2010 – Asa Winstanley

Wikileaks: Insights on Palestine from the Cables

Written for the New Left Project Blog.

A guest post by Asa Winstanley*

One of the first things that struck me while reading the cables from the US embassy to Israel in Tel Aviv was how worried the Israeli government seems to be about the Goldstone Report into war crimes committed during Israel’s 2008-2009 attack on the people of Gaza. In cable 09TELAVIV2777 of December 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is said to have named the report as one of three “principal threats” facing Israel—the other two being Iran’s alleged nuclear programme and “missile proliferation”.

Second, there are important insights into the high level of collaboration between Israel and forces that have been called the “Palestinian Contras” in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Indeed, the first “cablegate” headline on Palestine was sourced from cable 09TELAVIV1177, in which Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak is reported to have said he “had consulted with Egypt and Fatah prior to Operation Cast Lead, asking if they were willing to assume control of Gaza once Israel defeated Hamas”. In other words, Fateh leader Mahmoud Abbas (whose term as PA president expired in January 2009) knew the massive Israeli onslaught was coming but said nothing. This was widely suspected, but to read confirmation of it from a confidential US government source is something new.

There’s more. Cable 07TELAVIV1732, which I like to call “War of the Puppets”, was released this week. To my mind, it’s the most interesting of the Palestine cables released so far. Written in June 2007 during Gaza street-fighting caused by the ultimately unsuccessful Fateh coup attempt, it details a meeting between then-ambassador Richard H. Jones and Yuval Diskin (head of Israel’s secret police, the Shabak—aka Shin Bet). It is a portrait of how divided Israel’s Palestinian collaborators really were. “[Gaza warlord Mohammed] Dahlan is trying to manage Fatah’s security forces by remote control. We are not even sure where he is… ” Diskin is quoted as saying. He continued: “[Dahlan’s men in Gaza] ask us to attack Hamas. This is a new development. We have never seen this before. They are desperate.” Again, this is all important corroborating evidence for things we already knew or suspected. Recent media reports of a power struggle between Abbas and Dahlan (whom Fateh elements close to the US now blame for “losing” Gaza) suggest little has changed in terms of Fateh infighting.

Diskin is also reported in 07TELAVIV1732 to have claimed the Shabak had “a very good working relationship with the [Palestinian Authority] Preventive Security Organization (PSO) and the General Intelligence Organization (GIO).” The most striking quote in the whole cable to me is this: “Diskin said that the PSO shares with ISA [Shabak] almost all the intelligence that it collects”.

There is also something of an overlooked smoking gun in this cable. Of Tawfik Tirawi, leader of the PA’s GIO: “Diskin said… he is trying to develop ties with the Dughmush family in the Gaza Strip.’” The Doghmush clan (aka the “Army of Islam”), you may recall, are the same group that in March 2007 kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston (he was rescued by Hamas in July). While a Fateh connection to the group has long been suspected, to my knowledge this is the first confirmation of it from official sources.

Overall, this is a Palestinian Authority acting as nothing more than an extension of the Israeli occupation forces – a relationship that has only deepened in the last three-and-a-half years. However, there is a lot missing in the cables: little on the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza, nothing on the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai and little on the July 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon. Despite some rather unlikely conspiracy theories currently doing the rounds on the internet, the likely reasons for these gaps are more mundane. First, none of the cables are rated “Top Secret”; second the inherent bias of US government personnel towards Israel; and third, only a small fraction of the leaked cables have actually been published so far. Indeed, during an interview with Al Jazeera this week, Julian Assange claimed they had thousands of cables on Israel still to come, including material on the al-Mabhouh assassination and the July 2006 war.

Also, of note is a graph illustrating the composition of the cables cache on the Wikleaks website. It appears to show that around 2000 cables from the US consulate in Jerusalem are still to come. These could be more interesting than the cables released so far (almost all from the embassy in Tel Aviv).

To be continued, in all likelihood.

* Follow Asa Winstanley on Twitter or visit his website: www.winstanleys.org

Book review: Humanity and warmth in “Letters from Palestine”

Written for and originally published on The Electronic Intifada.

Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 15 December 2010

Western publishers have too often neglected the perspective of Palestinians and other Arabs when it comes to books on Israel and the Palestinians. Letters from Palestine, a new collection of Palestinian writing edited by Kenneth Ring and Ghassan Abdullah, is thus a welcome initiative. As writer Anna Baltzer says in the foreword: “Palestinians themselves are the experts on their own plight and liberation struggle, and their voices are the ones that most need to be heard.” It’s a simple but effective idea — allowing Palestinians to explain in their own words what their lives are like.

Ring explains in the introduction that his interest in the plight of the Palestinian people is relatively recent. The book takes the form of a selection of letters to Ring from Palestinian correspondents, many of whom he was put in touch with by his co-editor Ghassan Abdullah, who himself writes one of the best, and most humorous, chapters of the book. Most of the pieces were written especially for this volume, but others were originally sent out as emails or blog posts addressed to American friends. There are even two poems, including the transcendent and brilliant “Pick Me Up” by Hind Shoufani.

There is a decent selection of the Palestinian experience in all its variety represented in the book; all contributors are Palestinians from the diaspora, from the West Bank and from Gaza — plus one account of contemporary Palestinian life in Haifa. The international scope of the Palestinian reality is well conveyed. Unfortunately omitted for the most part, is the particular plight of refugees in the camps in Arab states (although there is a good selection of stories from West Bank and Gaza refugees). The subjective and personal nature of most of the pieces also means the work as a whole suffers a little from lack of context and detail at times.

The kind of subjects that constitute “everyday life” for Palestinians varies greatly, even within this selection. But some common themes do emerge: personal and collective identity; return and dispersal from the homeland; racism, freedom and family life are some of the most identifiable. The final part of the book brings things up-to-date with tales from the most recent major Israeli assault on the population of Gaza in winter 2008-09.

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Book review: understanding the economics of occupation

Originally published on Electronic Intifada.

Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 1 November 2010

Economist Shir Hever has served as the main author behind a series of pamphlets entitled “The Economy of the Occupation” published by the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem during the past five years. The pamphlets serve as the basis for Hever’s debut book, The Political Economy of the Occupation. Although the work as a whole is still a little disjointed at times, there are enough flashes of brilliance to make this new book more than worth your while.

Hever has an impressive grasp of the literature and has trawled through a slew of primary and secondary sources and raw data to synthesize a solid analysis of the economic factors behind the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Indeed, The Political Economy of the Occupation abounds with fascinating and original insights.

Hever outlines three distinct periods: the early occupation, the late occupation (or the years of resistance) and the privatized occupation (the last two periods overlapping). While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a policy toward the Palestinians of “economic peace” during the 2009 elections, the origins of this idea can be found at the beginning of the occupation in 1967 — of course, it failed.

Hever recounts that soon after occupying the West Bank in June 1967, the military authorities implemented policies such as the “open bridge” to Jordan (an “enemy state” at the time) which allowed Palestinians to continue trading with the Hashemite Kingdom. But this was only one element in a carrot and stick approach. Palestinians were required to obtain permits from the military regime for “nearly any economic activity, from going to work inside Israel to setting up a shop.” Such permits were often revoked in cases where the Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet, made accusations of “dissenting political activity” (p. 9).

Such economic suppression forced Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to cease working on independent farms, as they became unprofitable. Many then sought jobs within Israel or in the newly booming oil economies of the Gulf states.

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Book review: diary from pre-Nakba Palestine

Originally published at Electronic Intifada.

Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 13 October 2010

In recent years, a growing number of Palestinian memoirs have been published in English. These have tended to be from activists and writers such as Ghada Karmi (author of the phenomenal In Search of Fatima) and Raja Shehadeh or by Palestine Liberation Organization officials such as Shafiq al-Hout (forthcoming in translation from Pluto Press). A Young Palestinian’s Diary 1941-1945: The Life of Sami ‘Amr is an interesting departure from this pattern, because the late Sami ‘Amr (although he was latterly a successful bureaucrat and businessman in Jordan) did not live a particularly noteworthy life. Furthermore, since the diary ends in 1945, the work lacks any kind of narrative or reflection of the catastrophic events of 1948 — the year that normally forms the backbone of most Palestinian memoirs.

In terms of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, Sami’s diary is mostly apolitical, apart from one short entry in which he predicts that the Zionists could drive the Arabs out of Palestine. The diary is almost totally prosaic, sometimes boring. The star of the book, however is Kimberly Katz, who translated Sami’s diary from the handwritten Arabic manuscript. This professor of Middle East history also introduces the work with a 65-page historical contextualization (the diary itself is only 83 pages long) as well as embellishes the diary itself with copious explanatory footnotes on almost every page.

