Wake Up!

Last year was tough, but lots of courageous things happening in Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, France, England and right here in NYC, so it's time to get some perspective and stay uplifted thanks to Outlandish:

let's not cry tonight, I promise you one day it's through
my brothers, my sisters,
shine a light for every soul that ain't with us no more
my brothers, my sisters

As the great African liberation leader Amilcar Cabral, murdered by colonialism, said, "tell no lies; claim no easy victories". God bless all the freedom strugglers in the Middle East, Europe, America, Canada, and beyond, surviving and fighting white supremacy worldwide inshallah.

Check out Outlandish, O-Marz, Salah Edin, DAM, Arab Summit and others on the new Middle East download from Egypt and Lebanon over at African Hip Hop Radio.

Speaking of super group Arab Summit: here's Part 1 and Part 2 of a recent interview with Davey D talking about their album, Fear of an Arab Planet. Claiming a lineage with Public Enemy, and through that the history of Black Power, should tell us a lot about where the struggle should be going. Here's another interview over at Electronic Intifada.

One more hip hop note. Long time coming documentary, Slingshot Hip Hop, on Palestinian originators DAM, Arapeyat and others, directed by NYU's own Jackie Reem Salloum, is finally coming out. Although parts of it were presented at the Other Israel film festival this last Fall, it will hit theaters after its run at Sundance last week.

There's a release party on February 8th for Slingshot Hip Hop at the Knitting Factory with DJ Kayper, GC and The Soul Mafia, and Erika Rose as part of Israeli Apartheid Week here in NYC. Check it out.

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The Other Wall: Darkness in Gaza

The other wall

In Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love, which chronicles his stay with the Palestinian fedayeen in the early 1970s, there is a story about a highly symbolic incident in Beirut. One day, an apparently homeless Palestinian man suddenly showed up in the neighborhood. He smelled bad and seemed to have mental problems. People felt sorry for him and gave him food and money when they could. Shortly after, when the Israeli army invaded Beirut, this same man was standing in the turret of a tank rolling down the street where he played the role of harmless madmen, returned as another kind of madmen, a colonel in a uniform with a grim look on his face. The so-called Palestinian homeless man turned out to be an Israeli intelligence officer, returning during the subsequent invasion with his mask off to wreak mass terror on the civilian population.

In retelling this story, Genet gets at one of the mythic and psychological aspects of settler colonialism: that it is "identical with Power" itself. The power to manipulate the natives in this story is the other side of the colonel's return as a sadistic tormentor. This is possible, according to Genet, because colonialism equates its order with the "beginning" of history itself. The madmen is needed to constantly demonstrate the indestructability of the colonial regime, to continuously reimpose the racial order, and to revitalize the myth that history is either himself or nothing.

This same idea appears in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth; a book in which the living body of Palestine-Israel emerges from its pages today. The settler "is the absolute beginning," says Fanon, who must live by the idea that "This land was created by us" and that "If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages." Therefore, "the settler asks each member of the oppressing minority to shoot down 30 or 100 or 200 natives, he sees that nobody shows any indignation and that the whole problem is to decide whether it can be done all at once or by stages." This madman, lost in a delirium of racial phantasms, looms over Gaza today.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flooded over the border between Gaza and Egypt last week, temporarily breaking the blockade imposed by the U.S., Israeli, European, and Arab regimes. Palestinians fought Egyptian police and later blew up and toppled the border wall. It wasn't only that Palestinians overwhelmed the small police forces, but Egyptian authoritarian ruler Hosni Mubarak had to claim that he allowed a temporary halt to the siege because, once again, the Palestinian struggle against apartheid and the movement for democracy throughout the Middle East converged.

Once again, the Palestinian struggle strikes a blow against imperialism and white supremacy.

Anti-apartheid protests in Lebanon

The current crisis in Gaza has had the potential to spark off the kind of large demonstrations against Israeli apartheid and the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime that were seen in the spring of 2002. That spring saw the glimpses of a mass movement against the U.S.-supported dictatorship throughout the Middle East. This last week threatened to repeat 2002, with demonstrations in Cairo, Beirut, Amman and elsewhere. In Cairo, several hundred people were arrested, many of whom were hauled-off to Mubarak's torture chambers with U.S. applause. Meanwhile, a general strike in Lebanon has converged with its own demands, while U.S.-backed right wing gangs have been attacking strikers. The convergence of Egyptian anti-apartheid solidarity and anti-imperialist solidarity with Iraq and Lebanon and the Egyptian labor strike movement has continued to show the possibilities of struggle against the Mubarak regime.

At the same time, the temporary break of the siege in Gaza has been an equally powerful, though uncertain, victory over the depravity of Western imperialism, the apartheid regime, and its Arab vassal states. The U.S. and Israeli strategy of combining what the Washington architects of Central American policy in the 1980s called going "primitive", that is mass killings of the civilian population, with building up the military power of the elites, has failed. Imperialism's public relations advertisements for "democracy" in the Middle East are only more exposed in Palestine-Israel and Lebanon by the popular movements for democracy, where imperialism has not yet been successful in inducing aspects of civil war as it has in Iraq.

The Israeli effort to strengthen the embargo against food, fuel and money into Gaza, has been shown for what it is by the Palestinians. The Israeli government has always used blockades against Palestinian bantustans since it controls them, but since 2006 such embargoes increased in scale. Last week, the government imposed a complete blockade and all power was cut, and darkness overtook Gaza.

The Israeli government says that since homemade rockets continue to be launched from Gaza, it will impose a complete blockade until they stop. 2 people in Sderot were killed recently from these rockets. The NYTimes reports, "Israeli Prime Minister Olmert said he won't allow Gazans to live ordinary lives while Israelis next to Gaza are suffering from daily rocket attacks". So how have Palestinians been doing these last two years living "ordinary lives"?

The blockade has been in place to varying degrees since Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections in the beginning of 2006. But that's only part of the story. The Israeli army has coupled this blockade with continued murders and arrests of Palestinian activists and civilians. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, in the last two years the Israeli regime has killed 1030 Palestinians, 193 of which were children. During these two years, 44% of these 1030 dead were civilians. Almost half of all Palestinians killed didn't even have a gun in their hands. In this same time, only 24 Israelis were killed. This doesn't even include the over 1000 civilian dead in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 2006, or the number of brave Lebanese who took up arms to defend their homes and not let the apartheid regime carry out another 20 year occupation.

How to make sense of these sick numbers? Since the second intifada began in 2000, it has challenged the legitimacy of the apartheid regime. This regime has responded by practicing mass terror and the destruction of the Palestinian social fabric itself, while further entrenching its segregationist and displacement policies. While American supplied F-16s, Apache helicopters, and tanks strafe the Palestinian bantustans, soldiers shoot up demonstrations, murdering hundreds of people. Meanwhile, Zionist fascist militias rampage through Palestinian ghettos, destroying shops, cars and crops in the field. It was a policy announced in the very beginning of the second intifada when more than a dozen Palestinians living inside the Green line, so-called Palestinian-Israelis, were shot down for organizing demonstrations in solidarity, while Zionist mobs prowled the streets looking for Palestinians to lynch.

A couple days relief

In the Gaza bantustan in recent years, these practices can only be characterized differently in that they're of a much greater scale. Water, medicines and food have been low and malnutrition and preventable diseases are growing. Since there are no supplies, Gaza's meager textile factories have come to a close and the entrances out of the bantustan are blocked by Israeli soldiers, preventing any further work inside the Green Line. Unemployment is at 75%.

Meanwhile, Israeli Jews live their ordinary lives undisturbed by any of this. Olmert's Orwellian flip is exactly the kind of psychological displacement by the colonial racist mind that Fanon notes in Wretched of the Earth: it is the whites that are under attack, and as for the condition of the native he has only brought upon himself. The scales of violence, therefore, are appropriate in the moral economy of white supremacy. We see this in American newspapers where, if a an Israeli Jew is occasionally killed, there is front page coverage, while every week Palestinians are killed in demonstrations and arrests and they remain unmentioned and faceless. Olmert's comment reveals exactly the calculus of white life as more valuable than non-white life.

This gets at Genet's Israeli madman as colonial sadist. In the social ideology of Zionism, colonial sadism is based on the racial ideas of Arab inferiority and barbarism. The Zionist madman must commit mass state terror because the native not only deserves it, but this is the only way to maintain the racial order in the logic of colonialism and apartheid. Gaza today is only the most extreme example of this dynamic in Palestine-Israel.

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New Flyer: Gaza and Ongoing Apartheid

The entrenchment of apartheid as one set of laws and practices for the indigenous population and another for Jews is ongoing and getting worse. As one well-known leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, the situation facing Palestinians is even worse than in South Africa. U.S. government and institutional support—like right on this campus—is integral to apartheid’s existence. In the United States, Britain, South Africa and Egypt, there is a growing campaign of boycott of Israeli goods and divestment from companies doing business inIsrael-Palestine. It is modeled on the successful solidarity efforts in support of the democratic movement to end South Africa apartheid. Similarly, the Palestinian movement to end apartheid cannot succeed if we here do not hold our own university accountable.

NYU students are building an anti-apartheid campaign here. Get involved!

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What Is The “Peace Process?”: The Annapolis Talks and the Future of the Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Struggle

Olmert, Bush, Abbas: trying to save apartheid

“If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” - Ehud Olmert, Annapolis talks, 11/07

Last November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas met with US President George Bush in Annapolis, Maryland for the first stage of a new round of “peace talks” – an official society song and dance that the world has not seen in almost six years since the "Road Map to Peace" talks in Taba. Most people outside of the United States (including most Israelis), understand that the so-called “peace process” is a public relations scam, that contrary to the supposed purpose of these talks – the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state and the negotiation of a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace – the peace talks are actually designed to give international legitimacy to Israeli apartheid regime, and to prolong the day of reckoning when a Palestinian civil rights movement finally dismantles this structure from below.

But why are these new talks just happening now? Why, after six years of dormancy, has the Colonial Fascism Cabaret just come back to town? Is it because of the Hollywood writer’s strike, and there was just no one to write the lines? While this would be a solid guess for those not in the know, the six years of public silence are certainly not for lack of words. Rather, this recent round of peace talks is occurring because of a profound crisis in Israeli apartheid policies and thought, triggered by the very recent and very powerful popular struggles of the Palestinian people. To understand the current phase of official society “dialogue” in Israel/Palestine, we need to look at the recent history of democratic movements among the Palestinians themselves.

In the last two decades, there have been two major anti-colonial uprisings in historic Palestine: the First Intifada, from 1987-1993, and the Second Intifada, from 2000-2004. These movements created an immense political crisis for the Israeli state and official society (not to mention the Palestinian establishment), precisely because they challenged the very foundations of unequal social relations institutionalized in the laws and de facto practices of Israel - relations characterized by ethnic separation and subjugation in a hierarchy of citizenship.
Because as in apartheid South Africa, access to citizenship and civil rights in Israel is defined by race and ethnicity through religion, Jew versus Arab, a system in which Jews have full political rights and Palestinians have modified ones or none at all, depending on where they live.

The two-state solution is no longer a possibility for Palestinians because there cannot be an acceptance of living in bantustans which the Israeli government has created. The paradigmatic shift to an anti-apartheid analysis, signals a possible return to the original program in the PLO charter for a democratic Israel-Palestine for equal rights, for the national Palestinian movement. This is what the Zionist regime fears. The demand for equal rights and citizenship as a goal for the national movement would end, once and for all, the public relations stunts of the "peace process".

Every Israeli and American state official knows this, hence the tirelessly revisited “peace process” and its crucial “two-state solution.” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said it best himself during the recent Annapolis talks: ““If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” The Orwellian mirage of a two-state promise is the only way to maintain Israel as a Jewish state, to maintain the rigid ethnic segregation and separate but unequal practices that define the entire social fabric of Israeli society as a whole.

In the Israeli political establishment, there have been two approaches to dealing with these Palestinian democratic challenges to the current state of affairs. One promotes continual military subjugation and even genocide against the Palestinian population – the civilian shoot-to-kill policy during the two Intifadas, or the recent total-war military blockade and economic strangulation of the entire Gazan population, being just two examples of this. The other position advocates the “the two state solution:” a political arrangement where Palestinians are placed on a handful of disconnected and Israeli military regulated ethnic reservations and these reservations are collectively referred to as a “state” against all rational instinct.

