Workers Daily Internet Edition Year 2002 No. 78

Year 2002 No.78, April 24, 2002	ARCHIVE	HOME	SEARCH	SUBSCRIBE

Daily On Line Newspaper of the
Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
170, Wandsworth Road, London, SW8 2LA. Phone 020 7627 0599
Web Site: http://www.rcpbml.org.uk
e-mail: office@rcpbml.org.uk
Subscription Rates (Cheques made payable to Workers' Publication Centre):
Workers' Weekly Printed Edition:
70p per issue, £2.70 for 4 issues, £17 for 26 issues, £32 for 52 issues (including postage)
Workers' Daily Internet Edition sent by e-mail daily (Text e-mail):
1 issue free, 6 months £5, Yearly £10

The Day After

From under the rubble of our homes, workplaces, cities and camps, we rise again to proclaim to the Israeli occupiers: you did not break our will and never will!

You have killed, imprisoned, tortured, stole and destroyed, but you will never conquer us or our will to live in freedom and dignity. Here, on the day after, we remain a people with a just cause. We rise again and say, with one voice and will:

First: You, who have deprived our people and the people of the region of security and peace will never enjoy security and peace unless you withdraw from the Palestinian territories back to the borders of the 4th of June 1967, and unless a Palestinian state is established with full sovereignty over its land and water and sky and borders, with Jerusalem its capital, and unless all colonial settlers and settlements are uprooted, and unless there is a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem based on international legitimacy, and specifically UN Security Council Resolution 194.

Second: No one, no matter how big or small, can impose a leadership upon us. We are not a herd of sheep for Sharon or Bush or any other figure to dictate our fate. We decide, and we alone, who leads us and who negotiates in our name.

Third: We support the demand by the UN Secretary General to send international forces to protect the Palestinian people, and to inhibit the occupiers from destroying Palestinian society and its institutions. The delay in deploying such a force has led to the war crimes and massacres that we have warned against and other assaults on civilians, property and institutions. We demand that those responsible for these war crimes and massacres be brought to justice as war criminals.

Fourth: The Palestinian people reserve the full right to confront the occupiers using all methods sanctioned by international legitimacy, until the occupiers and their settlers evacuate our land.

Fifth: The Palestinian people will express its own will on how to confront the occupation and to manage the struggle in all its manifestations, political, diplomatic and using the media, and to assess the previous internal situation and draw lessons from it.

And to show the occupiers that our will is not broken, and that their barbaric onslaught has destroyed so many lives and livelihoods but it could not destroy our rights and our will, or force us to change our narrative, we call on all Palestinians to carry out a series of activities, beginning with mass demonstrations of the 'day after' in all Palestinian communities, to make the occupiers understand and to show the world that we are not broken and never will be, and that we shall win in our goal of living on our land in freedom and dignity.

The demonstrations will start at 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday 24, 2002.

Arab-Jewish Demonstrations

An Arab-Jewish solidarity convoy carrying food to villages, towns and refugee camps in the vicinity of Bethlehem is to take place this Friday, April 26. This is an area where life was completely disrupted because of the conflict, the continuous siege and closure by the Israeli forces, with the destruction of civilian and administrative facilities of the Palestinian Authority. The convoy aims to affirm the ties with the people of the area, and to express solidarity and support.

The convoy will transfer supplies of food and medicine to their Palestinian friends. If the siege continues, the convoy will transfer the supply to another location, chosen by the Palestinian hosts.

Jews for Justice for Palestinians

By Renee Sams, New Worker (NCP)

The Brockway Room in Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, was crowded to the doors with people sitting on the floor at the first meeting of Jews for Justice for Palestinians on Monday, April 22. This organisation was only formed last February to enable Jews in this country to express their opposition to Israeli policies.

They say that "as well as organising to ensure that Jewish opinions critical of Israeli policy are heard in Britain, they will develop ways of extending support to Palestinian people trapped in the spiral of violence and repression and help Israeli groups working with them".

Chairing the meeting, Irene Bruges said, "We want to make sure that those who are in opposition to the Israeli policies are not alone and isolated," and she continued, "We are clearly and very thoughtfully against the military occupation of the West Bank."

On the platform, Adah Kay, who has just returned from Ramallah having stayed there for some weeks with her husband and experienced the gunfire and at times total curfew, said that the failure of the Sharon government "to withdraw from the West Bank is a fatal mistake".

She was brought up and educated in Israel and her family were Zionists and she intends to return to Israel and take up her job there in the university where she is doing research on the "right of return".

She spoke of what it was like to live under a total curfew unable to go out into the town. Her neighbours were very friendly and helpful, and a compound of five houses became a little community, Jews and Palestinians, sharing food and clothes, supporting each other.

They became very dependent on the news, whatever they could get from Israeli radio, television to Al Jazeera and eagerly waited for e-mails from friends. She said she had a "feeling of being suspended in time" and became "glued to the television".

News of demonstrations and meetings all over the world calling for the withdrawal of the military from the West Bank and support for the Palestinian cause from all over the world became of great importance to those shut up inside the compound, and Adah stressed what a great help it was in giving us an "enormous morale boost".

When the curfew was lifted and they were finally allowed to go out of their houses and she saw the devastation caused by the tanks and shells, houses are now only piles of rubble and so many people are now homeless.

Ramallah "was a poor shabby place" before the army moved in, and now "Palestinians are distraught, they only want to be left alone, to be able to rebuild their lives".

This was done by "one of the most sophisticated armies in the world attacking a civilian population". She was angry and felt acute sadness and she added, "I feel ashamed to be a Jew."

Another angry Jew was Ronnie Cohen, a refusenik who would not accept his call up papers and serve in the Israeli army as all the citizens of Israel are expected to do.

He said that the figures that the military give on refuseniks are very unclear, although everybody has noticed how many people are not going into the army due to a doctor's certificate of one kind or another. He thinks this is a way of trying to avoid declaring opposition to the pressure.

One of the pressures is that it is a misdemeanour if you refuse to go and you are then put in prison for 35 days. They can do that as many times as they like. There are problems in taking this road, as employers may find that when you come back to work they no longer have any work for you.

There are now three organisations, he explained, which are trying to help the families involved and to give them support. It is interesting to note that in a recent survey from one of the universities as many as 25% understood the reasons as opposed to previous figures which showed only one or two percent.

Rabbi Jeffrey Newman, who has many friends and family in Israel, said that they are in great fear after the suicide bombers, and he went on to say, "Fear makes people act in irresponsible ways and that is what is happening in Israel now."

He called on Jews to be positive about the situation and call for justice. "Justice," he said, "is a fundamental Jewish concept," and in this situation they have to "be guided by what the Palestinians feel is justice".

Chief Executive of Medical Aid for Palestine, Sa'ida Nusseibeh, stressed that it is important for the "Palestinians to know what the peace groups like Jews for Justice, and Just Peace UK" are doing. "They need to know what is going on," she said. "They need everything we can do to give them moral support."

US Aid: The Lifeblood of Occupation

By Matt Bowles (SUSTAIN - Stop US Tax Funded Aid to Israel Now)

The article from which the following has been extracted was originally published in the March/April issue of Left Turn magazine.

Israel has maintained an illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Palestinian territories) for 35 years, entrenching an apartheid regime that looks remarkably like the former South African regime, [enclosing] Palestinians into small, non-contiguous bantustans, imposing closures and curfews to control where they go and when, while maintaining control over the natural resources, exploiting Palestinian labour, and prohibiting indigenous economic development.

The Israeli military (IDF) – the third or fourth most powerful army in the world – routinely uses tanks, Apache helicopter gunships, and F-16 fighter jets (all subsidised by the US) against a population that has no military and none of the protective institutions of a modern state.

All of this, Israel tells its citizens and the international community, is for "Israeli security". The reality, not surprisingly, is that these policies have resulted in a drastic increase in attacks on Israel. These attacks are then used as a pretext for further Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas and more violations of Palestinian human rights which makes Israeli civilians more secure; all of which further entrenches Israel's colonial apartheid regime. Most Americans do not realise the extent to which this is all funded by US aid, nor do they understand the specific economic relationship the US has with Israel and how that differs from other countries.

The aid pipeline

There are at least three ways in which aid to Israel is different from that of any other country. First, since 1982, US aid to Israel has been transferred in one lump sum at the beginning of each fiscal year, which immediately begins to collect interest in US banks. Aid that goes to other countries is disbursed throughout the year in quarterly instalments.

Second, Israel is not required to account for specific purchases. Most countries receive aid for very specific purposes and must account for how it is spent. Israel is allowed to place US aid into its general fund, effectively eliminating any distinctions between types of aid. Therefore, US taxpayers are helping to fund an illegal occupation, the expansion of colonial-settlement projects, and gross human rights violations against the Palestinian civilian population.

A third difference is the sheer amount of aid the US gives to Israel, unparalleled in the history of US foreign policy. Israel usually receives roughly one third of the entire foreign aid budget, despite the fact that Israel comprises less than .001[%] of the world's population and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes. In other words, Israel, a country of approximately 6 million people, is currently receiving more US aid than all of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean combined when you take out Egypt and Colombia.

This year, the US Congress approved $2.76 billion in its annual aid package for Israel. The total amount of direct US aid to Israel has been constant, at around $3 billion (usually 60% military and 40% economic) per year for the last quarter century. A new plan was recently implemented to phase out all economic aid and provide corresponding increases in military aid by 2008. This year Israel is receiving $2.04 billion in military aid and $720 million in economic aid […].

In addition to nearly $3 billion in direct aid, Israel usually gets another $3 billion or so in indirect aid: military support from the defence budget, forgiven loans, and special grants. While some of the indirect aid is difficult to measure precisely, it is safe to say that Israel's total aid (direct and indirect) amounts to at least five billion dollars annually.

On top of all of this aid, a team from Israel's finance ministry is slated to meet with US government officials this month about an additional $800 million aid package which the Clinton administration promised Israel (and the Bush administration later froze) as compensation for the costs of its withdrawal from Lebanon. The US also managed to find another $28 million in the 2001 Pentagon budget to give Israel to purchase "counter terrorism equipment".

According to the American-Israeli Co-operative Enterprise (AICE), from 1949-2001 the US has given Israel a total of $94,966,300,000. The direct and indirect aid from this year should put the total US aid to Israel since 1949 at over one hundred billion dollars. What is not widely known, however, is that most of this aid violates American laws. The Arms Export Control Act stipulates that US-supplied weapons be used only for "legitimate self-defence".

Moreover, the US Foreign Assistance Act prohibits military assistance to any country "which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognised human rights". The Proxmire amendment bans military assistance to any government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to allow inspection of its nuclear facilities, which Israel refuses to do. To understand why the US spends this much money funding the brutal repression of a colonised people, it is necessary to examine the benefits for weapons manufacturers and, particularly, the role that Israel plays in the expansion and maintenance of US imperialism.

A very special relationship

In the fall of 1993, when many were supporting what they hoped would become a viable peace process, 78 senators wrote to former President Bill Clinton insisting that aid to Israel remain at current levels. Their reasons were the "massive procurement of sophisticated arms by Arab states". Yet the letter neglected to mention that 80% percent of those arms to Arab countries came from the US itself.

Stephen Zunes has argued that the Aerospace Industry Association (AIA), which promotes these massive arms shipments, is even more influential in determining US policy towards Israel than the notorious AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) lobby. AIA has given two times more money to campaigns than all of the pro-Israel groups combined. Zunes asserts that the general thrust of US policy would be pretty much the same even if AIPAC didn't exist: "We didn't need a pro-Indonesia lobby to support Indonesia in its savage repression of East Timor all these years."

The "special relationship" between the US and Israel must be understood within the overall American imperialist project and the quest for global hegemony, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, 99% of all US aid to Israel came after 1967, despite the fact that Israel was relatively more vulnerable in earlier years (from 1948-1967). Not coincidentally, it was in 1967 that Israel won the Six Day War against several Arab countries, establishing itself as a regional superpower. Also, in the late 1960s and particularly in the early 1970s (this was around the time of the Nixon Doctrine), the US was looking to establish "spheres of influence" – regional superpowers in each significant area of the world to help the US police them.

The primary US interest in the Middle East is, and has always been, to maintain control of the oil in the region, primarily because this is the source of energy that supplies the industrial economies of Europe and Japan. The US goal has been to insure that there is no indigenous threat to their domination of these energy resources. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the US made the strategic decision to ally itself with Israel and Iran, which were referred to as "our two eyes in the middle east" and the "guardians of the gulf". It was at this point that aid increased drastically, from $24 million in 1967 (before the war), to $634 million in 1971, to a staggering $2.6 billion in 1974, where it has remained relatively consistent ever since.

Israel was to be a military stronghold, a client state, and a proxy army, protecting US interests in the Middle East and throughout the world. Subsidised by the CIA, Israel served US interests well beyond the immediate region, setting up dependable client regimes (usually military-based dictatorships) to control local societies. Noam Chomsky has documented this extensively: Israel was the main force that established the Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire, for example. They also supported Idi Amin in Uganda, early on, as well as Haile Selasse in Ethiopia, and Emperor Bokassa in the Central African Republic.

Israel became especially useful when the US came under popular human rights pressure in the 1970s to stop supporting death squads and dictatorships in Latin America. The US began to use Israel as a surrogate to continue its support. Chomsky documents how Israel established close relations with the neo-Nazi and military regimes of Argentina and Chile. Israel also supported genocidal attacks on the indigenous population of Guatemala, and sent arms to El Salvador and Honduras to support the contras. This was all a secondary role, however.

The primary role for Israel was to be the Sparta of the Middle East. During the Cold War, the US especially needed Israel as a proxy army because direct intervention in the region was too dangerous, as the Soviets were allied with neighbouring states. Over the last thirty years, the US has pursued a two-track approach to dominating the region and its resources: It has turned Israel into a military outpost (now probably the most militarised society in the world) that is economically dependent on the US while propping up corrupt Arab dictatorships such as those in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. These regimes are afraid of their own people and, thus, are very insecure. Therefore, they are inclined to collaborate with the US at any cost.

Prospects for activism

[…]

Many Jewish organisations have emerged as well, such as Not in My Name, which counters the popular media assertion that all Jewish people blindly support the policies of the state of Israel. Jews Against the Occupation is another organisation, which has taken a stand not only against the occupation, but also in support of the right of Palestinian refugees to return. These movements, and particularly their new-found connection with the larger anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-corporate globalisation movements, are where the possibilities lie to advance the Palestinian struggle.

[…] The demands must be that Israel comply with international law and implement the relevant UN resolutions. Specifically, it must recognise that all Palestinian refugees have the right to return, immediately end the occupation, and give all citizens of Israel equal treatment under the law.

We must demand that all US aid to Israel be stopped until Israel complies with these demands. Only when the Palestinians are afforded their rights under international law, and are respected as human beings, can a genuine process of conflict resolution and healing begin. For all the hype over peace camps and dialogue initiatives, until the structural inequalities are dealt with, there will be no justice for Palestinians and, thus, no peace for Israel.

What Is the Real Story around the Church Of Nativity?

Written by Ghassan Andoni (a Christian who lives 100 metres away from the Church of Nativity)

It is amazing how much one can twist facts. But more amazing is how much people can be influenced by twisted facts. In relation to the Church of Nativity, two stories are being widely circulated.

The Israeli story: a large group of armed "terrorists" entered the Church of Nativity. They took dozens of civilians including Christian priests and monks as hostages and are using them as human shields to launch attacks on the Israeli army, which is surrounding the place. Therefore, Israel is attempting to rescue the hostages and capture the "terrorists".

The Palestinian story: As the Israeli army invaded Bethlehem and Israeli tanks approached Manger Square, around 240 Palestinians including some armed Palestinians entered the Church seeking a safe shelter. Armed Palestinians laid down their arms and are seeking the protection of the Christian clergy inside the church.

Who are the people inside the church?

All resources from inside the church including Father Ibrahim Faltas, Christian Lawyer Tony Salman, and the governor of Bethlehem Mohammad Almadani confirmed repeatedly that: the vast majority of the people inside are innocent civilians who ran into the church to save their lives. The armed Palestinians who entered the church were mostly members of Palestinian Authority tourism Police, policemen from the adjacent Palestinian police station, and some Palestinians who decided to fight against the Israeli invasion of their city.

The Vatican repeatedly announced that all people inside the church are non-engaged and only seeking a shelter that the church is willing to provide. The Vatican repeatedly affirmed that there is no hostage-taking situation.

As the siege of the church continued, Israel employed a continued pressure to force the people inside the church to surrender. Some methods used are:

Preventing any supplies of food. Currently people inside the church are starving.

Preventing evacuation of dead bodies from inside the church (two bodies are still inside).

Preventing any medical help for scores of injured people (nuns are dealing with the situation with primitive first aid means).

Positioning snipers all over the place and shooting at any moving target. So far two people were killed inside the church and two more wounded including an Armenian Priest.

Shooting randomly inside the church. This random shooting resulted in a fire that destroyed three rooms inside the church. A Palestinian was shot dead by a sniper while attempting to extinguish the fire.

Throwing rounds of sound grenades into and around the church. This is going on all daytime and especially at night.

Transmitting, through loudspeakers, sounds that are beyond the threshold of pain into the church.

Attempting twice to burst into the church from its eastern entrance. In one attempt they destroyed one of the church gates using explosives.

So far, and aside from the suffering of people inside the church, considerable damage has been done to the church itself. With the little protest and concern from the side of the Christians all over the world and from the side of the international community, it is likely that Israel will upgrade its assault and might cause more substantial damage.

All attempts to negotiate a settlement to this situation failed. Israel insists on either complete surrender without conditions or a deportation outside the country. They are refusing the involvement of any third party in such efforts.

It is extremely worrying that with the increased pressure on Israel to leave the PA areas, Israel might attack the church in an attempt to kill or arrest people inside. It can happen, it might result in a massacre taking place inside the church, and it might destroy the Church. Something urgent must be done to prevent this from happening.