The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

I Just Want to Kiss the Earth

My Visual Diary in Occupied Palestine

Rasha AL Jundi
01/10/2023

13 August

Acceptance

The list of the accepted.

Name: Rasha Al Jundi

Date of travel: August 21st for 7 days/6 nights

This was the message that flashed across my phone screen from the Jordanian travel agent.

I don’t remember a time when I held my breath for so long ever before in my life.

August 21

Exclamation mark

“Do you have a weapon in your bag?”

This was the first question that the Israeli occupation border police officer asked me after inquiring if I can speak English or not. My positive answer to this latter question got him to exclaim with open arms to a hall full of people “FINALLY!” I was on a bus with approximately 45 other travellers, most of whom were elderly. We were the first “tourist group” of Jordanian passport-holders who were given approval by the Zionist occupation to visit our own homeland.

The irony that big brother imposes on Palestinians in exile continues with the performance of hypersexualized and condescending border control agents. I was in the middle of the queue to the first officer so I took my time to calm my pounding heart. It was the first time I come this close to the occupier. My heart beats and tense jaw reflected my rage, while my deep breaths reflected my control.

While I waited patiently for my turn, I examined the well-constructed hall at the northern Zionist “border” with Jordan. It is famous for being designed for tourists groups crossing by land, hence the fancy airport-like fluorescent-lit structure. My eyes darted from one corner to another taking in all the details, every camera, sign and tile. I took in the female agents with full makeup, well-manicured long nails, freshly styled hairdos and super tight jeans that accentuate their bodies. I took in the male agents with their tight t-shirts that show off their constantly flexing chest muscles. I took in every bark in Hebrew hurled at an old lady, every smirk, snort and snicker at anyone who did not place their bag in the correct way on the X-ray belt. I took in their stares and I stared back.

Questions flowed:

What is your purpose for visiting Israel?
Tourism.
Where are you staying?
Metropole hotel.
In which city is it?
Jerusalem.

After a few more similar questions, a rectangular red sticker from a roll was slapped on my passport with the exclamation mark on it emphasised in blue ink. I was led to wait for a body search and after inspecting my bags, the passport control officer asked me the same questions in English before pausing at my grandfather’s name and wondering out loud, suddenly in Arabic: “Your grandfather’s name is Moses?” After some more waiting on the cold steel chairs, a cat showed up, sat in my lap and purred.

A female traveller fainted. She was Palestinian with an Israeli passport. The officers dragged their feet to respond while other travellers lifted her feet and sprayed water on her face. She eventually got up and was escorted to the seat next to me as she regains her composure. I handed her a small bag with a few left over nuts.

Another officer walked up to me, this time a woman, with a massive smile on her face. She greeted me as if we were long lost friends and proceeded to inquire about my work (being a photographer stood out the most), my place of domicile and eventually my permanent residency in Germany. The latter got me the needed nod to grant me the final entry approval by the occupier to my homeland.

Plan your death well…

“There is only one way for you to be allowed to remain here. It is – may God give you health – in the case of your death. But make sure to die in an Israeli hospital, ok? Otherwise, they won’t let you stay.”

With these words, the Palestinian guide ended his long list of rules. He attempted to lighten his persistent demands for us to not to even think of breaking the entry approval duration rules of seven days and six nights only. Our trip was already planned by the occupation before it has even started. The occupation’s approval wreaks of control. In addition to the duration of our stay, the dates of travel, the entry/exit points and departure time on August 27th were all already set by them. Israeli colonisation of Palestine is “ingenious”. It does not only occupy our land and minds, it also occupies our time.

For travel agents to guarantee that Jordanian passport-holders are bound to leave:

Occupied Palestine on the designated date, they get a close next of kin for each one of us to sign on financial guarantees that range between 25 to 30 thousand Jordanian dinars. I couldn’t help but wonder: is the “penalty” to return to Palestine equivalent to the cost of the majority of new vehicles that clog the streets of Amman? This is probably why, after receiving the occupation’s blessings to smell our country, our passports are collected by the Palestinian agent who receives us, leaving each one of us with a copy of the original and the flimsy Israeli green entry visa paper to move around.

Despite the loud and repeated instructions by the agent, the mood on the bus was one of pure happiness and joy. We made it. Many of us for the first time in their lives. Others for the first time since childhood. We were all glued to the bus’s windows. No one wanted to miss an inch of the land. Phones started ringing with excited relatives inquiring about our arrival times to either one of the two drop off points: first Jericho, second Jerusalem.

I had earlier decided to get off in the latter. After all, it is my first time home, so I had to see the heart of it. Surprisingly, after initially taking away my documents, the agent squeezed through towards my seat and handed me back my passport. For a second, the thought of staying back crossed my mind. Just for a second.

August 22

Fatima returns

A few months ago, a German friend travelled to the heartland of occupied Palestine to visit a friend of hers. She attempted to document my mother’s depopulated village Beit Dajan for me and shared the images she made on WhatsApp. The shock of how foreign everything looked on my phone screen stayed with me for several weeks. I could not show the images to my mother. I did not know at the time, that I will be making the same trip to Beit Dajan a few months later.

This time I confronted the ugliness of erasure myself. A block of identical houses sat neatly next to each other, with a school in the middle of the settlement, now called “Bet Dagan”. Nothing of the Palestinian identity was left in any of what I saw, except for an orange grove at the edge of this alien place. Fenced by grand Palestinian cacti, the land was beautiful and I heard my mother’s description of her grandfather’s groves in my ears. I asked the taxi driver to stop and wait for me as I stepped out and walked over to the fence. Luckily, I found a big enough dent in the barrier to sneak into the grove. I had planned a symbolic return for my late Grandmother Faima (Umm Ali), since my departure from Amman. With an embroidered purse that she made for me a few years before her death, my grandmother accompanied me throughout this trip.

I took the purse out underneath an orange tree and whispered to her that she is back home now. I will never forget the heaviness in the air, the smell of the orange tree leaves and the watchfulness of the cacti over me. At that moment, I reclaimed the Palestinian beauty of the land in Beit Dajan in spite of the Israeli ugliness. And I kissed the earth.

My embroidered purse from my late grandmother Fatima (iPhone image: August, 2023)

It was 17:45 when the bus parked near Damascus gate in Jerusalem. I remember the moment I stepped out of it. The sharp sweet smell of jasmine hit my nose and I looked up to realise that I was standing underneath a giant tree, decorating the fence of the Jerusalem hotel. Despite being located opposite a large bus station, the razor sharp scent took over. I smiled with relief. I was very anxious that the fist thing I will see and experience in the city is the extreme Orthodox Jewish presence. It was the rush hour for people to head back to their homes from work and universities. So I took my time on the side of the main road watching mainly Palestinians come and go from that neighbourhood.

The sun was slowly bending towards its exit for the day. A pleasant breeze caressed my skin and hair. Jerusalem’s unforgettable air hugged me tenderly and welcomed me home.

Visiting Yafa and Haifa was equally difficult. Western structures and standards of capitalist development have taken over both cities and pushed the few Palestinian community members into tiny cantons. I struggled to reconcile the views of the Israeli and other tourists posing for photos by the old Yafa port. Scenes of the old city scape from the latest book by Suad Amiry “Mother of Strangers” [1] came rushing into my head as I walked around the clock tower square. After successfully finding a Palestinian place to grab a cup of coffee, I asked the driver to take me to Al Manshiyya quarter.

“It’s all gone,” he said, pointing to the last standing proof of its existence, the Hassan Beq mosque. Surrounded by endless cranes, the mosque sits in the middle of what the Zionist entity wishes to develop into a central business district in Yafa. As Al Manshiyya was really a bridge of commerce between the port and Tel Aviv, colonisers are not wasting time in transforming it to an actual link merging Tel Aviv with Yafa to become one. The Palestinian Arab identity was completely scrapped into rubble, which nowadays forms the basis of a park on the side of the road. “They now call it the Oasis of Justice,” the driver smirked. The irony of that fact made me feel like a character in a new book. Unfortunately though, it would not have been a fictional one.

Despite my rage at the ugliness and strangeness of the “Mother of Strangers”*, I could not leave Yafa without feeling the the sea. Our sea. So I spent time floating in the Mediterranean, which hugged me with its warm August waves and welcomed me home. I have visited the same sea countless times before and lived by it in Tunisia for two and a half years. Yet, the water felt different against my skin this time around. I reclaimed my right to the Yafa sea.

The Boys of Akka

I felt like there was a heavy weight on my chest after stopping in Haifa and seeing everything in between as we drove though the Zionist entity. As I stepped out of the taxi in Akka, I felt that weight lifting. Zaki Nassif’s “Ya Ahiqata al Wardi”** filled up the air of the parking lot, as a lone cat rummaged through the overfilled municipal trash bin and people shuffled slowly towards the nearby Al Jazzar mosque. Shopkeepers shouted greetings and jokes to each other. The smell of cigarette smoke combined with shawarma and the salty sea filled the air. The sights and sounds of Palestinian stubbornness lightened my pace. The city’s mighty high walls cradled its stone houses, which are beautified by pots of flowers and cactus. I instantly fell in love with Akka.

After one of the best seafood meals at Abu Christo, I made my way through the city to check out the young boys who are famous for jumping off the city wall into the sea. Hussein, Abdallah and Mohammed greeted me enthusiastically. “Do you want to jump?” one of them exclaimed in my direction. They did not shy away from inviting other passersby or spectators from joining them. They regularly scale the thirteen-meter-high city wall to perform acrobatic jumps throughout the afternoon until sunset.

“Play girl, don’t play.” Akka City Wall (August, 2023)

While I spent time documenting their stunts and enjoying the excitement of their youth, I couldn’t help but notice the floods of young Jewish visitors who flocked the city in religious groups. I was not sure whether those groups were from within the Zionist entity or from abroad. I watched a young Jewish girl break away from one of them and pray against the city wall. When I circled back from watching the boys to where she was, about an hour later, she was still in the same position. To her right, I noticed a kind of arcade boxing game that stood there unused. She couldn’t be more than fourteen years old. Yet her life as a future Israeli Jewish settler has been paved for her. She will end up here, perhaps even taking the place of one of the Boys of Akka, and claiming that she was here first. I stopped and looked hard at two adjacent yet very different scenes of youth and I wished I could go up to her and say “Play girl, don’t pray”.

Milk Grotto Chapel, Bethlehem (August, 2023)

23 August

Big Brother

The Israeli occupation manifests itself in everything that is ugly in Occupied Palestine as a whole and in Jerusalem in particular. I always thought that George Orwell’s novel 1984 and the idea of Big Brother that it presents was a mad fantasy. Until I met the Zionist entity. The obvious crime that the occupation commits on our land from the Annexation Wall to settlement expansion, extensive surveillance cameras on every corner and underage religious Jewish settlers strutting around Old Jerusalem showing off their heavy M16, are all one form.

The hard truth sneers at me from every direction.

What the Zionist Big Brother also does so well, in a subtle way, is the rewriting of the place’s history. Does one pay attention to the newly planted star of David in the ancient tiles of the city’s walls? Does one marvel at the beauty of a creeping green leafy plant on the facade of Damascus gate, only to realise that this plant is a colonial tool to hide any Islamic appearance from the city walls?

Religious tourist groups roaming the alleys of Jerusalem surely don’t pay attention or look closer. They don’t see the occupier’s soldiers at every gate of the Al Aqsa Mosque compound inspecting Palestinians for their IDs so they can go in and pray. They don’t see the surveillance that profiles everyone, including them. They don’t see children with guns. They don’t see Big Brother. They only see stones. Those that they believe are the holiest truths, that they crossed miles across skies and seas to see, touch and whisper ancient phrases against. They don’t see the people of the city, its original inhabitants. The ones who are holding the fort against every colonial Jewish attempt to erase their kind and replace them with a foreign looking one. I have never despised tourism more than religious tourist groups in Jerusalem and their unholy conduct.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem (August 2023)

24 August

Ghosts & Ghettos

The first time I heard about Al Shuhada street in Hebron city that is notorious for settler attacks against Palestinian residents was more than ten years ago. I did not imagine, at the time, that I will be standing in the same street, a decade later, looking up at its wired metal rooftop that is littered with trash thrown by Israeli settlers aiming at Palestinians underneath. It is without doubt that the ugliness of the Zionist Big Brother reaches its peak in Hebron.

Despite its expanding neighbourhoods and lavish homes that reflect wealth and the tacky taste of the rich, Hebron’s old city was one of the saddest places that I visited in occupied Palestine. Walking through its deserted alleys and homes, I can only imagine how vibrant it must have been before the cancer of Zionism infected it. I can hear children playing around every corner, their laughter filling the air. I can see ghosts of women and men crowding the alleys with their shopping bags full of pickles, olives and sweets from the market place. I can hear vegetable and fruit cart sellers announcing their prices out loud for stay at home buyers. I can see the lights of the old city at night, keeping everyone awake until the late night hours.

What greeted me was the hollowness of the alleys. What remains is the shell of a city that was once the heart and core of commerce and trade in occupied Palestine. Doorways covered in intricate cobwebs. Multiple story households emptied of memories. The occupation dissects the city in half with a concrete wall and barbed wire. It literally created an underground Palestinian ghetto with an overground Jewish presence. The consistent invasions of the old city and the settlement expansion through it drove many of its original Palestinian inhabitants out seeking better living and work conditions. After old Jerusalem and Akka, seeing Hebron was like mourning a dear loved one.

“Are you Muslim?” asked the redheaded Israeli soldier who sits inside an air-conditioned glass box at the guarded entrance of the Ibrahimi Mosque.

I nod and move on through the second metal gate. Cameras point at me in every direction, as I step into the mosque’s courtyard towards the women’s toilets to perform wudhu and change into my prayer clothes. Another wall dissects through the mosque and cuts it in half. Just like the city that hosts it, it is dismantled and divided to create a ghetto within the ghetto. Every Saturday, illegal Jewish settlers are known to invade the mosque’s grounds and are allowed into every corner of it. They dance and perform their fanatic rituals around Abraham and Joseph’s tombs. Similar to Jerusalem, the site of a Turkish tourist group admiring the stones of those tombs gave me the chills. When they started to rub their hands against what they can reach from those sites and close their eyes in meditation, I cursed every tomb and every worshipped stone in Palestine.

Remove them all, together with those intruders on our land.

The Ibrahimi Mosque Dissected in Half, Hebron (August 2023)

Martyrs on Necklaces, Nablus Old City (August 2023)

Martyr memorials

Martyrs in Restaurants, Nablus Old City (August 2023)

I have always wondered when we will be able to have a memorial to commemorate our martyred people, until I entered Nablus’s old town. Walking through it is like walking through a live martyr memorial of sorts. It is constantly updated with new images of the newly killed every week. Martyrs are everywhere, like the living dead: on coffee carts, pendants, shop signs, monuments, restaurant halls and household walkways. Most are standing tall, smiling. Some are holding weapons, others not. Youth splattered all over the city’s walls, watching over us and reminding us all of our losess and wins. A fresh breeze caresses the flag of the “Lion’s Den”, the infamous armed resistance group that started off in Nablus. The city is obviously proud of its martyrs and the blood it has been spilling to water the Palestinian earth. Yet I cannot help but question if any of those young men yearned to liberate the whole land? Or was it the absence of hope that pushed one to choose a death to be remembered by? It is a well known fact that the Palestinian Authority’s collaboration with the occupier has quashed any organised Palestinian resistance movement.

Martyrs on Coffee Carts, Nablus Old City (August 2023)

I faced the hard truths and questions on my own. I guess we all yearn for the time of the organised resistance movements of the past. Perhaps those young martyrs wished for the same thing.

Arabic sprayed off sign in Old Jerusalem (August 2023)

Zionist Carnage, Occupied West Bank (August 2023)

On the road with the coloniser, everything that I had read and heard about the occupation in books, lectures and talks was being laid out right in front of my eyes. The sprawling and expanding settlements on hilltops looking down at Palestinian ghettos. The paired snipers standing against each other’s backs in a ready to shoot position at every passing Palestinian vehicle. The watchtowers at checkpoints with their advanced remote controlled automatic rifles. The roadsigns plastered with posters of the so-called “Jewish Messiah”.

The endless bulldozers, cement blocks, walls and bridges ravaging the land. The congested Palestinian cities that are eating away at what remains of their enclaved landscapes to expand. The carnage that is ripping away our existence as a population.

August 26

The Land Speaks Arabic

On one quiet late afternoon, I sat on a hilltop in Beit Jala contemplating my visit and admiring the vast and beautiful landscape. The space I was in was ideally located to block any views of Israeli settlements. It gave me an hour of peace. I took a few steps down the hill to an olive tree and noticed its new branches springing up from its base. I realised that during my trip I saw the vine tree creep through the walls; the fig tree drape over the barbed wire; the cacti spread over our ruined villages. The land is fertile with Palestinian blood and bones.

If we are all gone, the land will continue to resist the cement, the bulldozers, the settlements and the road construction on its own.

August 27

Exit Wounds

“Do you have a weapon?”

The question that the Zionist entity greeted me with upon my entry is laid out again in front of me. This time, however, to a fellow passenger on the bus at the Sheikh Hussein crossing into Jordan. The Israeli officer stepped onto the bus and selected a passenger at random to ask him this question. Due to his badly pronounced Arabic word for “weapon”, the passenger did not understand the question until we all shouted out the correct pronunciation at him. We just wanted to move on. A simple “No” followed by a smirk was enough to get us going. I remembered what the Palestinian agent told us a week earlier as he wished us a good trip:

“Remember, this is the state of the one soldier, not the rule of law.”

The air on the bus was heavy with sadness and frustration. Seven days and six nights were a fleeting moment in a sweet dream. One passenger took out his frustration at the agent, while another started crying as he recited the traveller’s prayer in the microphone for everyone else.

As the man sitting next to me started sharing anecdotes from his family visit, I did not hold back my tears as I listened attentively to him. He silently handed me a napkin.

I cried that this was my first, very short-lived time in the homeland and it could be my last.

I cried for the love that I lost in Palestine.

I cried for what could have been.

I cried because I did not want to leave.

But they did not want me to stay.

Footnotes

1 *Yafa city was nicknamed “Mother of Strangers” by its Palestinian inhabitants, as it was known to welcome any visitor or “stranger” to it.

Ten Elements of a Leftist Peace Policy

Die LINKE has always been a party of peace. This must continue

Claudia Haydt
20/09/2023

For some time now, unrest has stirred within left-wing political party die LINKE. In addition to discussion of a possible split, the party has seen a string of conflicts over core themes. Of particular note is the dispute over peace policy. The virulent concerns are also addressed at party-internal regional conferences.

At the south Germany regional conference Claudia Haydt, board member of the IMI who is also active within die LINKE, proposed principles which die LINKE must adhere to in order to continue operating as a credible party for peace. She did so in a 10-item list. The drafted list does not intend to summarise a comprehensive policy, but rather serves as a catalogue of tasks that will help meet the present pacifist-political demands.

Over the past months, many of those actively engaged with die LINKE have been repeatedly confronted with the question: what does this party stand for? Such questioning makes ascertaining the hurdles facing a left-wing political party all the more important in securing the party’s future. As such, consistently relating the fight against poverty to the fight for human rights is essential, just as action against climate change is only effective when combined with comprehensive social policy.

We fight for the rights of individuals (as with the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz [1]) and for a strong community in which wealth is redistributed from the top downwards. Equally so, the interests of the people must be foregrounded in leftist peace policy. Solidarity with the victims of war, violence, and those in need motivates our stances on international issues. Nonetheless, falling into the trap of imperialist violence in the name of leftist values is not a solution.

Die LINKE’s programmatic framework decisions, met at the party convention, as well as the stances of the party executives bear a pacifist imprint. Unfortunately, public statements by prominent party members repeatedly and fundamentally contradict this message. Therefore, it is necessary to answer with clear peace policy messaging and action.

In the following, I will list ten items with which we can and must position ourselves against the present socially hegemonic militarisation discourse. The following will also largely disregard issues concerning the geopolitical parameters of current events and the nature of armed conflict—not because these concerns are irrelevant, but because there has yet to be a consensus reached within the party on how to approach them. Here I prefer to concentrate on areas which correspond to the predetermined party programme and the shared political actions and positioning, which are possible and necessary today:

1. Die LINKE is a party of international order: we uniformly criticise violations of international law, regardless of whether responsibility lies with Russia, NATO, Turkey, Germany, or Saudi Arabia. We do not ignore human death and suffering, regardless of where the affected live or the colour of their skin.

2. We do not defend warring factions. Wars of aggression remain wars of aggression, though the aggressors may refer to history in justifying their actions. Nonetheless, an understanding of the interests with which war is pursued is worthwhile. Striving to understand conflict dynamics does not make anyone an ally to the aggressor. We should not accuse each other of this—insofar as no attempt to justify violence is being made. The search for peaceful and sustainable solutions is not realistically possible without the full picture of a conflict in mind.

3. Military alliances are not collective security systems. Security systems include potential foes. That is demonstrably not the case with NATO. NATO was founded as a military bloc and remains as such today. Thus, NATO cannot be a partner for peace. Simply because Putin’s invasion is clearly bad, NATO is not suddenly good. Our leftist goal of a collective security system which includes Russia is difficult to negotiate at this time. Nonetheless, it is right that we not give up hope for long-term, peaceful order in all of Europe.

4. Every weapon finds its war. Armament kills even long after wars end. To say that weapons remain in their intended destinations and meet their intended targets is to turn a blind eye to reality. Not only do they make their way from one war zone to the next, but they also pose domestic problems. That is how, to this day and in this very country, organised crime is outfitted with weapons from the Yugoslav wars. For these reasons, we must not allow doubt to arise in the fact that armament is and remains problematic—arms production and export alike—no matter where it takes place. Let us halt the mass expansion of the weapons industry and further pursue the goal of economic conversion.

5. In addendum to the above: those who build tanks, warplanes and warships do so with steel and other valuable resources. Steel is forged in furnaces. Furnaces use unthinkable amounts of energy and release corresponding amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Conduction of but also preparation for wars destroy human and natural means of existence. Additionally, investing in the arms industry creates a deficit of billions which are desperately needed for socio-ecological reconstruction. We can either fight the climate catastrophe or arm ourselves. In other words: those who invest a minimum of 2% of the GDP in armament have given up on the goal of keeping global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees celsius.

6. The global security turning point pursued by Scholz and his Ampel-coalition [2] drives us into an era of mass cuts of social services. Excluding military spending, we are already witnessing budget cuts in all areas. Instead of improvement, care-related professions have seen federal grants slashed; rather than being salvaged, hospitals are being closed, and there is not enough money to fund a basic child allowance for families. The Ampel-coalition passes one armament project after another. Orders for tanks, attack helicopters, and warships are often paid over a period of ten to fifteen years. The exceptional 100-billion-euro credit financing these payments will expire in 2026. Thereon, in accordance with NATO’s 2% spending goal, a remaining 20 billion euros must be drawn from the general budget—a sum nonetheless insufficient to cover the costs of the armament schedule. We must stop this armament madness and the consequential social clear-cutting as soon as possible.

7. It is no accident that debate surrounding mandatory civil service has increasingly swept the political landscape as of late. This obligation, imposed on young people, is intended to fill personnel gaps in the military and social system, and it would be applicable to all genders. However, this is a step backwards rather than a sign of progress. Within the framework of mandatory civil service, young people are registered, sorted, and—according to evaluation metrics—groomed to become either cannon fodder or cheap labour in haemorrhaging health and social sectors. As such, let us take a clear stance against mandatory civil service and in favour of a more robust public sector. Moreover, the freedom to evade military service may also be an important international step toward peace. That young men who have escaped drafting in Russia cannot rely on finding refuge here is unacceptable.

8. An increasingly powerful arms industry has increasingly strong political influence. The arms industry is among the economic sectors at highest risk for corruption. After all is said and done, this matter concerns billions in public funds and comparable amounts in private profits. The arms industry poses a danger to democracy. The influence of arms industry lobbying in politics is already far too great. The more money that flows into armament, the greater the danger becomes—with Germany being no exception. The Federal Bureau of Defence Technology and Procurement has, to date, broken its own anti-corruption rules in 450 cases. Increases in defence programming and with rules being relaxed last year via the Procurement Acceleration Act will see a dramatic increase in the political power of the arms industry if we do not stand in clear opposition to it—another benefit to the credit of DIE LINKE in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania successfully speaking out against Rheinmetall’s settlement in the region.

9. There are alternatives to global escalation, to the spiral of armament, and to military confrontation. As long as we are unable to overcome global exploitation through fair international cooperation, the path to world peace will prove extremely difficult. As we know, capitalism carries in it war as a cloud carries rain. However, steps toward deescalation are possible today. This includes the aforementioned strengthening of regional structures for security and cooperation. It also includes new generations of global disarmament agreements, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and regulations halting the use of killer drones and lethal autonomous weapons. Furthermore, foreign cultural policies and all measures which build bridges, person to person: financing for peace service, but also for international student exchange, sufficient funding for humanitarian help, and financing for international development to at least meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Sadly, the necessary financial resources to meet these goals are missing—we will not settle for this.

10. As mentioned previously, DIE LINKE must not allow doubt to spawn around the fact that it is a, or rather the, party for peace. Unfortunately, another party has, for the moment, been relatively successful in selling itself as such in the Bundestag. In doing so, the so-called ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD) is committing phenomenal label fraud. Although the AfD’s policy against Russia is less confrontational than the governing Ampel-coalition (perhaps additionally due to their admiration for Putin’s reactionist social politics), it is, through and through, a military party that places crucial emphasis on a strong German military with its reactionary political goals. The AfD’s parliamentary representatives have ranked among them several military and armament lobbyists, and the party acts as an antagonist in debates concerning military armament. AfD using the idea of peace as a justification for their policies is a perversion, and the same goes for when other nationalist, reactionary powers use this logic.

True peace policy is international and based on solidarity. On the spectrum of political parties in the Bundestag, only DIE LINKE stands for these values. This we must prove — self-assuredly and clearly — through our stances, actions, and alliances.

Footnotes

1 Proposed policy to ease the process for transgender, non-binary, intersex, and other gender diverse individuals in seeking name and gender marker changes.

2 From ‘streetlight’, Ampelregierung is the name given to the governing coalition of the SPD, FDP and Green party (red, yellow, and green, respectively) as shorthand.

This article first appeared in German on the website of the Informationsstelle Militarisierung. Translation: Shav McKay. Reproduced with permission

A history of theleftberlin Website

How we got here, where we want to go next, and how you can help

Phil Butland
18/09/2023

A number of people have contacted theleftberlin recently to express their interest in contributing to our website. As a result, we have recently expanded our editorial board and are still looking for writers, editors, translators and people who are active on social media platforms. Commissioning editor of theleftberlin Phil Butland explains where we started, and how we got to where we are now.

10 years ago, the LINKE Berlin internationals began as a group of mainly non-German activists living in Berlin to mobilise for the 2014 EU election. After the election was over, the group just kept on growing, and with it, its potential audience. In the decade since the group was formed, the percentage of Berliners without a German passport has increased from 10% to over 25%.

The LINKE Internationals are still active, and as the name suggests, receive some funding from die LINKE, the German Left party. It has set itself the dual aims of integrating non-Germans into German politics and making the German Left more aware of the wealth of talent and experience living on its doorstep. While the Berlin Internationals is a political project, theleftberlin – which is independent of parties but shares some members – is primarily a journalistic project.

Initially, the LINKE Internationals had their own website, which mainly contained events and activities in Berlin that could be of interest to an international Leftist audience. As the website developed, it started publishing more political articles. Some people who did not want to be connected to die LINKE were interested in being part of what we were doing with the website, so in October 2019, it was relaunched as theleftberlin.com.

Since then, theleftberlin has had an independent editorial board. Although many of our journalists have strong opinions on all sorts of issues, we do not toe any “party line”. Instead, we aim to contribute to the discussion within the international Left in Berlin and beyond.

2020 Relaunch

In December 2020, we at theleftberlin relaunched the website with a new design and expanded our editorial board, many of whom were Berlin-based Leftists who wanted to stay active during the lockdown period of the pandemic. We decided that if there were few opportunities to take to the streets, we would at least take journalistic steps towards building the movement. It was around this time that our current structures started to emerge.

The original website tended to republish articles which had appeared elsewhere, as selected by the editorial board. Since our relaunch, however, we have concentrated on original material – most articles we publish have not appeared in English anywhere else with a few exceptions; most notably, calls to action from the Global South that have not reached a wide enough audience in Europe.

One of our first major projects was the series Rebellious Daughters of History – pen portraits of around 100 radical women by British socialist historian Judy Cox. Some of the women were well-known, others forgotten, but all helped change the course of history. The articles were later published by Bookmarks publications as a book.

Editorial board

We have a weekly editorial meeting which lasts between 30 minutes and an hour. We review the previous week’s articles and take decisions about which articles we would like to publish, and which possible writers and interview partners we could approach. Between meetings, we communicate on the online platform Mattermost.

We have a wish list of articles that we would like to publish, including those to which no one has committed yet. After each editorial meeting, we post a list of articles in search of an author on our Mattermost page, so that people who don’t have the time or inclination to take part in editorial meetings can see some possible subjects which they might address.

As we do not have a budget, the work is 100% voluntary, so we can only publish articles if we find a volunteer to write it or give us an interview. This has its benefits and disadvantages, but it does mean that everyone who works on the website is treated equally. Members of the editorial team write some of the articles, but we also invite people from campaigns and local activists to write about what they are doing.

Our collaborators and confederates

We maintain a close working relationship with the Berlin LINKE Internationals, whose activities we continue to publish on our Events page. If we are looking for an article about a certain part of the world, we usually reach out to Berlin-based exile organisations like Berlin for India or Sudan Uprising. We also have an agreement with Bloque Latinamericano that we will try to translate and publish each other’s articles.

Since the Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen (DWE) campaign to expropriate the big landlords hit Berlin, we have published a number of articles by Right2TheCity, DWE’s working group for non-Germans. Some of our editorial team are also active in Right2TheCity. We also publish regular articles by housing activist Nancy du Plessis.

We were recently approached by a journalist at the neues deutschland newspaper who is interested in working together, so we will see what comes out of this potential collaboration. We are also grateful for the countless individuals – some of whom have been professional journalists, others, people who just want an outlet for their thoughts – who have contributed articles. Our website is much stronger as a result.

What we publish

theleftberlin has gone through some changes over the years, but we have always attempted to provide quality left-wing journalism for an international audience. Although we concentrate on Berlin and Germany, we have a wider brief, with correspondents in cities like Paris, Athens and New York who regularly report on what’s happening in their country.

We do not have a strict editorial line and try instead to reflect the full range of debate on the Left. But there are some things that we will not publish. We oppose all forms of racism, sexism, transphobia, and imperialism. We are also aware that part of the Left and women’s movement have taken positions which are objectively transphobic. Such opinions have no place on our website. Similarly, a worrying part of the German Left supports Israeli settler colonialism. Those views would be better suited to other outlets, of which there are plenty.

We do not speak with one voice on all issues. If we are offered an article that reflects a point of view on the Left, we will usually publish it. But if individual editorial board members disagree with its contents, we may publish a reply offering an alternative point of view.

Every so often, people ask us why we haven’t covered a particular issue. The usual reason is not that we don’t want to, or that we have refused to cover something on principle, but that every published article needs someone to write it. So, if you think that theleftberlin should be doing more to cover a particular issue or viewpoint, please consider writing something yourself, or finding us someone who is acquainted with the subject matter.

Newsletter

One of our big successes is our weekly Newsletter, which we’ve been sending in different forms since early 2019. The Newsletter is now sent out every Thursday lunchtime to over 1,500 people. If you don’t receive it already, you can subscribe here. Like the website, the Newsletter has evolved over time.

The Newsletter currently contains a summary of (usually) five events and activities which will take place in Berlin in the coming week. We also list publications on theleftberlin that have been posted since the previous Newsletter, as well as occasional links to podcasts, videos, photo galleries and radio programmes. We also include the following features, which can also be found on the Website.

The Campaign of the Week (COTW) introduces an organisation or alliance in Berlin, usually one which is organising an event in the coming week. As well as being in the Newsletter, the COTW is linked from our homepage for one week. After that, it is stored in our COTW archive, which is now home to over 150 campaigns.

News from Berlin and Germany is a summary of 6-8 news stories from the previous week. There is a paragraph of information about each story, and a link to the original, which is usually a newspaper report in German. The News from Berlin and Germany item is published on the website every Wednesday. You can search for previous versions here.

Left journalism Day School

In November 2021, we organised our first Left Journalism Day School, in which members of our editorial board introduced parallel workshops on conducting interviews, creating videos for social media platforms, and producing a podcast episode. This was followed by a session by Tina Lee from Unbias the News on how to write for the web. Finally, Alice Lambert and Phil Butland from our editorial board introduced sessions on how people could concretely work on theleftberlin.

After very positive feedback from the 30 people who attended, we organised a second Day School in May 2022. The format was similar, but this time we also presented on Radio Berlin International (see below) and Tina returned to talk about Storytelling and Research. Once more, the emphasis was on collaboration, and giving everyone a voice, regardless of how much or little experience in journalism they had.

Originally, we had planned to offer the journalism Day Schools on a regular six-month rhythm, but people were too involved in other projects to be able to realise that aim. We do hope to be able another Day School in 2024 as we think that the experience of the first schools was a great benefit to both the attendees and the theleftberlin website.

Radio Berlin International

In December 2021, we launched Radio Berlin International, a radio programme that is broadcast every other Sunday on reboot.fm on 88.4 MHz in Berlin, 90.7 MHz in Potsdam, and “FR-BB & 24/3” on DAB+ Digital Radio in Berlin. reboot.fm is currently on summer break, but the next programme should go out on October 8^th.

The shows last an hour in total and consist of two to three interviews or reports mixed with music chosen by the interviewees. The subject matter follows the aim of theleftberlin, namely, catering to the international Leftist audience based in Berlin. All past episodes can be accessed via our website.

Get involved

There are now roughly 30 people working in some capacity for theleftberlin, and we are always happy to welcome more helping hands. We prefer to give people small, regular tasks, and to allow them the ability to do as much or as little as their current situations allow.

We also welcome unsolicited articles on any subject which interests you. You can read some guidelines about the format of our articles here. If a subject is not urgent (or if it’s something which won’t go away, like climate disaster), we prefer not to set deadlines and wait until the author has something they are happy with.

Although most communication is online (either through Mattermost or in the weekly editorial meeting), we are planning to have occasional face-to-face meetings to discuss medium and long-term planning. This will be open both to the editorial team and to anyone who’s interested in what we are doing.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, or you just want to know more, you can contact us at team@theleftberlin.com. Please help us not just to interpret the world, but also to try to change it.

Photo Gallery – Demonstrating against right-wing Fundamentalists, 16th September 2023

Demonstration from Brandenburger Tor to Bebelplatz organised by the Bündnis für Sexuelle Selbstbestimmung

The Left Berlin
16/09/2023

Photos: Phil Butland, Antony Hamilton, Brian Janßen, Rosemarie Nünning

The European Union’s Favorite Hydrocarbon Dictatorship

Imperial powers are profiting from Azerbaijan’s offensive against Armenia

Jerome Chakaryan-Bachelier
15/09/2023

A party which has monopolized power for decades, a muzzled press, an army that regularly violates international law and commits war crimes, and a mafia clan that holds on to power thanks to its gas exports… You might think we’re talking about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but we’re actually talking about Ilham Aliyev’s Azerbaijan. Far from being considered a rogue state by the European Union, the latter has steadily drawn closer to Azerbaijan since the start of the war in Ukraine. Ursula von der Leyen described Ilham Aliyev as a “reliable and dependable partner” at a press conference in July 2022, only shortly after the Azeri regime re-started its campaign of brutal military aggression against its Armenian neighbor. Could the European Union once again offer up Armenia as a sacrifice to the appetites of Azerbaijan?

The 44-day war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020 did not draw special attention from Western journalists. Yet the intensity, brutality, and innovative military strategies of this invasion were anything but commonplace in the Caucasus region. The total war waged by the Aliyev clan’s regime took up old practices such as the bombing of civilian targets, extreme anti-Armenian hate campaigns, execution of prisoners, torture of civilians, and psychological warfare aimed at paralyzing the opposing side, among other tactics.

The conflict also took on the hallmarks of the 21st century. The use of drones became a central element of Azeri tactics, due to their noise – which sows panic among civilians and soldiers alike – and the difficulty in tracing them. Images of the torturing of civilians and prisoners were shared on Azeri Telegram feeds, showing soldiers laughing. At the same time, Azerbaijan’s army chief and president celebrated their victories by listing the capture of villages and towns, one by one, on Aliev’s Twitter account. The psychological effect on Armenians was significant – all in a context where no one contested the Azeri triumph.

Only a month after the war ended in November 2020, Ursula von der Leyen’s administration, through Josep Borrell (High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy), declared that “the EU wishes to conclude an ambitious new comprehensive agreement with Azerbaijan, based on democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms” after a meeting with Azeri representatives.

Azerbaijan’s recent victory was built on the pillars that Aliyev’s father built after a military defeat in 1994, when the Armenian army penetrated Azeri territory to secure the borders of the newly self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh. The head of state used the military defeat and the hundreds of thousands of internal refugees to reinforce Armenophobia. Armenophobia has long been alive and well in the region – one need only recall the Armenian genocide for proof of that.

Reopening old scars

During the first years of independence in the 1920s, various massacres took place between the two ethnic groups before the formation of the Soviet Socialist Republics. As a result of these events, the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast was founded as a quasi-independent territory in 1923.

Stalin decided that the territory would be Azeri, although its population was predominantly Armenian. However, oblast status implied a significant devolution of political power, and thus a certain degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the Soviet Socialist Republics. Throughout the Soviet era, both countries were emptied of their respective ethnic minorities, except in the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast where 94% of the population was still Armenian in 1990. When the first war ended in 1994 with a ceasefire, the 2000-year-old Armenian population on the shores of the Caspian Sea disappeared, while the Muslim presence dating back to the Seljuk conquests suffered the same fate within the borders of present-day Armenia.

These disappearances are accompanied by the destruction of the respective heritages. When Heydar Aliyev signed the end of the conflict, he realized that this new country did not have the financial means to continue the war to regain its territorial integrity. He therefore decided to sign the first “contract of the century” to exploit the natural resources that had been coveted by the ruling forces for centuries. 13 companies from 8 countries (Azerbaijan, Turkey, the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Norway, Russia and Saudi Arabia) set out to exploit Azeri hydrocarbons. Heydar Aliyev died in 2003, succeeded by his son Ilham. He has continued his father’s energy policy by signing a new “contract of the century”. To regain full territoriality, the regime had to arm itself, and obtain a green light from the Western powers.

Baku began to make a name for itself in Europe through caviar diplomacy. Various members of parliament in different countries, including the European Parliament, received gifts and invitations to the Caucasian capital. These bribes help to extend the Aliyev regime’s influence abroad. The Western press is remarkably silent on the repeated human rights violations and fraudulent elections taking place in Azerbaijan – a simple comparison with the media’s treatment of the same crimes committed by Russia is enough to assess the extent of the omerta enjoyed by the Azeri regime.

Having bought the silence of European diplomats, Aliyev was able to build an army equipped with cutting-edge technology imported from the USA, Israel, Russia and, above all, Turkey. The Turkish-Azeri alliance goes back a long way. As far back as the 1920s, Turkey supported the inter-ethnic massacres committed by Azeris against Armenians – the latter being allies of the Russians. Heydar Aliyev is credited with popularizing the slogan “two states, one nation”, which is based on the shared language between Turks and Azeris, said to have emerged from the Seljuk conquests around the first millennium – though this account makes a few historical shortcuts.

This alliance was reactivated in 2020, when the Turkish army was authorized to deploy in the Nakhichevan enclave. Several thousand jihadists were transferred from Turkish-occupied northern Syria to support the Azeri army. Faced with the magnitude of the Azeri army and its intertwined international networks, Armenia was unable to fight on equal terms. Thus, in 44 days, the Armenian army was routed – and the Azeri advance turned into a massacre, before being halted by Russian military intervention. [1]

Pipelines, Armenophobia and NATO

The ceasefire agreement of November 10, 2020 led to the departure of Armenian troops from Azerbaijan and the maintenance of a corridor between what remains of the oblast and Armenia (the Lachin corridor). 2,000 Russian troops were deployed to maintain security, while all Armenian prisoners, as well as the wounded and remains of the deceased, were to be returned. In Armenia, point 8 of the agreement is a particularly bitter pill to swallow: “All economic and transport links in the region will be restored. The Republic of Armenia guarantees the security of transport links between the eastern regions of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Autonomous Republic of Nakhichevan, in order to organize the free movement of citizens, vehicles and goods in both directions. Transport control will be exercised by border guards of the Russian Federal Security Service”. For the Azeri side, this is the equivalent of the Lachin corridor, which would provide continuity between the two Azeri territories separated by the Syunik region. A few weeks later, a pro-Erdogan newspaper revealed the plans between the two regimes.

A new gas pipeline is envisioned to double exports to the European Union by avoiding transit through Georgia [2]. New infrastructure – also mentioned in point 9 of the ceasefire agreement – would also be prepared to connect the Turkish market to Asia. This corridor, so ardently desired by the Ankara-Baku axis, has not yet seen the light of day – or at least one can say that it is still far removed from Panturkic aims.

At the same time, Armenophobia is reaching new heights. During an address to the nation in October 2020, Aliyev declared: “I said we would drive [Armenians] off our land like dogs, and we did it”. He went on to contest Armenian territory: “I said they had to leave our lands, or we would expel them by force. And it happened. The same will happen to the Zangezour corridor […] which was taken from us 101 years ago”. A “victory museum” opened in Baku, displaying vehicles taken from the enemy and the combat equipment of Armenians killed on battlefields. They were represented in the form of grotesque wax mannequins with distorted features.

The European Union’s leniency towards Aliyev raises questions. While Azerbaijan is in the “Western” camp and is keen to strengthen its cooperation with NATO, it is not aligned with Europe and the US in every respect. Numerous Russian companies are present in Azerbaijan through the intermediary of Lukoil, which holds a major stake in the country’s main gas field. As for the increase in Azeri gas exports since the Ukrainian conflict, it’s hard not to observe this as the consequence of increased gas imports from Russia.

Will the Europeans and Americans allow Aliyev to continue his war of conquest against Armenia, considered too close to Russia? Nothing is less certain. American leaders seem to have sensed an opportunity in the South Caucasus, which would enable them to increase their hold on the international gas market. Armenia occupies a strategic position in this region. Bordering Iran, its territory abounds in natural gas, and numerous development projects are underway to supply the European Union and the Asian market. In the south, as mentioned previously, new projects on the Baku-Ankara axis could achieve this. Similarly, from the south towards the north, an Iranian gas pipeline could reach Georgia, where the Azeri pipeline that exports gas to Europe is already located.

Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Armenia a few days after the Azeri offensive – again supported by Turkey – seems to indicate that a new energy era is dawning, and that new military alliances will be formed to protect the interests of the world’s former leading gas exporter. The United States could become the guarantor of Armenia’s security, putting Russia in an unprecedented position of weakness. Russia was absent during the Azeri incursion into Armenia, despite repeated requests for support from Yerevan. Russia and Armenia are both members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which is supposed to implicate its members in a defensive military alliance in case of an attack. Putin’s desire to weaken President Pachinian, who is too close to the West for his taste, is obvious. Weakened as well by the invasion of Ukraine, it is unlikely that Vladimir Putin’s Russia will multiply its fronts and engage in a costly proxy war with Azerbaijan – with which it incidentally enjoys cordial relations.

However, this does not mean that geopolitical blocs are being reconfigured. For the time being, the rapprochement between the United States and Armenia is largely symbolic, and Azerbaijan remains a privileged partner of Western states. Beyond the rhetoric, Azerbaijan continues to supply itself with the weapons of NATO and its allies, and supplies the European Union with gas. Once again, Europeans demonstrate their inability to deploy outside the zones of American influence and to defend an independent diplomatic approach.

This article first appeared in French on the LVSL website. Translation: Florent Marchais. Reproduced with permission.

Notes :

[1] In the territories inhabited by the 150,000 Armenians in what remains of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast.

[2] A buffer state between the European Union and Azerbaijan, considered to be in Russia’s orbit.