This was first published in 3QuarksDaily

The daily realities of living under an illegal military occupation are unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t lived under them. No matter how much one writes, it is impossible to convey the ghastliness, injustice, oppressiveness and inhumanity of being ruled over by a repressive military accountable to no one. The death of Iman Al-Hams, however, may provide an illustrative anecdote.

On the morning of the 5th of October, 2004, a morning as rudimentarily awful as any lived under a brutal occupation, 13-year-old Iman, wearing her blue and white school uniform and carrying her schoolbag, left her house in Rafah refugee camp to go to school. Iman wandered a few meters away from her usual route to school and ventured into the large security zone surrounding an Israeli military base, which is, as is common, located near Palestinian civilians’ houses and schools. What follows is a gruesome tale of sickeningly cold-blooded murder.

Iman was spotted by the Israeli military base’s watchtower. She was about 100 yards away from the military base when the following conversation took place between a soldier in the watchtower, an army operations room and a certain Captain R, who remains unnamed to this day:

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From the watchtower: “It’s a little girl. She’s running defensively eastward.”

From the operations room: “Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?”

Watchtower: “A girl about 10, she’s behind the embankment, scared to death.”

A few minutes later, Iman is shot from one of the army posts

Watchtower: “I think that one of the positions took her out.”

Captain R: “I and another soldier … are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill … Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her … I also confirmed the kill. Over.”

Captain R—along with another soldier—walks towards Iman, and shoots two bullets at point-blank range into her head to “confirm the kill.” He starts to head back to his base, before turning around again and emptying all the bullets from his machine gun into the body of Iman.

Captain R then “clarifies” why he killed Iman: “This is commander. Anything that’s mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over.”

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After she was taken to the hospital, doctors counted 17 bullet wounds in Iman’s body, and three in her head, though they were unsure of the exact number since her little body was shattered to the point where one couldn’t accurately count how many bullets had riddled it.

Anywhere in the world, you would expect such a murderer to be tried and to receive a very harsh sentence. Unfortunately, the laws that apply in most of the world do not apply to Palestinian children and their murderers. An Israeli military court, on October 15, 2004, cleared the soldier of any wrongdoing or unethical behavior, declaring that “confirming the kill” is standard procedure.

A few of the soldiers serving with Captian R seem to have not been satisfied. They were apparently motivated by racist animosity towards him (he is Druze, they are Jewish), and took the matter to a Military Police court. He was charged not with the murder of Iman, but with “illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice.” He was cleared on all counts.

To add insult to fatal and gruesome injury, Captain R was then compensated with 80,000 Israeli Sheckels (around US$20,000) plus legal fees for the inconvenience of being taken to court over a triviality such as the life of a Palestinian child. The court also criticized the Military Police for investigating the case in the first place. Captain R was then promoted to the rank of Major, and continues to serve in the Israeli Army, where he may well have murdered other children in the past three years.

This is by no means an isolated incident or a freak failing of the “justice” system, but rather one example of many such stories that will shock anyone with an ounce of conscience or humanity in them. One could write whole books with the stories of children like Iman, killed in callous cold blood, whose murderers faced no repercussions whatsoever for their crimes. Since 2000, almost 1,000 Palestinian children have been murdered by the Israeli Army, and countless other thousands injured. Not a single Israeli soldier has faced any form of punishment, demotion, or even reprimand over any of these murders.

As The Guardian’s Chris McGreal put it back in June 2005:

B’Tselem argues that a lack of accountability and rules of engagement that “encourage a trigger-happy attitude among soldiers” have created a “culture of impunity” - a view backed by the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which last week described many army investigations of civilian killings as a “sham … that encourages soldiers to think they can literally get away with murder”.

In southern Gaza, the killings take place in a climate that amounts to a form of terror against the population. Random fire into Rafah and Khan Yunis has claimed hundreds of lives, including five children shot as they sat at their school desks. Many others have died when the snipers must have known who was in their sights - children playing football, sitting outside home, walking back from school. Almost always “investigations” amount to asking the soldier who pulled the trigger what happened - often they claim there was a gun battle when there was none - and presenting it as fact.

The tragedy of these stories is not just that these lives of innocent children have been lost, but that the Israeli Army, backed by the government, has made it entirely clear that all Palestinians are fair game to their soldiers. Had Iman’s murder been an isolated incident whose perpetrator was punished, one could argue that the Israeli army was not complicit in it. But by acquitting the proudly self-confessed murderer, along with hundreds of his likes, the army is sending a clear message to anyone who would listen that it is an institution that finds child-murder acceptable.

This is illustrative of the real injustice and tragedy of the occupation. Callow 18-year-olds, drunk on their power, sit behind some of the most sophisticated murder machinery in the world and unleash it on a civilian population. Their trigger-happy guns are the only judge, jury and executioner around. There are no moral imperatives, no accountability, and not even any incentive to attempt to minimize damage to civilians. The lives of those surrounding this murder machinery are dispensable.

This is why it is imperative that the occupation end. It is a fundamental right of the Palestinian people, like any other people, not to have their children murdered with impunity by an occupying army. Only when this happens can there be any prospect for peace. Ending the occupation is not conditioned on what the Palestinians do or how they behave, or whether they resist the occupation or not; it is a fundamental right for Palestinians, on a par with the right not to be enslaved.

Under occupation, every child, woman and man is collateral damage waiting to happen. Three years ago it was Iman’s turn. If the world lets the madness of this occupation continue, we will witness a new Iman Al-Hams every day, and our silence will make us complicit in her murder as well.

 
Normal service resumed

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.

My latest article on 3QuarksDaily:

Imagine an American TV network deciding to take the American Idol format and apply it to poetry; lining up poets to read their poems in front of temperamental judges while the nation gets out its mobile phones to vote for its favorite poet. One can be sure the show would not survive the first commercial break before the chastened executives pull the plug on it and replace it with yet another series on the Life and Times of Nicole Ritchie. Yet, that was exactly the formula for the latest TV sensation to take Arab countries by storm.

Perhaps the only thing that is as hard as translating Arab poetry to other languages is trying to explain to non-Arabs the extent of poetry’s popularity, importance and Arabs’ strong attachment to it. Whereas poetry in America has been largely reduced to a ceremonial eccentricity that survives thanks to grants and subsidies from fanatics who care about it too much, in the Arab world it remains amongst the most popular forms of both literature and entertainment. Whereas America’s top poets may struggle to fill a small Barnes & Noble store for a reading, Palestine’s Mahmoud Darwish has filled football stadiums with thousands of fans eager to hear his unique recital of his powerful poems. And while in America a good poetry collection can expect to sell some 2,000 copies, in the Arab world the poems of pre-Islamic era poets are still widely read today in their original words, as are those from the different Islamic eras leading to the present. The late Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani had a cult following across the Arab world, and his romantic poems have for decades constituted standard covert currency between lovers.

The Arab World has had its own enormously successful pop music answer to American Idol in Superstar which has concluded its fourth season with resounding success, unearthing some real stars of today’s thriving Arabic cheesy pop scene. But a few months ago, the governors of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi took a bold move by organizing a similar contest for poets. This comes as another step in Abu Dhabi’s ambitious attempts to use its petro-dollars to transform itself into the capital of Arab culture, and one of the world’s leading cultural centers; a Florence to Dubai’s London.

The show, named Prince of Poets, was an enormous success. Some 4,000 poets from across the Arab world sent in submissions to be considered. 35 were chosen for the show, and millions of viewers from across the Arab world tuned in to watch them recite their poetry, get criticized by Arab poetry’s answer to Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson (5 older poets and professors), improvise verses on the spot, and address wide-ranging issues from women’s rights, Iraq, love, democratization, Palestine and the old staple of Arab poetry: self-aggrandization. The winner would not only gain fame, but also a grand prize of 1,000,000 UAE Dirhams ($270,000).

The success of the show was wilder than anyone could’ve expected. The Arab press has had reports about how it has achieved the highest ratings in its spot, overtaking football matches and reality-TV; and millions have paid for text messages to vote for their favorite poet.

The turning point in the show’s popularity, many have speculated, came when young Palestinian poet, Tamim Al-Barghouti, read his poem “In Jerusalem“. Tamim, who is a distant cousin and close friend of mine, is the son of famous Palestinian poet and writer Mourid Al-Barghouti (author of the excellent I Saw Ramallah) and Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour. Tamim’s charisma, poetry, personality and politics captured the imagination of the Arab world. A veteran of years of student political activism in Palestine and Egypt, Tamim was once deported from Egypt by the authorities after engaging in one too many anti-Iraq War protests for the liking of Egypt’s regime. He then moved to America where he completed a Ph.D. in Political Science at Boston University in only three years, before working for the United Nations in Sudan. Through all of this, he has managed to publish four collections of poetry that have received critical acclaim and is expanding his Ph.D. thesis into a book on political identity in the Middle East to be published in 2008. He is now headed to Germany to become a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

While many contestants opted away from talking about politics in their poems, hoping to not cause any grievance to the generous leaders of the United Arab Emirates who are hosting this show, or to any of the other Arab leaders, Tamim’s poetry was almost entirely political. Whether it was about Palestine, Iraq, or Arab dictatorships, Tamim was as courageous as he was eloquent, raising a few eyebrows in the quiet Emirate where discussing regional politics is not considered the wisest choice of discussion topic.

“In Jerusalem” is a poetic diary of Tamim’s last visit to his land’s occupied capital; a sad traverse through its occupied streets defiled by the occupation soldiers and the illegal settlers living on stolen Palestinian land, and around the apartheid walls choking the city with their racist denial of Palestinians’ basic freedoms and rights. Nonetheless, the poem ends on a cheery and optimistic tone, leading to the jubilant excitement with which the Arab world enjoyed the poem.

Palestinian newspapers have dubbed Tamim The Poet of Al-Aqsa; his posters hang on the streets of Jerusalem and other Palestinian cities, where key-chains are being sold with his picture on them. Sections of the poem have even become ring-tones blaring out from mobile phones across the Arab World, and 10-year-old kids compete in memorizing and reciting it. Hundreds of thousands of people have seen Tamim’s poems on Youtube and other video websites.

But perhaps Tamim’s most amazing feat was how he has galvanized all Palestinians into following him and supporting him. After all of the troubles that Palestine has been through recently, and all the divisions that have been spawned within the Palestinian people, it was very refreshing to finally find something that unequivocally unites all Palestinians, and rouses millions of Arabs behind the cause that was tarred recently by the actions of some Palestinians.

This unifying effect was most glaringly captured when the TV stations of both Hamas and Fatah threw their support behind the unsuspecting Tamim, broadcasting his poems repeatedly, and urging people to vote for him, catapulting him from a little known young poet into a symbol of national resistance and unity. Finally, after months of divisions amongst Palestinians, there was something uniting them: a reminder of the true essence of the cause of the Palestinians, of the real problem, the real enemies and the real need for unity to face these challenges for the sake of Palestinian people and their just cause.

All of which made the final result of the contest most surprising. After having consistently received the highest ranking from the viewers’ votes and the unanimous flattery of the judges, and after a barn-storming flawless last poem that had the judges gushing, Tamim ended up in fifth place out of the five finalists. The poetess that was expected to most strongly challenge Tamim, the Sudanese Rawda Al-Hajj, who had focused her poems on women’s empowerment, finished fourth. The winner, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Abdulkareem Maatouk, a poet from the host country, the United Arab Emirates, whose poems had steered clear of anything political or controversial.

Though Tamim refused to comment, speculation was rife that the results were rigged. That Tamim and Rawda, widely viewed as the two best poets, would finish bottom of the finalists was certainly implausible, and one could not help but imagine that politics came into play. Abu Dhabi may want to fashion itself as the capital of culture, but it probably values its political stability more than any cultural pretenses. Arab regimes may have behaved like warring tribes with narrow self-interest over the past century, but there is one thing in which their cooperation was always exemplary: the effective suppression of all voices of dissent. As the contest became more popular, and the crown of the Prince of Poets more prestigious, it may have become too hard for the organizers to accept giving the trophy to a Palestinian rabble-rouser who in one of his poems bemoaned the times that have “degraded the free amongst us, and made scoundrels into our rulers.”

Nonetheless, there is no doubt who the real winner was; it was not just Tamim and his poetry which will now rival Mahmoud Darwish’s as the voice of the Palestinians, but also the Palestinian people who were reminded of the meaning of their unity, and their cause, which has found its best advertisement that has strengthened the mutual affection, dedication and support of millions of Arabs in the midst of one of its darkest hours.

Tony Karon, a good friend of mine, is a South African who was part of the anti-apartheid movement before moving to America and becoming editor in chief of Time.com. He also writes regularly on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and Middle East politics in general. His personal blog, Rootless Cosmopolitan, is one of the best places to go for analysis of Middle East issues in particular, and global politics in general. And he is one of the few people that are as rabid as I am in supporting Liverpool FC!

A few weeks ago I wrote an article for his blog on European policy in the Middle East. Make sure you check out the rest of Tony’s excellent site for some really fascinating writing and excellent insight.

Excerpt:

“The tragic aspect of Europe’s policy with regard to Palestine today is not just that is practically indistinguishable from the policy of the US, but that it comes bundled with great self-righteousness and an unshakable belief that it is not only the correct policy, but is also vastly morally superior to anything anyone else is doing. The financial aid provided by Europe is the major rationale supporting this smugness.

“Here is a small microcosm of how this madness works: A Palestinian town has a wall built surrounding it from all sides, making it impossible for previously prosperous farmers to access their land, patients to reach their doctors and children to reach their schools. Naturally, the town is devastated. That’s when Europeans send in their conscience-assuaging, smugness-propping aid “experts” to “save” the town, in the process relieving Israel from having to deal with the consequences of its crimes. They provide the farmers with food instead of the food they could have produced themselves, and proceed with projects to teach Palestinians “alternative industries”, “new business models”, “good local governance”, “participatory development”, “creative educational techniques” and countless other meaningless prattle that the Palestinians would gladly give up for having the wall removed, an independent state and some sense of normalcy bestowed on their lives. Naturally, these projects have a short shelf-life; the funding soon dries up, the “experts” leave, but the apartheid wall remains, the livelihood of a whole town is devastated, and the mirage of Palestinian independence is even more distant.”

Read the rest of it here

I have started writing a column for the 3QuarksDaily website. It’s a really great site and I’m real glad to be writing there. Make sure you check out the site and see the About Us section.

Here is my first article published yesterday, about the Right of Return means to me, with relevance to my grandfather’s land that was usurped by Zionists in 1948; drawing a contrast between demanding that I give it up, and demanding that blacks give up the right to front seats in a bus.

Excerpt:

The way to end racial conflict in the American South was not for Rosa Parks and blacks to give up their rights to the front of the bus and ‘let everyone live in peace’, but by ending the system that denies someone the right to sit in a certain part of a bus depending on their skin color. Similarly, peace in Palestine will not come when Palestinians give up their right to own a piece of land because of the religion to which they were born; but rather, when we abolish the system that assigns plots of lands, houses and villages to people based on what version of god they believe in.

I will never consider there to be peace in Palestine so long as I can visit my grandfather’s house in Atteel and look a few kilometers west to see my land that I can not visit, own, or sell. The day I can reclaim that land, I will visit it once, savor the feeling, and the very next day, I’ll sell my share of it to the highest bidder regardless of their religion, race or ethnicity, and donate the money to an educational institute that will teach the children of Palestine, regardless of their religion, race or ethnicity about the importance of equality and justice, about Rosa Parks, and about how peace could never be achieved on the basis of racist exclusion, whether it be from the front of a bus or from an orange grove.

Read the rest of the article here and make sure to check out the comments section, which has a lively debate developing.

American taxpayer money at work in Jenin (left) and American taxpayer money not at work in New Orleans (right)

On my news feed, a few days ago, next to each other were two items that demonstrate two incredible, and not all too unrelated, phenomena that tell you a lot about America today.

New Orleans Pursues Foreign Aid
Washington to Increase Military Aid to Israel

As New Orleans struggles to rebuild itself, and the Federal money that was supposed to fund this rebuilding is trickling far slower than it was promised, President Bush announced an increase in the aid package to Israel and secured it for the next ten years.

The Big Easy, one of America’s most beautiful and diverse cities, languishes in debris two years after it was devastated by hurricane Katrina, the incompetence of the Army Corps of Engineers who never bothered to check the levies, and the criminal negligence of the Bush Administration and their countless cronies at all levels of government.

Only half of the promised $320million in Federal aid for infrastructure has arrived to New Orleans, leaving its mayor desperate enough to pick up the phone and call back all the world leaders who had made pledges for aid, including Saudi Arabia and Cuba.

On the other hand, the criminal government of Israel, which has murdered thousands of children over the last few years is given $2.4billion (rising to $2.9b) in military aid. This is the money that will go to fund tanks, aircrafts, machine guns that will eventually bomb Palestinian and Lebanese children. With each of these dollars, America is engendering the enmity of millions of Arabs who watch these weapons in action every day.

What was most fascinating was this snippet:

The prime minister asked U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for his assistance in expediting the handling of a number of IDF procurement requests meant to complete the replenishment of equipment and stores used during the Second Lebanon War.

Gates pointed out that though there is no problem with the requests in principle, there is an orderly procedure. However, Bush intervened and directed the defense secretary to expedite approval of the IDF’s requests.

It must be reassuring for the millions of Americans who saw their President do nothing as New Orleans drowned that he “intervened” to “expedite” the IDF request. President Bush will go to any lengths to make sure that bureaucracy and “orderly procedures” do not get in the way of Israel’s bombing of children. As for the children drowning in New Orleans, he can trust Michael Brown to take care of them.

So in one case, the American government is not spending enough money to rebuild one of the country’s most beautiful cities, leaving thousands homeless; while in the other case, the government is spending money on weapons to destroy Arab cities, murder Arab children and win more enemies.

This week marks the 40^th anniversary of the start of the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza.  Generations of Palestinians have now lived their entire lives under the rule of a criminal military regime.  It is about time the world did something about this.  Let us all join together to work globally to end this atrocious occupation.

If you are in America, please try to make it to the End the Occupation Rally in Washington DC on June 10^th.  If you can not make it, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support this incredibly important effort, and the US Campaign to End Israeli Occupation.  Adalah-NY are arranging for buses from New York; you can buy tickets from their website www.mideastjustice.org.

If you live in the UK, please try to make it to the National Demonstration against the Occupation in London on June 9^th, and make sure you stay up to date with all the actions of two great organizations in the UK: the Enough! Coalition and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

There are actions against Israeli apartheid all across the world this week.  You can see here a list of actions in over 25 countries.  And make sure you regularly read www.stopthewall.org, the website of the Grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Campaign for excellent news, analysis, maps and activist resources.

The United Nations today released a report with the most detailed map of the West Bank, showing the horrible reality of the apartheid regime Israel has installed in the West Bank, which makes apartheid in South Africa look like a picnic, as Ronnie Kasrils, a veteran South African fighter of apartheid, has said repeatedly.  He has a new interview with Gideon Levy in which he discusses why his opposition to Israeli apartheid is a consistent extension of opposition to South African apartheid, and why Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is much worse than anything the South Africans did.

Also, make sure you read this excellent piece by Tony Karon, a South African journalist who grew up a Zionist supporter of Israel, who reflects on how his perception of Israel has changed over time, and what the current situation means for Israel in the future, in light of the experience of South Africa’s own apartheid regime.

The reality today may be depressing but we should never lose hope.  Many oppressive regimes with incredible criminal power and no morality like Israel have been defeated before, as South Africa clearly shows.  As long as people from all over the world continue to work to support justice in Palestine there is no doubt that Israel’s despicable apartheid regime will fare no better than its counterpart in South Africa.

Today is the 59th anniversary of the saddest day in the history of Palestine, the day in which racist Zionist colonialism completed the destruction of more than 500 towns, the dispossesion of around a million refugees, the murder of thousands and the establishment of a settler colonalist regime that subsits to this day.

Never will Palestinians anywhere forget this day. And never will we stop working to end its tragic legacy which continues to this day to oppress millions.

Like Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, this settler colonial regime is destined to be defeated. It will be defeated simply because we Palestinians are incapable of being defeated.

Nothing that the criminals in charge of the racist Zionist regime ever do will succeed in destroying the Palestinian will to return and end settler colonialism in Palestine. The Palestinian will to return is stronger than ever.

In the refugee camps of Gaza, Jenin, Nablus and the rest of Palestine; in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt; in their exiles in Arab countries, Europe, the Americas and the world over; millions of Palestinians–young and old– will reflect on this day and remember their inalienable right to return to their homes.

As an old song by Fairouz said:

Another day has passed

Our exile has increased by one day

And our return has drawn one day nearer

Make sure to check out www.PalestineRemembered.com, and excellent resource for everything related to the Nakba with full documentation of Zionist crimes, massacres and village destruction.

Also, George Bisharat has an excellent editorial in the San Fransisco Gate about what exactly the Nakba means to millions of Palestinians, and why its rememberance is not only vital for the sake of remembrance, but also vital for the future.

For Palestinians, memory matters
It provides a blueprint for their future

George Bisharat
Sunday, May 13, 2007

Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are asked to forget? That question is especially poignant at this time of year, as we move from Holocaust Remembrance day in early spring to Monday’s anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948.

In the months surrounding that date, Jewish forces expelled, or intimidated into flight, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians. A living, breathing, society that had existed in Palestine for centuries was smashed and fragmented, and a new society built on its ruins.

Few Palestinian families lack a personal narrative of loss from that period — an uncle killed, or a branch of the family that fled north while the others fled east, never to be reunited, or homes, offices, orchards and other property seized. Ever since, Palestinians worldwide have commemorated May 15 as Nakba (Catastrophe) Day.

No ethical person would admonish Jews to “forget the Holocaust.” Indeed, recent decades have witnessed victims of that terrible era not only remembering, but also regaining paintings and financial assets seized by the Nazis — and justifiably so.

Other victims of mass wrongs — interned Japanese Americans, enslaved African Americans, and Armenians subjected to a genocide that may have later convinced Hitler of the feasibility of mass killings — receive at least respectful consideration of their cases, even while responses to their claims have differed.

Yet in dialogues with Israelis, and some Americans, Palestinians are repeatedly admonished to “forget the past,” that looking back is “not constructive” and “doesn’t get us closer to a solution.” Ironically, Palestinians live the consequences of the past every day — whether as exiles from their homeland, or as members of an oppressed minority within Israel, or as subjects of a brutal and violent military occupation.

In the West we are amply reminded of the suffering of Jewish people in World War II. Our newspaper featured several stories on local survivors of the Nazi holocaust around Holocaust Remembrance Day (an Israeli national holiday that is widely observed in the United States).

My daughter has read at least one book on the Nazi holocaust every year since middle school. Last year, in ninth grade English literature alone, she read three. But we seldom confront the impact of Israel’s policies on Palestinians.

It is the “security of the Jewish people” that has rationalized Israel’s takeover of Palestinian lands, both in the past in Israel, and more recently in the occupied West Bank. There, most Palestinian children negotiate one of the 500 Israeli checkpoints and other barriers to movement just to reach school each day. Meanwhile, Israel’s program of colonization of the West Bank grinds ahead relentlessly, implanting ever more Israeli settlers who must be “protected” from those Palestinians not reconciled to the theft of their homes and fields.

The primacy of Jewish security over rights of Palestinians — to property, education, health care, a chance to make a living, and, also to security — is seldom challenged.

Unfortunately, remembering the Nazi Holocaust — something morally incumbent on all of us — has seemingly become entangled with, and even an instrument of, the amnesia some would force on Palestinians. Israel is enveloped in an aura of ethical propriety that makes it unseemly, even “anti-Semitic” to question its denial of Palestinian rights.

As Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently observed: “Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred.”

What this demonstrates is that memory is not just an idle capacity. Rather, who can remember, and who can be made to forget, is, fundamentally, an expression of power.

Equally importantly, however, memory can provide a blueprint for the future — a vision of a solution to seek, or an outcome to avoid. My Palestinian father grew up in Jerusalem before Israel was founded and the Palestinians expelled, when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in peace and mutual respect. Recalling that past provides a vision for an alternative future — one involving equal rights and tolerance, rather than the domination of one ethno-religious group over others.

Thus, what Palestinians are really being commanded is not just to forget their past, but instead to forget their future, too. That they will never do.

George Bisharat is professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He writes frequently about the Middle East.

In recent years, Israel has openly admitted that ISA (formerly the General Security Service) interrogators employ “exceptional” interrogation methods and “physical pressure” against Palestinian detainees in situations labeled “ticking bombs”. B’Tselem and HaMoked - Center for the Defence of the Individual have examined these interrogation methods and the frequency with which they are used, as well as other harmful practices. The report’s findings are based on the testimonies of 73 Palestinian residents of the West Bank who were arrested between July 2005 and January 2006 and interrogated by the ISA. Although it is not a representative sample, it does provide a valid indication of the frequency of the reported phenomena.

B’tselem and Hamoked have a new report out on Israeli torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. It is really disturbing reading, but adds nothing new to what everyone with an ounce of brains already knows.

The pigs that run the Israeli government are inhuman criminals with such an incredible racist outlook that they find nothing at all wrong with torture and cold-blooded murder of children. Truly, Israel offers an incredible insight into how humans that claim to be civilized and for peace can commit the most horrible atrocities and still go around the world saying they want peace. The hypocricy is amazing even by Zionist standards.

This is not news for me, but it is news for moronic juvenile American Zionists who still insist that Zionism as a doctrine can be reconciled with “humanist”, “progressive” or “liberal” ideals. These are people whose blindness is glaring that it wouldn’t matter if Israel murdered 4 million Palestinians in broad daylight, they would still find a way to justify it as the correct and necessary thing to do. As usual those morons will continue to ignore this and act like it never happened, and continue to trot out their usual idiotic claptrap about how they want to work for peace, and how the road for peace is blocked by terrorism.

It never occurs to these dumbfucks that the reason there is no peace is the occupation, ethnic cleansing, torture and cold-blooded murder that are the defining characteristic of this despicable Zionist movement since its inception.

And it never occurs to them that by continuing to support Israel and making the world’s only superpower offer unconditional support for Israel, they are the root of the problem.

And of course, the majority of American media will continue to ignore this report, and will continue to write that Israel does not torture.

So today there is a huge showdown in the Bank over Wolfowitz, and it looks like he might actually be forced out. A decision will be made this week. Wolfie is protesting his innocence saying that he is subject to a “smear campaign” (which begs the question: Is it even possible to smear someone like him?) Steve Clemons has some of the gritty details (here and here), and George W Bush is, expectedly, speaking up in support of his demented crony.

I have to say, this is more than I had expected; I thought that this would be swept under the rug quickly, but all credit to the unity and determination of the Workers of the World (Bank) who, with nothing to lose but their very comfy contracts and 5-star junkets in starving countries, have made enough of a big deal about this that the Executive Board had to do something. It also helped that pretty much everyone in the development world despised Wolfowitz and couldn’t wait for a chance to lay into him.

On a more theoretical, academic and mundane note: I have always had a lot of trouble with the World Bank’s obsession with corruption and democratization, a fetish that started with Wolfensohn’s reign in 1994 and continues to grow.

The case the World Bank has incessantly tried to make since the mid-1990’s is that fighting corruption and democratizing are the keys to unlocking sustained economic growth and development. After a thorough review of the development literature, one will find that the simplistic relationship that everyone talks about between corruption and democracy and development has very flimsy support in the real world.

The theoretical, quantitative and case-study evidence on this is really missing, and relies heavily on some really shoddy statistical work that frankly makes very little sense.

My personal take from reviewing all this literature is this: corruption and democracy have very complex interactions with one another and with other factors that in turn influence growth and development. It is too complex to be able to generalize it across countries across different points in time, and it is misleading to attempt to study it in a simplistic cross-country regression. The simplistic mantras of “corruption bad” and “democracy good” are quite misleading and possibly as wrong as saying “corruption good” and “democracy bad”.

However, this does not just say that we should just forget about these things; we have to remember that these are important issues not just for their impact on development, but for their own right. It is a mark of the short-sightedness of some development economists that they only view the issue of democracy in terms of its impact on growth, ignoring its importance in its own right.

But what we should say about this is that the attempts from an international institution with as much clout as the World Bank or the IMF to crusade around the world with this message and packaging it as a necessary and sufficient precondition to development and growth has in itself possibly been harmful to the causes of development and growth.

This is at best irrelevant and promises false results that will lead to skepticism towards the virtues of democracy and anti-corruption; but at worst, could lead to political and economic implications that then complicate things for developing countries. The best example of this is how democratization and liberalization have, in many cases, lead to certain elites managing to capture power and special interests in their own hands, and weakened the government’s ability to undertake positive policies for development.

This is a very complex issue and I have not discussed it here thoroughly enough, but I will discuss this more in the future. Suffice to say for now: The World Bank should certainly tread very carefully when discussing these issues. However, they should certainly be very assertive in throwing Wolfowitz out on his ass for what are surely corrupt and despicable acts with no potential good for anyone but him and his cronies.