[For those interested in maintaining the status quo – in the
Middle East and in our own country – the demand for a cease fire is
threatening, because it means negotiation, and negotiations might call
the existing status quo into question. ]
[[link removed]]

CEASEFIRE IS A FIRST STEP TOWARDS JUSTICE AT HOME AND ABROAD  
[[link removed]]


 

Kurt Stand
November 15, 2023
Washington Socialist
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ For those interested in maintaining the status quo – in the
Middle East and in our own country – the demand for a cease fire is
threatening, because it means negotiation, and negotiations might call
the existing status quo into question. _

, Graphic by artist KILL JOY accessed from AGAINSTAPARTHEID.ART

 

“I AM GRIEVING for every Palestinian, Israeli, and American life
lost to this violence, and my heart breaks for all those who will be
forever traumatized because of it. War and retaliatory violence
doesn’t achieve accountability or justice; it only leads to more
death and human suffering,” SAID CONGRESSWOMAN CORI BUSH. “Today
[October 25] I am introducing the _Ceasefire Now Resolution_
[[link removed].],
vital legislation that calls for de-escalation and an immediate
ceasefire in Israel and Occupied Palestine, and for humanitarian
assistance to urgently be delivered to the 2.2 million people under
siege and trapped in Gaza. The United States bears a unique
responsibility to exhaust every diplomatic tool at our disposal to
prevent mass atrocities and save lives. We can’t bomb our way to
peace, equality, and freedom. With thousands of lives lost and
millions more at stake, we need a ceasefire now.”

[Congresswoman Bush and veterans demanding Ceasefire stand in front of
Capitol holding “Veterans for Ceasefire Now” sign]

_Rep. Cori Bush urging passage of the Ceasefire Now resolution, with
veteran advocates, on the steps of the Capitol Building on November
9th._

“I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today,
and every day,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote in a statement, as a
co-sponsor of the _Ceasefire Now Resolution_, adding “The failure
to recognize the violent reality of living under siege, occupation,
and apartheid makes no one safer. We cannot ignore the humanity in
each other. As long as our country provides billions in unconditional
funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle
of violence will continue.”

In addition to Bush and Tlaib, the bill was co-sponsored by
Representatives André Carson, Summer Lee, and Delia C. Ramirez and
joined by eight other members of Congress: Jamaal Bowman, Bonnie
Watson Coleman, Jesús “Chuy” García, Jonathan Jackson,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Nydia
Velázquez (a list now grown larger). 

If we wish to understand the sentiment that lies behind this
resolution, we may want to listen to the lines of Palestinian poet
Samih Al-Qasim who himself saw the inside of Israeli prisons on more
than one occasion:

_And destruction’s tide
rises higher still than the tide,
and the angel’s wing grows distant,
and the winds of devastation draw near,
and you sit atop the earth:
no moaning interferes,
no ark comes to save you,
no olive branch is here in the orbit,
and over death you wither
folding your shirt on the heart’s ordeal.
‍
You fold and all,
Strange and sad –
sadder than water._

[Samih al-Qasim and the language of revolution | Middle East Eye]

Contemporary photo of Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim.   Photo
from _Middle East Eye_
[[link removed]]
.

Like the struggle for peace and justice everywhere, the resolution
seems fragile, a whisper against the rising tide of war.  Yet a
whisper can turn into a cry, a small step can be the path that leads
out of the abyss. It is striking the fierce opposition this simple
plea arouses. The line is drawn – war or peace, oppression or
freedom, human empathy or destruction.  It is up to us to choose.

BLAMING THE VICTIM

Despite law-and-order demagogues who proclaim violence as originating
from “bad” individuals or cultures, violence does not spring from
the void — it has root causes and those causes need to be understood
if the violence is to be overcome and resolved.

