Despairing Angels
Carnalized in our time
Wingless
floating floating
Serenading cities aflame
far below
Lyrics of death descending
Shrill with despair
Not not
the sweet Tiepolo angels
Now now
a lost imagining:
the sweetest among angels
are being tutored to die
While wingless beings
graceless and grotesque float
above our menaced planet
One of the flashpoints in Occupied Palestine in recent years has involved non-violent weekly protests against continued Israeli construction of a separation wall extending throughout the whole of the West Bank. A particularly active site for these protests has been the village of Bi’lin near the city of Ramallah, and it is here where the Israeli penchant to use deadly force to disrupt nonviolent demonstrations raises deep legal and moral concerns. These concerns are accentuated when it is realized that way back in 2004 the International Court of Justice (the highest judicial body in the UN System) in a rare near unanimous ruling declared the construction of the wall on occupied Palestinian territory to be unlawful, and reached findings ordering Israel to dismantle the wall and compensate Palestinians for the harm done. Israel has defied this ruling, and so the wall remains, and work continues on segments yet to be completed.
It is against this background that the world should take note of the shocking death of Jawaher Abu Rahma on the first day of 2011 as a result of suffocation resulting from tear gas inhalation while not even being part of the Bi’lin demonstration. Witnesses confirm that she was standing above the actual demonstration as an interested spectator. It was a large year end demonstration that included the participation of 350 Israeli and international activists. There was no excuse for the use of such a harsh method of disrupting a protest against a feature of the occupation that had been pronounced to be unlawful by an authoritative international body. As it happens the brother of Ms. Rahman had been killed a few months earlier by a tear gas canister fired with a high velocity from a close range. And there are many other reports of casualties caused by Israel’s extreme methods of crowd control. International activists have also been injured and harshly detained in the past, including the Irish Nobel Peace Laureate, Mairead Maguire. Together these deaths exhibit a general unacceptable Israeli disposition to use excessive force against Palestinians living under occupation. Just a day later an unarmed young Palestinian, Ahmed Maslamany, peacefully on his way to work was shot to death at a West Bank checkpoint because he failed to follow an instruction given in Hebrew, a language he did not understand.
When this lethal violence is directed against unarmed civilians seeking to uphold fundamental rights to land, routine mobility, and self-determination it dramatizes just how lawless a state Israel has become and how justifiable and necessary is the growing world campaign of delegitimation centered upon the boycott, disvestment, and sanctions movement (BDS). Each instance of Israeli excessive and criminal violence inflicts suffering on innocent Palestinian civilians, but it also is a form of martyrdom in the nonviolent Legitimacy War that the Palestinians have been waging within Palestine and on the symbolic global battlefields of world public opinion with growing success.
Israel knows very well how to control unruly crowds with a minimum of violence. It has demonstrated this frequently by the way it gently deals, if it deals at all, with a variety of settler demonstrations that pose far greater threats to social peace than do these anti-wall demonstrations. It is impossible to separate this excessive use of force by Israel on the ground against Palestinians from the indiscriminate use of force against civilians in Israel’s larger occupation policy, as illustrated by the cruel punitive blockade that has been imposed on the people of Gaza for more than three years and by the criminal manner in which carried out attacks for three weeks on the defenseless population in Gaza exactly two years ago. Is it not time for the international community to step in and offer this long vulnerable Palestinian population protection against Israeli violence?
.
Underneath Israel’s reliance on excessive force as a matter of strategic doctrine are thinly disguised racist ideas: Israeli lives are worth many times the value of Palestinian lives and Palestinians, like all Arabs, only understand the language of force (an essentially genocidal idea launched influentially years ago in a notorious book The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai published in 1973. It is also part of a punitive approach to the occupation, especially in Gaza, where WikiLeaks cables confirm what was long suspected: “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to [U.S, Embassy economic officers] on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gaza economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” (cable reported on Jan. 5, 2011, Norwegian daily) Then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in a speech delivered in January 2008 said of the blockade: “We will not harm the supply of food for children, medecine for those who need it and fuel to save lives..But there is no justification for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal live while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards (at southern Israel).”
This is a clear confession of collective punishment of a civilian population by Israel’s political leader at the time, violating the unconditional prohibition of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Such gross criminality should subject Israeli political leaders to international mechanisms designed to impose accountability on individuals responsible for the commission of crimes against humanity. It also makes it evident that the blockade is punitive, not responsive to cross-border violence that incidentally at all times was far more destructive of Palestinian lives and property than that of Israelis. Beyond this, the Hamas leadership in Gaza had since its election repeatedly attempted to establish a ceasefire along its border, which when agreed upon with the help of Egypt reduced casualties on both sides to almost zero after being establishment in mid-2008. This ceasefire was provocatively disrupted by Israel on November 5, 2008 to set the stage for launching of the massive attacks on Gaza, lasting for three weeks after being initiated on December 27th of 2008.
In that war, if such a one-sided conflict should be so described, the criminality of the tactics relied upon by the Israeli Defense Forces has been abundantly documented by The Goldstone Report, by a comprehensive fact-finding mission headed by John Dugard under the auspices of the Arab League, and by detailed reports issued by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. There is no reasonable basis for any longer doubting the substance of the allegations of criminality associated with those three weeks of all out attacks on the people and civilian infrastructure, including UN schools and buildings.
The Goldstone Report correctly noted that the overall impression left by the attacks was an extension of the Dahiya Doctrine attributed to an Israeli general during the Lebanon War 2006 in which the Israeli destruction from the air of a district in South Beirut was a deliberately excessive response, at the expense of civilian society, because of being an alleged Hezbollah stronghold, and in response to a border incident in which ten Israeli soldiers lost their lives in an encounter with Hezbollah combatants. The 2009 Goldstone report quoted IDF Northern Command Chief Gadi Eisenkot, who said, “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. […] This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.” In effect, the civilian infrastructure of adversaries such as Hamas or Hezbollah are treated as permissible military targets, which is not only an overt violation of the most elementary norms of the law of war and of universal morality, but an avowal of a doctrine of violence that needs to be called by its proper name: STATE TERRORISM.
We have reached a stage where the oppressiveness of the Israeli occupation, extending now for more than 43 years and maintained in multiple daily violations of international humanitarian law. In its essence and by design the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip should be understood and condemned as STATE TERRORISM as exhibited both in structure and practice.
For Americans, the long occupation of Iraq, dating back to 2003 when George W. Bush notoriously proclaimed ‘mission accomplished,’ is measured almost entirely by the American casualty count and the cost of the war to taxpayers, now estimated to be over $3 trillion, an amount large enough to make major inroads on global poverty and preventable disease. The loss of Iraqi lives or the devastation of the country, or the long suffering inflicted on the people of Iraq, does not enter into calculations. Much attention is given to whether the outcome can be called ‘a success’ or somehow beneficial for the people of Iraq, but without any notice of the enormous human price paid by a people that was never consulted in typical imperial behavior. Iraq is the poster child of post-colonial colonialism that disregards the ethos of self-determination in pursuit of geopolitical goals such as oil, regional hegemony, Israeli priorities.
