Middle East and North Africa Archives - Page 3 of 3

Tearing down the walls that colonise Palestine, a thousand bricks at a time

By ISS Blog Bliss 26 May 202113 January 2025 2993 views

Palestinians are showing enormous bravery during this moment of horror. The walls of intimidation and despair that Israel has erected in the minds of Palestinians to prevent resistance are being torn down. Now that everyone has seen that Palestinians will no longer be silent , we need the rest of the world to respond with corresponding acts of courage and support, tearing down the wall of silence, inaction and complicity so Palestinians can finally enjoy freedom, justice and equality.

A man waves the Palestinian flag for Eid al-Fitr prayers at the Dome of the Rock Mosque in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem, Thursday, May 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Yesterday, without prior warning, a close relative of mine, 84, experienced an eruption of long-suppressed memories of his traumatic childhood during the 1948 Nakba and was overcome by mixed feelings of ominous fear and liberating hope. While unbearable, the images of the latest massacre of Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip did not bring him to this emotional tipping point, nor did the images of the brutal repression of worshippers in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound or the relentless forcible displacement of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and around occupied East Jerusalem.

What did was the view, from his little balcony in Akka (Acre), of young Palestinians struggling to fend off a mob of far-right Jewish Israelis roaming the streets, chanting “death to Arabs”, and hunting Palestinians to lynch. The same thing happened to indigenous Palestinian communities in Lydda, Jaffa, Ramleh, Haifa, Bat Yam and in other places, triggering calls for international protection.

As my relative looked on, memories of his beloved Haifa in 1948 gushed through his mind – of Zionist militias aided by British soldiers literally chasing Palestinians at gunpoint to the sea. Of the makeshift raft his family had to board, heading to Lebanon ‘for safety’. Of his father’s wise decision to disembark in Acre instead.

Yet, even as these memories filled his mind – memories of existential fear and the trauma of vulnerability – they shared space with a new and inexplicable hope. “My generation lost Palestine,” he said. He then continued with a defiant inflection and a smile: “But this new generation is courageous, resilient, determined to resist and to overcome 73 years of our ongoing Nakba. All they… I mean, all we need is some, just some, more courage from the world.”

Cracks in the walls that colonise the mind

It is not naïveté or fatalism that gives hope to my elder relative or the Palestine diaspora. It is the fact that the dual walls that Israel has so systematically erected over decades – the walls it is truly trying to ‘guard’ – are showing some serious cracks, if not beginning to topple. The first of these walls is Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s ‘iron wall’ of despair that has colonised Palestinian minds. The second, just as inhibiting and debilitating, is the wall of intimidation that inhibits many people of influence worldwide from speaking out for Palestinian rights.

In 1923, Jabotinsky, a prominent Zionist leader, theorised the necessity of the first wall: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized…. Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.” He recommended an ‘iron wall’ to overpower the native Arab Palestinian population, partly by colonising our minds through instilling a sense of hopelessness and making us internalise a sense of inferiority, as Frantz Fanon puts it. Decades later, and backed by the United States and the European Union, Israel had built concrete walls and employed its Dahiya Doctrine (a doctrine of extreme, ‘disproportionate’ violence targeting Palestinian – and Lebanese – civilians and civilian infrastructure) precisely to sear into our collective consciousness the futility of resisting its colonial hegemony.

As for the other wall, Israel and its lobby groups have invested massive resources in building it in the minds of opinion-shapers globally, especially in the West, making the price of dissence, of defending Palestinian rights, ruthlessly painful to one’s career, reputation, and even mental health. Analysing this wall, Edward Said explained how ‘avoidance’ and “fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history [Palestine] has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it.”

Cracks in both walls have started to widen under pressure from fearless Palestinian popular resistance across historic Palestine and the corresponding courage that Hollywood celebrities, prominent musicians, star athletes, and millions of activists worldwide are displaying in standing up against the injustice. The bravery of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah defending their homes against forcible displacement is among the factors inspiring tens of thousands of other Palestinians to participate in acts of civil disobedience. The same Palestinian bravery was visible in the thousands who defended the occupied Old City of Jerusalem against a ‘pogrom’ by Israeli ‘Jewish fascists’ – a pogrom, moreover, encouraged by government officials expressing “racist, even genocidal animus towards Palestinians” – as the progressive Jewish American group If Not Now described it.

This bravery has inspired an outpouring of support across new and vital parts of the US landscape. Expressing a growing sentiment in the US Congress, and connecting military funding to Israel with social and justice struggles at home, representative Cori Bush said, “The fight for Black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected. We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma… we are anti-apartheid. Period.” Susan Sarandon tweeted, “What’s happening in Palestine is settler-colonialism, military occupation, land theft and ethnic cleansing.” Halsey wrote, “It is not ‘too complicated to understand’ that brown children are being murdered + people are being displaced under the occupation of one of the most powerful armies in the world.” Viola Davis, Mark Ruffalo, Natalie Portman, and many others expressed solidarity with Palestinians.

These cracks, which shatter much of the silence that Palestinians have often witnessed, reflect the cumulative, creative, and strategic efforts exerted over years by Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and other Palestine solidarity campaigners around the world, including those by progressive Jewish groups. A 2018 US poll for instance shows that 40 percent of Americans (56 percent of Democrats) support imposing sanctions or more serious measures on Israel to stop its occupation.

A particularly important source of Palestinian hope is the growing impact of the Palestinian-led nonviolent BDS movement, which aims to end Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid and defends the right of Palestinian refugees to return home. Sovereign funds in Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and elsewhere have divested from Israeli or international companies, and banks that are implicated in Israel’s occupation. Mainstream churches in South Africa have endorsed BDS, while major churches in the United States, including the Presbyterian Church and the United Methodist Church, have divested from complicit US companies and/or Israeli banks. The city of Dublin in 2018 became the first European capital to adopt BDS, while tens of other cities and hundreds of cultural institutions and public spaces across Europe have declared themselves Israeli Apartheid Free Zones. BDS has won the endorsement of major international trade union federations in South Africa, Latin America, India, Europe, Canada, and the United States. Thousands of artists, academics, and hundreds of student governments, LGBTQI+ groups, and social justice movements across the world have also endorsed BDS accountability measures.

The main contribution of the BDS movement to Palestinian liberation, however, is its role in decolonising Palestinian minds from deep-seated powerlessness, and in leading a radical praxis of globalised, intersectional resistance, transformation, and emancipation.

Today, more than ever, Palestinians are telling the world that true solidarity with our struggle for freedom, justice, and equality spells out BDS. We are shattering our wall of fear every day, and we need not just “some more courage”, as my relative from Acre said, but an eruption of meaningful solidarity that ends all complicity in Israel’s oppression.

This article was edited by Lize Swartz. The original appeared here.

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the author:

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights defender and cofounder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, former ISS Visiting Research Fellow. He is corecipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award.

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What can we do as Palestine burns?

By ISS Blog Bliss 20 May 202113 January 2025 5189 views

It is May 2021. Once again, Palestine is burning. Again, the US- and EU-funded Israeli military machine is in full throttle and again, the US – now led by Joe Biden – persistently blocks a UN Security Council Resolution, even to call for a cessation of violence. I am again writing, the latest of dozens of articles, feeling hopeless as people are killed and most of the world remains silent. I ask myself, again … what can I do?

Picasso’s painting of Guernica 1(937) with Palestine colours

In the weeks leading up to the violence that is now shaking Palestine, there has been “fear and fury” in Jerusalem. The pro-settler group Nahalat Shimon has been using lawfare to try and evict Palestinians from their homes in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah (at the time of writing, the case was on appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court). And the violence has spread across the country. Jewish-Israeli mobs have roamed the streets of the “multicultural” towns of Acre, Haifa and Lod, searching for those who are Palestinian – or who look “Arab” – dragging them from their cars and homes, and in one case beating an Arab man on live television. A smaller, but totally unacceptable number of Jewish civilians have also been killed in the mob violence.

Other mobs of Jewish-Israelis roamed through streets, chanting “death to Arabs” and smashing up storefront windows of Palestinian-owned shops in scenes that the organisation Jewish Voices for Peace described as reminiscent of the Nazi-led Kristallnacht.

Also in May, a massive crowd of Jewish-Israelis celebrated in the square outside the Western Wall, celebrating Jerusalem Day, gazing above the square as Palestinians fled a violent police raid of the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, one of the holiest places in Islam, during Eid-al-Fitr.

Netanyahu has firmly declared that he would “bring back sovereignty to Israel’s cities with an iron fist, if necessary”. The latest round of violence is no doubt a welcome distraction for the Israeli strongman who has been on trial in Israel for corruption and continually unable to form a government, leading to the country’s fourth election in two years.

And as if that were not horrifying enough, Gaza, too, is in flames – again. The territory is already struggling with a humanitarian crisis in the midst of a 15-year-long Israel siege of the territory. Enraged by the violence in Jerusalem at one of Islam’s holiest places, Hamas militants began launching mostly homemade rockets into sparsely populated Israeli towns. While the majority of the bombs were destroyed by sophisticated missile defence systems provided by the US government, some have managed to make it through. As of 13 May this year, a total of seven people – six Israelis and an Indian national – had reportedly been killed, including an Israeli child. There have been reports of Israelis fleeing with their terrified children to bomb shelters and safe rooms.

The Israeli military – the most technologically advanced on Earth – responded with its usual, brutally terrifying force, which Netanyahu vowed to continue. Once again, Israel’s massively well-armed military has targeted densely-populated civilian areas. By 13 May, the numbers of dead Palestinians was reported to be 113, the large majority of whom were civilians. According to the United Nations relief agency OCHA, these numbers include 14 Palestinian children.

So how did this all start?

To understand how this latest bout of violence started, one needs to face what facilitates these kinds of eruptions of violence, time and again. There are four points we need to understand, two of which squarely point to Israel, and two that point to the rest of the world.

First, Israel is a settler-colonial regime and the majority of Palestinians living in Gaza are refugees and their descendants. Some regard this regime as having started in 1967 when Israel occupied the territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem; others see this as having begun in 1948 when Israel unilaterally declared its independence after ethnically cleansing the territory of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and refusing them to return to their homes and livelihoods. One could go back even further than that, and certainly to the end of the first World War, when Ottoman Rule ended and Britain was designated to administer Palestine and prepare the territory for independence. This never happened. Regardless of when one considers this regime to have started, the main point is that it continues and expands until this day.

Second, Israel is an apartheid regime, both in the Palestinian territories that it continues to belligerently occupy and administer in a grossly unequal way that Al Haq, B’tselem, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations in a difficult-to-find report all describe as a situation of apartheid. Apartheid also exists in Israel itself, as affirmed in 2018 with a racist Nation-State Law that affirmed Israel as a homeland for Jews and Hebrew as the only official language (Arabic used to be included); it is described as a system of exclusionary constitutionalism.

Third, Israel is persistently supported, particularly by the European Union and the United States. Despite an International Criminal Court investigation of reported war crimes and crimes against humanity now taking place, US and EU support remains unwavering, including USD 3.8 billion of military aid that the US provides every year, which is more than its entire combined aid budget for every other country in the world.

Finally, there is widespread ignorance, with citizens and politicians confused by media reporting that – in its well-intended, but misguided efforts at “balance” – ends up favouring an Israeli perspective.

So, what can we do?

Hopelessness tends to lead to inaction. It is the human condition to turn a blind eye when the situation is just too awful, confusing, or far away. However, as Angela Davis powerfully reminded us in a statement posted on 17 May, people in the United States did not remain silent when George Floyd was killed from a police officer putting his knee in Floyd’s neck. And people should not remain silent now as Palestinians – and Israelis – have their lives cut short by yet another wave of violence. Davis condemned not only the violence in Israel and Palestine, but condemned the Biden-Harris administration for their complicity in it.

Clearly, the violence should stop immediately, and there should be justice, but what can those of us in The Hague, New York, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Karachi or Kuala Lumpur do?

