The Origins of the Ebola Crisis

from Counterpunch.org
WEEKEND EDITION OCTOBER 10-12, 2014

Is Microsoft Medicine the Solution for Ebola?

by TARIQ ALI and ALLYSON POLLOCK

Tariq Ali: Today we are going to discuss medicine and what is going on in Africa but not just there, in other parts of the world too, and how privatised medicine is now dominating the field except in a few oasis there are still left Cuba, Venezuela, etc. With me is Professor Allyson Pollock, one of the best known public health scientists and experts in her field anywhere. Ebola. What are its origins and how did it spread so quickly in these three African countries and is now causing panic elsewhere?

Allyson Pollock: Well Ebola is a virus, nobody quite knows what the origins are, some think it might be from the bat, and it is spread through bodily fluids, so that is an important mechanism. In most normal situations it should be very easily contained by quarantine and by isolation but the big problem in the countries where it is most prevalent, which is Sierra, Liberia and Guinea, is that these are very, very poor countries, where the infrastructure has increasingly been ripped out, especially in terms of health systems and the, um, virus is now in urban areas where there is close human contact, so it makes it very difficult to control and contain especially when it is happening in areas where there is a lot of overcrowding and poverty and poor sanitation.

Tariq Ali: And the Western health community, so to speak, the World Health Organisation, was slow to react, I felt, in terms of what could have been done at an early stage of this disease.

Allyson Pollock: Well I suppose the WHO was hoping, as in the previous outbreak - large outbreak in the 1970s, that it would be fairly easily contained. Perhaps what happened that they hadn’t reckoned with the fact that these countries where it is emerging are actually among the very poorest countries? Liberia and Sierra Leon have been through their own long periods of civil war, conflict with displaced refugees where the gross domestic product and the economy has very badly suffered and what we have seen in all these countries is a real hollowing out of all sorts of public services but especially health systems. So it is very, very difficult to contain it and we have got real issues of poverty. So, I suppose the first hope was that these would be fairly, err, the disease would be fairly easily contained but actually of course it is a virus that has a very high case fatality rate, they say about 55% chance of dying if you contract the virus. So this is very serious but one of the big problems is that the Western world, especially the US government is coming back with solutions of guns and magic bullets so we’ve been here before; the announcement by Obama that he is going to send in 3,000 troops and the parallel announcement that they are going to focus on rapid vaccine production. And this is a complete removal from the social and structural determinance of public health because the origins of all public health are in very simple and basic solutions. It’s about clean water, sanitation, good nutrition – so the evils of poverty. And, on top of that you need very good health systems with proper doctors and nurses and facilities that you can isolate people and you can also do what’s called ‘contact tracing’ so you need to go back into the community to find out who the affected individuals have been in contact with so that you can then quarantine and isolate those individuals to make sure that they actually then don’t get the disease and then pass it on during the incubation period. And all of that has been stripped out.

This is what these countries are looking at, they’ve had a total erosion and collapse of their public health care systems and this is the tragedy. So the population has very, very few doctors and nurses. They simply cannot cope and of course the public facilities that are there are overcrowded, they are in terrible conditions and they are completely and utterly understaffed. So this problem of an epidemic was going to hit them, it could have been Ebola, it could be something else – it could be cholera or whatever. This was actually going to come home to hit these countries very hard indeed. This was entirely predictable and it’s been predictable for more than 20 years and it is what the public health lobby and the public advocates have been talking about. The solution to these epidemics is not the magic bullets of vaccines and it is not sending in the troops. It’s structural, it’s social, it’s economic, it’s environmental and it is putting in all the public health measures.

Tariq Ali: But the entire world capitalist system as it functions is basically not in favour of public health services, they are in favour of privatised solutions, privatised facilities which means that in most countries increasingly you have a two or three tier system; you have very good quality hostpitals for the rich and people who can afford them, you have a second tier for more middle class people who also have to pay but not so much and their facilities aren’t so good and then you have public hospitals, not just in Africa but in countries like India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which are a total complete disgrace and nothing is done about it on a global level at all because this is not a priority. I mean it is just outrageous. Do you think, I mean, given that this is how the health system functions from what you said, the obvious solution, medium-term and long-term, is to create a strong social infrastructure in these countries but that is what the International Monetary Fund asked them not to spend money on, the last four decades so what do you think they can do?

Allyson Pollock: Well I think you are raising important issues; what is the role of the IMF, the World Bank, the African Development Bank because again if we look at Liberia and Sierra Leone and Guinea, which actually have a lot of natural resources, what is happening to these countries, in terms of their economics is that increasingly the lands are being privatised and being occupied by foreign investors who are coming in and they are simply stripping out the resource and the assets. Liberia has a GDP, gross domestic product, of a couple of billion dollars, and a population of five or six million, so how are they meant to rebuild when actually you’ve got foreign directors coming in and public private partnerships and great flows of money going out and you don’t have any mechanism for redistribution because redistribution means you are trying to build a fairer society and you are trying to put the resources back in.

So it starts with the economy, it starts with what’s happening to the land, it starts with the fact that palm oil and cocoa and rubber are important cash crops and there’s land, and these ownership, has been transferred and I mean this is very well documented by important organisations like Global Witness but also the Oakland Foundation in the US, who have actually chartered what is happening to the land and remember, many of the farmers, for instance in Liberia, 70% of the population, live in rural areas. They will be subsistence farmers so this is an issue and when you have the population spending 80% of the money on food and then you have all these cordons around them, then of course you have got a real problem because the poverty is actually going to be accelerated in these countries because of the Ebola virus, because the borders are closing and because you don’t even have economic flow any more. So I think we need to start with the economics because that is the cause of the structural problems and then we’ve got the World Health Organisation, which is the international global authority on health. It has the law making powers but systematically over 20 years it has been completely starved of funds and such funding as it gets are tied to all sorts of conditions and those conditions are being set by large, global NGOs such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which have no democratic base, no accountability and which in turn are doing untold harm through their vertical disease programmes because they are not rooted in public health and the public health systems. And a good example of a vertical disease programme is when you take Ebola and then you bring in your operation to tackle Ebola and you ignore all the other causes of disease, such as TB or malaria, or poverty, malnutrition and at the same time when you focus all the efforts of the industry on vaccine development.

But actually vaccines are not what these countries need. It’s proper redistribution and public health measures and we learn nothing from history; that is what is shocking. All the great reforms, all the great collapse of infectious disease epidemics was actually not down to drugs and vaccines, it was to redistributive measures, which included sanitation, nutrition, good housing and actually above all a real democratisation. And with it came education and all the other measures that we need. Now I’m not saying we don’t need vaccines, but one of the big problems is that that vaccine developments itself is now in the hands of these large very powerful foundations like NGOs, like GAVI – the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative, who in conjunction with big companies like GSK and Merck, are out to seek patents and the reason why they like vaccines is it gives… because vaccines mean mass immunisation, it means numbers and numbers mean money. And of course is being paid for by the West and Western governments when this money could much more easily flow into the governments themselves to re-build their health systems because we are talking about re-building public health infrastructure and that includes putting in community primary health care, community health systems, infection control units at community level, putting in hospitals and training nurses and doctors. And the big, other big problem in all of these countries is not just a brain-drain, because a few doctors and nurses are there, they want to leave and that is happening also in Nigeria, or they want to work in the private sector or they want to work for these NGOs because the money is much better and so the whole public health system is completely hollowed out. And this is a real problem because the Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates, do not believe in the public sector, they do not believe in a democratic, publically owned, publically accountable.

Tariq Ali: So in fact the WHO, because of governmental policies, and the priorities of the Washington consensus, i.e.. neoliberalism, privatisation of medicine, inability to control Big Phgarma, has effectively ditched what it used to do? In the sense that it can’t do what needs to be done, shore up, strengthen, build if necessary in some of these countries public health systems.

Allyson Pollock: Well, there is a very important paper recently in the British Medical Journal, I think by David Legg, which actually sets out what has been happening to the WHO over two decades where the US refuse to give the funding that it should have done and then what you have is when Western governments and the US come in, they tie it to conditionalities, which is usually around the Bill & Melinda Gates priorities and not around the essential public health priories and the WHO has its hands tied. And actually it is the world health organisation, it has got the law making powers and yet it has never exercised these functions we are talking about democratic deficits that are happening when large global funds like the Gates Fund or the Buffett Fund can actually determine what the world priorities are and so distort what the priorities should be for public health because it is tied to the economics, they need to industrialise, they need to medicalise and they need to pharmaceuticalise. But there is a big backlash coming, a big backlash in the Western world, much more critical thought about the ethicacy and the safety and the appropriateness of the drugs and vaccines and medications and this group is beginning to be more and more articulate and more and more and more concerned. But one of the big problems is that because of this huge amount of money that the Bill & Melinda Gates Fund have, is that the technicians, like myself, the public health tribes, have been captured because of their success in predicated upon getting jobs, or research, tied to the interests of the Global Fund. So the critical thought is being hollowed out and so at the same time are the essential public health functions because public health is there as Ibsen would say, to be the enemy of the people, but actually it is there to be critical, to appraise and to think rationally and to remind everybody about what the social determinance of health are, and it is not rocket science. It doesn’t need magic potions or millions of dollars spent on genetics and the laboratories, it needs very, very basic things, but they are essential because they are what the public health infrastructures are built on.

Tariq Ali: Contrast this, what’s going on in the bulk of the world with a tiny country like Cuba, which has managed to construct a public health system, which is precisely many things that you are arguing for. It is very oriented to preventive medicines which stop a disease from spreading, and has now amongst the best record of both public health services and its affects in terms of what Cuban’s citizens and increasingly because the help they have given Venezuela, Venezuelan citizens and other South American citizens who never used to have health are now in much better shape than many people, for instance, in Eastern Europe which went in for big privatisation; leave alone Africa and large parts of Asia. You’ve studied the system I think?

Allyson Pollock: Well yes I think the Cuba’s system is very inspiriting and anybody who has been to Cuba can’t but feel the public health benefits of it. I mean they are a country that really know the meaning of austerity and yet their GDP, which is the equivalent of many of these poor countries, but they don’t have this extraordinary inequalities because their vision and campaign has been around public health and health for all. So they have done extraordinarily well and quite remarkably well. I mean the real problem comes as what’s happening now and will they get side-tracked by neoliberal policies and the need to get drugs to market, and the need to sell drugs; it is a very important time for Cuba to think about it. But actually they need to all the time be remembering what their GDP is and what they’ve achieved with their GP compared with some of these poorer countries in the world like Sierra Leone and Liberia – Liberia especially.

Tariq Ali: The other thing of course is that the Cubans have sent out a lot of their doctors to parts of Africa, South America, to whenever there is a disaster . I remember during bad floods in Pakistan, really bad, a whole team of Cuban doctors arrived and were taken to the remotest parts of the country where women were not allowed by their menfolk to see doctors because most doctors were male. And when they saw the Cuban team, which was 60% women, 40% male doctors, the men in these communities said ‘ah you have women doctors; you are doctors, and they said, ‘yes, yes’, they say, ‘okay you can see the women whenever you want’. So amazing rapport developed between them and the women were very pleased and so were their kids and a Cuban doctor told me that they said to us, ‘where do you come from you people?’ and she said, ‘we come from Cuba’. ‘Where is that?’, and she said, ‘it’s a tiny island in the Caribbean’ and they said, ‘who is your leader? I mean who/what is the government’. So they were careful because they were on a medical mission but they said, ‘do you want to see a picture of Fidel Castro who is our leader’ and said ‘yes’. So they showed a picture of Castro and the women said, ‘my god, he’s got a beard like they have in that village 20 miles from here, do you want to go and see those beards’. [laughs]. But they were incredibly impressed and the entire media in Pakistan was talking about what they’d done, they said we don’t want any help from the government, we arrive with our tents, our equipment, all we want is receptacles in which we can heat clean water and the rest we will do; we will bring our medicines with us. And the thing is this is the other point which rises that unlike the health services constructed in Western Europe after the 2nd World War including the National Health Service, the governments in these countries never actually set up pharmaceutical industries to compliment those health services. Nor did they even seriously consider nationalising them, because that would have brought the prices of medicine right down and they need never have charged prescriptions. So let’s come for a minute to a subject you know very well – the health service in Britain and in the European Union countries, I mean what is happening to that Allyson? It is one thing to talk about Africa but what is happening to the health services in Europe.

Allyson Pollock: What is happening now in Europe as many people are aware is that, we have got neoliberal policies coming from the US both the health care industry in the US, which have exhausted the funds of America because health care is running it about 18, 18% of GDP, compared with 9 or 10% average in Europe, so the European health care investors need to find new markets and they are busy attempting to penetrate and open up the health care systems of Europe. And of course the biggest trophy for them is the United Kingdom NHS because it was for a long time the most socialised of all the health care systems. So we’ve had devolution; so Scotland, Wales and England all have their own health care services and Scotland and Wales which are very tiny, they don’t cover more than 8 or 9 million people, they have retained a national health service but England, which many people don’t realise this, England abolished its national health service in 2012 with the Health and Social Care Act. What remains of the NHS is a funding stream, or a government pair, and the NHS has now been reduced to a logo and what the government is now doing is accelerating a break up of what remains of the national health service under public ownerships, so closing hospitals, closing services and privatising or contracting out. So just as we heard in Liberia and Guinea about how the public lands are being transferred like the enclosures to private owners from abroad, the same thing is happening with our pubic services, our public hospitals, our public facilities are also being enclosed in a way and given over to private-for-profit investors and this is happening in extraordinary speed in England. Faster than anywhere in Europe. And this is a major global neoliberal project, if you like.

Tariq Ali: To privatise health.

Allyson Pollock: Well to privatise not just the healthcare system but also ultimately the funding. Now in the US, just under half of that 18% GDP is actually paid for by the government but the government is in effect a tax payer and then channels the money into private-for-profit corporations. The government in England abolished the health and social care act because it wanted to open up new funding streams. So it wants to reduce the level of services that are available publically, create a climate of discontent with the NHS, forcing people who are in the middle classes, that’s like you and me Ali, to go and privately and pay either out of pocket or with our healthcare insurance, so that we desert, we exit what is left but at the same time the government is reducing all our entitlements because there is no longer a duty to provide universal healthcare. That duty that has been in place since 1948 was abolished in 2012. So that duty has now gone and so now the government can reduce all the entitlements, reduce everything that is available and increasingly we are going to have to pay out of pocket or though private health insurance. And the private health insurance industry are here, they are here form the US and they are absolutely gearing up with the new structures the government has put into place to move into private-for-profit health insurance; that is what we are going to be seeing. And actually the new system the government is putting in place is modelled on the US and yet that will come at huge loss and it will also be a public health catastrophe because it will mean that many, many millions will increasingly go without care and of course markets render people invisible, they are not seen. Nobody knows. The doctor in front of you only sees the patient that come to them; it doesn’t see the many tens of thousands who are being denied access to healthcare, which is why in the US the doctors are not out on the street campaigning. But in the UK the doctors are out on the street campaigning, they are putting in, they are standing now for the National Health Alliance Party, they are now putting in candidates to stand against the conventional parties. And so you see that the doctors are still prepared to fight for universal health care but once our NHS has gone completely, it’s been abolished, but once all the remnants have gone, you have to use the parallel of the oak tree, it seems to be blooming and flourishing but the roots have been severed and that can take many months or years for that to completely decay. But once it has gone the doctors will no longer be there. They’ll be like the doctors in the US interested in themselves, interested in their own pockets and not interested in universal access to healthcare. And this is the crime of the century, if you like, the way in which the English coalition, both Conservative and Liberal Democrat, have actually abolished our NHS but they have had a lot of help along the way from the Labour government before them.

Tariq Ali: Labour more or less set the basis for it when they were in power.

Allyson Pollock: Absolutely. Alan Milburn the Health Secretary did this in in 2000. In 1997 the Labour government had its, had its chance to reverse the privatisation and marketization policies, to get rid of the private finance initiative and they had a very good Secretary of State who was quite determined to some of that….

Tariq Ali: Frank Dobson?

Allyson Pollock: Frank Dobson. But they got rid of him extra quick and instead of which we got Alan Milburn and his ten-year plan and now he has gone off to join the very healthcare companies that he helped to build up. And I mean I think that is the tragedy as when that bill was going through parliament to abolish the NHS, many of the peers, and many of the MPs had conflicts of interests because they had actually interest in the healthcare companies that they were establishing.

Tariq Ali: It is outrageous really. And Milburn himself is one of them.

Allyson Pollock: Well, it is a travesty for democracy, it really is and as a public health doctor it is an absolute catastrophe because at the moment we know, people of all ages, with serious mental illnesses who cannot get access to health care, people with stroke, people with chronic illnesses, chronic diseases who are increasingly being denied access to healthcare and they are voices in the wilderness, they are not being heard because there is no collective mechanism for them to be heard any more. And the doctors and nurses are absolutely in despair. Now we do have solution; my colleagues we’ve written an NHS reinstatement bill which we hope that whichever party comes to power, they will actually run with to reinstate the NHS, so there is a solution out there, which is drafted and written and ready, that would restore and reinstate the NHS.

Tariq Ali: It is perfectly legitimate to make huge profits from the basic needs of ordinary people?

Allyson Pollock: Yes from people’s diseases and people’s illnesses. Well it began with a pharmaceutical industry and the vaccine production, it is perfectly acceptable to make profits from them, so why shouldn’t we now go and make profits from illness and care. But of course the NHS in England was set up, to be redistributive. It’s funded through taxation, which is meant to be progressive and the money is meant to flow according to need. But what we are now beginning to see is that money will flow according to the needs of shareholders and not patients, and that is a very real concern. Of course. It is all down to political will. Everything can be reversed but it comes down to politics, to democracy and people making their voices heard.

Tariq Ali: Agreed.

Allyson Pollock is professor of public health research and policy at Queen Mary University of London.

Tariq Ali is the author of The Obama Syndrome (Verso).

Shlomo Sand: ‘I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew’

His past was Jewish, but today he sees Israel as one of the most racist societies in the western world. Historian Shlomo Sand explains why he doesn’t want to be Jewish anymore


Shlomo Sand
The Guardian, Friday 10 October 2014 09.42 EDT
Shlomo Sands
‘When I am far from Israel, I see my street corner in Tel Aviv and look forward to the moment I can return to it’ … Shlomo Sand. Photograph: Gali Tibbon/Graphic
During the first half of the 20th century, my father abandoned Talmudic school, permanently stopped going to synagogue, and regularly expressed his aversion to rabbis. At this point in my own life, in the early 21st century, I feel in turn a moral obligation to break definitively with tribal Judeocentrism. I am today fully conscious of having never been a genuinely secular Jew, understanding that such an imaginary characteristic lacks any specific basis or cultural perspective, and that its existence is based on a hollow and ethnocentric view of the world. Earlier I mistakenly believed that the Yiddish culture of the family I grew up in was the embodiment of Jewish culture. A little later, inspired by Bernard Lazare, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marcel Rayman and Marek Edelman – who all fought antisemitism, nazism and Stalinism without adopting an ethnocentric view – I identified as part of an oppressed and rejected minority. In the company, so to speak, of the socialist leader Léon Blum, the poet Julian Tuwim and many others, I stubbornly remained a Jew who had accepted this identity on account of persecutions and murderers, crimes and their victims.

Now, having painfully become aware that I have undergone an adherence to Israel, been assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos of persecutors and their supporters, and have appeared in the world as one of the exclusive club of the elect and their acolytes, I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew.

Although the state of Israel is not disposed to transform my official nationality from “Jew” to “Israeli”, I dare to hope that kindly philosemites, committed Zionists and exalted anti-Zionists, all of them so often nourished on essentialist conceptions, will respect my desire and cease to catalogue me as a Jew. As a matter of fact, what they think matters little to me, and still less what the remaining antisemitic idiots think. In the light of the historic tragedies of the 20th century, I am determined no longer to be a small minority in an exclusive club that others have neither the possibility nor the qualifications to join.

By my refusal to be a Jew, I represent a species in the course of disappearing. I know that by insisting that only my historical past was Jewish, while my everyday present (for better or worse) is Israeli, and finally that my future and that of my children (at least the future I wish for) must be guided by universal, open and generous principles, I run counter to the dominant fashion, which is oriented towards ethnocentrism.

As a historian of the modern age, I put forward the hypothesis that the cultural distance between my great-grandson and me will be as great or greater than that separating me from my own great-grandfather. All the better! I have the misfortune of living now among too many people who believe their descendants will resemble them in all respects, because for them peoples are eternal – a fortiori a race-people such as the Jews.

I am aware of living in one of the most racist societies in the western world. Racism is present to some degree everywhere, but in Israel it exists deep within the spirit of the laws. It is taught in schools and colleges, spread in the media, and above all and most dreadful, in Israel the racists do not know what they are doing and, because of this, feel in no way obliged to apologise. This absence of a need for self-justification has made Israel a particularly prized reference point for many movements of the far right throughout the world, movements whose past history of antisemitism is only too well known.

To live in such a society has become increasingly intolerable to me, but I must also admit that it is no less difficult to make my home elsewhere. I am myself a part of the cultural, linguistic and even conceptual production of the Zionist enterprise, and I cannot undo this. By my everyday life and my basic culture I am an Israeli. I am not especially proud of this, just as I have no reason to take pride in being a man with brown eyes and of average height. I am often even ashamed of Israel, particularly when I witness evidence of its cruel military colonisation, with its weak and defenceless victims who are not part of the “chosen people”.

Earlier in my life I had a fleeting utopian dream that a Palestinian Israeli should feel as much at home in Tel Aviv as a Jewish American does in New York. I struggled and sought for the civil life of a Muslim Israeli in Jerusalem to be similar to that of the Jewish French person whose home is in Paris. I wanted Israeli children of Christian African immigrants to be treated as the British children of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent are in London. I hoped with all my heart that all Israeli children would be educated together in the same schools. Today I know that my dream is outrageously demanding, that my demands are exaggerated and impertinent, that the very fact of formulating them is viewed by Zionists and their supporters as an attack on the Jewish character of the state of Israel, and thus as antisemitism.

Palestinians crossing the border into Egypt
‘I am often ashamed of Israel, particularly when I witness evidence of its cruel military colonisation, with its weak and defenceless victims who are not part of the “chosen people”,’ writes Shlomo Sand. Photograph: Hatem Moussa/AP
However, strange as it may seem, and in contrast to the locked-in character of secular Jewish identity, treating Israeli identity as politico-cultural rather than “ethnic” does appear to offer the potential for achieving an open and inclusive identity. According to the law, in fact, it is possible to be an Israeli citizen without being a secular “ethnic” Jew, to participate in its “supra-culture” while preserving one’s “infra-culture”, to speak the hegemonic language and cultivate in parallel another language, to maintain varied ways of life and fuse different ones together. To consolidate this republican political potential, it would be necessary, of course, to have long abandoned tribal hermeticism, to learn to respect the Other and welcome him or her as an equal, and to change the constitutional laws of Israel to make them compatible with democratic principles.

Most important, if it has been momentarily forgotten: before we put forward ideas on changing Israel’s identity policy, we must first free ourselves from the accursed and interminable occupation that is leading us on the road to hell. In fact, our relation to those who are second-class citizens of Israel is inextricably bound up with our relation to those who live in immense distress at the bottom of the chain of the Zionist rescue operation. That oppressed population, which has lived under the occupation for close to 50 years, deprived of political and civil rights, on land that the “state of the Jews” considers its own, remains abandoned and ignored by international politics. I recognise today that my dream of an end to the occupation and the creation of a confederation between two republics, Israeli and Palestinian, was a chimera that underestimated the balance of forces between the two parties.

Increasingly it appears to be already too late; all seems already lost, and any serious approach to a political solution is deadlocked. Israel has grown used to this, and is unable to rid itself of its colonial domination over another people. The world outside, unfortunately, does not do what is needed either. Its remorse and bad conscience prevent it from convincing Israel to withdraw to the 1948 frontiers. Nor is Israel ready to annex the occupied territories officially, as it would then have to grant equal citizenship to the occupied population and, by that fact alone, transform itself into a binational state. It’s rather like the mythological serpent that swallowed too big a victim, but prefers to choke rather than to abandon it.

Does this mean I, too, must abandon hope? I inhabit a deep contradiction. I feel like an exile in the face of the growing Jewish ethnicisation that surrounds me, while at the same time the language in which I speak, write and dream is overwhelmingly Hebrew. When I find myself abroad, I feel nostalgia for this language, the vehicle of my emotions and thoughts. When I am far from Israel, I see my street corner in Tel Aviv and look forward to the moment I can return to it. I do not go to synagogues to dissipate this nostalgia, because they pray there in a language that is not mine, and the people I meet there have absolutely no interest in understanding what being Israeli means for me.

In London it is the universities and their students of both sexes, not the Talmudic schools (where there are no female students), that remind me of the campus where I work. In New York it is the Manhattan cafes, not the Brooklyn enclaves, that invite and attract me, like those of Tel Aviv. And when I visit the teeming Paris bookstores, what comes to my mind is the Hebrew book week organised each year in Israel, not the sacred literature of my ancestors.

My deep attachment to the place serves only to fuel the pessimism I feel towards it. And so I often plunge into despondency about the present and fear for the future. I am tired, and feel that the last leaves of reason are falling from our tree of political action, leaving us barren in the face of the caprices of the sleepwalking sorcerers of the tribe. But I cannot allow myself to be completely fatalistic. I dare to believe that if humanity succeeded in emerging from the 20th century without a nuclear war, everything is possible, even in the Middle East. We should remember the words of Theodor Herzl, the dreamer responsible for the fact that I am an Israeli: “If you will it, it is no legend.”

As a scion of the persecuted who emerged from the European hell of the 1940s without having abandoned the hope of a better life, I did not receive permission from the frightened archangel of history to abdicate and despair. Which is why, in order to hasten a different tomorrow, and whatever my detractors say, I shall continue to write.

• This is an edited extract from How I Stopped Being a Jew by Shlomo Sand, published by Verso at £9.99. Buy it for £7.49 at bookshop.theguardian.com. Sand will discuss the book at SOAS, University of London on 14 October, versobooks.com/events

Academic civility and its discontents

Joseph Massad The Electronic Intifada 9 October 2014

Young people carry signs in support of free speech, academic freedom and reinstatement of Steven Salaita
The outcome of the ongoing battle at Illinois will set a precedent for university communities across the country. (Jeffrey Putney/Flickr)

The charge of incivility has invariably functioned since the nineteenth century and through the present as a form of racial and class denouncement, both in Western Europe and the United States. Indeed, it has been a white European and Euro-American, mostly Protestant, accusation leveled at East European Jews, the Ostjuden, for what anti-Semitic epistemology has always regarded as their “vulgarity.” Even assimilated German Jews, and their American descendants, would be held in its grips, telling jokes about the failure of Jewish assimilation in Western Europe and in the US, when at certain moments of distress the Jewish performance of civility fails and reverts to an un-Protestant Jewish “vulgarity” that anti-Semites love to denounce and ridicule.

In his important 1974 book The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, John Cuddihy historicizes the coming to being of this anti-Semitic value and trait. Cuddihy demonstrates how assimilating the Ostjuden has often centered on their acquisition of European and Euro-American Protestant civility as a trait that would be key to their entry into modern civilized European society. Surrendering their vulgarity, the Ostjuden were told, would be the price they have to pay to become part of European and Euro-American Christian civility. This would become a charge that Jewish converts to Protestantism and assimilated German Jews would continuously level at their unassimilated co-religionists, including in New York, where German-American Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century invented the epithet “kyke” to describe East European Jews.

The charge of incivility was not effective only because assimilated German Jews and converts insisted on imposing it on East European Jews but primarily because European Protestant anti-Semites had imposed it on both groups as a modern value without which, they were told, all Jews would remain relics of the past.

A similar situation exists today with some of the assimilated Arab- and Muslim- Americans, including those who are half-white and carry Arabic or Muslim patronyms, who often charge unassimilated Arab- and Muslim-Americans, especially those who come from the Arab and Muslim worlds and were not born in the United States, with incivility, indeed with an ignorance, or worse, a refusal to learn the civil and hence civilized language of Euro-Americans, which some of the assimilated American Muslims and Arabs have learned very well.

The charge of incivility against Steven Salaita was recently responded to in this precise vein. Palestinian-American professor Beshara Doumani, while expressing concern about the violation of Salaita’s academic freedom, felt it necessary to declare at a public forum he organized at Brown University last month that Salaita’s tweets are “of the kind that I personally would never tweet.”

Indeed, ever since the campaign that sought to deny me academic freedom at Columbia University started with the official acquiescence of the university administration in October 2004, some of my own Arab-American colleagues at Columbia showed and continue to show similar concerns about my vulgar Arab “incivility” and “immoderation” (which is how they describe my extramural defense of the colonized Palestinians and my attacks on anti-Palestinian colonial racism in my journalistic articles and public lectures) compared to my Arab-American colleagues’ own mastery of these key white Protestant traits.

It is these traits, which enabled the Columbia University administration to parade some of my Arab-American colleagues as “good Palestinians” as opposed to the “bad Palestinian” that I seem to constitute. In contrast, it was some of my liberal Jewish colleagues who gave me their unequivocal support and showed no discernible concern about the question of “civility.”

The non-official campaign against me had in fact started in June 2002, three months before the establishment of Campus Watch, when Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer began to publish articles targeting me and calling for my dismissal from Columbia and escalated to include then Congressional Representative Anthony Weiner’s public call in October 2004 on Columbia to fire me.

Civility and policing

The charge of incivility in an academic setting is hardly new and goes back at least to the 1960s student movement. Since the late 1970s, and during the 1980s, Edward Said was subjected to it and to related charges — rage, anger, immoderation, extremism; indeed one attacker dubbed him “Professor of terror.” Dangerous as these charges were, they were made before the neoliberal order had been fully established, before the 11 September 2001 attacks, before the many “Gulf wars,” before Islam and Arabs were declared as the primary, if not the only real, enemy to the American way of life, including its increasingly much touted value of white Protestant “civility.” This is why Columbia University defended Said then against these and later charges.

But times have changed. In today’s neoliberal climate where US President Barack Obama is putting the final touches on the dismantlement of the welfare state, and continuing the country’s war against various Muslim enemies, increased repression inside the United States has become a necessity. This has not only been carried out through legislations like the Patriot Act and legal and illegal police surveillance, but also through the much more thorough militarization of police forces across the country. As peaceful demonstrators against economic ills and poverty have been deemed “not non-violent” demonstrators, this has required a whole new mindset of how to crack down on them.

