Tag: Gaza

The Palestinian protest camps in Gaza are world’s most daring protest

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

Today is the long-planned climactic day of the Great March of Return, a Palestinian protest on the fenceline of the Gaza Strip. On March 30, Palestinians set up five protest camps a half-kilometer from the Israeli military. These camps are themselves a form of mass protest, reminding the world that two-thirds of Gazans are refugees from towns, villages, and farms within Israeli territory. The protest’s chief demand is the Right of Return, their ability to freely return to their homes and/or to re-establish the communities they have maintained in exile for the past 70 years. Protesters are also demanding an end to the eleven-year blockade of Gaza, imposed in 2007, which has crippled the territory economically. The camps have been the staging grounds for weekly demonstrations, in which ten to thirty thousand protesters rally while at first hundreds, and more recently thousands of protesters have advanced into the unilaterally declared buffer zone along the fence. During these protests, unarmed Palestinians have thrown stones and flaming bottles towards the fence, and used a variety of tools to dismantle part of the wall that keeps them caged and isolated from the rest of the world.

Marchers, journalists, protesters engaged in confrontation and those who have peacefully approached the fence have all been subjected to an unprecedent barrage of violent force on the part of the Israeli military, who are positioned in towers and earthen embankments on their side of the fence. Israeli snipers have shot over 2,500 people and as of today, killed over fifty Palestinians. Yet week after week they keep coming.

The Great Return March in Gaza continues to be the most daring tactical encounter between protesters and security forces on the planet.

If you’ve seen the film Gandhi, you know the scene where people line up and risk beatings to defend their strike. Journalistic coverage of this march on the Dharasana Salt Works was a devastating proof the moral bankruptcy of British Rule in India. I’ve long said this could not be repeated when the opponent has deadly weapons. The Gaza protests have proven me wrong.

The Gaza protesters are unarmed militants, not satyagrahis. They are not arriving empty-handed but with stones in their hands. But they have injured no one on the Israeli side. They are deploying unequal means: inflicting symbolic damage while suffering brutal and deadly violence. And their response to that violence is not to switch to the deadlier means at their disposal (guns and rockets), but to keep coming back.

This is the dynamic of the Soweto Uprising, a turning point in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Unequal violence proved morally unsustainable for the regime, ultimately isolating it from its support system in the United States and Europe. The dynamic on the side of Israel and its backers remains unknown; will shooting thousands of essentially defenseless civilians provoke a moral reckoning? That choice is up to us.

You probably haven’t seen this protest from the inside. To do so, see the last footage captured by Yaser Murtaja, who was killed by Israeli gunfire in April. It offers a flash of insight into what the ongoing Gaza protests entail. Watch it.

After the break, four things you need to know about the protests…

Read More »

Who was on the Gaza flotilla? An Israeli Jew and the IHH speak in harmony

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

The two most compelling comments on the flotilla tragedy I’ve read came from very different sources. One is an Israeli Jew, Udi Adoni, writing on the Israeli online news service Ynetnews. The other is from IHH, the Turkish aid group that sponsored the MV Mavi Marmara, the ship that saw at least nine of its passengers shot dead. At a time when the Israeli state is eagerly telling the world that flotilla, and especially IHH, is Hamas, Iran, al-Qaeda and terrorists; and that the passengers who fought back were a terrorist ambush, the coincidence of these two voices is striking, and critical to hear. (everything that follows is their words0

Udi Adoni, “A view from the Left”: It is not true that among the participants of the flotilla there are proponents of peace and proponents of war. Its beauty lies in the seemingly impossible coalition of contrasts of men and women, homosexuals and clergymen, Muslims and Jews, Christians and communists, anarchists and Hanin Zoabi and Dror Feiler. They all agreed to unite for an unarmed action. They all decided to act for freedom without a fight.

IHH press conference (I’m fairly sure the speaker is Bülent Yıldırım, its president, but it’s not indicated on the page), June 4: Our group was made up of all sorts of people, including leftists, rightists, liberals, conservatives, atheists, muslims, christians, jews, buddhists…Ours was a civil and pacifist initiative created by conscientious, civilian, unarmed people who carried with them nothing but humanitarian aid.

And we set sail to prove to the people of Gaza, who have been under a siege for years which is not unlike an imprisonment in a castle, that human kindness has not yet died.

Keeping our faith in the spirit of civil power, our Freedom Flotilla did not take any orders or any kind of support from any government during its organization. Our power came solely from the conscience of humanity and the courage of our rightfulness. We wanted to be a source of invigoration for the people of Gaza on whom many states turn a blind eye.

Adoni: But I was afraid to stand on board a ship that carries food and hope to Gaza, and to find myself confronting the men of the corps which I had served loyally 30 years ago. Looking back, it is a pity I did not join. I am asked, “Surely you would not have beaten IDF soldiers?” True. I suppose that I would have tied myself to a post and screamed with fear and faith. However, the question is not at all how I would have behaved but whether one has the right to self-defense against maritime terror applied by a state.

IHH: Ours was self-defense. And self defense is legitimate. It has always been legitimate in all systems of law and throughout history.  I am a lawyer. I should know this better than anyone. However, we did not defend ourselves with firearms against these terrorists that attacked us with firearms, we did not have such means anyway

Adoni: There were no firearms on board the ship. There were no suicide bombers. On the practical level, opposing worlds, united against the occupation and for the people of Gaza, to a struggle which was not supposed to bring death…but life.

IHH: Now some people are asking, “Why did you go there?”

We did, because we are humans. We went out there because we are humans. The conscience of humanity has not yet died, this we wanted to prove to humanity itself. For this, we went out there.

We went and we will go again.

Turkish Journalist Cevdet Kılıçlar apparently murdered on Gaza flotilla

Carwil Bjork-James2 Comments

Update, June 5: The International Federation of Journalists is calling for an inquiry into Cevdet Kılıçlar’s killing and the shooting of Indonesian cameraman Sura Fachrizaz. The investigation would also consider the treatment of all journalists on the flotilla and the confiscation of their pictures, cameras, and computers.

Update: IHH (the German acronym is the circulating one) has posted a photo album of Cevdet Kılıçlar (it appears to be pictures of him, rather than by him, but I don’t read Turkish) to its Facebook page. I’ve included his picture below now.

Original post: Onboard the Mavi Marmara, the largest ship of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, at least nine passengers were killed. Witness reports and forensic evidence now suggest that at least one of those killed was documenting the raid and not participating the clashes between Israeli commandos and passengers that came along with it. Turkish journalist Cevdet Kılıçlar was shot in the forehead at close range, the bullet ripping away the back of his skull. Kevin Ovenden, a British activist onboard and eyewitness, has stated that Kılıçlar was filming at the time and has his camera held to his eye.

Kılıçlar worked for the Taraf, and Selam and Milli newspapers in Turkey. For the flotilla, he was employed by boat organizer, the Human Rights and Freedoms (İHH) Humanitarian Help Foundation, as part of its press staff. He was one of sixty journalists on the flotilla.

Relatives mourn over Cevdet's coffin Photo:Bulent Kilic/AFP

Cevdet Kılıçlar was 38. He leaves behind a grieving widow, Derya, and two children. He was also a gifted photographer, as you can see from his flickr page from a recent trip to Baku, Azerbaijan.

I draw three things from this sad news. First, the tragedy in Gaza has crossed the “it could have be me” threshhold, and I am sadder and more angry than before because of it. Second, the manner of this death as described by Ovenden, can be nothing other than murder. Third, the complete Israeli seizure of photographic evidence from those onboard is an even more serious than before; the grounds for a complete, independent, international investigation lie in part in what the Israelis have taken and may choose to destroy.

Cevdet Kılıçlar, c. 1972-2010

Sources for this story: Erol Önderoğlu and Tolga Korkut, “Journalists Returned from Israel – İHH Employee Dead.” Mehmet Nedim Aslan, “Israeli commandos killed journalist as he photographed their crime.”

