Today, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau finally spoke out about Israel’s upcoming annexation plans and was quoted as saying that he has “expressed Canada’s disagreement over the proposed annexation directly to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, the country’s ‘alternate’ prime minister under a power-sharing agreement.”
CPA chairperson, Hanna Kawas, responded to the Prime Minister’s comments on Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, with the following statement:
If the Trudeau government truly “favours a two-state solution”, why did it vote AGAINST all resolutions that support the two state solution at the UN General Assembly for the past five years?!
1. The “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine” resolution that calls “on Member States not to recognize any changes to the pre-1967 borders, including with regards to Jerusalem”; 2. “Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources” resolution; 3. The resolution that condemns the “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan” and reaffirms the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force”; 4. The resolution concerning “Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem” that expresses “grave concern about the continuing systematic violation of the human rights of the Palestinian people by Israel”.
And finally, why would Canada vote against a resolution to uphold the rights of “Persons displaced as a result of the June 1967 and subsequent hostilities”, unless it supports Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the “Greater Israel Project”?!
Today, PM Trudeau claimed to “deplore” Israel’s annexation plans and said they “are going to delay any prospect of lasting peace in the Middle East”. If the Canadian government is genuine in this belated expression of opposition to Israel’s illegal policies, then the absolute minimum expected is to impose sanctions on the Israeli government until it respects international law. Actions speak louder than words!
There is a recent surge of official voices in the West that are alarmed at the agenda of the new Israeli coalition government. Many western liberal governments are offering slightly more than their usual token objections to Israeli policy, including some European threats of sanctions if Israel implements its new annexation plans.
Is all of this because of concern for the human rights of Palestinians? Or concern for the “rule of law” that they are so fond of referencing?
Or is it because they know that formal Israeli annexation of new chunks of the occupied Palestinian territories will be the final blow to the moribund “two-state solution”? A mirage that for over a quarter of a century has legitimized and fueled the status quo of Israeli settler colonialism and continuing ethnic cleansing, but with “plausible deniability” for many international players.
Once this new annexation is implemented, even though it is really only a legalization of what already exists on the ground, then the “two-state” carrot can no longer be dangled in front of Palestinian and Arab eyes as any type of legitimate approach.
Since the signing of Oslo in 1993, this flawed approach has been a bonanza, not just for successive Israeli governments, but also for many others. How many countries have increased and normalized diplomatic and military cooperation with Israel; how many governments have increased free trade agreements with Israel, in the process blessing the fruits of an illegal occupation; and how many have been able to dismiss legitimate Palestinian resistance and grievances under the ruse of negotiations over the illusory and promised but never delivered “two-state” future?
Annexation by any other name…is still annexation.
All the while in these last 27 years, Israel has at least tripled the number of illegal settlers, pushing Palestinians off their lands, crippling Palestinian agriculture and development, and then killing or injuring Palestinians who dare to protest. All with the blessing of the international community as long as some lip-service is paid to the mantra of the “two-state” solution. As long as one adds some sentence at the end of a press release committing to a “negotiated settlement based on two states”, then support of Israeli military brutality can carry on unexcused.
Not that any of this should come as a surprise. Back in 1992, even before the Oslo Accords were on the table, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was blunt in stating the purpose of such endless negotiations. According to the NY Times, he was quoted “in a published interview…as saying he wanted to drag out peace talks with the Palestinians for a decade while vastly increasing the number of Jewish settlers in Israeli-occupied territories”.
And even if we accept the hypothesis that some analysts are now putting forward that the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority were misled and duped by these Israeli-US schemes, we have to ask: For 27 years?? Perhaps five years, after which the promised Palestinian state was supposed to be implemented. But over a quarter of a century?? Even the late Yasser Arafat finally realized the strategic error involved in the quagmire of the Oslo Accords, a realization that many would argue cost him his life in 2004.
And its not as if there weren’t already precedents for US deception regarding the Palestinian movement. In 1982, then US special envoy Philip Habib guaranteed the safety of people in the refugee camps if the PLO agreed to leave Beirut. Written notes stated: “We also reaffirm the assurances of the United States as regards safety and security…for the camps in Beirut.” And we all know the tragedy that quickly followed, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, where over a thousand unarmed Palestinian men, women and children were butchered and driven out of their homes yet again.
All those now finally finding their voices to criticize Israel’s new annexation plans should know that their words ring hollow, unless they are backed up by significant and concrete steps to hold Israel accountable. The absolute minimum would be sanctions on the government and state of Israel until it respects international law. Imposed immediately! Anything less is just naked deception, aimed at keeping Palestinians under the boot of Zionist colonization permanently.
