What is going on in Jerusalem's Sheikj Harrah neighbourhood?
Dozens of Palestinians are facing imminent
dispossession from their homes in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of
Sheikh Jarrah, in what they say is a move to force them out and replace it
entirely with a Jewish settlement.
The Jerusalem District Court ruled at least six families must
vacate their homes in Sheikh Jarrah on Sunday, despite living there for
generations.
The same court ruled seven other families should leave their homes
by August 1. In total, 58 people, including 17 children, are set to be forcibly
displaced to make way for Jewish settlers.
The court rulings are a culmination of a decades-long struggle for
these Palestinians to stay in their homes. In 1972, several Jewish settler
organisations filed a lawsuit against the Palestinian families living in Sheikh
Jarrah, alleging the land originally belonged to Jews.
These groups, mostly funded by donors from the United States, have
waged a relentless battle that resulted in the displacement of 43 Palestinians
in 2002, as well as the Hanoun and Ghawi families in 2008 and the Shamasneh
family in 2017.
What is the story of Karm al-Jaouni in Sheikh Jarrah?
In 1956, 28 Palestinian refugee families displaced from their homes in the
coastal cities of Yafa and Haifa eight years prior eventually settled into the
Karm al-Jaouni area in Sheikh Jarrah.
The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, at the time was under the mandate
of Jordan, which struck an agreement with the UN agency for refugees (UNRWA) to
build housing units for these families. The deal stipulated the families were
to renounce their refugee status in return for land deeds signed in their names
after three years of living in the area.
However, that did not take place and in 1967 Jordan lost its mandate as
East Jerusalem was occupied by Israel.
Khalil Toufakji, a Palestinian cartographer and expert on Jerusalem, said
he travelled to Ankara in 2010 to search in the Ottoman-era archives for a
document that negates any Jewish ownership of Karm al-Jaouni.
“I found the deed and presented it to the Israeli district court, which
promptly rejected it,” After more digging, Toufakji found out in 1968 that
Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, issued a decree – signed by the finance
minister at the time – which stated Israel was bound to the Jordan-UNRWA
agreement.
“This fact is what has been raised to the Jerusalem High Court on behalf of
the Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah,” he said, but added there is little
reason to believe the court will rule in favour of them. “Israeli courts –
judge, jury and legislation – are all in the service of the Jewish settlers,”
he said.
How do Palestinians see the role of the Israeli courts?
Under international law, the Israeli judicial system has no legal authority
over the population it occupies.
Last month, an appeal by
Palestinian human rights groups to the UN Special Procedures said Israel’s
discriminatory legal foundation “provides the basis for its creation of an
apartheid regime over the Palestinian people as a whole”.
“Not only has Israel unlawfully extended its domestic civil legal system to
occupied East Jerusalem, but proceeded to enact more discriminatory laws and
policies that enforce the confiscation of Palestinian property in East
Jerusalem in favour of settlers, the forcible transfer of Palestinians, and the
expansion of Israeli-Jewish presence in the city,” the appeal said.
Fayrouz Sharqawi, global mobilisation director for Grassroots Jerusalem,
previously said that it is “absurd” to count on the Israeli judicial system to
protect Palestinian rights.
“This system is an integral part of the Zionist colonial state, which
identifies as a ‘Jewish state’ and accordingly and systematically oppresses,
dispossesses and displaces Palestinians,” she said.
What has been the response of Jordan?
On Thursday, Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it handed over 14
official documents related to building the housing units in Sheikh Jarrah to
the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The documents show the development ministry at the time entered into an agreement
with the UNRWA to build 28 housing units for the Palestinian refugee families.
The official spokesman for the ministry, Daifallah al-Fayez, said in
a statement that Jordan is committed to providing
all possible backing to the Palestinians living in Sheikh Jarrah.
“Keeping Palestinian Jerusalemites rooted in their land is a national
principle in Jordan’s efforts to support our Palestinian brethren,” he said.
According to Zakariah Odeh, the director of the Civic Coalition for
Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, Jordan should exert more effort to safeguard
the current and future situation for the Karm al-Jaouni families.
“Jordan does hold responsibility in resolving this issue, as these
Palestinian families carried out their end of the agreement, which was to give
up their refugee status,” he said.
“There are plans to build 255 settlement units in place of the Palestinian
homes,” he continued. “Jordan owes it to the dozens of families who are threatened
with displacement and should intervene on a political and diplomatic level.”
Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem is largely not
recognised by the international community.
Israel’s settlement project, which is aimed at the consolidation of
Israel’s control over the city, is also considered illegal under international
law.
