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On Normalization and the Meeting of Palestinian Movements

by The One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) in Historic Palestine   (The following is an unofficial translation of the Arabic original declaration. With the translation I expanded some terms to make them understandable to the foreign reader. Thanks to all the people that helped with this translation.) On September 3rd, the leaders of different Palestinian […]


12/09/2020

by The One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) in Historic Palestine

 

(The following is an unofficial translation of the Arabic original declaration. With the translation I expanded some terms to make them understandable to the foreign reader. Thanks to all the people that helped with this translation.)

On September 3rd, the leaders of different Palestinian movements, overcoming deep divisions, met in Beirut and Ramallah. This followed the invitation of the President of the Palestinian Authority, to discuss a common response to the ‘Normalization Agreement‘, between the United Arab Emirates and Israel. What made this meeting possible is the American-Israeli imperialist alliance’s total and aggressive denial of the Palestinian people’s basic rights. The imperialist alliance’s cynical approach removed any remaining illusions about a settlement to the conflict. Such illusions became prevalent after the Oslo Accords, and even existed before.

The imperialist powers are violating international law and humanitarian and ethical standards, and have disappointed all those who gambled on them. With “The Deal of the Century” the USA is repeating the injustices of the British 1917 ‘Balfour Declaration’, by giving the Zionists Palestinian land over which they do not have any rights.

Now they drag corrupt and blood-stained Arab dictatorships into this rogue alliance. Those Arab regimes go beyond normalization to become accomplices in the aggression against the Palestinian people. The Palestinians are exposed to the most heinous crimes by the colonial Western regimes, through their proxy in the region.

All of this forced the Palestinian leadership to choose between two clear options: Surrender or Resistance. As for the Palestinian people, they continue resisting. This resistance has continued for more than a century, against the Western-Zionist plot to uproot and replace them by foreign settlers and form a bridgehead for European colonization in the heart of the Arab region.

The meeting of the factions was an important step towards the national unity yearned for by our Palestinian people. This ever since the disastrous division (between Gaza and the West Bank) in 2007. During this period, Israel waged three atrocious wars and committed numerous crimes against humanity; imposed a blockade on two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; intensified its settlement and “Judaization” activities and the killings in the West Bank and Jerusalem; in addition to enforcing colonialist oppression of a million and a half of our people in the Galilee, the Triangle Region and the Naqab. And then, of course, we should not forget the plight of the millions of refugees who were displaced and uprooted from their homeland. Their right of return Israel continues to deny, thus embodying the brutality of Zionism and the lack of justice and ethics of the so-called international community.

National unity, based on a comprehensive, emancipatory vision and a correct resistance strategy, is an essential condition for joint work and a precursor to defeating oppression and achieving freedom and justice. It is also an essential condition to restore and enhance popular Arab support, and to mobilize for our cause all advocates of freedom around the world. Ours is a just cause, that should concern all the peoples of the world, especially the oppressed, of which the Palestinian people is a part, who are struggling to achieve freedom, justice and human dignity.

The question remains: does the movements’ meeting, and its resulting statement and decisions, constitute a real turning point in the march of the Palestinian people, and redefine the way towards freedom and independence? The current leaders bear the responsibility for the division and failure to rebuild the Palestinian national movement and to achieve liberation – they were responsible for the national, political and moral devastation that all this has entailed. Are they qualified, capable, and even willing to break with the era of fatal illusions? Is it possible to move and advance the national liberation project towards a new era of true liberation struggle without the youth and without the participation of new leaderships? Our people ask these questions, people from all the layers of society: workers, peasants, intellectuals, detainees and many others.

Accordingly, the ‘One Democratic State Campaign in Historic Palestine‘ asserts that, in order to fulfil the purpose of the meeting, the following conditions should be provided:

First, we should start from the fact that the Palestinian people, wherever they are, all 13 million, are one people; and that Palestine includes all the land located between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean, not merely the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Second, affirming the right of return of Palestinian refugees whom the Zionist movement expelled from Palestine and seized their properties, pursued them in their places of refuge, waged wars on them and assassinated some of their leaders. It is a natural and sacred right, recognized by an international decision since 1948.

Third, liberating the ‘Palestine Liberation Organization’, which has become subordinated to the ‘Palestinian Authority’ and its “security coordination” with the occupation. It should be liberated from the grip of bureaucracy and the restrictions of the Oslo Accords. It should be rebuilt on democratic foundations to represent all components and communities of the Palestinian people, wherever they are, including the Palestinians of 1948, and based on a program of return and liberation.

Fourth, the withdrawal of the PLO’s recognition of Israel. Israel which has continued expanding its colonial settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem and imposed a siege on the Gaza Strip. Israel ignores all international laws that prohibit settlements in the occupied territories and criminalize the existing apartheid system. Israel adopted the so-called “Nationality Law” – a blatant colonial apartheid law – to grant false legitimacy to its colonization of all of historic Palestine. Israel has unambiguously stated – together with its patron the United States – that the country located between the river and the sea belongs to the Zionist movement. According to them the Palestinian people have no right to their homeland. A homeland which the Palestinians have not left for thousands of years, except under the pressure of the colonialist Zionist movement and its crimes of ethnic cleansing perpetrated in 1948, and still being perpetrated against the Palestinians – even the holders of its citizenship.

Fifth, responding to this colonial expansion and the new “Balfour Declaration” by stating that the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination applies to all of historic Palestine. This means reviving the PLO’s program, represented by the return and liberation of Palestine from Zionism, its colonial regime and apartheid. The ‘One Democratic State Campaign in all of Historic Palestine’ revives this solution. But in a modern form, in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews can live in a human, democratic, egalitarian system, after dismantling the Israeli colonial apartheid regime, in the context of the removal of colonialism from the entire Arab region. The one state project is not merely a vision, but a resistance project, in which participate also Jewish anti-Zionists who oppose the system of colonialist settlement and its crimes.

Sixth, holding elections for the Palestinian National Council, with the participation of all the Palestinian people, without exception. The limitation of the elections for the Legislative Council and the Palestinian presidency to the West Bank and Gaza Strip cements the Oslo Accords. But they divide and fragment the Palestinian people and erases the universal Palestinian identity. It keeps the majority of the Palestinian people, especially those in 1948 areas and the refugees, outside the scope of representation, the conflict, the national unity project and the right to self-determination. Further, this exclusion prevents the participation of all Palestinians, without exception, in the Palestinian struggle for the right to self-determination.

Seventh, cancelling all the punitive measures taken by the Palestinian Authority against our people in the Gaza Strip since March 2017, and compensating them for all their dues. It is completely unacceptable to talk of national unity and reconciliation between the movements while, at the same time, imposing sanctions on a key component of our noble people.

Eighth, the adoption of the Palestinian boycott movement in a practical and clear way as a pioneering means of struggle. Acting resolutely against all forms of normalization with apartheid Israel, primarily through the abolition of security coordination with the occupation and the dissolution of the so-called Committee for Interaction with Israeli Society.

Ninth, the formation of a broad, popular front that adopts an effective popular resistance strategy, from all aspects, including the struggle in the streets, cultural, social and economic resistance. This front would establish a path towards a new, free society that is capable of steadfastness and cohesion while it achieves its interim goals, then its ultimate goal of dismantling the colonialist apartheid system and the establishment of the democratic state in all of historic Palestine.

This English translation first appeared on the Free Haifa Website. Reproduced with permission

Paris Demo Supports Black MP against Racist Magazine

As French politics starts up again after the summer, and preparing the 2022 presidentials begins to interest all the mainstream political parties, questions of racism are centre stage – who will win the votes of the ten million people who voted for Marine Le Pen in 2017? In this atmosphere, a hard-right but sophisticated and […]


06/09/2020

As French politics starts up again after the summer, and preparing the 2022 presidentials begins to interest all the mainstream political parties, questions of racism are centre stage – who will win the votes of the ten million people who voted for Marine Le Pen in 2017?

In this atmosphere, a hard-right but sophisticated and influential magazine, Valeurs Actuelles, frequent guests on TV political analysis programmes, launched a political attack on the antiracist movement. It published an anonymous short story entitled “Obono the African” in which Black France Insoumise MP, Danièle Obono, is transported in a time machine back to the age of slavery (where she will learn that it was mostly the Africans’ fault!) The story was illustrated by a drawing of Mme Obono in chains, and is chock full of the most disgusting racist stereotypes of Africans.

Daniele Obono, along with the other MPs from the France Insoumise has been active supporting in parliament and in the media the Yellow Vest Movement and the huge strikes to defend pensions. She and the people around her have helped move the FI to better positions on islamophobia (though more progress is needed) and the FI leadership supported last November’s first ever mass demonstration against islamophobia.

The Right detest Obono because she is a Black political leader, but she is also often denounced by left wing people, or even Left activists, convinced of the dangers of an (imagined) Black separatism. When, a few years back, she participated in a couple of educational meetings only open to Black people, this counted as a scandal in France, so weak is much of the French Left on racism. As a number of Black activists’ networks in the country have grown in strength in recent years, these weaknesses are becoming more visible.

On Saturday 5th September, several hundred people demonstrated in Paris in support of the MP, who is taking the magazine to court  for “racist insult” over this publication. There should have been more (and I know plenty of Left people who would not go because of their disagreements with what they think she stands for).

Though Emmanuel Macron phoned Mme Obono to assure her of his solidarity, he had himself accepted an interview in this magazine and praised it as a ‘very good magazine’. Although Macron comes from political traditions which did not put islamophobia centre stage, these days he is of course adapting, hoping to win some votes of those who went for Le Pen in 2017. So, in his keynote speech this week, he underlined the dangers of ‘separatism’, of those who ‘want to impose on everyone the law of their group’. He is too cowardly to say so, but everyone knows he is attacking Blacks and Muslims. The antiracist movement has its work cut out for it.

An Annoying Thing

The Kinderbonus is supposed to benefit all kids, but the childen of single mothers are getting a bum dea


05/09/2020

There are a lot of very annoying things about living in Germany: shoes are expensive, bureaucracy is intense, people can be unfriendly, a lot of people are racist, everyone, and by this I mean everyone white, is insane about the headscarf, you can’t get oral thrush treatment from the pharmacy and you only get it from the doctor if they like you very, very much, are a very, very, VERY kind person, and you have had non-stop itching genitals for the past 700 years.

But the most annoying thing about living in Germany is the way that liberal non-Germans and neoliberal Germans propagate this myth that Germany is a Sozialparadies.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are things we enjoy in Germany, which we wouldn’t enjoy in other countries, which make living here, if not easy, then at least bearable. It always amazes me how relatives of mine in the UK – including relatives, by the way, who voted for Corbyn, find zero hour contracts okay because they’re so “flexible” (WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, LIKE YOUR BOSS WON’T NOTICE IF YOU DON’T COME IN KINDA FLEXIBLE, WHY GO INTO WORK AT ALL THEN?) or how friends and family in Britain worry about being evicted from rented accommodation – even, sometimes, shockingly, when pregnant. However these examples don’t, to me, suggest that modern Germany is a Sozialparadies but rather that Brexit Britain, is, quite literally, a living hell.

But Germany does, sometimes, have welfare utopia elements to it. Nursery school costs in Berlin are so low, they are almost negligible. But what does it say that they are just as negligible for the poor, working or otherwise, as they are for the wealthy? Does that seem fair to you? Or take child benefit, if you will. The Job Center certainly does – from the children of Hartz-IV welfare recipients. Does that seem fair to anyone in the world? I don’t know who could possibly think it is fair that people to whom 200 euros is not a lot of money get to keep it, and people for whom 200 euros could mean the difference between a dignified life and barely surviving – people who can’t afford to buy their kids fresh fruit and veg every day, get a washing machine repaired, take them ice-skating – get it ripped from them? I don’t know how anyone, of any political persuasion, can find this acceptable. I also don’t see how it is legal. Hartz-IV welfare recipients are allowed to earn extra money and I don’t see why their children are not allowed to do so too. The clue is in the name – KINDERgeld. It’s a fucking travesty, and it makes me angry every time I think of it.

And now the Kinderbonus! During the half-hearted German lockdown, lots of married German women, or women with partners, were, it seemed to me, using solidarity with single mothers as the main reason why nursery schools had to open as quickly as possible. Where is this solidarity now? Where is the empathy? Where is the anger? All I hear is the sound of total indifference!

Single mothers, who often, during our half-lockdown, were stuck indoors on their own with kids for weeks and weeks and weeks on end, are now being forced to share the measly 300 euros with their ex-partners. IT IS INFURIATING. The very people who suffered the most are benefiting the least! Ex-partners are legally entitled to pay 150 euros less maintenance (Unterhalt) if they wish to.

“I’d like to see him try!” my friend Carola says. Her useless ex, as we nickname him (look, #notallmen but really #almostallmyfriendsexesnooffenceboys) saw her two kids TWICE over lockdown, even though he was still going to illegal raves in Hasenheide. In fact, he generously justified his lack of contact as being due to his inability to stop attending dance parties in the park. SOMEBODY GIVE THE GUY A MEDAL – oh wow, you don’t need to! The German state has given him a 150 sperm donor achievement unlocked bonus. What a, pardon my French, fucking joke!

Would it have been the worst thing in the world to pay single parents twice? WOULD IT? Would it really? Would it have been the worst fucking thing in the world, if the German state had decided that because it would be unfair for conscientious part-time non-custodial parents to be totally missed out of this corona compensation, the lone custodial parents (let’s face, it the single mums) were given 300 euros, and the non-custodial parent got a 150 euro bonus? Yes, it would be a tiny bit unfair on married couples – BUT THEY HAD EACH OTHER TO SURVIVE CORONA WITH. And to be honest, it wouldn’t be some kind of brave, social decision made which was “fairer” for single mums – it would just make things a teeny-tiny weeny-tweeny TINY minsicule ant-like microbe-sized bit less unfair.

All those crocodile tears shed about single mothers during half-hearted German lockdown – and now nobody can even be bothered to pretend to give a shit. Germany is a Sozialparadies – for the middle-class. I don’t know how anyone, anyone alive can think this is okay. The only way you can think this is okay is if you secretly think the children of women who are prepared to leave their husbands/get pregnant without being in a stable relationship with a man deserve to be punished, just like in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, when they wouldn’t bury her illegitimate dead baby inside the graveyard.

Photo Gallery: 29 August Demonstration – You’re marching with Nazis and Fascists

Today there was a demo in Berlin against the Corona measures, organised by a dubious group which was happy ro welcome hard-core Nazis into their ranks. Although not everyone demonstrating was a Nazi, Nazis from throughout Europe mobilized. Counter-demos were organised with the main slogan being chanted “you’re marching with nazis and fascists”. Police used […]


29/08/2020

Today there was a demo in Berlin against the Corona measures, organised by a dubious group which was happy ro welcome hard-core Nazis into their ranks. Although not everyone demonstrating was a Nazi, Nazis from throughout Europe mobilized.

Counter-demos were organised with the main slogan being chanted “you’re marching with nazis and fascists”. Police used a strategy of random kettling, often separating counter-protestors from each other. This led to anti-fascists being spread across town. Here are some photos from the protests.

For more information, see ,,Solidarity instead of common cause with Nazis.

Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass and Hertha Marks Ayrton

Rebellious Daughters of History #49


by Judy Cox and Sam Kirk (guest post)

The real first black woman to stand as Vice President (and it’s not Kamala Harris) Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass (1874 – 1969)

Charlotta Amanda Spears was born in Sumter, South Carolina, in 1874, the sixth child of eleven. She received an education from public schools.

Later, she moved to California and began working at the California Eagle newspaper. When its founder died, she became editor and then owner of the California Eagle, one of the first black women to own a newspaper.

She took courses at Columbia University and University of California. In 1912, Joseph Bass joined the Eagle. He shared Charlotta’s concern about injustice and racial discrimination. They married and ran the Eagle together.

During the 1920s, Charlotta became co-president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey. She campaigned against segregated schools and against job discrimination. Carlotta was also the director of the Youth Movement of the NAACP.

The Eagle’s circulation of 60,000 made it the largest African-American newspaper on the West Coast. Between 1912 and 1951, Under Charlotta’s leadership, the Eagle led various campaigns, against D. W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation, against the Ku Klux Klan and against police brutality. The paper also supported the “Scottsboro boys,” nine young men who were framed and convicted of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931.

Charlotta received threatening phone calls and at one point was confronted by eight men robed in white, who she scared off after displaying a firearm.

In 1934, Joseph died and Charlotta assumed control of the paper.

In 1942 the Department of Justice interrogated Charlotta over claims that the paper was funded by Japan and Germany. The FBI monitored Charlotta, who they believed supported the Communist Party.

In the 1940s, the Republican Party chose Bass as western regional director for Wendell Willkie’s presidential campaign. But she later left the Republican Party and joined the Progressive Party.

Carlotta served in 1952 as the National Chairman of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an Communist-led organisation of black women protesting against racial violence.

That year, she was nominated for vice president of the United States by the Progressive Party, the running mate of lawyer Vincent Hallinan. Charlotta became the first African-American woman to run for vice president of the United States. Her platform called for civil rights, women’s rights, an end to the Korean War, and peace with the Soviet Union.

In 1966, Bass had a stroke and retired. In 1967, when she was ninety-one, the FBI still classified Charlotta as a potential security threat.

She died in Los Angeles on April 12, 1969 and was buried alongside her husband in Evergreen Cemetery, East Los Angeles, California.

Hertha Marks Ayrton, 1854 – 1923

It is a pleasure to tell the story of a scientist to which I have 3 affinities. Firstly she is a physicist, secondly she helped found an organisation which became the union that became the first trade union that I joined as a science technician in the NHS, and thirdly she was an activist trying to make the world a better place.

Born Sarah Marks to Jewish parents she showed great promise as a child. Due to family hardship after the death of her father, her education was funded by others.

As a woman scientist, she was not taken seriously by many institutions. She invented many things, but her most well-known achievements were the invention of a line divider used by engineers for scale diagrams, arcing in lamps and the Ayrton fan. If you’ve ever been to the “flicks” but wondered why cinemas are sometimes called this because there is no flickering, you have Hertha Ayrton to thank. The lamps originally used in cinemas and street lights were unstable so caused flickering. Hertha redesigned them which stabilised the light source and got rid of the flickering, but the name for cinemas continued.

Her work attracted the attention of other scientists and she was proposed by one male scientist to become a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1902, only given to top scientists then and now. However, married women were not admitted at the time. Two years after her rejection, she was allowed to read a paper to the Royal Society, becoming the first woman to do so. It took another 20 years for women to be allowed to become Fellows (sic) of the Royal Society!

She invented many other things. Her invention of a fan to clear poisonous gas from the trenches in the first World War was at first turned down, but later adopted and also used in mines.

A woman not afraid to speak out, after Marie Curie’s discovery of Radium was wrongly attributed to Curie’s husband, Ayrton engaged with the media regarding the sexism: ‘Errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat’. This had also happened to Ayrton, despite the fact that her husband was keen for her to get recognition for her work and fully supported her.

She and Marie Curie were friends. After Curie needed somewhere to rest, following an operation on her kidney, and being pilloried in the French press with sexist and racist abuse for having a relationship with a man who, whilst married, was separated from his wife and Curie was a widow. Curie and her teenage daughters, Irene and Eve, stayed with Hertha in 1912.

Ayrton taught Irene maths and it was through Irene that Ayrton persuaded Marie Curie to sign the petition against the imprisoning of suffragettes, something that Curie was normally averse to. The stay coincided with the most active time for Hertha in the suffragette campaign (1911-1913) and probably influenced the young Irene who became involved in politics later in life.

Joining the Womens Social and Political Union (WPSU) in 1907, she got involved in a variety of ways, attending the marches, looking after many of the women (including Emily Pankhurst), when they were released from prison after being force fed during the tortuous cat and mouse episodes. Like many other women, Hertha refused to fill in the 1911 census. Instead she wrote on the paper: “How can I answer all these questions if I have not the intelligence to choose between two candidates for parliament? I will not supply these particulars until I have my rights as a citizen. Votes for Women.”

She agreed to have WPSU money transferred to her account to protect it from threatened confiscation by the state.

A formidable woman, George Eliot allegedly based the character Mirah from the novel Daniel Deronda on Ayrton. Eliot along with others supported Ayrton to study at Girton College Cambridge having no independent means. Like other women of the time, although completing her degree studies she was not allowed to be awarded her degree. A situation that didn’t change until 1948!

Ayrton was also a founding member of National Union of Scientific Workers which later merged with another union becoming the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS).

Her daughter Barbara also joined her on WPSU marches and went on to become a Labour MP.