Check out all the amazing solidarity photos for #NakbaDay on our FB page, including an amazing series “BC Teachers in Solidarity with Palestine”.
One of the photos from “BC Teachers in Solidarity with Palestine”.From Vancouver to Palestine on #Nakba72, #NakbaDay highlighting that the right of return is the #KeytoJustice
Ansar: A Testament to the Ugly Brutality of the Israeli Jailer
By Marion Kawas
April 17th marks a special day in the Palestinian calendar, that of Palestinian Prisoners Day. This year it takes on even more importance as the more than 5000 Palestinian political prisoners are incarcerated with the added threat of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Palestinian prisoners have long played a unique role in the fabric of Palestinian society and its collective resistance. They cross all factional and social barriers, and in many cases, represent the best of several generations of leaders. When some in the Western world repeatedly ask “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?”, we can confidently say that he or she has most likely been imprisoned (or assassinated) by the Israeli state.
Nearly every Palestinian family has a story of at least one member that has been imprisoned either by Israel or a neighbouring complicit regime in the region. As such, the issue of prisoners has historically been a unifying bond for the Palestinian people. Each prisoner is a microcosm of the Palestinian reality, be they arrested while under occupation, in a refugee camp in exile or under the thumb of the apartheid regime in the Galilee or Naqab.
Today, the political prisoners in Israeli jails comprise members of the legislature, children, and women; they also include over 430 administrative detainees. These are prisoners held without charge or trial for renewable periods of 6 months, who are often then re-arrested after being released. Not only is administrative detention void of due process, it is also profoundly cruel; these prisoners know that upon their eventual release, they can be (and often are) picked up at any moment in the future on the whim of Israeli security officials.
Ansar 1, 11, and 111
The Ansar prison camps run by the Israeli authorities give us a glimpse into the history and brutality of such incarceration. The original Ansar camp was established by the invading Israeli army in south Lebanon in 1982 and was infamous for its vicious treatment of prisoners. It gave birth to the even more notorious Khiam prison camp in Lebanon, that Israel handed over to the then South Lebanon Army. An interesting footnote here is that the “Butcher of Khiam”, Amer Fakhoury, was recently arrested in Lebanon and then magically released in a scandalous miscarriage of justice, praised by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Ansar 11, or the Beach Camp, was established by the Israeli occupation army in Gaza during their time there. And Ansar 111, also known as Ketziot prison, still exists as one of the more gruesome Israeli penal establishments for Palestinian prisoners. It is located in the Naqab/Negev desert and had its peak during the first intifada, at which time it was the largest detention camp run by the Israeli military.
Upon looking at archival reports and footage of the original Ansar camp, one is left with the feeling that it was a testing ground, a blueprint for what the Israeli military would later implement in 1987 in the occupied territories. The collective punishment, the “secret charges” that led to incarceration, all of this was refined and later “meted out” during both Palestinian intifadas.
Several foreign doctors, including Canadian Chris Giannou, were rounded up during mass sweeps in south Lebanon in 1982 and later gave eyewitness testimony at meetings and official hearings. This is a small excerpt of Dr. Giannou’s account:
”All the males were paraded in front of three parked jeeps. In each one was a man with a hood over his head and an Israeli seated beside him. As we walked by, certain people would be singled out and walked away, and ‘X’ or something in Hebrew written on their backs. And, thus, 5,000 or 6,000 people were arrested on simple denunciation by a hooded man.”
Palestinian prisoners, their suffering and their role in the broader society is a constant theme in Palestinian poetry and music. Palestinian-American composer and singer George Kurmoz had a song called “Ansar”, written in memory of the prison camps, which is both haunting and profoundly moving. His work is extremely difficult to track down nowadays, but here are a few of the lyrics of “Ansar” as well as a copy of the song produced specifically for this Prisoners Day by Voice of Palestine, Canada. The translation cannot do justice to the subtlety and complexity of the original version, but it offers some glimpse into the song’s essence.
“They come with the breath of the lonely grave
The bells tell a story of the new dawn
From Ansar, the prison,
From the villages of the hardened arms
From the bodies that vanish, where the screams of martyrs echo loudly,
The roses are my destiny, for the black earth…”
This year, for Prisoners Day 2020, with the concerns of the spread of COVID-19 in such unsanitary and overcrowded facilities, many advocacy and human rights groups are intensifying their efforts to free Palestinian political prisoners. Online and social media campaigns are being launched to put pressure on the Israeli government to finally end the incarceration of so many Palestinians, an abhorrent and inhumane practice that has stolen the best years of successive generations.
