Accusations of “Human Shields”: Obscene “Rationale” for Israel’s Mass Murder of Civilians by Alan Goodman

http://revcom.us/
July 28, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

After the massacre of 16 people seeking shelter at a UN school—as well as other massacres that Israel has overtly taken credit for—Israel claimed that these were the Palestinians’ own fault because forces firing rockets at Israel use “civilians as human shields.”

The U.S. government and the media amplify that with a constant stream of statements and coverage that portrays the one-sided slaughter of Palestinians as supposedly morally complex and ultimately justifiable. Headlines, like the one in the New York Times titled “Israel Says That Hamas Uses Civilian Shields, Reviving Debate,” train Americans to turn away from the horrific crimes Israel is committing.

For humanity to advance beyond a state in which “might makes right”—and where things ultimately come down to raw power relations—will require, as a fundamental element in this advance, an approach to understanding things (an epistemology) which recognizes that reality and truth areobjective and do not vary in accordance with, nor depend on, different “narratives” and how much “authority” an idea (or “narrative”) may have behind it, or how much power and force can be wielded on behalf of any particular idea or “narrative,” at any given point.
Bob Avakian
BAsics 4:10

A one-sided, genocidal massacre is presented as hopelessly complicated: “Nothing is ever so clear in the complex and often brutal calculus of urban warfare.” (Headline and quote are from the New York Times July 23, 2014).
A spokesman for an imperialist “think tank” (that develops strategies and excuses for the crimes of the U.S. empire and its agents around the world) declared “Hamas knows that it works to its advantage, politically and diplomatically, as the civilian death toll mounts.”

As if the Palestinians are intentionally getting Israel to slaughter them because it makes Israel look bad.
Here’s the reality:
For eight years Israel has subjected the people of Gaza to constant brutality, drone strikes, assassinations. Israel has cut off almost all contact between Gaza and the outside world. You can’t visit there. Relief ships have been attacked by Israel in international waters and humanitarian activists on board murdered by Israeli troops. Israel has literally starved people in Gaza, restricting imports of food and cutting off people’s ability to grow food, or to fish off Gaza’s Mediterranean coast. Over 13 percent of the children in Gaza suffer from acute malnutrition. Nearly 19 percent suffer from anemia. Unemployment is over 38 percent—far higher than in the U.S. during the Great Depression. People in Gaza do not have access to drinkable water and reliable electric power. (See “Gaza by the Numbers: Who the People are, how They got There” by Juan Cole, Guardian, July 8, 2014.)

And all this is in the context of decades of driving the Palestinian people, as a whole, from their land, and trying to destroy their lives, spirit and culture.
Whenever there is resistance of any kind from any force to all this, Israel strikes at the civilian population. They call the non-combatants they murder “collateral damage” and blame—often without any basis—whatever group they want to target and isolate.

It is Israel that has a policy of mass murder of civilians—often at random—in schools, hospitals, homes and on beaches.In fact, mass murder and collective punishment of civilians is Israel’s main weapon in enforcing the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Some apologists for Israel openly argue that there is no such thing as a Palestinian civilian!

Now, when ineffective rockets are fired towards Israel from within this densely packed prison, Israel cries that the forces firing the rockets are using civilians as “human shields.” And Israel uses that charge to justify intensifying the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestine, including repeatedly bombing UN schools where people gather to seek shelter, killing dozens.
U.S. Backing for Every Crime
The U.S. provides massive financial and technology aid to Israel’s military. Every crime Israel has ever committed has been backed by the U.S.
Over and over again, we hear from the rulers of the U.S., including Barack Obama, about the “shared ideals” of the U.S. and Israel.
That is true: they share the (immoral) ideals of exploiters and violent oppressors that sit atop a world of exploitation, injustice and oppression.

Here’s the basic truth:
All this bullshit about “human shields” from the rulers of the U.S., their mass media, and their Israeli hitmen is an obscene, immoral “rationale” for mass murder.

One apartheid state: Report from occupied Palestine Nat Winn

http://kasamaproject.org/
Posted by Nat Winn on Thursday, 17 July 2014 in Imperialism & War

The following article is A Word to Win News Service.

Palestine now: the situation and mood in the West Bank

14 July 2014. A World to Win News Service. The following are edited notes of a conversation with three feminist academics who have just returned from a visit to occupied Palestine.

We arrived two days after the bodies of the three kidnapped settler youth were found. The Israeli authorities had been blockading Palestinian communities and arresting people before that, with the excuse that they were looking for the three, but after that it got worse. What we saw was collective punishment on a mass scale, resulting in the arrest of at least 700 people, many of whom had been in prison before. The security forces had lists of people they were looking for. These raids were a way of creating an atmosphere of terror.

Our first night was in East Jerusalem. Israeli settlers, in this case often recent immigrants from the U.S., as well Russia and Eastern Europe, are moving into Palestinian neighbourhoods and forcing the inhabitant out. Local Palestinians identified many of the settlers in the Old City as yeshiva (Jewish religious school) students. There are also whole families with young children. The women are in a “permanent state of pregnancy”, with multiple young children in many families.

Settlers appropriate land often by using fraudulent documents showing that they or their family owns the property, and the police evict the Palestinians living there. Sometimes it’s a building or a whole floor of a building, sometimes just an apartment or even a single room. Once they move in they make life intolerable for the Palestinians around them. They bring their guards, and they and their children harass the Palestinians constantly to make them leave.

This process may appear similar to what would be called “gentrification” in North America, but in East Jerusalem and Hebron, it’s a violent process. It’s ethnic cleansing.

For example, in the Old City of Jerusalem, in one apartment complex, there is only a single Palestinian family left. They can’t use the main stairs because settlers harass them. Instead, they have to take an old, dangerous staircase to go in or out.

Walking through East Jerusalem we saw a highway where, we were told, settlers in their cars often try to run down Palestinian children walking there. One of our hosts is known in the community and speaks Hebrew, so people come to her for help. Children come to her and say, “Help we’re being chased by settlers.” This is daily life.

Settlers are now moving into an Armenian (Christian) community next to the Jewish quarter in the old city in Jerusalem. The settler youth constantly spray slogans like “Jesus is a son of a bitch” on the walls to let people know they have to leave. The slogans are put up and then cleaned off and then put up again constantly.

It took us two hours to drive from Ramallah to Hebron in the West Bank, which is about 50 kilometres, in order to go around the checkpoints.

The Israeli military had closed down Hebron a few days before we got there. They blocked off the Palestinian area, not letting anyone in or out overnight. Then after that they wouldn’t allow males under 25 to come or go.

There are less than a thousand Israeli settlers in the old city of Hebron, but in the name of protecting them the entire Palestinian population is subject to daily denigration and violence. Their lives are deliberately made miserable. In the old city about 12 kilometres of a main street are closed off to Palestinians. The Palestinians who live there can’t have ordinary visitors and need special permission even for family members to come. The roofs of people’s homes are on the street level and the living areas are below that. The people who live there aren’t allowed on their own roofs.

We met a family who told us about an unusual snowstorm. The snow piled up on the roof and water was leaking into the rooms below. The father had to apply for permission to go up and clean off the roof. He was given ten minutes to do that, and it was hard for him because he was partially disabled from once having been shot in the leg. Meanwhile, Israeli kids were playing on the roof as they liked, making snowmen and so on.

The same man told us how he was sitting in his living room one day when he heard water running. He looked out and saw settler youth standing on his roof and peeing down on his doorstep.

There are a pair of Palestinian primary schools, one for girls and the other for boys, in the area of Hebron that is closed off to Palestinians. The children have to go through checkpoints to get there, and on the way they are often harassed by settler youth. Sometimes it’s verbal; sometimes they throw rocks or bottles of urine. The settler kids go to their parents and complain about the Palestinian kids, and their parents come and get the school closed down. But Palestinian parents aren’t allowed to come to the school.

On Jewish religious holidays the checkpoints are closed and so the road is too. Since the buildings are all connected, the children can go from roof to roof until they reach the school. The IDF (Israeli army) spray-painted insults on the walls of the home of a lady who lives next to the school, and they harass her for allowing children to pass through her house to get to school.

Hebron is a Palestinian city, but the settlements are under control of the IDF and the Palestinian police in the old town are not allowed to protect Palestinians from the settlers.

Israeli security forces control the checkpoints in and out of the old town. Palestinians have to wait in line to show their identity cards, sometimes for hours. This makes daily life impossible. The soldiers are particularly hard on Palestinian male youth. They are supposed to inspect ID cards and then give them back, but sometimes they just put the card in their pocket and make the owner wait in the sun for three or four hours. Since you can’t move around without an ID card, you have no choice but to just stand there. They deliberately provoke people. The night before we got there, a kid who had been made to wait a long time started to get excited and they shot him in the leg.

The checkpoints are a mechanism of punishment as well as control. They are a constant source of humiliation.

On the Jewish side of one settlement in Hebron, there is a big sign in Hebrew and English declaring, “You are now leaving free Israel.” The settlers complain about restrictions on their movements through Hebron because it is under Palestinian control. The settlers consider it part of their own country where they should be allowed to do whatever they want.

When you cross into the West Bank from Israel, the landscape changes. There is dust and debris everywhere, it’s not neat and clean like the Israeli side. The Bedouin villages in the occupied territory are in a very bad state. They are desperately poor. People might have a small garden. They graze animals. The shelters in the villages are made of corrugated sheet metal. In contrast, the settlers have built suburban communities, which resemble gated communities in Florida.

When you enter Ramallah itself, the landscape changes yet again. There are new buildings, some for Western companies like HSBC, others for UN organizations and the Palestinian Authority’s administration offices as well as extensive housing development, much of which is unoccupied.

Israeli settlements are not allowed in Ramallah itself. Because it’s a Palestinian administrative centre, and a place where Palestinians are allowed to build, Ramallah is where foreign money goes. Bahrain, Kuwait and other Gulf countries fund university facilities. Money from the Palestinian diaspora also ends up here.

That’s one factor in the political mood in Ramallah, a former centre of Palestinian activism that was very, very quiet when we were there. The PA will not allow protests. They attacked a pro-Hamas demonstration. People we talked to were extremely contemptuous of the PA, and Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine that are connected to the PA. You can recognize PA officials’ cars by their license plates, and they drive luxury models.

Ramallah used to be known as a secular city, but that has changed over the last few years. Now many of the young women and even little girls, maybe the majority, cover their heads. This is especially the case in the universities, and not so much in the areas with cafes and restaurants and businesses. We met many people who expressed support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime because they supposedly stand up to Israel. Religion has also become a big part of daily life, much more than when some of us were there in 2005.

There were many demonstrations against the Israeli lynching of the young Palestinian boy while we were in Palestine, and against the attacks on Gaza. Many took place in Palestinian towns and neighbourhoods in Israel itself, not the West Bank. One such demonstration was in Nazareth, where 20 protesters were arrested by the IDF after use of tear gas and sound grenades. Repression is one factor preventing protests in the PA-controlled cities, but there has also been a strong depoliticalization. Many people turn inward, or to NGO-type activities instead of resistance. Many people tend to focus on micro-identities – my region, my town. A belief that Palestinians are different than other Arabs and people in the Middle East. Some intellectuals rationalize that Islamism is once again giving expression to national identity. There is no women’s movement. There is an extremely strong atmosphere of political backlash against the revolutionary movements of the
1960s and ’70s and up until the Oslo Accords that created the PA in 1993. We haven’t seen that so strongly anywhere else in the Middle East.

There are pockets of resistance, but largely functioning through the mechanisms of NGOs and human rights groups. Palestinian youth in Ramallah go to Qalandiya (a refugee camp surrounded by the Israeli “separation” wall, with a major Israeli military presence) to thrown stones at the Israeli security forces. They want to confront the Israeli army.

People have mixed sentiments about what to do, depending on where you are and who you talk to. It’s complicated. PA President Mahmoud Abbas has no credibility. People say he is Netanyahu’s spokesman in the West Bank.

There’s a general disillusionment with the traditional Palestinian left like the PLO and PFLP, especially among youth. Hamas is the only organization with much popular support. Some people talk about launching a third Intifada (the Palestinian uprisings against the occupation in 1987-1993 and 2002-2005). The youth and other people want to be able to express their rage and frustration. It’s not clear what that would mean. In Ramallah, it would definitely include targeting the PA.

Can you imagine Gaza has had one of the largest concentrations of refugee camps in the world? Palestinians there are refugees in their own country, and Palestinians from the West Bank aren’t allowed to go there. Only humanitarian groups, journalists, and UN are allowed to enter Gaza, but with much difficulty and delay.

Every time Hamas shoots off one of their rockets, they recruit. So does Islamic Jihad.

This whole situation, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and the Hamas rockets, actually helps Israel. It’s not clear who killed the three settler youth, or for what purpose. No one has claimed responsibility. But it’s allowed Netanyahu to link Hamas and Da’ash (ISIS or “the Islamic state” in Iraq and Syria) and put Israel’s “security” at the centre of what’s happening in the region, in competition with Iran. This also allows Israel to attack the unity government between Hamas and the PA.

Years ago it was difficult to talk about the one-state solution. Now there is much popular discussion of a one-state solution, including graffiti and t-shirts saying “48+67=1”, meaning the land Israelis occupied in the 1948 war plus the land they occupied after the Six Day War in 1967 equals one nation. However, many argue there is already a one-state solution: an apartheid state.

Stop the Bombing of Gaza! No Invasion!

http://revcom.us/
Israel Unleashes Mass Terror on the Palestinian People
by Alan Goodman | July 14, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Since July 7, Israel has subjected the two million people of the Palestinian territory of Gaza to a deadly reign of terror from the sky. And as we go to press, Israel has massed troops on the edge of Gaza, sending a message that the murderous attacks on Gaza might intensify with a land invasion. In 2008-2009, Israel invaded and bombed Gaza, killing 1400 people, most of them civilians. Eighty-nine of them children, by Israel’s official count.
AP Photo: Rafah refugee camp in Gaza where five members of the Ghannam family were killed by an Israeli missile on July 11.
Rafah refugee camp in Gaza where five members of the Ghannam family were killed by an Israeli missile on July 11. Photo: AP
The ruling class media in the U.S. are wildly distorting what is going on—portraying this as an “exchange of missiles,” part of a “cycle of violence” in which Israel is defending itself from terrorists. And this is training Americans to identify with horrific oppression in the name of “fighting terrorism.”
The reality: Israel—with one of the most powerful high-tech militaries in the world—is pummeling, carrying out mass murder, and terrorizing the two million Palestinians—in what has been accurately called the world’s largest outdoor prison camp—with fighter jets, Apache helicopters, missiles, tanks, warships, and drones. As of July 12, Israel had launched at least a thousand bombing attacks, killing more than one hundred people, injuring hundreds and hundreds, causing massive destruction of Gaza’s fragile water and power supplies, and terrorizing the entire population.
From Gaza? A few hundred ineffective missiles, resulting in zero reported Israeli deaths.
AP Photo:
Two women were killed when an Israeli missile hit this clinic for disabled people in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza on July 12. Photo: AP
Israel claims it is “carefully targeting” Hamas commanders and military infrastructure. And that any “collateral damage” (the term armies of oppression use to refer to human beings they kill who are not accused of being combatants) is because Hamas operates in neighborhoods these people live in.
The reality: Israel is targeting the Palestinian people as a whole.
So far about a fifth of the reported deaths in Gaza from the Israeli assault are children, some as young as three years old. Eight members of one family, including five children, were killed on July 10 in a bombing raid that blew up two homes in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
In the first two days of the assault, a missile struck a house in Al-Maghazi, a beachside refugee camp near Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, killing a mother and her four children. And two women and four children died in a series of raids to the north and east of Gaza City.

