Palestine: Intensified boycott campaign responds to Israel's intensified repression

Originally published by Green Left Weekly, December 4.

 

Israel has detained at least 1200 children since October 1.

As the latest upsurge in mass Palestinian resistance to Israel's occupation entered its third month, the world marked the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on November 29.

The date marks the UN's recognition of Palestine as a non-member observer state in 2012, as well as the adoption of the original UN partition plan in 1947, that divided Palestine into two states.

Governments and international bodies around the world took the opportunity to express solidarity with the Palestinian people. Yet there are no signs that the self-styled “international community” — in reality, the Western imperialist countries and their allies — are making the radical shift away from supporting Israel's crimes that true solidarity would entail.

The day before, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) issued a damning statement announcing the number of Palestinians arrested by the occupying forces since October 1 had reached 2400 — half of them children under 18.

The death toll from the recent violence is 104 Palestinians, 21 Israelis, one American and one Eritrean, Al Jazeera reported on November 30.

The death of Palestinians have been obfuscated by Israel's propaganda machine, with victims slandered as "stone throwers" or "knife attackers".

Extrajudicial killings
An example of this was the murder of Ashraqat Taha Ahmad Qatanani, 16 years old, at Huwarra checkpoint on November 22. She was run over by a prominent Israeli settler, Gershon Mesika, whose car ran off the road after striking Qatanani.

He alleged, without any evidence, she was about to attempt a stabbing of Israelis waiting at the checkpoint's bus stop. “I didn't think twice: I stepped on the gas,” he told Arutz Sheva that day. Arutz Sheva dubbed Mesika a "hero civilian" who "thwarted a stabbing".

After Mesika ran her down, nearby soldiers shot the wounded teenager, who died at the scene.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited the US in November, took the opportunity to press Barack Obama's government to recognise the illegal settlements built on Palestinian land in the West Bank, Haaretz reported on November 24.

Internet access
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has finally allowed for West Bank Palestinians to access 3G mobile internet infrastructure, with an agreement signed by Israel's Army Coordinator Yoav Mordachai and Palestine's Minister for Civil Affairs Hussein al-Sheikh on November 19.

Mamoun Mattar, a Palestinian IT and broadcasting expert, told Al Jazeera on November 29: “I am not sure it is that advantageous now to go to 3G while all surrounding countries are using 4G and are preparing for 5G.”

He said Israel had only allowed the concession as they had already upgraded their network to 4G, leaving the frequencies vacant. However, communication will still be restricted — and Gazan Palestinians won't be granted access to 3G at all.

BDS backlash
The strongest international responses to the latest wave of oppression have been through the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Some important BDS campaigns have come to fruition.

The American Anthropological Association overwhelmingly voted to support boycotting Israeli academic institutions on November 20, joining a number of United States academic bodies which have supported the academic boycott in recent years.

Campaign group Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions declared the victory “a historic day for the Association, affirming the finest anti-colonial, anti-racist traditions within the discipline of anthropology.”

And while it falls far short of full BDS against Israel, the European Union's decision to mandate all Israeli settlement goods be clearly labelled on November 11 poses a real threat to Israel's attempts to annex the West Bank by stealth through ever-expanding settlements.

Hysteria over BDS
The decision has resulted in hysteria in Israel, with Netanyahu responding that the decision “brings back dark memories”, alluding to the boycott of Jewish businesses during the 1930s. Other Israeli government ministers repeated the clichéd denunciations of “disguised anti-Semitism”.

Netanyahu even announced on November 29, International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, that Israel would unilaterally suspend the European Union from peace talks between Israel and Palestine.

Hysteria over BDS has even led Israel's parliament, the Knesset, to pass the initial reading of a law that would “bar anyone who publicly calls to boycott Israel or part of Israel from entering the country.” Lawmaker MK Yinon Magal said, “Anyone who wants to boycott is welcome to do so from Syria.”

The Israeli hysteria over BDS, or even partial measures like the EU's settlement labelling decisions, is an indication that international solidarity with Palestine can be effective.

Israeli military companies have recently begun to feel the impact, with their exports last year falling to just 53% of their 2012 peak, prompting Israel's four biggest arms dealers to write a letter warning Netanyahu of a “major crisis”.

But the Australian subsidiary Israeli arms dealer Elbit, which was targeted by BDS protesters in 2014, hopes to kick-start their faltering exports with a new joint bid with Australian manufacturer Elphinstone Group to build 225 Sentinel II vehicles for the Australian Defence Forces (ADF).

This should be the focus of protests.

ASIO Harassment

Originally published by Green Left Weekly. 

On Tuesday the 16^th of April, I received a knock on the door from two members of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, better known as ASIO.

The two told me they would like to have a conversation. When I asked what they wanted to speak about, they told me they were doing their job - protecting national security – and had a few questions about my involvement in activism in Sydney.

Apparently the latest threat to national security is “political violence” in the activist community. As a Palestine solidarity activist involved in organising the Sydney rally to commemorate Nakba (the catastrophe, when the state of Israel was created and Palestinians dispossessed) the agents wanted to speak to me about any concerns I might have, or for me to identify any individuals who I was worried might be responsible for acts of political violence.

I replied that the only fears of violence that I had from my involvement in Palestine solidarity activism were from the far right groups and individuals who often organise counter mobilisations – or simply send threatening and intimidatory emails, messages and phone calls in an attempt to stop or derail our protests and other events.

I was also questioned by the employees about the recent rally against police violence at Mardi Gras – which I didn’t attend – and the picket lines at the University of Sydney, where I study, organised by the National Tertiary Education Union. Once again, my answer was that the only violence I have seen in my time as an activist has been initiated by those seeking to silence our right to protest. 

 

In the case of Sydney University, this comes from members of the “Public Order and Riot” Squad of the NSW Police force, who have been sentin to break up the picket and other protests to defend education and student rights. At the latest picket, they were responsible for breaking one student's leg and another's ribs.

Other people in Sydney and Melbourne involved in campaign groups have also been approached by ASIO and asked not to speak about these visits.

In a context of the “war on terror” overseas — which has involved Australian troops involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past decade — there is a war on civil liberties at home.

ASIO’s mandate is broad and without scrutiny. The organisation is responsible for providing security assessment for refugees seeking asylum in Australia, with no public oversight. Tamil asylum seeker Ranjini and her two sons are locked up in Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre because ASIO decided she is a “security risk”.

 

Security organisations have had their powers expanded and budgets increased by Labor and Coalition governments, and consequently have increased their monitoring of Australians.

As $900 million is being slashed from our universities through an “efficiency dividend”, the new ASIO headquarter building in Canberra is facing yet another costly delay in opening. After being estimated to cost $460 million when construction began under the Howard government, the full price tag is now being estimated at over$631 million dollars – over 2/3 of the university cuts.

Construction has had no parliamentary oversight, and there was no public consultation.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (the ASIO Act) even makes it illegal to publish the identity of any officer, agent or employee of the organisation. 

Last year, Green Left Weekly reported on activists involved in pro-Palestine and pro-Tamil solidarity campaigns in Adelaide who had also been visited by South Australian Police working in “security and intelligence”.

These visits are an attempt to intimidate people into ending their involvement in legitimate political organisations. Organising and attending demonstrations is not illegal and people involved in these activities should not be monitored by ASIO.

There is no law that prevents people from speaking publicly about a visit from ASIO. Shining a light on these practices is important to show that we will not be intimidated into exercising our democratic right to protest.

If the powers that be were serious about national security, they might abolish this spy agency - and withdraw our troops from the costly and unjustifiable occupation of Afghanistan - instead of harassing activists who are only exercising their democratic right to protest.

Update on the Australian left

Against the backdrop of Labor's cave-in to the right on offshore detention of refugees, the whole political establishment using the September 15 #muslimrage protest to whip up Islamaphobia to a level not seen since the Cronulla roots, and the defeat of equal marriage laws for LGBTIQ couples in the Tasmanian and federal, the Australian left has been making some steps forward that
I think it's worth looking at in a little depth.

The mainstream response to the September 15 Muslim rally in Sydney has been predictably depressing. Even supposedly progressive forces like the Greens have wholeheartedly joined the conservatives in condemning the 'bad Muslims' who protested against the film, Innocence of Muslims. Under duress of raids, arrests and threats to increase charges against protesters, Muslim community leaders have likewise joined in the condemnation, rather than highlighting the reasons Australian Muslim youth feel alienated - racism in our society and our participation in wars of occupation against Muslim peoples.

However, there has been a good raft of left responses to the incident and the resulting Islamaphobia. Both Green Left Weekly and Socialist Alternative have run pieces from eyewitnesses highlighting that it was the police, not the protesters, who initiated the violence. This had been substantiated by an SBS report; however, it didn't stop Queensland senator Brett Mason from attempting to pass a motion to condemn Green Left for reporting it. Green Left TV responded with an in-depth report on the issue, featuring researcher Mohammad Tabaa and activist and independant political candidate from a neighbouring electorate to mine, Rebecca Kaye.

A sign-on statement of progressive community leaders and campaigners has started to pick up steam today. However, I've noticed the popularity of the anti-demonstration liberal responses like Peter FitzSimmons's amongst the secular left in the Arab world. We have to understand the context of struggle between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces to determine what real gains for democratic struggle and the working class will be won from the Arab Spring; the strategy of both the film-makers and imperialists and the political Islam movements winning elections in the last year is to encourage the revolutionaries to be sidelined by the cultural divide, and we must oppose that however we can wherever we are. For us in Australia, that means standing in solidarity with the Muslim community and doing our best to prevent another Cronulla riot from ever happening.

Looking at the left itself, a little bit of sussurus had been sweeping the internet since Jorge Joquera's announcement that he would be joining Socialist Alternative (btw, get a better search function for that website!). Although he is just one activist, the fact that her is a former leader of the DSP, and active in Cuban solidarity when Socialist Alternative subscribes to the theory of state capitalism, means it's been a significant signal.

In the aftermath, there's been some important steps towards the kind of constructive collaboration Dan Dimaggio talked about that I mentioned in my last post on this topic - the Revolutionary Socialist Party is discussing merging with Socialist Alternative, while the Socialist Alliance and Alternative have also announced the possibility of closer collaboration. These groups have slightly different backgrounds; the RSP split from the DSP, the largest group which initiated the Socialist Alliance, over the question of whether or not the DSP should dissolve into the Alliance after other organised left tendencies pulled out. This eventually happened in 2010 (some figures are sceptical of the reality of this, but my answer is myself and probably half of the other leaders of the Alliance were never in the DSP; I wrote more about this in my earlier posts). The RSP argued that an explicitly Marxist organisation was still necessary, rather than an organisation aimed at forming a broad anti-capitalist pole; this seems a little more in line with the goal of the Alternative project, which likewise prioritises the direct importance of winning revolutionaries to Marxist politics on the level of ideas.

The possibility of these groups coming together in some sort of project or around some points of unity (perhaps Socialist Alternative's Marxism 2013 conference) is at the moment in the air, and a lot of figures on the internet and in the broader campaigning left have been asking me about this in recent weeks, whether we are just being recruited by Socialist Alternative or if there's a deeper regroupment going on here. I can't say how genuine or deep any of these moves will run, but for now I'm somewhat optimistic. I think some of the ideas Derwin/Dimaggio outlined seem more likely to come to fruition for us here - joint events at conferences, joint speakers, cross-publications, etc all seem possible right now. Perhaps a broad "organisational" agreement for these groups is possible somewhere in the future, but there's still competing theories about What Is To Be Done being advanced that seem, to me, to preclude that possibility - For The Moment...

The experience of the recent NSW council elections has also been a step forward for the left. Housing Action, a joint ticket between the Communist Party of Australia, Socialist Alliance & independant left activists, achieved a decent showing, forcing incumbent mayor Clover Moore to respond to the issue of investment in and maintenance of public housing. Although I wasn't directly involved in the ticket's decision making, from all reports the process of sitting down and hashing out what policy all involved could agree upon was the easiest part of the project of all. And out in Auburn, the Battler coalition of progressive candidates has gotten Tony Oldfield of the CPA elected on the back of consistent community campaigning against a radioactive waste dump first brought in by Labor.

Lastly, I recently attended the EduFactory conference at the ANU in Canberra. One participant described it as the largest gathering of the anti capitalist student left she'd seen in around a decade - with all of the 100+ conference participants (who spoke at least) articulating that the neoliberal drive for cuts, rationalisations and restructures on campus must be opposed. Plans have been established to further link up the different campus struggles and potentially launch national campaigns around future attacks on our education.

We live in interesting times...

Visiting Villawood

Today I visited Villawood Detention Centre here in Sydney, where Serco keeps refugees under guard at the behest of our government. I've visited the single men in stage 2/3 before, as well as the high security section stage 1 (where both asylum seekers with criminal records and those who have made trouble or staged protests inside detention centres are kept). But today was my first time visiting the Housing stage, where families and children are kept locked up.

I met Ranjini, a Tamil woman who fled Sri Lanka in 2008, as the Sinhala chauvinist government was tightening the net on the breakaway northern territory of Tamil Eelam. Her first husband, the father of her two boys, was killed in the fighting. Her two boys, 6 and 8, have lived through the voyage from Sri Lanka to India, from India to Christmas Island, then the stagnation of our detention system until about a year ago, when she was released into the community to have her asylum application processed. However, a few months ago she was called up by Immigration, plucking her two sons out of school, to be locked back up in Villawood.

Her younger son is full of energy - he pulled me outside to play hide-and-seek, to build a tent out of the soccer goals, to try and fix his bike's broken wheels. He is allowed out of the centre to go to a public school, where he is accompanied by a minimum of 3 Serco guards; they can visit parks, and once Clovelly Beach, but only after it's been investigated and cleared by Serco. For now, though, he is still full of beans; he reminded me of the young boy at my neighbour's house in Wollongong. But I know that growing up behind barbed wire has to be wearing on his mind. He made me promise to bring him a real tent the next time I visit.

These are the human beings that our establishment politicians and media voices demonise to misdirect our alienation and anger.

 This article, in which I interviewed Austin Mackell, was originally printed in Green Left Weekly.

Egypt: Arrests 'a sign of desperation', says Mackell

Australian journalist Austin Mackell, United States student Derek Ludovici and Egyptian translator Aliya Alwi are facing charges of inciting people to vandalise public property after being detained by the police in the Egyptian city of Mahalla El-Kubra on February 11.

The group tried to interview Kamal Elfayoumi, a trade worker in the industrial city, when their car was surrounded by groups of local residents. Reports posted by Alwi on Twitter said: "Our car got rocked and beaten against the glass, got called a whore and all sorts of things. Police escorted us to station."

At first, the group thought they were simply being protected by the police. However, after several hours, the police told the group that they were being charged with "offering money to youth to vandalise and cause chaos".

Alwi said they were being transferred to military intelligence in the neighbouring city of Tanta. In the next three days, the group was moved back and forth eight times to stop supporters mobilising in their defence.

However, several activists from No to Military Trials, a network formed to prevent civilians being tried by military courts and other injustices, quickly arrived in Mahalla and began spreading attention to the issue online.

Under pressure from a campaign for their release within Egypt and globally, the three were released on February 14.

Austin told Green Left Weekly: "I've been banned from leaving the country while the charges are being investigated, but I'm trying to get home to renew my passport.

"The Egyptian authorities don't care about me overstaying my visa. I'm being charged with inciting people to vandalise public property, along with Aliya and Derek.

"[Foreign Minister] Kevin Rudd needs to publicly come out and defend me. Embassy staff have told me he is following the case, so he should do something.
 
"I'm a journalist, not a spy."

Mackell said the two Egyptians detained with the group, Alwi and their driver Zakaria Ahmad, were both treated far more aggressively than he and Ludovici. He said Ahmad was being beaten in an attempt to turn him against the others.

"It's a sign of desperation from [the military regime]," Mackell said.

"The targets of the strategy of talking about 'foreign hands' are not us [foreign journalists], they are Elfayoumi and the other activists here. It's an attempt to discredit their real work.

"I am just a means to that end."

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which controls the military authorities, assumed presidential powers when Hosni Mubarak resigned from office on February 11 last year.

Mahalla has been the epicentre of independent union activity and strikes for the past five years.

"The February 11 strike was a bit of a flop in Mahalla; less than 10% of workers in the factories took part," Mackell told GLW. "But Elfayoumi is still optimistic, he says the momentum in the factories is still building."

In Egypt, activists, unions, bloggers and journalists still face constant harassment from right-wing baltageya gangs paid off by the interior ministry and from official state forces.

"The most likely scenario is some people were there to instigate trouble," said Mackell. "They were not necessarily attempting to instigate trouble against us, but against the strike and the people who were marching.

“Then when we were there we became perfect targets."

More than 12,000 people have been arrested and 8000 charged by military tribunals since the uprising against former President Mubarak began a year ago. Many female detainees have been subjected to cruel and degrading "virginity tests".

In the face of the huge protests that have marked the one year anniversary of the overthrow of Mubarak, the Egyptian government has intensified attempts to discredit protesters and shift the blame away from itself for ongoing repression.

Al Jazeera English reported that a letter from the SCAF read on Egyptian State Television on Friday said: "Egypt is facing conspiracies that seek to topple the state and spread chaos … it will not bow to pressure to accelerate the transition to full civilian rule."

Despite this, millions continue to take to the streets.