Intifada consequence of relentless war crimes

Forty years dishonest brokering in Arab-Israeli-Palestinian affairs

Excerpt, minor editing by Carolyn Bennett

Naseer Aruri’s thoughts on “the Oslo Accords and the new Intifada”

THE U.S. ENDEAVOR TO IMPOSE ITS HEGEMONY ON THE MIDDLE EAST, which predates the 1967 [Six Day] War, reflects the consensus of U.S politicians on all sides of the spectrum. With the departure of the former colonial powers--the United Kingdom and France--U.S. planners decided the Middle East would have to be recolonized by the United States. In an era of decolonization, Arab nationalist ideas and concepts, such as Arab unity, Arab socialism, nonalignment, return and restitution for Palestinian refugees, and indeed Arab-Israeli parity, were considered anathema in Washington and Tel Aviv.

For four decades, U.S. administrations were able to hold tight to this consensus, but there were adaptations and stylistic changes along the way, meant as a sort of cosmetic surgery to make the policy less objectionable to conservative Arabs.

Oslo was the diplomatic equivalent of the military destruction of Iraq.

THE ROLE OF THE U.S. MEDIA BORDERS ON THAT OF AN INFORMATION OFFICE IN THE ISRAELI FOREIGN MINISTRY AND THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT. They parrot the Israeli accusation that Palestinian parents send their children to the street to throw stones and get killed in order to score a propaganda victory.  

Such racist attitudes are based on the premise that Palestinians don't value human lives as do Israelis and Westerners-- a well-known and well-documented phenomenon in Western discourse about Third World societies challenging colonialism. 

… [T]he accusation, moreover, assumes that … the Palestinian people have no independent judgment or critical faculties.  

This isn’t the first time that the U.S. media have misunderstood the essence of a popular evolution among oppressed people. South Africans, the Vietnamese, Central Americans, and African American activists in the 1960s were portrayed as being driven by ‘external’ forces whenever they challenged the oppressive status quo. 

What the media fail to--or refuse to--understand is that all these struggles and the popular discontent throughout the Arab world are really a consequence of the efforts of the imperial powers and their regional collaborators to restructure and rearrange the political systems of the region to suit their interests. 



Second Intifada
Part of the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Image at Wikipedia

THE PEOPLE ARE ASSERTING THEIR LEGITIMATE RIGHT OF RESISTANCE. And they are paying an exceedingly high price for it--with their lives and children’s lives, with their homes and property, and with their livelihood.  

As long as this Intifada continues, the old rules of the division of labor between the PA, Israel, and the United States will be obsolete, discredited, and illegitimate.

 The Intifada has penetrated the conscience of the Arab masses, the Islamic community, and numerous constituencies around the world who came to recognize Israel’s acts as … war crimes.

NASEER ARURI 

Jerusalem-born Naseer Aruri is Chancellor Professor (Emeritus) of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and author of  Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History (2006); Dishonest Broker: America's Role in Israel and Palestine (2003); Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return (Editor, 2001); Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward W. Said (Co-editor, 2001); The Obstruction of Peace: The U.S., Israel, and the Palestinians (1995); Occupation: Israel Over Palestine (Editor, 1983). 

Sources and notes

Interview with Naseer Aruri (speaking with ISR's ANTHONY ARNOVE about the Oslo Accords and the new Intifada), International Socialist Review Issue 15, December 2000-January 2001, Oslo: Cover for Territorial Conquest

      

The Oslo Accords (officially, the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements or Declaration of Principles) were declared an attempt to resolve the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Oslo Accords were a framework for the future relations between the two parties.  

Since the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada ─ the Second Intifada (Al-Aqsa Intifada or the Oslo War), the second Palestinian uprising, a period of intensified Palestinian–Israeli violence beginning in late September 2000 and ending roughly in 2005 leaving an estimated death toll of 5,500 Palestinians, 1,100 Israelis and 64 foreigners) ─ the Oslo Accords have come into increasing disfavor by Palestinians and Israelis. 

Amid incessant violence, brutal occupation, and continuous expansion of Israeli settlements, a report in late 2010 said, though there was no official statement, the Palestinian Authority no longer considers itself bound by the Oslo Accords. Wikipedia

Intifada:  the act of shaking off] (1985): uprising rebellion; specifically: an armed uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Britannica

Image at Wikipedia
Second Intifada: Part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Clockwise from above: A masked Palestinian militant, Palestinian children throwing rocks in Hebron, a soldier patrolling in front of the West Bank Barrier, aftermath of the Mercaz HaRav massacre, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Intifada

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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BLOCKADE Gaza women suffer, far-reaching human costs

Jilbāb, Zanzibar
image for illustration

Guardian article “Women in Gaza: how life has changed” by Angela Robson, a journalist who covers development, gender and human rights
Editing by Carolyn Bennett

Israel against people of Gaza

“Before the blockade,” her husband made “good money working in Israel,” a woman of Gaza tells uardian reporter Angela Robson. The blockade ended all that and she took the brunt of his pain. 