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Map: Wikimedia Commons
Nine people were killed and 10 more injured by an Israeli airstrike at a beachside café in Gaza, including people living near the café. They were watching the World Cup. In response to questions about the attack from the New York Times, a spokesman for the Israeli military refused to identify any particular target in the attack but said it was a “precision strike” that was “targeting a terrorist.”
As we go to press, Israeli bombers destroyed a clinic for disabled patients, killing at least two residents and a staff member and severely burning others. The center is well known and has been at the same location for almost ten years.
A medical aide described the situation on the ground. “It is very difficult for hospitals to cope. For health staff it is very difficult for them to reach their work. It’s really problematic even if the Rafah crossing is opened. If the aggression continues we expect more casualties. This will be very overwhelming for hospitals, which are already suffering from severe shortages of drugs, fuel and the lack of electricity.
See also:
Israel Sets Loose a Lynch Mob
by Alan Goodman
“Every minute you see ambulances coming in and private cars bringing in new casualties. Staff are trying their best in emergency rooms, but sometimes the emergency rooms are unable to cope. It’s a chaotic situation.” (UK Guardian, July 10, 2014)
This is “collective punishment” of the Palestinian people. It is a war crime. And it is punishment, most fundamentally, for the ongoing existence of the Palestinian people who have been subjected to ethnic cleansing since the founding of Israel.
And as these crimes continue, U.S. diplomats cover for Israel, the U.S. military works extremely closely with Israel, and the U.S. provides massive financial backing for Israel.
The Blockade and the Rafah Border Crossing
Gaza is almost completely surrounded by Israel, as well as sharing a small border with Egypt. Since 2007, Israel has enforced a vicious blockade of Gaza with the collaboration of a succession of Egyptian regimes. Nearly all essential supplies into Gaza are choked off or controlled by Israel with a conscious policy of creating serious nutritional deficiencies among the civilian population. At the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, Israel launched a one-sided massacre of Gaza, destroying schools and shelling hospitals, and killing some 1,400 Palestinians. The invasion damaged 15 of 27 hospitals in Gaza and damaged or destroyed 43 of its 110 primary health care facilities. Israel has obstructed reconstruction of hospitals with bans on construction materials. People in Gaza have very limited access to the outside world through dangerous underground, illegal tunnels into Egypt that have been attacked by Israeli bombers. There is a commercial border crossing between Egypt and Gaza at the town of Rafah—which for a time allowed access to international commerce. The Rafah crossing has been closed by the current Egyptian regime. It was opened briefly during the current crisis to allow the evacuation of some injured patients.
Why? For decades, Israel has served as an attack dog for the interests of the U.S. empire in the oil-rich and strategic Middle East, and beyond. The developing upheaval and chaos in the Middle East and moves by the U.S. to maneuver within that, along with the increasing isolation of Israel in world public opinion, have strained that relationship. But at the same time, the turmoil in the region—along with other challenges to the U.S. as the world’s sole superpower—serve to reinforce the need for rulers of the U.S. to have a ferocious attack dog.
And so the U.S. continues to back up Israel’s crimes (while making a few “on the record” statements about not overdoing the slaughter). This is not an expression of “shared values of enlightenment and human rights.” It is a vivid, horrific, bloody illustration of how the predatory interests of the U.S. empire define the “special relationship” between the rulers of the U.S. and Israel.
The bombing must stop! And the people of the world must speak up: NO Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Terror & lies: Israel unleashes brutal pogrom against Gaza

http://kasamaproject.org/threads/

ISH
Posted by ISH on Friday, 18 July 2014 in News & Analysis

Terror & lies: Israel unleashes brutal pogrom against Gaza
“Free Free Palestine! Down Down Israel!”

by ISH

Wednesday’s direct Israeli hit on four young children playing football on a Gaza beach tells a story.

It epitomizes the entire disgusting episode in occupied Palestine that has unfolded since the collapse of so-called peace talks earlier this year. Western journalists witnessed the precision targeting of the four children by the Israeli naval forces who blockade the Gaza coastline. Pictures of the tiny torn bodies being carried away from the scene filled the internet.

The US network NBC immediately pulled the reporter who had honestly reported on the targeting of the children. Predictably Israeli spokesmen offered a few brutally transparent crocodile tears for “unfortunate mistakes,” and yet the very next day the Israelis killed more children, and proceeded to bomb the Al-Waffa Orthopedic Hospital into oblivion. Shortly afterwards, a few hours ago as of this writing, Israeli tanks crossed into Gaza under the cover of darkness, marking a significant escalation of the Israeli extermination campaign against the Palestinian population.

Dawn is about to break on an unknown future for the almost 2 million people crowded into the small, impoverished, besieged enclave of Gaza. Over 250 Palestinians have already been killed, almost 2,000 wounded. 80% of the dead are non-combatants, and an obscene number are children. It is estimated that one Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every three days for the past 13 years, so the events of the current Israeli offensive are far from an anomaly.

What is happening in Gaza is not a conflict, it’s a massacre. What is happening is not a war, but a pogrom, the herding together and culling of the captive Palestinian population.

Israel and its supporters have crafted a brutal narrative absolving themselves of all guilt for the mass murder they are committing. From the Israeli government, and the legions of Zionist agents spouting officially approved “hasbara,” or “explanations” in the media and on the internet, down through the echelons of politicians in countries far and wide — here in the US including conservative and liberal alike — we hear that Israel is just “defending itself” and “trying to prevent civilian casualties.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Israel knows what it is doing, fully consented to by President Obama and the US government. Wielding the spectre of “Islamic terror,” Israeli apologists blame the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas for their own actions in the most grotesque and self-serving ways. With the utterance of the word “Hamas” all morality and human empathy is to be cast aside, and all license for brutality and inhumanity assured. The Zionists blame Hamas for using the population of tiny, crowded Gaza as human shields, as though there was someplace in Gaza not to be a human shield, as though there was someplace else either Hamas or the population could go. But the truth must be told: as one person noted on twitter, “blaming Hamas for firing rockets at Israel is like blaming a woman for punching her rapist.”

The accomplices of Israel in the American media are unstinting. The day of the assassination of the four children, the so-called paper of record The New York Times ran a small sub-headline: “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach and Into Center of Mideast Strife,” while running a feature photo and headline about “An Israeli Town’s Emergency Routine” that lamented the effect of Gaza’s rockets on the town’s beach lifestyle and the sleep habits of local residents. Thus the dead children are blamed for their own deaths and the inconvenience of Israelis ranked worse than the murder of whole Palestinian families.

Meanwhile pictures are readily available of crowds of Israelis camped out on the heights outside Gaza having carnage-viewing parties, where cheers go up every time the light and noise of bombs striking their targets becomes clear.

It’s not hard to find accounts of what life is really like for the population of gaza. “This night is one of those terrifying ones. dark, no electricity, smoky haze and constant bombing and shaking. windows are breaking!” tweeted one Gaza resident, Mohammed Omer. Many firsthand accounts are too heartbreaking to retell. The pharmacist just back from study in Cuba, his young wife now a widow. The child who finds out his whole family has just been killed. The eighteen members of a family slaughtered just to eliminate one Hamas government official, who in the end was the only one to survive.

The Israeli military gives Palestinians momentary warning of impending doom, the so-called knock on the roof warning shot. The Israelis claim this absolves them of responsbility for what happens next. Palestinian poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha exposes the horrible reality:

“They call us now.
Before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think “Do I know any Davids in Gaza?”
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of war time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.”
The politicians have all blamed Hamas for prolonging Gaza’s agony by rejecting a ceasefire that Israel briefly accepted. Yet the ceasefire, hatched in Washington, suggested to Israel by the military-lead government in Egypt and not even discussed with the Hamas leadership (all in hiding for fear of assassination by Israel) was really more of a demand for surrender. The fact that Hamas countered with an eminently reasonable 10-year truce plan was entirely ignored by the pro-Israel media.

A few months ago the politicians were trumpeting yet another round of “peace” talks, aimed at the final surrender of the Palestinian people to their Zionist occupiers. But it all went to shit when even the collaborationists in the ruling Palestinian Authority couldn’t stomach Israeli intransigence and their continued ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Talks were broken off, and the American negotiators led by the creepy secretary of state John Kerry packed up and went home. The Fatah-led branch of the Palestinian Authority running the West Bank announced a unity deal with the Hamas-led branch of the Palestinian Authority running Gaza. Despite widespread skepticism among Palestinians that unity would stick, all hell broke loose as the Israelis and Americans went into full panic mode.

Escalating land seizures, so-called “settlement” building and daily violence against the Palestinians was becoming routine for the Israeli apartheid state: but an alliance of Hamas and Fatah opened up the possibility that Israel would lose its PA partner in oppression, and Israel began to do everything in its power to sabotage the unity agreement.

In June, three teenaged Israeli settlers (one of whom was old enough to be in the Israeli military) went missing while hitchhiking in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli government accused Hamas of kidnapping the settlers, and launched a massive dragnet across the West Bank. Hundreds of Palestinians were kidnapped by the Israeli government, and several were killed. People had their homes ripped apart by Israeli soldiers. After a couple weeks the settlers were found dead, and it’s clear they were killed more or less right away. It’s been widely suggested that the Israeli government knew this, but used the interval to whip up a racist frenzy across Israeli society against Palestinians. As of this writing, no actual tie between the killings and Hamas has been established; indeed it’s been suggested it was the work of supporters of the ISIS network ravaging Syria and Iraq.

Very little of the media narrative bothered to question why Israeli teenagers were wandering around with impunity in militarily occupied territory. The Hebron area of the occupied West Bank where these events unfolded is one of the most segregated of the occupied territories: Israeli military force barricades a small settler outpost protecting Israeli-only roads and Israeli-only neighborhoods from the local Palestinian population. The local settlers routinely brutalize Palestinian civilians. Frankly, the three Israeli settlers should be compared to teenaged Belgian colonists wandering around the Belgian Congo in 1914 or German teens wandering around occupied Ukraine in 1942.

The disappearance of the three settlers provided the Israeli government with an excuse to whip up a frenzy of vengeance. It was aimed at Hamas, but directed against all Palestinians. Mobs chanted “Death to the Arabs.” Israeli young people created facebook memes dehumanizing Arabs. Prime Minister Netanyahu himself raised the call for revenge. The Israeli government has created a vicious rationalization for its actions that is almost unbearably and tragically ironic given the facts on the ground: “A deep and wide moral abyss separates us from our enemies,” said Netanyanu. “They sanctify death while we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion.” This should be called what it is, racist contempt for the Palestinians. It is the justification for the Israeli policy of collective punishment.

Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked posted this genocidal screed on facebook: “Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there…They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists.”

In the aftermath of the settlers being found dead Israeli thugs beat up Palestinians; thugs in uniform rearrested many of the Palestinians freed from Israeli prisons under peace agreements. One young man was brutally burned alive. While eventually three Israelis were arrested for killing the young Palestinian, the Israeli disinformation machine initially tried a vile bit of pinkwashing, at first claiming that young Mohammad Abu Khdeir was killed by his own family for being gay. Khdeir’s Palestinian-American cousin was subsequently beaten senseless by Israeli police. (As with the death of the young Turkish-American Furkan Dogan on the Mavi Marmara blockade runner ship at the hands of Israeli pirates a few years ago, all of a sudden the US government lost interest in the welfare of American citizens abroad).

What are the stakes as Israel attempts to pummel the Palestinians of Gaza into submission?

New York based Palestinian activist Amin Hussein says, “why is surrender at this juncture so dangerous? Because Israel intends either to beat Gaza and the resistance into submission so they can function like the PA but in Gaza, or pave the way for Israel’s entry into Gaza to destroy the resistance, kill as many people as possible, make the price in life so unbearable, that people would wish it would end. Egypt has provided cover for genocide. This is how genocides happen. You blame the victim for the necessity to kill them. This is a war on the Palestinian people in which Arab countries, including the counter-revolutionary neoliberal Palestinian Authority and the international community, are paving the way for death and destruction, way beyond what we have seen.” Hussein urges concrete solidarity against the horrors now unfolding: “Us, being in the streets, doing more, we bring the one-sided war home.”

There is so much more to discuss about Palestine. About the role of the various resistance factions, the contradictory but ultimately counterrevolutionary role of the Palestine Authority, about the prospects for a single democratic and socialist state where Muslims, Christians, Jews and atheists can live together. But for now the moral imperative is exposing the truth about the murderous pogrom that Israel has unleashed, and standing in solidarity with the residents of Gaza, indeed with all Palestinians.

Although most world governments have closed their eyes to the Israeli attack on Gaza, mass demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinians have taken place all over the world expressing the revulsion of common people against what the Israelis are doing. I urge you to find a solidarity action in your area, and take a stand with the right of the Palestinians to resist Israeli brutality. Don’t let the Palestinians stand alone.

Despite advances on the front of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, the situation in Palestine is grim right now. One can only hope that the Israeli butchers have taken a step too far; and that the justified rage of people against their crimes of war will make itself known. The late Palestinian communist poet Tawfiq Ziad expressed it well:

“Gentlemen, you have transformed
our country into a graveyard
You have planted bullets in our heads,
and organized massacres
Gentlemen, nothing passes like that
without account
All that you have done
to our people is
registered in notebooks.”
– See more at: http://kasamaproject.org/threads/entry/terror-lies-israel-unleashes-brutal-pogrom-against-gaza#sthash.hPcUwSI6.dpuf

Bhagat Singh: Eighty-Three Years On

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/
by Radha D’Souza
Chaman Lal. Understanding Bhagat Singh. Delhi: Aakar, 2013. pp. 245.

Left Traditions in South Asia

Bhagat Singh is to South Asia what Che Guevara is to Latin America — a popular iconic figure who continues to inspire generations of youth in the subcontinent in their struggles against imperialism and the trajectory of national politics after independence. In India successive generations of social justice movements have taken the name Naujawan Bharat Sabha (Youth Society of India), the organisation founded by Bhagat Singh and his comrades in 1926. The Naujawan Bharat Sabha phase in the lives of many of us left an indelible mark in the kind of choices we made in later life. During Bhagat Singh’s times the British Left were familiar with the figures in the nascent Indian Left movements. Three British communists were imprisoned and tried along with Indian communists in the Meerut Conspiracy Case decided in 1933 under the anti-terrorism laws introduced by the colonial government. The trial inspired the Red Megaphone street theatre group in Manchester to stage a play titled Meerut.1 International interest in the South Asian Left faded somewhat after World War II.

In India the radical Left tradition never died down. The first action by the Indian state after independence was to send armed forces to the Telangana region in Southern India to put down the revolutionary movement there. The Telangana armed struggle liberated 3,000 villages spread over 16,000 square miles, home to a population of 3 million people, and held the region from 1946 to 1951.2 It was put down by one of the bloodiest repressions in a context when independence was still under negotiation and the constitution was being written. The trials of 10,000 Telangana insurgents kept the movement alive until the Naxalbari, Srikakulam and other revolts from 1969 onwards infused the revolutionary tradition with renewed energy. Once again India witnessed one of the bloodiest armed state repressions, and India contributed a new phrase, ‘encounter killings’, to the English vocabulary. In the aftermath of the repression many on the international Left wrote off the radical Left in India. With globalisation and the renewed corporate invasion of India, however, the radical Left resurged again under the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The point to note here is that in India figures like Bhagat Singh are important factors in the resilience of the radical Left. Bhagat Singh does not leave a “legacy” in that he is not a memory from the past. Bhagat Singh lives in the struggles, its songs and stories, in Telangana, Naxalbari, the Central Indian plains and elsewhere in the subcontinent. His life and the lives of his comrades provide a frame of reference for contemporary youth to make sense of the nation they inherited after independence.

