" Huwaida Arraf on Palestine"
Interviewed
by Yousef M. Aljamal, CPDS via E-mail.
1- First,
could you please give us a brief introduction about ISM?
The International
Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting
the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action
methods and principles. We founded this international coalition to support and
strengthen the Palestinian popular resistance by providing the Palestinian
people with a resource -- international protection and a voice -- with which to
resist, nonviolently, an overwhelming military occupation force.
The resources the Israeli
government has at its disposal are well-known - over $3 billion in military aid
from the U.S., hundreds of millions of dollars in private funds, and the
unquestioned diplomatic support of the only superpower in the world exercised
through its veto in the UN Security Council of any resolution that would compel
Israel to abide by international law. The Palestinians also need strong
resources.
We
focus on providing support for the Palestinian unarmed resistance, not because
we take a hostile view to the armed resistance, but rather because we believe
that unarmed resistance is strategically more advantageous to Palestinians.
Seeing as Israel
is superior to us militarily, it’s better not to fight them in that arena, but
rather in an arena where we are stronger, or at least where we have the
possibility of building up our strength. This arena is that of the popular
struggle, or the strategic unarmed resistance. I also must note, that while I,
personally, and the ISM as an organization, recognize the Palestinian right to
use armed struggle to resist occupation (even if we don’t engage in or actively
support it), we strongly believe that armed resistance MUST adhere to
international law. It is true that Israel frequently violates the laws
that regulate armed conflict, but we do ourselves no service by doing the same.
The first ISM campaign was in August of 2001. At that time over 50 civilians
from various countries came to the Occupied Palestinian Territory to engage in
a 2-week, coordinated campaign of nonviolent direct-action against occupation
forces and policies. Since that time we've had nearly 7500 civilians from all
over the world come join us. Many of our volunteers come North America and
Europe, but we’ve also had a number of volunteers from Latin America, Africa and various Asian countries. The socio-economic
and age range of the volunteers is vast, with the average age being over 30. A number of volunteers
have been over the age of 60 and we've even had people in their eighties join
us.
Internationals
joining the Palestinian struggle is important for 4 key reasons, and these form
the foundation of the ISM:
1) Protection: an international
presence at Palestinian civilian actions/protests can insure a certain level of
protection for the Palestinian people engaged in nonviolent resistance. Palestinians acting/resisting alone are often
met with harsh and even lethal forms of violence by Israeli occupation forces,
including arbitrary, long-term arrest, beating, severe injury and sometimes
even death. The Israeli occupation forces have succeeded to label every
Palestinian man, woman and child as a potential terrorists and thereby justify
their actions. No body holds Israel
accountable for Palestinian lives, but foreign civilians do have governments
responsible for them and are harder to label as "terrorists." As such, when internationals are present with
Palestinians at popular actions, lethal forms of violence are usually not used
by most Israeli soldiers.
2) Message to the mainstream media:
The Palestinian struggle is not being accurately reported by the mainstream
corporate international media. Example: When Israeli troops open fire and kill
Palestinian civilians, it is often reported as "clashes" and very
rarely by what it really is, Israeli forces opening fire on civilians. The mainstream media tends to show the
Israeli - Palestinian conflict as one in which two sides are fighting over a
piece of land and can't live together, instead of the Palestinian struggle for
freedom, dignity, and human rights that it is.
Palestinians are inaccurately depicted as violent people who hate Jews
and want to destroy Israel. Internationals of various social, national
and religious backgrounds, joining Palestinians in the freedom struggle can
help to dispel this notion. The ISM volunteers from all over the world that
join us can reach out to their respective media sources and give Palestinians
the voice that we don't have.
3) Personal witness and transmitting of
information:
International civilians joining Palestinians on the ground can bear witness and
return home to talk to their communities about what is happening. We encourage volunteers to talk to their
friends, family, and colleagues when they return home, as well as to organize
larger speaking events where they can present what they experienced to
community members and to the media. This information and education can then be
used to lobby policy makers in an effort to change US foreign policy. Currently we
have many ISM volunteers and groups actively engaged in local Boycott,
Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) efforts, which is a powerful form of nonviolent
resistance that is having a psychological as well as a financial impact on Israel. The
kind of eyewitness reporting that ISM engages in helps to generate more action
in support of the Palestinian freedom struggle.
4) Break isolation / provide hope:
The occupation isolates Palestinians and cuts the Palestinian people off from
the rest of the world and from each other. At the very least, international
civilians have been able to raise the morale of the Palestinian people living
under occupation by standing with them and saying, "you are not
alone." We feel that this helps
create or return hope that is vital to our struggle – hope that Israel keeps
trying to extinguish. Hope, that people acting together can change things, has
been a cornerstone of our philosophy.
