Afghanistan: Another Untold Story

Afghanistan: Another Untold Story
By Michael Parenti

December 05, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" -- Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghan history and the role played by the United States.

Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.

Some Real History

Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.

The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. “It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.
The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.

The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.

A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs—-in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women.”

The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a “genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope.”

But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government’s dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.

Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.

A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.

It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.

In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.

Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style

The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.

After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.

Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as “a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.’”

Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.

Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah’s name against the purveyors of secular “corruption.”

In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan---fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.

The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of “immorality” that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research.

The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed “immoral” were stoned to death or buried alive.

None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban’s oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women.

If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.

The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.

The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas

While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.

US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific.

The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush’s war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL’s hopes for getting a major piece of the action.

Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a “rogue state” designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.

In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.

One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, “there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy.” But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.

US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.

The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth’s dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world.

In the face of all this Obama’s call for “change” rings hollow.


Michael Parenti’s recent books are Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader and the forthcoming God and His Demons. For further information, visit www.michaelparenti.org.

This article also available on Michael Parenti's web site here.

Aides Say Obama’s Afghan Aims Elevate War

In a move that is bound to result in more Afghan and US deaths, and to further undermine a country already in shambles due to US policy, the New York Times (NYT) reports on January 28th that President Obama

intends to adopt a tougher line toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as part of a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development, senior administration officials said Tuesday.

...

Mr. Obama is preparing to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan over the next two years, perhaps to more than 60,000 from about 34,000 now.

12,000 additional US troops are to be deployed to Afghanistan by midsummer 2009.

While the article focuses on the current administration's problems with Afghan President Karzai, the impact of the US policy on the Afghan people is the issue at hand. As the NYT article says, the Afghans are experiencing

a flourishing drug trade and the resurgence of the Taliban.

The drug trade can be traced to the lack of other forms of work in a country where 53% of the population lives below the poverty line, inflation is at 30%, and 80% of the labor force is involved in agriculture. (From Wikipedia, "Economy of Afghanistan".) This economy is the result of US policy in how the development of the Afghan economy was handled after the US invasion, and in the lack of economic development prior to the invasion.

The rise of the Taliban is a definite result of the US policy towards this country. Following US policy, the US worked to undermine the secular, progressive communist government that governed this country and strengthened the most distorted, fundamentalist, and retrograde sectors of the society, to the benefit of both the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

As detailed in the article "How the CIA Created Osama bin Laden" (GreenLeft.Org, 19 September 2001),

“Throughout the world ... its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They're doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America ... [They are] freedom fighters.”

Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden's notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?

In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today's supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the “evil empire”, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The “evil empire” was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.

The GreenLeft.org article continues,

In April 1978, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in reaction to a crackdown against the party by that country's repressive government.

The PDPA was committed to a radical land reform that favoured the peasants, trade union rights, an expansion of education and social services, equality for women and the separation of church and state. The PDPA also supported strengthening Afghanistan's relationship with the Soviet Union.

Such policies enraged the wealthy semi-feudal landlords, the Muslim religious establishment (many mullahs were also big landlords) and the tribal chiefs. They immediately began organising resistance to the government's progressive policies, under the guise of defending Islam.

Washington, fearing the spread of Soviet influence (and worse the new government's radical example) to its allies in Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states, immediately offered support to the Afghan mujaheddin, as the “contra” force was known.

...

Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the mujaheddin factions. Other Western governments, as well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more.

Washington's policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.

Thus the Afghan people were treated as pawns in a cynical US cold war chess game resulting in millions losing their lives; a decades long policy that undermined the Afghan economy and central government, violated the right of the Afghan peoples to self-determination, and rained death and destruction on an impoverished people struggling to survive.

The Obama administration appears to be acknowledging that the post-US invasion central government created by President Bush and lead by President Karzai does not extend beyond sections of the capital city. The

Obama administration would work with provincial leaders as an alternative to the central government, and that it would leave economic development and nation-building increasingly to European allies, so that American forces could focus on the fight against insurgents.

Evidently the Obama policy goals are very limited, focusing on achieving little more than policing:

“If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who served under Mr. Bush and is staying on under Mr. Obama, told Congress on Tuesday. He said there was not enough “time, patience or money” to pursue overly ambitious goals in Afghanistan, and he called the war there as “our greatest military challenge.”

The administration is focusing on pressing for anti-corruption initiatives. This runs the risk of appearing to abandon central government in that country.

“If it looks like we’re abandoning the central government and focusing just on the local areas, we will run afoul of Afghan politics,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “Some will regard it as an effort to break up the Afghan state, which would be regarded as hostile policy.”

Mr. Gates said

“My own personal view is that our primary goal is to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorists and extremists to attack the United States and our allies, and whatever else we need to do flows from that objective.”

Thus the Obama administration continues one of the policy mistakes of the Bush administration, seeing Afghanistan and that region through the lens of a "war on terror". This policy ignores the needs of the people in the region, and ignores the long history of US intervention that is the underlying cause of the rise of retrograde and reactionary trends in the political society of the region.

There does not appear to be a concensus in the US peace movement on Afghanistan, in part because of the belief that it served as the home base for Al Qaeda when the 9/11/01 attack on the World Trade Center took place.

This view ignores the US role in creating Al Qaeda and the Taliban, in undermining civil society, and in fostering thirty years of war in the country and in the region with no regard for the needs and goals of the people living there.

The peace movement is involved in a discussion on the question of Afghanistan, reflected in the United for Peace and Justice Organizing Discussion on the question.

The first important step in developing a clear position from the antiwar movement on Afghanistan is to generate more discussion about the situation there and how the peace movement can play a role in promoting peaceful solutions to the problems. We suggest several resources and critical questions for discussion which will help you in this process.

1. Organize discussions within our own group.
2. Raise questions with candidates.
3. Follow how your media is covering (or not) this issue and offer them resources to improve their reporting.
4. When your group feels it understands the issues well enough, organize a community forum.

Whatever our views on the U.S. military in Afghanistan, an escalation will mean more casualties, more hatred and more money wasted on war rather than rebuilding communities there and here. As the U.S. war machine tries to distract from its failures by shifting focus from the occupation of Iraq to the war in Afghanistan, we must adapt our strategy. It’s time to speak out now!

However, there is an active policy now in the Obama administration which demands protest. The US does not help countries that it invades and polices; it uses those countries for its own purposes. War does not destroy Al Qaeda and similar organizations, it acts as a recruiting tool. It is natural for a person to look at the cynical policies that the US and its allies have followed in the region and to see corruption and inhumanity whereever the US has extended its hand because that in fact is the reality of US policy.

The peace movement can consider

• an end to the US war against the people of Afghanistan
• respect for the right of the Afghan people to self-determination
• withdrawal of all troops with no bases left behind
• no-strings attached help for rebuilding Afghanistan
  

While the situation today is different in many dynamics from the period of anti-colonial struggle that some of us remember, there are also similarities. In many parts of the world we have peoples that are struggling against US imperial policies including occupation and long term destruction of civil society.

In the periods of anti-colonial struggle the nationalist and Marxist ideologies that imbued those movements with such humanity and power were augmented by the existence of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union no longer exists, and what ideologies and organizational forms people find available are those that the US created in its cynical and short-sighted battle against communism on behalf of exploiters and their allies.

It is no surprise that the anti-imperialist sentiment finds expression through these retrograde forms when those are what is available.

The US peace movement has a special task of looking beyond anger and fear to the struggles of the people against whom the US wages war, and building people-to-people, movement-to-movement bridges based on peace and mutual respect to overcome the wars, destruction, and the deaths. We can stand against US imperialism and cynical US policies that forget the people living in the countries it destroys.

We can say No War Against Afghanistan for the sake of our own youth and, just as much, for the sake of the struggling Afghan people.

Obama issues appeal to Israel, Hamas

In what can only be interpreted as a one sided approach to the peace process in the Palestinian struggle against occupation and Israel militarism, President Obama

said Hamas must end rocket fire at Israel, and Israel must "complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza." Although those steps were taken this week, low-level violence has marred the fragile cease-fire.

Obama said he would aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians while also always defending Israel's "right to defend itself."

This continues the line established by prior administrations that focused on the US's "special" relationship to Israel and viewed Israeli actions as defensive against the Palestinian people rather than as the aggressive and illegal acts of an occupying power.

In the meantime, Israel understands that in the eyes of many nations the Israeli attack on Gaza was a war crime. The VOANews.com reports

Israel's prime minister has assembled a team to defend the country against charges of war crimes in its recent offensive against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.

While the VOANews.com report spins the offensive as if it were against "Hamas militants", the reality is that the Israelis devestated the entire region and murdered many women and children. The offensive was clearly designed to terrorize the entire population, following a blockade that had the same goal.

President Obama's naming of a new special envoy to the Middle East, Sen. George Mitchell, should be welcomed if it signals a commitment to work for a just peace in the region. However the statement on Israel and Hamas signal a policy of "more of the same" rather than "change we need".

The President's statements on continuing the Bush policy of a "War on Terror" are also unwelcome to those who were looking for a more sophisticated and sensitive, even if not anti-imperialist, foreign policy in the regions including Pakistan and Afghanistan. This is the region that President is declaring

"the central front" in the battle against terrorism and extremism. "There, as in the Middle East, we must understand that we cannot deal with our problems in isolation," he said.

A foreign policy that approachs the US issues in that region in context of the needs of the people of the region as well as those of the US people, and which puts the peaceful and mutually beneficial resolution to issues at the forefront of a policy, would be welcome. However, putting the relationships to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the context of the "battle against terrorism and extremism" draws lines that are sure to make diplomacy difficult, signaling an aggressive and combative approach to diplomacy there.

Finally, on Iraq, the NY Times report said that

Obama's top military officials said yesterday they will make sure he knows the potential downside of any timetable for pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq, including the 16-month deadline he set during his presidential campaign.

Here again we have to applaud the President in his desire to bring the troops home and hope that he does not take the occassion of various "downsides" to a timetable to move away from that goal.

All in all, for those who are proponents of peace and social justice, these first steps toward foreign policy send a message of continuity with some of the key components of the Bush administration's policies, and continue along lines that are not designed to achieve a just peace in the Palestinian struggle. Hopefully as the President continues involvement in these processes he will extend his tone of humanity and inclusiveness to the oppressed and the hungry of Palestine as much as to those of us here in the United States who look to him for humane and caring leadership.

Cease Fire Now! End the Siege!

Editor's note: This statement is published despite the report in the New York Times this evening that

Israel’s prime minister announced the unilateral cease-fire in Gaza late Saturday, saying all Israeli objectives for the war had been reached.

Israeli soldiers will remain in Gaza as an occupying force, and Hamas has pledged to carry on the struggle against the occupation.



Almost three weeks into "Operation Cast Lead," we call once more on Jews and others to speak out for a cease fire and against the siege of Gaza.

At Jewish Voice for Peace, we echo the report issued on January 14 by 9 Israeli human rights organizations: Israel's military operations in Gaza pose a "clear and present danger to the lives and well-being of tens of thousands of civilians." In Gaza, "the level of harm to the civilian population is unprecedented" while "military forces are making wanton use of lethal force."

We condemn Israel's assault on Gaza. As of today , more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli assault, including at least 335 children and many more civilians. Nearly 5,000 have been wounded, many paralyzed for life. Tens of thousands have fled their homes - but Gaza is entirely sealed off, so there is nowhere to hide, no safe haven for civilians, no escape corridor for civilians to flee the air, sea and land attacks. Electricity and running water are scarce, the health system has collapsed and sewage is running through the streets in some areas. Inside of Israel, rockets continue to rain down, hitting population centers like Beer Sheba and Ashkelon and causing widespread fear.

We condemn these ongoing rocket attacks, which indiscriminately target civilians. 13 Israelis have been killed, 3 of them civilians, with over 82 civilians injured.

Jewish Voice for Peace:

* Calls on all Americans to support Rep. Dennis Kucinich's resolution calling for an "immediate and unconditional ceasefire" and "unrestricted humanitarian access" to Gaza. Call your congressperson or write them today.

* Joins the call from Human Rights Watch (and others) for Israel to stop using white phosphorous, an incendiary tool permissable in the laws of war as an "obscurant" - but when used in densely populated Gaza, causes widespread, horrific burning of the skin.