For Iraqis, the occupation followed a frightening ‘shock and awe’ onslaught in 2003 that had been preceded by twelve years of punitive sanctions that took hundreds of thousands of civilian lives following the Gulf War of 2001 that deliberately devastated the infrastructure of the country to a degree that a respected UN Report described the country as bombed back to ‘the stone age.’ A phenomenon that Madeleine Albright notoriously described at the time on prime time TV “as worth it” when confronted with the estimated civilian losses due to sanctions as 700,000.
During this period Iraq shifted its status from being the country with the most impressive development statistics in the region with respect to social indicators to becoming a failed state in every sense: increasing poverty, loss of skill personnel in all sectors, declining literacy, declining life expectancy, staggering unemployment, destruction of cultural life, pervasive civic violence, lethal religious conflict, all forms of acute insecurity. (See some salient statistics in the Ghent Charter with link at end of text below)
(additional information is contained in an excellent article by Dirk Anriaensens, “Iraq: The Age of Darkness,” <www.brussellstribunal.org/> International Seminar on the Situation of Iraqi Academics, under ‘publications’)
True, Iraq under Saddam Hussein had been oppressively governed, especially for the Kurdish minority and the Shiite majority, but there was a high degree of social order, material progress, and economic stability. True, Iraq was a disruptive presence in the region, attacking Iran (with U.S. encouragement) in 1980, and then invading and annexing Kuwait in 1990. Yet nothing can vindicate the American led response based on war, punitive sanctions, and prolonged occupation. By now it should be evident that the forcible destruction of the regime of Saddam Hussein caused a far worse humanitarian catastrophe than did the abuses, however dreadful, associated with his governance. Military intervention has been uniformly shown to be a darkly dysfunctional corrective for abusive governance, especially in the post-colonial era. The tragedy inflicted on the people of Iraq is a direct result of American crimes of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the offenses for which German and Japanese leaders were prosecuted and punished after World War II at the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals. If there is a lesson in all this, it is that imperial grand strategy as it is playing out in the Middle East and Central Asia is intrinsically criminal, and its cruel impositions can only be defeated by campaigns of global solidarity. Neither states nor the United Nations possess the political will or capabilities to oppose effectively these extensions of colonial behavior in the post-colonial era. As far as human rights are concerned, their realization is essentially a societal challenge, and unless abuse reaches the level of genocide or ethnic cleansing, violations should never serve as a pretext for military intervention even if disguised as ‘humanitarian intervention’ or fulfillments of the norm of ‘responsibility to protect.’
By now, there are no excuses left to ignore the horrors that accompany foreign military occupation. The prolonged experiences of Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan provide a consistent confirmation that benevolent claims of the occupier are disguises for exploitation, corruption, oppression, and violence against innocent civilians.
My focus in this blog is on the terrible condition of institutions of higher learning in Iraq.
The shocking portrait of what occupation has meant for academicians and students is depicted by the Ghent Charter that has been endorsed by prominent educators in Europe and elsewhere, including the Rector of the University of Ghent. The BRussell Tribunal has played a leading part in exposing these realities afflicting Iraqi universities, and has organized a seminar to take place in Ghent, Belgium, March 9-11, 2011, with the title “Defending education in times of war and occupation.” It is important that all of us, especially those paying taxes in the United States to pay for this occupation, understand that our silence is complicity. Especially those of us associated with teaching and research in American universities bear an additional responsibility to exhibit even now our solidarity with those who have suffered and are suffering in Iraqi academic communities. We know that many faculty members have been murdered since 2003 (over 500 confirmed cases), particularly those who spoke out and acted against the occupation, and many more have fled the country permanently. The departure of university personnel is part of a wider exodus of middle class Iraqis, estimates are over two million, leaving the country deprived of the sort of national social fabric essential to avoid predatory forms of foreign economic exploitation of the country. We who devote our lives to higher education realize the importance of educated and dedicated young people for the wellbeing of a country. If Iraq’s future is to be restored to some semblance of decency, its institutions of higher learning will need to become safe and hospitable for students and faculty.
In the meantime, read the Ghent Charter and weep! Ghent Charter in Defense of Iraqi Academia
Digital Enigma
Rivers of words
flowing through my mind
from smiling eyes
from everywhere
These intimate strangers
descending from digital clouds
becoming even aspiring lovers
or worse…declared soulmates
Or so it seems
Or so it seems
Our 21st century senses permeable
that lust for lust
that thirst for phantasy
neglecting what is touchable
this love that infects our bodies
disabling all that is autoimmune
befogging our clogged desiring
escaping from what? to what?
Or so it seems
Or so it seems
The answers my friends the answers
encased in the soul’s tomb
mummified forgotten
mystery unsolved unsolvable
Or so it seems
Or so it seems
It is dismaying that during this dark anniversary period two years after the launch of the deadly attacks on the people of Gaza, code-named Operation Cast Lead by the Israelis, that there should be warnings of a new massive attack on the beleaguered people of Gaza. The influential Israeli journalist, Ron Ren-Yishai, writes on December 29, 2010, of the likely prospect of a new IDF major attack, quoting senior Israeli military officers as saying “It’s not a question of if, but rather of when,” a view that that is shared, according Ren-Yishai, by “government ministers, Knesset members and municipal heads in the Gaza region.” The bloody-minded Israeli Chief of Staff, Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi reinforces this expectation by his recent assertion that “As long as Gilad Shalit is still in captivity, the mission is not complete.” He adds with unconscious irony, “We have not lost our right of self-defense.” More accurate would be the assertion, “We have not given up our right to wage aggressive war or to commit crimes against humanity.” And what of the more than 10,000 Palestinians, including children under the age of 10, being held in Israeli prisons throughout occupied Palestine.
Against this background, the escalation of violence along the Gaza/Israel border, should set off alarm bells around the world and at the United Nations. Israel in recent days has been launching severe air strikes against targets within the Gaza Strip, including near the civilian crowded refugee camp of Khan Younis, killing several Palestinians and wounding others. Supposedly, these attacks are in retaliation for nine mortar shells that fell on open territory, causing neither damage nor injury. Israel also had been using lethal force against children from Gaza, who were collecting gravel from the buffer zone for the repair of their homes. As usual, the Israeli security pretext lacks credibility as if ever there was an occasion for firing warning shots in the air, it was here, especially as the border has been essentially quiet in the last couple of years, and what occasional harmless rockets or mortar shells have been fired, has taken place in defiance of the Hamas effort to prevent providing Israel with any grounds for the use of force. Revealingly, in typical distortion, the Gaza situation is portrayed by Ashkenazi as presenting a pre-war scenario: “We will not allow a situation in which they fire rockets at our citizens and towns from ‘safe havens’ amid [their] civilians.” With Orwellian precision, the reality is quite the reverse: Israel from its safe haven continuously attacks with an intent to kill a defenseless, entrapped Gazan civilian population.
Perhaps, worse in some respects than this Israeli war-mongering, is the stunning silence of the governments of the world, and of the United Nations. World public opinion was briefly shocked by the spectacle of one-sided war that marked Operation Cast Lead as a massive crime against humanity, but it has taken no notice of this recent unspeakable escalation of threats and provocations seemingly designed to set the stage for a new Israeli attack on the hapless Gazan population. This silence in the face of the accumulating evidence that Israel plans to launch Operation Cast Lead 2 is a devastating form of criminal complicity at the highest governmental levels, especially on the part of countries that have been closely aligned with Israel, and also exhibits the moral bankruptcy of the United Nations System. We have witnessed the carnage of ‘preemptive war’ and ‘preventive war’ in Iraq, but we have yet to explore the moral and political imperatives of ‘preemptive peace’ and ‘preventive peace.’ How long must the peoples of the world wait?
It is appropriate to recall the incisive words of Haidar Eid found in his article “Sharpville 1960, Gaza 2009,”(http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10232.shtml
http://www.zcommunications.org/gaza-2009-by-dr-haidar-eid) that were uttered in reaction to the attacks of two years ago: “While Israeli armed forces were bombing my neighborhood, the UN, the EU, and the Arab League and the international community remained silent in the face of atrocities. Hundreds of corpses of children and women failed to convince them to intervene.” International liberal public opinion enthuses about the new global norm of ‘responsibility to protect,’ but not a hint that if such an idea is to have any credibility it should be applied to Gaza with a sense of urgency where the population has been living under a cruel blockade for more than three years and is facing now new grave dangers.
And even after the commission of the atrocities of 2008-09 have been authenticated over and over, by the Goldstone Report, by an exhaustive report issued by the Arab League, by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, there is no expectation of Israeli accountability, and the United States effectively uses its diplomatic muscle to bury the issue, encouraging forgetfulness in collaboration with the media.
It is only civil society that has offered responses appropriate to the moral, legal, and political situation. Whether these responses can achieve their goals only the future will tell. The Free Gaza Movement and the Freedom Flotilla have challenged the blockade more effectively than the UN or governments, leading Israel to retreat, at least rhetorically, claiming to lift the blockade with respect to the entry of humanitarian goods and reconstruction materials. Of course, the behavioral truth contradicts the Israeli rhetoric: sufficient supplies of basic necessities are still not being allowed to enter Gaza; the water and sewage systems are seriously crippled;
there is not enough fuel available to maintain adequate electric power; and the damage from Operation Cast Lead remains, causing a desperate housing crisis (more than 100,000 units are needed just to move people from tents). Also, most students are not allowed to leave Gaza to take advantage of foreign educational opportunities, and the population lives in a locked in space that is constantly being threatened with violence, night and day.
This portrayal of Gaza is hardly a welcoming prospect for the year 2011. At the same time the spirit of the people living in Gaza should not be underestimated. I have met Gazans, especially young people, who could be weighed down by the suffering their lives have brought them and their families since their birth, and yet they possess a positive sense of life and its potential, and make every use of any opportunity that comes their way, minimizing their problems and expressing warmth toward more fortunate others and enthusiasm about their hopes for their future. I have found such contact inspirational, and it strengthen my resolve and sense of responsibility: these proud people must be liberated from the oppressive circumstances that constantly imprisons, threatens, impoverishes, sickens, traumatizes, maims, kills. Until this happens, none of us should sleep too comfortably!
XII..31…2010
I am using this blog to indicate my support for the Stuttgart Declaration that emerged from an outstanding conference held in that German city last November. The convenors of the conference are seeking signatures. To sign go to this url <http://senderfreiespalaestina.de/>
The significance of the Stuttgart Declaration can be expressed briefly in the following three observations:
(1) The symbolic awakening of Germany to the suffering and injustice inflicted on the Palestinian, given the great sensitivity of these issues in Germany due to national memories about the Nazi background and the Holocaust, is a further sign of the growing strength of the Palestinian solidarity campaign. It underscores the fact that German passivity with respect to the Palestinian situation can no longer be justified, if it ever could, as a repudiation of this guilt-ridden past, but rather represents an acquiescence in a cruel regime of collective punishment of a people that has gone on for several decades, which was a core element of Naziism. This acquiescence continues at the level of the state in Germany, but the Stuttgart Declaration exhibits a German societal readiness for moral engagement with the Palestinian plight and struggle that expresses moral and legality clarity about the conflict, and should be seen as a historically important refusal to be no longer intimidated by feverish Zionist efforts to portray any and all criticisms of Israel, however well grounded, as nothing more than expressions of anti-semitism. If the Germans are no longer intimidated by this kind of baiting, neither should the rest of us who lack the pretext of history.
(2) The political purport of the Stuttgart Declaration is to lend the weight of considered intellectual opinion and political judgment to the growing consensus worldwide among Palestinians and their most committed supporters that the vision of peace by means of Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967, leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state on this 22% segment of historic Palestine, is no longer a realistic or desirable basis for a just peace. As the Declaration makes clear, to confirm the Israeli state as a Jewish state is to consign the Palestinian minority of about 1.5 million to permanent second-class citizenship in the land of their forefathers; there is no way that a religiously and ethnically defined state can be reconciled in the early 21st century with human rights and democracy. Beyond this, the settlement phenomenon, now proceeding at an accelerated pace of unlawful expansion, has converted the occupation by Israel into a de facto reality of annexation, which while being unlawful is politically irreversible as a practical matter. Of course, it is Palestinians, and only Palestinians, that can decide on what satisfies their struggle to realize their right of self-determination, and it is open question as to whether in the circumstances of 2011, there is any single entity that can speak authoritatively on behalf of ALL Palestinians. In this respect, the Stuttgart Declaration is one expression of a voice inflected by the convictions of leading Palestinian patriots and their strongest supporters, including those with an Israeli identity. It is a legacy of Edward Said’s advocacy of a unified secular and democratic state encompassing the whole of historic Palestine that is embodied in the Stuttgart Declaration, and one more reason to support and disseminate it.
