File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2002/postcolonial.0204, message 145


From: mlevine-AT-benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu
Date: Sat,  6 Apr 2002 13:00:17 -0800
Subject: solidarity with palestinians


dear fellow list members, i've written the piece pasted below as a call 
to arms, and available on alternet.org at the following link:

http://alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12786

please pass it around if you think it's useful, and please let me know 
if you're organizing any solidarity trips to palestine, or know who is, 
so i can put people in touch with them..

thanks!!!!
best
mark
----------

  Bring the Turtles to Ramallah

  Mark LeVine, AlterNet
  April 4, 2002

  Viewed on April 6, 2002

  ------------------------------------------------------------------- 

  One of the main reasons that the 1999 protests in Seattle gained such 
notoriety and sympathy was the surprise of
  seeing a seemingly disorganized group of ageing unionists and often 
strange-looking young people use a massive
  nonviolent protest to challenge and even transform the policies of the 
world's most powerful institutions. The
  success of Seattle served as a wake-up call to couch-potato activists 
everywhere that cynicism and political apathy
  were not the only options for those opposed to the status quo. 

  Today, the situation in the occupied territories is ripe for the same 
kind of action. 

  For years a small group of Palestinian, Israeli, and international 
peace activists (the Christian Peacemaker Teams, the
  Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, the International 
Solidarity Committee, Bustan Shalom, Haluzay
  Shalom, Rabbis for Human Rights, to name a few) have been using 
creative, nonviolent activism to inspire
  Palestinian society to transform its struggle against Israeli 
occupation into a large-scale, nonviolent civil protest.
  Such a movement could more successfully push the army -- and more 
importantly, the Israeli and international
  publics -- to face up to the brutal injustice and reality of 35 years 
of what even the New York Times's Thomas
  Friedman now admits has been "colonial occupation." Indeed, it's no 
surprise that the previous Israeli assault on
  Palestinian cities, in February, came just as Palestinian leaders, 
intellectuals and activists were urging their public to
  move toward massive nonviolent civil disobedience. It's no surprise 
that this past weekend Israel declared much of
  the West Bank a closed military zone after groups of peace activists 
marched, loud and proud, in front of Israeli
  tanks to protect Palestinian civilians and leaders alike. 

  These actions demonstrate that there is little the Israeli Government 
fears more than the type of large-scale
  nonviolent protest so many of us have long urged Palestinians to 
follow in place of violent resistance. And in fact
  Israel has a sad history of arresting, deporting and even shooting 
Palestinian and foreign peace activists (not to
  mention journalists), which is a major reason why today there is no 
infrastructure within Palestinian society for a
  Gandhi/King inspired program of civil disobedience. Yet at least in 
part because not enough Israelis and
  international activists have been willing literally -- figuratively 
isn't worth much -- to stand side by side with
  Palestinians against the occupation, most Palestinians have concluded 
that they are ultimately alone, and that the
  only way to win their freedom is to make Israelis suffer more. The 
moral and strategic flaws in this calculus have
  never been clearer. 

  So I would argue to the tens of thousands of globe-trotting 
globalization protesters that you have been missing a
  much more pressing case of globalization. The Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict is intimately tied to the militarization of
  the Middle East. Militarization is at the heart of the inability of 
the countries of the region (who are both the least
  democratic and largest per capita arms purchasers in the world) to 
engage successfully the forces of economic and
  cultural globalization. 

  In fact, the entire Oslo process was premised on securing Israel a 
leading position in the new globalized order. On
  the strategic level, the mis-named "labor" elite, led by Shimon Peres, 
saw peace with Palestinians as the necessary
  and sufficient condition for a high-tech, low-wage Israel assuming its 
natural place as the cultural and economic
  "engine of the new Middle East" (not surprisingly, Arab commentators 
immediately jumped on this rhetoric and
  continue to use it as a justification for opposing "normalization" of 
relations between Israel and Arab states, fearing
  that the Arab world can neither compete with Israel nor fend off the 
further "invasion" of the Western culture it
  represented). 

  More specific to the Oslo framework for "peace" with Palestinians, the 
rarely mentioned economic section of the
  accords represented a textbook case of neo-liberal neo-colonialism, 
with Israel retaining the power to dictate the
  details of what industries/export policies Palestinians could pursue 
and maintaining whatever Palestinian "state"
  would emerge as a captive open market for Israeli goods (many of which 
are produced by cheap labor in Jordan and
  Egypt). Ultimately, one can even see that the intensification of 
religious nationalism among politically and
  economically marginalized communities in Israel/Palestine has helped 
doom the so-called peace process. Middle
  Eastern ("Mizrahi") Jews, who have long faced discrimination by the 
European Jewish elite, are among the leading
  Israeli "opponents" of peace (in large part because they realized the 
peace and prosperity that Peres and Co.
  envisioned would do little for them). Muslims both inside Israel and 
in the occupied territories have seen economic
  opportunities and standards of living fall and poverty rise during a 
decade of peace-making and become
  increasingly radicalized. That poverty has come in response to the 
neo-liberal economic policies of successive
  Israeli governments since 1977, when Israel joined Margaret Thatcher's 
England as the first countries to try out the
  Milton Friedman school of economic shock therapy that Ronald Reagan 
would bring home to roost a few years
  later. 

  Indeed, the situation in Palestine/Israel has long constituted a much 
more immediate and clear threat to peace, justice
  and autonomous development than the complex and contradictory programs 
of the IMF and World Bank. And
  while the two thousand Israeli and Palestinian activists who faced off 
against Israeli troops are an encouraging sign,
  they will not succeed in defeating the violence without massive 
international support and solidarity. Unfortunately,
  in over two years of urging and arguing with leaders of the 
globalization protest movements I have consistently been
  frustrated in attempts both to bring in Arabs and Muslims into the 
international dialog, and to turn our attention to
  the pressing need for their intervention in the Middle East. 

  I've faced off against riot police in Prague and bulldozers in the 
West Bank; and I can tell my fellow activists that
  the need for your courage, ingenuity and enthusiasm is far more 
immediate and will have far greater effect in
  Ramallah and Beit Jala than anywhere else. So bring on the samba 
bands, puppeteers and turtle people; let's turn
  Ramallah into Seattle! As the situation grows ever more dire, nothing 
short of a massive influx of activists ready to
  put their bodies on the line will challenge the terror of tanks and 
suicide bombers alike, and create the space in
  which Israeli and Palestinian activists, presently cowed into silence 
by blood-soaked populations, can challenge and
  inspire their peoples toward a future of peace and reconciliation. 

  If you want more information about plans to organize solidarity trips 
to Palestine/Israel, or even better, help
  organize them, email community-AT-tikkun.org or visit www.tikkun.org. 

  Mark LeVine is Assistant Professor of History at UC Irvine and author 
of the forthcoming Overthrowing
  Geography, Re-Imagining Identities: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle 
for Palestine (University of California Press).
  He has been published in numerous scholarly and journalistic venues, 
including Le Monde, Tikkun, the Christian
  Science Monitor, Beliefnet.com, alternet.org, the International 
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Journal of
  Palestine Studies, and the Mediterranean Studies Journal. 

  ------------------------------------------------------------------- 
     Reproduction of material from any AlterNet.org pages without 
written permission is strictly prohibited. © 2001
                         Independent Media Institute. All rights 
reserved.


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