Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
INTERNATIONAL
The International Sociological Association: Statement on the Situation in Israel and Palestine
The International Sociological Association (ISA) expresses its deep concern about the horrific events of October 2023 in Israel and Palestine as the human carnage there is unfolding in plain view. There have been far too many victims in this and previous cycles of violence. War and violence are never acceptable solutions and are against all the values we uphold. We stand by and respect the UN resolutions concerning this situation and share the call by many of our Palestinian and Israeli colleagues for an immediate release of hostages, exchange of prisoners, and the ending of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
The ISA stands in solidarity with the Israeli and Palestinian social scientists who have defended human rights and raised their voices against the killing and kidnapping of civilians, the bombing of civilian infrastructure, including residential areas, hospitals, and universities, and occupation and war in general. The ISA condemns the massacre of Israeli and Palestinian civilians. We share the repeated denunciation by our colleagues in the Israeli Sociological Society of the violence against Palestinians and the illegal colonies in the Palestinian territories over the past few years.
We also express our deep concern about and condemn the rise of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia globally and the everyday acts of violence these entail. We are particularly alarmed by the political backlash within the international academic community. The ISA cannot remain silent as spaces of public and academic debate are shrinking and increasingly policed. Today, more than ever, we require critical interventions by social scientists. Academic freedom needs to be protected and promoted. Well-informed and nuanced debate and a historicized and sociological understanding of the events that have led to the October 2023 atrocities are required to forestall further catastrophic loss of life. As stated by the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, “it is not only permissible, but it is essential for scholars to situate the current war in its broad historical contexts, including those of settler colonialism.” Our duty as sociologists is to maintain spaces of debate and foster discussion during such a critical moment.
The ISA, as an international community of more than 5,000 sociologists, declares its commitment to maintain the resolve of its global membership, strengthen international dialogue, particularly with and among those of our colleagues who are affected by this war, make critical voices heard in our global scientific communities, and facilitate the dissemination of critical analyses in its publications and scholarly events.
The International Sociological Association (ISA)
Fourth International: Motion Palestine
The offensive of the 7th October of 2023 and the brutal acceleration of the ethnic cleansing waged by the State of Israel have put Palestine into a catastrophic situation, but have also given rise to mass demonstrations accross the world.
The sections and militants of the FI propose to all available forces to launch or revive a lasting movement of solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people that demonstrates that the international working class rejects Israel’s colonialism.
For this purpose, we address ourselves to all the components of the labor and social movements to offer a mass support to Palestinians. We make a special effort to rally the mass labor organizations to their cause (trade-unions, political organizations). We strongly express our solidarity to comrades targeted by repression because of their support for the Palestinians, as is the case in France.
We strive to regroup all those forces on the basis of an internationalist orientation, independent of nationalist and fundamentalist options, able to clearly keep a distance from the objectives and methods of currents like Hamas or Fatah, without of course putting the colonizing power on the same plane as the colonized : this kind of political basis is a condition to regroup the maximum of forces among youth and workers in imperialist countries, in dominated countries and more specifically in the Middle East.
23 October 2023
International Committee of the FI oct. 2023
IRAN
Iranian Progressives Respond to Israel’s Genocidal Assault on Palestinians
Iranian progressives, strongly condemn Israel’s bombing of the people of Gaza. While they emphasize the genocidal character of the Israeli siege of Gaza, they also strongly condemn Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israeli civilians, planned with the Iranian government’s extensive training and support.
A majority of the Iranian public who oppose their own government know that for the past four decades the Islamic Republic has instrumentalized the plight of the Palestinians for its own authoritarian purposes. Nevertheless, they feel a deep sympathy with the Palestinian people in their struggle for national self-determination against Israeli occupation.
Iranian progressives, strongly condemn Israel’s bombing of the people of Gaza. While they emphasize the genocidal character of the Israeli siege of Gaza, they also strongly condemn Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israeli civilians, planned with the Iranian government’s extensive training and support.