(3) The Stuttgart Declaration is also a document that exposes the contrast between the perspectives of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement and inter-governmental diplomacy as to how to resolve the Palestine/Israel Conflict. The statist world of diplomacy is still fixed on negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority based on realizing the goal of ‘a viable and and independent’ Palestine living in peace next to Israel. It presupposes an unrealizable goal, given 43 years of Israeli encroachment, of a viable Palestinian state, and imagines that a ‘demilitarized’ Palestinian entity on what remains in the West Bank after the settlement blocs, the infrastructure of roads and security zones, and the separation wall are deducted from the 22% remnant. This inter-governmental road leads no where, but to some combination of illusion combined with Israeli hegemony. The societal perspective, so well articulated in the Stuttgart Declaration, relying on coercive soft power via the BDS movement, offers both peoples and the region a peaceful future based on justice and genuine reconciliation. The issue for all of us committed to this struggle is whether we have the will and commitment to make soft power prevail over hard power.
*****************************************
THE STUTTGART DECLARATION
“Separated in the past – together in the future”. Stuttgart, 26-28 November 2010
Equality – or nothing (Edward W. Said)
From 26-28 November 2010, over 200 participants came together for a “Palestine Solidarity Conference”. The theme of this 3-day conference, with the title Separated in the past – together in the future, was “Barriers and Perspectives for a just solution” of the conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinians.
The speakers were the Israeli historian Prof. Ilan Pappé from the University of Exeter (U.K.), Prof. Haidar Eid from the Al Aqsa University Gaza, Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh from Bir Zeit University Ramallah, the co-founder of the Internet Portal Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian activist Lubna Masarwa, the international law expert from Hamburg Prof. Norman Paech, the journalist and human rights activist Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, Annette Groth MP from the parliamentary fraction of the left party (DIE LINKE), lawyer Jörg Lang, and Attia Rajab and Verena Rajab from the Stuttgart Palestine Committee. The jazz musician Gilad Atzmon supported the conference with his welcome address. The actress Julianna Herzberg and Samir Mansour with his Layalina Ensemble performed in the cultural programme. The patron of the conference was the Israeli-German lawyer and human rights activist Felicia Langer.
The conference participants from England, France, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, the USA and Germany discussed strategies and objectives that they could follow together.
The great majority determined that the dogmatic adherence to the 2-State Solution ignores the actual realities and assumes a false parity between a colonized and occupied people on one side, and a colonial state with its military superiority on the other. This falsely propagates the possibility of achieving a peace in which the Palestinians living in the areas occupied in 1967 are granted limited national rights, while the rights of those living within the borders of 1948 and of the expelled are denied their rights. 2
The adherence to a 2-State Solution condemns Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to live as second class citizens in their historic country, in a racist state in which they are not allowed the same rights as Jewish citizens. Furthermore, the continuance of a Zionist state on the land of the Palestinian refugees denies these refugees the internationally recognized right to return.
The Two-State Solution cannot lead to anything other than the consolidation and cementation of inequality. The model of two states separated according to ethnicity or religion means ethnic separation or fundamental inequality inside this state, as we experience in Israel today.
The contributions of Ilan Pappé and the Palestinian speakers showed conclusively that the hitherto so-called “peace process” and negotiations have been merely a smoke screen behind which Israel continues to steal land and disenfranchise the Palestinian population.
At the end of the discussion there was general agreement that only the creation of a shared secular and democratic state in historical Palestine with equal rights for all can bring peace and equality for Palestinians and Israelis – a state in which all people live together with equal rights, irrespective of their religion or background. This of course includes the Palestinians expelled from the country (fulfilment of Resolution 194 of the UN General Assembly).
Leading powers, above all the USA and the EU countries, continue to tolerate or support the sustained transgressions of Israel against international law and the abuse of all UN resolutions, which condemn the colonial and discriminatory politics of Israel as illegal. The governments of the USA and the EU tolerate the constant attacks against the Palestinian people and their homes. In particular, the complete failure of the “international community” during the Israeli massacre in Gaza in Winter 2008/2009 demonstrates clearly that only pressure from civil society worldwide can enforce a change in the politics of Israel and her supporters.
The politics of eroding international law by Israel’s allies particularly affects the Federal Republic of Germany, and its governments, parties, trade unionists, and media, who have pledged themselves to a close relationship with Israel. They tacitly endorse Israel’s politics and human rights abuses, and even partially support them.
One current example of the connection between Germany and the Apartheid State of Israel is the involvement of Deutsche Bahn with the high-speed railway project between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, 3
which travels through the West Bank, and must lead to the expropriation of the land of the inhabitants, while these Palestinians in the West Bank are simultaneously forbidden to use the train. A further example is the German support for the activities of the Jewish National Fund, a central Zionist institution which safeguards Apartheid in the State of Israel. Currently, the Jewish National Fund is displacing Palestinians in the Negev from their historical lands with its forestation and settlement projects, as the example of the village of Al Arakib near Beer Sheva makes plain. Recently, Al Arakib was destroyed by Israeli security forces for the seventh time.
The conference participants discussed methods and possibilities of how our grassroots movements can become effective towards a shared future for Palestinians and Israelis on the basis of equal rights. The barriers are high, as there are powerful interests for the retention of the role of Israel as an imperial outpost of Europe and the USA and their economic and strategic interests. In this role, Israel is given carte blanche to break and erode human rights and international law.
The most effective method follows the example of the boycott campaign which was part of the effective fight against Apartheid in South Africa. The conference participants agreed on the urgent need for people in Germany also to support the international campaign for Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
With this, they supported the appeal from virtually all Palestinian civil organizations to boycott the discriminatory and colonial politics of the Israeli government and to put pressure on our respective governments and economic institutions to enact embargos and sanctions against Israel. Boycott measures and disinvestment are also the theme of the Kairos Paper adopted by Palestinian Christians in December 2009, and of the Cairo appeal from the Gaza Freedom March at the beginning of this year.
No time can be lost with this campaign, as the ethnic cleansing in Palestine and the slow genocide of the people of Gaza through the illegal blockade continues every day. Many have already died and continue to die on a daily basis because they are denied exit to seek medical treatment. The contamination of land and water from the legacy of the war against Gaza also leads to illness and death.
The campaign provides many opportunities to actively join in as part of an already very successful international network of solidarity groups, trade unions, anti-racist initiatives, anti-globalization groups, church groups, critical Jewish and Palestinian federations and left parties, everywhere where we are actually connected with the power structures, institutions and politicians, that practise and 4
consolidate injustice. Everywhere those who profit from the Israeli Apartheid regime must be called to account. In Germany in particular we must make a stand against the military and so-called “security cooperation” with Israel.
“These non-violent punitive measures”, as stated in the appeal from 9 July 2005 (Palestinian United Call for BDS against Israel) “must be maintained until Israel complies with her obligation to the Palestinians to allow the inalienable right to self-determination, and to all the standards according to international law”.
The following issues must be realized (citation from the appeal):
1. “The end of the Israeli occupation and the colonization of all Arab land, as well as the dismantling of the apartheid wall.
2. Israel’s recognition of the fundamental right of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equal rights.
3. Israel’s respect, defence and support for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their houses and to their property, as prescribed in UN Resolution 194.”
The international BDS campaign is naturally not orientated against Jews, nor against Israeli citizens as such, but against the oppressive politics of a state, and against the firms and institutions which are complicit in the occupation, those who support the occupation and those who profit from it. It is thus supported by numerous Jewish organizations and by Israeli individuals.
Boycott, Disengagement from investments and Sanctions are the key way in which everyone – as previously against the South African Apartheid regime – can help to build economic and moral pressure. The BDS campaign has above all a great symbolic effect, in which it holds a mirror in front of the Israeli public and confronts them with the fact that ever more people in the world regard the politics of their country as criminal.
The numerous attempts by Palestinians, Israelis and international groups to break the illegal blockade of Gaza provide, as with BDS, a method to break the structures of injustice and the isolation of the oppressed. The conference participants call for further Freedom Flotillas and for mass actions by land and sea to bring the blockades and occupation of Gaza and the West Bank to collapse.
The participants of the Stuttgart conference also call for: 5
The release of the over 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners, particularly the women and children, and parliamentarians.
The end of the Israeli settlement politics and the return of the stolen land.
The removal of all barriers, checkpoints and Apartheid walls in Palestine.
The stop of house destruction in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, in the Negev, in Galilee, and in the whole country.
The de-recognition of the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in Germany, as this concerns an Apartheid organization of the state of Israel.
The participants call on trade unions, peace movement, anti-racist initiatives and civil society to embrace these positions.
It is high time to put pressure on Israel. The Zionist system of Israel will not recognize the rights of the Palestinians from itself. Every day of delay costs lives. Our initiatives must avoid giving the impression that this is a conflict between two equally powerful adversaries. In truth, the Israeli military maintains absolute superiority over a practically defenceless Palestinian people. Our aim must be to make this situation clear to people worldwide quickly and effectively and to mobilize for the rights of the Palestinians.
Stuttgart, 10 December 2010
There is no question that the Senate ratification of the New START Treaty was a political victory for the Obama presidency, demonstrating that it could override hard core militarism associated with the right wing of the Republican Party that is mindlessly opposed to any international source of restraint on the American nuclear weapons policy, even if the purpose is only, as here, to limit the costs and risks of nuclear weaponry. But was it also a victory for the cause of nuclear disarmament, getting to zero as the guiding new approach to this infernal form of destructive power?
Not long after President Obama moved into the White House he gave a visionary speech in Prague on April 4, 2009 where he declared “..I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Then came some cautionary language, “I am not naïve. This goal will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, ‘Yes, we can.’” And then the reassurance that the vision is not meant after all to be taken seriously as a political project: “Make no mistake: as long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies..”
Many mistakenly read the Prague speech as setting forth a program of action that would move the world toward a comprehensive treaty for nuclear disarmament, what is prescribed in Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, but this is not the case, whatever Barack Obama may privately wish. There was no reason to point out that nuclear weapons could not be eliminated within a decade or so if the necessary political will existed. After all, the present window of opportunity in modern world history is almost uniquely favorable to nuclear disarmament. No war-threatening strategic rivalry exists among leading states at present. At the same time, the menace posed by non-state political extremists acquiring and using nuclear weapons creates a strong incentive to work hard toward the elimination of this weaponry. Beyond this, there are no acceptable ways to prevent further proliferation of these weapons in the years ahead, and the mere effort to do so carries a high price tag, providing a looming pretext for aggressive war as is the case in relation to Iran. Then there are the moral/legal arguments that have always existed since the bombs were first dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945: these weapons are completely indiscriminate and utterly disproportionate, and are massively cruel in their overall effects, particularly for those exposed to radioactive fallout. To possess and threaten the use of such weapons and to create in societies a citizenry ready to rely on such genocidal approaches to national security is to strike at the moral core of political culture, which must rests on respect for the sacredness of innocent lives, which is completely absent from the nuclearist mindset.
Yet why not consider reductions in the number of nuclear warheads on strategic missile launchers and agreed verification procedures to test compliance on the part of Russia and the United States as a step, even if a modest one, in the right direction? There is 30% reduction over the amounts agreed upon in the last US/Russian treaty on nuclear weapons concluded in 2002, bringing the total down to 1,550 warheads, but even here the results are less than meets the eye. Each bomber is now being counted as a single warhead no matter how many nuclear weapons it actually carries. There are also some minor restrictions placed on the number of launchers that each side is permitted to possess. In my view, this treaty is designed to avoid an expensive quantitative nuclear arms rivalry, and to create some favorable publicity to undergird the claim that the leading nuclear weapons states are beginning to live up to their bargain to get rid of the weaponry, as well as to put the relations between Russia and the United States on a friendlier footing. But if you look just a bit deeper, it becomes obvious that this treaty is at best concerned with the management of this weaponry and not with disarmament. To get the necessary Republican votes for ratification the Obama Administration promised $85 billion for the modernization of the nuclear arsenal over the course of the next decade, and insisted that nothing in the treaty would interfere with the development of nuclear missile defense systems, which are widely seen as not primarily defensive, but as making it less likely that any sort of retaliation by a country attacked would produce significant damage in the attacking country. To go further than this New START approach would suggest that the formidable American military-industrial-media complex is ready to let go of the weaponry, and this is not the case, and never has been.
There are two logics at work in relation to nuclear weapons: the realist logic that believes that it is a dangerous illusion to suppose that these weapons can ever be eliminated, and is reinforced by the geopolitical logic that legitimizes the weaponry for the nuclear weapons states while (selectively) criminalizing attempts to acquire the weapons by other states, including those like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that are surrounded by hostile states and threatened by the United States. Preventing unwanted proliferation is treated by the United States as justifying military threats, and possibly attacks, on the preemptive/preventive war reasoning that was used by the Bush presidency to justify the attack on Iraq in 2003, while neutral or desirable forms of proliferation are indulged (for instance, Israel, India). No domain of international life is more characterized by double standards than is the status of nuclear weapons since 1945. It is an apocalyptic mind game in which the world is supposed to accept the lie that the threat flowing from nuclear weaponry derives primarily from those that do not possess these weapons rather from the nuclear weapons states, above all the United States, that has never even been willing to renounce the option to use nuclear weapons first. In his Prague speech President Obama said that “..as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, we can lead it, we can start it.” We should certainly be asking whether the New START Treaty is any kind of start? It hardly seems so as the side assurances on modernization and missile defense seem like robust commitments to continue to bolster the nuclear arsenal in ways that more than offset the quantitative reductions in warheads and launchers, given their large numbers. The treaty might more accurately be called the New Continuation Treaty.
The other logic is one that takes credible steps to explore the prospects for phased nuclear disarmament accompanied by verification. This logic is guided by a commitment to long-term human survival, by strategic prudence, and most of all by acknowledging the inherent immorality and unlawfulness of relying on genocidal instruments of power and security, and of preparing for their use in circumstances subject to neither scrutiny nor accountability. When the most important possible decision a government might ever make is entrusted to a secret set of guidelines that are never exposed to criticism and dissent, it is obvious that democratic forms of governance are being severely compromised. There is every indication that several of the leading nuclear weapons states will never part with these weapons unless there emerges a grassroots global campaign of unprecedented strength, and this seems unlikely without the tragic stimulus of a war fought with nuclear weapons.
We can appreciate that President Obama achieved a domestic political victory, needed at home to counter the perception of his ineffectual presidency, but we also need to keep focused on what is acceptable and what is not with respect to governmental policy. Perhaps, the New START Treaty will make Obama more re-electable, but it will not move us any closer to a world without nuclear weapons, and by substituting illusion for reality, may reduce what momentum had been building for converting the visionary goal embraced at Prague into a genuine political project undertaken belatedly, but with all seriousness, on behalf of the peoples of the world.
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This table of nuclear forces provides a snapshot of the nuclear weapons arsenal, and the relative size of various country’s share:
| Status of World Nuclear Forces 2010* | ||||
| Country | Strategic | Non-Strategic | Operational | Total Inventory |
| Russia | 2,600 | 2,050a | 4,650 | 12,000b |
| United States | 1,968 | 500c | 2,468d | 9,600e |
| France | 300 | n.a. | ~300 | 300f |
| China | 180 | ? | ~180 | 240g |
| United Kingdom | 160 | n.a. | <160 | 225h |
| Israel | 80 | n.a. | n.a. | 80i |
| Pakistan | 70-90 | n.a. | n.a. | 70-90i |
| India | 60-80 | n.a. | n.a. | 60-80i |
| North Korea | <10 | n.a. | n.a. | <10j |
| Total: | ~5,400k | ~2,550k | ~7,700k | ~22,600k |
| * All numbers are estimates and further described in the Nuclear Notebook in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the nuclear appendix in the SIPRI Yearbook. Additional reports are published on the FAS Strategic Security Blog. Unlike those publications, this table is updated continuously as new information becomes available. Current update: May 26, 2010. a Russia’s estimated total inventory of non-strategic warheads is approximately 5,390 warheads, down from 15,000 in 1991. b The estimate for the size and composition of the total Russian inventory comes with considerable uncertainty but is based on Cold War levels, subsequent dismantlement rates, and official Russian statements. Perhaps as many as a quarter (~3,000) of the weapons listed may be awaiting dismantlement. An estimated average of 1,000 retired warheads are dismantled per year. c Approximately 200, probably including some inactive warheads, are deployed in Europe. d An additional 2,500 warheads are spares and in central storage and not counted as operational. e In addition to the 5,100 warheads in the DOD stockpile, approximately 3,500-4,500 retired warheads are awaiting dismantlement. In addition, nearly 14,000 plutonium cores (pits) and some 5,000 Canned Assemblies (secondaries) are in storage. See here for breakdown of U.S. warhead inventory. f France is thought to have a small inventory of spare warheads but no reserve like the United States and Russia. An additional reduction announced by President Sarkozy in March 2008 will reduced the inventory to slightly less than 300 warheads in 2009. g Many “strategic” warheads are for regional use. The status of a Chinese non-strategic nuclear arsenal is uncertain. Some deployed warheads may not be fully operational. Additional warheads are in storage, for a total stockpile of approximately 240 warheads. h Only 50 missiles are left, for a maximum of 150 warheads. “Less than 160” warheads are said to be “operationally available,” but a small number of spares probably exist too. Forty-eight missiles are needed to arm three SSBNs with a maximum of 144 warheads. One submarine with “up to 48 warheads” is on patrol at any given time. In addition to the 160 operationally available warheads, another 65 or so are in reserve for a total stockpile of 225. i All warheads of the four lesser nuclear powers are considered strategic. Only some of these may be operational. India and Pakistan are increasing their inventories, with Pakistan thought to have a slight lead. j Despite two North Korean nuclear tests, there is no publicly available evidence that North Korea has operationalized its nuclear weapons capability. A 2009 world survey by the U.S. Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) does not credit any of North Korea’s ballistic missiles with nuclear capability. k Numbers may not add up due to rounding and uncertainty about the operational status of the four lesser nuclear weapons states and the uncertainty about the size of the total inventories of three of the five initial nuclear powers. | ||||
How many time have I seen them together
Yet mostly near birth or just after death
Neglecting the hard passage through time
From infant Jesus to the cross is too quick
For my modern eye to see
And rarely caught the painter’s fancy
But holding the holy infant
Became back then the artist’s signature of belief
As holding the limp sacred body
Became the artist’s inscription of faith
This holy mother alone for centuries
Abandoned in hard times by Joseph
Or was it the other way around
Abandoned also by her only son
Or was it the other way around
Her son who finds the world to lose it
And is found again and mortally spurned
And found yet again to be so well remembered.
In 2010 only the most diehard Zionist would deny the presence of multiple forms of Israeli discrimination being daily inflicted upon the Palestinians in the course of an occupation that has gone on for more than 43 years. It is hardly a secret that Israel lavishes every kind of benefit on the settler population of the West Bank while subjecting Palestinian existence to severe torments that bring cruel suffering, and produce an atmosphere of unalleviated anxiety that inevitably accompanies a situation in which the oppressor can do anything it wants whenever it pleases (up to and including dispossession and murder) with impunity, while the oppressed is left utterly vulnerable without the protection of law and placed in a no-law vacuum that constitutes a condition of utter subjugation (or subject to Israeli military law, which is roughly the equivalent), that is, when victimized, no-law, when accused, one-sided oppressive law).
The release a few days ago of an exhaustive Human Rights Report, “Separate and Unequal: Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” is a major event. It exhaustively documents the forms of discrimination against Palestinians in the West Bank, and enjoys the credibility of an NGO that has an impeccable global reputation for getting the facts and applicable law right, and exercising restraint with respect to political implications. When HRW speaks the media listens (although media bias is such that it keeps its mouth mostly shut if the target is Israel). The public has every reason to believe that whatever allegations are made by HRW are fully supported by reliable evidence. For all these reasons, and in the setting of the Global Palestinian Solidarity Movement, and specifically the BDS Campaign, those who support the Palestinian struggle should welcome this publication, and do their best to make it as widely known as possible. This is so even though, in important respects, ‘Separate by Unequal’ ( an ironic play on the American Jim Crow doctrine supported for years by the Supreme Court under the rubric ‘separate and equal’) doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know before, or at least should have known. If anyone is ‘shocked’ after reading this report, it means that for more than four decades their ears have been filled with wax, and their eyes blindfolded.
But the report is more than a conclusive demonstration of acute and pervasive discrimination against Palestinians as a salient feature of the Israeli occupation. It also brings to life abstractions and statistics by relating stories of specific individuals and particular communities that have endured the occupation or enjoyed the privileges of being a settler living in a settlement. This confirms what has been reported in a series of powerful recent books on the occupation that rely on the power of storytelling to convey the actualities of social and political set of conditions. I would recommend highly the following recent books for capturing with compassion and concreteness the daily suffering and insecurity of Palestinian lives, thereby supplementing the more analysis and presentation of the practices reported upon so tellingly in the HRW Report. In my view these books extend the story being told in the report about life in Area C of the West Bank, even though their geographic focus is Gaza or another dimension of life in the West Bank: Laila El-Haddad, Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between (Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books, 2010); Rich Wiles, Behind the Wall: Life, Love and Struggle in Palestine (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2010); Ramzy Baroud, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter (London, UK: Pluto Books, 2010); Sharyn Lock (with Sarah Irving), Gaza Beneath the Bombs (London, UK: Pluto Books, 2010). Each of these books is powerful partly because it speaks so movingly from experience relying on the resources of the heart, as well as those of the head, and thereby creating unforgettable auras of enduring authenticity.
It is an aspect of the ugly atmosphere that still prevails in the United States that whenever HRW issues a report critical of Israel, the organization is described as ‘courageous.’ In a democratic society that supposedly values the rule of law it should not require courage to depict patterns of practice that so flagrantly and systemically violate international humanitarian law norms as embodied in the Fourth Geneva Convention. But it is courageous. A human rights organization dependent on private funding and media access takes its life in its hands wherever it challenges Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. In this respect, it is appropriate to acknowledge the principled leadership of HRW that undertook to produce this report, knowing with the certainty of the cycles of the moon, that a vicious counter-attack designed to discredit would undoubtedly greet the study at the moment of its publication. And what is more, that the attack would be short on substance, but adept at the politics of deflection. It would cleverly seek to redirect the eye of a reader from the message to the supposedly perfidious messenger. Already a spokesperson from the office of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, launched such an attack only a day after the report was released as saying: “Unfortunately, over the last few years there has been a series of documented cases in which Human Rights Watch has allowed a blatant anti-Israeli agenda to pollute its reporting.” (Financial Times, XII.20.2010) In fact,
HRW is scrupulously careful whenever it ventures on this treacherous ground of criticizing Israel, and leans over backward, as was also the case with the defamed Goldstone Report, in giving every possible benefit of reasonable doubt to Israeli claims.
NGO Monitor characteristically shoots from the hip, tries its best to discredit NGOs or individuals who dare to be truthful about the situation of Palestinians living under occupation even if their approach is methodical and mild. CNN gave TV exposure to Gerald Steinberg, the notorious founder and principal toxic voice of NGO Monitor, in which he absurdly claimed that the HRW Report consists of “manufactured allegations” that ignore the supposed intense ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and is thus insensitive to the “legitimate security” of Israel. From this perspective, it is but a short leap to contend that “the report exploits human rights” and is part of the larger plan to turn Israel into “a pariah state.” In essence, the HRW is being criticized because it relies on information gathered by such highly respected human rights NGOs as al Haq, Badil, B’Tselem, and Yesh Din, as well as the UN agency, OCHA. HRW is also accused of promoting the BDS agenda by recommending that outside sources of settlement funding be respectful of international law and withhold financial support. NGO Monitor also explicitly argues that outsiders should refrain from ever holding Israel accountable because it is as an open society that engages in self-criticism and needs no external assessment as to law or morality. Without much effort at disguise, what irks these defenders of Israel is that the claim that the international community holds Israel to higher standards than other countries in the region, and is supposedly obsessed with Israel while turning a blind eye to the violations of others. Of course, there is a bit of truth to this claim, although it overlooks the degree to which it was a colonialist mentality (first, Britain, and then, the United Nations) that inflicted the tragic destiny on the Palestinian people from a time long pre-dating the independence of Israel as a sovereign state. What is also not considered, is the degree to which the United States in particular, through an unprecedented network of public and private sector initiatives, has been regularly financing the settlement dynamic and Israeli militarism.
What is strange, although understandable given the oppressive structure of Israeli discrimination, is the lack of attention given by the critics of the HRW report to its most central contention: that the Israeli settlers unlawfully present and their settlements unlawfully established are given the fullest protection of the law and the maximum security possible, while Palestinians living under this occupation who are according to international humanitarian law, ‘protected persons,’ are abused constantly, are compelled to live decade after decade without rights or the barest minimum of security, that there land and prospects for a decent future are constantly diminished by the expansion of the settlements.
The moderateness, and from my perspective, the incompleteness of the HRW report can be expressed by calling attention to several shortcomings of its conclusions and recommendations:
—time: although the report is explicit about the patterns of discrimination being aggravated due to the length of the occupation, there is no attention accorded to the intrinsic unlawfulness of an occupation that is so prolonged.
International humanitarian law was designed for temporary occupations of short duration, not a quasi-permanent set of circumstances that includes ill-disguised tactics of land seizure and the incremental dispossession of long-term Palestinian residents. Any ‘right’ of occupation should long since have lapsed. It is a failure of international humanitarian law that it makes no provision for this failure to bring a belligerent occupation to a timely and agreed end (here anticipated in accordance with SC Resolution 242 agreed upon in 1967, and pointing to an Israel withdrawal).
—criminality: the report addresses violations of international law and human rights law, but it holds back from describing these violations in terms of their criminal character. Surely, the structures of discrimination (roads, security, legal regime, access to water, mobility) establish the primie facie basis for allegations of apartheid arising from the dual structure of privilege (for Israeli settlers) and vulnerability and deprivation (for Palestinians). It should be understood that the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) treats apartheid (forms of systematic discrimination based on race) as one type of Crimes Against Humanity. This international crime of apartheid is deliberately conceived of as a distinct crime of generic character, and not to be equated with the racist patterns of discrimination that existed in South Africa under the apartheid regime that operated there. As well, the crime of apartheid is embedded in customary international law, which makes it a crime even without any formal undertaking by the ICC. Additionally, the patterns of discrimination are rendering life unbearable for Palestinians residents in most of the West Bank. As many as 31% of those interviewed for the HRW report are seeking to escape somehow from life under occupation. Such an outcome appears to qualify this occupation as a form of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ even if there is evidence lacking of a blueprint or specific intent. An inference of ethnic cleansing follows from the deliberateness of the dual structures of law and administration, producing either direct or indirect forms of displacement of the indigenous population.
