Making noise and creative artful activism is great! Informing a few hundred people a day about social issues is great!
A few HUNDRED-THOUSAND people MUCH better!
Changing the conversation is great!
But making REAL concrete positive change for local NYC residents MUCH better!
What has been done by your group to that end? Any concrete achievements? ie Legislative changes by NYC Council. Increase of participants in weekly meetings and NON VIOLENT DIRECT ACTION events?
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Possible ways to do this asap
1) **** Guerrilla Outreach / Artful Activism ie Create robust thriving NYC Activism Light Brigade to spread good ideas and initiatives and critical info with LED and Laser LIGHT possibly? We would like to build/acquire and use at least a few times a week (during tolerably-weathered evenings) promote IMPORTANT NYC resident-empoweing info & be a source of inspiration for New Yorkers info and potentially widely popular local state and national initiatives *****
1a) acquire / make ASAP a scrolling-text LASER projector http://is.gd/scrollinglasertext that can PROJECT useful TEXT AND INFO pertaining to important NYC resources onto vertical surfaces and/or a
Brigade can be used to help stop the Military Industrial CONGRESSIONAL complex!!!! ie Disaster Capitalism ie. WallStWarSt paradigm! Stop #SuperPACs!!! #JumpstartGreenEconomy http://solidaritynyc.org/ http://neweconomy.net ,
http://soo.gd/justiceduckling in a huge way solicit help from NYC techie community (see list below) to create robust online NYC activism calendar (and a telephone daily recorded telephone hotline for non-Internet savvy New Yorkers!).
Online version can include event mapping based on zip code, keywords, preferences. Daily Email & sms alerts mailing list? Google maps? Other solutions? MUST BE EASY TO INPUT EVENT INFO!
3) #MustSeeDocs FREE ONLINE VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES, real human stories, eye-opening, usually saddening shocking and outraging! But also inspiring! And hopefully moving people into ACTION!
4) http://is.gd/mustseedocs < —— viewable / printable documents online educational flyers, and list of possible NYC law changes that could benefit all of us! hosted on sites like SCRIBD! Looking to grow this asap. Have TONS of FLYERS from past 7 years of activism that I’d like to DIGITIZE and UPLOAD to internet!
****** 5) #NYCPeoplesPlatform if say 3/4 of New Yorkers could agree on progressive initiatives what would that look like ? ******** Once we form this living document
6) Occupy NYC Hall! 2) Occupy NYC Council! and Occupy NYC Community Boards! What do you think of #NYCPeoplesPlatform #ChangeTheLaws campaign for NYC get massive input from general pubic to rate and evaluate determine best ideas for an #IfIWereMayor #IfYOUwereMayor campaign? Maybe install MORE LinkNYC (restore Internet browsing on these kiosks!) and other tech tools to build this channel for best ideas to flow to as many connected and offline New Yorkers as possible?
Community POLL in different languages that can be distributed TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE as QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE ASAP pertaining to COMMUNITY/NEIGHBORHOOD CONCERNS
Ways to share and quickly assess and rate/vote on best ideas/initiatives for IMMEDIATE progressive NYC policy change Maybe reach out to LinkNYC ( City of New York, CityBridge, Intersection Qualcomm, CIVIQ Smartscapes ), the people that make those MTA touchscreens ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Group )! Turn them into possible multilingual public opinion/ best-civic-ideas/survey-stations and possibly help build a widely popular #NYCPeoplesPlatform? That we can then lobby City Council?
Keep the code OPEN SOURCE!
Ways to share and quickly assess and rate/vote on WHAT constitutes a BASIC HUMAN NECESSITY/NEED that they would like NYC legislature and executive to SUBSIDIZE and FUND by DIVERTING money being used towards WAR AND VIOLENCE WALL ST BANKS, PETROCHEMICAL, AND MASS-SURVEILLANCE and ‘POLICING’ to be used for HUMAN NEEDS!
ie
Right to publicly assemble
Right to have free speech in public and not get pounced on
Right to not get brutalized terrorized or killed by NYPD. JUSTICE via an Elected Civilian Review Board
Right to impeach / repalce corrupt “leaders” ASAP (or DISSOLVE illegitimate “Government”!)
Right to Healthy food
Right to shelter / heat / air conditioning / hot & cold running water/ sink/shower / cooking facilities / refrigerator / storage
Right to clean clothing
Right to high quality public transport
TRUE health care ie Natural healing
******* 7) PROMOTE LIST AGGREGATE of Practical positively useful meetups etc. etc. Publish this list… Call it Good Groups NYC / Good Pages NYC —- or something better… gather list of all like-minded activism & community groups in NYC. Publish quarterly? Promote in a huge way. Use this list as a starting point to
***** We should probably find a way ASAP for New Yorkers share a list of THE BEST small and large groups in NYC who are 1) fighting for HUMAN RIGHTS 2) successfully serving the needs of NYC residents and 2) hopefully EMPOWERING The residents of NYC! What constitutes a HUMAN NEEDS ie if NYC could operate as a Human Rights ZONE!!!! *****
8) Annual #VacantSpaceCount ANNUAL census by City of NY or crowdsource if we have to. Get an idea of which spaces lots and buildings have been long vacant and can be utilized by able-bodied able-minded homeless and for the public good.
****** 9) Build a robust online NYC resident activist artist barter network. Existing groups to reach out to:
Goal: BASIC NEEDS MET FOR ALL! build a sharing network / barter etc. for people with a little extra they can spare in these troubled times with someone that provide SUPPORT and MOVEMENT BUILDING from it. NOT enablement and dependence though
Known ones based in NYC:
Really Really Free Market (Freegan meetup), Brooklyn Free Store / In Our Hearts, Free University, @OpSafeWinterNYC, The House of Good Deeds
Maybe we should all get together along with NYC Civic Hall / BetaNYC techs and see if we can build something asap?
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10) Cooperative NYC translator service. Come together with silent rave party headphones ( http://is.gd/translatorheadphones ) use these translators and headphones for
***** 11) Monthly #DefragTheMovement monthly organizing meetings to unite human rights groups in NYC and provide live interpreter/translation services for anyone that speaks any of major NYC languages *****
12) Possibly initiate War Tax Boycott for April 17. See https://nwtrcc.org/ National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee How many people on this list know that Pentagon has declared $9 TRILLION (with a T!) missing!!???
Not event mentioning the Trillions spent that HAVE been accounted for. allocate that money for long-overdue local public works projects!
13) Free / low-cost Holistic Healthcare 4 ALL (including Dental care) for all who want it http://thirdroot.org
15) Maybe petition City of NYC or use #ParticipatoryBudgeting channels to push for the issuance of hometown money ie.. http://is.gd/hometowmmoney ie community currency ie… vouchers and monetary awards for people who are humanitarians / good samaritans / activists, community leaders working for the public good and desperately in need of basic living costs met! ie free metrocard that do homeless outreach, activism, etc.
***** 16) NYC Truth Commission which we’d like to form ********
to
a) honor courageous whistleblowers, journalists and documentarians alive and deceased
AS WELL AS
b) form OUR OWN investigatory committees to help raise awareness about and hopefully SOLVE many outstanding unsolved NYC terror crimes and political assassinations. Goal is to hopefully expose real perpetrators of crime and hopefully prevent future crime from happening and prevent further reckless endangerment and senseless killing of innocent / benevolent / peaceloving people people. calling forward eyewitnesses and experts
Public inquiry into #MissingTrillions from Pentagon currently documented over 9trillion (with a T)! can tie this into PUBLIC INQUIRY into MAJOR CRIME OF 9/11/01 and now 2020-2021 “CV” #PLANdemic!
17) Election Reform Act of 2017 involves ways we can restore integrity and inclusiveness in local state and federal elections for instance have elections on a holiday. Paper ballet/instant run off etc. Eliminate electoral college etc. Constitutional amendment perhaps? https://is.gd/unrigthedeepstate
17a) Election reform for NYC City Council and NYC Community Board etc CROWDSOURCING & funding campaign for a PAPER BALLOT OLD-SCHOOL COMMUNITY NEIGHBORHOOD ELECTIONS for new community representatives BASED ON COMMUNITY MERIT not MONEY!
19) ******* Form list of what constitutes as a CREDIBLE JOURNALISM SOURCES ie a list or flyer of ALTERNATIVE NEWS NETWORKS for #ThePublicGood to counter Fake News! ******
20) Start our own newspaper / publishing company!
21) Find a physical space in NYC to create a video editing / journalism hub to counter fake news!
22) ******* Provide a USB flash drive of STUFF WE NEVER LEARNED IN SCHOOL BUT SHOULD HAVE ****** ie survival skills, true history of USA — of political prisoners, and environmental destruction, free energy, natural healing modalities, home remedies, nature of corporations & expose crimes against humanity, like facebook, monsanto, g4s etc etc etc, nature of government, plight of indigenous nations, Black Wall St. , Palestinians, Tibetans, Cointel Pro 101 etc etc etc see
23) Demand that NYC City Council and Mayor acknowledge Indigenous peoples request to #RemoveColumbusStatue and #RenameColumbusDay to
#IndigenousPeoplesDay
24) Make it much easier for Indigenous folks and collectively oppressed and marginalized people acquire and utilize city REAL ESTATE and BUILDINGS!
24) #OccupyTheFarm http://occupythefarmfilm.com/ build a work-exchange / rideshare network for local state farmers so that relations and networks can be established with local farmers!
25) **** NYC Shower Bus!!! a converted mobile bus where people can take showers and or/ 19a) PUBLIC FUND so broke NYC residents can take showers and do laundry *******
25) MACC metro anarchists coordinating council — send community representative to monthly MACC meeting to build coalitions! http://defendj20resistance.org/
26)****** #WaterAsFuel quantum jump can make motor vehicles run in water and power communities with breakthrough energy technology! Develop prototype with hacker and young engineering students and developers! Look up
Possibly draft and initiate a petition asap for this and #BestIdeas4Biden campaign. If mass public support, at very least it will raise mass public awareness about people like Dr. Cynthia McKinney (Green Party candidate for President of USA in 2008!) (would be nice to have this ready for NYC Womens’ March!)
28) #FreeALLpoliticalPrisoners NOW! shine light on this elephant-in the-room! And release aged PPs and POWs NOW!
29) #FreeALLNonViolentOffenders pardons NOW!
30) Tied into #GanjaNYC #IbogaineNYC etc free the plants! End the bogus failed drug war. Treat addiction as an illness NOT a crime. It is widely known that CIA and USA Inc. have been controlling heroin from Afghanistan etc.! They WANT people addicted. It’s is their cash crop for black budget projects! https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/ganjanyc
31) ****** #StopMonsanto – Mandatory labeling of GMO and possible BAN of known toxic Monsanto products in NYC! NOW ********
32) ***** Close down vacate any company doing business in NYC or with NYC that is known to be shady and human rights abusers! #StopG4S etc etc
etc.
32a) Possibly ******* rewrite NYC charter ****** to ban these types of companies from operating in NYC ********
33) #BanForcedVaccination look it up! Vaccines are bogus as well! http://is.gd/awakenyc
34) #StopThePoliceState #StopPoliceTerror ie WE THE NYC residents decide how POLICE OFFICERS and resources are utilized here in NYC. Not millionaire / billionaire Mayors!
35) #BanHorseCarriages a no brainer to humane people everywhere! #HumaneNYC!
36) ***** Rethink and hopefully #ReclaimPublicSpace #TakeBackTheLand #TakeBackTheStreets #RestoreCommonLaw and allow people to pitch tents in parks and outdoors (as long as they do it responsibly)! See hashtag:
#RememberZuccotti ******
37)******* Possibly make a City Council resolution declaring human right to FREE SPEECH ,(reasserting constitutional and NATURAL BORN rights). Prevent UNINVITED crazy obscene wasteful oppressive NYPD from partaking in marches! ******
38) Build a strong #EvictionProtectionNetwork like Boston’s #CityLifeVidaUrbana http://www.clvu.org/ make City Council pass a MORATORIUM on bank foreclosures and evictions from places of residence!
40) ******** #RealPoliticalCourageTest for any potential future government representative *****
41) PEARS search engine ( http://is.gd/pearssearchengine ) or something similar. GOGGLE is buying up every evil technology in sight (search: Boston Dynamics killer robots!) . FUNCTIONS like NSA. And cooperates fully with US Government ON DEMAND. Find alternative SEARCH ENGINE(S) that promotes local community, privacy, anonymonity, ASAP
42) Ham-radios, INTRANET infrastructure built that can be RUN and SUPPORTED by local NYC residents / ie stakeholders. Make it freely accessible! Teach skills in HIGH SCHOOLS!!!!!!
43) ****** Reform education system in NYC and promote ALTERNATIVEmodalities for education!! See work of
44) Identify cheap easy tech solutions for NYC Actvisits and creative people.. ie. Kits to enable your cell-phone screen project a small 3D HOLOGRAM ( https://is.gd/cellphone3dhologramprojector ) etc. Teach these things in NYC PUBLIC SCHOOL
45) Alternative currency ie bitcoin, blockchain and/or non-counterfeitable ANALOG printed money
47) Stimulate, motivate, incentivize MORE ideas that would advance NYC so that we can all live with more peace, dignity and humanity! Find away to a way to channel best ideas through civic tech, COMPETITIONS with PRIZES and social rewards!! #BestIdeas4NYC #IfIWereMayor #IfYOUwereMayor
48) ***** Connect with the best NYC subway performers for an annual / biannual old-school JAM!!!!! Possibly fundraiser??? ***
49) ***** Connect with techies! Civic Hall NYC 118 w 22nd st 12th fl and also SFO-based Reboot Democracy civic tech tools (ie #ResistTools) and BetaNYC and other Hactivists ****
50) ****** Connect with landlords that are willing to host MONTHLY / weekly pop-ups like this:
Please share whatever you want with New Economy people maybe can collaborate
1:1 Barter Advisor
OurGoods
12:00–8:00pm
Historic Essex Street Market
Meet with an OurGoods “barter advisor” for 10–30 minutes. These one on one consultations aim to connect creative people to other artists, designers, and craftspeople who want to trade skills, spaces, or objects in an atmosphere of mutual respect. To schedule an appointmentnow, email caroline@ourgoods.org.
We are NYC’s civic technology and open government vanguard. … First, you can learn about our history though “Made In NYC: Civic Hacking 102,” and you can … #BetaNYC, NYC’s open data, open gov, & civic tech community (New …
List things we all can agree on (or at least things that most people in your crew can agree on).. use that as a template to invite ALL New Yorkers to take part including TEENS and PRE-TEENS. Like a Best Ideas, “If I were President” “if I were Governor” “If I were Mayor” type of things. Ways to TRULY make NYC NYS and America great.. .the BEST ideas/initiatives from these groups. Form a TRULY progressive NYC Council, #ProgressiveCabinet etc. Get people to run for office on these principles… the #NYCPEOPLESPLATFORM. #BRANDNEWCONGRESS
#OccupyNYCCouncil Make it a living document where people can VOTE/RATE best ideas. #BetaNYC
#NYProtest If you know of any videos, news etc. exposing the truth about what’s happening in Middle East or in USA, please send it to us! Please start diverting your money from these operations. PUT MONEY into OPEN-SOURCED investigation where WE THE PUBLIC are entitled immediate access to the THE RAW SURVEILLANCE FOOTAGE of these terror event crime scenes. Get info OUT TO THE PUBLIC QUICKLY and keep it in RESPONSIBLE HONEST HANDS. We strongly believe the Government and the powers that shouldn’t be… are engaged in what’s known as deep psychological, spiritual, and economic warfare against the American people. #911WakeUP#StopAIPAC#StopZionazis & dehumanizing and suffering live from peaceloving people. By your silence — guess what? you support racist thuggery as well as public policy with inherent racism and classism built into it.
Ben Norton: Israel Is the Master of Racism and Dehumanization
TEHRAN (FNA)- An American journalist and writer is of the opinion that it’s absolutely logical and fair to maintain that Israel is a racist and apartheid state that abides by no internationally-recognized rule or convention.
Ben Norton said in an interview with Fars News Agency that Israel is unrestrainedly suppressing the Palestinian citizens, and because of its strong political, economic ties with the United States, it’s never held accountable over its war crimes and violations of international law.
According to Mr. Norton, the United States is complicit in the atrocities of Israel. “Israel has violated at least 70 UN Security Council resolutions, but the US has prevented any punishment. Israel has committed crime after crime after crime, but the US has prevented the UN from taking any disciplinary action.”
Ben Norton believes that along with the military campaign in the Occupied Territories, Israel is also carrying out an intense, racist campaign of demonizing and dehumanizing the people of Palestine to justify their killing. “To perpetuate the violence upon which it thrives, a state ultimately must convince its soldiers to pull the trigger. If it humanizes those whom it wants dead, it becomes hard for soldiers to blindly follow orders and kill—the soldiers see how much they have in common with their supposed enemy.”
“But if it dehumanizes those whom it wants dead, those same soldiers will not think twice. Racism is the most effective means of practicing dehumanization, and Israel is the master of both,” he added.
Ben Norton is a freelance writer and journalist based in the United States. A well-informed commentator on the Middle East current affairs, his work has been published in Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, CounterPunch, Common Dreams, Think Progress, and ZNet, among other publications. His website can be found at BenNorton.com.
On the politics of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel’s racial discrimination against the people of Palestine, its contributions to the growth of Islamophobia and the international community’s responses to the criminal actions of the Israeli regime, FNA spoke to Mr. Norton. The following is the text of the interview.
Q: Do you find any similarities between the apartheid regime that reigned South Africa from 1948 to 1994, and the Israeli regime that has been putting in place derogatory laws of racial discrimination against the people of Palestine for more than 6 decades? Many scholars have drawn an analogy between Israel and the apartheid South Africa in terms of their treatment of the people under their rule. Do you consider it a logical analogy?
A: The apartheid Israel-South Africa analogy is a rather common and useful way of introducing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to those who may not be familiar with it. To answer the question, yes, I think the analogy is logical. That said, in some regards, it is rather limited.
First and foremost, I should say that we need not ask my opinion on the matter; we can simply turn to one of the most prominent leaders in the movement against South African apartheid, Desmond Tutu.
“I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid,” Tutu has said. “I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.”
Tutu has been a vocal supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Correspondingly, he has too advocated drawing an analogy between the boycott movement against apartheid in South Africa and the BDS movement against apartheid in occupied Palestine.
Supporters of apartheid Israel often cite F. W. de Klerk, the last president of apartheid South Africa, a white son of Dutch colonialists, who called such an analogy “unfair.” This conservative leader, who oversaw an apartheid regime, and who still today lives in an all-white neighborhood, in a lavish house with five servants of color, was in Israel to receive an honorary doctorate from Haifa University when he claimed, on Israel’s Channel 2, “you have Palestinians living in Israel with full political rights,” and “you don’t have discriminatory laws against them.”
For starters, de Klerk’s statements, factually speaking, are simply incorrect. Whether or not one agrees with the apartheid Israel-South Africa analogy is one thing. That Israel is an apartheid state, on the other hand, is not up for debate. In 2007, David A. Kirshbaum, of the Israel Law Resource Center, published a report titled “Israeli Apartheid – A Basic Legal Perspective,” meticulously detailing the many ways in which—according to its very own laws, not just the ways in which they are implemented—Israel is an apartheid state.
There are myriad examples of this apartheid in practice. In perhaps the most recent instance, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon officially banned Palestinians from traveling on Israeli-run public transportation. In 2012, renowned Israeli journalist Gideon Levy published the results of a scholarly statistical study in Israel’s most prominent newspaper, Haaretz. The poll “exposes anti-Arab, ultra-nationalist views espoused by a majority of Israeli Jews,” noting that 49% of Israeli Jews explicitly want their government to treat Jewish citizens better than Arab ones. It found that 69% would object to giving 2.5 million Palestinians the right to vote if Israel were to annex the West Bank and that 74% are in favor of separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians. Even in this hyper-nationalist and jingoist society, 58% of Israeli Jews admit their government practices apartheid against Arabs.
That Israel apologists point to de Klerk in an attempt to deny this reality is most telling. Zionists cite a white president of apartheid South Africa, the man who controlled the apartheid regime, in an attempt to rebuke the apartheid Israel-South Africa analogy; Palestinian solidarity activists cite a leading black South African activist, the man who led the anti-apartheid movement, who approves of the apartheid Israel-South Africa analogy. One hardly needs to look any further.
In the US, denial of this reality runs deep. In April 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry—while obsequiously acquiescing to most of Israel’s demands and happily supporting most of Israel’s illegal actions, including expansions of Jewish-only settlements the UN has continuously insisted are illegal—warned that Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state” as if it weren’t already one. He quickly recanted his statement, after the media chewed him up and spit him out. In the US political establishment, one cannot dare utter such a comparison, because one cannot dare criticize Israel. The truth tends to be rather controversial.
Part of this refusal to acknowledge Israel as an apartheid state is rooted in an ignorance of the definition of the term apartheid. Some try to argue apartheid refers only to a specific form of institutionalized racism, one in which a minority population rules over a majority—as was the case in South Africa. In terms of international law, they are mistaken. Apartheid is a more general concept.
In November 1973, the United Nations General Assembly instituted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, defining apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” As examples of apartheid in practice, it lists “murder, torture, inhuman treatment and arbitrary arrest of members of a racial group; deliberate imposition on a racial group of living conditions calculated to cause it physical destruction; legislative measures that discriminate in the political, social, economic and cultural fields; measures that divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate residential areas for racial groups; the prohibition of interracial marriages; and the persecution of persons opposed to apartheid.” All of these are practiced in Israel. Literally all of them.
Many try to speak of South African apartheid as if it were some uniquely evil form of injustice that did not exist elsewhere and will never return again. The unfortunate truth is that, under Jim Crow, the US was too an apartheid state. Still today, systemic racism in the US satisfies the legal definition of apartheid. It is for this reason that, in August 2014, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, who herself endured the brutality of apartheid in South Africa, likened the systemic racism in the US against black Americans, and more specifically the violent police crackdown on the recent nonviolent uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, to the violence she saw under the horrific white supremacist system in her home country.
Unfortunately, there is a small yet vocal movement in the US, consisting mostly of young, nationalist liberals, that criticizes any attempts to liken the South African and black American struggles to that of the Palestinians. They claim that drawing these parallels is merely “exploiting” the struggle of people of African descent in order to advance another cause. Such a position is hopelessly misguided. Drawing analogies between other examples of apartheid should by no means be interpreted as a means of diminishing the horror of South African apartheid. The racist South African regime was grotesque and despicable; pointing to other instances of grotesque and despicable regimes only strengthens the understanding that these sickening injustices are products of larger global systems of oppression.
Internationalist and intersectional struggle is not the “Oppression Olympics,” if you will. Not only does this questionable movement silent the voices of countless South Africans and black Americans who have firmly drawn parallels between their struggles for liberation and that of the Palestinians, it is fundamentally anti-intersectional and anti-internationalist. It is imperative that we recognize that the fight for justice in Palestine is not an isolated one. It is inextricably linked to the US’ own history, and continued present reality, of racism and settler colonialism; it is part of the global ills of imperialism and white supremacy.
All of this said, I am sympathetic to the position that the apartheid Israel-South Africa analogy breaks down when one considers some important factors. For one, Israel’s policies toward the occupied territories is very different than those directed toward Israeli Arabs. In the words of Noam Chomsky, “In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by ‘apartheid’ you mean South African-style apartheid. What’s happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse.”
More simply, Palestinians living in Israel live in an apartheid system. Palestinians live in the occupied territories live under something far worse.
Zionism is an explicitly racist and explicitly settler colonialist ideology. The “Father” of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, openly spoke of “the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea,” calling it “something colonial.”
Consequently, if one had to pick a historical parallel to the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing in Palestine, perhaps the best option would be the European colonialists’ own project of settler colonialism in what we call the “Americas.” This is particularly true in the US and Canada, where the preponderance of the population is not of Indigenous descent.
The land we now inhabit was ethnically cleansed in an intentional project. European colonialists used African slave labor in order to build their country. There were indeed indigenous slaves, but, to speak generally, the European colonialists’ preferred strategy was to ethnically cleanse natives by forcing them off of their land into smaller and smaller settlements, or by simply killing them.
Similarly, in 1947-1948, the agenda of Zionism was to ethnically cleanse the land of Arabs in order to create a Jewish state. Distinguished Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has painstakingly detailed these blatant policies in his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This is the Nakba.
In Israel-Palestine, on the other hand, not only does Israel not need Palestinian labor, it does not want it. Many modern Zionists are motivated by an extreme nationalist, frankly fascist, and often religious fundamentalist, ideology. The reason they do not give equal rights to Palestinians is because they do not want Palestinians in what they see as “their” land. They want a Jewish state in the literal definition of the term—what Israeli scholar Oren Yiftachel refers to as an “ethnocracy.” Many Zionists believe God gave them all of the land West of the Jordan river – or even beyond, in the case of Kahanists, including parts of modern-day Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq as well. Many non-religious Zionists believe the same. As Pappé once joked, “Most Zionists don’t believe that God exists, but they do believe that He has promised them Palestine.”
The apartheid regime in South Africa was indeed a colonialist project, but it was not necessarily a settler colonialist project, in the same sense of that in historic Palestine and that in what we today call the Americas. In these regards, the apartheid Israel-South Africa analogy does break down, because Israel’s project of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and what Pappé calls “incremental genocide” in the Occupied Territories is even worse than apartheid.
None of this should be controversial. These are incontrovertible historical facts.
A critical parallel between the South African and Israeli apartheid regimes that must not go unmentioned is the question of US support. Steadfast US support is common to both.
For many years, the US government officially considered South African leader Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress “terrorists.” In fact, it was not until July 2008 that Mandela’s name was removed from the US’ “terrorism” watch list. On Larry King Live in 2000, Mandela recalled “I was called a terrorist yesterday, but when I came out of jail, many people embraced me, including my enemies, and that is what I normally tell other people who say those who are struggling for liberation in their country are terrorists. I tell them that I was also a terrorist yesterday, but, today, I am admired by the very people who said I was one.”
Reagan was an enormous supporter of South Africa and its system of institutionalized white supremacy. In a 1981 CBS interview, the US president asked, in earnest, “Can we abandon a country that has stood beside us in every war we’ve ever fought, a country that strategically is essential to the free world in its production of minerals we all must have?” The International Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) had been so successful by the 1980s that even the UN General Assembly demanded that countries divest from and impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa. Reagan refused to do so, preferring what he called a policy of “constructive engagement.”
Ergo, in this way, yes, the apartheid Israel-South Africa analogy is appropriate. The leading international force that sponsored both systems of “domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons” was the US. Without unfaltering US support for apartheid South Africa, justice would have been achieved many years before; without indefatigable US support for apartheid Israel, justice would have already been achieved. As celebrated historian Rashid Khalidi has insisted, “the United States is precisely the enabler of all of this.”
In short, once again, yes, I would argue the apartheid Israel-South Africa parallel is indeed a logical analogy. As with any analogy, it has flaws, and there are perhaps better historical analogies from which to choose namely, the European settler colonialist project in what we now call the Americas, but, for those unfamiliar with the history behind the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the South African example is informative and effective.
Q: What do you think is the root for the racially-driven, egregious hate crimes against the Palestinians by the Israeli settlers and other residents of the Occupied Territories and East Jerusalem (Al-Quds)? There are reports of Israeli citizens approaching the Palestinian people on the streets, shouting “Death to Arabs” on them and insulting them aggressively. Why do the Israelis, who have actually occupied the homeland of the Palestinians and displaced thousands of them, hate the Palestinians such vehemently?
A: It should be recognized that, for centuries, Jews and Arabs lived in lived in relative peace in the Middle East and elsewhere. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a religious conflict, but it should also be recognized that, for centuries, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and those of other belief systems lived in relative peace in the Middle East as well.
Those ignorant of the historical roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claim Jews and Arabs have been “fighting forever.” Such a position is blatantly un-historical and incorrect. The problem is not that Jews are inherently racist against Arabs or that Arabs are inherently racist against Jews. Jews and Arabs are both Semitic peoples who speak Semitic languages and share a common history. The problem is simply the racist, colonialist movement of Zionism.
The “Father” of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, openly spoke of “the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea,” calling it “something colonial.” He appealed to British colonialists including genocidal mining magnate Cecil Rhodes for support. Ohio State University Presidents’ Club Professor of Law John B. Quigley documents the colonialist origins of Zionism in his 2005 book The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective. Quigley cites the correspondence between Herzl and Rhodes, noting how explicitly the Father of Zionism referred to his nationalist ideology as a form of a colonialism.
In the 1947-1948 war that founded the state of Israel, Zionist militias forcibly expelled 800,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Even before the war began, fascist Jewish militias such as Irgun and Lehi indiscriminately bombed Palestinian civilian areas. Both of these groups modeled themselves after European fascist movements. Lehi in fact aligned itself with the Nazis and Italian fascists. Its goal was to help Nazis deport Jews to historic Palestine and to create what it called a purely Jewish state based on “nationalist and totalitarian principles.”
The Jewish Agency and leaders of Jewish organizations around the world regularly condemned Irgun and Lehi as terrorist groups. In April 1948, the two militias carried out the infamous Deir Yassin massacre, slaughtering over 100 civilians, including women and children. In June 1948, Irgun was disbanded; former Commander Menachem Begin created the Herut party out of its ashes. In the wake of this bloodbath, leading Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, published a letter in the New York Times, warning about “the ‘Freedom Party’ [Herut], a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and fascist parties.” Einstein, Arendt, et al. were particularly concerned about the visit of Menachem Begin to the United States in order “to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States.”
That Zionism has explicitly colonialist and fascist origins is indubitable. A movement that is rooted in such obscenely racist ideologies, therefore, does not suddenly become progressive and peaceful. Even so-called “left”-leaning Israeli Prime Ministers still exhibit unmitigated bigotry. While publicly insisting that there “were no such thing as Palestinians,” that they “did not exist,” Meir regularly espoused overtly racist beliefs, going so far as to say that peace “will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
In 1947, in the midst of proto-Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, the supposedly “leftist” founder of Israel, and later the ethnocracy’s first prime minister, ordered the military to no longer worry about differentiating between “innocent” and “guilty” Palestinians. “Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion” of the indigenous Arab population, Israel’s Founding Father commanded. He later maintained that “[w]e must do everything in our power to ensure that they never return.”
Once again, Zionism is an explicitly racist and colonialist ideology, so “left”-wing Zionism is oxymoronic; it does not exist.
Not long ago, it was not controversial to point out that Zionism is overtly racist. In 1975, with the ratification of General Assembly resolution 3379, the United Nations determined “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the US wrestled back hegemony over the UN and forced the revocation of the resolution—yet the fact that the preponderance of the international community voted on the statute (72 to 35) attests to its accuracy.
The racism that we see today, therefore, is not exactly new. One might argue that the level of racism has reached a new high, but it has been present since 1947 and before. Israeli mobs shout “Death to Arabs” because the Israeli state is fundamentally structured upon the death of Arabs, and because the hyper-nationalist ideology of Zionism says that Arabs must be killed in order to maintain the ethno-religious purity of that state.
This form of institutionalized racism is a self-feeding cycle, an Ouroboros, if you will. In its seven decades of existence, Israel has gradually continued to expand, annexing more and more Palestinian territory, in flagrant violation of international law. Such has been the case with every settler colonialist project. The settler colonialist will never be content; as long as the settler owns less than 100 percent of the land, it will want more. Consequently, in order to continue expanding, the Israeli settler colonial project, like those of the US and Australia, has relied on violence. The easiest way to motivate this violence is with racism, and with religious extremism, but I do not want to overstate the importance of religion in this conflict.
The problem is, if you ethnically cleanse a people for 67 years, and militarily occupy them for 47, and treat them as “human animals”—to quote present Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu—they are not going to like you. And if you kill and imprison that people’s leading nonviolent activists, they are going to eventually turn to violent forms of self-defense and resistance.
Israel, like any aggressor and oppressor, creates false pretenses to justify its continued aggression and oppression. If Palestinians violently resist their incremental genocide, they are “terrorists,” sub-human “snakes” – in the words of Member of Knesset Ayelet Shaked – who supposedly “do not value human life.” Instead of pointing out the real root causes of Palestinians’ violent resistance, namely, colonization and occupation, Israel claims that is it “part of their culture,” of their religion, of their own DNA.
Racism is among the strongest of potential false pretenses. If a government is trying to fight, let alone exterminate, an entire people, racism is the most powerful weapon—more powerful than even bullets themselves. It is not a coincidence that US media and popular culture go to great lengths to depict “enemies” of the US government with grotesque, racist, orientalist stereotypes and caricatures.
To perpetuate the violence upon which it thrives, a state ultimately must convince its soldiers to pull the trigger. If it humanizes those whom it wants dead, it becomes hard for soldiers to blindly follow orders and kill—the soldiers see how much they have in common with their supposed “enemy.” But if it dehumanizes those whom it wants dead, those same soldiers will not think twice. Racism is the most effective means of practicing dehumanization, and Israel is the master of both.
Q: How do you think Israel has contributed to the growth of Islamophobia and discrimination against the Muslims by spreading a fear of them, as represented by the Arab Palestinians, who are denied their most basic religious rights in the Occupied Territories, including the right to worship and say prayers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque? Why has Israel embarked on a project of systematic abusing, torturing and persecuting the Muslim people of Palestine? Is it part of a larger project spearheaded by the US government?
A: It should be established, firstly, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a religious conflict. As with many conflicts, it may appear to be religious, at surface level, but the conflict is fundamentally a political one. There is a religious element, because most of the people on the two sides of this political conflict are of different religions, yet the Palestinians are ultimately fighting for freedom, human rights, and control over their own lives and land.
Religious nationalists, including religious Jewish Zionists, and especially Christian Zionists in the US, often like to speak of the conflict as if it were religious, because then they can use extremist interpretations of Christianity and Judaism to justify the crimes against humanity Israel has committed against the indigenous Palestinians. But this still does not make it religious at its core.
Israel also sometimes employs this strategy, exploiting Islamophobia as a tool to increase support for its project of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing. It is, frankly, in Israel’s interest to spread anti-Muslim bigotry. The majority of Palestinians are Muslim. By playing off of religious prejudices, Israel can further dehumanize the population it ultimately wishes to see ethnically cleansed from what it claims is “its” rightful land.
Israel is indeed engaging in a “project of systematic abusing, torturing and persecuting the Muslim people of Palestine,” but this is not because they are Muslim; it is because they are Palestinian. Israel engages in the same campaign against Christian Palestinian – in fact, Israel often goes out of its way to target Christian Palestinians, as a way of fomenting division.
There is no “larger project spearheaded by the US.” Israel’s oppression of Muslims existed long before the US stepped in. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in 1947 and, unofficially, before. Although the US supported Israel at this time – according to a popular historical anecdote, immediately after Israel announced its founding, White House staff woke up President Truman, in the middle of the night, so that he could recognize it – the US did not become Israel’s closest ally, and did not begin pumping US tax dollars into Israeli state coffers, until Israel demonstrated its military might and annexed the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, and West Bank in the 1967 war. Israel is not the US’s “puppet” in a “crusade” against Islam, contrary to the conspiracy theories some propose. Some extremist Christians in the US sometimes speak of the conflict in this way, but this view of US foreign policy is naïve, and frankly incorrect.
The role of the Christian Zionist movement is important, but I feel it is often overstated, to be honest. Yes, the Republican Party in the US is filled with Christian fundamentalists, but, at the end of the day, in spite of the religious inclinations of its bureaucrats, the US is a capitalist state, not a theocratic one. Religion plays a minor role in decision making; real decisions are made in regards to the interests of the propertied class. Corporate power trumps political power. This is how capitalism works. The US supports Israel not because it is waging a war on Islam; the US supports Israel because the ethnocracy supports its imperial interests in the region.
Saudi Arabia has the second-largest oil reserves in the world –18 percent of the entire planet’s reserves. Iraq has the fifth-largest. The tiny countries of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have the sixth- and seventh-largest, respectively. The Middle East is a treasure trove of oil, and the US needs oil. It really, really needs oil.
The US economy would come to a screeching halt, in mere moments, in a blink of an eye, were it to run out of oil. In the contemporary global economy, in contemporary global industrial society itself, it is absolutely impossible to function without oil. It would be very hard to overstate the importance of oil.
Those who find it far-fetched that a country would go to war over oil simply do not understand the role oil plays in the contemporary world. Since its illegal 2003 invasion, the US has essentially turned Iraq into an oil colony. By supporting Israel, no matter what it does, no matter how heinous its crimes, the US is simply befriending the most powerful country in the region with the largest oil reserves in the world. Steadfast US support for Israel is part of a larger imperialist strategy in the Middle East.
Because the interests of the bourgeoisie and Christian Zionists happen to coincide on the issue of Israel-Palestine, at the surface, it may appear as though it is a religious conflict. It is not, however. As with most conflicts in human history—even apparently religious ones, such as the Crusades—it is fundamentally materialist at its core. It is about economics, power, and control over capital.
Q: How is the reaction of the hardline white supremacist Israelis to the emergence and empowerment of the progressive, leftist movements in the Occupied Territories and the fact that a growing number of Israeli citizens are waking up to the atrocities committed by the Tel Aviv leaders in defiance of the international law, Security Council resolutions and calls by the community of nations that demand Israel to live up to its commitments as an occupying power?
A: The reaction of Israel to any form of resistance in Palestine is always the same: violent repression.
I would not say that leftist movements in the Occupied Territories are growing. On the contrary, support for Islamist resistance forces, namely Hamas and Islamic Jihad, is growing. Israel is exploiting this fact and relying on ignorant anti-Muslim bigotry to further demonize Palestinian resistance, claiming Hamas is the “same” as ISIS, Boko Haram, and other violent, reactionary groups. It matters not to Israel that Hamas – and Hezbollah, as it often adds to its Naughty List – is an unambiguous enemy of ISIS, nor that ISIS has publicly vowed to destroy Hamas because Hamas, in its words, “defends democracy.”
The question of Hamas is complex. Hamas is a large and diverse organization. For starters, it was democratically elected, and two thirds of its branches are devoted to providing social services for Gazans. The other third is a resistance force that acts in self-defense against a country that bombs its children, hospitals, schools, and places of worship including not just mosques but also Christian churches. Hamas is Islamist, but Islamism is an exceedingly heterogonous political ideology. ISIS, on the other hand, is a fascist movement that contradicts the most basic tenets of Islam. There is no comparison whatsoever. Israel tries to lump all Islamist forces together, in order to demonize resistance.
This has not always been the case, however. Just a few decades ago, Israel was supporting the very same Islamist resistance organizations that is seeks to crush today.
It is most telling that, for decades, the leading Palestinian resistance forces and the leading resistance forces in much of the Arab and Muslim world were secular and socialist. The marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, of which it is a part, was the primary vehicle of resistance against Israeli oppression—and against the attempts of Western imperialist powers to support this oppression.
So, back to my original point, I would not say that leftist movements in the occupied territories are growing, but this is because of Israel’s policies. And, beyond that, it is because the PLO, dominated by Fatah, has proved itself to be complicit with Israeli oppression. Abu Mazen has actively worked with Israeli security forces in order to suppress Palestinian resistance. In 2010, the PFLP voluntarily suspended its participation in the PLO, protesting chairman Abbas’ collusion with the government that is waging a “war against the Palestinian people.” The PFLP explained the PLO “does not meet the needs or aspirations of the Palestinian people” and has “accepted the logic of the slave master and do[es] not seek to change the reality.” By betraying the Palestinian people it purports to represent, the PLO has given its secular, nominally left-leaning ideology a bad reputation.
In response to the other half of your question, I, unfortunately, do not think that a “growing number of Israeli citizens are waking up to the atrocities committed by Israel.” In fact, the facts show that the opposite is true. 95 percent of Israelis supported their government’s most recent slaughter in Gaza, euphemistically dubbed Operation “Protective” Edge. 95 percent—this is about as close to a national consensus as you ever get.
Israeli leftists are at a point where many simply want to leave their country. Most have given up on trying to change a society that lurches further and further to the far-right. Esteemed Israeli journalist Gideon Levy is now openly describing Israel as “fascist,” in his Haaretz articles and in news interviews. Israeli fascist mobs brutally beat not just Arabs and African refugees, but also leftist and anti-Zionist Jewish protesters. Police just stand by watching them—sometimes even giving the fascists a hand. All the signs show that Israel is a fascist society, and there appear to be no indicators demonstrating that it is going to get any better. It looks as though things are going to continue getting worse. And that is beyond terrifying.
Q: For a long time, the Israeli politicians have been using the cover of “anti-Semitism” to obstruct any criticism of their actions and discriminatory policies against the Palestinians. They automatically brand as anti-Semite and Jew-hater anyone who condemns their brutalities, regardless of the essence and content of the criticism that has been leveled. Is the excuse of anti-Semitism going to work for a long time and help the Israeli leaders evade accountability and facing justice?
A: Zionists use many obscene and vile tactics to defend their racist, settler colonialist ideology, yet the ubiquitous anti-Semitic slur may very well be the most repugnant of them all.
The unfortunate reality is that many people do not know the difference between Judaism or Jewishness and Zionism. Zionism is an explicitly racist and explicitly settler colonialist ideology. The “Father” of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, openly spoke of “the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea,” calling it “something colonial.” Zionists exploit this ignorance of the definition of Zionism in order to whitewash Israeli crimes.
In many ways, it can in fact be argued that Zionism is itself an anti-Semitic movement. Many Zionists have gotten to the point where they are so extreme in their jingoist hyper-nationalism that they try to argue that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic, because it opposes a movement that fights for “Jewish self-determination,” they claim. This position is grotesquely anti-Semitic, as it suggests that all Jews have the same conception of “Jewish self-determination,” let alone that all Jews believe a homogenous, apartheid, ethnocratic Jewish state is the expression of “Jewish self-determination.” In short, when Zionists claim anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, what they are actually saying is that all Jews have the same political ideas and believe the same things. Now that is anti-Semitism.
What is worst of all about this abominable practice is that it is often directed at Jews themselves. According to many Zionists, Jews who oppose Zionism – read: a racist, colonialist movement – are “self-hating,” or even “not” Jewish. This is anti-Semitism in its most blatant form. Zionists construct an essentialist view of Jewishness that says that “this is what it means to be a Jew.” This is already a racist act. Then, Zionists call Jews who do not conform to their essentialist conception of Jewishness “self-hating” or “not Jewish.” Sometimes, the Zionists who are calling anti-Zionist Jews “self-hating” or “not Jewish” are not even Jewish themselves! This is racism in its rawest form.
This problem is not limited exclusively to Zionism. This is a problem with nationalism itself. A quick caveat here: Nationalism is not necessarily always a reactionary ideology. There are certainly historical examples in which nationalism was an important way of united members of oppressed groups in order to resist oppressor groups. Most of the time, however—and all of the time when it is nationalism practiced by an oppressor group, as in the case of Israel—nationalism is a fundamentally reactionary ideology.
Leading anti-imperialist scholar Eqbal Ahmad constantly warned of its dangers, explaining “Nationalism is an ideology which always has the Other. And therefore, it’s a double distortion. You distort by glorifying your own, and you distort by darkening the other’s history.” Zionism, like any form of nationalism, constructs a false binary of the world, seeing the Palestinian as the “Other.” This binary is predicated on racism.
In a discussion about nationalism with Mubashir Hasan, Ahmad’s colleague and comrade, the former cautioned nationalism “unites the exploiters and exploited to fight united exploiters and exploited of other nations. And thus it prevents social change.”
Accordingly, Zionists often use anti-Semitism as an excuse to disguise the real reasons why Palestinians engage in resistance against the state that is ethnically cleansing and colonizing them. Zionists reiterate ad nauseam the preposterous notion that “all Palestinians are anti-Semitic.” For starters, this ignores the fact that Palestinians are Semitic themselves. The term “anti-Semitic” was created by racist 19th-century German pseudo-scientists. Like most racists, they were asinine, and used “Semite” as synonymous with “Jews,” without realizing that both Jews and Arabs are Semites.
Beyond that, this cheap tactic also explicitly silences what the Palestinian resistance itself has to say. In her autobiography, Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled writes “The supreme objective of the Palestinian liberation movement is the total liberation of Palestine, the dismantlement of the Zionist state apparatus, and the construction of a socialist society in which both Arabs and Jews can live in peace and harmony.” Creating a state “in which both Arabs and Jews can live in peace and harmony” is the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it is one that many Palestinians have been calling for for decades.
It is rarely mentioned, but it must be said. The fact of the matter is that Zionism is one of the primary instigators of anti-Semitism in the world. Zionism, by constantly claiming that Israel represents the Jewish people, and by constantly silencing and persecuting Jewish voices who oppose this racist narrative and challenge Israel’s crimes against humanity, is one of the principal reasons anti-Semitism continues to be a problem. This is just one of the many ways in which the Palestinian solidarity movement is a fundamentally anti-racist movement.
Q: The Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, which has been in effect since 2006, has caused a true humanitarian disaster in the besieged coastal enclave. As you wrote in one of your recent articles, more than 90% of the people of Gaza live in extreme poverty, over 65% of the population is unemployed, and 95% of Gaza’s water is undrinkable. Why doesn’t the UN take action to change this calamitous situation and help the defenseless people of Gaza? Who is responsible for the plight of more than 1.5 million Palestinians entrapped in Gaza?
A: The role of the UN in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is important, yet often misunderstood. For not just years, but for decades, the UN has played a leading role in speaking out against the Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing, and oppression of Palestinians.
In its November 1967 resolution 242, the UN Security Council, including even the US, demanded that Israel withdraw from the territories it militarily occupied only five months before. Since this time, Israel has only withdrawn from the Sinai Peninsula; it still illegally occupies the West Bank and Golan Heights.
With UN Security Council resolution 446, adopted in March 1979, the UN also explicitly maintained “that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” The US abstained from this vote.
Countless UN resolutions and statements have since stated, in no uncertain terms, the same thing: Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, and the settlements are illegal. Moreover, every few years when Israel “mows the lawn,” massacring Palestinian civilians, UN officials consistently accuse Israel of war crimes.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has also been an important force in assisting the Palestinians. In some ways, UNRWA is problematic, as it outsources Israel’s legal responsibilities. As an occupying power, Israel has an obligation, under international law, to ensure the well-being of the population it occupies. Instead, Israel starves, tortures, and murders that population, and UNRWA and international aid ensures that it does not die. Yet UNRWA still provides an incredibly important service to Palestinian refugees whom many of the surrounding Arab states ignore and even oppress themselves.
Indeed, there are many things to criticize about the UN. There has been collusion between UN and Israeli officials; this is documented. Thanks to Wikileaks reports, in just one of the many examples of backdoor dealing, we now know that UN officials, all the way up to the Secretary General himself, were working with US officials to censor the Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, known colloquially as the Goldstone Report. Even the Goldstone Report, nonetheless, with all of its flaws, was quashed by President Obama.
The problem is not necessarily with the UN. The UN does have a lot of problems on a lot of issues, and it is much too kind to Israel, but the primary problem is not with the UN. The problem is with the US. Israel has violated at least 70 UN Security Council resolutions, but the US has prevented any punishment. Israel has committed crime after crime after crime, but the US has prevented the UN from taking any disciplinary action. The US constantly vetoes resolution that would hold Israel accountable for its crimes.
Distinguished historian Rashid Khalidi has written entire books about how the US has intentionally obviated peace in occupied Palestine. In a November 2014 interview on Democracy Now, Khalidi explicitly said “the United States is precisely the enabler of all of this.”
On some issues, the UN, bullied by the world’s hegemonic countries, is on the wrong side. In the case of Israel-Palestine, the UN is on the right side, because the vast, overwhelming preponderance of the international community is on the side of justice. The UN is very, very, very far from perfect; it is as imperfect as the countries that comprise it. Yet, as Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, has said, “you only have to be 10 percent objective to come to the same critical conclusions that I came to in relation to Israel’s violation of fundamental human rights in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, the three segments of occupied territory.” The UN is by no means objective, but, on the issue of Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine, it is at least 10 percent objective.
The party responsible for the plight of the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped in an open-air prison in Gaza, and the further 2.7 million Palestinians brutalized in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, is not the UN. The party responsible is indeed a two-letter acronym that begins with “U,” but it is not the UN; it is the US.
Q: A large number of US academicians have joined the wave of academic and cultural boycott of Israel, which includes a variety of mechanisms for embarrassing Israel on the global level and showcasing its isolation and loneliness, including pressing the presidents of American universities to refrain from visiting Israel, asking the American universities to stop their student exchange programs with Israel and cut any investment in the Israeli companies run from the settlement regions. Will such measures really yield significant results and compel the Israeli leaders to change their behavior toward the Palestinian people?
A: The BDS movement is, hands down, the most important movement in the struggle for justice in Israel-Palestine, outside of resistance in occupied Palestine itself.
For starters, BDS was called for by leading Palestinian intellectuals and activists as the ideal means by which the international community can express solidarity with the Palestinian people. In any movement against oppression, racism, and settler colonialism, it is imperative that activists wishing to stand in solidarity with an oppressed group in its struggle for justice do what that oppressed group has actually asked of them. The BDS movement is precisely that. Yet, even beyond this most significant factor, the BDS movement is so important because it is effective. And its efficacy is already being seen on campuses across the US, and across the world.
Israeli universities are doubtless complicit in Israel’s crimes. In the wake of Israel’s summer 2014 slaughter in Gaza, Israeli scholar Amir Hetsroni, who before the attack, had been opposed to BDS, wrote in Haaretz of “the undeniable attempts by academic management to prevent students and faculty from speaking their minds and punishing those who protest against the war.” “A college that prohibits students from taking part in political protest is not an academic institute. A university that vetoes its faculty’s right to publish non-Zionist – not to say anti-Zionist – scholarship is not a university. In such cases an academic boycott might be an acceptable response,” he said.
In October 2014 I published an article in Mondoweiss titled “Academia, the ‘battleground’ in the Palestinian solidarity movement,” detailing how Israel has outlined an intentional policy of targeting and repressing Palestinian solidarity activists on US campuses. During the Second Intifada, head of Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) and former Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky went on a tour of US and Canadian college campuses. Upon returning to Israel, he told Prime Minister Sharon “the most important battleground for the future of the Jewish people is campuses.” Israel and closely linked Zionist organizations have since gone so far as to work with US university administrators, police – including local police and the FBI, and even politicians to engage in a McCarthyist campaign of repression.
The real ground being gained in the BDS movement is indeed happening on US campuses, but it is not gained merely by cutting ties between universities; rather, it is being gained by divesting from corporations. A cultural and academic boycott is important, and cutting university ties is a step, but these are not enough. The real power of the BDS movement lies in its economic potential.
We live in a global capitalist system. If one wants to effect change, therefore, one must target powerful economic institutions—namely, corporations. The BDS movement’s call for divestment from and boycotts against large corporations, such as Caterpillar, HP, Lockheed Martin, and more, is where its power really lies.
BDS has already scared Israel’s Justice Minister, who noted that the movement is growing “exponentially,” warning that his fellow denizens in an oblivious Israel are living in a “bubble, … disconnected from the international reality.” Sodastream’s stock is plummeting. The corporation, whose principal manufacturing facility is situated in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, has virtually become synonymous with apartheid profiteering. Europe’s boycott movement is already taking a hefty economic toll. Now, peace organization CODEPINK is leading an exciting new movement, Boycott RE/MAX: No Open House, calling for a boycott of RE/MAX, the world’s largest real estate company. RE/MAX Israel, a franchise of the US-based corporation, sells properties in illegal Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. This brand new campaign already has the corporation trembling in its pecuniary boots.
Universities have already played an important role in this movement, and will only continue to do so. That said, universities are still, in many ways, enclaves of privilege. Not everyone can go to college, and, given the enormous financial burden required to do so in the US, many students do not have time to participate in activism. The goal should hence be to extend BDS into all communities in civil society. No one should support Israel’s policies of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism, and no corporation or institution should profit off of these crimes. In the words of a popular chant, “When Palestinians are oppressed, boycott, sanction, and divest!”
Art adds vitality and energy to advocacy; and it reaches people at deeper emotional levels and in their hearts conveying what cannot be said with mere facts.
We had been covering art as part of our reporting on the movement at Popular Resistance, but it wasn’t enough. There has been so much artistic activism that we decided it needed to be highlighted with its own website, Creative Resistance.org. It is a place where community members, activists and activist artists can connect and inspire each other. We encourage everyone to find ways that art can be incorporated into your actions and into the work in your community.
Art Builds Commitment, Community and Movement
One goal of public protest is to pull people to the movement in order to grow into a mass movement that cannot be ignored. Activist art turns a protest into a spectacle, from a turn-off to a turn-on, from an event ignored to one that is widely reported. The protest becomes art itself. If done well and with intention, it will draw people to the movement.
For example, before a protest or other event, a community art build can be organized where people involved in advocacy create art together; and where families, community members, professional colleagues and others are invited to co-create. This process builds stronger connections within the community, deepens the understanding of the issue and provides a way for individuals to express their personal relationship to the issue.
As Tatiana Makovkin, an organizer with Creative Resistance, wrote recently: “Art is good for our communities, and artistic collaboration is a bonding experience. We make art together, not just because of the changes it can bring to the world around us, but because of the way it changes us internally.”
Another group that uses the creation of art as a catalyst for change is the Bee Hive Collective. This Maine-based group tells stories through incredible graphics. They are done in a sophisticated cartoon-like style in order to make them accessible and engaging. The stories are based on concerns that communities have about their lives and the environment. They have gone to the coal fields of Appalachia, refugee camps in Latin America and partnered with other communities whose voices need to be amplified, whose stories need to be heard and whose struggle for social and environmental justice needs to be told.
Sometimes art lifts a protest to what Bill Moyer of the Backbone Campaign calls a “spectacle action.” We’ve been involved in protests against the Trans-Pacific Partnership with Moyer and each was a spectacle action. In a recent TPP protest we draped four massive banners on the building of the US Trade Representative, across from the White House complex. The action, which the Washington Post called the greatest guerrilla theater in DC history, created images used by media all over the world and showed people who are opposed to the TPP in other countries that there is opposition in the US too.
In a protest in Salt Lake City as TPP negotiators were inside a hotel conducting secret negotiations, theBackbone Campaign and other groupsflew massive weather balloons holding a banner outside their conference window saying “Psst TPP. What are you hiding?” The banner used humor to mock their secret negotiations and raise the issue of why they were hiding from all of us who will be impacted by the deals they make behind closed doors.
These spectacle protests also sent a message to our adversaries that we are a force to be reckoned with because we were willing to take risks and were clear in our denunciation of their unpopular, anti-democratic actions. They were put on notice – proceed and you should expect resistance.
That same type of message has been sent all up and down the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring toxic tar sands sludge from Canada through the farm belt of America, over precious fresh water sources and to the Gulf of Mexico to be processed for transport overseas. When the Tar Sands Blockaders began in the southern portion of the pipeline, they put up massive banners in the trees where activists were doing tree sits. The message on the banner: You Shall Not Pass was a clear threat of resistance.
The use of art in resistance can make protests less frightening and something people want to attend and join. Protest signs that advertise an event or are used at the event draw attention and spread our message, as do the massive puppets seen at many protests produced by groups like People’s Puppets, Bread and Puppet Theater, the Backbone Campaign and others. As these puppets march through neighborhoods accompanied by singing and chanting, people are drawn to them and some end up participating. Street theater is another way to attract people. Rev. Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir is one example of many groups who perform.
A book which shows the breadth of creativity in activism is Beautiful Trouble. It compiles hundreds of examples of creative resistance. The authors write, “The realization is rippling through the ranks that, if deployed thoughtfully, our pranks, stunts, flash mobs and encampments can bring about real shifts in the balance of power. In short, large numbers of people have seen that creative action gets the goods — and have begun to act accordingly. Art, it turns out, really does enrich activism, making it more compelling and sustainable”
Reaching People Beyond Their Heads
To be effective in our advocacy it is not enough to provide facts, figures and graphs and reach people in their heads. Studies have shown that facts that contradict someone’s belief are often ignored and even have the opposite effect of strengthening people’s preconceived notions. In order to change people, we have to reach them at a deeper, more emotional level.
Throughout history, the most effective political actors have married the arts with campaigns for social change. While Martin Luther King Jr is now largely remembered for his example of moral courage, social movement historian Doug McAdam’s estimation of King’s “genius for strategic dramaturgy,” likely better explains the success of his campaigns.
Dramaturgy means the art or technique of dramatic composition and theatrical representation. One of the co-founders of the Center for Artistic Activism, Stephen Duncombe, describes the story of how King used drama when the civil rights movement selected Birmingham, AL as the place for protest by creating a confrontation with Police Chief Bull Connor. Connor had been an abusive police chief in Birmingham for 23 years and in 1961 had abused the Freedom Riders. Connor tried running for mayor, but lost the election. The day Connor lost the election, King’s group announced Project C (for confrontation) challenging the racist police practices of Connor. The goal was mass arrests and confrontation that would overwhelm the police and penal system. King’s arrest led to his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
On May 2, 1963, King’s group used a new tactic in Birmingham by having children march through the streets, resulting in 959 children aged 6 to 18 being arrested. The next day large numbers of protesters came out and Connor turned the dogs and fire hoses on them. This went on for several days and produced images that created anger at Connor and support for the civil rights activists. Three thousand protesters were arrested over a five day period. The impact on the reputation and economy was extremely negative causing a majority of businesses to reach agreement with King to desegregate lunch counters, rest rooms and drinking fountains on May 10. The businesses also helped to get the protesters released and created systems for black-white communication. On May 11, Connor was ordered to leave his office.
King had picked the stage, the antagonist and protagonists. The narrative was predictable because they knew how Connor would react and the civil rights activists had been trained to respond appropriately. Through dramaturgy, King had created a dramatic composition that was vivid, emotional and engaged the American people – based on the truth – to tell the story of racism in Birmingham and advance the cause of civil rights by reaching people beyond their minds, deep into their emotions.
Think of the iconic photos of African Americans being attacked by dogs and having the fire hoses turned on them; and of children being arrested. These iconic images are still carried with many Americans because they reached deep down into people. Sometimes when the stage is set and the narrative is being told, the iconic image, unimagined before it happens, is created and advances a movement.
Another path into the emotions of people is humor. The Yes Men are one of the groups that have used humor to make a point. The Yes Men describe their workas “Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them, and otherwise giving journalists excuses to cover important issues.” And, they have mocked some of the biggest corporate criminals on the planet. Their method is to put these corporations in an uncomfortable position, forcing them to respond to hoax news that ‘reports’ the corporation is going to do something good. The corporation then responds – ‘no we’re not going to do something good.’
The Yes Men are now working to share their experience and broaden the talent of hoax humor activism with the Yes Lab. Their goal is to helpactivists carry out media-getting creative actions through a series of brainstorms and trainings. They call their tactic that creates a public spectacle to spark public debate “laughtivism” as they recognize that humor opens people’s minds.
Another powerful artistic tool is music. It draws people in and can open the door to a movement message. From hip-hop to folk music to rock and roll, there is musical activism. And it is also a tool for creating solidarity and confidence when activists face difficult situations.
Creativity sustains movements
The struggle for social justice is a long-term endeavor that goes through periods of ups and downs. Artful activism in resistance movements can provide new energy and make the goals feel more tangible. Art allows us to imagine the future and sense the world differently.
Art does not have to be expensive. It can be as simple as a can of spray paint for graffiti. The artist Bansky has brought street art to a new level, but at its root it is simple and accessible. Another group that takes graffiti to a new direction is theCalifornia Department of Corrections, which ‘corrects’ billboards to put forward a social and economic justice message by adding their comments or changing a few words on the billboard.
Bread and Puppet Theater describes the birth of the “Cheap Art Philosophy … born in 1979 when [they] filled their old school bus with hundreds of small pictures painted on scraps of masonite, cardboard and newspaper, painted slogans and statements about art and Cheap Art, and hung them on the outside of the bus. Then they drove it to neighboring towns and sold the stuff for 10 cents to 10 dollars.” They report the idea has spread:
“Today Cheap Art is practiced by all kinds of artists and puppeteers all over, and continues to cry out: Art is Not Business! Art Is Food! Art Soothes Pain! Art Wakes Up Sleepers! Art Is Cheap! Hurrah!”
Isn’t this the sharing world want we need to see? Imagine art builds in every town bringing communities together and deepening commitment, massive puppets and balloons carrying the message of justice in parades and protests across the country, entertaining and educating theatrics in the streets, music reaching the uninvolved and strengthening the resolve of the already active. People sharing and participating together in building a movement of creative resistance whose foundations are joy and resolve spurs us to re-imagine and create the world we want to see.
Occupy Union Square 
