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Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died on Thursday the 11th of November, and Mahmoud Abbas has been elected in his place. On the day that Arafat died, to minimise the publicity, Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician who had been jailed for 18 years for revealing details of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme, after being beaten, drugged and kidnapped by Mossad (the Israeli secret service) in Italy, was re-arrested supposedly on suspicion of passing confidential material to unauthorised persons since his release in April. To harass him further, he was re-arrested again on New Years Day.
Mordechai spent the first eleven and a half of those years in solitary confinement and had served the whole of his sentence because he refused to accept that he had done anything wrong. Scientists agree that he primarily had photos to offer, so the Israeli claim that he has nuclear secrets is nothing but an empty pretext for continuing the punishment. He had been kept in Israel against his will, and defied the Israeli regime by talking to foreign media. He was later released to house arrest, but the police didn’t return his computer. Ironically, the day of his re-arrest (the 11th of November) is known as Armistice Day, when firing stopped in the First World War. There is an International Vanunu Committee which campaigns for full freedom for Mordechai, as well as campaigns in the USA and UK.
The brutal attacks by the Israeli regime on Palestinian civilians (including shooting children who show defiance and bulldozing homes of the families of suicide bombers), as well as the building of an “apartheid wall” which eats into Palestinian territory, must be opposed.
Israeli soldiers last year murdered a Palestinian schoolgirl, Iman al-Hams, in the Southern Gaza Strip, causing outrage in Israel. The soldiers didn’t even think she was male or older – they thought that she was a 10-year old girl!
I participated in a piece of street theatre in Manchester City Centre in which we threw balls of paper, representing stones, at a mock tank and fell down dead. I got up earlier than everyone else who had “died” so that I could hand out copies of a leaflet to shoppers who had stopped to watch. My leaflet had a headline “No to suicide bombings – yes to workers’ unity – in Iraq and Israel/Palestine”. I showed sympathy for people who are resorting to suicide bombings in the Middle East by pointing out that they show the strength of feeling by ordinary Muslims, but pointed out that they are counterproductive. In the case of Israel, the regime uses suicide bombings as an excuse to attack the Palestinians even harder.
That direct action was organised by the Forum for Palestine and Jews for Justice for Palestinians. I have also attended meetings of both organisations in Manchester City Centre (I am a quarter Jewish so the latter organisation is appropriate for me to get involved in). I have life membership of Manchester University Student Union, so I have started getting involved in some societies there, including the Forum for Palestine society at that university.
Unity between working class Jews and Palestinians will be hard to achieve, but such unity leading to a socialist Middle East is the only way out of the quagmire of violence on both sides. Mahmoud Masarwa, a member of the Israel/Palestine section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), the international organisation to which my former revolutionary socialist organisation (the Socialist Party which was known as “the Militant Tendency” when it was infiltrating the Labour Party) is affiliated to, was jailed for years on trumped-up charges due to the fact that he was organising working class unity. Mahmoud was recognised as a political prisoner by Amnesty International.
I have sometimes attended the regular pickets outside Marks & Spencer (M&S) in Market Street, Manchester City Centre. They have regularly taken place for a few years on Saturdays between 12 noon and 3pm (or 2pm depending on numbers). These protests take place because M&S allegedly make donations to the Israeli regime as well as selling Israeli goods. Some pro-Palestine activists therefore argue that M&S should be boycotted. However, M&S is seen by many as a Jewish chain, so this can be seen as anti-semitic. Additionally, I discovered that M&S is quite ethical in some ways (its milk does not come from cows that have been fed partially genetically modified feed unlike every other supermarket’s own brand milk apart from the Co-op, and its coffee is organic and ‘fair trade’, and its board had more women members on it than any other company surveyed by the Guardian until a recent shake-up). I therefore protested outside M&S with a leaflet merely calling for a boycott of Israeli goods.
The police had banned protests outside M&S over the Christmas period, supposedly as a temporary measure. Although I was allowed to hand my leaflet out at one of the entrances for a while, and then told by a police officer that I had to keep moving if I wanted to keep protesting, the police eventually clamped down and asked for those who wanted to continue protesting and get arrested to stand next to the store and everybody else to move elsewhere. I was an ‘informal’ psychiatric patient (part time political prisoner) at the time, and I did not want to get ‘sectioned’ again, so I did not join the protestors who were continuing. However, I handed out some leaflets to people who were watching, and got arrested anyway! Details of my arrest are included in this message. To see my “Boycott Israeli Goods” leaflet, modified to mention my arrest, click here.
Israel/Palestine is likely to be one of the last places on Earth (if not the last place) where a socialist revolution takes place. An important factor in overcoming the hatred between ordinary Jews and Palestinians could be my band Galaxia, which will include a Jewish singer (as well as myself being a quarter Jewish) who supports Palestinian freedom.