When he can’t find any work and we have nothing to eat, he blames me. He is like a crazy animal.  

I stay quiet when he hits me.  

Afterwards, he cries and says, if he had a job, he wouldn’t beat me. 

This 23-year-old woman (Eman) is described further by Robson as being “dressed in a black veiled jilbab and living in a collapsing shack on the outskirts of Gaza City” where “an open sewer flows past her front door and rubbish streams into her kitchen” when the rain comes. She is a woman who left school at the age of 10 and seven years later was married and a mother.

“Behind the blockade, conservatism rises,” the news story reports, as do “unemployment, poverty, depression, and domestic violence.”

Fact and consequence of oppression 

The blockade cuts off 1.6 million Palestinians from the rest of the world. Unemployment reports show “more than 45 percent of working-age people are jobless, one of the highest rates in the world.”  

Deepening unemployment, fear of violence and restrictions on movement leave women and children to bear the brunt of men’s reaction to these unacceptable conditions. A staffer with Oxfam Gaza told the press that, as unemployment deepens so does domestic violence and underneath the acting-out behaviors are multiple issues: “psychological trauma, the feeling of being trapped, rampant poverty.” 

Women of Gaza 

Azza al-Kafarna is a women’s rights activist, manager of the Gaza news agency Ramattan and someone described as refusing to bow to conservatism. However, she said women of Gaza generally have been frightened into covering up and keeping silent.   

“Up until the 1980s, she said, “we were wearing swimsuits on the beach.”  Now women “are covering themselves more, not necessarily because Hamas tells them to; but because they are afraid.”

Though the pressure backward does not return women to conditions prevalent during the 1987 intifada when stones were thrown and criticism hurled at women who did not cover up, life for women “still feels precarious. The veil for some women is perhaps a physical shield against the world,” Azza al-Kafarna said; but “it may also … be one of the few things over which [a woman] feels she has control.”

Sources and notes

Some names in the news report were changed to protect women’s identities.

“Women in Gaza: how life has changed” (Article by Angela Robson, a journalist covering development, gender and human rights), July 30, 2012, http://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/world/2012/jul/30/women-gaza-life-changed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/30/women-gaza-life-changed

http://khamakarpress.com/2012/07/page/2/

Image: Woman weaing jilbāb, Zanzibar, http://www.flickr.com/photos/funkstop/50161592/
Pembuat rahimadatia
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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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Mid-East “new diplomacy” rising — Bennis

Beyond Palestinian-Israeli impasse to a diplomacy rooted in international law, human rights, equality for all

Two articles excerpted, edited with re-reporting by Carolyn Bennett

Ancient Middle East Britannica image

What is essential after 20 years of failed U.S. diplomacy, says Institute for Policy Studies Fellow Phyllis Bennis, is “some means of moving the debate out of Washington and into the United Nations.”

“The challenge to and overthrow of U.S.-backed dictators across the Arab world is changing landscapes across the region and in countries far from the Middle East,” Bennis wrote in an article published on Wednesday, before President Mahmoud Abbas made the case for full Palestinian membership at the United Nations. “The notion spreading throughout the ‘Arab Spring’ — that a revolutionary process could contain both an internal focus (the shaking up of old social hierarchies) and an external focus (aimed at shaking out old leaders and old ideas) — had its roots in the first Palestinian uprising, the socially inclusive, grassroots-based and non-violent intifada that began a generation ago in 1987. So it should surprise no one that Palestinians are still engaged in nonviolent mobilization that aims both to end Israeli occupation, settlement, and apartheid, and to democratize and hold accountable its own internal leadership.

Arabia Britannica image

… For the first time since before World War II, the United States cannot rely on sycophantic Arab dictators willing to viciously suppress their own people in order to sign friendly oil contracts and make nice to Israel, while maintaining the good ties to Washington that keep the stream of arms sales and foreign aid flowing.

For the first time, some Arab regimes are being forced to at least partly take into account popular opinion.

… [I]n such a heated and high-profile atmosphere, a U.S. veto [of Palestinian full membership in the UN] will almost certainly lead to significant diplomatic challenges for Washington’s military, resource, economic and political relations.

After the Palestinian president’s Friday speech before the UN General Assembly, Bennis wrote this.

“There was a potential game changer in Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s speech …  that  marks the end of the 20-year-long U.S.-backed failed peace process and the potential beginning of a whole new approach to Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy — one based on international law, human rights and equality for all.