We should not forget that there is a violence that has defined the
conditions of life in Gaza; one which the phrase “open air prison”
begins to suggest. There is violence in the conditions of life in the
West Bank in which apartheid-like barriers keep apart Israelis and
occupied Palestinians, freedom of movement for the former based on
denial of freedom of movement for the latter.  And there is violence
in treating some groups of citizens in society as having fewer rights
than other groups of citizens as happens to Palestinians within the
borders of Israel itself. Until Palestinians are able to live as free
men and women, violence in all its forms will persist.

Palestinian women demonstrate against Israeli soldiers in the Jabalia
refugee camp in Gaza City_. Female protesters in Jabalia, Gaza By
Robert Croma. License: CC BY NC SA 2.0 [link removed]

Noting this does not take away from responsibility of any who act in
wanton disregard for human life. When a child is killed, the reason
behind it does not matter – there is a lifeless body, there is
grief. To talk about causes and reasons at that point seems itself to
be a crime. But what does it mean when one child’s death matters
and another child’s death doesn’t? For we need to recognize that
Palestinian deaths – the killing of Palestinian children by Israeli
soldiers – in the past year barely made a dent in the news. The
names, the hopes of a life cut short, the anger and hurt of grieving
parents, they all barely entered into the consciousness of our media,
of our society. Acknowledging that does not relativize the pain
experienced by those who lost loved ones in the Hamas attack on
Israel, rather the reverse is true; it is an argument to organize for
equality for hope in life, rather than equality in grieving.  

By failing to confront the use of force by those with power to
suppress those without, we make inevitable the seemingly endless
cycles of violence and counter violence.  Many who are unable to see
that connection are blinded by the racism which we know all too well
from our own society.  After all, the rhetoric of
“superpredators” used by politicians to justify enactment of the
draconian laws that have led to the extraordinary rates of mass
incarceration in the United States was designed to characterize some
people as less than human, to deny social causes to individual
behaviors. Militarized policing and tossing out the concept of
“innocent before proven guilty” in turn normalized mass
incarceration as the chosen means of addressing crime, rather than
enaction of social policies to transform the equality promised in
words into equality in life as experienced. Unfortunately, and
tellingly, it has led to the practice of arresting and charging
children as adults, giving decades-long sentences even to children in
their early teens. A racial blind spot allows that to happen; a field
of vision that sees whole categories of people as irredeemable.

Moreover, that blind spot goes one step further – it enables the
“neutral” observer from afar to blame the community for being
responsible for its own oppression. Too many African Americans in
prison, living in poverty, lacking education? – well it is
“their” fault; we (one can insert whatever “we” one wants
here) had to overcome challenges too. It is a logic that lies just
below the surface of society – open racists and right-wingers make
it explicit, yet far too many –  who otherwise perceive themselves
as liberal minded – fall into the same mindset.  Were it not so,
the continued structural discrimination afflicting African Americans
(or of Native Americans, or those of Spanish-speaking immigrant
heritage) would be viewed as intolerable – meaning it would not be
tolerated and social policy and budgetary priorities would be so
reordered to address those inequities. But, of course, it is
tolerated, at an enormous cost to us as a society, at an enormous cost
to all working people. Tolerated through a rationalization that
blames the victims: i.e. blaming personal or familial or community
dysfunction, blaming bad leadership or bad decisions as the reason for
lack of progress by those who have been and still are being held back.

Familiar refrains all and returns us to Palestine-Israel—and our
failure to hold those who have power responsible, a refusal to look at
the structure of society that creates such conflicts, an unwillingness
to look at the systemic basis for oppression, an unwillingness to look
for systemic solutions. Instead, we have violence, counter-violence,
and the continuation of the unacceptable – alongside the easy answer
of seeing conflict as reflecting ancient hatreds, irrational peoples,
divisions rooted in history and blood, and other stereotypes that deny
the humanity of those involved. It is that denial which links
Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism, seeing people as identities that deny
humanity, as if solutions can be found apart from social justice,
apart from peace.