Sami’s work is not a memoir, but a diary recounting day-to-day events: his career aspirations, his family problems and, most of all, his preoccupation with finding the right woman to marry. Although Katz notes that Sami later hoped it would be published, it certainly doesn’t read as though it were ever intended for public viewing.

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The Receiving End of our Dreams: book review of “A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement”

Originally published on the New Left Project.

‘A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement’ by James Horrox (AK Press, 2009)

In his seminal book Expulsion of the Palestinians, Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha writes of Israel Zangwill’s infamous slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” that it was not intended as a literal demographic assessment: “[Zionists] did not mean that there were no people in Palestine, but that there were no people worth considering within the framework of the notions of European supremacy that then held sway” [1].

James Horrox’s book on anarchism in the kibbutz movement marginalises the Palestinian people in a similar way – they do not really exist in his narrative of how the Israeli collective settlements were established and then functioned. He is writing about Palestine, a country whose population was around 90% Arab (Christian and Muslim) when the first kibbutz was established in 1910, as if its primary importance was as a plaything for European experiments in group living [2].

The book is a strange attempt to blend Zionist mythology with anarchism. In the forward, Israeli anarchist Uri Gordon questions “the validity of applying anti-colonial hindsight to people that any progressive would otherwise consider economic migrants or refugees” (p. iv).

Gordon is, in part, referring to the Jewish refugees who fled the Russian Empire because of antisemitic pogroms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Horrox similarly claims that “Palestine was rapidly becoming the destination of choice for Jewish refugees” with the rise of the Zionist Organisation (later renamed the World Zionist Organisation) and the pogroms of 1903-1906 (p. 14). In reality it was a relatively small minority of ideological Zionists who chose to go to Palestine. As Mike Marqusee points out in his extraordinary memoir, 1.7 million of the 2 million Russian Jewish refugees between 1881 and1921 in fact left for the USA [3]. Estimates suggest that from the mid-1850s to 1914, the number of Jews who fled Czarist Russia was about 2.5 million of whom about 50,000 (2%) emigrated to Palestine [4].

Continue reading The Receiving End of our Dreams: book review of “A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement”

Images Of Solidarity And Strength In Palestine

Originally published in the Morning Star

Wednesday 08 September 2010, Asa Winstanley

Photographer, film-maker and human rights campaigner Pennie Quinton is familiar to many on the London activist scene.

Since late 2004, she has spent much time living and working in occupied Palestine. Now, with a large photographic archive to draw on, Quinton has selected some of her best work from Palestine for this new exhibition, named Tadamon after the Arabic word for solidarity.

The photos comprise three broad sections – popular resistance against Israel’s apartheid wall, a massive 2008 funeral procession for four assassinated resistance fighters in the Bethlehem area, and Nablus solidarity demonstrations for Gaza during Israel’s brutal 2008-9 onslaught against the coastal enclave.

Some of the best images, though, are expressions of Palestinian cultural resistance through popular dance and music.

While familiar signifiers of the conflict such as slingshot-welding youth are represented, Quinton has steered away from the typical. In one striking close-up, her camera homes in on the sons of a murdered fighter as they almost literally force the tears back into each other’s eyes.

Basem Abu Rahme, a non-violent martyr in a village’s struggle to regain its annexed land, is pictured a year before his murder at the hand of Israeli forces displaying some of the hundreds of spent tear gas shells collected by the people of Bil’in. It would be the impact from one of these, fired at high velocity, that caused his death on April 18 2009.

The exhibition is a healthy antidote to the wearisome “balance” syndrome that most of the media falls prey to in this country which falsely assumes parity of power between colonised and coloniser.

Quinton’s sympathetic eye for the Palestinian people shines through in this deeply humanistic collection.

Runs until October 5 at Freedom Bookshop, Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E1. Open from 12pm-6pm Monday to Saturday and 12pm-4pm on Sunday.

Book review: history lesson on the left’s Palestine blind spot

Originally published on Electronic Intifada.

Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 30 July 2010

Mike Marqusee’s book If I am Not For Myself, newly available in paperback, is a fascinating, meandering sort of family memoir. From the subtitle “Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew” one expects an autobiography. As it turns out, it mostly tells the story of Marqusee’s grandfather Edward V. Morand, based on an inherited suitcase full of his old personal letters, newspaper clippings and so forth.

