Generation Palestine: Voices from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement
256
Generation Palestine: Voices from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement
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Overview
Generation Palestine helps to answer this question by bringing together Palestinian and international activists in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The movement aims to pressure Israel until it complies with International Law, mirroring the model that was successfully utilised against South African apartheid.
With essays written by a wide selection of contributors, Generation Palestine follows the BDS movement’s model of inclusivity and collaboration. Contributors include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ken Loach, Iain Banks, Ronnie Kasrils, Professor Richard Falk, Ilan Pappe, Omar Barghouti, Ramzy Baroud and Archbishop Attallah Hannah, alongside other internationally acclaimed artists, writers, academics and grassroots activists.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781849647809 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 03/06/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 360 KB |
About the Author
Rich Wiles is a photographic artist, writer and activist, whose work has been widely exhibited internationally. His books include Behind the Wall (Potomac Books, 2010) and Generation Palestine (Pluto, 2013).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Palestine's Global Battle that Must be Won
Ramzy Baroud
INTRODUCTION: BEIT SAHOUR SHOWS THE WAY
On 19 September 1989, a serene Palestinian town on the outskirts of Bethlehem became grounds for what seemed like a one-sided battle. Hundreds of armoured Israeli military vehicles, and thousands of soldiers stormed the small town of Beit Sahour. Several military helicopters observed the fear-provoking scene from above, helping the numerous military men below coordinate their movement. On the other side, in this once restful, largely Christian-Palestinian town, residents remained home. No fighters in military fatigues awaited the arrival of the tanks at street corners. No guns. Not a semblance of armed resistance. But in Beit Sahour, true popular resistance was afoot. Indeed, Beit Sahour in 1989 was a focal point of collective action and boycott. It was a war without guns, like most of the activities carried out by rebelling Palestinians during the First Palestinian Intifada, the uprising that began in 1987. But Beit Sahour took the strategy of civil disobedience – refusing to pay taxes, boycotting the Israeli occupation and all of its institutions – to a whole new level, reminiscent of the legendary Palestinian strike of 1936. The Israeli mission in Beit Sahour on that day was aimed at forcing Palestinians to pay taxes, as hundreds of tax collectors were part of the military raid. Not only was there taxation with no representation, but the money exacted from occupied Palestinians financed the very military apparatus that tightened the noose around the neck of a beleaguered and oppressed population. The Israeli government's response to this seemingly intolerable act was 'the biggest taxation raid in recent history'.
The story of Beit Sahour, of course, didn't start on 19 September, but was a culmination of two overlapping histories, one concerning the First Intifada, and the other falls within a wider context of a well-rooted history of popular resistance that spans several generations. Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's defence minister at the time, wanted to teach the Beit Sahourians a lesson, thus the exaggerated military crackdown and awesome show of force. Obviously, the message was meant to reverberate beyond Beit Sahour to reach every town, refugee camp and village throughout the Occupied Territory, which were all engaged in various forms of boycott and civil disobedience. Indeed, the events that took place in Beit Sahour were a microcosm of a much larger political milieu. Both parties – the Israeli military and the Palestinians – behaved in ways that also corresponded to the same historical imperatives:
The military and tax officers started exploring the possibilities for raiding Beit Sahour. The first waves started during June. They arrested groups of old people, six, seven or ten at a time, keeping them at detention centers, trying to figure out what the reaction of Beit Sahour would be, and also trying to make a penetration through these groups. On the other side, a perfect system of support was created in Beit Sahour, by which masses were visiting and comforting and showing solidarity to families of all those who were detained. At the same time, all those who were released were also visited and supported. Popular and neighborhood committees were in charge of all the arrangements. It was twenty-four-hour continuous work under severe conditions imposed by the military, for anyone who was identified as being active was risking administrative detention or even imprisonment of up to ten years (as Yitzhak Rabin declared).
When all else failed, the military was summoned, occupation forces moved in en masse, and tax collectors worked their magic, confiscating all that they could seize. Many families were left with nothing, literally. Most of the confiscated furniture and other personal belongings were sold at auctions inside Israel. The small town fell under a 45 day military curfew, starting on the night of 21 September. Hundreds of Beit Sahour's residents were taken to military camps and many remained in prison under various pretexts. The Israeli military may have thought it had won a decisive battle, but on that day a star near Bethlehem shone in the night sky of Palestine, connecting past and present, inspiring hope that people, despite the many years of military occupation, still had much power, enough for the steadfast residents of a small town to vex the leaders of Israel's political and military establishments.
The events in Beit Sahour, and the non-violent civil-disobedience campaign that defined the Intifada as a whole was not a historical anomaly, but consistent with a reality that seemed to be the most common thread in Palestinian revolts – first against British colonialism and ever-growing Zionist immigration prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948, and the successive popular revolts that followed. Within both the First Intifada (1987), and the First Revolution (1936), strategies of boycott in various guises figured prominently amongst myriad forms of resistance. Today's Palestinian-led movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel is often said to be modelled on the Anti-Apartheid Movement boycott campaigns, and in the international context that is certainly a valid reference, but the use of the boycott strategy also has indigenous roots within Palestine's history of resistance against oppression.
