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Action & Ideas for Peace in South Asia
| September 30, 2007
A Global Satyagraha Against Imperialismby Rohini Hensman
Gandhi's
birth anniversary on October 2 provides a fitting occasion to launch a
global satyagraha - defined by him as 'truth-force', a non-violent
struggle using the power of the truth - against imperialism. Such a
struggle is urgently needed today, given the carnage being inflicted by
imperialism in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the threat of even
greater carnage in Iran. Support for the people of these countries
needs to be stepped up to a higher level globally if the continuing
holocaust is to be halted.
The oldest of the three struggles is
that of the Palestinian people against Zionism. While the indigenous
Jews of Palestine lived in peace with their Muslim and Christian
neighbours for centuries, the advent of European Zionism - a colonial
enterprise promoted by the British Raj in the 19th century - ignited
conflict by dispossessing Palestinian peasants of the land they were
cultivating. During the British Mandate period after World War I, a
nationalist Palestinian revolt was brutally crushed by the British,
even as they encouraged the Zionist settlers. In 1938 Gandhi, despite
his deep sympathy for persecuted Jews, saw quite clearly the colonial
character of the enterprise being carried out 'under the shadow of the
British gun'. The Zionists quite cynically used anti-Semitism, the Nazi
persecution of the Jews, and later the Holocaust, as a justification
for their settler colonialism. Although they - like the European
settlers in North America - waged a war for independence from the
British, this did not change their colonial relationship with the
indigenous people. The partition of Palestine, pushed through in the UN
by the US in 1947, gave most of the land to the European settlers, but
they were not content with that: Zionists declared their intention of
colonising the whole of Palestine and parts of neighbouring countries,
and many of the terrorist attacks subsequently carried out against the
Palestinians were outside the area assigned to the Zionists. The
establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was accompanied by brutal
ethnic cleansing directed against the indigenous Palestinians.
More
recently, the occupation of the West bank and Gaza after the 1967 war,
the division of the West Bank into a series of ghettoes by the
apartheid wall, and the conversion of the Gaza strip into one big
ghetto, has exposed the long-standing Zionist plan to wipe Palestine
off the map. It is a model of settler colonialism falling somewhere
between the South African model and the genocidal model of the European
settlers in North America and Australia. As in Apartheid South Africa,
discrimination against non-Jews is inscribed in Israeli law. But unlike
the South African regime, the Israeli regime wishes to eliminate the
non-Jewish indigenous population altogether. The methods often resemble
Nazi policies: for example, mass murder like the massacre at Deir
Yassin, herding people into ghettoes, depriving them of food, water,
infrastructure, essential services and a livelihood, and the abhorrent
Nazi policy of collective punishment. But the project is a colonial
one, aimed at getting rid of Muslim and Christian Palestinians by
massacres and population transfer, actions codified in international
law as 'crimes against humanity' by the Nuremburg Charter and the
International Criminal Court.
Palestine/Israel is de facto a
single state now: Israel, by its actions, has ruled out any possibility
of a two-state solution to the conflict, and indeed, such a solution
would have been unjust, legitimising the expulsion of large numbers of
Palestinians from their own land and discrimination against those who
remain. The only meaningful struggle would be for a democratic, secular
state of all the communities living in the whole of historical
Palestine, with equal rights for all. Refugees, according to
international law, would have the right to return if they wish to, and
all Jewish immigrants, including settlers outside Israel, would have
the right to stay, provided they abide by the democratic principle of
equal rights for all, special privileges for none. The joint
Palestinian/Israeli campaign for a one-state solution to the conflict
has called on the international community to support them by a Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel, similar to the
campaign against Apartheid South Africa, to force it to democratise,
and this is the least we can do to demonstrate our solidarity (see
http://www.odspi.org/ ). A major weakness of this campaign, however, is
that it fails to attack the source of Israel's military, diplomatic and
economic support, without which it would not even exist, much less be
able to defy international law with such impunity, namely US
imperialism.
On the other hand, the anti-war movement, while
conscientiously publicising the British ORB poll suggesting that 1.2
million Iraqis have died violent deaths as a result of the US-led
occupation, and many more - especially children - have died of
malnutrition and disease, while reporting that the US-led NATO troops
in Afghanistan are killing civilians and causing malnutrition, and
exposing and opposing plans to attack Iran, seldom highlights the role
of Israel, especially in instigating the attack on Iraq and now on
Iran. There are occasional complaints that Israel influences US foreign
policy to the detriment of US interests, or, conversely, that the US
influences Israeli policy to the detriment of Israel's interests, but
the truth seems to be that the two are so intertwined that separating
them is impossible. A rare occasion on which the close symbiotic
relationship between the US and Israeli states was discussed was during
the criminal Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006; it was again suggested
after the September 2007 Israeli air strike on Syria. Yet cooperation
between the US and Israel seems to be standard practice rather than
anything unusual.
What this suggests is that the anti-war
movement needs to target Israel as much as the US, while the Palestine
solidarity movement needs to target the US as much as Israel. In what
way can the US be compelled to stop its aggression against Afghanistan,
Iraq, and possibly Iran, and its total support for Israeli crimes
against humanity in Palestine? As the bombs started falling on Iraq in
2003, I wrote and circulated an appeal entitled 'Boycott the Dollar to
Stop the War!', arguing that although the military strength of the US
was enormous, its economy was in a mess; with a massive gross national
debt, the only reason it could finance its foreign wars and occupations
was because of the inflow of over a billion dollars a day from
countries accumulating foreign exchange reserves in dollars because it
was the world's sole reserve currency. The denomination of the oil
trade in dollars made it additionally desirable. With the advent of the
euro, however, there was the possibility of an alternative world
currency; therefore individuals, institutions and countries opposed to
the war on Iraq should refuse to accumulate dollars or use them outside
the US, because these were activities that helped to finance US-Israeli
aggression against Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghanis. After the World
Social Forum meeting in 2004, the Boycott Bush Campaign adopted the
dollar boycott as part of its strategy (see
http://www.boycottbush.org/dollar_en.php ).
Four-and-a-half
years later, the war has not stopped, but there is a significant
reduction in the worldwide use of the US dollar as a reserve currency,
and the value of the dollar has fallen. Campaigns to persuade
governments to reduce their dollar holdings further could well be
successful, since a falling dollar constitutes a loss for them.
Pressure could also be put on oil-producing countries to denominate
their oil sales in some currency other than the dollar. This does not
necessarily mean denominating the oil trade in euro; in some cases,
oil-producing countries could be asked to accept their own currency in
payment for oil exports, and pay for imports, likewise, in their own
currency. This would be a boon to South Asian countries, for example,
who could then use remittances from migrant workers in Gulf countries
and earnings from exports to these countries directly for their oil
imports. In other cases, barter could be used, as Venezuela is already
doing. A reorientation of trade away from the US would minimise the
fallout of a reduction in US imports as the dollar falls. Campaigning
for policies of employment creation, protection of workers' rights,
shorter working hours, social security and minimum wages that are
adequate to support a decent standard of living will redistribute
resources from destructive militarism to productive consumption of
working people, and thus expand mass markets in all countries.
It
must be emphasised that the purpose of these boycott campaigns against
the US and Israel is to follow Gandhi's principle of non-violent
non-cooperation with injustice and oppression. It is not intended to
harm wage-earners in either of these countries, although they will have
to learn to do without the privileges that come from being
beneficiaries of imperialism. It may be easier today (when imperialism
is linked to neo-liberalism at home) than it was in the past (when
imperialism was linked to social-democracy at home) for US workers to
understand that their interest lies in solidarity with the Iraqi oil
workers' union resisting the US occupation and proposed oil law, and
not in support for their own state's occupation of Iraq and plans to
rob it of its oil. It will be even easier when the full burden of the
billions spent not only on US military forces and armaments, but also
on hundreds of mercenary armies and corrupt contractors, falls on US
taxpayers rather than being borne by the rest of the world. The people
of Israel and the US have the greatest power to force their governments
to stop the slaughter in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq and threat of
more slaughter in Iran, by methods ranging from mass demonstrations and
electing anti-war representatives to civil disobedience and a general
strike.
What about the EU? Some leaders, like Blair and Sarkozy,
have been fully supportive of the US-Israeli imperialist project,
others less so. But there has not been any consistent opposition, even
to the worst crimes; EU complicity in the horrifying slow-motion
genocide being committed in Gaza is particularly disturbing. Given that
the EU, unlike the US and Israel, at least pays lip-service to
international law, it would be worth bombarding its leaders with
reminders of the gross violations of international human rights and
humanitarian law being committed by the US and Israel, and their own
role as active or passive accomplices.
It is also necessary to
resist the displacement of the goal of nuclear disarmament by that of
non-proliferation. Anti-war groups have responded to statements by Bush
and Sarkozy that a nuclear-armed Iran is 'unacceptable' by emphasising,
quite correctly, the lack of any evidence whatsoever that Iran is
developing nuclear weapons. But it has been left to campaigners for
nuclear disarmament to point out the dishonesty involved in these
denunciations of Iran, which make the unstated assumption that
nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, Israel, China, Russia, Britain, France,
and above all USA - the only state that has actually used these weapons
of mass destruction - are acceptable. The anti-war and Palestine
solidarity movements need to challenge this assumption most vigorously.
We must highlight the hypocrisy of Bush and Sarkozy using the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) against Iran, which has not violated it,
when they themselves are violating Article VI of the NPT, in which
parties to the treaty undertake to 'pursue negotiations in good
faith...on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict
and effective international control'. Indeed, non-proliferation makes
no logical or practical sense in the absence of nuclear disarmament.
Logically, if these weapons are so evil that countries have to be
barred from obtaining them, then those that already possess them should
proceed to eliminate them; practically, so long as some countries have
nuclear weapons, others will inevitably strive to acquire them, and
some will succeed.
The NPT is a discriminatory treaty, in that
it subjects non-nuclear weapon signatories to strict safeguards while
nuclear weapons states are allowed to get away with a commitment to
nuclear disarmament that there is no means of enforcing. Therefore,
instead of the NPT we should emphasise the importance of universal
ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bans
nuclear tests by all countries without discrimination, and the Fissile
Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT), which would ban the production of
fissile material for nuclear weapons, and subject the nuclear weapons
states to the verification procedures currently applicable only to
non-nuclear weapons states. While not actually measures of nuclear
disarmament, these treaties would prevent nuclear weapons states from
expanding their arsenals and developing new weapons, pending the
introduction of a new a treaty on total global nuclear disarmament,
which would be the ultimate goal.
In conclusion: if we wish to
stop the war in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq, and prevent it from
spreading to Iran and other countries, we need to take the following
measures:
1) support the Palestinian-Israeli struggle for a
single democratic state in historical Palestine by a campaign of
boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel;
2) boycott the US dollar until it ceases to be a world currency, thereby refraining from contributing financially to the war;
3)
campaign for a ban on the production, stockpiling and use of all
nuclear weapons, including Depleted Uranium weapons, as well as
chemical and biological weapons, and weapons such as land mines and
cluster bombs that target civilians;
4) lobby the UN on all
these issues: an earlier petition to the UN General Assembly that
contains the e-mail addresses of UN Ambassadors and others can be found
at http://www.waronfreedom.org/petition.html
5) and finally,
work for democracy in our own countries and oppose the threat or use of
force by our own governments, since a democratic and peaceful world
order can only be built out of democratic and peaceful constituents!
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