Power to the People!

Jeff Halper, on the magnificent hole in the wall:

The people of Palestine have done it again, taking their own fate in their hands after being let down by their own “moderate” political leadership and, indeed, the entire international community in their struggle for freedom. Early this morning they simply blew up the wall separating Gaza from Egypt, breaking a siege imposed on them by an Arab government in collaboration with Israel.

We, the peoples of the world, should take great pride and encouragement in this quintessentially civil society refusal to accept subjugation, to abandon their fate to governments, including their own, for whom the lives of ordinary people are simply grist for their political charades — Annapolis and its subsequent “peace process” being but the last cynical expression. For the Palestinians represent far more than just themselves. Their refusal to submit to the dictates of governments, or to governments’ lack of interest in the well-being of people in general, reflects the desire of billions of oppressed people for identity, freedom, a decent life and actualization of their collective and individual rights and potentials. Most of the oppressed, the “wretched of the earth” as Franz Fanon called them a half-century ago, are too preoccupied with the daunting daily struggle for survival to organize and resist. Others do resist in a myriad of ways, but are most often repressed by their own political and economic “leaders,” disappearing anonymously from view. In a few cases they have managed to mount effective resistance to oppression, even to prevail — though the billions spent on “counterinsurgency” warfare by the US, Europe, Russia, Israel and many “developing” nations augur ill for peoples attempting to overthrow oppressive regimes.

In this the Palestinians stand at the forefront, in the front lines of peoples’ insistence everywhere that their rights, well-being and fundamental values as human beings be respected by governments. And they do so (and I write this as an Israeli with great sorrow and shame) against one of the world’s strongest and most ruthless military powers — a power that has dispossessed them from 85% of their land, which is trying to transform its occupation into a permanent regime of apartheid, which has spent decades impoverishing and disenfranchising them; the fourth largest nuclear power which nevertheless casts itself as the victim. Not only have the Palestinians experienced the dehumanization all oppressed and colonized peoples experience, not only have they been made into the embodiment of the rich and powerful’s greatest fear, evil “terrorists” who may tear down their privileged “civilization,” but they have been turned into guinea pigs. Israel is able to gain an edge in the counterinsurgency industry and win entree into the heart of the American military/hi tech complex by turning the Occupied Territories into a laboratory for the development of fiendish weaponry and tactics intended for use against people.

And yet the Palestinian people — and in particular those who remain sumud, steadfast, in Palestine — continue not only to resist but to surprise and confound its would-be Israeli master at every turn. Despite unlimited control, a complete monopoly over the use of force, utter callousness and a vaunted Shin Beit, Israel’s military intelligence, Palestinians vote as they want, resist, carry on their daily lives with dignity — and blow huge holes in the walls and policies constructed in order to imprison and defeat them.

All this is not on the minds of those desperate people who surged into Egypt today. They may not have the “Big Picture.” Yet they deserve the respect and gratefulness of every person who cherishes a better world based on human rights and dignity, a world that is inclusive. As an Israeli Jew, I have been saddened and mortified that my own people, after all they have experienced, cannot see what they are doing to others. But on a larger scale, not as an Israeli Jew but as a human being, I take heart in the Palestinians’ active refusal to be ground under a global system that is producing unimaginable wealth and power for a few at the expense of the growing ranks of the wretched.

I am not a Palestinian; I am not one of the oppressed. I only hope I can use my privilege in an effective way in order to redeem the gift the people of Gaza have given all of us: the realization that the people do have power and can prevail even in the face of overwhelming power. We may each express our responsibility towards the people of Gaza in whatever way most suits us, but as the privileged we must do something. We owe the Palestinians and the Palestinians writ large at least that.

Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a candidate, with the Palestinian peace activist Ghassan Andoni, for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org.

Patience running out

I’ve been frustrated with the lack of progress I’ve made in recent weeks trying to come up with an original and coherent topic to write about for my research paper. I think I may have found one over the weekend while watching a lecture given by Robert Fisk at MIT a year back for his book, The Great War for Civilization.

