Gaza: A View From the Ground
A South African Perspective
By Prof. Patrick Bond
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25174
Global Research, June 8, 2011
Here in Palestine, disgust expressed by civil society reformers about Barack Obama's May 19 policy speech
on the Middle East and North Africa confirms that political
reconciliation between Washington and fast-rising Arab democrats is
impossible.
Amidst many examples, consider the longstanding U.S.
tradition of blind, self-destructive support for Israel, which Obama has
just amplified. Recognizing a so-called ‘Jewish state’ as a matter of
U.S. policy, he introduced a new twist that denies foundational
democratic rights for 1.4 million Palestinians living within Israel. For
a Harvard-trained constitutional lawyer to sink so low on behalf of
Zionist discrimination is shocking. For although Obama mentioned the “1967 lines”
as the basis for two states and thereby appeared to annoy arch-Zionist
leader Benjamin Netanyahu, this minimalist United Nations position was
amended with a huge caveat: ‘with land swaps.’
Obama thus implicitly endorses illegal Israeli
settlements (with their half-million reactionary residents) that pock
the West Bank, confirming its status as a Bantustan for 2.5 million
people, far more fragmented than even the old South African homelands.
Another 1.6 million suffer in the isolated Gaza Strip.
Map of Israel.
Obama also claimed, “America values the dignity of
the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator,”
stretching credulity.
The Arab Spring Gets In The Way
“He was with the dictators until the very last
minute,” rebuts Ramallah-based liberation activist Omar Barghouti,
regarding both Tunisia's Ben-Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. “He's missed
the point of the Arab Spring. It's not just about the street vendor, it
is about social justice. The pillage of the resources of the region by
the U.S. has to come to an end.”
Resource extraction and Israeli empowerment explain
Obama's recent flirtation with unreformable Libyan and Syrian tyrannies,
as well as ongoing U.S. sponsorship of brutal regimes in Yemen, Bahrain
and Saudi Arabia. So it was impossible for the U.S. president to avoid a
subtle confession: “There will be times when our short-term interests
don't align perfectly with our long-term vision of the region.”
“There will be times”? That's the understatement of
the year, considering “short-term interests” reflect the corrupted
character of corporate-purchased U.S. politicians. (Obama needs to raise
$1-billion to finance his re-election campaign next year.) Pursuit of
such narrow interests gets Washington into perpetual trouble, including
bolstering Israeli aggression, becoming dependent upon oil from despotic
regimes, and dogmatically imposing free-market ideology on behalf of
U.S.-dominated multinational capital.
I am witnessing the results firsthand in Gaza and the
West Bank, and was lucky to even get here, for last Tuesday, the day
after I arrived at the main regional airport in TelAviv (with my white
skin, multiple passports and non-Muslim surname), my friend Na'eem
Jeenah also tried to enter Israel en route to Palestine with South
African papers. For four hours the Israeli border police detained
Jeenah, a Johannesburg leader of the Palestine Solidarity Committee.
Intervention by concerned SA diplomats couldn't appease immigration
officials, who forced him to board a flight to Istanbul where he waited
for another day before returning home.
Apartheid – Israeli Style
South Africans who get through immigration invariably
confirm conditions here that deserve the label ‘Israeli apartheid.’
Last month, Judge Richard Goldstone's reputation-wrecking reversal on
the UN Goldstone report, regarding the Israeli army's intentional
killing of Gaza civilians during the January 2009 “Operation Cast Lead”
invasion, cannot disguise 1400 dead, of which no more than half were
Hamas-aligned officials.
That massacre was, according to Israeli journalist
Amira Hass, a chance for the army to practice high-tech urban warfare
against a caged populace, replete with white phosphorous, combat robots,
drones and other terror weapons.
Erez (Gaza border) protest on Nakba day, 15 May 2011.
Just as I crossed Gaza's northern Erez border post
last Friday, Israeli Defense Force soldiers fired on unarmed marchers
who are Palestine's unique contribution to the Arab Spring, leaving two
wounded. The Sunday before, tens of thousands of these brave people,
especially refugees, mobilized using FaceBook and walked to several 1967
lines, resulting in fifteen murders by trigger-happy Israeli soldiers.
Along with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
non-violent struggle against Israeli power, this Satyagraha-style
movement, adopting strategies and tactics pioneered in Durban, South
Africa by Mahatma Gandhi a century ago, must strike fear in the hearts
of TelAviv securocrats. No longer can they portray their enemies as
rocket-launching Islamic fundamentalists who worship Osama bin Laden.
What I also learned from Palestinian civil society
activists is that the pillaging of this region by the West is being
planned by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank,
following similar support to dictators last year – though with
unintended consequences! – in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.
Evidence includes two documents presented by the IMF
and World Bank to an April 13 Brussels donor conference, spelling out
Palestine's wretched economic fate in technocratic terms. The IMF
insists on lower civil service wages, electricity privatization, subsidy
cuts and a higher retirement age. The World Bank advocates a free-trade
regime which will demolish the tiny manufacturing base.
In his speech last Thursday, Obama endorsed an
IMF/Bank document on the regional economy to be tabled at this week's G8
meeting of industrial powers in France. Although Washington promised
$1-billion in debt relief, it comes with conditions such as “supporting
financial stability, supporting financial modernization and developing a
framework for trade and investment relations with the EU and the USA.”
Go ahead and snigger, but absurd as this sounds in
the wake of the recent U.S.-centred world financial meltdown, Obama's
gift is actually an “attempted bribe of the Egyptian democratic
revolution,” says Barghouti. In any case there is another $33-billion of
Mubarak's “Odious Debt” yet to be cancelled, and reparations to be paid.
Concludes Barghouti, “If anything, the U.S. has
played a very negative role. The best thing Obama can do for the region
is leave it alone. We've seen U.S. democracy-building in Afghanistan and
Iraq, so no thank you.” •
Patrick Bond is based at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society,
Durban, South Africa, and traveled to Palestine courtesy of TIDA-Gaza
and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. His full report on the dangers of
neoliberal influence in Palestine is available on the palestine.rosalux.org website.