First of all, recognise that this is not an even-sided conflict. It is massively asymmetrical. Unlike Israelis, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have no bomb shelters or sophisticated missile defence systems. They have no drones or fighter aircraft. In Gaza especially, which has been described as an open-air prison, people not only have nowhere to go; they rarely even have electricity, potable water or food nowadays due to the Israeli siege of Gaza that has been going on, and deepening, since 2016.

Second: voice your anger and concern to family, friends, neighbours, and elected representatives. Let Palestinians tell their own story. Share the music of Shai Zaqtan of Nai Barghouti and others. Post your outrage on social media and make it visible in street protests. As the corona lockdown eases in many parts of the world, speak to others, including at community centres and in places of worship.

Finally, do what you can in your individual and professional capacity to support the Palestinian call for #BDS = Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.

Update: Since the article was initially drafted, the United Nations and Save the Children reported that “58 children[i] in Gaza and two children in southern Israel have been killed in the last week. More than a thousand people in Gaza, including 366 children, have also been injured.” Source, OCHA. At the time of the “ceasefire” on 20 May 2021, this figure was revised to “at least 232 Palestinians, including 65 children, who have been killed in the Israeli bombardment. On the Israeli side, 12 people, including two children have been killed.”

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the author:

Jeff Handmaker is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and focuses on legal mobilisation.

COVID-19 | How exclusionary social protection systems in the MENA are making the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects worse

By ISS Blog Bliss 3 March 2021 2596 views

[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592900783478{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1592900766479{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-left: -10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]The COVID-19 pandemic has made the majority of people living in the MENA region even more vulnerable, adding to existing structural problems that include under-resourced public health services, a high degree of labour informality, and high poverty and unemployment rates. Temporary social and economic support measures to mitigate the pandemic’s effects are not sufficient, however – the region has to go beyond piecemeal policies. Countries need to expand the scope and scale of social provisioning and social protection as well as the quality of and access to public health services by moving towards a universalist approach to social policy, writes Mahmoud Messkoub. [/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”19534″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief the importance of state-centred approaches in managing pandemics and mitigating their socio-economic impacts on the population. But public health services in most MENA countries are underfunded and inadequately designed to cope with the pandemic. The MENA population has suffered, especially those people living in low-income and non-oil-exporting countries.

Here, as elsewhere in the world, to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic, states have taken a number of measures ranging from temporary cash payments to the poor and vulnerable, furlough schemes, and financial support to employers and industries to the relaxation of regulations governing financial market support to companies and individuals through lower interest loans. Most MENA countries adopted a combination of these measures (OECD, 2020).

However, these short-term measures cannot deal with the long-term structural insecurity and vulnerability facing the majority of people in the MENA who live precarious lives in highly unequal societies, where the top 10% of the population takes 64% of the total income (Alvaredo et al., 2017). Their vulnerability to a large extent can be ascribed to the concentration of economic activity and employment in the informal sector, which is usually overlooked in social security and regulatory measures that tend to focus more on formal employment sectors (ILO, 2019; O’Sullivan et al., 2012). The exclusionary character of the countries’ social protection programmes is a great cause for concern, as even in ordinary circumstances vulnerable populations working informally do not have adequate social protection against health problems, a loss of income, and other contingencies.

Informality and unemployment rates are high in the MENA

According to OECD (2020), in the MENA the informal sector employs some 68% of the workforce, while in individual countries such as Yemen and Lebanon the portion rises to 74% and 71%, respectively. Another structural problem is persistently high unemployment rates that have particularly hit the youth as well as educated women across the MENA (O’Sullivan et al., 2012). In 2018, the youth unemployment rate was around 30% in the MENA – the highest in the world (Kabbani, 2019). And large-scale poverty and vulnerability are also high in the MENA despite its riches. MENA countries are heterogeneous in terms of their resource base. The headcount poverty rates of a-dollar-a-day (or more) are high in the labour-abundant and resource-poor countries like Egypt. But poverty is also present in the populous, resource-rich and industrializing countries of Iran and Algeria. The other aspect of poverty is its regional spread: rural headcount poverty rates are higher in rural areas than in urban areas (Messkoub, 2008).

The most vulnerable are being overlooked, also during the pandemic

It is against this backdrop of poverty and vulnerability that the pandemic emerged, plunging the weakest countries in the region into a deeper crisis, with very limited social protection measures to help protect vulnerable populations. Whilst all countries in the region had some kind of social protection programmes before the pandemic, and in some cases extensive ones, coverage in most middle- and low-income MENA countries is limited to members of the civil service, police, and military, as well as those in the modern, regulated private sectors of manufacturing and services. The majority of the population working in agriculture, the informal sector, and other unregulated activities have very limited access, if any, to state social protection programmes. To start with, entitlement to most of these programmes requires a formal labour contract. But entitlement and access vary depending on the area of social protection: health, old age, unemployment, work injury, or family allowance.

Regarding health services, there is an urban-rural divide in favour of the former, in addition to high out-of-pocket expenditure and a general neglect of primary and preventive healthcare. High spending on expensive diagnostic and curative health care can be observed, and low-income/low-status migrants, displaced people, refugees, and ethnic minorities have limited access to public health services (WHO, 2010; Loewe, 2019).

The fragmentation of health insurance and service provision also limits the coverage and adequacy of social policies. In most MENA countries, there are different public and private health insurance programmes and health service providers. If these were integrated into a common national health insurance programme, the result could be increased coverage and an improvement of the services provided by reducing administrative costs and rationalising overlapping services (Loewe, 2019). Other complementary public health measures should also be placed on the agenda: the provision of clean water, improved sanitation, and a greater emphasis of preventative health care (Karshenas et al., 2014).

Why universal social protection is needed now more than ever

Thus, countries in the region are in urgent need of increasing expenditure on public health to manage the current pandemic as well as strengthening the health system to improve entitlement and access to health services. Reform and re-organisation of the health system beyond the public sector is part of this agenda. The region needs to return to the ideals of universal entitlement and access to health and other social services that are essential to the social policy agenda of developmental states. Selectivity and exclusion in terms of who qualifies for social protection benefits will only harm these countries, as responses to the pandemic have shown.

References and further readings

Alvaredo, R., Assouad, L. and Piketty, T. (2017) Measuring lnequality in the Middle East 1990 2016: The World’s Most Unequal Region? Reprinted 2020. [https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02796992/file/2017-15_.pdf] [Accessed: 10 September 2020.]

ILO, 2019. Working Poor or how a job is no guarantee of decent living conditions. April.

Kabbani, N. , 2019. Youth Employment in the Middle East and North Africa: Revisiting and Reframing the Challenge. Brookings Institution. [https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Youth_Unemployment_MENA_English_Web.pdf ][Accessed: September 2020]

Karshenas, M., Moghadam, V. and R. Alami (2014), ‘Social Policy after the Arab Spring: States and Social Rights in the MENA Region,’ World Development, Vol. 64, issue C, pp.726-739.

Loewe, M. (2019), ‘Social Protection Schemes in the Middle East and North Africa: Not Fair, Not Efficient, Not Effective,’ in Jawad, R., Jones, N. and M. Messkoub (eds., 2019), pp.35 60.

Messkoub, M. (2008), Economic Growth, Employment and Poverty in the Middle East and North Africa, Geneva: ILO Working Paper Series, No. 19.

Messkoub, M. (2021, Forthcoming), ‘Social Policy in the MENA Region,’ in H. Hakimian, ed.(2020) Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Economy. London: Routledge.

OECD, 2020. COVID-19 crisis response in MENA countries. Updated 9 June [https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/view/?ref=129_129919-4li7bq8asv&title=COVID-19-Crisis-Response-in-MENA-Countries] [Accessed: 10 September 2020.]

O’Sullivan, A., Rey, M-E and Galvez Mendez, J. (2012) Opportunities and Challenges in the MENA Region. OECD.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]An earlier version of this blog titled ‘COVID-19, Public Health and Social Policy in MENA’ was first published by the Alternative Policy Solutions, a public policy research project at the American University of Cairo.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1614791812480{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]About the author:

Mahmoud Messkoub (PhD Econs, University of London) is based at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, NL). He has researched and taught economics of development, social policy and population (mobility/migration, age structure and ageing) at universities of London (Queen Mary), Leeds and Erasmus (ISS). His current research interests are in the areas of economics of: social policy and population ageing, migration and universal approach to social provisioning. His recent publications are related to social policy, poverty and employment policies, cash transfers and evaluation of unpaid household work. He has acted as a consultant to ESCWA, ILO and the UN (DESA, UNFPA). He is currently working with an EU and African consortium on an EU funded – Horizon 2020 research project : ‘Crisis as Opportunities: towards a Level Telling Field on Migration and a New Narrative of Successful Integration’

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The EU’s new pact on migration: what’s next after all the shock, sadness, and solidarity talk?

By ISS Blog Bliss 27 January 202119 January 2025 4399 views

Several shocking events that transpired in Greece last year have not been met by truly humane solutions, showing that the performative moments of ‘refugee crises’ are not enough to move EU leaders into adopting a different approach toward refugees. The EU’s long-awaited New Pact on Migration and Asylum is supposed to change how refugees are treated, but with the European Commission set to promote ‘a European way of life’ through the pact, harsh practices are bound to continue, writes Zeynep Kaşlı.

It has been almost half a year since the catastrophic fire razed the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesvos in September last year, leaving around 13,000 residents without shelter in the midst of a COVID-19 lockdown. Some were immediately relocated to mainland Greece; however, over 7,000 refugees had no choice but to move to another makeshift camp, awaiting the processing of their asylum applications through ‘accelerated’ procedures. In this context, the question arises: will the EU change its approach toward refugees by introducing the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, and will anything change this year for refugees themselves?

A worrying development that almost went unnoticed

In March last year, at the time when the first COVID-19 cases appeared in most countries across the globe, Greek and EU authorities had to take immediate action at the Greek-Turkish land border when Turkish authorities announced they would not stop passage to Europe and allowed thousands of refugees to pass the Turkish side of the Kastanies-Karaağaç Border Gate in Edirne. In response, the Greek government suspended the submission of asylum applications for one month, and the European border and coastguard agency Frontex deployed 100 additional border guards from 22 EU member states to halt the influx of refugees. Their ardent resistance to forced migration ended with the killing of refugee Muhammad Gulzar, leaving others wounded. Many thousands of other refugees who could not enter Greece were left with no place to go, stuck in limbo between fleeing and surviving.

What do these events tell us about the EU border and migration regime? Do they have any transformative role to play in EU-level policy making, and, if so, what is that role?

The news of these rather shocking and extraordinary events quickly spread across Europe, evoking strong emotions and triggering actions, from deep empathy to suspicion of the intentions of displaced people waiting at the borders. Under these circumstances, the long-awaited New Pact on Migration and Asylum was launched by the European Commission on September 23, 2020 as a “fresh start on migration: building confidence through more effective procedures and striking a new balance between responsibility and solidarity.”

The initial assessment by civil society organizations of the legislative and non-legislative proposals clearly show that the New Pact is considered far from a novel approach in terms of the guarantees put in place for compliance with international and EU legal standards, in promoting the fairer sharing of responsibility for asylum in Europe and globally, or in terms of the kind of migration management practices it is likely to accelerate. These include ‘return sponsorship’ and the increasing use of detention, as well as the restriction and criminalization of all sorts of humanitarian activities.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned ‘shocking’ events are about to become (from a European gaze) an intermezzo of what van Reekum calls a routinized emergency visualized through images of migration by boat. I agree with van Reekum that as manifested in ongoing rescue operations in the Aegean Sea, emergencies gain a routine character due to the unresolved ethical questions that the New Pact seems to be far from solving.

Really ‘shocking’, or history repeating itself?

The events at the Greek-Turkish land border were not new. We witnessed a similar ‘shock’ back in mid-September 2015 when over 3,000 people marched to the Turkish border province of Edirne asking for safe passage to Europe. At that time, they were forcefully stopped a few kilometers before the Kastanies-Karaağaç Border Gate and were allowed to wait until the EU heads of state had an informal meeting on September 23 to discuss the implementation of the European Agenda on Migration and how to increase collaboration with third countries like Turkey to alleviate the migratory pressure on the EU’s frontline member states. Just like in 2020, they were put in buses and transferred to other Turkish cities, while quite a number of them were detained and forcefully expelled to Syria without due procedure.

Hence, what we can call the first intermezzo in 2015 led to the EU-Turkey Statement aiming for a fast-track return of the rejected asylum seekers from Greece to Turkey as a “safe third country.” Five years after this first intermezzo, we can confidently say that the EU’s hotspot approach combined with the EU-Turkey Statement proved to be a highly ineffective policy at best, demonstrated by the low number of returns under the deal, the declaration of the suspension of the deal by the Turkish government, and the order of the Court of Justice of the European Union questioning the authorship and responsibility of the deal.

The second intermezzo in 2020 coinciding with the launch of the long-awaited New Pact further revealed two things. First, the EU has become more dependent on the willingness of its neighbours near and far to continue hosting millions of displaced people. Second, the only action plan the EU and its member states are able to come up with is greater militarization at the border and fewer rights for thousands of people who have already survived different forms of violence throughout their journey to and in Turkey and are in search for a life with dignity and peace.

Going back to the question posed above, the performative moments of the crises seem to play only a reproductive, rather than a transformative, role in shaping the EU-level migration and asylum policy. While the violent encounters at the land border further strengthen what van Houtum and Bueno Lacy call the ‘iron borders’ of fortress Europe, the burning down of camps such as Moria and ‘compassion fatigue’ in the Greek islands are the epitome of the ‘camp border’ within Europe that basically brings home the EU’s decades-old externalization policy. Seen from this perspective, the extraordinary events we witness at the land borders, hotspots and camps described above are only a byproduct what Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins also call part of the routine work of bordering to order politics.

This routine work of bordering already became crystal clear in the discussions on the title of Commissioner-Designate Schinas’ portfolio on migration, security, employment and education. Even though the portfolio title was soon changed from ‘Protection’ to the ‘Promotion of the European Way of Life’ due to sharp criticism, even the changed title remains symbolic of the failure of the EU to transform its refugee policy. This is particularly visible in its reference to a singular European way of life that is to be promoted across Europe. While the EU means different things to different sides of the European public, from the populist right to the green left, it remains a union of free mobility for the lucky few, whereas it has also become a deportation union for many.

As the relatively shocking news from Greece has slowly turned into an intermezzo of routinized emergency, in the face of allegations against the EU agency Frontex, a deeper discussion is necessary on what a ‘European way of life’ entails in the face of EU member states’ responsibility for displaced people arriving at their borders or in the neighbourhood of Europe.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Zeynep Kaşlı is Assistant Professor in Migration and Development at ISS, affiliated with the Governance, Law and Social Justice Research Group. Her research interests include mobility, citizenship, borders, transnationalism, power and sovereignty with regional expertise in Turkey, Middle East and Europe.

Power to the People? The Right to Information Law in Morocco

By ISS Blog Bliss 16 October 202019 January 2025 4293 views

Morocco’s recently enacted Right to Information Law is a potentially powerful tool in the hands of its citizens, but their ability to use it is still largely dependent on the government’s commitment to transparency and political will to enforce it.

With the ratification of the Right to Information Law (31.13) in February 2018, Morocco has officially joined the Open Government Partnership (OGP).¹ This is a major step for the monarchy as it vows to commit to the four key principles of the OGP: public access to information, asset declarations by public officials, fiscal transparency, and citizen participation. On March 12, 2020, Law 31.13 came into force two years after its promulgation. According to the new law—and pursuant to Article 27 of the 2011 constitution—citizens have the right to request information held by the public administration, elected institutions, and public service provision organizations. Whereas the Right to Information Law promises to promote transparency and responsiveness as well as to restore public trust in state institutions, it is still unclear as to how it will benefit disadvantaged groups in marginalized regions and improve local governance. Law 31.13 has the potential to improve the quality of public services and empower citizens, but there are also major obstacles and gaps that require immediate attention—including the lack of political commitment to transparency, the prevailing institutional culture of retaining information, and, most importantly, the increasing closure of the civic space and crackdown on opposing voices.

Discussions on a Right to Information Law were initiated as early as 2007, following Morocco’s ratification of the UN Convention against Corruption (Resolution 58/4). However, it was not until the Arab uprisings and the February 20^th movement when government officials and civil society actors embarked on an initiative to promote accountable, responsive, and inclusive governance.² As a result, Article 27 was drafted and included in the 2011 amended constitution, and, therefore, access to information became a fundamental right to all citizens and legal residents of Morocco. A specialized commission composed of members of ministerial departments, government agencies, private sector companies, and civil society organizations was later established to work out the details of the law. Law 31.13 was the product of these collective efforts. It was ratified in February 2018 after years of debate and legislative battles. The law was originally scheduled to come into effect a year after its publication in the official gazette in March 2019. However, Law 31.13 was only officially enacted in March 2020, following a one-year delay due to logistical hiccups and implementation-related issues.

In a nutshell, Law 31.13 grants citizens the right to access information retained by government entities. Individuals can submit a free application to the relevant institution and request information on items such as laws, data, and reports. However, there are exceptions that apply to the type of information requested, such as those relating to homeland security and citizens’ private data. The law, under Article 29, also outlines penalties for citizens’ misuse of the requested information. Government agencies must respond to requests within twenty working days of their receipt. In some urgent cases (e.g. protection of lives or public safety), information must be provided within three days. Information officers’ failure to respond to requests is penalized under Article 19 of the law.³ Consequently, the implementation of law 31.13 relies on two main pillars: the appointment of well-trained civil servants who can adequately respond to public requests for information, as well as the proactive and timely publication of data that is accessible to the public.

Law 31.13 has the potential to be an effective tool for empowering citizens, especially those in marginalized regions, such as those in the rural margins of the monarchy. Most of these regions have witnessed intense popular unrest over the past few years, as citizens demand improved availability of basic services, such as healthcare, electricity and clean drinking water. The recent regionalization reforms introduced in Morocco’s 2011 constitution⁴ and the ensuing Organic Laws⁵ provided a significant boost toward strengthening the role of local governance and citizen participation in the decisionmaking process. However, the realization of these goals was unlikely without citizen access to relevant information. The municipal councils are now obliged to comply with Law 31.13, which will enable citizens to scrutinize their local representatives and hold them accountable. Karim El Hajjaji, co-founder of Tafra Association⁶, says “So far, it is extremely difficult to know what the communes [municipalities] are doing with the public resources they have in hand. Law 31.13 makes it mandatory to publish not only their budgets, but their public procurement calls and processes, spending programs, and all information related to local governance.”⁷

Thus far, the diminished availability of financial resources and qualified human capital are often cited as the biggest obstacles toward the successful implementation of the law. But in practice, altering societal and institutional culture is the real challenge. The law requires the Moroccan territorial collectivities (regions and municipalities) to nominate new information officers tasked with responding to citizens’ requests. These territorial collectivities are generally showing willingness to engage and are sending their newly nominated information officers to trainings. However, Ahmed Jazouli, a Moroccan policy expert involved in the training programs of civil service agents, maintains, “The main obstacle is the culture of retaining information by civil servants. They should be trained on releasing information and on the proactive publication of data. It is essential to focus on changing the dominant culture among public servants.”⁸

Apart from changing bureaucratic culture, it is key to foster a political culture of transparency, which is currently lacking. Most public institutions still hold back information that may show evidence of mismanagement or misuse of public resources to avoid legal scrutiny. According to the new law, it is mandatory for municipalities to make their financial data and development plans available online, yet few municipal budgets are currently accessible online. For instance, the city council of Casablanca has made significant efforts to promote dematerialized services and to keep its website updated. This example stands in contrast to other major well-endowed cities such as Rabat, which currently lacks a website. According to Karim El Hajjaji, “It is definitely not a matter of financial resources, but rather of political will.”⁹

Far-reaching campaigns are also crucial for raising public awareness of the law and its impact on their everyday lives. The law offers an opportunity, but it is up to citizens to exercise their rights to ensure equitable service delivery policies. Civil society organizations have a strong role to play in this regard. For example, Transparency Maroc, together with several national and international partners, organized a group of civil society organizations to lobby for a transparent and participatory budget. Similarly, referring to the Right to Information Law, Transparency Maroc is demanding more consistent information about the special COVID-19 fund, which was set up by the Moroccan government in March 2020 to compensate those who lost income due to the lockdowns.¹⁰ Indeed, the government’s management of this fund—which supports over five million households—has received widespread criticism from activists and NGOs. Oxfam Maroc, for example, is advocating for the fund to come under parliamentary oversight and be subject to checks by the Court of Audit. Others, including Tafra, called on the government to disclose the data used to develop the scenarios for the evolution of the pandemic in Morocco. However, the Haut Commissariat au Plan refused to do so, citing personal data protection constraints. This means that researchers and experts–such as those at Tafra–are not able to quality check the scenarios put forth by the government and thus cannot be part of the decisionmaking process in terms of lockdown policy and how the special fund is spent.

Finally, the potential of the Right to Information Law cannot be assessed without taking into account the closing civic space, including the restriction of media freedom in Morocco. More recently, the government used the COVID-19 crisis to pass a new emergency law, No. 2.220.292, declaring a health emergency and setting penalties of a up to three-month prison sentence and a fine of up to 1,300 Dirham (around 134 USD), for anyone breaching “orders and decisions taken by public authorities” or for anyone “obstructing” through “writings, publications or photos” of those decisions. Apart from prosecuting more than 90,000 people for breaking the law and other crimes, authorities have used it to prosecute several human rights activists and citizen journalists, accusing them of “incitement to violate the authorities’ decisions during the health emergency,” when in fact they criticized the “cronyism” and unequal distribution of aid by local authorities during the COVID-19 crisis.

The continued crackdown on journalists and opposing voices stands in stark contrast to the government’s recent efforts aimed at increasing citizens’ trust in the government and responding to calls for transparency. Such trust is arguably a pre-condition for citizens to invoke the law and make use of its provisions. In the meantime, disenchanted citizens would rather mobilize collectively and in the streets of major cities, as in May 2020, when protestors gathered to contest their exclusion from the COVID-19 fund. In short, while the Right to Information Law is a potentially powerful tool in the hands of citizens and civil society organizations, its application and enforcement largely relies on the government’s political will and commitment to genuine reforms.

This research is part of a larger project on the dynamics of decentralization in the MENA region. The project is generously funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

This blog article was first published here by the Sada Journal.

About the authors:

Marwa Shalaby is an assistant professor in the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses primarily on the intersection of the politics of authoritarianism, and women in politics. Follow her on Twitter @MarwaShalaby12.

Sylvia Bergh is an associate professor in development management and governance at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, and a senior researcher at the Centre of Expertise on Global Governance at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Her current research focuses on social accountability initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa region.

¹ Seventy-eight countries and a growing number of local governments—representing more than two billion people—along with thousands of civil society organizations are members of the Open Government Partnership.

²A recent report by the OECD points out that most MENA countries lacked access to information laws prior to the Arab uprisings. In the few MENA cases that promulgated such laws before the uprisings, many provisions penalized the sharing and communication of information without prior authorization by the relevant authorities.

³ The law states that officials who fail to provide citizens/legal residents with requested information will be subject to disciplinary actions, however, the specifics of such penalties remain unclear.

⁴ According to Article 1 of the 2011 amended constitution, “the territorial organization of Morocco is decentralized, and based on an advanced degree of regionalization.”

⁵ OL #113.14 outlines the authorities and responsibilities of the different local governance units (i.e., regions/provinces/municipalities) and it puts in place participatory mechanisms for citizens (Article 119).