Free Gaza flotilla: Accusation on bulletproof vests a dangerous distortion

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

As you probably know, Israel’s May 31 raid on the Free Gaza Movement’s flotilla of aid-bearing ships has occasioned a torrent of justifications, short video clip releases, and arguments. On the Israeli side, this began before the nine to nineteen dead activists bodies were yet cold. The narrative, remarkably, made the unarmed activists aboard the ships into a lynch mob and a terrorist ambush. In short, the Israeli government has been extremely eager to make the story fit a standard narrative in the region, one of treacherous asymmetrical warfare.

Those looking for the other side of the story had to wait out detentions and deportations, but eyewitness accounts are increasingly circulating. Both the anti-blockade activists and third-party journalists have had their ability to tell the story severely crimped by the Israeli seizure of film, memory cards, cameras, computers and other personal effects of those onboard.

The Israeli search has resulted in a remarkable remix of the goods they claim were onboard the ships, most visible in this photoset released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And here is I where I can offer my humble contribution to correcting propaganda. A well-circulated story right now involves this contention:

Israeli officers later displayed slingshots, knives and truncheons they said were found on the ship as evidence of organized resistance. Defense officials also say some activists had military-style gear such as bulletproof vests and night-vision goggles and carried large sums of cash. (AP)

The AP is simply reporting their claim, but is also giving the Israeli government the sole opportunity to create a narrative from various objects onboard. Let’s consider a very serious alternative story. Observe the following Israeli government photo:

Note, by the way, the clean, unruffled, un-shot-at state of the vests. Now read this from the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2002:

No one is more keenly aware of the risks taken by ambulance personnel than Mohammed El Hessi, a 26-year-old Palestine Red Crescent (PRCS) paramedic who was called to the scene of a gunboat attack on a security post north of Gaza City on the night of 7 March. Mohammed, who responded to the call along with three of his colleagues, would be dead today had it not been for the bullet-proof vest he was wearing. Such vests have been supplied to the PRCS by the ICRC, with the knowledge of the Israeli authorities. Mohammed suffered serious shrapnel wounds as his team attempted to retrieve two bodies. A piece of metal was subsequently found embedded in the ceramic back-plate of his vest. A second PRCS ambulance team came to the rescue and managed to evacuate the dead and wounded after more than an hour. Mohammed was rushed to a hospital in Gaza, and his life is now out of danger. During the same rescue operation, a member of an ambulance team from the local medical services was killed.

“Without a doubt, the bullet-proof vest saved his life,” said Dr Fayez Jibril, head of the PRCS’s emergency medical service in Gaza, as he examined Mohammed’s bloodstained vest the following morning. “This is where the shrapnel lodged. If it had pierced his body, it would have gone straight to his heart.”

Who needs bulletproof vests in Gaza? No doubt people like paramedic Mohammed El Hessi. Why should we think that this vest was meant for him? Reading on in the same 2002 story:

Respect for medical personnel, ambulances and medical facilities bearing the protective red cross and red crescent emblems is compulsory under international humanitarian law. Any violation of this rule puts the safety of all medical and humanitarian workers in jeopardy. (Full article from the ICRC)

Oh, you mean these emblems? Compare them to the ones on the vest.

No matter how much the Israeli government might wish it had faced a commando team onboard the Gaza-bound flotilla, it didn’t. But it’s willing to weave a web of lies to make you think that it did. Hopefully, we can be a little less trusting of this kind of propaganda, and a little more concerned for lives like Mohammed El Hessi, the paramedic whose life was saved by a bulletproof vest with a red crescent.

The Gaza War: Time for Introspection…

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

The December-January war in Gaza came and went too fast for people in the United States who weren’t already convinced to come to a moral reckoning with what was being done in our name, and with the money and weapons we provided. Unlike the Iraq war, advertised for over a year before, this one took place in the shadow of a U.S. national election campaign that was generally unconcerned with Israel and Palestine.

But there should be no mistake for United States residents that this war was ours. The United States government was nearly unique in providing unqualified support to the Israeli assualt, which left over 1300 people dead. Near-unanimous votes in both houses of the U.S. Congress backed the Israeli position, nearly word for word. The unprecedented demand that the Palestinian side renounce violence per se as a condition of negotiations was included in that endorsement. The new president, Barack Obama, maintained a strategic silence but made clear that “Israel’s security” is “sacrosanct” in the campaign.

The depth of this support cannot be pinned entirely on the pro-Israel lobby, athough its operation is a part of the way Washington works, with clear parallels to the Indonesia lobby that maintained a flow of arms during more than two decades of the occupation of East Timor. But US support is also an issue of popular mentality, of the minds and perspectives in our community. It combines Christianity and Fundamentalist apocalyptic viewpoints with a common self-perception of our societies as divinely blessed cities on a hill in a hostile wilderness. This perspective is the ideology that was needed by our shared histories as a settler colonial states, reinforced over the past forty years by anti-Arab racism. It’s about resonance, a shared politics that makes it possible to endorse one another’s crimes. Smart analyses of these political affinities has come from both right (see Walter Russell Mead writing in Foreign Affairs last summer) and left (see chapter 4 of Retort collectives’ Afflicted Powers).

Somehow these ideological limitations seem to distort American perceptions more than Israeli ones when it comes to Israeli actions. No doubt this combines real and legitimate guilt and remorse over antisemitism (though rarely does that come with a real self-examination about antisemitism in American history) with the World War II-centered story of American nationalism. The fact that defeating Nazi antisemitism is at the center of the last war most Americans can be proud of has made many reluctant to criticize the Jewish state that emerged in the years that followed.

But not keeping our eyes open gets us into big trouble. Fortunately, the Israeli media some times offers an up-close view that is sadly lacking in our own. So too, of course, do the Arab and international media. Right now, the Gaza war is being examined in a big way. Take a look…

Change will come from us, when and where it comes…

Carwil Bjork-James1 Comment

It’s 19° here in DC this morning, where I will be joining some six or seven digit number of people outside for the inauguration. Washington is an old hometown to me, but it does have a different feel when it’s claimed as a front yard by people from across the country. Walking around last night, I saw more people on the street than I ever have, black folks selling “I was there” sweatshirts, and other black folks dressed to the nines out partying, a big time reception or three in different night spots, people dressed to be dropped off in limos (and clearly used to that too) walking through the cold because of the security perimeter, and a cleared out and brightly lit Pennsylvania Ave. surrounded by security fencing but nonetheless open to the public.

And in the past month, I’ve seen a disastrous war, bought, paid for, armed, and endorsed by my country but carried out in Gaza. I’ve called my black, Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn, Ed Towns, only to hear the exact Israeli line from his legislative aide, calling the deadliest assault in Palestine in three decades an act of “self defense.” Now over 1300 people are dead, and 50,000 are homeless.

I’ve also seen on video a black man shot in the back in Oakland, while waiting to be cuffed by BART police. And Oakland was my city, and New Year’s is my holiday in the Bay, and I had helped break up a fight earlier in the week, so I can sure imagine being swept up when the cops arrived. Oscar Grant could have been me.

These causes for despair can be healed, but it will be us, our actions that heal them by standing up and challenging injustice. I’m proud of so many people for standing up to these two in recent weeks (on Gaza | on Oscar Grant). They are what I have to celebrate today.

A couple months ago, I signed on to a call for a Bloc to be present at today’s inauguration called “Celebrate People’s History, Build Popular Power.” Given today’s mega-concert like feel, it might not be the action with the greatest impact. But I’m grateful for a way to set myself a bit apart today, to say the words “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” in a way that can never be the same as listening to the same words. To make the future we want, we all need to produce rather than consume our politics. See you in the streets, celebrating and fighting.

Gaza update

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

Gaza-End the BlockadeLife for one-and-a-half million people in Gaza has been getting dramatically worse in the past two years. The territory has been surrounded by walls, barbed wire, and an electrified fence. Its older residents can look across these lines towards the lands and ruined villages from which they were expelled in 1948 and 1967. Across the border, an armed conflict is asymmetrically raging. Armed Palestinian factions launch small-scale rockets at Israeli coastal cities in hopes of emulating the pressure that led to the 2002 Israeli withdrawal from occupied southern Lebanon. Meanwhile a far greater Israeli arsenal targets Gaza’s cities, and periodically pushes in with tanks, armored vehicles and soldiers who raid Palestinian homes. The most recent Israeli push—in response to the death of an Israeli student at Sapir College from rocket fire—is still in progress, although a 2-day “interval” was observed while US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the region. The impact confirmed by B’Tselem so far is:

From 27 February to the afternoon of 3 March, 106 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip. Contrary to the Chief of Staff’s contention that ninety percent were armed, at least fifty-four of the dead (twenty-five of them minors) did not take part in the hostilities. In addition, at least forty-six minors were wounded.

