A boycott by any other name ...

Last update - 07:45 13/04/2007

By James Bowen

In the late 19th century, changes in Ottoman law created a new class of large landholders, including the Sursuq family from Beirut, which acquired large tracts in northern Palestine. A similar situation had long existed in Ireland, where most land was controlled by absentee landlords, many of whom lived in Britain.

The 1880s, however, initiated dynamics that led the two lands in different directions. In 1882, the first Zionist immigrants arrived in Palestine, starting a process that subsequently led to the eviction of indigenous tenant farmers, when magnates like the Sursuqs pulled the land from under their feet, selling it to the Jewish National Fund.

In contrast, in 1880, Irish tenant farmers started a process that turned them into owner-occupiers. A former British army officer played a role in this drama, which introduced his name as a new word into many languages.

Western Ireland was again suffering near-famine conditions. The potato crop had failed for the third successive year. Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, agent for Lord Erne, the absentee landlord of an estate in County Mayo, refused the request of tenants for a rent reduction and, instead, in September 1880, obtained eviction notices against 11 of them for failure to pay their rent.

Thirty years earlier, evictions had expelled huge numbers of Irish to North America. But times were changing: A nationwide tenants' rights movement, the Land League, had recently been formed, under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, a scion of the landlord class, whose pro-tenant sympathies were inherited from his American mother, a woman whose grandfather had been one of George Washington's bodyguards. Speaking on September 19, 1880, Parnell outlined the strategy of the league:

"When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him, you must shun him in the streets of the town, you must shun him at the shop-counter, you must shun him at the fair and at the market-place and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind, as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation."

Three days later, court officials attempted to serve Boycott's eviction notices on the tenants, and the Land League policy went into effect. Within two months, Boycott's name had become a synonym for ostracism, he had left the estate, and both landlords and government had discovered the power of ordinary people. Within a year, legislation at Westminster provided government finance for tenants wishing to purchase their farms.

For too long, Israel has been taking land from which Palestinians have been evicted, and detestation is spreading around the world. In Ireland, photos of Israeli bulldozers are placed beside those of landlords' battering rams. Even a former U.S. president has recognized hafrada ("separation" in Hebrew) as apartheid. Disgust has reached such a level that even highly conservative institutions that normally try to avoid politics are driven to express concern.

One such body is Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists. Its annual general assembly on March 28 passed a resolution whose full text is: "Mindful of the August 4, 2006 call from Palestinian filmmakers, artists and cultural workers to end all cooperation with state-sponsored Israeli cultural events and institutions, Aosdana wishes to encourage Irish artists and cultural institutions to reflect deeply before engaging in any such cooperation, always bearing in mind the undeniable courage of those Israeli artists, writers and intellectuals who oppose their own government's illegal policies towards the Palestinians."

Although on the surface, this is a mild resolution, it is a boycott call in all but name. Its significance was not lost on Dr. Zion Evrony, the Israeli ambassador in Dublin. The very same day, he issued a press release that was replete with cliches that might have worked several decades ago, when Irish people were still unaware of the horrors that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians.

Possibly, the alacrity of Dr. Evrony's response was due to the fact that the strength of feeling among Irish artists had been rehearsed in the Irish press. Indeed, the proposer of the motion, playwright Margaretta D'Arcy, who is Jewish, had written in The Irish Times on February 16 that, "I was reluctant to advocate a cultural boycott of Israel until I visited the country for the first time last November ... I became convinced that a cultural boycott was necessary, if only as an act of solidarity with those in Israel who seek to remove the inequality, discrimination and segregation of their society."

Continuing, she quoted from "Land Grab," by Yehezkel Lein, published by B'Tselem - the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories: "The settlement enterprise in the occupied territories has created a system of legally sanctioned separation based on discrimination that has, perhaps, no parallel anywhere in the world since the apartheid regime in South Africa."

Ms. D'arcy finished by saying: "My uncle went to live in the Holy Land in the 1920s to help set up the utopian dream of peace, justice and equality between Jew and Arab. It was only when I arrived there that I realized how mistaken he was. He would have done better to have stayed in the East End of London to struggle for peace, justice and equality in England."

Parnell finished his call to action by saying that "there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public opinion of all right-thinking men."

They were both right.


Prof. James Bowen is the national chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Oxfam calls for end to Palestinian blockade

Ian Black, Middle East editor
Friday April 13, 2007
Guardian Unlimited


Aid to the Palestinian Authority was suspended in April 2006 after Hamas's victory. Photograph: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are suffering "devastating" humanitarian consequences as incomes plummet, debts mount and essential services face meltdown, Oxfam says in a report that calls for an immediate end to the international financial blockade of the Hamas-led government.

With poverty up by 30% in 2006 and previously unknown levels of factional violence on the streets, the Palestinian territories - occupied by Israel in the 1967 war - risk becoming "a failed state" if the punitive measures are not lifted, the charity warns.