⁶ Tafra Association is a research center in Rabat whose mission is to improve the understanding of Moroccan institutions to participate in the consolidation of the rule of law in Morocco.

⁷ Interview conducted by the author (Marwa Shalaby) in Rabat, February 2020 and follow-up email in June, 2020.

⁸ Interview conducted by the author (Marwa Shalaby) in Rabat, February 2020 and follow-up email in June, 2020.

⁹ Interview conducted by the author (Marwa Shalaby) in Rabat, February 2020 and follow-up email in June, 2020.

¹⁰ Getting access to this fund is even more important given the fact that 46 percent of the active population has no health insurance and 4.3 million households are employed in the informal sector without social security benefits.

Seeds of resistance: Palestinian farmers fight against annexation and pandemic

By ISS Blog Bliss 17 July 202019 January 2025 3684 views

The violent Israeli encroachment and annexation of Palestinian land is compromising the future of the West Bank and putting its residents in an extremely vulnerable position. Palestinians are resisting both annexation and the Covid-19 pandemic by returning to their land and cultivating it, with the support of social justice movements. A concrete example of their contribution to Palestine’s rich agrarian heritage is a seed bank, whose hardy indigenous seeds are feeding people in the short term and protecting the climate and defending territory for generations to come.

It has not been an easy year for Palestinians, if there ever was such a thing. With the turn of a new decade in January, the U.S. administration unveiled the paradoxically branded calling for Israel to unilaterally annex about a third of the West Bank. Then the coronavirus slipped through the checkpoints into Bethlehem in March, sending millions of Palestinians into lockdown. And in April, Israel formed a unity government with an eye on the immediate annexation of the Jordan Valley in direct violation of international law.

The land grab is set to be pushed through this month, and many Palestinians worry that it could go largely unnoticed as the world’s attention is focused squarely on defeating the Covid-19 pandemic and curbing its economic fallout.

Palestine is often presented as an anomaly in global politics. Apologists of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories have been able to effectively present a narrative of exceptionalism by emphasising the relatively small size of this hotly contested corner of the Mediterranean, insisting that there are irreconcilable religious divisions. The fight against Covid-19 points to similar dynamics as the Israeli government has received lavish praise for its response to the pandemic within its own borders while letting it spill over into the occupied territories essentially unchecked.

In the context of crisis that has recently been compounded by the looming annexation plan and the health threats presented by the pandemic, social justice movements in the agricultural sector have elevated their struggles to new levels. Key among these endeavours are the protection of natural resources such as land, water, and seeds, as well as the ongoing struggle for the recognition of multiple forms of Palestinian sovereignty.

“Our response to the coronavirus pandemic has been to urge our people to go back to their lands and cultivate,” said Amal Abbas* of the Union of Agricultural Works Committees (UAWC), a small-scale food producers’ movement representing some 20,000 peasant farmers and fishers in the West Bank and Gaza. This Palestinian version of sheltering in place mirrors UAWC’s broader strategy of resisting occupation and annexation, work that it has been doing since 1986.

Settler colonialism, the invasive process that seeks to replace an indigenous population with an external one, has its own Kafkaesque set of rules upholding it in the Israeli legal system. An important example of this is a law that stipulates that if land is not worked for three years, it automatically becomes [Israeli] state land. The Israeli military has gone to great lengths to fold as much “idle” Palestinian land as possible into the architecture of the state. This law is used in part to justify the establishment and expansion of illegal Israeli settlements by means of violent evictions, home demolitions, the confiscation of cultivated agricultural land, and the separation wall.

Palestinian human rights defenders are working to flip this narrative and the overarching political project it sustains on its head. Farmers and rural workers in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip—just like anywhere else—have been longstanding agents of social change, and for this reason are among the most targeted sectors of Palestinian society.

This slow form of violent encroachment, together with the fast-tracked one of annexation that is on the Israeli parliamentary table with strong U.S. support, puts the future of the West Bank and its residents in an extremely vulnerable position. “The Israeli military has been taking advantage of our current emergency situation and accelerating its actions,” offered Amal.

Some of the most egregious actions taken by Israeli authorities in the current context of pandemic have occurred in the Jordan Valley, which is precisely the area they seek to annex. This area already falls under the classification of Area C, meaning that it is part of the more than 60% of the West Bank that is under full Israeli civilian and military control. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Area C is rich in natural resources such as underground water and fertile growing land. Not only is the Jordan Valley the unequivocal agricultural jewel of Area C, but it is also a strategic border with Jordan and a gateway to the Arab countries of the greater Levant.

Public services are in short supply for the Jordan Valley’s majority Bedouin population. That is why movements of farmers and workers like UAWC are filling that gap, providing basic services like water, sanitation, education, seeds, food, and nutrition. Even these services face relentless and aggressive opposition. For instance in late March, the Israeli military destroyed an emergency coronavirus field clinic that Palestinians were in the process of erecting in the northern Jordan Valley.

Despite these threats, UAWC and other Palestinian grassroots organisations visit elderly people and pregnant women in mobile clinics, distribute educational and protective supplies, and construct rooftop and urban gardens across diverse communities. This coronavirus crisis response work has largely been successful because it is a reflection of the kind of work Palestinian social movements continually engage in throughout the ongoing crises that occur under military occupation.

“Some of the best work that we are doing to fight off the virus and resist the annexation is through our seed bank,” said Amal. UAWC has maintained a seed bank since 2003; in it they safeguard rare heirloom Palestinian seeds that have been carefully passed down from one generation to the next. These seeds and the food sources they produce have a multiplicity of purposes. “Not only do our indigenous seeds make it easier to return to our land and protect it through cultivation,” Amal explained, “they hardly use any water and shield us from climate change.” She added: “And with so many still locked down because of Covid-19, continuous access to seeds allows people to feed their families and neighbours when it is unsafe to access food via the marketplace.”

UAWC insists on the importance of internationalism and solidarity in normalising the plight of the Palestinian small-scale food producers it represents. It is a member of the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina, which has taken a strong stand against colonialism and corporate control of agriculture and is active in 81 countries. Maintaining that important political relationship has allowed Palestinian activists the opportunity to host learning exchanges in their territories and also participate in those that take place abroad.

“Together with La Vía Campesina, we are using this opportunity to prove to the whole world that the global health care and food systems are not working and put forth our solution of agroecology as an alternative to the neoliberal model,” Amal explained.

Our contributions to the food sovereignty movement as Palestinians can help people understand that the occupation is about control over natural resources just like most other land grabs – Amal

Certainly, the militarised Israeli conquest of Palestinian territory has its own history, but it is also indicative of settler colonial processes that have taken place elsewhere, such as in the Americas, Australia, and South Africa. As this next phase of annexation plays out in the West Bank, against the distracting backdrop of the pandemic, these connections are critical. Far from an anomaly of the global politics of natural resources, Palestine has encapsulated them in a microcosm.

* Name has been changed to maintain confidentiality

This article was originally published on Open Democracy and has been reposted with permission of the author.

About the author:

Salena Fay Tramel is a journalist and PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, where her work is centered on the intersections of resource grabs, climate change mitigation, and the intertwining of (trans)national agrarian/social justice movements.

Misleading narratives distort antisemitism discourses

By Jeff Handmaker 2 July 20202 February 2025 4339 views

Bigotry, in all its forms, is steadily rising. Clearly, being non-racist is not enough; we need to be anti-racist to be able to combat race-related bigotry once and for all. This principle should indeed apply to all forms of bigotry, including antisemitism. However, as this article explains, misleading narratives in the documentary film Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations distort our understanding, and even serve as a cover, for other forms of intolerance, which can move us closer to bigotry instead of further away from it.

Anti-black racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry are on the rise in Europe and elsewhere in the world, according to annual reports of the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance. As a result, people are rising up in protest through #BlackLivesMatter and other movements. The global outcry and calls for change following the police killing of George Floyd vividly reveals just how prevalent racism still is. Yet, it is also clear how some organizations purporting to challenge such hate crimes can use an anti-racist message as “cover” for other forms of bigotry and intolerance, as a recent documentary has also done.

Antisemitism in films and documentaries

In cinematography, antisemitism, like other forms of bigotry, often has been afforded special attention. As a Jewish youth growing up in my congregation, I watched many of these movies dealing with antisemitism—from classics such as Ben-Hur (1959) to the more recent Schindler’s List (1993). One of the most recent and acclaimed documentaries I saw was the bold 2009 film Defamation by Israeli film-maker Yoav Shamir. I was therefore curious about how antisemitism was dealt with in the recently released documentary Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations by the American film-maker Andrew Goldberg. However, I felt very dispirited after watching it. Rather than meaningfully addressing the very real problem of antisemitism in the world, this documentary reproduces misleading narratives that distort discourses on antisemitism.

In this article, I will explain how the film-maker argues that there is a moral equivalence between four different forms or “mutations” of antisemitism and what’s wrong with this conceptualization of it.

Four “mutations” of antisemitism

Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations attempts to show how four different examples of antisemitism manifest in present-day society and the “logics” that purportedly drive antisemitism. The documentary is intended to provide what the film-maker regards as an honest view of antisemitism, but is so unbalanced that it ends up having the opposite effect.

In Part I of the movie, the focus is on the Far Right in the USA. After very moving, personal testimonies by victims of various violent antisemitic attacks, the documentary turns to an interview with a Mr. Walker, who is running for the state legislature in North Carolina. Walker insists that “God likes whites more than blacks”, argues that black persons and Muslims are the same, and finally reproduces a typical antisemitic conspiracy trope that “the Jew was created to destroy white Christian nations”. George Will, a prize-winning Washington Post columnist, then sums up the perverse “logic” behind antisemitism: “In a healthy society that has problems, people ask ‘what did we do to cause this’? In an unhealthy society that has problems, they say ‘who did this to us’? And the Jews are always a candidate.”

In Part II, the focus is on a smear campaign by the right-wing, nationalist president of Hungary, Victor Orban, aimed at the liberal Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist George Soros. Classic antisemitic tropes are invoked, presenting clear examples of antisemitism through the use of grotesque cartoons and photoshopped images of Soros with exaggerated Judaic features. Moreover, the Hungarian media juxtaposes images of Muslims entering the country against accusations that they are “inundating your culture” and, moreover, are part of a “Soros plan”. Posters, billboards and television ads all reinforce these patently antisemitic and Islamophobic messages.

I am disgusted. However, something crucial is missing. While examples of antisemitism by Orban and others in his government are well established, paradoxically, as one interviewed professor notes, Orban does not want to be accused of antisemitism. Indeed, “he wants to pose with ‘them’—he even wears the hat”. Why is it, then, that Orban, his political party and the Hungarian government crudely reproduce antisemitic tropes while simultaneously object to being called antisemitic? The film-maker doesn’t address this crucial issue at all, also avoiding Orban’s very public cultivation of diplomatic ties with the State of Israel.

Further omissions are apparent in Part III of the film, which purports to focus on antisemitism among the “Far Left” in the United Kingdom. There is no mention of antisemitism within the Conservative Party. The focus is squarely on the Labour Party. The accusation is that Labour’s alleged antisemitism problem is due to “left-wing extremists” who condemn capitalism, criticize Israel and therefore by definition are antisemitic. This is both highly unconvincing and inflammatory, reinforced by interviews with embittered former Labour members who are also vocal supporters of Israel (and neo-liberal economic policies), such as former Labour leader Tony Blair.

Totally unaddressed are what these so-called “left-wing extremists” criticize, namely Israel’s discriminatory and brutal policies against Palestinians that have been labelled as an “apartheid regime”. While maintaining its thin claims against “leftists”, the film-maker fails entirely to engage with the many critics of these claims, such as Jamie Stern Weiner or Mehdi Hasan. Or with a comprehensive report on distorted media coverage of the Labour Party by Dr. Justin Scholsberg of Birkbeck College and journalist Laura Laker. Or with the book Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, The Party and Public Belief by award-winning journalists and academics Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Scholsberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller. To name but a few.