The Association for Iranian Studies wrote:
As academics, we have a moral obligation to counter hate speech and hate-acts and to work toward peace, tolerance and justice. Sometimes, it is difficult to know how to compare different experiences of suffering or to mete out justice, but one thing is certain: Endless cycles of oppression, violence and hate only derail and delay the possibility of a peaceful future. (Association for Iranian Studies, 2023)
Most Iranian progressives have learned lessons from the 1979 Iranian Revolution when a religious fundamentalist, authoritarian and misogynist organization was allowed to represent the aspirations of the masses. They do not wish this on the Palestinian masses.
F. Dashti, a writer for Zamaneh, a Persian-language website in Holland with writers inside Iran, wrote: “Of course the Israeli Palestinian issue is very complicated. . . If only these two main elements were involved, perhaps the situation would not become so complicated. However, there are others behind the scene or sometimes on the stage who establish themselves with utterly different interests and calculations. The changes that they have brought about and their occasional ruses for appearing on one side and then on the other, make everything more complicated.” (Dashti, 2023)
Khosrow Sadeghi-Borujeni, a labor and social welfare researcher in Iran, writes about Israel’s role since 1987 in propping up Hamas as an alternative to the more secular Palestinian nationalist leaders. He cites Adam Hanieh, a Jordanian political economist, on Hamas’s torture and murder of Palestinian leftists, and its promotion of misogyny and capitalist exploitation. Borujeni concludes that “if these realities and interactions of existing forces in the field of struggle are not taken into consideration, the legitimate defense of Palestine and the violence of a captive people will only lead to a greater human toll and will be a pretext for further repression of the people of Palestine and Lebanon, in the interest of the U.S. and Israel. Therefore, a force that is itself part of the problem and which has itself benefited from this problem for decades, cannot take forward steps in the pathway toward solving the problem.” (Sadeghi-Borujeni, 2023)
A recent statement issued by several Iranian socialist organizations in exile is entitled, “The People of Palestine and Israel Will Not Benefit from This Reactionary War.” This statement argues that “in the past few years, with the ‘Abraham Accords’, reactionary Arab governments have promoted open reconciliation with Israel, which has endangered the position of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic in confronting Israel.” Thus, the Islamic Republic of Iran “needs this war and is one side of these politics of war promotion.” (Rahe Kargar, 2023)
Many activists inside Iran are also deeply concerned about the Islamic Republic’s instrumentalization of the Palestinian cause and its use of pro-Palestinian rhetoric to cover over its intensifying repression at home. While the Iranian government speaks about the suffering of the Palestinian people under Israeli colonialism, it continues to crack down on Iran’s national minorities such as the Kurds, many of whom have been executed simply for believing in the Kurdish right to self-determination. Kurdish activists who have fled to northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government to seek refuge in Kurdish opposition party camps are now being pushed out under Iranian government pressure. Most recently, a prominent Iranian filmmaker, Dariush Mehrjui and his wife, Vahideh Mohammadifar, a screenwriter were stabbed to death in their home in a manner similar to various other dissident intellectuals in the past few decades. Prior to his assassination, Mehrjui had challenged the Ministry of Culture in a videotaped message against censorship. (Najafi, 2023)
S. Shams, a reporter from Zamaneh writes: “It seems that a deep dialogue to build solidarity between Iranian and Palestinian fighters does not exist. With the exception of a letter from some Palestinian artists at the beginning of the Zhina Uprising [the Woman, Life, Freedom movement] in defense of Iranian freedom fighters, we have not seen any other clear stances expressed about current struggles inside Iran, and often it seems that Palestinian activists are evasive when it comes to talking about issues in Iran.” (Shams, 2023)
In response, a Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions activist states: “The state of constant war severely limits free speech. The Palestinian people are under pressure. They live and struggle in a complicated situation and cannot easily criticize anyone.” (Shams, 2023 )
While the pressures that the Palestinian people face are immense, and Israel’s latest invasion of Gaza is becoming bloodier and more destructive by the day, the possibility of this war becoming a massive regional war with the intervention of Iran and its proxy militia groups is very real.
Iranian progressives are with the Palestinians in their struggle against genocide. However, they also want to make sure that the Iranian government does not take advantage of this war to extinguish the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that emerged in Iran last year as a struggle for women’s rights, the rights of oppressed minorities and labor rights. They do not want the world to forget that Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian feminist human rights activist who is incarcerated, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous struggle for women’s rights and against the death penalty.
