HUMAN RIGHTS & EQUALITY FOR ALL,FREEDOM & JUSTICE FOR PALESTINE, ZIMBABWE, BURMA, EVERY COUNTRY SUFFERING FROM WARS, DROUGHTS, STARVATION, MILITARY ADVENTURES, DICTATORSHIPS, POLICE STATES, RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION, HOMOPHOBIA, CENSORSHIP & OTHER OBSCENITIES.INTERNATIONAL ASYLUM SEEKER SUPPORT
A BLOG SITE, "BLOGNOW" COLLAPSED IN 2009, SO USE THE GOOGLE SITE SEARCH ENGINE
The following article is from The Age online, and is more than about time that the non-Murdoch media acted like they say on the top of their paper - Independent - always.
It now remains to be seen whether they will try and build up a campaign to force this pathetic government and its loyal opposition to get the asylum seekers out of the concentration camps on Manus, Nauru and places like the Mantra hotel in Preston, Melbourne.
Australians who have not supported those trying to get these human rights abuses ended need to reconsider how they have felt being in "lock down" because of COVID-19, and now need to have some understanding of the cruelty to which asylum seekers have been exposed for all these years and DO SOMETHING!!
Refugee activists occupy Preston hotel housing medevac detainees
Healthcare
workers have previously described the makeshift detention centre
housing more than 60 men as a "very high-risk environment" for
transmitting the coronavirus.
Eight
activists checked into three rooms at the Bell Street hotel on Monday,
and barricaded themselves into at least one of the rooms from 7.30am
Tuesday.
The protesters have also occupied the roof of the hotel
and locked themselves on as part of the demonstration. Banners have been
draped from the roof saying: "let them out" and "seven years lock-down
freedom now".
Footage from the scene shows police escorting all eight activists off the property mid-afternoon.
A
statement from the Whistleblowers, Activists and Communities Alliance
(WACA) said the demonstration aimed to draw attention to the need for
detainees to be provided with the medical care they were brought to
Australia for under the now-repealed "medevac laws".
Banners are on the roof of the hotel, saying, "let them out".Credit:WACA
"Over
the last two months of this pandemic the federal and state government
message has been 'we are all in this together'. Clearly some of us of
are more in this together than others. We are not truly together until
all, including detained asylum seekers and refugees, have their
freedom," spokesperson Gaye Demanuele said.
Last month, more than 1180 healthcare professionals signed a joint letter to the government calling for the men to be released.
"Failure
to take action to release people seeking asylum and refugees from
detention will not only put them at greater risk of infection (and
possibly death), it also risks placing a greater burden on wider
Australian society and the health care system," said the letter, drafted
by infectious diseases expert Professor David Isaacs.
More than
60 men are confined to a secure floor of the motel, which is off limits
to other guests and staffed by armed guards. While Australian Border
Force, which operates the motel's secure wing, has cancelled all outside
visits, guards come and go throughout the day.
No
detainee in immigration has tested positive to COVID-19, and a
spokesperson said the Australian Border Force was focussed on health and
safety during the pandemic.
The protesters began the demonstration about 7.30am on Tuesday.Credit:WACA
"A
range of measures have been introduced to actively manage health,
hygiene and cleaning requirements in all detention facilities. These
measures are continually reviewed in line with the current health
advice," the spokesperson said.
"All detainees continue to have ongoing access to the medical professionals located within facilities, including after hours."
Refugee activists on the roof of the Mantra hotel in Preston on Tuesday.Credit:WACA
Any detainee with flu-like symptoms are tested and quarantined, according to Border Force.
Kurdish
man Farhad Bandesh was medically evacuated from Manus Island and then
moved from the Mantra to the Melbourne Immigration and Transit
Accommodation centre (MITA).
A refugee activist barricaded in a Mantra hotel room on Tuesday.Credit:WACA"My friends [at Mantra] are really sick, mentally and physically, and the situation there is really stressful," Mr Bandesh said.
"At
the moment I think they've got good energy because of the people that
are supporting them, and we are still asking for our rights after so
many years."
He thanked the protesters, "they show we are not alone".
"All the detention centres are all the same, everyone is panicking and they are scared. They don't want to catch the COVID-19."
The roof of the Mantra in Preston.Credit:WACAActivists
have bypassed lockdown restrictions during the pandemic by walking past
Mantra and the MITA centre in protest of detention.
Walking is
considered exercise and is allowable under Victoria's lockdown rules
though protests themselves are a breach of the restrictions.
Last month, 30 people were also fined for protesting in support of refugees and asylum seekers outside the Preston hotel.
The Palestine Solidarity
Campaign, the largest British Palestinian solidarity group, successfully
petitioned to reverse a 2016 ban preventing local governments divesting
from companies involved in the Israeli occupation.