But as the militarized police has been deployed to take care of these “not non-violent” dissidents, it cannot do so as easily with dissidents inside the walls of the academy. This is where “incivility” comes in as a primary policing mechanism of dissident academics. Achieving this, however, would not be easy in a university culture that values academic freedom and freedom of opinion. A weak link in the chain of academic freedom had to be found, one around which people could more easily mobilize — one that could set a precedent. Enter the Question of the Palestinians and Israel.

The Question of Palestine and suppressing dissent

Since 1948, there has been a solid consensus across the different branches of American elite opinion in the US on Israel, accompanied by broad public support. Whereas dissent from this consensus always existed, it was confined to marginalized political groupings and individuals — and in the case of the latter if the individual was not already marginalized, her or his marginalization would ensue immediately.

In the last ten years, however, dissent on the Question of the Palestinians and Israel has traveled from the margins to mainstream America — to artists, scientists, journalists, academics and students, including prominent Jewish academics and scores of Jewish students. Whereas once Noam Chomsky was the only prominent Jewish academic who dissented on Israel and who was marginalized from mainstream public opinion as punishment for his dissent, today a whole slew of prominent Jewish academics are dissenters, including Ella Shohat, Richard Falk, Joan Scott, Judith Butler, Ann Stoler and many more.

However, the persistent mainstream consensus on Israel is what makes the powers that be convinced that the success of their campaign to suppress dissent in the universities will be more likely if its entry point was the Question of the Palestinians and Israel, whereby they could highlight related questions around which there is consensus, namely the question of anti-Semitism, the history of the Jewish holocaust, and how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

Using the Question of the Palestinians and Israel as the entry point to suppress dissent inside the walls of the academy is both tactical and strategic:

It is tactical because once successful, it would take away key aspects of faculty governance and transfer them to neoliberal university administrations, and would set a precedent and an ensuing chilling effect on other, perhaps even more dangerous, kinds of dissent that command larger public support than do the Palestinians. Let us recall here that the Ford Foundation used the Question of the Palestinians and Israel in 2003 to impose a limitation on its funding until potential grantees signed a statement pledging to oppose “violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state,” a move that, at the time, elicited condemnation from some university provosts including Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Yale and Cornell.

The provosts wrote Ford a letter in April 2004 (six months before the official witch hunt targeting me at Columbia had started) expressing “serious concerns” about the new language, on the grounds that it attempted to “regulate universities’ behavior and speech beyond the scope of the grant.” “It is difficult to see,” they wrote, “how this clause would not run up against the basic principle of protected speech on our campuses.”

Using the Question of the Palestinians and Israel in this manner is also strategic in order to stop the growing tide of academic dissent on Israel, specifically with the question of boycott and divestment affecting neoliberal forms of investment and overall US policy in the Middle East.

The success rate of this plan has been mixed. It was finally partially defeated at Columbia University in 2009 — when I was granted tenure — despite its initial total success, aided as it was by the ideological collusion of the university top brass in this repressive campaign for reasons that were not confined to ideology but were also concerned with the neoliberal corporate expansion of the university. The university was throughout this period campaigning for the necessary political support to annex a large section of upper Manhattan, which it secured before granting me tenure.

It was more successful at DePaul University and more recently at the University of Illinois, both of which deployed the anti-Semitic and racist charge of incivility against an American Jewish professor, Norman Finkelstein, and an Arab-American professor, Salaita, respectively.

The war to control the university rages on; but the forces of repression, which hide behind white Protestant normative civility that they deploy to advance neoliberal control, are sharpening their knives and learning from their past mistakes. In the case of DePaul and Illinois, they are, or, in the case of the latter, may be willing to pay the financial costs for a settlement or even may accept to lose in court — in Salaita’s case, the cost-benefit analysis by the administration at the University of Illinois is clearly not strictly financial in the short term but rather in the long term, wherein they could pay a high sum to Salaita now for the price of transferring faculty governance to the administration and of suppressing dissent once and for all. This is part of the ongoing neoliberalization of the university characterized by the rise of an astronomically paid managerial class, the erosion of tenure and the adjunctification of faculty.

In the best case scenario, even if Salaita sues the University of Illinois, wins the lawsuit, and the University of Illinois pays him a large sum, the University of Illinois will still be the winner while Salaita, faculty governance and dissent will be the losers. Unless the campaign against the University of Illinois is intensified, including a continuation and an expansion of the ongoing boycott, working with the American Association of University Professors to deny the university accreditation based on its suppression of academic freedom and its usurpation of faculty rights, continuing protests by students and faculty at the University of Illinois itself to force it to reinstate Salaita, this battle will be lost and will set a most dangerous precedent for university communities across the country, where administrations would not brook tolerance of that which they deem uncivil, and therefore un-Protestant.

The Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley Nicholas Dirks, who as dean of the faculty at Columbia, had organized the official McCarthyist witch hunt against me before he left to greener pastures (in the process, he co-opted a number of leftist and “post-colonial” academics to assist and defend him in his violation of academic freedom), might have been the first university leader to declare solidarity with the University of Illinois and threaten the uncivil on his new campus with dire consequences, but more are following in his footsteps with little fear.

The war is not lost and there will be many battles to come, but who wins the battle of the University of Illinois could largely determine the war’s outcome.

A version of this article was presented at a Princeton University panel organized by Professor Max Weiss titled “The Salaita Case and Beyond: Academic Freedom, ‘Civility,’ and the Future of the University” on 6 October 2014.

Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. His book Islam in Liberalism is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Tags:

Fact Sheet on the case of Professor Steven Salaita , a Palestinian-American who lost his job because he exercised his right of free speech

The following statement was prepared by a group of NY/NJ activists who are working on a speaking tour in the area for Prof. Steven Salaita scheduled for November 16-20. When the speaking engagements are firmed up they will be published.



Steven Salaita, a tenured professor of American Indian Studies at Virginia Tech, accepted a job offer of a tenured position in the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. A contract was signed in October of 2013. Anticipating their move from Virginia to Illinois along with their one-year-old child, Salaita and his wife both quit their jobs and sold their house.

In early August 2014, a few weeks before the start of the school year, the UICU Chancellor Phyllis Wise, without consulting the American Indian Studies Department, or any public process at all, told Salaita that his contract had been terminated.

Emails that have since come to light, due to a local newspaper’s (the News-Gazette) request for them under the state’s Open Records Act, revealed that during July, 2014 Wise had been consulting with alumni and members of the university’s office that deals with fund raising over what to do about the objections of wealthy and influential donors to Salaita’s hiring and their threats to cut off donations.

In one email by Chancellor Wise she described a two page briefing document about Salaita that she received from a major pro-Israel lobbying group. A FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to see this document was filed by The Electric Intifada, a web publication. By law, public institutions are required to keep such documents on file. The University informed The Electric Intifada that it cannot find any such document.

The reason given by chancellor Wise for the irregular and legally questionable “unhiring” was the content of tweets that Salaita, a Palestinian American, had sent out from his private twitter account denouncing Israel for its attack on Gaza.

Wise called Salaita’s tweets criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “uncivil,” and said that this demonstrated that he wasn’t fit to be on the UICU faculty. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) along with the Chicago civil rights law firm of Loevy & Loevy, is representing Professor Salaita. In a public statement on the case, the CCR said, “The University’s action to repress or penalize Professor Salaita’s speech on a matter of public concern such as Israel/Palestine because of disagreement with its message is impermissible “viewpoint discrimination,” a serious First Amendment violation. It is also no defense for the University to claim that his speech was offensive or aggressive, as the First Amendment also clearly protects the tone and manner of speech others find objectionable. “


Recently, as if on cue, university officials around the country have been calling for “civility” as a new standard for judging acceptable speech about Israel/Palestine. In practice, it means censorship. It is part of an active campaign of some Zionist organizations and individuals in the USA to stamp out growing support for Palestinian rights at American colleges and universities and to punish any faculty, students and university administrators who don’t tow the line.

The reaction against this serious violation of Salaita’s free speech and legal rights has been strong. Over 6,000 scholars in numerous disciplines have pledged to boycott UICU. Several scholars have already cancelled scheduled appearances at events on the UICU campus. A general petition demanding reinstatement has over 16,000 signatures as of August 24. At UICU the American Indian Studies and the American Studies Departments have voted no confidence in Chancellor Wise. Other academic departments at universities around the country have condemned UICU’s termination of Salaita’s contract.

The Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association (MLA) sent a letter to IUCU asking them to rescind their action against Salaita and the Illinois Conference Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors issued a statement condemning the university’s action. Students and faculty at UICU have held rallies in support of Salaita and protested this politically motivated voiding of a legal contract.

Winning this case is important not only for the sake of Steven Salaita’s rights, but for the sake of academic freedom and free speech on American Campuses. We are up against an orchestrated campaign to eliminate dissenting views on Israel/Palestine which, if successful, will lead to millionaire donors determining who gets hired and fired, what is taught and what kind of speech is allowed on American universities.



Relevant links:
o CCR: http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/professor-salaita-termination-speech-critical-israel

o Response:http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/prof-salaita-and-his-attorneys-respond-university-of-illinois-trustee-vote-terminate-his-tenured-pos

o Donation link:https://fundly.com/support-steven-salaita#

• 10/3/14
• NYC Salaita Support Group

Muslim discrimination against women bad, Jewish discrimination against women good

from Jonathan Cook's blog
22 SEPTEMBER 2014
When men-only streets are okay in London

Imagine in one of London’s central districts, a Muslim group representing a significant section of the local community puts up notices before a street event telling women to confine themselves to one side of the road only. The posters, in Arabic and English, state: “Women should please walk along this side of the road only.”

How much coverage in the UK media do you think this would receive? Would we see articles about Muslims trying to bring sharia law to the streets of London? Would commentators fall over themselves to decry Islam as a religion of extremism and intolerance? Would our media and politicians call on Muslim leaders to denounce such primitive practices?

From long experience, we all know the answer.

So how to explain the near-silence about exactly this happening last week in the London district of Hackney, except that religious Jews rather than Muslims were the party responsible. The Shomrim organisation put up the signs in preparation for the Torah procession in Stamford Hill. The posters were removed after local residents complained.



But as the Redress website notes, the official response has been decidedly muted. An online search finds this story apparently of interest – and then only marginally – to local London media, plus one low-key story in the national Independent newspaper. And a police spokesman merely expresses concern about a “potential misinterpretation” of the signs, without explaining in what possible way they might be misinterpreted.

He adds that Shomrim “have agreed that next year they will only be written in Hebrew and will be removed more swiftly after the event.”

As Redress observes:

In other words, as long as the Jewish misogynists confine their hateful practice to Hebrew-reading Jewish women, and do so quickly before anyone has had time to ponder why this is happening on the streets of a British city, everything would be fine.

It is worth bearing this story in mind next time you read an Islam scare story in the western media. What standards are used in assessing the Muslim community and how consistently are they being applied to other religious communities? And if there is an inconsistency, what motivates it? Why are news editors regularly playing up a Muslim threat, but playing down a Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Sikh threat?

www.redressonline.com/2014/09/uk-official-implies-jewish-misogyny-is-fine-as-long-as-it-is-confined-to-jews/

- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2014-09-22/when-men-only-streets-are-okay-in-london/#sthash.Qp6v49Kz.dpuf

Listen up White House, in this case Netanyahu might be right

according to an article in Haaretz, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his daily briefing on Monday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks that American criticism of Israeli settlement construction was against American values, “did seem odd.”

“It did seem odd for him to defend Israel's position by saying the US position is un-American,” Earnest said. “American values are why this country's support for Israel has been unwavering.” Earnest repeated the U.S. criticism of settlement construction and said that continuing it “will send a troubling message” about Israel’s intentions.

But maybe in this case Netanyahu is right. He's saying the US government is betraying its values by not verbally supporting Israeli settler expansion, stealing ever more Palestinian land.

Why? Because the United States came to be what it is today by using the same methods as Zionist Israel: by stealing the land of the indigenous people, pushing them out and killing them. American values and Zionist Israeli values are the same.

One of the complaints itemized in the Declaration of Independence was that King George III was preventing the 13 colonies from expanding their borders and wiping out the Indians. And look at our history: pushing the frontier westward; pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing that included genocidal polices designed to kill native people; the theft of about 50% of Mexico in a trumped-up war in 1848; using the most likely fake attack on the US battleship Maine to declare war on Spain and rip off Puerto Rico and the Phillipines; and on and on.(Did I mention slavery?)

The Imperial USA got going using the same values as Israel is displaying: white men of European origin invading other people's land declaring that it was promised to them by god and proceeding to "cleanse" the area of "savages" who have no rights.

But then, in reality, Netanyahu doesn't have anything to worry about from Obama's White House; Obama isn't actually going to do something to stop Israeli from stealing Palestinian land. This is all wordplay.

By recognizing “State of Palestine,” Sweden could harm Palestinians

from The Electric Intifada
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Mon, 10/06/2014 - 22:04
041014_shh_00_1.jpg

The trappings of “statehood” and “state” recognition will not restore usurped Palestinian rights. (Shadi Hatem)
The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah was ecstatic last weekend after Sweden’s new centre-left Prime Minister Stefan Löfven announced in his inaugural address to parliament what appeared to be a break with Western orthodoxy: his country would recognize the “State of Palestine.”

“We salute the announcement by the Swedish prime minister,” crowed Saeb Erekat, the PA “chief negotiator.”

Although dozens of countries already recognize the “State of Palestine,” including several in Europe, Israel’s staunchest backers – the US, Canada, Australia and most of the European Union states – do not.

For the PA, with no achievements – and many losses – to show for more than two decades of a “peace process,” such diplomatic recognition is a coveted prize that gives the false impression of progress.

But American objections and Israeli fury quickly pushed the Swedes to try to cool expectations.

On Friday, US State Department spokesperson Jennifer Psaki criticized the Swedish move as “premature.”

The Swedish ambassador in Tel Aviv was summoned to the Israeli foreign ministry for a scolding on Monday – but Sweden’s government would not reveal the content of his discussion with Israeli officials.

And the Swedish prime minister was subjected to the usual insults by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman who suggested that Löfven did not understand the region.

“If what concerns the prime minister of Sweden in his inaugural address is the situation in the Middle East, he would better focus on the more urgent problems in the region, such as the daily mass murder taking place in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the region,” Lieberman advised.

Publicly, the Swedes did their best to soothe Israel’s anger.

Prime Minister Löfven spoke with Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog, chair of Israel’s Labor Party, a “sister party” to Löfven’s Social Democrats.

Herzog told Haaretz that Löfven stressed that Sweden “wasn’t going to recognize a Palestinian state tomorrow morning” and “wants to speak first with all the relevant parties, including Israel, the Palestinians, the United States and other EU states.”

So much for a big, bold break.

Vague statement

Also on Sunday, Sweden’s foreign ministry tweeted out Löfven’s exact words apparently to underline Sweden’s support for the sterile “peace process” and the “two-state solution.”

And this statement was posted on the website of the Swedish embassy in Tel Aviv:

The following text is a quote from the Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s declaration on the government policy in the parliament on 3 October.

“The conflict between Israel and Palestine can only be resolved through a two-state solution, negotiated in accordance with the principles of international law. It must guarantee the legitimate demands of both the Palestinians and the Israelis for national self-determination and security. A two-state solution requires mutual recognition and a will to coexist peacefully. Therefore, Sweden will recognize the State of Palestine.”

Löfven’s commitment has no specific date attached to it, leaving, at best, confusion over his government’s intentions.

Sweden’s new foreign minister Margot Wallström added to the confusion, tweeting cryptically: “Recognizing Palestine: Important step towards a two-state solution. Both sides must be respected.”

on Twitter

By “both sides,” she presumably means the occupier and colonizer on the one hand, and its victims, on the other.

Sweden’s misguided motives

Wallström elaborated on Sweden’s intentions in comments to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter on Sunday.

The minister said that the strong Israeli reaction was unsurprising. “This I can understand and respect even if I do not share it.”

She said she didn’t think the planned move would “have any serious impact on relations between Sweden and Israel,” stressing “We have good relations.”

She rejected criticism that the move was too early: “I would say that the risk is that it is too late.”

But why float this step at all? “It is important that we take an initiative that hopefully will inspire other countries,” Wallström said.

Wallström is right: that it is too late. It is too revive the dead “peace process” and there is no point talking about a “two-state solution” any more. She’s also right to suggest that things cannot go on as they are and something must be done.

But moving from quiet complicity with Israel to antagonizing it with symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state – while maintaining “good relations” – will do absolutely nothing to change the Palestinian reality, even if other states followed Sweden’s lead (if and when it comes).

“State” harms Palestinians

As I have explained in my book The Battle for Justice in Palestine and in an article for Al-Shabaka recognition of a Palestinian “state” in a fraction of Palestine actually negates the rights of most Palestinians and conflicts with the Palestinian right of self-determination.

While recognizing the “State of Palestine” excites and pleases many people who support the Palestinian cause, people should not to get carried away with the aesthetics of “statehood” in what would amount to a bantustan.

Instead, I have argued, they should focus on the negative consequences for the right of return and the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

So from my perspective, I do not see recognition of a Palestinian “state” in the context of the so-called two-state solution as anything to celebrate. Indeed, it may well be harmful to Palestinians in the long run.

What Sweden could do

But I do applaud Sweden’s desire to show leadership, initiative and to break with a stifling consensus. So, here are some ideas for Sweden’s new government that might actually do that:

Lead a campaign for the immediate, unconditional end to Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza, which amounts to “collective punishment.”

End Sweden’s arms purchases from Israel and call on all countries to impose an arms embargo.

End Sweden’s military collaboration with Israel.

Stop Swedish and EU financial support for Israeli occupation.

Stop EU research support to Israeli occupation.

Support efforts to bring Israeli war criminals to justice by arresting war crimes suspects who set foot in Sweden and encouraging other countries to do the same.

Ban the import to Sweden of all Israeli settlement goods, and encourage EU countries to do the same.

Urge EU countries to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

Sweden led the way among European countries in opposing apartheid in South Africa. That included rejecting the regime’s bantustans which were designed to preserve apartheid by disguising it as “independence” for Blacks.

It is also past time for Sweden and other countries to stop concealing their complicity with Israeli apartheid behind the so-called “two-state solution” and to openly support full rights and equality for all Palestinians throughout historic Palestine.

Tags: