace and a racist’s justice.

It is not enough to expect pro-Palestinians to accept the utterance of words of support against annexation from politicians supporting Orwellian peace agreements. The time for feigned pro-Palestinian support should be over. Genuine support for the Palestinian struggle demands opposition to Israeli settler colonisation itself.

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Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak is a PhD candidate at Monash University, faculty of Education and Palestinian organiser. Her research project explores the emergence of radical political subjectivities and imaginaries. Tasnim’s grandparents were exiled from Yaffa during the Nakba in 1948 to a refugee camp in Gaza, where they, including her father, were again displaced to Al-Hussein refugee camp in Amman after the annexations of 1967, when her mother and her family were also exiled from Ya’bad, Jenin in the West Bank.

More by Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak