A Directive of Shame

Last month, I learned from Mireille Fanon Mendes France about Evo Morales' open letter to the European Parliament.

Evo Morales is the first indigenous President of Bolivia. He took the initiative to prepare this text before the European Parliament’s vote on the European directive on immigration which its opponents call the "shameful directive". The directive aims at making Europe a fortress against immigration by harmonizing the rules about the detention and expulsion of immigrants. It was voted by the European Parliament on 18 June 2008. The amendment against the directive that was proposed by the United European Left (GUE-Nordic Green lLeft) got 114 votes, the directive 538.


In the name of the people of Bolivia, and of all my brothers on earth, I make this appeal to the consciences of leaders and citizens, on the text of this "directive for return".

Up until the end of the World War II, Europe was an emigrant continent. Tens of thousands of Europeans departed for the Americas to colonize, to escape hunger, the financial crisis, the wars or European totalitarianisms and the persecution of ethnic minorities.

Today, I am following with concern the process of the so called "Return Directive". The text, validated last June 5th by the Interior Ministers of 27 countries in the European Union, comes up for a vote on June 18 in the European Parliament. I feel that it constitutes a drastic hardening of the detention and expulsion conditions for undocumented immigrants, regardless of the time they have lived in the European countries, their work situation, their family ties, or their will and achievements in integration.

Europeans arrived en masse in Latin and North America, without visas or conditions imposed on them by the authorities. They were simply welcomed, and continue to be, on our American continent, which absorbed the European economic misery and political crisis at that time. They came to our continent to exploit the natural wealth and to transfer it to Europe, with a high cost to the original populations in America. As is the case of our Cerro Rico de Potosi and its fabulous silver mines, which provided this mass of monetary wealth to the European continent from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The people, the wealth and the rights of the migrant Europeans were always respected.

Today, the European Union is the main destination for immigrants around the world. This is a consequence of Europe’s positive image of space and prosperity and public freedom. The great majority of immigrants go to the EU to contribute to this prosperity, not to take advantage of it. They are employed in public works, construction, and in services to people in hospitals, in jobs the Europeans cannot perform or do not want. They contribute to the demographic dynamics of the European continent, maintaining the relationship between the employed and the retired which provides for the generous social security system and helps the dynamics of internal markets and social cohesion. The migrant offers a solution to demographic and financial problems in the EU.

For us, our emigrants represent help in development that Europeans do not provide us in return – since few countries really reach the minimum objective of 0.7% of its GDP in development assistance. Latin America received, in 2006, remittance (monies sent back) totaling 68 billion dollars, or more than the total foreign investment in our countries. On the worldwide level it reached 300 billion dollars which is more than 104 billion authorized for development assistance. My own country, Bolivia, received more than 10% of the GDP in remittance (1.1 billion dollars) equal to a third of our annual exports of natural gas.

It is clear that the flow of immigration benefits Europe, and, to a slight degree, the Third World (since we lose millions of qualified workers, in whom, in one manner or another, the states in question, despite their poverty, have make considerable financial and human investment).

Unfortunately, "Return Directive" project is an enormous complication to this reality. While we can agree that each State or group of States can define their migratory policies in true sovereignty, we cannot accept that the fundamental rights of the people be denied to our compatriots and brother Latin-Americans.

The "Return Directive" foresees the possibility of jailing undocumented immigrants for up to 18 months before their expulsion – they call it "distancing", according to the terms of the directive. 18 months! Without a judgment or justice! As it stands today the proposed text of the directive clearly violates articles 2, 3, 5,6,7,8 and 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

In particular, Article 13 of the Declaration states :

1. All persons have a right to move freely and to choose their residence in the territory of a State.

2. All persons have the right to leave any country, including their own, and to return to their country.

And, the worst of all, is that the possibility exists for the mothers of families with minor children to be arrested, without regard to the family and school situation, in these internment centers where we know that depression, hunger strikes, and suicides take place.

How can we accept without reacting for them to be concentrated in camps, our compatriots and Latin American brothers without documents, of which the great majority have been working and integrating for years? On what side is the duty of humanitarian action? Where is the "freedom of movement", protection against arbitrary imprisonment?

In parallel, the European Union is trying to convince the Andean Community that the Nations (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru)  sign an "Association Agreement" that includes the third pillar of the Free Trade Agreement, of the same nature and content as that imposed by the United States. We are under intense pressure from the European Commission to accept conditions of great liberalization of our trade, financial services, intellectual property rights and our public works. In addition under so called "judicial protection" we are being pressured concerning our nationalization of the water, gas and telecommunications, completed on Worldwide Workers’ Day.

I ask, in that case, where is the "judicial protection" for our women, adolescents, children and workers that look for better horizons in Europe? To promote, on one hand, the free circulation of merchandise and flow of currencies and investments, while we face the imprisonment of our brothers who attempt to circulate freely, this is to deny the foundations of liberty and human rights.

Under these conditions, if the "Return Directive" is passed, we will be ethically unable to deepen the negotiations with the European Union, and we reserve the right to legislate that the European Citizens have the same obligations for visas that they impose on the Bolivians from the first of April 2007, according to the diplomatic principle of reciprocity. We have not exercised it up until now, precisely because we were awaiting good signs from the EU.

The world, its continents, its oceans and its poles undergo difficulties of a global scale: global warming, contamination, the slow but sure disappearance of the energy resources and biodiversity while hunger and poverty increase in every country, debilitating our societies. To make migrants, whether they have documents or not, the scapegoats of these global problems, is not the solution. It does not correspond with any reality. The social cohesion problems that Europe is suffering from are not the fault of the migrants, rather the result of the model of development imposed by the North, which destroys the planet and dismembers human societies.

In the name of the people of Bolivia, of all of my brothers on the continent and regions of the world like the Maghreb and the countries of Africa, I appeal to the conscience of the European leaders and deputies, of the peoples, citizens and activists of Europe, for them not to approve the text of the "Return Directive". As it is today, it is a directive of shame.

I also call on the European Union to elaborate, over the next months, a migration policy that is respectful of human rights, which allows us to maintain this dynamic that is helpful to both continents and that repairs once and for all the tremendous historic debt, both economic and ecological, that the European countries owe to a large part of the Third World, and to close once and for all the open veins of Latin America. They cannot fail today in their "policies of integration" as they have failed with their supposed "civilizing mission" from colonial times.

Receive all of you, authorities, Euro parliamentarians, brothers and sisters, fraternal greetings from Bolivia. And in particular our solidarity to all of the "clandestinos".

Evo Morales Ayma
President of the Republic of Bolivia

O my beloved Watan

From the Hindi film Kabuliwala (1966). Singer: Manna Dey.

Aye mere pyaare watan, aye mere bichhade chaman, tujh pe dil kurbaan
Tu hee meree aarzoo, tu hee meree aabroo, tu hee meree jaan

Tere daaman se jo aaye, un hawaaon ko salaam
Choom loon main us zubaan ko jis pe aaye teraa naam
Sab se pyaaree subah teree, sab se rangeen teree shaam
Tujh pe dil kurbaan

Maa kaa dil banke kabhee seene se lag jaataa hai tu
Aur kabhee nanhee see betee ban ke yaad aataa hai tu
Jitnaa yaad aataa hai tu, utnaa tarapaataa hai tu
Tujh pe dil kurbaan


O my beloved Watan, O my separated garden, I surrender my heart to you
You are my desire, you are my pride, you are my very life

I salute the winds that waft from your land
I kiss the lips that utter your name
Most beautiful of all are you dawns, your dusks the most hued
I surrender my heart to you

Sometimes you come as mother's bosom to embrace me
At other times you come as remembrance of a tiny daughter
I throb with grief at every remembrance of you
I surrender my heart to you

Beleaguered political imagination

by Shamita Basu
The Statesman, 19 January 2009

A soccer great comes calling: The Implications of State-Sponsored Grandstanding

In the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai massacre, the people of Kolkata were treated to a historic football match and the inauguration of an equally memorable football academy by one of the soccer greats, Diego Maradona. The television channels aired a cacophony of claims and counter-claims over which media house had earned the exclusive right to televise the “night and day in the life of the soccer star in Kolkata”. Ministers and football clubs vied with each other over providing nuggets of information on the Argentinian. The overwhelming hype may have left him wondering why he had never ever heard of the clubs of such a soccer-crazy city.

Hype over Maradona

However, the perceptive section of the citizens had realised the objective of the hype over Maradona. Was it a cynical attempt to divert public attention from Lalgarh and the Singur fiasco? It was largely a contrived effort to feel exhilarated. The “transitionals”, that is those among the dispossessed, who had dreamt of power and glory, and the sub-literates who over the years had been deceived by promises of acquiring social mobility, were of course enthused by the arrival of Maradona thanks to the efforts of the state’s sports minister.
It is now established in political theory that the sovereignty of an exhausted political regime evinces a strong tendency to rely on mass ceremonies and engage in ritualistic excesses in order to make its presence felt. A regime, which is in a state of perpetual crisis, its legitimacy tested by pandemics, pestilence, evictions, displacement, environmental hazards, routine corruption and police atrocities and with its executive control pushed to its limit, is forced to regenerate such state sponsored ceremonies. And the exercise is embellished with gold and silver heaped on a retired footballer.

It is intriguing how the ruling dispensation can be further propped up by a section of the intelligentsia which argues that opposition to a totalitarian regime is a conspiracy of the elite against the popular. The equation of the popular with the poor has of course completed the discourse.

The greatest intellectual disservice done to the poor is an understanding that is widely circulated and valorised, specifically their tendency to be vulgar, violent, crass and credulous. This bizarre construct divests the poor and the oppressed of their right to be refined, tolerant, humble and wise. This is an extremely perverse and populist notion of the impoverished masses. Daily wage-earners and domestic helps didn’t throng the stadium to see Maradona in action as it were, indeed to witness the celebration of what was deemed as celebrating popular culture.

What began as the great modernist phase of the Bengal leftists in the seventies was over time vulgarised supposedly to incorporate the non-elitist segment of the society. Ideologically, it sought to establish the most dangerous connection between modernity and the inevitability of exclusion of all that was morally good, ethical and universal within the axis of both cosmopolitan and indigent culture. The pitch for a class character of ethics and morality steadily destroyed the great Bengali culture that had a history of accommodating the vernacular and modern in the nationalism of the 19th century.

Doing away with English at the primary level completed this parody of modernity. The culture, which the Bengalis inherited since the mid-18th century, was abandoned in favour of a dispensation that robbed the under-privileged of any social access to the cultural heritage. Those who felt the loss of this cosmopolitan culture were silenced by the “neo-liberals”. The trend is in accord with the practices of sovereignty in a totalitarian state power.

The reason why a totalitarian party has succeeded in Bengal is the adroitness with which it has successfully combined a political theology of egalitarianism with the classical logic of sovereignty. The great political thinker, Carl Schmitt, observed: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”. The exception means the appropriate moment when it can step out of the rule of law for the sake of what it terms as public interest or social good.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is not only exercised by brutality and violence, but through acts of generosity towards its subjects. Hence hooch outlets can thrive. The state must be generous to the deviant among the poor. It also has to perform its social duty to bring over such heroes as Maradona to those who lack the means to be part of the glamour that is associated with international soccer. Therefore, glamour in the form of a state-sponsored soccer match must be organised for the poor.

Scholars, who have studied the character of the Indian state, have argued for a segmentary nature of the Indian state where the central authority can rule successfully through a local network of sovereign rulers. This historic form was faithfully emulated in Bengal through what can be described as local structures of adjudication such as the neighbourhood clubs or citizens’ committees in urban Bengal, unions affiliated to the party in both the private and public sectors. Governance was gradually relegated. The Maradona fever in Kolkata was merely a crude expression of a beleaguered political imagination.

Photo: © Reuters.

Ten myths about Pakistan

by Mohammed Hanif
Times of India, 4 January 2008

Living in Pakistan and reading about it in the Indian press can sometimes be quite a disorienting experience: one wonders what place on earth they're talking about? I wouldn't be surprised if an Indian reader going through Pakistani papers has asked the same question in recent days. Here are some common assumptions about Pakistan and its citizens that I have come across in the Indian media...

Pakistan controls the jihadis: Or Pakistan's government controls the jihadis. Or Pakistan Army controls the jihadis. Or ISI controls the jihadis. Or some rogue elements from the ISI control the Jihadis. Nobody knows the whole truth but increasingly it's the tail that wags the dog. We must remember that the ISI-Jihadi alliance was a marriage of convenience, which has broken down irrevocably. Pakistan army has lost more soldiers at the hands of these jihadis than it ever did fighting India.

Musharraf was in control, Zardari is not: Let's not forget that General Musharraf seized power after he was fired from his job as the army chief by an elected prime minister. Musharraf first appeased jihadis, then bombed them, and then appeased them again. The country he left behind has become a very dangerous place, above all for its own citizens. There is a latent hankering in sections of the Indian middle class for a strongman. Give Manmohan Singh a military uniform, put all the armed forces under his direct command, make his word the law of the land, and he too will go around thumping his chest saying that it's his destiny to save India from Indians . Zardari will never have the kind of control that Musharraf had. But Pakistanis do not want another Musharraf.

Pakistan, which Pakistan? For a small country, Pakistan is very diverse, not only ethnically but politically as well. General Musharraf's government bombed Pashtuns in the north for being Islamists and close to the Taliban and at the same time it bombed Balochs in the South for NOT being Islamists and for subscribing to some kind of retro-socialist, anti Taliban ethos. You have probably heard the joke about other countries having armies but Pakistan's army having a country. Nobody in Pakistan finds it funny.

Pakistan and its loose nukes: Pakistan's nuclear programme is under a sophisticated command and control system, no more under threat than India or Israel's nuclear assets are threatened by Hindu or Jewish extremists. For a long time Pakistan's security establishment's other strategic asset was jihadi organisations, which in the last couple of years have become its biggest liability.

Pakistan is a failed state: If it is, then Pakistanis have not noticed. Or they have lived in it for such a long time that they have become used to its dysfunctional aspects. Trains are late but they turn up, there are more VJs, DJs, theatre festivals, melas, and fashion models than a failed state can accommodate. To borrow a phrase from President Zardari, there are lots of non-state actors like Abdul Sattar Edhi who provide emergency health services, orphanages and shelters for sick animals.

It is a deeply religious country: Every half-decent election in this country has proved otherwise. Religious parties have never won more than a fraction of popular vote. Last year Pakistan witnessed the largest civil rights movements in the history of this region. It was spontaneous, secular and entirely peaceful. But since people weren't raising anti-India or anti-America slogans, nobody outside Pakistan took much notice.

All Pakistanis hate India: Three out of four provinces in Pakistan - Sindh, Baluchistan, NWFP - have never had any popular anti-India sentiment ever. Punjabis who did impose India as enemy-in-chief on Pakistan are now more interested in selling potatoes to India than destroying it. There is a new breed of al-Qaida inspired jihadis who hate a woman walking on the streets of Karachi as much as they hate a woman driving a car on the streets of Delhi. In fact there is not much that they do not hate: they hate America, Denmark, China CDs, barbers, DVDs , television, even football. Imran Khan recently said that these jihadis will never attack a cricket match but nobody takes him seriously.

Training camps: There are militant sanctuaries in the tribal areas of Pakistan but definitely not in Muzaffarabad or Muridke, two favourite targets for Indian journalists, probably because those are the cities they have ever been allowed to visit. After all how much training do you need if you are going to shoot at random civilians or blow yourself up in a crowded bazaar? So if anyone thinks a few missiles targeted at Muzaffarabad will teach anyone a lesson, they should switch off their TV and try to locate it on the map.

RAW would never do what ISI does: Both the agencies have had a brilliant record of creating mayhem in the neighbouring countries. Both have a dismal record when it comes to protecting their own people. There is a simple reason that ISI is a bigger, more notorious brand name: It was CIA's franchise during the jihad against the Soviets. And now it's busy doing jihad against those very jihadis.

Pakistan is poor, India is rich: Pakistanis visiting India till the mid-eighties came back very smug. They told us about India's slums, and that there was nothing to buy except handicrafts and saris. Then Pakistanis could say with justifiable pride that nobody slept hungry in their country. But now, not only do people sleep hungry in both the countries, they also commit suicide because they see nothing but a lifetime of hunger ahead. A debt-ridden farmer contemplating suicide in Maharashtra and a mother who abandons her children in Karachi because she can't feed them: this is what we have achieved in our mutual desire to teach each other a lesson.

The writer is the author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Photo: Courtesy National Geographic.

Chant 4 Change

From my friend Jai Uttal.

Celebrate the Inauguration of Barack Obama with sacred activist Shiva Rea, world-renowned kirtan/chant artists Jai Uttal, Dave Stringer, Gaura Vani & As Kindred Spirits and 400 other conscious revolutionaries. Join us for a full night of chant, dance, expression and teaching within sight of the White House and the Washington Monument. This is the place to be on the night before the Inauguration. Millions are converging on the nation's capital to witness this once-in-a-lifetime event. Be here now at the heart of the movement! Breathe! Chant! Move! Dance! We will lift our hearts and voices to empower ourselves, our new leaders, our city, our country and our world in this revolutionary gathering of sacred sound and movement.

Note: Register in advance. This event will sell out.

Jai Uttal, Shiva Rea and more

www.brownpapertickets.com/event/50783

Church of the Holy City

1611 NW 16th Street

Washington, DC 20009

www.chant4change.com

Tel: 202-316-2472

DuPont Circle Metro accessible. Street parking is very limited. All ages welcome. Children on laps are free. Drinks and light fare available for purchase.

7:00pm - 11:00pm

After Obama's victory, I had written to Jai:

I thought about the music that should inaugurate President Obama's swearing in. The attached picture - the music would convey the expression of grief of the mother, and touch of consolation of her child, and finally a rousing call to the people to make them aware of the gravity and complexity and challenge of what lies ahead and yet give them faith and conviction in their own capability to achieve this, and energise them in every way for that.

Mahatma Gandhi on Jews and Palestine

This article was written on 20 November 1938, and published in Harijan on 26 November 1938.

Several letters have been received by me asking me to declare my views about the Arab-Jew question in Palestine and the persecution of the Jews in Germany. It is not without hesitation that I venture to offer my views on this very difficult question.

My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became life-long companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age-long persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them. Apart from the friendships, therefore, there is the more common universal reason for my sympathy for the Jews.

But my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.

The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colorable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.

But the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone. And he is doing it with religious zeal. For he is propounding a new religion of exclusive and militant nationalism in the name of which many inhumanity becomes an act of humanity to be rewarded here and hereafter. The crime of an obviously mad but intrepid youth is being visited upon his whole race with unbelievable ferocity. If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is therefore outside my horizon or province.

But if there can be no war against Germany, even for such a crime as is being committed against the Jews, surely there can be no alliance with Germany. How can there be alliance between a nation which claims to stand for justice and democracy and one which is the declared enemy of both? Or is England drifting towards armed dictatorship and all it means?

Germany is showing to the world how efficiently violence can be worked when it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as humanitarianism. It is also showing how hideous, terrible and terrifying it looks in its nakedness.

Can the Jews resist this organized and shameless persecution? Is there a way to preserve their self-respect, and not to feel helpless, neglected and forlorn? I submit there is. No person who has faith in a living God need feel helpless or forlorn. Jehovah of the Jews is a God more personal than the God of the Christians, the Musalmans or the Hindus, though, as a matter of fact in essence, He is common to all the one without a second and beyond description. But as the Jews attribute personality to God and believe that He rules every action of theirs, they ought not to feel helpless. If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment . And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the god fearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

It is hardly necessary for me to point out that it is easier for the Jews than for the Czechs to follow my prescription. And they have in the Indian satyagraha campaign in South Africa an exact parallel. There the Indians occupied precisely the same place that the Jews occupy in Germany. The persecution had also a religious tinge. President Kruger used to say that the white Christians were the chosen of God and Indians were inferior beings created to serve the whites. A fundamental clause in the Transvaal constitution was that there should be no equality between the whites and colored races including Asia tics. There too the Indians were consigned to ghettos described as locations. The other disabilities were almost of the same type as those of the Jews in Germany. The Indians, a mere handful, resorted to satyagraha without any backing from the world outside or the Indian Government. Indeed the British officials tried to dissuade the satyagrahis (soldiers of non-violence) from their contemplated step. World opinion and the Indian Government came to their aid after eight years of fighting. And that too was by way of diplomatic pressure not of a threat of war.

But the Jews of Germany can offer satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than Indians of South Africa. The Jews are a compact, homogeneous community in Germany. they are far more gifted than the Indians of South Africa. And they have organized world opinion behind them. I am convinced that if someone with courage and vision can arise among them to lead them in nonviolent action, the winter of their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be turned into the summer of hope. And what has today become a degrading man-hunt can be turned in to a calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah.

It will be then a truly religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanized man. The German Jews will score a lasting victory over the German gentiles in the sense that they will have converted that latter to an appreciation of human dignity. They will have rendered service to fellow-Germans and proved their title to be the real Germans as against those who are today dragging, however unknowingly, the German name into the mire.

And now a word to the Jews in Palestine. I have no doubt that they are going about it the wrong way. The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart. The same God rules the Arab heart, who rules the Jewish heart. They can offer satyagraha in front of the Arabs and offer themselves to be shot or thrown in to the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them. They will find the world opinion in the their favor in their religious aspiration.

There are hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they will only discard the help of the British bayonet. As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them.

I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.

Let the Jews who claim to be the chosen race prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth. Every country is their home including Palestine, not by aggression but by loving service. A Jewish friend has sent me a book called The Jewish Contribution to Civilization by Cecil Roth. It gives a record of what the Jews have done to enrich the word's Literature, art, music, drama, science, medicine, agriculture, etc. Given the will, the Jews can refuse to be treated as the outcaste of the West, to be despised or patronized. He can command the attention and respect of the world by being man, the chosen creation of God, instead of being man who is fast sinking to the brute and forsaken by God. They can add to their many contributions the surpassing contribution of non-violent action.

Photo: Courtesy Damon Lynch

"A single state for Jews and Palestinians"

by Tariq Ali

The Guardian, 30 December 2008

From the ashes of Gaza

In the face of Israel's latest onslaught, the only option for Palestinian nationalism is to embrace a one-state solution.

The assault on Gaza, planned over six months and executed with perfect timing, was designed largely, as Neve Gordon has rightly observed, to help the incumbent parties triumph in the forthcoming Israeli elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than election fodder in a cynical contest between the right and the far right in Israel. Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to be assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon in 2006, sit back and watch.

Washington, as is its wont, blames the pro-Hamas Palestinians, with Obama and Bush singing from the same AIPAC hymn sheet. The EU politicians, having observed the build-up, the siege, the collective punishment inflicted on Gaza, the targeting of civilians etc (for all the gory detail, see Harvard scholar Sara Roy's chilling essay in the London Review of Books) were convinced that it was the rocket attacks that had "provoked" Israel but called on both sides to end the violence, with nil effect. The moth-eaten Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt and Nato's favourite Islamists in Ankara failed to register even a symbolic protest by recalling their ambassadors from Israel. China and Russia did not convene a meeting of the UN security council to discuss the crisis.

As result of official apathy, one outcome of this latest attack will be to inflame Muslim communities throughout the world and swell the ranks of those very organisations that the west claims it is combating in the "war against terror".
The bloodshed in Gaza raises broader strategic questions for both sides, issues related to recent history. One fact that needs to be recognised is that there is no Palestinian Authority. There never was one. The Oslo Accords were an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinians, creating a set of disconnected and shrivelled Palestinian ghettoes under the permanent watch of a brutal enforcer. The PLO, once the repository of Palestinian hope, became little more than a supplicant for EU money.

Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office. The west and Israel tried everything to secure a Fatah victory: Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted threats and bribes of the "international community" in a campaign that saw Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the IDF, their posters confiscated or destroyed, US and EU funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and US congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run.

Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January 2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza – in the words of an Egyptian intelligence officer, "the public will then support the Authority against Hamas."

Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this. Hamas's electoral triumph was treated as an ominous sign of rising fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace with Israel, by rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world. Immediate financial and diplomatic pressures were applied to force Hamas to adopt the same policies as those of the party it had defeated at the polls. Uncompromised by the Palestinian Authority's combination of greed and dependency, the self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and policemen, and their acquiescence in a "peace process" that has brought only further expropriation and misery to the population under them, Hamas offered the alternative of a simple example. Without any of the resources of its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary people.

It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad base of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran. How far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional degree of credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like those of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been retaliations against an occupation far more deadly than any actions it has ever undertaken. Measured on the scale of IDF killings, Palestinian strikes have been few and far between. The asymmetry was starkly exposed during Hamas's unilateral ceasefire, begun in June 2003, and maintained throughout the summer, despite the Israeli campaign of raids and mass arrests that followed, in which some 300 Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank.

On August 19 2003, a self-proclaimed "Hamas" cell from Hebron, disowned and denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in west Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas ceasefire's negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas, in turn, responded. In return, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and, in September 2003, the EU declared the whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization – a longstanding demand of Tel Aviv.

What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups resorted, but its superior discipline – demonstrated by its ability to enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the past year. All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest-armed oppression of modern history.

"Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering under military occupation for 45 years against occupation force," said General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993. The real grievance of the EU and US against Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort, from Taba to Geneva, to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The west's priority ever since was to break this resistance. Cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority is an obvious weapon with which to bludgeon Hamas into submission. Boosting the presidential powers of Abbas – as publicly picked for his post by Washington, as was Karzai in Kabul – at the expense of the legislative council is another.

No serious efforts were made to negotiate with the elected Palestinian leadership. I doubt if Hamas could have been rapidly suborned to western and Israeli interests, but it would not have been unprecedented. Hamas' programmatic heritage remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the belief that the political choices before it are either rejection of the existence of Israel altogether or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a fifth of the country. From the fantasy maximalism of the first to the pathetic minimalism of the second, the path is all too short, as the history of Fatah has shown.

The test for Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the satisfaction of western opinion, but whether it can break with this crippling tradition. Soon after the Hamas election victory in Gaza, I was asked in public by a Palestinian what I would do in their place. "Dissolve the Palestinian Authority" was my response and end the make-believe. To do so would situate the Palestinian national cause on its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its resources be divided equitably, in proportion to two populations that are equal in size – not 80% to one and 20% to the other, a dispossession of such iniquity that no self-respecting people will ever submit to it in the long run. The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike, in which the exactions of Zionism are repaired. There is no other way.

And Israeli citizens might ponder the following words from Shakespeare (in The Merchant of Venice), which I have slightly altered:

"I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that … the villainy you teach me, I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."