Handala's message to apartheid

This second vision is specifically modeled after the South African apartheid regime’s “peace offerings” constructed through the 1960s and 1970s – a series of limited autonomy Bantustans, militarily surrounded and bisected by the apartheid state forces, having no political autonomy and subject to new invasion and occupation at any time. These were the terms of both the Oslo and Camp David Accords. But what unites the first and second vision is that they both share a philosophy of racial manifest destiny and separation, falsely equating the history and identity of Jewish people with the existence of an apartheid state. This philosophy is called Zionism. Zionist justification for Israeli apartheid is intimately tied to notions of superior and inferior races and cultures, often associated with the idea and practice of white supremacy.

Therefore, the context of the Annapolis has to be seen through this goal of empowering Palestinian representatives, whose base of support is the U.S. and Israeli governments, to affirm an international recognition of de facto apartheid. But this cannot be done effectively if grass roots popular democratic resistance is not crushed and at the same time the leading resistance organization, Hamas, is not destroyed. Bush promoted the idea of elections through Abbas, but Abbas lost badly to Hamas. Since the election of Hamas to the bantustan government in 2006, the Israeli government, and the U.S. and European regimes have been working to remove it.

Through their proxies in the Fatah party elite, led by Mahmoud Abbas, Salam Fayyad and Mohammed Dahlan, they were able to carry out a coup. The bantustan government was restored in the West Bank ghettoes to the Fatah elite--who got rich off of the Oslo years in the 1990s, while apartheid was further entrenched-- however they were run out of Gaza, where Hamas has historically deeper roots.

Mohammed Dahlan, close to the Israeli government and the U.S., was directed by Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, and flushed with more American and Israeli weapons, to attack and destroy Hamas and any resistance in Gaza and in the West Bank. Although this plan failed in Gaza, it is being carried out in the West Bank bantustans. Now the Palestinian Authority police forces are being overseen by US general Keith Dayton. The goal is to ensure that the work of apartheid goes on undisturbed while Palestinian faces imprison and murder any resistance to it.

If the original goal of the "peace process" in the 1990s was to reestablish the political legitimacy of Israeli apartheid that was quickly fading with the democratic challenges of the first intifada, this time it is more difficult to restore that legitimacy. In the 1990s, the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization was allowed to enter the West Bank and be the Palestinian face of this process. It worked for awhile because despite great disillusionment, Yasser Arafat still had a lot of symbolic legitimacy as the most recognized leader of the historic national movement and leader of Fatah. There is no such illusory legitimacy today. The Palestinian Authority, and the hand-picked people like Fayyad, Abbas and Dahlan, depend completely on American and Israeli government interests.

While Abbas and the PA leadership smile during photo-ops like Annapolis, saying nothing about the structures of apartheid, Israel continues its collective punishment of the Gazan population and is quietly consolidating its apartheid structure in the West Bank as well, strengthening and expanding its infrastructure of Jewish-only towns, Jewish-only roads, IDF checkpoints and the latest "security" wall.

The democratic aspirations of the Palestinian people to be free from apartheid have sent a wave of fear through Israeli (and not to mention American) official society. The election of Hamas to municipal power in Gaza (and the subsequent total war response of the Israeli Defense Forces against the Gazan civilian population) is only one manifestation of this. The recent Annapolis peace talks come on the heels of a growing awareness amongst Israeli rulers that apartheid is losing its legitimacy, and that something must be done on the international scene to preserve the racial character and hierarchy of Israeli society as a whole.

It is important for democratic minded people in the US, and all people of good faith, to support the Palestinian struggle against apartheid and exert real pressure on the Israeli government through divestment and economic boycott here. The American student divestment movement played a critical role in the 1980s in bringing the South African apartheid regime to its knees. It is up to this generation to see that the same solidarity is offered to the Palestinian people as they continue the struggle against colonialism and apartheid in their homeland.

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