The settler state of Israel, imposed on historic Palestine by massive and sustained force of arms and an apartheid structure of racist segregation, could not last for a day without being shored up by its main pillars: Wall Street, the Pentagon and the Big Lie.
But a rising sea change is eroding that support foundation. After more than half a century of resistance to colonial occupation, the fortitude and endurance of the Palestinian struggle—from youth to elders—is inspiring a surge of solidarity around the world. Two prolonged Intifadas—Uprisings—have swept like waves across Palestine.
This determination to fight for freedom against all odds has motivated Israelis themselves to lay down their arms or to refuse to take them up against the Palestinian population.
It is difficult for anyone called into military service to refuse to
fight, even in an unjust war. During the Pentagon war against the
Vietnamese people, many heroic youths in the United States refused to
enlist as soldiers and GIs overseas rebelled against their
commanders. Their will to resist induction or even to frag
their officers was roused by the indomitable resolve of the Vietnamese
nation to oust imperialist occupation.
Today in the Middle East, Jewish youths and adults in record numbers
are refusing induction into the Israeli Defense
Forces or are
balking at the order of their own commanders to shoot-to-kill
Palestinians in the occupied territories. And while the Israeli
military wages war against a people without an army—using
Palestinian civilians as human shields
—many people from
around the world and across the U.S., including many Jewish activists,
are voluntarily traveling to the occupied territories to enter the
fray by defending the Palestinian people with their bodies.
This takes a lot of guts and a lot of consciousness to do so, because
of the Big Lie. Zionism as a willing tool of imperial empires has
always mantled itself in the cynical falsehood that it was creating a
safe homeland for Jewish people. After the horrors of the fascist
Holocaust, the idea of a haven was certainly appealing. The lie was
sweetened with more mendacity: that Israel was a land without a
people for a people without a land.
This prevarication was
accompanied by an orchestrated campaign of terror to force a mass
exodus of Palestinians from their farms and homes, villages and
cities.
The widening ranks of refuseniks
in Israel objectively
demonstrate the growing understanding that no people can free
themselves from oppression by acting as an oppressor nation to
subjugate another people. Israel has always been, and remains, an
outpost for imperialist interests—financial, military and
strategic—in the Middle East, not the interests of Jewish people,
and certainly not in the interests of the masses of Arab people.
IDF soldiers have witnessed the death and terrible destruction wreaked by the treads of the Israeli military machine that bristles with weaponry made in the USA. They have seen firsthand the torture of Palestinian prisoners, humiliation and brutalization of Arab women, men and children in the grip of apartheid, and the destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure and widespread and organized military looting of Arab homes.
As a result, students as young as high school age are refusing to enlist, knowing that they face prison. Every Jewish male must serve three years in the IDF and then become a reservist.
More than 317 faculty members of Israeli universities have signed onto
a letter to express our appreciation and support for those of our
students and lecturers who refuse to serve as soldiers in the occupied
territories. ... For 35 years an entire people, some three and a half
million in number, have been held without basic human rights. The
occupation and oppression of another people have brought the State of
Israel to where it is today.
Soldiers from all ranks, including several hundred decorated officers, are refusing military service in the occupied territories. One of former Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu's nephews is behind bars for refusing service because of Israel's oppression and occupation of the Palestinian people. (MiddleEast.org, Aug. 17)
Rami Kaplan, a 29-year-old major in the Israeli armored corps, is a
leader in the Courage to Refuse group. He wrote in an April 30
International Herald Tribune article, Israel's occupation of the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip can in no way be considered
democratic. It oppresses 3.5 million people, denying them their basic
human rights. My refusal to militarily participate in this occupation,
on the other hand, is most certainly a democratic act.
He continued, The refusal of the 435 signatories to the 'Courage to
Refuse' letter is a refusal to fight for continuation of the
occupation, or, more precisely, for continuation of the
settlements. It is a refusal to fight in a war of choice fueled by an
extremist messianic ideology.
Progressive Israeli activists from Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc, warned pilots they were carrying out punishable war crimes after the Israeli Air Force dropped a 2,000-pound bomb from a U.S.-supplied Israeli F-16 into the center of densely populated Gaza City at midnight on July 22. The blast killed Sheik Salah Shehadeh, senior commander of the military wing of Hamas and 14 other adults and children, and wounded at least 176 others. In response, IAF Commander Major Gen. Dan Halutz angrily demanded the Gush Shalom activists be tried, possibly for treason. (gush-shalom.org)
Divest from apartheid!Activists who immediately think about the brutal system of segregation in South Africa, backed up by bloody state repression, date themselves back to a multifaceted and fierce struggle in the late 1970s and 1980s against Pretoria's white supremacist rulers in the tip of Africa who enjoyed the deep-pocket backing of U.S. big business.
But today the demand is for Israel's corporate cronies in this country—from Wall Street to the ivy-covered halls of academia—to stop financing the apartheid occupation of Palestine.
Since Israel is not a viable economy that can stand on its own, it can only bloom because of the torrential river of U.S. patronage—an average of $3 billion to $4 billion a year in official aid and billions more in financial tributaries. The Pentagon and its adjunct military-industrial complex have built Israel into the world's fifth-ranking military power, despite its having a population of about 5 million people.
From Harvard, MIT and Princeton on the East Coast to the University of
California on the West Coast, the demand to divest from Israel is
rising on 40 campuses across the breadth of the United States. And,
according to dyed-in-the-wool opponents of the pro-Palestinian
activist effort, this is just the beginning. Jeff Rubin of the student
organization Hillel—which strongly opposes divestment—told
the Associated Press he expects the campaign to widen when the new
school year opens this fall. We are taking it seriously,
he
said.
Widely circulated petitions list many demands, including a call to ratchet up the pressure on Israel to withdraw from Arab territory it seized in the 1967 war, return to the negotiating table and halt building settlements.
Demands for divestment are aimed at goliaths that prop up the Zionist settler regime—like AT&T, McDonald's, Hewlett Packard and GE.
Palestinian lawmaker Hana Ashrawi spoke optimistically about the
struggle for divestment. It will begin to get people to question
their assumptions,
she said. And she pointed out that Jewish
people in the U.S. were among the people of courage and wisdom
who have added their names to the growing stacks of petitions.
From Berkeley to Ann Arbor, city councils are debating divesting their municipalities from Israel.
And speaking of Berkeley, a group of some 25 lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans activists from the group QUIT—Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism—took over a downtown Berkeley Starbucks on Aug. 17.
The imaginative and brave action used razor-sharp satire to slice
through the Zionist claim to historic Palestine. They declared
Berkeley a city without people for people without a city,
vowing to continue to establish more settlements
in future
actions. They erected plastic palm trees to make the concrete
bloom
and signs reading, It works in Palestine, why not
here?
and, It's ours because we say so.
The Starbucks was an early target, the group explained, because founder and CEO Howard Shultz is a major backer of the Israeli state and this corporate coffee chain is one of the bull's-eyes of the divestment movement.
Since Mr. Shultz clearly believes it is okay for one group of
people to grab land belonging to another and say they have a right to
it, we figure he won't mind if we take some of his,
QUIT's leaflet
explained.
The parallels between the racist apartheid system of rule in South Africa and in Israel beg comparison. In a newspaper editorial published in the U.S. press in June, South African Nobel laureate and former Archbishop Desmond Tutu endorsed the call for divestment and drew parallels between the conditions of occupation that Palestinians endure and the segregated districts that Black people were forced into in South Africa during white supremacist rule.
Ian Urbina, associate editor at the Middle East Research and
Information Project, pointed out in his article The Analogy to
Apartheid
that white-ruled territories in South Africa consisted
of 87 percent of the country, including big cities and most of the
arable land. Nominally independent bantustans, forming a
horseshoe-shaped archipelago along the nation's outskirts, made up the
remaining 13 percent of the land.
(Middle East Report 223, Summer
2002)
The state of Israel sprawls over 78 percent of the original
British-mandated territory, while Palestine makes up the remaining 22
percent. Urbina added, In early September 2000, Israeli activists
organized a conference in Neve Shalom to announce a Campaign Against
an Emerging Apartheid, which some on the radical left feel is an apt
description of Israel's 'matrix of control'— composed of
settlements, bypass roads, security zones and checkpoints—in
Palestine.
Urbina also noted, Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish
heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle, recently published a letter
titled 'Not in My Name.' Signed by several hundred other prominent
Jewish South Africans, the letter drew an explicit analogy between
apartheid and current Israeli policies.
(http://merip.org/mer/
mer223/223_urbina.html)
Jewish Israeli political scientist Ilan Pappe told the Associated
Press that he, too, sees clear parallels between the settler state and
apartheid South Africa. The only thing that can end the Israeli
occupation is outside pressure,
he believes.
Palestinian rights activist Jabr Wishah recounts his discussion with Nelson Mandela when the former South African political prisoner visited the Gaza Strip three years ago. Wishah, who spent 15 years in Israeli prisons, said he and Mandela compared notes about Israeli and South African interrogation tactics. (AP, Aug. 19)
In a major embarrassment to the Tel Aviv settler regime, Mandela has agreed to observe the trial of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti—a lawyer, member of the Palestinian legislative council and secretary general of the Fatah movement in the West Bank. Barghouti, arrested in April on charges of murder and terrorism, is the first senior Palestinian to face trial in the two years of the Intifada.
Khader Shkirat, board member of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights
Network, quoted Mandela as having said, What is happening to
Barghouti is exactly the same as what happened to me. The government
tried to de-legitimize the African National Congress and its armed
struggle by putting me on trial.
![[Documents menu]](../bin/bk.gif)