Thursday, October 26, 2017

Transforming Hamas & Fatah | Is Jewish National Fund Racist? | Balfour & Beersheba | More ..

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Hamas and Fatah Must Transform to Speak on behalf of Palestinians

By Ramzy Baroud

The reconciliation agreement signed between rival Palestinian parties, Hamas and Fatah, in Cairo on October 12 was not a national unity accord - at least, not yet. For the latter to be achieved, the agreement would have to make the interests of the Palestinian people a priority, above factional agendas.

The leadership crisis in Palestine is not new. It precedes Fatah and Hamas by decades.

Since the destruction of Palestine and the creation of Israel in 1948 - and even further back - Palestinians found themselves beholden to international and regional power play, beyond their ability to control or even influence.

The greatest achievement of Yasser Arafat, the late and iconic leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was his ability to foster an independent Palestinian political identity and a national movement that, although receiving Arab support, was not entirely appropriated by any particular Arab country.

The Oslo Accords, however, was the demise of that movement. Historians may quarrel on whether Arafat, the PLO and its largest political party, Fatah, had any other option but to engage in the so-called 'peace process'. However, in retrospect, we can surely argue that Oslo was the abrupt cancelation of every Palestinian political achievement, at least since the war of 1967.

Despite the resounding defeat of Arab countries by Israel and its powerful western allies in that war, hope for a new beginning was born. Israel reclaimed East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, but, unwittingly unified Palestinians as one nation, although one that is oppressed and occupied.

Moreover, the deep wounds suffered by Arab countries as a result of the disastrous war, gave Arafat and Fatah the opportunity to utilize the new margins that opened up as a result of the Arab retreat.

The PLO, which was originally managed by the late Egyptian President, Jamal Abdul Nasser, became an exclusively Palestinian platform. Fatah, which was established a few years prior to the war, was the party in charge.

When Israel occupied Lebanon in 1982, its aim was the annihilation of the Palestinian national movement, especially since Arafat was opening up new channels of dialogue, not only with Arab and Muslim countries, but internationally as well. The United Nations, among other global institutions, began recognizing Palestinians, not as hapless refugees needing handouts, but as a serious national movement deserving to be heard and respected.

At the time, Israel was obsessed with preventing Arafat from rebranding the PLO into a budding government. In the short term, Israel achieved its main objective: Arafat was driven to Tunisia with his party's leadership, and the rest of the PLO's fighters were scattered across the Middle East, once more falling hostage to Arab whims and priorities.

Between 1982 and the signing of Oslo in 1993, Arafat fought for relevance. The PLO's exile became particularly evident as Palestinians launched their First Intifada (the uprising of 1987). A whole new generation of Palestinian leaders began to emerge; a different identity that was incepted in Israeli prisons and nurtured in the streets of Gaza and Nablus was sculpted. The greater the sacrifices and the higher the Palestinian death toll rose, the more heightened that sense of collective identity grew.

The PLO's attempt to hijack the Intifada was one of the main reasons why the uprising eventually faltered. The Madrid talks in 1991 was the first time that true representatives of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories would take on an international platform to speak on behalf of Palestinians at home.

That endeavor was short-lived. Eventually, Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas (today's head of the Palestinian Authority - PA) negotiated an alternative agreement secretly in Oslo. The agreement, largely sidelined the United Nations and allowed the United States to claim its position as a self-proclaimed 'honest broker' in a US-sponsored 'peace process.'

While Arafat and his Tunisian faction were allowed back to rule over occupied Palestinians with a limited mandate provided by the Israeli government and military, Palestinian society fell into one of its most painful dilemmas in many years.

With the PLO, which represented all Palestinians, cast aside to make room for the PA - which merely represented the interests of a branch within Fatah in a limited autonomous region - Palestinians became divided into groups.

In fact, 1994, which witnessed the official formation of the PA, was the year in which the current Palestinian strife was actually born. The PA, under pressure from Israel and the US, cracked down on Palestinians who opposed Oslo and justifiably rejected the 'peace process.'