* Demands an end to the vicious siege on Gaza, which brought the population to the brink of humanitarian disaster with extreme shortages of food, water, fuel and medical supplies.

* Calls for an end to the 41 years of occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, including an immediate end to the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Only when Palestinians and Israelis are both equally free to decide their own sovereignty will there be peace.

One bright spot in the midst of this terrible darkness is the explosion of dissent in all corners of the globe. We are especially moved by the Israelis who refuse to fall in line with the drumbeat of war: those like Nomika Zion in southern Gaza who, despite living terrified under rocket fire, stand up to say "Not in my name...The bloodbath in Gaza is not in my name nor for my security." or the group "Other Voice", made up of Israelis living under the threat of qassams, who call for Israel to end the attack and strike a truce with Hamas.

We are inspired by those Israeli soldiers who refuse to fight this civilian population, some of whom are already in jail for their refusal; those Israelis who gather every week to demand their country halt its assault and end the siege, or protest everyday at countless intersections throughout the country; and especially those Israelis who stand outside Sde Dov airforce base in Tel Aviv every morning to remind the pilots that every day they drop their bombs, they drop them on civilians.

In North America, we are inspired by the thousands of people who have gone into the streets for protests, in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere, and especially the Jewish women who held a sit-in the Israeli consulate in Toronto, telling the Israeli authorities that "we'll end our occupation when you end yours."

And we are motivated by the tens of thousands who have signed petitions and sent letters calling for Congress to work for an immediate ceasefire and end the siege, and by the tens of thousands who have signed up on JVP's email list and sent thank-you letters to Jon Stewart (www.thankyoujonstewart.com). We are hopeful that more journalists and op-ed page editors will tell the truth about Gaza and Israel (here are examples from the Washington Postand the Wall Street Journal.)

And we are grateful to our friends at Jewish Peace News for bringing us insightful analysis and timely reports on dissent against the war.


© Copyright by JewishVoiceForPeace.org

US Rabbis Urge Obama to Push for Immediate Gaza Truce

US Rabbis Urge Obama to Push for Immediate Gaza Truce

 

By Natasha Mozgavaya and Haaretz Staff

 

January 15, 2009 by Haaretz (Israel)

 

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055463.html

 

A group of rabbis and other religious leaders bought advertising space in the New York Times this week to call for U.S. president-elect Barack Obama to push for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.

 

The ad, placed by the Network of Spiritual Progressives and claiming to represent more than 2,800 other religious, cultural and community leaders, urges Obama to convene an international Middle East peace conference to "facilitate a lasting and just settlement for all parties."

 

Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, who convened the group, said the group had to buy the advertising space because the national newspapers would not make room for their perspective.

 

"They feel that AIPAC's choice is overwhelming, and there's no space left for empathy or objective coverage

- the media, according to the group, simply ignored the voice of the Jewish opposition to war in Gaza," Rabbi Lerner said.

 

Eleven prominent British Jews, including Baroness Julia Neuberger, published a letter in The Observer newspaper last weekend expressing their "horror" at the Gaza conflict and calling on Israel to stop its military campaign.

 

Israel has been waging an offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip since December 27. The operation, launched in order to halt cross-border rocket fire, has come under heavy criticism for the high number of civilian casualties.

 

AFL-CIO - Acuff Cuts Through the Spin About Employee Free Choice

Our own Stewart Acuff delivered quite a shock to Fox News last week. Despite the network and corporate spin, Acuff told talk show host Neal Cavuto the Employee Free Choice Act does not eliminate or make illegal the secret ballot election when workers want to form a union. After parroting the party line for so long, that seemed to come as shock to Cavuto.

 

Click link below to see:

Acuff Cuts Through the Spin About Employee Free Choice

 

 

Post-Tribune Jan. 14 addition: "Environmental, citizens groups upset with Daniels"

"Environmental, citizens groups upset with Daniels"
By Gitte Laasby
A coalition of environmental and citizen action groups are getting fed up with Gov. Mitch Daniels' lack of response to their public information requests.
The groups requested information two and a half months ago but have not received any documents.
http://www.post-trib.com/business/1375985,dukedoc.article

William Sieghart: We must adjust our distorted image of Hamas

Gaza is a secular society where people listen to pop music, watch TV and many women walk the streets unveiled

-- William Sieghart

Last week I was in Gaza. While I was there I met a group of 20 or so police officers who were undergoing a course in conflict management. They were eager to know whether foreigners felt safer since Hamas had taken over the Government? Indeed we did, we told them. Without doubt the past 18 months had seen a comparative calm on the streets of Gaza; no gunmen on the streets, no more kidnappings. They smiled with great pride and waved us goodbye.

Less than a week later all of these men were dead, killed by an Israeli rocket at a graduation ceremony. Were they “dangerous Hamas militant gunmen”? No, they were unarmed police officers, public servants killed not in a “militant training camp” but in the same police station in the middle of Gaza City that had been used by the British, the Israelis and Fatah during their periods of rule there.

This distinction is crucial because while the horrific scenes in Gaza and Israel play themselves out on our television screens, a war of words is being fought that is clouding our understanding of the realities on the ground.

Who or what is Hamas, the movement that Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, would like to wipe out as though it were a virus? Why did it win the Palestinian elections and why does it allow rockets to be fired into Israel? The story of Hamas over the past three years reveals how the Israeli, US and UK governments' misunderstanding of this Islamist movement has led us to the brutal and desperate situation that we are in now.

The story begins nearly three years ago when Change and Reform - Hamas's political party - unexpectedly won the first free and fair elections in the Arab world, on a platform of ending endemic corruption and improving the almost non-existent public services in Gaza and the West Bank. Against a divided opposition this ostensibly religious party impressed the predominantly secular community to win with 42 per cent of the vote.

Palestinians did not vote for Hamas because it was dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel or because it had been responsible for waves of suicide bombings that had killed Israeli citizens. They voted for Hamas because they thought that Fatah, the party of the rejected Government, had failed them. Despite renouncing violence and recognising the state of Israel Fatah had not achieved a Palestinian state. It is crucial to know this to understand the supposed rejectionist position of Hamas. It won't recognise Israel or renounce the right to resist until it is sure of the world's commitment to a just solution to the Palestinian issue.

