AFRICA’S SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE
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