While
the primary purpose of the ISM has been to engage in and support the
Palestinian unarmed, civilian-based freedom struggle against occupation, at
times when aggression of the Israeli military against Palestinian civilians has
increased, the ISM took up a role in providing humanitarian assistance and
protection by using their status as internationals to escort doctors,
ambulances, schoolchildren and other civilians to work, hospital and school. We
have also engaged in internationals only efforts to disrupt military operations.
Prime examples of these include breaking through Israel’s military cordons to put
internationals in the presidential compound as well as in the Church of the
Nativity when they were both under siege in 2002.
2-
Well, What is the role of
ISM to en-counter The Israeli Propaganda machine?
As
I mentioned above, ISM provides people from all over the world to come and see
with their own eyes what is happening on the ground in Palestine and to take part in the popular
resistance. This kind of first-hand experience is important to countering the
Israeli propaganda machine in three ways: (1) it provides many people from
different backgrounds speaking different languages to give eyewitness accounts
from places where Israeli attacks and other atrocities take place. This
increases the likelihood that journalists will get information that they might
not otherwise receive, as well as gets information out about what is happening
in Palestine using alternative media sources; (2) when the volunteers return to
their homes, their first-hand experience, stories and pictures provide a
compelling and hard-to-argue-with narrative for other people that would not
otherwise get this kind of information; and (3) the experience ends up being
life-changing for so many volunteers and therefore they are driven to work hard
when they return to their countries. It is this drive that is behind a lot of
the activism for Palestine
on college campuses, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions efforts, and others.
I
believe that all of the above combined, plays a very important, and effective
role in countering Israeli propaganda. This is not to say that we’re “winning”
but we have to remember that Israel
spends upward of $1 billion per year on their public relations efforts,
compared to almost nothing that we spend. They have professional public
relations firms working for them; we have the free voices of the people. They
have lies to spin; we have truths to tell. Their money and political power
might buy them the mainstream media and the politicians, but not for long as we
continue to inform and mobilize the masses…
3-
Do Palestinian
communities in the West play a positive role in exposing Israel's
crimes?
This
is not an easy question to answer. My direct experience is with the United States,
where, unfortunately for too long, we were disorganized and divided, in
addition to many members of the Palestinian community choosing to be apolitical.
Add to this the fact that what was mobilized around generally had to do with
raising money to provide aid to Palestine.
While this is important, Palestinian communities in the west focused all of
their energies (which have been limited) to responding to the crises that Israel is so
good at creating. In other words, we have been, and largely still are, reacting
and giving our money to aid and not the political efforts that might lead to a
change in the situation that has left Palestinians in need of aid.
That
said, I have noticed a shift in recent years and young Palestinian activists
have been leading this shift.
4-
You played a major role
in breaking Gaza's siege and brought dozens of
activists to Gaza.
You were one of the activists on The Freedom Flotilla that was attacked in the
International waters in May 2010. Do you think that Israel
has lost its reputation as "the only democracy in the Middle East" in
the West after its attacks on Gaza
in 2008-2009 and its attack on The Freedom Flotilla?
No,
I don’t think that Israel’s
brutal aggression has anything to do with its reputation as “the only Democracy
in the Middle East.” We must remember that democratic
governments commit unspeakable crimes. Just look at what the US and the UK
have done and are doing to Iraq
and Afghanistan,
to name just a few. Israel’s
self-proclaimed status as the “only Democracy in the Middle
East” should be challenged from a more factual basis. First, Israel is not the only entity in the Middle East
with democratic traditions. What about the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon? In
terms of the former, we don’t have a country to call democratic; in terms of Lebanon, she’s
more accurately described as a Republic, which is actually better than a
Democracy. A Republic is governed under a Constitution that places certain
limits the voice of the majority in order to protect the rights of the minority,
something that a Democracy does not.
But
even if Israel is a
democracy, that doesn’t mean that Israel is not guilty of horrific
crimes, which must be stopped. Perhaps the best analogy to make here is to that
of the United States
prior to the late 1960s. Everyone recognizes that the US is a
democratic country. Well, the U.S.
was a democracy while it practiced slavery in the 18th and 19th
centuries, and after that, continued outright racism against the black minority
in the US,
depriving black people of equal rights and opportunity, not to mention
subjecting them to degrading and abusive treatment. Just because Israel is a
democracy that doesn’t mean that it’s not occupying, oppressing, killing, and
maiming; it doesn’t mean that Israel is not a colonial, apartheid regime, which
is not only illegal, but a crime against humanity.
In
terms of its 2008-2009 assault on Gaza – Operation Cast Lead, and its lethal
attack on the Freedom Flotilla, Israel
lost something more important than its reputation as a democracy. Israel lost its
image of victimhood, and perhaps for the first time, was exposed clearly as a
violent aggressor.
5-
Does the Palestinian rift
hinder ISM efforts to get the Palestinian voice heard in the West? How?
Undoubtedly
this rift it hinders efforts. First of all, it allows questions about the
divisions to be raised and detract from the core issues. Second, it provides
fuel for Zionists who love to point to the chaos in Palestinian society and our
violence against each other in order to justify their repression and boost
their colonialist claims. Third, it divides our community outside (albeit to a
lesser extent) as it does inside.
That
said, I’m going to point to a larger issue that the split between Fatah and
Hamas. We have not been able to capitalize properly on the international
solidarity movement with Palestine
due to our lack of a unified
representative leadership for our national liberation struggle. In theory,
this leadership is supposed to be the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),
but the PLO has been deliberately marginalized and for the past 18+ years
existing in name only as an unelected and unrepresentative institution. This
absence of a unified national resistance movement means that we also do not
have a national strategy for effective resistance and are unable to communicate
effectively with the solidarity movement what we want and what we want them to
do to support us. To give an example of how this not only prevents us from
taking full advantage of the solidarity movement but how it can actually be
harmful to our efforts, I will refer to a UN Conference of Civil Society
Organizations in Solidarity with the Palestinian People that I spoke at in
2002. I clearly remember an organizer of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee
in South Africa telling us
how they were working on promoting a boycott of Israel
and even pressuring the South African government to cut relations with Israel. The
South African government asked the Palestinian Representative Office in South Africa whether or not boycott, divestment
and sanctions against Israel
was a demand of the Palestinian leadership? The Palestinian Ambassador said no.
In this case, and in many others, the “official” Palestinian leadership
hindered the ability of a solidarity organization to advocate for Palestine.
To
make up for this absence of a unified national leadership with an effective
strategy for fighting the occupation, Palestinians civil society has tried to
step up and make their voices heard. The most successful example of this is the
2005 Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
(BDS). By releasing a statement and a call to action endorsed by over 170
Palestinian civil society organizations, we gave the solidarity movement some
direction. So, Palestinian civil society has been trying to make up for what I
consider a massive failure of our leadership. This is not enough however. I
strongly believe that Palestinians, not only in the West Bank and Gaza, but also in 48 and
all over the world need to focus on building or rebuilding a unified
representative leadership to lead our national struggle forward. One of the
ways to do this is by reviving the PLO and its institutions, starting with
direct elections to the Palestine National Council (PNC).
6-
You likely heard about
"The Israel
Project", if Palestinians need to en-counter such a project, what are the
main points they need to shed light on?
I
don’t think that we need to focus on countering this project per se. We should focus on setting the agenda and
shaping the debate. It is the Israel Project that should continue scrambling to
devise ways to counter what we are
doing. Everything the Israel Project produces is really empty and devoid of any
truth, designed to manipulate people who don’t have accurate information and to
give people that are already under the influence of the Israeli lobby hollow
words and arguments to use to defend their support of Israel. This is
all easily countered by facts and information that we put out.
If
I would recommend that we take anything from the Israel Project, it is their
focus on using language that resonates with the audience that it is trying to
reach. This is one thing for us to keep in mind in our communications.
Sometimes, we can really turn people away by using language that people might
think is extreme, or that doesn’t mean much to them. Highly emotional language
and images are understandable, but not very effective. This is not to say that
we should not appeal to people’s emotions, we should, but through personal
stories told in calm language. For example, an image of an elderly man standing
in a cage that is one of Israel’s
checkpoints can expose the racism and deliberate degradation that is part of Israel’s
policies. People can relate to this, imagining their own fathers subjected to
such humiliating treatment. Whereas if we show a picture of a bloody body, this
will likely only inflame the emotions of those who already support our cause.
Others will not relate this to a deliberate policy that is unjust, but rather
to the unfortunate results of war. Israelis can show similar pictures.
7-
If you have a message to
the Palestinian young bloggers and writers who write in English, what would you
say?
I
would say that I need to take advice from them! It’s wonderful that we have so
many talented young writers. I don’t write much at all, which is a great
weakness. I feel that our young Palestinian writers know better than me, but
for the sake of stressing a few important points:
(1)
Strive
for accuracy:
It’s often hard to get accurate information fast, but the more one focuses on
her/his information accuracy, the more s/he will become a credible source of
information, not only for the general public, but also for journalists. This is one thing we’ve tried to do with ISM
volunteers. Because we have ISM volunteers in sensitive places where
journalists do not often go, we have stressed the importance of getting
accurate information that we can pass along to journalists in the hopes that
they will report on actions and incidents. If you give a journalist wrong
information, s/he will not be likely to use you as a source again. However, if
you consistently provide accurate, reliable information, you will become a
source for journalists and others, which can only be helpful in disseminating
news about what is happening in Palestine.
(2)
No
need to exaggerate: This is another piece of advice we give to ISM
volunteers. The things that happen in Palestine
on a daily basis are bad enough, so there is no need to exaggerate anything.
Tell it like it is.
(3)
Personal
stories:
You want to try to relate to your readers and have them relate to you. I think
this is best done through personal stories and experiences.
8-
New Media motivated Arab
youths express themselves, do you believe that Palestinians can make use of it
to get rid of the occupation? How?
New
media, alternative media, social media – all of these can be used as tools in
fighting the occupation. We will need more than media to get rid of the
occupation, but effective use of various new media tools to communicate
information and organize collective action can greatly strengthen us.
To
get rid of the occupation, we have to change people’s behavior; we have to
create situations where people’s actions that support the Israeli occupation are
altered in order to weaken the occupation. For example – soldiers who refuse to
serve in the Israeli army can help weaken Israel’s military capabilities;
Israeli society that wakes up from it’s indifference or government-supporting
trance can increase pressure on the Israeli government to alter its policies;
governments that impose sanctions on Israel can weaken Israel’s political and
economic power; people, organizations, and institutions that boycott Israel can
create pressure on Israeli society to pressure its government, and create an
image crisis for the Israeli state, etc. To motivate these and other sectors of
society to act, we need to communicate effectively, and here, we use new media
as a tool to disseminate information and to organize.
For
example, as I talked about above, ISM volunteers go back to their home
countries and spread the word about what’s happening in Palestine. We then want to transform this
knowledge into action – to lobby government officials to change their policies
and stop supporting Israeli occupation and apartheid, to boycott Israel, etc. So
we use new media and other communication tools to inform, so that we can then
turn that information and knowledge into action.
Also
in terms of organization, we’ve seen how social media has helped to mobilize
people. We can use social media tools to organize coordinated actions around
the world designed to put pressure on Israel. But while social media can
be a great organizing tool, I think that we should be careful about relying only
on social media, especially for organizing local actions. We should not forget
that many people don’t use the Internet, don’t use Facebook and Twitter as a
source of information and we need to reach these people too. So, these media
tools should be used in addition to other traditional means of communication
9-
Why do you believe that
one-state solution is the best one to the conflict?
I
actually do not advocate the one-state solution. This doesn’t mean that I
support the two-state solution either. Rather, I take a “rights-based
approach.” This means that I focus on the rights that we’re struggling to
achieve and don’t spend time arguing about one state or two. In reality, I
don’t care if it’s 10 states or no states, as long as the rights of Palestinians
and all people are respected and implemented. This includes the right of our
refugees to return and to compensation for their losses, the right to complete
equality under the law, and other rights currently denied to Palestinians. As a
political solution, one state would likely achieve this best. However, if two
states were proposed that included the right of all refugees to return to their
homes (even if not the exact homes they lived in) inside 48 Palestine, and
guaranteed equality for all people, meaning that Israel would NOT be defined as
a Jewish state, but a state that represented all her people equally, then that
could also work. Since the two-state solution that has been and is currently
talked about does not guarantee the above, in principle, I am opposed to it.
But, instead of spending time arguing that one state is better, I choose to
focus on the rights that we’re fighting for. This is my personal approach. I
don’t argue that it’s the best approach, but I do feel that it focuses us on
principles and rights, which are hard to argue with. For example, a Zionist
argument against the one-state solution is that it seeks to wipe out Israel. Whereas
it’s hard for a Zionist to say that they can’t agree to total equality of
citizens within the state. I would say to a Zionist “no, I don’t want to wipe
out Israel, but I want to be
treated equally inside Israel.”
This means that Israel
cannot define itself as a Jewish state, because then it would need to maintain
a Jewish majority. This means that it would need to take steps to ensure that
Jews remain a majority, including preventing Palestinian families from
reuniting, continuing to recruit Jews to bring to Israel
while keeping Palestinians out, perhaps some day restricting the number of
children Palestinians inside Israel
can have!”