In the five years that I have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank, I have met hundreds of Hamas politicians and supporters. None of them has professed the goal of Islamising Palestinian society, Taleban-style. Hamas relies on secular voters too much to do that. People still listen to pop music, watch television and women still choose whether to wear the veil or not.

The political leadership of Hamas is probably the most highly qualified in the world. Boasting more than 500 PhDs in its ranks, the majority are middle-class professionals - doctors, dentists, scientists and engineers. Most of its leadership have been educated in our universities and harbour no ideological hatred towards the West. It is a grievance-based movement, dedicated to addressing the injustice done to its people. It has consistently offered a ten-year ceasefire to give breathing space to resolve a conflict that has continued for more than 60 years.

The Bush-Blair response to the Hamas victory in 2006 is the key to today's horror. Instead of accepting the democratically elected Government, they funded an attempt to remove it by force; training and arming groups of Fatah fighters to unseat Hamas militarily and impose a new, unelected government on the Palestinians. Further, 45 Hamas MPs are still being held in Israeli jails.

Six months ago the Israeli Government agreed to an Egyptian- brokered ceasefire with Hamas. In return for a ceasefire, Israel agreed to open the crossing points and allow a free flow of essential supplies in and out of Gaza. The rocket barrages ended but the crossings never fully opened, and the people of Gaza began to starve. This crippling embargo was no reward for peace.

When Westerners ask what is in the mind of Hamas leaders when they order or allow rockets to be fired at Israel they fail to understand the Palestinian position. Two months ago the Israeli Defence Forces broke the ceasefire by entering Gaza and beginning the cycle of killing again. In the Palestinian narrative each round of rocket attacks is a response to Israeli attacks. In the Israeli narrative it is the other way round.

But what does it mean when Mr Barak talks of destroying Hamas? Does it mean killing the 42 per cent of Palestinians who voted for it? Does it mean reoccupying the Gaza strip that Israel withdrew from so painfully three years ago? Or does it mean permanently separating the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, politically and geographically? And for those whose mantra is Israeli security, what sort of threat do the three quarters of a million young people growing up in Gaza with an implacable hatred of those who starve and bomb them pose?

It is said that this conflict is impossible to solve. In fact, it is very simple. The top 1,000 people who run Israel - the politicians, generals and security staff - and the top Palestinian Islamists have never met. Genuine peace will require that these two groups sit down together without preconditions. But the events of the past few days seem to have made this more unlikely than ever. That is the challenge for the new administration in Washington and for its European allies.

William Sieghart is chairman of Forward Thinking, an independent conflict resolution agency

MLK Weekend; Yes We Can Launch

United for Peace and Justice is launching the "Beyond War, A New Economy Is Possible: Yes We Can" campaign this weekend as the nation honors the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. From January 17-19, the MLK Holiday weekend, there will be hundreds of events celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. all over the nation.

The following is the text of the leaflet for the campaign:

Our nation is on the eve of one the most important moments in our history: the inauguration of the first Black president of the U.S. There is great excitement and hope, here and around the world.

At the same time, the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on: the death tolls mount and the financial costs are staggering, draining resources from our cash strapped communities and contributing to the current economic crisis. The “war on terror” has other costs, too, as our rights - especially the rights of the most vulnerable - have been systematically undermined.



We have been here before. More than forty years ago, a senseless war raged in Vietnam. The result: 58,000 young Americans and more than three million Vietnamese dead; a society broken and scarred; illegal assaults on our civil liberties, all in the name of patriotism. Today we are in the midst of an endless “war on terrorism” that has included invasions and occupations, and sweeping erosions in everyone’s basic human rights, particularly in communities of color.

In April 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at New York’s Riverside Church about what Vietnam meant for the United States. His words remind us of the choices we face in 2009, and how urgent it is that we change current U.S. policies—in Iraq, in the Middle East, around the world, and here at home.

“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

“It became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled in our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

“I knew I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.

“The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves ... marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy....

“[W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.... A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Forty-two years later, Dr. King’s challenge to us remains. Our country can make a change, a turn towards humanity and law and decency. Or we can continue down the road of deepening social injustice and permanent war. It’s time for our government to turn to the values of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — take action to make that change.

The Importance Of Being Partisan for the Palestinians

A Personal Opinion: It Is Vital to Be Partisan for the Palestinians

As the Israeli assault on Gaza continues for day 18 NPR radio reported that aproximately 40% of the Palestinians killed were women and children. Israel blames Hamas for this.

In the period leading up to the Israeli bombardment and subsequent brutal aggression against the people of Gaza the Israelis maintained a brutal and deadly blockade of the area, stopping medical supplies, food, and all necessities from entering. Israel blames Hamas for this.

The Israeli air force rains death from the skies on the densely populated Gaza region destroying schools, homes, families, children. Israel blames Hamas for this.

The discourse about the Palestinian struggle needs to clearly reject the ridiculous claims by Israel that they are acting to defend their civilian population from the evil of terrorist Hamas. Evidently from the brutality and breadth of their attack Hamas is everyone in Gaza and everyone in Gaza is a terrorist.

The use of the term terrorist has become a catchall for "bad people", often used as if "Muslim" equated to terrorst. The term is a convenient lie used to condemn whole peoples and their movements for self-determination and dignity.

The discourse on the Palestinian struggle seems to always start from today, with justified outrage for the Israelis civilians killed while dismissing the Palestinian civilians killed.

The US media does not report the Palestinian people's struggles in historical context. There is a tendency to minimize the Palestinian claim to nationality and statehood while cynically inflating the Israeli position for yet another time; for the Israelis Hamas is to blame for everything.

Generations of vicious US backed Israeli brutality against the Palestinians, continuing today, sets the stage for the efforts at winning independence by the Palestinians.

Who can forget the September 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila?

The ongoing Israeli settlement activity taking Palestinian lands that makes the drawing of state lines as defined in UN resolutions effectively impossible, the wall the spits its disrespect for the families that live in its shadow, the bodies of dead children carried by fathers and mothers to overcrowded hospitals, a people driven to desperation by despair,

There can be no just peace in the Palestinian struggle against the US supported Israeli occupation and aggression until people are willing to take a partisan stand on behalf of the Palestinians in the face of the heavily partisan US policy on behalf of the Israelis.

There is no question of the ongoing existence of the state of Israel. The question is stopping US backed Israeli slaughter of the Palestinians. That is the predicate for peace, not a halt to Hamas missiles.

In the United States the peace movement cannot get confused on the question of a balanced position. Our role here is to look at the US role in the ongoing struggle. The US funds the Israeli agression. Here is the US the role of the peace movement must be to demand that the US end all economic and military support for Israeli aggression and for the Israeli military.

Its time to address the Israeli-Palestinian struggle on the same basis as the struggle that the US anti-apartheid movement engaged in to win the battle against apartheid in South Africa.

A just peace is possible in the Palestinian struggle for nationhood and for dignity. It requires a partisan outlook on behalf of the Palestinian people, and a focus on our country's role in supporting the injustice and murder that Israel inflicts on the Palestinians.

There is no justification for the killing of civilians by anyone ever. However, the role that the US is playing in the problem is to support Israeli military activity against the Palestinians. That is what we here in the United States have the special responsibility to address, and to end.

For a just peace that brings statehood, dignity, and a time to heal to the Palestinians, and safety to both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Obama and Israel

The discussion about what role the United States may have in helping to implement a just peace in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict is heating up due to the Israeli aggression against Gaza and the expectation by many that the Barack Obama administration may chart a new course in relating to Israel.

As Ian Williams reported on January 9, 2009 in Foreign Policy in Focus,

On January 5 John Bolton, the former unconfirmed U.S. envoy to the United Nations, advocated in The Washington Post a "three-state solution" to the Palestinian problem. This "solution" involved returning Gaza to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan because the Palestinian state has manifestly failed.

While Bolton's solution is not a good one, it reflects the sense that many have both in the Palestinian and Israeli communities and here in the United States that prior peace initiatives have not yielded much fruit. While standing completely against the Bolton proposal, it is good to see attempts at bold solutions and new paradigms being considered.

Williams's article continues

A perennial cutter of Gordian knots, Bolton usually misses the complexity of the turns — and the identity of the knot-tiers. In this case, he missed the rather obvious point that the Palestinian Authority's ailments are connected to the Israeli refusal to allow a viable and contiguous state to exist and its constant undermining of whatever party the Palestinian people elect, first Fatah and now Hamas. In fact, Bolton doesn't go far enough. Following his line of "reasoning," Israel should be returned to Britain as a mandate and then quickly turned over to the United States.

The Obama administration isn't likely to pick up Bolton's advice to dissolve the Palestinian state. In the current policy vacuum, however, Obama should be ready for a serious rethink of U.S. policy. And that rethink should begin with Israel.

Israel and the United States

Israel is far from being simply a U.S. satellite and base. In many ways, the United States orbits Israel. For domestic political reasons, the U.S. government in effect uncritically guarantees almost any act of any Israeli government. There are, of course, some limits, though not many. For example, it's clear that Israel either couldn't or wouldn't mount an attack on Iran without U.S. approval, which was likely withheld more because of its potential effect on U.S. forces in the region than any principled objection to the idea.

This U.S.-Israeli relationship gives President-elect Obama, despite his distressing silence on the Gaza conflict, a unique window of opportunity. Domestically, he garnered the votes of almost 80% of American Jews, despite a furious campaign from Republican and Likudnik die-hard organizations questioning his attachment to the Zionist project and Israel's defense.

Even after his kowtowing to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) during the primaries, Obama won even more support from American Muslims than he did from Jews.

Obama shouldn't listen to conservative Jewish organizations, who outshout the silent majority of American Jews who abide by their traditional liberal and humanitarian instincts. The overwhelming majority of American Jews voted for Obama, and the emergence of voices like J Street offers an opportunity for a new president who owes the "Israel Lobby" nothing.

Obama and Israel

If Obama wants to be a real friend to Israel, he has to let the Israeli government know its actions are not consequence-free. There is both a principled and a pragmatic constituency that he can address in Israel itself. Until now, the Israeli electorate has worked on the principle that whatever happens, the United States will provide support. If the government needs replacements for expended cluster bombs, the United States will airlift them in. If the UN, the EU, and other international actors criticize Israel's military actions, Washington will send the aid check as always. This uncritical support of Israel must change.

Obama shouldn't let the immediate crisis in Gaza deflect from the root problem. Israeli leaders have a profound ambivalence toward the peace process, to which they officially subscribe even as they continue building settlements in the West Bank. The United States must push Israel toward greater engagement with a peace settlement. Nor can the United States or the EU continue to ostracize any Palestinian (or for that matter the Lebanese) leadership demonized by Israel as terrorists.

On the carrot side, Obama should promise full security guarantees to Israel within the internationally accepted borders, based on the June 1967 lines.

Since he is being bipartisan, the new president should take up where George Bush Sr. and James Baker left off almost two decades ago. Any Israeli spending on settlement building should be condemned in the UN, and matched by equivalent reductions in U.S. aid. He should also implement actual U.S. policy by reminding Israelis that American weaponry is intended for defensive purposes and that any used in attacks beyond the borders won't be replaced.

Finally, the president-elect should speak out now about the desirability of Israel abiding by UN Security Council Resolution 1860, which calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, Israeli troop withdrawal, and sustained delivery of humanitarian assistance. A word from Obama would give Israel the excuse it desperately needs to extricate itself from the hole it dug in Gaza, while redounding to the president-elect's credit globally.

Given the cast of mind of many leading Democrats, such a rethink of U.S.-Israel relations is sure to be controversial. But early and speedy action before Obama starts campaigning for reelection should produce results. And backing a durable peace would be the best way of supporting Israel in the end.

Any move to redefine the relationship between the United States and Israel toward a more balanced foundation that acknowledges the needs of the Palestinian people and the justice of their struggle is to be celebrated. The options that Ian Williams presents above are one set of possible issues that need to be considered. The focus on governmental action could be broadened to include mass action on behalf of a just peace in the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

The Guardian of Saturday, January 10 2009, published a report by Naomi Klein entitled Enough. It's time for a boycott taking a different approach. Naomi Klein wrote:

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.

Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.

The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

Israel is not South Africa.

Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.

This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."

Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

The proposals being advanced by Ian Williams and by Naomi Klein have some contradictions but are not fundamentally at odds with each other; they can be made to be mutually supportive. Both are worth consideration and action by people's movements and by the Obama administration as we as a nation move forward to reevaluate our relationship with Israel and with the Palestinians. The most important aspect of this reevaluation is to move away from the dehumanization of Palestinians that is inherent in the uncritical support that prior administrations have given to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, and a renewed recognition of the justice of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and statehood.

CALL CONGRESS NOW!
DEMAND ACTION TO HELP END THE SIEGE OF GAZA


Earlier today, Thursday, the Senate unanimously passed a one-sided resolution supporting Israel for 'defending itself' from Hamas. Outrageous as this is, the House of Representatives will most likely do the same tomorrow, Friday.


Call your Representative NOW! to tell them to vote 'NO' on any resolution that fails to call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire -- as well as for unimpeded access for humanitarian aid into Gaza and a lifting of Israel's illegal siege.


United For Peace and Justice -- working with member groups such as the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Peace Action, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Progressive Democrats for America, and Code Pink -- is organizing this national Congressional call-in day. We must let our Congressional representatives know that we will not stand for an unfair and unbalanced resolution that supports Israel's continued assault on Gaza, with no clear path for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.


There are several biased resolutions on the table, most of which applaud Israel for being a 'strong ally' in the 'War on Terror'; falsely blame Hamas for breaking the ceasefire; fail to recognize the legitimacy of Palestinian elections; and say nothing about Israel's responsibility for the killing and injuring of Palestinians and imposing collective punishment on them through a brutal siege -- all with U.S. weapons.


If you don't know who represents you in Congress, then you can find out at Congress.org (enter your zip code in the upper right corner of the website). Once you know who represents you call 202-224-3121 and the operator will connect you to your Representative. You can also call this Congressional switchboard number at 1-800-828-0498.

When you are connected to your Representative's office, keep your message short and to the point. Tell them:

Congress should be calling for an immediate, unconditional, comprehensive ceasefire. Israel has killed more than an estimated 700 Palestinians and injured more than 3,000 since December 27. Resolutions that condition a ceasefire will only lead to more needless death and destruction, and biased resolutions that enable Israel to continue killing and injuring Palestinians are unacceptable. We are also critical of Hamas for launching rockets aimed at and killing civilians in Israel.
*

Congress should be calling for unrestricted access for humanitarian aid. Israel is allowing through only a trickle of humanitarian aid into Gaza. As the Occupying Power of the Gaza Strip, Israel is legally obligated by the 4th Geneva Convention to ensure that Palestinians receive adequate supplies of food, medical supplies, and other necessities of life. Israel's siege on the Gaza Strip imposes an illegal collective punishment on 1.5 million civilians by denying them access to these vital supplies in violation of international law. Israel must lift its siege of the Gaza Strip to comply with its Geneva Convention obligations and humanitarian aid deliveries must be allowed to enter without restrictions.
*

Israel is misusing U.S. weapons to attack a civilian population. Instead of placing blame for Israel's war on and siege of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on the victims, Members of Congress should join with Rep. Dennis Kucinich in demanding from the Secretary of State an investigation into Israel's violations of the Arms Export Control Act. Members of Congress must hold Israel accountable for its misuse of U.S. weapons to kill Palestinian civilians in violation of U.S. and international law, not vote for resolutions which justify these illegal killings.
*
It is vitally important to make sure Congress hears from us! As few as 20 phone calls from their constituents can prevent Representatives from supporting these atrocious resolutions cheerleading Israel. Your call WILL make a difference -- call 202.224.3121 NOW to join our national movement.


After calling your Representatives and urging them to vote NO on any one-sided, biased resolution, we hope you will also call your Senators and let them know how upset you are with their vote today blaming Gazans for the current crisis. Call 202-234-3121 to be connected to the offices of your elected officials in Washington, D.C.


Don't forget to amplify your voice in Congress by having your friends call-in. Be sure to forward this message as widely as you can and encourage others to make these calls.

For more background information, organizing resources, ideas for action and a calendar that lists public protests all around the country, check the website of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

Finally, we need your financial support to help us keep doing this important work. Just click here to make a secure online donation, or to find out how else you can contribute to United for Peace and Justice. Thank you for whatever you can donate at this critical moment.

Help us continue to do this critical work: Make a donation to UFPJ today.

UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE
www.unitedforpeace.org | 212-868-5545
PO Box 607; Times Square Station; New York, NY 10108

100 Days to Close Guantanemo & End Torture Campaign

United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and Witness Against Torture - a Catholic Worker led UFPJ member group - are co-sponsoring the 100 Days to Close Guantanemo & End Torture Campaign, marking the seventh year of the US use of Guantanemo as a detention and torture center.

From January 11th to January 20th, 2009, there will be a Prisoner Procession and Fast for Justice in Washington DC. January 11th is the anniversary of the opening of the Guantanemo facility.

On January 20th through April 30th, 2009, there will be a sustained presence at the White House, film screenings, community meetings, and creative actions taking place throughout Washington DC. In this same time period communities across the country are encouraged to organize events designed to mobilize people concerned about the torture and illegal detention at the US facilitiy at Guantanemo.

Please consider participating in this worthy campaign.

NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF BLACK LAWYERS CONDEMNS THE MASSACRE IN GAZA

PRESS RELEASE



-----------------

12/31/08

NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF BLACK LAWYERS CONDEMNS THE MASSACRE IN GAZA



The National Conference of Black Lawyers ("NCBL") condemns the massive

military attack by Israel upon Gaza. Since Saturday, December

27 Israel's bombs have rained on Gaza, hitting targets such as a

refugee camp and a university. News agencies reported today that over

375 Palestinians, including women and children as young as age 4, have

been murdered. Over 1400 have been wounded.



The military attacks are not Israel's only act of aggression towards

Gaza. For over a year the Israeli government has held a stranglehold on

Gaza, preventing the entry of necessary goods such as food and medicine

into the territory. Israel's actions are inhumane and are in violation

of international law. Israel controls both access to Gaza and the

freedom of movement of Gazans. As an occupying power, Israel's

blockade amounts to collective punishment in violation of Article 33

of the Fourth Geneva Convention. United Nations Special Rapporteur

Richard Falk has even characterized the blockade policies as a crime

against humanity. In addition, Israel's indiscriminate firing on

civilian populations violates the rules of war and the Fourth Geneva

Convention.



Each year the United States government gives billions of dollars

in taxpayer money to Israel, described as "aid." As taxpayers we demand

that the United States stop funding Israel's illegal actions. Further,

the NCBL calls on the international community to decry the military

attacks on Gaza, as well as the blockade.

-------------------------------

Protest the Israeli Invasion of Gaza Now!

Protest the Israeli Invasion of Gaza Now!


The New York Times reports tonight



Israeli tanks and troops swept across the border into Gaza on
Saturday night, opening a ground war against the militant group Hamas
after a week of intense airstrikes.


The article continues

Officials have stated repeatedly that the aim is not to fully reoccupy Gaza. But it was clear that the military was leaving the door open for a long-term operation; a spokesman said Saturday that the ground push “will continue on the basis of ongoing situational assessments.” And it remained an open question whether Israel would try to eliminate the Hamas government.

The Israeli aggression against the 1.5 million Palestinian people living in the Gaza region is a crime against humanity. First the entire population had to endure a brutal blockade that lead to starvation and the break down of essential services. This was followed by about a week of aerial bombardment which killed hundreds of people, aproximately 25% of whom were civilians.

The Palestinian people have a right to struggle for self-determination and to live in safety, in peace, and with dignity and respect.

Now the Israelis have invaded.

We urge our members, friends and all peace-loving people to consider the following action proposals to end the bloodshed:

1. Contact the White House to protest U.S. policy and demand emergency negotiations for an immediate cease-fire. Call 202-456-1111 or send an e-mail to comments@whitehouse.gov.

2. Contact your Representative and Senators at 202-224-3121

3. Ask President-elect Obama to pursue a new policy toward Israel/Palestine, and send a message at www.change.gov.

4. Organize or join public protests.

Demand an end to the Israeli aggression today.

Ramallah women protest Bush

·
9/27/2008: Palestinian women at an anti-Bush protest in Ramallah refuse orders from the Palestinian security forces to leave the protest area.

Israel Rejects Cease-Fire, but Offers Gaza Aid

Day six of the Israeli aerial bombing of the Gaza penninsula. As the New York Times reports,

Alongside the military offensive, officials said Israel would work with its allies to build a durable, long-term truce, and would seek to expedite and increase humanitarian aid. But it would not agree to a proposed 48-hour cease-fire.

This is typical of the cynical manipulations that characterize so much of the Israeli relationship to the struggle of the Palestinian people. The Israelis will work to create a peace once it can unilaterally dictate the terms and has wiped out the civilian infrastructure supporting 1.5 million people's lives.

Seen in the context of Israel's denial of access to humanitarian aid, including food, under the blockade that preceeded the Israeli attack, this statement is particularly tragic because the people being attacked are effectively defenseless.

Israeli strikes

on Thursday morning hit government buildings and the Parliament, while militants fired at least 13 rockets at locations in southern Israel, including two in the city of Beersheba, the Israeli army said. One relatively long-range rocket scored a direct hit on an eight-storey apartment house in Ashdod, some 25 miles from Gaza, according to news reports. No injuries were reported and the Israeli Army said warplanes counter-attacked, hitting the site in Gaza from which the rocket was launched.

NPR is reporting that the entire civil infrastructure of Gazan civil society has been destroyed including medical facilities, the Parliment, and the information infrastructure that supported civil society.

As the NYT reported in In Dense Gaza, Civilians Suffer,

Dr. Madhoun, a general practitioner, was in an ambulance responding to an Israeli strike at the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Another missile hit the ambulance. The driver, Muhammad Abu Hasira, died instantly. Dr. Madhoun lingered for a day, dying of his wounds on Wednesday in the intensive care unit of Shifa Hospital, where hundreds of people have been brought since Israel began its heaviest assault on Gaza in three decades.

The dentist cried.

“He was just doing his work,” said the dentist, who would not give his name. “He’s a doctor, and I can’t understand why Israel would hit an ambulance. They can tell from the cameras it’s an ambulance.”

It has always been this way, over years of conflict here, that civilians are killed in the densely populated Gaza Strip when Israel stages military operations it says are essential for its security. But five days of Israeli airstrikes have surpassed past operations in scale and intensity; the long-distance bombardment of the Hamas-controlled territory has, however well aimed at those suspected of being militants, splintered families and shattered homes in one of the most densely populated places on Earth.

Among the total dead — between 320 and 390, according to the United Nations — Palestinian medical officials say that 38 were children and 25 were women. The United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees said 25 percent of those killed had been civilians. Israel said it knew of 40 civilian deaths but that it was still checking.

The facts and the figures barely begin to capture the horror of the Israeli attack.

“Conditions for parents and children in Gaza are dangerous and frightening,” Maxwell Gaylard, United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said in a statement.

“It is absolutely crucial that there is an end to the fighting,” he said. “Without it, more civilians will continue to be killed. Without the violence stopping, it is extremely difficult to get food to people who need it, we cannot assess where the most urgent needs are.”

In the debate over civilian casualties, there is no clear understanding of what constitutes a military target. Palestinians argue that because Hamas is also the government in Gaza, many of the police officers who have been killed were civil servants, not hard-core militants. Israel disagrees, asserting also that a university chemistry laboratory, which it claims was used for making rockets, was a fair target in an attack this week, even if it could not show conclusively that those inside the laboratory at the time where engaged in making weapons.

The Israelis attempt to define their attack in terms of self-defense against terrorism. The Israeli position, as put forward by Shimon Peres on NPR today, is that if the Hamas leadership cared about their people they would stop attacking Israel. However, this position denies the continuous economic and military attack that Israel maintains against the Palestinian people, and which negotiation has proved fruitless to stop. A focus on Hamas and internal Palestinian struggles can confuse the situation. The Israeli attack is destroying the complete civil infrastructure for life for 1.5 million Palestinians. It is an attack against the Palestinian people, not against Hamas.

There have been demonstrations in Indianapolis protesting against the Israeli attack. World wide protests are increasing pressure on Israel to stop their attack.

In the United States, which provides billions of dollars and military support to Israel, we have an opportunity to influence the peace process by demanding an end to all US support for Israel until the Palestinian people have an independent state as laid out under UN resolutions.

United for Peace and Justice: Take Action to Protest Israeli Attack on Gaza

Take Action to Protest Israeli Attack on Gaza

Mid-morning Saturday, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) launched a series of deadly air strikes on the occupied Gaza Strip. As we write this, an estimated 275 people have been killed. Hundreds of innocent people have been wounded. According to news reports today, Israel plans to keep these attacks going and has brought scores of tanks to the border with Gaza.

These Israeli attacks come on top of a brutal siege of the Gaza Strip which has been going on for years and has created a humanitarian catastrophe of dire proportions for Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinian residents by restricting the provision of food, fuel, medicine, electricity, and other necessities of life. All of this is happening in the most densely populated and one of the poorest areas of the world.

Israel is carrying out these attacks with F-16 fighter jets and missiles provided by U.S. taxpayers. From 2001-2006, the United States transferred to Israel more than $200 million worth of spare parts to fly its fleet of F-16's. In July 2008, the United States gave Israel 186 million gallons of JP-8 aviation jet fuel. Last year, the United States signed a $1.3 billion contract with Raytheon to transfer to Israel thousands of TOW, Hellfire, and 'bunker buster' missiles.

Israel's lethal attack on the Gaza Strip could not have happened without the active military and political support of the United States. We need to take action now to protest this attack and demand an immediate cease-fire.

The U.S. Campaign to End the Israel Occupation (a member group pf UFPJ) has issued an action alert with these suggestions -- we urge you to take action today!

* Contact the White House to protest the attacks and demand an immediate cease-fire. Call 202-456-1111 or send an email to comments@whitehouse.gov.
* Contact the State Department at 202-647-6575 or send an email by clicking here.
* Contact your Representative and Senators in Congress at 202-224-3121 or find contact info for your Members of Congress by clicking here.
* Contact your local media by phoning into a talk show or writing a letter to the editor. To find contact info for your local media, click here.
* Organize a local protest or vigil and tell us about it at congress@endtheoccupation.org.
* Sign our open letter to President-Elect Obama calling for a new U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine and find out other steps you can take to influence the incoming Administration by clicking here.

In addition, the Middle East Children's Alliance (another member group of UFPJ) is working with health organizations in Gaza to procure the most-needed medicines and send them directly to Gaza with the help of the Free Gaza Movement. You can make a secure online contribution now.

Background Information

Below are three articles you may want to read for background information and reports on the Gaza crisis.

'If Gaza Falls...', Sara Roy, Professor at Harvard's Center For Middle Eastern Studies and author of 'Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict'.

'Gaza Massacres Must Spur Us To Action', Ali Abunimah, Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of 'One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse' (Metropolitan Books, 2006).

'Report on Gaza', Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Update December 22, 2008.

CPUSA Denounces Israeli Attacks In Gaza

CPUSA Denounces Israeli Attacks In Gaza

The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) emphatically denounces the Israeli attacks in Gaza, which have left several hundred dead and unknown numbers wounded. The attacks have been carried out with a total disregard for the safety of children, women, old people and other noncombatants and are the latest phase in a brutal campaign to strangle the people of Gaza by blockading them and denying them access to basic necessities. The pretext stated by the Israeli government, namely the resumption of the Hamas rocket attacks, is far out of proportion to the damage being inflicted on innocent people by the IDF bombings. What is more, the Israeli government has telegraphed plans to continue the bombings and follow them up with an invasion by ground forces.

The Communist Party of Israel has suggested that the current Israeli attacks are a demagogic move related to the current electoral campaign in that country, as well as perhaps being intended to present the incoming Obama administration with a fait accompli, making it more difficult for Obama to adopt a new approach to the Israel-Palestine issue. The CPUSA denounces the Bush administration for the verbal and material support it is rendering to the Israeli agression. We demand an immediate end to the Israeli attacks, and we endorse the call of the Communist Party of Israel for sanctions on that country and on its leaders. We call on the incoming Obama administration to make a radical change in US policy on the Israel-Palestine issue, and to pressure the Israeli government to return to honest negotiations toward a two-state solution.

National Committee, Communist Party USA

Israeli Aircraft Continue Raids on Gaza; Arab Anger Rises

The New York Times today reports that

In a third straight day of deadly air strikes against the emblems and institutions of Hamas on Monday, Israeli warplanes pounded targets in Gaza including the Interior Ministry while the Israeli army declared areas around the beleaguered enclave a “closed military zone.”

According to George Dwell, Public Relations Contact for the Indiana "Yes We Can" Coalition for Peace and Justice,

The people of Gaza were already suffering horribly under the Israeli blockade. As the United Nations pointed out on November 19, 2008, 'the restrictions deprived Palestinians of "basic human rights". The use of Israeli state power against the Palestinian people is illegal under international law, and is a human tragedy of immense proportions.

According to the New York Times, "The United Nations Relief and Works Agency said more than 50 of the dead were civilians...."

The article continued "In a statement on Monday, the Israeli army said some areas around Gaza had been declared a “closed military zone,” a move which some analysts depicted as a potential precursor to a ground offensive."

Frank Berzimla, member of the Communist Party of Indiana CPUSA, said "The issue of the Israeli attacks on Gaza is not an issue of Israel fighting for its life. The Israeli attacks are applications of disproportionate state force against an oppressed people living under a blockade, and who have endured unending oppression since Israel started seizing Palestinian land, controlling the natural resources in the area, attacking every manifestation of real self-determination on the part of the Palestinians, and generally acting as a proxy for US imperial aspirations in this oil rich area. It is incorrect to see this through the lens of a Muslim/Jewish conflict. It would be more appropriate to see the Palestinian struggle in Gaza and in Palestine as a whole as an anti-imperialist struggle akin to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa or the struggle of African states against the yoke of colonial exploitation."

The Indiana "Yes We Can" Coalition for Peace and Justice calls for all-out protests across Indiana to say "No Invasion of Gaza; Stop the Bombings; End US economic and military support for Israeli Aggression".