Marwan Barghouthi: Israel is not a peace partner

October 4, 2009

Bethlehem – Ma’an – Jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouthi called for Palestinians to form a unified campaign of peaceful, popular resistance to Israeli settlements in an interview made public on Sunday.

In an interview from Israel’s Hadarim Prison through his lawyers, Barghouthi said that “there is no Israeli peace partner.

“Anyone who thinks that peace is possible with the current Israeli government and was not possible with the previous governments is being delusional,” he was quoted as saying.

In the interview he also praised caretaker Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s plan to establish a Palestinian state, de facto, in the next two years. He called on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership, specifically, to endorse the plan, along with a program of peaceful resistance.

Barghouthi, a Fatah figure thought to have a political base extending beyond his own party, was jailed by Israel in 2002 for militant activity during the Second Intifada. In 2004 he briefly campaigned for the presidency from prison before endorsing Mahmoud Abbas.

The following are excerpts from the interview:

What are your thoughts on the anniversary of the Second Intifada?

I would like to express my deep respect for all Palestinians for their steadfastness, for not giving up their rights, no matter how much suffering they are facing and will face, because there is no compromise on freedom, return, and independence.

Do you think that a third Intifada is on its way?

The question that should be asked is why did the Al-Aqsa Intifada break out? Was it not because of the collapse of the peace process? Because the negotiation reached a dead end? Was it not because of continued settlement and Judaization in Jerusalem? The refusal [of Israel] to end the occupation and accept Palestinians’ rights? And now is there an Israeli partner for peace? The answer is a big ‘no.’ Did the settlements stop?

What is happening now is the height of settlement activity since 1967. In addition there is the Judaization of Jerusalem. First it was one home after another, now it’s one neighborhood after another. I am saying this loudly: anyone who thinks that peace is possible with the current Israeli government and was not possible with the previous governments, is being delusional.

The problem is that there is no leader in Israel either like Charles de Gualle in France who ended the colonization of Algeria, or like De Klerk, the president of Apartheid South Africa who handed over power to Mandela. Israel does not [want] peace and is not ready to end the occupation.

Intifada does not result from a decision by this official or that leader, or this faction or that. It comes from the collective will of the Palestinians. That’s what happened in the First and Second Intifadas.

What is needed now is a popular movement of peaceful resistance to confront settlement, a movement that has the participation of all the leaders, factions, organizations, and the Palestinian Authority. It is clear that the conditions that were in place when the Second Intifada broke out are still in place.

What do [you] think of the New York summit between President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and US President Barack Obama?

Honestly, I hoped it would not take place because the conditions of its failure are clear. It is regrettable that the American stance, as articulated by Obama and welcomed by Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians, has begun to evaporate. The Israelis and Americans are the ones who benefited from this summit.

It was important that President Abbas’ refused to resume negotiations before settlements come to a halt, and he should maintain this position. If the negotiations resume with such an [Israeli] government, what will we win?

I urge the Executive Committee of the PLO to insist that Israel commit to the principle of ending the occupation, withdraw to the 1967 borders, recognize Palestinians’ right to self-determination, establish an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital, recognize [UN] resolution 194, stop settlements, and release prisoners as a precondition to hold any negotiations with the Israeli government.

I hope we do not repeat the experience of previous years in which the Israelis took advantage of the negotiations in order to give them cover to continue expanding settlements and mislead world public opinion.

Is is possible to successfully confront Israel’s settlement project?

First, what is needed is a firm and consistent political stance on the basis we already discussed. Secondly, the PLO Executive Committee, with all of the factions, should set a plan and vision for a wide popular and peaceful movement against settlements. We need the Executive committee, the factions, and PLC members to turn up the heat on popular demonstrations.

What is needed from Israel and the US is a decision to end the occupation, not more negotiations. Negotiations have been going on for years and that’s enough. The Palestinian leadership should work to isolate Israel and put it under siege and force it to implement international resolutions.

Prime Minister Salam Fayyad had presented his plan titled “Palestine: Ending the occupation, establishing the state. Have you read this document? What you think of it?

I read the document more than once. I think it’s a good plan. It makes a the argument that ending the occupation is a precondition to establishing the state. But the PLO and the factions should compliment this plan with a blueprint for peaceful, popular resistance.

What are your thoughts on the efforts toward reconciliation and the current Egyptian proposal, especially since you were the one who initiated the national reconciliation document [the Prisoners’ Letter]?

The prisoners’ document was in fact the product of the collective will of the leaders of all the factions inside the prisons. It was an honor for me to participate in it along with the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, DFLP and Fatah. It is still the best program for national unity.

I read the Egyptian proposal. It was sent to me through my lawyer Khader Ishqerat. I welcome this proposal. I am calling on all the national and Islamic factions to seize this opportunity to hold a comprehensive national dialogue to sign an agreement before the end of October, along with an urgent announcement of a date for new elections for the presidency, parliament, and PNC members, along with an end to media incitement, and political arrests. The factions must also release prisoners and turn a new page in relations on new bases of national partnership and pluralism, with regular elections.

When do you expect a prisoner exchange deal

We are following up with the media reports about this issue. We hope that a prisoner exchange will be carried out, in which all the prisoners will be released. The list submitted by Hamas did not exclude anyone and we support this firm stance.

Syria rescinds Abbas invitation amid UN controversy

05/10/2009 16:09

Bethlehem - Ma'an - Syria turned away President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday, reportedly over his decision to delay a vote over South African justice Richard Goldstone's report on the Gaza assault last winter.

The president was originally scheduled to arrive in Damascus on Tuesday, following a brief state visit to Yemen that began on Sunday.

The Qatari network Al-Jazeera reported on Monday that Abbas' trip was suddenly called off in light of Syria's outrage over the Palestine Liberation Organization's decision in Geneva on Friday to stall debate on the report.

The wildly unpopular move led the UN Human Rights Council to delay approval for the Gaza fact-finding mission's results until March 2010 at the earliest.

Meanwhile, the Paris-based news agency AFP quoted a Palestinian official confirming that Damascus had "postponed" the visit, although the anonymous source insisted it had nothing to do with the Gaza report.

The real reason Syria pushed off the trip, the official said, was because of a "surprise" state visit from Saudi King Abdullah. The source did not mention whether there were plans to reschedule.

In any case, Damascus was outraged about the UN postponement, which, according to a number of reports, was ordered by Abbas at the behest of the United States and other Western powers seeking to protect Israel from international criticism.

"Syria was surprised by the request of the Palestinian National Authority [PNA] to postpone taking action," reported SANA, the Syrian state news agency.

It added, "Syria finds it strange that the PNA could go for delay, cutting short many Arab, Islamic and international efforts to take appropriate measures to put the report's recommendations into effect."

According to a government source quoted in the Syrian newspaper Al-Watan, Damascus "opted to cancel the visit... out of respect for the blood of martyrs and victims in Gaza, which Israel attacked for 23 days."

While the PA "markets itself as a defender of its people in the face of Israeli aggression," the official added, "Instead of seeking direct condemnation of Israel, the [Palestinian] Authority whitewashed the blood and corpses of innocent children, women and elderly civilians."

The independent newswire Champress quoted an official source as saying, "Damascus is preoccupied with a number of concerns at the moment, which may not allow us to accommodate Abu Mazen's [Abbas'] visit."

It said observers viewed the cancellation a result of "Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' blatant rejection of the positions of Syria, and his policies toward the Goldstone report."

Meanwhile, the president touched down in the Yemeni capital of Sana'a on Sunday, and was previously scheduled to arrive in Damascus on Tuesday to meet Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad and other senior officials, as well as Palestinians.

He was not expected to meet with Khaled Mash'al, Hamas' Damascus-based leader in exile, who sharply criticized the PA leader on Friday for the UN controversy.

Back in Palestine, several hundred Palestinians turned out for a demonstration in Ramallah.

Answering critics of the boycott movement

Sami Hermez, The Electronic Intifada, 1 October 2009

Over the last three years, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has been gaining stride. Individuals around the world have been joining this call, from organizing actions in supermarkets in France and Great Britain protesting Israeli products made in settlements, to filmmakers withdrawing movies from film festivals, to prominent Israelis making a public stand with the BDS movement. Only recently, a multi-billion dollar Norwegian wealth fund divested from the Israeli arms company Elbit, while other companies, like Veolia, a French conglomerate involved in building and managing the Jerusalem light-rail, have suffered setbacks due to the bad publicity the boycott movement has generated.

The list of successful BDS actions has now become too long to list, yet, there are still many out there who do not believe in this movement and have reservations on a number of grounds, offering two main concerns that are rarely tackled, and when they are it is only cursory. The first is the criticism of why a boycott movement against Israel and not countries like China, Sudan or the US. This claim often gets tagged on with the idea that this is due to an inherent anti-Semitism. The second concerns the argument that boycott is against dialogue, which often comes along with accusations that it promotes censorship and is a form of collective punishment.

Boycotting other countries

Two recent open statements on boycott over the summer, by Naomi Klein and Neve Gordon, both anticipated the first criticism, but neither went far enough in explaining why it is necessary to boycott Israel and why we don't boycott other countries. Gordon asked the question only to almost completely ignore it, while Klein has provided two explanations that when combined begin to form a coherent response. In her article published by The Nation on 8 January 2009, in response to the question of why we do not boycott other western countries that are also human rights abusers, Klein wrote that "Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work." While this is true it does not fully respond to the critics.

There are several other reasons why we do not boycott some of the other countries mentioned above. By far the most important of these, outlined by Klein in an interview with Cecille Surasky on 1 September 2009, is that individuals around the world are not boycotting, but rather, they are responding to a call for boycott coming from Palestinian civil society. Klein is not the first to say this; veterans of the South Africa anti-apartheid campaign who led a successful boycott have also stressed the need to stand with indigenous communities. Boycott is a move to heed the voice of an oppressed group and follow its lead. The idea is that there are no movements out of Tibet, in the case of Chinese oppression, or Iraq in the case of the American occupation, that are calling for boycott and for the international community to respond to that call. This is important! The BDS movement comes from within Palestinian society and it is this factor that makes it so powerful and effective. If there were calls for the boycott of places like the US, China or North Korea coming from those the governments oppress, then it would be worthwhile to listen to such calls.

Naomi Klein's original comment that BDS is not dogmatic but tactical is crucial, in that the movement does not claim that BDS can successfully be used in fighting all oppression wherever it is, but that in certain cases of apartheid and colonial oppression, this tool is highly effective. The case of Israel proves very salient here because it receives an almost surreal amount of aid and foreign investment from around the world, most notably the US, with which it enjoys a special status. This makes the daily operations of the Israeli state and its institutions far more accountable to the international community than a place like Sudan, frequently brought up by boycott critics because of the violence in Darfur. It also means, in the case of economic boycott and divestment, that the international community is withdrawing its gifts and support, rather than allowing it to enjoy its special status -- hardly a punishment. It is the high level of support that Israel enjoys that makes it susceptible to BDS, whereas in some of the other countries that are often promoted in debates for boycott, as Klein says, "there are [already] very clear state sanctions against these countries."

In the same September article, Yael Lerer, an Israeli publisher interviewed alongside Klein, echoed this position: "these countries don't have these film festivals and Madonna is not going to have a concert in North Korea. The problem here is that the international community treats Israel like it was a normal, European, Western state. And this is the basis of the boycott call: the special relationship that Israeli universities have with European universities and with universities in the United States, which universities in Zimbabwe don't have. I do believe that Israel could not continue the occupation for one single day without the support of the United States and the European Union."

Critics of BDS must keep in mind the tactical aspect of the movement. We cannot boycott all countries in the world, but this does not mean that BDS against Israel cannot be applied as a tool to force a restructuring of relations between Palestinians and Israelis. This leads into the next criticism regarding boycott as being anti-dialogue.

Boycott is dialogue

Since the signing of the Oslo accords in 1994, many have walked down the path of dialogue -- I tried it for several years -- and found this to be a strategy to stall for time while the Israeli government was building facts on the ground. We saw dialogue become the slogan for former criminals to clean their bloody hands and appear as peaceful while they continued their strategies of oppression; Israeli President Shimon Peres has been the master of such tactics. I found on college campuses in the US where I studied that dialogue was a way to neutralize confrontation and sanitize a dirty conflict. But avoiding confrontation favors the status quo, and the status quo has been, until BDS, in favor of occupation.

The boycott movement is, to be sure, against this dialogue, but not dialogue in an absolute sense. In fact, at its very core, BDS is a movement that is premised on dialogue and of re-appropriating the meaning of dialogue to its rightful place -- one that sees a communication between two equal partners and not one where the occupier can force demands and dictate terms to the occupied. BDS is supposed to foster dialogue by locating those who are committed to real and consistent struggle against Zionism -- and this is most appropriately seen not in economic forms of boycott but in cultural and academic boycott where artists, musicians, filmmakers, academics and other cultural figures are able to come together, converse and build networks in the face of oppressive institutions that are the real target of these boycotts. Where economic boycott creates economic pressure, cultural boycott fosters dialogue and communication precisely because it shames and shuns those that directly collaborate with the Israeli government and its institutions.

The power of all these forms of BDS is in their recognition that true justice can only be achieved when Israelis and Palestinians work together for a common cause, when they realize that their struggle is shared, and when Israelis understand that they must sacrifice alongside Palestinians if they want true peace. The power of BDS is that it offers an alternative to the national struggles of Hamas and Fatah, and calls on Israelis to join Palestinians in their struggle, and to move beyond the comfort zone of preaching peace, and into the realm of action that requires a "no business as usual" attitude. Indeed, BDS provides the means to generate a new movement that can respond to the main Palestinian political parties that have made a mockery of a people's right to resist, despite their achievements of the past. A significant part of this is that BDS enables a discourse that moves beyond "ending the occupation" to place demands for the right of return and equal rights for Palestinians in Israel as top priorities.

If Israelis and Palestinians can build a movement together, can struggle together, then this movement will embody the world they wish to create, one that is shared. Thus, BDS is not a tactic for a national movement; as it gains strength it will prove to have foes on both sides of the nationalist divide. Its power as a tactic lies in its ability to foster a movement that challenges nationalist discourse. It can create the conditions to make possible a movement that recognizes that while national self-determination remains a central element in a world ruled by antagonistic nationalisms, it should not be constrained by traditional notions of nationalism based on superiority and ethnic exclusion, or by the force of current political parties. In this way, BDS is not anti-dialogue, on the contrary, it is a call out to Israelis to be partners in struggle. It is a call out to Israelis to take a step forward towards envisioning collectively an alternative relationship in the land of Israel-Palestine.

It is time to step out of our comfort zones, to confront, to not be satisfied in talking about tolerance and dialogue for the sake of dialogue. It is time to realize that people already recognize the humanity of the other, but that politics intervene to ensure "we" do not grant "them" this humanity. It is time to realize that it is not the Israeli who is targeted by BDS, but the Israeli government and Israeli institutions that collaborate in the occupation of the Palestinians, and degrade and demonize them. Finally, it is time to realize that BDS is a winnable, nonviolent strategy precisely because it works on slowly changing attitudes and building bridges towards a common vision of justice and equality, and because it creates a real feeling of loss, therefore real pressure, on Israeli governments and institutions, that go beyond the lip service of the "peace process."

Sami Hermez is a doctoral candidate of anthropology at Princeton University working on questions of violence and nonviolence.