Artists Juxtapose a World of Dispossession
By Jaisal Noor
Material for a film (2004–) and Material for a film (performance) (2006)
By Emily Jacir
Guggenheim Museum Through April 15
Museum as Hub Becoming Dutch: “Exodus 2048”
By Michael Blum
New Museum Through March 29
The ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has recently found an outlet in the gallery world. Israeli artist Michael Blum’s futuristic installation Exodus 2048, currently at the New Museum, and the highly acclaimed Palestinian-American artist Emily Jacir’s commemoration of slain Palestinian artist and intellectual Wael Zuiater at the Guggenheim, catapult the viewer into a world of dispossession and dislocation. Both evoke cultural and political oppression, themes all too common to the Palestinian and Jewish experience.
Due to the high birthrates among Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and Israeli Arabs, combined they are projected to outnumber Israeli Jews by 2025. One possible outcome of this “demographic problem,” explored in Exodus 2048, is the Arab Israelis’ overthrow of the Jewish state and the forced migration of the Israelis.
PHOTO COURTESY: NEW MUSEUM
PHOTO COURTESY: NEW MUSEUM
The world Blum creates includes a new Jewish state in Uganda, Israel’s government in exile in Brooklyn, and the refugee ship Exodus 2048, which wanders the seas for months before finally being accepted by the Dutch government. The exhibit depicts a refugee camp in a museum in the Netherlands where 150 of the boat’s passengers find shelter.
The exhibit opens with six text panels chronicling the events from Dec. 26, 2047, the start of the Arab uprising, to the end of the state of Israel five months later.
Viewers can sneak a peek through curtains into a refugee camp scene. The room is jammed with cots and bunk beds and the floor strewn with personal belongings, newspapers, children’s toys, open bags of potato chips, spilled coffee, dirty rags, shopping carts full of bags and clothes. Televisions pump out Hebrew language programming and the radios blare Israeli music.
Jacir’s two-part exhibition, which won the Guggenheim’s 2008 Hugo Boss prize, resurrects the life and work of Zuiater, a Palestinian born in Nablus who lived much of his life in exile as an artist and served as a spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was assassinated by Mossad agents in Rome in 1972 for his alleged association with Black September, the group responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli Olympians in that year’s Munich Games. No evidence has been offered linking him to the attacks, and by many accounts Zuiater was dedicated to nonviolence.
The exhibit includes personal effects from Zuiater: postcards he wrote to his girlfriend Janet, photos of him with family and friends, and photos of places that he frequented. It also brings Zuiater to life through audio recordings of him translating his writings from Arabic to Italian and conversations captured by Italian police wiretaps. When Zuiater was killed, he was carrying a copy of 1,001 Arabian Nights (his life’s ambition was to translate the work into Italian). One of the bullets was lodged in the spine of the novel. Jacir devotes a room to displaying 1,000 blank books with bullet holes, which she shot with a .22 caliber pistol, similar to that which took Zuiater’s life.
According to a friend of Zuiater, “his ultimate goal was the reconciliation of the Jews with the Palestinians.” The violent elimination and marginalization of moderate and progressive voices has had a deep impact on the Palestinian national struggle. As the exhibit points out, the world will never know Zuiater’s opinion of Hamas, the Islamist movement that was founded more than a decade after his death.
Blum’s work obviously invokes the plight of displaced Palestinians, especially the hundreds of thousands who have lived in refugee camps for decades. Another reference to the conflict comes from a fictitious Jewish leader who vows before leaving Israel, “You shouldn’t consider our escape as treason or cowardice, but as a strategic retreat while preparing for the next battle.” These words could have come from the mouth of any number of Arab leaders throughout the last 60 years of defeats.
South African intellectual and anti-apartheid activist Breyten Breytenbach has noted that “No two peoples are as similar and have as much of a shared commonality as the Israelis and the Palestinians.” These exhibits provide a rare glimpse into their intertwined history and future.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Blocking the ‘Washington Consensus’: New Book Reveals How Bolivia Rolled Back Neoliberalism
Blocking the ‘Washington Consensus’: New Book Reveals How Bolivia Rolled Back Neoliberalism
By Jaisal Noor
Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization
Edited By Jim Shultz and Melissa Crane Draper
University of California Press, 2009
Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable that in 2009 Bolivia would approve a constitution rejecting neoliberal policies and recognizing indigenous rights. Drawing on a decade of advocacy, research and reporting from Bolivia, the Democracy Center looks for lessons from the struggle in Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization. Editors Jim Shultz and Melissa Crane Draper weave together eyewitness accounts and interviews framed by insightful analysis.
The book presents a range of perspectives within the globalization debate, from Bolivian officials on the payroll of the U.S.-based Inter-American Development Bank, to Doña Porfira, one of the countless Bolivians whose livelihood was washed away during the massive Enron and Shell oil spill of 2000. The book documents the enormous gap between the reality on the ground and the theoretical benefits of policies dictated by the “Washington Consensus,” under which funds are loaned to developing nations on the condition they privatize state industries and cut public spending.
Bolivia has the greatest number of indigenous people in South America and is among the continent’s poorest nations. This poverty can be traced back to the extraction of vast amounts of silver from “Cerro Rico” by the Spanish, which financed its empire for the next two centuries, but left Bolivia deeply impoverished. Chronic poverty translated into chronic political instability and dependence on foreign aid. Starting in the 1980s, the economic policies of the “Washington Consensus” were leveraged upon Bolivia in return for desperately needed financial aid. This succeeded in enriching the elite few, while the vast majority suffered.
Recently, Bolivians have had increasing success rejecting these policies. During the Water Revolt of 2000, Bechtel took control of Cochabamba’s water supply and distribution and jacked up the price. In response, residents organized,took to the streets and drove Bechtel out of the city. Shultz was awarded for his reporting in Cochabama by Project Censored. Ever since, Bolivia has found itself at the forefront of opposition to neoliberalism, and the Democracy Center has been on the ground to report on events and to organize campaigns in solidarity.
When Bechtel sued Bolivia for $50 million dollars for the loss of the water contract in 2004, international solidarity movements pressured the company to settle for a five-cent symbolic payment. Bolivian social movements and indigenous groups have also had increasing success, for the first time propelling one of their own, Evo Morales, to the presidency in 2005. With this victory Bolivians firmly rejected the neoliberal policies that perpetuate poverty. The editors point out that while Morales has begun directing profits from the sale of Bolivia’s natural resources towards the indigenous majority, an abundance of resources alone is not enough to guarantee wealth. Bolivia’s challenge is to create a sustainable model of resource extraction and growth.
Bolivia held a constitutional referendum January 25. The referendum was hotly contested, and the version put to ballots was considered watered down by many of the nation’s indigenous groups who had pushed for stronger language addressing land distribution. The referendum passed easily, and included provisions for political reforms, land reform, the advancement social programs and indigenous rights and will make changes to the country’s oil and gas laws.
On January 23rd, I spoke with Jim Shultz, executive director of the Democracy Center, which is located in Cochabamba, Bolivia. He is also the co-editor, along Melissa Crane Draper of the book “Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization” published last month. An excerpt of our conversation follows.
Jaisal Noor: The release of your book coincides with two historic events. You have the inauguration of the first African-American president in the US, and you have the vote on the constitutional referendum on Sunday January 25 in Bolivia, which is expected to pass. Could you describe the mood right now towards the constitutional referendum, which is seen by many as a compromise compared to what was originally sought by the indigenous people of Bolivia?
Jim Shultz: After 11 years in Bolivia, I’ve seen quite a few elections and this is one of the stranger ones. Up until the very last few days, there’s been almost no visibility of campaigning on the streets. Not in the urban area here in Cochabamba where I work or the rural area of Tikiawa (?) where I live. Usually for almost a month before an election you see lots and lots of campaigning. On the other hand, the few times that I have snuck a peak at television here and there, it’s pretty obvious that the airwaves in Bolivia are just carpeted with ads. I mean, [practically]the only ads on the air are ‘yes’ or ‘no’ ads on the constitution. And some of them are completely over the top. You know, an image of Evo Morales and an image of Jesus - “Which side are you on? Vote ‘no’ on the constitution” is one of the ads that have been running.
The political interests that are promoting the yes or no vote have certainly invested resources on television to make their case. But I don’t see a lot of popular engagement in the vote. If you contrast that with, for example, the election in December 2005 in which Evo [Morales] was elected, my gosh — for weeks you couldn’t walk out of your door without being plastered with some sort of campaign activity. There were mass rallies in stadiums, there were caravans, there were people leaf-letting on corners for candidates — this has been almost absent in this vote.
Most Bolivians are just trying to deal with the day-to-day struggles of making ends meet in an economy that is in deep trouble, and trying to find some economic opportunity in a country where there isn’t much, dealing with the rises in the prices of food. I just think that [this vote] hasn’t really connected with people as something that has a real direct impact on their lives. And Bolivia’s problems that are really about how the government can have a strategy to generate economic opportunity in this country for the people who have been frozen out of economic opportunity.
Now certainly people without land who focus on land as the economic opportunity that they’re seeking have pinned their hopes on the new constitution. But land reform has been watered down so much in this new constitution that I’m not quite sure what difference it’s going to make. All of the big tracts of land that are currently out there that are “in production” are now exempt from land reform under this watered-down proposal. Certainly people’s hopes are that if Bolivia can get more control of its gas and oil resources and get involved in the sale of those and the marketing of those that those resources can be used to invest in infrastructure projects and education and those kinds of things to lift up people’s lives.
But again the problem is that, one, Bolivia has had a real hard time getting its state oil company up and running and efficient. Two, just as in Venezuela and elsewhere in the world, oil revenues are not going to be in the coming years what they were in the last few. So it’s not going to be the raining gold that people thought it was as oil prices and gas prices are reduced. And three, under any political party and ideology in this country Bolivian governments have a real hard time operating honestly and efficiently to deliver the goods. So it’s unclear how schools are going to suddenly get better. It’s unclear how a pretty decrepit public health system is going to suddenly get better. These issues of reclaiming natural resources and all of these things are extremely important and certainly that was the original intent of the constitutional process, but I sense more and more of a disconnect between the process of political change in the country and how people’s day to day lives are impacted.
Jaisal Noor: One of the core themes in Dignity and Defiance is the basic human desire for self-determination, which is something I fear many in the West, especially in the United States, take for granted. One of the watershed moments in Bolivia’s anti-globalization movement was the Cochabamba water revolt, which was a struggle against corporate globalization. Do you see any difference in a Clinton administration and a Bush administration, which were dominated by corporations, to an Obama administration, which is dominated by corporations? Do you think there is a hope that U.S.-Bolivian relations will change? They have been tense in the last several months of the Bush administration.
Jim Schultz: Your point is right about self-determination. The fundamental point about the Democracy Center is that democracy isn’t about elections and all by itself. Democracy is the right of every person on this planet to understand and influence the public decisions that shape their lives. What the book documents is how organizations like the IMF and the World Bank - which are controlled by the United States government structurally - undermine that principle of democracy and took away from the people some basic decisions about who controls their water, who controls their gas, and oil, how money should be raised and spent in their national budget. Bolivia was the lab rat for 20 years of the Washington Consensus or the neoliberal model, exported to poor countries under pressure from the World Bank and the I.M.F., and the lab rat rebelled. And that’s what’s so profound. Not just the [Cochabama water war of 2000] but other struggles after are David and Goliath- quite literally David versus Goliath with a sling and that’s all people had here as well.
The lesson from that is that people do want to make these decisions for themselves. And the question of whether or not the United States will be a force on the side of democracy in this regard or against it under new administration, that’s the right question to ask. It’s not about the politicians who sit in the chair. There’s no question that we have a right to be more hopeful that Obama’s sitting in the chair than George Bush or even Bill Clinton, but it’s not about what the politicians do. The politicians will ultimately stick their fingers in the wind and try to figure out which way the wind is going. That’s what they do. The issue is now how do we connect the people in the United States with the people in Latin America to influence the government of the United states and the governments of Latin America to make policy that’s based on what the people need and what the people are demanding.
Let me give you an example. You talked about the decline in the relationship between the Bush administration and the Morales administration which was stunning, I mean, they kicked each others ambassadors out and all of that. Well one of the things that the Bush administration did to retaliate against Bolivia was basically try to nuke 20,000 Bolivian jobs by taking Bolivia out of this Andean Trade Preferences program. And we have a project; we call it voices from Latin America, which is very simple. We use old fashioned organizing and new technology to bring people’s voices into the debates that affect their lives. And so, a team of young people from the democracy center, Bolivian and U.S., fanned out by jeep and bus around the country and interviewed the people who were going to lose their jobs. Put together a five minute video within a week, put it up on YouTube, tied it to an electronic petition and then we hammered on the Bush Administration until they agreed to actually let that video and that testimony be aired at the Washington hearing that the law required that the administration hold on Bush’s plan. And so, these people’s voices were actually right there in that room in Washington, heard. And I think doing that kind of thing is the way we educate people in the United States about what’s happening, it’s the way we educate and pressure politicians in the United States to take the different view of the way they’re handling countries like Bolivia and regions like Latin America. At the end of the day, What Bolivia teaches us is that change happens not because politicians led the way, but because people led the way. And ultimately change will happen in the United States because people lead the way. And ultimately change will happen in the way globalization works on this planet based on whether people link up across national lines and come up with new strategies to challenge globalization to be something that can serve the interest of people in stead of take away their democratic decisions and take away their natural resources, and make them essentially tools of what the world should look like.
Jaisal Noor: As much as your book deals with the successes of the anti-corporate globalization movement, it doesn’t gloss over its shortcomings. Could you share some of your insights on the future of the struggle in Bolivia?
Jim Schultz: It’s a sad fact that nine years after the Water Revolt, which was a global inspiration, the public water company’s situation here in Cochabamba is still miserable — it’s still inefficient, it’s still corrupt, it’s still not doing the job. Part of the lesson here is if we don’t follow up these great victories in the street with nutsand- bolts work of creating the alternative that actually delivers the goods, then the victory ends up being hollow. And sooner or later, if public control of these resources doesn’t work, the people in places like Bolivia are going to begin to turn around and say, “Gosh, we really should have corporations doing this.” So as a movement for social justice we have to pay much more careful attention to building these public systems that can deliver the goods.