The crackdowns reached many Palestinians who took leadership positions during the First Intifada. The Israeli gambit worked to perfection: The Palestinian leadership in exile was brought back to crackdown on the leadership of the Intifada, while Israel stood aside and watched the sad spectacle.

Hamas, which itself was an early outcome of the First Intifada, found itself in direct confrontation with Arafat and his authority. For years, Hamas positioned itself as a leader of the opposition that rejected normalization with the Israeli occupation. That won Hamas massive popularity among Palestinians, especially as it became clear that Oslo was a ruse and that the 'peace process' was moving towards a dead-end.

When Arafat died, after spending years under Israeli army siege in Ramallah, Abbas took over. Considering that Abbas was the brain behind Oslo, and the man's lack of charisma and leadership skills, Hamas took the first step in a political maneuver that proved costly: it ran for the PA's legislative elections in 2006. Worse, it won.

By emerging as the top political party in an election that was itself an outcome of a political process that Hamas had vehemently rejected for years, Hamas became a victim of its own success.

Expectedly, Israel moved to punish Palestinians. As a result of US urgings and pressures, Europe followed suit. The Hamas government was boycotted, Gaza came under constant Israeli bombardment and Palestinian coffers began drying up.

A Hamas-Fatah brief civil-war ensued in the summer of 2007, resulting in hundreds of deaths and the political and administrative split of Gaza from the West Bank.

Officially, Palestinians had two governments, but no state. It was a mockery, that a promising national liberation project abandoned liberation and focused mostly on settling factional scores, while millions of Palestinians suffered siege and military occupation, and millions more suffered the anguish and humiliation of 'shattat' - the exile of the refugees abroad.

Many attempts were made, and failed to reconcile between the two groups in the last 10 years. They failed mostly because, once more, the Palestinian leaderships leased their decision-making to regional and international powers. The golden age of the PLO was replaced with the dark ages of factional divisions.

However, the recent reconciliation agreement in Cairo is not an outcome of a new commitment to a Palestinian national project. Both Hamas and Fatah are out of options. Their regional politicking was a failure, and their political program ceased to impress Palestinians who are feeling orphaned and abandoned.

For the Hamas-Fatah unity to become a true national unity, priorities would have to change entirely, where the interest of the Palestinian people - all of them, everywhere - would, once more, become paramount, above the interests of a faction or two, seeking limited legitimacy, fake sovereignty and American handouts.

- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His forthcoming book is 'The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story' (Pluto Press, London). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

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If White National Fund Sounds Racist, So Should Jewish National Fund

By Yves Engler

Imagine if there were an organization called the White National Fund that raised tens of millions of dollars each year from Canadians to buy land in the US to be held exclusively for people of European descent. WNF land couldn't be leased or sold to anyone who they didn't consider "white". Would it be acceptable to give such an organization charitable status so donors received tax breaks?

While similar exclusionary land policies are its raison d'être, Jewish National Fund apologists in Canada claim it is racist to highlight the organization's discrimination.

In a recent commentary on Jagmeet Singh's embrace of imperialist NDP foreign critic Hélène Laverdière I pointed out that she "participated in a ceremony put on by the head of the explicitly racist Jewish National Fund during a visit to Israel" in November.

An individual on my Facebook had the temerity to respond:

"Yves Engler would do well to more thoroughly research the long and positive history, aims and accomplishments of the Jewish National Fund, before branding it with his own thinly veiled anti-Semitism, by describing (and underlining) it as 'explicitly racist'." (My "underlining" was a link to supporting evidence.)

The Green Party was smeared in a similar fashion when members proposed a resolution calling on the Canada Revenue Agency to revoke the JNF's charitable status because of its "discrimination against non-Jews in Israel through its bylaws which prohibit the lease or sale of its lands to non-Jews." In a National Post op-ed last summer then JNF head Josh Cooper accused the Greens' of discrimination and a commentary published by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs directly labeled the party "anti-Semitic".

JNF officials responded in a similar way after a 2013 protest against the organization in Colorado. KKL-JNF World Chairman Efi Stenzler said, "attacksand demonstrations against us [Jews] have picked up momentum of late, we [JNF] are targeted first and foremost because we are helping to realize the Zionist vision."

The chutzpah of JNF apologists' beggars belief. JNF racism is not concealed; it is, in fact, the organization's raison d'être. The US State Department, UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Israeli SupremeCourt are all on record regarding the discriminatory policies of the JNF, which controls 13% of Israel's land and has significant influence over most of the rest. Indicative of its discrimination against the over 20% of Israelis who aren't Jewish, JNF Canada's Twitter tag says it "is the caretaker of the land of Israel, on behalf of its owners - Jewish people everywhere."

Its parent organization in Israel - the Keren Kayemet LeYisrael - is even more open about its racism. Its website notes that "a survey commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals that over 70% of the Jewish population in Israel opposes allocating KKL-JNF land to non-Jews, while over 80% prefer the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than as the state of all its citizens."

The JNF is an openly Jewish supremacist organization operating in a Jewish/white supremacist state. Think KKK during Jim Crow in the US South. But, in the JNF's case proponents of the racist organization smear internationalist/universalist critics as discriminatory!

The JNF provides a stark example of the ethnocratic blinders that Zionism has placed on large swaths of Canada's Jewish community. Seven decades ago Jewish individuals and groups fought against discriminatory land use policies in this country while today thousands attend JNF fundraisers across the country.

In the most famous challenge to discriminatory land covenants, in 1948 Annie Noble decided to sell a cottage in the exclusive Beach O' Pines subdivision on Lake Huron to Bernie Wolf, who was Jewish. During the sale Wolf's lawyer realized that the original deed for the property restricted sale to "any person wholly or partly of negro, Asiatic, colored or Semitic blood." The deed further explained:

"The land and premises herein described shall never be sold, assigned, transferred, leased, rented or in any manner whatsoever alienated to and shall never be occupied or used in any manner whatsoever by any person of the Jewish, Hebrew, Semitic, negro or colored race or blood, it being the intention and purpose of the Grantor, to restrict the ownership, use, occupation and enjoyment of the said recreational development, including the lands and premises herein described to person of the white or Caucasian race not excluded by this clause."

Noble and Wolf tried to get the court to declare the restriction invalid but they were opposed by the Beach O'Pines Protective Association. Both a Toronto court and the Ontario Court of Appeal refused to invalidate the racist covenant. But Noble pursued the case - with assistance from the Canadian Jewish Congress - to the Supreme Court of Canada. In a six-to-one decision the highest court reversed the lower courts' ruling and allowed Noble to purchase the property.

Were the judges who voided the discriminatory land covenant "anti-Caucasian"? Of course not.

If the JNF disappeared or Israel outlawed discriminatory land policies would Israeli Jews become oppressed? Hardly.

But, myself and other Canadian critics haven't even called for the JNF to be outlawed. Notwithstanding the anti-Semitism smears, the above-mentioned Green Party resolution or Independent Jewish Voices' JNF campaign simply calls on the Canadian state to stop subsidizing its discrimination (and implicitly for public representatives in this country to stop participating in JNF events). As far as I'm aware, no one has called for the organization to be banned, its executives to be investigated for contravening Canadian law or for the land and assets it controls to be seized.

Eventually the JNF's charitable status will be revoked. Taxpayers can't be expected to subsidize discriminatory land-use policies in Israel forever. At some point groups and individuals who claim to oppose racism will stop running scared of "anti-Semitism" insults and will add their voice to Independent Jewish Voices political and legal challenge of the JNF's charitable status.

For the Palestinian solidarity movement the campaign to revoke the JNF's charitable status is important beyond winning the specific demand. It draws attention to the racism intrinsic to Zionism and highlights Canada's contribution to Palestinian dispossession.

The campaign to revoke the JNF's charitable status is simply a call for the Canadian state to stop subsidizing an explicitly racist, colonial, institution. There is nothing anti-Jewish in that.

- Yves Engler is the author of Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid and a number of other books. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit his website: yvesengler.com.

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Ugly Truths Behind Balfour and Beersheba

By Jeremy Salt

Within a month two events will be celebrated that have a left a deep imprint on the 'western' consciousness. The most significant is the Balfour Declaration, a piece of paper whose destructive consequences the people of the Middle East have had to live with every day since it was signed in November, 1917. It was signed by a man, Arthur James Balfour, who in 1905, as Prime Minister, was regarded by Jews as anti-semitic for his sponsorship in the House of Commons of the Aliens Bill, specifically designed to keep Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia out of England.

Balfour regarded the rights and aspirations of the 'Arabs' as inconsequential compared to those of the Jews. More than 90 per cent of the population of Palestine in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs, Muslim and Christian, were described in his declaration as 'existing non-Jewish communities.' The phrase is menacing: what exists today might not necessarily exist tomorrow, which was exactly what the Zionists and senior figures in the British government, including Winston Churchill, Minister of Munitions during the war and Colonial Secretary afterwards, had in mind. Palestine would be filled with Zionist settlers until the demographic balance had reached the point where the indigenous population could be overwhelmed.

The Palestine Balfour wanted to turn into a Jewish 'national home' had a Palestinian population of about 600,000 and a Jewish population, composed mostly of recently arrived European settlers, of eight to ten per cent of that number: private land ownership, in the towns and the country, was almost wholly in Palestinian Muslim or Christian hands, with state and village lands part of their collective inheritance. By 1945, through legal or semi-legal purchase, the Zionist agencies had still only managed to acquire less than six per cent of Palestine. The rest of what they wanted they would have to steal.

On October 31, two days before Balfour issued his pernicious declaration, Australian cavalrymen had broken through Ottoman defences at Beersheba (Bir Saba'). The 4th, 8th, 9th, 11th and 12th Australian Light Horse as well as the Imperial Camel Corps were all involved. The centenary will be celebrated this year by visiting contingents of Australians and New Zealanders. Israeli travel companies are cashing in, offering 'In the Footsteps of the Anzacs in the Holy Land' tours taking in territories occupied in the 1967 war, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, down to the Jordan River valley, as well as Beersheba.

The Times of Israel has even mocked up a 'photograph' of 1917 cavalrymen bearing the Australian and Israeli flags. The official Australian delegation will be led by the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull: those taking part in the 'celebrations' will include the world champion cyclist Cadell Evans and the actor Bryan Brown. Evans will lead Australian mountain bikers on a ride along the 'Anzac Trail', running from Beersheba to the Gaza strip: perhaps some of the riders might wonder what is on the other side of the fence and think twice about their presence in Israel.

Beersheba's dark history in the 20th century includes the massacre of between 40 and 120 civilians by ANZAC soldiers at Sarafand, close to Beersheba, on December 10, 1918. Hundreds of New Zealand troops entered the village and have been held primarily responsible for the massacre but Australian troops were there and, according to some evidence, also took part. The number of the dead is inexact. They were only 'Arabs', after all, an attitude confirmed by the fact that while General Allenby was disgusted by the killings, no-one was charged for this war crime.

After victory over the Ottomans, Beersheba passed into British hands. Sarafand became the site of a military camp and thus part of a string of bases and prisons anchoring the British occupation of Palestine. On May 20, 1948, six days after the British departure and David Ben-Gurion's announcement of the establishment of the state of Israel, Sarafand (Sarafand al Amr to distinguish it from another Sarafand) was attacked by Zionist forces. Almost all its houses were destroyed and its entire population of more than 2000 people driven out. The British military base at Sarafand was turned into an Israeli military base combined with an interrogation and torture centre known to Palestinian prisoners in the coming decades as the 'palace of hell' or the 'palace of the end', coincidentally (or otherwise) the same name, Qasr al Nihayya, given to the Iraqi royal palace used by Saddam Hussein as an interrogation, torture and killing centre.

Beersheba's turn for ethnic cleansing came on October 21, 1948, during Operation Yoav, one of the many campaigns launched to take complete control of the Naqab all the way down to the Gulf of Aqaba. Beersheba was inside the territory allocated to the Palestinian state in the partition plan of 1947. It did not have a Jewish population at all and neither were there any Jewish settlements nearby. The population of Beersheba about 6000 was entirely Palestinian, including sedentary or semi-sedentary beduin: the population of the Beersheba district was about 110,000, almost all driven out of their villages and the town itself. Many of the buildings in Beersheba were destroyed but the central mosque was retained and eventually turned into a museum, set aside in recent years for events such as a wine and beer festival, against Palestinian protests.

Many of the residents of Beersheba and its environs ended up in Gaza as part of the outflow of about 200,000 people driven out of southern Palestine. With Beersheba in their hands, the Zionists could then begin the conquest of the southern Naqab. They had been allocated this region in 1947 irrespective of the fact that it had no Jewish population at all. Given the enormous mass of territory the Zionists had taken beyond the limits of the partition plan some resistance developed in the US State Department to the idea that Israel should have all the Naqab as well. But Israel insisted that it 'must have' what it had been promised and, in particular, 'must have' Eilat.

No-one in the State Department raised the obvious point that there was no Eilat on the map, only a Jordanian police post, Umm Rashrash, standing on the site where the Zionists planned to build Eilat. On March 10, 1949, Israel completed its conquest of the Naqab by seizing Umm Rashrash. It had insisted on taking what it had been given in the partition plan, and had insisted on holding what it had taken outside the partition plan, and it got away with it. Umm Rashrash was developed into the port city of Eilat, and the ethnically cleansed town of Beersheba was turned into the 'capital' of the 'Negev:' the nuclear weapons development and production plant at Dimona lies about 35 kilometres to the south. The ethnic cleansing of the beduin from the Naqab has continued in waves down to the present day.

Australia has its own savage colonial past. Several years ago, the Rudd government initiated the 'sorry' movement which was at least an acknowledgement of the crimes committed against the indigenous people. No lecture is now given or conference given without speakers acknowledging the rights of the traditional owners of the land. In the cities, with aboriginal land long since built over, the acknowledgement of their rights is never followed up by any practical attempt to give some of it back. In the outback, furthermore, away from the city lights, where even neglect can be neglected, the problems experienced by aboriginal people continue unredressed, as John Pilger's recent documentary Utopia makes painfully clear.

Australian politicians, by and large, defend the 'rights' of the indigenous people even if there is little clarity on exactly what those rights should include. In any case, acknowledging indigenous rights in Australia and defending them elsewhere are clearly two different matters. Australian politicians have a track record of slavish deference to Israel, a state which continues its racist war of usurpation against the Palestinian people despite international condemnation. The list includes all recent Prime Ministers, John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Malcom Turnbull. Onslaughts on Gaza resulting in the killing of thousands of people are met with the response that Israel is entitled to defend itself while at the UN Australia has repeatedly voted against the upgrading of Palestine credentials. Julia Gillard, presenting herself as the defender of the rights of women and children around the world, has never once defended the rights of women and children in Gaza and the West Bank: on the contrary, her defence of Israel added up to justification for its crimes.

Greeting Benyamin Netanyahu in Sydney in February this year, Turnbull remarked that 'we have so much in common, shared values, democracy, freedom, the rule of law. Two democracies, one very small in area, one vast but each of us big-hearted, generous, committed to freedom.'

These remarks are such an insult to the intelligence of Palestinians and Australians aware of Israel's criminal behaviour, a rapidly growing number, that Turnbull himself can surely hardly believe what he is saying to be true. Palestinians are not free. In Gaza, in East Jerusalem and on the West Bank they live in a state of bondage: even in pre-1967 Israel they are subjected to a two-tier legal and social system. No country in the world has shown more contempt for international law and conventions than Israel.

Even as Australians were planning their Beersheba visit an infuriated Israel pulled out of UNESCO, along with the United States. The immediate cause was UNESCO's designation of the West Bank city of Hebron, including the Ibrahimi Mosque and the 'cave of the patriarchs' claimed to be lying beneath it, as a 'Palestinian World Heritage site in danger.' Hebron is an occupied city that has been turned by the Israeli state into one of the most racist places on the face of the earth. The state's agents are soldiers and settlers who work together against the Palestinian population, the soldiers protecting the settlers whatever they do and punishing the Palestinians whatever they don't do. The heart of the city has been gutted by the occupiers. The central bus station, an artery for all life in the town, was closed down in the early 1980s. The central market soon followed, along with all surrounding Palestinian buildings, in the name of security for the settlers living on the heights above. The only visitors to the shuttered ghost market now are Jewish tourists protected by soldiers and believing anything they are told.

In 1994 Baruch Goldstein, an American-born settler from Kiryat Arba, adjoining Hebron, and a follower of the genocidal rabbi Meir Kahane, walked into the Ibrahimi mosque and massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers with an assault rifle before being beaten to death by the rest of the congregation. This horrific act was celebrated by the Kiryat Arba setters. At Goldstein's funeral one rabbi said that a million Arabs were 'not worth a Jewish fingernail' while another, Dov Lior, now the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba, described Goldstein as being 'holier than all the martyrs of the holocaust.'

Far from punishing the settler community which nurtured Goldstein, and then celebrated the massacre with a monument built to his memory, Israel took advantage of the moment to bring the mosque under its direct control, with only nominal authority retained by the waqf (religious charitable foundation) authorities. Two thirds of the mosque was turned into a synagogue to serve the setters of Kiryat Araba and Jewish visitors and one third allowed the Palestinians. They continue to pray at the mosque despite checkpoints and intimidation by soldiers and settlers because it is Palestinian property, because it is their place of worship and because they are determined to prevent it falling wholly into the hands of the occupier.

The UNESCO vote was only the organisation's latest attempt to protect Palestinian sites. Israel's record of cultural destruction goes back to the beginning: in 1948 it destroyed close to 500 villages or hamlets and in 1967, having seized East Jerusalem, it immediately pulled down the medieval Magharibah (North African) quarter, built for Muslim pilgrims in the 12thcentury by a son of Salah al Din al Ayyubi (Saladin), to make way for a 'plaza' around the wall of the Haram al Sharif, the compound containing Al Aqsa (the furthest) mosque, designated by Israel as the 'Temple Mount.'

Destruction of the Muslim Mamillah cemetery in Jerusalem (Al Quds or 'the holy') began soon after the 1948 war to make way for an 'independence park.' Created in the 7th century the cemetery has been targeted repeatedly, with an estimated 1500 tombs having now been removed, with many of the remains simply thrown away. A parking lot has been built on cemetery land and plans laid for the construction of a 'museum of tolerance.' The destruction/desecration of the cemetery is part of an ongoing process to water down, hide or wipe out the character of what the great scholar Albert Hourani once described as the perfect example of a medieval Islamic city.

Australians visiting Jerusalem or taking side trips to the Golan Heights during their Anzac holy land tour need to understand what they are sanctioning by their presence. In Beersheba they will be commemorating a battle which stands in Palestinian memory as the scene of a massacre. They will be trooping in and out of a city built up on ethnically cleansed Palestinian land. They will be riding the 'Anzac trail' up to Gaza where, behind the fence, Palestinians who once lived in or around Beersheba were driven out by those who took the town over.

The problem is not just that Palestine was ethnically cleansed once, in 1948, and twice, in 1967, but that the clearing of the land continues in East Jerusalem and on the West Bank. There is no remorse, no regret by Israel, no willingness to come to terms with the past, only triumphalism, arrogance, more criminality and endless restatements that 'this land belongs to us and only us.' Morally, Australian public figures visiting Israel to take part in state-sponsored events put themselves in a contradictory position. Defending, at least in word, indigenous rights in their own country, they are visiting a country where the destruction of the rights of another indigenous people does not belong to the past but, after more than 70 years, remains an ongoing process.

- Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.