I’m confident you haven’t heard the names of any of these children, nor the circumstance of their deaths. Here’s B’Tselem again:

The killing of four children – ‘Ali Dardona, age 8, Muhammad Hamudah, 9, Dardona Dardona, 12, and ‘Omer Dardona – and wounding of two others while they played soccer in the street, east of the Jabalya refugee camp on 28 February. B’Tselem’s investigation indicates that Qassam rockets may have been fired earlier about 100 meters from where the children were. However, no armed Palestinians were killed or injured in the incident.

The killing of Iyad and Jacqueline Muhammad Abu-Shabak, brother and sister, 16 and 17 years old, when they were watching the fighting from the window of their house east of Jabalya. According to testimonies by family members, the two were shot in the head and chest.

The killing of six-month-old Muhammad al-Bur’i, at the family’s home in the Rimal section of Gaza on 27 February, and the wounding of others, in the shelling of the nearby Interior Ministry building. The building is a civilian office building, and not a legitimate military target.

Current operations, of course, come with the full support of the U.S. government, and presidential hopefuls McCain, Clinton and Obama.

Unfortunately, missiles and invading soldiers may not be nearly as destructive as the policies of “economic warfare” (in the words of the Israeli government), which now extend to restricting, and at times cutting off, electricity and fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip. The result is a new humanitarian crisis. A joint report, The Gaza Strip: A humanitarian implosion, on the current depth of the crisis has been released by eight UK human rights and aid groups, including Oxfam and Amnesty International. According to Geoffrey Dennis, Chief Executive of CARE International UK:

Unemployment has soared and 80% of people in Gaza are now dependent on food aid compared to 63% in 2006. Water and sewage infrastructure is on the point of total collapse. Unless the blockade ends now, it will be impossible to pull Gaza back from the brink of this disaster and any hopes for peace in the region will be dashed.

Key facts in the report:

  • 80% of families in Gaza currently rely on food aid
  • 95% of Gaza’s industrial operations are suspended due to the ban on imported raw materials and the block on exports
  • 18.5% of patients seeking emergency treatment in hospitals outside Gaza in 2007 were refused permits to leave
  • Hospitals are currently experiencing power cuts lasting for 8-12 hours a day
  • 40-50 million litres of sewage continues to pour into the sea daily

“Humanitarian crisis” means daily disasters. Here’s one father’s description from the inside.

The U.S. role in the Fatah-Hamas battles of 2007 is the subject of a new Vanity Fair exposé. David Rose reports in “The Gaza Bombshell,” that the U.S. armed Fatah to expel the popularly elected Hamas government from Gaza.

In essence, the program was simple. According to State Department officials, beginning in the latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with leaders of four Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She asked them to bolster Fatah by providing military training and by pledging funds to buy its forces lethal weapons. The money was to be paid directly into accounts controlled by President Abbas.

…

Legal or not, arms shipments soon began to take place. In late December 2006, four Egyptian trucks passed through an Israeli-controlled crossing into Gaza, where their contents were handed over to Fatah. These included 2,000 Egyptian-made automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips, and two million bullets.

This shipment, and arms and training that followed, were joined by the leak of a State Department-drafted “Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency”:

The early drafts stressed the need for bolstering Fatah’s forces in order to “deter” Hamas. The “desired outcome” was to give Abbas “the capability to take the required strategic political decisions … such as dismissing the cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.”

Hamas read this as a call for a coup. So did Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser, a neo-conservative by the name of David Wurmser:

Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.

Hamas seized complete control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Outsiders like myself were left to see it as mere internecine warfare. Now we have questions to ask about how our government armed one political party to oust the other, while backing the siege that keeps Gaza’s Palestinians on the edge of survival.