That privatization of water is certainly no panacea, and in places such as Cochabamba, it is certainly not the answer. And this gap between the theory and reality is something that is extremely important. The flip-side of that, and this is something we document in the book as well, is the gap between the romance of kicking the corporations out and the hard work involved in actually making things work. Look at it- its a sad fact that nine years after the Water Revolt, which was a global inspiration, the public water company here in Cochabamba is still miserable, its still inefficient, its still corrupt, its still not doing the job. And you know the Democracy Center as an organization, we sort of straddle the line that not many organizations do. One hand, we’re very integrated and very involved in social justice movements that involve protest and direct action, and all of those things.
Jaisal Noor: What do you think the future holds for US-Latin American relations?
Jim Schultz: Oddly enough, the one upside to the “global war on terror” is that the Bush Administration didn’t pay any attention to Latin America while an important pendulum swung with the election of a whole class of left-of-center national governments. They range in ideology and policy quite a bit, and governing style, but from Lula in Brazil, to Chavez in Venezuela, to Morales here in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador - the list is quite long. Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, South America is in very different political space the last time the United States tried to bully people around. And they are a very united force. After the violence in Bolivia in September and October [2008], the South American presidents not the United States intervened.
The way we make sure a difference happens is by linking citizens with citizens, people with people in the United States and Latin America. Diplomatic relationships between the United States and its neighbors ought to be determined by the people of the United States and those neighbors as opposed to just diplomatic experts. That’s really new, we’re very accustomed to having lots and lots of citizen engagement and activism in protest and advocacy on domestic issues, not so much on foreign policy issues. If there’s a war, people will come out on the streets. But this idea of saying “You know what? Diplomatic relationships between the United States and its neighbors ought to be determined by the people of the United States and those neighbors as opposed to just diplomatic experts”. That’s what we are trying to build and that’s what I think we’re going to see in the next 10 years. That’s what we are trying to build and that’s what I think we’re going to see in the next 10 years.
For more information about the tour, visit the Dignity and Defiance website:
democracyctr.org/publications/dignitydefiance/
By Jaisal Noor
Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization
Edited By Jim Shultz and Melissa Crane Draper
University of California Press, 2009
Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable that in 2009 Bolivia would approve a constitution rejecting neoliberal policies and recognizing indigenous rights. Drawing on a decade of advocacy, research and reporting from Bolivia, the Democracy Center looks for lessons from the struggle in Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization. Editors Jim Shultz and Melissa Crane Draper weave together eyewitness accounts and interviews framed by insightful analysis.
The book presents a range of perspectives within the globalization debate, from Bolivian officials on the payroll of the U.S.-based Inter-American Development Bank, to Doña Porfira, one of the countless Bolivians whose livelihood was washed away during the massive Enron and Shell oil spill of 2000. The book documents the enormous gap between the reality on the ground and the theoretical benefits of policies dictated by the “Washington Consensus,” under which funds are loaned to developing nations on the condition they privatize state industries and cut public spending.
Bolivia has the greatest number of indigenous people in South America and is among the continent’s poorest nations. This poverty can be traced back to the extraction of vast amounts of silver from “Cerro Rico” by the Spanish, which financed its empire for the next two centuries, but left Bolivia deeply impoverished. Chronic poverty translated into chronic political instability and dependence on foreign aid. Starting in the 1980s, the economic policies of the “Washington Consensus” were leveraged upon Bolivia in return for desperately needed financial aid. This succeeded in enriching the elite few, while the vast majority suffered.
Recently, Bolivians have had increasing success rejecting these policies. During the Water Revolt of 2000, Bechtel took control of Cochabamba’s water supply and distribution and jacked up the price. In response, residents organized,took to the streets and drove Bechtel out of the city. Shultz was awarded for his reporting in Cochabama by Project Censored. Ever since, Bolivia has found itself at the forefront of opposition to neoliberalism, and the Democracy Center has been on the ground to report on events and to organize campaigns in solidarity.
When Bechtel sued Bolivia for $50 million dollars for the loss of the water contract in 2004, international solidarity movements pressured the company to settle for a five-cent symbolic payment. Bolivian social movements and indigenous groups have also had increasing success, for the first time propelling one of their own, Evo Morales, to the presidency in 2005. With this victory Bolivians firmly rejected the neoliberal policies that perpetuate poverty. The editors point out that while Morales has begun directing profits from the sale of Bolivia’s natural resources towards the indigenous majority, an abundance of resources alone is not enough to guarantee wealth. Bolivia’s challenge is to create a sustainable model of resource extraction and growth.
Bolivia held a constitutional referendum January 25. The referendum was hotly contested, and the version put to ballots was considered watered down by many of the nation’s indigenous groups who had pushed for stronger language addressing land distribution. The referendum passed easily, and included provisions for political reforms, land reform, the advancement social programs and indigenous rights and will make changes to the country’s oil and gas laws.
On January 23rd, I spoke with Jim Shultz, executive director of the Democracy Center, which is located in Cochabamba, Bolivia. He is also the co-editor, along Melissa Crane Draper of the book “Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization” published last month. An excerpt of our conversation follows.
Jaisal Noor: The release of your book coincides with two historic events. You have the inauguration of the first African-American president in the US, and you have the vote on the constitutional referendum on Sunday January 25 in Bolivia, which is expected to pass. Could you describe the mood right now towards the constitutional referendum, which is seen by many as a compromise compared to what was originally sought by the indigenous people of Bolivia?
Jim Shultz: After 11 years in Bolivia, I’ve seen quite a few elections and this is one of the stranger ones. Up until the very last few days, there’s been almost no visibility of campaigning on the streets. Not in the urban area here in Cochabamba where I work or the rural area of Tikiawa (?) where I live. Usually for almost a month before an election you see lots and lots of campaigning. On the other hand, the few times that I have snuck a peak at television here and there, it’s pretty obvious that the airwaves in Bolivia are just carpeted with ads. I mean, [practically]the only ads on the air are ‘yes’ or ‘no’ ads on the constitution. And some of them are completely over the top. You know, an image of Evo Morales and an image of Jesus - “Which side are you on? Vote ‘no’ on the constitution” is one of the ads that have been running.
The political interests that are promoting the yes or no vote have certainly invested resources on television to make their case. But I don’t see a lot of popular engagement in the vote. If you contrast that with, for example, the election in December 2005 in which Evo [Morales] was elected, my gosh — for weeks you couldn’t walk out of your door without being plastered with some sort of campaign activity. There were mass rallies in stadiums, there were caravans, there were people leaf-letting on corners for candidates — this has been almost absent in this vote.
Most Bolivians are just trying to deal with the day-to-day struggles of making ends meet in an economy that is in deep trouble, and trying to find some economic opportunity in a country where there isn’t much, dealing with the rises in the prices of food. I just think that [this vote] hasn’t really connected with people as something that has a real direct impact on their lives. And Bolivia’s problems that are really about how the government can have a strategy to generate economic opportunity in this country for the people who have been frozen out of economic opportunity.
Now certainly people without land who focus on land as the economic opportunity that they’re seeking have pinned their hopes on the new constitution. But land reform has been watered down so much in this new constitution that I’m not quite sure what difference it’s going to make. All of the big tracts of land that are currently out there that are “in production” are now exempt from land reform under this watered-down proposal. Certainly people’s hopes are that if Bolivia can get more control of its gas and oil resources and get involved in the sale of those and the marketing of those that those resources can be used to invest in infrastructure projects and education and those kinds of things to lift up people’s lives.
But again the problem is that, one, Bolivia has had a real hard time getting its state oil company up and running and efficient. Two, just as in Venezuela and elsewhere in the world, oil revenues are not going to be in the coming years what they were in the last few. So it’s not going to be the raining gold that people thought it was as oil prices and gas prices are reduced. And three, under any political party and ideology in this country Bolivian governments have a real hard time operating honestly and efficiently to deliver the goods. So it’s unclear how schools are going to suddenly get better. It’s unclear how a pretty decrepit public health system is going to suddenly get better. These issues of reclaiming natural resources and all of these things are extremely important and certainly that was the original intent of the constitutional process, but I sense more and more of a disconnect between the process of political change in the country and how people’s day to day lives are impacted.
Jaisal Noor: One of the core themes in Dignity and Defiance is the basic human desire for self-determination, which is something I fear many in the West, especially in the United States, take for granted. One of the watershed moments in Bolivia’s anti-globalization movement was the Cochabamba water revolt, which was a struggle against corporate globalization. Do you see any difference in a Clinton administration and a Bush administration, which were dominated by corporations, to an Obama administration, which is dominated by corporations? Do you think there is a hope that U.S.-Bolivian relations will change? They have been tense in the last several months of the Bush administration.
Jim Schultz: Your point is right about self-determination. The fundamental point about the Democracy Center is that democracy isn’t about elections and all by itself. Democracy is the right of every person on this planet to understand and influence the public decisions that shape their lives. What the book documents is how organizations like the IMF and the World Bank - which are controlled by the United States government structurally - undermine that principle of democracy and took away from the people some basic decisions about who controls their water, who controls their gas, and oil, how money should be raised and spent in their national budget. Bolivia was the lab rat for 20 years of the Washington Consensus or the neoliberal model, exported to poor countries under pressure from the World Bank and the I.M.F., and the lab rat rebelled. And that’s what’s so profound. Not just the [Cochabama water war of 2000] but other struggles after are David and Goliath- quite literally David versus Goliath with a sling and that’s all people had here as well.
The lesson from that is that people do want to make these decisions for themselves. And the question of whether or not the United States will be a force on the side of democracy in this regard or against it under new administration, that’s the right question to ask. It’s not about the politicians who sit in the chair. There’s no question that we have a right to be more hopeful that Obama’s sitting in the chair than George Bush or even Bill Clinton, but it’s not about what the politicians do. The politicians will ultimately stick their fingers in the wind and try to figure out which way the wind is going. That’s what they do. The issue is now how do we connect the people in the United States with the people in Latin America to influence the government of the United states and the governments of Latin America to make policy that’s based on what the people need and what the people are demanding.
Let me give you an example. You talked about the decline in the relationship between the Bush administration and the Morales administration which was stunning, I mean, they kicked each others ambassadors out and all of that. Well one of the things that the Bush administration did to retaliate against Bolivia was basically try to nuke 20,000 Bolivian jobs by taking Bolivia out of this Andean Trade Preferences program. And we have a project; we call it voices from Latin America, which is very simple. We use old fashioned organizing and new technology to bring people’s voices into the debates that affect their lives. And so, a team of young people from the democracy center, Bolivian and U.S., fanned out by jeep and bus around the country and interviewed the people who were going to lose their jobs. Put together a five minute video within a week, put it up on YouTube, tied it to an electronic petition and then we hammered on the Bush Administration until they agreed to actually let that video and that testimony be aired at the Washington hearing that the law required that the administration hold on Bush’s plan. And so, these people’s voices were actually right there in that room in Washington, heard. And I think doing that kind of thing is the way we educate people in the United States about what’s happening, it’s the way we educate and pressure politicians in the United States to take the different view of the way they’re handling countries like Bolivia and regions like Latin America. At the end of the day, What Bolivia teaches us is that change happens not because politicians led the way, but because people led the way. And ultimately change will happen in the United States because people lead the way. And ultimately change will happen in the way globalization works on this planet based on whether people link up across national lines and come up with new strategies to challenge globalization to be something that can serve the interest of people in stead of take away their democratic decisions and take away their natural resources, and make them essentially tools of what the world should look like.
Jaisal Noor: As much as your book deals with the successes of the anti-corporate globalization movement, it doesn’t gloss over its shortcomings. Could you share some of your insights on the future of the struggle in Bolivia?
Jim Schultz: It’s a sad fact that nine years after the Water Revolt, which was a global inspiration, the public water company’s situation here in Cochabamba is still miserable — it’s still inefficient, it’s still corrupt, it’s still not doing the job. Part of the lesson here is if we don’t follow up these great victories in the street with nutsand- bolts work of creating the alternative that actually delivers the goods, then the victory ends up being hollow. And sooner or later, if public control of these resources doesn’t work, the people in places like Bolivia are going to begin to turn around and say, “Gosh, we really should have corporations doing this.” So as a movement for social justice we have to pay much more careful attention to building these public systems that can deliver the goods.
That privatization of water is certainly no panacea, and in places such as Cochabamba, it is certainly not the answer. And this gap between the theory and reality is something that is extremely important. The flip-side of that, and this is something we document in the book as well, is the gap between the romance of kicking the corporations out and the hard work involved in actually making things work. Look at it- its a sad fact that nine years after the Water Revolt, which was a global inspiration, the public water company here in Cochabamba is still miserable, its still inefficient, its still corrupt, its still not doing the job. And you know the Democracy Center as an organization, we sort of straddle the line that not many organizations do. One hand, we’re very integrated and very involved in social justice movements that involve protest and direct action, and all of those things.
Jaisal Noor: What do you think the future holds for US-Latin American relations?
Jim Schultz: Oddly enough, the one upside to the “global war on terror” is that the Bush Administration didn’t pay any attention to Latin America while an important pendulum swung with the election of a whole class of left-of-center national governments. They range in ideology and policy quite a bit, and governing style, but from Lula in Brazil, to Chavez in Venezuela, to Morales here in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador - the list is quite long. Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, South America is in very different political space the last time the United States tried to bully people around. And they are a very united force. After the violence in Bolivia in September and October [2008], the South American presidents not the United States intervened.
The way we make sure a difference happens is by linking citizens with citizens, people with people in the United States and Latin America. Diplomatic relationships between the United States and its neighbors ought to be determined by the people of the United States and those neighbors as opposed to just diplomatic experts. That’s really new, we’re very accustomed to having lots and lots of citizen engagement and activism in protest and advocacy on domestic issues, not so much on foreign policy issues. If there’s a war, people will come out on the streets. But this idea of saying “You know what? Diplomatic relationships between the United States and its neighbors ought to be determined by the people of the United States and those neighbors as opposed to just diplomatic experts”. That’s what we are trying to build and that’s what I think we’re going to see in the next 10 years. That’s what we are trying to build and that’s what I think we’re going to see in the next 10 years.
For more information about the tour, visit the Dignity and Defiance website:
democracyctr.org/publications/dignitydefiance/
Gaza’s Facts on the Ground: A Summary of the Israeli Assault
Amnesty International released a report Nov. 5 stating that a five-and-a-half-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas “has brought enormous improvements in the quality of life in Sderot and other Israeli villages near Gaza.” However, it warned that a spate of Israeli and Palestinian attacks and counter-attacks in the previous 24 hours could “once again put the civilian populations of Gaza and southern Israel in the line of fire.”
Seven weeks later, Israel launched a massive military offensive into Gaza that shocked much of the world while gaining widespread support inside the Jewish state.
The Gaza offensive took 13 Israeli lives, including three civilians. Meanwhile more than 1,300 Palestinian lives were lost, more than half of which were civilians, including at least 400 children. At least 5,000 were injured. The price tag for the reconstruction of 21,000 homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and other infrastructure destroyed is estimated at more than $2 billion. The conflict destroyed half of Gaza’s agricultural industry, which provided a quarter of its food.
Gaza is one of the most crowded places on earth; it holds 1.5 million people, half of whom are children under 15. The majority of Gazans are the descendants of Palestinians who were forced to flee during the founding of Israel in 1948. Eighty percent of Gazans subsist on less than $2 a day and depend on the United Nations for basic survival. Israel has imposed a 19-month-long blockade, stopping food, fuel and medical supplies from reaching Gaza despite U.N. pleas that the restrictions be lifted.
Israel stands accused of firing on and killing civilians waving white flags, those it ordered to flee their homes and on aid workers. Israel has also been accused of refusing to let the injured get medical care by impeding and firing on ambulances. A coalition of nine Israeli human rights groups called for an investigation into whether Israel committed war crimes, protesting the “wanton use of lethal force” against Palestinian civilians. The U.N.’s special rapporteur to Palestine said Israel could be in violation of the U.N. Charter, the Geneva Conventions, international law and international humanitarian law. The Israeli explanation for high civilian casualties is that Hamas fighters concealed themselves within the civilian population.
Amnesty International accused Israel of using white phosphorus “in densely populated residential neighborhoods, [which] is inherently indiscriminate,” adding, “Its repeated use in this manner … is a war crime.” Israel has also been accused of using cluster bombs in densely populated areas, as well as using experimental weapons that are illegal under international law, including dense inert metal explosives (DIME) and GPS-guided mortars. A former U.S. Department of Defense official, now with Human Rights Watch, stated, “Experimenting has a different meaning for Americans. We think animal experimenting, but [its use was] indeed a field test.” Israel has dismissed all accusations of using illegal weapons and promised to protect its soldiers from prosecution.
It is difficult to say how many Israeli soldiers and reservists refused to take part in the fighting as the Israeli military was sending military resisters quietly home rather than jailing them and risking puncturing an aura of shared national purpose. One military resister who went public with his opposition was Yitzchak Ben Mocha, who refused to fight in Gaza because, “It’s not a war of defense. … You can’t separate the war in Gaza from the fact that the Palestinian nation is under occupation for more than 40 years.”
A DIFFERENT PATH FORWARD
According to the Israeli group Peace Now, Israel has escalated settlement expansion by 57 percent over the past year. The scope of the Israeli government’s complicity came into focus Jan. 30. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that a secret database developed by the Israeli military confirms that many settlements are built on private Palestinian land and considered illegal under Israeli law. According to Haaretz, “in the vast majority of the settlements — about 75 percent — construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued. The database also shows that, in more than 30 settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure (roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations) has been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents.”
It has been reported that President Barack Obama may start indirect low-level talks with Hamas, similar to those that the Carter administration held with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the late 1970s. In 1982, Israel responded to the PLO’s willingness to negotiate by invading Lebanon, where the PLO was based, in a war that killed as many as 25,000 people. Twenty-seven years later the PLO’s Fatah party has been reduced to the role of collaborating in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and in spite of 16 years of negotiations it has been unable to stop Israeli expansion onto Palestinian lands.
It has been argued that the objective of Israel’s assault on Gaza was to knock out Hamas because it opposes the Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Jerusalem. According to a leading Israeli expert on the conflict Avi Shlaim, the “definition of terror is the use of violence against civilians for political purposes.” So while Hamas is a terrorist organization, “by the same token, Israel is practicing state terror, because it is using violence on a massive scale against Palestinian civilians for political purposes.”
An internationally-backed peace agreement has been on the table for more than 30 years: the creation of a Palestinian state in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. With Hamas now indicating it is willing to negotiate along these lines, the main obstacle to peace remains the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation, which only the U.S. public has the power to end.
To read more coverage on the Arab-Israeli conflict and related activism, click here.
Seven weeks later, Israel launched a massive military offensive into Gaza that shocked much of the world while gaining widespread support inside the Jewish state.
The Gaza offensive took 13 Israeli lives, including three civilians. Meanwhile more than 1,300 Palestinian lives were lost, more than half of which were civilians, including at least 400 children. At least 5,000 were injured. The price tag for the reconstruction of 21,000 homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and other infrastructure destroyed is estimated at more than $2 billion. The conflict destroyed half of Gaza’s agricultural industry, which provided a quarter of its food.
Gaza is one of the most crowded places on earth; it holds 1.5 million people, half of whom are children under 15. The majority of Gazans are the descendants of Palestinians who were forced to flee during the founding of Israel in 1948. Eighty percent of Gazans subsist on less than $2 a day and depend on the United Nations for basic survival. Israel has imposed a 19-month-long blockade, stopping food, fuel and medical supplies from reaching Gaza despite U.N. pleas that the restrictions be lifted.
Israel stands accused of firing on and killing civilians waving white flags, those it ordered to flee their homes and on aid workers. Israel has also been accused of refusing to let the injured get medical care by impeding and firing on ambulances. A coalition of nine Israeli human rights groups called for an investigation into whether Israel committed war crimes, protesting the “wanton use of lethal force” against Palestinian civilians. The U.N.’s special rapporteur to Palestine said Israel could be in violation of the U.N. Charter, the Geneva Conventions, international law and international humanitarian law. The Israeli explanation for high civilian casualties is that Hamas fighters concealed themselves within the civilian population.
Amnesty International accused Israel of using white phosphorus “in densely populated residential neighborhoods, [which] is inherently indiscriminate,” adding, “Its repeated use in this manner … is a war crime.” Israel has also been accused of using cluster bombs in densely populated areas, as well as using experimental weapons that are illegal under international law, including dense inert metal explosives (DIME) and GPS-guided mortars. A former U.S. Department of Defense official, now with Human Rights Watch, stated, “Experimenting has a different meaning for Americans. We think animal experimenting, but [its use was] indeed a field test.” Israel has dismissed all accusations of using illegal weapons and promised to protect its soldiers from prosecution.
It is difficult to say how many Israeli soldiers and reservists refused to take part in the fighting as the Israeli military was sending military resisters quietly home rather than jailing them and risking puncturing an aura of shared national purpose. One military resister who went public with his opposition was Yitzchak Ben Mocha, who refused to fight in Gaza because, “It’s not a war of defense. … You can’t separate the war in Gaza from the fact that the Palestinian nation is under occupation for more than 40 years.”
A DIFFERENT PATH FORWARD
According to the Israeli group Peace Now, Israel has escalated settlement expansion by 57 percent over the past year. The scope of the Israeli government’s complicity came into focus Jan. 30. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that a secret database developed by the Israeli military confirms that many settlements are built on private Palestinian land and considered illegal under Israeli law. According to Haaretz, “in the vast majority of the settlements — about 75 percent — construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued. The database also shows that, in more than 30 settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure (roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations) has been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents.”
It has been reported that President Barack Obama may start indirect low-level talks with Hamas, similar to those that the Carter administration held with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the late 1970s. In 1982, Israel responded to the PLO’s willingness to negotiate by invading Lebanon, where the PLO was based, in a war that killed as many as 25,000 people. Twenty-seven years later the PLO’s Fatah party has been reduced to the role of collaborating in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and in spite of 16 years of negotiations it has been unable to stop Israeli expansion onto Palestinian lands.
It has been argued that the objective of Israel’s assault on Gaza was to knock out Hamas because it opposes the Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Jerusalem. According to a leading Israeli expert on the conflict Avi Shlaim, the “definition of terror is the use of violence against civilians for political purposes.” So while Hamas is a terrorist organization, “by the same token, Israel is practicing state terror, because it is using violence on a massive scale against Palestinian civilians for political purposes.”
An internationally-backed peace agreement has been on the table for more than 30 years: the creation of a Palestinian state in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. With Hamas now indicating it is willing to negotiate along these lines, the main obstacle to peace remains the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation, which only the U.S. public has the power to end.
To read more coverage on the Arab-Israeli conflict and related activism, click here.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Interview with Jim Shultz on Bolivia's Constitutional Referendum by Jaisal Noor
Interview with Jim Shultz on Bolivia's Constitutional Referendum by Jaisal Noor
Bolivia is holding a constitutional referendum Sunday, January 25. The referendum has been hotly contested in Bolivia and its current version is much watered down compared to the original document. It is expected to pass easily and includes provision for political reforms, land reform, the advancement social programs and indigenous rights and will make changes to the country's oil and gas laws.
On Friday January 23rd, I spoke with Jim Shultz, executive director of the Democracy Center, which is located in Cochabamba, Bolivia. He is also the co-editor, with Melissa Crane Draper of the book “Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization”. They will be accompanying other Democracy Center activists on US tour in February to raise awareness of the impact of US policy towards Latin America. They will be in New York City on February 17th and 18th. For other dates, and more information you can visit the Dignity and Defiance website here: http://democracyctr.org/publications/dignitydefiance/.
Bolivia is holding a constitutional referendum Sunday, January 25. The referendum has been hotly contested in Bolivia and its current version is much watered down compared to the original document. It is expected to pass easily and includes provision for political reforms, land reform, the advancement social programs and indigenous rights and will make changes to the country's oil and gas laws.
On Friday January 23rd, I spoke with Jim Shultz, executive director of the Democracy Center, which is located in Cochabamba, Bolivia. He is also the co-editor, with Melissa Crane Draper of the book “Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization”. They will be accompanying other Democracy Center activists on US tour in February to raise awareness of the impact of US policy towards Latin America. They will be in New York City on February 17th and 18th. For other dates, and more information you can visit the Dignity and Defiance website here: http://democracyctr.org/publications/dignitydefiance/.
Listen to the interview (26 minutes).
Download URL: http://media.switchpod.com/users/jaisalnoor/Shultz40kbs .mp3
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Top Three Gaza Myths Debunked By Jaisal Noor
Despite the so-called "liberal" media’s endless barrage of pro-Israeli propaganda, a significant portion of the U.S. public is opposed to the current attack on Gaza. As the casualties mount and peace is pushed further out of reach, The Indypendent’s Jaisal Noor exposes three big myths of the conflict.
MYTH # 1
The root of the conflict is that Hamas is a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel.
It is true that Hamas commits unjustifiable terrorist acts and is on the United States’ terror list. The "terrorist" label is often used against enemies of U.S.-supported countries. When it was deemed in their interest, Israel and the United States bolstered both Hamas and its predecessor the
Muslim Brotherhood. Terrorist tactics were also used by the groups Irgun and the Stern Gang to aid in the creation of a Jewish state. Meanwhile, Israel stands accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians by the United Nations and human rights groups.
The "terror" list currently includes the Lebanese Hezbullah which was born from the resistance to the 1982 Israeli invasion, and until last year included Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.
Another former member of the U.S. terror list is the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The original PLO charter concurs with the Hamas charter, proclaiming that "armed struggle" be used to reclaim Palestine. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once accused former PLO leader Yasser Arafat of being a "terrorist," and refused to negotiate with him. Today the PLO’s biggest party, Fatah, is the preferred peace partner.
Recently, Hamas has firmly maintained that it is now willing to participate in negotiations based on internationally recognized borders and rights. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that as early as 2006, Hamas leader Ismaeil Haniyeh offered "a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders and … a truce for many years." Haniyeh called on President Bush to launch a dialogue with the Hamas government. "We are not warmongers, we are peacemakers and we call on the American government to have direct negotiations with the elected government." Hamas re-emphasized this position recently, adding, "our conflict is not with the Jews, our problem is with the occupation." The United States and Israel ignored the offer.
Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank — which were occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War — are recognized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 as the land for a future Palestinian state. This has become the international consensus for peace, with only Israel, the United States and a handful of other nations voting against the annual General Assembly resolution calling for a settlement based on "242."
MYTH # 2
Hamas is to blame for ending the cease-fire and Israel’s actions are in self-defense.
The three conditions for the June 2008 ceasefire were that (1) Israel would drastically reduce its military blockade of Gaza, (2) Israel would halt all military incursions into Gaza and, (3) Hamas would halt all rocket attacks into Israel.
From the outset of the cease-fire, Israel did little to ease its military blockade. As a result, Gazans continued to suffer from a lack of food, fuel, financial aid, electricity, clean water, medical supplies and more. The United Nations warned that Gaza would face "catastrophe" if the blockade were not lifted. The Israeli government maintained that the blockade was necessary to stop rocket attacks. However, as the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper reports, Hamas had ceased launching rockets into Israel during the cease-fire and even arrested members of militant groups who did fire a handful of rockets.
Despite the intense blockade against Gazan civilians, the cease-fire held until Nov. 4. On that date, Haaretz reports, it was the Israeli military that made an incursion into Gaza and killed six Palestinians. The Israeli government sought to justify these actions, saying that these Palestinians were suspected of plotting to kidnap Israeli soldiers. Predictably, militants responded to the attack by launching rockets into Israel. Thus began the unraveling of the cease-fire.
Following the end of the cease-fire, Israel moved closer to an invasion, claiming this was the only remaining option to eliminate rocket attacks from Gaza. According to Haaretz, Hamas offered to extend the ceasefire if Israel lifted its blockade. There is evidence that Israel was planning to strike Gaza before and during the cease-fire.
The White House said that Israel will cease its attack when Hamas has agreed to a truce. Hamas has said it would abide by a cease-fire if border crossings were reopened and the economic siege of Gaza ended. Israel has refused this offer.
Meanwhile, Israel unleashed its U.S.-supplied arsenal — which includes unconventional weapons — while attacking its own designated safe-areas. This forced the Red Cross and United Nations to briefly suspend relief work in Gaza, spurring the Vatican to compare the conditions there to a "concentration camp." The United States abstained from a Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire.
MYTH #3
Israel and the United States are doing everything in their power to achieve peace.
For decades the United States has provided Israel with billions of dollars annually in military aid and backed Israel’s seizure of occupied lands. The number of settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem has increased from 200,000 in 1990 to more than 460,000 today. Claiming it received secret U.S. approval , Israel announced it would build thousands of new homes in 2008. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that this directly "contravenes both international law and Israel’s obligations" in the peace process.
Israel has also erected a "security barrier" through the West Bank, annexing large swaths of land. In 2004, the International Court of Justice declared construction of the wall "contrary to international law."
Meanwhile, even outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has recently stated that to achieve peace and recognition by the Arab world, Israel "should withdraw from almost all of the territories, including in East Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights."
Amid reports that President-elect Obama may reverse U.S. policy and negotiate with Hamas, scholar Norman Finkelstein observes, "Hamas in recent months has supported a two-state settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, joining the international consensus. It’s abiding by the terms of the truce, showing it can be trusted to abide by its agreements, which means it was becoming a credible negotiating partner." He adds, "Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni stated in early December 2008 that although Israel wanted to create a temporary period of calm with Hamas, an extended truce ‘harms the Israeli strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognizes the movement.’ Translation: a protracted cease-fire that enhanced Hamas’ credibility would have undermined Israel’s strategic goal of retaining control of the West Bank." Finkelstein concludes: "Israel was facing a new Palestinian peace offensive and therefore it has to knock out Hamas."
Click here to view a 2008 map of Israeli Settlements and separation barrier in the West Bank produced by the The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B'TSELEM.
Adam Sheets contributed to this article.
Despite the so-called "liberal" media’s endless barrage of pro-Israeli propaganda, a significant portion of the U.S. public is opposed to the current attack on Gaza. As the casualties mount and peace is pushed further out of reach, The Indypendent’s Jaisal Noor exposes three big myths of the conflict.
MYTH # 1
The root of the conflict is that Hamas is a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel.
It is true that Hamas commits unjustifiable terrorist acts and is on the United States’ terror list. The "terrorist" label is often used against enemies of U.S.-supported countries. When it was deemed in their interest, Israel and the United States bolstered both Hamas and its predecessor the
Muslim Brotherhood. Terrorist tactics were also used by the groups Irgun and the Stern Gang to aid in the creation of a Jewish state. Meanwhile, Israel stands accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians by the United Nations and human rights groups.
The "terror" list currently includes the Lebanese Hezbullah which was born from the resistance to the 1982 Israeli invasion, and until last year included Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.
Another former member of the U.S. terror list is the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The original PLO charter concurs with the Hamas charter, proclaiming that "armed struggle" be used to reclaim Palestine. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once accused former PLO leader Yasser Arafat of being a "terrorist," and refused to negotiate with him. Today the PLO’s biggest party, Fatah, is the preferred peace partner.
Recently, Hamas has firmly maintained that it is now willing to participate in negotiations based on internationally recognized borders and rights. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that as early as 2006, Hamas leader Ismaeil Haniyeh offered "a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders and … a truce for many years." Haniyeh called on President Bush to launch a dialogue with the Hamas government. "We are not warmongers, we are peacemakers and we call on the American government to have direct negotiations with the elected government." Hamas re-emphasized this position recently, adding, "our conflict is not with the Jews, our problem is with the occupation." The United States and Israel ignored the offer.
Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank — which were occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War — are recognized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 as the land for a future Palestinian state. This has become the international consensus for peace, with only Israel, the United States and a handful of other nations voting against the annual General Assembly resolution calling for a settlement based on "242."
MYTH # 2
Hamas is to blame for ending the cease-fire and Israel’s actions are in self-defense.
The three conditions for the June 2008 ceasefire were that (1) Israel would drastically reduce its military blockade of Gaza, (2) Israel would halt all military incursions into Gaza and, (3) Hamas would halt all rocket attacks into Israel.
From the outset of the cease-fire, Israel did little to ease its military blockade. As a result, Gazans continued to suffer from a lack of food, fuel, financial aid, electricity, clean water, medical supplies and more. The United Nations warned that Gaza would face "catastrophe" if the blockade were not lifted. The Israeli government maintained that the blockade was necessary to stop rocket attacks. However, as the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper reports, Hamas had ceased launching rockets into Israel during the cease-fire and even arrested members of militant groups who did fire a handful of rockets.
Despite the intense blockade against Gazan civilians, the cease-fire held until Nov. 4. On that date, Haaretz reports, it was the Israeli military that made an incursion into Gaza and killed six Palestinians. The Israeli government sought to justify these actions, saying that these Palestinians were suspected of plotting to kidnap Israeli soldiers. Predictably, militants responded to the attack by launching rockets into Israel. Thus began the unraveling of the cease-fire.
Following the end of the cease-fire, Israel moved closer to an invasion, claiming this was the only remaining option to eliminate rocket attacks from Gaza. According to Haaretz, Hamas offered to extend the ceasefire if Israel lifted its blockade. There is evidence that Israel was planning to strike Gaza before and during the cease-fire.
The White House said that Israel will cease its attack when Hamas has agreed to a truce. Hamas has said it would abide by a cease-fire if border crossings were reopened and the economic siege of Gaza ended. Israel has refused this offer.
Meanwhile, Israel unleashed its U.S.-supplied arsenal — which includes unconventional weapons — while attacking its own designated safe-areas. This forced the Red Cross and United Nations to briefly suspend relief work in Gaza, spurring the Vatican to compare the conditions there to a "concentration camp." The United States abstained from a Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire.
MYTH #3
Israel and the United States are doing everything in their power to achieve peace.
For decades the United States has provided Israel with billions of dollars annually in military aid and backed Israel’s seizure of occupied lands. The number of settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem has increased from 200,000 in 1990 to more than 460,000 today. Claiming it received secret U.S. approval , Israel announced it would build thousands of new homes in 2008. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that this directly "contravenes both international law and Israel’s obligations" in the peace process.
Israel has also erected a "security barrier" through the West Bank, annexing large swaths of land. In 2004, the International Court of Justice declared construction of the wall "contrary to international law."
Meanwhile, even outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has recently stated that to achieve peace and recognition by the Arab world, Israel "should withdraw from almost all of the territories, including in East Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights."
Amid reports that President-elect Obama may reverse U.S. policy and negotiate with Hamas, scholar Norman Finkelstein observes, "Hamas in recent months has supported a two-state settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, joining the international consensus. It’s abiding by the terms of the truce, showing it can be trusted to abide by its agreements, which means it was becoming a credible negotiating partner." He adds, "Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni stated in early December 2008 that although Israel wanted to create a temporary period of calm with Hamas, an extended truce ‘harms the Israeli strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognizes the movement.’ Translation: a protracted cease-fire that enhanced Hamas’ credibility would have undermined Israel’s strategic goal of retaining control of the West Bank." Finkelstein concludes: "Israel was facing a new Palestinian peace offensive and therefore it has to knock out Hamas."
Click here to view a 2008 map of Israeli Settlements and separation barrier in the West Bank produced by the The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B'TSELEM.
Adam Sheets contributed to this article.
Monday, December 29, 2008
The History of the Media Coverage of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Note: (This was written in early 2006, but this is still relevant as ever for those seeking an understanding of the roots of the current conflict.)
By Jaisal Noor
As the saying goes, there are always two sides to every story. The Israel-Palestinian conflict over the land historically known as Palestine is no different. On one side you have the Jews, a people brutally persecuted throughout their history. Their persecution culminated in the 20th century Holocaust resulting in six million European Jews being exterminated by the Nazis. On the other side you have the Palestinians, consisting of both Muslim and Christian populations. These people have been without a state since 1948, when a Jewish state was established in the UN Jewish Mandate, and have been living under a military occupation since 1967. While Jews maintain a Biblical right to their land, Palestinians argue that they had been living there thousands of years before the Zionists started arriving in the late 19th century. Also, they bring up that while Jews were being persecuted by Christians, they had always been welcome and protected in Muslim lands. The Jewish suffering had taken place at the hands of the Europeans, not the Palestinians.
Since the 1967 War, Israel occupied and started establishing settlements in the land promised to Palestinians, the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The problem is that according to International Law, and affirmed by U.N. Security Council rulings, it is illegal to acquire land through war and it is illegal to build settlements on those occupied lands. Although the Palestinians have received much moral support from the remainder of the world, this has done nothing to relieve them of the illegal occupation, land seizures, torture, and killings carried out against them by Israel. They have in turn committed their own unjustifiable acts in retaliation.
Throughout this time, the US mainstream media has been overtly biasedii through several means.iii The first method is achieved by largely ignoring the atrocities of Israel, while highlighting those of the Palestinians. The second is by ignoring and downplaying the US support for Israel. The third is by not providing a context in which the news unfolds, thus denying people an understanding of the situation. By inaccurately depicting the Israel-Palestine conflict, the media prevents a fair picture of situation from being created.
The entire portrayal of the familiar term ‘Peace Process’ is instrumental in understanding the bias. The reason the peace process was started, the reason Israel decided to reverse its previous position of not negotiating with the PLO, was the high price that it was paying for its brutal repression of the largely nonviolent Palestinian Intifada in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Because of the uprising, for the first time it became necessary for the Israelis to start peace talks. Culminating from a series of talks in the late eighties and early nineties was the Oslo Accords of 1993.
The press heralded the 1993 Oslo Accords as a breakthrough in the peace process. The reality of the situation was very different. All of the central issues for the Palestinians, including sovereignty, statehood, final borders, and the question of settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, and water were all deferred. Israel got acceptance and recognition from most of the Arab world and developed commercial, political or indirect relations with major Arab countries. In light of the so called breakthrough, the Palestinians were allowed to be pushed into the back of the minds of their supporters. All that the Palestinians actually got from Oslo was limited control of 17.2 % of the West Bank and Gaza, divided into 75 islands, all isolated by the Israeli-controlled territory and checkpointsiv. This self-rule was instituted by PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He acquiesced to Israeli demands by accepting Oslo, and following the standard colonial pattern, in many ways became a collaborator.
To maintain his usefulness to the Israelis, Arafat had to impose a harsh regime on those who he ruled. This rule only exacerbated the cycle of violence. As renowned British correspondent Robert Fisk explains, “Amnesty [International]’s own words were more eloquent than any reporter’s notes: “…killings of Palestinians by Israeli security services or settlers have led to suicide bombings and the deaths of Israeli civilians. These have led to waves of arbitrary arrest, incommunicado detention, torture and unfair trials [by Palestinian Security forces]. The Palestinian population have been the main victims of such violations…the Occupied territories have become a land of barriers, mostly erected by Israeli security services, between town and town and village and village.”v By not providing its readers and viewers of this essential understanding of this context, the American press obscured the public’s fundamental understanding of what was to unfold in the following years.
The press depicted this period as the time of the Peace Process, a process that was improving the situation for the Palestinians. Instead, after Oslo the situation got significantly worse for the Palestinians. Between 1991 and 2000, the number of Israeli settlers doubled from 200,000 to 400,000, a flagrant violation of the terms of the Oslo agreement. The people living under occupation were subjected to increasingly harsh treatment, as they watched the peace process stutter and fail. By the year 2000, things were getting desperate. After last-ditch efforts at Camp David and Taba, talks were suspended without any significant deals as new governments took power in the United States and Israel. After seven years and virtually no real progress, all that was needed was the slightest spark to the powder keg of their denied aspirations for the situation to explode.vi
This came in the form of Ariel Sharon, in September 2000. He marched onto the third holiest site in Islam, the Haram al-Sharif. Accompanying was one thousand troops and leaders of a group that wanted to destroy the Mosques, and replace them with Jewish temples. According to George W. Bush, Sharon is "a man of courage and peace," reported the Washington Post on January 5, 2006. It is instructive to note, this was stated with no comment. If one examines his record, not mentioned by the press, one sees a very different picture. One has to again go to a foreign journalist to get the history on the man held “personally responsible”vii by his own government’s investigation for his role in the massacres of up to 1,700 civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. This was a wound still fresh in the minds of the Palestinians.viii
The result of Sharon’s visit was the second Palestinian Intifada, a rebellion that continues to this day. The Intifada, started with unarmed rock throwers attacking Israeli troops. The Israeli troops responded with deadly force. Noam Chomsky, writing in the May 2002 issue of a London-based magazine Red Pepper, makes a very powerful point as he cites the American response, and the press’s refusal to report it. In the days following the start of the Intifada “Israel used US helicopters to attack civilian targets, killing 10 Palestinians and wounding 35, hardly in "self-defense." [President] Clinton responded with an agreement for "the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade" (Ha'aretz, 3 October, '01), along with spare parts for Apache attack helicopters. The press helped out by refusing to report the facts” Unbelievably, one has to go to the Israeli or British press to discover this fact. This self-censorship in the American press continued throughout the Intifada.
As the second Intifada grew, so expanded the Israeli response. These responses took three main forms: illegal killings, tortures, and house demolitionsix. According to the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the occupied Territories, B’Tselem, 3,386 Palestinians have been killed since September 2000, 1,008 of them were classified as combatants, and 676 of them were children. During the same period, 992 Israelis were killed, of those, 309 were security forces and 118 were children. Amnesty International writes that “Israeli security services have routinely tortured Palestinian political suspects on the occupied territories”x. B’Tselem counts that 4170 Palestinian homes have also been destroyed since the beginning of the second Intifada.xi
In multiple cases, these activities were downplayed, while their Palestinian responses, such as suicide bombings, drew much more prominent coverage. Importantly, the noted connection between Israeli attacks and Palestinian response is left out. For example, the internationally acclaimed website Electronic Intifada, notes that CNN exclusively uses Israel figures of killings and demolitions, totally ignoring the corresponding reports compiled by B’Tselem. The disparities are shocking. Where as …Israel claims that during … 13–24 May 2004 “ that 40 "armed [Palestinian] militants" and 12 Palestinian civilians were killed, and 56 buildings were demolished… During the same period, fieldworkers from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, based in Gaza, recorded that "56 Palestinians, 45 of whom are civilians, including 10 children, were killed and at least 200 others were injured".xii
These have only been a few examples of how the press misrepresents the facts of the Israel-Palestine debate. As demonstrated, the media downplays the actions of Israel, ignores the US support for the occupation, and denies the reader a context for the unfolding events that it covers. These combine to give the average American citizen a very biased and distorted understanding of the situation.
The media does this because the policy makers in Washington have decided that it is in America’s best interests to support Israel. In America, it is the media’s job to propagandize the public to get it to go along with government policy. This is important because America is a democracy and ultimately the government is responsible to its constituents.
Before one can talk about the media, one must understand its role in a democratic society, and to do this, one has to understand the different meanings of the word democracy. There are two starkly different conceptions. First, there is the dictionary.com definition: a democratic society exists when the citizens have a meaningful impact on how their country is run. Second, there is the working definition: Democracy exists when the country is run in the interest of the members of the business party, the “‘specialized class’, [who] manage in the ‘common interests’ [that for some reason] ‘very largely elude public opinion.”xiii The public is allowed to vote for either faction of the business party, thereby participating in this democracy.
The working definition came into existence after the turn of the 20th century. Working through popular movements, the public began exerting some control in the government. Simultaneously, the strength of these popular movements made it impossible for the government to continue imposing its will onto the public with the old-fashioned techniques of fear and intimidation. Thus, the media became vital to those in power because its role became to, “ensure that the ‘great beast,’ as founding father Alexander Hamilton called the public, [did] not stray from its proper confines”xiv. The means of acquiring knowledge were to be controlled by corporations, which were in the hands of the specialized class. This corporate controlled media would limit public discourse to ensure that the public would agree with the decisions made on its behalf.
It is important to understand that this is necessary because the public’s actual interests are very different than those of the specialized class. Once alternatives to the corporate controlled press were eliminated, the public’s means of acquiring knowledge would become very narrow. The term propaganda was invented the same time that the alternative to the mainstream, the working-class press, was eliminated from American society. This working-class press has a strong, well-documented history, and had a circulation comparable to the corporate press in America until the 1930s.xv When such alternatives to corporate media sources are absent, “the legitimization of existing authority and power relations is more readily maintained, and the myths that act to place primary reason in abeyance (i.e., the inherent good of the “free market,” economic competition, U.S. nationalism, [or support for Israel]) are invariably perpetuated…”xvi
The working-class press was aware of this new trend, and “according to Yale University labor historian David Montgomery, condemned what they called the "bought priesthood," referring to the media, the universities and the intellectual class, that is, the apologists who sought to justify the absolute despotism that was the new spirit of the age: “gain wealth, forgetting all but self”.xvii The independent press was powerless to oppose this trend, and its ability to represent popular movements and provide an alternative to the corporate media was destroyed.
“In 1920 there were 700 cities” in the U.S. “with competing dailies.” By 1986, however, despite a doubling of the population, “there were only a dozen cities with competing dailies.xviii The ideological battle to oppose the new ‘spirit of the age’ was also lost. By 2004, the media was controlled by just six intertwined corporations.xixTo sum up the defeat, one can quote “Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan, [who]writes 'what each person seeks [today]…is mastery over a world of slaves.'"xx
It is also important to understand why the specialized class has decided that unwavering support of Israel is in America’s national interests. For example, Israel has been a crucial ally in crushing radical nationalism in the Middle East, thereby securing energy resources in the area.xxi Because of its favorable status, it is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. A revelation of what the money is used for may render the public against this funding. This money is used for Israel’s expansionist policies which include but not limited to the "security wall" Israel has built over the years dividing Palestinian lands into little "Bantustans" & Palestinian cross traffic between their own lands then becomes subject to Israeli control via check posts. A fully informed public might oppose this if a debate is ever allowed to exist. The media ensures that this debate will not happen.
Also, the Israel Lobby is a very powerful force in Washington that does all it can to swing policy in favor of Israel.xxii Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, and was created in large part as a safe-haven for the Jews. Evangelical Christians, who also have religious ties to Israel, are among the strongest supporters of the Jewish state.
Oil has played the dominant role in guiding US policy in the Middle East for over 50 years. Resulting from these policies have been enormous profits for US companies. Furthermore, whoever controls the oil resources of the Middle East has a stranglehold and veto power over the world’s economic centers that are dependent on it, specifically Asia and Europe. As Asia and Europe continue to assert their independence from US policy after the end of the Cold War, and threaten to challenge America’s global hegemony, control over Middle East energy resources is become increasingly important in maintaining American power. xxiii
After its creation, support for Israel was originally mild, but it quickly reached unprecedented levels after the 1967 war. During this war Israel effectively crushed the Arab armies and along with it Arab-nationalism.xxiv This was very important because this Arab-nationalism was threatening US-Saudi oil corporations in the region. After defeating these forces, Israel found itself in a very favorable relationship with the US government.
After this moment, Israel became entwined with national interests specifically because it could help secure US-control of the oil in the Middle East. The US similarly supported the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the Saudi royal family in Saudi Arabia, because they could be depended on to secure control of the oil. The US government, as well as the media, ignored the crimes of these corrupt and brutal rulers. As long as these tyrants provided oil, they were not criticized in the US media in order to not jeopardize the close relationship the US enjoyed with these regimes. For example, just as criticism of Israel is absent today, it was unacceptable of Saddam Hussein when he was an ally. His barbaric acts of cruelty against his own people only became an issue and were reported in the press only after he fell out of grace with the US.xxv
Beyond the oil, support for Israel is necessary because it has been an important ally during the Cold War conflicts. For example, it supplied weapons to the Apartheid South-African regime and to the Contra terrorist forces that were attacking Nicaragua from Honduras. This was important, because despite the media’s shoddy reporting, the heinous crimes of those receiving US aid angered the public so much that grassroots movements were able to pressure Congress to pass laws in order to stop their funding. The public had strayed out of its confines, so the US government, still of course acting in the best interests of the public, used Israel as a conduit for the transfer of these weapons.
Another factor in suppressing dissent against US policy against Israel is the powerful pro-Israel Lobby in Washington. Professors John Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt, professor at Harvard University recently published an 80-page paper The Israel Lobby in the London Review of Books. Because this article is largely critical of the large influence of this lobby, its US publisher refused to print it. The two professors bring up the issue of the pro-Israel lobby primarily because they feel that US support for Israel is now hurting US national interests.
According to Walt and Mearsheimer, the Lobby, as they refer to the groups that advocate support for Israel, is considered the second most powerful lobby in America after the American Association of Retired People. It uses its tremendous influence to stop debate of policies involving Israel. One of these policies is to fund both the Democrat and Republican parties, thereby buying their support. It also extensively pressures the media to portray Israel in only a good light. Some key supporters of Israel that are in Congress are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who stated in September 2002 that ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ xxvi“Evangelical support for Israel dates to the 19th century, when Christian Zionists called for the return of Jewish exiles to Palestine to fulfill biblical prophecies.”xxvii Many prominent Americans are Christian Evangelists and support Israel’s expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Such figures include Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives.
The Lobby’s power in the legislative branch is very important, as Walt and Mearsheimer establish: “A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent.”
After the Walt and Mearsheimer piece was published, it was immediately labeled as anti-Semitic in the America media. The resulting hysterics within the US accused the authors of anti-Semitism because they dare to suggest that a pro-Israel lobby even exists. The actual arguments were, of course, dismissed without comment. On the other hand, it had a mixed reception in Israel; it would seem that the US media is more staunchly pro-Israel than Israel is.xxviii For example, writer and former Israeli Knesset member Yuri Avneri wrote in response to the piece: “The findings of the two professors are right to the last detail. Every senator and congressman knows that criticizing the Israeli government is political suicide. If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow annulling the Ten Commandments, 95 U.S. senators (at least) would sign the bill forthwith.”xxix
As has been well documented throughout modern US history, the media in the country tends to go along unquestioningly with the government’s policy decision. Its role is essential because those in power believe that national interests elude public opinion. Overall, the media inaccurately portrays the Israel-Palestine conflict because at the moment unconditional US support for Israel is considered to be in the national interests. Policy makers have come to this decision and in American society it is the media’s job to sell this to the public. By avoiding and skewing the debate, the media assures that the public is both kept ignorant of the facts, and that an educated debate is impossible.
In order to solve this problem, the corporate media must once again have an independent counterpart. Once this is created, the corporate media’s automatic support of government decisions will no longer remain unchallenged. By restoring an alternative press that is outside the reach of private power, critical mainstream debate will resume once again, and the public will be able to evaluate for themselves if the government is acting in its interests.
What is specifically needed is a grassroots campaign to end the monopolistic control of the media by corporations. This must be combined with pressure applied to both the Democrat and Republican parties, forcing them to pass this reform. It is imperative to recall that no movement has had any success without an extensive grassroots organization behind it. This includes the movements that brought upon universal suffrage, the end to slavery, women’s right to vote and civil rights. All the values that we hold dear as Americans were fought and struggled for and would not exist if the public did not force them through the government. This struggle will be no different.
This movement will require is the participation of vast numbers of citizens, talking, educating and debating each other on the merits of this proposal. As soon as the movement is unified, it will demand that the government carry out its wishes, and because America is a democracy, the government will have to comply.
The exact demands and program of the movement will have to be conceived democratically, but they will likely follow a plan that will balance the influence and reach that the corporate media has with independent media. This includes news reporting in television and print, the basic ways that public educates itself and forms its views of the world.
To determine how the organization is run, elections will be held on the local level. Communities will decide what group of people will oversee the management of their local news media. These independent groups of citizens will oversee production, ethics, publication and distribution.
All the various branches of the federal government shall carry out the enforcement of this initiative. The forms of checks and balances currently in place are perfect for dismantling the monopolistic corporate control and making sure that transition to public ownership is smooth. The judicial branch will make sure that the reforms are upheld. The executive branch will be responsible for carrying out the reform. And legislative branch, both on a national and local level will be responsibly for passing further supporting laws as necessary. Funding will be carried out through public donations and taxpayer subsidies dollars if shortages occur. This will be maintained through creation of foundations created in Congress or local bodies.
An excellent example and possible model of independent media is the nonprofit organization Democracy Now. As it’s website www.democracynow.org, states, “Democracy Now! is funded entirely through contributions from listeners, viewers, and foundations. We do not accept advertisers, donations from corporations, or donations from governments. This allows us to maintain our independence.”
The show’s guests include experts with varying beliefs, and its goal is to provide an independent voice that the public can rely on to get the full story on issues. Views that contradict that of policy makers are openly debated on Democracy Now. For example, Democracy Now draws from a vast array of sources when covering the Israel-Palestine conflict. Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Robert Fisk who are prominent critics of Israeli policy are regularly featured on Democracy Now while rarely getting coverage in the mainstream press.
While it serves as an outlet for critics of US policy, it also balances its coverage with features and debates with proponents of US policy. For example, the show recently broadcast a debate between pro-Israeli Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz and Noam Chomsky, and a short while later a debate between Norman Finklestein and Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. Citing experts and academics from a variety of backgrounds allows it to give its viewers, listeners and readers a much more complete and picture of the conflict than allowed in the corporate controlled press.
As Chomsky and Edward Herman in their seminal study on the mass media, Manufacturing Consent, conclude: “The organization and self-education of groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and activism, continue to be the fundamental elements in steps toward the democratization of our social life and any meaningful social change. Only to the extent that such developments succeed can we hope to see media that are free and independent.” xxx
Once the independent media’s voice is able to reach the general American public, it will be able to hold the government responsible, in reference to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The result will be accurate cover both Israeli and Palestinian actions, fair depictions of US support for Israel and a complete historical context for the public.
They will show how actions of Israelis and Palestinians don’t occur in a vacuum, and encourage a fair debate of policies. It will expose false claims of anti-Semitism, which currently is the term applied to any critic of Israeli policy. The coverage will also include reports of non-partisan agencies such as human rights groups.
The current trend of one-sided Congressional votes in Israel’s favor will be examined. The United Nations General Assembly, Security Council, World Court’s rulings and decisions will no longer be dismissed with contempt or ignored. And finally, the media will be able to expose pressure by Israel lobby on the media and government
Lastly, the media will be able to provide a historical context in which the news unfolds. The history of the conflict and major figures, such as Ariel Sharon will no longer be censored. The term ‘Peace Process’ will be able evaluated and history of US and Israeli involvement with creation and funding of extremist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which eventually became Hamas, will be looked into.
By placing checks on those in power, a reasonable debate over policies will be forced to occur. Politicians will not be able to rely on the media to automatically agree with their decisions, may be forced to rethink policies, to prove to the public what their actions are in the best interests of their constituents.
“As Judge Gurfein ruled in supporting the right of the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers, a properly functioning democracy needs "a cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press that must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know”. xxxiSuch a press has not existed in the United States since the labor press was destroyed in the 1930s, but it is not out of the realm of possibility for this phenomenon to reemerge.
i Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict(New York: ST. Martin's Press, 1988)
ii Edward Said, gifted Palestinian scholar made two breakthroughs in his works Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, in which he at length documented the prevalence of the racist stereotypes and characterizations of Arab people in Western scholarship and culture.
iii Although not uniformly biased against Palestinian, the media’s overall depiction of them in reporting has been thoroughly documented by media watch dog groups, such as Counter-Punch. http://www.counterpunch.org/kchristison0819.html
iv Rashid Khalidi,"The United States and Palestine" in Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Periolous Path in the Middle East(Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
v Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 333.
vi Ibid, 4
vii http://www.caabu.org/press/documents/kahan-commission-contents.html
viii Robert Fisk “When Journalists Refuse to tell the Truth about Israel”, The Independent, April 17 2001, Independent.co.uk
ix9 Norman G. Finkelstein. "Why can Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified" Aftenposten. 1/14/2006
x www.amnesty.org/resources/pdf/ combating_torture/sections/section2-1-2-2.pdf
xi http://www.btselem.org/english/Press_Releases/20060104.asp
xii http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1187.shtml
xiii Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (Boston: South End Press 2003 )
xiv ibid 13
xv Noam Chomsky "Democracy and Education." Mellon Lecture Hall. Loyola University, Chicago . 19 Oct 1994.
xvi James F. Tracy, “Smile while I cut your throat” Journal of Communication Inquiry 25:3 (July 2001): 298-325. Sage Publications.
xvii Ibid 15
xviii Ibid 16
xix Ben Bagdikian The Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
xx Ibid 15
xxi Rashid Khalidi “The United States and Palestine” in Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East(Boston: Beacon Press, 2004)
xxii Norman Finkelstein “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.
xxiii Noam Chomsky “Israel Lobby?” (Zmag.org, March 28, 2006)
xxiv Charles D. Smith, Palestine and The Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York, S Martin’s Press, 1988)
xxv Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 333.
xxvi John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt The Israel Lobby in the London Review of Books
xxvii Bill Broadway, The Evangelical-Israeli Connection, the Washington Post, March 27, 2004.
xxviii Tom Regan, Israeli media condemn, discuss report on US-Israel ties. Csmonitor.com March 24, 2006
xxix Alexander Cockburn “The Uproar Over The Israel Lobby” The Free Press. May 5, 2006. http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/2/2006/1368
xxx Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent.Pantheon Books, 1988
xxxi ibid 30.
By Jaisal Noor
As the saying goes, there are always two sides to every story. The Israel-Palestinian conflict over the land historically known as Palestine is no different. On one side you have the Jews, a people brutally persecuted throughout their history. Their persecution culminated in the 20th century Holocaust resulting in six million European Jews being exterminated by the Nazis. On the other side you have the Palestinians, consisting of both Muslim and Christian populations. These people have been without a state since 1948, when a Jewish state was established in the UN Jewish Mandate, and have been living under a military occupation since 1967. While Jews maintain a Biblical right to their land, Palestinians argue that they had been living there thousands of years before the Zionists started arriving in the late 19th century. Also, they bring up that while Jews were being persecuted by Christians, they had always been welcome and protected in Muslim lands. The Jewish suffering had taken place at the hands of the Europeans, not the Palestinians.
Since the 1967 War, Israel occupied and started establishing settlements in the land promised to Palestinians, the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The problem is that according to International Law, and affirmed by U.N. Security Council rulings, it is illegal to acquire land through war and it is illegal to build settlements on those occupied lands. Although the Palestinians have received much moral support from the remainder of the world, this has done nothing to relieve them of the illegal occupation, land seizures, torture, and killings carried out against them by Israel. They have in turn committed their own unjustifiable acts in retaliation.
Throughout this time, the US mainstream media has been overtly biasedii through several means.iii The first method is achieved by largely ignoring the atrocities of Israel, while highlighting those of the Palestinians. The second is by ignoring and downplaying the US support for Israel. The third is by not providing a context in which the news unfolds, thus denying people an understanding of the situation. By inaccurately depicting the Israel-Palestine conflict, the media prevents a fair picture of situation from being created.
The entire portrayal of the familiar term ‘Peace Process’ is instrumental in understanding the bias. The reason the peace process was started, the reason Israel decided to reverse its previous position of not negotiating with the PLO, was the high price that it was paying for its brutal repression of the largely nonviolent Palestinian Intifada in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Because of the uprising, for the first time it became necessary for the Israelis to start peace talks. Culminating from a series of talks in the late eighties and early nineties was the Oslo Accords of 1993.
The press heralded the 1993 Oslo Accords as a breakthrough in the peace process. The reality of the situation was very different. All of the central issues for the Palestinians, including sovereignty, statehood, final borders, and the question of settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, and water were all deferred. Israel got acceptance and recognition from most of the Arab world and developed commercial, political or indirect relations with major Arab countries. In light of the so called breakthrough, the Palestinians were allowed to be pushed into the back of the minds of their supporters. All that the Palestinians actually got from Oslo was limited control of 17.2 % of the West Bank and Gaza, divided into 75 islands, all isolated by the Israeli-controlled territory and checkpointsiv. This self-rule was instituted by PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He acquiesced to Israeli demands by accepting Oslo, and following the standard colonial pattern, in many ways became a collaborator.
To maintain his usefulness to the Israelis, Arafat had to impose a harsh regime on those who he ruled. This rule only exacerbated the cycle of violence. As renowned British correspondent Robert Fisk explains, “Amnesty [International]’s own words were more eloquent than any reporter’s notes: “…killings of Palestinians by Israeli security services or settlers have led to suicide bombings and the deaths of Israeli civilians. These have led to waves of arbitrary arrest, incommunicado detention, torture and unfair trials [by Palestinian Security forces]. The Palestinian population have been the main victims of such violations…the Occupied territories have become a land of barriers, mostly erected by Israeli security services, between town and town and village and village.”v By not providing its readers and viewers of this essential understanding of this context, the American press obscured the public’s fundamental understanding of what was to unfold in the following years.
The press depicted this period as the time of the Peace Process, a process that was improving the situation for the Palestinians. Instead, after Oslo the situation got significantly worse for the Palestinians. Between 1991 and 2000, the number of Israeli settlers doubled from 200,000 to 400,000, a flagrant violation of the terms of the Oslo agreement. The people living under occupation were subjected to increasingly harsh treatment, as they watched the peace process stutter and fail. By the year 2000, things were getting desperate. After last-ditch efforts at Camp David and Taba, talks were suspended without any significant deals as new governments took power in the United States and Israel. After seven years and virtually no real progress, all that was needed was the slightest spark to the powder keg of their denied aspirations for the situation to explode.vi
This came in the form of Ariel Sharon, in September 2000. He marched onto the third holiest site in Islam, the Haram al-Sharif. Accompanying was one thousand troops and leaders of a group that wanted to destroy the Mosques, and replace them with Jewish temples. According to George W. Bush, Sharon is "a man of courage and peace," reported the Washington Post on January 5, 2006. It is instructive to note, this was stated with no comment. If one examines his record, not mentioned by the press, one sees a very different picture. One has to again go to a foreign journalist to get the history on the man held “personally responsible”vii by his own government’s investigation for his role in the massacres of up to 1,700 civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. This was a wound still fresh in the minds of the Palestinians.viii
The result of Sharon’s visit was the second Palestinian Intifada, a rebellion that continues to this day. The Intifada, started with unarmed rock throwers attacking Israeli troops. The Israeli troops responded with deadly force. Noam Chomsky, writing in the May 2002 issue of a London-based magazine Red Pepper, makes a very powerful point as he cites the American response, and the press’s refusal to report it. In the days following the start of the Intifada “Israel used US helicopters to attack civilian targets, killing 10 Palestinians and wounding 35, hardly in "self-defense." [President] Clinton responded with an agreement for "the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade" (Ha'aretz, 3 October, '01), along with spare parts for Apache attack helicopters. The press helped out by refusing to report the facts” Unbelievably, one has to go to the Israeli or British press to discover this fact. This self-censorship in the American press continued throughout the Intifada.
As the second Intifada grew, so expanded the Israeli response. These responses took three main forms: illegal killings, tortures, and house demolitionsix. According to the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the occupied Territories, B’Tselem, 3,386 Palestinians have been killed since September 2000, 1,008 of them were classified as combatants, and 676 of them were children. During the same period, 992 Israelis were killed, of those, 309 were security forces and 118 were children. Amnesty International writes that “Israeli security services have routinely tortured Palestinian political suspects on the occupied territories”x. B’Tselem counts that 4170 Palestinian homes have also been destroyed since the beginning of the second Intifada.xi
In multiple cases, these activities were downplayed, while their Palestinian responses, such as suicide bombings, drew much more prominent coverage. Importantly, the noted connection between Israeli attacks and Palestinian response is left out. For example, the internationally acclaimed website Electronic Intifada, notes that CNN exclusively uses Israel figures of killings and demolitions, totally ignoring the corresponding reports compiled by B’Tselem. The disparities are shocking. Where as …Israel claims that during … 13–24 May 2004 “ that 40 "armed [Palestinian] militants" and 12 Palestinian civilians were killed, and 56 buildings were demolished… During the same period, fieldworkers from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, based in Gaza, recorded that "56 Palestinians, 45 of whom are civilians, including 10 children, were killed and at least 200 others were injured".xii
These have only been a few examples of how the press misrepresents the facts of the Israel-Palestine debate. As demonstrated, the media downplays the actions of Israel, ignores the US support for the occupation, and denies the reader a context for the unfolding events that it covers. These combine to give the average American citizen a very biased and distorted understanding of the situation.
The media does this because the policy makers in Washington have decided that it is in America’s best interests to support Israel. In America, it is the media’s job to propagandize the public to get it to go along with government policy. This is important because America is a democracy and ultimately the government is responsible to its constituents.
Before one can talk about the media, one must understand its role in a democratic society, and to do this, one has to understand the different meanings of the word democracy. There are two starkly different conceptions. First, there is the dictionary.com definition: a democratic society exists when the citizens have a meaningful impact on how their country is run. Second, there is the working definition: Democracy exists when the country is run in the interest of the members of the business party, the “‘specialized class’, [who] manage in the ‘common interests’ [that for some reason] ‘very largely elude public opinion.”xiii The public is allowed to vote for either faction of the business party, thereby participating in this democracy.
The working definition came into existence after the turn of the 20th century. Working through popular movements, the public began exerting some control in the government. Simultaneously, the strength of these popular movements made it impossible for the government to continue imposing its will onto the public with the old-fashioned techniques of fear and intimidation. Thus, the media became vital to those in power because its role became to, “ensure that the ‘great beast,’ as founding father Alexander Hamilton called the public, [did] not stray from its proper confines”xiv. The means of acquiring knowledge were to be controlled by corporations, which were in the hands of the specialized class. This corporate controlled media would limit public discourse to ensure that the public would agree with the decisions made on its behalf.
It is important to understand that this is necessary because the public’s actual interests are very different than those of the specialized class. Once alternatives to the corporate controlled press were eliminated, the public’s means of acquiring knowledge would become very narrow. The term propaganda was invented the same time that the alternative to the mainstream, the working-class press, was eliminated from American society. This working-class press has a strong, well-documented history, and had a circulation comparable to the corporate press in America until the 1930s.xv When such alternatives to corporate media sources are absent, “the legitimization of existing authority and power relations is more readily maintained, and the myths that act to place primary reason in abeyance (i.e., the inherent good of the “free market,” economic competition, U.S. nationalism, [or support for Israel]) are invariably perpetuated…”xvi
The working-class press was aware of this new trend, and “according to Yale University labor historian David Montgomery, condemned what they called the "bought priesthood," referring to the media, the universities and the intellectual class, that is, the apologists who sought to justify the absolute despotism that was the new spirit of the age: “gain wealth, forgetting all but self”.xvii The independent press was powerless to oppose this trend, and its ability to represent popular movements and provide an alternative to the corporate media was destroyed.
“In 1920 there were 700 cities” in the U.S. “with competing dailies.” By 1986, however, despite a doubling of the population, “there were only a dozen cities with competing dailies.xviii The ideological battle to oppose the new ‘spirit of the age’ was also lost. By 2004, the media was controlled by just six intertwined corporations.xixTo sum up the defeat, one can quote “Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan, [who]writes 'what each person seeks [today]…is mastery over a world of slaves.'"xx
It is also important to understand why the specialized class has decided that unwavering support of Israel is in America’s national interests. For example, Israel has been a crucial ally in crushing radical nationalism in the Middle East, thereby securing energy resources in the area.xxi Because of its favorable status, it is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. A revelation of what the money is used for may render the public against this funding. This money is used for Israel’s expansionist policies which include but not limited to the "security wall" Israel has built over the years dividing Palestinian lands into little "Bantustans" & Palestinian cross traffic between their own lands then becomes subject to Israeli control via check posts. A fully informed public might oppose this if a debate is ever allowed to exist. The media ensures that this debate will not happen.
Also, the Israel Lobby is a very powerful force in Washington that does all it can to swing policy in favor of Israel.xxii Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, and was created in large part as a safe-haven for the Jews. Evangelical Christians, who also have religious ties to Israel, are among the strongest supporters of the Jewish state.
Oil has played the dominant role in guiding US policy in the Middle East for over 50 years. Resulting from these policies have been enormous profits for US companies. Furthermore, whoever controls the oil resources of the Middle East has a stranglehold and veto power over the world’s economic centers that are dependent on it, specifically Asia and Europe. As Asia and Europe continue to assert their independence from US policy after the end of the Cold War, and threaten to challenge America’s global hegemony, control over Middle East energy resources is become increasingly important in maintaining American power. xxiii
After its creation, support for Israel was originally mild, but it quickly reached unprecedented levels after the 1967 war. During this war Israel effectively crushed the Arab armies and along with it Arab-nationalism.xxiv This was very important because this Arab-nationalism was threatening US-Saudi oil corporations in the region. After defeating these forces, Israel found itself in a very favorable relationship with the US government.
After this moment, Israel became entwined with national interests specifically because it could help secure US-control of the oil in the Middle East. The US similarly supported the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the Saudi royal family in Saudi Arabia, because they could be depended on to secure control of the oil. The US government, as well as the media, ignored the crimes of these corrupt and brutal rulers. As long as these tyrants provided oil, they were not criticized in the US media in order to not jeopardize the close relationship the US enjoyed with these regimes. For example, just as criticism of Israel is absent today, it was unacceptable of Saddam Hussein when he was an ally. His barbaric acts of cruelty against his own people only became an issue and were reported in the press only after he fell out of grace with the US.xxv
Beyond the oil, support for Israel is necessary because it has been an important ally during the Cold War conflicts. For example, it supplied weapons to the Apartheid South-African regime and to the Contra terrorist forces that were attacking Nicaragua from Honduras. This was important, because despite the media’s shoddy reporting, the heinous crimes of those receiving US aid angered the public so much that grassroots movements were able to pressure Congress to pass laws in order to stop their funding. The public had strayed out of its confines, so the US government, still of course acting in the best interests of the public, used Israel as a conduit for the transfer of these weapons.
Another factor in suppressing dissent against US policy against Israel is the powerful pro-Israel Lobby in Washington. Professors John Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt, professor at Harvard University recently published an 80-page paper The Israel Lobby in the London Review of Books. Because this article is largely critical of the large influence of this lobby, its US publisher refused to print it. The two professors bring up the issue of the pro-Israel lobby primarily because they feel that US support for Israel is now hurting US national interests.
According to Walt and Mearsheimer, the Lobby, as they refer to the groups that advocate support for Israel, is considered the second most powerful lobby in America after the American Association of Retired People. It uses its tremendous influence to stop debate of policies involving Israel. One of these policies is to fund both the Democrat and Republican parties, thereby buying their support. It also extensively pressures the media to portray Israel in only a good light. Some key supporters of Israel that are in Congress are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who stated in September 2002 that ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ xxvi“Evangelical support for Israel dates to the 19th century, when Christian Zionists called for the return of Jewish exiles to Palestine to fulfill biblical prophecies.”xxvii Many prominent Americans are Christian Evangelists and support Israel’s expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Such figures include Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives.
The Lobby’s power in the legislative branch is very important, as Walt and Mearsheimer establish: “A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent.”
After the Walt and Mearsheimer piece was published, it was immediately labeled as anti-Semitic in the America media. The resulting hysterics within the US accused the authors of anti-Semitism because they dare to suggest that a pro-Israel lobby even exists. The actual arguments were, of course, dismissed without comment. On the other hand, it had a mixed reception in Israel; it would seem that the US media is more staunchly pro-Israel than Israel is.xxviii For example, writer and former Israeli Knesset member Yuri Avneri wrote in response to the piece: “The findings of the two professors are right to the last detail. Every senator and congressman knows that criticizing the Israeli government is political suicide. If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow annulling the Ten Commandments, 95 U.S. senators (at least) would sign the bill forthwith.”xxix
As has been well documented throughout modern US history, the media in the country tends to go along unquestioningly with the government’s policy decision. Its role is essential because those in power believe that national interests elude public opinion. Overall, the media inaccurately portrays the Israel-Palestine conflict because at the moment unconditional US support for Israel is considered to be in the national interests. Policy makers have come to this decision and in American society it is the media’s job to sell this to the public. By avoiding and skewing the debate, the media assures that the public is both kept ignorant of the facts, and that an educated debate is impossible.
In order to solve this problem, the corporate media must once again have an independent counterpart. Once this is created, the corporate media’s automatic support of government decisions will no longer remain unchallenged. By restoring an alternative press that is outside the reach of private power, critical mainstream debate will resume once again, and the public will be able to evaluate for themselves if the government is acting in its interests.
What is specifically needed is a grassroots campaign to end the monopolistic control of the media by corporations. This must be combined with pressure applied to both the Democrat and Republican parties, forcing them to pass this reform. It is imperative to recall that no movement has had any success without an extensive grassroots organization behind it. This includes the movements that brought upon universal suffrage, the end to slavery, women’s right to vote and civil rights. All the values that we hold dear as Americans were fought and struggled for and would not exist if the public did not force them through the government. This struggle will be no different.
This movement will require is the participation of vast numbers of citizens, talking, educating and debating each other on the merits of this proposal. As soon as the movement is unified, it will demand that the government carry out its wishes, and because America is a democracy, the government will have to comply.
The exact demands and program of the movement will have to be conceived democratically, but they will likely follow a plan that will balance the influence and reach that the corporate media has with independent media. This includes news reporting in television and print, the basic ways that public educates itself and forms its views of the world.
To determine how the organization is run, elections will be held on the local level. Communities will decide what group of people will oversee the management of their local news media. These independent groups of citizens will oversee production, ethics, publication and distribution.
All the various branches of the federal government shall carry out the enforcement of this initiative. The forms of checks and balances currently in place are perfect for dismantling the monopolistic corporate control and making sure that transition to public ownership is smooth. The judicial branch will make sure that the reforms are upheld. The executive branch will be responsible for carrying out the reform. And legislative branch, both on a national and local level will be responsibly for passing further supporting laws as necessary. Funding will be carried out through public donations and taxpayer subsidies dollars if shortages occur. This will be maintained through creation of foundations created in Congress or local bodies.
An excellent example and possible model of independent media is the nonprofit organization Democracy Now. As it’s website www.democracynow.org, states, “Democracy Now! is funded entirely through contributions from listeners, viewers, and foundations. We do not accept advertisers, donations from corporations, or donations from governments. This allows us to maintain our independence.”
The show’s guests include experts with varying beliefs, and its goal is to provide an independent voice that the public can rely on to get the full story on issues. Views that contradict that of policy makers are openly debated on Democracy Now. For example, Democracy Now draws from a vast array of sources when covering the Israel-Palestine conflict. Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Robert Fisk who are prominent critics of Israeli policy are regularly featured on Democracy Now while rarely getting coverage in the mainstream press.
While it serves as an outlet for critics of US policy, it also balances its coverage with features and debates with proponents of US policy. For example, the show recently broadcast a debate between pro-Israeli Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz and Noam Chomsky, and a short while later a debate between Norman Finklestein and Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. Citing experts and academics from a variety of backgrounds allows it to give its viewers, listeners and readers a much more complete and picture of the conflict than allowed in the corporate controlled press.
As Chomsky and Edward Herman in their seminal study on the mass media, Manufacturing Consent, conclude: “The organization and self-education of groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and activism, continue to be the fundamental elements in steps toward the democratization of our social life and any meaningful social change. Only to the extent that such developments succeed can we hope to see media that are free and independent.” xxx
Once the independent media’s voice is able to reach the general American public, it will be able to hold the government responsible, in reference to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The result will be accurate cover both Israeli and Palestinian actions, fair depictions of US support for Israel and a complete historical context for the public.
They will show how actions of Israelis and Palestinians don’t occur in a vacuum, and encourage a fair debate of policies. It will expose false claims of anti-Semitism, which currently is the term applied to any critic of Israeli policy. The coverage will also include reports of non-partisan agencies such as human rights groups.
The current trend of one-sided Congressional votes in Israel’s favor will be examined. The United Nations General Assembly, Security Council, World Court’s rulings and decisions will no longer be dismissed with contempt or ignored. And finally, the media will be able to expose pressure by Israel lobby on the media and government
Lastly, the media will be able to provide a historical context in which the news unfolds. The history of the conflict and major figures, such as Ariel Sharon will no longer be censored. The term ‘Peace Process’ will be able evaluated and history of US and Israeli involvement with creation and funding of extremist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which eventually became Hamas, will be looked into.
By placing checks on those in power, a reasonable debate over policies will be forced to occur. Politicians will not be able to rely on the media to automatically agree with their decisions, may be forced to rethink policies, to prove to the public what their actions are in the best interests of their constituents.
“As Judge Gurfein ruled in supporting the right of the New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers, a properly functioning democracy needs "a cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press that must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know”. xxxiSuch a press has not existed in the United States since the labor press was destroyed in the 1930s, but it is not out of the realm of possibility for this phenomenon to reemerge.
i Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict(New York: ST. Martin's Press, 1988)
ii Edward Said, gifted Palestinian scholar made two breakthroughs in his works Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, in which he at length documented the prevalence of the racist stereotypes and characterizations of Arab people in Western scholarship and culture.
iii Although not uniformly biased against Palestinian, the media’s overall depiction of them in reporting has been thoroughly documented by media watch dog groups, such as Counter-Punch. http://www.counterpunch.org/kchristison0819.html
iv Rashid Khalidi,"The United States and Palestine" in Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Periolous Path in the Middle East(Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
v Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 333.
vi Ibid, 4
vii http://www.caabu.org/press/documents/kahan-commission-contents.html
viii Robert Fisk “When Journalists Refuse to tell the Truth about Israel”, The Independent, April 17 2001, Independent.co.uk
ix9 Norman G. Finkelstein. "Why can Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified" Aftenposten. 1/14/2006
x www.amnesty.org/resources/pdf/ combating_torture/sections/section2-1-2-2.pdf
xi http://www.btselem.org/english/Press_Releases/20060104.asp
xii http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1187.shtml
xiii Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (Boston: South End Press 2003 )
xiv ibid 13
xv Noam Chomsky "Democracy and Education." Mellon Lecture Hall. Loyola University, Chicago . 19 Oct 1994.
xvi James F. Tracy, “Smile while I cut your throat” Journal of Communication Inquiry 25:3 (July 2001): 298-325. Sage Publications.
xvii Ibid 15
xviii Ibid 16
xix Ben Bagdikian The Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
xx Ibid 15
xxi Rashid Khalidi “The United States and Palestine” in Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East(Boston: Beacon Press, 2004)
xxii Norman Finkelstein “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.
xxiii Noam Chomsky “Israel Lobby?” (Zmag.org, March 28, 2006)
xxiv Charles D. Smith, Palestine and The Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York, S Martin’s Press, 1988)
xxv Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 333.
xxvi John Mearsheimer Stephen Walt The Israel Lobby in the London Review of Books
xxvii Bill Broadway, The Evangelical-Israeli Connection, the Washington Post, March 27, 2004.
xxviii Tom Regan, Israeli media condemn, discuss report on US-Israel ties. Csmonitor.com March 24, 2006
xxix Alexander Cockburn “The Uproar Over The Israel Lobby” The Free Press. May 5, 2006. http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/2/2006/1368
xxx Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent.Pantheon Books, 1988
xxxi ibid 30.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Defining an Occupation: Voices about Apartheid in the Palestinian Territories
By Jaisal Noor
Recently the United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockman joined a growing number of international figures when he equated Israeli policies with that of apartheid South Africa. “Although different,” he said, “what is being done against the Palestinian people seems to me like a version of the hideous policy of apartheid. That can not, should not, be allowed to continue.”
D’Escoto Brockman also suggested that, “the U.N. should consider following the lead of a new generation of civil society, who are calling for a similar non-violent campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel to end its violations”
The comparison of the Israeli occupation to apartheid remains a controversial one, especially within the United States. Recently Palestinian-Canadian activist Diana Buttu and South African anti-apartheid activist Reverend Eddie Makue completed a two week, anti-apartheid speaking tour through eleven U.S. cities. Their trip was sponsored by the organization, U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. I asked them to discuss the link between apartheid South Africa and the conditions in Palestine, the reasons behind their tour and their advice to activists hoping for change under the Obama administration. Here is an excerpt of the interview.
Jaisal Noor: Could you briefly describe apartheid in South Africa for those not familiar with it? Why do you find it important to make a link between apartheid in South Africa to the conditions in Palestine today?
Eddie Makue: Apartheid in South Africa was a formalized system of discrimination based on race, where the official policy of the government was separating people in society. The main sufferers under the system were the native black people of the country who particularly suffered separation under the basis of land, and on the basis of the movement of people in the country through some very rigid laws that were developed. And important to note is the fact that the system was rejected by the world calling it a crime against humanity. The rulers of the apartheid system considered themselves a law unto themselves and refused to be judged by any people, other then themselves.
What we find in Palestine in the moment is that there are very many similarities with apartheid South Africa in the sense that again it is a formalized institutionalized separation practiced by the Israeli authorities against the people of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Where there are a whole range of mechanisms, like for example the apartheid wall, the use of the military and Israeli police in order to prevent the free movement of the Palestinian people, and that is — like in the case of apartheid South Africa — done against the will of the people that are the victims of the system.
JN: Why did you decide that now was the time for an anti-apartheid tour in the United States?
EM: We never anticipated that America with its own bad civil rights record would reach a situation where a black person would be appointed as the president. We believe that it is therefore appropriate at this time, when these changes are happening in the United States that this tour be undertaken.
When you talk about strategy — we have learned that often when the people lead that the leaders follow. [It’s essential] to build a critical mass the same way that the people of the United States supported anti-apartheid movements, that the people will again stand up to the challenge
Diana Buttu: This issue of apartheid is becoming quite mainstream in the U.S. In Israel itself, Israeli leaders are talking about how this is a case of apartheid. They are not willing to recognize that it is apartheid, but they are saying that is increasingly tending towards that direction.
JN: How might the situation be affected by president-elect Barack Obama’s appointments to key foreign policy positions. Which individuals poised to join Obama’s inner circle are you most concerned about?
DB: The appointment of Rahm Emanuel indicated to me that he simply doesn’t get it. Here is a person who has voted in favor of every single pro-Israel resolution since he’s been in office. The same individual who has even voted in favor of war in Lebanon, a war that was condemned by human rights organizations around the world. In addition to the fact that he has served in the Israeli army. It kinda just doesn’t get any worse than that in terms of being hawkish when it comes to Israel. So his appointment indicates to me either that Barack Obama is simply not interested in dealing with this issue or that if he is, going to deal with the issue, that he is going to take the same position that the Clinton [administration] took, which was to continue to blame the Palestinians, which he already did during his election campaign, to continue to put more pressure on the Palestinians to concede even further on their territory, to accept this apartheid framework, so that is very alarming.
What I think it then calls for activists to do is really start pushing the framework of apartheid and start demanding that a different framework and different approach be used when it comes to addressing this issue.
The solution is not to simply put an Israeli leader and a Palestinian leader in a room together and just pray and hope they get along. There is an occupation here; there is a denial of freedom and there is an apartheid system — not just for the Palestinians who are living in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip — but also for the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel as Israel defines itself as a Jewish state.
So the challenge for activists is not to just be content with idea of people sitting in a room, nor is it to be content with framework of negotiations that has been put forward by the Clinton administration, but to really start to push for global change in terms of the way that people are addressing this issue. Start demanding equality for the Palestinians. And this is why we have focused on the same tools that have worked in South Africa, that of boycott, divestment, sanctions. The three tools that worked in South Africa worked in the sense that it got global awareness as being tools that could similarly work to get more global awareness and push for an end to the apartheid that Israel is carrying out.
JN: What are some specific ways for activists to get involved?
DB: One of the tools that worked in South Africa was getting universities and colleges with investment funds to divest from those companies that were doing business with apartheid South Africa and so to there’s been a growing movement within the United States to push for the same thing. An initiative that is happening in New York is protesting Lev Leviev, who has a number of diamond stores in the New York area. This is an individual who himself has been funding a lot of the settlements and promoting this idea of Israeli-only roads, Israeli only housing in the West Bank. There have been a number of protests put on by Adalah-NY [The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East] in order to protest the work he is doing. Also, one of the tools that worked in Ireland was that people stopped consuming food coming from apartheid South Africa. If you look with bar codes beginning with a number 9-7-2 those are Israeli products.
EM: The two companies identified with the Campaign to End the Occupation to stop doing business with Israel are Caterpillar and Motorola, not only in cell phones, but supplying fuses for the bombs and equipment for the observation which inhibits the free movement of the people in the Occupied Territories. When we look at Caterpillar, we are encouraging people to look at the shares that they hold in Caterpillar, so that they don’t support through shareholding the companies operations in the Occupied Territories; but secondly also for people to attend meetings because they have shares in the company and to raise the concerns with regard to the way in which Caterpillar is conniving with the Israeli Defense Force in the destruction of the homes of people in the Occupied Territories.
When we talk about Motorola, we are requesting people to hang up on Motorola and there is a website, hanguponmotorolla.org. And in that particular initiative, we are saying to people that they can stop buying Motorola cell phones because Motorola is allowing its surveillance equipment to be used in the situation there and successes have been achieved before with Motorola where they supplied similar equipment to apartheid South Africa and also recently to Burma and the pressure from the consumers have made a difference, and we are requesting for that to continue.
—
Although he also is critical of the occupation, South African anti-apartheid activist and poet Breyten Breytenbach rejects equating Israeli policy to apartheid. I asked him to explain his position.
JN: In your 2002 open letter to [former-Israeli prime minister] Ariel Sharon, you said that Israel’s actions should not be equated with apartheid. Do you still hold that opinion? Why or why not?
Breyten Breytenbach: There are obviously many similarities between the laws, beliefs and practices that defined apartheid, and the Israeli policies pertaining to the occupied territories of Palestine — and even, to an extent, to Palestinians living in Israel as Israeli citizens. The informing principle in both instances is racism, born from Western colonialism; the essential purpose is economic exploitation and territorial theft; the instruments are segregation and state terrorism — death, humiliation, incarceration, etc.
My objection to equating Israeli policies to apartheid are as follows: It does not advance our understanding of the specificity of these historical and political phenomena (and a pre-condition for effective resistance is to clearly see the enemy ideology and politics for what they are). In this regard, I have said many times that “apartheid” was not “Nazism.” These facile equations may have some propaganda impact — because we all recognize the international revulsion caused by apartheid. And referring to the “known” is a shortcut in trying to make a statement and a bid for support, but we in effect weaken our case because the differences (in method or scale or even intention) can be too easily pointed out and thus undermine the purpose of our denunciations.
Each one of these horrendous paradigms are defined enough in their own specificity and history for us not to need facile equations, which take the place of deeper and closer analysis and understanding. The purported similarities between apartheid and Israeli/U.S. policies also suggest that similar tactics can be used to combat them — I think this is only marginally true. The historical context of these two phenomena are different and the international perceptions and thus possibilities of mobilizing solidarity are not the same either, despite lip service condemnation. The Israeli state is effectively supported from abroad, especially by the USA and significant parts of Europe — for geopolitical, financial and cultural or religious reasons — which was not the case with the SA [South Africa] regime, at least not to the same extent. Finally, in important ways the Israeli occupation actions are worse than those of apartheid — the hatred, the cynicism, the cruelty, the need to humiliate … are more intense and “intimate” than anything we ever saw during apartheid. And then, of course, the Palestinians have neither an ANC [African National Congress], nor a figure of the stature of Nelson Mandela.
JN: What actions must Americans take to help end the Israeli occupation?
BB: For obvious reasons, the USA is the power that could help end occupation and the bringing about of justice — equitable territorial partition (If the “two states” solution is adopted, although I believe that there should be enough political courage and moral imagination to bring about a single-state accommodating both communities), restitution, the return of the exiles, an end to land grabs and blockades, etc.
It could do so because of the intertwinement of U.S. and Israeli interests at both national and personal or community levels, and because of Israeli dependence on the U.S. Israel’s economy is largely artificial, a “war economy” fueled by American aid. What American citizens can do is for them to decide. Greater solidarity from Americans — exchanges, making the situation known, explaining that the Israeli occupation is pivotal to an understanding of the recurrent larger conflicts in the region, having more Americans physically present in the occupied territories to help build, to bear witness, to be “shields” if necessary — all of these will be useful, as long as it is clear that these acts of solidarity are not instrumentalized by religious differences or confrontations and are not anti-Semitic, either implicitly or overtly.
There is always the temptation to demonize the other, the “enemy” — and this is not only stupid, but ultimately self-defeating. No two peoples are as similar and have as much of a shared communality as the Israelis and the Palestinians. This is why it is also so very important for Americans to work with Israeli activists and opposition or even resistance groups, of whom there are quite a number.
Recently the United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockman joined a growing number of international figures when he equated Israeli policies with that of apartheid South Africa. “Although different,” he said, “what is being done against the Palestinian people seems to me like a version of the hideous policy of apartheid. That can not, should not, be allowed to continue.”
D’Escoto Brockman also suggested that, “the U.N. should consider following the lead of a new generation of civil society, who are calling for a similar non-violent campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel to end its violations”
The comparison of the Israeli occupation to apartheid remains a controversial one, especially within the United States. Recently Palestinian-Canadian activist Diana Buttu and South African anti-apartheid activist Reverend Eddie Makue completed a two week, anti-apartheid speaking tour through eleven U.S. cities. Their trip was sponsored by the organization, U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. I asked them to discuss the link between apartheid South Africa and the conditions in Palestine, the reasons behind their tour and their advice to activists hoping for change under the Obama administration. Here is an excerpt of the interview.
Jaisal Noor: Could you briefly describe apartheid in South Africa for those not familiar with it? Why do you find it important to make a link between apartheid in South Africa to the conditions in Palestine today?
Eddie Makue: Apartheid in South Africa was a formalized system of discrimination based on race, where the official policy of the government was separating people in society. The main sufferers under the system were the native black people of the country who particularly suffered separation under the basis of land, and on the basis of the movement of people in the country through some very rigid laws that were developed. And important to note is the fact that the system was rejected by the world calling it a crime against humanity. The rulers of the apartheid system considered themselves a law unto themselves and refused to be judged by any people, other then themselves.
What we find in Palestine in the moment is that there are very many similarities with apartheid South Africa in the sense that again it is a formalized institutionalized separation practiced by the Israeli authorities against the people of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Where there are a whole range of mechanisms, like for example the apartheid wall, the use of the military and Israeli police in order to prevent the free movement of the Palestinian people, and that is — like in the case of apartheid South Africa — done against the will of the people that are the victims of the system.
JN: Why did you decide that now was the time for an anti-apartheid tour in the United States?
EM: We never anticipated that America with its own bad civil rights record would reach a situation where a black person would be appointed as the president. We believe that it is therefore appropriate at this time, when these changes are happening in the United States that this tour be undertaken.
When you talk about strategy — we have learned that often when the people lead that the leaders follow. [It’s essential] to build a critical mass the same way that the people of the United States supported anti-apartheid movements, that the people will again stand up to the challenge
Diana Buttu: This issue of apartheid is becoming quite mainstream in the U.S. In Israel itself, Israeli leaders are talking about how this is a case of apartheid. They are not willing to recognize that it is apartheid, but they are saying that is increasingly tending towards that direction.
JN: How might the situation be affected by president-elect Barack Obama’s appointments to key foreign policy positions. Which individuals poised to join Obama’s inner circle are you most concerned about?
DB: The appointment of Rahm Emanuel indicated to me that he simply doesn’t get it. Here is a person who has voted in favor of every single pro-Israel resolution since he’s been in office. The same individual who has even voted in favor of war in Lebanon, a war that was condemned by human rights organizations around the world. In addition to the fact that he has served in the Israeli army. It kinda just doesn’t get any worse than that in terms of being hawkish when it comes to Israel. So his appointment indicates to me either that Barack Obama is simply not interested in dealing with this issue or that if he is, going to deal with the issue, that he is going to take the same position that the Clinton [administration] took, which was to continue to blame the Palestinians, which he already did during his election campaign, to continue to put more pressure on the Palestinians to concede even further on their territory, to accept this apartheid framework, so that is very alarming.
What I think it then calls for activists to do is really start pushing the framework of apartheid and start demanding that a different framework and different approach be used when it comes to addressing this issue.
The solution is not to simply put an Israeli leader and a Palestinian leader in a room together and just pray and hope they get along. There is an occupation here; there is a denial of freedom and there is an apartheid system — not just for the Palestinians who are living in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip — but also for the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel as Israel defines itself as a Jewish state.
So the challenge for activists is not to just be content with idea of people sitting in a room, nor is it to be content with framework of negotiations that has been put forward by the Clinton administration, but to really start to push for global change in terms of the way that people are addressing this issue. Start demanding equality for the Palestinians. And this is why we have focused on the same tools that have worked in South Africa, that of boycott, divestment, sanctions. The three tools that worked in South Africa worked in the sense that it got global awareness as being tools that could similarly work to get more global awareness and push for an end to the apartheid that Israel is carrying out.
JN: What are some specific ways for activists to get involved?
DB: One of the tools that worked in South Africa was getting universities and colleges with investment funds to divest from those companies that were doing business with apartheid South Africa and so to there’s been a growing movement within the United States to push for the same thing. An initiative that is happening in New York is protesting Lev Leviev, who has a number of diamond stores in the New York area. This is an individual who himself has been funding a lot of the settlements and promoting this idea of Israeli-only roads, Israeli only housing in the West Bank. There have been a number of protests put on by Adalah-NY [The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East] in order to protest the work he is doing. Also, one of the tools that worked in Ireland was that people stopped consuming food coming from apartheid South Africa. If you look with bar codes beginning with a number 9-7-2 those are Israeli products.
EM: The two companies identified with the Campaign to End the Occupation to stop doing business with Israel are Caterpillar and Motorola, not only in cell phones, but supplying fuses for the bombs and equipment for the observation which inhibits the free movement of the people in the Occupied Territories. When we look at Caterpillar, we are encouraging people to look at the shares that they hold in Caterpillar, so that they don’t support through shareholding the companies operations in the Occupied Territories; but secondly also for people to attend meetings because they have shares in the company and to raise the concerns with regard to the way in which Caterpillar is conniving with the Israeli Defense Force in the destruction of the homes of people in the Occupied Territories.
When we talk about Motorola, we are requesting people to hang up on Motorola and there is a website, hanguponmotorolla.org. And in that particular initiative, we are saying to people that they can stop buying Motorola cell phones because Motorola is allowing its surveillance equipment to be used in the situation there and successes have been achieved before with Motorola where they supplied similar equipment to apartheid South Africa and also recently to Burma and the pressure from the consumers have made a difference, and we are requesting for that to continue.
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Although he also is critical of the occupation, South African anti-apartheid activist and poet Breyten Breytenbach rejects equating Israeli policy to apartheid. I asked him to explain his position.
JN: In your 2002 open letter to [former-Israeli prime minister] Ariel Sharon, you said that Israel’s actions should not be equated with apartheid. Do you still hold that opinion? Why or why not?
Breyten Breytenbach: There are obviously many similarities between the laws, beliefs and practices that defined apartheid, and the Israeli policies pertaining to the occupied territories of Palestine — and even, to an extent, to Palestinians living in Israel as Israeli citizens. The informing principle in both instances is racism, born from Western colonialism; the essential purpose is economic exploitation and territorial theft; the instruments are segregation and state terrorism — death, humiliation, incarceration, etc.
My objection to equating Israeli policies to apartheid are as follows: It does not advance our understanding of the specificity of these historical and political phenomena (and a pre-condition for effective resistance is to clearly see the enemy ideology and politics for what they are). In this regard, I have said many times that “apartheid” was not “Nazism.” These facile equations may have some propaganda impact — because we all recognize the international revulsion caused by apartheid. And referring to the “known” is a shortcut in trying to make a statement and a bid for support, but we in effect weaken our case because the differences (in method or scale or even intention) can be too easily pointed out and thus undermine the purpose of our denunciations.
Each one of these horrendous paradigms are defined enough in their own specificity and history for us not to need facile equations, which take the place of deeper and closer analysis and understanding. The purported similarities between apartheid and Israeli/U.S. policies also suggest that similar tactics can be used to combat them — I think this is only marginally true. The historical context of these two phenomena are different and the international perceptions and thus possibilities of mobilizing solidarity are not the same either, despite lip service condemnation. The Israeli state is effectively supported from abroad, especially by the USA and significant parts of Europe — for geopolitical, financial and cultural or religious reasons — which was not the case with the SA [South Africa] regime, at least not to the same extent. Finally, in important ways the Israeli occupation actions are worse than those of apartheid — the hatred, the cynicism, the cruelty, the need to humiliate … are more intense and “intimate” than anything we ever saw during apartheid. And then, of course, the Palestinians have neither an ANC [African National Congress], nor a figure of the stature of Nelson Mandela.
JN: What actions must Americans take to help end the Israeli occupation?
BB: For obvious reasons, the USA is the power that could help end occupation and the bringing about of justice — equitable territorial partition (If the “two states” solution is adopted, although I believe that there should be enough political courage and moral imagination to bring about a single-state accommodating both communities), restitution, the return of the exiles, an end to land grabs and blockades, etc.
It could do so because of the intertwinement of U.S. and Israeli interests at both national and personal or community levels, and because of Israeli dependence on the U.S. Israel’s economy is largely artificial, a “war economy” fueled by American aid. What American citizens can do is for them to decide. Greater solidarity from Americans — exchanges, making the situation known, explaining that the Israeli occupation is pivotal to an understanding of the recurrent larger conflicts in the region, having more Americans physically present in the occupied territories to help build, to bear witness, to be “shields” if necessary — all of these will be useful, as long as it is clear that these acts of solidarity are not instrumentalized by religious differences or confrontations and are not anti-Semitic, either implicitly or overtly.
There is always the temptation to demonize the other, the “enemy” — and this is not only stupid, but ultimately self-defeating. No two peoples are as similar and have as much of a shared communality as the Israelis and the Palestinians. This is why it is also so very important for Americans to work with Israeli activists and opposition or even resistance groups, of whom there are quite a number.
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