Lowkey - "Long Live Palestine"
You’re listening to Back in the USSR here on 93.3 FM
CFRU, I am Siegfried. I was absent from
Guelph last week, visiting a good friend of mine in Ottawa-Hull so I didn’t do
a live show last week, as you might have noticed, but before I left I said that
I’d be addressing a particularly pressing issue on the show when I got
back. A subject that I have
unfortunately not devoted enough attention to this year, and that is the
subject of Palestine and the Palestinian liberation struggle in the face of
Israeli settler-colonialism and Apartheid.
This issue was recently thrust back into center stage with the recent
decision of the Trump administration to move the US embassy in Israel from
Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, thus recognizing Israel’s claim to the entire city and
denying the aspirations of the Palestinians who have long sought an independent
viable state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
To give some historical background: During the 1947-48
ethnic cleansing campaign through which the Israeli state was created, Israel
took control of West Jerusalem. Twenty years later, East Jerusalem was occupied
and, in 1973, the Israeli government mandated a 73 to 26 percent demographic
advantage for Jewish residents.
Since that time, 280,000 settlers have illegally moved
in, and Israel has stripped 14,500 Palestinians of their residency rights, made
it prohibitively difficult for the remaining Palestinians to get building
permits, enacted discriminatory budgets, and provided municipal services
unequally. In short, Apartheid was
introduced to East Jerusalem.
However, the city, long the center of Palestinian life,
does not fall under Israeli sovereignty according to international law.
In this respect, Trump’s decision, in the words of the Palestine Centre for
Human Rights, amounts to “recognition from those who do not own to those who do
not deserve.” In the words of the Palestinian Youth Movement, the decision is
“tantamount to spitting in the face of our people and decades-long
anti-colonial struggle and even constitute[s] a form of colonial incitement,” a
“symbolic coup-de-grace towards Palestinian assertion of our rightful
self-determination and agency over our shared social, cultural and historical
heritage.”
Likewise, the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq
noted that the “recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel violates the
inalienable Palestinian right to self-determination” while the Al-Mezan Center
for Human Rights points out that it is a “blatant breach of UN resolutions 476,
478, and 181 and undermines the rights of the Palestinian people.”
Palestinians have launched mass protests in response
to Trump’s blatant assault on their national rights. Israeli forces have bombed Gaza, killing two,
and wounding approximately one hundred Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The US government and the Israeli government
remain defiant of international law and worldwide condemnation and are moving
ahead with their clear agenda of further colonization and displacement of the
Palestinian people.
As my friend Greg Shupak, who recently published a
book about the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, has pointed out,
this move by the US to recognize Israeli occupation of Jerusalem is nothing
new. It pre-dates the Trump administration
by decades in fact, and has overwhelming bi-partisan support in the US Congress
and Senate. Democrats have actually been
pushing for this for the past twenty-five years.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both came into office
saying they supported moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, and, in 1995,
Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which mandated that the United
States move its embassy to Jerusalem. Thirty-two Democrats, including Joe Biden
and John Kerry, cosponsored the bill.
In June 2017, the Senate voted 90-0 to reaffirm the 1995
law and to call on the president to follow its provisions. Prominent Democrats like Cory Booker, Ben
Cardin, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Chuck Schumer co-sponsored the resolution and
Bernie Sanders voted in favor of it. Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in
the Senate, actually criticized the president in October for his indecision
over the issue and now claims he advised Trump to recognize Jerusalem as
Israel’s “undivided capital.”
In this regard, the Jerusalem declaration represents
another instance of bipartisan support for Israeli settler colonialism.
The US government provided significant support to
Israel since its creation, but the 1967 Six-Day War consecrated the
relationship. Since then, Israel has served as, in Greg Shupak’s words. “an
invaluable proxy for the American state, providing mercenary services against
Arab nationalism, Middle Eastern leftists, Soviet allies in the region and
beyond, and any force considered a barrier to American capital.”
Israel has also become a lucrative arms market for US
firms, and the ruling classes of both nations are so deeply enmeshed in sectors
such as technology and security that it’s difficult to tell where one ends and
the other begins. Israel could not have
committed its innumerable crimes against the Palestinians and others in the
region at any approaching the scale that it has without the United States
underwriting it financially, military, and politically.
The so-called “peace process” is part of this
relationship. At the end of the Cold
War, American and Israeli capitalists and politicians decided it would be
within their best interests to integrate Israel into the regional order in the
Middle East. For that to happen, they would have to put the Palestinian
question to rest and either eliminate or co-opt the anti-colonial resistance
movement among the Palestinian people.
The 1993 Oslo Accords, negotiated in the wake of the
Soviet Union’s collapse, were the culmination of this effort. Denied their strongest ally, the Palestinian
Liberation Organization, similar to the ANC in South Africa in the same period,
was forced to make painful compromises. The
agreement put off the issues of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees’ right of
return to an unspecified date and gave Palestinians only limited sovereignty over
Gaza and the West Bank.
Oslo assigned the administration of these territories
to the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was itself created as a result of the
accords. Mandy Turner accurately
describes the PA as “a non-sovereign entity whose existence is subject to
continuous negotiations with its occupier, Israel,” as well as with
international donors unaccountable to Palestinians, making it “party to a
complex process of co-optation while Israel continued its colonial practices.”
The PA has regularly fulfilled both Israeli and American wishes, even
collaborating with Israeli security forces in suppressing Palestinian
resistance to the occupation.
Oslo did nothing to halt the Israeli settler colonial
project. Since 1993, the number of
Israelis illegally settled in the West Bank — including East Jerusalem — has
more than doubled. Gaza has been effectively reduced to the world’s largest
open-air prison, where Israel has slaughters thousands, while Palestinian
citizens of Israel continue to face systemic discrimination. The violence
inherent in all these colonial relationships underlines the fact that “peace”
is a misnomer: better to think of the process as one more phase of the 21st
Century equivalent of the American Frontier, with the Palestinians playing the
role of Native Americans on the receiving end of ultimately genocidal policies.
As Rashid Khalidi documents in his book Brokers of
Deceit, the United States has not stayed neutral in talks between Palestine and
Israel but has acted, in his words, as “Israel’s lawyer.” US politicians have acted
in accordance with “domestic politics and the politics of big oil and the big
arms industry, all of which favored maintenance of a status quo predicated on
preventing a just and peaceful resolution” in Palestine-Israel.
From this perspective, Trump’s assertion that
Jerusalem is the capital of Israel can only be understood as the logical
conclusion of the so-called “peace process”.
Greg Shupak’s latest article "The Jerusalem Gambit", which my script for this show is mainly based on, appeared in Jacobin magazine.
Here's a report by the Real News Network on the UN's motion condemning
Trump's move and the significance it has:
Phyllis Bennis (TRNN 2017) - "UN Defies Trump Threats in Jerusalem Vote"
TRNN (2017) - Palestinians resist Israel and its US enabler
MDC - Who's the terrorist now? (song from second
intifada)
Abby Martin (Breaking the Set 2015) - Apartheid state gives impunity for IDF soldiers
The Wolfe Tones - Plastic Bullets
Shir Hever (TRNN 2015) - Manifestations of Israeli Apartheid
Saree Makdisi (FORA 2015) - Out of Sight Out of Mind, Israel trying to erase Palestinians
Lowkey - Soundtrack to the Struggle
Abby Martin (Breaking the Set 2015) - How the term human shield is used to justify state sponsored massacres
Michael Parenti (Rambo and the Swarthy Hordes 1989) -
On racist imperialist propaganda
Lee Reed - Bazooka Rap
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