About 200,000 Israeli citizens live in East Jerusalem under army and police
protection, with the largest single settlement complex housing 44,000 Israelis.
“Sheikh Jarrah is but one example of what is happening to Palestinian
neighbourhoods in Jerusalem regarding forced displacement,” Odeh said.
“Last year was the highest rate of settlement expansion in the East
Jerusalem on record – about 4,500 units. The year 2020 also saw 170 Palestinian
structures demolished, including 105 homes, which resulted in the displacement
of 385 people.”
According to Toufakji, the Israeli policies of arrests, demolishment of
structures, land confiscation and forced displacement are all in accordance
with the Israeli government’s “demographic balance” in Jerusalem at a 70-30,
limiting the Palestinian population in the city to 30 percent or less.
“This plan has been in place since 1973, when then
prime minister Golda Meir gave the green light to the Gavni Committee to
achieve this ratio,” he said.
“And in 1990, Ariel Sharon – who was the minister of housing construction
at the time – set in motion the plans to build settlement blocs right in the
middle of Palestinian neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, in order to encircle,
fragment and disperse the Palestinian residents.”
Odeh said all of these policies are in line with Israel’s so-called
“Greater Jerusalem” plan, which aims to cut off the surrounding Palestinian
neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem from the city by way of the separation barrier
and annexing surrounding Jewish settlements.
“As a result, some 140,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites live outside the
separation barrier, and cannot access the city,” he said. “The past year also
saw the approval of expanding existing settlements in occupied East Jerusalem
such as Givat Hamatos on Beit Safafa lands and [Har Homa] settlement on Jabal
Abu Ghneim in the south near Beit Sahour,” Odeh continued.
Several Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem are also facing the
threat of forced displacement.
“The al-Bustan area in Silwan, which is south of the Old City, has 119
families in 88 buildings that are under threat of demolishment to make way for
an Israeli archaeological park,” Odeh said.
“In Wadi Yasul, 84 homes are also under threat of demolishment to make way
for expansion of an Israeli national park. And in Batan al-Hawa, 700 people are
slated to be forcibly displaced because the Ateret Cohanim settler group said
Jews used to live there before.”
Last February, 22-year-old Mohammed el-Kurd, whose family faces
displacement on Sunday, managed to successfully lobby 81 UK lawmakers,
including Jeremy Corbyn, to sign a letter
regarding the situation in Sheikh Jarrah.
In April, at least 190 organisations wrote a letter to the prosecutor of
the International Criminal Court, urging her to investigate the imminent forced
displacement of families in Sheikh Jarrah as part of her continuing
investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.
In the past few weeks, the hashtag in English and Arabic #SaveSheikhJarrah has been circulating on
social media, aimed at raising awareness and piquing interest on a grassroots
and official level at the imminent displacements.
Palestinian activists have called on international leaders and advocates to
pressure Israel to end what they say is Sheikh Jarrah’s “ongoing Nakba”.
Bravo Roger Waters! I'm with you and the Palestinians!
An estimated 90,000 Muslim worshippers prayed at the nearby Al-Aqsa Mosque on Islam’s holy night of Laylat al-Qadr – or the “Night of Destiny”, the most sacred of prayers during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan – on Saturday.
Some stayed on to protest Israeli plans to forcibly expel Palestinian families from their ancestral homes on land claimed by illegal Jewish settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem.
Israeli security forces on horseback and in riot gear fired stun grenades and water cannon against Palestinians who in turn threw stones, lit fires, and tore down police barricades in the streets leading to the walled Old City’s gates.
And then pro-Zionist or Coward mainstream media bring up again the outrageous rethoric of another cycle of violence ».
For
Jerusalemites and for Just people well informed and that know History, it is
frankly nauseating to hear commentators throw around cliches of “cycle of
violence”, call for a “return to calm”, and generally engage in bothsidesism,
whenever violence erupts. And in the past few weeks, it was repeated yet again :
« there are no two equal sides in Jerusalem ».
The
problem with these statements is that they whitewash the fact that Jerusalem is
a city under violent occupation and its occupier, Israel, has made its intent
to slowly uproot the native Palestinian population quite public.
In
this sense, violence is a permanent feature of the lives of Jerusalem
residents, even when outside observers perceive the streets to be “quiet”. And
it is not a matter of “both sides” de-escalating.
This
past year had been particularly violent for Palestinian Jerusalemites. The
impact of COVID-19 on our community is dwarfed by the effects of relentless
harassment, arrests, home demolition and displacement by the Israeli
authorities, ultimately aimed at the ethnic cleansing of the city.
No
one should be surprised at the amount of anger Palestinians hold towards the
Israeli occupation authorities in the city. Their encroachments on the rights
of the Palestinian community are endless and are directly responsible for any
uptick in violence.
Such
is the case with this latest violent episode which began in the first days of
the Ramadan.
Ramadan
is a special time for Muslims all around the world, but in Jerusalem, the
festive atmosphere is simply magical, like Christian Easter and Christmas. It
is a time when Jerusalemites – young and old – come together with friends and
family, stroll through the streets of the city, buy sweets, drink coffee, and
enjoy the light displays, impromptu music shows and street performances. Jerusalem
is more alive late at night during any other time of the year. It is a special
experience that reflects the strong communal bonds among Palestinian
Jerusalemites. And it is, of course, a favourite occasion for the Israeli
authorities to harass Palestinians and spoil their festivities. This year was
no different.
On
April 12, a day before the start of Ramadan, one could notice the first signs
that the Israeli authorities were planning something. The space, benches and
steps around the Damascus Gate plaza were blocked by metal barricades. Damascus
Gate, with its three police garrisons erected in recent years, looked like a
militarised encampment.
There
was no reason to set up these barriers at a popular Ramadan hangout spot other
than to upset the Palestinians. The decision to bar West Bank Palestinians from
visiting Jerusalem to pray at Al-Aqsa, citing a lack of vaccinations as an
excuse, further riled Jerusalemites.
The
reaction was immediate: on the first day of Ramadan, April 13, a large number
of young people gathered at the Damascus Gate to protest against the arbitrary
actions of the Israeli occupier. Over the following days, the protests grew, as
Israeli provocations continued. On April 22, hundreds of extremist Jews marched
on the old city under the protection of the Israeli police, chanting “Death to
Arabs!” Palestinian youth were relentless in their resistance.
Thirteen
days into Ramadan, on April 25, the barricades fell. I arrived a little after
9pm that night, around the time when people were beginning to gather after
Taraweeh prayers. Large crowds of Palestinians marched, determined to take back
the occupied Damascus Gate. The Israeli police withdrew and the youth then
forced the removal of all barricades and poured into the space. Chanting,
singing and dancing, we reasserted our presence on our land.
The
“victory” was bittersweet, however. For almost two weeks, Palestinian youth
were subjected to brutal suppression, getting beaten up, attacked with stun
grenades and foul-smelling “skunk” water cannon, and detained. And while
foreign media paid attention to these dramatic images, it ignored completely
Israel’s other sustained campaigns of brutality against Jerusalemites.
While
Palestinian youth were resisting encroachment on their public spaces, some Jerusalemites
were facing brutal dispossession of their homes.
In
Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, 500 Palestinians from 28 families are
facing eviction from homes that have belonged to them for generations. In
February, a court ruled that six Palestinian houses where 27 people live are to
be handed over to Jewish settlers. Earlier this week, the court gave the
Palestinian families four days to “reach an agreement” with the Jewish
settlers, in which they would renounce that they own their homes in exchange
for a delay of their eviction.
The
appalling absurdity of the court decision is a prime example of Israel’s brutal
occupation and ethnic cleansing policies. In Israeli apartheid courts,
there is no justice for Palestinians. More
than 200 families in East Jerusalem are at risk of eviction due to similar
court cases filed against them.
The
Palestinian families have vowed to resist. In one video that went viral prior
to the court hearing, Sheikh Jarrah resident Muna al-Kurd is seen confronting a
settler about stealing Palestinian homes, in which he replies with a heavy
American accent “If I don’t steal it, someone else will.” Half of al-Kurd’s
home had been taken over by Jewish settlers in 2009.
Home
demolitions are another brutal Israeli practice to have continued over the past
year, even amid the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since March 2020, more than
163 homes and structures were demolished in East Jerusalem, displacing 359
Palestinians, including 167 children.
In
February, the Jerusalem Municipality requested the activation of demolition
orders against some 70 Palestinian homes in the al-Bustan area of Silwan
neighbourhood, adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem. The Israeli municipality
plans to build an archaeological park there. If carried out, the demolitions
would uproot some 1,500 Palestinians.
Jabal
al-Mukaber, a neighbourhood of Jerusalem most affected by demolitions over the
past three years, has seen homes demolished and families displaced to make way
for a planned ring road that is supposed to connect Israeli settlements in the
southern West Bank to Jerusalem. In June 2020 alone, 23 buildings belonging to
Palestinians were demolished, resulting in the displacement of 57 people,
including 34 children.
