Putting the Economic Cart before the Political Horse

 
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Anyone who had hopes that Gordon Brown’s tenure as Prime Minister might herald a positive in change Britain’s policy towards Palestine should begin to get disappointed.

On September 17 The British Treasury released a report that Mr. Brown had commissioned while he was still Chancellor about the economic situation in Palestine. Once one cuts through the rosy rhetoric and the NGO language (“co-operation”, “historic opportunity”, “better future”, “material stake in the future”) and some curtailed token criticisms of Israel, what emerges is the rotten core of the usual wrong-headed Blairite nonsense.

The report states that “the current vicious cycle of poverty and unemployment contributing to instability and conflict, and in turn further poverty and unemployment, must be broken.” How to break this, of course, is by instituting economic reforms in Palestine that will generate employment, raise hopes for the future, and then generate a shiny happy Palestinian population that will make peace with Israel. This is bullshit, to put it mildly.

The report cleverly returns to placing the root of the problem at the foot of the Palestinian economy, ignoring that the real root is the occupation, persecution and racism that are not only the root of the conflict, but the root of Palestinians’ misery and economic problems.

The only way there will ever be any hope for a Palestinian economy recovering and prospering is by ending the occupation and the Palestinians having a sovereign state that can determine its own future. Once that happens, there will be a good chance for a peaceful solution, and in turn more economic progress. To continue to peddle the line that economic development is needed as a prerequisite for independence is at best stupid, but more likely criminal excuse-peddling to justify doing nothing except giving some token aid.

India did not need to develop its economy before British colonialism ended. Nor did East Timor need to become Singapore before the Indonesians stopped massacring its population. South African blacks could not have prospered economically before apartheid ended, and to suggest that economic development of the Bantustans in the 1980’s was the real key to a peaceful solution in South Africa would’ve been a sick joke that only white-supremacists could’ve contemplated. In all those cases, it was the occupation, colonization, and racism that were the root of the problem. It was only when these were removed that there was a chance for some economic progress in those place. And in all of these places no self-respecting adult was stupid enough to suggest that the economics is what needs to change before the political situation changes.

The situation is no different in Palestine. All talk about the economy being the key to peace is a load of nonsense aimed at justifying inaction towards the real problem: the occupation. If Mr. Brown really cares about the Palestinian economy and Palestinians’ future, there is only one thing he can do: work at ending the occupation. Unfortunately, he seems more interested in carrying on the Blair line of yielding to the Americans entirely when it comes to Palestine. After all, it is much easier to just recycle some of Blair’s old “economics-first” ideas into brand new shiny reports than to actually do something that might anger the de-facto British Foreign Office in Washington.

Karma Nabulsi has an excellent article on this in The Guardian which concludes:

The latest initiative from the government suggests improvements driven by private investment. The absurdity of proposing to stimulate investment in this hell - where because of Israeli closures and checkpoints Palestinians cannot trade between their own towns much less with the outside world - or the fact that the present economic catastrophe is a direct consequence of the military occupation, gets no acknowledgement here. By avoiding the real issue of Israeli intransigence, and with no plan on tackling it, neither jobs nor justice are on offer to Palestinians. They expect international support to help them win their freedom - or at least not assistance in their oppression. As Mary Anderson, a contributor to the Chatham House book, explains: if you can do no good in Palestine, at least do no harm.

Irish Call for boycott

The erudite and courageous James Bowen, from the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign has this excellent article on the need for boycotting Israel. I agree with everything he says, but I have one small point to make:

Notice how an Israeli newspaper can publish something like this, but no American paper will ever touch it. This speaks volumes of how disgustingly idiotic, biased and downright racist American media is in discussing Israel/Palestine. But before supporters of Israel start boasting about how great their democracy is and how great their society is for having a free press, they should stop to think for a minute. The fact that Israel’s press openly and freely talks about all the land theft, persecution and human rights abuse that happens in Israel means that the people know what’s going on, and yet continue to support it and elect the same criminals that undertake it. While Americans can genuinely plead ignorance over what is happening in Palestine, Israelis can not. Which raises a million questions about how they continue to vote for despicable war criminals like Ariel Sharon.

And this, in turn, poses another supportive argument for boycotting Israel. As long as the Israeli people know these attrocities are happening, and feel no need to do anything about them, then an international boycott is essential to make them realize, like South Africa’s whites before them, that you can not continue knowing about this despicable oppression and voting to continue it without facing sanctions from the world.

A boycott by any other name …

_{By James Bowen}
In the late 19th century, changes in Ottoman law created a new class of large landholders, including the Sursuq family from Beirut, which acquired large tracts in northern Palestine. A similar situation had long existed in Ireland, where most land was controlled by absentee landlords, many of whom lived in Britain.

The 1880s, however, initiated dynamics that led the two lands in different directions. In 1882, the first Zionist immigrants arrived in Palestine, starting a process that subsequently led to the eviction of indigenous tenant farmers, when magnates like the Sursuqs pulled the land from under their feet, selling it to the Jewish National Fund.

In contrast, in 1880, Irish tenant farmers started a process that turned them into owner-occupiers. A former British army officer played a role in this drama, which introduced his name as a new word into many languages.

Western Ireland was again suffering near-famine conditions. The potato crop had failed for the third successive year. Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, agent for Lord Erne, the absentee landlord of an estate in County Mayo, refused the request of tenants for a rent reduction and, instead, in September 1880, obtained eviction notices against 11 of them for failure to pay their rent.

Thirty years earlier, evictions had expelled huge numbers of Irish to North America. But times were changing: A nationwide tenants’ rights movement, the Land League, had recently been formed, under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, a scion of the landlord class, whose pro-tenant sympathies were inherited from his American mother, a woman whose grandfather had been one of George Washington’s bodyguards. Speaking on September 19, 1880, Parnell outlined the strategy of the league:

“When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him, you must shun him in the streets of the town, you must shun him at the shop-counter, you must shun him at the fair and at the market-place and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind, as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation.”

Three days later, court officials attempted to serve Boycott’s eviction notices on the tenants, and the Land League policy went into effect. Within two months, Boycott’s name had become a synonym for ostracism, he had left the estate, and both landlords and government had discovered the power of ordinary people. Within a year, legislation at Westminster provided government finance for tenants wishing to purchase their farms.

For too long, Israel has been taking land from which Palestinians have been evicted, and detestation is spreading around the world. In Ireland, photos of Israeli bulldozers are placed beside those of landlords’ battering rams. Even a former U.S. president has recognized hafrada (”separation” in Hebrew) as apartheid. Disgust has reached such a level that even highly conservative institutions that normally try to avoid politics are driven to express concern.

One such body is Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists. Its annual general assembly on March 28 passed a resolution whose full text is: “Mindful of the August 4, 2006 call from Palestinian filmmakers, artists and cultural workers to end all cooperation with state-sponsored Israeli cultural events and institutions, Aosdana wishes to encourage Irish artists and cultural institutions to reflect deeply before engaging in any such cooperation, always bearing in mind the undeniable courage of those Israeli artists, writers and intellectuals who oppose their own government’s illegal policies towards the Palestinians.”

Although on the surface, this is a mild resolution, it is a boycott call in all but name. Its significance was not lost on Dr. Zion Evrony, the Israeli ambassador in Dublin. The very same day, he issued a press release that was replete with cliches that might have worked several decades ago, when Irish people were still unaware of the horrors that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians.

Possibly, the alacrity of Dr. Evrony’s response was due to the fact that the strength of feeling among Irish artists had been rehearsed in the Irish press. Indeed, the proposer of the motion, playwright Margaretta D’Arcy, who is Jewish, had written in The Irish Times on February 16 that, “I was reluctant to advocate a cultural boycott of Israel until I visited the country for the first time last November … I became convinced that a cultural boycott was necessary, if only as an act of solidarity with those in Israel who seek to remove the inequality, discrimination and segregation of their society.”

Continuing, she quoted from “Land Grab,” by Yehezkel Lein, published by B’Tselem - the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories: “The settlement enterprise in the occupied territories has created a system of legally sanctioned separation based on discrimination that has, perhaps, no parallel anywhere in the world since the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

Ms. D’arcy finished by saying: “My uncle went to live in the Holy Land in the 1920s to help set up the utopian dream of peace, justice and equality between Jew and Arab. It was only when I arrived there that I realized how mistaken he was. He would have done better to have stayed in the East End of London to struggle for peace, justice and equality in England.”

Parnell finished his call to action by saying that “there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public opinion of all right-thinking men.”

They were both right.

Prof. James Bowen is the national chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign.