Reprinted from Consortium News
Israeli author and human rights activist Jeff Halper who has challenged the Israeli practice of destroying Palestinian homes (usually for simply building after being denied a permit) attempts to answer the question why the world continues to accept such repeated brutalities perpetrated by the Israelis against a million-plus locked-down, very poor Palestinians.
Halper detects a quid pro quo, a violent marriage of convenience in which "Israel offers its expertise in helping governments pursue their various wars against the people and, in return, they permit it to expand its settlements and control throughout the Palestinian territory."
Halper's latest book, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, focuses on a "global Palestine," and "how Israel exports its Occupation -- its weaponry, its models and tactics of control and its security and surveillance systems, all developed and perfected on the Palestinians -- to countries around the world engaged in asymmetrical warfare, or domestic securitization, both forms of 'war against the people.'"
He contextualizes Israel's globalization of Palestine "within the capitalist world system. Inherently unequal, exploitative, violent and increasingly unsustainable, Capitalism must pursue innumerable wars against the people if it is to enforce its global hegemony. These are precisely the types of wars -- counterinsurgency, asymmetrical warfare, counter-terrorism, urban warfare and the overall securitization of societies, including those of the Global North -- in which Israel specializes."
Halper, whose activism also includes work for over a decade as a community organizer in the working-class Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, is a coordinator of the Wars Against the People project of The People Yes! Network; he has served as the Chairman of the Israeli Committee for Ethiopian Jews; he was an active participant in the first attempt of the Free Gaza Movement to break Israel's crippling economic siege on the Gaza Strip by sailing into Gaza in 2008; he's an active member of the international support committee of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine; and he was nominated by the American Friends Service Committee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, together with the Palestinian intellectual and activist Ghassan Andoni.
Halper spoke recently with Dennis J Bernstein.
DB: Let's talk a little bit about house demolitions, before we get into this book and what you're talking about in terms of the way in which Israel perfects and then exports oppression. Talk a little bit about your work with the houses.
JH: Well, I'm an Israeli activist. I grew up in the States, actually, in Minnesota, but I've lived in Israel now for more than 40 years. I've been involved all those years with the Israeli peace movement. And for the last 20 years I've been the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, as you mentioned. We call ourselves ICAHD.
And that's a political organization that's trying to fight the Israeli occupation, and achieve a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. But [we also operate] in order to give people an idea of what occupation means, which is kind of an abstract term sometimes, and how it works, and what Israel's intentions are.
Now, as an anthropologist, I tried to read political intentions from what the powers are doing on the ground, not from what they're saying. We took the issue of house demolitions as our focal point. Israel has demolished 47,000 Palestinian homes in the occupied territories since 1967, since the occupation began. [T]hat's on the background of about 60,000 homes that were demolished in 1948, in what the Palestinians call the Nakba. Thousands and more are demolished inside Israel all the time, of Israeli citizens, all of whom are Arabs. For example, there is one Bedouin community in the Negev that's been demolished now 90 times, and rebuilt.
DB: Same community.
JH: The same community. And we've all gone out and rebuilt with them, and it's been re-demolished. Because they want to build a military settlement on top. And this is inside Israel. And a lot of these Bedouin men serve in the Israeli army. So one of the points of house demolitions is that we can't really separate the occupation from Israel itself.
We think the two-state solution is gone, it's over. And basically Israel has created already one state which is an apartheid state. I mean, there's only one government, one army, one water system, one currency between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, in the entire country. We don't even call the occupied territories, "occupied," we call them Judea and Samaria. Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, the Palestinian side has been annexed.
So there is one country today. And what the house demolition issue shows is that, yes, in fact Israel is still demolishing homes, still ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population, after 70 years. And so what we do is we ... first of all, we resist demolitions. I get in front of bulldozers, we resist. We also rebuild homes. We built 189 homes, which takes quite a bit of resources, activists coming from all over the world.
So if you think of it in political terms, 189 political acts of resistance, of Israelis and Palestinians, and Internationals together. I think that is meaningful. And then we take what we learn on the ground, our analysis is genuinely grounded, and we go abroad, like I am now here in the Bay Area, to try to work with the activists. First of all, to update them on what's happening and to give them focus.
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