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By Maung Zarni

“Israel cannot build peace on genocide. We have got to find more humane ways to solve our problems.”

As the host of FORSEA Dialogue Series on Democratic Struggles established to educate grassroots activists keen to learn about contemporary struggles for peace, justice and liberty, the exiled Burmese dissident and genocide scholar Dr Maung Zarni interviewed the 1976 Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire. She is renowned worldwide for her grassroots campaign to build “peace by peace” in her native Northern Irish city of Belfast.

In the 30-minutes interview, the Northern Irish activist shared her grounded perspectives on a wide raging subject of historical and contemporary importance.

Her views are grounded because she has done her homework very well and because she has personal knowledge of things in which she has publicly weighed in on, with her impeccable moral voice rooted in her Christian upbringing whereby devotees are taught “God is love”.

She talked passionately about the devastating US-led sanctions against Iraq where she witnessed children lying in hospital beds waiting to die because of the lack of medicine.

Importantly, she recounted her conversation with Saddam Hussein’s Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, who told her, “Iraq was doing everything to make peace with the United States.” The US Secretary of State James Baker openly threatened Saddam’s representative to the world, “we will bomb Iraq if you don’t do what we tell you to do.”

The then US President George W. Bush was quoted in USA Today as having characterized Aziz, Number 12 on US’s Wanted List, someone who “doesn’t know how to tell truth”. Aziz was Number 12 on US’s Wanted List drawn up before the second and illegal invasion of Iraq in 2002, and he was captured in Bagdad and questioned in captivity by US interrogators.

For Aziz was unable to tell his American captors whereabouts of Saddam’s non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

Here is USA Today reportage on 3 May 2003: “President Bush expressed unshakable confidence Saturday about finding banned weapons in Iraq and complained that Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein’s closest deputies, is not cooperating with U.S. forces who have him in custody. Bush said the deputy prime minister, the most visible face of the former Iraqi government other than Hussein, ‘still doesn’t know how to tell the truth.”

In Palestine, she witnessed the horrific human conditions of Gazans who have been subjected to Israel’s 16-years-long blockade of Gaza, which former of Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet and retired admiral Ami Ayalon, “an open-air prison”.

Israeli security forces deported her from the Occupied Palestine three times as she and her team of international peace activists attempted to break the Israeli blockade by, setting sail on Freedom Flotilla.

Maguire displayed a razor-sharp moral clarity when she said, “Zionism is just evil,” with her spot-on analysis of what the Zionist project of creating the Jewish Homeland by seizing, with relentless and sustained violence, the land that belongs to the Arabs indigenous to Palestine, or the Palestinian people. She added, “Israel only wants the land, but not the Palestinian people.”

Many “Jews with conscience” would agree with Maguire’s blunt take on political Zionism, the founding ideology of Israel. Robert Lemkin, an Oxford-based acclaimed filmmaker, who contributed a solo piano performance in support of Free Palestine on FORSEA’s 5-hour YouTube LIVE event  stated that his late mother who was in charge of Britain’s WWII-era Kindertransport initiative for West London Synagogue, was “a lifelong opponent of political Zionism”. Her uncle and entire family in the Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia were “liquidated” at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

More recently, in her no-hold-barred analysis entitled “A Jewish Plea: Stand Up to Israel’s Act of Genocide” (Boston Review, 13 October, 2023), Stephanie Fox, Executive Director of the Jewish Voice for Peace, which is the world’s largest organization of “Jews with conscience” opposing the Zionist Israel as the apartheid colonizer, elaborated on the Zionism and its deadly project for the Palestinians. In Fox’s own words:

“Since the founding of the state of Israel, the Zionist movement has positioned the domination and oppression of Palestinians and the colonization of Palestinian land as the answer to the very real question of Jewish safety. They have taken the very real pain and trauma that we as Jews carry and sharpened it into a deadly weapon. We desperately must understand that what is happening is not a cycle of violence. It is a system of violence. Everyone is caught in its teeth.

It is the system of settler colonial apartheid that the Israeli government has built and maintained over the past seventy-five years—with billions upon billions of dollars from the United States. Settler colonialism is a structure, a language, a culture, an ideology—an interlocking, totalizing, system of violence. It is a machine of war and dehumanization against Palestinians. It is this system that imperils the lives and safety of everyone.”

In his latest essay “All that remains” (Prospect, Jan/Feb. 2024), the Baghdad-born Israeli Jewish historian at Oxford University offered a new history of Israel’s founding in 1948, and what it entails for the native Palestinians:

From whatever perspective one chooses to view it, the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. Three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. Israelis calls it “The War of Independence”; Palestinians call it the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The most horrific event in the suffering-soaked history of the Jews was the Holocaust. In the history of the Palestinian people, the most traumatic event is the Nakba, which is not in fact a one-off event but the ongoing process of the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland that continues to this day, in the unspeakable horrors being visited by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on Gaza.

Maguire’s passions for peace and justice have also taken her to Bangladesh in February 2018 where she and two other members of the Nobel Women’s Initiatives – met with Rohingya survivors of Myanmar genocide in one of the world’s largest refugee camps in Cox’s Bazaar, and listened to their tales of mass rape and slaughter at the hands of Myanmar security forces. The trio of distinguished activist visitors – Iran’s Shirin Ebadi, Yemen’s Tawakkol Karman, and Maguire – met with the Prime Minister Sheik Hasina and pressed the latter to take Myanmar to the International Court of Justice, the United Nation’s court of member states, for breaching the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, of which both Myanmar and Bangladesh are “state parties”, or signatory states.

A few years later in 2020, Gambia invoked the above-mentioned binding inter-state treaty against Myanmar. Infamously, Aung San Suu Kyi, Maguire’s sister Nobel Peace laureate, showed up at the world’s court “on the side of genocide perpetrators”.

Maguire said, “I knew her husband (the late Michael Aris) very well. On many occasions, I campaigned with him for his wife’s release during her house arrests.” Maguire found Aung San Suu Kyi’s stance “desperately disappointing”.

The trip to Cox’s Bazaar was not her first attempts to support the wretched of Myanmar, or the Burmese dissidents opposing through non-violence the country’s genocidal military dictatorship. Two decades earlier Maguire joined a group of Nobel Peace laureates including the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Rigoberta Menchu in Thailand. They wanted to shine a spotlight on Myanmar military’s egregious rights violation and violent repression against different ethnic communities of Myanmar, besides a political persecution of a fellow Nobel laureate. They travelled from Bangkok to the Thai-Burmese borders which was home to 250,000 Karen war refugees forcibly displaced by Myanmar military’s scorch-earth operations.

The Northern Irish peace campaigner is not naively preaching peace in a world run by deeply immoral forces and actors. Her activism is anchored in a structural analysis that connects political states, governments and corporations. She sees how politicians and government officials “sell their own people” down the river to multinational corporations. Undaunted, she talked about how a small group of dedicated grassroots campaigners could permanently shut down a US arms manufacturer Raytheon in Derry, 90-minutes’ drive from Belfast.

To fully understand Maguire’s faith in the power of people working together for common good, a close look at her own personal background.

Born in 1944, Maguire grew up as an ordinary citizen in the working-class Catholic neighbourhood in West Belfast which had long suffered the sectarian violence between the Protestant loyalists to the UK and the Catholic Irish.

One big tragic event turned her into a relentless campaigner for peace and reconciliation.

Belfast in those days was, effectively, a British army garrison town, trying to keep order on the streets where the Irish Republican Army and the armed Unionist organization Ulster Defence Association battled each other. [According to a BBC documentary series, London was hardly a neutral party; but rather, it infiltrated both organizations, which it gave a list of targets from respective movements to, well, eliminate one another.]

In August 1976, Maguire lost three family members; niece Joanne (8), and nephews Andrew (6 weeks) and John (2½) – in a roadside accident in Belfast caused by an out-of-control car driven by a Provisional Irish Republican Army member. Andrew was in a pram when the car hit the family.

A British trooper sniped the man behind the wheel, whom they suspected to be an IRA. The driver was instantly killed by the sniper fire, and the driver-less car consequently swerved, hit and killed the three children on the spot, while their mother Anne, Maguire’s sister, was left “dangerously ill” and subsequently succumbed to death.

Maguire subsequently teamed up with two fellow local residents – Betty Williams, an eyewitness to the fatal accident, and Ciaran McKeown, a young journalist – to start organizing rallies and marches demanding peace under the banner of Peace People. The Norwegian Nobel Committee had recognized Peace People’s movement, and two of the co-founders Maguire and Williams, with the Nobel Peace Prize for 1976.

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, peace has been established in Ireland. The days of “the Troubles,” as the sectarian strife between the Catholic Irish and the pro-British Protestants in the state was referred to, are over. But Mairead has since remained a tireless and principled champion of peace, justice and freedom in national communities similarly marred by decades of violent conflicts, repression, and genocides.

Her passions for “resolving our problems through more humane ways” have led her to embrace a more global outlook which connects her to the wretched of the earth, whatever their names or geography.