Story Transcript
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Kim Brown: Welcome to The Real News. I’m Kim Brown. A major decision
by the UK Supreme Court protects the rights of organizations, including
government organizations, to boycott, divest and sanction the State of
Israel, even companies that support the exploitation of Palestine. In
2016, the British government issued severe guidelines banning government
organizations and even local governments from participating in the BDS
movement in any way.
Now this has impacted the Local Government Pension Scheme, the LGPS,
which were obligated to invest the pension money of public service
workers in companies that violate international law. Now, that decision
was met in Britain with some resistance. Channel four of the BBC spoke
with Rafeef Ziadah from the Palestine Society at SOAS University.
Rafeef Ziadah: I think it’s disgraceful that the British government has
decided to intervene in this way, attacking local democracy and stopping
councils from making ethical decisions around investments. I think the
public has every right to be able to intervene in these issues, to talk
to our elected officials and to have an impact on corporations that we
disagree with, involved in arms trade, against sweatshop labor and for
Palestinian rights as well.
Kim Brown: In response to the government decision at the time, world
famous journalist Glenn Greenwald said that the attempt to ban BDS is
the worst attack on freedom of speech in the West in contemporary times.
So joining us to discuss this today is Ben Jamal. Ben is the director
of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which is the largest UK civil
society organization dedicated to securing Palestinian human rights. He
joins us today from London. Ben, thank you so much for being here.
Ben Jamal: Nice to be here Kim.
Kim Brown: So, Ben, let’s go back to 2016 for a moment because I
wanted to get your opinion about the British government’s decision to
ban a boycott. We’ll get into, did they have the right to do so, in just
a moment. But I wanted to get your take as to why they took this
extraordinary step to put this down on paper.
Ben Jamal: Yeah. Well, I think, and we said this at the time, we had
to really understand the government’s move as part of the global
campaign that’s been going on for many years and which is right with the
support of friendly allies amongst Western government, has sought to
use what’s defined as law [inaudible 00:02:31] seeking to introduce laws
that effectively criminalize BDS.
So we’ve seen laws introduced in the
United States, I think more than 20 States have such laws. We’ve seen
them introduced in France, we’ve seen them introduced in Germany, is
part of the wider campaign to de-legitimize the Palestine Solidarity
Movement and de-legitimized activism for Palestine. And these
regulations that the government introduced in the UK in 2016 with the
first serious attempt we’d seen in the UK to do something similar and to
attempt to prohibit action that was effectively… People making
decisions not to invest money in companies that were complicit in
Israel’s violations of international law to attempt to prohibit that
sort of activity.
Kim Brown: So talk to us a little bit about the appeal. What exactly
did PCS argue in front of the UK Supreme court and how did the
government defend its decision to impose a ban on BDS, on local
governments?
Ben Jamal: Well, our argument was framed around… First of all, the
obligation as we saw it of public bodies not to be complicit in having
their money invested, having the money of their pension scheme holders
invested in companies that we’re complicit in international law
violations complicit in the violation of human rights, it was about the
rights of pension holders on how their money was going to be spent. That
if they said, “I don’t want my pension invested in a company that’s
helping build illegal settlements”, they should have that right.
The
grounds on which we had to fight the case were narrower. So the grounds
on which we fought it and on which we won, were an argument about the
fact that the government actually did not have the legal right to do
what it was doing because pension law did not allow it to do that.
And also your question about how did the government justify what it
was doing, I mean the regulations actually didn’t mention Israel or
Palestine at all. They were framed in a way that said local government
pension schemes cannot choose to divest in support of boycott,
divestment and sanctions campaigns in any situation where the UK
government itself has not imposed sanction. So didn’t specifically
mention Israel, but in the whole of the rhetoric around the regulations,
the government may clear this was about stopping BDS that was targeted,
a company’s complicit in Israel’s violation of Palestinian human
rights. When the regulations were announced, they were actually
announced, if I recall correctly in a press conference in Tel Aviv, so
the minister responsible nine districts in Tel Aviv and make clear that
these were part of their view about the illegitimacy of boycott and the
way they framed that, why did they say that boycott was illegitimate?
Because they use the line that, without stating it boldly, that boycott
is inherently antisemitic, they used the line, “The boycott campaigns
damage community cohesion.”
In other words, that boycott campaigns are in some way targeted at
the Jewish community, which is inherently untrue. The BDS movement is
run on anti-racist principles. It targets complicity and not identity.
It targets companies and institutions and organizations that are
directly supporting Israel’s violation of human rights.