Iranian progressives want to express their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle on the basis of a life-affirming vision that challenges religious fundamentalism, authoritarianism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia and class exploitation. (Statement of Minimum Demands, 2023)
Frieda Afary
References:
Association for Iranian Studies. (2023) “AIS Council Statement on the War in Gaza.” October 12.
Fassihi, Farnaz and Ronen Bergman. (2023) “Invasion Prompts a Renewed Examination of Hamas’s Connections to Iran.” New York Times. October 14.
Dashti, F. (2023) “Vahshat-e Bitafavoti.” Zamaneh. October 10.
https://www.radiozamaneh.com/784876/
Najafi, Elahe. (2023) “Mehrjui as Aqaz to Farjam.” Zamaneh. October 14. https://www.radiozamaneh.com/785457
Rah-e Kargar. 2023. “Mardom Felestin va Esrail Hich Manafe’I dar in Jang-e Erteja’I Nadarand.” Rahe Kargar. October 9.
https://rahkargar.com/?p=23706
Ramezanian, Ali. (2023). “Hemayat-e Mali va Taslihati-ye Iran as Hamas Cheqadr Ast?” BBC Persian, October 17. https://www.bbc.com/persian/articles/cprxydnn3v7o
Sadeghi-Borujeni, Khosrow (2023). “’Madar-e Sefr Darejeh-e’ Khavaremianeh.” Naqd-e Eqtesad-e Siasi. October 11.
Shams, S. (2023) “Mobarezeh-e Jahani Aleyh-e Apartaid dar Felestin: Peyvandsazi baraye Azadi-ye Hamegani.” Zamaneh. October 8.
https://www.radiozamaneh.com/784342/
Statement of Minimum Demands of Iranian Unions and Civil Society Organizations. February 14, 2023.
• Iranian Progressives in Translation. A Blog by Frieda Afary. October 17, 2023:
https://iranianprogressives.org/iranian-progressives-respond-to-israels-genocidal-assault-on-palestinians/
UNITED STATES
JVP: All of Palestine is under attack
For many of us, it’s impossible to imagine the scale of death and destruction in Gaza.
In just two weeks, the Israeli military has killed over 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli warplanes have flattened entire neighborhoods. Shell-shocked children are left to search for their parents under the rubble. Millions of Palestinians have once again been made refugees, bombed as they tried to flee. Surgeons are operating by the light of their cellphones, increasingly without anesthesia.
Let us be clear: This is genocide.
This isn’t a war on Hamas. It’s a war on the Palestinian people.
While international attention is focused on Gaza, the Israeli government and extremist settler groups are taking the opportunity to accelerate the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israeli settlers are being armed by the Israeli state, and have become indistinguishable from Israeli soldiers. Both abuse Palestinians with impunity.
On October 12, as the last villagers of Wadi al-Seeq left their homes, driven out by ongoing settler terror, a group of Israeli “soldiers-settlers” — some dressed in military uniform and some in civilian clothing — took three Palestinian men captive.
For hours, the men were tortured: They beat them, forced them to strip down to their underwear, handcuffed and blindfolded them, urinated on them, extinguished cigarettes on their bodies, and attempted to sexually assault one of them.
Settlers have carried out dozens of attacks, setting Palestinian homes on fire, destroying their property, and shooting at them with live ammunition.
Over 90 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 26 children, have been murdered by the Israeli military and settlers since October 7.
They include 16-year-old Mohammad Rafat Mohammad Edwan, who was throwing stones at Israeli soldiers when he was shot with live ammunition. The bullet lodged itself in his lung, and four days later, on October 14, he was dead.
On October 12, 62-year-old Ibrahim Wadi and his son, 24-year-old Ahmad Wadi, were killed when Israeli settlers opened fire on the funeral procession of four Palestinians who had been murdered the previous day — three by Israeli settlers and one by an Israeli soldier.
And on October 19, 11-year-old Yousef Mohammad Omar Zaghdad was killed when the Israeli military fired a missile at a group of civilians inside Noor Shams refugee camp. Three other children were killed in the attack.