No interview with this truly remarkable peace activist would be complete without a mention about Maguire, the person. Guided by her Christian faith, she exudes warmth, humility, and belief in the universal fellowship of humans. At 79, she looked more physically fail than when the FORSEA interview host met her at the bi-annual conference of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA for the first time in October 2015.

But her mind remains razor sharp, and her speech coherent and her arguments for peace as cogent and inspiring as ever. Since Hamas’ attacks of 7 October, one often hears the phrase “Judaeo-Christian Civilization” (presumably vis-à-vis Islamic militancy or “savagery”), from the lips of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel’s high profile supporters including the likes of Alan Dershowitz. In the most perverted way, Western supporters of Israel have hoisted the flag of “(Western) Civilization” while arming, financing and protecting the “one and only Jewish state”, as it has institutionalized the policy of genocidal displacement and destruction of the native population of Palestinian over the last 70-years.

Mairead Maguire sets a high bar for other activists, Nobel Prize winners or not, to “speak truths to power,” no matter the price. Long before Amnesty International advocated for the freedom of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Maguire has championed the cause of Julian Assange twice whom she met at the Ecuadorian Embassy when he was holed up there. Going against the currents, she nominated Assange twice for the Nobel Peace Prize. She said, “Julian Assange is a very brave man.”

And so is Mairead Maguire for typically going against the prevailing elite opinion, as misguided and morally warped it is, about the man who knowingly risked his life to tell the world the evil deeds which the most powerful state on earth has been carrying out, globally, while maintaining its soft power, with a façade of it as “a beacon of freedom, democracy and human rights”.

Unlike the political class and the corporate elite, that reign in the Global North, Maguire was sober, self-reflective and brutally honest when she said, “I feel deeply ashamed that I came from a Western place where we have allowed our governments to kill so many people (around the world).”

… For oil. For Land. For corporate profits. For imperialists’ economic security.

Today’s deeply troubled and violent world desperately needs to hear from anti-imperialist citizens of the world who refuse to be divided along these “civilizational” lines or geopolitical and corporate interests and who dare speak truth to power. Mairead Maguire is one of these voices whose grounded and wise words need to be heeded.

Maung Zarni

“Israel Cannot Build Peace on Genocide” Mairead Maguire

Dr Maung Zarni is a scholar, educator and human rights activist with 30-years of involvement in Burmese political affairs, Zarni has been denounced as an “enemy of the State” for his opposition to the Myanmar genocide.

17 December 2023

Source: forsea.co

By Avi Shlaim

On 7th January 2009, while Operation Cast Lead was in full swing, I wrote an article in the Guardian. “How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe”. This was Israel’s first major assault on the Gaza Strip after its unilateral withdrawal in 2005. Further major military offensives followed in 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022, not counting minor flare-ups and nearly 200 dead during the border protests in 2018 known as the March of Return. By my count, the current war is the sixth serious Israeli assault on Gaza since, and by far the most lethal and destructive. And it also raises the ominous spectre of a second Palestinian Nakba.

The only way to make sense of Israel’s cruel and self-defeating wars in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. From whatever perspective one chooses to view it, the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. Three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. Israelis call it “The War of Independence”; Palestinians call it the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The most horrific event in the suffering-soaked history of the Jews was the Holocaust. In the history of the Palestinian people, the most traumatic event is the Nakba, which is not in fact a one-off event but the ongoing process of the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland that continues to this day, in the unspeakable horrors being visited by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on Gaza.

The United Kingdom was the original sponsor of the Jewish state, going back to the Balfour declaration of 1917. But by 1948, the United States had replaced the UK as the principal backer. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state, although they themselves had enabled and empowered the Zionist takeover of Palestine. The conditions that gave rise to the Nakba were made in Britain. Yet no British government has ever accepted any responsibility for the loss and suffering it brought upon the people of Palestine.

In the period since 1948 the western powers, led by the US, have given Israel massive moral, economic and military support, as well as diplomatic protection. The US has used its veto power in the UN Security Council 46 times to defeat resolutions that were not to Israel’s liking. America also gives Israel around $3.8bn in military aid each year, with more this year to enable Israel to sustain its military offensive in Gaza. The trouble with American support for Israel is that it is not conditional on Israeli respect for Palestinian human rights or international law. As a result, Israel gets away, literally, with murder.

In August 2005, a Likud-led government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pull-out from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,500 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace. But in the year that followed, more than 12,000 settlers moved into the West Bank, consolidating Israeli control, and further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority, but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen as the Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land. This did not stop Israeli spokespersons from making the preposterous claim that by quitting they gave the Gazans a chance to turn the strip into the Singapore of the Middle East.

In December 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, in breach of a six-month ceasefire that Egypt had brokered. This was not a war in the usual sense of the word but a one-sided massacre. For 22 days, the IDF shot, shelled and bombed Hamas targets and at the same time rained death and destruction on the defenceless civilian population. In all 1,417 Gazans were killed, including 313 children, and more than 5,500 wounded. Eighty-three per cent of the casualties were civilians.

War crimes were investigated by an independent fact-finding mission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and headed by Richard Goldstone, a distinguished South African judge who happened to be both a Jew and a Zionist. Goldstone and his team found that Hamas and the IDF had both committed violations of the laws of war. The IDF received much more severe strictures than Hamas, on account of the scale and seriousness of its violations. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups were found guilty of launching rocket and mortar attacks with the deliberate aim of harming Israeli civilians. The Goldstone team investigated 36 incidents involving the IDF. It found 11 incidents in which Israeli soldiers launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal outcomes (in only one cause was there a possible “justifiable military objective”); seven incidents where civilians were shot leaving their homes “waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so”; an attack, executed “directly and intentionally” on a hospital; numerous incidents where ambulances were prevented from attending to the severely injured; several attacks on civilian infrastructure with no military significance, such as flour mills, chicken farms, sewage works and water wells—all part of a campaign to deprive civilians of basic necessities. In the words of the report, much of this extensive damage was “not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”.

In conclusion, the 452-page report noted that while the Israeli government sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of the right to self-defence, “the Mission itself considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”

Under the circumstances, the mission concluded that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.” Goldstone later published an op-ed in the Washington Post, saying that while Hamas had committed war crimes (its rockets were “purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets”), “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel. The other three members of the fact-finding mission said that they stood by the conclusions, which were “made after diligent, independent and objective consideration of the information related to the events within our mandate, and careful assessment of its reliability and credibility.”

Neither Israel nor Hamas was held to account nor made to pay any price for its war crimes. The Israelis resorted to a character assassination of the report’s author rather than engaging with any of its findings. Although it did not lead to any action, the Goldstone report offers a deep insight into the pattern of Israeli behaviour in Gaza in this and all subsequent operations. The absence of sanctions also explains why Israel was able to continue to act with utter impunity and, yet again, to get away literally with murder.

While committing war crimes, Israel claims to be exercising its inherent right to self-defence, and its western cheerleaders repeat this claim parrot-fashion. In this most recent and most devastating attack on Gaza, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, outdid even Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak by stating that Israel’s right to defend itself justified the denial of water, food and fuel to the civilian population. All three leaders persisted for eight weeks in their refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire, contenting themselves with feeble pleas to Israel for pauses in the fighting to allow humanitarian aid to reach the besieged civilian population.

Like most of its claims in this savage war, Israel’s claim that it is simply exercising its right of self-defence is baseless—or at least hotly disputed. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, has noted that under international law this right is only relevant in the case of an armed attack by one state against another state, or if the threat comes from outside. The attack by Hamas, however, was not by a state, nor did it come from outside. It came from an area for which, under international law, Israel is still the occupying power because after its withdrawal it continued to control access to Gaza by land, sea and air. Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies. In this case, therefore, the self-defence clause, Article 51 of the UN Charter, has no relevance. It is the people under occupation who have under international law the right to resist, including the right to armed resistance. And the Palestinian people are in a unique position: they are the only people living under military occupation who are expected to ensure the security of their occupier.

Taken together Israel’s attacks on Gaza reflect a profoundly militaristic outlook, a stubborn refusal to explore avenues for peaceful coexistence, habitual disregard for the laws of war and international humanitarian law, and utter callousness towards enemy civilians. Israeli generals talk about their recurrent military incursions into Gaza as “mowing the grass”. By this they mean weakening Hamas, degrading its military capability and impairing its capacity to govern. This dehumanising metaphor implies a task that must be performed regularly and mechanically and with no end. It also alludes to indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and inflicting the kind of damage on civilian infrastructure that takes several years to repair.

Under this grim rubric, there is no lasting political solution: the next war is always just a matter of time. “Mowing the grass” is a chilling metaphor but it provides another clue to the deeper purpose behind Israel’s steadfast shunning of diplomacy and repeated resort to brute military force on its southern border.

The current Israeli bombardment of Gaza is a response to the Hamas attack on Saturday 7th October, or Black Saturday. This was a game changer. In the past, Hamas has fired rockets on Israel or engaged with Israeli forces inside its territory. On 7th October, Hamas and the more radical group Islamic Jihad used bulldozers to break down the fence round Gaza and went on a killing spree in the neighbouring kibbutzim and settlements, murdering about 300 soldiers and massacring more than 800 civilians, 250 of whom were at a music festival. They also captured 240 hostages, including some military personnel. The brutal, murderous attack on civilians was a war crime, and it was rightly denounced as such by international political leaders.

Whether the Hamas attack was totally unprovoked, as Israel and its friends claim, is another matter. The attack did not happen in a vacuum. The backdrop was 56 years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories—the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times. It constitutes daily violence against the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and a daily violation of their basic human rights.

Hamas is not a terrorist organisation pure and simple, as Israel and its western allies keep insisting. It is a political party with a military wing whose attacks on civilians constitute terrorist acts. Indeed, Hamas is more than a political party with a military wing. It is a mass social movement, a prominent part of the fabric of Palestinian society which reflects its aspiration to freedom and independence. It is the failure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to achieve freedom and statehood that largely explains Hamas’s growing influence.

In 1993 the PLO signed the first Oslo Accord with Israel. Mutual recognition replaced mutual rejection. For the Palestinian national movement this was a historic compromise: it gave up its claim to 78 per cent of Palestine as it existed between 1920 and 1948 under the League of Nations Mandate, in the hope of gaining an independent state in the remaining 22 per cent, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with a capital city in east Jerusalem. But it was not to be. The Oslo Accord turned out to be not a pathway to independence but a trap.

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Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies

Following the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the hardline nationalist party Likud came back to power under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spent the rest of his political career in a relentless and so far successful effort to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. He has never been a partner for peace with any Palestinian faction. His game is to play them off against one another in order to frustrate the Palestinian national struggle. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told his Likud colleagues in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” By weakening and discrediting the moderates in the West Bank, Netanyahu inadvertently assisted the rise of Hamas.

The 1988 Hamas Charter is antisemitic, denies Israel’s right to exist and calls for a unitary Muslim state in the whole of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea” as the slogan goes. But like the PLO before it, Hamas gradually moderated its political programme. Perhaps realising that the suicide bombings it carried out during the Second Intifada were both morally wrong and politically counter-productive, it opted for the parliamentary road to power. In January 2006, Hamas won an absolute majority in an all-Palestine election, in both Gaza and the West Bank, and proceeded to form a government. This was a more moderate, pragmatic government and it offered to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel for 20, 30 or 40 years. Although the Charter was not revised until 2017, in a long series of speeches Hamas leaders indicated that they would accept a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders.

Israel refused to recognise the democratically elected Hamas government and turned down its offer of negotiations. The US and EU followed Israel’s lead and joined it in measures of economic warfare designed to undermine it. The western powers claim to believe in democracy but evidently not when the Palestinian people vote for the “wrong” party. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, if the Israeli and western governments are dissatisfied with the Palestinian people, they should dissolve the people and elect another.

With Saudi help, the rival Palestinian factions managed to reconcile their differences. On 8th February 2007, Fatah and Hamas signed an agreement in Mecca to stop the clashes between their forces in Gaza and to form a government of national unity. They agreed to a system of power-sharing, with independents taking the key posts of foreign affairs, finance and the interior. And they declared their readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel.

Israel did not like this government either and again refused to negotiate. Worse was to follow. Israel and the US secretly plotted with Fatah officials and Egyptian intelligence to undermine the national unity government. They hoped to reverse the results of the parliamentary election by encouraging Fatah to stage a coup to recapture power.

In 2008, a leak of memos from the Israel-Palestinian Authority negotiations showed that Israel and the US armed and trained the security forces of President Mahmoud Abbas with the aim of overthrowing the Hamas government. (Later, the “Palestine Papers”, a cache of 1,600 diplomatic documents leaked to Al Jazeera, would reveal more.) American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Hamas pre-empted a Fatah coup with a violent seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007. At this point the Palestinian national movement became fractured, with Fatah ruling the West Bank and Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip.

Israel responded to the Hamas move by declaring the Gaza Strip a “hostile territory”. It also enacted a series of social, economic and military measures designed to isolate and undermine Hamas. By far the most significant of these measures was the imposition of a blockade. The stated purpose of the blockade was to stop the transfer of weapons and military equipment to Hamas, but it also restricted the flow of food, fuel and medical supplies to the civilian population. One American senator was outraged to discover that pasta was on the list of proscribed items. The boycott applied not only to imports but, perversely, also to some exports from Gaza. Why prevent the export of agricultural products, fish and other non-lethal goods? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the hidden motive was to cripple Gaza’s economy and to inflict poverty, misery, and unemployment on its inhabitants.

In its non-military aspects, the blockade constituted a form of collective punishment that is clearly proscribed by international law. Given the scale of the suffering inflicted by the blockade on the inhabitants of the strip, if Israel were a person it could be considered guilty of “depraved indifference”, a concept in American law (its equivalent under English common law is “depraved heart”) that refers to conduct that is so wanton, so callous, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the lives of others and so blameworthy as to warrant criminal liability.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza since 7th October may undoubtedly be described as “depraved indifference” on account of the indescribable suffering it is inflicting on civilians. While the main enemy is Hamas, Israel keeps targeting civilian infrastructure, residential buildings, schools, mosques, hospitals, ambulances and UNRWA food depots. By the end of November, the death toll has risen to more than 15,000 dead and more than 30,000 injured—more than the total of the previous military offensives combined. An estimated 6,150 of the dead are children and 4,000 are women. Slaughter of civilians on such an industrial scale may well have taken Israel to the verge of committing genocide, “the crime of all crimes”.

There is one other aspect of this campaign that was not present in previous ones: the danger of ethnic cleansing. In previous campaigns Israel brought death and destruction to the people of Gaza but kept them cooped up in the enclave, “generously” allowing them to stay in their homes. This time Israel ordered the residents of the northern part of Gaza, nearly half the total population, to move to the southern part of the enclave. Some of those who obeyed the order were subsequently killed in Israeli air strkes. At the time of writing more than 1.8m, out of a total of 2.3m, have been internally displaced. As the Israeli military offensive moved into southern Gaza, the refugees were ordered to move out of the area to which they had fled. This amounts to a forced transfer of civilians: a war crime.

The upshot is that nowhere in Gaza is safe. Stretching the laws of war beyond credulity, Israel argues that civilians who disobey its orders and stay put in their homes in the north become legitimate military targets. In addition, Israel seems to be working on a plan to transfer people permanently from Gaza into northern Sinai. In a leaked document dated 13th October, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence drafted a proposal for the transfer of the entire population of Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian government has expressed strong objection to the plan as well as its determination to keep the Rafah crossing firmly closed—apart from to allow some aid into Gaza during the ceasefire. But the combined pressures of the massive bombardment by the IDF and its medieval-style siege on Gaza may result in a human avalanche across the border. One thing is certain: any civilians who leave Gaza will not be allowed to return to their homes. More than half of the houses in Gaza have already been destroyed or damaged in indiscriminate Israeli bombing. So nearly half the population do not have homes to return to. No wonder that the bleak legacy of 1948 haunts the Palestinian community.

While the martyrdom of over two million innocent Palestinian civilians continues, despite the temporary ceasefire and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, a bigger question looms: who will run what remains of the Gaza Strip after the guns fall silent? Netanyahu has declared that he wants the IDF to keep indefinite security control of the strip but no one in Israel wants to assume all the responsibilities of an occupying power again. Meanwhile, his own grip on power at home is weakening. He faces strong popular opposition for his failure to prevent the horrendous Hamas attack and, more generally, for making Israel the most dangerous place in the world for Jews to live. He is also embroiled in a corruption trial on charges—all of which he denies—including fraud, breaching public trust and accepting bribes. Politically speaking, he is a dead man walking. His days in power are numbered and there is a chance that he will end up in prison. But he is still the prime minister, and his clearly stated aim is to eradicate Hamas and to prevent it from returning to power ever again. So, who will govern the Gaza Strip after the Israeli army leaves?

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This is not a conflict between two equal sides but between an occupying power and a subjugated population

Early signs suggest that the Americans and the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, favour the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. This is a totally preposterous proposition. The problem is not Hamas—which did not exist until 1987—but the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Moreover, the Hamas that committed the massacre of 7th October is far more extreme than the Hamas that won the 2006 elections and formed a national unity government. By blocking the path to peaceful political change, Israel and its western supporters are largely responsible for this regression to fundamentalist positions. Hamas may not be to their liking, but it still commands broad popular support. If an election were held today, Hamas would almost certainly beat its Fatah rival again.

And what about the sclerotic Fatah-led Palestinian Authority? It is docile, weak, corrupt and incompetent, and can barely govern the West Bank. It receives funding from the EU and to a lesser extent from the US, essentially to serve as a subcontractor for Israeli security in the area. It has shown itself to be utterly incapable of resisting the expansion of Israeli settlements, the escalation of settler violence, the slow but steady takeover of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the flagrant encroachment by fanatical religious Zionists on the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. Fatah also lacks legitimacy because no parliamentary elections have been held since January 2006. It has stalled on holding another parliamentary election precisely because it realises that Hamas would win.

The idea that this discredited Palestinian Authority can be imposed on the proud and long-suffering people of Gaza on the back of Israeli tanks is completely detached from reality. But it is mildly interesting, in as much as it exposes the moral and political bankruptcy of the people who espouse it. It is not for Israel or its imperialist backers to tell the people of Gaza who should govern them. If the events of the last few weeks have demonstrated anything, it is that the old narrative of Israel having a right and a duty to defend itself against a terrorist organisation, no matter the human, civilian cost, can no longer be sustained. What is happening in Gaza today is the cruel manifestation of Israeli state terrorism. Terrorism is the use of force against civilians for political ends. The cap fits and Israel must wear it. The Israeli politicians and generals who orchestrate the criminal assaults on the people of Gaza are no better than riffraff.

This ghastly war has also exposed the ruthless hypocrisy of the western leaders, their blatant double standards, their indifference to Palestinian rights and their complicity in Israel’s war crimes. Israel is an aggressive settler-colonial state and increasingly a Jewish-supremacist state intent on keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of subordination. As long as Israel has western support, it will continue to act unilaterally, in violation of international law, in breach of a raft of UN resolutions and in defiance of the most basic norms of civilised international behaviour.

This is not a conflict between two equal sides but between an occupying power and a subjugated population. And there is absolutely no military solution to this conflict. Israel cannot have security without peace with its neighbours. A negotiated political compromise, as in Northern Ireland, is the only way forward. That settlement required external intervention, as does this one. Here, however, the US cannot serve as the sole broker because its pronounced bias in favour of Israel would make it a dishonest one. Ever since 1967, it has arrogated to itself a monopoly over the Israeli-Palestinian peace process but failed to put pressure on Israel to compromise. What is needed now is a new international coalition led by the UN which includes the US and EU but also Arab states and members of the global south. The priorities of such a coalition would be humanitarian relief, reconstruction and a long-term political plan that includes an independent Palestinian state on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with a capital city in East Jerusalem.

Such a plan is eminently practical. All it would take to realise it is for Israel to shed its settler-colonial and Jewish-supremacist ambitions, for America to end its unconditional support for Israel, for the EU to morph from a payer to an active player, for the United Nations to overcome its self-imposed impotence, and a few similar trifles.

Correction: This article initially attributed the ironic suggestion that a government might dissolve the people and elect another to the German novelist Günther Grass. It was, in fact, made by the playwright Bertolt Brecht in his poem Die Lösung (The Solution) following the 1953 East Berlin uprising.

Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at Oxford University.

8 December 2023

Source: prospectmagazine.co.uk

By Stefanie Fox

I have by my desk a quote attributed to beloved Jewish writer and activist Grace Paley: “The only recognizable feature of hope is action.” For over a decade that has motivated my work to build a thriving moment of American Jews in solidarity with Palestinians. But where do you find hope in the midst of utter horror? My only hope in this moment is that my fellow Jewish Americans and people of conscience all across America will unite in a way we never have before to call for an end to genocide.

Israel has dropped more bombs on Palestinians in Gaza this week than the United States dropped on Afghanistan in a full year of the war. Last night the Israeli government issued an evacuation order for the entire northern Gaza Strip, telling residents to evacuate in twenty-four hours. This order forewarns a ground invasion. Israel’s intention is to try to absolve itself of responsibility for what will ultimately be massive casualties among untold thousands who are unable or unwilling to leave. The UN has already deemed this impossible in the narrow strip where for sixteen years Israel has imprisoned 2.2 million Palestinians—nearly half of them children—in a crushing siege of land, air, and sky.

This is genocide.

Text threads, from those who still have an hour or so of battery life on their phones, are full of panicked families trying to discern if they should try to flee. There is nowhere to go. Entire families—grandparents, baby nieces, uncles and aunts, siblings—have been annihilated. Boys are killed as they play soccer in front of a mosque; friends are searching for their families in rubble or getting calls that they were bombed in a crowded marketplace trying to buy food before Israel cut off the supply.

So many children will die who have never seen life outside of the walls of the ghetto that Israel has locked them in, as politicians here in the United States cheer on the carnage, claiming they are doing it to protect people of my own religion.

This is genocide.

Yes, on Saturday, Hamas militants broke out of the prison of Gaza and massacred 1,200 Israelis, including many civilians, taking more than 100 hostages. From the second I heard what was happening I have been overcome by a combination of grief and horror at the massacre itself, and also the sheer, unrelenting terror of knowing how the Israeli and American governments would weaponize these deaths.

And like clockwork, the loss of Israeli lives is being used by our government to justify the rush to genocide, to provide moral cover for the immoral push for more weapons and more death.

For Jews, the pain we feel is not ours alone. Since the founding of the state of Israel, the Zionist movement has positioned the domination and oppression of Palestinians and the colonization of Palestinian land as the answer to the very real question of Jewish safety. They have taken the very real pain and trauma that we as Jews carry and sharpened it into a deadly weapon. We desperately must understand that what is happening is not a cycle of violence. It is a system of violence. Everyone is caught in its teeth.

It is the system of settler colonial apartheid that the Israeli government has built and maintained over the past seventy-five years—with billions upon billions of dollars from the United States. Settler colonialism is a structure, a language, a culture, an ideology—an interlocking, totalizing, system of violence. It is a machine of war and dehumanization against Palestinians. It is this system that imperils the lives and safety of everyone.

While the vast majority of the violence of the apartheid regime lands on Palestinians, there is no safety for Israelis in a system rooted in such dehumanization and oppression. In the words of Holocaust survivor Hajo Meyer, “My great lesson from Auschwitz is: whoever wants to dehumanize any other must first be dehumanized himself. The oppressors are no longer really human, whatever uniform they wear.” The Israeli government has lost any semblance of humanity as they wage a genocide against the people living in Gaza.

It is not Palestinians who have chosen the language of violence for this land. It is the Israeli government and the United States government that have created a state of violence.

Palestinians have remained steadfast in seeking freedom against immeasurable violence. Tens of thousands of Palestinians protested in weekly grassroots nonviolent protests at Israel’s militarized border wall around Gaza during the Great March of Return in 2019, and the Israeli government sent military snipers to murder and maim hundreds of children, women, medics, and journalists. Palestinians launch boycott campaigns to win their rights, and the Israeli government opens an entire new ministry to combat the nonviolent movement. Palestinians work at human rights organizations to document the crimes against them, and they are called and treated as terrorists. Palestinians speak the language of freedom, and the Israeli government responds—every single time—with the language of violence.

The United States government has united to fully support the Israeli war machine. Already the United States sends more than $3 billion in aid to Israel every year. Now Senator Lindsey Graham said, “I am with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place.” Make no mistake: Israel isn’t defending itself, it is committing mass murder. Biden says, “We’ll make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of itself.” Make no mistake: Israel is waging genocide.

My dear ones in Palestine are saying that they have never experienced such destruction in seventy-five years of occupation. My dear ones are saying there is not a moment to wait. Do not sit back while Israel carries out a genocide fully enabled by the United States. Bring your full body, your spirit, your communities, your humanity, to meet this moment, to call your representatives, to the streets. “Never again” means standing up for Palestinian people. “Never again” means this very moment.

Stefanie Fox is Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace.

13 December 2023

Source: bostonreview.net

By Jonathan Kuttab

Genocide is a well defined legal term defined by the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”

“Intent” is usually the most difficult part to prove, but in the case of Palestine, intent is clearly expressed in the blatant statements by Israeli leaders, calling Palestinians in Gaza “human animals,” referring to Palestinians as “Amalek” (the tribe God commanded King Saul to destroy in the Old Testament), and declaring that there exist “no innocent Palestinians in Gaza,” which must be destroyed.

Never before has there been a case where such a genocide is being committed and reported on in real time on a daily basis, along with an openly declared policy of cutting off their water, food, electricity, and fuel, and subjecting them to massive bombardment , after ordering them to move from their homes, (with no safe place to go to) and while over 50% of their buildings are destroyed. 1.9 million individuals out of a population of 2.3 million are currently displaced, the scenes of destruction are apocalyptic, with the destruction affecting all hospitals, schools, UN facilities, churches, mosques, bakeries, libraries, court houses, municipalities and universities, and all public and private structures. No place is safe.

The images of huge craters in the midst of apartment buildings, of crowds huddled around food distribution centers, and of children pulled out from under the rubble are now compounded by scenes of masses of individuals, clearly civilian, stripped down to their underwear being humiliated, trucked to unknown locations, and paraded for sport are all over the internet. Meanwhile, despite the killing of local journalists (89 as of this writing) and a prohibition on foreign journalists from entering, the world is fully informed of these atrocities as Israel continues its massive bombing of a defenseless population with no end in sight.

How do we explain, in the face of this overwhelming evidence of an ongoing genocide, that the world, including the church, is largely silent with only mild, tepid pronouncements of concern, and where those who dare even speak of a ceasefire, or de-escalation on humanitarian grounds, are themselves attacked, silenced, and ridiculed as naive supporters of terrorism?

One explanation, apart from the clear complicity of those in power, is the abuse of the concept of anti-semitism. The Western world indeed has much to repent from in its racism, discrimination, and hatred of Jews and Judaism throughout history. Yet recognition of that guilt and of the sin of anti-jewish antisemitism should not be used to justify, condone, or permit complicity when the state of Israel, long practicing apartheid and Jewish supremacy, turns to engage in genocidal practices against its enemies. Yet charges of antisemitism are being effectively weaponized against Palestinians who had nothing to do with that Western phenomenon.

A second explanation lies in the power of narrative. From Day One (October 7) a particular narrative has been promulgated by Israel and uniformly copied by the corporate media in this country which takes the events of that day out of their historical context, viewing them as an unprovoked attack on a peaceful Israel by a demonic evil force named Hamas. The evil is of such a nature that it needs to be eliminated and eradicated, and any and every action needed to achieve that just goal is legitimate, and in fact it is righteous. Viewed through this lens, the entire history of Israeli occupation, settlement policies, fascist government control, and the ongoing oppression of Palestinians is irrelevant. International law and the rules of warfare are also beside the point. Massive civilian casualties and even actions amounting to genocide, as indicated above, are but unfortunate “collateral damage” that, if noted at all, is to be laid at the door of the evil Hamas which “started” the whole mess.

This narrative has obtained acceptance across the board, and it is reflected by the corporate media from the right to the left. From Fox News to MSNBC and CNN. Any discussion of the issue begins, usually, with a demand to condemn Hamas and its barbarous actions on October 7 to confirm that you do indeed accept the established narrative. The uniformity of the narrative across all media (with the exception of social media) reminds one of a totalitarian regime, not a country which purportedly values a free press. Those who have tried to present a more nuanced approach as to what happened on October 7, what led to it, or what is happening now in Gaza are viciously attacked as terrorist sympathizers or, at the very best, as “useful idiots” who are being exploited by that same evil force, Hamas.

At FOSNA, we must ask whether in fact the churches and most Christians in the West have not also been taken in by this narrative, swallowing it hook line and sinker. That would explain why even the mildest calls for an immediate ceasefire are viewed as “controversial,” are difficult to make, and require so much “courage.” In times like these, it behooves the church to consider the situation based on its own principles and ethics and not to follow slavishly the prevailing narrative.

This is all the more true when the US government is directly implicated in the ongoing genocide and that American Christians, living in a democracy, have some measure of responsibility for American Government complicity in this ongoing genocide, which is taking place with American weapons, American money, and under an American diplomatic umbrella that protects Israel and grants it the ability to act with impunity without worrying about the United Nations, world opinion, international law, or indeed common human morality. What distinguishes Christians should be that we live according to a different ethic, and according to the values of the Kingdom of God. While the world may prioritize violence and military power, the church should be preaching a different ethic of love, peace and nonviolence. The failure of the church to lead in challenging the logic of genocide is a serious testament of the condition of the church toady.

14 December 2023

Source: www.fosna.org

(This is a Position Paper issued by Indo Palestine Solidarity Network, India, a network of like- minded people drawn from all parts of India committed to solidarity with the Palestinians in their struggle for justice and liberation.)

IPSN expresses appreciation to its author, Rev. Roger Gaekwad, an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church of India. Mizoram Synod. He has served in Aizawl Theological College, Mizoram and was eventually Principal of the College. Gaekwad also served as Director of the Senate Centre for Extension & Pastoral Theological Research of the Senate of Serampore College for over 6 years. He was later elected as General Secretary of National Council of Churches in India for 8 years. He currently serves as Mentor, Dinbandhu Ministries, Nagpur.)

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Lives of the Palestinians in Gaza do not seem to matter! Buildings (whether they housed families, hospitals, educational institutions, or any other facilities), the flora and fauna and the land of Gaza are being razed to the ground, reduced to rubble and dust in the ongoing war! Gaza O Gaza!

As Fr. David Neuhaus, S.J., a Jesuit priest, and an Israeli citizen, has stated, “The belief that victory is attainable by defeating the enemy in pitiless warfare is at the heart of the rhetoric of war. This is perhaps the most venomous myth in any conflict.” Gaza, along with the West Bank, is bearing the brunt of this inhuman ideology. The promotors and perpetuators of such cruel violence have not learnt from the lessons of history, or from the teachings on love, justice and peace of their scriptures.

1. Apartheidic Injustice and Violence

Gaza is experiencing yet another devastating round of the ongoing apartheid in their land since 1948, when Israel was made a nation state by the powers of that time. Apartheid, as Dr. Jerry Pillay[1] said in 2016 in an article on apartheid in the Holy Land, comes from an Afrikaans word meaning ‘apartness’ or ‘separateness’. “It is a policy or practice of separating or segregating groups. This policy separated white and non-white people in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. Black people had to carry special papers or have permission to live and work in particular areas. Many laws were made that prevented mixed marriages, and black people could not own land in white areas, vote or use the same public facilities as white people. Public toilets, parks, beaches and recreational facilities were restricted in certain areas for white people only; black people would be arrested if they tried to use these facilities.”

While there are differences in the South African and the Israel-Palestinian contexts, by and large, we see similar expressions of disrespect and disregard for human dignity and rights, the same use of the law to demonize and brand others as ‘terrorists’, and the same denial of people’s rights to adequate economic and educational opportunities.

Since the past 75 years:

Whether it’s a child imprisoned by a military court or shot unjustifiably, or a house demolished for lack of an elusive permit, or checkpoints where only settlers are allowed to pass, few Palestinians have escaped serious rights abuses, and have been subject to humiliation and psychological, political and economic oppression.

During these past 75 years,

The erection of the Wall in the name of securityfor Israelis has ultimatelystolen land, and separated Israelis and Palestinians from each other.

During the past 75 years,

Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories are in direct violation of international law, depriving Palestinians of land, natural resources and freedom.,

During the past 75 years,

the economic impact of the occupation is seen in the following: businesses abandoned because of the wall and blockages, the doors of shops wielded and closed, olive fields destroyed, restrictions on movement and the emergence of ghost towns in what used to be thriving communities.

II

During the past 75 years,

Gaza has been subject to unimaginable torment:

(i)           During the Nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948 which witnessed the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians at the hands of the marauding Israelites, tens of thousands of Palestinians took refuge in Gaza. The invading Egyptian army seized a narrow coastal strip 25 miles (40 km) long, which ran from the Sinai to just south of Ashkelon. The influx of refugees saw Gaza’s population triple to around 200,000.Gaza O Gaza!

(ii)          In the Six-Day War of June 1967, the Gaza Strip was again taken by Israel, which occupied the region for the next quarter century. In December 1987, rioting and violent street clashes between Gaza’s Palestinians and occupying Israeli troops marked the birth of an uprising that came to be known as the intifada (“shaking off”).Gaza O Gaza!

(iii)         In autumn 2007,  Israel declared the Gaza Strip under Hamas, a hostile entity, and approved a series of sanctions that included power cuts, heavily restricted imports, and border closures. Gaza O Gaza!

(iv)         In January 2008, facing sustained rocket assaults into its southern settlements, Israel broadened its sanctions, completely sealing its border with the Gaza Strip and temporarily preventing fuel imports.Gaza O Gaza!

(v)          Beginning on November 14, 2012, Israel launched a series of air strikes in Gaza, in response to, what the Israeli government said, an increase in the number of rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli territory over the previous nine months.Gaza O Gaza!

(vi)         In June 2014 three Israeli teenagers were allegedly kidnapped; Israel conducted a massive crackdown in the West Bank and increased air strikes in the Gaza Strip, prompting retaliatory rocket fire from Hamas. As fighting continued to escalate, Israel launched a 50-day offensive into the Gaza Strip on July 8. Some 2,100 Palestinians and more than 70 Israelis were killed in the ensuing conflict, with about 5,000 targets hit in the Gaza Strip.Gaza O Gaza!

(vii)        In the spring of 2018 a series of protests along the border with Israel, which included attempts to cross the border and flying flaming kites, was met with a violent response from Israel. Both the protests and the violence reached a peak on May 14 when about 40,000 Gazans attended the protests. When many of them tried to cross the border at once, Israeli troops opened fire, killing about 60 people and wounding 2,700 others. The violence escalated into military strikes from Israel and rocket fire from Hamas and continued for several months. Gaza O Gaza!

(viii)       In May 2021, in response to the demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah of Palestinian families, protesting against Israel’s plan to forcibly evict them from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. thousands of Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) held their own protests in support of the families. Confrontations between Israeli police and Palestinian demonstrators prompted Hamas to launch rockets into Jerusalem and parts of southern Israel; Israel responded with air strikes in the Gaza Strip.Gaza O Gaza!

(ix)         And now we behold this year, a full-scale war, through which the Israeli government has vowed to exterminate Hamas, and in fact all Palestinians, from Gaza. Gaza o Gaza!

1. The Elephant and the Ants

There is this story of a lost baby elephant, which was transported by its sympathizers to asmall enclosure in a national park, where it could grow in safety. Several ant colonies also resided in that enclosure. As the elephant grew bigger and bigger, he started to drive out the ants from what the elephant called his “space.”Time and again he used to spurtwater on them with his trunk. The sympathizers, who had originally placed the elephant in the enclosure, marveled at his growth and applauded his show of strength.