Kim Brown: There’s a lot of conflation between criticism of the state
of Israel and antisemitism, but the court ruled in favor of PCS. What
reasons did they give behind their decision?
Ben Jamal: So as I said, we made the argument and the thrust of our
campaign obviously was the ethical position, but we had to fight it. And
the reason we took the cases, we were advised that we had good legal
grounds and that the most likely chance of success was the government
didn’t have the power. There’s a principle in UK law relies on a Latin
phrase called ultra vires. It means you’re acting outside the boundaries
of the powers you have. So the argument that was used in that one was
the pension regulations, the pension law to which the government
attached these regulations puts obligations upon pension companies to
make decisions that are always in the benefit of their members to
enhance proper investment decisions, et cetera. And the argument in that
one was the government did not have the right to attach conditions to
how they invest money.
That had nothing to do with any of those considerations. I thought
they were to do with foreign policy positions. So that’s the basis on
which we won. So it’s a very important victory. Obviously the legal
principle was narrow, but as a line in the sand against the government
attempts to introduce anti-bias law is very important. But we do have
another battle on our hands because the government in the recent Queen’s
Speech, so that’s the statement that a new government makes when it’s
elected, about what laws it intends to bring in over the next parliament
over the next five years. The government has announced that intends to
introduce another law that would ban all public bodies from supporting
BDS campaign. So we know I have to take the fuel from this victory and
build the coalition, which we’re in the process of doing to oppose the
next law that the government is trying to bring in.
Kim Brown: The court’s decision is important and interesting, not
just for people in the UK, but really all over the world and here in the
US various politicians such as New York governor Andrew Cuomo has said
that they can’t control what people buy or choose not to buy, but state
institutions can nevertheless ban BDS activities and choose to boycott
any company or organization that practices BDS. So in a way, if it’s a
public institutions don’t belong to the people, but are the private
tools of politicians to promote a pro-Israel agenda, do you think that
the decision of the UK Supreme Court will have an impact beyond the
Britain’s borders?
Ben Jamal: I mean, I hope it does in two ways. One, I think it
encourages campaigners across with huge numbers of messages coming into
us from fellow solidarity activists around the world. We’ve had
messages, numerous messages from Palestine. One that stuck with me is
someone who described it as a historic day and I spoke to them and said,
“Look, you might be able to play in this, anti-semitism is a narrow
vitreous and important victory.” They said, “No”, they don’t understand.
I’m a Palestinian myself, so I did understand we Palestinians don’t win
many victories against the UK government. And of course there’s a whole
history going back to the boat for a declaration that informs that
statement. And they also said to us, we’re all walking foot taller
today. So it’s important as an act of solidarity, is important as
encouraging others, we can fight back against these laws where we have
legal tools available to us.
They are something we should use as part of our campaigning as well
as making the political case. They’re also though important in other
ways. We hope the more victories we win like this is an international
solidarity movement, the more we send a message to those trying to
introduce these punishers laws that they will be opposed and that we can
build political campaigns and public support and use the law ourselves
where it’s available to us to oppose these attempts.
They’re really
about suppressing the Palestinian peoples rights to call for action by
the international community to oppose their oppression. But individual’s
rights to say, “Well, I wish to show solidarity for the Palestinian
people and I want to take action to ensure that my country, my
institutions, my local authority, my university is not complicit in
supporting this injustice in how it spends its money, particularly where
that money might belong to me. It might be my money. So they’re
choosing to invest in illegal and immoral activities.”
Kim Brown: A major decision announced by the UK Supreme Court and a
big victory for the BDS movement. Today we’ve been speaking with Ben
Jamal. Ben is the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He’s
been joining us today from London. Ben, we appreciate your time in
speaking with us. Thank you so much.
Ben Jamal: Nice to be here Kim.
Kim Brown: And thank you for watching The Real News Network.
Photograph Source: Delegates to the San Remo conference in Italy, 25 April 1920 – Public Domain
One hundred years ago, representatives from a few powerful countries
convened at San Remo, a sleepy town on the Italian Riviera. Together,
they sealed the fate of the massive territories confiscated from the
Ottoman Empire following its defeat in World War I.
It was on April 25, 1920, that the San Remo Conference Resolution was passed
by the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council. Western Mandates were
established over Palestine, Syria and ‘Mesopotamia’ – Iraq. The latter
two were theoretically designated for provisional independence, while
Palestine was granted to the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish
homeland there.
“The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the
(Balfour) declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the
British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favor of
the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people,” the Resolution read.
The Resolution gave greater international recognition to Britain’s unilateral decision,
three years earlier, to grant Palestine to the Zionist Federation for
the purpose of establishing a Jewish homeland, in exchange for Zionist
support of Britain during the Great War.
And, like Britain’s Balfour Declaration, a cursory mention was made
of the unfortunate inhabitants of Palestine, whose historic homeland was
being unfairly confiscated and handed over to colonial settlers.
The establishment of that Jewish State, according to San Remo, hinged on some vague ‘understanding’
that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious
rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
The above addition merely served as a poor attempt at appearing
politically balanced, while in reality no enforcement mechanism was ever
put in place to ensure that the ‘understanding’ was ever respected or
implemented.
In fact, one could argue that the West’s long engagement in the
question of Israel and Palestine has followed the same San Remo
prototype: where the Zionist movement (and eventually Israel) is granted
its political objectives based on unenforceable conditions that are
never respected or implemented.
Notice how the vast majority of United Nations Resolution pertaining
to Palestinian rights are historically passed by the General Assembly,
not by the Security Council, where the US is one of five veto-wielding
powers, always ready to strike down any attempt at enforcing
international law.
It is this historical dichotomy that led to the current political deadlock.
Palestinian leaderships, one after the other, have miserably failed
at changing the stifling paradigm. Decades before the establishment of
the Palestinian Authority, countless delegations, comprised those
claiming to represent the Palestinian people, traveled to Europe,
appealing to one government or another, pleading the Palestinian case
and demanding fairness.
What has changed since then?
On February 20, the Donald Trump administration issued its own version of the Balfour Declaration, termed the ‘Deal of the Century’.
The American decision which, again, flouted
international law, paves the way for further Israeli colonial
annexations of occupied Palestine. It brazenly threatens Palestinians
that, if they do not cooperate, they will be punished severely. In fact,
they already have been, when Washington cut all funding to the Palestinian Authority and to international institutions that provide critical aid to the Palestinians.
Like in the San Remo Conference, the Balfour Declaration, and numerous other documents, Israel was asked,
ever so politely but without any plans to enforce such demands, to
grant Palestinians some symbolic gestures of freedom and independence.
Some may argue, and rightly so, that the ‘Deal of the Century’ and
the San Remo Conference Resolution are not identical in the sense that
Trump’s decision was a unilateral one, while San Remo was the outcome of
political consensus among various countries – Britain, France, Italy,
and others.
True, but two important points must be taken into account: firstly,
the Balfour Declaration was also a unilateral decision. It took
Britain’s allies three years to embrace and validate the illegal
decision made by London to grant Palestine to the Zionists. The question
now is, how long will it take for Europe to claim the ‘Deal of the
Century’ as its own?
Secondly, the spirit of all of these declarations, promises,
resolutions, and ‘deals’ is the same, where superpowers decide by virtue
of their own massive influence to rearrange the historical rights of
nations. In some way, the colonialism of old has never truly died.
The Palestinian Authority, like previous Palestinian leaderships, is
presented with the proverbial carrot and stick. Last March, US President
Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told
Palestinians that if they did not return to the (non-existent)
negotiations with Israel, the US would support Israel’s annexation of
the West Bank.
For nearly three decades now and, certainly, since the signing of the
Oslo Accords in September 1993, the PA has chosen the carrot. Now that
the US has decided to change the rules of the game altogether, Mahmoud
Abbas’ Authority is facing its most serious existential threat yet:
bowing down to Kushner or insisting on returning to a dead political
paradigm that was constructed, then abandoned, by Washington.
The crisis within the Palestinian leadership is met with utter
clarity on the part of Israel. The new Israeli coalition government,
consisting of previous rivals Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu
and Benny Gantz, have tentatively agreed
that annexing large parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley is
just a matter of time. They are merely waiting for the American nod.
They are unlikely to wait for long, as Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said on April 22 that annexing Palestinian territories is “an Israeli decision.”
Frankly, it matters little. The 21st century Balfour Declaration has
already been made; it is only a matter of making it the new uncontested
reality.
Perhaps, it is time for the Palestinian leadership to understand that
groveling at the feet of those who have inherited the San Remo
Resolution, constructing and sustaining colonial Israel, is never and
has never been the answer.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author
and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A
Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in
Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident
Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.
Hating Arabs as a Common Ground: Why Israel’s Coalition Government is Likely to Survive
In January, Netanyahu was indicted on multiple counts of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. His trial is scheduled for May 24.
By making such an assertion, Gantz is simply deluding himself,
following one the most disgraceful acts of political betrayal in the
country’s modern history. By agreeing to join Netanyahu’s Likud party,
Gantz has demolished
his own parliamentary group which unified several major parties in one
single bloc, all with the aim of removing Israel’s longest-serving
leader from power.
The Blue and White, which until recently consisted of three parties
(Hosen Li-Israel, Yesh Atid and Telem), presented itself to Israeli
voters as a political force that would finally restore some credibility
to Israel’s ailing political institutions.
Clearly, Israel was not ready for such a mission.
It is convenient to blame Gantz for the collapse of Israel’s
once-burgeoning opposition, but the problem with Israel’s political
elites is far more complex than that of a single individual.
Israeli leaders insist that democracy, transparency, and inclusion
are achievable, even when millions of the country’s Arab citizens are
marginalized and continue to be victims of institutional racism that
dates back to the very foundation of Israel.
In actuality, Gantz could have formed a government with the help of
the Joint List, a coalition of Arab and progressive parties, which is
the only Israeli political bloc that represents hope for a better, more
inclusive future.
The supposed Israeli ‘centrist’, however, opted to join Netanyahu –
and to, consequently, alienate his own allies, Yesh Atid and Telem –
than meet the reasonable conditions of the Joint List.
The Joint List, which had eventually endorsed Gantz to form a government, had merely requested the removal of the Nation-State Law (which defines Israel as a Jewish State), the Kaminitz Law (which
restricts building in Arab communities in Israel) and ending the
Israeli occupation of Palestine, in accordance with international law.
The Arab parties’ demands were simply too much for Gantz to handle, for several reasons.
One, Gantz is essentially a right-wing politician and a military hawk, who favors the annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories and has called for even harsher wars on Gaza.
Two, the Blue and White would have never been able to build a wider
coalition if it adhered to any of these demands. This much was made clear by the head of Yisrael Beiteinu leader, Avigdor Lieberman.
Three, Member of Knesset (Parliament) Zvi Hauser, one of the most
influential figures of the Blue and White, is among the main forces
behind the racist Nation State Law of July 2018. Expecting Hauser to
cancel the jewel of his political achievements would be most unrealistic
and would have further destabilized a party that has already lost
nearly half of its supporters in a matter of days.
Hauser is an interesting character, an ambitious politician and a
person to watch, as he will play an important future role in Israel’s
coalition government.
Hauser will now become the “proverbial long arm of the Judicial Appointments Committee,” according to Yossi Verter, writing
in Haaretz. This committee, in particular, was the main stumbling block
in the difficult negotiations, which preceded the announcement of a
government coalition deal between Gantz and Netanyahu.
According to the deal, Netanyahu can accept or reject any of Hauser’s
future appointments. Hauser is unlikely to find Netanyahu’s
interference unacceptable, simply because he is used to the idea of
being Netanyahu’s point man.
Yes, indeed, Hauser entered
public service in 1994 to serve as the Likud party’s spokesman under
Netanyahu who, at the time, was the country’s opposition leader. In
fact, Hauser’s political career throughout the years seems to be
intrinsically linked to Netanyahu’s own.
And here, yet, is another common ground between the Likud and the
Blue and White, which could make the planned annexation of parts of the
occupied Palestinian West Bank and Jordan Valley very much possible.
The text of the coalition government agreement spoke of potential
annexation of parts of the occupied territories as early as the summer,
in accordance with the US President Donald Trump’s “Vision for Peace”.
This understanding was by no means a concession on the part of Gantz, who, too, supports some form of annexation.
That’s where Hauser’s role becomes vital once more, for it was Hauser himself who headed
the ‘Coalition for the Israeli Golan’, which championed and promoted
Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
Hauser’s wish received a huge boost in March 2019, when Trump signed the order recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli.
Despite its difficult birth and the Blue and White setback, the Netanyahu-Gantz coalition has more in common than meets the eye:
For one, Gantz seems to have abandoned his strategy of getting rid of
Netanyahu through the court system. With Hauser as a middle man,
Netanyahu, at least for now, is somewhat safe.
Secondly, not only is the annexation of Palestinian territories (despite strong Palestinian and international rejection to such a move) not a point of contention between the coalition partners, but a point of agreement as well.
Thirdly, with Gantz’s rejection of a coalition that includes the
Joint List, and Netanyahu’s complete disregard for the Palestinian
leadership in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians are entirely erased
from the political map of Israel’s ruling elites. This is unlikely to
change in the future as well.
There is one positive aspect in Israel’s unpromising government
coalition, and that is clarity. Knowing of Netanyahu’s anti-Palestinian,
anti-peace, and anti-international law long legacy, we should have all
the clarity needed to understand that no just peace can possibly be
achieved when Netanyahu is still at the helm.
The same can be said of Gantz as well, who preferred to willingly
shake the hand of the devil than to find common ground among the leaders
of Israel’s Palestinian Arab community.
Even when Netanyahu’s eighteen-month term as Prime Minister expires, a
Gantz-led Israeli government is unlikely to fare any better.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author
and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A
Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in
Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident
Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.