Part IV focuses exclusively on what the filmmaker describes as “Islamic radicalism” in France. The primary perpetrators of antisemitism, it is claimed, are “Islamic extremists”. Brief reference is made to what is described as “France’s colonial experiment”, which led to hundreds of thousands of Muslims to move to France. The implication is that those suffering from “post-colonialism” have a problem. Rather than acknowledge the country’s expansive Islamophobia, the film-maker plays directly into it, asserting that, based on “surveys”, one-third of Muslims in France are antisemitic, as compared with ten percent of non-Muslims. The suggestion that Muslims are far-more inclined than anyone else to hate Jews is both unsubstantiated, based on anecdotal examples and utterly fails to address the historical context of both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Time for a serious discussion about antisemitism

As the film does reveal, there is clearly a problem of antisemitism (as well as Islamophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry and intolerance), deserving of a serious discussion. However, the film is so filled with distortions that it doesn’t help to really understand, let alone combat this problem.

The film’s fatal flaw, noted elsewhere by Michelle Goldberg, is its conflation of criticisms of Israel and antisemitism. Indeed, this becomes a conspiracy theory of its own that “people hate Israel because they simultaneously hate the Jews, capitalism, and Western democracy”. Moreover, by interspersing credible examples of antisemitism with highly questionable examples, the selective treatment of these four “mutations” and the drawing of a moral equivalence between them critically undermine the very important goal of addressing antisemitism.

The need for critical reflection

The global fight against bigotry must be taken seriously. Hence, a serious and balanced documentary about antisemitism would be something different entirely. It would acknowledge the context of antisemitism as being part of a broader pattern of hatred, intolerance and discrimination affecting many persecuted groups. It would include constructive criticism of the film-maker’s assumptions. And finally, it would not make simplistic and distorted assumptions that critics of Israel’s expansionist, colonial and discriminatory regime are de facto antisemitic.

About the author:

Jeff Handmaker is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and focuses on legal mobilisation.

He is a regular author for Bliss. Read all his posts here.

‘I will not return unless the regime of Assad falls’ by Nawras Al Husein and Natascha Wagner

By ISS Blog Bliss 18 June 20202 February 2025 3771 views

The award-winning documentary film ‘For Sama’ tells the story of a mother who filmed her life in war-torn Aleppo for her newborn, Sama. The mother documented her daughter’s first moments, but also the context in which they tried to live, including the regular bombing of the hospital, the blood-covered victims, dead people and, by and by, the destruction of the city. A recent study by ISS researcher Natascha Wagner and Nawras Al Husein highlighting the voices, fears and perceptions of Syrian refugees who fled to Turkey and Germany shows that decisions by refugees to return to their country of origin are complex; the general assumption that Syrian refugees wish to return to Syria after the war has ended should not be taken as a given. The research shows the necessity of engaging with refugees to inform decisions on their future.

With the recent spread of the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe, leading to lockdowns and causing thousands of deaths, our attention has been diverted from other ongoing crises. June 20 is International Refugee Day, and amidst the many other crises we find ourselves in, we are experiencing one of the biggest refugee crises of our time. In March 2020, the Syrian civil war entered into its 10^th year. While the war is still ongoing, the future of Syrian refugees—victims of the civil war forced to flee their home country and temporarily residing in neighbouring countries and beyond—is already heavily debated.

The Syrian civil war has resulted in more than 5.9 million internally displaced people and more than 5.6 million refugees as of 1 July 2019. The majority of Syrian refugees are concentrated in the countries that border Syria, particularly Turkey, but a significant number are also hosted in EU countries, mainly Germany. Turkey hosts almost two-thirds of the Syrian refugees, while Germany had 568,785 officially registered Syrian asylum applicants by December 2019, making it the host country with the largest Syrian refugee population in Europe.

For the UN, a number of European countries hosting refugees, as well as the Syrian government, the return of Syrian refugees to their country of origin is the desired solution. The unprecedented influx of Syrian refugees over the last years has resulted in political, social, and economic challenges for host countries, with social tension rising in the wake of the mass migration in 2015. The discourse of the alleged threat that refugees pose to host communities is used by right-wing populist parties to win votes. Thus, host governments are under pressure to consider return migration scenarios given the political challenges they experience. But do Syrian refugees feel the same?

Inclusivity for informed and data-driven decision-making

The voices of Syrian refugees have seldom entered the debate on refugee policy. Therefore, in 2018, we interviewed 577 Syrian refugees in Germany (241) and Turkey (336) and explored whether they consider return migration an option, and, if so, when. We wanted to highlight the needs, aspirations, and agency of Syrian refugees in deciding upon their future. Understanding decision-making about return migration, particularly in the case of refugees, is not an easy task. Yet, for this very reason it is important to provide informed and data-driven information from the refugees themselves to host-country policy-makers.

Some of the main considerations or views informing the decision to return to Syria include:

Regime Al-Assad. We found that of the interviewed refugees in Turkey, 76% want to go back home. Among the Syrian refugees in Germany, only 55% wanted to go back. The current political regime under Al-Assad plays an important role concerning their desire to return to Syria. For the majority of refugees, an end to the current regime is needed to ensure their eventual return. For the German group, the likelihood of intended return increases by 21% if the Al-Assad regime is to be discontinued. Given that Al-Assad is still in power and the Western world is to a large extent inactively watching the conflict, host countries should not count on a speedy return of Syrian refugees, at least not voluntarily.

Civil and Political Rights. We also inquired whether other institutional preferences affected intentions to return. While refugees appreciate the democratic values of freedom of speech and belief, the data suggest that the existence of these liberties does not feed into the return migration decision in either of the host countries. Thus, simply imposing these values on the Syrian regime is unlikely to trigger mass return movements.

On-the-spot Information. Our research further analyzed whether exposure to positive or negative information regarding return migration impacted refugees’ intentions to return. The negative news item shown to respondents presented the latest facts about numerous challenges faced by Syrian refugees who returned home from Lebanon. The positive news item consisted of a leaflet with encouraging information on support for returnees, including relevant links and addresses in case of interest. We found no systematic impact on the decision to migrate back. This suggests that host governments cannot expect (rapid) information disseminated by refugee agencies—even if it is positive and provides support—to impact refugees’ decision making about their return.

Infographic Syrian Refugees returning home — The infographic can be downloaded here: https://www.iss.nl/en/news/return-migration-syria-voices-refugees-germany-and-turkey

Moving beyond repatriation agendas

If large-scale return migration is desired, we should try to better understand the preferences and concerns of the refugees themselves. We would do well to listen to the voices of the refugees themselves, since they have very clear ideas about what would make returning worth the effort. The situation in Syria continues to be unstable and it remains to be seen whether the country can find a way back to peace in the near future.

As our research shows, the end of the war and even political change would not be enough for all refugees to consider returning. Consequently, host countries should already start investing in the integration of those refugees who stay on. Taking the stance that the presence of the Syrian refugees is entirely temporary is not what the data suggest. The integration of the Syrian refugees within the host countries, regardless of how long they intend to stay, is an opportunity that can also support return migration, as it will give visibility to the refugees and their concerns.

Source: This blog is based on Nawras Al Husein & Natascha Wagner, “Determinants of intended return migration among refugees: A comparison of Syrian refugees staying in Germany and Turkey“, June 2020.

About the authors:

Nawras Al Husein is an ISS alumnus and currently works for CARE Netherlands as project manager and cash advisor. He is a humanitarian and development practitioner who has been managing complex emergency responses in Syria and Turkey for the last 8 years as well as early recovery and development projects in Syria and Yemen. His most recent research focuses on identifying the determinants of intended return migration among Syrian refugees hosted in Germany and Turkey.

Natascha Wagner is associate professor of Development Economics at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands). Her research interests lie in international economics/ development, ICT for development and health. A recurring theme in her research is gender and female empowerment as well as social exclusion. Natascha has published articles in, among others, Health Economics, Economics of Education Review, Journal of Development Studies and World Development.

Title Image Credit: ekvidi on Flickr. The image has been cropped.

More legal flexibility needed for Syrian refugees living in Jordan and elsewhere by Dina Zbeidy

By ISS Blog Bliss 25 November 201930 June 2020 2830 views

Jordan is home to some 700,000 Syrian refugees who are trying to adapt to Jordanian laws and customs, including the legal requirement and social expectation to register a marriage. Dina Zbeidy argues that while the precarious legal and economic status of Syrian refugees in Jordan plays a part in preventing them from registering their marriages, development organizations can play an important role by shifting their focus to addressing structural obstacles Syrian refugees face and by challenging the problematic legal system.

Marriage registration is mandatory in many countries, including Jordan, and its importance is inscribed in various international conventions.[1] The non-registration of a marriage has a number of grave consequences in Jordan specifically, since, here, lineage and nationality pass through the father. Therefore, marriage registration is needed in order for children born in Jordan to receive a legal identity and gain access to various rights and services. Indeed, one of the main concerns among organizations and officials revolve around the fact that non-registration can lead to children lacking a recognized national identity[2].

In Jordan, development organizations and Jordanian officials debate the negative implications of the non-registration of marriages among Syrian refugees. However, they often miss the point and their argumentations diverge from the concerns and daily experiences of Syrians themselves. In 2016, I conducted over ten months of fieldwork as part of my PhD research on marriage practices among Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Jordan and the work of development organizations on the topic. I noticed that Syrian refugees were often concerned with navigating the legal and social obstacles they faced due to their recent displacement. While most of my respondents were aware of the legal obligation to contract a marriage through court, they often did not have the means to do so, and were worried about the negative image Jordanians held towards Syrians because of their different marriage practices.

The fact that some Syrian couples in Jordan do not register their marriages stems from a variety of factors. One factor is the different legal system they were used to in Syria. While according to Syrian law marriages should also be concluded through the court, in practice most Syrians concluded what they term a zawaj sheikh, that is a marriage concluded by a sheikh and fulfills the Islamic requirements of a marriage, but is not officially registered at court. The couple usually registered the marriage at a later stage, often after the birth of their first child.

In addition, many Syrians in Jordan faced difficulties obtaining the necessary legal documents. Especially young Syrian men were reluctant to seek the assistance of the Syrian embassy as they were wanted in their country for military service. Moreover, for the majority of Syrians who struggled financially, the high costs in documentation and transportation formed another obstacle.[3]

While most Syrians were aware of the requirement to register a marriage, the obstacles they faced did not lead them to refrain from getting married. Having lost loved ones due to war, and away from family members dispersed around the region, marriage provided them with one way through which they could build a new life in displacement. Respondents stressed the desire to start their own families and make a home for themselves amidst their precarious conditions. Therefore Syrians have tried to find ways to circumvent the legal obstacles to ensure that they can still get married.

Structural obstacles must be addressed

Syrian refugees thus face a number of challenges when it comes to complying with Jordanian laws on marriage registrations. But what development organizations and Jordanian officials fail to highlight is the problematic legal system itself. Interventions of organizations focus on spreading awareness around the legal requirement of marriage registration through workshops and explaining the consequences of failing to do so. By doing this, they place the responsibility for change on the shoulders of refugees themselves instead of addressing the structural obstacles refugees face, or calling for Jordanian officials to facilitate marriage registration for refugees who lack the means to do so according to the current regulations.

Moreover, harsh laws related to the recognition of newborn infants pending marriage registration status are particularly problematic. Bearing children outside of an official marriage is still a taboo issue on which organizations choose not to publicly campaign, leaving the patriarchal legal system unchallenged. In order to alleviate the burden placed on refugees, it is necessary to place the focus for finding a solution on the Jordanian legal system itself. This can be done both by taking into account the specific obstacles refugees face due to their displacement, and by addressing women’s vulnerable legal status in Jordan when not officially married.

Dina Zbeidy will hold a seminar about the Marriage Registration in Jordan at the ISS on November 26.

[1] See for example Article 3 of the UN General Assembly Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages, and Article 16.9 of the Convention of Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

[2]In my interviews with employees of Jordanian development organizations, the scale and impact of unregistered marriages became apparent. I was told about a case of a Syrian couple living in Jordan who had concluded a marriage according to Syrian custom. When the wife went to the hospital to deliver her baby, she was asked by hospital staff for her marriage contract. When she was unable to provide them with one, social services took her newborn baby away and the husband was arrested. While the law discusses the status of an ‘illegitimate child’, it does not mention the removal of a child. Nevertheless, this practice seems to be a regular occurrence.

[3] As mentioned by my respondents and according to the Registering Rights Report (2015).

References:

Nimri, Nadeen. 2017, February 28. To Give Birth to a Child outside of Wedlock in Jordan. Raseef22 (Arabic).

Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC). 2015, October 15. Registering Rights: Syrian Refugees and the Documentation of Births, Marriages, and Deaths in Jordan. Cambridge: IHRC, Harvard Law School

Part of the arguments and ethnographic data in this piece were discussed and published in the following article:

Zbeidy, Dina. 2018. “Marriage Registration among Palestinians and Syrians in Jordan: Debating Identity, Society, and Displacement.” Sociology of Islam, 6(3), 359-380.

Image Credit: DFID – UK Department for International Development on Flickr. The image was cropped.

About the author:

Dina Zbeidy is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her PhD research focuses on marriage practices and discourses among civil society and refugee communities in Jordan. She has over eight years of professional experience in non-profit work in Palestine and the Netherlands. She currently teaches social sciences and conducts research on topics related to law and justice at the Leiden University of Applied Sciences.

Legal mobilization to end impunity for international crimes by Jeff Handmaker

By Jeff Handmaker 16 September 201919 June 2020 3218 views

In 2014, on the 20^th of July, the Israeli military targeted and bombed a home in a refugee camp in Gaza, killing several family members of Saad Ziada, including his mother and three brothers. Since this day, Mr. Ziada, a Dutch citizen and resident of the Netherlands, has persistently been seeking justice through legal mobilization. Ziada’s search for justice reveals the immense challenges faced by individuals and organizations seeking to hold individuals accountable for international crimes through different forms of legal mobilization.

It hasn’t been an easy journey. Ziada’s family were some of the 2000 killed, overwhelmingly civilians, during this large-scale Israeli military operation, which was extensively documented by United Nations investigators as well as representatives of Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations. Numerous reports, including extensive dossiers that have been submitted to the International Criminal Court in The Hague as part of a preliminary examination, allege that international crimes were committed during Israel’s 2014 military operation.

Holding individuals accountable who were allegedly responsible in either Gaza or Israel has been a non-starter. The Israeli government has not even acknowledged that crimes took place, let alone pursued investigations against the alleged individuals responsible for those crimes. Ziada has therefore been compelled to seek justice elsewhere.

The most common response to any crime committed by an individual is prosecution in the country where the crimes took place. Obviously, this is an unrealistic prospect in a country that is led by a government unwilling to even acknowledge that such crimes took place. But international crimes have a special character.

International crimes are described in the preamble of the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court as “unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity”. Accordingly, multiple alternatives to prosecute international crimes have gradually emerged on the basis of what is described as “universal jurisdiction”. These alternatives include prosecution by the International Criminal Court or other specialized tribunal and prosecution in a “third country” that may have little to no association with the crime committed or the nationality of the alleged perpetrator.

The person who is prosecuted for international crimes doesn’t even need to have committed the alleged crimes themselves. For example, the Netherlands prosecuted the Dutch businessman Guus Kouwenhoven in relation to his complicity in war crimes committed in Liberia. In 2017, the Dutch Court of Appeal found Kouwenhoven to be criminally liable for his complicity in these crimes.

Alongside criminal jurisdiction, there is the possibility to sue an individual who is alleged to have committed an international crime for damages in a civil court. This is currently the basis of the case that has been brought to the Dutch District Court in The Hague by Ziada. The case is being brought against two Israeli military commanders who were believed to have ordered the bombing, including the former General Chief of Staff of the Israeli military, Benny Gantz, who has been campaigning to become president of Israel.

Universal jurisdiction received significant attention in our 2019 book Mobilising International Law for ‘Global Justice’, particularly in a chapter by Aisling O’ Sullivan. O’Sullivan argued how the struggle for ending impunity for international crimes is locked in a struggle between two competing approaches: on the one hand, there is a desire to hold individuals accountable for the most heinous of crimes; on the other, there is a desire to maintain order between nations which can be disrupted by these kinds of criminal trials. What further complicates matters are the different power positions between states and the tendency to give “deference to the interests of powerful states” (p. 180).

Universal jurisdiction was also the topic of a seminar that I co-organized in 2010 with Professor Liesbeth Zegveld, the outcome of which was contained in an ISS Working Paper. One of the key observations at this seminar was that “while some governments show a willingness to prosecute these crimes, others see this as a ‘problem’ and even advising their nationals / soldiers not to travel abroad” (p. 14).

What we observed then as a “relatively new area of the law” (p. 15) is now gaining currency, particularly in the courts of the Netherlands. Zegveld, who is also a prominent human rights lawyer, has represented several individuals and groups who have been seeking justice for international crimes committed against them and their loved ones. This includes the family of three men, including Rizo Mustafic, an electrician, who were killed during a massacre in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovnia by Serbian military forces in 1995. A Dutch military contingent was part of a United Nations military force stationed in Srebrenica at the time and was said to have mostly stood by while the massacre took place. In September 2013, the Dutch Supreme Court confirmed that the Dutch military commanders were partly responsible for not taking sufficient action to try and prevent the massacre.

Apart from the obvious political sensitivities involved in holding individuals accountable for international crimes, these kinds of cases are incredibly complex, not least the challenges of gathering evidence to prove what happened. There are also various cultural and other challenges associated with international criminal justice, particularly through international criminal tribunals, which I have discussed in other academic work.

Zegveld represents Ziada in the case that will be heard on 17^th September, 2019. Will the outcome of this particular case of legal mobilization further advance the struggle against impunity for international crimes? There can be little doubt that international lawyers, human rights groups and concerned individuals around the world will be awaiting the outcome of this hearing with great anticipation.

Image Credit: Palestine Justice Campaign

About the author:

Jeff Handmaker is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and focuses on legal mobilisation.

He is a regular author for Bliss. Read all his posts here.

The question of democracy in environmental politics: The Green Road Project in Turkey by Melek Mutioglu Ozkesen

By ISS Blog Bliss 22 July 201929 June 2020 1549 views

Road construction is usually presented as a major condition for development, but the question is: development for who and whose land is being intruded for the construction of the road? In Turkey, these questions were prominently raised by social movements and civil society organizations when the government launched its Green Road Project in 2013. It is promoted by the state authorities for making the Black Sea region accessible to the incoming tourists that would arguably improve the economic conditions of the people living in the region. Six years later, the road has almost been completed, and this post can only pay homage to the brave and gradual field attempts of social movements to stop this project.

The Green Road Project is a road project with a length of 2645 kilometers that will connect the highlands of the Artvin, Bayburt, Giresun, Gümüshane, Ordu, Rize, Samsun and Trabzon provinces in the northern part of Turkey. The target of the Green Road Project is declared as ‘the completion of not only the Green Road Project to provide a significant brand value to the region in the tourism sector and link the highlands to each other, but also the acceleration of social progress that will be ensured through the resulting economic development.’[1] However, it also means the loss of livelihoods, increase in construction, rent, and environmental damage for the locals living in the region.

The Green Road, introduced by state officials as a regional development project, is justified by a discourse of serving ‘the people’ and providing local and national development through infrastructural modernization, which could result in a tourism boom and attract foreign investment. It led however to the adverse reactions of highland residents. Non-governmental organizations involved in the protest argue that the process has been carried out without consulting the local people at any moment during the policy making stages. Various organizations such as TEMA, the Fırtına Initiative, ‘Brotherhood of the Rivers/Highlands’, and ‘Black Sea in Revolt’ monitored the project very closely and struggled against it. They tried to stop the construction for a long time until eleven locals were detained by the gendarme and 24 locals were prosecuted on the charges of violating the freedom of work.

Mother Havva, depicted in the title image, who has become the symbol of the social opposition in the region, says:

‘Let them see if there is anything green in this road. Those highlands are ruined for whom? Highlands should be for our children, for our animals. We have no place to go. We kept our hometown alive by protecting our highlands and forests. The state exists because we exist, because this folk exists. Neither would [exist] these police, this gendarme, this judge, this government, this district governor for that matter. They exist as long as we exist. We are people with our land, our green, our highland!’[2]

Apparently, Mother Havva and the government officials do not refer to the same group as ‘the people’. This contested use of ‘the people’ makes us question which people this project serves? Which people will gain and lose by it? Mother Havva, while justifying her resistance against the project, protests that the state acts against – their peoples’ rule and their will. Perceiving ‘the people’ as the founding component of the state, she also questions who the state is? The Turkish government identifies its uncontested executive actions as democracy for the Justice and Development Party (AKP) since its rise to power in 2002, and has been trying to legitimate itself as the representative of the ‘will of the people’. On the other side, ‘the people’ identify themselves with their environment and lands, and consider this project as a threat for their livelihoods. This contested use of the term ‘the people’ by the locals and the officials sheds light on different projects of democracy endorsed by the two sides. While the locals have been struggling for their representation in the ongoing projects happening on their living space and refuse to leave absolute control to the mercy of the political authority, the government officials have been legitimizing their actions through conducting their representational legitimacy in the country.

In the Green Road Project, participatory action seems out of the agenda in an ever suspending process which excludes the opposing locals from any stage of policy making itself. Even when the locals mobilized to struggle/protest against the project, they were threatened, detained and were usually marginalized through various discourses such as that of ‘pasture occupiers’, settled in the region without legal permission and against local development. In this context one can say that the Green Road Project is one clear example that asks for the necessity of participatory democracy in environmental politics in Turkey in order to avoid the threats and disappearance of the livelihoods of the rural people in the region.

[1] DOKAP (2014). Doğu Karadeniz Projesi (DOKAP) Eylem Planı 2014-2018. T.C. Kalkınma Bakanlığı.

[2] BirGün. (2015) Havva ananın isyanı: Kimdir devlet? Devlet bizim sayemizde devlettir.

Image Credits: Demiroren News Agency

About the author:

Melek Mutioglu Ozkesen is a visiting PhD researcher in the Political Ecology Research Group at the ISS. She comes from the Ankara University in Turkey.

Confronting Apartheid Through Critical Discussion by Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo and Jeff Handmaker

By Jeff Handmaker 17 June 201919 June 2020 4128 views

The history of apartheid in South Africa is generally well-known. Yet, apartheid is not exclusive to that country. According to international law, and on various social grounds, Israel too may be viewed as maintaining an apartheid regime. What does apartheid mean and how has the international community confronted both South African and contemporary regimes of apartheid? This article takes up this discussion, reflecting on a recent event organised at the ISS.

On 11^th April 2019, ISS hosted an event to critically discuss the concept of apartheid and its application. Inspired by the work of known South African legal scholar Professor John Dugard, who addressed this event, he and other panellists went beyond the legal-historical origins of apartheid in South Africa and explored its relevance to the longstanding impasse between Israel and the Palestinians.[i]

Beyond the legal foundations of apartheid in South Africa and it becoming a crime in international law, the panelists explored the social impact of apartheid as separate development and how civic organizations and governments have resisted or maintained this situation.

Apartheid under international law

According to international law, the crime of apartheid, as defined by article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, is a crime against humanity. It consists of:

inhumane acts (…) committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.

The origins of this crime can be traced to the racialized legal regime established in South Africa from 1948 to 1990, although its definition is not restricted to that particular case. To the contrary, it is now an established position within academia, among civil society organizations, and UN agencies that the policies of Israel towards the Palestinian population also may be legally classified as an apartheid regime.

According to Dugard, Israel is more disrespectful of international law than South Africa was. He underscored that South Africa had accepted the importance of complying with norms of international law, yet argued that these norms were not applicable to the facts. By contrast, despite being party to several Human Rights Conventions that South Africa never was,[ii] Israel disregards the applicability of international law norms. This includes the Israeli government’s refusal to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, which in 2004 confirmed that the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the settlements and associated regime were contrary to international law.[iii]

So, how does one explain such a dismissive attitude towards international law? Both Dugard and Shawan Jabarin, who also spoke at the event, agreed that a combination of State complicity and lack of political will on the part of the United States and the European Union to ensure that Israel respected human rights and other sources of international law played a crucial role in perpetuating Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people.

As Jabarin further highlighted, although legally it is possible to argue that Israel’s occupation has many features of apartheid and colonialism, when assessing how the concept of apartheid applies in the Israel-Palestine territory, a purely legal analysis is insufficient. It is critical to consider political factors and the daily conditions that people face under the regime.

How nationality works in Israel-Palestine

Israel does not legally-recognise Israeli nationality. Instead, Israelis and Palestinians experience profoundly different conditions and enjoy different privileges, depending on their legally-mandated, privileged nationality as Jewish, or in accordance with more than 130 other officially-recognised nationalities. By disassociating the concepts of nationality and citizenship, Israel enforces a particularly strict regime of separate development. Ronnie Barkan, who also addressed the event, argued strongly that apartheid went beyond its application to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, noting that not every Israeli citizen enjoys the same rights. In other words, the dual-layered legal framework of Israel privileges Jewish nationality, while excluding and/or neglecting the rights of everyone else.

Moreover, Barkan argued that Israel was built upon this sophisticated dual-layered framework that on the surface seemed like a democracy, but only protected the rights of a privileged national group. For example, although Palestinians are allowed to vote, only candidates who recognize Israel as a Jewish state are permitted to participate in elections. In this sense, the participation of Palestinians in the political system is only apparent in so far as it does not have the potential to modify power structures, or their living conditions.

Nationality also determines who gets access to land and who is allowed to live in certain areas. The blockade of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the establishment of settlements and the forced displacement of Palestinians from their villages are further examples of inhuman practices, through which Israel exercises its control.

All panelists agreed that the issue went beyond domination. The long term goal of Israel’s apartheid regime is not merely to exercise control over Palestinians, but to expel them from the land.

Responses to challenge apartheid

In July 2018, Israel issued the “Nation-State Law”.[iv] Among other measures, the law declares that Israel is a Jewish state, and that the only official language is Hebrew, whereas previously the second official language was Arabic. The law is by no means the first, but possibly the most blatant effort to entrench apartheid. Protests from civil society have been considerable, including a stepping-up of the Palestinian-led Movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (the BDS Movement) until Israel respects Palestinian rights.

As observed by the third panelist, Nieuwhof, the BDS Movement offers an action perspective, a tool to mobilize citizens to pressure governments and companies to support the Palestinian people. One of the early achievements of the movement, she noted, was a decision by the Dutch Bank ASN to divest from Veolia, one of many companies that has generated profits from the illegal occupation of the territory of Palestine.

All in all, the event was both timely and highly-relevant to the ISS research agenda on social justice. Regardless of one’s views, it is important to preserve spaces for discussions like this, which allow us to explore a critical perspective regarding one of the most relevant social justice issues of our time.

[i] In addition to Dugard, Ronnie Barkan, an Israeli human rights activist and founder of the movement Boycott From Within shared his perspectives, together with Adri Nieuwhof, a long-standing human rights advocate who worked from the late 1970s with the Holland Committee for Southern Africa and Shawan Jabarin, a Palestinian human rights advocate, Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and General Director of the Al-Haq.

[ii] Israel is signatory of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (ratified on 1973), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ratified on 1979), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (ratified on 1991), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified on 1991).

[iii] Israel’s Supreme Court only partially recognised the ICJ’s ruling. See Susan Akram and Michael Lynk (2006) ‘The Wall and The Law: A Tale of Two Judgements’, Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 24(1): 61-106.

[iv] This was the subject of an earlier event, also organized at ISS.

Image Credit: © 2007 George Latuff. Wikicommons. Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for fighting apartheid in South Africa, said that “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”.

About the authors:

Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo is a recent graduate from the Erasmus Mundus Program in Public Policy. She is a lawyer and a specialist in Environmental Law. Her research interests are the political economy of extractivist industries, environmental conflicts, and rural development.

Jeff Handmaker is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and focuses on legal mobilisation.

He is a regular author for Bliss. Read all his posts here.

Distorted anti-Semitism allegations in UK’s Labour Party are a cover for Israeli apartheid by Jeff Handmaker

By Jeff Handmaker 4 March 201919 June 2020 2825 views

On 18 February 2019, Luciana Berger and six other British Members of Parliament (MPs) left the UK Labour Party. The most prominent reason provided by the departing MPs, led by Berger, is that the Party had become ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’, due mostly – or so it would appear – to Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s outspoken criticisms of the Israeli government and military. As discussed in this blogpost, which draws on a longer article published on Mondoweiss, these allegations are both dangerous distortions of anti-Semitism and serve as a shameful cover for Israel’s regime of apartheid.

In the extensive reporting that followed the departure of the Labour MPs, a Spectator columnist alleged that this was the beginning of the end for Labour, while the Guardian claimed that the party faced an anti-Semitism crisis. It was hardly mentioned in any of this reporting that the seven Labour Party members who decided to leave were all closely tied with Labour Friends of Israel, an avowedly pro-Israel organisation. Berger is its former director.

A report by the Media Reform Coalition identified ‘myriad inaccuracies and distortions’ in the reporting of anti-Semitism claims against the Labour Party, which prompted a public statement by prominent journalists and scholars. Fomenting a strategy of disinformation is consistent with claims made by Jonathan Cook, a highly respected author and long-time journalist, who has established that the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs has long been actively seeking to marginalise its critics through a range of measures.

But where did the anti-Semitism claim come from?

The IHRA Definition

The contemporary ‘debate’ over anti-Semitism within the Labour Party relates to August 2018, when pro-Israel members of the party proposed the incorporation of a highly controversial definition of anti-Semitism. Called the “Working Definition of Antisemitism” and drafted in 2016 by a group called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the IHRA definition contains vague and dangerously far-reaching conflations of criticisms of Israel and references to the holocaust.

The lobby to incorporate the IHRA definition was fierce and unrelenting, largely led by Berger and others affiliated with Labour Friends of Israel. At the time of the August 2018 debate, there were even efforts to smear Hajo Meyer, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz who had once spoken at a Labour Party rally where he made comparisons between the Nazi regime and his observations of Israeli policies. Meyer, an outspoken retired theoretical physicist, recorded his experiences in a moving memoir The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed, published in 2012.

Steven Garside, a member of the UK Labour Party and Palestine Solidarity Campaign who strongly opposed the IHRA definition, maintained that erroneous allegations of anti-Semitism were in fact related to Corbyn’s harsh criticisms of the Israeli government and military. Ash Sarkar of the Sandberg Instituut condemned the move as a threat to free expression. Prominent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson warned that the definition would suppress legitimate criticism of Israel while failing to cover genuine cases of anti-Semitism.

But despite these criticisms and warnings, Labour ultimately decided to incorporate the definition in full.

Since then, emboldened by the wide-ranging IHRA definition, groups such as Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Chronicle, with very little substantiation, have sought to equate criticism of Israel as “Jew hate”.

For liberal supporters of Israel, adopting the IHRA definition has been a crucial strategy. However, the true aim of such vacuous, yet highly damaging allegations is to avoid a critical dialogue on Israel’s policies of apartheid against Palestinians. Unlike South Africa apartheid, which from the 1960s became increasingly reported, understood and eventually condemned, Israeli apartheid has been shamefully underreported and is far less understood.

So what does Israeli apartheid look like?

The many forms of apartheid in Israel

Israeli apartheid takes many forms, whether this be the overt racism enshrined in Israel’s 2018 “Nation-State law” that discontinued Arabic as an official language, which is now being challenged in Court, or Israel’s continued blockade and bombing of Gaza (since 2005) that is currently the subject of a preliminary examination by the International Criminal Court.

Apartheid also takes the form of literally hundreds of insidious Israeli military orders, including Order 101 that makes it impossible for Palestinians to legally protest. Israeli regulations make it virtually impossible for Palestinians to build a home. This is due to the fact that Israel’s land and zoning regulations are, according to Israel’s Basic Law, oriented around “preserving” the land for Israel’s Jewish inhabitants.

But the most insidious manifestations of Israeli apartheid are the decades-long, everyday experiences of Palestinians. Farmers have to stand in long lines to reach their sheep in the agricultural village of Qalandia (that is surrounded by a high, concrete wall). School children in Hebron cannot walk to school without being stopped daily by soldiers at a military checkpoint to check the contents of their schoolbags. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has heard numerous cases of official abuse against Palestinian women, including a seven-month pregnant woman assaulted at a checkpoint.

Given these examples, and much more, of Israel’s apartheid policies, it is exasperating that there is such a resistance to criticise Israel. And yet, this is exactly what happens. Liberal groups such as Labour Friends of Israel in the UK, Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) in the Netherlands and others repeatedly fuel the public’s outrage on anti-Semitism through disingenuous use of the IHRA definition, yet simultaneously maintain a silence that Israel’s policies amount to apartheid, not unlike the approach of like-minded liberal groups in Israel.

Apartheid cannot compete with a global social justice movement

Just as was ultimately the case in South Africa, neither Israel’s government, nor its most adamant, liberal supporters, can compete with a global social justice movement committed to ending Israel’s regime of apartheid. Rooted in equal rights claims, this movement is bolstered by growing judicial attention to Israel’s commission of war crimes and a highly successful, Palestinian-led global campaign of boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS).

The success of the BDS movement is acknowledge to have transformed the debate on Israel-Palestine. Indeed, as prominent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has put it, BDS has been a true success story for the movement, succeeding to undermine Israel’s strongly cultivated image as a liberal democracy.

The conclusion that can be drawn from all this is that just like those who turned a blind eye for decades to apartheid in South Africa, the failure of Luciana Berger, Labour Friends of Israel, CIDI, and others to confront Israeli apartheid will place them all on the wrong side of history.

Image Credit: https://www.stopthewall.org/apartheid-wrong

About the author:

Jeff Handmaker is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and focuses on legal mobilisation.

He is a regular author for Bliss. Read all his posts here.

Development Dialogue 2018 | Morocco’s ‘ninjas’: The hidden figures of agricultural growth by Lisa Bossenbroek and Margreet Zwarteveen

By ISS Blog Bliss 6 December 201818 May 2020 2712 views

In Morocco’s Saïss region an agricultural boom is unfolding, premised on a process of labour hierarchisation shaped along gender lines. Female wageworkers find themselves at the lowest strata and take little pride in their work and are stigmatised. In such a context, how are rural women able to engage in agricultural wage work without losing their dignity and without being stigmatised? What can we learn from their daily working experiences?

“NINJAS” FEMALE WAGEWORKERS

While driving through Morocco’s agricultural plain of the Saïss in the early morning, the roads are crowded with vans and pickups that are packed with workers, the majority of whom are women. The way in which these women are dressed has earned them the nickname of ‘ninjas’: they have wrapped thick scarves around their faces, barely showing their eyes (see Picture 1). This outfit is symptomatic of their paradoxical situation: although they are indispensable for realizing Morocco’s ambitious agricultural modernization plans, their contributions tend to go or are made invisible, also by themselves. Female labourers may say that their dress is meant to protect themselves from the sun—“because we do not want to become black”—as well as from dust and pesticides. Yet, in addition to these practical considerations, many also admitted that their scarves conveniently serve the purpose of hiding their faces, allowing them to remain invisible and “anonymous”.

THE EMERGENCE OF A GENDERED LABOUR HIERARCHY

Their experiences are embedded in a new hierarchical labour order that is currently emerging (Bossenbroek 2016). Whereas most male labourers whom we interviewed take some pride in their work as they often get the better-paid jobs and could use it to model and perform a particular modern rural masculine identity, women find themselves at the lowest strata of this hierarchy. This newly emerging gendered labour hierarchy is grounded in, reproduces, but also slightly alters prevailing normative notions of femininity and masculinity in the study area. These prevailing norms divide various activities between the genders, while also narrowly circumscribing what is appropriate behaviour for men and women. Men are expected to be or become the breadwinner of the household, responsible for maintaining their families. A father, or husband, who falls short of financially supporting his wife or family is not well perceived in the society. In this regard, a woman working for wages automatically raises questions about her husband’s (if she has one) ability to provide. During various interviews, women stated for example that “a husband who accepts to let his wife work outside, is not a real man and can expect trouble”, or as a young unmarried female wageworker once said when asking about her future husband: “It does not matter what kind of work he does. It is more important that he actually has a job.”

Prevailing feminine socio-cultural gendered norms further circumscribe the various activities and identities of female wageworkers. This makes it difficult for rural women who engage in wage work to combine their remunerative activities with the identity of being a virtuous rural woman. Although women often engage in farm work, they take little pride in their activities as rural female identities rather rest on domestic tasks. They are in charge of the good functioning of their household and for raising the children. Their mobility is restricted and closely watched and controlled (see also Belarbi 1995). In addition, the activities rural women engage in as well as their mobility are deeply entangled with notions of honour and shame. These notions guide interactions in certain social contexts, specifically in public interactions between non-intimates (Abou-Lughod 1985, p. 247).

Such normative gender identities and norms are importantly (re-)produced and reinforced by gossip and rumours that circulate. There are for instance many negative stories about women working for wages in the agricultural sector. Male farmers and foremen may refer to female wageworkers as single young women with illicit behaviour, or as women “who make the farmer lose his mind”.

Hence, in order to continue with their wage work activities without losing their image of a respectable woman, female wageworkers develop different tactics. They for instance actively hide the fact that they work and perform as a good housewife in charge of her household, or present their work as a logical extension of their role as mother, as one female mother worker stated: “I have to work in order to keep my children out of the misery and provide them with a better future”. In the meantime, they fulfil the role of female breadwinner and trespass on the public domain, considered masculine, on a daily basis. In doing so, they negate on a daily basis hegemonic definitions of womanhood and come to explore new concepts of self, female status, and human worth (see Ong 1991).

References:

Abou-Lughod, L. (1985) ‘Honor and sentiment of loss in Bedouin society’, American Ethnologist 12 (2): 245 – 261.

Belarbi, A. (Eds.) (1995) Femmes rurales. Casablanca: Editions Le Fennec.

Bossenbroek, L. 2016. ‘Behind the veil of agricultural modernization: Gendered dynamics of rural change in the Saïss, Morocco’. PhD Dissertation Wageningen University.

Ong, A. (1991) ‘The gender and labor politics of postmodernity’, Annual Review of Anthropology 20 : 279 – 309.

This blog article is part of a series related to the Development Dialogue 2018 Conference that was recently held at the ISS. Other articles forming part of the series can be read here, here and here

About the authors:

Lisa Bossenbroek obtained her PhD in 2016 with the rural sociology group at the University of Wageningen (the Netherlands). As part of her research she studied the role of young people in agrarian dynamics and the interactions of processes of agrarian change and gender relations. Currently, she works as a post-doc at the Faculty of Governance, Economics and Social Sciences (EGE–RABAT), Morocco.

Margreet Zwarteveen is Professor of Water Governance Education with the Integrated Water Systems and Governance Department at IHE Delft Institute for Water, and with the Governance and Inclusive Development group, University of Amsterdam. She is concerned both with looking at actual water distribution practices and with analysing the different ways in which water distributions can be regulated (through technologies, markets and institutions), justified (decision-making procedures) and understood (expertise and knowledge).

Resistance and persecution: fighting the politics of control by Salena Tramel

By ISS Blog Bliss 2 March 201819 June 2020 1501 views

Social justice movements from around the world are pushing back against a shift toward nationalism, extraction and environmental destruction. Those who resist increasingly do so at risk of great personal harm, arrest and indefinite jailing as political prisoners, or the criminalisation of their movements as a whole. Even so, the resistance not only remains steadfast, but is also steadily gaining strength.

Introduction

The rise of destructive and reactionary political power impacts people and ecosystems across many global settings. These shifts in control, characterised by a resurgence of racist and nationalistic rhetoric and policies, a redoubling of environmental exploitation and even climate change denial, and a renewed expansion into and pillaging of indigenous territory, represent urgent challenges for social movements and activists. Although these contemporary pressing issues have some distinctive new features, they are rooted in past forms of injustice, whether that be borrowing from the colonial playbook or amplifying the privatisation schemes of the more recent neoliberalism, such as free trade and deregulation.

At the same time, these are precisely the dynamics that cultivate resistance. Social justice movements from around the world are pushing back against this shift toward nationalism, extraction and environmental destruction. Those who resist increasingly do so at risk of great personal harm, arrest and indefinite jailing as political prisoners, or the criminalisation of their movements as a whole. Even so, the resistance not only remains steadfast, but is also gaining strength, in places as diverse as Brazil, Honduras, and Palestine—countries featuring violent, conservative, reactionary and acquisitive governments.

Power grabs in Brazil

Gaining political control starts with power grabbing—a concept to which the sprawling country of Brazil is no stranger. Power grabbing in the form of smashing intricate peasant leagues occurred during the military dictatorship, and it continues to this day. Most recently, the parliamentary coup that ousted a democratically elected president and relegated authority to an unelected and corrupt right wing was the ultimate seizure of power.

Under such corruption and disregard for democratic processes, social movements suffer even more intense criminalisation. This has often included the pre-emptive imprisonment and even assassination of peasant and indigenous leaders, most notably those connected to the Landless Workers Movement (MST) that is arguably the largest and most important state-level peoples’ movement in the Americas.

Nearly twenty-two years ago in April 1996, 19 activists from the MST were killed by the Brazilian military police in what would come to be known as the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre. Now, more than two decades after the massacre, the Brazilian government tends to treat activism—especially that which takes place in the countryside—as a criminal activity. Mining in Brazil, much like logging, is strongly opposed by peasant and indigenous movements as one of the greatest threats to the world’s largest rainforest while championed by the powerful nexus of state, business, and lobbies.

These massive power grabs contextualised within a definitive push for right-wing exclusionary populism have spelled trouble for seekers of social justice. The MST as a whole is increasingly criminalised and its members imprisoned. This is due in large part to the peasant movement’s relentless efforts towards agrarian reform, for which its activists can be arrested without evidence.

Resource grabs in Honduras

Power grabbing is indeed oftentimes connected to resource grabbing, yet another piece of the overall political dynamics of control. Although resource grabbing, in the form of taking away peoples’ rights to water and land, have been fixtures of injustice for centuries, this phenomenon has recently taken new shapes under globalisation. More specifically, powerful states and their militaries tend to prey on the weak points of former colonies for their own financial and political gains. As the case of Honduras warns us, when intertwined with power grabs, resource grabs become even more deadly—especially for those who resist.

Honduras, however, has vast alliances—peasant, environmental, feminist, LGBTQ, indigenous, Garífuna (Afro-indigenous), and labour struggles that engage in multiple forms of resistance, from land occupations to human rights documentation to interfacing with the state. The criminalisation of these movements and imprisonment of activists is routine.

In Garífuna communities along Central America’s Caribbean coast, the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) has been at the forefront of resistance to what has become an attack on their ancestral resources and cultural identity from all sides: sea, water, land, and forest. OFRANEH uses organizing tactics from community radio broadcasts to land occupations, all of which the government has noted and responded to with violence. The group’s leaders face threats or instances of imprisonment on falsified charges on a daily basis. OFRANEH’s vice president Alfredo López spent six years in prison before finally being released for ‘lack of evidence’ and intense international pressure in 2015.

Control grabs in Palestine

In Palestine, power grabs and resource grabs have resulted in the ultimate manifestation of enclosure—control grabbing. First by British Empire, and then by Israeli occupation, Palestinians have been continually squeezed out of their homeland, and those who remain are subject to various forms of violence and discrimination.

The current hard-line political climate in Israel has increased the Israeli government’s stronghold on Palestinian lands. This amounts to territorial restructuring in the forms of illegal settlement expansion and transfer of Israeli citizens into occupied Palestinian territory, in the case of the West Bank, and increasing restricted access zones and militarised attacks, in the case of the Gaza Strip. These and other forms of control perpetrated by the Israeli occupation are likewise made possible and maintained through outside military and financial support.

Palestinian human rights defenders and social movements pose one of the biggest threats to maintaining and proliferating the occupation, a fact that has not been lost on the Israeli government. The result has been a trend of mass incarceration, including administrative detention, where people are held in prison for months or even years without charge or trial, supposedly because of ‘secret evidence.’ The Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association in Palestine, Addameer found that as of July 2017, 449 Palestinians were being held without trial or even charge.

One such political prisoner held without charge is Abdul-Razeq Farraj, a leader in the Union of Agricultural Works Committees (UAWC). Farraj has spent more than 16 combined years in Israeli prisons, most of them under administrative detention. Most recently, he was wrested from his home and family at midnight on May 24, 2017, and has been held without cause ever since. Abdul-Razeq’s work with UAWC has been focused on improving the lives of Palestinian farmers, whose suffering is in large part due to confiscation of land and water resources and repression under Israeli occupation.

Grabbing back

The struggles in Brazil, Honduras, and Palestine are indicative of politics of control—and resistance—that are happening all over the world. In Brazil, the coup government has chosen corporate-driven economic growth, privatisation, and corrupt politics through power grabbing rather than respect for democratic processes and the well-being of its low-income populations, particularly peasants and indigenous peoples. Honduras, a fragile state in the wake of a coup, bears the scars of external influence, and these wounds are most pronounced in the form of unchecked natural resource grabbing.

And in occupied Palestine, one of the world’s few remaining colonial projects continues with no end in sight; in the absence of statehood or any meaningful form of political sovereignty, the Israeli occupation has become the extreme expression of control grabbing. In each of these cases, oppressive states and business interests use a variety of tools of repression, from criminalisation and the creation of political prisoners, to physical threats and assassinations.

Winning back sovereignty and achieving justice are the political tasks at hand in these and other cases around the world, and ones that movements and activists take seriously—no matter how high the stakes. From Brazilian mass movement building to pinpoint alternatives and retain the countryside, to Honduran reclamation of natural resources through food sovereignty, agroecology, and climate justice, to relentless Palestinian efforts of upholding international law and defending human rights, people are challenging destructive political orders. Doing so is a collective act of resilience and resistance, ‘grabbing back’ in order to move forward in uncertain times.

What you can do

Grassroots International, a U.S.-based non-profit, supports small farmers and producers, Indigenous Peoples and women working around the world to win resource rights: the human rights to land, water and food. Grassroots works through grant-making, education, and advocacy. The Landless Workers Movement (MST), Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), and Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) are among its global network of partners.

The unabridged article originally appeared in Huffington Post and can be read here

Salena Tramel is a PhD researcher at the ISS, where her work is centered on the intersections of resource grabs and climate change mitigation, and the intertwining of (trans)national agrarian/social justice movements. In addition to her research at ISS, Salena draws on her global experience with social movements and grassroots organisations to inform her work as a policy and communications consultant and freelance journalist. Prior to joining the academic community at ISS, Salena served as the program coordinator for the Middle East and Haiti at Grassroots International, where she oversaw two key geographical areas while developing pro-poor advocacy strategies at the US/UN levels.