Intervention from below

BY MIKE MARQUSEE

In a show of solidarity with Palestinians, dockworkers in Durban refused to unload a ship carrying Israeli cargo.

Photo: Reuters

Learning from the past: South Africans protesting Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Something special took place in Durban last month when dockworkers, members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), refused to unload a ship carrying Israeli cargo. It was an intervention from below in global politics, drive n not by national, ethnic or religious affinity but by principle, experience and common humanity.
The dockworkers were responding to the call for a boycott of Israeli goods issued by a broad coalition of Palestinian (and some Israeli) civil society organisations, including human rights groups and trade unions. That call had already been endorsed by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, of which SATAWU is an affiliate, and the dockworkers knew that they had the backing of the wider movement.
Immediately and concretely, the dockworkers were responding to Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza, which left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead, including 431 children, as well as 5,300 injured, including 1,870 children and 1,600 permanently disabled. Israel’s losses were of a different order: three civilians and 10 soldiers killed, 113 soldiers and 84 civilians injured. Gaza’s infrastructure was battered. 120,000 houses were damaged and 4,000 demolished. In the course of the operation, the Israelis are said to have dropped 1.5 million tons of explosives on Gaza — one ton for each inhabitant.
The dockworkers were also responding to — and respecting — the call and lesson of their own history. They remembered the importance of international support in the battle against apartheid. Initially, the international campaign had been little more than a small-scale irritant, reliant on the patient, sometimes lonely labours of grass-roots activists. An early success came when dock workers in various countries refused to unload South African goods. In time, the boycott grew and took a material toll on the apartheid regime.
South African trade unionists know this history well. That was seen last year when they turned away a Chinese ship carrying arms to the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.
They also know that throughout the course of their struggle against apartheid, Israel was engaged in intensive military, economic and technological (not least nuclear) collaboration with the white minority regime, whom it saw as an ally in a global conflict.
Similar experience

Significantly, in explaining their action in Durban, union leaders and members have stressed the similarity between Palestinians’ experience of Israeli rule and their own experiences under apartheid. Supporters of Israel object fiercely to this analogy; for suggesting it, even as prestigious a figure as former President Jimmy Carter was anathematised: speaking engagements cancelled and funds removed from his charitable foundations. But how will they resist the analogy now, when it is being drawn by those with most authority and right to draw it?
There are many who think of international labour solidarity as something belonging to a distant past. True, far too often it has amounted to little more than empty rhetoric. But what we saw in Durban was international labour solidarity not as a slogan or admirable ideal or bit of wishful thinking but as a living practice, a pointer to the future. In a world of over-hyped spectacle, this was the real thing. Most importantly, it is not an isolated event. The Western Australian section of the Maritime Union of Australia endorsed the boycott and has urged its members not to handle Israeli goods. In January, the Norwegian Locomotive Drivers Union stopped all trains in the country for a two minute protest against the Israeli onslaught.
In fact, Durban was really a crest in a wave of protest that has followed Israel’s all-out military assault on a captive, besieged, largely defenceless population. In Britain, students at more than 21 universities have mounted occupations demanding an end to their institution’s ties with Israel and support for Palestinian education. Victories have been secured: scholarships for students from Gaza, reviews of investment policies, and in some cases cancellation of contracts with Israeli-based corporations.
For the students as for so many others, Gaza epitomised basic divisions, basic choices. Between the powerful and the powerless, between the “war on terror” and respect for human rights and human life. Between Western interests and the interests of the world majority. Between passively standing by and actively engaging — whatever the odds — in the pursuit of justice.
Gathering momentum

The wave of protest has washed well beyond academia and the trade unions. A convoy of more than 100 vehicles carrying £1 million of aid assembled in the north of England and is now making its way across North Africa to Gaza. A crude attempt by British police to smear the convoy by arresting some of its participants (all later released uncharged) under anti-terrorism laws deterred no one.
The pro-Palestinian activists, obviously small in number in the greater scheme of things, draw strength from the fact that they represent an increasing proportion of public opinion, in Britain and elsewhere. On this issue, there is a growing fissure between governments and peoples. International support, whether from dockworkers of Durban or students in Britain, is critical for the Palestinians: a vital counterweight to the powerful forces arrayed against them, which include the U.S. government and the European Union, due to sign a new preferential trade agreement with Israel.
India is also one of the major culprits. In recent years, commercial, military and intelligence links with Israel have burgeoned, under both BJP and Congress-dominated governments — links justified by a drastically misconceived paradigm in which Israel and India share a common enemy in the “war on terror”. In this context, the issue is not as peripheral as it may seem to many in India.
The international boycott and divestment campaign has, of course, a long way to go. As yet, the pressure on Israel is symbolic, not material. The bulk of the public there regards the Gaza assault as a success. The big vote for the Right-wing parties in the recent election suggests they have turned their backs, for the moment, on any compromise with the Palestinians. It is sobering to note that the U.S. Congress voted to support Israel’s actions in Gaza by a majority of 390 to 5. Meanwhile, Gaza remains under Israeli blockade, even minimal humanitarian aid is often blocked, and it has been impossible to start reconstruction. On the West Bank and in east Jerusalem, Israel gobbles up more territory and makes wider claims.
In these desperate circumstances, economically strangled and violently assaulted, the Palestinians at least know that they are not alone, that there are people out there aware of and angry about their plight.
Common assumptions about the limits of human solidarity have become routinely and excessively pessimistic. It is taken for granted that our loyalties — our willingness to sacrifice — are confined to family and close friends, and beyond that, to ethnic, communal or national groups, somehow also assumed, like the family, to be “natural” categories. Anything wider is weighed as too abstract, too remote, too theoretical to motivate human activity. In their uncompromising, far-reaching and at the same time concrete universalism, the Durban dockworkers and their global allies have shown that this is not the case.

Gazans in Peril

Amb. Marc Ginsberg

Former US Amb. to Morocco and Deputy Sr. Advisor to Pres. Carter for Mid-East Policy

So much as been written about the fighting in Gaza and its political and military consequences, but surely not enough has been written about the terrible humanitarian conditions that have befallen its unfortunate non-combatant inhabitants.

Every party -- yes, any party remotely involved in instigating or failing to prevent the latest outbreak of war in Gaza -- is partly the cause as well as the source of any durable solution to this growing humanitarian calamity -- and there are not enough fingers to point. Debating whether Hamas is justified in firing missiles into Israel or whether Israel is justified in its response is really not this blog's principal focus, please. Neither is the plight of Israel's southern cities and its inhabitants who have been terrorized far too long by Hamas' brand of war-like coexistence.

My goal, however treacherous, is to set aside the political blame game that has characterized the debate, and to focus on the terrible civilian conditions inside Gaza with the hope that the plight of Gazans will foster expedited preparation for an emergency international relief effort to address the humanitarian crisis that grips Gaza now and which will surely get far worse in the days ahead.

Whenever Gaza's guns go silent, tens of thousands of Palestinians caught in the crossfire between Hamas militants and Israeli forces will haltingly emerge from the rubble to survey the terrible destruction that has befallen them as winter rains add more misery to the situation.

Entire blocks of stores and homes have been destroyed; services have been disrupted; and families have endured a barrage of fire and counterfire rendering what passes as normality in Gaza a distant memory. If Gaza was destitute and replete with misery before the latest Middle East war, it surely will face an even bleaker existence in the days ahead.

Conditions throughout Gaza were bad enough for its inhabitants before the fighting -- an economic blockade by Israel, and Hamas' Islamic extremist economic disorder had collectively transformed Gaza into a state of perpetual depression.

But things have gone from very bad to much worse in recent days as fighting has escalated.

At this hour, Gazans have almost no electrical power, and are under almost a round-the-clock blackout. Store shelves are empty, urgent medicine is in short supply, and only a few homes have running water since there is no fuel to run the water pumps. Sewage is flowing in the streets, and medical authorities, who cannot cope with the flood of civilian victims, are concerned that this witch's brew will breed a terrible post-conflict pandemic of assorted maladies that will only lead to more deaths.

Under such conditions, most would flee becoming refugees again, but in Gaza there is nowhere to run. The borders are sealed and there is no escape.

The human tragedy that has befallen Gaza's Palestinians -- Hamas supporters or not -- warrants every American to take cognizance because of its consequences for a durable Middle East peace. Americans are seeing very little of the human misery in Gaza since Israel has restricted media access. But regional Arab television stations are showing enough disturbing images to enflame the Arab street.

The harsh conditions in Gaza are undoubtedly going to get far worse before they get better, particularly if Israel presses ahead with its ground offensive if Hamas refuses to accept an Egyptian cease fire proposal that is being considered right now by representatives of all sides to the conflict in Cairo.

And as surely as the humanitarian crisis grows, I am concerned that Israel, rather than Hamas, will engender more hatred against it from among Gaza's citizens for what has been wrought on them. That, too, is yet another sorrowful consequence to the fighting.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which is the international humanitarian assistance pipeline for Palestinians will be even more short-funded and taxed to launch and administer an emergency humanitarian relief operation, so a global emergency relief operation facilitated by Israel and Egypt will be vital to supplement what relief agencies have haltingly been able to accomplish during the fighting.

And who will fund such a relief operation? That remains to be seen. Traditionally, the Palestinians have in the best of times received precious little in the way of international assistance over the years, but here, too, regional politics must give way to the plight of Gaza's Palestinians first. Wealthy oil-producing regional states should consider forming a relief consortium supplemented by international donations, including assistance from Israel and Egypt to lay the groundwork for expedited logistical facilitation.

Urgent planning by international relief agencies and donors for such an effective and sustainable relief operation must begin NOW and not when a cease-fire is achieved. By that time, too many more Palestinians will have fallen victim.

The inevitable question lingers: what will become of the hundreds of thousands of Gaza's Palestinians who surely will find themselves still ruled by Hamas when Israeli forces inevitably withdraw from Gaza? Unfortunately, there is no place for them to go in the short term...and they will be forced to remain in Gaza to confront the aftermath of the fighting.

Under pre-war conditions, the Egyptian-Israeli blockade of Gaza's borders had already rendered Gaza's economy a disaster, compelling Gazan's to funnel smuggled consumer goods through the network of tunnels underneath the Gazan-Egyptian border that also served as Hamas' underground missile railroad route. The blockade by both Egypt and Israel cannot continue. If a cease-fire is achieved -- and its chances of remaining durable are questionable -- a better solution must be found to end the economic noose that is strangling Gaza's faltering economy and enable unfettered relief to its citizens.

As much as I believe that Hamas in its current incarnation constitutes an insurmountable roadblock to Palestinian statehood, Hamas will probably remain in control of Gaza despite Israel's hopes that Hamas would just collapse. For that reason, Israel will have to consider ending its economic blockade of Gaza PROVIDED Hamas ceases its missile attacks on Israel and stops smuggling them into Gaza under some form of supervised border control that is "bullet proof." An end to weapons smuggling and missile launches in return for a lifting of the blockade seems to me to be the best that anyone can hope for given the utter lack of common ground that Hamas and Israel share.

In the final analysis, the people of Gaza and Israel's southern cities deserve a concerted international diplomatic and humanitarian response to relieve the suffering on both sides of Gaza's borders. That will require a sustained round-the-clock diplomatic search for a modicum of common ground between Hamas and Israel to get a cease-fire in place as rapidly as possible.

For the sake of those whose suffering is taking a turn for the worse as each hour passes, the urgency to get to a diplomatic solution in Cairo takes on a whole new meaning.