—language: the report speaks in terms of violations, not crimes, not the overall illegitimacy of persisting occupation that encroaches on the fundamental rights of the occupied, and leaves those living under occupation without a clear path to achieving their most fundamental of rights, the right of self-determination. I believe it is necessary to use harsher language than is usual in mainstream circles in describing the situation confronting the Palestinians who continue to endure this occupation. It is ‘annexation’ not ‘occupation,’ it is ‘ethnic cleansing’ not ‘house demolitions’ and ‘settler only roads, not just ‘land seizures,’ and constraints on ‘mobility,’ but ‘settler colonialism.’ In keeping with the BDS campaign it is time for the peoples of the world to perceive the Palestinian multiple nakba (catastrophe) without evasive or legalistic terminology that obscures and normalizes rather than illuminates the abnormality of the situation and gives rise to a mobilizing sense of outrage.
XII.22..2010
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The report can be downloaded from the HRW home page website:
Separate and Unequal
Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
GET THE REPORT
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He initiated this blog partly in celebration of his 80th birthday.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Interrogating the Arizona Killings from a Safe Distance
11 JanI spent a year in Sweden a few years after the assassination of Olaf Palme in 1986, the controversial former prime minister of the country who at the time of his death was serving as a member of the Swedish cabinet. He was assassinated while walking with his wife back to their apartment in the historic part of the city after attending a nearby movie. It was a shocking event in a Sweden that had prided itself on moderateness in politics and the avoidance of involvement in the wars of the twentieth century. A local drifter, with a history of alcoholism, was charged and convicted of the crime, but many doubts persisted, including on the part of Ms. Palme who analogized her situation to that of Coretta King who never believed the official version of her martyred husband’s death.
I had a particular interest in this national traumatic event as my reason for being in Sweden was a result of an invitation to be the Olaf Palme Professor, a rotating academic post given each year to a foreign scholar, established by the Swedish Parliament as a memorial to their former leader. (after the Social Democratic Party lost political control in Sweden this professorship was promptly defunded, partly because Palme was unloved by conservatives and partly because of a neoliberal dislike for public support of such activities)
In the course of my year traveling around Sweden I often asked those whom I met what was their view of the assassination, and what I discovered was that the responses told me more about them than it did about the public event. Some thought it was a dissident faction in the Swedish security forces long angered by Palme’s neutralist policies, some believed it was resentment caused by Palme’s alleged engineering of Swedish arms sales to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, some believed it was the CIA in revenge for Palme’s neutralism during the Cold War, some believed it could have criminals in the pay of business tycoons tired of paying high taxes needed to maintain the Swedish maximalist version of a welfare state, and there were other theories as well. What was common to all of these explanations was the lack of evidence that might connect the dots. What people believed happened flowed from their worldview rather than the facts of the event—a distrust of the state, especially its secret operations, or a strong conviction that special interests hidden from view were behind prominent public events of this character.
In a way, this process of reflection is natural, even inevitable, but it leads to faulty conclusions. We tend to process information against the background of our general worldview and understanding, and we do this all the time as an efficient way of coping with the complexity of the world combined with our lack of time or inclination to reach conclusions by independent investigation. The problem arises when we confuse this means of interpreting our experience with an effort to provide an explanation of a contested public event. There are, to be sure, conspiracies that promote unacknowledged goals, and enjoy the benefit of government protection. We don’t require WikiLeaks to remind us not to trust governments, even our own, and others that seem in most respects to be democratic and law-abiding. And we also by now should know that governments (ab)use their authority to treat awkward knowledge as a matter of state secrets, and criminalize those who are brave enough to believe that the citizenry needs to know the crimes that their government is committing with their trust and their tax dollars.
The arguments swirling around the 9/11 attacks are emblematic of these issues. What fuels suspicions of conspiracy is the reluctance to address the sort of awkward gaps and contradictions in the official explanations that David Ray Griffin(and other devoted scholars of high integrity) have been documenting in book after book ever since his authoritative The New Pearl Harbor in 2004 (updated in 2008). What may be more distressing than the apparent cover up is the eerie silence of the mainstream media, unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials. Is this silence a manifestation of fear or cooption, or part of an equally disturbing filter of self-censorship? Whatever it is, the result is the withering away of a participatory citizenry and the erosion of legitimate constitutional government. The forms persist, but the content is missing.
This brings me to the Arizona shootings, victimizing both persons apparently targeted for their political views and random people who happened to be there for one reason or another, innocently paying their respects to a congresswoman meeting constituents outside a Tucson supermarket. As with the Palme assassination, the most insistent immediate responses come from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, both proceeding on presuppositions rather than awaiting evidence.
On one side are those who say that right-wing hate speech and affection for guns were clearly responsible, while Tea Party ultra-conservatives and their friends reaffirm their rights of free speech, denying that there is any connection between denouncing their adversaries in the political process and the violent acts of a deranged individual seemingly acting on his own. If we want to be responsible in our assessments, we must restrain our political predispositions, and get the evidence. Let us remember that what seems most disturbing about the 9/11 controversy is the widespread aversion by government and media to the evidence that suggests, at the very least, the need for an independent investigation that proceeds with no holds barred.
Such an investigation would contrast with the official ‘9/11 Commission’ that proceeded with most holds barred. What has been already disturbing about the Arizona incident are these rival rushes to judgment without bothering with evidence. Such public irresponsibility polarizes political discourse, making conversation and serious debate irrelevant.
There is one more issue raised, with typical candor and innocence, by the filmmaker, Michael Moore. If a Muslim group has published a list of twenty political leaders in this country, and put crosshairs of a gun behind their pictures, is there any doubt that the Arizona events would be treated as the work of a terrorist,, and the group that had pre-identified such targets would be immediately outlawed as a terrorist organization. Many of us, myself included, fervently hoped, upon hearing the news of the shootings, that the perpetrator of this violence was neither a Muslim nor a Hispanic, especially an illegal immigrant. Why? Because we justly feared the kind of horrifying backlash that would have been probably generated by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, and their legion of allies. Now that the apparent perpetrator is a young white American, the talk from the hate mongers, agains without bothering with evidence, is of mental disorder and sociopathology. This is faith-based pre-Enlightenment ‘knowledge.’
What must we learn from all of this? Don’t connect dots without evidence. Don’t turn away as soon as the words ‘conspiracy theory’ are uttered, especially if the evidence does point away from what the power-wielders want us to believe. Don’t link individual wrongdoing, however horrific, to wider religious and ethnic identities. We will perish as a species if we don’t learn soon to live together better on our beautiful, globalizing, and imperiled planet.
Tags: al Qaeda, Arizona, conspiracy, David Ray Griffin, Gabrielle Giffords, guns, Sarah Palin, Sweden, United States, violence, WikiLeaks