[A letter initiated by a group of Palestinian intellectuals and activists, aiming to formulate a new discourse, in the context of the Palestinian liberation movement, and presenting it to members of the Jewish settler community in Palestine, calling on them to break away from Zionism and integrate with the Palestinian people. The letter, in several languages, with an updated list of signatures, is available on the “Ajras” (Bells) website ajras.org and there you can sign it and discuss with us. This letter was also published in Free Haifa in Arabic (the original) and Hebrew.]
Aptly and beautifully has our late Mahmoud Darwish described the relation between the occupier and the indigenous, the Palestinian: “And the murdered has come to love the face of the murderer”. This poetic embellishment caricaturizes the special relation that has slowly formed between the Palestinians and their occupiers. With time, and the prolonged occupation, both the oppressor and the oppressed have come to define themselves in terms of their Other in their fight against their Other. Often have our colonizers, their tongues having tasted our water and eaten from the goods of our land, and their fair skins having basked in the rays of our sun, come to claim they are Us. And such is the nature of life that their racist discourse has come to creep into ours.
It is a unique relationship. A relationship where, we have come to reckon, the Israeli hopes for our demise, in order to replace us smoothly, and appropriate for themselves our land, our culture and our name. Yes, we believe that you, wittingly or unwittingly, long to become us. Us, the children of the Canaanites, the Arabs, the peoples of distant lands; a melting pot of Turks, Kurds, Amazighen, Africans and others who have come and become us.
What has prevented you, who have come, from becoming us?
While you look for answer, we shall answer for you: The answer is Zionism. It is Zionism, in its secular and religious shades, that has proudly refused the call of Palestinians and Jews, prior to 1948, for a secular, democratic state, a state of all its citizens. In the name of your fear, of the Holocaust and many holocausts you have been through, it is Zionism that has refused to share a destiny. In the name of these crimes against Jews, it is Zionism that has justified its own crimes, the barbarity of its militias and the atrocities of its state, the occupation of the land and the cleansing of its people.
It is Zionism, for over a century now, that has stood in the way of our dreams, both yours and ours and all humans’, of justice, of democracy, of equality and of good.
It is Zionism that has stood in the way of life, common life, based on freedom and fairness. Instead, it has yielded violence, trading roles with regional powers that share its thirst for domination, and have shared your sword against forces of peace, democracy and justice.
The solution, you wonder? The solution begins with the end of this vision of supremacy and oppression, and the erection in its stead of this land’s first plural, democratic state, a régime of peace and justice for all, including the Palestinian refugees returning to their homes from which they were uprooted.
It begins with your abandoning the delusion that you may come and cleanse yourself of us, kill us, replace us, and claim to be Us.
May you, rather, follow the example of those who have preceded you in coming to our land and who have come to shape us; may you choose to join us to build a country of us all, under the values of a secular, democratic state, the values of peace and justice and equality – a light unto Humankind, shining towards a better world that we may help build.
This is a message to You, and to Us. Is it a cry in the wilderness, an empty cry interrupted by more violence, to despots’ delight; or is it a trumpet to the end of tyranny and bigotry, to the end of darkness, and the beacon of another world? — The choice is in our hands, Ours, and Yours.
This land, we believe, will welcome those who have come in peace, in harmony, in love, mirroring the beauty of its forests, its water, and its soil; and will grant its name to those who will to be entwined with it. Yet it will vomit out, as it oft has, those who choose the path of darkness, and who will wither away.
En los años setenta (entonces en el siglo anterior) yo era activista en una pequeña organización trotskista llamada “La Alianza de los Trabajadores”. Nos tomábamos absolutamente en serio la organización de la clase trabajadora en Palestina, árabes, judíos y todos los demás, para liderar una revolución socialista y liberar a Palestina. Algunas de nuestras actividades diarias eran organizar comités de trabajadores y apoyar a los trabajadores en huelga por sus derechos. Una de esas huelgas dejó una impresión especial en mí.
Fue en los primeros días de mayo cuando escuché que los trabajadores de una gran fábrica en el camino al norte de Haifa a Akka (Acre) estaban en huelga. Fui allí para ver qué estaba pasando. Los trabajadores estaban delante de las puertas cerradas de la fábrica, por lo que era fácil hablar con ellos. Me senté con miembros del comité de trabajadores, quienes estaban felices de expresar sus quejas.
La fábrica era propiedad colectiva de los kibbutzim circundantes, asentamientos comunitarios sionistas sçolo para judíos. Los trabajadores procedían de los pueblos árabes cercanos (todavía llamados “aldeas”, aunque perdieron sus tierras por la confiscación sionista y se convirtieron en barrios de trabajadores que tenían que salir a trabajar fuera del pueblo). Explicaron por qué trabajar en una fábrica de kibbutz era peor que en muchas fábricas capitalistas. No hay un sólo jefe, sino que cada gerente, ingeniero, oficinista o trabajador de uno de los Kibbutzim es parte de la gerencia. E incluso los trabajadores árabes más profesionales no tienen oportunidad de promoción, ya que todos los buenos trabajos se conservan para la gente del kibbutz.
Pero no estaban en huelga tratando de mejorar sus condiciones. En árabe, cuando hay una pelea, dicen: “No estalló por la granada, sino por el corazón lleno”. La granada en nuestro caso llegó con el Día Internacional de los Trabajadores, que solemos llamar simplemente Primero de Mayo. En aquellos días, la “Histadrut” sionista todavía pretendía ser un “Sindicato de Trabajadores Socialista”, y los Kibbutzim estaban todos organizados como parte de la Histadrut. La Histadrut convocó una gran manifestación del Primero de Mayo en Tel Aviv, y la gente del kibbutz se estaba preparando para participar.
Cerrar la fábrica no era algo sencillo: contenía instalaciones industriales que funcionaban las 24 horas, los 7 días de la semana. Cerrarlas y luego reiniciar las operaciones era bastante complejo y costoso, y se hacía sólo una vez al año en el Yom Kippur (Día del Perdón) judío. Entonces, los gerentes del kibbutz informaron a los trabajadores árabes que no se les permitiría tomar un día libre el Primero de Mayo. Cuando el comité de trabajadores protestó, sus gerentes respondieron que, a diferencia de la gente del kibbutz, que planeaba ir a la manifestación del Primero de Mayo, los trabajadores árabes no tienen conciencia de clase y querían el día libre sólo para ir a hacer un asado con sus familias. .
Eso fue demasiado y los trabajadores cerraron la fábrica el primero de mayo. La huelga continuó durante los días siguientes, ya que los trabajadores exigían que se les pagara su día libre.
No sé quién ganó la huelga. Los kibbutzim todavía controlan las tierras confiscadas y las fábricas subsidiadas por el estado. Pero creo que, desde entonces, ellos, al menos, abandonaron su intento de mantener el monopolio de la conciencia de clase.
In the seventies (back then in the previous century) I was an activist in a small Trotskyist organization named “The Workers Alliance.” We were absolutely serious about organizing the working class in Palestine, Arab, Jews and everybody else, to lead a socialist revolution and liberate Palestine. Some of our daily activities were to organize workers’ committees and to support workers striking for their rights. One of those strike left a special impression in my mind.
It was in the first days of May when I heard that workers in a big factory on the way north from Haifa to Akka (Acre) were on strike. I went there to see what was going on. The workers were hanging around the factory’s closed doors, so it was easy to speak with them. I sat with members of the workers’ committee, who were happy to express their complaints to me.
The factory was collectively owned by the surrounding Kibbutzim – Jewish-only Zionist community settlements. The workers were coming from the nearby Arab towns (still called “villages,” though they lost their land to Zionist confiscation and became workers’ sleeping neighborhoods). They explained why working in a Kibbutz factory was worse than in many capitalist factories. There is not only one boss, but every manager, engineer, clerk, or worker from one of the Kibbutzim is part of the management. And even the most professional workers have no opportunity for promotion, as all the good jobs are preserved for Kibbutz people.
But there were not on strike trying to improve their conditions. In Arabic, when there is a quarrel, they say: “It didn’t break out because of the pomegranate, but because of the full heart.” The pomegranate in our case came with International Workers Day, which we are used to call simply First of May. In those days the Zionist “Histadrut” still pretended to be a “Socialist Trade Union”, and the Kibbutzim were all organized as part of the Histadrut. The Histadrut called for a big May Day demonstration in Tel Aviv, and the Kibbutz people were preparing to participate.
Closing the factory was not a simple thing – it contained industrial facilities that were operated 24 hours, 7 days a week. Closing them and then restarting operations was quite complex and costly, and was done only once a year on Jewish Kippur. So, the Kibbutz managers informed the Arab workers that they are not allowed to take a day off on First of May. When the workers’ committee protested, their managers retorted that, unlike the Kibbutz people that plan to go to the First of May demonstration, the Arab workers have no class consciousness, and they wanted the day off just to go and make barbecue with their families.
That was too much, and the workers closed the factory on May First. The strike continued over the next days, as the workers demanded to be paid for their day off.
I do not know who won the strike. The Kibbutzim still control the confiscated lands and the state-subsidized factories. But I think that, since then, they, at least, gave up their attempt to keep monopoly over class consciousness.
Reem Hazzan was invited to address an anti-Netanyahu rally in Haifa but refused after organizers censored her speech. Her experience shows why the current protest movement is alienating Palestinians.
(The following article was published on March 8, 2023, in Mondoweiss.)
Good spirited invitation to civil war: “The Arabs will compete against the winners”
The current protests in Israel taking place across the country are pitting the country’s new extreme-right government versus the Israeli-flag-waving supporters of the previous “respectable” right-wing government. One meme circulating about this internal conflict presents good-spirited instructions for participation in “a civil war” as if it was a sporting event and finally adds: “The Arabs will compete against the winner.”
Palestinians, both those that succeeded in staying in or near their lands after the 1948 Nakba (a quarter of whom are “internally displaced”) and those living under direct military occupation or siege in the West Bank and Gaza, are always “on the receiving end” of Israel’s “Jewish Democracy.” The previous government, under Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid and their “Change Block,” tried to prove its Zionist credentials by being harsher than its predecessors against Palestinians on both sides of the green line: killing more people, intensifying nightly raids on Palestinian towns and villages, raising the number of administrative detentions, waging campaigns of house demolition and ethnic cleansing. Now, the new Netanyahu government is in a hurry to prove that it can be even more oppressive and brutal on all fronts.
Based on these painful experiences, few Palestinians feel a need to join the current Zionist opposition’s campaign to save Israel’s “democracy.”
At the heart of the protest campaign is the defense of the independence of Israel’s Supreme Court. Palestinians know this court mostly for its role in giving formal legitimacy to all the crimes against them over the last 75 years. Under the previous government, this court approved the most drastic government plan for ethnic cleansing in Masafer Yatta, in the southern West Bank. And, just this month, this court issued another decree trying to press the government to complete the ethnic cleansing of Khan al-Ahmar, to the east of Jerusalem, at the request of a militant settlers’ association.
Last week the One Democratic State Campaign published a declaration in Mondoweiss, calling on Palestinian and their Jewish supporters not to join the Zionist protest movement aimed at preserving the misleading “respectability” of “Jewish democracy.” Today I want to look in more detail into the efforts of those Palestinians and leftist Jews who are trying to influence the movement from within.
On the one hand, the leaders of the protest clearly don’t want any meaningful Arab participation. While speaking about “democracy,” they avoid mentioning in any way the systematic oppression and discrimination against Palestinians wherever they are. The only time that some of the protest leaders suddenly turn their sights on Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, also known as ’48 Palestinians, is to accuse them of not participating in their protest and to revive the hate campaign against the leaders of the Arab parties in the Knesset, who they blame for the failure of the previous government.
Over the last Israeli election campaigns, many well-funded NGOs were working to convince ’48 Palestinians to take part in the elections, claiming it is not important who you vote for, but it is critical to take part. Now, some of the same forces are working to compel a similar “Israelization” of the Arab Palestinian masses by calling for their participation in the protest movement. However, with the protest movement’s current slogans, this is a tough task.
We witnessed here, in Haifa, the unfortunate case of one of the main Palestinian activists trying to mobilize such participation. He found himself distributing a video message from the Israeli singer Aya Korem, calling for the defense of Israel’s courts. It was a profound embarrassment, as in the video, Korem explains that it is only the international respectability of Israel’s courts that allows soldiers that commit war crimes, like the killing of journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, to avoid being indicted in the international criminal court.
Similarly, General Benny Gantz, one of the leaders of the opposition, whose election campaign was based on his “achievement” of killing thousands of Palestinians in Gaza in 2014, explained it in a speech to the weekly protest in Haifa on February 25, 2023: “For decades, I guarded you. And while I guarded you, the court guarded me.”
The organizers of the local protest in Haifa, a group called “the people’s protest,” are proud of their “inclusive approach” of being the only part of the protest movement to have invited an Arab speaker to their main Saturday night demonstration every week. But on February 18, the designated Arab speaker, Reem Hazzan, didn’t show up. It was soon shared on social media and later published in Haaretz that the organizers were not happy with the contents of the speech that she intended to deliver.
Ms. Hazzan agreed to my request to give an interview for Mondoweiss to explain what happened. She also gave me the text of her intended speech and a letter she wrote to fellow activists immediately after being censored.
Reem Hazzan holding a megaphone at a demonstration in Haifa. Photo by “Hadash – The Front for Peace and Equality”.
Before bringing in Ms. Hazzan’s words, I owe the readers some background. First, in the invitation to the February 18 demonstration, Reem’s family name was spelled incorrectly. This is an almost inevitable episode whenever an Arab Palestinian is “included” in the Israeli sphere. Ms. Hazzan was described in the invitation as a “political activist and a feminist.” This is certainly true. In addition, she is the secretary of the Haifa branch and of the Haifa District Committee of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI).
In some Western countries being “a communist” might sound like being on the extreme left. However, in local Palestinian politics, the communist party is regarded as the most moderate political force (excluding some opportunistic political formations with no principles at all), and it keeps Arab-Jewish partnership at the heart of its ideology and practice, even when the political reality doesn’t show much feasibility to this approach. In the current protest movement, the CPI has engaged through wider coalitions of (mostly Jewish) democratic activists. In Haifa the main such formation is “The Block Against the Occupation,” which forms a distinct group within the protest, raising slogans against the 1967 occupation and for “democracy and equality for everyone.”
Hazzan told me how, as the February 18 demonstration approached, she received many telephone calls from the organizers, requesting that she submit the written text of her intended speech in advance. She felt that they were very anxious about what she might say, but they claimed it was a common procedural process, as they wanted to make sure, for example, that the speech was not too long. She assured them that her text editor had a word count function and that she could promise to limit herself to the allowed 350 words. They said that all speakers were submitting their speeches in advance, but she checked and found this was not exactly true.
On Saturday, she submitted the almost-finished text. Even though the organizers initially said that asking her to share her text was only a “technicality,” they soon returned to her with complaints about the content. They said it was “sad” and “pessimistic” and didn’t do enough to mobilize the Arab public to participate in the demonstrations. In fact, she had thought deeply about what could be done to convince the Arab public, and her text was meant to share her conclusions with the protesters.
In the speech, she explained:
“There is a direct connection between Israel’s rejection of peace, the deepening of the occupation, dismantling the welfare state and harming workers, and the destruction of democracy and the rise of fascism. The Arab public and the lower classes will feel partners in the protest when this protest will act not only to stop the moves against the liberal foundations of the Israeli regime, to maintain “business as usual”. We will feel partners, and will be partners in the struggle, when the goal will be to change the policies of racism and discrimination and establish a new social contract based on the pursuit of peace and equality. When the fight for democracy will aim for real democracy: not democracy only for the Jews, but democracy for everyone.”
And finally, she tried to finish with an optimistic tone: “You need us with you. We all need each other. This is the meaning of solidarity. Only together will we win. Haifa will lead the change – the power is in our hands!”
These pretty basic exhortations for peace and equality were, apparently, beyond what “the Arab speaker” is allowed to pronounce in Haifa’s “most inclusive” demonstration for “democracy.” Hazzan told me she tried to edit her speech and add some more positivity and optimism to it, but by then, the organizers had made their priorities clear. She was told to submit an amended text, or she would not be allowed to speak. In the face of this ultimatum, she felt that the whole process was wrong. The organizers were speaking to her, a representative of the Arab public, from a position of power. They duplicated inside the protest movement the same undemocratic attitudes that characterize the Israeli state. She consulted her comrades and decided not to submit any new text. That night there was no Arab speaker in the Haifa demonstration.
In an open letter to democratic activists, issued the same night, Hazzan explained her position:
“We have a responsibility to stimulate the discussion about what is a democratic struggle and how to build partnership in struggle. The left and the Arab public shouldn’t allow others to use them as a tool. We have the responsibility to explain and shout that there is no democracy without equality, no democracy with occupation, and no democracy without the participation of the Palestinian Arab public. My speech might be correct in the eyes of some and inappropriate in the eyes of others. In any case, censoring political opinions is preserving fascism, not fighting against it. It is difficult to be a partner in such a system designed to preserve the balance of power. We must think together about a real alternative to the struggle for democracy and the end of the occupation.”
As I was writing this report on Saturday, March 4, I found out that the “Arab speaker” in the Haifa demonstration that night was a reserve lieutenant colonel in the Israeli army. I’m pretty sure this time, the organizers weren’t as nervous anticipating what he might say.
Since Israel’s Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, announced sweeping “reforms” in Israel’s judicial system, intended to nullify the power of the Supreme Court to declare laws unconstitutional and to pack the judiciary with political appointees, a regime based on settler colonialism, apartheid and Jewish supremacy over Palestinians has been debating how to preserve itself as “a democracy”. A growing protest movement has arisen calling for civil disobedience, including “militant” statements of defiance by former senior political, security and military officials.
No one can predict how this confrontation will end. It is clear, however, that it represents solely an internal Zionist dispute. The protests never reference the other side of Israeli “democracy”: the exclusion of Arab citizens, who the “opposition” leaders make clear are neither welcome to join the protests nor are even considered a legitimate part of the political system. On the contrary. The leadership of the opposition believes that conspicuous participation of Palestinians in the demonstrations might actually harm their struggle against the government, since it gives the ruling coalition of Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich a pretext for smearing the protests as “anti-Zionist”. And, needless to say, those who struggle to “preserve democracy”, the Zionist “liberals”, have never even pretended to recognize the national and democratic rights of the Palestinians living under a cruel regime of colonial apartheid in the 1967 Occupied Territories, the refugee camps and the Exile.
Regardless whether the coalition and the opposition in Israel reach a settlement or whether the rifts that have developed within the state and the settler society will remain incurable, our Palestinian people continue their struggle and their legendary steadfastness. Nonetheless, given the political realities, a debate has arisen within the political elite of the 1948 Palestinians over how to best respond to the events. Leaders of some Arab political parties and a handful of activists do call for participation in the demonstrations of the Zionist opposition. The overwhelming majority of our people, however, refrain from participating, realizing the moral contradiction and political harm that such participation entails.
We are not observing a class struggle. The colonial project and the privileges it provides to the settler society prevent the development of class consciousness. Nor is it a struggle over the solutions required to end the crimes of occupation, colonialism and apartheid or to end the suffering of the Palestinian people. Rather, we are witnessing merely a struggle over who shapes and controls the apartheid system, all with the aim of preserving Jewish supremacy and colonial rule. And, for Palestinians, it matters little who does control the court system. Whether liberal or conservative Zionists, the Israeli courts, from the lowest to the highest, will continue to legitimize and enforce the crimes of expulsion, massacres, and ethnic cleansing, all of which are essential to preserving the Israeli state apparatus’ control over the Palestinian majority between the River and the Sea.
For all these reasons, Palestinian citizens refuse to participate in demonstrations aimed at protecting “Jewish democracy”. Palestinians and the Jews who oppose apartheid and settler colonialism must continue building a united resistance movement; they must not get distracted by “protests” that only legitimize a fake democracy and in fact strengthen its repressive system of colonization and control. A genuine movement of liberation requires a long-term resistance strategy, a national and human liberation vision. It should unite those who live in Palestine and those who were expelled by the Zionist movement and its embodiment, the state of Israel. This movement should pose a clear alternative: building a single democratic state in historic Palestine on the ruins of the apartheid regime and its criminal offshoots.
This is the real alternative to participating in a protest movement intended to preserve a racist colonial regime. It is a realistic alternative, demanding long, hard struggle. But it leads us in the right political direction, unlike protests that only offer cosmetic improvements to an unjust and violent system of oppression. This goal can only be achieved by a Palestinian national, democratic movement, after rebuilding itself, recovering its liberating, humane vision and mobilizing around a political program – in our view, that of a single democratic state over all of historic Palestine. It requires the articulate combination of internal popular struggle with external struggle as represented by the boycott strategy and the force of international solidarity.
The racist mobs who lynched Palestinians in May 2021 are now a major political force in Israel. The mask is off for Israeli apartheid.
(The following article appeared today in Mondoweiss)
Four consecutive election campaigns in Israel had been fiercely waged around a single issue – for and against the grotesquely corrupt “King Bibi,” a reference to Benjamin Netanyahu. These elections failed to produce a clear verdict among the divided Israeli Apartheid electorate. Though Palestinians constitute the majority of the population under Israel’s rule, they are prevented from any opportunity to democratically influence their fate. While the pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps quarrelled, the fate of the Palestinians was completely excluded from the discussion. Even the word “peace”, that used to be mentioned regularly (without any meaning) in previous Israeli elections, is now completely out of fashion.
But it turns out that Netanyahu’s year outside of the government did succeed in changing the agenda for the November 1, 2022 elections. The opposition led by Netanyahu’s Likud party concentrated all its rhetorical firepower into racist incitement against the idea of a government supported by Arab parties. In return, the outgoing government coalition led by Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz tried to make the public forget the experience of their awkward time at the helm which collapsed into endless internal stifle by frightening the public with the rising power of Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the openly fascist ultra-right. This reciprocal campaign of hate and fear succeeded in waking up the public from the election fatigue and raised participation levels among both the Jewish Israeli public and the “48 Palestinians” that have the right to vote.
The results, as most of the world noticed, was that the proudly thuggish Ben-Gvir was the hero of the day, with his Religious Zionist List emerging as the third largest party, and Netanyahu received his long-dreamed of majority. Netanyahu can now ride on the back of the racist puma to escape the prison gates that threatened to close on him. In the 80s the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane used to say to Israelis: “I say what you think”. Now it is Israel’s coming out party. It is time to throw away the masks and declare itself the Apartheid state – based on racism, settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing – that it always was.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU RIDES ITAMAR BEN-GVIR, AND THE GHOST OF MEIR KAHANE, BACK TO POWER IN ISRAEL’S RECENT ELECTIONS. (CARTOON: CARLOS LATUFF)
What actually happened in the elections?
The Israeli electorate continued a long one-way journey to the religious racist right. It is a combination of several long-term trends:
The growing orthodox Jewish religious communities and the alliance between the orthodox leadership and the secular right;
The growing number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, where the conflict with the Palestinians is much more violent;
The hijacking of the army and state apparatus by the politically-dynamic settler community with the quiet consent of the apathetic old elites;
And finally, the illusion about the existence of a Zionist-left is slowly but steadily fading.
There was actually no big shift from the voters in this election. In May 2021, one ultra-right party, Yamina (Hebrew for “to the right”), agreed to join the anti-Bibi camp, in return for the appointment of its leader, Naftali Bennett, as prime minister, and the ability to dictate the government’s racist and neo-liberal, anti-social agenda. Now that that government dissolved, Yamina’s voters have returned to their natural place. All the rest of the shifts in the results are due to the self-inflicted injuries from the leaders of the “alternative” camp.
It is all the same old Israeli racist politics, where the Palestinians are not considered a legitimate part of the political game – no thinking about a political solution is allowed, and no Arab can share any shade of power. It is a colossal repeat of the fiasco in 2020, when general Benny Gantz ran away from the prospect of leading a government supported by Arab Knesset members and agreed to support a Netanyahu government which he had promised to prevent. Now in this election, the whole Lapid government ran away from its own shadow in an effort to avoid the accusation of “leftism” or “relying on Arabs”, to the point of self-destruction.
After Bennett’s party members deserted him one after the other, he finally toppled his own government leaving the helm to Lapid. Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, both aspiring to lead the anti-Bibi block, focused their election campaigns on discrediting each other. Each of them tried to burnish his credentials by killing more Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Merav Michaeli, from the disintegrating old Zionist Labor Party, refused to form even a technical block with the similarly decaying Meretz, fearing that her party, that boasts of the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 occupation, would be painted as too leftist. And, finally, Balad claims Lapid conspired with the leaders of the Arab Joint List to throw Balad off the list at the last minute in an attempt to make the list more palatable as partners for a future Zionist coalition. To do this they needed to remove from the Knesset the only voice that dared to speak (in a low voice) about “transforming Israel to a state of all its citizens”. These last two decisions alone, throwing out Meretz and Balad, are directly responsible for the fact that Netanyahu now has a majority and can build his fully right-wing government.
In the ashes after their self-made defeat, all the leaders of this “alternative camp” are blaming each other and destroying whatever remains of their chances to return to power anytime soon.
How dangerous is the new government?
On November 3, as I write this, Israel’s occupation forces killed four Palestinians in the West Bank, one of them a 14-year-old child. According to a report that was published by the UN on the day of the elections, 2022 witnessed more killings of Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces and settlers than in any other year since the UN started to monitor such killings in 2005. And this took place under a government fiercely supported by the fake “Israeli Left” of Meretz, and that could exist only thanks to the support of an opportunistic Palestinian politician like Mansour Abbas.
Will Netanyahu’s new far-right government kill more? Sure, they might. But it was never Israeli public opinion that limited atrocities against the Palestinians. The basic fact is that Israel needs the support of the United States (and, to a lesser degree, Western Europe) militarily, economically, and politically to ensure its continuing impunity for performing crimes against humanity. The main power that may restrain Israeli war crimes is pressure by western powers, motivated by the fear of backlash by the Arab masses. One encouraging signal is that there were already some warning signals from Israel’s international backers following the election results.
However, me and many others also have personal reasons to be concerned. If Ben-Gvir were to become Minister of Internal Security, as has been reported, he might send the police knocking on my door. This is the additional threat of the fascists, not only the military occupation, but also targeting political opponents. Thinking about this direct threat, I can’t help but remember that the last time they came to take me for Shabak interrogation, in April 2021, they didn’t knock on my gate but literally knocked it down. So, political oppression is nothing new either. Maybe under the new government more people will finally understand that “Israeli Democracy” doesn’t exist, and hence can’t be defended or saved.
The real struggle
The struggles for democracy, for human rights, for Palestinian liberation, for the right of return, for the establishment of a free, secular, democratic state in Palestine – all these essential struggles can’t take place within the framework of the Knesset – the Legislative Assembly of Apartheid Israel. The Palestinian struggle was not part of these elections – but the elections happened in the shadow of this struggle.
With the ascendance of the Religious Zionism camp, the settlers and racist mobs who were attacking and lynching Palestinians in the mixed cities in May 2021 gained their recognition and place as a major political force in Israel.
Another echo of May 2021 can be seen in these elections. It is the success of Balad as an independent party. The party, which had just a single deputy in the last Knesset, gained 3% of the vote and could have 3 or 4 members if it was not for the 3.25% minimum barrier for representation. Balad received most of its votes from the young Palestinians that defended their neighborhoods against Ben-Gvir’s thugs (and the Israeli police and border guard) in May 2021. Most of the radical youth would not naturally vote in Knesset elections. And now Balad, in spite of all the support it received, is out of the Knesset also. Could it open the road for the development of a new Palestinian alternative, independent of the Israeli-dictated frameworks?
And finally, a personal word again… In the grassroots movements that I’m a member of, Herak Haifa and Abna elBalad, we have no illusion that any real change can be achieved through the Knesset. We boycotted the elections as we always do. In these last elections everybody expected that there would be historic gains for the election boycott, with as many as 60% of those Palestinians that are allowed to vote refusing to take part. But the horror campaign had its effect, and Palestinians voted in higher-than-expected numbers, maybe 54%. The boycott movement stayed unusually low-profile. The leaders of the Arab Knesset parties and the fake Zionist “left” turned hysterically to the Palestinian voters to save us all from the fascists. If they ever believed their own words, they wouldn’t have destroyed their election chances by their own actions.
As a person that spends much of his life organizing and participating in demonstrations, I had an extraordinary experience today (Friday, September 2, 2022), taking part in the biggest demonstration I’ve ever seen.
We just happened to be in Buenos Aires in Argentina, in a family visit. Yesterday’s evening we were sitting at Adam’s apartment when, suddenly, his room-mate went in and informed us that some Neo-Nazi tried to shoot Argentina’s vice president and former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Soon we were watching videos of the assassination attempt on several TV channels and social media. Adam said there might be a general strike the next day, but then Argentina’s president spoke to the shocked and angry people and said the next day will be “a national holiday to allow Argentines time to express themselves”.
In the subte
The next day we had to find out what this holiday would mean. Schools were closed and we’ve seen only a few of the endless fleet of buses that are usually buzzing around in Buenos Aires. They said the subway (locally known as “subte”) would run a limited service, but it still seemed the safest bet.
The “A” line to the city center was crowded at its utmost capacity. I had to actually push the people standing near the doors to create some small space for my body. And I was also pushed in my turn into the compressed mass by the people that joined us at the next station.
Travelling in an overcrowded subway, pressed body to body against complete strangers, is not a pleasant experience, bringing to the extreme the alienation of our city life. But then something miraculous happened. Somebody at the other side of the car started singing, and soon most of the people on the car joined. It came out that we were all going to the same demonstration. We were not complete strangers anymore; we had our common cause and purpose.
How big it was?
I thought we were going to demonstrate in Plaza de Mayo – the traditional place for Argentina’s demonstrations in front of Casa Rosada (the Pink House), the president’s office. When Adam said we will go off the subte two stations before, I suspected that he wanted to avoid the crowd. But when we emerged from the subway station to the street, it was already full with thousands of people on both sides, all marching toward Plaza de Mayo.
Usually, when you try to evaluate how many people took part in a demonstration, you measure how much space it occupied. Did it fill the square? If there was a march, how far were the last marchers from its beginning? But today’s demonstration in the center of Buenos Aires didn’t fit into any of these measures. People filled the square from the morning, and filled the streets around it. When we arrived there in the afternoon there were still endless streams of thousands of people coming to join the protest.
When the street was blocked with demonstrators and it seemed we will never make it to Plaza de Mayo, we switched to a parallel street. It was also full of people marching with flags and slogans, singing, shouting, jumping and dancing.
I felt like the kid that was all his life playing football in the neighborhood, and now came for the first time to see a match in the top league.
Some background
I don’t know Spanish and don’t claim to have deep knowledge of Argentina’s class struggle and politics. And this post is not intended to try to summarize what (little) I’ve learnt about it from reading the news… I will just mention here some basic facts, to help the readers that need this background. If you’re familiar with Argentina’s basic politics, you may skip this section.
Argentina is a third world country, suffering from imperialist super-exploitation. It is still traumatized from a murderous CIA-sponsored military dictatorship that ruled and terrorized the population between 1976 and 1983, murdering tens of thousands of political and social activists.
The roit police was hiding on a side-street
Argentina’s politics is dominated by Peronism, a heterogeneous political current named after Juan Peron, who was Argentina’s elected president for 3 (non-consecutive) terms, until his death in 1974. Peron was widely supported by the working class and is identified with important social reforms, but he was not a socialist. In fact, Peron explained that improving the lot of the workers and poor masses was the best way to prevent a socialist revolution. There are many different Peronist political currents, both right and left.
The election of Nestor Kirchner as president in 2003, in the middle of deep economic crisis, and his replacement by his wife Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in 2007 – 2015, consolidated “Kirchnerism” as the main current of Peronism. Kirchnerism represents a more coherent “left-of-center” approach: staying within the capitalist political framework, but attempting to strengthen the local economy and improve the lot of the working class.
Argentina under the Kirchners saved itself from economic collapse by refusing to pay its external debt, much of which was accumulated by the military dictatorship buying weapons to murder Argentine’s people. In spite of attempts by the imperialist powers to punish Argentina, the Kirchners led it through a decade of fast economic growth and improving social conditions. But finally the tightening economic siege had its effects and the government lost popularity. In the 2015 elections Cristina could not stand again for presidency, after serving two terms. The Peronist candidate lost and Argentina entered a period of destructive neo-liberalism under right wing president Macri.
Before the next elections in 2019, the United State tried desperately to prevent the Peronists from coming back to power. The IMF gave Macri the biggest ever loan in its (the IMF’s) history – 57 billion dollars. This money disappeared without any visible benefit to Argentina’s economy. Cristina, still under constant attack from the capitalist media and elements of the “law enforcement” establishment, agreed to a role as vice president under more “moderate” (i.e. bluntly pro capitalist) President Alberto Fernandez (no family relation). They won the elections, but their government suffers the combined pressure of the IMF paralyzing debt, the economic devastation from the pandemic, the constant resistance of local capitalists and its own internal divisions.
If there was ever a “debt trap”, the IMF’s loan to Macri is probably one of the most damaging types of it. Under Macri, the IMF’s dollars were used to enable the local and international capitalists to draw their money from Argentina in hard currency, driving inflation up and depriving the country of much needed investment. When the new Peronist government came to power, it was paralyzed by the impossible demand to pay back the loan. As of now, after long negotiations, the government reached an agreement to repay the debt gradually, which forces it to perform an austerity program at the expense of the basic needs of the population. The left wing within the Peronist coalition objected to the agreement, but it was approved in parliament with the votes of the right wing opposition.
Thinking about Peronism
Once again, I must emphasis that I only bring my impressions as a stranger that doesn’t speak the local language, and not any studied analysis.
We were slowly navigating along the long columns of marchers that were stuck in the streets and avenues leading to Plaza De Mayo. Moving in the narrow human streams through the crowd, we made it all the way to the center of the Plaza. The crowd was very heterogeneous, bringing together workers, students and the capital’s professional classes.
Looking around I’ve seen many different group of demonstrators, many of them carried carefully prepared flags, slogans, pictures and shirts. I was impressed by the fact that I didn’t see any dominant groups or slogans. Of course, support of Cristina against the assassination attempt was a common theme, and pictures of Peron, Evita, Nestor and Cristina were held by many groups. But you could see also Che Guevara, Chavez, Evo Morales and others. The signs and slogans indicated the presence of trade unions, different political groupings and grass root movements. The slogans were mostly left wing, demanding social justice, speaking about struggle, revolution and people’s power.
I thought about the transformation that happened in many countries around the world, where in the twentieth century the struggle for social justice was dominated by few hegemonic political parties. Mostly it was the pro-imperialist Social Democracy and the Stalinist Communist Parties. In the twenty-first century we witnessed the fast decline of many of those traditional parties, and the emergence of new types of grass-root based wide coalitions, with no single ideology or organizational central control.
Could it be that the Peronist movement succeeds to stay the dominant force in Argentina’s Left because it was such a kind of loose heterogeneous coalition in the first place?
In recent Argentine history, shifts in the political balance were, several times, expressed in shifts in the internal balance within the Peronist movement. In the nineties of the previous century, the heydays of the unipolar world, Argentine was led by Peronist president Carlos Menem, who carried neo-liberal policy. After neo-liberalism led to economic meltdown, the Latin American “Pink Wave” leftward was expressed in Argentina by the shift inside Peronism and the emergence of Kirchnerism as the main tendency. After losing the elections to the anti-Peronist Macri in 2015, and still under pressure from imperialism and local capitalists, the Peronists succeeded to regain power in 2019 by an internal shift to the right, under current president Alberto Fernandez.
Now, that Latin America is experiencing its second Left Wave, with popular struggle bringing more leftist movements to power, from Mexico in the north through Colombia and until Chile, could there be another shift to the left inside the Peronist movement?
The political moment
We were speaking with friends in Argentina, trying to understand how they see the assassination attempt and the public response to it.
From our small sample of opinions, it seems that the strongest feeling was the shock and fear at the prospect that political violence might return to Argentina. The country is still traumatized by the terror of the military dictatorship. Many people came to the demonstration not out of support to Peronism, but in an act of solidarity against the attack.
But the attack was not an isolated act by a loony individual. The attacker, as was found later in the investigation, was part of some wider conspiracy. And it came on the background of endless incitement and hate speech. Now there is danger that the counter-measures would include new laws to limit the freedom of expression. Historic experience teaches us that such laws are likely to be used mostly against people that struggle against oppression and exploitation.
The attacks on Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, whether the assassination attempt, the capitalist media’s hate campaign or the endless efforts to criminalize her, are basically not directed against her personally, but are part of the capitalist class attack on the important social gains of the Argentine people.
Now Argentina is faced with a renewed economic crisis. The IMF imposed austerity and the resurgent capitalist class are eroding living standards and social rights. If the Peronist government continues its retreat in front of the international and local rightist pressure, its working class and popular base would be farther frustrated and alienated, and it is likely to be defeated in the election next year. Some of the people we talked with in and around the demonstration expressed the hope that by standing up to the assassination attempt, the leftist forces within and outside the Peronist movement will regroup for a renewed struggle for social justice.
A comment about the BBC
After taking part in a demonstration, I surf the web to see what was written about it in the press. It is a good way to “calibrate” my view of the media, to expose bias and learn from it how to regard reports about events that I couldn’t view in person.
Writing about the assassination attempt, the BBC described Cristina’s supporters, who prevented the attacker from shooting her, as “a mob”!
Nobody knows exactly how many people took part in the solidarity demonstration. I heard different estimations, ranging from the hundreds of thousands to more than a million people. But the BBC reported about it in a few lines, saying only “thousands”…
With the death of Eli Aminov, this week the small community of opponents of the regime of the State of Israel lost one of its clearest and most important voices, a thinker, writer, worker, and political activist whose original thinking influenced multiple generations of activists and writers.
Eli was born in Summayl, a Palestinian village that was transformed into an impoverished Tel Aviv neighborhood in the late 1930s, to a father who had immigrated from Bukhara and a mother who had come from Poland. When he was nine years old, when the State of Israel was established, the family’s Arab neighbors, including Eli’s childhood friends, were turned into refugees, and their homes were given to Jewish immigrants, an event that etched itself deep into Eli’s memory. After his military service, Eli worked in various jobs, and in the course of his life he worked, among others, as a jeweler and as the owner of a print shop.
Eli was a veteran member of the Matzpen organization, which he joined in the beginning of 1967. His signature appears on the historic declaration from the summer of 1967, in which political activists called on the State of Israel to withdraw immediately from the territories that were occupied in the war and to strive for a solution of a just peace with the Palestinian people.
In 1975, Eli left Matzpen to join Brit Hapoalim (the workers alliance organization, also known as “Avantgarde”, the name of its theoretical publication). This was a period of rising mass Palestinian struggle that preceded the general strike and uprising of March 30, 1976, the historic “Land Day”. Brit Hapoalim, which was identified with a Trotskyite anti-Stalinist ideology, emphasized at that time the Palestinian character of the revolution, and called on Jewish activists to join the Palestinian struggle. It called for the establishment of a socialist state in Palestine, emphasized the necessity to dismantle the colonial entity established by the Zionist movement in order to create a basis for a shared future for Arabs and Jews, and objected to the recognition of a right of self-determination for Jews in Palestine – a position that Eli had already championed earlier in internal discussions inside Matzpen.
Eli’s activism was not limited to bringing about an end to the occupation and to the increased militarization of the State of Israel. He also saw the need for presenting a comprehensive alternative, and he was among the first to support the one state solution of a single democratic state in all of Palestine. In the 1990s he initiated the establishment of the “The Committee for one Secular and Democratic Republic in the whole of Palestine”. The committee’s principles, which were phrased in plain language by Eli Aminov and Dr. Yehuda Kupferman, included the call for the establishment of one democratic secular state in all of Palestine, in which the economic infrastructure and means of production would belong to the entire population as a democratic right and an expression of its sovereignty.
Eli was close to Prof. Israel Shahak and one of the executors of his will, together with Dr. Emmanuel Farjoun. In the afterword that he wrote for the Hebrew edition of Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, he reminded readers that Shahak had been one of the first thinkers who had defined Israel as an apartheid state.
In his essay “A ‘Binational State’: The New Deception Replacing the ‘Two State Solution’”, published in 2013, Aminov wrote that “there is no practicable political alternative to a single secular democratic state between the Jordan River and the sea.” In his last essay, “From Land Redemption to Apartheid Regime”, which appeared in an essay compilation published this year by November Books under the name The Nation Trap, he surveys the ways and methods by which the Zionist project, for decades before the establishment of the Israeli state and during all the years of its existence, dispossessed the Palestinians of their land in order to establish a Jewish nation state. He defined the nation state as an “origin-based metaphysical entity”, and described how the methodical land theft became the basis for the system of Jewish-Israeli apartheid laws, which he described in the essay. Aminov wrote about what characterized Israeli apartheid, as compared to the South-African system. His conclusion was: without a fundamental reform transforming Israel from a state based on ethno-religious origins to a secular and democratic state, a remedy to the apartheid regime is not possible. “Ultimately, the ‘Jewish nation’s’ ownership of the land is the material glue that connects the colonial racism of the Zionist movement with the xenophobic racism of Halachic Judaism”, he wrote.
In his final years, despite a marked deterioration of his health, Eli would arrive every Friday to the vigil in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in the company of Nitza Aminov, his former wife, who had remained a close and supportive friend. He regularly posted succinct and pointed comments on Facebook and on various websites, and addressed many current events in local politics. He was a sociable man and an excellent cook who will be sorely missed by his many friends and acquaintances, those who know him personally and those who came to appreciate his character on the internet. May his memory be blessed.
* * *
Eli Aminov in a demonstration – 2017 – from Facebook
So far Ofra’s article. Please allow me to add some personal memories.
I knew Eli when he was a member of “The Revolutionary Communist League” (AKA “Matzpen Marxisti”) in Jerusalem in the 1970s. I had joined Brit Hapoalim (that had split off from Matzpen in 1970) in 1973, and we held pointed discussions with Matzpen and with the various factions that split from it. In 1975, Eli and some of the other members of Matzpen Marxisti decided to join Brit Hapoalim.
Eli told me how he had become a leftist activist. When he was young, he had been a detective with the Jerusalem Police. Around that time, Uri Avnery and the “Ha-Olam Ha-Zeh” group organized civil protests against religious coercion, and Eli had sent the organizers a letter of support. Instead of a response from the intended recipients, he was summoned to be investigated and reprimanded because of his dangerous views. This helped him understand the character of the regime that he was serving, and soon thereafter he resigned and became a democracy activist. The struggle for the separation of state and religion and against the central role of the Jewish religion in the justification and foundation of the racist structures of the Israeli regime always remained a key interest of his.
In the mid 1980s, the period of the activities of the “Committee for Solidarity with Bir Zeit University”, settler rabbi Moshe Levinger would organize provocative demonstrations opposite Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem. The people in the camp asked for our support in holding counter-demonstrations. I remember how we would come from Haifa to Jerusalem and drop in at Eli and Raya’s, his then-partner, enjoy their boundless hospitality, eat, and get organized for the demonstration. From there we would continue to the vigil in Dheisheh, all together, including the children, and after the vigil we would either end up being hosted by activists in the refugee camp and have fascinating political conversations, or we’d end up under arrest at the Bethlehem police compound. And after being released we would know where to go: to Eli and Raya’s.
Later, in the “Abnaa el-Balad” movement, we made a number of attempts to broaden the reach and to recruit Palestinian, Jewish and international partners to the struggle for the Palestinian’s right of return to their land and to establish a secular and democratic state in all of Palestine. Conventions with that goal were held in Nazareth in 1998 and again in Haifa in 2008 and 2010. Eli and the groups of activists that he always collected around him were always our first address when we would look for partners whose loyalty to the democratic route was uncompromising and never in doubt.
After the Munich Conference in support of one democratic state in historic Palestine (July 2012), a communiqué went out, calling for coordinated action in all of Palestine (on both sides of the green line), in the Palestinian diaspora, and in the solidarity movement, around a basic plan that defines the democratic principles of the restoration of Palestinian rights, and to solve the problem of the migrant population that were brought into Palestine in the framework of the Zionist project. Eli and the members of the “Committee for One Democratic State in Historic Palestine” took part in setting up a work group in Jaffa and participated in the coordination meetings with various organizations in Ramallah.
I visited Eli in his home in Jerusalem about two months before he passed away. His body was already weakened by his sicknesses, but his spirit was strong, and his mind was sharp and analytical. We brought up memories from 50 years of joint struggle. Together we analyzed recent international developments and agreed that the increased crisis of imperialist hegemony and the resulting ongoing wars only prove that the democratic solution that we had fought for all our lives was not only the most just solution, but also the only sustainable solution, and that for that reason, the fight will ultimately be won.
Activists in Haifa prevented a construction crew from beginning to destroy the Muslim cemetery in Balad a-Sheikh, but fears remain the bulldozers may return soon.
(The following report appeared on Feb 16, 2022, in Mondoweiss. You can also read it in Hebrew.)
Last week, heavy machinery arrived to carry out excavation work in the Muslim cemetery in Haifa, but activists who were called to the area managed to reach an understanding with the workers and the contractor, and prevent the attempt to damage the cemetery. The event spurred a protest, and on Friday a demonstration was held at the venue, despite intimidation from Israeli security services.
The story of this recent threat began on Monday, February 7, when the threat to the Muslim cemetery in Balad a-Sheikh in Haifa suddenly became very tangible: some heavy machinery for earthwork arrived at the edge of the cemetery, and their operators began preparations to dig.
In early December 2021, when a protest tent was set up on the outskirts of the cemetery, the situation was not clear. Some of the land was expropriated as early as the 1950s, and even though almost 70 years have passed since then, the cemetery continues to exist on the ground. When I reported here on the struggle for recognition of the cemetery, I cautiously wrote that “new building plans are feared.”
The protest tent – guarding the cemetery day and night – photo courtesy of the Waqf Trustees
The precautionary steps and the continuous guarding in the cemetery were proven necessary. When the heavy vehicles arrived, the activists who were called to the scene made it clear to the staff that it was a cemetery. The workers, all Arabs, immediately refused to carry out any work on the site. Following them, the Jewish contractor announced that when he was hired to work on the site he was not told that it was a cemetery, and that he did not intend to carry out the work.
As the whole matter was closed with an understanding between the activists and the workers, the police force that was sent to secure the job was left with nothing to do.
The cemetery, founded in the 1930s on an area of 44 dunams, was used not only by Balad a-Sheikh itself, but by the Muslim community in Haifa and the surrounding towns and villages. Many families in the area have family members buried there.
Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, who was the imam of the al-Istiqlal Mosque in Haifa and a key leader of the Palestinian community, and was a prominent leader of the resistance to the British occupation of Palestine and to the Zionist colonization, was also buried in this cemetery in 1935. For this reason, it has since been called the “Al-Qassam Cemetery” (as opposed to the old cemetery of Balad a-Sheikh itself, named after Sheikh al-Sahli), and has symbolic significance for Palestinian heritage as a whole.
The cemetery in Balad a-Sheikh has been the subject of expropriation, corrupt deals by state officials, and legal and public struggles for decades since the 1950s.
Demonstrators calling for boycott of Kirur Ahzakot – photo courtesy of Nahed Dirbas
In recent years, the court in the Krayot (suburbs North of Haifa) has heard a lawsuit by a company named “Kirur Ahzakot”, which claims ownership of a large part of the expropriated area, against the trustees of Waqf al-Istiqlal. At the end of the hearing, the court rejected the company’s claim to oblige the trustees to vacate the graves. It ruled that if the company wanted to vacate graves, it must first submit construction plans, and if the construction plans required it – submit a request to vacate the graves to the appropriate authority in the Ministry of Health.
Meanwhile, the company is trying to “shorten proceedings” and establish facts on the ground, hiding behind contractors and developers. The police, instead of preventing their actions, unsurprisingly focus their attention on those trying to guard the cemetery.
Calling for boycott of Kirur Ahzakot and Gold Line – photo courtesy of the waqf trustees
The attempted attack on the cemetery was broadcast almost real time on Arab media, and provoked widespread reactions on social media. The Hebrew press, as usual, ignored the incident. On the evening of the day of the attack, in the protest tent, there was a gathering of the Waqf al-Istiqlal trustees, representatives of the families of the buried and the tent committee, along with representatives of protest groups and young people from the Arab neighborhoods of Haifa. They decided to hold a protest demonstration on Friday at 2 o’clock in the afternoon.
Prior to the demonstration, several organizers and activists received calls from people who introduced themselves as police or Shabak (GSS) personnel, who tried to dissuade them from demonstrating. I myself was astonished to receive a call from a person who introduced himself as “Amichai from the Shabak”, and tried to persuade me to “use my influence” to “prevent violence” in the demonstration.
Despite the threats, many dozens of activists came to the demonstration on Friday. Police, reinforced by special forces, surrounded the area and blocked some traffic at the intersection ahead of time. Even before the demonstration began, the police demanded that Palestinian flags will not be hoisted near the main road.
Despite police attempts to prevent it – Palestinian flag appeared in the middle of the demonstration. Photo by Nahed Dirbas.
Several young women carrying flags were stopped by police near the police checkpoint, while the rest of the protesters lined up along the main road, across a bridge that was built over the cemetery. Finally, a large Palestinian flag also appeared in the center of the demonstration. The press later stated that this was probably the first time that a Palestinian flag had been hoisted in the town of “Nesher” (as the area is now called) since the original residents of Balad a-Sheikh were expelled in 1948.
The demonstrators carried signs in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, calling for the cemetery to be respected and not to be damaged. Some of the signs directly blamed the companies involved, “Kirur Ahzakot” and “Gold Line”, along with the Israeli establishment, for harming the cemetery, and called for a boycott of their products.
Some of the calls in the demonstration also referred to the attack on cemeteries as one of the hallmarks of the apartheid state. Sheikh Raed Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement, who was recently released from a lengthy prison sentence, also joined the demonstration and was enthusiastically received by the protesters.
Sheikh raed Salah joined the demonstration and was enthusiastically received – photo by Nahed Dirbas
On the other side of the road, a small counter-demonstration took place, accompanied by photos of ultra-right MK Itamar Ben Gvir and a large poster calling to join his organization, “Jewish Power.”
Meanwhile, the damage to the cemetery was prevented, and the attempt to damage it only provoked and reinforced the call to stop all demolition plans and the demand for recognition of the cemetery and the return of its entire land to the ownership of the Waqf. At the same time, fears intensified of another attempt to mount bulldozers in the cemetery, which might be backed up by the use of massive force, as the police regularly do in forcing demolitions against the Arab Palestinian population.
At the end of the demonstration, activists gathered in a tent to discuss ways to expand the struggle.
We, in Herak Haifa, support the Palestinian activist, academic and blogger Shahed Abu-Salama.
We reject the allegations against her as a smear campaign, organized by Zionist groups in cooperation with Zionist apartheid regime.
Such campaigns take place all over the world, in order to silence the voice of struggling Palestinians, and to oppress any form of Palestinian resistance to the Zionist settler-state, together with anyone who advocates for freedom and justice in Palestine.
Shahed Abu-Salama raises a clear genuine voice, from besieged Gaza and from Sheffield, England. She brings her story and opinions as a Palestinian, a Gaza resident and a young woman activist.
The smear campaign against Shahed Abu-Salama is being held at the same time as the harassment campaign against Palestinian women activists within occupied Palestine, including our comrade Somaya Falah. This campaign is being held by Zionist police and Shabak in the form of detainment, interrogations and incitement via the cooperating Zionist media. Coordinated or not, those cases are parts of an attack on Palestinian women and their right to be involved in the struggle for justice and freedom. With both Shahed and Somaya, part of the intimidation campaign is to sabotage their academic careers, to damage their opportunities to study and teach and to threaten other Palestinian academics.
From occupied Haifa we stand with Shahed Abu-Salama and hold her hands. We join our voice to Shahed’s in the call for ending Zionist apartheid in all parts of Palestine. We stand with activists all over the world who face the Zionist attacks on Palestinians’ freedom of speech.
Together we will exercise our right to call for the end of the siege on Gaza, for the release of the Palestinian prisoners and for the return of the refugees to all parts of their occupied land.
Together we will never stop fighting for freedom and justice in place of the Zionist settler state on all parts of historic Palestine.
Free Haifa 