On 22 October 2021 the Israeli Defence Minister, Benny Gantz, issued orders which designated six prominent West Bank-based Palestinian human rights organisations as supporters of terrorism. These were the prisoners’ rights group Addameer; the Palestinian branch of Defence for Children International; the human rights group Al-Haq; the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees; the Bisan Research and Advocacy Centre and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees. Gantz declared that all six groups were connected to and financially supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
In reality what Gantz and the Israeli state are most concerned about is the fact that all six organisations have been involved in presenting dossiers and evidence to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague documenting Israel’s violations of human rights.
The ICC is investigating the onslaught unleashed by Israel on Gaza in 2014 and the human cost and suffering it caused. Gantz was Commander-in-Chief of the Israeli armed forces during the attack and so is potentially in line to be brought before the Court. During the 2019 election, Gantz boasted in campaign videos about how parts of Gaza had been ‘returned to the Stone Age’ by the 2014 military onslaught. Labelling these six Palestinian organisations ‘supporters of terrorism’ is a pre-emptive strike by Gantz and the Israeli state to attempt to discredit any evidence they have provided to the ICC.
In a clearly connected move, at the beginning of November Palestinian banks shut down the accounts of around 80 NGOs and civil society groups based in the Gaza Strip. The reason given by the Palestinian Monetary Association, which is an arm of the Palestinian Authority (PA), was that the groups had not kept their internal administrative procedures up to date. In reality President Mahmoud Abbas and the PA have long been opposed to the independence of Palestinian NGOs as the vast majority of them are opposed to the political corruption of the PA. In March, in an attempt to gain control of their activities, Abbas issued a Presidential Decree which, if fully implemented, would make Palestinian NGOs mere appendages of PA ministries.
Abbas clearly saw the move by Israel against prominent NGOs in the West Bank as an opportunity to widen the attack and move against NGOs in the Gaza Strip, organisations which provide services to some of the poorest people who live there. As well as attacking political critics of the PA, Abbas will be hoping that this disruption to the work of Gaza’s NGOs will also politically harm Hamas.
This attack by the PA on NGOs in Gaza politically supports Israel’s attempts to internationally discredit and undermine the work of Palestinian NEWS NGOs that are defending the Palestinian people from Israeli occupation.
Resistance
In sharp contrast to the collaboration of the PA with the Israeli state, Palestinians in the prisons and on the streets continue to resist the ongoing Israeli occupation.
In the prisons, as we go to press, two prisoners continue their hunger strikes calling for immediate release as they have never been charged with any offence. On 11 November Miqdad al-Qawasmeh ended his 113 day hunger strike after an agreement was made between the Israeli prison authorities and the Hamas prison leadership that he would be released in February; the hunger strikes of Kayed Fasfous and Ayyad Hraimi ended in victory on 22 November with arrangements in train for their release.
The struggle to prevent the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district of East Jerusalem continues. In May 2020 the struggle against Zionist colonialist settlers attempting to force them from their homes became a flashpoint that ignited struggles all over historic Palestine. In an attempt to dampen the struggle the Israeli courts intervened and postponed the Sheikh Jarrah evictions. In October the courts attempted to get four Palestinian families to accept that the land is owned by Zionist colonialists in return for having ‘protected tenancy’ for 15 years and only paying a nominal rent. At a press conference on 2 November, the families rejected this sham. One resident, Muna el-Kurd, declared that the families ‘unanimously reject the settlement offered by the occupation court’. She went on to say that they would rely on the ‘Palestinian street’ to build support for their fight.
Labour Zionism
The representative of the Zionist state in Britain, Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, an extreme far right Zionist, spoke at a meeting in the London School of Economics (LSE) on 10 November. Hotovely, notorious for her denial of the Nakba – the explusion of Palestinians from Israel – as ‘an Arab lie’, as well as her openly expressed wish to annex the West Bank and ban marriage between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, amongst other racist views, was met with a large demonstration. Inevitably, British Zionists leapt in to brand the protest as ‘anti-Semitic’. The Home Secretary Priti Patel called on the police to investigate the incident for ‘anti-Semitism’. Not to be outdone in his rabid support for Zionism, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer called the protest ‘totally unacceptable’; His stance was endorsed by Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy and Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas Symonds. Mere weeks later, the Labour Party’s staunch support for Israel was again on display, as on 24 November, in a parliamentary vote on Priti Patel’s proposal to designate the whole of Hamas – the democratically elected leadership of Gaza – as a terrorist organisation. Keir Starmer whipped his MPs into supporting this further criminalisation of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Nandy told Jewish News that such a ban ‘was absolutely the right thing to do.’
Bob Shepherd
Isolate the Zionist State! Victory to the Palestinian Resistance!
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 285, December 2021/January 2022