Morand (or EVM as he is referred to throughout) was an American lawyer, sometimes columnist and Jewish activist. The fight against anti-Semitism on the streets of New York during the long build-up to the Second World War forms a large part of the narrative thrust of the book. Marqusee takes us through the Jewish and leftist milieus of the period, with extensive detours via extracts from his own life story, with analysis on religion, history and politics.

We meet Jewish prophets, heretics, thinkers, militants and activists: from Amos to Spinoza, the Haskalah and the Bund. They are a mixed bag, but their stories are rarely less than intriguing. Marqusee recalls a politically formative moment from his childhood, when an Israeli soldier, fresh from the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, visits his Jewish weekend school. The exotic visitor’s dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians makes a deep impression on the 14-year-old Mike:

“… they were better off now, under Israeli rule. ‘You have to understand, these are ignorant people. They go to toilet in the street.’ Now something akin to this I had heard before. I had heard it from the white Southerners I had been taught to look down upon … So I raised my hand … It seemed to me that what our visitor had said was, well, racist” (p. 59).

Around the dinner table, Marqusee senior angrily dismisses his son’s reaction as “Jewish self-hatred.”

Continue reading Book review: history lesson on the left’s Palestine blind spot

Book review: Gideon Levy and the Western media elite

Originally published on Electronic Intifada.

Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 26 July 2010

The small volume The Punishment of Gaza is a selection from Gideon Levy’s columns on Gaza in Israeli daily Haaretz since 2006. The dissident Israeli journalist reminds us that the brutal Israeli assault on Gaza has not been a matter of isolated wars of aggression, but an ongoing, long-term policy directed at the population of that small, refugee-packed fraction of Palestine.

Despite his ideological limits, Levy is a searing critic of Israeli brutality, as anyone who has read him will know. Right from the beginning, he named the last major Israeli massacre of Gaza “a war crime” — in his 27 December 2008 article “The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again.” And he criticized it on moral grounds, not merely as the “mistake” or “blunder” that hypocritical Israeli pundits, masquerading as critics, would label it much later on.

At his best, Levy has a way with words that leads him to some brilliant indictments of Israel. He speaks of “the basic, twofold Israeli sentiment that has been with us forever: to commit any wrong, but to feel pure in our own eyes. To kill, demolish, starve, imprison and humiliate — and to still be right, not to mention righteous.” He describes how the 2008 feature film Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman’s apologia for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, “outraged” him on a second viewing: “Art has been recruited here for an operation of deceit” and, “this is not an antiwar film.” He also seems to implicitly support the movement to boycott Israel with statements such as “Israelis don’t pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end” and the piece “A Just Boycott.”

Yet reading Levy can be a frustrating experience. In a July 2006 piece about an attack on Gaza after the capture by Palestinian fighters of a soldier involved in shelling the Strip, Levy writes: “The legitimate basis for the [Israeli army’s] operation was stripped away the moment it began.” This is an odd and convoluted phrase. Why not just say it was illegitimate to begin with? But there is worse than that. In an article arguing for negotiations with Hamas, he describes the first Palestinian intifada as “unnecessary and cursed.” Palestinians would beg to differ — the popular uprising is widely regarded as a high point of legitimate and mostly unarmed resistance.

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EI exclusive: Leaked documents show PA undermined Turkey’s push for UN flotilla probe

Originally published on Electronic Intifada

Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 22 June 2010

A document sent to Ibrahim Khraishi, Palestinian Authority representative at the UN in Geneva, proves that the PA attempted to undermine Turkey’s push for a UN Human Rights Council investigation in to Israel’s attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla (Patrick Bertschmann/UN Photo)

The Palestinian Authority attempted to neutralize a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution condemning Israel’s deadly attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, leaked UN and Palestinian Authority documents obtained by The Electronic Intifada show. Israel’s 31 May attack killed nine Turkish citizens, including a dual US-Turkish citizen, and injured dozens of others aboard the Mavi Marmara in international waters.

Download the document leaked to EI [PDF]

The Electronic Intifada (EI) today publishes one of the documents it obtained, containing proposed amendments to a draft Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution. Annotations to the resolution indicate the Palestinian Authority (PA) stood with European Union (EU) countries against Turkey’s calls for robust action to hold Israel accountable.

