As the world mourns the death of football’s legendary player, Diego Maradona, many people are also paying tribute to his vocal support for the Palestinian cause.
The former Argentinian player and World Cup winner died on Wednesday from a heart attack at just 60 years old, following years of health problems.
His death came two weeks after being released from a Buenos Aires hospital following brain surgery.
Maradona has been hailed as an anti-imperialist, left-wing socialist, who has supported progressive movements.
He counted among his friends the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s late President Fidel Castro, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.
He was seen on more than one occasion accompanying Chavez, wearing an anti-George Bush shirt.
He unapologetically supported Palestine, even after hanging up his football boots.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri tweeted his condolences to Maradona’s family and fans across the world.
“We are so sad for the death of one of the greatest footballers, ‘Maradona’, who is known for his support of the #Palestine cause,” he wrote.
In 2012, Maradona described himself as “the number one fan of the Palestinian people”.
“I respect them and sympathise with them,” he said. “I support Palestine without any fear.”
Two years later, during Israel’s summer offensive on the besieged Gaza Strip that killed at least 3,000 Palestinians, Maradona expressed his outrage and criticised Israel.
“What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is shameful,” he said in a statement.
A year later, reports circulated that Maradona was in negotiations with the Palestinian Football Association over the possibility of coaching the Palestinian national team during the 2015 AFC Asian Cup.
In July 2018, he met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during a short meeting in Moscow, again reiterating his long-standing support for Palestinians.
“In my heart, I am Palestinian,” he told Abbas as he embraced him in a clip that was uploaded on his Instagram page.In the same year, Maradona expressed his opinions on the US’s role in Syria, which was in its seventh year of civil war as President Bashar al-Assad consolidated his control over the majority of the country.
“You don’t need to go to university to know that the United States wants to wipe Syria out of existence,” he said.
“Making billions from arms exports which fuel the conflict while providing a small fraction of that in aid to Yemen is both immoral and incoherent.” So thundered Oxfam’s Yemen Country Director, Muhsin Siddiquey after consulting figures from the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) showing that members of the G20 have exported over $17 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since the Kingdom entered the conflict in Yemen. “The world’s wealthiest nations cannot continue to put profits above the Yemeni people.”
They
do, and will continue to do so, despite the cholera outbreak, coronavirus,
poorly functioning hospitals, and 10 million hungry mouths. The latest
illustration of this is the Trump administration’s hurried $23
billon sale of 50 F-35 fighter aircraft, 18 MQ-9B Reaper
drones, air-to-air missiles and various other munitions to the United Arab
Emirates. The UAE used to be a more enthusiastic member of the Saudi
Arabian-led coalition that has been pounding Yemen since 2015. Despite
completing a phased military withdrawal from the
conflict in February 2020 to much fanfare, Abu Dhabi remains involved in the
coalition and an influential agent. Amnesty International has issued a
grim warning that such
weapons might well be used in “attacks that violate international humanitarian
law and kill, as well as injure, thousands of Yemeni civilians.”
With
the imminent change of administration in the United States, there is a moral
flutter in Congressional ranks, though much of it remains meek and slanted.
Democratic Senators Bob Menendez (NJ) and Chris Murphy (Conn.), along with
Republican Senator Rand Paul (Ky) intend introducing separate resolutions
disapproving of President Donald Trump’s sale. Menendez felt morally
mighty in
warning the Trump administration that “circumventing
deliberative processes for considering a massive infusion of weapons to a
country in a volatile region with multiple ongoing conflicts is downright
irresponsible.”
Murphy
expressed his support for “the normalization of
relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), but nothing in
that agreement requires us to flood the region with more weapons and facilitate
a dangerous arms race.”
The
US President-elect, Joe Biden, has thrown a few titbits of promise to critics
of the US-Gulf States circle of love and armaments. During the Atlanta
Democratic debate held in November last year, he entertained a
departure from a policy embraced during the Obama
administration, certainly with regards to Saudi Arabia. “I would make it very
clear that we were not going to in fact sell more weapons to them.” A Biden
administration would “make them pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah
that they are.” Specifically on the Yemen conflict, he promised to “end the
sale of material to the Saudis where they’re going in and murdering children.”
Fighting words, easily said when a candidate.
This
view was reiterated to the Council on
Foreign Relations in August this year. “I would end US support for the
disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen and order a reassessment of our relationship
with Saudi Arabia.” The Trump administration had issued the kingdom “a
dangerous blank check. Saudi Arabia has used it to extend a war in Yemen that
has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, pursue reckless foreign
policy fights, and repress its own people.”
Progressive
groups have picked up a scent they find promising. Policy director for Win
Without War, Kate Kizer, expressed hope “that [Biden] starts by
immediately undoing as many of the just-notified sales to the UAE as possible,
and by putting the brakes on transfers that Congress has previously tried to
reject under Trump.”
The
moral wash on this is, however, thin. Menendez, for instance, is hardly giddy
about the fate of Yemeni civilians in the context of such arms sales, citing “a number of outstanding
concerns as to how these sales would impact the national security interests of
both the United States and of Israel.” Priorities, priorities.
Biden’s
top foreign policy advisor, Tony Blinken, seems less concerned about who will
be the target of the weapons in the UAE sale than any upset caused to that most
unimpeachable of allies, Israel. Sales of the F-35,
for instance, were intended as a US-Israeli preserve. Selling it to other
powers in the Middle East might well compromise the “qualitative military edge”
doctrine Washington adopts towards the Jewish state. “The Obama-Biden
administration made those planes available to Israel and only Israel in the
region,” explained Blinken in an interview with
the Times of Israel. The new administration would have to “take a hard
look” at the F-35 sale. Was it, he wondered, a quid
pro quo for the normalisation deal between Israel and the UAE?