Sent by a friend - and if you used to think George W Bush was the worst US President ever, all we had to wait for was Donald Trump in the North American continent and Bolsonaro in the South American continent and you start to get the picture.
Let me start with a story about the Democratic primary. Now, I’m no
operative, so this story has nothing to do with voting choices or
electability. It’s about how Palestine disappears in US electoral
discourses, even when people who identify as Palestinian purport to make
it visible.
Sometime ago, I was added to an online group of Palestinian Americans
organizing for Bernie Sanders’ campaign. The specific identity of the
group is immaterial. Many such groups existed and as far as I can see
the outcome of their work fit a standard template: we’re Palestinian
(and thus purport to speak for all Palestinians from within the United
States); Bernie’s not perfect (but he really is kinda perfect); Bernie’s
by far the best on Palestine (trust us); this isn’t merely about
Palestine (Palestine is merely the pretext); we’ll be sure to hold him
accountable (even though we just finished giving him unqualified
support). I don’t want to put Palestinians on the spot; all statements
supporting presidential candidates look more or less the same. Let’s
call it a limitation of the genre and leave it at that.
So, members of this group were working on a statement explaining why
Palestinians should support Sanders. Somebody put up a shared document
with various points exaggerating Sanders’ record as an advocate for
Palestinian rights and some fantasizing about Palestine’s future under a
Sanders presidency. Again, pretty typical stuff, which is to say a
whole lot of bullshit.
In the margin of the document, a user asked, “Is Sanders a Zionist?,”
to which another person replied, “Yes he is.” No discussion ensued.
The question and answer hung in silence until the document went public,
at which point any consideration of Sanders’ Zionism had been scrubbed.
I’m less interested in the question of Sanders’ Zionism than I am in
the reasons for scrubbing Zionism from the conversation about Sanders.
Sanders doesn’t call himself a Zionist, and the label can flatten a
pretty wide range of thought, but if we examine Sanders’ positions
against what the Palestine solidarity movement understands to be
Zionism, then Sanders unambiguously fits the description. He constantly
affirms Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He opposes right of
return. He treats Netanyahu as the aberration from a humanistic norm.
Yeah, he’s a Zionist. This fact wasn’t lost on his Palestinian
American champions. It just didn’t seem to bother them very much.
But let’s leave the question of Sanders’ Zionism to the side, for it
has proved effective at putting colleagues at loggerheads. Whatever
Sanders or any other politician thinks about Palestine should have no
influence on how Palestinians think about Palestine. In fact,
according to the mythography of electoralism, it’s the community’s duty
to educate the politician. In order to accomplish that goal, the
community needs to convey principles it considers nonnegotiable. For
Palestinians, those principles would include right of return and full
equality in all of historic Palestine.
That’s not what happened in the various statements of support.
Instead, their authors instrumentalized Palestine as an abstract
commitment—an idea mobilized through performances of ethnic
verisimilitude—in order to boost a campaign extraneous to the actual
work of decolonization. Rather than pressuring the politician, they
made demands of the audience and assured people opposed to Zionism that
voting for someone pledging to uphold Israel’s “Jewish character” wasn’t
a pragmatic concession, but an act of virtue, a feat of devotion to
Palestine.
What does it mean that groups visibly and proudly identifying as
Palestinian felt it necessary to scrub Zionism in order to boost a
politician jockeying to supervise US Empire? By what moral calculus did
those groups take vital demands off the table? Did they have the
consent of refugees for whom right of return is sacrosanct? Of the
Palestinian working class in the United States? Or was it an exercise
in unilateral leadership by the diasporic professional class?
I know what the response is: we didn’t mythologize anyone; we
regularly pointed out his weaknesses. Well, not really. (I didn’t see
you pointing out that Sanders is a Zionist, for example.) Exerting
tremendous energy to conceptualize Sanders as a benevolent uncle figure
and then occasionally saying “he needs more work on this issue” or “we
need to keep pushing him” was a cardinal feature of mythologization, as
was running interference with points of view more palatable to the
mainstream when fellow anti-Zionists dissented from the consensus.
Saying “he’s the best on Palestine even though he’s not perfect” was the
rankest kind of mythmaking. It confused “being better than a terrible
field” with “being good.”
I saw in these statements a yearning to matter, a desire to at long
last be taken seriously after decades of abuse and disregard. It’s a
normal response to subordination, to the pain of continuous betrayal,
but no amount of high-minded talk about an electoral revolution will
compel sites of power to care about Palestinian Americans. They
shouldn’t be our audience, anyway. Palestinians are admired by people
around the world who value justice and resilience and dignity. Let’s
not forgot our place, which isn’t among consultants and technocrats, but
with the ignominious, the surplus, the unbeloved.
