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| EDITORIAL |
The Native American, the Palestinian: A Spirited Fight for Justice
By Ramzy Baroud Thousands of Native Americans resurrected the fighting spirit of their forefathers as they stood in unprecedented unity to contest an oil company's desecration of their sacred land in North Dakota. Considering its burdened historical context, this has been one of the most moving events in recent memory. The standoff, involving 5,000-strong Native American protesters, including representatives of 200 tribes and environmental groups, has been largely reduced in news reports as being a matter of technical detail - concerning issues of permits and legal proceedings. At best, both the tribes and the oil company are treated as if they are equal parties in a purportedly proportionate tussle. "'Dakota' means 'friendly' and yet, it seems, neither side has been too friendly to each other," wrote Mark Albert in the website of the American broadcasting television network, CBS. The Dakota Nation is justifiably alarmed by the prospect that its water supplies will be polluted by the massive pipeline, which will extend across four states and stretching over 1,100 miles. The 'other side' is the company, Energy Transfer Partners, whose construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the cost of $3.7 billion is infringing upon the territorial rights of Native American tribes, destroying sacred burial grounds and threatening to pollute the main water sources of large communities of Native Americans. Fear over future spills under the Missouri River is hardly a hype. The US is struggling with ongoing water crises, partly because of dilapidating infrastructure, but also because of numerous oil spills and natural gas leaks. The recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the BP oil spill earlier in the Gulf of Mexico - both resulting in massive humanitarian and environmental crises - are only two recent cases in point. But the problem is far deeper and constantly worsening. Data obtained by the news network, CNBC from the government's Environmental Protection Agency showed that "only nine U.S. states are reporting safe levels of lead in their water supply. These include Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota and Tennessee." The mobilization of the tribes has been met with state violence. Instead of appreciating the serious grievances of the tribes, particularly those in the Standing Rock Reservation - which is located only one mile away, south of the pipeline - the state governor summoned all law enforcement agencies and activated the National Guard. Mace was used on protesters; they were beaten, arrested and chased out by armed men in uniform. In the United States, when the people stand up to corporations, it seems that, more often than not, state violence is galvanized against unarmed people to protect the big businesses. But missing from this story is an essential component: the mobilization and unity among Native American tribes has been the most awe-inspiring in many decades. As chiefs and representatives of tribes from all across the United States kept arriving at the encampment grounds, the collective spirit of Native American nations was being vigorously revived. In fact, the ongoing mobilization of Native American tribes is far greater than the struggle against a money-hungry Corporation, backed by an aggressive state apparatus. It is about the spirit of the Native people of this land, who have suffered a prolonged genocide aimed at their complete eradication. To see them standing once more, along with their families, riding their feather-draped horses and fighting for their very identity is a cause for celebration. It brings hope to oppressed people all across the world that the human spirit will never be destroyed. The genocide of the Native Americans, similar to the ongoing destruction of the Palestinian Nation, is one of the lowest points of human morality. It is particularly disheartening that there are yet to be serious attempts at addressing that grave injustice. For 500 years, Native Americans witnessed every attempt at erasing them from the face of the planet. Their numbers dwindled from ten million prior to the arrival of Europeans to North America to less than three hundred thousand at the turn of the 20 th century. They were exterminated by colonial wars and ravaged by foreign diseases. Calls to destroy Native Americans were hardly implicit but, rather, clearly-articulated. For example, Spencer Phips, Lieutenant Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Province issued this statement in 1755 on behalf of King George II: "His Majesty's subjects to embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians." The price list for the scalp of murdered Natives were as follows: "50 pounds for adult male scalps; 25 for adult female scalps; and 20 for scalps of boys and girls under age 12." The genocidal approach to Native Americans continued, unabated. A century later, in 1851, California Governor Peter H. Burnett made this declaration: "A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct." Methods of extermination differed, from outright murder to disease-infected blankets, to, as of today's standoff, threatening their most viable resource: water. Yet, somehow, the spirit of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and numerous brave chiefs and warriors still roam the plains, urging their people to stand up and carry on with an overdue fight for justice and rights. Palestinians have always felt that the legacy of the Native Americans is similar to their own. "Our names: branching leaves of divine speech; birds that soar higher than a gun. You who come from beyond the sea, bent on war; don't cut down the tree of our names; don't gallop your flaming horses across the open plains." I recall the day that magnificent piece of Arabic literature was first published in full in Palestine's 'Al-Quds' newspaper. At the time, I was a teenager in a refugee camp in Gaza. I read it with much trepidation and giddiness - carefully, slowly, and repeatedly. Those who could read, recited it out loud to those who could not. Many tears were shed on that day, mostly because we all knew too well that we, in fact, were the 'Red Indians.' They were us. Long before feminist critical theory coined the term 'intersectionality' - which contends that oppression is interconnected and one oppressive institution cannot be examined in isolation from others, Palestinians - as other victims of genocidal colonization - fully comprehended and held such a belief. Palestinians are losing their lives, land and olive trees as they stand up to Israeli tanks and bulldozers. Their reality is a replay of similar experiences faced - and still being confronted - by Native Americans. Well into the 21st century, the Native American-Palestinian struggle remains one and the same. "Our pastures are sacred, our spirits inspired, The stars are luminous words where our fable is legible from beginning to end.."
