Sawt al Niswa | صوت النسوة - boycott

International Solidarity: The Power to Create Something Better

Lamia Moghnie — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:05:00 +0000

Lina Myritz

International solidarity is crucial because the plight of Gaza’s 1.5 million impoverished and isolated inhabitants is not a domestic problem, not a natural disaster, not a mistake. It is the perfectly logical consequence of generations of ugly craftsmanship on the part of foreign diplomats, politicians and businessmen – all profiteering from the brutal colonisation of the Palestinian people. As citizens of corrupt and hypocritical countries or simply as human beings on this earth informed of the basic facts on the ground, we are all obliged to act. And this is just what the crew of the Freedom Flotilla has done.

There is no shortage of knowledge about the situation. If one wishes to know, it is easy to find out that the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated places on this planet, home to 1.5 million Palestinians, of which over half are children. It is, likewise, easy to learn that Gaza is surrounded by 12-meter high walls and subject to a crippling blockade since June 2007. The economy is virtually non-existent, with sky-high rates of unemployment and 70% of people living under the internationally established poverty line (2009). After Israel’s military onslaught Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, over 1,400 Palestinians were slaughtered. Since then, the blockade has only hardened. Almost a third of homes have no running water, others making do with a few hours per day. Sewage treatment centers are not functioning, crops fail because of under-irrigation, and hospitals struggle to deal with regular and prolonged power cuts.

All of this is public knowledge. And yet while the Palestinian people are being forced to make impossible decisions – surrender or die, leave forever or remain incarcerated – most of the elites in the rest of the world are doing their best to support Israel while claiming to be reasonably critical of its momentary exaggerations. As a European, I feel sick at the thought of the free-trade agreement, the continued arms trade, how aid money time after time rebuilds what Israel has destroyed without an incriminating word, how Israel was welcomed into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) just a couple of weeks ago, or the innumerable other investments and exchanges that characterize the EU-Israeli relationship. It is not that the governing powers in Europe or the United States do not know how to engage in practical, useful solidarity. It is just that they picked sides a long time ago and all else is lip-service to public opinion.

I was born with blood on my hands but this is not about guilt, it is about the will and the power to create something better. We cannot wait for our governments, or our NGOs, or our celebrities to free Palestine. It is up to us. The people on the ships should rightly be celebrated as heroes and solidarity actions should be undertaken, but we cannot stop there. Their action was devised to do what sweet-talking politicians claiming to represent them would not do: Break it – something simple and good for the people of Gaza, the only thing one can and must do when faced with an unrighteous blockade of all that is life. They did this as an example, not to be put on a pedestal, but so that more people would join them and invent their own ways of dismantling the great but surmountable building-blocks of occupation. Their recipe is working! In the wake of the Israeli brutality, Turks are storming the Israeli embassy, Swedish dockworkers are blocking Israeli ships from leaving or entering the ports, US students are voting for divestment, and people all over the world are on the streets screaming out their fury. Is it sad that this only happens after foreign activists are killed, rather than when thousands of Palestinians are slaughtered? Of course. It’s disgusting. But let’s not waste time analyzing it, let’s use it. And while we’re at it, let’s swivel the focus to what actually is at stake.

The Freedom Flotilla is not and must not become a phenomenon apart from the rest of the struggle, but an extension of it. Much like the daily struggle of the Palestinian people in Palestine, in all its various and inspiring manifestations, must not be something we just admire from afar and write beautiful texts about but something that we actually learn from and let it direct us to similar bravery and steadfastness.

I woke up this morning, not so worried any more, because the so-called little people, of which I am a proud member, take action every single day: When going to their shops and shunning, sabotaging or shoplifting Israeli goods; when tirelessly writing e-mails, phoning, picketing or blocking companies that persist in dealing with Israel; when dismantling weapons and preventing the take-off of planes headed for Israel; when teaching their children the true meanings of words like terror, self-defence and collateral damage, words like justice, solidarity and freedom; when getting up every morning to a new day of navigating checkpoints, invasions, arrests. Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere are already fighting the fight each and every single day. But we must show them that they are not struggling alone and we must at least try to match the immense risks that they take to preserve dignity and life.

The murdered members of the Freedom Flotilla, and above all the thousands of Palestinian martyrs who have been slaughtered both before and after the boarding of the Mavi Marmara, will have died in vain if we simply stand still and gape in awe at their courageous actions. Theirs is a call to up the ante, to take bigger risks and feel the tide turning in favour of justice. Theirs is a vision of the world in which grandmothers are not afraid to go to jail for a while if that’s what it takes, in which workers and students strike, consumers carefully read labels, and toddlers learn how to riot as naturally as they learn how to walk. Theirs is a vision of a world in which the movement grows every time one of us is killed. So, whatever your motivation, use it! Guilt, love, fury, sorrow – I guess they’re all fine as long as they lead you somewhere you want to go.

I want to go to a free Palestine and I want my friends to come too, bloody hands and all!

Publisher:

Sawt al' Niswa

Section:

Opinions

Category:

Activism

Tags:

Featured:

What's Music Got To Do With It

Pascale Ghazaly — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 21:00:00 +0000

www.maxkeiseronfacebook.com

Maya Mikdashi

The arguments have become familiar. We want to enjoy life; music is not political; dancing should unify us, not divide us. We can’t keep being the sacrificial lamb of the Palestinian cause. Aren't you Lebanese? Are you an Islamist? Don’t you like rock and roll music, coca-cola, and dancing under the stars at open-air raves? Aren’t you for the freedom of expression? Are you (gasp) intolerant?

The questions that the debate whether we, in Lebanon, should join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel engenders have nothing to do with liking music, being fanatical, or censorship. The issue is not a band that played a concert in Tel Aviv, had a stopover in Cyprus, and continued on to Beirut. It is not that this same band performed the week the Israeli state attacked a flotilla of peace activists trying to break the criminal blockade of Gaza, an area of land that is home to over 1.3 million Palestinians and has been placed under siege for over three years. The question is not whether or not we can, or should, empathize with Palestinians living within a settler colony. The question is not if we have to be political. The question is: Can we afford not to be political? Can we absolve ourselves of responsibility towards each other as citizens and residents of Lebanon, as Arabs, or as human beings in the name of music and a good time? And if and when we do absolve ourselves of responsibility, what kind of politics are we engaging in? When we surrender politics to the politicians, what are we doing?

The political permeates every aspect of our lives. From the moment we wake up in particular neighborhoods in, for example, Beirut to the moment that our maid brings us our evening snack and puts our children to sleep, we are engaged in politics. This engagement continues as each of us drives in his or her car to locations that are close by, when we pass by the myriad unkempt children and disabled adults standing in highways selling their sadness, maneuver through a security checkpoint in a politician’s neighborhood, and as we sweat in long pants during the hot summer in a failed attempt to avert the unwanted verbal and physical advances of men on the Manara who know they are not accountable to anyone. Politics is about the struggle over life, how we live it, where we live it, who gets to live a livable life, and who gets to live. We are political because we are alive. Depoliticization is a political process, it is a tactic of a power that aims to separate the messiness of shared life into compartments such as “culture,” “government,” “economy,” “personal life,” “government,” and, my personal favorite, “civil society.” Once segregated into neat, independent packages, we are told that our “political” involvement begins, and ends, at the level of government. Depoliticization comes with neoliberalism, an ideology that masks its praxis being claims to be a “way of life.” The idea that Liberalism is a way of life or that it is simply “good values” has historically fueled capitalist expansion, colonialism, and the imperial notion that western history is at once the telos and the unfolding of world history. More recently, neoliberalism has been the ideology driving the perversion of human rights discourse to justify the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the banning of the headscarf in France, and the reinvigoration of authoritarian regimes in the Arab world.

One does not have to engage in an ideological analysis to see that art, and in this case, music, is anything but apolitical. When U2 announced that it would not play any concerts in apartheid South Africa, they were making a statement. When Elton John refused to heed to the boycott of South Africa and played concerts in that country, he was also making a statement. Playing a concert in an apartheid state is a statement. When international artists perform in Israel after a BDS campaign has been launched and after they have been asked to join it in solidarity with the oppressed, their performance lends legitimacy to a political regime that openly calls for the continued occupation of Palestinian lands, legal and infrastructural apartheid, and the expulsion of indigenous populations outside the state’s borders. Perhaps musicians who play venues in Israel today are ignorant about the political situation. But is ignorance an excuse? Today, people with access to information have to consistently choose to remain ignorant of current events. Furthermore, ignorance about structural oppression, ongoing settler colonialism, and apartheid, is a luxury of power that contributes to violence against those that are not powerful. Neutrality in the face of gross inequality and oppression is the most insidious form of partisanship towards the powerful. Every act of boycott is a statement against the status quo.

Lebanese event organizers who invite artists that perform in Israel are not breaking any laws. But they are making a statement as to the normalization of ties with Israel and they are not supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions initiative. People who want to attend these events are entitled to spend their leisure time however they want. But they too are making a statement as to the normalization of Lebanese ties with Israel and they, too, are choosing to not support the BDS campaign. If the choice for artists is between profiting monetarily from apartheid oppression and making a statement by not performing in Israel, for patrons, the choice is between allowing those who profit monetarily from apartheid to continue to profit monetarily from your own money. The calculations are simple. If enough people decide that they will not patronize performances by artists who also perform in apartheid Israel, either the event organizers will need to cater to this new reality or, imagine, we could actually force international artists to choose to either play in Lebanon or in Israel. Imagine Lebanon being “happening” enough to be a rival of Israel in terms of what is known as the “cultural scene” or the “summer circuit.” Imagine us being more effective than the hollow regimes that rule the Arab Middle East.

When I engage in an act of boycott against DJ Tiesto, I am also making a statement that I refuse to entrust the entire arena of politics, and the question of Lebanon’s relationship with Israel, to politicians that I know are corrupt, sectarian, and inefficient. I am making a statement that I refuse to normalize ties with a state that has invaded my country three times in the years that I have been alive, displaced over a million of my fellow citizens and destroyed tens of thousands of their homes as recently as 2006, and denies the right of return to over 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. I do not have a gun. I do not have a political party. I have a choice; to allow artists who break the boycott to profit from me or not. I make that choice because I cannot accept the logic that my life, or a Palestinian life, is worth less than an Israeli life. I make that choice because I refuse racism and the violence that it licenses.

My decision to boycott musicians who do not adhere to the BDS campaign is not because I am anti- Israel or because I am pro-Palestine. You can blame Palestinians for all of Lebanon’s problems and still take a stance against apartheid. If you are against the logic of racism and its articulation as settler colonialism, then you are also against apartheid. Apartheid is a technology of rule that has been operationalized in many different countries in different historical contexts, and will continue to be operationalized as long as it continues to be normalized. We should be demanding that artists refuse to be complicit in this system. Boycotts work. Today, sixteen years after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, we should not expect less of the world. And we definitely should not expect less of ourselves.