In
al-Walaja, seven buildings were destroyed and families displaced without
warning to make space for the establishment of an Israeli national park. Homes
were also demolished in the Sur Bahir area because the buildings were in a
“buffer zone”, arbitrarily determined by Israeli authorities.
Israeli
violence does not stop at evictions and home demolitions. It also extends into
the political sphere, where the Israeli authorities continue to deny the
Jerusalemite Palestinians their political rights. They regularly attack and
arrest Palestinians engaged in political activities or attempting to represent
political parties; even Palestinian Authority (PA) officials are harassed.
In
recent days, the Israeli government unequivocally indicated that it would not
allow the Palestinian legislative elections, originally scheduled for May 22,
to be also held in East Jerusalem, where nearly 400,000 Palestinians live.
Israeli police regularly raided events that promoted the Palestinian elections
and arrested Palestinian parliamentary candidates. As a result, PA President
Mahmoud Abbas officially postponed the planned elections, citing Israel’s
outright refusal for the election process to be held in East Jerusalem.
By
contrast, Israelis living in Jerusalem have been free to vote four times in the
past two years, many of them casting a ballot for the same Jewish extremists
who recently were chanting “Death to Arabs!” in our streets.
Jerusalem
may have disappeared from the news for now, but the occupiers have not left us
alone. The colonial violence has not gone away.
Israel
does its best to make life for Jerusalem’s Palestinians a misery and a constant
struggle. It does everything to make Palestinians disappear. But they will not.
Every day, they face police brutality, arrests, home evictions and demolitions,
impoverishment and a denial of basic human rights. The occupier’s violence is a
permanent feature of Palestinian lives.
However,
the Palestinians are determined to fight for their city and remain, no matter
what Israel does in its tireless effort to erase them.
That said, after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville,
North Carolina, and then President Donald Trump responded by saying there were
“good people on both sides,” people who abhor white supremacism stood up, took
notice, and condemned the marchers. Anti-racists would be wise to do the same
about the far-right march that took place at the end of April in Jerusalem.
The situation in Jerusalem began with clashes between
Palestinians and sraeli forces over new restrictions placed on the Damascus
Gate entrance to the Old City. Then, the far-right Jewish group Lahava called
for a “demonstration of national dignity.” Leaked WhatsApp messages revealed
calls to lynch Palestinians.
As the
Jewish-Israeli extremists marauded through the streets on Thursday, April 22,
Israeli forces fired rubber-coated steel bullets at Palestinian
counterprotesters. The remarks of a young orthodox Jewish girl went viral on social media. “I don’t want to burn your villages, I just want you
to leave and we’ll take them” she said. On her shirt was a sticker reading
“Rabbi Kahane is right.” Kahane’s group was placed on the US terror list in
2004.
105 Palestinians were injured, twenty-two requiring
hospitalization. Twenty Israeli police officers were also injured. The next
morning, Israel’s Internal Security Minister Amir Ohana released a statement condemning “attacks by "Arabs".” He said nothing of the violence committed by Jews.
US State
Department spokesperson Ned Price condemned the “rhetoric of extremist protestors.” However, the US embassy in
Jerusalem’s statement that they were “deeply concerned” declined to weigh in on
the issue of Jewish extremism.
Avi Mayer of the
American Jewish Committee tweeted: “The individuals perpetrating it are as foreign to me and my Judaism as
are skinheads, white supremacists, and other racists around the world.” But
those who chanted “death to Arabs” in Jerusalem are a normalized, accepted part
of Israel’s government.
Members of
Lehava, the group that organized the extremist march in Jerusalem, are
followers of Kahanism, a Jewish supremacist ideology based on the views of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Inspired by Kahane, in 1994, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians in the West Bank Ibrahimi mosque. As recently as
2014, three members of Lehava were charged with setting fire to an integrated bilingual Palestinian-Jewish
school.
In 1988, the Kach
party was banned from running for the Israeli Knesset. In 2004, the US State
Department labeled Kach a terrorist organization. However, the Kahanist movement has
recently made its way back into Israel’s government where it is being met with
open arms.
During Israel’s
recent election, Netanyahu, willing to do anything to hold onto his prime
ministership, encouraged voters from his own Likud party to cast their ballots
for the anti-Arab Extremist-Religious Zionism slate, which included the
Kahanist-inspired Otzma Yehudit party, so that they could make it over the
election threshold. Extremist-religious Zionism won six seats, bringing Kahanism back into Israel’s Knesset for the first
time since the 1980s.
As Netanyahu is
proving unable to form a coalition, attention is now turning towards Naftali
Bennett, the next most likely candidate to become Israel’s prime minister.
In 2016, Bennett called Israelis to be willing to “give our lives” to annex the West Bank”,
evoking the Kahanist view that terrorist acts against Palestinians are a
patriotic act of martyrdom. Bennett’s negotiations as he hopes to form a government, have included meetings with Religious Zionism.
Such statements
as Bennett’s call for violence have surely led to increased levels of unrest in
the Holy Land. After last week’s extremist march in Jerusalem, clashes
continued between unarmed Palestinian protestors and Israeli heavily armed forces.
In solidarity with the Palestinians from occupied West Bank, homemade rockets were launched from Gaza and the Israeli military responded with heavy
bombings, Finally, on Sunday, April 25, Israel’s police commissioner gave in and ordered the barricades at Damascus Gate be removed.
Though the
situation in Jerusalem has now calmed, the floodgates of Jewish extremism have
already been flung wide open.
The neo-Nazi
march in Charlottesville and Trump’s response rightfully alarmed the world.
Though Trump has been ousted from office, we all know that the violent racist
movement that blossomed during his presidency did not begin with him and is far
from gone. We would be wise in the aftermath of Israelis’ “death to Arabs”
march in Jerusalem to also speak out against Kahanism, the banalization of
Israeli apartheid, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the destruction of
Jerusalem’s historical population.
PALESTINA
On April 27, the leading international NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW)
issued a 213-page report, titled “A Threshold Crossed”, condemning Israel for
“committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against
Palestinians” in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT) and in Israel
itself.
The report undoubtedly marks the crossing of a threshold for the rights
group, which has long been shying away from such overt and comprehensive
criticism of Israel, to the frustration of Palestinians and advocates of Palestinian
rights.
But the threshold that the report’s name ostensibly refers to is a legal
one that, in HRW’s analysis, Israel has finally crossed. “While much of the
world treats Israel’s half-century occupation as a temporary situation that a
decades-long ‘peace process’ will soon cure, the oppression of Palestinians
there has reached a threshold and a permanence that meets the definitions of
the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director
of HRW.
So, according to the group, Israel’s crimes against Palestinians have
reached such severity that they can now be considered as crimes against
humanity – crimes deemed by the international community to be some of the most
serious, potentially warranting the most serious punishment.
But the designation of
Israel’s settler-colonial endeavour as a form of apartheid is nothing new. The
legal term “apartheid” has long been used to characterise Israel’s actions
against Palestinians.
The 1973 Apartheid
Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court define
apartheid as systematic and institutionally entrenched domination and
repression by one racial group over another through “inhumane acts”. Among such
acts are: “arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial
group”; measures “designed to divide the population along racial lines by the
creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or
groups”; “forcible transfer”; “expropriation of landed property”; and denial of
“the right to leave and to return to their country, [and] the right to a
nationality”. All these have been part and parcel of Israel’s settler-colonial
project in Palestine since the very beginning. And UN diplomats, legal scholars
and activists have applied the concept of apartheid to Israel since at least
the 1970s.
In 1975, the United
Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism to be a
form of racism – later rescinded due to Israeli pressure. Although not defining
Israel as an apartheid state, the Resolution made that association explicit. It
based its equation of Zionism with racism on previous resolutions, including
the 1963 Resolution 1904 (XVIII), which affirmed that “any doctrine of racial
differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable,
socially unjust and dangerous”. Resolution 3379 also drew a line tying Israel
to “the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa”, which were “organically
linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the
human being”. Other UN debates in this period also recognised the “collusion”
of Israel, Zionism, and South Africa’s apartheid regime, as in Resolution 3151
of 1973.
After visiting the Holy
Land in 2002, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, widely regarded as “South
Africa’s moral conscience”, said what he saw in Israel’s treatment of
Palestinians reminded him “so much of what happened to us Black people in South
Africa”, an observation he has since reiterated. Since 2005, student activists
on campuses across the globe have been organising educational events during
“Israel Apartheid Week”. These events are staged to raise awareness of the
Palestinian liberation struggle and to highlight the similarities between
Palestinians’ efforts and the South African anti-Apartheid movement. And in
2017, ESCWA, a UN body, issued a report on Israel’s apartheid practices against
Palestinians.