Wrote Mahmoud Darwish, of the Native Americans. Of the Palestinians. - Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include "Searching Jenin", "The Second Palestinian Intifada" and his latest "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story". His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.
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| FEATURED | Israel's Bogus Civil War
By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth Is Israel on the verge of civil war, as a growing number of Israeli commentators suggest, with its Jewish population deeply riven over the future of the occupation? On one side is a new peace movement, Decision at 50, stuffed with former political and security leaders. Ehud Barak, a previous prime minister who appears to be seeking a political comeback, may yet emerge as its figurehead. The group has demanded the government hold a referendum next year - the half-centenary of Israel's occupation, which began in 1967 - on whether it is time to leave the territories. Its own polling shows a narrow majority ready to concede a Palestinian state. On the other is Benjamin Netanyahu, in power for seven years with the most right-wing government in Israel's history. On Friday he posted a video on social media criticizing those who want to end the occupation. Observing that a Palestinian state would require removing hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers currently living - illegally - on Palestinian land, Netanyahu concluded: "There's a phrase for that. It's called ethnic cleansing." Not only did the comparison upend international law, but Netanyahu infuriated the Obama administration by implying that, in seeking to freeze settlement growth, the US had supported such ethnic cleansing. A spokeswoman called the comments "inappropriate and unhelpful" - Washington-speak for deceitful and inflammatory. But the Israeli prime minister is not the only one hoodwinking his audience. Whatever its proponents imply, the Decision at 50 referendum is about neither peace nor the Palestinians' best interests. Its assumption is that yet again the Israeli public should determine unilaterally the Palestinians' fate. Although the exact wording is yet to be decided, the referendum's backers appear concerned solely with the status of the West Bank. An Israeli consensus believes Gaza has been free of occupation since the settlers were pulled out in 2005, despite the fact that Israel still surrounds most of the coastal strip with soldiers, patrols its air space with drones and denies access to the sea. The same unyielding, deluded Israeli consensus has declared East Jerusalem, the expected capital of a Palestinian state, as instead part of Israel's "eternal capital". But the problem runs deeper still. When the new campaign proudly cites new figures showing that 58 per cent support "two states for two nations", it glosses over what most Israelis think such statehood would entail for the Palestinians. A survey in June found 72 per cent do not believe the Palestinians live under occupation, while 62 per cent told pollsters last year they think Palestinians have no rights to a nation. When Israelis talk in favor of a Palestinian state, it is chiefly to thwart a far bigger danger - a single state shared with the "enemy". The Decision at 50 poll shows 87 per cent of Israeli Jews dread a binational conclusion to the conflict. Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service and a leader of Decision at 50, echoed them, warning of an "approaching disaster". So what do Israelis think a Palestinian state should look like? Previous surveys have been clear. It would not include Jerusalem or control its borders. It would be territorially carved up to preserve the "settlement blocs", which would be annexed to Israel. And most certainly it would be "demilitarised" - without an army or air force. In other words, Palestinians would lack sovereignty. Such a state exists only in the imagination of the Israeli public. A Palestinian state on these terms would simply be an extension of the Gaza model to the West Bank. Nonetheless, the idea of a civil war is gaining ground. Tamir Pardo, the recently departed head of Israel's spy agency Mossad, warned last month that Israel was on the brink of tearing itself apart through "internal divisions". He rated this a bigger danger than any of the existential threats posited by Mr Netanyahu, such as Iran's supposed nuclear bomb. But the truth is that there is very little ideologically separating most Israeli Jews. All but a tiny minority wish to see the Palestinians continue as a subjugated people. For the great majority, a Palestinian state means nothing more than a makeover of the occupation, penning up the Palestinians in slightly more humane conditions. After many years in power, the right is growing in confidence. It sees no price has been paid, either at home or abroad, for endlessly tightening the screws on the Palestinians. Israeli moderates have had to confront the painful reality that their country is not quite the enlightened outpost in the Middle East they had imagined. They may raise their voices in protest now but, if the polls are right, most will eventually submit to the right's realisation of its vision of a Greater Israel. Those who cannot stomach such an outcome will have to stop equivocating and choose a side. They can leave, as some are already doing, or stay and fight - not for a bogus referendum that solves nothing, but to demand dignity and freedom for the Palestinian people. (A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.) - Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit his website: www.jonathan-cook.net. |
