Encouraging news arrived yesterday from Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss.

Among mainstream churches, the Presbyterian Church (USA) has been a leader in the movement for ethical investment.  As the report makes clear, it’s no easy task.

While international power games grind away over our heads, initiatives like this represent one of very few vehicles by which people outside the power structure – most of us, that is – can take practical action for human rights and a just peace in Israel-Palestine.   [For an in-depth look at Israelis and Palestinians in the grassroots BDS movement, see chapter 17, Our Way to Fight.]

Here’s the news:

The Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Committee on Mission Responsibility through Investment has recommended that the church divest from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions due to their relationship to Israeli human rights abuses in the occupied territories.  This decision comes as the result of a corporate engagement process which began in 2004 and sought to influence corporate policy vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  From the church press release:

“The General Assembly asked us to do everything we could to bring about change through dialogue, and we have done this, even asking the Assembly for more time over the years,” said committee chair the Rev. Brian Ellison, a pastor from Kansas City, Missouri. “Today we are sadly reporting that these efforts have not produced any substantive change in company policies or practices, and that there is little reason for hope they will do so in the future.  According to the Assembly’s prior directives and the church’s ordinary engagement process, we have little choice but to recommend divestment.”

The committee has been engaging several companies profiting from non-peaceful pursuits in the region, including activity connected with Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, since the 2004 General Assembly.  MRTI’s recommendations will be presented in February 2012 to the General Assembly Mission Council and then, with the Council’s approval, to the General Assembly in July 2012.

“We have not made this decision lightly, but have undertaken it with prayer and great care,” Ellison said.  “We have appreciated the witness of brothers and sisters around the church in our process, both from presbyteries where these corporations are located and from those who have called us to move more quickly in this direction.  We continue to pray for employees of these companies and their congregations as they are affected by this decision.  We also continue to pray that all companies and individuals in the region will redouble their efforts to seek a just peace and support for human rights for all Israeli and Palestinian people.”

The press release also included the following information about the companies in question:

“Caterpillar has profited from sales of its products to Israeli military and civilian authorities, including its D-9 bulldozers which are used to demolish Palestinian homes and construct settlements and Israeli-only roads on Palestinian land, acts deemed illegal under international law.  The company has never accepted responsibility for how its products are used and has not responded to requests for dialogue since 2009 from MRTI or other religious groups.

Hewlett-Packard has profited from sales of specialized technology used in invasive and unjust biometric scanning processes at checkpoints in the separation wall constructed on Palestinian territory.  It has also provided hardware used by the Israeli Navy in its internationally condemned blockade of the Gaza Strip and in the municipal governments of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, deemed illegal under international law. Discussions with the company have been unproductive, and the company has been unwilling to address serious issues of concern.

Motorola Solutions, one of two companies to emerge from a corporate reorganization of Motorola at the start of 2011, has profited from providing communications technology to the Israeli military used in operations in the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, and has built and supported high-tech surveillance systems in the separation barrier and Israeli settlements built illegally on Palestinian land.  The company has consistently declined to have dialogue with religious investors.”

Please pass this message on to others.

The founder of the Israeli organization Zochrot [featured in Our Way to Fight, chapter 14], Eitan Bronstein is deeply thoughtful, a practical visionary, and a brave man.  Despite repeated attacks and death threats, he refuses to be silenced on the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their land of origin.  Although Israel and its backers have succeeded in keeping this matter entirely off the table, in fact it lies immovably at the deep, raw heart of the conflict.

Here is Eitan Bronstein’s latest argument, published September 7 in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Why not return?

No idea in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has had as much potential and been so neglected and rejected as that of return of the Palestinian refugees.

[MR: I offer a little context here.  On May 11, 1949, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273 admitted Israel to the United Nations, after Israel promised to implement prior UN resolution 194.  Article 11 of Resolution 194 calls for the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, which is established practice under international law, and in every other conflict in the world.  As of 2011, Israel has yet to honour its promise.  Eitan continues:]

Israel’s denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, beginning at the end of the 1948 war and continuing today, focused public discussion about the refugees’ return on an argument about that right and left no place for new visions and political practices to develop as part of public debate.

The Palestinians declare their right of return, dream of it and recently have also been trying to implement it by returning to the places from which they were expelled, thereby challenging the borders of the Jewish state.  Israelis, for their part, reject this fundamental right, viewing its implementation as a dreadful apocalyptic scenario, no less than a second holocaust.

At the same time, a new possibility is developing: utopian thinking about the actual return of Palestinian refugees.  This skips over the question of right, although it assumes its existence, in order to focus on practical issues raised by the refugees’ return.

An exhibit opening September 19 in the gallery of Zochrot – an organization which focuses on the Nakba and encourages Israelis to understand and accept its reality – will display various projects dealing with practical aspects of the return of Palestinian refugees.  Israelis, Palestinians and others present their preliminary efforts to imagine refugees returning to their homeland, taking into account the great changes on the ground which have occurred since their uprooting.  These efforts are based on two fundamental assumptions:  no one will be displaced from the home they live in, and all the refugees and their descendants have the right to choose to actually return.

A range of projects are displayed, differing in their conceptual approach to return as well as in the media in which they are presented, such as “man-in-the-street” video interviews with Israelis and Palestinian refugees and the results of the “counter-mapping” workshop in which Israelis and refugees from Miska village planned how it could be rebuilt in its original location between Ramat Hakovesh, Sde Warburg and Mishmeret.

The exhibition provides a workshop in which visitors are able to propose their own ideas.  It will be accompanied by a series of evening discussions open to the public in which these ideas and the overall vision will be critically examined.  In addition to the importance of public involvement, the exhibition’s conception recognizes the preliminary nature of this endeavor, which is like the stammering of a child learning a new language.  Zochrot doesn’t intend to present perfectly developed, final ideas about the return of Palestinian refugees, but instead to raise the questions about it.

How many refugees will want to return and where will they live?  How will they earn a living?  What will happen to the historic village core?  Will it be rebuilt or otherwise preserved?  What about refugees who don’t choose to return?  What will be the relations between the returnees and residents of nearby localities?  What will be the nature of the state to which they return – a Jewish state, as it is today, solely for Jews?  Will the returnees own their homes and be able to sell them in the free market?  If so, is there a danger that the localities to which refugees return will become the focus of real estate speculation?  What will happen to the fabric of existing communities in the refugee camps whose members come from various localities of origin?  Will these communities be broken up even though most of their members never lived in the localities of origin and the only community in which they lived was that of the refugee camp?  What effect will return have on the current “host” cities and societies (Damascus, Amman, etc.)?  How will Jews and Arabs living in Israel today arrange to absorb the returning refugees?

The mapping workshop developed the idea that the return of Palestinian refugees contains the hypothetical potential of opening up Israel’s Jews to the Arab world in whose midst they live.  New relationships will thereby develop between Israel’s Jews and the geographical and human environment in which they live.  The idea behind this exhibit may seem illusory and fantastic today.  But if we dare imagine such a future, of Israelis and Palestinians living together, without fear, perhaps we’ll also see its life-giving potential rather than simply anticipating the next war.

[MR: Please give this message wings by passing it on to others.]

Two weeks from now Palestinian officials will seek statehood status from the UN General Assembly.  Maybe.  What kind of state are they seeking?  Who knows?  It’s a secret.

According to the urgent call for transparency that follows below, issued yesterday by the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-apartheid Wall Campaign, the official secrecy that continues to shroud the initiative poses grave dangers to the Palestinian people, over whose heads and behind whose backs it has been packaged.

The governments of more than 100 countries have already declared their support for the idea of a Palestinian state – of some kind.  On the other hand, Israel continues to escalate its high-level manoeuvring to kill the initiative, and US officials faithfully vow that they will never allow it to happen.  Whatever it is.

Among progressive commentators, debate rages, and ultimately comes down to this:  ‘The statehood initiative is the best chance Palestinians will ever have to achieve even a measure of freedom’ versus ‘this will officially lock Palestinians forever into a disconnected series of prisons, or bantustans (as in apartheid South Africa), or Indian reserves (as in North America).’

By my own reading of history, I’m more convinced by the second argument than the first, but really it’s hard to say, because no one except a few select Palestinian officials know what the proposal contains.   Which is the problem, as outlined in the call below.

A note about the source:  The Palestinian Grassroots Anti-apartheid Wall Campaign is a coalition of Palestinian non-governmental organizations and village popular committees that work hard and courageously to stop and eventually to dismantle the Apartheid Wall, and to resist the Israeli military occupation and colonization of Palestinian land.

Much of what we hear about Palestine and Israel is the official version, dropped on us from above.  This call comes from the ground where people live, behind the wall.   Please read it through.  It’s an eloquent testament to clear thought and real democracy:

At two weeks from the crucial date of September 21, still no one knows what the text and details of the proposed initiative at the UN are.  As many Palestinian organizations, intellectuals, and activists have stated, we will not and cannot support an initiative, the content of which we do not know. The core of the issue is the fact that our leadership has moved this initiative forward without any open discussion about it and now wants the Palestinian people to blindly support it.  This is indicative of a much deeper problem within the Palestinian body politic and begs an urgent call for transparency, accountability, and popular participation.

Palestinians all remember the moment in 1993 when the Palestinian leadership took everyone by surprise presenting them with the fully negotiated Oslo Accords.  After decades of struggle, sacrifice, and suffering of a people in its entirety there was trust in the leadership.  We believed them when they assured us that the Oslo Accords were a step towards the attainment of our rights.  Nobody was really informed about the Paris Accords, the economic agreement that completed the Oslo Accords and further strangled Palestinian life.

In the following twenty years, the same people that negotiated Oslo continued negotiations in secretive meetings and without any publicly and collectively agreed upon terms of reference.  As the Palestine Papers published by al-Jazeera ultimately revealed, the many rumours told about those endless negotiations behind closed doors were real: far too many times our negotiators have negotiated about our rights themselves rather than for ways to attain them.

Today, the “peace process” and the associated negotiations are almost unanimously considered a failure, an instrument at the hands of Israel to continue the colonization of our land, the theft of our resources,  and the displacement of our people.  On top of it, the Oslo process was a circus mirror depicting occupation and apartheid as peace and  understanding. However, the same people responsible for the two decades of failed “peace” process ask us now once again to trust another initiative, the risks and content of which is still kept away from the public.

It almost seems as if the Palestinian official leadership does not want to acknowledge the massive gap that separates it from the people; as if it wanted us to forget that the elections for the PNA [Palestinian National Authority] and Palestinian Legislative Council did not provide accountability and legitimacy because of Western interference, that the structures of the PLO have been lingering in neglect since the early nineties, and that their representativity has been eroded.  All the while, the Palestinian leftist parties are seemingly caught in the same position of indecision as in 1993,  unable to propose an alternative or even to offer a significant intervention on this issue.

Thankfully, Palestinian society as such has learned two lessons from the past two decades: first, where the destiny of an entire people is concerned, the people must have their word, and second, don’t believe in processes without aims and deadlines.

Unsurprisingly, one of the founding demands of the Palestinian youth movement that has emerged in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ is the call for immediate and direct elections to the PLO National Council to allow peoples’ participation in the political processes.  Yet another generation of Palestinians is growing to pick up the struggle from where we brought it to and to join the popular resistance.

However, once again the Palestinian leadership expresses the same attitude of arrogance in front of its people. Instead of supporting its people in the struggle, the PNA continuously seeks to limit and control popular mobilization in the areas under its administrative control.  Confrontations with the occupation are curtailed in an attempt to transform popular resistance into a manifestation of support for this or that initiative.  As a result, true popular resistance today is only growing in areas C, where the PNA does not exercise any police presence.

While there is certainly a wide consensus within the Palestinian people that a shift in strategy away from negotiations is overdue, there is as well an urgent need to collectively, democratically, and openly discuss where to go next.  Rethinking and re-strategizing of the Palestinian struggle is indeed necessary and cannot be left in the hands of a few.  The Palestinian leadership must not lose the notion of service to its people and expect instead that the people serve the leadership.

The proposed move at the UN might potentially  – depending on the still opaque content of the proposal – be a monumental shift away from the national liberation struggle towards a dispute between a factual and a virtual state, a move that could jeopardise venues for claims regarding Palestinian refugee rights and change structures of official representation. Others argue that instead the UN initiative does not touch on any of these issues and would only bring Palestinians more opportunities to hold Israel accountable in international forums.  This begs the question why the PLO has so far not used the instruments already at hand.  Why in seven years has there never been any attempt at activating the decision on the legal consequences of the Wall issued by the  International Court of Justice on July 9, 2004?  Does the PLO actively support Turkey in its intention [announced by the Turkish government this week] to bring the siege on Gaza before the same international court?  Why is the Goldstone report not being used to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes?

In conclusion, the current UN initiative marks the peak of a crisis within the political structures of representation and urgently requires short term and long term responses.  In the short term, we  need immediate clarity on the exact content of the UN initiative, and an open and inclusive forum of discussion where popular and expert concerns are taken seriously and integrated into the proposal; a forum that includes Palestinians and their political and social expressions from all over our homeland and from the diaspora.  In the mid and long term, direct elections for the National Council of the PLO and a general reversal of the current attitude of our leadership towards greater respect, trust, and support for the struggle of the people are essential.  Only in this way can we build new processes that make possible a true consensus on a post-Oslo Palestinian national strategy.

If in the coming two weeks our leadership shows readiness for a truly transparent, accountable, and participatory process, then not only will the UN initiative profit from it, but this approach could open the way to a restructuring of the Palestinian body politic, close the gap between the leadership and the people, and lay the basis for an effective rethinking of the Palestinian national strategy.

Until then: we will not buy anything within a closed bag.

This message just arrived from the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, occupied Palestine:

When the Israeli army attacked the Freedom Theatre on July 27th [MR: see several previous blog posts], they took away two of our members, Adnan Naghnaghiye and Bilal Saadi.

After a month in prison without charges, an illegal practice under international and Israeli law, both men were finally released on August 22nd.  Theatre school student Rami Hwayel, also seized by the military at a checkpoint, is expected to be released in a few days.

However, also on August 22nd, the army seized Freedom Theatre security guard Mohammed Eisht Naghnaghiye, brother of Adnan.  Once again heavily armed soldiers came in the night.  Furniture was thrown to the floor and broken, and dog excrement left on the floor. The army also took another three residents of the camp that same night.

Yesterday the army extended Mohammed Eisht Naghnaghiye’s illegal arrest by 15 days.

In addition, another student at the theatre school, Momeen Syatat, has been informed by the army that he is to hand himself in for interrogation on September 1st.  [MR: This procedure is standard for the occupying army, and gives the false impression to Israelis and foreigners that compliance is voluntary.]

Further, two technicians at The Freedom Theatre, Mohammed Saadi, 21 years old and Ahmad Matahen, 20 years old, have also been told to hand themselves in at the Salem military base outside of Jenin. [MR: It is also standard practice for the occuping army to arrest young people arbitrarity, then to offer them a way out of brutal interrogation by collaborating, ie spying, on their fellow citizens.  Such forced collaborations often include making false accusations as required by the military handlers.]

The outcome of the previous interrogations confirms what we at the theatre have claimed from the start – these people are not suspects and could have been questioned without being arrested at all, not to mention the inhumane treatment they suffered.  They all cooperated in giving any information they had, to assist in finding the person(s) who murdered our beloved co-founder Juliano Mer-Khamis.  [MR: The Israeli army claims to be conducting a criminal investigation into the April 2011 murder, but given that Jenin is Palestinian territory, Israel actually has no legal jurisdiction there.  On the contrary, harassment of a vital and widely respected cultural institution that challenges power is a much more likely cause of the army interventions.  The occupier would like nothing better than to see the Freedom Theatre close.]

All of us at the theatre want more than anything that the murderer of Juliano Mer-Khamis be brought to justice, and therefore Mohammed and Ahmad have decided to obey the order and contribute any information that might help.  However this is on condition that they are treated in accordance with rule of law.  To walk into the arms of the Israeli security service quite often means disappearing from the surface of the earth, never knowing when you will come back and knowing that you most certainly face harsh treatment.

We demand that Mohammed, Ahmad, Momeen and Eisht be treated no worse and no better than any Israeli citizen brought in to participate in a civil criminal investigation.  Their legal rights, as stipulated by international law, must be honoured.

Mohammed and Ahmad will go voluntarily to the Salem military base only on condition that their lawyer is allowed to accompany them and to see them immediately before and after interrogation, and that they will not be arrested and not be denied access to their lawyer as has been done in the previous cases.  This demand has been relayed to the Israeli security and we are awaiting their answer.

In the meantime, these continuing cruel and unnecessary arrests have forced the Freedom Theatre to hire a lawyer to protect the rights of its members.  Legal fees already approach 5000 EUR [MR: At current rates that’s about $7000 Cdn, or 4400 British pounds].

We fear that costs may increase further as the cycle of Israeli arrests does not seem to end.

The Freedom Theatre is unable to allocate this money from our project funding without jeopardizing our progams, and the families of the innocent arrestees are also unable to cover the fees.  We therefore ask our friends and supporters around the world to contribute to the legal costs.

These cases will also enable us to expose the discriminatory legal system applied to the Palestinians.

You may make your donation here.  Please mark your donation with “Legal”.

For the Freedom Theatre

Jacob Gough, acting general manager

[MR:  And please give this message wings, by passing it on to others.]

“Sometimes you have to run very fast to remain in the same place.  But experience shows that when you’re active you build something, and if you don’t stop in the middle and leave in despair, it will bring results.  Even if you won’t live to see them, at least you know you’re doing something that’s needed.”  Michal Shwartz, Israeli activist.

For almost a month now, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have poured into the streets for massive, unprecedented protests against their government, whose ruthless neo-liberal policies systematically enrich a tiny elite at the expense of the vast majority.

To avoid being dismissed as ‘leftists’ (which PM Netanyahu did anyway), protest leaders disallowed any mention of the colossal, toxic elephant in the room: the ever-expanding matrix of  extravagantly subsidized settlements built illegally on Palestinian land, and the massive military apparatus that’s required to back them.

Several Israeli commentators like Uri Avnery worry that this bizarre denial of reality could fatally compromise the protests, and then all it would take to unravel them is a ‘security’ scare.  This tactic has always worked in Israel.

On Thursday August 18, several attacks were launched by unknown assailants near the southern Israeli town of Eilat: gunfire hit a bus carrying soldiers, an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) detonated under an army patrol vehicle, an antitank shell hit a civilian car, and shots were fired at Israeli soldiers.  One Israeli soldier, one border guard sniper and six Israeli civilians were killed.  (More detail here, from JNews, “alternative Jewish perspectives on Israel-Palestine”.)

Immediately, protest leaders in Tel Aviv called off their protests.  Instead they organized a “mass march for the dead.”  Israeli dead, that is.  Palestinians in Gaza killed by the most intense Israeli attacks since the 2008-09 invasion will not be mourned by the protesters in Tel Aviv.   (The current Israeli military escalation started on Thursday, despite the absence of any clear evidence that the perpetrators originated in Gaza.)  Nor will the Israeli marchers mourn the Egyptian soldiers killed on Thursday by Israeli rockets on the border between Gaza and Sinai.  (In response, Egypt has made a formal protest, and has threatened to withdraw its ambassador from Israel.)

None of this is new, except in the details.  From its inception, the Israeli state has been built on territorial expansion, military occupation and war.  The only ‘peace’ such a regime can allow – or even contemplate – is a dictated colonial peace, of the sort imposed on indigenous people in the Americas, Australia and other European colonies.  This is peace without justice, the deathly stillness of tyranny triumphant.  By contrast, a just peace is alive, mutually beneficial, democratic, and vibrant with possibilities.  Such a peace sidelines the military and is thus intolerable to a military state.

Still, defying impossible odds, ‘ordinary’ people in Palestine and Israel continue to search for traces of common ground, and in that rocky ground they determinedly plant seeds for a just peace.  It is to explore and honour this steady, grueling, sometimes dangerous work that I wrote Our Way to Fight.

So then, what is new?  Boycott, divestment and sanctions, at least in the Israel-Palestine context.  Despite escalating attacks by Israel and its backers, the international BDS movement continues to grow, slowly but surely.  Its impact can be measured in many ways, including the recent Israeli law outlawing support for boycott.  (A shocking threat to democracy which, ironically, some Israeli commentators suggest may have been one of the sparks for the tent protests!)

The Salit quarry strike is also a new phenomenon.  On the surface it is not such a big thing, but its implications are enormous, both for authentic democracy and for a just peace.

A little background:

When I travelled in Israel with Michal Shwartz and Dani Ben-Simhon of the Workers Advice Centre, they had just experienced a breakthrough at the Salit quarries.  For two years WAC-MAAN (MAAN is the Arabic translation of the acronym WAC) had been trying to organize diggers, manual labourers who work in archeological sites and stone quarries.  As in agriculture and trucking within Israel, in the excavation business bosses collaborate with manpower companies to create a virtual slave market, picking and choosing from the most excluded, and thus most desperate for work – Palestinians, Ethiopians, the elderly, women.  The official Israeli labour federation, the Histadrut, has no interest in such marginal workers.

In May 2010, after Salit management halted negotiations aimed at forming a union, the forty production workers at the quarries went on strike.  They refused management’s offer to resume negotiations without WAC as their union.  Three days into the strike, management agreed to marathon negotiations toward a collective agreement, the first in twenty-seven years at the quarry, and the first ever between Palestinian workers and an Israeli company.  (The quarries are located in Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli military control, so the Israeli owners naturally assumed that this gave then full control over the Palestinian workers.)

But what do workers’ rights have to do with peace?  “In WAC,” Dani Ben-Simhon explained, “we are trying always to reinforce this idea of shared working class interest, regardless of nationality.  This is different from other organizations that talk about peace and co-existence here.  Either they talk and talk but say nothing about politics, or they eat hummus together and that’s it.  We’re talking about something much bigger, mutual working class interest to make a change in our society.”

The way I read history, this would be a long, steep uphill battle.  Since Michal Schwarz has been at this kind of struggle much longer than I have, I asked her how she reads history.  She replied:  “We are not people who lack patience, who think we can change history with our own hands.  We look around, we see how things have gone in the past and how they are going now, and we work at the tempo that history forces on us.  Sometimes you have to run very fast to remain in the same place.  But experience shows that when you’re active you build something, and if you don’t stop in the middle and leave in despair, it will bring results.  Even if you won’t live to see them, at least you know you’re doing something that’s needed.”

Which brings us to the strike.  After a full year of negotiations, in April 2011 a collective agreement was drafted between the Workers Advice Center and Salit Quarries.  The workers are seeking a gradual increase in wages, a pension plan, and safer, healthier working conditions.  But then Salit management engaged in a series of delaying tactics to avoid signing the agreement.  Finally on June 16 the workers voted to strike.

According to a WAC-MAAN update, “The strike has completely frozen the company’s activity.  Trucks from outside contractors which arrived in the first days of the strike to load up with sand and gravel no longer come. Traffic which on a regular working day constitutes some 100 trucks has stopped.  Damage to the quarry so far is estimated at about NIS 2 million [MR: currently about $555,000 Cdn].”

Two months into their strike, the quarry workers are surviving on a small support fund contributed by unions and individual donors in several countries.  WAC-MAAN has now set up a public strike fund to receive contributions via PayPal.

The appeal page includes reports on the strike from mainstream Israeli and Palestinian media, and a fascinating interview with Muhammad Fukara, who has worked in the quarries for 27 of his 52 years.

Many people are watching to see how this struggle develops.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports: “Most Palestinians working for Israelis in the West Bank suffer from poor working conditions.  Spontaneous strikes have broken out against such companies in the past, but this is the first time workers have organized and gone on strike to demand a collective wage agreement.”

The quarry workers’ appeal concludes: “Be part of this historic achievement!”

It will bring results.