No longer is the failed U.S.-controlled ‘peace process’ the only diplomatic game in town.

The Palestinian application for recognition as a full Member State of the United Nations places the diplomacy squarely where it has always belonged — in the UN, not in Washington. …

Middle East incl Occupied Territories Britannica image

“T]here is now at least the basis for laying a new diplomatic foundation, different from the current approach that maintains Israel’s huge disparity in power and accepts Israeli ‘red lines.’  … This could mean something entirely new — diplomacy grounded in international law and human rights that ends occupation, ensures the right of refugees to return to their homes, and replaces apartheid with equality for all.…

“… [T]he challenge is to make this new opportunity real and to take maximum advantage of it, not to let it dissolve into endless bureaucracy. There is a serious danger that the UN Security Council, rather than moving to schedule a rapid vote with its inevitable U.S. veto, will instead move to create a committee, to launch an investigation, to commission a report… and otherwise move to simply bury the Palestinian application in the labyrinthine mumbo-jumbo of UN diplo-speak. …”

But maybe, she says —

“… Maybe some governments will take seriously their obligation to protect an occupied population suffering under decades of occupation, apartheid and dispossession.

“Just maybe this will mark the beginning of a different approach to achieving Palestinian rights and equality — with the world, not the United States, as the ‘honest broker.’

“… Twenty years of a U.S.-controlled process designed to maintain Israeli power and privilege is over. ‘It is enough.’”

Sources and notes

“Bye-Bye ‘Peace Process -- Palestine Comes to the UN” (Phyllis Bennis), September 21, 2011, http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/bye-bye_peace_process_palestine_comes_to_the_un

“Abbas at the United Nations a Game Changer? Maybe” (Phyllis Bennis), September 23, 2011, http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/abbas_at_the_united_nations_a_game_changer_mayb

Also listen on CounterSpin:  “Phyllis Bennis on Palestinian statehood — Mainstream reporting on the Palestinian bid for UN recognition regularly employs loaded language in portraying the initiative as an underhanded gambit which is threatening to the U.S. and Israel. Exactly how does the Palestinian bid threaten anyone?

“Has the U.S. press always disdained unilateralism in Middle East? … CounterSpin talks with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

CounterSpin (9/23/11-9/29/11), http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4404

PHYLLIS BENNIS

Veteran writer, analyst and activist on Middle East and UN issues, Phyllis Bennis is a fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and director of its New Internationalism Project. She is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001, Bennis helped found and remains on the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation.

She works closely with the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition and co-chairs the UN-based International Coordinating Network on Palestine. Since 2002, she has played an active role in the growing global peace movement. She continues to advise several top UN officials on Middle East and UN democratization issues.

Books by Bennis include Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer and Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN. http://www.ips-dc.org/staff/phyllis

MAHMOUD ABBAS

A Palestinian politician, who served briefly as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2003, Mahmoud Abbas was elected PLO president in 2005 after the death of PLO president Yāsir Arafāt.

In the early 1990s, Mahmoud Abbas shaped Palestinian negotiating strategy at both the peace conference in Madrid (1991) and in secret meetings with the Israelis in Norway. Through the resulting Oslo Accords (1993), Israel and the Palestinians extended mutual recognition to each other, and Israel ceded some governing functions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to a Palestinian Authority.

Abbas was a senior member of the Palestinian delegation to the Camp David peace talks in July 2000 and adamantly rejected Israel’s peace offer but opposed the violent Palestinian uprising called the intifāḍah (Arabic: ‘shaking off’) that followed. In 2003, after intense international pressure, Abbas was installed as Palestinian prime minister as an effort to circumvent Arafāt, who was considered an impediment to peace by Israel and the United States. Abbas quickly renounced terrorism, called for an end to the intifāḍah against Israel, and resolved to create a single Palestinian armed force. He soon resigned from office saying he had been undermined by Israel, the United States, and Arafāt.

Following Arafāt’s death in November 2004, Abbas was named head of the PLO. In January 2005, he garnered more than 60 percent of the vote and won the election to succeed Arafāt as president of the Palestinian Authority.

Mahmoud Abbas was born (1935) in the Arab-Jewish town of Zefat and fled with his family to Syria during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Despite the family’s refugee status, Abbas earned a law degree from the University of Damascus. In the late 1950s, Abbas was one of the founders of Fatah, which spearheaded the Palestinian armed struggle and came to dominate the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

As head of the PLO’s international department in the late 1970s, Abbas was instrumental in forging contacts with Israeli peace groups. In 1982, Moscow State University awarded Mahmoud Abbas a doctorate in history. [Britannica note]

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Bennett's books available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY];  Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY];  • Articles also at World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire

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