Palestinians were already struggling to make ends meet when key donors, including the US, the EU and Canada, suspended direct aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in April 2006. The move came in response to the victory of the Islamist movement Hamas in parliamentary elections. Israel halted the transfers of tax and customs revenue it owed to the PA shortly afterwards.

Hamas refuses to recognise Israel, to renounce violence or to accept existing peace agreements, but it has hinted recently at a more pragmatic approach and largely observed a ceasefire. Last month, in a deal brokered by Saudi Arabia, it agreed to form a national unity government under President Mahmoud Abbas, triggering new moves to ease the boycott.

The PA is now operating on a quarter of the $160m (£81m) a month it needs to finance its activities. The impact has been so severe because an estimated one million people depend on incomes paid to 160,000 government employees. Oxfam reports that 46% of Palestinians now do not have enough food to meet their needs; that the number of people in deep poverty (defined as those living on less than 50 cents a day) nearly doubled in 2006 to over one million; and that incomes of PA workers had fallen to 40% of their normal levels. A November 2006 poll of government workers showed an increase in poverty from 35% to 71%.

Salam Fayyad, the highly regarded Palestinian finance minister, said in Brussels on Wednesday that the boycott had "devastated" the Palestinian economy.

Norway has agreed to resume financial assistance to the PA , while Russia, France, and other EU governments are considering renewing transfers in order to improve the lives of Palestinians, beyond a "temporary international mechanism" designed to provide direct support to Palestinians without going through the PA.

The US and Israel have showed no sign of changing their positions despite repeated calls to accept that the blockade has proved counter-productive.

Oxfam argues that it is legitimate for donors to attach conditions to how their money is spent, but not to advance a political agenda. Aid could be suspended if money was used corruptly or to fund terrorism. "International aid should be provided impartially on the basis of need, not as a political tool to change the policies of a government," said Oxfam's international executive director, Jeremy Hobbs.

"Oxfam opposes violence against civilians and supports Israel's right to exist alongside a viable and independent Palestinian state. But suspending aid - and withholding tax revenue in violation of international agreements - is not an ethical or effective way to achieve these outcomes. And in this case, it hasn't worked. Instead, parents have been driven into debt, children taken out of classrooms and whole families deprived of access to medicine and healthcare."

Israeli embargo impoverishes Palestinians

Web posted at: 3/24/2007 3:6:29
REUTERS

jerusalem • Conditions for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip would worsen further unless Israel lifts an economic embargo and lets people and goods move more freely, a senior UN official said yesterday.

Karen Koning AbuZayd, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said donors had poured in more money last year than ever before “but that’s because we’ve made everybody aid-dependant”.

“Everybody is just in bad shape now with the whole economy going down so badly. They just don’t have any opportunities,” she said at her office in Jerusalem, citing high unemployment and shortfalls in wage payments over the past year.

“We’re handing out food to most of the refugees in Gaza and a good proportion of those in the West Bank, and the (UN) World Food Programme is feeding the non-refugees.”

Israel says its curbs, which include withholding most Palestinian tax revenue since Hamas Islamists came to power after 2006 elections, are a response to attacks on Israelis.

Some foreign donors who halted direct aid to the Hamas-led government over its refusal to recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept existing agreements have eased a diplomatic boycott since Hamas formed a unity cabinet with President Mahmoud Abbas’s more moderate Fatah faction on March 17.

“Israel is still saying no to paying the tax bill and giving the Palestinians the money that’s theirs,” AbuZayd said.

She noted some recent improvement in allowing businessmen in and out of the Gaza Strip but said “things really won’t work” unless Israel relaxed restrictions on the Karni and Erez crossings into Gaza and on the Rafah border terminal with Egypt.

Despite the direct aid embargo, the United Nations says about $1.2 billion in foreign aid reached the Palestinians last year, up from $1 billion in 2005. Nonetheless, the Palestinian economy contracted nearly 10 percent and poverty rates rose.

AbuZayd said she hoped next week’s Arab summit would produce an agreed peace proposal which the international community could use to encourage renewed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

“One of our messages .. is to encourage people from each side to see the other as a partner and to get active at the negotiating table,” she said. “We say that from a humanitarian point of view because we just see things getting worse.”

UNRWA’s 27,000 staff provide education, health care, social services and emergency aid to over 4.3 million refugees in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

AbuZayd, a US national, said discussions were under way on the sensitive matter of how UNRWA could sustain the expanding refugee population with no political solution in sight.

“It’s an issue and it’s something we are now having to talk seriously about with our donors, because it is 58 years and every year there are more refugees, which means we need more money, more schools, more teachers and so on,” she said.

Like refugees elsewhere in the world, Palestinian refugees and their descendants retain their status “until they can go home, go somewhere else or settle where they are”, she said.