SACW | October 01-02, 2007 | Call for a global Satyagraha on 2 Oct 2007

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | October 01-02, 2007
| Dispatch No. 2456 - Year 10 running


A GLOBAL SATYAGRAHA AGAINST IMPERIALISM

by 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 struggle 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!