One day, when a small ant from one ant colony in the southernmost corner of the enclosure, questioned him about what he was doing, the elephant told him to be quiet and threatened to finish him off!Later that night, the ant crept into the elephant’s trunk and started biting him. He bit it till the elephant experienced intense pain. With all the strength he could muster, he blew out the ant from his trunk. Then in his uncontrollable rage, he screamed, “You Terrorist! How dare you attack me! I will finish you off!” and he began stamping on the entire southernmost ant hill …

Though not a perfect allegory, the story highlights the plight of Gaza. Gaza O Gaza!

IV   VOICES

1. One can hear a 21^st Century Jeremiah lament over Gaza:

For the brokenness of the daughter of my people I am broken,
I mourn, and horror has seized me.

Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of the daughter of my people
not been restored?

O that my head were a spring of water
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of the daughter of my people! (Jer. 8:21-9:1)

2. So also, one can visualize a 21^st century Habakkuk crying out from Gaza,

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law becomes slack,
and justice never prevails. (Hab.1:2-3)

3. Another aggrieved person from Gaza questions God: “Why are people quoting words of judgement against Gaza as the fulfillment of your prophecy in our times?”

Thus says the Lord:
For three transgressions of Gaza,
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,^[a]
because they carried into exile entire communities,
to hand them over to Edom.
So I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza,
and it shall devour its strongholds (Amos 1:6-7)

How quickly such people forget that God the Lord has also declared divine judgement against Judah and Israel as well through the same prophet: Amos 2: 4-11.

Similarly, when some people are quoting Zephaniah 2:4-7 highlighting God’s destructive judgement of Gaza and Ashkelon, claiming that the same is now coming to be fulfilled in 2023, they forget that Zephaniah began with a prophecy against Judah (1:2-2:3). These prophesies of Zephaniah were already fulfilled when countries along the eastern Mediterranean Coast suffered under the military campaigns of the Egyptian and Babylonian armies.

Likewise, the prophesies against Gaza, Ashkelon and other cities, in Zechariah chapter 9, trace Alexander’s march through the eastern Mediterranean coast cities in 332-331 B.C. E.

4. Then again, one hears another voice of anguish, “O Lord, why should the Israelites consider themselves to be ‘your chosen people’ exclusively? Did you not say through Amos to the Israelites,

Are you not like the Ethiopians to me,

O people of Israel? says the lord.

Did I not bring Israel from the land of Egypt,

and the Philistines from Caphtor and

the Arameans from Kir (Amos 9:7)?”

God’sWord clearly asserts to the Israelites thatthe Ethiopians, a “people of color”, were equally beloved to God, thereby challenging the exclusionary self-understanding of Israel.Furthermore,in the book of Amos, it is stated quite explicitly that,in history, God engaged actively not only in the liberation of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, but also in the “bringing up”, that is, liberating, the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Arameans (Syrians) fromKir.” (Am.9:7)Thesewere two foreign peoples that were at different times Israel’s most threatening enemies, yet God engaged in their liberation.

Indeed, God enacts “Exoduses” for Israel’s enemies. God’s emancipatory power extends to other peoples who are not commonly taken to be “chosen.” God exposes Israel’s claim to the exclusionary love and justice of God, and insists that in universal scope YHWH’s emancipatory reach extends everywhere, at many times, and in many places, bringing emancipation for those not yet liberated.

Then again, in God’s vision of the future of the nations, in Isaiah 19:24-25, it is stated:

On that day Israel will be the third party with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people and Assyria the work of my hands and Israel my heritage.”In all three cases the prophet is using titles —God’s people, the work of God’s hands, God’s heritage—which are applied to the “chosen people”.

5. Another bereaved Gazan mother cries out in agony, “O Lord how can the government of a people who went through the unforgettable experience of the Holocaust duringWorld War II, be so cruelly malicious to us?”

18,000 people have already been killed in Gaza, most of them being women and children. Over 49,229 are reportedly injured. Many more people are missing, presumably under the rubble, waiting for rescue or recovery. At least 6,000 buildings have been damaged and about a third of them destroyed. Up to 80% of the population may have been forced to flee their homes. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 22 hospitals and 36 health facilities have been damaged since the war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023. Among the buildings destroyed or partially destroyed are the main Palestinian court, known as the Justice Palace, the Palestinian Legislative Council complex, 339 education facilities and 167 places of worship.

In Deut. 24: 17-18, God says to the Israelites, “Do not deny justice to a resident alien or fatherless child, and do not take a widow’s garment as security.Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. Therefore, I am commanding you to do this.” In the case of the Palestinians, they are not resident aliens but rightful residents of Palestine.

God had also said to the Israelites,^“Remember, that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” (Deut.5:15). The implication of this weekly remembrance for the Israelites was that they should recall the hardships they underwent under the reign of the stone-hearted Pharaoh; therefore, they would have to be compassionate to, and just in their relationships with their neighbors.

6. The voices of a group of Palestinian Christians articulated through theKairos Document: A Moment of Truthon 11 December 2009 continue to reverberate again and again

2.3.2 Our presence in this land, as Christian and Muslim Palestinians, is not accidental but rather deeply rooted in the history and geography of this land, resonant with the connectedness of any other people to the land it lives in. It was an injustice when we were driven out.

2.3.4 Our connectedness to this land is a natural right. It is not an ideological or a theological question only. It is a matter of life and death. . . We suffer from the occupation of our land because we are Palestinians. And as Christian Palestinians we suffer from the wrong interpretation of some theologians.

2.5 We also declare that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is a sin against God and humanity because it deprives the Palestinians of their basic human rights, bestowed by God. It distorts the image of God in the Israeli who has become an occupier just as it distorts this image in the Palestinian living under occupation.

4.2.1 Love is seeing the face of God in every human being. Every person is my brother or my sister. However, seeing the face of God in everyone does not mean accepting evil or aggression on their part. Rather, this love seeks to correct the evil and stop the aggression.

The aggression against the Palestinian people which is the Israeli occupation, is an evil that must be resisted. It is an evil and a sin that must be resisted and removed. Primary responsibility for this rests with the Palestinians themselves suffering occupation.

4.2.4 Christ our Lord has left us an example we must imitate. We must resist evil but he taught us that we cannot resist evil with evil. This is a difficult commandment, particularly when the enemy is determined to impose himself and deny our right to remain here in our land.

5.1 We all face, today, a way that is blocked and a future that promises only woe. . . We place our hope in God, who will grant us relief in His own time. At the same time, we continue to act in concord with God and God’s will, building, resisting evil and bringing closer the day of justice and peace.

And so

May our Palestinian children, sisters and brothers in Gaza be comforted by the concluding words of Dr. Daniel Migliore in his book, Faith Seeking Understanding, “God is present as co-sufferer with all the wretched of the earth, whether in cancer wards or in concentration camps.”

May our Palestinian children, sisters and brothers in Gaza hear words of hope from our Compassionate Just God saying, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Gaza; I have heard their cry on account of their oppressors. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from their oppressors.”

Gaza O Gaza!

_________________________

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

12 December 2023

By Maung Zarni

Despite the differences in goals, interests and strengths, Myanmar’s disparate armed organizations ultimately share the unequivocal rejection of both the military and its coup regime. 

Eleven days into the Operation 1027, the senior most leadership of the regime – Min Aung Hlaing and his senior ex-General Myint Swe, the former vice president under the National League for Democracy (NLD) government of Aung San Suu Kyi, held an emergency National Defence and Security Council meeting in Naypyidaw on Nov. 9 and reportedly discussed the  prospects for “national disintegration.”

The regime media Global New Light of Myanmar quoted Myint Swe telling the meeting attendees, “if the government does not effectively manage the incidents happening in the border region, the country will be split into various parts.”

After the military unprecedented defeats in northern Shan State, the Straits Times ran an opinion editorial flagging this “balkanization” warning. The Japan Times editorial on Dec. 1 was even more shrill about what it projects as “chaos” and the process of Myanmar state failures, now that more than half-the-country has fallen into the hands of “ethnic insurgent” organizations, fighting for the rights of their own populations (as opposed to all of Myanmar as a country).

Japan’s primary concern is in the event of such a state collapse, its adversary, China, would openly intervene in a country which has been run – and ruined – by the World War II Japan-fathered national military. Successive military regimes since the coup of 1962 have used the discourse of “national disintegration” as an ideological magic wand to rally the historically ethno-nationalist majoritarian Burmese public behind their acts of usurpation.

In his Dec. 2 interview with The Irrawaddy, the Kokang Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) spokesperson Li Kyar Win pointed out that the embattled Min Aung Hlaing reportedly used the word “foreign invasion” to describe the Brotherhood Alliance’s successful military operations against regime troops.

This had a clear intent to mobilize the country’s xenophobic Burman nationalist majority. Alas, this time neither the military’s scaremongering propaganda mantra of “national disintegration” nor “foreign invasion” secured any buy-in from the country’s Burman ethnic nationality.

Debunking the view that non-Bamar ethnic resistance movements have only narrowly defined self-interests, for instance, minority rights, the same MNDAA spokesperson stated that the Brotherhood’s politico-military objective is ultimately “to eradicate the military dictatorship.”

