A
Global Satyagraha
Against Imperialism
By Rohini Hensman
01 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
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!
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