Photo: www.stopthewall.org
A voice is crying out for justice, from every place where there is struggle… may all humanity hear itself in our cry. –Zapatista compañera Elena, Chiapas, 21 July 2007 (http://www.narconews.com/Issue46/article2748.html )
Anarchists Against the Wall has become one of the major direct-action groups protesting against the multiple oppressions of the Israeli state. Their politics concentrates on radical confrontation, and they are one of the few tough bunches of comrades in Israel/Palestine facing the brutal power of the state in concrete solidarity with the oppressed, week after week, in a spirit of what is called in Arabic tsumud, persistence with grit, non-violent dogged resistance.
STOPPING THE GREAT WALL OF PALESTINE
AATW activists are centrally involved in the struggle against the West Bank Barrier, the segregation wall being built by the Israeli political class. They are out there every week with the Palestinian popular resistance and village committees against the Apartheid Wall — known in Hebrew by the euphemism geder ha-hafrada (Separation Fence) and called by many Palestinians jidar al-fasl al-‘unsuri (‘Racial Segregation Wall’) — in diverse areas of the West Bank, including the villages of Bil’in west of Ramallah, al-Ma’asara and Ertas south of Bethlehem and elsewhere. Their demo at Bil’in on 3 August 2007 was number 130 (http://www.ainfos.ca/ainfos04901.html ). They are also helping to protect Palestinian olive trees from bulldozing as ever more land is expropriated. At the same time, they are engaged in a really major legal campaign in the courts to defend their right to join together with Palestinians to protect their land and protest state violence and oppression (see below).
FIGHTING HOUSE DEMOLITIONS
As AATW broadens the interface of struggle, below an article by ex-psychologist and full-time activist Ilan Shalif. Ilan reports on their recent direct action against house demolitions of Arab Palestinian and Jewish working-class Israeli homes inside the Zionist state, vicious urban gentrification and the resultant plight of the homeless. And wholesale demolition of homes of ‘resistant’ simple Bedouin, mainly ex-herders and marginal agriculturalists in the semi-arid Negev, now settled in permanent largely ‘unrecognized’ villages and gradually absorbed as wage slaves in the Israeli capitalist economy after most of their lands were literally robbed.
REBUILDING DEMOLISHED HOMES
AATW activists are helping in August 2007 to rebuild the home of Zina and Omar Al-Adassi in the Ajami neighborhood in Jaffa, south Tel Aviv, bulldozed at 5 a.m. full of furnishings by the Israel Land Administration in early July. The Al-Adassi family has four children, one of whom is disabled. They lived in their home for 26 years, and since its destruction have been living outside in an orchard in Jaffa. The demolition of the Al-Adassi family home is part of a current wave of hundreds of demolition and evacuation orders in Jaffa, designed to evict Arab residents and promote the conversion of Jaffa into an exclusively wealthy-Jewish city, with the construction of some 5,000 luxury housing units where Ajami now stands (see http://www.imemc.org/article/49488 ). The rebuilding is coordinated by the Jaffa Popular Committee, founded in March 2007 to struggle against the wave of home demolitions and evacuations of Arab residents from Jaffa (see http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/853180.html ).
SUDANESE REFUGEES IN DISTRESS
AATW people have also taken a direct role in lending a hand to Darfur refugees, who have fled into Israel across the Sinai desert from Egypt, especially in recent months, and are being badly treated by the Israeli state and local municipalities. A spokesperson from the Prime Minister’s office has said: “We don’t want to be the Promised Land for African refugees.” Most are homeless, penniless; many have been imprisoned in Israel as ‘enemy nationals,’ since Sudan does not recognize Israel. All face the threat of deportation. A number were recently ousted from town by Hadera city hall and literally dumped in Liberty Bell Park in Jerusalem; AATW activists are now helping them find shelter. There are some 2,400 African refugees in Israel now, about half from Sudan. Many in the Israeli political class and the electorate oppose their deportation to Egypt, but few Jews in Israel other than AATW wish them to stay on with asylum. Ilan’s article is followed by some background URLs I’ve added.
BUILDING NATURAL BRIDGES OF RESISTANCE
Progressive groups in North America should seek direct contact with AATW, through their website http://awalls.org and other channels. They need solidarity, practical productive links, invites to speak. They are present on a broad front of protest in Israel, including against nuclear arms on Hiroshima Day Aug. 6. Israel is the only nuclear power in the Near East.
As political scientist Neve Gordon recently wrote:
They have no official leaders, no office, and no paid staff, and yet they have managed to accomplish more than many well-oiled NGOs and social movements […] As Jewish activists they are well aware that the Israeli military behaves very differently when Israeli Jews are present during a protest in the West Bank and that the level of violence, while still severe, is much less intense. Indeed, according to Israeli soldiers the military has more stringent open fire regulations for demonstrations in which non-Palestinians participate. So when a village’s public committee decides to carry out non-violent protests against the occupying power, the anarchists mingle with the demonstrating villagers, thus becoming a human shield for all of those Palestinians who have chosen to follow the path of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Even though the anarchists are frequently beaten and arrested, they do not desist. [The Nation, web, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070813/gordon ]
THE LEGAL STRUGGLE
Like SDS increasingly will be in North America, AATW is now engaged in a major battle to protect civil liberties. The Israeli state is seeking to undermine their work by a massive barrage of indictments, 63 to date. Neve Gordon:
[w]hen the Israeli police began to realise that beating and detaining them would not stop their stubborn resistance, a different strategy was adopted. Scores of legal indictments were issued by the state prosecutor. The anarchists took this as a new challenge. They have launched a legal campaign, whose aim is to defend the basic civil right of all Israelis to resist their government’s rights-abusive policies. Leading this battle is Gabi Lasky, an energetic lawyer, who spends many of her weekends releasing anarchists from detention and her weekdays representing them in court.
So AATW comrades also need material help, and have just issued an appeal for funds: http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=6029 . As the arrest of an SDSer in a clash with neo-Nazis in Morristown/NJ July 28 points up, a legal defense fund is integral to the struggle, from Brooklyn to Bil’in.
Established four years ago, the political spectrum of activists in AATW is wider than social anarchism in the stricter sense and reflects antiauthoritarian anticapitalist PGA views as well, analogous to a rich array of thinking inside SDS / MDS about analysis, praxis & ways forward. But all in AATW are committed to uncompromising direct action on various fronts, often against fully-armed Israeli troops. A number have been wounded in confrontations with state violence. North Americans can learn from their struggle. Their battle on the streets and in the courts. They are natural allies.
MATZPEN
Ilan was an early member of Matzpen (Compass), the anti-Zionist Israeli Socialist Organization active in the 1960s, 70s and early 1980s. Matzpen is integral to the background of the anticapitalist antiauthoritarian struggle in Israel (see http://matzpen.org for articles, documents). Its current associates meet regularly, are active in AATW and other groups, though Matzpen no longer operates as an organization on the ground. You can download the Matzpen book The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism, Doubleday 1972: http://matzpen.org/index.asp?p=other. Thirty-five years later, it is still essential reading. As the Introduction notes:
The Zionist state was born in the violent expropriation and expulsion from their country of the Palestinian Arabs, and that process continues today. In open alliance with Western, especially United States, imperialism, and in scarcely hidden collusion with the most reactionary forces in the Arab world, the Zionist state actively sets itself against every step, no matter how faltering, taken by the Arab masses to alleviate the centuries’ old misery imposed on them by colonialism and imperialism. […] This state of affairs is, moreover, in no sense accidental. It was the inevitable outcome of the success of the Zionist project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. And to change this reality requires not merely a change of government or a modification of one or another specific policy, but a revolutionary transformation of the very foundations of Israeli society.
¡YA BASTA! / KHALAS!
The global synergy of resistance is deepening. At a time when Zapatistas meeting in Chiapas are engaged in an international Encuentro/Encounter with followers of La Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona from more than 80 countries (http://www.narconews.com/Issue46/article2743.html ), and the Oaxacan Popular Movement is growing in strength as a people’s rebellion, it is important to see AATW in the spirit of such resistance, struggle for indigenous autonomy and vernacular values, the ethos of Arab-Palestinian/Jewish radical solidarity – the “many other groups who exist all over the world but who we do not see until they shout ya basta of being despised, and they raise up, and then we see them, we hear them, and we learn from them” (Sixth Declaration EZLN, http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/auto/selva6.html#Anchor-VI-23240 ).
Within this dynamism, in Palestine/Israel, the watchword is: ¡Basta ya! / khalas!
***************
Ilan Shalif AATW A-Infos Matzpen
The various struggles for a roof over one’s head cross national borders
As the Anarchists Against the Wall (AATW) get more credit as serious activists, we are both invited to (and on our own initiative) join other struggles. Among the struggles within Israeli borders, we have recently been invited to participate in four main struggles. There is the gentrification project in the old Palestinian neighborhood of Jaffa (now annexed as the southern district of Tel Aviv). About 500 Palestinian families holding Israeli citizenship were issued court orders for the demolition (of the whole or part) of their homes – to clear the area for gentrification by the rich (mostly Jews from Tel Aviv). The few direct actions AATW people were involved in have already prevented some demolitions for a while.
Following that, in connection with the Jaffa struggle, we were invited to participate in the struggle of 30 families from Kfar Shalem who were issued with eviction orders to make space for a building project. (This is the old village of Salama where immigrant Jews were placed after the original Palestinian inhabitants were transferred out in the 1948 war.)
A third struggle is that of the Palestinian bedouin of the Negev – the southern part of Israel. These are the indigenous, semi-nomadic Palestinian dwellers of the arid lands in the region where Beersheba city is located. Many of the original inhabitants were driven away to Egypt (Sinai) and Jordan between 1948 and 1952, during the birth of Israel. Some were forced to relocate within that region. Throughout the years, the Israeli state made efforts to confiscate their land, which was used for marginal agriculture and villages, and to concentrate them into a few new towns.
The latest wave of suppression involves the demolition of more than 100 houses, with court orders for the destruction of whole villages. Lately, as part of the struggle, they and their Jewish supporters invited AATW activists to join them. A protest tent camp was recently set up in Jerusalem, near the Parliament.
And the fourth, somewhat different, project is that of the homeless tent compound in the center of Jerusalem. They are the present tip of the iceberg of some tens of thousands of people who lost their homes due to the neo-liberal policy of the Israeli State, that privatized public housing projects and refuses responsibility for housing problems of the very needy. The tent camp is organized by veteran social-struggle activists with long-established contacts with the extra-parliamentary left and with the anti-authoritarian left. We were naturally invited to join them. Some of our members have spent days and nights there. The struggle against homelessness in general and against the eviction of the camp in particular is on the agenda.
Yesterday evening, we had a joint demonstration in Jerusalem of the three struggles: the homeless camp (which initiated this demo), The Kfar Shalem people who will soon be homeless too, and the bedouin activists. About 300 people participated in the demonstration. We marched for about an hour along the two main streets in central Jerusalem towards the prime minister’s official residence. The AATW drum circle and team of clowns made the march livelier. The speeches made by the activists of the three struggles stressed the joining of hands of Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians. Afterwards we marched to the homeless camp in the center of city and socialized there before dispersing. FROM: http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=6044 [25 July 2007]
BACKGROUND
* On the decades-long struggle of the al-Naqab (Negev) Bedouin, a solid site is www.dukium.org A general article on Bedou ‘unrecognized” villages: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9434 . A recent violent confrontation over home demolition in the Bedouin village of Al-Nassra: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/888839.html .
* The specific “refugee camp” by Bedouin across from the Israeli Knesset where AATW also participated is described here by the mainstream Israeli press: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/882365.html On the background to the current Bedouin protest, mass demolitions the end of June 2007, see: http://www.icahd.org/eng/news.asp?menu=5&submenu=1&item=452
* On the situation in Kfar Shalem, where AATW has joined hands, lotta continua, see: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/881760.html
* The homeless encampment in Jerusalem where AATW activists have participated is reported on by Womyn of the Protest Tent: http://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos19631.html
* The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, coordinated by American-born activist anthropologist Jeff Halper, concentrates on the West Bank, and is also concerned with demolitions in Tel Aviv & the Negev: http://www.icahd.org/eng/
* On khalas!, Arabic for “enough, no more!,” see the site of the Palestinian rock band KHALAS based in the ancient city Akka north of Haifa: www.khalas.net/bio.php “The group of three are part of the Arab minority who’s experiencing social, political, educational, and economic discrimination. They grew up denied their basic rights and services and for them it is time to send a message to the world that enough is enough… `Khalas’.” The expression was borrowed with the same meaning into Israeli Hebrew popular slang.
* On transnational Zapatismo, see Thomas Olesen, International Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the Age of Globalization, London: ZED Books 2005, esp. chapters 2-4.
* For an inside anarchist view of the people’s rebellion in Oaxaca today, see http://www.narconews.com/Issue46/article2734.html