During the primary, and during the 2016 election cycle, whenever I
expressed skepticism about deploying Palestine in service of a
presidential campaign, other Palestinian Americans quickly intervened:
“Well, I mean Steve’s making an, ahem, important point, but, here, let
me butt in and do it, you know, more responsibly.” I found it to be a
pathetic move. The idea was to keep radicalism in check, or to snuff it
out. Decolonization, however, is inherently radical in the metropole.
The interventions were thus a form of ostracism: we don’t want
disreputable elements of our community running a bus over this good foot
we’re trying to put forward. The limits of US electoralism came to
define the parameters of Palestinian liberation.
Electioneering requires compromise, but compromise isn’t a neutral
practice. The people are made to sacrifice for the affluent. That’s
how compromise works under capitalism. Every time, every single time,
it’s some aspect of Palestinian freedom that must be compromised. Never
the candidate’s position. Never the system’s inherent conservatism.
Never the ongoing march of settler colonization. We’re volunteering to
be captured by the settler’s notion of common sense.
And what would have happened if your guy won? You already gave up
right of return. A one-state solution. Anti-imperialism. Nobody was
talking about general strikes until the pandemic. And nobody ever talks
about armed struggle. How did you plan to get these things back on the
table after having surrendered them to a person whose first, second, and
third priority is appeasing power?
You gave up something Palestinians
have struggled and died for over the course of decades, and for what?
Just to make the apocryphal and frankly useless point that this
politician is a more tolerable Zionist than the other ones?
And when your guy loses? This is the question of the moment, isn’t
it? You gave up all that leverage for nothing (except for individual
benefits). What happens next? God knows I can’t answer that question.
I’m not saying don’t participate, don’t vote, don’t be interested in a
candidate. That’s not the point. I dislike coercive forms of
persuasion. I’m simply trying to convince you not to give up the idea
of freedom as it’s articulated by the downtrodden. Not for any reason.
Certainly not for a goddamn politician.
There’s a question you ought to ask as necessary (which is to say
constantly): what happens to Palestine? When we humor a system
calibrated to exclude us, when we pretend that liberation is possible on
the margins of a hostile polity, when we imagine liberal Zionism as a
prelude to freedom, then what happens to Palestine?
Raising this kind of skepticism is a good way to get branded a
hater. (Treating the recalcitrant as irrational is a central feature of
electoral discipline.) I hate this sensibility precisely because I’m
not a hater, because I recognize that defiance is a priceless asset in
conditions of loss and dispossession. Let’s please abandon this smug
idea that skepticism ruins the party for sensible people. It’s an ugly
form of internal colonization. Recalcitrance can be a deep, abiding act
of love, in this case a devotion to life realized in the form of a
simple question: what happens to Palestine?
The system you deign to reform ranks nothing above ruling class
accumulation—the system, in other words, is designed to betray, and
performs its mandate with brutal efficiency. And so the answer to that
timeless question never changes: Palestine goes away. Any group that
doesn’t facilitate a flow of capital into the imperial core is fit for
disappearance. Our mandate, in turn, isn’t to seek the approval of our
oppressor, but to earn his contempt.
Instrumentalizing the persecuted is a critical feature of electoralism. Promoting a Zionist presidential candidate and remaining faithful to the core tenets of anti-Zionism? Forget it. It’s not happening. It can’t
happen. Electoralism is salted against insurgency. It’s not a space
for ideas, for creativity, for the simple decency of not asking the
least powerful among us to defer their freedom; it’s hostile to anything
that impedes the reproduction of orthodoxy. Liberation has always
required tremendous imagination. That’s not on offer when the talking
points are being written by David Sirota.
You have no cause to be angry with Sanders. Not now. He hasn’t
broken a single pledge. He never hid his intentions. There was plenty
of reason for concern when he kept repeating liberal Zionist platitudes.
It was you, not Sanders, who folded Palestine into a campaign that
always promised to maintain the status quo. The outcome was easy to
predict because it has many decades of precedent. Palestinians, victim
of a million betrayals, should know this better than anyone. We also
know that struggle has no easy trajectory. Mass movements predicated on
voting make for attractive sources of relief. Then they go up in smoke
and you’re left to find the next shiny figure to exploit, the next
fount of excitement and pageantry and social capital. This isn’t a
serious politics. It’s terminal naivete, or industrial self-promotion.