In the lecture, Fisk began by recalling how, after finishing his 1300+ page magnum opus, the thing that amazed him the most was “how much restraint the Muslims have shown toward the West.” I proceeded to watch the remaining hour and a half long lecture captivated by his masterful grasp of history and its lessons, and wondered, if his statement was worth exploring further. After all, wasn’t his book about how the Muslims have always fought back and then turned on one another?

Fisk’s book is about the history of the post-WWI Middle East. If you want to understand the Algerian revolution; the genocide of Turkish Armenians; the origins of the sheikdoms of the Middle East – his book is simply the best. The part it leaves out, is connecting that history to the rise of nationalist/indigenous/religious movements that are behind the surge in radicalism that has turned the West upside down in recent years.

Has the Muslim world run out of patience?

I think this topic is in great need of research. Because while there are individuals out there who have stressed the need to ask why this is all happening, the discourse has largely remained confined to a handful of issues like, the US presence in the Middle East and its unwavering support for Israel – on the Left, and – the evil, backward ideology of Islam and the grand plans of Al Qaeda to impose Shar’ia law on the whole world – on the Right. (Of course, some of these are simply stupid – can you guess which ones – while others are severely neglected issues that deserve all the air time they can get.)

Ultimately, my hope is to answer the big question above and in the process, gain a better understanding of the movements myself and perhaps shed some light on a topic, I feel, has largely gone unnoticed.

The leverage of debt

I wrote a while back about how the media waters down select topics and criminalizes individuals or groups because of ideological reasons. It all came back tonight when I finished Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. While majority of the book focuses on the plethora of facts and figures about abject poverty more than half the world now lives in, the book really shines when the polemicist in Davis comes through and debunks the neoliberal policies of the Bretton Woods institutions – the IMF and the World Bank – and urges us to be mindful of those increasingly getting left behind and ignored.

Davis makes it plain: the West, in particular, the loan-sharking conglomerates of the IMF and World Bank are largely responsible for the misery of the poor in the South. On top of the regional wars and families of dictators the West so generously bequeathed the Third World post-colonialism, it also left behind a legacy of destroyed economies and heaps of debt these countries never had a chance of paying off. The problem worsened during the 70s when soaring oil prices forced them to seek financial assistance from foreign banks.

In came the IMF and the World Bank.

The idea was to leverage the debt of the Third World to “restructure” loan-seeking countries into export economies existing primarily to service the West. Of course, the official line went more along the lines of “helping the poor help themselves.” One of the earlier examples of this help came through the Urban Development Department, led by the genius of Robert McNamarra, which took on the task of urban housing policy. “The intention was to make housing affordable to low-income households without the payment of subsidies, in contrast to the heavily subsidized public-housing approach.” The strategy, in essence, focused on improving slums by giving out self-help loans to residents who could then use the money to improve their homes. The program became an embarrassing failure when it was revealed that the money either “trickled straight up to the land developers and the construction industry” or “poached by the middle class or non-needy in the same way as had public housing.”

Subsequently, the IMF began work on the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). The affect on the Third World was twofold: 1) Complete control of these ruined economies by Western banks and creditors, and 2) Full-blown privatization; removal of all import controls; uncontrollable inflation; massive cuts in public health care, education and sanitation programs; downsizing of the public sector; elimination of all subsidies to small farmers; an even wider gap between the rich and poor; further increases in the number of orphaned children, women who prostitute; rise in crime, gangs and narcotrafficking; and of course, even more poor people.

Writer Fidelis Balogum describes what the program meant for the Nigerian poor:

“The weird logic of this economic programme seemed to be that to restore life to the dying economy, every juice had first to be SAPed out of the under-privileged majority of the citizens. The middle class rapidly disappeared and the garbage heaps of the increasingly rich few became the food table of the multiplied population of abjectly poor. The brain drain to the oil-rich Arab countries and to the Western world became a flood.”

In closing, Davis argues that the future of humanity depends on how these “abjectly poor” will react to the vapid existence imposed upon them by these neoliberal institutions. Will they revolt, as the terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, or will they accept their misery and continue to provide the cheap labor and raw materials the West so desperately needs to exist? From narcotraffickers in Columbia to suicide bombers in Gaza, this question must be debated honestly if we’re truly interested in figuring out why this is beginning to hit us home.