Students for Palestine

From the electronicintifada

LSE Students Union Palestine Society, The Electronic Intifada, 31 July 2008

Students and striking local government workers united to picket a London School of Economics (LSE) event in Starbucks on Kingsway, Holborn last week, in opposition to their support for the state of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

The LSE Annual Fund and Alumni Relations departments had teamed up with Starbucks to offer an “afternoon of free coffee and cake tasting for Postgraduates,” in a clear attempt by the global coffee chain to undermine the role of the LSE Students’ Union as the primary supplier of refreshments on LSE’s campus.

Students have previously expressed outrage at LSE Director Howard Davies’ active support of organizations complicit with Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Davies, a member of the National Council of the Academic Study Group of the Friends of Israel Education Foundation, has previously refused the School’s endorsement of informal links established between LSE academics and Birzeit University in Palestine. The Academic Study Group was founded in 1977 for the “promotion of new collaborations” with Israeli institutions. Israeli human rights groups have accused these institutions of being “part and parcel of Israel’s colonial system of oppression against the Palestinians.”

On 30 May 2007 UCU (University and College Union) passed a resolution at its annual congress calling upon members of the Union “to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions.” The next day LSE’s Davies posted a statement on the LSE website condemning the resolution and by implication a free debate on the issue.

Students were also angered by the statement of former LSE Chair, Lord Tony Grabiner, for his remarks in a House of Lords debate on anti-Semitism in which he branded the UCU motion for debate as “poisonous,” warning that “we must be vigilant.”

Meanwhile, Starkbucks CEO and Chairman Howard Schulze is renowned for actively supporting the Zionist occupation of Palestine. In 1998 he was honored by the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah with “The Israel 50th Anniversary Friend of Zion Tribute Award” for his services to the Zionist state in “playing a key role in promoting close alliance between the United States and Israel.” The Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah funds Israeli arms fairs and the Zionist propaganda website, honestreporting.com. Schulz’s work as a propagandist for Israel has been praised by the Israeli Foreign Ministry as being key to Israel’s long-term PR success. In 2002, whilst the Israeli army was slaughtering Palestinians in Jenin, Nablus and Bethlehem he made a provocative speech blaming the Palestinians of terrorism, suggesting the intifada was a manifestation of anti- Semitism, and asked people to unite behind Israel. Starbucks still continues to support Zionism by sponsoring fund raisers for Israel.

Outgoing Chair of the LSE Palestine Society, Ziyaad Lunat stated: “LSE should be clear that we will not allow it to actively or passively support the occupation of Palestine, nor collaborate with other organization renowned for their support of Zionist imperialism. LSE students are becoming more and more aware of the issues and resolutions passed by a majority of students at LSE show that they find Israel’s activities repugnant.”

UNISON activist and former LSE student, James Caspell stated: “Whilst we are striking over fair pay, students and workers in Britain should unite and show solidarity with our Palestinian comrades at every opportunity, who live in effective open air prisons and denied of basic material security.”

LSE Students’ Union is twinned with An-Najah University in the West Bank, and last year voted to divest from companies operating in Israel or providing the state with arms.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

A Canadian student who took part in a protest against the security wall Israel’s building in the West Bank has been arrested and faces deportation from the Jewish state.

Victor McDiarmid, a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement, had been living in the West Bank for nearly a month when he was arrested Wednesday at a demonstration by women from the village of Nilin, where Israel plans to build the next section of its security barrier.

McDiarmid, 23, was arrested after taking photographs of Israeli soldiers who were breaking up the protest by villagers, who say the barrier will separate them from their farmland.

“He was taken by Israeli soldiers whilst at the front of the demonstration and was taken off towards the jeep. And then he has reported to us that for 20 minutes they were punching, kicking and spitting in his face,” said Adam Taylor, ISM’s media co-ordinator.

The organization’s lawyers say they were told McDiarmid, who is from Kingston, Ont., was to be released Thursday from the Israeli military prison where he was being held. Instead, he has been transferred to a detention centre for people facing deportation.

An Israeli Defence Force spokesperson said officials won’t be able to comment until they check details after the Jewish Sabbath.

His parents told CBC News they support their son and the work he was doing in Israel to expose human rights violations.

Robert McDiarmid said he is outraged his son could still be sitting in a detention centre.

“I’m angry at the human rights abuses in the West Bank. I’m angry that the Canadian government’s aborting,” McDiarmid said, adding that his son has said he wants to stay in Israel and fight his deportation.

The International Solidarity Movement describes itself on its website as a “Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods and principles.”

As I lead a delegation of UK students around the West Bank, I thought about how the trip was to benefit the Palestinian people. When they spend money, they help the Palestinian economy, their solidarity helps boost morale and when they record incidents of abuse they help give legitimacy to Palestinian claims of oppression.

The power that international qualifications of abuse give to Palestinians was shown by the release, earlier this week, of a video showing the shooting of a Palestinian youth. The video shows a soldier grabbing the young man and dragging him to his feet. He is blindfolded and handcuffed and looking unstable as he stands, the senior officer holding him instructs a nearby soldier to shoot him in the leg. The soldier raises his gun and shoots, at which point the photographer drops her camera in surprise and by the time the camera returns to him, the victim is on the ground in what appears to be quite a fair amount of pain.

When coming to respond to this incident, the usual IDF trick of denying any knowledge wouldn’t fly, unfortunately for them it had been caught on film. The brief suggestion by the IDF that the moment where the camera was out of focus represented a sinister editing trick was also quickly dropped for fear of embarrassment. In the end there was nothing to do but begrudgingly apologise and try as hard as possible to suggest that the incident was a one-off. The incident, claimed Ehud Barak “was a grave and wrong one and is not indicative of the IDF’s norms”, “Warriors do not behave like this”, he concluded philosophically.

It would seem safe to assume that Ehud Barak, in his long and brutal career would have, whilst not abided by one, at least heard of such a thing as a human rights report. This novel type of document normally contains within it an assessment of what is taking place in a certain area of the world and compares how well the actions of groups in that area correlate or fail to correlate with norms established in international human rights agreements. For somebody who had never read such a report on Palestine, seeing a video of a Palestinian man being shot for no immediate reason would indeed be surprising.

For an Israeli minister however, there can be no excuses. B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, reports frequently on abuses that take place and concludes that, “Both the army and the Border Police have yet to make it unequivocally clear to security forces serving in the Occupied Territories that it is absolutely forbidden to abuse and beat Palestinians”. Their attempts thus far are deemed by B’Tselem to be “more lip service than a frank and honest attempt to uproot the phenomenon once and for all”

Amnesty International’s report into how soldiers treat Palestinians is also worth quoting at length: “impunity remained widespread for Israeli soldiers and settlers responsible for unlawful killings, ill-treatment and other abuses of human rights of Palestinians and attacks against their property. Investigations and prosecutions relating to such abuses were rare and usually only occurred when the abuses were exposed by human rights organizations and the media.”

Similar reports by Human Rights Watch, Al-Haq, Physicians for Human Rights, Breaking the Silence and many, many others paint a similar picture; that on top of the systematic abuse legitimized by the Apartheid regime in the West Bank, individual soldiers consistently violate, with impunity, the thin legal protection that is afforded to Palestinians. For anybody who took the time to google ‘human rights’ and ‘Israel’ the brutality of the situation faced by Palestinians would be readily evident and they would see that the incident in the video, instead of being a singular freakish occurrence, is actually wholly indicative of the way that Israeli ‘warriors’ behave.

Why then was there such an outpouring of anger and sorrow for the case of this one individual caught on camera?

There is definitely something to be said for the power of photography. A photo often does, paint a thousand words and seeing very often is believing. But beyond the clichés there is a deeper more sinister reason why despite mountains of evidence on other cases, it is only this one that will get the attention, if not the justice which it deserves.

The prevalent attitude that leads to Palestinian claims being ignored are evident in all facets of the history and politics of Palestine. Benny Morris, one of Israel’s most frank historians come political commentators managed to write an entire book about the greatest crime committed against Palestinians, the Nakba, using precious little first hand evidence from Palestinian witnesses. The reason? Because according to Morris, Palestinians (or Arabs as he calls them) have a “penchant for exaggeration” therefore they cannot be considered credible sources. Arabs, he tells us, are simply unable to tell the truth.

Edward Said wrote 30 years ago about the West’s orientalist attitude in its dealing with the Arab world. He argued that Arabs were represented as ‘the noble savage’, ruthless, merciless and untrustworthy. When one looks today at the occupation of Palestine and the way in which Palestinian claims of abuse are ignored, one can’t help but thinking that orientalism is alive and well.

As our delegation heard time and time again of beatings, torture and daily harrassment, one of them felt compelled to ask me “if there are so many incidents of abuse and so many first hand accounts of it, then why isn’t action being taken?”. One man who they met explained how his mother was shot on the front step of their house. He took us to her grave, he showed us the injuries that he suffered during her murder and the bullet holes on the nearby walls. Why was he still waiting for justice and why was his case to be ignored?

Another B’Tselem report explains that when Palestinians come to complain about their abuse, they are faced with “a system which tends not to believe them, and which tends to protect rather than prosecute those who injured them”. In most cases where a crime has been committed, procedure is to take an account of events from all those concerned, and use them, along any evidence at the scene to form a picture of what happened and thereby dish out justice accordingly. The fact that Palestinian complaints are ignored so out of hand suggests that Palestinians are not deemed human enough to be considered serious winesses.

Part of the statement by Barak is very revealing in this regard. Amongst the stream of empty words and crocodile tears of sorrow, he committed to “exact the full extent of the law in this case”. ‘Only in this case’ because no Palestinian, with their deceptive lying ways, would ever be able to prove to the world that the abuse that they had suffered was real and even if they could, unless the crime they suffered was as blatant as the incident caught of film, then a suitable lie can be fabricated to explain it away.

Even when a crime is caught on film, however, it is not sufficient evidence for a conviction and as the criminal soldier from the incident above walked free on Tuesday, Palestinians will be wondering what they need to do to for the world to take seriously the daily attacks that they face. Because in Palestine, it would seem, even the camera lies.

Biography

Akram Salhab is a Palestinian from Jerusalem who is currently studying an undergraduate degree in Politics at the University of Leeds. He is active with the UK student movement, Action Palestine, as well as being the national student coordinator for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He works with these organisations on campaigns to raise awareness of the plight of Palestinians and to give momentum to the BDS movement to end Apartheid.

Mail & Guardian Online

Crack! Fizz! Then, even more alarmingly, WOOMF!! We can’t see what’s happening, but for the South African journalists tagging along it sounds ominously familiar.

A pitiless sun above, white dust and plastic litter underfoot, dry-stone walls, prickly pear thickets, ancient olive groves.

All around us on the dirt road are Palestinians, some as young as eight or nine, who seem unfazed by the noise of battle and almost six weeks of almost daily protest. They chant slogans in Arabic and wave Palestinian and green and white Hamas flags.

The turnout disappoints one of our Israeli hosts, Elan Orian from Anarchists Against the Wall. Perhaps 250 villagers from Nilleen are marching, instead of the expected thousand, accompanied by 40 or 50 Israeli sympathisers.

But he takes comfort from the fact that there is some support from nearby Palestinian settlements. “The biggest weakness is that each village protests on its own. It’s much easier for the military to deal with,” he says.

We top the ridge and the battlefield unfolds before us.

Visible through olive groves charred by past confrontations — hot teargas canisters start fires, our hosts say — is the parched valley that marks the route of the “separation barrier”. Beyond lies more Palestinian land, from which the barrier will soon divide them.

On the opposite ridge two bull­dozers are busy uprooting olive trees to create a 70m-wide “exclusion zone” for the fence itself, gravel swathes to highlight footprints and access roads for Israeli security vehicles.

A long line of demonstrators is winding up the opposite hillside; with Israeli activists in the van to moderate security force violence, they plan to veer left and throw themselves in the path of the clanking behemoths.

Yesterday, a Palestinian proudly tells me, a small group of protesters broke through and inflicted some damage on the vehicles.

Nilleen, on the West Bank north-west of Jerusalem, near Ramallah, has just emerged from a four-day siege and curfew and the security forces are pumped for action. Having­ declared the valley a “closed military zone”, about 100 soldiers and border police — the latter particularly feared for their brutality — are strung out along the ridge.

As the demonstrators toil upwards, they come under a steady shower of teargas canisters and stun grenades, which can blow off fingers if handled, an activist warns me.

There is no retaliation, not even stone-throwing. Wherever we have been on the West Bank the theme has been one of non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation and the wall.

We follow through the drifting wisps of teargas; my eyes and nose start to stream. I stop on the ridge and my companions move on.

Unknown to me, the advance guard of the protesters has been beaten back by the troops, who are now driving onwards to clear the ridge. Suddenly, at 50m or less, a khaki-clad, helmeted group is striding through the bushes hurling stun grenades and firing rubber bullets as they come.

Something hisses past my head and through the tree behind me. Just ahead, a vivid flash and thunderclap. Over the rocks, through the thorn-bushes, slip-sliding down the path and I’m at the bottom of the hill again.

Behind me, carried on a stretcher, is a middle-aged American member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, which “maintains a violence-deterring presence between Israeli settlers, soldiers and Palestinians”. She has been hit in the buttock by a rubber bullet, indicating that her back was turned to her assailant.

Others are treated in the field by paramedics or moved to the clinic in Nilleen, while two Palestinians with “penetration wounds” are transferred to hospital.

In the past 16 days 220 protesters have been treated for injuries, according to a village spokesperson. In nearby Biddoo, where the wall has been completed, at least two have died.

Now begins the slow, straggling retreat, accelerated by an army flanking movement through the olive trees which harries the protesters back to the edge of the village.

The mood is bitterly defiant. A villager, holding aloft an olive branch, the resistance symbol of the Palestinian fellahin (farmers), proclaims the start of the third intifada. “Fuck you, soldiers!” screams another. An Israeli activist shouts up at the guardians of the bulldozers: “I’m ashamed of you! I’m ashamed to be Jewish!”

A Palestinian loads a slingshot and hurls a desultory rock or two across the valley; they drop harmlessly short of the soldiers.

An ironic symbol of a grossly unequal contest: David the Palestinian and his slingshot versus the Israeli Goliath. Except that the ruthlessly efficient giant shows no sign of falling.

In many ways it is RSA circa 1988 — stones against guns in an elemental fight against injustice.

There is no compensation for the uprooted olive trees, which are the basis of the Palestinian economy, and we were told in Biddoo that the soldiers use every possible device to obstruct Palestinian access to the groves from which the barrier separates them.

The unstated aim, villagers insist, is dispossession.

There is, too, the larger picture. The International Court of Justice condemned the wall as unilaterally imposing a political boundary between Israel and the West Bank it occupied during the 1967 war.

Designed to secure the Israeli settlements set up on conquered territory in defiance of the Geneva Convention — at Nilleen it balloons around the religious settlement of Modi’in Illit — it will entrench the seizure of another 8,6% of Palestinian land.

But in other respects conditions are far more suggestive of South Africa in the 1960s. With Israel’s economy growing at more than 5% a year and the backing of the world’s superpower, it is buffered from international pressure.

But the obvious difference between the West Bank 2008 and South Africa 20 years back is that the security forces are comfortably holding the line. And this imposes a terrible strain on the strategy of non-violence.

Although many Nilleen villagers are sure to return to the barricades tomorrow, next week and next month, the shrinking turnout worries Orian.

What, in this daunting context, drives the Israeli activists loosely organised under the misleading banner of Anarchists Against the Wall?

A few may be youthful hell-raisers in heavy-metal T-shirts, but many, perhaps most, are not ideological anarchists — they are grown-ups with brains, skills and jobs.

Orian, for example, is a physicist and environmental scientist in his thirties; Kobi Snitz, hit above the ear by a teargas canister during the protest, is a 36-year-old mathematician at Technikon Haifa.

We interview them at the Nilleen clinic: Ivan, an Argentinian immigrant struck in the face with a rifle butt; Snitz, who complains that the Israeli vanguard was advancing with arms raised when it was attacked; Jonathan Pollak, with a suspected fracture after a baton was broken across his leg.

Pollak tells us he has sustained at least 10 injuries in wall-related protests, including a brain haemorrhage which prevented him from standing for weeks. But he’ll be back, he says. The others echo him.

Guilt, snorts an Israeli photographer when we return to our hotel, arguing that the activists have a perverse need to suffer. I reflect that guilt can be a fitting response, particularly to rights violations in one’s name.

For Orian resistance to the wall has cemented Israelis and Palestinians in a new and fragile bond. Anarchists Against the Wall may be dismissed as lunatics and traitors by the Israeli mainstream, but like South African whites in the mould of Joe Slovo and Neil Aggett, they have opened a tiny conduit of goodwill between two warring peoples.

There is another motive which one would expect to resonate with Jews everywhere. It was highlighted by Amos Goldberg, our tour guide at Yad Va’shem, Jerusalem’s remarkable Holocaust memorial.

A middle-aged Holocaust historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and member of Children of Abraham, which fosters ties between Jewish and Muslim youth, Goldberg was arrested a month ago while confronting Israeli security forces in the conflict-torn West Bank city of Hebron.

His focus is less on the perpetrators and victims of the European genocide than on the millions of ordinary, decent people, many of them not anti-Semitic, who watched from the sidelines.

“We blame the Poles for not helping the Jews,” he says. “I don’t want to be a bystander.”