| FEATURED | Human Rights of the Settler By Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon Just a few weeks after the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that he cares about the rights and lives of Palestinians in Gaza more than the Palestinian leadership does, he posted a new video message on his Facebook wall, arguing that any future dismantlement of Jewish settlements in the West Bank would amount to "ethnic cleansing". He went on to intimate that insofar as the United States and other western countries support the uprooting of Israeli settlements as part of an agreement with the Palestinians, they were, in effect, supporting the cleansing of Jews. "Would you accept ethnic cleansing in your state? A territory without Jews, without Hispanics, without blacks," he rhetorically asked, thus drawing a direct link between the settlers in the colonised Palestinian territories and racially discriminated citizens in the US. Netanyahu's description of any potential evacuation of the West Bank colonies reflects the ethics of settler colonialism in which any attempt to dislocate the settlers is now equated with injustice. Unwilling to acknowledge that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and 1967, and that they continue to live under the constant threat of displacement as a direct result of his own government's policies, Netanyahu depicts Israeli and thus Jewish settlers' disengagement from the occupied West Bank, which constitutes a mere 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine, as an egregious violation of the rights of Jewish settlers. The irony is, of course, that these settlers initially colonized this land after it was captured in the 1967 war at the behest of the state. Moreover, by invoking the phrase ethnic cleansing of Jews, Netanyahu is clearly mobilizing a concept that is deeply ingrained in Jewish collective memory and comprises a red line not only for the Israeli state but also for the international community. In fact, he is actually repeating a refrain first invoked by Israel's former Foreign Minister Abba Eban, who in 1969 defined the return to the pre-1967 borders as "something of a memory of Auschwitz". Through the metaphor of "the memory of Auschwitz", Eban suggested that a withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 would correspond to another genocide of the Jewish people, this time in the temporal and spatial setting of Palestine. Tragically, the invocation of the horrific violations perpetrated during the Holocaust has long served to legitimize ongoing colonization and is presented as a preventive measure against the re-materialization of Auschwitz. Thus, Netanyahu's mobilization of settler ethnic cleansing echoes Eban's "Auschwitz lines", while introducing the novel notion of settler human rights. Through his Facebook video he transforms the colonizing settler into the victim of human rights abuses and the subjected Palestinians into the perpetrators who are ostensibly supported - unjustly, according to this distorted logic - by the international community. This, to be sure, is a very strange form of human rights: It is the human rights of a dominant ethnic group whose dominance has been instituted precisely through the expulsion and subjugation of Palestinians. Furthermore, decolonization becomes a crime against humanity, and the global discourse of human rights is turned into a tool for advancing domination. In sharp contrast to the racial discrimination against African-Americans, Hispanics, and other people of color in the US, Israeli settlers are an inordinately privileged group. Moreover, they are not a minority in the Jewish state, and despite Netanyahu's attempts to revise history, it is crucial to remember that state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing and ongoing human rights violations are what enabled the Jewish settlers to occupy the lands on which they live in the first place. - Nicola Perugini is lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. And Neve Gordon is a Leverhulme visiting fellow at SOAS, University of London. They contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. (A version of this article was first published at Al Jazeera.) |
| NEWS |
Senior Facebook Officials Visit Israel to Discuss Social Media 'Incitement'
A delegation of senior Facebook officials has arrived in Israel for a series of meetings with government representatives and civil servants to discuss the issue of incitement on Facebook, The Times of Israel reported on Sunday. Monika Bickert, Facebook's head of product policy and counter-terrorism, and Joel Kaplan, vice president of Global Public as well as a former deputy chief of staff for policy at the White House, are heading the delegation, according to the report. Israeli officials have slammed Facebook for allowing online incitement that they claim leads to terror activities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the Facebook delegation's visit to Israel at the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday. "The aim is to increase cooperation against incitement, incitement to terror and murder on social networks," he said, according to The Times of Israel. "Terror groups use the internet to hurt humanity. We are determined to fight this phenomenon so I welcome this cooperation, or at least the willingness to cooperate, that Facebook is demonstrating which we hope will yield better results." Facebook has come under increasing pressure from Israeli politicians and officials for the type of content it allows on its platform. Israel's justice and internal security ministers recently announced plans to propose legislation banning the use of Facebook to advance "terror" and outlawing incitement from the Internet. Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, and Internal Security Minister, Gilad Erdan, said they instructed their respective ministries and the police to draft a new bill for removing terror content from the internet and social media. Shaked and Erdan said the legislation would aim to make it illegal to publish "offensive content" such as "encouraging terror attacks, shaming, insulting public officials and slandering". The principles of the bill would be that the state would issue a warning letter to internet, domain name and social media providers who can potentially remove the content as site administrators. If the providers, such as such as Facebook and Google, remove the terror content there would be no further action. If they do not remove the content, the bill would allow the state to request the courts to order the providers to remove the content within 24 hours, as Facebook does in the European Union, said the statement. This would be backed by a law that blocks content inciting "terror" and ensures its "complete removal". Israel maintains that online content has played a significant role in fueling the latest Palestinian intifada that broke out in October 2015. (Middle East Rising, PC) |
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The Palestine Chronicle is an independent online newspaper that provides daily news, commentary, features, book reviews, photos, art, etc, on a variety of subjects. However, it's largely focused on Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East region. The Palestine Chronicle is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization. To contact the editor, submit an article or any other material, please write to: editor@palestinechronicle.com. For other inquiries write to: info@palestinechronicle.com. |
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