ROOTS OF WAR 

Therein lies the determined opposition to the call for a cease
fire. A cease fire, in and of itself, simply means stopping the
killing, killing which those with the greater fire power are quite
unready to stop. Yet without a cease fire, war continues, without a
cease fire there is no basis for the release of the hostages Hamas is
holding in Gaza (or the reciprocal release of Palestinian political
prisoners, many detained for years without charges).  

But for those interested in maintaining the status quo – in the
Middle East and in our own country – the demand for a cease fire is
threatening, because it means negotiation, and negotiations might call
the existing status quo into question. For Palestinians and Israelis
solutions that end the reality of oppression experienced by millions
and allow all to live a life of peace with justice, will require such
negotiations, as happened in Ireland and South Africa. Ultimately,
allowing equal political rights to all will enable divides over issues
to be resolved through political means, through democratic
struggle. How this will be achieved is for the people who live or are
from the region to determine, as genuine democratic rights and
equality is not what those in power in Israel want, however much it is
needed.  

While those of us abroad can have our opinions about one solution or
another, no solution imposed from abroad will be lasting. What those
of us who stand in solidarity with the Palestinians can do, however,
is to end the interference by our government which has long supported
Israeli violations of international law and its denial of Palestinian
human rights. 

Far from being an honest broker, our government’s policy for years
has been determined by the perceived need of our “power elite” –
those corporate, military and political circles that conduct foreign
policy — to maintain US primacy in world affairs. The same sects
that call for “democracy,” after all, support Saudi Arabia, the
same sects that denounce wars of aggression invaded Iraq and
Afghanistan. And the same sects that talk of economic growth are
those that have imposed structural adjustment policies around the
world, devastating for local populations, while being quite a boon for
global capital and profits. The military, far from being a vehicle
for national defense, has become an instrument of domination, and a
never ending cash cow for the parasitical arms industry. These same
sets of policies have their domestic equivalent, in anti-unionism, in
the outflow of jobs, in privatization, in mass incarceration, in
police violence, and in the racism that is intensified by the
insecurity of life these bring. For all those, today’s call for a
ceasefire is a threat, for all others it ought to be a call to action.

REMINDERS FROM THE PAST

Profits for some – hardship for many. It is no accident that Reps.
Bush, Tlaib and the other DSA members and progressives in the House
who initiated this call for a ceasefire are the same who support
social justice and redistributive measures domestically. The demand
for a ceasefire is a demand for justice for Palestinians, it is a
demand for peace for Palestinians and Israelis alike, it is part of a
campaign to cut the US military budget and to begin to spend funds for
humanitarian needs abroad and for social programs at home. Peace and
justice are intertwined here, abroad and everywhere. And in that
spirit, these words from a novel by Fred Wander, written as a
recollection of his childhood in the Buchenwald concentration camp,
provide a fitting call to action:

_“But when I return, Feinberg says that night in block sixteen, if I
should live so long, and I return to the ground-floor apartment in Rue
des Rosiers, I’ll stand and listen, the walls will talk:  You lived
here, the walls will say, you brought up your children here, where are
they now, how have you watched over them?  And I will answer: I
believed, I trusted God.  I was happy, I’ll say. Every day I was
happy. Had worries, I argued with my loved ones, with my wife, with
the kids, I cursed, committed sins of every kind, lied a thousand
little lies, that was life, that was my life.  And, still I was
happy, they were my most beautiful years, with my children, with my
wife, all together … But the walls will demand an accounting, they
will ask: You sat here and wasted your time. You dreamed. You knew
nothing. And what happened, where are they now? – I don’t know,
I’ll say.  And then I will cry. But the walls will be quite
cold:  Now you are crying because misfortune has descended upon
you. Back then you didn’t cry? And yet the world was full of
misery.  You didn’t see it?”_

* Israel-Gaza War
[[link removed]]
* Ceasefire
[[link removed]]
* Peace Negotiations
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]