Monthly Archives: June 2021

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Amnesty condemns Israeli military shutting down a Palestinian health provider

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The Palestinian Union of Health Workers Committee (UHWC) is one of the main providers of health services in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), running hospitals and health clinics which provide medical care to marginalized communities. It provides essential health services to thousands of Palestinians and also runs a programme for women’s health among many others.

More than 310,000 Palestinians have contracted Covid-19 and the virus has killed 3,500 of them. UHCW has been at the forefront of the Covid-19 response in the OPT, providing medical care to Covid-19 patients at its health facilities as well as through mobile clinics for hard-to-reach communities. It plays a vital role in raising awareness and offering public health guidance on the spread of Covid-19. Additionally, it leads local advocacy efforts to improve the Palestinian health system.

On 9th June, Israeli army forces raided the UHWC headquarters in Ramallah in the early hours without warning. They forced their way in by breaking the main door down and confiscated computers and memory drives which are essential to run its services effectively. This was immediately followed by a military order for the UHWC to close for six months.

Amnesty International has warned that the order to shutdown UHWC will have catastrophic consequences for the health needs of Palestinians across the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

This is not the first time that UHWC and its staff have been targeted by the Israeli military. Its Jerusalem office was shut down by Israeli authorities in 2015. Its Ramallah office was previously raided in October 2019 – when its finance director was arrested – and in March 2021 when two other members of staff were arrested.

The organisation has come under attack repeatedly from the Israeli authorities, with its employees facing harassment and arrests for its alleged affiliation with the Popular Liberation Front for Palestine, a Palestinian political party with an armed wing and listed as a terrorist organisation.

Associating a community organisation with terrorism in order to criminalise it is a very familiar tactic in nations across the world, in the context of the global war on terror, to delegitimise opposition, dissidence and resistance. 

The allegations against UHWC come from a report by NGO Monitor which claims to be a globally recognized research institute promoting democratic values and good governance. Its objective is to hold NGOs to account through transparency and adherence to human rights. Its primary focus is non-governmental organizations (NGOs), their funders, and other stakeholders, in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

NGO Monitor is based in Jerusalem. Its funders are organisations from the United States and a few from Israel. It is well endowed with a turnover of nearly 1.8 million US dollars in 2019. Among its International Advisory Board are prominent pro-Israeli supporters such as Professor Alan Dershowitz, Elliot Abrams and Douglass Murray, among others. Its Board of Directors and Legal Advisory Board have highly qualified individuals from the academic and business world who have varied associations with Israel.

Its activities aim to defund European finance for Palestinian organisations by allegations of association with terrorism. Its publication attacks human rights organisations such as B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch which have called out Israeli apartheid.  It opposes any resistance against Israel, such as the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

The claims that NGO Monitor makes of impartiality and defending human rights are patently false. It is a right wing organisation which is pro-Israel and seeks to delegitimise any opposition to Israel. This shows how pro-Israeli political organisations have the capacity to influence both knowledge and decision-making at an international level.

Saleh Higazi, Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International said in a statement, “As the occupying power Israel has a clear obligation under international law to protect the rights of all Palestinians – including their right to health. So far they have completely failed to fulfil this responsibility throughout the global pandemic, pursuing a discriminatory Covid-19 vaccination policy. Israeli authorities must immediately rescind the shutdown order and put an end to the harassment of health workers.”

Appeals to Israel to respect international law have always fallen on deaf ears. Israel is being shielded by the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe from any criticism or pressure to change its policies. This provides an unconditional impunity, giving it free pass to act as it wishes, defying international law and conventions.

Israeli policies have strangled the Palestinian health care system for decades. The cumulative effect has meant the Palestinian healthcare system is in a state of chronic crisis with continuous shortages of money, investment in infrastructure, medication, medical equipment and a lack of specialist doctors and medical staff in general.

Per capita expenditure in Israel on health services is eight times greater than in the West Bank and Gaza.  This is reflected in the staffing of health services.  Israel has eight times more specialist doctors than the West Bank and Gaza, 1.76 compared to 0.22 per 1,000 residents.  While Israel has 4.8 nurses per 1,000 Israelis, the figure for the occupied territories is 1.9.

Furthermore, the Palestinian public health system is not able to provide specialized treatments for complex medical problems in fields such as oncology, cardiology and orthopaedics. Many patients needing such care are referred to private Palestinian health facilities in East Jerusalem and, if needed, to hospitals in Israel, Egypt and Jordan at a significantly higher cost.

The Israeli Ministry of Health also controls the import of pharmaceuticals to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It allows only the import of medicines registered in Israel and blocks imports from neighbouring markets which could provide medications at lower costs. Importing raw materials needed for the local manufacture of medicine is almost impossible because of restrictions by Israel.

All these constraints are reflected in health outcomes. The life expectancy of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza is about ten years lower than that of persons in present-day Israel.  Meanwhile, infant mortality and maternal death rates are four times higher in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the West Bank and Gaza, an average of nineteen babies die per one thousand births, while in Israel, the average is four out of one thousand. Four times as many Palestinian mothers die during childbirth compared to mothers in Israel, 28 compared to 7 per 100,000.

The incidence of infectious diseases is higher in the occupied Palestinian territories than in Israel. Disturbingly, some vaccinations against life-threatening diseases are not given in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Expensive vaccines that prevent Hepatitis A, chickenpox, pneumonia, rotavirus (the common cause of severe diarrhoea among infants and young children) and human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer, are not included in the Palestinian Authority’s national vaccination program because of lack of access and cost.

Needless to say, the healthcare situation in Gaza is extremely precarious, fragile and near to collapse.  The Israeli blockade for 14 years, reinforced by the Egyptians, the periods of non-cooperation by the Palestinian Authority and the four devastating aerial bombardments by Israel, have left a trail of destruction both of human life and resources.

The destruction of housing has created a mass of displaced people – the ruin of the economy, a mass of jobless. Food insecurity and rising poverty mean that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while over 90 per cent of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption. A meagre electrical power supply, a badly-depleted water aquifer and the inability to treat sewage have only intensified the social health crisis.

The deaths of loved one caused by bombings have filled the living with grief and trauma. Those injured during bombings and live firings during the March 18th demonstrations near the border have left them with disabilities. Across the Gaza Strip, psychological trauma, poverty and environmental degradation have had a negative impact on residents’ physical and mental health; many, including children, suffer from anxiety, distress and depression.

On top of all this, the Israeli authorities are hell-bent on criminalising and closing down Palestinian civil society organisations built by Palestinians to serve the health needs of their community. The shutting down of UHWC is unforgivable and indefensible.

It shows that the Israeli apartheid system is a heartless and cruel system which has no regard for the wellbeing of Palestinian people. It is clear that Israeli policies want to decimate the Palestinian population in order to contain the demographic threat they are believed to pose.

We must be ever vigilant of what Israeli policies are doing to Palestinians under occupation and speak out critically against our government’s policy of looking the other way. We must support the struggle of Palestinians for freedom and self-determination. We must not remain silent.

Image by Chicago Man from  Creative Commons  marked with a CC BY-NC 2.0 license.

First published on Labour Hub on 22 June 2021 https://labourhub.org.uk/2021/06/22/amnesty-condemns-israeli-military-shutting-down-a-palestinian-health-provider/

Palestine

Why we must support Palestinian families resisting eviction in Sheikh Jarrah

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The silence of the press and TV on the eviction of the Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem is deafening. The only explanation one can have is the effectiveness of the lobbying by the Israeli state and the collusion of journalists and editors in silencing this issue. It is patently clear that Arab lives do no matter to our media. This confirms the long history of anti-Palestinian racism as Ghada Karmi has so well argued.

Sheikh Jarrah is a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem.  Some 300 Arab residents belonging to 28 extended families in Sheikh Jarrah could be evicted and made homeless.

The Israeli Haaretz newspaper interviewed and published the stories of several families.  I would just like to recount four of those stories.

At 72, Mohamed Sabbagh’s family fled from their home in Jaffa in 1948 when he was one year old. Their original home is now a synagogue. The family wandered around nearly a decade, beginning with a stay in an Egyptian town, then the Gaza Strip, followed by a journey on foot to Hebron, from where they moved to Jerusalem.

In Jerusalem their first home was a makeshift car garage. The Jordanian government brought his parents to Sheikh Jarrah in 1956, where they settled in a compound allocated to them. Over time this developed into a maze-like complex to accommodate the families of his four brothers, as well as his family, with his wife and two of their grown-up children, with their spouses and children – altogether, 32 members including 10 children.

Through his adult life, he did all sorts of odd jobs which included working as plumber, a driver and a hospital receptionist.  They remained together under cramped conditions because Palestinians cannot get permits to build extensions or move to newer locations.

Moving on to the Diab family with seven family members: Saleh Diab, 51, was born in Sheikh Jarrah after his father moved to Jerusalem in 1956 from Jaffa, as part of the Jordanian resettlement programme.

In early May, the family were sitting on the patio of their home when they heard a commotion. He popped out to see what was going on. There was a protest against evictions. The Israeli soldiers assaulted him and broke his leg.

Diab had his own business, a bakery but about seven years ago, but it went bust. He got a job in the bakery department of a large supermarket. He was fired from his job in May without a good reason. He believes that the real reason was complaints by some settlers to his employers about his political activism.

Abdel Fattah Skafi’s family comes from the Baka neighbourhood of West Jerusalem. They were forced out in 1948 and dispersed to different areas of East Jerusalem. Eventually his parents moved to Sheikh Jarrah in 1956 by arrangements with the Jordanian administration. At 71, he is now retired after working his entire life as a shoemaker with great pride.

Skafi and his wife share a small four-room space with three of their six children and their grandchildren, altogether 14 family members. His grandchildren are refusing to attend school, fearing that they would be evicted and won’t be able to come home. He fears that they are regressing in the current situation from being outstanding students.

Finally we come to El-Kurd family with six family members with one minor, who are threatened with eviction. The family was expelled from Haifa in 1948.

The response from 24-year-old Muna El-Kurd was to throw herself into campaigning against eviction. She rose to prominence internationally, with Arabic and international media regularly quoting her in their reports about the protests.  She has 1.2 million followers on Instagram.

On Sunday June 6th, Israeli police arrested her, suspecting her of “participation in disturbing the peace and in riots” that have taken place recently in Sheikh Jarrah. A video posted on social media showed her being handcuffed on arrest at her home and taken off to the police station.

The police allegations are false. They want to silence her because she is getting the message out about the Sheikh Jarrah evictions. She does not have a history of violence towards anyone.

Her brother Mohammed is also active in the protest movement and was summoned by the police on Sunday. He turned himself in. The outrage of these unjust arrests got worldwide attention and the police released both of them.

Reading their stories, one can only admire them for their resilience and strength in surviving against all the odds. Every individual in the families involved are under immense stress because of the threat of evictions. The children suffer from anxieties and their education is damaged. It is a living nightmare for them.

Through May and still continuing, Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood have held demonstrations in response to the imminent threat of forced eviction.  Amnesty International has documented arbitrary arrests of peaceful demonstrators, the use of excessive force, arbitrary use of sound and stun grenades as well as the arbitrary spraying of maloderant (skunk) water cannons at demonstrators and homes in Sheikh Jarrah. The Israeli police have placed the area under siege and continue to attack peaceful protestors and injuring hundreds.

Israeli forces have also been intimidating and arresting journalists who are reporting on Sheikh Jarrah. On May 28th,  the Al Kofiya satellite channel TV crew were attacked and their leading reporter Zaina Halawani and cameraman Wahbi Mikeh were arrested and removed from the neighbourhood. After five days in jail, the judge at Jerusalem’s Central Court released them on bail of 4,000 shekels ($1,230) each and ordered them to be put under house arrest for a month, forbidding them from communicating with each other for 15 days.

On June 5th, Al Jazeera News Channel’s journalist Givara Budeiri was arrested brutally when covering a demonstration and remanded in custody for several hours. Her left hand was fractured and she had to be treated in a hospital on her release.So what is behind these evictions? After 1948, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was under Jordanian administration, which struck an agreement with the UN agency for refugees (UNRWA) in 1956 to build housing units for these refugee families. 

In the 1960s, the 28 families agreed a deal with the Jordanian government that would make them the owners of the land and houses, receiving official land deeds signed in their names after three years. In return, they would renounce their refugee status.  However, this was scuppered when Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem after the 1967 war.

Since 1972, several Jewish settler organisations, mostly funded by donors from the United States, filed lawsuits against the Palestinian families living in Sheikh Jarrah, alleging the land originally belonged to Jews during the Ottoman rule in 1885. 

Khalil Toufakji, a Palestinian cartographer and expert on Jerusalem, found a document in the Ottoman-era archives in Ankara which negates any Jewish ownership of the neighbourhood. However, when he presented the deed to the Israeli district court, it was promptly rejected.

In 1991, the Palestinian families accused their Israeli lawyers and legal representatives of forging their signatures on documents stating that the ownership of the land belonged to settlers. This skulduggery turned Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah from owners to tenants facing removal orders from settlers.

But it was not until 2008, after a US-based settler group, Nahalat Shimon International, bought the disputed land rights, that they used inherently discriminatory laws, such as the Legal and Administrative Matter Laws as well as the Absentee Property Law of 1950, to confiscate Palestinian land or property and transfer it to settler groups. 

In 2009, the Ghawis, along with the Hanoun family (a combined total of 55 people) were forcefully kicked out of their homes, their furniture and belongings strewn across the lawn.  The memory is still fresh in the minds of all residents in this neighbourhood.

In the first week of May, the Jordanian government ratified 14 agreements from the 1960s with Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah to strengthen their position against the Israeli courts. But all the families feel that they will never get justice from the Israeli courts which always favour settlers.

Israeli law allows Jews who may have historic property rights in East Jerusalem to recover those properties, but Israeli discriminatory apartheid laws do not allow Palestinians to claim their properties in West Jerusalem and elsewhere, even if they have the deeds.

Underlying all this is the policy of the Israeli government to limit the population of Palestinians in East Jerusalem to 30 percent or less. This is achieved by arrests, demolition of structures, land confiscation and forced displacement of Palestinians.

It is urgent that the Jordan, UNRWA and the international community take diplomatic and political action against this ethnic cleansing, dispossession and land theft. The Israeli government is shirking its responsibilities as an occupying power.

The good thing is that hundreds of Palestinians and Jews in East Jerusalem marched together on June 11th to stop the evictions.  We must support the grassroots organisations leading the resistance. International solidarity does matter. 

On Facebook, support the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement.  If you are a twitter user, you can get updates and share using the hashtags #SaveSheikhJarrah, #SheikhJarrah and #StopJerusalemExpulsions. You can also find a sample of tweets to share here.

Also follow Mohammed El-Kurd @m7mdkurd.  On Instagram, you can follow muna.kurd15 where she posts latest updates on the situation in Arabic but in most cases English translations are available.            

Don’t donate to funds claiming to help Sheikh Jarrah. The families are not taking donations and haven’t endorsed any funds. “We are committed to keeping the fight for Sheikh Jarrah a political one. It is not time for humanitarian support yet,” Mohammed el-Kurd tweeted.

Join the ‘Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions’ movement. BDS is a form of protesting, boycotting and working towards ending international support of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Find their call to action here.

Sign these petitions:

Stop Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians from East Jerusalem

Facebook, we need to talk.

Demand an end to Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians from East Jerusalem

Sheikh Jarrah -Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Image: Sheikh Jarrah Demo, June 11th. Author: Kara Newhouse Creative Commons image was marked with a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

First publishes by Labour Hub on June 16 2021 https://labourhub.org.uk/2021/06/16/why-we-must-support-palestinian-families-resisting-eviction-in-sheikh-jarrah/

genocides

The legacy of imperial genocides

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German responsibility for the Herero genocide should be the beginning of many imperial reckonings

Germany accepting historical and moral responsibility for the genocide a century ago of the Herero people in present-day Namibia should just be the beginning for all ex-colonial powers to recognise genocides across the five continents.

As far as I know, the TV channels in UK did not broadcast this news. Most of the tabloids and the broadsheets ignored it except for the Guardian. The BBC news website reported it. Only Al-Jazeera English TV gave coverage to the story but it does not have a large audience.

Most people rely on TV for their news.  They are blissfully unaware of the Herero genocide, one of the first genocides of the twentieth century. School history books and teachers would not have covered such genocides. They are erased from history. The only genocide that is widely known is the Holocaust.

This comes at a time when there are calls for imperial reckoning. There is agitation for removal of statues of slave traders and colonisers from public spaces. European museums are under pressure to repatriate objects looted during violent imperial expeditions. Calls for formal apologies for past racist violence are getting louder.  There are demands for including imperial history and the roots of racism in the school curriculum.

News reports barely cover the context of the events and set it in a wider historical framework. One of the best jargon-free introductions to this is Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All The Brutes.  In this short, extraordinary book, Lindqvist weaves a narrative of his Saharan travel with historical reflections drawing on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, scientific theories, social debates and literary worksto tell a gruesome story of imperialism and racism over two centuries.

European world expansion, accompanied by a shameless defence of extermination and white supremacy, created a political climate, psychology and violence that led to a series of genocides which began to be regarded as the inevitable by-product of progress and modernity. This culminated in the most horrendous of all, the Holocaust.

The Heart of Darkness was written during the patriotic delirium after Kitchener’s return in 1898. He had defeated the mighty Mahdist army using a whole new arsenal – gunboats, automatic weapons, repeater rifles and dum-dum bullets at Omdurman. The entire Sudanese army was annihilated without once having got their British lines within a gunshot. Within five hours, eleven thousand Sudanese were killed and the sixteen thousand wounded were left to die. The British lost only forty-eight men. It was a sweet revenge for Gordon’s defeat and death in 1885. Churchill was present and he rejoiced with champagne on the Nile.

The weapons race among European nations had produced a technical superiority that enabled the annihilation of any conceivable opponent from other continents. The tools of imperialism – the ship’s cannons firing on ports of continents, the river streamer carrying Europeans and arms deep into the heart of continents and railways to ease the plundering of continents were put to full effect. Within decades, the ‘gods of arms’ had conquered another third of the world. Many Europeans took this military superiority as intellectual and even biological superiority.

During the nineteenth century, religious explanations for the extermination of indigenous people, often thought of as divine intervention, were replaced by biological ones. Both Charles Darwin and William Wallace, co-founders of the theory of natural selection, came to view the extermination of indigenous people as the result of natural selection, just as the weeds of Europe overran North America or the European rat exterminated native New Zealand rats. In his The Descent of Man, Darwin devoted a section on the extermination of the races of man. The extermination of the Tasmanians by white settlers within a short period was emblematic.

In Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s main character Marlow tells the story of his journey up the Congo River in search of Kurtz, a highly successful ivory trader. He witnesses the violence that is inflicted on the African people who are exploited relentlessly. When he reaches Kurtz’s trading station he finds posts with severed human heads on them. Kurtz had ruled with extreme terror to obtain ivory from the interior with the help of an African tribe that worshipped him as their god.

In 1891, King Leopold II of Belgium issued a decree which gave a monopoly to his representatives to obtain rubber and ivory, with the natives compelled to provide forced labour without payment. Those who refused had their villages burnt down, their children murdered and their hands cut off to set an example. When this was exposed by credible witnesses, King Leopold succeeded in London in suppressing this story as Queen Victoria was preparing for the imperial jubilee. The great powers condoned the genocide in Congo for they had been complicit in similar acts elsewhere.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Germany had no colonies. Scholars like Theodore Waitz and George Garland were able look at extermination more critically than other Europeans and saw through the naturalistic constructs. Europeans grabbed native lands and resources through land clearances, displacing the natives and privatising the commons.  The rapacity of white settlers destroyed everything the native thought, believed and felt.  Although physical force was the most tangible factor in extermination, the use of ‘cultural violence’ was equally efficacious.

Germany, with its unification under Bismarck and a massive leap in industrial advance in the late nineteenth century, was a major European power that did not have colonies and coveted a colonial empire. The Berlin conference of 1884 kicked off the so called ‘scramble’ for Africa. Germany embarked on the conquest of South-West Africa (now Namibia), German East Africa (now Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania), German Kamerun (now Cameroon and a part of Nigeria) and German Togoland (now Togo and eastern part of Ghana). 

It was in South-West Africa that Germans demonstrated that they too had mastered the art of hastening the extermination of indigenous ‘inferior’ people, an art long practised by the British and other Europeans.  German anthropologists had changed their tune and justified the annihilation of indigenous people.

Mimicking the North American example, the indigenous Herero people were banished to reserves. Their grazing lands and cattle were seized and handed to German settlers and colonial companies. The Herero leader, Maherero, wanted to avoid war and over two decades signed treaties with the German colonial government ceding large areas of land. The Germans just ignored the treaties as ‘superior races’ were wont to do. When German encroachments persisted, the Hereros rebelled.

In October 1904, General von Trotha issued orders for the Herero people to be exterminated. The German borders were a free fire zone where every Herero with or without weapons was to be shot. Most of the Hereros were driven out to the desert and the border was sealed off.  Almost the entire people, about eighty thousand, died in the desert, lacking water and food. German patrols found skeletons around dry hollows dug by the Hereros in vain attempt to find water. The few thousand that were left were rounded up and sentenced to hard labour in German concentration camps, which were just death camps.

This is the horror for which Germany has accepted historical and moral responsibility. After years of negotiations with the Namibian government, Germany will fund 1.1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) of reconstruction and development projects in Namibia to directly benefit the genocide-affected communities.

Herero paramount chief Vekuii Rukoro dismissed a deal agreed by the two governments as “an insult” because it did not include payment of reparations. It is indefensible for Angela Merkel’s government to offer the funds as gesture of reconciliation and avoid legally binding reparations.

Imperial nostalgia is still prevalent in the UK more than any other ex-colonial power. A 2020 poll showed that 32 percent of the people were proud of the British Empire while only 19 percent believed that it was something to be ashamed of. This is indicative of the most successful brainwashing for centuries.

But Britain has many skeletons in the proverbial cupboard across the world. Its colonisation of North America, Australia and New Zealand with Anglo-Saxon settlers was the biggest land grab in world history and it was based on extermination of the natives.  Its colonisation across the Third World was based on exploitation, and violence when there was resistance.

It is more than just the infamies of slavery and slave trade. It is more than toppling of nefarious statues. The The Late Victorian Holocausts in India, the plundering and burning to the ground of Benin City, and Kenya’s gulags are just some of the many examples. All this has been erased from history and concealed from people for a long time through the inculcation of patriotism.

We have before us a huge educational and political task to reclaim the savage, hidden history of Imperial Britain and reproduce it in our school textbooks, libraries, museums, public squares and universities.

Image: Shark Island, Lüderitz, Namibia was the home of the Shark Island Concentration Camp between 1905 and April 1907, as part of the Herero and Namaqua genocide of 1904–1908. Author: Johan Jönsson (Julle), licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

First published by Labour Hub 7 June 2021

https://labourhub.org.uk/2021/06/07/the-legacy-of-empire/