And now what? You disposed of the most radical members of our
community, systematically excluding so many brethren from the
life-sustaining pleasure of shared resistance, in order to assuage a
bunch of faceless assholes waiting for the first opportunity to dispose
of you, all that love sacrificed for no reward beyond some retweets and
an evanescent sense of importance, your moment of being accepted by the
polity now replaced by angry regret for having again succumbed to the
gravitational pull of authority, of the state and its functionaries, of
the very institutions that maintain our dispossession. But our nation,
Palestine, is neither temporary nor ephemeral. Our politics should
match the condition.
It should not be a matter of distinction, but Julian Assange is a
figure who is becoming the apotheosis of political imprisonment. This
seems laughable to those convinced he is an agent without scruple, a
compromiser of the Fourth Estate, a figure best packed off to a prison
system that will, in all assuredness, kill him.
That’s if he even gets there. Having spent a year at Her Majesty’s
Belmarsh prison, the WikiLeaks publisher faces the permanent danger of
contracting COVID-19 as he goes through the bone-weariness of legal
proceedings. Even during the extradition hearings, he has been treated
with a snooty callousness by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser,
which does not bode well for a favourable finding against the US
submission. As he endures them, he suffers in a facility that is
succumbing to the misrule caused by the coronavirus.
On April 9, Assange’s friend Vaughan Smith gave a description
of conditions that gave little cause for Easter cheer. “Julian is now
confined alone in a cell for 23.5 hours every day. He gets half an hour
of exercise and that is in a yard crowded with other prisoners.” Smith
also had a shot at the running of the prison. “With over 150 Belmarsh
prison staff off work self-isolating, the prison is barely functioning.”
The UK Department of Justice has adopted a mild approach to the issue
of releasing prisoners in the face of the coronavirus epidemic.
Despite the Prison Governors’ Association suggesting the release of
15,000 non-violent prisoners, the Department of Justice has opted for
the lower total of 4,000. To date, a meagre 100 have been released.
Assange insists that the situation is graver at Belmarsh than is
otherwise advertised. Official figures put the number of COVID-19
deaths at one in the maximum security facility. There are at least two,
with the possibility, argues Assange, of more.
By any reasonable assessment, Assange fits the bill of a non-violent
prisoner, and one with genuine political credentials. He was granted
asylum by Ecuador, a point of little interest to Baraister. His
condition both physical and mental has appalled friends, acquaintances
and a number of officials.
Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,
has spent much time beating the drum of awareness about his plight.
Since 2010, he stated
in May last year, “there has been a relentless and unrestrained
campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation against Mr
Assange, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom,
Sweden and, more recently, in Ecuador.”
Rather than turning their attention to this state of circumstances,
news outlets prefer to gorge themselves on other details, such as the
newly revealed identity of his partner, which Judge Baraitser refused to
keep concealed. The writing on this subject is needlessly though
predictably tawdry.
“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fathered two sons
while hiding in embassy,” has been a favourite formulation. The Daily Mail can barely resist stirring the sauce pot, giving
Assange the appearance of an international man of fornicating mystery.
“Gabriel, aged two, and his one-year-old brother Max were conceived
while their father was hiding out to avoid extradition to America, where
he faces espionage charges over the leaking of thousands of classified
US intelligence documents.” But the man who sowed his oats was also,
the Mail is thrilled to remind us, “wanted in Sweden where he
was accused of rape.” It was rather good of them to also tell readers
that Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation, though it does so
with customary scepticism.
The old hacks can barely resist regarding the entire matter of Assange having a partner and children as peculiar. The Mail seemed
to think it had uncovered a stunning morsel of information that would
shock all. “The news will come as a bombshell to Assange’s friends and
enemies since he was widely understood to have led a near-monastic life
since entering the embassy in 2012.” Monks would surely disagree with
that flawed assessment, as would his friends.
The theme of oddity has also made it across the Atlantic. The New York Post, for instance, considered it
“an even odder twist” that “British rapper M.I.A. is a godmother to the
children”. Hardly – M.I.A, along with a large clutch of celebrities,
has been a vocal supporter and barracker.
This mixture of lazy scribbling, creepy curiosity and saccharine
interest will do little to aid Assange.
His partner, now revealed as
lawyer Stella Moris-Smith Robertson, attempted to take some of the edge
off perceptions of the publisher in a court statement supporting bail.
“My close relationship with Julian has been the opposite of how he is
viewed – of reserve, respect for each other and attempts to shield each
other from some of the nightmares that have surrounded our lives.”
Retaining that shield will be an increasingly difficult matter now.
Assange’s scalp is precious. The application for bail made by his
defence team on March 25 was denied. Access to him from his legal team
is limited, hobbling the case. Even during a raging pandemic, where
entire states have mobilised their resources, there is always room for
little bit of vindictiveness. Scores need to be settled; the balance
sheet ordered. To that end, Judge Baraister and the UK justice system,
have not disappointed.
