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AFRICA’S
SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE
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Many people
think that the cause of Palestine resembles that of Vietnam, Algeria or
even South Africa. But although there is a resemblance in some aspects,
there is something entirely unique about our cause. What we have been
and still are confronted with is not merely foreign invasion, occupation
and even settlement. All this has been experienced by other countries.
But no other country has been confronted with a plan to liquidate its
national identity, as has happened in the case of Palestine, nor
confronted a plan to empty a country of its people as has happened in
the case of the Palestinian people. It goes beyond anything previously
recorded in modern history.
---- Yasser Arafat
More than five
decades ago the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to
partition Palestine into two states, one Arab and other Jewish. The
criminality of such act vis-à-vis the Palestinian Arabs is now accepted
by the international community. The Palestinians opposed the partition
on the grounds that it was incompatible with law and justice and the
principles of democracy. They also questioned the legal competence of
the UN to recommend the partition of their ancestral land. But as
Stephen Penrose wrote in his book, The Palestine Problem: Retrospect and
Prospect:
It was
American pressure which brought about the acceptance of the
recommendation for the partition of Palestine …. voted by the General
Assembly on November 29th, 1947.
Two prominent
Jewish intellectuals raised their voices against this injustice. Judah
Magnes, the late Rector of the Hebrew University, said: “But, as far as
I am concerned, I am not ready to achieve justice to the Jew through
injustice to the Arab”. And Albert Einstein, in his book, Out of My
Later Years, declared: “I should rather see reasonable agreement with
the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of
the Jewish State”. Twenty years after the partition and the
establishment of the State of Israel, President Julius Nyerere of
Tanzania, at the 1967 TANU Conference in Mwanza, stated:
The
establishment of the State of Israeli was an act of aggression against
the Arab people…. the international community accepted this. The Arab
States did not and could not accept that act of aggression…. The Arab
States cannot be beaten into such acceptance.
PLO and the
African Liberation Movements
In 1964 the
Palestine Liberation Organisation was established as an umbrella
organization of the Palestinian resistance movement. Its National
Charter claimed that ‘the Palestinian people have a right to
self-determination following the liberation of their country’. Gradually
the organization asserted itself as the most authentic representative of
the Palestinian people.
At a time when
the PLO was established, the African ferment for independence was
raging. The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, established in 1962,
had already embarked on an armed struggle in 1964. The ANC of South
Africa and its allies in the Congress Alliance, confronted with the
Sharpville Massacre and the banning of open democratic politics, was
preparing for a prolonged armed struggle. MPLA and ZAPU were to follow
the same path. The existence of ‘an axis of evil’ between apartheid
South Africa and Israel necessitated the forging of links and bonds of
militant solidarity between the PLO and the African liberation
movements.
Israel’s Wars
of Conquests
The first
Israel war against the Arabs took place in 1948, followed by the
Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956 as a result of the Egyptian
nationalization of the Suez Canal. In this invasion Israel participated
on the side of the French and the British.
But it was the
Six Day War that devastated the Arabs and gave a rude awakening to the
Palestinians. It brought the Palestine Question to the international
stage. Within a few days Arab states were defeated by Israel, Arab lands
were occupied, the West Bank and Gaza were put under Israeli military
occupation and Israelis and Palestinians found themselves face to face.
Stripped of all its rhetoric, the Six Day War was about the territorial
expansionism. Moshe Dayan, the then Israeli Defence Minister, when
addressing the Khibutzin youth leaders in the Golan Heights on July 5,
1968, stated:
Our fathers
reached the frontiers which were recognised in the Partition Plan. Our
generation reached the frontiers of 1949. Now the Six Day War generation
carried these frontiers to Suez, the Jordan and these Golan Heights. But
this is not the end. For after the present ceasefire lines, there will
be new ones which will extend beyond the Jordan and as far as central
Syria as well.
Vada Nobky, in
her book, The June War, quotes from Moshe Menuhin, the father of the
world-renowned violinist and himself a religious Jew in the tradition of
Hebrew prophets, to show that Dayan’s dreams were not a jubilant
reaction to the June War victory, but deep in the heart of the whole
philosophy of Zionist exapansionism. In The Decadence of Judaism in Our
Time, Moshe Menuhin testifies that during his Edwardian boyhood in
Palestine, it was “drummed into our young hearts that the fatherland”
must extend to the ancient borders and that it “must become Goyimrein”
(that is, free of gentiles).
Palestinian
Resistance
One of the
qualitative and most positive developments to have emerged in the Middle
East after the Six Day War was the appearance of Palestinians’ open
resistance against occupation. Previously, the Palestinians were
scattered in different refugee camps in different countries of the Arab
world, but now they were freedom fighters. The sixth Palestinian
Congress held in Cairo in September 1969 put forward the principle that
the Palestinian cause is in the first instance the cause of the
Palestinian people and that its prosecution should therefore primarily
lie in the hands of the Palestinians while the role of progressive
humanity is to render all possible support. One might disagree with some
of the tactics adopted by the Palestinians in their struggle, but
everybody understands what they are fighting for. Lady Fisher, wife of
the 99th Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote:
When French
men and women formed themselves into resistance groups to embarrass the
German forces occupying their land, we hailed them (quite rightly, I
believe) as heroes and heroines. Why therefore must Arabs, who try to do
the same thing against enemy forces occupying their land be referred to
as “terrorists” and “saboteurs”? Surely they are only doing what brave
men always do, whose country lies under the heel of a conqueror.
African
Solidarity with the Palestinian Struggles
What the sixth
Palestinian Congress said in 1969 may have been true then, but it cannot
be true now. The struggle is Palestinian only in the sense that the
original problem emanated from the territory of Palestine, but the
struggles now are universal in character and have international
dimensions.
Presidents
Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria were very
much instrumental in trying to link the struggles of the African and
Arab peoples. They did so by correctly pointing a finger at imperialism
and situating Zionism and apartheid within its orbit. Nasser’s
realization of the danger posed by Israel was not based on so-called
Arab ‘traditional’ hatred of the Jews. It was based on Israel’s policy
of wars which it uses as a means for territorial expansion, and also
Israel’s alignment with imperialist powers. Nasser first sounded the
danger of Israel at the Casablanca conference of African states. He also
introduced to the Arab leaders the problems of the national liberation
movements in Africa and the Middle East. The first Arab States Summit in
1964 stated:
They affirm
that the Arabs, in their legitimate defensive position, will organize
their political and economic relations with other states according to
the attitude of these states towards the just Arab struggle against
Zionist ambitions in the Arab world. They hope that the African and
Asian states which adopted the Addis Ababa Covenant, and which have made
great sacrifices in the struggle against colonialism, have opposed
racial discrimination and have been and still are exposed to
colonialists and Zionist ambitions, especially in Africa – they hope
that all these states will offer sincere help and support to the Arabs
in their just struggle.
Prior to the
1967 war, most African states were indifferent to the Middle East
Conflict and considered the Palestine Question as a problem of the
refugees. Actually several African states had established strong ties
with Israel, which employed some resources extended to it by the United
States and some western powers and its technical personnel to engage in
infrastructural and community development projects and military and
security institution building in Africa. But the war opened Africa’s
eyes, and they saw Israel as a pawn to mitigate imperialist schemes.
According to Gitelson, in Israel’s African Setback in Perspective,
twenty-nine (29) African states broke relations with Israel between 12
June 1967 and 13 November 1973. It was also during this time that a
number of African states recognized the PLO as an authentic
representative of the Palestinian people and established diplomatic
relations with it. Several solidarity organisations mushroomed in the
continent to mobilize public opinion in support of Palestinian people.
PLO has been granted observer status at the OAU (and now AU), and
President Yasser Arafat had attended a number of OAU Summits.
Is Israel
interested in Peace?
It is becoming
more and more clear to Palestinians and the international community that
Israel in its present state of thriving militarism has no need of peace.
The world has seen the failure of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak
of the second Intifada, the awful sufferings of the Palestinians on the
reinvaded West Bank and Gaza, and the ‘imprisonment’ of their leader,
Yasser Arafat, until his death. But for how long can the Palestinians
and the peoples of the world wait for Israel to be convinced of the need
for peace. Israel would do well to heed the wise words of the former
Chairman of the U. N. Committee on Palestine Rights, Mendes, who said:
Ruthless,
blind and unjust force can build nothing which cannot be destroyed by
even greater force based on justice and law…. When a people wishes to
free itself of an occupier although the occupier may be militarily more
powerful, it will always be successful. This was the case in Vietnam,
Algeria, in Madagascar, in Angola. The same will hold for Palestine.
One of the
main problems in the Middle East is U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to
see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy. The sooner Palestinians and
the international community realize that in the Middle East they are not
just confronting the Israel but also the US, the better. U.S is not a
‘neutral’ and ‘impartial’ power in the Middle East.
The Death
of Yasser Arafat – End of An Era
Yasser Arafat
was a symbol of the Palestinian people’s struggle for identity,
independence and statehood. He symbolized the hopes and aspirations of
the Palestinian people, and was able to articulate them very
effectively. PLO, under his leadership, was able to make big strides but
it also suffered setbacks and made grave mistakes. One of his major
achievements was to mobilize international public in support of the
Palestinian people, and to forge links of militant solidarity between
Africa and Palestine. Historians will come to testify that despite the
fact that the Palestinians themselves were faced with a powerful enemy
and they needed to mobilize every once of their strength and a pound of
their resources for their struggle, yet the shared all these with
comrades-in-arms fighting for African liberation. That unity, forged in
struggle, needs to be kept alive and in this way the African and
Palestinian peoples will be honouring that great son of the Arab people.
A Way Forward
In an
interview conducted by Christopher J. Lee with Noam Chomsky of M.I.T,
published in Safundi, the question of sanctions against Israel again
emerged. The renowned Palestinian intellectual and political activist,
the late Edward Said, in his The Politics of Dispossession published in
1994, states:
The question
to be asked is how long can the history of anti-semitism and the
Holocaust be used as a fence to exempt Israel from arguments and
sanctions against it for its behaviour towards the Palestinians,
arguments and sanctions that were used against other repressive
governments, such as South Africa? How long are we going to deny that
the cries of the people of Gaza … are directly connected to the policies
of Israel government and not to the cries of Nazism?
It is true
that the immediate post-Oslo period saw the immobilization of solidarity
action with the people of Palestine. But this was of PLO’s own doing.
They thought they had almost arrived in Jerusalem, and that an
independent state was about to be established. Some of their
representatives abroad started to behave as if they were diplomats and
not freedom fighters. The recent goings also might have the same effect.
Israel (and the United States) behave as if it was a single person –
Yasser Arafat – who was an obstacle to peace in the Middle East. They
disregard all the initiatives, sacrifices and options that went to pass
over the years. It is time now to rethink and reflect. The new situation
demands new methods of solidarity. The following are tentative
suggestions that Africa, Asia, the non-aligned countries and the Islamic
world can adopt:
* Isolation of
Israel until it really commits itself to peace
* Mobilisation
of public opinion against Israeli crimes in Palestine
* Holding its
armed forces answerable to international human rights instruments
* Revival of
solidarity committees with Palestine and offering all-round support to
the Palestinian people
* Pressure on
the Israeli government to free all political prisoners
* Pressure on
the Israeli government to stop all settlements and to dismantle those it
has built on the Palestinian territory.
There can be
no peace in the Middle East until the aspirations of the Palestinian
people are met, namely an independent state on the pre-1967 borders with
Jerusalem as its capital and the right of return. Only then will Israel
enjoy peace and security.
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Prof Haroub
Othman
Institute
of Development Studies
University
of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
cri@udsm.ac.tz
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