Enabled by the Israeli military and empowered by a climate of impunity and lawlessness, Israeli settlers are taking advantage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza to steal more Palestinian land, thereby expanding Israeli control of the West Bank. Hundreds of Palestinians from over a dozen different communities in the West Bank have been displaced as a result.
“They came into the village and destroyed houses and sheep pens, beat an 85-year-old man, scared our children. Slowly our lives became unlivable,” Sliman al-Zawahri, a resident of the now-depopulated village of Ein Rashash, told the Guardian.
Israel’s war on Gaza has also heightened the discrimination faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel and those with Jerusalem IDs, who are increasingly being arrested, harassed, doxxed, suspended from school, and fired from their jobs for expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
The expansion of Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy relies on the destruction of all Palestinian life. For Palestinians, there is no right way to protest their subjugation, and nowhere safe from Israeli violence.
• The Wire. 24 October 2023::
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/palestine-under-attack/?sourceid=1001761&emci=862d7844-9b72-ee11-b004-00224832eb73&emdi=ebead5a4-a172-ee11-b004-00224832eb73&ceid=533408
David Finkel: Death Spiral Delusions: Behind the New Israel/Palestine Disaster
IN A RECENT post “Catastrophe in Jenin and Palestine, continued” (July 8, 2023), I reiterated a previous remark: “The degenerative spiral in the so-called Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ is nowhere near reaching the bottom yet.”
First, the immediate desperate priority for supporters of Palestinian freedom, and simple human decency, must be demanding international pressure to stop the Israeli siege of Gaza with its genocidal implications.
Not only the Israeli bombing and pending ground assault but even more, the cutoff of food and water, gas and electricity will spell death for tens if not hundreds of thousands of Gaza civilians in the months that the military operation to “crush Hamas forever” and “change Gaza for decades” would likely take.
As the degenerative spiral descends to a death spiral for Palestinians and Israelis, it’s also become all the more important to be clear about what’s behind it. Without trying to respond to daily headlines where every horror surpasses the previous one, we must investigate the big, bigger and biggest delusions of the present moment and those leading to it.
Since this piece is being written for predominantly Palestine solidarity readers, to begin with, I’m afraid that on the pro-Palestinian side (and perhaps the thinking of the HAMAS leadership), there’s a delusion that the HAMAS raid, spectacular, amazingly organized without Israeli detection – and let’s face it, murderous – would trigger a broader uprising in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Palestinian communities inside Israel.
It will do nothing of the sort – unless the lunatic religious-Zionist West Bank settlers take the occasion to escalate their wave of violence against Palestinian villages (which may be a bit less likely since Israeli army units who protect the vicious settler assaults are being redeployed to Gaza and the Lebanese border).
Even if feeling some understandable emotional satisfaction that at least someone’s fighting back, the Palestinian population has no ambition to be martyred along with their families, nor do they wish to duplicate the gruesome scenes of ordinary Israeli civilians slaughtered in the streets. (Besides, upsurges like mass strikes or popular intifadas don’t happen because someone “calls” for them.)
If the idea of a Palestinian upsurge in the wake of this horror is one big delusion, a bigger delusion is the Israeli one that’s now been exposed before the world, including the Israeli public.
That delusion was that imprisoning and periodically “mowing the grass” by bombing Gaza, keeping its population on bare subsistence food rations and a couple hours of daily electricity, while expanding West Bank settlements and choking off the hopes for Palestinian self-determination and sustainable economy, would all be made viable by “normalization” of relations with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, etc.
It’s haunting to consider that so great was Israel’s illusion of safety and “security” that an all-night holiday youth dance party was happening, right down the road from where two million people live in the walled-in Gaza cage. This of course became the scene of the greatest carnage of the HAMAS raid, taking more than 260 kids’ lives at latest count, captured in gory cell phone and televised images.
That barbarous mass slaughter, and the Israeli delusion of security — which itself has been predicated on the success of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, high-tech repression and killing of Palestinians on no small scale — are inextricably connected. So is the twinning of Israel’s now-exploded delusion of security with what’s become a blood lust among sectors of the Jewish public to “destroy Gaza, kill them all” – an all-too-predictable response and another turn of the downward death spiral, which the Netanyahu government will exploit to the fullest.
To be sure, the Israeli public’s anger is also targeting their government, which failed to notice the impending danger while it was consuming the country over its moves to disempower the judiciary and expand the reach of religious authorities, all to curb Netanyahu’s prosecution on multiple corruption charges (sound familiar?). What all this might ultimately produce in Israeli politics will be an open question for months to come — depending on the results of the war against Gaza, the fate of the captured Israeli citizens, and the impacts on Israel’s economy among other factors we can’t yet predict.
The Biggest Delusion
But this brings us to the biggest delusion of all, the American delusion – embodied in National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s recent gloat that “the Middle East is safer than it’s been in decades.” It’s an extension of the Israeli delusion, but compounded by the arrogance of the imperial overlord.
The U.S. policy presumption is that brokering Israel’s “normalization” with the ghastly Saudi regime and other repressive Gulf states will isolate Iran, bring some Saudi and Qatari money in to pacify the Occupied Territories, solidify the Palestinian Authority as a branch office of the Occupation, and make Palestine disappear as any threat to “stability.”
One may assume that Iran, at some level, was involved – how directly and operationally, U.S. intelligence either doesn’t know or isn’t saying – in preparing the HAMAS operation, to blow up the pending Israeli-Saudi-U.S. alliance that the Iranian regime sees as a strategic threat. But that’s made possible only because Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues without letup.
Unquestionably the U.S. record of permanent betrayal of promises to Palestinian representatives, and two decades of a cynical fraud called the “peace process,” contribute to the growing rage that made an explosion ultimately inevitable. What we now see is the Biden administration pledging more weapons and high-tech air power to Israel — which will only escalate further once the Animal House known as the Republican House of Representatives majority chooses its next Speaker.
In truth, Israel has all the military hardware it needs to obliterate Gaza multiple times over. (Ukraine needs weapons for its defense – Israel doesn’t.) What Israel doesn’t have is the slightest hint of political will for peace, reconciliation and reparations with the Palestinian people – or of any program to do so even if it wanted. Nor does U.S. policy have anything of the sort to offer.
A Road Forward?
No one should mistake the fact that the foreseeable prospects for Palestine, and democratic forces in Israel, are dire. For activists in the United States, our immediate concentration must be on demanding no Israeli siege of Gaza and ending U.S. aid to the racist Israeli state; building the BDS movement; and resisting the drive, which will certainly escalate, to criminalize BDS and pro-Palestinian advocacy.
As regards the struggle for Palestinian freedom, it is necessary both to recognize the right of oppressed people to choose their own means of struggle, and to understand at the same time that the ideology and strategy of HAMAS, with its deliberately murderous method and the colossal destruction it brings on its own population, leads absolutely nowhere.
I urge everyone to read in full the essential new article by Gilbert Achcar “On Hamas’s October Offensive,” and I can do no better to conclude here than by quoting Achcar’s closing paragraph:
“The Palestinian struggle must rely primarily on mass political action against Israel’s oppression, occupation, and settler-colonial expansion. The new underground armed resistance organised by young Palestinians in Jenin or Nablus can be an efficient adjuvant to the people’s mass movement, provided it is predicated on the latter’s priority and conceived in such a way as to incentivise it. The regional support that the Palestinian people should rely upon is not that of tyrannical governments like that of Iran, but that of the peoples fighting against these oppressive regimes. Herein lies the true potential prospect for Palestinian liberation, which needs to be combined with the emancipation of Israeli society itself from the logic of Zionism that has inexorably produced its polity’s ever-expanding drift to the far right.”
David Finkel
[Other references:
- The current Against the Current editorial, “Palestine and Empire” (ATC 226), preceded the new explosion but discusses the U.S. policies that helped cause it.
- The online magazine +972 from Israel provides critical ongoing coverage and insight.
- Normal Finkelstein’s book Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom was published in 2018 but remains essential, if unbearably painful, reading.]
• Solidarity. Posted October 10, 2023:
https://solidarity-us.org/death-spiral-delusions-behind-the-new-israel-palestine-disaster/
• Current positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Series II
ESSF (article 68152), Current positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Series II
• Current positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Series I
ESSF (article 68144), Current positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Series I
Twitter
Facebook