Mammoth arms sales continue to remain matters of business and politics, with business tending to be the crowing representative. Halting or curbing arms sales is only ever trendy and never permanent. Oxfam reminds us of that blood-soaked truth. “When arms exports by G20 nations to other members of this [Arab] coalition are included, the figure of $17 billion rises to at least $31.4 billion between 2015 and 2019, the last year for which records are available.”
PALESTINA
“These days are an irreplaceable opportunity to
establish our hold on the Land of Israel, and I’m sure that our friend,
President (Donald) Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu will be able to take
advantage,” Miki Zohar, a member of the Likud Party was quoted in the
Christian Science Monitor.
By “these days”, Zohar was referring to the remaining
few weeks of Trump’s term in office. The US President was trounced by
his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, in the presidential elections held on November
3.
Trump’s defeat ignited fears
in Tel Aviv, and heated debates in the Israeli Knesset that the new US
administration might challenge Israel’s unhindered settlement expansion
policies.
Indeed, not only was Israel allowed to expand old
settlements and build new ones throughout Trump’s term, but was actually
encouraged by US officials to do so with a great sense of urgency.
US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is an ardent
supporter of rapid expansion and was handpicked for his role, not because of
his diplomatic experience – he has none – but to help facilitate US support for
Israel’s colonial expansion. In doing so, the US violated international
consensus on the issue, and reversed earlier US positions that perceived
Israel’s illegal settlements as “obstacles to peace”.
Friedman was entrusted with communicating the ominous
new American agenda regarding Israel’s illegal action in the occupied
Palestinian territories and also in the Syrian Golan Heights. In June 2019,
Friedman, rather clumsily, articulated a new American position on the illegal
Jewish settlements when he said in an interview with
the New York Times that “Israel has the right to retain some, but unlikely all,
of the West Bank.”
The green light to Netanyahu was translated, in
January 2020, into an announcement by
Israel that it intended to formally annex nearly a third of the West Bank
within a few months.
The illegal annexation was set to
take place on July 1. Just prior to that date, Friedman resurfaced, this time
with a less coded message, that Netanyahu’s annexation had the full backing of
the US government. He told the
Israeli newspaper, Israel Hayom, that Washington was preparing to acknowledge
the Israeli move to apply sovereignty in ‘Judea and Samaria’, using the
biblical reference to the West Bank.
Annexation did not materialize as
grandly as expected. Instead, the Netanyahu government opted to cement its de
facto annexation of Palestinian land by announcing plans to build more
settlements, barring Palestinian farmers from reaching their land and
accelerating the policy of home demolition.
Months before Biden became the US president-elect,
Israel seemed to be preparing for the possibility that the Trump administration
might not be re-elected. Certainly, while a Biden presidency is bound to remain
unconditionally supportive of Israel, the new administration is likely to
return to old policies pertaining to the ‘peace process’ and the two-State
solution. Netanyahu has long been averse to such rhetoric as, in his view, such
unnecessary delays will cost Israel precious time that could be invested in
building yet more settlements. Politically, the mere discussion of a return to
negotiations could, potentially, splinter Israel’s powerful, yet fractious,
pro-settlement right-wing alliance.
Immediately it was clear that Trump had lost the race,
Netanyahu egrudgingly congratulated Biden.
Even the Israeli leader’s belated acknowledgement of Trump’s defeat did not
spare him the political ambush that awaited him. Many Knesset members attacked
Netanyahu for losing Israel’s bipartisan support in Washington by allying
himself with the Republican Party and the Trump administration.
Leading the charge was Israel’s opposition leader from
Yesh Atid-Telem, Yair Lapid, who had already criticized the Prime Minister’s
“Republican First” approach to US politics. His views were shared by many Israelis
in the Knesset and media.
Reversing course in Trump’s last weeks in office is
not an easy choice, especially as the Trump administration remains committed to
help Israel achieve its objectives to the very end.
On November 19, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, became the first top US official
to visit an illegal Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. During his
visit to a winery in the Psagot settlement, Pompeo gave Netanyahu yet more good
news. He announced that products from illegal Jewish settlements could now be labeled “Made
in Israel”, and that the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
movement would be declared ‘anti-Semitic’
by the US State Department.
The latter announcement will give Israel the legal
capital required to prosecute and silence any US civil society opposition to
Israel’s illegal occupation. Israel is counting on the fact that Biden is
unlikely to dare contest or reverse such policies due to the sensitivity of the
subject of anti-Semitism – real or alleged – in US politics.
The same rationale applies to the settlement building
frenzy throughout occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
On November 20, Israeli authorities announced that
80 Palestinian families would be evicted from their homes in the neighborhood
of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. These homes would, in turn, be handed over
to illegal Israeli Jewish settlers.
The news of the mass eviction came only a few days
after the government’s announcements that the illegal settlements of Givat Hamatos and Ramat Shlomo,
both located in East Jerusalem, are set for major expansion.
The massive development in Givat Hamatos, according to the
Israeli group ‘Peace Now’, “will severely hamper the prospect of a two-State
solution because it will ultimately block the possibility of territorial
contiguity between East Jerusalem” and major urban centers in the West Bank.
The announcements are strategically timed, as they
carry an unmistakable political message that Israel does not intend to reverse
its settlement policies, regardless of who resides in the White House.
The coming weeks are likely to witness even more coordinated Israeli-US moves, where the Trump administration will seek to fulfill Netanyahu’s political wish list, leaving Biden with little political margin to maneuver, thus denying his government the self-proclaimed, undeserved title of the ‘honest peace broker’.
INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix
Palestinian Center
for Human Rights
International Solidarity
Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom
Defense for
Children
Breaking the Silence
BRASIL
AOS FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas
