woensdag 20 november 2024

If This Is Not Genocide, What Is?

 


If This Is Not Genocide, What Is?

Francesca Albanese speaking at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) November 2024 . Photo Left in Europe, Flickr

JVL Introduction

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine was recently in London, speaking at several venues.  There were objections to her speaking at an attempt to “Ban Fran” by the self named “Campaign Against Antisemitism” which regards almost any criticism of Israel and any support for Palestinian rights as antisemitic.  The protest was present when the interviewer went to hear her speak.  This interview and its introduction outlines the important issues very clearly as they “discussed the Gaza genocide, Israeli settler colonialism, the rights and obligations of peoples and states under international law, and challenges encountered in the course of her mandate as UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

LL

This article was originally published by Tribune on Wed 13 Nov 2024. Read the original here.

If this is not genocide, what is? An interview with Francesca Albanese

UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese speaks to Tribune about Israel’s genocide as a form of ‘colonial erasure’ — and why the Palestinian cause is a symbol of resistance against all forms of exploitation.

Since the onset of Israel’s exterminationist war on the people of Gaza thirteen months ago, Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has acquired international renown as a public chronicler, legal anatomist, and political opponent of genocide. Appointed to the role in May 2022 — the month Israeli forces assassinated Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin — the Campagna-born international human rights lawyer has produced a succession of official reports detailing Tel Aviv’s apartheid regime, its renovation of the West Bank into a ‘constantly surveilled open-air panopticon’ crisscrossed by colonial settlements, and, since last October, its crimes of genocide against the Palestinians.

Spearheading the urgent demand within international fora for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, and for the mobilisation of all forms of global pressure upon the Israeli state, Albanese’s heightened profile has naturally seen her subjected to the same rote defamation campaigns familiar to all supporters of Palestinian liberation in Britain. Now, in the face of recent pleas from Israel advocacy organisations to bar her from western college campuses, the Special Rapporteur has undertaken a speaking tour of London universities, addressing Israel’s present genocide and the role (and limits) of international human rights law in resisting it. Coming as the IDF’s so-called Generals’ Plan to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza proceeds, and as more Palestinian and Lebanese children join the thousands upon thousands slaughtered, it was recognised by all attending Albanese’s Monday night address at SOAS that the hour could not be graver.

Approaching the campus off Russell Square, I initially found my path through the SOAS gates blocked by a microcosmic standoff: pro-Zionist demonstrators — brandishing Union and Israeli flags and posters reading ‘BAN FRAN’ and chanting ‘I-I-IDF!’ — flanked by police, and between them and the university, a considerably larger, louder, younger, and more diverse pro-Palestinian cohort, most among them students. With cheers and drumbeats rising as she greeted the assembled crowd, Albanese’s celebrity reception dramatised the resonance felt by the pro-Palestine campaigners between her international stand for the people of Gaza in the face of personal attack and their own activism in the face of disciplinary repression at SOAS.

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall, co-director at the institution’s Centre for Human Rights Law, opened proceedings once the vastly oversubscribed event finally got underway with the statement that: ‘We stand in solidarity with Francesca Albanese against attempts to silence her powerful and courageous voice.’ Herself a SOAS human rights law graduate, Albanese’s legal expertise was favourably contrasted by her former lecturer, Professor Lynn Welchmann, with that of another alumnus of that school, David Lammy, following the Foreign Secretary’s recent claim in Parliament that the use of ‘genocide’ to describe what the Israelis have prosecuted in Gaza ‘undermines the seriousness of that term.’ Her relentless activity in support of Palestine and against genocide at the UN praised as ‘valiant’, Albanese entered to a standing ovation to deliver her lecture, ‘Imperialism, Colonialism, and Human Rights: The Litmus Test of Palestine’

In lieu of a summary of the lecture, it’s worth quoting Albanese’s opening description of the topography of the Gaza genocide up to November 2024 in full:

‘Allow me to put the situation of the Palestinian people, as it is now, squarely in our minds. In Gaza, for 401 days, we have watched Israel’s constant bombing, fire, and artillery fire continue to spare nothing and no-one. Warfare has shown its most ruthless face. Large-scale indiscriminate bombing; the use of artificial-intelligence selected-targeting systems; the persistent surveilling of unmanned drones overhead; automatic snipers firing at people as they shop at markets, collect water, seek medical help, or even as they sleep in tents; soldiers bunkered down in tanks attacking unarmed civilians. Burned alive; left to die agonisingly slow deaths under the rubble; whole generations of families, crowded in homes that are bombed and razed in a single instant; hospitals and refugee camps now turned into cemeteries, full of journalists, students, doctors, nurses, persons with disabilities, that once inhabited these now-decimated lands.’

After an initial meeting at a crowded reception in SOAS’s Paul Webley Wing following the lecture, Tribune arranged to meet with Albanese the next day at an Afghan restaurant in Mile End. Surrounded by roads sporting lampposts festooned with Palestinian flags, we discussed the Gaza genocide, Israeli settler colonialism, the rights and obligations of peoples and states under international law, and challenges encountered in the course of her mandate as UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories.


OD

Thank you so much for speaking with Tribune. I’ve been reading through your UN reports ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ (March 2024) and, more recently, ‘Genocide as Colonial Erasure’ (October 2024), and of course attended your lecture in SOAS last night where you explained that you insist on the genocide framing because ‘The destruction which we see in Palestine is exactly and precisely what settler colonialism does. This is what a settler-colonial genocide is.’

Could you elaborate the argument that you’ve been advancing, in terms of the discourse of international law, regarding the respects in which the ongoing genocide in Palestine can be conceived as a settler-colonial venture?

FA

First of all, what constitutes genocide is not defined by personal opinions or personal stories or by comparison with what has happened in the past, although the past has a lot to tell us about what a genocide looks like. What constitutes genocide from a legal point of view is established by Article Two of the Genocide Convention. It consists of a series of acts which are criminal in and of themselves, like acts of killing, acts of infliction of severe bodily or mental pain, the creation of conditions of life leading to the destruction of a group, the forced transfer of children, the prevention of births. These are acts of genocide recognised by the Genocide Convention.

In order to have genocide, the critical element is the intent to destroy a group — in whole or in part — through even one of these acts. You could have, like happened in Australia or Canada, genocide implemented primarily, even though not only, through the transfer of children, so without killing. So, here’s the first issue, that a number of people dispute that the label ‘genocide’ can be affixed to what Israel is doing because Israel has only killed 45,000 people, as if it was normal, while it has destroyed the entirety of Gaza.

Some people see the brutality of this and still defend it as ‘self-defence’. The point is that this extreme destruction, this violation of basic rules to protect civilians and civilian premises and civilian life in international law, has been completely levelled by the Israeli logic that everyone was killable, either as a terrorist or a human shield or as collateral damage, and everything was destroyable. And this is why, 402 days later, we have a Gaza that is no longer liveable. Gaza is destroyed. If this is not an ostentatious genocide, what else is it?

We also need to understand the context in which this genocide is taking place. This is why I wrote the latter report [‘Genocide as Colonial Erasure’]. The acts of killing, rendering life impossible, forcibly displacing the Palestinians while bombing them north to south, west to east, forcing them to live in the most inhospitable places in Gaza after having destroyed everything that could allow them to access livelihood, after depriving them of water, food, medicine, fuel for over one year — one year! — and also arbitrarily arresting, depriving of liberty, torturing, raping, thousands of Palestinians. Do we see the reality?

And the thing is that this didn’t start just one year ago. The Palestinians have been oppressed, repressed, mistreated, made the object of abuse, indignities, humiliation, and egregious violations of international law for decades. Israel does so in the pursuit of the realisation of a ‘Greater Israel’, a place for Jewish sovereignty only between the river and the sea. This is why I say that this is a genocide that is being conducted not just because of ideological hatred transformed into a political doctrine, as has happened through the dehumanisation of ‘the other’ in other genocides; this genocide has been committed because of the land, for the land. Israel wants the land without the Palestinians. And for the Palestinians, staying on the land is part of who they are as a people. This is why I call it genocide as colonial erasure.

OD

In your report, you have observed, noting that International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings have also found, that under international law, the Israeli occupation is in and of itself deemed to constitute an act of aggression, which you’ve written thereby ‘vitiates’ any claim Israel may make to a sovereign state’s right of self-defence. Could you explain again, in terms of international law, what the fact that the occupation is itself deemed an act of aggression means for Israel’s oft-claimed ‘right to defend itself’, and, therefore, also for the Palestinians as a people’s right of armed resistance, in principle?

FA

The International Court of Justice has established what serious legal experts, scholars, and others have said for decades. Israel maintains an unlawful occupation in the occupied Palestinian territories, namely Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. It prevents Palestinians from realising their self-determination, meaning their right to exist as a people. It is tantamount to racial segregation and apartheid because it translates into and allows a continuous annexation of Palestinian land for the benefit of Jewish Israeli citizens only. This is why [per the ICJ’s ruling] the occupation must be dismantled totally and unequivocally and unconditionally before September 2025. So this means that the troops have to go, that the settlements have to be dismantled, that those Israeli citizens have to be returned to Israel unless they want to stay as Palestinian citizens. But the land is to be returned to the Palestinians. The resources cannot continue to be exploited by Israel. This is very clear, and this is the only way to secure a way forward. This is also, in my view, the beginning of the end, the real, concrete beginning of the end of Israel’s apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory and beyond.

Because Israel maintains an occupation that translates into the oppression of the Palestinian people, Israel faces threats to its security emanating from the occupied Palestinian territories. But these are consequential from the oppression that Israel imposes upon those territories. And the only way to extinguish that security threat is to end the occupation. Israel has the right to defend itself within its territory from attacks upon its territory from other states. This is what would give Israel the right to use military force and to wage a war against another ‘country’. But the point is that Israel is attacking the people it has maintained under occupation. And violations of the right of self-determination [of the Palestinians] lead to resistance. The right to resist is to a people is what the right to self-defence is to a state, so there is an intimate conflict and conflation between two clashing interests. However, international law is clearly on the side of Palestinian self-determination. The right to resist, of course, has limitations. It cannot target civilians through killing and taking hostages. But what follows suit is that there should be justice, investigation, and prosecution over such acts, not a war of annihilation.

OD

Turning to the UK context, at the very start of the genocide in Gaza, Keir Starmer, then Leader of the Opposition, infamously signalled his support for, in his words, Israel’s ‘right’ to cut off water and energy into the Gaza Strip. And now, as Prime Minister, he and his Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who have both previously stood on pro-Palestinian platforms, have denied the claims of genocide, Lammy arguing that to use that claim undermines the gravity of the term historically. At the same time, they have characterised their government as one which maintains a ‘profound respect for international law.’ In what respect does Britain’s stance that what is happening in Israel is not a genocide, and indeed, its continued supply of arms and other supportive materiel to the Israeli state, figure with its claims to be adhering to international law?

FA

Well, first of all, let me tell you that I don’t think that one can call himself or herself a human rights lawyer if they don’t stand for human rights without political or ideological considerations. Saying that starvation is acceptable is simply betraying what international law stands for, which is ultimately the protection of civilians in situations of armed conflict, hostilities, crisis, etc. Here you have a foreign secretary who is denying that a genocide is ongoing, even where the International Court of Justice has recognised it. He needs to explain how he disqualifies that. But in any case, we will hear, I think, excuses. History will judge these people who have not done anything in their power to prevent atrocities. Meanwhile, in doing so, the UK is violating its obligations under international law not to aid and assist a state which is committing international wrongdoings. This is where we are. There are responsibilities; there might be complicity. This is why I encourage strategic litigation in this country to hold people accountable, but also to make sure — and this is the power of the people — to make sure that its elected leaders do not drag this country and its taxpayers into funding a war of annihilation.

Stephen Kapos, a Holocaust survivor who always stands i solidarity with Palestinians with Francesca Albanese, London, 11 Nov 2024

OD

As noted last night, you were trained at SOAS (as well as other institutions) as an international human rights lawyer. Discussed in the Q&A session after your lecture were differing perspectives on the utility or viability or credibility of international law and the institutions of the postwar international order as means to restrain acts of aggression and crimes against humanity, when at the same time, we can perceive and understand embedded imperialist legacies and power-structural realities within these.

Tribune is a long-standing socialist and internationalist publication that backed the anti-apartheid movement to help liberate South Africa from its very outset. How can activists approaching questions of global politics from that sort of perspective relate to the arguments in defence of engaging with the discourse and framework of international law and existing international institutions to try and help secure Palestinian self-determination while also maintaining that critical anti-colonial perspective on those institutions?

FA

We need to see the problem within our systems, which may seem to be on the periphery of international relations, but are still the centres of the Empire: a system that can control other people’s land, other people’s will, other people’s resources, and make their lives miserable. This is no longer happening only to the Global South; it is also happening to many of us in the Global North. It’s time to see that in the fragility and precariousness of many categories of people, from workers to the elderly, people with disabilities, LGBT people, and migrants. Human rights like freedom of expression and freedom of speech, as well as the right to be remunerated adequately, or the right to have adequate housing and healthcare: these are things that are becoming more and more violated, including in the Global North, and cannot be disconnected from the violations that people in the Global South suffer at the hands of a system which is very much Western-led. Palestine epitomises this system, the struggle of indigenous people, the struggle of victims of the enduring legacy of colonialism, including discrimination against refugees and migrants from the Global South, the struggle for environmental justice. This is why the struggle of Palestine is becoming a symbol of resistance across the world for many who want just to live in a more equal, fair, and non-discriminatory order.

OD

You recently called for the reformation of the old UN Special Committee against Apartheid. How do you see the role of the United Nations and UN-related institutions during the international anti-apartheid movement over South Africa as having a practical significance for the movement in international solidarity with Palestine today?

FA

I think that the United Nations played a role gradually, in the sense that there was debate brought about primarily by states in the Global South to abolish apartheid, but it was largely a reflex of the turmoil that was enveloping the world. The international anti-apartheid movement was a grassroots one, which was originated in this part of the world — in Britain and Ireland — but also soon became rooted in other parts of the West in order to resist through the economic disempowerment of the apartheid regime and help the South Africans liberate themselves from that repressive form of state. This shows that today, like in the past, what is needed is global action, global action in the new revitalised grassroots movement that exists. There is BDS, and there have been students’ protests and students’ actions to reestablish the core of international law, the core principles of international law. It continues, but much more needs to be done. Holding businesses accountable, pushing trade unions into action, holding political leaders — and fellow citizens who have been fighting as part of Israel’s apartheid regime, whether as part of the business enterprise or as soldiers — accountable. It’s time to push for accountability at the domestic level and not just internationally.

OD

One last question, which is perhaps slightly more of a personal one: as UN Special Rapporteur, and especially since October 7, your international profile has expanded substantially, and you have been the target of considerable hostility, personal slanders, attempts at character assassination, etc. (including from Biden administration representatives), with pro-Israel advocacy groups opposing, for instance, your freedom to speak on university campuses. We saw some demonstrators outside SOAS last night, chanting ‘BAN FRAN’ as well as ‘I-I-IDF’. What has been your experience of this opposition, and how have you felt this has impinged upon your mandate as a UN special rapporteur? Do you have a response to those people who would attempt to shut you down?

FA

First of all, let me qualify the protests because people who were not there but read your article might get the wrong impression. There were about ten individuals shouting, with more flags than feet on the ground. They were not a real protest. They were nuisances. A tiny, tiny nuisances. But, I mean, it’s fair. Let them come. Let them cry out, ‘BAN FRAN’, while people are being slaughtered, with 17,000 children killed. Let them do whatever they like. Frankly, I don’t think this is important. I don’t think this is relevant. Also irrelevant is the fact that governments who are complicit with genocide attack me instead of dealing with their unmet legal obligations. I don’t want to entertain discussions concerning how insane these attacks are. They’re just yet another manifestation of how fierce the repression of Palestine, Palestinian identity, and Palestinian resistance to exist is, especially in Western societies.

Special thanks are due to Teresa Rasella, without whom this interview would not have been possible.About the Author

Francesca Albanese is international lawyer and academic and the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.

About the interviewer

Owen Dowling is a historian and archival researcher at Tribune

https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/if-this-is-not-genocide-what-is/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_source_platform=mailpoet&utm_campaign=today-on-the-jvl-blog-newsletter-total-articles-for-you_1

Ilan Pappe: Palestine’s Blood Never Dried






Ilan Pappe: Palestine’s Blood Never Dried

Ilan Pappe       
02.08.2024

From 1948 to today, ethnic cleansing hasn’t been about rare instances of Israeli extremity — it is a defining feature of the daily colonial subjugation of the Palestinian people.

 To adequately understand the historical context of Israel’s genocidal policies towards the Gaza Strip, one must first accept the definition of Zionism as settler colonialism.

Settler colonialism differs from classical colonialism. The settlers are not expatriates sent by an empire to build colonies that exploit new countries and their peoples for the benefit of the mother country. The members of settler colonial movements are not sent by anyone. In many historical cases they were, in fact, outcasts of Europe, people persecuted because of their faith, origins, or actions, and forced to seek — or believing themselves forced to seek — a place in which to build a new Europe where they would be safe.

Unfortunately, the countries they chose for the new Europe were already inhabited by indigenous people. In almost all cases where European outcasts and refugees became settlers in foreign countries, they were determined to get rid of the native populations. The late, great scholar of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, called this ‘the logic of the elimination of the native’.

The older settler colonial projects of European-settling in the Americas and Australasia ended in the genocide of the indigenous people. The more recent ones, as in the case of Palestine, resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the local population.

This main characteristic of settler colonial projects, the eliminatory impulse, has been very much ingrained into the Zionist mindset from the inception of the movement. The logic behind it is that the success of building a European Jewish state in Palestine depends on the ability of the settler movement to take over as much of Palestine as possible, with as few Palestinians in it as possible.

There are other features of setter colonialism which also fit the Zionist case study. Let me mention two very typical ones. First, the Zionist elite expunged the native population from the country’s history while appropriating the native culture and folklore as their own; thus, Palestinian customs, dress, and food are Israelised. Two glaring examples are the appropriation of hummus and falafel as national Israeli foods and of traditional Palestinian embroidery as authentic Israeli craft.

Second, like other settler colonial projects, Zionism relied on a colonial empire — the British — to build a foothold in the new country; once that was achieved, the settlers began a ‘war of independence’ against the empire, as happened in Israel in 1948, in the American War of Independence, and in the Boer War in South Africa. But here I focus on the constant desire to achieve the new country through the removal of the native population by any means possible — a desire that informed Zionist actions from early on and informs Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip today.

A History

Zionism appeared in Palestine in 1882 when a small number of Eastern European Jews were inspired by the idea of the ‘return’ of the Jews to the old Biblical Palestine as a panacea for antisemitism in Europe. For this group, Palestine was the appropriate location for the transformation of Judaism from a traditional religion into a modern-day national identity. Early Zionists were already discussing the transfer of the Palestinians, but of course they did not have the means to implement the vision of a de-Arabised Palestine.

The Zionist community in Palestine was able to commence ethnic cleansing on a smaller scale after Britain occupied Palestine in 1918 and a few years later established, under the auspices of the League of Nations, a mandatory state in Palestine.

With the help of the British authorities the Zionist movement purchased land from absentee landlords, who lived in Beirut, in two valleys: Marj Ibn Amer (today Emek Izrael) and Wadi Hawareth (today Emek Hefer).

Under the Ottoman land regime, large swathes of land had been owned by landlords, in this case living outside of Palestine. On these lands were villages that had been there for centuries. A change of land ownership had not affected these villages until then — but once these lands were purchased by the Zionist movement, the new owners demanded the eviction of the villages, effected with the help of the British police. A dozen villages were evicted in such a way in the mid-1920s.

By the time the British decided to leave Palestine and refer its future to the UN in 1947, the Zionist movement, with the help of Britain, had developed the capacity to perpetrate expulsions of Palestinians en masse. The moment came for such an operation when the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan — which proposed the division of Palestine between the settlers and the native people — at the end of 1947. Their objection was disregarded by the UN, and international legitimacy for establishing a Jewish state in part of historical Palestine was granted without their approval.

Even in the part of Palestine that the UN accorded to a Jewish state, there were a large number of Palestinians. Moreover, the movement was not content with the roughly 50 percent of historical Palestine accorded to it by the UN and wished to expand the future Jewish state over the areas designated a future Arab state. It was clear, then, that if its territorial ambition was going to be fulfilled, the Jews would be a minority in their new state, defeating the idea of a Jewish state altogether. The Zionist leaders therefore determined to spread over as much of Palestine as they could, and prepared a massive ethnic cleansing soon after the partition plan was adopted.

In February 1948, the Zionist forces began ethnically cleansing Palestine. Britain remained responsible for law and order until 15 May 1948, the day the mandate terminated. While the Arab world promised the Palestinians it would come to their rescue, it delayed its response until the British left Palestine. When that response came, it was too little and too late.

Contrary to the Israeli narrative, Palestinians did not become refugees because the Arab world went to war against the Jewish state on 15 May 1948. Before one Arab solider crossed the border into Israel, a quarter of a million Palestinians had become refugees, many from urban centres of Palestine that were totally destroyed.

The troops that entered from the neighbouring Arab states battled the new Israeli army until August 1948. Apart from the Jordanian army, they were ill-equipped and had no war experience. The Jordanian army limited its activity, in return for an Israeli agreement to allow it to annex the West Bank.

The Israeli army was thus able to conduct its operations on two fronts: first, it repelled the Arab armies’ entry to Palestine; and second, it continued the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Over the following seven months, Israel completed the expulsion of half of Palestine’s population, destroyed half of its villages — more than 500 — and demolished most of its urban neighbourhoods.

The Israeli army succeeded in expelling only half of the Palestinians from historical Palestine for three main reasons. First, in the north, the army had already encountered resistance and reached that part of Palestine too overstretched to complete its operations. Second, what became known as the West Bank was allowed by Israel to be taken over by Jordan along with its original population and a large number of refugees. Finally, hundreds of thousands of refugees expelled from the south of Palestine ended up in the Gaza Strip after Egypt refused to accept them.

As part of the Israeli–Jordanian armistice agreement signed in April 1949, Israel received a small portion of the West Bank known today as Wadi Ara, or the Little Triangle, an area it regarded as a crucial land bridge between the eastern valleys and the sea. Israel sent some of the villagers living there back to West Bank proper, but found it more difficult to do so after it granted these Palestinians citizenship (and one should give credit to the UN armistice committee watching over Israel’s attempt to remove the Palestinians there). The Palestinians who remained in the north also became like those in Wadi Ara, part of the Palestinian minority in Israel. The Palestinians you might meet today in Haifa, Jaffa, al-Ramleh, and al-Lid are mostly internal refugees who made their way into these former Palestinian towns.

The Palestinian citizens of Israel became second-rate citizens, living under strict military rule until 1966. Attempts to downsize this population also continued: several villages were ethnically cleansed in the first decade of statehood. When military rule was abolished in 1966, it was replaced by a local version of apartheid that retained the inferior citizenship of the Palestinians in Israel.

Imprisonment

As mentioned, settler colonial projects operate in two dimensions: space and population. In 1948, the Zionist movement took over about 80 percent of historical Palestine and expelled nearly 90 percent of the Palestinians living in those parts. The territorial appetite was not quenched, however, and the June 1967 War offered an opportunity to complete the geographical takeover: namely, occupying the whole of historical Palestine — Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

Pursuing this territorial end came at a price. After expelling nearly one million Palestinians before 1967, Israel now incorporated nearly two million more Palestinians. No wonder, then, that there were serious deliberations in the Israeli government after the war about another massive ethnic cleansing of the new territories. The government decided against it due to lack of conducive circumstances, the ministers in the cabinet citing three reasons: the war was over after six days, so such a cleansing could not be presented as one of its outcomes; there were already television crews filming; it was feared that refugees would likely show more resistance to a second attempt to displace them. The alternative was to enclave the populations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in two mega prisons. If you cannot expel the people, it was decided, you could exclude them from the citizenship of the occupying state, restrict their movement, and confine them to their own areas. Nonetheless, during and immediately after the war, Israel also expelled 300,000 Palestinians from various parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem. In the years to come, through various means, Israel would expel more than half a million Palestinians from these areas.

The enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank were soon encircled by military bases and Jewish colonies, strangulating the population in urban and small rural pockets. Consecutive Israeli governments claimed that this prison model was a basis for a future peace, and that they might even consider turning them into a ‘state’. This was the logic behind the Oslo Peace Accord of 1993, which was unfortunately accepted by the PLO leadership, misled to believe that indeed there was a genuine Israeli commitment to a two-state solution.

Unlike the leadership, the occupied people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip had rejected this prison model by 1987 and rebelled against the occupation in what became known as the First Intifada. The second came not long after, in 2000, and the PLO leadership joined it when it realised that the Oslo Accord was an occupation by other means. Israel responded to the Second Intifada by imposing a tougher prison model on the Palestinians. This one included massive arrests without trial, the demolition of houses, expulsions of people, and in frequent cases the wounding and killing of anyone resisting these collective punishments. Colonisation through the building and expansion of Jewish settlements continued as well. By the beginning of this century there were already 600,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Israel was, however, unable to persuade its citizens to settle the Gaza Strip. Israel had created the Strip in 1948 as a receptacle for the hundreds of thousands expelled during the Nakba, and by the end of the twentieth century this huge refugee camp had only attracted a few thousand Jewish settlers (who nonetheless took control of the water resources and fertile land). Similarly, while Israel was able to re-assert direct and oppressive rule over the West Bank after the Second Intifada with the help of a more cooperative Palestinian leadership, it found it hard to rule Gaza directly, the enclave remaining a centre of resistance.

In 2005, under the guidance of Ariel Sharon, the new prime minister, Israel tested a different prison model for the Gaza Strip, removing the settlers and disconnecting the area from the world through a siege. Support had been growing among the Strip’s population for the Islamist guerrilla movements that had emerged in the 1980s, and the vacuum left by the Israeli army was filled, through democratic elections, by Hamas. In response, Israel tightened the siege and supplemented it with a maritime blockade.

Hamas reacted by launching primitive missiles into Israel. Israel, in turn, and sometimes without any apparent cause, assaulted the Strip’s densely packed population of two million with its cutting-edge weapons. This huge, crowded refugee camp was bombarded four times between 2007 and 2023 from air, land, and sea. Each attack was more brutal than the last. In 2014 hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed, many of them children, with many more left traumatised, wounded, and homeless.

The Western world, under American leadership, afforded Israel immunity for all these attacks, which were severe breaches of international law, as was its continued violation of Palestinians’ basic civil and human rights in the West Bank and the Greater Jerusalem area.

Intensification

These polices have reached new levels of brutality since the election of a far-right government in 2022. Under Benjamin Netanyahu, this government incorporates messianic and fanatic parties whose members grew up in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and who aspire to annex both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip through colonisation and ethnic cleansing.

The narrative in the Western media is that the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 came out of the blue and was orchestrated by Iran. This narrative purposely ignores the intensification of Israel’s policies of oppression against the Palestinians, driven by the ideology of the new government, including massive arrests without trial, a shoot-to-kill policy targeting mainly teenagers, the tightening of the siege on the Strip, and encouraging settlers and the police to invade the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest place in Islam, with the aim of rebuilding, in its stead, a Jewish temple.

The Hamas assault was partly a response to these new policies, as well as an effort to dramatically change the balance of power and redirect the world’s attention to the Palestine issue, which had been marginalised since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

The initial Israeli reaction to the attack — in which 1,200 Israelis soldiers and citizens were killed and 240 abducted — was vengeful. But this desire for revenge was soon usurped by the extreme right-wing government as a pretext to implement its vision of a Greater Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea with as few Palestinians as possible inside it. Its hope is that Egypt and other countries will receive the refugees from Gaza, and that Jordan will absorb those expelled later from the West Bank.

There also remains a more pragmatic section of the government surrounding the prime minister’s party, Likud, and the Orthodox parties. Like the Zionist opposition parties, this section would like to introduce the prison model of the West Bank to the occupied Gaza strip. It is a vision fully supported by the USA, Britain, and the EU — and euphemistically called the ‘two-state solution’.

The Only Option

Patrick Wolfe described settler colonialism not as an event but as a structure. What he meant was that as long as the principal ideological motive of the settler colonial project is the displacement of the local population and its replacement with settlers, actions such as ethnic cleansing and genocide will continue. In 1948, Israel managed to take huge swathes of historical Palestine and expel nearly half of the Arab population, but the project of turning Palestine into a Jewish state remained only partly successful. As long as less than all of historical Palestine was under Israeli rule and Palestinians remained in historical Palestine, the ethnic cleansing and the genocide would — and will — continue.

The goal of absorbing the whole of historical Palestine was achieved in 1967. This ideological impulse for land without its indigenous people on it is the main cause for the violent cycles in Israel and Palestine. It is the impulse that informs the genocide currently occurring in the Gaza Strip, the daily killings of Palestinians in the West Bank, and the massive arrests without trial there, just as it motivates the continued violation of the basic rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Worse, it ensures that these actions will continue until the ‘successful’ completion of the settler colonial project.

The main reason this project of colonisation is incomplete is the strength of Palestinian resistance and resilience. Half of the population in historical Palestine is Palestinian, and many of its refugees dwell in camps and communities not far from its borders. This is despite the powerful international alliance that provides immunity to Israel, which includes the Global North, evangelical Christian denominations, some Jewish communities, right and extreme right parties, and multinational corporations, in particular those trading in arms and security.

There is still a way out of this endless cycle of violence, but it demands a paradigm shift from those who have the power in the region and the world to impact the reality on the ground. The hegemonic discourse that focuses on ‘peace’ between the coloniser and the colonised is irrelevant to that reality. The appropriate term to use is decolonisation, which will include the substitution of the apartheid regime that exists all over historical Palestine.

The cessation of the efforts to dispossess the Palestinians, the rectification of past evils in the form of the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, and the institutionalisation of a political regime based on equality in all aspects of life between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is the only hope for genuine peace in the future. The Palestinians do not have the power to obtain that future without the help of that part of the world that allowed a settler movement to dispossess them in 1948 and ever since. Britain and the USA are particularly complicit in the cartography of disaster that has enveloped historical Palestine since the arrival of the Zionist movement. They have a historical responsibility to stop the genocide in Gaza and the destruction of the West Bank, and to then enable the Palestinian liberation movement to build a new Palestine akin to that of the past, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexisted as one nation.

If this does not happen, Israel will not survive for long. Like the Crusaders many years before them, Israeli Jews will find out that you cannot impose a European state on the native people of an Arab Palestine against their will. To prevent the violent destruction of this colonialist project — one that also brought blessings to the country in many areas of life — and produce an authentic Hebrew culture, a non-violent decolonisation leading to one democratic state is the only viable option.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/08/palestines-blood-never-dried

maandag 18 november 2024

Israel's War on Hezbollah's Economic Empire: From Human Trafficking to Making Captagon

 






Israel's War on Hezbollah's Economic Empire: From Human Trafficking to Making Captagon

The Lebanese terror group owns a construction company, produces drugs and smuggles oil from Iran. Israeli jets have attacked Hezbollah financial institutions in Lebanon, but the group's economic network still spans the globe
Israel's extensive attack on the Hezbollah-linked al-Qard al-Hasan financial institution last month served several purposes. Not only did the airstrikes across Lebanon destroy buildings and offices hoarding gold and cash, they sent a message to the country's 1.5 million Shi'ites: Your economic, welfare and security network is being dismantled.
Israel was adhering to that famous old saying: "Follow the money."
For many years, the Israeli intelligence community knew how crucial it was to track terrorist groups' funds, but unfortunately this awareness wasn't always prioritized in the battle against Hamas and Hezbollah.
Hezbollah takes part in production and trade of the drug Captagon (Fenethylline) – the 'cocaine of the poor' – in southern Syria, where the Assad regime is also an active partner.
The turning point came after October 7, when the public was outraged at the Netanyahu government for having allowed and even encouraged Qatar to send funds to Gaza. A sizable chunk went toward arming Hamas.
Now, with the war against Hezbollah in full swing, Israel is making a great effort to block the funding sources and money-smuggling routes of the Lebanese Shi'ite terrorist organization.
A view shows a building damaged during a strike, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, October 7, 2024.
A view shows a building damaged during a strike, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, October 7, 2024.Credit: Aziz Taher/ REUTERS
"The fund-transfer channels are gradually closing," says a senior defense official who specializes in the field. "They're struggling to move funds, and Hezbollah is having a hard time paying monthly salaries to its people. But there is still no indication that it's in real financial distress."
This article is based on interviews with eight sources; people who have worked for the Mossad and the Defense Ministry, as well as American and Lebanese researchers. Some of the sources requested anonymity.
According to Israeli and U.S. intelligence estimates, Hezbollah's annual budget ranges from $700 million to $1 billion. A full 70 to 80 percent is funded directly by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force. The rest comes from donations and illegal businesses.
This partly covers salaries to the 40,000 or so members of Hezbollah's regular and reserve forces, and helps maintain the organization's welfare system. The average salary of a Hezbollah operative ranges between $200 and $400 a month. Commanders receive more, depending on rank and position.
This budget doesn't include the weapons transferred from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, says Matthew Levitt, an ex-counterterrorism intelligence analyst at the FBI and a former deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the U.S. Treasury, where he handled terrorist-financing issues. Levitt, who is considered one of the world's leading experts in this field, is currently a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
A journalist takes a tour inside Sahel General Hospital, in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024, a day after the Israeli army said that Hezbollah is storing hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold under the hospital.
A journalist takes a tour inside Sahel General Hospital, in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024, a day after the Israeli army said that Hezbollah is storing hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold under the hospital.Credit: Hassan Ammar,AP
"There are no exact numbers on the extent of arms smuggling to Hezbollah," says Dror Doron, a former researcher on Lebanon at the Prime Minister's Office. Israeli Military Intelligence has estimated that the Quds Force transferred to Hezbollah up to $300 million annually in weapons, components and materials. Intelligence Corps researchers believe that Hezbollah's weapons and equipment purchases in the last 15 years totaled about $5 billion.

Dabbling in cocaine

According to Levitt, Hezbollah's finances suffered a major blow in 2009. He says that due to the U.S. and international nuclear sanctions on Tehran, as well as the drop in oil prices and domestic instability in Iran, Hezbollah's budget was cut by up to 40 percent for a time. The organization thus had to find additional funds and diversify its portfolio.
Hezbollah has ventured to supplement its income in very creative ways, among them drug trafficking. Israeli intelligence knew about these efforts for decades but turned a blind eye because some dealers were recruited by Israeli intelligence, and some were double agents who worked with both Israel and Hezbollah.
The bulk of Hezbollah's drug income comes from Colombian, Brazilian and Ecuadorian cartels. According to Levitt, Hezbollah doesn't produce the drugs itself but its people launder money and move the proceeds.
The best-known drug lords are the Amin Baz and Taj al-Din families, which operate in Africa. Meanwhile, in 2016 the United States imposed sanctions on Shi'ite politician Amin Sherri for allegedly financing terrorism. In 2005 Sherri had been elected to the Lebanese parliament for Hezbollah, and last month Israeli planes bombed his offices.
Smoke rises from an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024.
Smoke rises from an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024.Credit: Hassan Ammar,AP
Hezbollah takes part in production and trade of the drug Captagon (Fenethylline) – the "cocaine of the poor" – in southern Syria, where the Assad regime is also an active partner. Israel didn't target the laboratories, even though Israeli intelligence knows their location.
"I don't understand why we didn't bomb them," says Udi Levy, the former head of Harpoon, a secret Mossad unit that did battle in the financial wars against Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran. "The people especially suffering from the epidemic of the Captagon trade are JordanSaudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and I suppose they'd be very grateful to us if the labs were destroyed."
Hezbollah also engaged in human trafficking; young women were smuggled from Eastern Europe and Africa to the Middle East. The key figure here was Mustafa Badreddine, notorious for the sexual abuse of women. Wanted for many years by Israeli intelligence, he was gunned down mafia-style at the Damascus airport.
His assassination was approved by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, who bumped off Badreddine for disobeying orders. Soleimani himself was killed by an American drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020, while Nasrallah was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Beirut a little over a month ago.
Hezbollah also occasionally benefited from diamond smuggling in west Africa and cigarette counterfeiting in the United States.
Israeli intelligence and the U.S. Treasury calculated that Hezbollah's income from illegal activities amounted to between 10 and 15 percent of its annual budget. Moreover, every year Hezbollah receives million-dollar donations from wealthy Lebanese Shi'ites around the world.
Levitt says that oil smuggling from Iran is an even greater source of income. To circumvent the sanctions, Iran transports oil to Syrian ports through a "shadow fleet" whose ships use fake documentation, register under the names of shell companies and fly foreign flags.
The Assad regime is well aware that part of the oil is sold in Syria. The proceeds are then converted from Syrian and Lebanese pounds to dollars and handed over to Hezbollah. According to foreign reports, in 2019, Israel deployed missile ships, naval mines and commandos to hit at least 12 ships that were carrying Iranian oil to Syria.
Boats are docked at the port city of Tyre, amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, southern Lebanon October 23, 2024.
Boats are docked at the port city of Tyre, amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, southern Lebanon October 23, 2024.Credit: Aziz Taher/ REUTERS
People walk on the beach, as smoke billows after an Israeli strike, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Tyre, southern Lebanon, October 23, 2024.
People walk on the beach, as smoke billows after an Israeli strike, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Tyre, southern Lebanon, October 23, 2024.Credit: Aziz Taher/ REUTERS
Oil smuggling was achieved via the Damascus-based company Al-Fadel Exchange – run by the Balwi brothers – which has now been hit by sanctions by the U.S. Treasury and the Israeli Defense Ministry. The brothers transferred millions of dollars to accounts (also sanctioned) at the Central Bank of Syria. The beneficiaries were the Syrian government, President Bashar Assad, the Quds Force and Hezbollah oil financier Muhammad Qasim al-Bazzal.
In 2016, Israel closed the Mossad's Harpoon unit, whose brief was broadened and transferred to a new unit at the Defense Ministry. It is known as Matal, a Hebrew acronym for National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing, the NBCTF. It's headed by Paul Landes, who told me that the Israeli Defense Ministry "imposed financial sanctions on 18 oil tankers operating in the service of Quds."
According to Landes, the big difference this time is that Western countries joined Israel's sanctions, so the tankers took down their flags and became a pirate force. "Several countries banned [the tankers'] entry into their ports, and in this action millions of dollars were confiscated from crypto wallets," he says.
Landes adds that a major challenge for his unit and Israel's allies are the crypto operations popular among terrorists and other criminals. He's especially proud that his office has issued more than 300 warrants against entities believed to be financing terror, including money changers, and against people involved in the efforts to improve of the accuracy of Hezbollah's missiles.

Onward Christian bankers

Doron, the former researcher on Lebanon at the Prime Minister's Office, notes that Hezbollah is both a paramilitary terror group and a political organization that has ministers in the government, a caucus in parliament and a network of welfare services. All these are enshrined in the Islamic concept of dawah – a kind of "invitation" to non-Muslims and secular Muslims.
For this purpose, Hezbollah established al-Qard al-Hasan, a concept that can be translated as a "generous loan" that does not require a guarantee or collateral.
Before the Israeli airstrikes, al-Qard al-Hasan had dozens of branches in Lebanon. "It's a tool for realizing the goal: developing and maintaining the civilian support system for the Shi'ite community, which numbers about 1.5 million people [over a quarter of Lebanon's population]," Doron says. "With its help, Hezbollah operates and finances preschools, schools and health clinics."
Documents of Hezbollah-run al-Qard al-Hassan are scattered at the site of an Israeli airstrike on Sunday night in Beirut's southern suburb, Lebanon, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024.
Documents of Hezbollah-run al-Qard al-Hassan are scattered at the site of an Israeli airstrike on Sunday night in Beirut's southern suburb, Lebanon, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024.Credit: Hassan Ammar,AP
Hezbollah's success in this realm was particularly visible given the Lebanese government's failures in providing these services. According to Doron, al-Qard al-Hasan was Nasrallah's baby and he took an interest in the charities no less than in the military "resistance," if not more.
Internationally active Lebanese construction companies are another crucial cog in Hezbollah's economic machine. One of the most important of these is Jihad al-Bina, which is directly subordinate to Hezbollah's Executive Council. In 2007, the United States imposed sanctions on the company, which with other firms built Hezbollah's bunkers and outposts, as well as its tunnels that crossed the southern border and were destroyed by the Israeli military in 2019 and during the current war.
To reduce Hezbollah's dependence on the Lebanese banking system, which is partly owned by Christians who oppose the Shi'ite group, Hezbollah tried to establish its own bank within al-Qard al-Hasan. But due to American pressure, Lebanon's central bank refused to grant Hezbollah a banking license, so Hezbollah installed its people in the existing banking system.
The U.S. pressure also forced Lebanon's central bank to shut down the Lebanese Canadian Bank, LCB. This bank helped launder drug money from South America and had strong ties to Hezbollah.
Displaced children, who fled Baalbek city and the nearby towns of Douris and Ain Bourday with their families amid the ongoing Hezbollah-Israel war, play at a school being used as a shelter, in Deir Al-Ahmar, east Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024.
Displaced children, who fled Baalbek city and the nearby towns of Douris and Ain Bourday with their families amid the ongoing Hezbollah-Israel war, play at a school being used as a shelter, in Deir Al-Ahmar, east Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024.Credit: Hassan Ammar,AP
But this effort was too small to curb Hezbollah's global business. Christian bankers told U.S. investigators that Hezbollah operatives threatened them and demanded their cooperation. In 2016, when the bankers refused, Hezbollah set off a bomb at the front door of a Beirut branch of Blom Bank. The message was clear.
Riad Salameh, the governor of Lebanon's central bank, is considered the main Hezbollah collaborator. No action was taken against him even though he was accused of collaborating with Hezbollah for many years. Salameh was allegedly protected because he was a source for U.S. administrations.
Only in August 2023 was he indicted on suspicions of corruption, along with family members and four associates. The United States, Canada and Britain imposed sanctions on him and confiscated some of his wealth. Salameh denies any wrongdoing and says he's keen to prove his innocence in court.
In December, Landes will step down as head of the National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing after six years on the job. His successor, to be appointed by the Defense Ministry, will continue delving into Hezbollah's finances. Most of the money is transferred in cash from Tehran to Beirut or Damascus in Quds Force suitcases by Iranian airline Mahan Air; once on the ground it goes by land to Beirut by courier. Therefore, it seems Landes' successor will have a Sisyphean task.
Financial routes are harder to block than arms smuggling, Doron argues. "The first thing Iran and Hezbollah did after the [2006] Second Lebanon War was to resume the fund transfers to rehabilitate the organization and wounded people in the Shi'ite community. I find it hard to believe that this time it will be possible to dry up Hezbollah's terrorist funds."