The Life of Bhagat Singh

Bhagat Singh was born on 28 September 1907 in Lyallpur district (renamed Faisalabad) in the part of Punjab that fell to Pakistan after partition of the country in 1947. His father and two uncles were involved in the freedom struggle. The Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in 1919 made a deep impression on 12-year-old Bhagat Singh. British troops ‘kettled’ (in contemporary policing vocabulary) protestors in an enclosed area and opened fire on unarmed people, killing many. He was executed in Lahore, also now in Pakistan, on 23 March 1931 at the age of twenty three. Bhagat Singh’s trial is perhaps the only known judicial proceeding conducted under a special ordinance introduced by the British government specifically for the trail of a single case (p. 53).3 In his book Understanding Bhagat Singh, Chaman Lal refers to Jinnah’s speech on the issue (p. 83, ch. 10). New facts surrounding his trial continue to surface to this day. On 5 May 2014 newspapers in India and Pakistan reported that Bhagat Singh was not named in the First Information Report for the murder of John Saunders in 1928.4

Saunders, an Assistant Superintendent of Police, was murdered in December 1928 in retaliation against the death of Lala Lajpat Rai, a moderate nationalist who was killed in a baton charge during nationwide protests against the visit of members of the Simon Commission. The Simon Commission was an all English-parliamentary commission appointed by the British Parliament to recommend constitutional reforms in India. Until now it was widely believed that Bhagat Singh was responsible for the murder. The recent news throws another question mark over his arrest and execution. He was arrested in connection with a different case which came to be known as the ‘Assembly Bombing Case’ in 1929. While the Central Legislative Assembly, set up by the British as a controlled experiment to introduce democratic institutions in India, debated the Public Safety Bill (the ‘anti-terrorism laws’ of that time), and the Trade Disputes Bill on industrial disputes, Bhagat Singh and his comrades threw fireworks made to create a loud noise but without explosive materials. Their reason was ‘it needs an explosion to make the deaf hear’ (p. 13). Their symbolic actions were inspired by the French anarchist Auguste Vaillant (p. 13).

The Central Assembly action was organised by the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA). The HSRA was formed after Gandhi called off the popular nationwide upsurge against the visit of the Simon Commission because of an incident in Chauri Chaura where a group of protestors turned violent and burnt a police station. The loss of confidence in Gandhi’s leadership in the country led Bhagat Singh and his comrades to form the HSRA. Their popularity outstripped Gandhi’s. Bhagat Singh did not escape arrest even when he could well have done so. Indeed Lal points out that the organising committee of the HSRA had initially opposed sending Bhagat Singh for the Central Assembly actions because of fears that he may be arrested for the murder of Saunders. Sukhdev, another martyr, taunted Bhagat Singh for backing out of the action and that prompted Bhagat Singh to insist he should be sent on the Central Assembly action (p. 52). From that moment Bhagat Singh knew he would be a martyr and he embraced it. Contrast the extraordinary efforts that the Bolshevik Party took to provide security for Lenin because they recognised the importance of his leadership for the success of their political goals. Martyrdom brings near divine status in Eastern societies, even to atheists.

Understanding Bhagat Singh

Understanding Bhagat Singh is a collection of essays written by Chaman Lal since he launched a national campaign to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh which fell in 2006. The essays were written over a period of 5-6 years prior. Lal has published extensively on the life of Bhagat Singh and other revolutionaries in Hindi, Punjabi and English. In 2007, the birth anniversary of Bhagat Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of India’s premier federal universities established the Bhagat Singh Chair to study revolutionary movements in India since 1757. 1757 was the year when, after the Battle of Plassey, the British East India Company first began to govern parts of India. Lal’s persistent campaign no doubt contributed to the establishment of the Chair. It took 75 years for Bhagat Singh to gain official recognition and ironically it has come in the wake of renewed corporate invasions after the WTO trade regimes and new military alliances in the wake of the so-called ‘global war on terror’. During the interim, the memory of Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom in 1931 lived on largely through oral histories, in political movements and writings by intellectuals, most of them outside the English academia. There are over 400 books published on Bhagat Singh in India, Lal notes (p. ix), including ballads and epics (ch. 16), most of them in Indian languages, but very few attempt to understand or analyse his thought. The task has not been an easy one for those who have attempted it.

Facts about Bhagat Singh’s life, political thought, British conduct of the trial and the nationalist leadership’s ambivalence towards him have dribbled through in dribs and drabs over eighty-three years as the recent news report indicates. The opening of the archives, the discovery of new documents from the older generation of freedom fighters, the Supreme Court’s exhibition of documents exhibited during the trials of revolutionaries, the centenaries and jubilees of various martyrs and other similar circumstances have contributed to a revivalism that seeks to take a fresh look at the revolutionary strand in India’s struggle for independence. Lal reproduces some of these materials as Annexure to the book. The British government proscribed Bhagat Singh’s writing (p. x). After independence the liberal intelligentsia in India and Britain privileged the elitist strand in the nationalist historiography led by Gandhi and Nehru and marginalised the contributions of the revolutionary strands.5 The collaboration between Indian and Western liberal intelligentsia continues to play out in particular ways under globalisation and to privilege certain political trends over others in India. The book is therefore a timely contribution.

What were the liberals marginalising and privileging, though? In the received narratives of independence Bhagat Singh and his comrades are portrayed as idealists and utopian youth. Typically the argument goes: the hearts of Bhagat Singh and his comrades were in the right place but their thinking was misguided, if they thought at all, which is excusable given their age. What the articles in the book bring out clearly is that far from being ‘misguided youth’, a phrase widely used to discredit successive generations of political opposition to the state in India, Bhagat Singh and his comrades were intellectually astute and capable of providing a different type of leadership to nationalist movement in India after the Ghadar movement was brutally suppressed by the colonial administration.6 Indeed Bhagat Singh and his comrades were products of the Ghadar movement. The Ghadar movement originated among the migrant Indian workers and expatriate communities in North America and mounted a formidable challenge to the colonial state. Lal argues that Bhagat Singh’s essay ‘Why I Am an Atheist’ written in Lahore jail in 1930 and published after his execution in 1931 and other jail writings demonstrate that far from being ‘misguided youth’ he was a mature intellectual with a good grasp of the revolutionary movements in Russia and elsewhere at the time. Lal has edited The Jail Notebooks and Other Writings (New Delhi: Leftword, 2007), a collection of Bhagat Singh’s writings. ‘A rebellion is not a revolution. It may ultimately lead to that end’ writes Bhagat Singh and further that a revolution is the ‘spirit of longing for change for the better’ (quoted at p. 16).

Bhagat Singh and his comrades provide the bridges to understanding the anti-imperialist struggles in post-Independence India in the same way as the First War of Independence in 1857 (known as the Indian Sepoy Mutiny in Britain and in Marx’s writings)7 provided the bridges to understanding the Ghadar movement in the early twentieth century. These crucial historical moments establish continuities in the anti-imperialist movements from 1857 to the present. Breaking crucial historical links dehistorisizes the present and mythologizes the past. In the process of ploughing through the voluminous publications on Bhagat Singh in India, Lal observes: ‘I found . . . that Bhagat Singh is more misunderstood’, and further ‘my focus [for the book] is more on documentation to clear the air about many myths or half-truths’ (p. x).

One of the many half-truths concerns the role of Gandhi at a critical juncture in the struggle for independence. That Gandhi did not intercede with the Lord Irwin to commute Bhagat Singh’s execution is well known. His friendship and admiration for Lord Irwin is also well known. Gandhi’s motivations for his silence over the executions were always opaque. The book (ch. 11) reveals the extent of Gandhi’s complicity in the execution of Bhagat Singh stooping, according to Lal, even to outright lies. The book is full of interesting episodes. For example Lal corrects the record by pointing out the hunger strikes/fasts by political prisoners is not Gandhi’s non-violent political innovation, another myth about Gandhi, but rather ‘the real progenitors of fast/hunger strike as a political weapon are Irish revolutionaries’ (p. 71). During 1916-1920 the conscience of the world was shaken by the fasts of Irish revolutionaries in prison. Their actions inspired Bhagat Singh and his comrades, one of whom, Jatin Das, died in prison. There are references to interesting details. For example the sister of the Irish martyr Terence MacSwiney sent Bhagat Singh and other political prisoners a solidarity message in support of their hunger strike in prison. These details give the reader the feeling of rediscovering Bhagat Singh.

Bhagat Singh’s most significant contribution to the struggle for independence was to replace the earlier slogan of the nationalist movement which was ‘Salutations to the Mother ‘ (i.e. India) with the slogan ‘Death to Imperialism! Long Live the Revolution!’ Both these slogans continue to echo at protests and demonstrations throughout the country to this day.

Conclusion

As a collection of articles published in newspapers and magazines over 5-6 years, each article addresses a target readership in a particular context. The book does not work as well as an edited collection. Facts are repeated in a number of different places and the book lacks a narrative structure. The author could have reworked the rich materials in the book giving it a thematic structure, clarified the aims, and provided a concluding chapter on how, according to him, the reader should understand Bhagat Singh. These shortcomings notwithstanding, the collection of articles is useful in the present context.

With the state aligned to the ‘war on terror’, fundamentalisms and dispossessions and a wide range of resistances to the state in the subcontinent, understanding the past holds the key to understanding the present. India stands at historical crossroads. Home to one sixth of humanity, the way India turns at the crossroads will undoubtedly have a wider impact beyond India. These are good reasons for international and national readers to know Bhagat Singh and through his life better understand a formative period in modern India.

1 See Working Class Movement Library at http://www.wcml.org.uk/Main/en/contents/international/india/meerut–an-attack-on-indian-trade-unionism-19291933/ (accessed on 28 May 2014).

2 Putchalapalli Sundarayayya, Telangana People’s Struggles and Its Lessons(New Delhi: Foundation Book Pvt Ltd, 2006 [1972]).

3 The practice of setting up special tribunals to try specific individuals (as opposed to a general law applicable to all) in particular countries was revived in 1991 when the UN Security Council Resolution set up the International Court on Yugoslavia. The special ordinance to try Bhagat Singh, critical legal scholars will be interested to know, is another example of the incorporation of legal practices within the Empire into international law.

4 ‘Bhagat Singh Not Named in FIR for Saunders’ Murder,’ Hindu, 4 May 2014.

5 Radha D’Souza, R (2014), ‘Revolt and Reform in South Asia: From Ghadar Movement to ‘9/11′ and After,’ Economic and Political Weekly (49.7, 15 February 2014), pp.59-73.

6 D’Souza (2014).

7 Karl Marx, ‘Indian News,’ New York Daily Tribune (14 August 1857), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/08/14a.htm (accessed on 28 May 2014).

Radha D’Souza is Reader in Law at the University of Westminster.

I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me

Doug Enaa
http://kasamaproject.org/

Wallace Shawn is a world famous actor and playwright. He has starred in multiple roles in the Princess Bride, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Toy Story and Gossip Girl. Aside from such roles, Shawn is also a life-long socialist. In the excerpt from his play “The Fever” reprinted below, Shawn gives a succinct explanation of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism.

-Enaa

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One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn’t understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I’d heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on “commodity fetishism,” “the fetishism of commodities.” I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.

His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, “Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds.” People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat’s price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. “I like this coat,” we say, “It’s not expensive,” as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, “I like the pictures in this magazine.”

A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.

For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn’t see it anymore.

– See more at: http://www.kasamaproject.org/threads/entry/i-could-see-the-fetishism-of-commodities-everywhere-around-me#sthash.0h7cy0ZI.dpuf