Saturday 31 March 2018

The Good Friday Massacre, Palestine and Anti-Colonial Struggle



Comrades, you’re listening to Back in the USSR here on 93.3 FM CFRU, I am Siegfried.  And I stand by what I said in last week’s show that anti-colonialism remains the chief political task of our time.  Last week I was talking about Burnaby B.C. and the hundreds of people who were willing to get arrested to stop the construction of the Kinder-Morgan pipeline on stolen native land.  I talked about the solidarity march we had in Guelph one week ago, led by Fossil Free Guelph, where we took the street, marched on the MP’s office and made our voices heard while making the point, loud and clear, that environmental justice and the struggle against settler-colonialism in this country are not separate issues.  They’re hand in hand.  Because whose land is threatened when pipelines leak? Whose children are poisoned when tarsands bitumen gets into the aquifers and watersheds? It’s overwhelmingly the indigenous peoples of this land who suffer the consequences of fossil fuel expansion and the drive for profit.  It’s the same thing in countries like Ecuador, where indigenous people are still living with the mess that Chevron created in its relentless pursuit of oil profits in the Ecuadorian rain-forest and suffering skyrocketing rates of cancer while the oil giant continues to refuse to pay one penny in compensation.  It’s the same thing in Alaska, where indigenous people are still living with the aftereffects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill almost three decades later, which practically destroyed the marine ecosystems that they relied on for their livelihoods.  It’s the same thing in Chile where the indigenous Mapuche people are facing fascist police violence for protecting their land in the face of multi-national mining conglomerates.  It’s the same thing in India and Brazil where hundreds of thousands of indigenous people are forcibly uprooted and driven from their ancestral lands through military force to make way for power dam construction.  It’s the same thing in Australia where the government actually allowed Britain to test its nuclear weapons on indigenous land in the 1950s.  And it’s the same thing in the United States where the lands of the Navajo people remain contaminated by the radio-active effects of uranium mining and where Black American communities are disproportionately situated alongside toxic waste dumps and highly polluting industrial sites, not unlike the indigenous people who live in Sarnia’s “Chemical Valley” in Ontario.  The struggle against colonialism and the struggle against capitalist environmental devastation are one and the same and this is extremely important to understand. 

Last week I also talked about Syria, where the United States is holding a full 25% of the country, including 90% of its oil reserves, under military occupation.  I talked about countries like Libya, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, where, just like in Syria, the toxic effects of the American imperial warmachine are being felt, from cancer-causing depleted uranium to a whole host of other leftovers that have the effect of poisoning the air, the water and the soil.  I talked about Vietnam, where the toxic effects of Dow Chemical’s Agent Orange defoliant are being felt to this day and where the ecosystem remains tainted by the byproducts of an imperialist war after almost fifty years.  But you can see it in Puerto Rico too, a U.S. colony, where for decades the US Navy poisoned Vieques Island with toxic munitions testing and were only forced to stop by a massive protest movement among local people who had suffered birth defects and runaway cancer rates.

So when the Apartheid state of Israeli besieges and blockades two million Palestinians in the world’s largest open-air prison, forces them to live in squalor, and then shoots them down when they demonstrate for freedom, none of this should come as a surprise.
 

Yesterday, Good Friday March 30 2018, was when the colonized Palestinian people marked Land Day, a commemoration day remembering the murder of six unarmed Palestinians by Israeli forces during the 1976 strikes to prevent the seizing of land for illegal settlements.

To mark Land Day, Gazans organized a series of peaceful protests along the border with Israel.  The protests are scheduled to last six weeks and will end on the Nakba commemoration on May 15, a day after the anniversary of Israel's official declaration of independence, remembered by Palestinians as the catastrophe day in which they were expelled from their land by an invading army.

The Israeli army was prepared well in advance of yesterday’s demonstrations and had signaled its willingness to use lethal force against unarmed people.

In a series of interviews published Wednesday, just two days before the massacre, IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot said that the Palestinian Land Day protests in Gaza would be met by one hundred snipers and other “special units”. “If there will be a danger to lives, we will authorize live fire,” he declared. “The orders are to use a lot of force.”

The occupation authorities decided to double the security forces presence on the Gazan border to safeguard the no-go zone fearing a mass break out into Israel, and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) started shooting live ammunition at demonstrators.

Israel's foreign ministry declared the protests to be a "deliberate attempt to provoke a confrontation with Israel," ignoring the rights of Gazans to protests an illegal occupation and continuous harassment of indigenous people.

Early on Friday, Gazan farmer Omar Waheed Abu Samour was killed by a tank shell while working in his own land near Khan Younis, even before the demonstrations started, showing the occupation forces' true intentions.

When the demonstrations began and thousands of unarmed Palestinians assembled to assert their rights under international law, it did not take long for the Israeli occupation troops to start shooting.   

True to form, the New York Times on Friday tried to frame the bloodshed as being the result of “clashes” between opposing sides, when in reality it was a one-sided massacre with heavily armed soldiers pitted against unarmed civilians in what became a gigantic shooting gallery.

Good Friday 2018 was to be “the bloodiest day in Gaza since Israel’s 2014 offensive,” according to the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.  At the end of the day, Palestine’s Health Ministry reported 15 dead and 1,400 injured, 773 of which were hit by live ammunition.  Gaza hospitals, running low on blood and overstretched by the huge number of wounded, were sent reeling after the massacre.

The Israeli army posted a statement on Twitter on Saturday apparently accepting full responsibility for the killings a day earlier of 15 Palestinians as thousands took part in the Great March of Return in Gaza.

The army then quickly deleted the admission – as more evidence of war crimes by its soldiers came to light – but not before a copy was made by the human rights group B’Tselem.

The now-deleted tweet from the official @IDFSpokesperson account stated: “Yesterday we saw 30,000 people; we arrived prepared and with precise reinforcements. Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.”

The UN has belatedly called for an independent inquiry, but it must be pointed out that last year, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, acting under US pressure, suppressed a report that condemned Israel’s colonial policies against Palestinians as an example of Apartheid.

For its part, The EU acknowledged that Israel used “live ammunition during clashes and demonstrations” but endorsed Israel’s “right to protect its borders” with “proportionate” force.
The PLO called for a day of national mourning in the wake of the shootings. Funeral services began with the burial of the 30-year-old Sari Abu Odeh on Friday evening.

According to Al Jazeera, other fatal victims include Mohammed Najjar (25), Mahmoud Muammar (38), Mohammed Abu Omar (22), Ahmed Odeh (19), Jihad Freneh (33), Mahmoud Saadi Rahmi (33), Abdelfattah Abdelnabi (22), Ibrahim Abu Shaar (20), Abdelqader al-Hawajiri, Sari Abu Odeh, Hamdan Abu Amsheh, Jihad Abu Jamous, Bader al-Sabbagh and Naji Abu Hjair.

Palestinian writer Shahd Abusalama stated, “There is no justification for suppressing people whose right to resist colonial oppression is guaranteed by international law. The fact that Israel has been able to continue this brutal violence against Palestinians with total impunity for 70 years reflects a deep-seated moral problem in our world”.  My response would be that deep-seated moral problems always arise from material conditions of oppression and exploitation.  The struggle against colonialism remains the key political struggle of our time and this is true all around the world.


You're listening to Back in the USSR.  The clip I'm about to play discusses something that is very poorly understood by Westerners: the right of a colonized people to armed self-defense.  This clip is of Jewish American scholar and Palestine solidarity activist Norman Finkelstein talking recently on the Real News about his latest book, which is about the situation in Gaza.  As you'll see, he argues that armed struggle is not effective but that the Palestinians, like any colonized people have the absolute right to use it under international law, in order to fight for their own self-determination.  The counter-argument that is put to him asks why the Palestinians in Gaza don't just engage in a mass campaign of civil disobedience instead.  Well, the massacre that happened on Good Friday was the answer to that counter-argument.  When the Israeli Apartheid state is willing to deploy 100 snipers against unarmed demonstrators engaging in an actual campaign of mass civil disobedience, shoot 15 people dead and injure a further 773 people with live ammunition, many of them critically, we're most certainly in a situation where armed self-defense is more than justified on the part of Palestinians.  In truth it's one of the few ways they have left of resisting a colonial occupation that only gets more brutal with each passing year.  Keep that in mind while you're listening to this interview.

(Norman Finkelstein on Gaza's right to armed self-defense)

(Bruce Cockburn - If I Had a Rocket Launcher)

You're listening to Back in the USSR.  One of the anti-colonial struggles that me and others have talked about a lot on this show is the black liberation struggle in America, and me and Brendan Campisi in particular have spoken a lot about the role that international solidarity played in that movement and how groups like the Black Panthers were genuinely inspired by the many anti-colonial struggles happening around the world in the 1960s and 70s, as well as by revolutionary governments that had emerged out of anti-colonial struggles, such as that of Cuba, China, Vietnam, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Algeria and others.   

 There was a real anti-colonial solidarity in these movements that transcended frontiers and was truly internationalist in form and content.  It is this international movement against colonialism that is for the most part missing from today's world, and given how interconnected these struggles are, and how global the impact of imperialism and capitalist exploitation are, it is essential that a new movement be created.  Eddie Conway of the Black Panther Party recently spoke on the Real News about how he and his comrades were affected by the Chinese Revolution in particular.

 (Siegfried Barazov - Lenin Poem)



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