INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE – 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.
Hmmm
“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)”
In the very first paragraph the blame for the “problem” is subtly shifted in part onto the Palestinians. What am I referring to here: “usually for simply building after being denied a permit”. It is offered to the reader without any further qualification and constitutes an outright indictment of the Palestinians. What the author studiously ignores here is the critical fact that in the vast majority of cases where permits are “denied” the Palestinian in question has already been denied repeated requests for a “permit”. Most germane however, is the fact that in the vast majority of those cases, the Palestinians ion question are being systematically denied the right to build homes on their own land! The intentional omission of these key facts intentionally skews the readers perception of the “problem”
Shame on this author and this website.