Although the HRW report
refers to some other applications of the concept of apartheid to define
Israel’s actions against Palestinians, it focuses on presenting “a detailed
legal analysis based on the international crimes of apartheid or persecution”.
More than just a legal category, however, the notion of apartheid is a moral
and political designation, and this is what makes it so contested and powerful.
By giving their report announcement the hashtag #Courage2FightApartheid, HRW
acknowledged how political this legal analysis really is, perhaps also hinting
at why it has taken the group so long to publicly accept a reality recognised
by so many across the world for decades.
Whether HRW’s decision to
recognise Israel as an apartheid state will be a watershed moment in the
decades-old Palestinian struggle and instigate political change remains to be
seen. Recent events – such as the February 5 International Criminal Court
decision affirming its territorial jurisdiction over the OPT, the January
report by Israeli NGO B’Tselem also labelling Israel an “apartheid state”, and
pitched battles over the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s
definition of anti-Semitism that seeks to silence criticism of Israel – already
suggest that a tipping point may be approaching.
Indeed, as Israel’s
Jewish supremacism became more explicit in recent years, it has become harder
to argue against its classification as an apartheid state. How can a rights
organisation, or anyone else continue to deny that Israel is an apartheid state
after the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, proudly stated that
“Israel is not a state of all its citizens … Israel is the nation-state of the
Jewish people and them alone”?
How can they deny that
Israel is committing the crime against humanity of apartheid after the Israeli
parliament passed the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law which denies the rights of
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20 percent of the country’s
population?
The HRW
report is undoubtedly a positive development and a step in the right direction.
But the question we are facing today is not whether Israel is an apartheid
state. The question is, when will the international community act in concert to
put an end to its obvious and obviously reprehensible system of oppression?
During the first Cold War between the United States & West Europe
against the Soviet Union injustice and human rights increasingly became a
central issue. This ought to have been a positive development, but it was
devalued by partisan use and the issue turned into an instrument of propaganda.
The essence of such propaganda is not lies or even exaggeration, but
selectivity. To give one example, the focus was kept on very real Soviet
oppression in Eastern Europe and away from the savage rule of Western-backed
dictators in South America. The political weaponisation of human rights was
crude and hypocritical, but it was extremely effective.
As the USA enter a second Cold War against china and Russia, there are
lessons to be learned from the first, since much the same propaganda mechanisms
are once again hard at work. Western governments and media unrelentingly
criticise China for the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province, but
there is scarcely a mention of the repression of Kashmiri Muslims in
Indian-controlled Kashmir. Diplomatic and media outrage is expressed when
Russia and the Syrian government bomb civilians in Idlib in Syria, but the
bombing of civilians during the Western-backed, Saudi-led air campaign in
Yemen, remains at the bottom of the news agenda.
Governmental and journalistic propagandists – for journalists who take this
selective approach to oppression are no better than propagandists – can see
that they are open to the charge of hypocrisy. People ask them how come that
the mass incarceration, disappearances and torture suffered by the Kashmiris is
so different from similar draconian punishments inflicted on the Uighurs?
This is a very reasonable question, but propagandists have developed two
lines of defence against it. The first is to claim that whoever asks « what
about Palestine », “Kashmir or Yemen” is fostering “whataboutism”,
culpably diverting attention from crimes committed against the Uighurs and
Syrian civilians. The nonsensical assumption here is that denouncing atrocities
and oppression in once country precludes one from denouncing them in another.
The real purpose of this gambit from the point of view of those waging
information wars is to impose a convenient silence over wrongdoings by our side
while focusing exclusively on theirs.
The second line of defence, used to avoid comparison between the crimes
committed by ourselves and our friends and those of our enemies, is to demonise
the latter so thoroughly that no equivalence between the two is allowed. Such
demonisation – sometimes called “monsterisation” – is so effective because it
denies the other side a hearing and means that they are automatically
disbelieved. In the 1990s, I used to write with copious evidence that UN
sanctions against Iraq were killing thousands of children every month. But
nobody paid any attention because sanctions were supposedly directed against
Saddam Hussein – though they did him no harm – and he was known to be the
epitome of evil. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified by claiming
that Saddam possessed WMD and anybody who suggested that the evidence for this
was dubious could be smeared as a secret sympathiser with the Iraqi dictator.
Simple-minded as these PR tactics might be, but they have been repeatedly
shown to be highly effective. One reason why they work is that people would
like to imagine that conflicts are struggles between white hats and black hats,
angels and demons. Another reason is that this delusion is fostered
enthusiastically by parts of the media, who generally goes along with a
government-inspired news agenda.
With President Joe Biden seeking to rebuild the international image of the
US as the « home of freedom and democracy » in the wake of the Donald
Trump presidency, we are back to these classic information strategies. For the
USA to bounce back unsullied in the eyes of the world, it is essential to
portray Trump, with his embrace of autocrats and denunciation of everybody he
disliked as a terrorist, as an aberration in American history.
Yet much of the planet’s population will have watched the film of Derek
Chauvin slowly asphyxiate George Floyd and may not look at America in quite the
same light as before, despite the guilty verdict in Minneapolis this week.
Asked about the impact of that verdict internationally, the US National
Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that America needed “to promote and defend
justice at home” if it was to credibly claim to be doing the same abroad. But
he dismissed as “whataboutism” and unacceptable “moral equivalence” the
suggestion that US protests about the jailing and mistreatment of Alexei
Navalny in Russia and China’s actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, was being
undermined by the fact that the US holds 2.4 million of its citizens in prison,
one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
Contrary to what Sullivan and other establishment figures say about
refusing to compare the US with Russia and China, “whataboutism” and “moral
equivalency” can be strong forces for good. They influence great powers, though
not as much as they should, into cleaning up their acts out of pure
self-interest, thus enabling them to criticise their rivals without appearing
too openly hypocritical.
This happened during the first Cold War, when the belief that the Soviet
Union was successfully using the American racial discrimination to
discredit the US as a protagonist of democracy, played an important role in
persuading decision-makers in Washington that civil rights for blacks was in
the government’s best interests.
Once “whataboutism” and “equivalence” become the norm in media reporting,
then the US government will have a powerful motive to try to end the
militarisation of America’s police forces, which shot dead 1,004 people in
2019. This also holds true for how the police handle race.
Cold War competition between global powers has many harmful consequences,
but it can also have benign ones. One forgotten consequence of the Soviet Union
launching Sputnik, the first space satellite in 1957, is that it led to a
spectacular surge in US government spending on scientific and general
education.
For the most part, however, the first Cold War was an arid exchange of
accusations in which human rights became a weapon in informational warfare. Can
anything be done to prevent the same thing happening as the second Cold War
gets underway?
It would be naïve to imagine that governments will not go on maligning
their enemies and giving themselves a free pass unless propelled to do better
by public opinion. And this will only happen by going beyond selective
reporting of human rights abuses and demonising all opponents of their national
governments as pariahs.
PALESTINA
Israel
is committing “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution” against
Palestinians and the international community must reevaluate diplomatic
relations with the state, a leading human rights group said in a report on
Tuesday.
The
213-page report from Human
Rights Watch (HRW) details how Israel has sought to maintain Jewish-Israeli
hegemony over the Palestinian people from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean
Sea.
“While
much of the world treats Israel’s half-century occupation as a temporary
situation that a decades-long ‘peace process’ will soon cure, the oppression of
Palestinians there has reached a threshold and a permanence that meets the
definitions of the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” Kenneth Roth,
executive director of HRW, said. “Those who strive for Israeli-Palestinian
peace, whether a one or two-state solution or a confederation, should in the
meantime recognise this reality for what it is and bring to bear the sorts of
human rights tools needed to end it.”
As
always, rogue Israel dismissed the organisation’s report, calling it
“propaganda”.
The HRW report follows a
conclusion reached by Israeli rights group B’Tselem, which published a study last
January that found Palestinians, divided into four tiers of inferior treatment,
are denied the right to self-determination.
Ines
Abdel Razek, an advocacy director for the Ramallah-based Palestine Institute
for Public Diplomacy organisation, said the HRW report is a welcome development
in shifting the goalposts of international engagement towards applying
international law and human rights – rather than “sanctifying a two-state
solution as an empty mantra that has only comforted Israel in its impunity. [It]
is clearly of major political importance in order to advance the urgent need to
reframe the political understanding about Palestine and Israel,” she told Al
Jazeera, “although frustrating for Palestinians to see that the world
needs validation from international or Israeli NGOs spelling out what we have
been documenting, analysing, saying and writing for decades.”
For
Mouin Rabbani, a co-editor of Jadaliyya, an independent research website, the
existence of apartheid has been “voluminously substantiated” by Palestinians
and their supporters for decades. “It is thus not Israel but rather HRW that
has crossed a threshold,” he said. “HRW is the industry leader in its field,
and that it has finally caught up with reality is in my view a significant
development. The report’s significance lies in HRW
“explicitly denouncing Israel as an apartheid regime, calling for Israel to
face real and serious consequences for what the report terms ‘crime against
humanity’. Perhaps most surprisingly, given its record on such
matters, [HRW] is for once not ‘balancing’ its analysis of Israel with ritual
denunciations of Palestinians,” Rabbani added.
HRW’s
report lists a range of Israeli abuses committed against the Palestinians:
sweeping movement restrictions against Palestinians in the occupied
territories, the demolition of homes and “near-categorical denial” of building
permits, the military occupation, land expropriation, and rejection of the
residency rights of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
In
fact, the Israeli government’s own words and actions – such as the 2018 nation
state bill, which defined Israel as the “nation-state of Jewish people”, and
its unrelenting settlement expansion policy, all point to its intent to
preserve its domination, HRW said.
For
Israel the term “apartheid” is explosive, vigorously rejected by itself and its
supporters. It has long described itself as the only “democracy in the Middle
East”, but its rejection of the label “apartheid” is in keeping with Israel’s
tradition of denouncing any criticism as “anti-Semitic”.
Even
as Israeli politicians openly speak of annexation, expansionism and of
maintaining presence in the occupied territories, the Israeli government points
to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, a fraction of the total Palestinians
under its control, as proof that it is not an apartheid regime, given their
ability to vote and be represented in the highest levels of government. They
constitute a fig leaf which ultimately fails to negate that Israel continues to
control the majority of the Palestinian people without recourse to rights.
By
responding to criticism or condemnation of its policies, Israel resorts to
delegitimising and, where possible, criminalising its critics and using the
anti-Semitic card as the core of its response.
It’s
a well-worn playbook, often augmented with other dirty tricks and various forms
of propaganda, such as denouncing critics as terrorists. Anti-Semitism has been
deliberately redefined by the Israeli government and its supporters to equate
with any criticism of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. The very
problematic International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of
anti-Semitism explicitly includes as an example that calling Israel an
‘apartheid state’ is anti-Semitic.
The
HRW report recommends that the international community adopt a rights-based and
accountability approach regarding engagement with Israel – including
conditioned military aid and vetting all forms of trade and cooperation –
instead of relying on the so-called peace process, which has been deadlocked
for years and has only served Israel to continue its policies with impunity.
Which
is sure is that there can be no peace or negotiations in the current power
structure, and as long as Palestinians are denied their fundamental national,
political and civil right. The current focus should be on increasing the cost
of sustaining Israeli hegemony and the continued denial of individual and
collective rights for Palestinians. Policymakers must shift their focus away
from securing a political solution that might herald peace, and instead fight
back against a trajectory of expanding Israeli territorial consolidation and
Palestinian dispossession in the entirety of the land.
Forced
evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem is an example of a systematic state
policy by the Israeli government that the international community can impose
punitive measures on, regardless of whether a peace process is ongoing or not.
Palestinians
have described their struggle as one against apartheid and settler colonialism
for decades, but the international community has largely refrained from
defining the Palestinian pursuit of rights in those terms.
While
a leading rights group using the term “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policies
against Palestinians is a step forward, it is nevertheless still unrealistic to
expect it to have a direct impact on foreign policy.
This
report could serve as a valuable educational resource and assist in advocacy
efforts and, as noted above, can serve to mainstream discussion of the issues
it raises, including potentially at the political level. In calling out Israeli
apartheid, HRW, as the industry leader and a prominent US organisation to boot,
makes it more acceptable to have discussions about Israeli apartheid, and how
Israel should be held to account, in polite society and mainstream media,
particularly in North America and Europe.
Actually,
the framework put forth by HRW is “incomplete” as it omits the context that is
embedded in settler colonialism. A ‘threshold’ has not been passe. In fact,
Israel’s settler-colonial project to conquer and systematically displace,
dispossess and fragment Palestinians, who they consider a ‘demographic threat’,
to replace them with Jewish settlers has been in place since 1948.
Although
it is clear that Israeli Jewish and international human rights organisations
coming to embrace using the word “apartheid” is indicative of a shift in how
the Palestinian struggle is being seen on the international stage, the policy
and political worlds are still lagging.
The
finding by HRW that Israel is practising the crime of apartheid foreshadows a
future where it will be increasingly difficult for international governments to
maintain the myth that Israel’s occupation and its control over Palestinians
are temporary. This is a necessary realignment in terms of how international
governments and organisations understand the reality in Israel/Palestine today,
and eventually, will make it harder for stakeholders to engage with the Israeli
government without accounting for this reality.