THE FIRST REVOLUTION
Jewish immigration to Palestine began gathering pace in the late nineteenth century, and what was initially perceived to be innocent immigration – whether prompted by religious callings or induced by the continued persecution of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe or the pogroms of Russia – had morphed into a multifaceted colonial scheme, with intense diplomacy and fervent military build-up. Much had changed since the first wave of Zionist immigrants arrived in 1882, to populate, among other communities, the first Zionist colony established five years earlier. Palestinians, based mostly in urban centres, were beginning to warn that the Jewish immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not the typical seekers of religious salvation and escapees of oppression. They were part of a Zionist programme to conquer Palestine, all of it, and displace its people.
In 1896, Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew, inspired a wider following for the Zionist colonial programme with his book Der Judenstaat (plausibly translated to 'The Jewish State'). The book didn't merely sketch ideas concerning the founding of a Zionist homeland, but it also represented a blueprint for implementing them. A year later, the First Zionist Congress was convened at the behest of Herzl, in Basel, Switzerland, forming the World Zionist Organization (WZO). The WZO took on the task of incessant diplomacy and quickly branched off to establish other units, funds and institutions, one of which was the Jewish National Fund. Established in 1901, the London-based fund was entrusted with acquiring Palestinian lands for Jewish-only use, to be tended by Jewish-only labour. Between 1880 and 1914, thirty Zionist colonies were established in Palestine, and the Jewish population there numbered about eighty thousand, mostly European nationals. This decidedly colonial project was framed within a greater imperialist project involving world powers. The secret treaty of May 1916, known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, between Britain, France and Russia determined the fate of Palestine as a largely internationalised territory. Worse, the secret formal letter of November 1917 that laid out British foreign policy by Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, to a leading British Zionist, Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild promised Palestine as a national home for the Jews. What was to be the future of the Palestinians, who were increasingly referred to as the 'non-Jewish' residents of Palestine?
The shared anxiety caused by Balfour's letter – known as the Balfour Declaration – and a growing awareness of the colonial project that was underway began inspiring the collective resistance of Palestinians, whose non-violent civil disobedience campaign at the time was most progressive in its design and outreach, even by today's standards. The Arab response to the letter was highly political and well structured. The political aspect of that popular resistance was channelled through the Palestine Arab congresses in the years 1919–23. In conjunction with heightened political organisation, peaceful mass protests were held to underscore the unity between the political elite and Palestinian society. Notable amongst these early marches were the political rallies of 27 February and 8 March 1920 and various acts of civil disobedience on 11 March, which included 'holding unsanctioned public protests in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa, in addition to closing their shops and submitting petitions to British authorities'.
Despite the eruption of violence on several occasions, including the bloody 1 May 1920 clash which resulted in the killing of 48 Arabs and 47 Jews, the overall resistance campaign remained inclusive, popular, non-violent and politically coordinated with representatives from Palestinian communities throughout the country:
Palestinians directed their resistance towards the British through the simplest and most basic non-violent methods of protest and persuasion: formal statements, declarations, petitions, manifestos, assemblies, delegations, processions, marches and motorcades. Arabs held street demonstrations, organized local strikes, sent delegations to London, organized support from Muslims in Mecca, and passed resolutions rejecting a Jewish homeland, opposing Jewish immigration and calling for the establishment of their representatives in the government. In addition to these protest and persuasions techniques, Palestinians utilized methods of noncooperation, including withdrawal from political systems and elections, general strikes, boycotts, tax withholdings and civil disobedience.
Soon, Palestinian leaders began realising the nature of the daunting struggle ahead. Violent Zionist provocations and harsh British reprisals to Palestinian resistance seemed designed to demoralise the public. This called for a dual campaign, which defined the early 1930s. Regional and international efforts were now combined by an inward strategy aimed at political organisation and awareness campaigns that would engage Palestinians everywhere, even in the smallest of villages. But the growth of a collective Palestinian consciousness was met with intensifying Zionist immigration and military development. In 1933, 30,000 Jewish immigrants flocked to Palestine, a number that would reach 42,000 in 1934 and 61,000 in 1935. These were also the years of the rise of Nazi power in Germany, which no doubt played a role in convincing even greater numbers of Jews to follow the Zionist directive.
Now that British designs were no longer a subject for debate, and politicisation and organisation of Palestinian society had reached the point of saturation, Palestine was to experience its first open and collective rebellion against the Zionist colonial drive and the British role in espousing it and labouring to ensure its success. In April 1936, all five Palestinian political parties collaborated under the umbrella of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. One of the AHC's first decisions was the hurried assembly of National Committees throughout Palestine. In May, al-Husseini summoned the first conference of the National Committees in Jerusalem, which collectively declared a general strike on 8 May 1936. Employing means of civil disobedience – as exemplified in its cry of 'No Taxation without Representation' – the 1936 uprising aimed to send a stern message to the British government that Palestinians were nationally unified and capable of acting as an assertive, self-assured society in ways that could indeed disturb the matrix of British mandatory rule over the country.
The first six months of the uprising, which lasted under different manifestations and phases for three years, was characterised at the outset by a widely observed general strike that was essentially a boycott of working within and supporting the structures and mechanisms of British mandatory rule. The strike lasted from May until October 1936. Palestine was simply shut down in response to the call of the National Committees and al-Husseini, a type of action that irked the British who saw the 'non-Jewish residents of Palestine' as deplorable, troublesome peasants with an untamed leadership that was, unlike the Jewish leadership, incapable of articulating a national programme, and most certainly incompetent of acting upon one, if such a programme were ever devised. Within a few years, Palestinians managed to challenge the conventional wisdom of the British, whose narrow Orientalist grasp on the Arabs as lesser beings with lesser or no rights – a model to be borrowed and amply applied by the Zionists, and official Israeli policies later on – left them unqualified to ponder any other response to a legitimate uprising but coercive measures.
Starting in the 1920s and extending to the late 1940s, Palestinians and their leaders resorted to various forms of resistance, beginning with political mobilisation, and ending with mostly ineffective (although with some notable exceptions) military attempts at defending Palestinian towns and villages as they fell before the Zionist military machine, backed or facilitated by colonial Britain. But within that period, Palestinian society was made to discover its own inner strength as a collective, employing strategies that predicated on the boycott of British and Zionist institutions.
LEGACY OF REVOLUTION
Combined British military might, and Zionist military and political advantage were enough to conquer Palestine during the events that lead to and included al-Nakba, or 'the Catastrophe' of 1948. Historic Palestine was depopulated of most of its non-Jewish inhabitants, who were expelled to many destinations. But the legacy of the collective struggle of the 1920s and '30s was to manifest itself repeatedly throughout the years and decades that followed.
The First Palestinian Intifada of 1987 is often juxtaposed with the popular and collective boycott and civil disobedience that defined the 1930s in general, and the 1936 revolt in particular. The Intifada was a collective retort to the 1967 Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For two decades, the Occupied Territory was placed under the iron-fist governance of the so-called Israeli Civilian Administration, that is, the military. Palestinians in the Occupied Territory attempted to organise boycotts of the military administration, with varied degrees of success, throughout this period. General strikes were held, and strikers were routinely punished through imprisonments and fines. The Intifada, however, was a call for a collective popular response to the occupation which finally inspired and thus involved the whole Palestinian community.
When on 8 December 1987, thousands took to the streets of Jabaliya refugee camp, the Gaza Strip's largest and poorest camp, the timing and the location of their uprising was most fitting, most rational and necessary. It soon spread to include virtually all Palestinian areas and communities. It was as if Palestinians had lost every trace of fear. Collectively, they became most daring at a time when Israel expected them to be most pacified and subservient. And when they rebelled, as has always been the case, they took everyone by surprise.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Generation Palestine"
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Copyright © 2013 Rich Wiles.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements by Rich WilesForeword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Part I: BDS: The Historical Context
1. BDS: Palestine's Global Battle that must be Won by Ramzy Baroud
2. Boycott, Bricks and the Four Pillars of the South African Struggle by Ronnie Kasrils
3. India's Freedom Struggle and Today's BDS Movement by Prabir Purukayathra and Ayesha Kidwai
4. The US Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement: Lessons and Applications for the Palestinian Liberation Movement by Kali Akuno
Part II: The Palestinian Call for BDS
5. The 2005 Palestinian Call for BDS - Official Text of the BDS Call
6. Why Palestinians Called for BDS by Raji Sorani
7. Self-Determination and the Right of Return: Interlinked and Indivisible Rights by Nidal al-Azza 8. Levelling the Scales by Force: Thoughts on Normalisation by Rifat Odeh Kassis
9. International Law, Apartheid, and Israeli Responses to BDS by Richard Falk
10. Towards a Just and Lasting Peace: Kairos Palestine and the Lead of the Palestinian Church by Archbishop Atallah Hanna
Part III: Economy, Academia and Culture
11. BDS: Perspectives of an Israeli Economist by Shir Hever
12. Colonialism, the Peace Process and the Academic Boycott - Ilan Pappe
13. Faithless in the Holy Land: A Musician's Journey to Boycott by Dave Randall
14. Our People by Iain Banks
15. Why We Back the Boycott Campaign by Ken Loach, Paul Laverty and Rebecca O'Brien
Part IV: Activists and Activism
16. Derailing Veoli by Adri Nieuwhof
17. The Case of the Edinburgh 5 by Mick Napier
18. Worker to Worker Solidarity: BDS in the Trade Union Movement - Rafeef Ziadeh
19. The Derry versus Raytheon Struggle by Eamonn McCann
20. Israeli Apartheid Week: A Gauge of the Global BDS Campaign by Hazem Jamjoum
Part V: BDS - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
21. Palestine's South Africa Moment has Finally Arrived by Omar Barghouti
Notes on Contributors
Index