The PA’s apparent collusion to shield Israel will recall for many its efforts to undermine UN action on the Goldstone report last October.

Apparently written by a European delegate, the document’s amendments would have seriously diluted Turkey’s original wording. The most damaging change would have removed the call for an independent UN investigation under HRC auspices. The document was provided to EI by a source who described how it was obtained inside the UN Office at Geneva, and asked to remain anonymous.

Turkey rejected the EU-PA amendments, and the final resolution on 2 June declared that the council “Decides to dispatch an independent international fact-finding mission to investigate violations of international humanitarian and human rights law resulting from the Israeli attacks” (“The Grave Attacks by Israeli Forces against the Humanitarian Boat Convoy,” United Nations Human Rights Council, Fourteenth session, A/HRC/14/L.1, Adopted on 2 June 2010).

The language in the final resolution was very similar to the January 2009 HRC resolution which led to the Goldstone report, the independent investigation that detailed war crimes committed during Israel’s 2008-09 invasion of Gaza.

Yet annotations apparently made by a European diplomat on the draft resolution obtained by EI make it clear that the PA consented to removal of this wording. A PA-backed alternative paragraph instead proposed that the HRC: “Requests the UN Secretary-General to ensure a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation conforming to the [sic] international standards.”

Continue reading EI exclusive: Leaked documents show PA undermined Turkey’s push for UN flotilla probe

Boycotting Israel – It’s Working

Originally published at the New Left Project

By Asa Winstanley

The global boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel’s apartheid system in Palestine has achieved many victories since it was launched by a broad coalition of Palestinian civil society in 2005. BDS victories seem to have flowed thick and fast in recent times, particularly since Israel’s vicious 2008-2009 assault on the civilian population of Gaza. A small sample: in September 2009 Norway’s pension fund divested from Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms systems company. In May of this year, hip-hop pioneer Gil Scott-Heron cancelled a prospective Tel Aviv gig after pressure to boycott from fans in London who also happened to be pro-Palestine BDS activists.

In what may yet turn out to be the biggest long-term BDS victory in Britain, the TUC voted in September to pass a motion calling for a boycott of goods from Israeli colonies in the West Bank. Although the initial motion put forward by the Fire Brigades Union called for a general boycott of Israeli goods, a General Council statement also passed at the September congress altered this to restrict the TUC campaign to settlement goods.

Despite this dilution, the motion was a clear sign of historical sea change in the British trade union movement – large parts of which tended to support Israel before 1967 because of their illusions about Zionist “socialism” (a “socialism” that happened to exclude Arabs). By now it is clear that the union grassroots overwhelmingly supports the BDS movement.

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Sailing into trouble: “To Gaza with Love” reviewed

Originally published on Electronic Intifada.

Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 4 January 2010

A scene from To Gaza with Love.

To Gaza with Love is a documentary by Aki Nawaz for Iran’s English-language channel Press TV. It is an account of the first boats that successfully broke the siege of Gaza in August 2008. The filmmakers traveled to the Gaza Strip with the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the trip. The subjective format of the film works well — presenter Yvonne Ridley speaks to the camera in an amiable video diary style, while Nawaz narrates to add context.

The Free Gaza Movement is a group of activists from around the world who decided to sail to Gaza from Cyprus to break the Israeli-enforced siege. The idea came about in response to Israel’s claim that, since the 2005 “disengagement,” it no longer occupies the coastal strip. Despite withdrawing its settlers, Israel still remains in control of all the borders, airspace and coast. The Free Gaza Movement is an effort to call Israel’s bluff. If Israel no longer occupies Gaza, it could surely have no objection to civilian boats sailing in — or so the argument went.

Although it is independent of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), many in the Free Gaza Movement are or have been ISM members, including ISM founder Huwaida Arraf. Israel has banned some of the members from entering Palestine/Israel.

The small group purchased two second-hand boats in Cyprus, and the film recounts the trials and tribulations they went through in the course of preparing to embark on the sea journey.

At the time, many in the global Palestine solidarity movement were skeptical of the chances of success — but were happy to be proven wrong when the two small vessels eventually landed in Gaza. After watching this film, it becomes apparent this success was a near miracle.

Continue reading Sailing into trouble: “To Gaza with Love” reviewed