Tag Archives palestine

Language in the War on Gaza

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Israeli and other world leaders are continuing to make claims in their attempt to justify the war on Gaza — statements that appear to be true and are taken at face value while they are in fact dangerously deceptive, writes Dubravka Žarkov, who argues that politicians outside Israel are far from powerless to stop the bloodshed in Gaza. But for that to happen, some hard truths have to be taken into account.

Israel’s political and military leaders have produced so many outright lies regarding Gaza and Hamas that it might seem there is no point in wasting one’s breath on them. Consider the following statements and the contrary evidence for those not yet convinced:

  • The IDF does not deliberately target civilians, journalists, medical facilities and staff, or restricts aid. In fact, the IDF has deliberately targeted civilians (as widely reported), journalists (as Human Rights Watch has detailed), and medical personnel (according to Amnesty International). It has also put various restrictions on aid.
  • The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is harboring among its employees Hamas militants who took part in the October 7 massacres. Yet, Israel has not shared any information or evidence to back up its assertions while UNRWA has screened its 13,000 staff in Gaza on a biannual basis.
  • Israel’s declared war on Gaza and the ongoing, undeclared war against Palestinians in the West Bank are “against Hamas” and “terrorists.” In fact, multiple Israeli governments, including the current one, have committed to appropriating all Palestinian territory and committing genocide against the Palestinians currently living there.
  • Iran is the main financier and supporter of Hamas. In fact, other entities like Qatar have been the main supporters of Hamas, and Israel too was instrumental in creating Hamas to divide Palestinian sympathies.

Other statements, however, made by Israeli and other world leaders, that may appear to be true, and that continue to be taken at face value, are in reality dangerously deceptive. Their aim is to justify Israeli politics regarding violence towards Palestinians, actions in support of the current war, or inaction in stopping it. Careful examination of a few of these will expose the ways in which such statements operate.

Dictionary of Deception

Probably the most repeated statement proffered by Israeli politicians and their supporters is that Hamas and Palestinians in general deny the Israeli state’s “right to exist.” This statement entirely ignores – and diverts attention away from – the unquestionable reality that Israel has existed as a state since 1948 and continues to exist, whether or not Hamas or anyone else objects to it.

At the same time, the Israeli complaint occludes the reality that it is Palestine whose right to exist as a state has long been denied. Although the majority of world governments have recognized Palestinian statehood, the State of Palestine has only an observer status in the UN. This is so because Israel and the United States, Canada, Australia, and an absolute majority of  European states have refused to recognize Palestinian statehood (though this might change in future). Israel’s current government has explicitly and loudly proclaimed that it has no plan to recognize a Palestinian state. It is, thus, Israel that denies any Palestinian state’s right to exist.

Instead, Israel is expanding the occupation of Palestinian territory, and when faced with resistance, it asserts its own “right to self-defense.” However, in 1983, the UN General Assembly explicitly affirmed Palestinians’ right to self-defense “by all available means, including armed struggle,” a right they share with all nations under “colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation,” as asserted in the Geneva Conventions. This right does not include violence against Israeli civilians, which Hamas militants have perpetrated. Such violence may qualify as war crimes. Nevertheless, the Geneva Conventions make clear that the “right to self-defense” belongs to the occupied, not the occupier. Any military or police action taken by an occupier against the occupied – even when the occupied uses violence against occupation – is violence, not self-defense.

Another instance of Israeli deception can be seen in Israeli politicians’ regular insistence that Palestinian schools teach their children to hate Jews. UNRWA – the main sponsor of education in the West Bank and Gaza – was accused of spreading incitement of violence and hatred of Jews in their textbooks. However, the European Union review of Palestinian schoolbooks has concluded that they include “a strong focus on human rights… express a narrative of resistance within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and…display an antagonism towards Israel.” None of this equates to hatred of Jews. The accusation of Palestinian schoolbooks spreading hatred is also debunked by The European Middle East Project.

The EU report further notes that textbooks produced by Israeli authorities removed “entire chapters on regional and Palestinian history”, which “fundamentally changes the [Palestinian] national narrative.” Israeli state school books often simply ignore the Palestinian presence, and perpetually depict Israel and Jews as victims of Palestinian and Arab enemy.

No wonder, then, that Israeli girls sing about the annihilation of Gaza on an online Israeli TV program, and Israeli soldiers in Gaza make videos broadcasting their mocking, humiliation, and killing of Palestinian civilians as well as their destruction or looting of Palestinian property. These soldiers are not necessarily right-wing Zionists like some of the Jewish citizens blocking aid to Gaza or trying to build houses within Gaza’s borders. Nor are they necessarily the Jewish settlers from the West Bank. Many of them are just ordinary citizens. But in their ordinariness, they provide a frightening and accurate picture of Israeli society’s general views of Palestinians. This is why a majority of Israeli citizens support the genocide in Gaza even if they do not support Israel’s prime minister and his government.

Finally, contrary to their lament of “grave concern” for “suffering in Gaza,” and their often self-serving statements, politicians outside Israel are far from powerless to stop the bloodshed in Gaza. Even within the classical diplomatic arsenal, individual states can expel Israel’s ambassadors and recall their own. They can impose sanctions or boycott Israeli businesses, politicians, cultural and sports representatives (as they have done, with vigor, with regard to Russia and Russians). They can stop their arms exports to Israel, sever economic relations, and multiply their financial support for humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza (rather than cutting that support). Only a handful of states have actually recalled their ambassadors from Israel. No Western state is among them, and except Bahrain, no other rich Arab state.

How can it be that the people who have demonstrated endlessly in support of Palestinians—and have identified and urged many of these measures—know more than powerful heads of state about strategies to stop the genocide?

The answer, of course, is that governments do know. And that reality brings us to some hard truths.

Hard Truths

Palestinians have no friends among Western governments. They have known this hard truth for a long time, and their knowledge has been confirmed in a most dreadful way. Even though a few European countries (like Spain and Ireland) have used very sharp language against Israel, they have taken no steps that would protect the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank. The United States and a few Western governments have bragged that they have imposed (travel and banking) sanctions on a few Jewish settlers and settlements. But this is a ludicrous substitute for effective action. Some Western leaders and governments now face court cases, brought by pro-Palestinian human rights organizations and lawyers, charging that they have violated both domestic and international laws by supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza (by supplying of ammunition to Israel), or by their failures to stop it. But, thus far, judicial interventions have not brought effective protections to the victims of genocide.

Palestinians also do not have friends among Arab governments, nor should they expect any. Their “Arab brothers” have expressed “deep concerns” about the Palestinian plight, but they have other, more important concerns, such as importing Israeli surveillance technology to keep checks on political opponents. Saudi Arabia, who long held to a policy of linking normalization with Israel to Israel’s recognition of the Palestinian state, now speaks only about a “path to Palestinian statehood.”

This means that Palestinians need their own new political force to achieve both formal recognition of statehood and peace with Israel. Are either of these two goals feasible? For now, there is no sign that various Palestinian factions will achieve unity, which is an absolutely necessary precondition to any long-term, sustainable Palestinian state. Hamas and Fatah have held numerous talks to no avail. Clearly, it is not easy to reconcile secular and Islamist worldviews, ideas of governance and ideals of societal relations. Even various Islamist factions do not see eye to eye. But without such unity, prior to the end of genocide and occupation, post-genocide and post-occupation Palestine will descend into internal violence and struggle for power. As for peace with Israel, the state of affairs in twentieth-century post-genocide societies does not offer grounds for much optimism. Genocides do not destroy only people, their cultures, and their histories. They destroy hope and imagination, too, which are necessities for building peace.

Israel, too, needs a new political force to build a totally new national narrative based on language from a dictionary very different from the dictionary of deception. The Israeli public’s overwhelming support of the destruction of Gaza, occupation of the West Bank, and expansion of settlements means that creating such a new political force and language could take generations, if ever. Still, it is possible to imagine that one day an Israeli public that is currently supporting the annihilation of Gaza may begin asking itself: “How has a state created to give hope to survivors of genocide turned into a perpetrator of genocide? What have I given my voice to and what have I been silent about?”

Unless and until this happens, there is no hope for either Israel or Palestine. Nor for the world within which all of us exist.

Reprinted from Foreign Policy in Focus with permission.

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

About the author:

Dubravka Žarkov retired in 2018 as an Associate Professor of Gender, Conflict and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the Netherlands where she taught feminist epistemologies, conflict theories and media representations of war and violence. Her books include The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (2007) and the co-edited collection Narratives of Justice In and Out of the Courtroom, Former Yugoslavia and Beyond (with Marlies Glasius, 2014). She was a co-editor of the European Journal of Women’s Studies. She lives in Belgrade, Serbia.

 

Imagining a feminist humanitarian system: reflections from co-organizing a panel on feminist approaches to humanitarian action

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The emergence of feminist analysis and advocacies within the humanitarian field offers opportunities to engage with and reflect on current practices. In this blog article, Gabriela Villacis Izquierdo & Kaira Zoe Cañete explore and consider the wide range of feminist approaches to humanitarian action presented during their panel at the International Humanitarian Studies Association Conference in 2023. They look into the multiple ways in which feminist approaches can lead to more equitable and desirable outcomes whilst also highlighting the potential of embracing these approaches to contribute to reforms within the sector.

 

“Are we trying to turn the humanitarian system into something that it could never become?”

This was a provocation laid down by one of the speakers in a panel that we (Gabriela and Kaira) organized at the 7thInternational Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA) Conference held in Dhaka in November 2023. The panel, titled “Mapping Feminist Approaches to Humanitarian Action”, invited conceptual, empirical, methodological, and practice-based papers to discuss the significance of feminist approaches to humanitarian action.

As an initiative under the ERC-funded Humanitarian Governance Project, the panel asked: In what ways can humanitarian practices be considered ‘feminist’? How can feminist advocacies, approaches, and research methodologies help address the challenges in contemporary humanitarian practices and governance? This article reflects on the presentations from the panel, which includes our own collaborative work, and highlights emergent themes and opportunities for advancing feminist approaches in humanitarian research and practice.

Constructing instead of extracting knowledge

The panel featured diverse presentations that underscored feminist contributions to addressing the complexities of humanitarian crises, beginning with how feminist methodologies can be useful for constructing knowledge about experiences of crises (to read all abstracts, visit the IHSA website). Vani Bhardwaj for instance presented her work on Bangladesh and how environmental impacts of humanitarian response can have gendered consequences. She problematized how approaches of INGOs working in the field, with their reliance on “traditional” data collection tools, can create and perpetuate (colonial) hierarchies, such as the extraction of knowledge and the reinforcement of power relations between researcher and “subjects” or “beneficiaries”.

Situated designs for mobility justice

Similarly, Emmanuel Kodwo Mensah from social enterprise Includovate introduced a mobility mapping methodology he developed with Dr. Kristie Drucza while studying South Sudanese refugees in Uganda, where mobility justice seems to be a distant possibility, especially for women. Through this approach, they were able to focus on the lived experiences of refugee women and men, who are also dealing with the negative impacts of climate change and could unveil the intricate realities that are behind the categories of “refugee” and “migrant”. This contribution provokes us to explore ways in which humanitarian responses can adopt a more situated design towards the achievement of mobility justice. Moreover, the presenters’ reflections motivated us to further explore the notion of allyship and ‘positive masculinities’ within the feminist approaches inside and outside the humanitarian realm.

At different levels, we could identify with Vani’s and Emmanuel’s analysis, as our own presentation in the panel aimed to share our experiences of doing feminist research in humanitarian and disasters contexts. Based on two different case studies – the Philippines and Colombia – we argued that despite the challenges posed by doing research in settings of crisis, it is important and possible to meaningfully engage with research participants and embody feminist principles of research, such as collaborative knowledge construction, awareness of intersectional identities of participants and researchers, and research as a two-way and relational process. For us, feminist methodologies have the potential to centre the situated and lived experiences of people affected and involve them in processes of knowledge-building.

Alternative forms of humanitarian action

A second set of presentations delved into alternative forms of humanitarian action. Gabrielle Daoust and Synne Dyvik highlighted one of the current humanitarian crises in Europe: the Ukraine war. They focused on the notion of private humanitarian hospitality through the case of the “Homes for Ukraine” scheme in the United Kingdom. The presentation was an invitation for us to reflect on the privatization of humanitarian responses as marked by a virtual outsourcing of government responsibility to private individuals in dealing with refugees.

This type of humanitarian response and the associated shifting of the ‘humanitarian space’ into the private and domestic sphere is enabled by particular gendered and racialised conceptions of the home (especially in relation to traditional notions of care work) and of humanitarian hospitality more broadly. In this case, white women from Ukraine are welcomed in the private spaces of UK citizens due to their perceived “harmless” identities as mothers and caregivers. Such a case would be different for other racialised refugees, especially men.

A critical look at the survivor-centred approach (SCA)

Inspired by their own experiences working on gender-based violence (GBV) during crises, Ilaria Michelis, Jane Makepeace, and Chen Reis presented a critical discourse analysis of the survivor centred approach (SCA) within humanitarian responses. For the presenters, the SCA has moved away from its feminist roots and objectives to become a technocratic tool. Humanitarian actors and service providers retain control while survivors’ choices are limited by rigid models and external assessments of their safety. As feminist practitioners and researchers, Ilaria, Jane and Chen challenged these practices within the humanitarian system and advocated for locally and survivor-led initiatives. Their recently published paper can be found here.

Knowledge extraction and the creation of dependency relations

Finally, María González presented her research about the resistance of the Tal’3at movement in Palestine from a decolonial, feminist, and critical lens. During her collaborative research with members of the Tal’3at movement, they identified how women in Palestine faced three main roots of oppression: occupation, patriarchy, and “the NGOs”. In relation to the theme of the panel, María focused on the ways in which international NGOs in Palestine tended to co-opt resistance efforts of women in Palestine through knowledge extraction and creation of dependency. Importantly, María showed how the Tal’3at movement counteracted these “structures of oppression” through political and anti-colonial engagement to advance freedom of all Palestinians.

Feminist approaches: a big step toward more equitable ways of doing things

By summarizing the different contributions to the panel, we intend to demonstrate the richness and diversity of feminist thinking and initiatives in this space. Over the last few years, feminist organizations have articulated the need to transform the humanitarian system not least of all for its tendency to privilege certain (Northern-centric and patriarchal) values, approaches, and worldviews. They have sought to make humanitarian action more attentive to the gendered, racialized, and lived experiences of crises thereby making aid more accountable, responsive, and accessible to those most affected. The emergence of feminist analysis and advocacies within the humanitarian field offers opportunities to engage with and reflect on current practices.

However, the ideas emanating from this are rarely brought into direct conversation with other (mainstream and non-mainstream) strands of humanitarian research and practice. Attention to context and lived experiences of crises, gendered power relations in humanitarian settings, intersectionality, and forms of care that are vital for survival and recovery are some of the contributions that a feminist perspective can bring to discussions not only on how humanitarian response can be “effective” but also transformative.

Through this panel, we have attempted to highlight some of these opportunities for further thinking and action that would help us address some of the challenges that beset humanitarian practice at present. The themes that arose in the panel discussion are certainly far from exhaustive, but they indicate valuable insights that are enabled through an application of feminist perspectives, ethics, and methodologies.

Going back to our collective concern — are we trying to turn the humanitarian system into something that it could never become? — we are convinced that it is possible, when we see what people on the ground are doing in their everyday practices of humanitarian action. We hope to be able to move further with this initiative and explore if and how feminist approaches can make a difference in the ways we respond to crises.

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to each one of the participants who share their knowledges and work during the panel.

Disclaimer

This blog article is part of the work of the Humanitarian Governance, accountability, advocacy, alternatives project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 884139.

About the authors

Gabriela_VillacisGabriela Villacis Izquierdo is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the alternative forms of humanitarian governance in Colombia, with an emphasis on feminist approaches and the potential of collective action, advocacy, and care.

 

 

 

Kaira Zoe Alburo-Cañete is Senior Researcher at the Humanitarian Studies Centre, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research interests include examining the everyday politics and ethics of living with, responding to, and recovering from disasters and other forms of crises.

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

Scholars stand for Palestine: 42 ISS MA Graduates (2022-2023) call for mobilization in support of Palestine

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On the 20th of December 2023, the MA students of ISS (cohort 2022-2023) celebrated their graduation. For them, the day of joy and pride was overshadowed by world events and a number of students made a statement in support of the Palestinian cause in relation to the current conflict in the region. As the statement was made on behalf of a large number of students, the editorial board of BLISS decided, at the students’ specific request, to publish their statement. We congratulate the students on their graduation and wish them well as they take the next step in their careers. This is the statement the students made:

MA-Graduation 2022-2023

Dear graduates, dear family and friends, dear ISS community,

We are gathered here today to celebrate our success in finishing our degree within the field of development studies. Besides celebrating all we have achieved and the futures that lay before us, we want to use this time and space to share our fears. We feel apprehensive to step out into the world in a hopeful manner. Rather, we feel conflicted.

Above all, at this institute, we have been taught to be critical and use our voices. Given the platform we have been granted here today, and as academics, through our degree, we feel responsible to speak up and no longer remain silent or neutral.

MA-Graduation 2022-2023

As we gather here today, an eliminatory assault is being waged by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza. This is not hyperbole. After two months of shelling the strip indiscriminately, including the use of white phosphorus, the bombing of hospitals and schools, calling for millions to evacuate in active war zones, and cutting all access to food, electricity, water and medical supplies, Israel is now in the middle of a ground assault. This is both cynical and brazen. Its 18-year long siege has and continues to strangle the 2.2 million people stuck in 365km². This situation is not just confined to Gaza. Since the start of the war, over 250 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by the Israeli military and settler militias. Israel has bombed Syria and Lebanon, and the Middle East region now stands on the edge of war.

At the same time, western governments are beating the drum of war, while pretending not to see what is unfolding in front of our eyes. For decades, these western powers have blindly supported Israel – militarily, diplomatically, and economically and suppressed any actions of solidarity with Palestinians. The current crisis, the death, the destruction, and oppression is as much on their hands as it is on those of the Israeli state.

The first response by universities across the Netherlands, instead of encouraging discussion, debate, and informed analysis, was to call on people to refrain from doing so within their communities. It leaves us feeling confused and hurt if we think back to the response given by universities after the invasion of Ukraine. Mere days after the war had started, universities raised Ukrainian flags and published solidarity statements in support of Ukraine. In the current situation, those same institutes remain silent, or worse, actively suppress protest and concerns by students and staff, hiding behind claims of ‘neutrality’ and ‘careful assessment of the situation’. As Desmond Tutu remarked; ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’

Right now, we must act. The priority of every single concerned university worker, student, and others is to mobilize in support of Palestine. We can’t watch this genocidal war happen in front of our eyes in silence. We must pressure our governments to withdraw all support for Israel’s massacre in Gaza and call an end to their complicity. Our actions matter in whether or not Israel is allowed to continue to flatten Gaza, expel and murder its inhabitants. 

MA-Graduation 2022-2023

As ISS students who were trained and shaped in a critical manner, it becomes an imperative to demonstrate our solidarity with Palestine. Our education empowers us not only to critique historical injustices but to actively engage in dismantling oppressive structures. Through our solidarity, we contribute to a collective effort that transcends borders, demonstrating that our commitment to justice extends beyond the classroom. There can be no justice under apartheid, no justice under colonial rule, no justice behind the barbed wire of an open air prison. We follow Dutch Scholars for Palestine’s lead in calling everyone to redouble our collective efforts to end the violent realities that Palestinians face, to increase the pressure on our institutions and governments, in order to hold Israel accountable for its crimes, and to end its colonial regime. We call on all of you to join us, and organize.

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

About the authors:

  1. Cecilia Begal
  2. Carlie Kinnear
  3. Margaret Arney (Maggie)
  4. Muhammad Azka Fahriza
  5. Sydney Cohee
  6. Roos Saat
  7. Joelle Vetter
  8. Carlos Adams
  9. Dedy Susanto
  10. Marialuisa Borja L
  11. Smriti
  12. Rassela Malinda
  13. Madeleine Walker
  14. Eliana Melhem
  15. Salma Annisa
  16. Yusnita Silsilia Warda
  17. Patience Atanga
  18. María Fernanda Cossío Calderón
  19. Ismi Nabila
  20. Loke Wan-Kit
  21. Harjas Kaur
  22. Maria Caracciolo
  23. Rupankar Dey
  24. Melisa Try Hatmanti
  25. Ejiroghene Andrew Oruarume
  26. Mainak Bhattacarya
  27. Lok Yee Liona Li
  28. Marie Boscher
  29. Laura Mercedes Caicedo Valencia
  30. Ianira Pereira Cipriano
  31. Ting Yi Wu
  32. Haliza Lubis
  33. Catalina Mora Baquero
  34. Johanne Degenhardt
  35. Radha Sivasankaran
  36. Vrinda Poojari
  37. Eman Shaukat
  38. Andrea Catalina Medina Garzón
  39. Sara Asmar Salazar
  40. Hang Nguyen
  41. Catalina González Sarmiento
  42. Syeda Sayema Mayesha

Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

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Fallout from Gaza: An academic community’s responses to the situation in Palestine

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Few regional conflicts have had as much of a global impact as the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Outbursts of violence, like the terrorist Hamas attacks and taking of hostages of October 7 and Israel’s massive retaliatory attacks since then, have sparked strong responses everywhere, including in our academic community at the International Institute of Social Studies. Having experienced those dynamics for two months now, it is time for some reflections. I offer mine, as rector of ISS, but obviously also as one human being among all.

Feeling

The first layer of responses in our academic community post-October 7 were emotional in nature. A number of students, PhD-candidates, and staff were not simply shocked or “uncomfortable” about what they saw. They were enraged by the sheer magnitude of the Israeli military response and the enormous humanitarian consequences for the Gazan population, including for so many children. This sense of rage stays on until today, fueled by what they regard as a lack of responsibility by other countries, by international organizations, and also by universities, including the ISS. ‘Why’, they asked, ‘do universities not explicitly condemn Israel’s actions that punish the whole Palestinian population in response to a terrorist act, speak out against genocide and apartheid, join the BDS-movement (boycott, disinvest, sanction Israël), and choose the side of the Palestinian victims of oppression?’

For me, this emotional layer is an important one, because it deals with our gut feelings, our moral intuitions, our fundamental stance when human dignity is trampled upon. It cannot be dismissed as ‘mere feelings’. It is also important because it signifies that we are all affected as human beings. To a degree we are experiencing a form of indirect and collective traumatization, which means that we don’t respond only rationally, but also from our fundamental instincts. Just like we cannot expect people in Gaza and Israel to respond in a purely rational manner to a life-threatening situation, we cannot expect those within our academic community to be fully rational when the foundations of morality and security are shocked.

Hence, the first thing we needed at the outset, to process this rage, was care and safety, not debates and fights. This holds true for those who have been personally affected because they have family and friends who have been living in Israel and Palestine. As university leaders, we immediately reached out to our staff, PhD candidates and students who we knew had a direct connection with the region. For example, we learned that one member of our academic community has lost more than 45 members of their family in Gaza in the past two months. We obviously missed a few people, because we didn’t always know each other’s connections, and this is something for us to reflect on for the future.

 

Thinking

Offering care for these feelings is not enough. As an academic institution, we are called to bring our knowledge and insight to a troubled and complex world. We have supported our scholars who have engaged in public appearances, for example on humanitarian issues and international rights and who have published opinion pieces. We organized a Teach-In just two weeks after 7 October at both our Hague (ISS) and Rotterdam (Woudestein) campuses, in which lecturers shared their insights on trauma, human rights, the position of children, the political economy and also the role of media in filtering information. These Teach-Ins, held at Erasmus University and other academic institutions, in which our faculty members also participated, helped not only to share knowledge. They also helped to transform a primarily emotion-driven response into one that also incorporated an academic and analytical attitude. By engaging with psychological, legal, humanitarian, historical, developmental and economic insights, we moved to a second layer of responses in which we asked ourselves how academics can contribute to thinking about a meaningful way of coping with the tragedies and cruelties we witness in the world.

The Teach-Ins were valuable, but not easy. The process of challenging each other to reflect, academically was not self-evident. Emotions still played a major role in framing peoples’ responses within our community, but also triggered a plea for institutional action. Here we faced a dilemma in that many of those participating in these and similar events shared a particular perspective on the situation in Gaza; this made the opportunities for dialogue less diverse and inclusive than they could have been. Students and staff who might be inclined to sympathize with Israeli population or to critique Palestine leadership were less visible. Some students approached me at different moments asking why we showed less interest in other conflicts, oppressions, and human rights violations in the world. They felt excluded that events focused only on Gaza, especially when accompanied by strong moral messaging. This remains a dilemma: how to accommodate and support, on the one hand, our community members who feel that we should speak out and act, and on the other hand, respond to members who feel that attention should also be given to Yemen, Sudan, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia or Myanmar.

 

Acting

That brings me to a third layer of responses: action. This took shape already in the early days of the post-October 7 surge of violence when students protested on our doorstep and remained visible in posters and messages distributed among our community. It was presented to the ISS leadership in the form of a request to issue explicit statements and break ties with Israeli institutions. Anything less than that would be understood by a substantial part of our community as neglecting our moral responsibility as an institution devoted to social justice. At the same time, we had to look critically at the role of academics and institutions in the midst of massive disinformation that sometimes also limits our potential to reach conclusions about what is happening.

Navigating these demands, it was clear for me and colleagues  in university leadership positions that we indeed needed to act. Neutrality in the face of violence is not an option. But we were also very clear that our role had to be knowledge-based and that our primary task was and remains to preserve academic freedom and to facilitate our scholars – from students to professors – to contribute their academic insights to society. We are grateful for the courage of all our scholars to do so and for the wisdom they bring to the world. We have witnessed how they have condemned the Hamas atrocities and also addressed Israeli atrocities, including violations of humanitarian law, and especially the cruelty of punishing an entire population with – as they argued – genocidal intent.

As an academic institute, we exercise restraint in speaking out by way of performative statements, especially because the protection of academic freedom is necessary to safeguard the space for our scholars to speak the truth. When the university itself defines what counts as true, just, and right, that immediately restricts the freedom of other academics. We do not remain neutral because we are afraid to take a stand. It is absolutely clear that as an institution committed to researching Global Development and Social Justice, we stand for the protection of human rights, for the assertion of humanitarian responsibilities, and for the need to ensure peace, justice and accountability. However, the Institute refrains from speaking out beyond these general principles. This will always remain a balancing act between saying too much and saying too little.

The fallout from the present tragedy in Gaza will continue to affect us. It leaves us with dilemmas on how to act. We will continue to organize care for the members of our community who are suffering. We will facilitate learning and nurture critical thinking. We will build our networks internationally and stimulate joint academic contributions towards a just world. We will not be unaffected. Indeed, we feel there should be more done than what we are capable of doing as academics. And when we operate as an institution with this kind of restraint, we are aware it will not be enough in the eyes of a substantial part of our community. But, we may be most effective if we contribute what suits our role: universities protecting academic freedom, so that scholars can share their knowledge and insights with the world, and scholar-activists take the firmer stand. The dialogue between those roles can hold us together in working toward a peaceful future.

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

About the author:

Prof. dr. (Ruard) RR Ganzevoort is the rector of the International Institute of Social Studies in Den Haag (part of Erasmus University Rotterdam) as well as professor of Lived Religion and Development.

Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

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In supporting Israel’s genocide, Germany has learnt nothing from history

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It is becoming increasingly clear that as the German government targets migrants and cracks down on pro-Palestine protests, some lives are more valuable than others. In this blog, Josephine Valeske—a project officer with the Transnational Institute’s War and Pacification programme—calls on the German Government to rethink its stance in both domestic and foreign policy.

Image by Author

Earlier this month, amid the unfolding genocide in Gaza, German leaders convened in a Berlin synagogue to mark the 85th anniversary of the 1938 November pogrom that formed part of the genocide perpetrated by Germany against Jews in Europe.

But it seems they have failed to learn from their own history. In a memorial speech for the victims of that night and the Holocaust that followed, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz affirmed that “Germany’s place is on Israel’s side”.

Referring to pro-Palestine solidarity protests, he said: “Any form of antisemitism poisons our society, just like Islamist demonstrations and rallies,” before going on to threaten migrants with deportation if they exhibited antisemitic behaviour.

The German government habitually conflates Judaism with the Zionist project in Israel, and has adopted a working definition of antisemitism that includes hatred of or attacks against the state of Israel. Its crackdown on Palestinian solidarity – from protests to memorials to cultural events – and the dangerous curtailment of freedom of speech have been well documented.

But as Scholz’s speech revealed, this crackdown also has an Islamophobic, anti-migrant dimension, at a time when the Social Democrat-led government has adopted a hard stance on migration in a desperate attempt to recapture votes from the right.

On 25 October, following a surge in support for the far-right AfD party and a panicked debate about rising numbers of immigrants, the government agreed on a legislative proposal that would expand police powers to search, detain and deport people without papers.

Two weeks later, a summit between the federal and state governments ended with the announcement of further cuts to financial support for asylum seekers and the possible outsourcing of asylum procedures to third countries – a potentially illegal process similar to the UK’s infamous, and ultimately failed, Rwanda deal.

 

Rights restricted

But for many centre-to-right politicians, this does not go far enough. They frame Palestinian solidarity protests as antisemitic, and instrumentalise them to demand further restrictions of rights.

In a recent video, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck from the Green Party called on Muslim associations to explicitly distance themselves from Hamas, and threatened deportations and revocation of residency permits for those who voice support for the group.

Meanwhile, Germany’s largest opposition party, the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is proposing legislation that would increase the sentence for antisemitic crimes, and lead to the loss or denial of international protection for refugees if they commit such crimes, including possible deportation.

Similar moves already seem to be taking place in practice: Zaid Abdulnasser, coordinator of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which was recently prohibited in Germany, reportedly received a deportation order because of his activism.

Under the CDU proposal, people applying for German citizenship would have to pledge their support for Israel’s right to exist and could be denied citizenship if they fail to do so, or if they are deemed to have an “antisemitic mindset”. Germans who hold dual citizenship and commit an antisemitic crime would stand to lose their German passport if convicted and sentenced to more than a year in prison.

Two weeks ago, explicitly citing pro-Palestine demonstrations, the CDU demanded the cancellation of a pending law that would make it possible for foreigners to fast-track their citizenship applications. In addition, former justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, of the Free Democratic Party has proposed to limit freedom of assembly to German citizens only.

While German politicians are outdoing each other in blaming antisemitism on immigrants, Muslims, Arabs or anyone who is not white, they conveniently ignore the fact that antisemitism among white, Christian and atheist Germans is actually a widespread problem. More than 80 percent of antisemitic crimes in 2022 were committed by people on the right-wing spectrum, continuing a trend from previous years.

When it became public in August that Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy governor of the state of Bavaria, had shared antisemitic propaganda in the 1980s, his party’s vote share increased in the following elections, and the government rewarded him with a fourth ministry.

 

Historical responsibility

If the German government is genuinely concerned about protecting Jews, it should address antisemitism coming from the majority white, right-wing population, instead of inciting hatred against minority groups. A similar message was recently conveyed by the Jewish Bund during an action called “You do not protect us” in front of parliament.

Right-wing violence has traditionally gone unchecked by authorities, whether it takes the form of antisemitism or other hate crimes.

The government failed to take any comparable action when it became known in 2011 that neo-Nazis had been on a seven-year murder spree while shielded by the intelligence service; when from 2014 onwards, tens of thousands of right-wingers started Monday marches against the “Islamisation of the West”; when a right-wing fanatic fatally shot nine people with migrant backgrounds in Hanau in 2020; or when a 2023 study showed that racism against Black people in Germany had risen by nearly 50 percent since 2016, among other examples. White, Christian and atheist Germans were never asked to distance themselves from any of these incidents.

Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear in both internal and external policy discourses that for the German government, some lives are more valuable than others. The demonisation of (those perceived to be) Muslims or immigrants, and the crackdown on solidarity protests goes hand in hand with Germany’s political and financial support for Israel.

While many countries, including France, are calling on Israel to cease fire amid its relentless military assault, which has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in Gaza, Scholz has reaffirmed his resistance to any such calls. Instead, his government has increased arms exports to Israel tenfold over 2022, with 85 percent of the permits granted after the Hamas attack and the ensuing military campaign.

Eighty-five years after the November pogrom, Germany should have learned that a genocide cannot be atoned for by enabling another genocide. Similarly, those who think that stoking Islamophobic and anti-migrant sentiments will fulfill Germany’s historical responsibility to fight antisemitism have learned nothing from history.

The German government must stop paying mere lip service to its commitment to human rights, and drastically change its stance in both domestic and foreign policy.

This article was originally published on Middle East Eye.

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

About the author:

Josephine Valeske is a project officer with The Transnational Institute’s War and Pacification programme.

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How was life in Gaza before October 7th?

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The war between Israel and Palestine has saturated the media with many views on the resulting effects. What about the state of things in Gaza prior to this violent conflict? In this blog, Irene Van Staveren — a professor of pluralist development economics at the International Institute of Social Studies — tickles our imagination to consider the complexities of social problems evident in Gaza prior to October 7, 2023 when the war broke out.

Image Source: Natalia Cieslik/World Bank, 2010.

Imagine you were a 13-year-old girl growing up in the Gaza Strip under ‘normal’ circumstances until a few weeks ago. Statistically, you would have made up over 40% of the total population along with all the other children up to the age of 14. You had three siblings. The likelihood of living below the poverty line was 53%. Just last year, hundreds of buildings were hit by rockets, including the power plant. Over the past years, you had experienced various bombings in and around Gaza City. As a result, like all the other children in your neighbo, you had an 87% chance of developing post-traumatic stress disorder according to the latest Human Development Report (p.89). There haven’t been any elections in 16 years, and your parents feel powerless.

You often didn’t have enough to eat because your parents had a high risk of unemployment (40% for men, 64% for women). One of your uncles had a fairly well-paying job outside of Gaza, which put him in the one percent who managed that. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to keep much of his salary as an UNCTAD report (p. 6) suggests that 30% of the earnings for such work go into the pockets of labour brokers. Your grandfather had a small olive grove and could sell some olive oil to foreign markets. However, he was increasingly stopped when trying to reach his grove. According to the same UNCTAD report (p.8), olive production had dropped by 60%.

So, you most likely shared a small living space with many people. This was quite challenging when you had to do your homework, especially because there was only electricity available half of the time. Often, there was no light in the evenings. Learning was a struggle, and the destruction of several schools led to the surviving children being divided among the remaining schools, making your class overcrowded.

The only escape from this situation might have been marriage. According to the Palestinian Authority’s statistical bureau, one in five girls gets married before their 18th birthday. You knew some of these girls – they dropped out of school early and became mothers at a young age. Finding a job was out of the question for them. Not that you would have had it much better. More than half of the youth in Gaza can’t find a job.

In the past, there used to be international aid to rely on. However, over the past ten years, it has plummeted from 18% of Gaza’s income to 2%, according to the World Bank (figure 2). Fortunately, most schools and many hospitals are run by the UN and aid organizations. But they face significant shortages of medicine and parts for medical equipment like X-ray machines. The WHO calculated that almost 70% of permit requests for importing these medical goods are denied. When your grandmother needed surgery at a hospital outside of Gaza, her doctor’s request wasn’t processed on time, putting her at a high risk of passing away. Thankfully, she survived. But you didn’t. Fourty percent of the victims of the current bombings in Gaza are children.

This column appeared in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, on 31 October 2023.

Image Credit: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED

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

About the author:

Irene van Staveren is a professor of pluralist development economics at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Professor van Staveren’s theoretical interest is in feminist economics, social economics, institutional economics and post-Keynesian economics. Her key research interest is at the meso level of the economy with topics such as social cohesion, social exclusion, inequality and discrimination, as well as ethics and values in the economy and in economics.

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Jewish scholars refuse to be silent about Gaza

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There have been many statements, petitions, Op-Eds and other forms of concern and condemnation from scholars following the resurgence of violence around the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians. This also includes Jewish scholars, such as an open letter from Jewish students at Brown University and another from Jewish writers. Moreover, there have been critical Jewish organisations that have long-supported a Palestinian-centred narrative, including the Promised Land Museum, and in particular their tribute to the late German-Dutch phycisist Dr. Hajo Meyer, Zochrot and Jewish Voices for Peace. In the same spirit, as Jewish employees and students at Dutch universities, universities of applied science and research institutions, we also refuse to stay silent about Gaza, and so present the following statement.

Photo: Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed, Destruction in Gaza, October 2023

We, Jewish employees and students in Dutch universities, universities of applied science and research institutions, refuse to stay silent about the recent surge in violence in Gaza.

We raise our voices to speak out against Israel’s war of destruction against the over two million Palestinians in Gaza, and demand an immediate cease fire. The high numbers of civilian victims of the Israeli bombardments so far, including the killing of thousands of children, a complete blockade for primary necessities of life in Gaza by Israel, and the actions and words of Israeli officials all justify the fear of a second Nakba; ethnic cleansing or genocide of the Palestinian population. “Never again” for us means never again for anyone.

We feel deep pain for the many civilian casualties during the attacks by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Precisely because we want to see an end to such gruesome violence, we refuse to abide by the logic of revenge that already has cost the lives of multiple times as many Palestinian civilians. We understand that the current wave of violence did not start with the actions of 7 October 2023, but is rooted in a long history of colonization, occupation and unequal treatment targeting the Palestinian people. If ending the current war against Gaza will only lead to a return to the status quo ante, this will mean a continuation of the violence that for Palestinians is a permanent reality. Peace, in this situation, will just be the prelude to the next major war.

Lasting peace is only possible on the basis of justice. At the very least, this means the recognition that the rule of law and human rights apply to all inhabitants of historic Palestine. It means recognizing the right of self-determination of the Palestinians, ending the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank, acknowledgement of the right of return for all Palestinian refugees, and equal rights between Palestinians and Jews from the Mediterranean to the river Jordan.

We promise to continue our efforts in this direction, during and after the current war. We support the call from Palestinian civil society for ceasing all forms of cooperation with Israeli institutions that contribute to the occupation of Palestinian territories and the unequal treatment of the Palestinian population.

As long as the injustice for Palestinians persists, we demand that our institutions speak out against this as firmly as they did one and a half years ago at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We forcefully resist any form of racism, islamophobia, antisemitism or other types of hate speech. We are inspired by the many Jewish voices in and outside of Israel that take a principled stance for Palestinian rights. As Jewish opponents of the Israeli actions, we are indignant about the attempts to equate criticism of the Israeli state and support for Palestinian rights with antisemitism. Islamophobia and antisemitism in response to the current war are very real problems. We ask our institutions to take active measures against a climate of threats, polarization and discrimination. However, to do so does not give a free pass to censor critical anti-war voices.

A safe learning environment does not preclude a firm stance against war and injustice. On the contrary, such a firm stance is our shared duty.

This statement was first published in Dutch in the NRC Handelsbad on13 November 2023.

Image Source: Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed, Destruction in Gaza, October 2023.

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

About the authors:

Dr. Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken (Lecturer, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam).

Prof. dr. Pepijn Brandon (Professor of Global History, Free University of Amsterdam).

Alcide Breaux (Student, Sandberg Institute and Gerrit Rietveld Academie).

Zazie van Dorp (BA Philosophy, LLB Law & employee University of Amsterdam).

Dr. Jacob Engelberg (Lecturer, Film, Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam).

Dr. Sai Englert (Lecturer, University of Leiden).

Gabriel Gottlieb (Student, Econometrics, Erasmus University Rotterdam).

Dr. Aviva de Groot (Postdoctoral researcher AI & Human Rights, TILT, Tilburg University).

Sophia Haid (Student, Media studies, University of Amsterdam).

Dr. Jeff Handmaker (Associate Professor of Legal Sociology, ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam).

Levi Hilz (Student, Sociology, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam).

Dr. Joost Kircz (Emeritus Lector Electronic Publishing, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences).

Naomi Kreitman (Student, Sandberg Institute).

Dr. Anna Mai (Postdoctoraal researcher, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics).

Yuval Molina Obedman, Ma (Recently graduated in Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, and International Relations, University of Leiden).

Dr. Tzula Propp (Postdoctotaal researcher, TU Delft).

Dr. Patricia Schor (Postdoctoral researcher, Free University of Amsterdam).

Juliet Tanzer (Student, Utrecht University).

Dr. Anya Topolski (Associate Professor, Ethics and Political Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen).

Dr. Markha Valenta (Lecturer, American Studies, Utrecht University).

Itaï van der Wal (Student LLM, Utrecht University).

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Militaries can’t target essential infrastructure during war—so why can they target telecoms?

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In this blog, Tom Ansell looks through an International Humanitarian Law lens at cutting mobile network and internet access, such as recent targeting of telecoms by the Israeli military during their ongoing retaliation against Palestinian people in Gaza. Whilst the cutting off of utilities such as electricity and water are considered to fall under a ban on collective punishment, International Humanitarian Law does not mention cutting off communication infrastructures. When we consider how vital phone and internet services are for human dignity, organizing relief efforts, and documenting war crimes or countering misinformation, it might be time to consider the deliberate cutting off internet and telecoms access as a breach of International Humanitarian Law and so a war crime.

Image by Troy Squillaci on Pexels

During the Israeli ground invasion unfolding in Gaza, and the accompanying aerial bombing campaign, there have been widespread reports of internet and communications blackouts – caused by heavy and deliberate bombardment of telecoms infrastructure, and confirmed by the UN. Whilst slightly different compared to ‘switch offs’ by governments, and paling in comparison to the bombing of civilians, cutting off people’s (particularly non-combatants) means of communications and creating a ‘blackout’ is nevertheless an important and under-reported element of modern warfare. International Humanitarian Law (IHL), the so-called ‘laws of war’ which are made up of a number of legal conventions and treaties (most famously the 1949 Geneva Conventions, itself signed by Israel) and have been signed by most countries around the world, don’t mention preserving civilian communications.

So, considering how important mobile and internet access is not only for keeping in touch, but also coordinating societal responses to disasters such as war and documenting the associated chaos, should we consider telecoms infrastructure in a similar way to how we consider water infrastructure in war, as something off-limits for military targeting and thus protected?

 

Cutting off water, medical systems, and electricity are already War Crimes

During a war, an occupying power (i.e., the military or armed forces that has invaded) has several legal obligations set out in IHL. Breaking these are considered ‘war crimes’, and are punishable at the International Criminal Court or a special tribunal. Cutting off water, medical systems, electricity, food, aid, and unnecessarily targeting civilian infrastructure are considered War Crimes because they amount to ‘collective punishment’ of a civilian population. This is expressly forbidden by Article 33 of the 1949 Geneva Convention on Civilians – and since then there have been various updates and treaties that form part of IHL that also expressly forbid targeting or deliberately destroying ‘Objects Indispensable to the Survival of the Civilian Population’. These generally refer to foodstuff, water, and medical supplies (evidently vital to survival), and whilst telecommunications aren’t on the same existential level of food and water, with an estimated 6.7 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide in 2023 (according to Statista), and the embeddedness of mobile phones in our lives, I’d suggest that smartphones have become indispensable to the survival of civilians in general.

Telecommunications and internet access is fast-becoming seen as a human right, too; closely linked to existing rights of Assembly, Expression, and Development. For example, in 2023 the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the UN said that “It may be time to reinforce universal access to the Internet as a human right, and not just a privilege” . Various countries around the world are also enshrining the right to internet access and connection in their laws, from its inclusion within the constitution of Greece , the Kerala High Court in India upholding access to the internet as covered by the right to education in the Indian Constitution, to Costa Rica’s Constitutional Court ruling that all Costa Ricans have the fundamental right to access information technology, especially the internet. Whilst it is true that Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law are different (for several legal reasons), IHL intends to protect the life and dignity of innocent people in war—meaning that there is at least a strong relationship and affinity in their intent.

 

Smartphones are vital for connecting and coordinating, especially in times of conflict

Let’s not forget that when we talk about cutting off all means of communication and access to the internet, we aren’t just looking at people not being able to contact their loved ones or the outside world (as bad as that is). People’s lives are put at risk by a ‘communications blackout’, because emergency relief is very often coordinated via mobile data and internet connections. When communications were cut off in Gaza on October 27, the Palestinian Red Crescent society reported that it had lost contact with its control room in Gaza, and that people were unable to call the 101 emergency number. If emergency aid organisations are unable to keep in contact with their staff, they can’t know if their staff are safe – nor can they know if their efforts to deliver food, medical, or other relief has been successful or needs to be targeted elsewhere.

A 2012 Save the Children report (completed in partnership with the Vodafone Foundation) makes it clear how important mobile phones are for providing information during a disaster. For example, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, information messages were sent out via the mobile network ‘Voila’ by the International Federation of the Red Cross –95% of recipients said that the information they received was useful, and 90% said that the information they received helped them make a preparation or change as a result. And it’s not just information that’s sent through mobile networks, either, with emergency cash transfers often sent in this way.

We can see the value of access to mobile data in the current violence in Gaza (and previous instances too), with Israel apparently warning civilians in Gaza of impending military action or airstrikes by phone call or automated text message. Quite how these warning messages can be received without mobile network access, though, is an open question.

 

Documenting serious war crimes and countering false information

It’s certainly true that cutting off mobile communications and access to the internet is an act with fewer direct deaths and injuries than other more grave offences, yet having access to mobile data is important in documenting and ‘proving’ these other serious crimes. This has become extremely clear during the conflict in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in February 2022, with the Ukrainian government even setting up an online service (‘e-Enemy’) for people to submit their pictures, videos, and messages that document brutality against civilians and other war crimes. This crowd-sourced evidence could prove vital in securing convictions for crimes should Russian military commanders or even politicians end up in front of the ICJ or a tribunal. And, as AccessNow warns, cutting off the internet could lessen the chances of Palestinians documenting serious war crimes. Allowing people to access social media and present their own documentary-style proof of their lived experience gives people voices, and also allows the countering of false and dangerous narratives with documentary evidence.

 

So, should cutting off the internet and telecommunications be a war crime?

International Humanitarian Law specifies a wide spectrum of ‘war crimes’, and whilst we often immediately think of the most grievous, any breach of IHL is a criminal act. Hence, and considering mobile connectivity’s important role in preserving human dignity, coordinating emergency aid response, documenting war crimes, perhaps the deliberate targeting of telecommunications should be included in the definition of ‘collective punishment’.

Image by Troy Squillaci on Pexels.

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

About the author:

Tom Ansell is the Coordinator of the Humanitarian Studies Centre and International Humanitarian Studies Association.

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International Humanitarian Studies Association conference roundtable and North South University statement on Gaza: “As scholars and practitioners of Humanitarian Studies, we strongly condemn acts of widescale and indiscriminate violence against civilian populations”

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This blog is part of a series about the International Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA) conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In this piece, Dorothea Hilhorst (Professor of Humanitarian Studies at ISS, outgoing IHSA President) and Sk. Tawfique M Haque (Professor and Chair of Political Science and Sociology, North South University) present a statement made by participants of a roundtable held at the conference to take stock of the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Image Source: Author

At the IHSA biennial conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a roundtable took place on the ongoing violence and humanitarian catastrophe in Palestine. The roundtable included contributions from Professor Dorothea Hilhorst (outgoing IHSA President), Research Professor Antonio De Lauri (incoming IHSA President), Professor Sk. Tawfique M. Haque (North South University), Professor Shahidul Haque (North South University), Professor Mohamed Nuruzzaman (North South University), and Dr Kaira Zoe Canete (International Institute of Social Studies).

During the roundtable, several aspects of the ongoing humanitarian situation were discussed, including access for humanitarian aid, the interests and positions of stakeholders in the conflict more generally, ways to counter the situation being used to further polarize society, and what the role of Humanitarian Scholars is in the face of the situation.

The International Humanitarian Studies Association and Center for Peace Studies (CPS) at North South University would like to share this statement, following the roundtable:

We extend our solidarity and sorrow towards those grieving loved ones in Palestine and Israel, and deplore violence carried out during this conflict. As scholars and practitioners of Humanitarian Studies, we strongly condemn acts of widescale and indiscriminate violence against civilian populations. This extends not only to ongoing military violence, but the blocking of humanitarian aid and assistance.

These actions by the Israeli state and military amount to multiple breaches of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), including the 1949 Geneva Convention that was signed by Israel. We condemn the collective punishment of over two million people in Gaza, of which more than half are children.

We also highlight UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2417, which condemns the use of starvation as a weapon of war, and confirms that any blocking of humanitarian aid breaks IHL. Further, we draw attention to Israel’s role as an occupying power in the Palestinian Territories, and its commitments to maintain medical services and infrastructure under IHL.

We call for respect for and adherence to IHL, International Criminal Law (ICL) and UNSC 2417 to prevent starvation (due to blocking access to food, water, electricity, health care and other items essential to survival) and death of civilians. This means allowing immediate access to aid for those who need it and protecting civilians.

Humanitarian Studies scholars need to use their knowledge and evidence to speak truth to power and counter any silencing mechanism that jeopardizes academic freedom and the freedom of expression. One of the challenges of wide-scale violence, wherever it happens, is that it makes us question the value of humanity. We need all voices in this discussion to maintain dignity and respect, and we condemn the use of antisemitic and Islamophobic language, as well as narratives of dehumanization and polarization especially when they come from powerful institutions, political leaders, and states.

For more information about the IHSA Conference, check out their website.

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

About the authors:

Dorothea Hilhorst is professor of Humanitarian Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University.

 

 

 

 

Professor Sk. Tawfique M. Haque is the Director, Center for Peace Studies (CPS), South Asian Institute of Policy and Governance (SIPG), North South University.

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Misinformation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is spreading like wildfire on social media — here’s why we keep reading fake news and what we can do to change it

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Can you trust what you read on social media about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Even some of the most popular posts are misleading. With more and more people using social media as their primary news source, how can we make sure that we’re getting accurate information? This question becomes much more relevant in times of conflict, where misinformation could cause widescale violence. In this blog article, Tom Ansell looks at misinformation in times of conflict and what we can do to encourage better reporting in fast-moving and dangerous contexts.

Image source: Pexels

Twitter/X has been accused of stoking the fires of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict by multiplying misinformation. Examples include a video shared over seven million times that supposedly shows Israeli soldiers going house to house in Gaza City. In reality, the video is from 2021 and actually shows an Israeli police operation. Another example is a video of Hamas fighters ‘shooting down an Israeli helicopter’ that is from a video game and has been viewed by over 300,000 people.

These posts are not only pushing false narratives but are also spreading emotionally charged misinformation that can certainly stoke more violence. With the cause of the explosion at the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza unclear, and with competing narratives from Gazan and Israeli authorities, plenty of misleading accounts have sprung up on Twitter/X that show videos reportedly of the explosion but that are actually from 2022, which has further inflamed tensions.

This is a worrying development for two reasons. First, engagement with and trust in ‘legacy’ media organisations, including national newspapers and media conglomerates, is at an all-time low across the world. Accurate and nuanced reporting that has been factually verified is no longer the dominant way for people to get their news. In various countries worldwide, more than half of people get their news from social media, including in Spain (50%), India (52%), Turkey (54%), Hungary (61%), Greece (61%), Peru (66%), and Nigeria (78%), according to Statista.

Second, people seem to be more likely to spread false information. An MIT study from 2018 suggests that Tweets (or X’s) that contain lies are 70% more likely to be retweeted compared to truthful posts, likely due to users’ ‘novelty bias’ (where new, surprising information is shared), or due to social media websites’ own algorithms.

Meanwhile, only a few weeks ago, the EU formally warned Twitter and Facebook about the growing proportion of misinformation on their networks, a warning that was re-iterated in the wake of the new waves of violence in Israel and Palestine. Whilst there are fact-checking accounts and initiatives on both networks (and also on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.), the real-world impact of mis- and disinformation that were identified in the COVID-19 pandemic has now come back sharply into focus with the ongoing campaign of violence in Israel and Palestine.

 

Why we read and spread disinformation

An appetite for quick information and near real-time updates has never been higher. And with few journalists immediately available and able to build a clear picture in a fast-moving context, an information gap grows. It’s precisely this gap that technology-focused and consumer-hungry social media networks fill by providing super quick updates and, often, photos and videos from the centre of a conflict zone that can push emotionally charged narratives and incite further violence.

Whilst there are large numbers of journalists from multinational legacy media organisations that can access conflict zones — usually wearing the famous blue ‘press’ bulletproof vest — — places where there is no authoritative or fact-checked source of news. This is particularly true for acute outbreaks of severe violence, where it is nearly impossible for a news organisation that is held to a high standard of accuracy to access the conflict zone. And when people cannot access authoritative news sources, they turn to alternative sources such as social media.

In protracted and lower-intensity conflicts, too, it is likely that local media will be unable to operate whether due to power cuts, looting, commandeering of equipment, or attacks on staff. And let’s not forget that in contexts with authoritarian governments, an independent local media is likely to suffer. Again, this can feed into a situation where people cannot access information from trusted sources and may turn to social media for the latest news updates.

Moreover, what drives engagement is often activating strong emotional responses in users through, for example, powerful images, videos, or narratives. Particularly within a conflict situation, by definition multilayered and complex, this leads the internal mechanisms of social media companies (“the algorithms”) to spotlight easily accessible and emotionally charged content. This combined with a huge hunger for information seems to lead in one direction: emotionally charged narratives reaching thousands of people without factual verification.

 

Social media provides lots of information, but often of low quality

As with many laissez-faire approaches, openness and freedom is to a certain extent an illusion. This is because, in the case of Twitter and Meta (the parent company of Instagram and Facebook), the company doesn’t exist to provide an information service- it exists to satisfy its shareholders and investors. The model for making money from social media is now fairly well researched, but in short: social media companies work as advertising platforms and sell advertising space. The longer someone engages with the platform, the more can be charged for advertising space.

The great equalising hope for peer to peer (P2P) media, where anyone can publish their views and ideas without editorial gatekeeping, including social media, is that it can give disempowered people a platform to voice their grievances or struggle and can reach audiences without waiting for a legacy media company to provide that platform. Within a conflict situation, this could extend to giving civilians a voice in the conflict or providing an outlet for non-state actors to give ‘their side of the story’.

However, whilst there are plenty of cases of legacy media organisations stoking hate, there is at least some basis for holding them legally accountable, even if it is slow-moving and limited. Social media companies, on the other hand, are not classified as ‘publishers’ and so do not have to kneel to publishing guidelines and law.

 

A role for citizen journalists and more strictly regulated platforms?

So, how can we find a balance between providing platforms for those people who are routinely missed by legacy organisations to speak their truths? One option could be equitable partnerships between media platforms and citizen journalists. Outlets like The Guardian seem to have a workable model for this.

Another solution could be strong legislation that considers social media organisations as the publishers that they are, and so holds them legally accountable for spreading misinformation. Perhaps a longer-term and more holistic solution, though, is creating platforms where the overall target is sharing accurate information and true voices, rather than seeking maximum returns on investment.

Image source: Pexels & Pexels.

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

About the author:

Tom Ansell is the Coordinator of the Humanitarian Studies Centre and International Humanitarian Studies Association.

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Israel’s blocking of humanitarian assistance breaches international humanitarian law

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Gaza is under constant blockade and subject to multiple airstrikes every day — with little regard for avoiding civilian harm. This is a breach of international humanitarian law, which places specific legal imperatives on combatants not only during war but also as occupying forces after war. In this article, Professor of Humanitarian Studies Dorothea Hilhorst critically discusses Israel’s responsibilities in its role as a combatant, as an occupying force, and as a neighbouring country.

Image by Palestinian Red Crescent

International humanitarian law (IHL) has suddenly become a very popular phrase in political discourse. The Dutch government, in its support of Israel, notes that it expects the country to uphold ‘international humanitarian law’ (sometimes referred to as ‘the law of international war’). These conventions and laws cover various aspects of how a country can act during combat, for example around questions of whether Israel can target civilian infrastructure if it is located above a Hamas tunnel. More specifically, though, IHL relates to strengthening and maintaining humanitarian help for civilians.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza is catastrophic. Within the space of just a few days, around one million elderly people, men, women, and children have been driven from their homes. Around half of these people have sought shelter in a UN building, for example a UNWRA school, which are now so overcrowded that most people sleep outside on the street. There is less and less food, and water has had to be limited to under one liter per person per day — for those that are lucky to get anything at all. Operations and medical treatments are no longer being carried out, or if they are it is without anesthetic.

At the same time, there is a huge queue of trucks waiting at the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza. These are full of humanitarian aid supplies: medicines, fuel, and food. At the time of writing, 20 trucks have been allowed in Gaza, but that is far short of the minimum of 100 trucks needed on a daily basis. Other than that, the border between this convoy and the people of Gaza remains closed, with the WHO saying that the supplies could help doctors at medical institutions operate on 1,500 people daily — if they reach the people of Gaza in time. It is Israel that holds the key to unlocking this aid, with the border deemed unsafe (and so kept closed) due to rocket attacks and air strikes. Last week dozens of people were killed in such strikes at the border.

It is usual to speak of and work towards ‘humanitarian corridors’ during conflicts, i.e. specific routes that are safe for people to evacuate through, or for aid to travel via. Under IHL, combatants in war are required to work towards creating and maintaining these corridors. This, and much of IHL, is based on the principle that citizens are innocent during conflicts and that civilian deaths should be avoided at all costs. This principle applies both to minimizing civilian death from combat and also maximizing access for life-saving humanitarian aid. Israel has stated it maintains Gaza under siege to avoid aid being captured by Hamas. However, this fear cannot be a reason to abandon Gazanian civilians and let them perish. UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffith commented on Wednesday that humanitarian access and help have become a question of life and death, that withholding help can cost countless innocent lives.

Israel has various legal responsibilities both as a combatant and as an occupying force (both Gaza and the West Bank are occupied territories and have been since 1967). Marco Sassoli, an internationally renowned expert in IHL at the University of Geneva, has made it clear that Israel’s blocking and cutting off of electricity, water, aid, and food from Gaza since October 9 is in clear breach of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which Israel has signed. The 1949 Convention makes clear that an occupying force cannot collectively punish civilians, whilst it also specifically requires an occupying force to maintain medical systems such as hospitals. Then, we must look at Israel’s role as a neighbour — with a moral imperative to allow access and open borders to humanitarian assistance — whilst the border between Israel and Gaza remains hermetically sealed.

It is not clear how much pressure various countries are putting on Israel behind the scenes to open the Rafah border crossing (and other borders), but it is time for this pressure to be reflected in public statements that condemn the withholding of humanitarian aid and directly state that preventing humanitarian help breaches international humanitarian law.

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

About the author:

Dorothea Hilhorst is professor of Humanitarian Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University.

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The recent upsurge of violence in Israel and Palestine signifies a “prelude to genocide”. How could this happen?

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The tragedy that has been continually unfolding in Palestine for the past 75 years recently took a dramatic turn when Palestinian armed groups broke through the steel gates closing off Gaza and entered Israel on 7 October 2023. While the details of what occurred are gruesome, but also very unclear, their actions led to a further escalation by Israel, with senior figures in the Israeli government vowing revenge in terms that are tantamount to an incitement to commit genocide. The massive loss of human life and deliberate targeting of civilians has been accompanied by feelings of incredulity. People are asking: How could this happen? In this article, human rights and legal mobilisation scholar Jeff Handmaker provides some context.

Boiling point reached after many years of oppression

Even for someone like myself who has been closely following the situation in Palestine for more than 25 years, the human cost of what we have been seeing in the past few days has been difficult to fathom. Veteran Ha’aretz journalist Amira Hass in describing the sheer scale of what’s currently happening noted that:

In a few days Israelis went through what Palestinians have experienced as a matter of routine for decades, and are still experiencing – military incursions, death, cruelty, slain children, bodies piled up in the road, siege, fear, anxiety over loved ones, captivity, being targets of vengeance, indiscriminate lethal fire at both those involved in the fighting (soldiers) and the uninvolved (civilians), a position of inferiority, destruction of buildings, ruined holidays or celebrations, weakness and helplessness in the face of all-powerful armed men, and searing humiliation.

Hass’s statement captures why it is so challenging for Israelis and Palestinians (and their supporters) to recognise the other’s humanity. Israelis find it hard to see the other’s humanity, as they have been promised that they would be safe and secure behind colonial borders and have only now experienced atrocities at this scale. Palestinians also find it hard to see the other’s humanity as they have never suffered the illusion that they were safe and secure behind colonial borders and have been experiencing atrocities at this scale for more than 75 years.

 

The Hamas attack didn’t come out of the blue

It is important in this context to understand what was behind the attacks by Hamas-affiliated groups, purportedly in response to Israel’s appalling treatment of Palestinians who remain under occupation in the Gaza Strip. It was purportedly also linked to the Israeli government’s open support of settler colonialism in the West Bank, as well as brutal attacks against largely peaceful demonstrators during the “Great March of Return”  in 2018 and recent provocations around the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. One should remember what life in Palestine looks like at present, particularly in the Gaza Strip, and how it got there.

To begin with, Gaza is one of the most densely populated regions in the world, with more than two million people living in an area of approximately 362 square kilometres (smaller than the Caribbean island of Curacao, which has a population of 153,000). Moreover, Gaza has been subject to a strict military blockade since 2007 that has limited the freedom and opportunities of Palestinians in a fundamental way. It is frequently described as an open-air prison, and many have called the oppressive governance of the area by Israel as nothing other than an apartheid state. This is why the attack on 7 October has been referred to by commentators such as Israeli journalist Amira Hass as part of a “cycle of violence” that “shouldn’t surprise anyone”. In other words, it should be seen in context and not as an isolated event.

 

Reacting to a long history of domination and oppression

To grasp the deeper context of the current violence, it’s also important to understand three key historical moments, none of which obviously excuses the committing of international crimes. Each of these historical moments has involved extensive human rights violations and international crimes in the context of Israel’s long record of domination and oppression of Palestinians.

The first key moment was in 1948, when Zionist founders of the State of Israel committed a series of operations which, according to scholars such as Walid Khalidi, Ilan Pappe, and Nur Masalha, amounted to a mass expulsion and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of historical Palestine. This is referred to by Palestinians as the ‘Nakba’, or ‘Catastrophe’. Approximately one-third of uprooted and dispossessed Palestinians ended up living in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, assisted by the United Nations and other humanitarian agencies. Around one-quarter of these refugees today reside in refugee camps in Gaza, and comprising around two-thirds of the population of Gaza.

The second key moment was the Israeli military’s capture of additional territories in 1967, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Golan, and Gaza. This resulted in further and forced displacement, movement restrictions, and other daily restrictions as Israel established settlements in the occupied territory. Israel withdrew the settlers 38 years later but has continuously maintained its occupation of the Gaza territory by air, sea, and land.

The third and most recent moment is Israel’s blockade of the territory starting 2007 in its current, extreme form, whereby it has been extremely difficult, and at times impossible, for Palestinians living in Gaza to access medicine, building materials, food, humanitarian assistance, and even electricity and water. Patients requiring advanced medical care that the overstretched hospitals in Gaza cannot provide have limited options due to the blockade, and as a result, many – including children – have died of easily treatable ailments. According to Physicians for Human Rights, the deteriorating healthcare situation has been particularly straining for women in Gaza. The ability of students to study abroad has also been extremely limited. Moreover, according to the United Nations, during the course of several brutal military operations, Israel has killed more than 6,400 Palestinians.

While these were key moments in what many commentators have characterised as Israel’s settler-colonial and apartheid regime against Palestinians, it is impossible to explain all dimensions. Suffice it to say that numerous documented violations that have been committed throughout these periods are currently the subject of an international criminal investigation by the International Criminal Court, albeit greatly delayed.

 

From oppression to onslaught

This brings us to 9 October 2023, when the government of Israel announced a “total” blockade of the Gaza Strip, including cutting off the electricity, food, and water supply to the area. Gazans were warned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that they are to pay an “immense price” for the actions of Hamas and have warned Palestinians to “get out of there [Gaza] now” as the Israeli military was going to “turn all Hamas hiding places … into rubble”.

Of course, Netanyahu knows full well that Palestinians in Gaza have nowhere to go; Israel’s military have even bombed the one remaining exit route, the Rafah Crossing, and have refused to set up a humanitarian corridor. Thus, at a bare minimum, Israel’s actions amount to the war crime of collective punishment, directed at a captive population with nowhere to go. And with 300,000 Israeli reservists having been called up to serve in active military duty, fears are that the consequences for the people of Gaza could be far greater than they have ever been before.

 

A prelude to genocide?

Some years ago, Richard Falk, a Princeton University professor and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, was said to have characterised the ongoing siege of Gaza as a “prelude to genocide”.[i] It is immensely worrying that more and more parties are starting to believe that Falk’s sober prediction might be coming true. Human rights NGOs have long referred to the oppression of the Palestinians and the control of Gaza as a crime against humanity.[ii] However, it is especially recent events and public proclamations of retaliation by Netanyahu as well as by military commanders referring to Gazans as ‘human animals’ and vowing to give them ‘hell’, that are making Falk’s claim seem more and more believable.

Taken together, the evidence suggests there are very well-founded fears that what we are now witnessing are very explicit intentions to accomplish the genocide of the Palestinian residents of Gaza. Rather than simply asking how this could happen and extending unconditional diplomatic support and military aid to Israel, observers of this carnage should also ask themselves how the carnage can be stopped. The answer is certainly not to commit further atrocities.

[i] These developments should also be seen in light of the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh in September 2023, in which Israel also played a central role in and for which there have been limited consequences for the government of Azerbaijan, could readily be seen as a prelude to genocide in and of itself.

[ii] While Gazans have long characterised that what they are experiencing as a ‘slow-motion genocide’ that has created an almost uninhabitable situation for many of its two million inhabitants, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’tselem and others have characterised as the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza as an apartheid regime, which like genocide is also a crime against humanity. Reinforcing these concerns, a group of eight renowned Palestinian research institutes and human rights organizations, including Al Haq, have further explained how Israel’s discriminatory and exclusionary polices are an explicit and expansive tool of settler-colonialism and ‘structural and institutionalised racism’.

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

About the author:

Dr. Jeff Handmaker is Associate Professor of Legal Sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam and has published widely on topics concerning Israel’s decades-long impasse with the Palestinians. He conducts research on legal mobilization.

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Why and how the City of Amsterdam should be opposing Israel’s apartheid regime

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Numerous Palestinian, Israeli, international and UN organizations as well as scholars have called Israel an apartheid and settler-colonial regime. The City of Amsterdam has historically acted against South Africa’s apartheid regime, yet the same is not happening now in relation to Israel’s apartheid regime. At a recent panel discussion on anti-racism, Jeff Handmaker talked to renowned anti-apartheid activists about the role the city could and should play in condemning Israel’s oppressive and racist actions. It is important that Amsterdam affirm its cultural heritage as a space for solidarity anti-racism, he writes.

Since 2005, several discussions, films and solidarity events have been organized globally and annually around the theme ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’. Eighteen years ago, it was a lot more difficult to argue that Israel’s regime should be called racist, apartheid and settler-colonial, even though Palestinian organizations for years had been showing this was the case. At present, owing to years of discussions on the topic, there is greater agreement on the nature and consequences of Israel’s human rights transgressions and forceful oppression of the Palestinian people.

But there is still a long way to go in getting countries and organizations to condemn Israel as it did South Africa. And so, last week, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week activities, I participated in a panel at an anti-racism conference in Amsterdam at Pakhuis De Zwijger to dialogue about the involvement of the City of Amsterdam during the South African anti-apartheid movement back in the 1970s and 1980s and whether it should be doing the same at present in relation to Israel’s apartheid regime.

Together with Layla Katterman, renowned German-Palestinian student activist and founder of Students for Palestine, veteran anti-apartheid activists Corrie Roeper (formerly of the Holland Committee for Southern Africa) and Bart Luirink (formerly of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the Netherlands), as well as veteran Palestinian solidarity activist and writer Robert Soeterik, we reflected on the city of Amsterdam’s stance on apartheid dating back several decades. This stance featured solidarity linkages and concrete projects between the municipality and anti-apartheid groups in South Africa. In reflecting on this history, we hoped to understand the dynamics of the anti-apartheid movement initiated by the city and to contemplate what scope there was for the formation of a similar anti-apartheid movement in respect of Israel’s racist, brutal, and colonial treatment of Palestinians. Here are some thoughts that were shared during the panel discussion.

 

Dutch and South African resistance movements had different roles

In the first part of the panel, the panellists reflected on the Netherlands’ role in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. I emphasised that black liberation groups led the movement, while others, including white liberal organizations such as lawyers’ groups, student groups and women’s groups supported it.  Eventually, many of these groups came together during the establishment of the United Democratic Front in 1983, led by anti-apartheid activists Yusuf Dadoo, Allan Boesak and others.

Accordingly, white liberal groups in South Africa such as Lawyers for Human Rights, the women’s-led group Black Sash and others, as well as groups from the global anti-apartheid movement, trade unions and others played key roles in helping to liberate South Africa. However, these roles were very different from those of the African National Congress and Pan-African Congress and black consciousness groups (though they were banned and operated underground) and eventually the United Democratic Front.  Black consciousness leader Steve Biko articulated this clearly in 1970:

 

The South African white community is a homogeneous community. It is a community of people who sit to enjoy a privileged position that they do not deserve, are aware of this, and therefore spend their time trying to justify why they are doing so. Where differences in political opinion exist, they are in the process of trying to justify their position of privilege and their usurpation of power.

 

Each group must be able to attain its style of existence without encroaching on or being thwarted by another. Out of this mutual respect for each other and complete freedom of self-determination … (there will arise) a true integration.

 

In other words, white liberal groups needed to understand the perspective of black liberation groups; the possibility for unity existed, although the former needed to learn how to listen. A similar dynamic exists in relation to liberal Israeli groups.

 

Both Palestinians and South Africans have experienced oppression

As a crucial point of comparison, Palestinians, like black South Africans, have been engaged in a longstanding struggle for self-determination against oppressive regimes. A further comparison to be made is that both in Palestine and in South Africa, there has been considerable fragmentation of the land, of political systems, and of the people themselves. In Israel-Palestine, a so-called “two-state solution”, which has been the official, albeit naïve position of most states to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, is truly an illusion.

Both systems of apartheid have involved layers of racial(ized) and legalized discrimination, undermining one’s access to equal / equitable education, health care, jobs, and livelihoods, as well as access to justice.

Yet, there are also key distinctions to be made; in particular, there is no such thing as Israeli nationality. By contrast, South Africa never imposed different nationalities; it did, however, classify and treat people differently based on racial(ized) legal categories.

 

The City of Amsterdam hasn’t (yet) declared Israel an apartheid state

We then sought to understand the current partnership between the cities of Amsterdam and Tel Aviv. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the City of Amsterdam explicitly opposed South Africa’s apartheid regime by severing former linkages with South African institutions and supporting anti-apartheid groups, both financially and politically. However, the same is not happening in the case of Israel. Despite Amnesty’s 2022 report, another by the Israeli NGO B’tselem and numerous others, including the most recent by Al Haq all declaring Israel to be an apartheid state, the mayor of Amsterdam and the Dutch government have considered the declaration of Israeli apartheid to be invalid. Moreover, both city and national government officials feel that such a matter should be decided by the court; there thus has been no official recognition by the city administration of Israel’s status as apartheid regime.

However, this is a blatantly incorrect position. The matter has in fact already been decided by several international courts, including the International Court of Justice in 2004 that affirmed Israel was violating international human rights.[1] This was followed by the opening of an international criminal investigation by the International Criminal Court following a decision by the Pre-Trial Chamber in 2021. [2] Thus, as an integral organ of the Dutch state, the municipality of Amsterdam is obliged to act in accordance with international law, including the outcomes of these two courts.

 

Amsterdam should formally sever its relationship with Tel Aviv

Lastly, we explored what could be done about this dismal situation. It was clear to most in the room that as long as there were not consequences for Israel’s criminal behaviour (as there frequently have been for Palestinians), there would be continued impunity. Consequences for state and individual violations are an essential feature of both state and individual accountability – this indeed is one of the principal reasons why treaties were concluded to establish the Geneva Conventions, the UN and more recently the ICC.

Hence, the speakers on the panel felt it was important to affirm, on the basis of both moral and legal obligations, that the City of Amsterdam is obliged to respect international law and not to assist an illegal situation. Accordingly, we felt it should sever its formal relationship with the city of Tel Aviv. In other words, beyond being a matter of legal obligation, in accordance with both the United Nations Charter and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, it is important that Amsterdam affirm its cultural heritage as a space for solidarity anti-racism.

At a broader level, we found that it is crucial to unpack what the role of settler-colonialism has been as a historical force, including how spatial segregation has occurred on the basis of race and ethnicity. In Israel-Palestine, certainly, this has principally been marked by the well-planned and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

 

The latest event taking place on 24 March 2023 at the ISS sought to address how one can legitimately resist this regime. A report of this event is forthcoming.

[1] The International Court of Justice affirmed in its 2004 Advisory Opinion that: (1) there is a Palestinian people with a right to self-determination; (2) the West Bank and Gaza, including E. Jerusalem, are occupied territories under international law, and Israel is an occupying power with legal obligations towards all civilians in the territory (i.e. PRINCIPAL obligations are aimed at Israel); (3) Israeli settlements violate international law and Wall is illegally constructed; (4) Conventions of International Humanitarian Law are fully binding on Israel, and must govern all Israeli actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and (5) Israel’s occupation practices (associated regime) violate both international humanitarian law and human rights.

[2] On 3 March 2021, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced it was opening an investigation into the Situation in the State of Palestine. This followed a decision on 5 February 2021 by the Pre-Trial Chamber of the Court that the ICC could exercise its criminal jurisdiction in the Situation, including alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity (which includes the crime of apartheid).

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

About the author:

Jeff Handmaker is Associate Professor of Legal Sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies and, together with Margarethe Wewerinke-Singh at the University of Amsterdam Law School, a member of the Steering Group of the Legal Mobilization Platform

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

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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?

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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

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

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Legal mobilization to end impunity for international crimes by Jeff Handmaker

Posted on 4 min read

In 2014, on the 20th 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 17th 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

JeffHandmakerISS
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. 

 

 

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

Posted on 6 min read

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 11th 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 Maria ArbelaezAna 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.

JeffHandmakerISSJeff 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

Posted on 5 min read

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

JeffHandmakerISS
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. 

 

 

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

Posted on 7 min read

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

picture_2Salena 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.