In January, the leaders of another cluster of Ethnic Resistance Organizations (EROs), including the Karen National Union (KNU), the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), and the Chin National Front (CNF/CNA), who have territorial control over vast swathes of Myanmar spelled out their Big Tent (inclusive) federalist vision with democratic and basic human rights for all groups and individuals.

“The military leadership knows that our ethnic resistance organizations are fighting for a federal system of power-sharing with the majority Burmans — not for secession or independence. It has deliberately mis-framed us as ethno-nationalist secessionists bent on disintegrating the Union of Myanmar in an attempt to pit us against the Burman majority, but its misinformation campaign is no longer working,” the EROs published in Nikkei Asia.

However, even in a few places where there exist ethno-nationalist contests within intra-minority populations, the contests are more about elite territorial ambitions and economic interests than the kind one observes in the Balkans where Serbian Orthodox Christians, Croatian Catholics, and Muslims of Bosnia have perpetrated atrocity crimes against one another over a long and sustained period. Precisely because of this crucial difference, I for one do not buy into the alarmist warnings of “Myanmar’s balkanization.”

Besides, the “balkanization” as such involved the birth or rebirth of new states out of a federated political system such as Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia, with mass atrocities as byproducts. There were external actors such as the military alliance NATO, or post-USSR Russia, whose meddlesome geopolitics in the Balkans made the already poisoned regional politics of race and faith worse.

Sandwiched among stable and populous neighbours including such global powers as China and India, redrawing Myanmar’s external boundaries is simply inconceivable. For none of the immediate neighbours would stomach the idea, let alone, the potentially violent realities with spill-over cross-border impact, of the disintegration of Myanmar as a political state.

With the exception of the ethnic Burman-controlled National Unity Government (NUG), run by the Burmese exiles in Washington and other Western capitals, who have been egged on by Western actors as “future leaders”, none of Myanmar’s EROs on-the-ground will undertake any act, military or political, that will breach the security concerns of Bangladesh, or Thailand, not to mention China and India.

However, what is unprecedented, ideologically and historically, is the generally anti-Chinese, and to a lesser extent, anti-Rakhine, majoritarian Burmese public are now rooting for the Brotherhood Alliance – and any other non-Burman EROs as they attempt to “eradicate the military dictatorship.”

The significance of Shan State and Operation 1027

Of all the ethnic regions, Shan State is the largest in the country’s physical geography, bordering on both China and Thailand, which form informal trade corridors. The state’s rich ethnic tapestry of Shan, Kachin, Wa, Pao, Ta’ ang (or Palaung), Intha, is also a source of  intra-group conflicts, and historical grievances, The territorial aspirations, and commercial interests in the state are thoroughly embedded in the web of interlocking resource-based and cross-border informal economies.

A high 64 percent of the state’s population is in the 15-64 age group, labeled “economically productive”, in the 2014 Myanmar census. In other words, Shan State has a high proportion of “fighting age” people, both men and women.

Because the Shan of Myanmar, the co-founders of the post-colonial Union of Burma alongside the Burman majoritarian leadership of the martyred Aung San, were granted the constitutional right of secession in 1947. Myanmar’s ruling elite, both political and military leaderships of the late Prime Minister U Nu and General Ne Win, built military bases in this vast mountainous state as early as 1953.

The Defence Services Academy was originally built in the purpose-built military town of Bahtoo, before it was subsequently relocated to Pyin Oo Lwin where it has remained since. To date, Shan State houses more than 200 battalions, the largest number established in an ethnically defined state in the country, according to a Shan researcher colleague of mine. The reported low morale and the understaffing of these units are related and significant matters.

That is why, the news of the stunning military victories by the Brotherhood Alliance’s Operation 1027 on Oct. 27 in northern Shan State precipitated a media and policy buzz around the military’s pending collapse and the need to prepare the NUG as the future government of Myanmar.

The Brotherhood Alliance

A word about the background of these groups is in order. The Brotherhood Alliance is made up of the three ethnic armed organizations.

The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (or MNDAA) leadership and rank and file are drawn from the Han Chinese minority known as the Kokang. The Myanmar military had, in the 1960-70’s, used the earlier incarnation of Kokang armed group as a counterforce or local militia against the armed resistance movements by the pro-independence Shan nationalists in exchange for lucrative commercial opportunities for the typically illicit trade, including narcotics.

Along with half-dozen other ethnic territories, the Kokang region has been established as a “Self-Administered Zone” by the reformist quasi-democratic government of President Thein Sein.

One of the relatively new armed organizations, the Arakan Army (AA) is led by Buddhist Rakhine political elite with their unconcealed aspirations for the reclamation of their ancient kingdom’s sovereignty lost to the rival Burmese based in the upcountry plains around Mandalay, several years after the French Revolution of 1789.

Out of geopolitical pragmatism, the AA leaders have indicated that they would be content with “internal sovereignty”. That is, Rakhine will remain a part of a post-military Myanmar which the AA leaders envisage as a loose confederation of politically autonomous regions.

Rakhine nationalists were the very first in Myanmar who revolted, without success, against the central government in Rangoon even before the actual ceremony for the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to the first independence government of Burma on Jan. 4, 1948.

Subsequently, Rakhine leaders led by the likes of Indian Civil Service (ICS) member and MP Kyaw Min waged their liberation struggle in the emerging parliamentary space, openly pushing for “internal sovereignty” in the 1950’s.

The central Burman-controlled government resorted to divide and rule, exploiting the emerging ethnic and religious divisions between predominantly Muslim Rohingyas and Buddhist Rakhine, alternating favours between the two rival claimants to indigeneity of the coastal state with a short 270-mile borders with Bangladesh.

The Ta’ang National Liberation Army (or TNLA, ethnic Palaung or Ta’ ang people) has evolved over the last 30 years since its inception as an armed organization fighting for the self-determination of the Ta’ ang people. The reformist-military government in 2010 created the Palaung Self-Administered Zone with its own territorial capital in northern Shan State. It is one of Myanmar’s least developed sub-regions.

The conventional wisdom – evidenced by foreign experts, for instance, the International Crisis Group (ICG) – is that these three groups have stayed “aloof” in the broader armed resistance made up of hundreds of pro-democracy People’s Defence Forces (PDFs) which are generally pro-democracy and supported Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD government.

But this “expert” opinion is based evidently on shoddy research. As early as March this year, The Irrawaddy was reporting on the Kokang group’s training and provisions of arms to the anti-military resistance groups in the Dry Zone Burman heartlands.

Everyone knows that the country’s most important ethnic resistance organizations such as the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO/KIA) in the north, the KNPP in the east, the KNU in the southeast and south, and the CNF/CNA in the West have provided these new generation armed resisters, most significantly from the Burmese majority heartlands, sanctuary, military training and arms. Resisters come from all walks of life from across Myanmar.

As a sign of a radical departure from the past discriminatory attitude – racist and internally colonial really – which the dominant Burman had displayed towards their fellow co-habitants, there is a widespread revolution in popular spirit: the Burman majoritarian public are profoundly appreciative of this invaluable collaboration and material assistance offered by the non-Burman ethnic resistance communities.

This bodes well for a country where the majoritarian Burman “Big Brother” racism had historically been mobilized and manipulated by the repressive central military for its own sinister ends. This is often overlooked by Myanmar watchers who focus on military statistics (for instance, troop strengths, cities captured or controlled, etc.)

What is less noted is the China-linked Brotherhood Alliance has also made its share of contributions to the growth of anti-military armed resistance organizations in terms of arms, training and even funding.

Even the United Wa State Army (UWSA) which is wholly dependent on China and hence seen as Beijing’s proxy is known a source of arms and ammunition to all anti-military forces throughout the country, despite the organization’s official “adherence” to the ceasefire with the Naypyidaw.

The AA is known to be the main trainer of the anti-military Bamar People’s Liberation Army (BPLA) while the KNU has offered them sanctuary. The BPLA has been an integral resistance force that has joined the Brotherhood Alliance in its historic Operation 1027 in northern Shan state.

According to Asian diplomats who participated in the so-called 1.5 Track meeting on the post-coup Myanmar held in India last April, Dr. Yin Yin Nwe, a key Shan-Myanmar adviser to Myanmar’s regime and ex-daughter-in-law of the late dictator Ne Win, accused Thailand of allowing Myanmar exiles to smuggle arms and ammunition to Myanmar’s growing armed resistance.

This was without any evidence. The meeting attendees included representatives of India, China, Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Indonesia, as well as state-linked think tanks from Myanmar’s neighbours.

The fact of the matter is various armed organizations along the 1,500-long China-Myanmar border, from the UWSA to the KIA to the Brotherhood Alliance have played a vital role as “enablers” – of Myanmar’s nationwide armed resistance –  not Thailand and its military with economic ties to Myanmar’s regime.

To be sure, the respective ultimate aims of different armed organizations are not necessarily identical: some are for “internal sovereignty”, some for the administrative control of expanded territories and populations, some for majoritarian democracy, and still some for an ethnically-defined federalist state.

But what is clear is that these disparate organizations, all armed and gaining significant battlefield experiences, share the common rejection of the regime, and the military.

Most importantly, all these groups envisage a future Myanmar, without this repressive national institution.

In short, the Myanmar military as the most repressive and murderous organization has no political role in a future Myanmar. Certainly, not without significant and fundamental institutional reforms.

To put it bluntly, the regime and its military are no longer seen as “a stakeholder” in any dialogue about the political future of Myanmar as a multi-ethnic political state, a fundamental departure from the ASEAN failed policy discourse of an “All-Inclusive Dialogue.”

—

Maung Zarni is a UK-exiled scholar and revolutionary from Burma with 35 years of direct political involvement in Burmese affairs.

12 December 2023

Source: english.dvb.no

By Natalie Brinham

Eight months after Myanmar’s genocidal violence in 2017, which saw more than a million Rohingyas driven into Bangladesh, 55-year-old Rafique (not his real name) welcomed me into his shelter in a busy section of the refugee camp. He served me tea and asked me to wait – he wanted to show me something important that would explain ‘everything I wanted to know’ about Rohingya statelessness in Myanmar.

After some time, he emerged from behind the blanket that had been hung as a make-shift wall. He placed a metal cash box on the bamboo floor. Opening it with a key, he revealed a stack of papers, cards and photos – tattered ones, faded ones and plastic covered ones. Very carefully, he unfolded and displayed the contents across the length of the floor in front of me and my young Rohingya ‘fixer’. Methodically, he placed them in date order with the oldest closest to him. There were ID cards from his parents, grandparents, uncles, aunties and children – fraying blue and pink ones from the 1950s, white ones for the 1990s and one new turquoise one; registration documents listing every family member from the 1970s to the 2010s complete with crossings out, alterations and comments added by officials; joint-mugshots of the family holding a board with their registration number; repatriation documents from the 1970s and 1990s; and piles of land registration papers going back to the early years of independence in the 1950s.

‘But Uncle,’ said my fixer in amazement, ‘This must be one of the most complete collections in the whole camp! How on earth did you manage to keep hold of all these documents?’

Other Rohingya refugees had told us how their documents had been confiscated, seized, destroyed and burnt by state officials. Rafique explained how he would wrap the papers and cards in plastic, secure them in a metal box and bury them deep underground. Each year for almost 30 years, he would dig them up, rewrap them and bury them somewhere else. His brother was well connected; when authorities demanded he relinquish old ID cards, he would say they were lost and offered bribes of food, farm produce, favours or money.

Pointing to the documents in turn, Rafique explained – over three hours – how successive regimes in Myanmar had slowly destroyed Rohingya identity as a group belonging to the Rakhine region of the country. He kept the papers, he said, to evidence Rohingya history in Myanmar. He re-told the stories of belonging of his relatives; three mass expulsions and forced repatriations since independence; slow denationalisation; violent encounters with state authorities. Finally, he talked about his determination to resist the current state ID scheme, which ‘makes Rohingya into foreigners’. Group resistance, he reasoned, was intricately connected to the mass violence, killings and expulsions that had landed him in this refugee camp in 2017. Myanmar, he said, would not be a safe place to return to until Rohingyas were ‘given back’ their citizenship.

Invisible people or invisible states?

At a global level, citizenship has been compared to a giant filing system. Each individual human is assigned at least one nationality and filed ‘according to their return address’ or where they can be deported to. From a statist point of view, stateless people – or people without any legal citizenship – are an aberration in that filing system. They have no return address, so cannot be formally deported or expelled.

Human rights advocates take a different view. Those un-filed people are an ‘anomaly’ in an international rights system that is supposed to apply universally to all humans. It’s impossible for people to realise their rights if no state is responsible for protecting or providing for them. As such, stateless people are often described as legally and administratively ‘invisible’. They struggle to access legal protections, education, healthcare, work and financial services. Further, they are unable to benefit from international development and aid interventions.

Though statist concerns over deportability and human rights concerns over rightlessness seem to be ideologically opposed to one another, proposed solutions to the problems of statelessness often align. Administrative invisibility is generally tackled by proposing more state registration, more documentation, more efficiency, more digitisation and more biometrics. Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, which commits to providing a ‘legal identity for all’ by 2030, has become a rallying cry for international development organisations, refugee and migration management agencies, multinational tech companies and NGOs alike.

Yet, these approaches to statelessness by-pass fundamental issues relating to state abuses of power. State authorities consolidate their power through identification technologies and ID schemes, and can misuse these powers to exclude and expel. Few people in the world are actually completely undocumented. More people lack the right documents to be able to live legally in their homes, move freely within their own country, find regulated work or use banking systems. Other people are wrongly documented/registered by state authorities as foreign. The wrong kinds of registration can make things worse.

Despite being hailed as the harbingers of social inclusion, digital ID schemes can harden the boundaries of citizenship, excluding minorities and making it more difficult for people of uncertain citizenship to function in society. As Rafique’s account shows, the implementation of ID systems can be intricately linked to citizenship stripping and mass atrocities. Analysis of how power functions (differently) in particular states and societies, and how it functions through citizenship regimes and ID systems, is absent in ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to delivering ‘legal identities for all’. ID schemes are often misconceived as neutral processes in which sets of biological and/or biographical facts about individuals are recorded. In fact, they are imbued with power and profoundly impact social relations.

In initiatives to lift ‘stateless people’ out of a state of invisibility – to count them and document them – we fail to look properly at the perpetrating states. States are not identical containers that will function once filled up with international policy recommendations, capacity development and technical advice. Rafique’s oral history, which covered a period of 30 years of UN presence in his homelands, tells a story not of the invisibility of stateless Rohingya, but of how international actors have failed to look at the criminal intent of the state relating to their ID schemes and registration processes.

Statelessness studies often grapple with how to research ‘invisible’ populations. It’s equally important to grapple with how and why state violence has been invisibilised in anti-statelessness work. The very best starting point is to listen properly to survivors of state violence. Rafique’s account is just one of many. Rohingyas and many other stateless people are not really ‘invisible’. It’s just that if we look for them through state-tinted lenses, we tend to look right through the structures that were built to incarcerate them.

Natalie Brinham is an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol, working with MMB and the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies.

12 December 2023

Source: migration.bristol.ac.uk

The statement issued by Washington-based World Kashmir Awareness Forum

December 11, 2023

The supreme court of India upholds the decision of the Modi Government to strip the occupied Jammu & Kashmir of special status. The verdict though disappointing does not come as a surprise. This is the same court that confirmed the death sentence on Afzal Guru, notwithstanding the fact (own admission of the chief justice) that evidence for the alleged crime was not conclusive. The judgment came “to satisfy the collective conscience of the nation.” The same court few years ago issued a judgment giving the Hindu majority a right to build a temple in place of Barbari Mosque. This decision came as a shock to legal luminaries who cast aspersion on the acumen of the judges of the highest court of the land. Any single or group of individuals expecting a fair judgment from Indian courts is exhibiting his/her naivety as rule of law has been buried under BJP Hindutva rubble by the Indian government.

It is evident that the decisions regarding these cases are made   within the precincts of establishment and all that is left for the judges is to narrate the judgment. Although very much expected this pronouncement is a slap on the face of freedom seeking nations and institutions of the world that eloquently expostulate for peaceful and amicable resolution of Kashmir issue. India, especially the present government has expansionist ambitions that can be detrimental, disastrous, and devastating for the whole region that includes three nuclear powered states. The appalling judgment passed today should leave no doubt in anybody’s mind that peaceful resolution of the protracted problem of Kashmir is not a part of the Indian agenda. Thus, onus is on the world bodies like United Nations to marshal all their resources to dissuade India from embarking in her nefarious designs. It must be emphasized here that today’s Supreme Court decision contravenes UN resolutions #122 and #126 adopted on January 24, 1957, and December 2, 1957, respectively. These resolutions prohibit any unilateral action targeted at changing the disputed nature of the State of Jammu and Kashmir.

Today’s decision in no way will dampen the spirit of Kashmiris to attain freedom from Indian occupation. The torch of liberty, peace and justice will continue to burn in the hearts of enslaved people of Jammu & Kashmir and will not be doused by these horrendous decisions.

With this final destructive blow, the moral fabric of the Indian judiciary lies in tatters. The rule of law and the system of justice has been abdicated from the country and what remains is a jungle roaming with hyenas. Indian authorities are living in a fool’s paradise if they believe that by their foolish antics and cowardly decisions the voices of freedom can be subdued. The nation of Kashmir has sacrificed over 100,000 youth and the honor of over 11,000 sisters and under no circumstances they will give up their peaceful struggle for freedom and justice. As a matter of fact, the struggle will be invigorated, and the people of Indian occupied Kashmir will spare no efforts to lead it to its logical conclusion.  It is for the world to decide if   they prefer a cataclysmic outcome of this struggle or will they restrain India to ensure peace, tranquility, and justice in Kashmir. The world powers do remember what Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations said on August 10, 20219 that “the position of the United Nations on this region (Kashmir) is governed by the Charter of the United Nations and applicable United Nations Security Council resolutions.”

For more information,

Please contact: info@kashmirawareness.org

www.kashmirawarenss .org