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Israel is a colonialist project and a product of Western imperialism

Israel is racist, colonial, and fascist (and has been from the start). The founding of Israel was the result of enormous diplomatic and executive power, substantial financing, and immoral military violence. A response to Jeffery Herf.


12/03/2024

Quoting George Orwell, as Jeffrey Herf did, is Orwellian in itself and encapsulates how Zionism endures — by distorting history through the inversion of meanings. Acts of explicit colonialism are portrayed as anti-colonial, fascism is painted as emancipatory, and racism is labeled as secular. Ideologically-driven Zionist academics seek to impose an inconclusive and misleading version of the history of 1948. To uphold this fragile Zionist narrative, selective omission, exclusion, suppression, or concealment of information is employed. This is evident in the Israeli government’s resealing of the Nakba archives and similar framing tactics in Herf’s selective text, which we will debunk throughout this section.

For decades, Israel controlled the narrative of its founding. It took generations under occupation and displacement for education to empower Palestinians to voice their experiences. Media advancements facilitated the circulation of images and stories during the First Intifada in 1987 which contradicted the Zionist narrative and received unprecedented international coverage. The brutality of occupation and the true face of Israel were broadcast for the world to witness. Wolfe (p.387 – 409) argues that Israel operates as a settler-colonial state, following the example of the United States and its unwavering support driven by ideology and geopolitical interests, implemented by the United Kingdom, and ratified by European states’ self-interest under the guise of guilt. Both the founding generation of Zionists and contemporary Zionists are far from being secular; instead, they adhere to a supremacist ideology. We need to recall the violent, colonial, and fascist nature of Zionism and correct Herf’s insinuation of the opposite narrative.

What is the real truth of Israel’s founding?

In essence, the state of Israel was not an overnight colonial project; it began before the emergence of the U.S. as the new superpower after the Second World War. The Zionist movement relied heavily on the United Kingdom – the prevailing imperialist superpower at the time. Foreign actors’ commitment to Zionism began with the British War Cabinet’s considerations after declaring war on the Ottoman Empire in 1914, of Britain conquering Palestine to safeguard the Suez Canal and establish it as a homeland for Jewish people. The British government’s Mandate to Palestine Article 2, put into effect in 1914 and particularly during the so-called mandate years starting in 1917, explicitly declares its intention:

The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.

Unilateral Zionist colonization struggled to make progress in the three decades leading up to the First World War, but the alliance between British imperialism and Zionist colonialism was supported by former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George (1916-1922), and as Sayegh writes (p.212), the appointment of Zionist Jew Herbert Samuel as a British Cabinet minister and the first High Commissioner in Palestine in 1920. George, Samuel, and other powerful European actors facilitated the implementation of the Balfour Declaration, which promised to make Palestine the Homeland of the Jewish people. The World Zionist Organisation was recognized as a representative ‘Jewish Agency’ in Palestine, and was composed of institutions established with the purpose of planning, financing, and supervising the systematic colonization process: The ‘Jewish Colonial Trust’ (1898), the ‘Colonization Commission’ (1898), the ‘Jewish National Fund’ (1901), and the ‘Palestine Office’ (1908) (Sayegh, p.210).

Over the next thirty years, the World Zionist Organisation played a critical role in facilitating the mass immigration of Zionists and the establishment of a Zionist settler community and paving the way for the dispossession and expulsion of the Arab people. Despite Arab protests, these external Western forces were implementing their will and imposed European Jewish immigration on the local Arab population rather than respecting the self-determination of the Indigenous population (Sayegh, p.212).

Lacking a historical presence in the Middle East until 1948, the United States of America had minimal involvement with the Zionist movement, unlike the British. To that point, the Zionist movement only spoke of a Homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine as promised by the British, and not a Jewish nation-state. Whereas the decision-makers in the US-American and British foreign policy establishment might have been almost universally opposed to the creation of the State of Israel for various reasons, the material reality on the ground in Palestine was very different. The phase of establishing the homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine was completed, and the second stage was ripe for the nation-state, inspired by US-American exclusive ideals of self-determination.

Herf writes that from the US administration, only President Harry Truman was for the partition plan and establishment of the state of Israel. In Herf’s argumentation, this positions Israel outside of the project of Western colonialism. Truman’s actions in fact highlight his entanglement with Western colonialism. His support for the UN partition plan and the recognition of the Jewish state stems from his ideological background shaped by his Baptist upbringing and extensive knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. His decisions were not primarily driven by strategic imperatives, as advised by American foreign policymakers, but rather by genuine compassion for Jewish suffering, religious beliefs, and the political advantage of gaining support from American Jews.

The fact that Truman refused to lift the neutral UN arms embargo from November 1947 to May 1948 does not change the fact that, as Leviero states, he agreed to give the Zionists a 10,000,000 US dollar loan after he met personally with Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization and an important figure in the colonization of Palestine. This loan was essential to their war efforts.

Already during the British mandate in Palestine, approximately 30,000 Jews served in the British army from 1939 to 1946, some in special units composed of Jews from Palestine, including the Jewish Brigade (Yad Vashem). Britain equipped, armed, and trained these units in the use of imperial weaponry, tanks, and planes. Contrarily, the British disarmed Palestinians who fought for their sovereignty; the men were arrested, placed in concentration camps, and some were assassinated or exiled. By 1939, 5,000 Palestinians had been killed and 15,000 wounded. In the 1940s, a generation that could have resisted the Zionists was missing. There were hardly any Palestinian institutions or activists left, and Palestinians lacked military and political leadership.

Contrary to Herf’s claim, the embargo affected both sides. As per a U.S. foreign relations document, the Zionists had adequate stocks of small arms and ammunition. They had the capability to support guerrilla warfare with their own weapon industry and had financial resources for arms transactions, unlike the Arabs. Moreover, the Zionists were able to accumulate light weapons and ammunition from Eastern European countries, primarily Czechoslovakia.

Why was the American bureaucracy against the Zionist project in 1947?

While Secretary of State George Marshall and his senior aide George Kennan opposed it, the American public and Congress supported it. As Amitzur Ilan writes in ‘The Origin And Development Of American Intervention In British Palestine Policy 1938-1947’ (p.4), public support was already reflected in Congress in 1922 when it adopted a resolution approving the Balfour Declaration. In 1944, both national parties called for the restoration of the Jewish Commonwealth, and in 1945, a similar resolution was adopted by Congress, making it of “notional” importance for both parties (Ilan, p.175).

The prevailing sentiment among many British and US American leadership and policymakers, including Truman, viewed the “real Palestine” through the religious lens of the land of (European) Jews and Jesus rather than acknowledging the current Arab population. The Jewish renaissance in the Holy Land also appealed to the Puritan evangelicalism of Britain’s leadership.

Truman was torn between considerations of national interests, particularly regarding oil, the fear of communist expansion in the Middle East, and the desire to uphold moral ideals, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Soviet bloc’s support for the Zionists reinforced British and American suspicions that a Jewish state would benefit the interests of Soviet expansion in the Middle East. Yet, the USSR was primarily interested in getting the British out of the Middle East. For this reason, the British were reluctant, yet, as mentioned earlier, the facts on the ground differed greatly.

What did the United States want instead? On March 18, 1948, President Truman met with Weizmann. Truman expressed his desire for a just resolution in Palestine without violence. He indicated that if a Jewish state is declared and the United Nations faces difficulties in establishing a temporary trusteeship over Palestine, the United States would recognize the newly declared state immediately.

Herf highlights that the support for the Zionists was not solely from the Soviet bloc but also from liberals and leftists in London, Paris, New York, and Washington. However, those same leftists and liberals in the imperial core did not recognize an issue with their nations’ colonization of foreign lands and were not in a position to serve as a moral compass. The French colonization of Algeria persisted into the 1970s. Colonizers perceived the colonized natives through a racist lens, depicting them as lazy, lacking knowledge, and racially incapacitated. On the other hand, Atran writes (p.721) that Western countries saw “Jewish civilization” as especially qualified to “bring culture to the desert of Palestine.” They thought Jews would bring back civilization that would function as a very effective guard of Western interests in the region (Atran, p.721).

Frustrated by The State Department officials’ contrary statements to his decision on the partition plan in the UN, writings from the Truman library show that President Truman wrote to his sister, Mary Jane Truman, that the State Department’s “striped pants conspirators” had “completely balled up the Palestine situation.” But, he writes, “it may work out anyway in spite of them.” Truman asserted that the United States did not coerce any nation into supporting partition. This claim, however, appears to hinge on defining coercion solely as direct threats or formal White House communications. In reality, two U.S. Supreme Court justices, Frank Murphy and Felix Frankfurter, reached out to the Philippine ambassador in Washington and sent telegrams to President Carlos Rojas cautioning that a negative vote would lead to the alienation of millions of Americans. American officials employed comparable methods in approaching several countries with a mixed stance. On March 22, 1948, President Truman wrote to his brother Vivian Truman regarding Palestine: “I think the proper thing to do, and the thing I have been doing is to do what I think is right and let them all go to hell.”

Whether it be the Western Left or Liberals, the USSR, the UK, or the US, historical decision-making was predominantly controlled by powerful foreign heads of state, diplomats, politicians, and military colonels of imperial powers. These individuals and powerful countries had no inherent connection to this part of the world or moral authority to decide the fate of the Indigenous population and their land, which makes Israel a colonial project.

Herf mentions Jamal Husayni, the representative of the Arab High Committee at the United Nations, rejecting a Jewish state in Palestine because it would undermine the “racial homogeneity” of the Arab world, attempting to paint Palestinians as racists with this example. Palestinian Arabs perceived Jewish immigrants as religious pilgrims or refugees and welcomed them hospitably. Even Herzl acknowledged the “friendly attitude of the population” (Sayegh, p.221) towards the initial Zionist colonists. Arab friendliness, however, turned into suspicion and resentment as the second wave of Zionist colonization began in 1907/1908. The deliberate displacement of Arab farmers and laborers from the new Zionist colonies, coupled with the systematic boycott of Arab produce, sparked anger among the Arab Palestinian population (Sayegh, p.221). Herf does not mention that the Zionist founding generation did not see themselves as part of the region, conducting themselves in a manner that aligned with and affirmed this perspective:

The State of Israel is a part of the Middle East only in geography, which is, in the main, a static element. From the decisive aspects of dynamism, creation and growth, Israel is part of the world Jewry. From that Jewry it will draw all its strength and the means for the forging of the nation in Israel and the development of the Land; throughout the might of world Jewry it will be built and built again (Sayegh, p.213). 

From Herzl to Weizmann, from Ben Gurion to Goldmann, the leaders of Zionism have all believed and propagated that the main enemy of Zionism is not Gentile ‘antisemitism’ but Jewish ‘assimilation’, as many European Jews believed would be the solution for their suffering (Sayegh, p.214). According to the Zionist doctrine, ‘assimilation’ is viewed as the loss of ‘Jewish identity’ and is the precursor to the end of the Jewish nation. Self-segregation, as per Zionism, serves as the response to the appeal for ‘Jewish assimilation’. By employing this logic that forcefully rejects the assimilation of Jews into non-Jewish societies, the fundamental Zionist principle of racial self-segregation also advocates for racial purity and exclusivity in the designated land where Jewish self-segregation is intended, inherently opposes the co-existence of Jews and non-Jews. The Zionist ideal of racial self-segregation necessitates the relocation of all Jews from their ‘exile’ lands and the expulsion of all non-Jews from Palestine. This full self-segregation is put forward as a requirement for the manifestation of ‘Jewish superiority,’ in line with Zionist teachings. The concept of the ‘Chosen People’ realizing its ‘special destiny’ is envisioned only when unified and isolated (Sayegh, p.215). Principles like self-segregation, exclusivity, and supremacy are what constitute the fundament of Zionism, making it a racist ideology.

To achieve this racial exclusivity, and right at its inception, the Zionist settler-state resorted to enduring, systematic, and relentless violence as a deliberate method to intimidate and displace the Arabs of Palestine. Massacres such as those at Dair Yaseen, Ain ez-Zaitoun, and Salah ed-Deen in April 1948 were strategic actions within a formal program aimed at terrorizing and forcibly removing the Arab population (Sayegh, p.215). This was the beginning of almost 8 decades of employing different forms of violence, subjugation, and forced expulsion, making Zionism a fascist movement.

While the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, did meet Hitler in late 1941, his role with the Nazis is inflated. As Gruner writes, by the time they met, Hitler had already overseen the murder of nearly one million Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. Dieter Wisliceny, an SS official involved in implementing the Final Solution, claimed during the Nuremberg trial that al-Husayni had suggested killing Jews to Hitler and other Nazi leaders. While some doubt Wisliceny’s credibility, believing he aimed to shift blame away from the Nazis onto Palestinians, as is done to this day by contemporary German political leadership, it is evident that Hitler and his associates did not require al-Husayni’s advice or inspiration. The decision to construct the first extermination camp in occupied Poland had been made before al-Husseini even met Hitler.

The founding of the state of Israel was indeed not a miracle but the outcome of meticulous executive planning, diplomatic influential power, substantial financing, and the results of violent paramilitary terrorism and British Army occupation. It was facilitated by the support of imperial colonial powers and a public who subscribed to Christian ideas of the end of days, and a Jewish renaissance in the Holy Land. Out of geopolitical interests, the story of Jesus was reshaped for a mythology creation of a secular Judeo-Christian nationalism; playing a crucial role in the formation of Israel. The myth of Israel as the only so-called democracy in the Middle East is directly borrowed from the United States’ strategy in the 1950s. Both present themselves not as traditional settler colonists but as revolutionary pioneers advocating for self-determination, freedom, and democracy.

Additional Reading

What’s the Story Behind Israeli Settler Farms?

The new US and UK sanctions were imposed mainly on settlers from the “farms” in the West Bank.


11/03/2024

On February 20, 2021, the secretary general of the Israeli settlement movement Amana, Ze’ev (Zambish) Hever, admitted that Amana had established more than 30 settler “farms” in the West Bank, and explained that the impact of these farms is much larger than their buildings area, as the herds that are kept in them need extensive grazing land. The settlers’ farms, Hever explained, “has more than twice the area of built-up settlements… each farm can guard an area of thousands of acres”, and he promised to establish 10 more farms.

Hever was right and indeed, the new farms, through violence and with the help of the Israeli military and police, manage to take control of many of the last grazing and agricultural areas that are available to Palestinian communities. Many suchß communities were already suffering from high rates of poverty, food insecurity, inadequate water supply and unsafe drinking water, lack of electricity, fuel and other basic services. These communities were chosen by the settlers exactly because they have no ability to survive other than grazing their herds and farming their lands.

The settler farms, of which dozens more have been established throughout the West Bank in recent years following the pilot project south of Mount Hebron in the late 1990s, are reminiscent of the “Potemkin villages”, the villages allegedly set up by Prince Gregory Alexander Potemkin during a tour of Tsarina Catherine II in order to create the false impression that he was indeed successful in developing prosperous villages in southern Russia.

Contrary to the story that the Israeli far-right is selling to the Israeli public, these are not young “pioneers” who one day set out on their own initiative to wander and decided to settle the “no-man’s land” of the West Bank, but rather a staged and well-financed performance.

Usually, a young settler couple is deliberately “parachuted” near Palestinian shepherds and farmers communities and in the heart of their pastures and agricultural lands. Much like children receiving a “LEGO Farm” set, the happy settler couple is given an assembly package (worth hundreds of thousands to million of shekels) of mobile residential buildings that later become permanent, tools and vehicles, connection to water and electricity infrastructure, herds of cows, goats or sheep that are supposed to graze in farmland and pastures previously cultivated and grazed by Palestinian farmers for generations. At least with regard to some of the settlers in these farms, it is very doubtful that they were previously involved in any kind of grazing and farming. It seems they jumped at the opportunity to get a farm and land for free, acting instrumentally for apartheid ideology.

The package also includes “Hill Youth”, designed to violently control local Palestinian communities. Their control methods are, among other things, throwing stones at the Palestinian herds, shepherds and farmers; driving vehicles or riding horses into the herds and cultivated fields; sending attack dogs after Palestinians and their herds; beating the shepherds and herds with sticks and whips; setting fire to fields or threatening to set them on fire; threating to stab or otherwise cause bodily harm, and conducting threatening “night visits” to the residential compounds of the Palestinian communities.

In view of the enormous impact of these “farms” on the West Bank, sanctions on individual settlers who operate them are not enough and the sanctions should be extended to target the economic and political actors in Israel who enable establishment of the farms and their operation. The immediate dismantling of these farms must be one of the main demands of the international community from Israel.

Palestine and international solidarity

Notes of a Catalan immigrant in Berlin


10/03/2024

7 October 2023 marked a turning point for many of us. My name is Itziar and I have lived in Berlin for two years. Since I arrived in Germany as a Catalan immigrant, of Jewish descent and committed to the Palestinian cause, I have witnessed the brutality, repression and censorship by the German state against its migrant population, at police, institutional and cultural levels.

To contextualize and explain why Germany (and its population) has a totally unconditional position of support towards the state of Israel, I will highlight a conversation I had the first week of arriving, with a new roommate. She was a sociology student and all afternoon we talked about feminism, antiracism, gentrification, queer movement, etc. Until I mentioned that I had been a member of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions in Israel) group of my university a few years ago. Her reaction was a pale face followed by a “Why?”. She wondered why I was a member of a group like the BDS after having been two hours talking about anti-colonialism. With some perplexity I explained to her that I, as a Jew, felt that I had the responsibility to contribute to the fight for the Palestinian cause. She replied “I know that my grandparents fought for the Nazis, and for this reason I cannot speak about this issue.” I thought “just you – more than anyone – should talk about it”.

This situation has been repeated time after time at work, and in social and political situations. The reflection I have is that Germany has not understood or overcome the Holocaust. The deeply racist structures of German society remain as valid as before. What has changed now is the political subject: if yesterday it was the Jews, today it is the Arabs. The identity policies of a so-called ‘left’ (more like progressive liberalism, than a true anti-fascist left) abandons a minority that does speak of Palestine and opposes the existence of the state of Israel.

In the first weeks after 7 October, the German state armed a massive institutional and media campaign to suppress the movement that emerged mainly from the Palestinian community. Germany is the European state with the most members of the Palestinian diaspora in Europe. During the first demonstrations responding to the bombings in Gaza, the Berlin police, illegally carried out a massive campaign of violent indiscriminate arrests. Targeting those wearing the Palestinian Kufiya, flew Palestinian flags or simply called out ‘Free Palestine’. Once the police even violently arrested a nine-month pregnant woman and pulled the hijab off another. Just a few of  many cases of police violence. Another chant still banned today is “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” where any individual shouting this slogan in public is automatically arrested. The pretext is they deny Israel’s existence which is therefore an antisemitic chant. Arrests were concentrated, during demonstrations, but also in the Neukolln neighbourhood in the Arab neighbourhood. The police presence continues to grow and patrol there to now.

In the initial demonstrations, the state also banned the existence of the Samidoun collective – categorized as a “terrorist organization”. The police carried out a coordinated attack, with the media present, of three of the social premises where various feminist and anti-racist groups meet. This included the much-loved Cafe Karanfil, a social coffee house especially by the Palestinian and migrant community, organize cultural and political activities. The attack took place during the early hours of the morning. These images circulated throughout Germany, reinforcing the Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian discourse.

The other sector in which the Arab community has suffered (and continues to suffer) systematic discrimination is the education sector. In schools there was a very strong wave of racism, perpetuated by both teachers and students. The state forbade students from carrying the Palestinian flag and the Kufiya in class, as symbols that ‘instil antisemitism’. Teachers were threatened with being firing if they did not adhere to the regulations or if they showed support for Palestine to pupils. This culminated in a teacher’s assault of a high school student with a Palestinian flag on their back, at a school in Neukolln. A few weeks later a girl was assaulted in the toilets of another high school outside Berlin, for carrying a chain around her neck under the name of Allah. The girl was taken to hospital in serious condition. In Wedding, a Muslim student was expelled from class for praying in silence in a corner of the classroom. Yet legislation dictates to have rooms to pray for students who want it. This school had previously been awarded as an educational institution committed to the anti-racist struggle.

Obviously, there was a strong response to this wave of discrimination, which strengthened the movement among students. However, on February 2, the police began another campaign of racism in schools. They presented themselves at the gates of schools to distribute flyers urging teachers and educators to call the police if hearing children and students state aloud that “Israel is committing a genocide”. This state-made steering of Zionist propaganda, includes how media lies when covering demonstrations or actions in solidarity in Palestine. It accuses protesters of antisemitism (although most of these calls are organized by Jewish groups among others). It empowers part of the German population to assault people in public space with complete impunity, simply for bringing a Kufiya or an adhesive of a watermelon.

With others, I was flyposting on the occupation in Palestine on the doors and walls of the street, when we were suddenly attacked by a man who came at us from behind running with the sheet in his hand. We had to hide in the  subway, behind a column, to avoid aggression, while the man searched for us along the train platform. A friend was verbally and physically assaulted in a supermarket, by a couple claiming to be from Israel, shouting that the Kufiya he was carrying was a “threat to his existence” after pushing him through the corridor. And another colleague (also with a kufiya) was also assaulted by three people who took him by the jacket, broke the buttons and drove him out of the wagon pushing him while they called “auslander raus” (immigrants outside). These are just cases that I have witnessed or experienced first-hand. The story is repeated by every person involved in the movement for Palestine here in Berlin.

On 22 February, the President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmaier of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) met with the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, to ensure more military and economic support for the Palestinian genocide. To prevent demonstrations to reject Herzog’s presence, the police fenced off the entire Tiergarten area. Tiergarten is a park converted into a memorial area for the victims of the Second World War. It is no coincidence that Germany invited the person responsible for a current genocide to broadcast live on TV, to meet in a space full of sculptures and memorials to honour the victims of Nazism. In this same concentration, which finally took place next to the park, one of the protesters leading the chants was arrested for shouting “Zionism is Fascism”.

Before this meeting, on 3 February, the state promoted a public day against the rise of the extreme right led by the AFD (Alternative für Deutschland) party, which took place in front of the Bundestag with hundreds of thousands of attendees. Some of the groups in solidarity with Palestine convened a block to have a presence and denounce the hypocrisy of parliamentary parties and self-called “left” sectors, in supporting Israel and silence the Palestinian voices within the anti-fascist movement.  From the outset, the police banned Palestinian flags under the pretext of ‘you cannot show national flags’ (while Israeli flags with rainbows were flying unpunished). The Palestinian flag is not a national flag, but a symbol of indigenous and anti-racist resistance. One of the organizers of the block and recognized activist, Rachel Shapiro, of Jewish origin – suffered an assault by a German man. He spat in her face while accusing her of antisemitism. Is there anything more antisemitic than a German spitting at a Jewish person in the middle of 2023? At the end of the act I heard one protester talking to another saying, ‘I don’t understand why these people should come with Palestinian flags to the demonstration against the AFD’. This phrase seemed to me to be very conclusive of the problem with the German left.

This is an absolute tokenization of antisemitism, so obsessive as an excuse to expand their discourses of anti-Arab hatred and Islamophobic racism. I would like to highlight the slogan “Nie wieder ist jezts” (or ‘never again is now’) refering to the Holocaust. It is on the lips of the entire German population which is currently legitimizing the genocide against the Palestinian people. It has the aim of evading the historical responsibility that Germany has both for the crimes of Nazism, and for the participation in the foundation of the state of Israel. Germany is an imperial power interested in the geo-resources of Palestine, just as the United States, Great Britain and all the Western powers that continue to legitimize an illegal, genocidal, supremacist and fascist state.

Despite this, solidarity with Palestine has grown substantially since October 7. Street protests have gained ground, thanks also to international pressure and solidarity throughout Europe and other countries. Especially in the cultural context, where groups of artists and activists have coordinated a movement to publicly denounce all institutions giving voice to the Zionist narrative. These actions on occasion, resulted in institutional crisis, or being forced to rethink their pro-Israeli policies. For example, the Berlinale film festival, which at the request of the mayor of Berlin of the CDU (Union Christian Democrats of Germany) Kai Wegner, included representatives of the extreme right AFD in the program. These were disinvited because of protests. Later, Wegner criticized the speech of an Israeli filmmaker who called for equality with the Palestinians, which Wagner called antisemitism.

Another action was a performative activity at the Hamburger Bahnhof gallery which exposed the artist Tania Bruguera. The organisers of the action, Thawra and Palästina Spricht accused Bruguera of expressing “unconditional support for Israel” and of supporting a demand by the government in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt that applications for German citizenship must sign a loyalty oath to Israel (this demand has since been withdrawn).

As a final reflection I would like to emphasize two points: the first is to consider the Zionist ideology as something inherently antisemitic. This given the current context and witnessing how the German extreme right (and all other parties) silences, delegitimizes and attacks any Jewish voice critical of Israel. A radical opposition between Judaism and Zionism is needed. Zionism has stripped the Jewish identity and used it to carry out ethnic cleansing in the service of the West. Germany remains in the same historical role as it did 80 years ago. And the second is the relevance of organizing, being present at the demonstrations, talking about Palestine in our environments and always questioning racist discourses. The situation in Germany is critical but thanks to international solidarity our movement has been able to consolidate, grow and confront the state, the police and the dominant narrative. For this reason I encourage each and every reader of this article to participate in your local calls and continue with BDS, and thus strengthen the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and all the oppressed peoples of the world.

This article was originally published in Catalan in El Septembre

“It’s So Berlin!” 8: Tourist Attraction

The eighth installment in our series of photographs and cartoons about Berlin.


09/03/2024

Photo: Rasha Al-Jundi

 

People visit the city for its history, infamous rave or night life and quirky punk-rock identity… They choose to see what they want to see and ignore the increasingly visible “uncomfortable” sightings , such as the homeless… Nonetheless, an accurate census of this group is not easy to come by. Old estimates put the population at 10,000 individuals in Berlin alone.

 

Cartoon: Michael Jabareen

 

Like other sister European cities, the homeless community in Berlin make up a core part of the urban dwellers. Visibly, they can come from any background and many struggle with drug and alcohol abuse. Albeit being a frequent sight on the streets, under bridges and on trains, it is very common for them to go completely unseen by the rest of the people in those spaces.

On the other hand, tourists flock Berlin in large numbers, and in recent years, they are also frequently seen crowding the streets almost all year long. People visit the city for its history, infamous rave or night life and quirky punk-rock identity. Just like typical tourists though, visitors don’t really see the city. They choose to see what they want to see and ignore the increasingly visible “uncomfortable” sightings , such as the homeless.

In this image, the abandoned item is a sink, that seems to have been left for so long that graffiti artists included it in their works that cover the wall in the background.

Titled “Tourist Attraction”, we decided to tackle the issue of the highly visible yet invisible homelessness and ignorant tourism in one frame. A homeless man is featured sitting on the side of the pavement with his scarce belongings while tourists focus on the graffiti on the wall. They directly ignore his presence that he almost seems a part of the graffiti, a typical Berlin “tourist attraction”.

Many civil society organizations work to support the homeless population around the city. Hot meals, donations and psychosocial support are regularly offered. Shelters are also available. Nonetheless, an accurate census of this group is not easy to come by. Old estimates put the population at 10,000 individuals in Berlin alone. Activists also report a visible increase in homelessness among migrants. State sponsored shelter options are hardly enough.

When we asked a few Germans what they thought about the homeless population, their general replies usually took an accusatory tone, stating that people choose to be homeless. Drug or alcohol addiction and mental illness enhance negative stereotypes. While kindness is present among some, reflections among others reek of white privilege.

Living on the streets is a harsh reality and each homeless person has a story behind their reality. As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote “Think of others”. The privileged have a roof over their heads to do just that.

Image taken in Friedrichshain, Berlin (2023).

Of Women and Resistance in Kashmir

On International Women’s Day, we highlight today the struggle of women in Kashmir living under military occupation.


08/03/2024

Content note: Discussion of military violence and rape

The following text is an excerpt from the book Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? by Essar Batool, Ifrah Butt, Munaza Rashid, Natasha Rather and Samreena Mushtaq, first published by the New Delhi-based feminist press Zubaan in 2016. The book chronicles a case of mass sexual assault and rape committed by the Indian Army in the villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Kashmir, in February 1991. The day, 23rd February, is also commemorated as Kashmiri Women’s Resistance Day.

What is it like to be a Kashmiri woman today? For any woman, fighting the dominance of men is hard enough, no matter where you come from, but in Kashmir we carry the burden of living two oppressed identities. We grow up learning two realities of life, which, however hard you might try, cannot be separated from each other. To begin with, there is silence, unfortunately taught as a survival technique to women across society. Patriarchy seems natural and eternal, it is the governing principle of the lives of women, imbibed through society, religion, tradition and culture. But we bear another burden: the silences of an occupation are even more deafening.

We must not just fight back against the everyday threats, like street harassment and sexism, but also against an occupying force that closely monitors every attempt to speak against it and the multitudes of its uniformed representatives dotting our valley. All Kashmiris of our generation have vivid, early memories of guns, the sounds of bullets, of Hindi-speaking army men entering their homes, and those humongous green, terror inducing, armoured vehicles that often announce ‘rakshak’ in screaming white letters. The earliest memories of her teenage years that any young Kashmiri woman will have are that of angry-looking armed men at street corners, heads covered in black bandanas, staring at any passing girl and jeering and making lewd remarks. To someone asking why we’re accusing the Indian Armed Forces when Kashmiri men in their position might do the exact same thing, we are tempted to say, try and talk back to someone, the muzzle of whose gun is staring at the tiny space between your eyes.

The historian Uma Chakravarti quotes a Manipuri woman who was raped by the armed forces:

“They have the power and they have the guns! I think we better stay silent.” [1] The gun, a symbol of power for them and of fear for the people, is enough to silence voices of dissent, however legitimate they might be. The first thing a Kashmiri woman is taught is to be aware of her vulnerability, to understand the many struggles she will have to undergo to prevent herself from becoming a victim. Dr Yakin Erturk, former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, has pointed out, “Militarized environments empower both public and private patriarchy.”

The women of Kashmir have borne many losses. Some have lost their lives, becoming the collateral damage of conflict. Others have lost their loved ones, watched them disappear into oblivion, sometimes to have them returned tortured, broken, and destroyed. Many live under the threat of imminent loss and that much dreaded word, rape. Rape has been used as a weapon of war and terror in Kashmir. Kunan-Poshpora is just an obvious and blatant example of the sexual violence that is committed with impunity against women in Kashmir. We live sexual violence in the subtlest forms every day. We stand at the gate waiting for loved ones to return, apprehensive and anxious. We are mothers, daughters, wives and sisters, worried sick for the safety of our families, asking our men for the nth time if they have checked that they’re carrying their I-cards, reminding them to avoid any green/khaki human form, urging them not to get into any trouble; and telling our young women to always be very careful, to only go out if they must, and not alone, and to come home before dark. Avoid the bunkers that house the uniformed men. Take an alternate road. Don’t use that road unless you have to. Apprehension is what we feel on a daily basis. This is how we live. We have had lullabies of bullets drifting us to sleep, the smell of blood waking us up, fear keeping us busy and hope keeping us alive. We Kashmiri women have been at the centre of the conflict, even though we have almost always been portrayed as victims, on the sidelines of the armed uprising. We too have resisted and survived.

We have chosen to resist in ways that range from a simple curse or a kangri thrown at an armed officer trying to molest us, to participation in stone throwing, street protests, and mass funerals, to supporting the armed struggle and organizing and working in civil society to express our political opinions and affiliations.

Anjum Zamrooda Habib, an eminent political, social and women’s activist and author of a jail memoir, Prisoner No. 100, spent five years in the infamous Tihar jail, held on fabricated charges. In an interview with Mushtaq ul Haq Sikander, she remarks on the non-recognition of the sacrifices made by women: “When resistance is amalgamated with politics only power seems to be the concern, plus in the war zone memories are short lived, add to this the fact that the whole world is male dominated and men don’t want to acknowledge the sacrifices of women and all these factors add up to foster this apathy.” The fragility of memory coupled with the general patriarchal nature of society tends to make us forgetful or at least ignorant of the participation of women in resistance.

Aasiya Jeelani is a name known to many Kashmiris: a young journalist and human rights activist who lost her life fighting for justice while on an election-monitoring mission in 2004. She edited and wrote in Voices Unheard, a magazine that was dedicated to the issues and struggles of women in Kashmir. As Suemyra Shah says in her tribute to Aasiya [2], “Aasiya was one of the many ‘behind the scenes’ women who was a living example of the strength of Kashmiri resistance in the face of many ugly years of tyranny and oppression imposed by outside intruders.” There are other such examples of individual women resisting publicly in a strong political voice.

However, there are thousands of other nameless and anonymous Kashmiri women who have together become a single and strong voice of resistance. In her account of the lives of Kashmiri women, Gita Hariharan writes:

“All the women spoke of the unbearable odds against conducting such safe, healthy, normal lives. But all of them, without exception, also spoke, in one way or the other, about their battles against these odds. About their anger and frustration; their protests; their plans of action; their travel in search of support. These women have had to make the language of resistance their mother tongue.”

The younger generation of women in Kashmir has become increasingly participative in the discourse of dissent and resistance.

All of us vividly recall moments from 2008 and 2010 when killing young Kashmiri men seemed to be the favourite pastime of the Indian Army. Protests were held in the women’s colleges we studied in. Nobody stopped us, we were only asked to be non-violent and not indulge in sloganeering of any sort. Anger manifests itself in various ways: joining a protest in a college was one of them. We marched all in white, protesting the brutal, cold-blooded murders; shouting slogans of ‘azaadi’, though we were warned not to, and we rejoiced when similar slogans echoed from the neighbouring boys’ college.

But you don’t have to be a college-going, middle-class Srinagar girl in a protest march to have a political opinion about the occupation. Women have resisted through more traditional cultural channels and have voiced their feelings quite clearly. We have been told of women glorifying those killed by the Indian Army as martyrs, through wanwun, the songs sung at moments of celebration in Kashmir. Seema Kazi states, quoting Rita Manchanda in her book, Gender and Militarisation, that as a cultural expression of resistance, “women would break out into a wanwun, the traditional Kashmiri song of celebration, intertwining couplets in praise of local mujahideen (freedom fighters).” [3] Women have mourned for the men they lost, for the sons who never came back, for the daughters who were raped, and for their beloved and beautiful land under the siege of tyrants. When the women of Kunan Poshpora speak, whether publicly or privately, it is clear that they believe that they were attacked because they are Kashmiri – in the same way as young Kashmiri men are martyred – and the women’s sacrifices are as great as those of any male martyrs.

Yet for years the women of Kashmir and of Kunan Poshpora have been portrayed as victims rather than survivors. The Indian media has shown them as weak burqa-clad women who are passive and voiceless. But lately, even in mainstream media accounts, the Kashmiri woman has been seen in a new avatar, brandishing a stone in her hand, defiantly challenging the Indian Armed Forces on the streets. Sanjay Kak, in ‘The Last Option: A Stone in Her Hand’, remarks:

Until the other day, Kashmiri women were little more than a convenient set of clichés, shown as perpetual bystanders in houses that overlook the streets of protest. When seen outside of that protected zone, they were cast as victims, wailing mourners, keening at the endless funeral processions […] but now an unfamiliar new photograph of the Kashmiri woman has begun to take its place on newspaper front pages. She’s dressed in ordinary salwar-kameez, pastel pink, baby blue, purple and yellow. Her head is casually covered with a dupatta and she seems unconcerned about being recognized. She is often middle aged, and could even be middle-class. And she is carrying a stone.

Kashmiri women are taking over street protests, hurling stones, while breaking traditional stereotypes and inhibitions, and creating a new kind of expression of resistance. Kashmiri women have always been part of mass rallies, and political funeral processions against killings. Soutik Biswas writes, “The coming out of women in the Muslim-dominated Kashmir valley has been helped by the fact that they have been traditionally freer than their counterparts in many parts of the world.” Thus while Kashmiri political life continues to be male dominated, Kashmiri women are coming to the forefront of the articulations of dissent, of resistance, and of freedom.

One such woman is Parveena Ahanger. Parveena lost her 14-year-old son to the elusive, yet much documented phenomenon of ‘enforced disappearance’ back in 1990. While fighting her case in the Srinagar High Court she, the human rights lawyer, advocate Parvez Imroz, and some relatives of the disappeared persons formed the Association of Parents of the Disappeared Persons (APDP), an organization that advocates the cause of those like her son who ‘vanished into thin air’. Parveena is the voice of resistance, and of the relentless search for justice. She transformed her grief into a resolve to fight not only for herself but for hundreds of other parents. The women of Kunan Poshpora speak the same language of resistance; they have been speaking it for 24 years now, fighting it out every moment of the day in numerous ways.

We, a group of young, professional women from Kashmir, resisting in our own ways, have a story to tell: the story of Kunan Poshpora that remains a part of the valley, a story that continues to flow with the streams, fall with the rain, and sleep on the restless earth like the snow.

We are five different girls, born and brought up in the land that is the clichéd ‘paradise on earth’; the place they show on Indian television where girls are dressed in embroidered pherans and decked up in heavy silver ornaments, happily singing bumbro bumbro, and dancing the rouf by the Dal lake, with snow-covered mountains in the backdrop. Well, that is not quite the truth. We breathe air that is heavy with the smell of blood mixed with mud, air that resounds with the noise of army boots and gunpowder. We live in a place where the Indian Army mass raped women in Kunan Poshpora in 1991, and describe any protest against the crime a conspiracy to defame them. The valley is full of cries and wails, of the songs of mothers about their sons who are dead, of women who found their world destroyed overnight, raped by Indian Armed Forces, the men in those hideous green uniforms, the sight of which makes you cringe if you are a Kashmiri woman. It’s not easy for us young women to tell this story of the women and men of Kunan Poshpora. This book is our attempt to tell their stories and build on the struggle that they have started. We are the narrators of this story, members of the support group for Kunan Poshpora, and among others, witnesses to the conflict.

The conflict that has seen a brutal military occupation, countless cold-blooded murders, mass rapes, endless enforced disappearances and creation of mass unmarked graves, has nurtured us. We have been brought up in an environment where words like rape, molestation, and any word with ‘sexual’ as a prefix was not to be mentioned ever. We have grown up learning the ‘safe’, and the ‘politically correct’ language, in our offices and universities. Words like ‘conflict’ have to be replaced by ‘development’; we are taught to be blind to the facts. We have gone through a rigorous grind where we are taught that there is no such thing as a ‘human rights violation’ and that you have to be apolitical to survive. This is a place that is free of the freedom of speech. In Kashmir, any expression against the state is met with stern action and hence the success in creating a mass silence. That is just how it is here; life in a cage where you talk only when it is certified as ‘state language’.

We have studied in universities that don’t allow you to choose politically loaded ‘explosive’ topics for research; where researching about the kangri and pheran is seen as Kashmiriyat, the unique sense of being Kashmiri, and where analytical abilities and political organizing by students are kept in check by making campuses absolutely ‘controlled’.

Yes, this is how we have grown up – women kept oblivious of the atrocities committed on the people of our land in the name of our ‘protection’ in the familial sphere, and of ‘national integration’ in the public sphere. It is important that we tell this story no matter how hard it is, for there have been repeated attempts to bury it, to erase it from public memory. That is precisely why we are writing, why we are narrating the tales of that night and the subsequent 24 years – lest we forget. In a conflict-torn place, the repetition of atrocities by the occupying forces is so systematic that you commemorate all the dates of a calendar by some massacre, killing, disappearance, encounter or rape. Public memory tends to become fragile. It is easier to forget than to remember and live each of these atrocities every day. We might choose to push the memories into dark corners of our mind, but the survivors have no such choice; they are forced to live with their memories, day in and day out. This book is a remembrance, a tribute, a movement against forgetting, a way of preserving and giving our memories back to ourselves, of telling the story of Kunan Poshpora as it happened and the continuing attempts of the Indian Army to obliterate the case and its memories.

1 Chakravarti, Uma (2014). “‘They Have the Power, They Have the Guns – We Better Remain Silent’: The Meaning of Impunity on the Ground” in Patrick Hoenig and Navsharan Singh (eds.), Understanding Impunity: Patterns of Human Rights Violations in India. New Delhi: Zubaan.

2 Shah, S. 2014. ‘A Queen of her Times: ‘Aasiya: Martyr of Peace’. Pp. 38–41. Kashmir. Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society.

3 Kazi, Seema. (2009). ‘Gender and Militarisation in Kashmir’, pp. 135–53. Between Democracy and Nation: Gender and Militarization in Kashmir. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.