The movement written off after September 11 is demonstrating its worth
in Palestine
George Monbiot
Tuesday April 9, 2002
The Guardian
Two sets of human shields are in use in the West Bank. The first is
less than willing. The Israeli army, like some of the terrorist groups
it has fought, has been taking hostages. Its soldiers have been
propelling Palestinian civilians through the doors of suspect buildings,
so that the gunmen they might harbour have to kill them first if they
want to fight back.
The second set of human shields has deliberately placed itself in the
line of fire. Since the army's offensive in the West Bank began,
hundreds of Israeli peace campaigners and foreign activists have been
seeking to put themselves in its way. At great personal risk, members
of the International Solidarity Movement have sought to protect
civilians by making hostages of themselves. It is a display of
extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice. It is also the latest
incarnation of a movement which just months ago was left for dead.
The movement to which many of the peace activists risking their lives in
Ramallah and Bethlehem belong has no name. Some people have called it
an anti-globalisation or anti-corporate or anti-capitalist campaign.
Others prefer to emphasise its positive agenda, calling it a democracy
or internationalist movement. But, because they have always put
practice first and theory second, its members have proved impossible to
categorise. Whenever it appears to have assumed an identity outsiders
believe they can grasp, it morphs into something else. It is driven by
a new, responsive politics, informed not by ideology but by need.
After September 11, this nameless thing appeared to vanish as swiftly as
it had emerged. The huge demonstrations planned for the end of
September against the World Bank and IMF in Washington became a small
and rather timorous march for peace. Most US activists, cowed by the
new McCarthyism which has dominated American discourse since the attack
on New York, kept their heads down. Commentators dismissed the movement
as a passing fad which had rippled through the world's youth, as
widespread and as insubstantial as Diet Coke or the Nike swoosh.
But those who dismissed it had failed to grasp either the seriousness of
its intent or the breadth of its support. The television cameras always
focused on a few hundred young men dressed in black and running riot,
intercut occasionally with the wider carnival of protest. But they
seldom permitted its participants to explain the sense of purpose which
propelled them. So most outsiders failed to see that the commitment of
many of the people involved in these protests is non-negotiable. The
movement is no more likely to go away than the governments and
corporations it confronts. Its survival is assured by its ability to
become whatever it needs to be.
Last month 250,000 protesters travelled to Barcelona to contest the
assault on employment laws and the public sector being led by Tony
Blair, Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar. This month some of them
moved to Palestine. Among those in the British contingent are people
who have helped to run campaigns against corporate power, genetic
engineering and climate change. They were joined this week by members
of the Italian organisation Ya Basta, which helped to coordinate the
protests in Genoa. For the movement which came of age in Seattle, the
World Bank and the West Bank belong to the same political territory.
If the protesters simply shifted as a mob from one location to another,
their efforts would be worse than useless. But one of the key lessons
this rapidly maturing movement has learned is that protest is effective
only if it builds on the efforts of specialists. Like most of the
Earth's people, the foreigners on the West Bank became visible when they
began to bleed (five British campaigners were injured last week by the
Israeli army's illegal fragmentation bullets), but some outsiders have
been working there for decades. New arrivals join long-established
networks and do what they are told. Among the bullets and the
bulldozers, the movement is discovering a courage long suspected but
seldom tried.
Protesters have moved into the homes of people threatened with
bombardment by the Israeli army, ensuring that the soldiers cannot
attack Palestinians without attacking foreigners too. They have been
sitting in the ambulances taking sick or injured people to hospital, in
the hope of speeding their passage through Israeli checkpoints and
preventing the soldiers from beating up the occupants. They have been
trying to run convoys of food and medicine into neighbourhoods deprived
of supplies; and seeking to encourage both sides to lay down their arms
in favour of non-violent solutions. They are becoming, in other words,
a sort of grassroots United Nations, trying with their puny resources to
keep the promises their governments have broken.
Perhaps most importantly, the peace campaigners are the only foreign
witnesses in some places to the atrocities being committed. Using
alternative news networks such as Indymedia and Allsorts, they have been
able to draw attention to events most journalists have missed.
They have seen how Palestinians, told by the Israeli army that the
curfew had been lifted, have been either shot dead when they stepped
outside or seized and used as human shields. They have witnessed the
sacking of homes and the deliberate destruction of people's food
supplies. They have seen ambulances and aid trucks being stopped and
crushed. On March 28 one peace protester watched Israeli soldiers in
jeeps hunting women and children who were fleeing across the fields on
the outskirts of Ramallah, trying to shoot them down in cold blood. And,
by becoming the story themselves, as they are beaten and shot, the
foreigners have brought it home to people who were dismissive of the
murder and maiming of indigenous civilians.
The movement's arrival on the West Bank is an organic development of its
activities elsewhere. For years it has been contesting the destructive
foreign policies of the world's most powerful governments, and the
corresponding failures of the multilateral institutions to contain
them. Rather than echo the thunderous but effete demand of commentators
on both sides of the Atlantic that Yasser Arafat (a man currently unable
to use a flushing toilet) should stamp out the terror in the Middle
East, the campaigners are, as ever, addressing those who wield real
power: Israel and the governments who supply the money and weaponry
which permit it to occupy the West Bank. The movement has always been a
pragmatic one, as ready to protest against Burma's treatment of its
tribal people or China's dispossession of the Tibetans as the IMF's
handling of Argentina. In Palestine, as elsewhere, it is seeking to
place itself between power and those whom power afflicts.
Everyone else is demanding that somebody should do something about the
conflict in the Middle East. The peace campaigners are doing it.
Source:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,681239,00.html
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