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Grassroots activism - Thursday in Palestine

21 June 2009

Mark Serwotka, general secretary, is currently visiting Palestine as part of a delegation hosted by the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions. Each day Mark will post his reflections on the visit.

Seperation barrier

A checkpoint into Ramallah.

Talking to trade unionists and others over the first few days of our visit we had heard about the appalling privations arising from a Palestinian economy in trouble: boarded up businesses and shops, farmers separated from their land by the wall, high rates of unemployment.

The UN had briefed us on the destruction of infrastructure in Gaza by the Israeli army and the lack of progress in repairing it.

Economy under pressure

On Thursday morning in Ramallah we had the opportunity to discuss this in detail at a economic research seminar attended by ministers from the Palestinian Authority and academics.

We heard that the restrictions on travel had severely affected all aspects of the economy and much of the public sector.

Individual Palestinians from the West Bank could no longer work in Israel. The occupation, continuing in contravention of UN resolutions, had left the Palestinians dependent on aid and heavily in debt to private banks.

We heard that the aid supplied by other countries was in effect financing the occupation.

It was tied to certain projects such as the setting up of industrial zones where Israeli businesses would employ Palestinians at a lower minimum wage and without union organisation. Crucially, exports nearly always left via Israel.

A bleak outlook

Not for the first time we were told that the outlook for Palestinian people is bleak. We had witnessed for ourselves the reality of oppression that lies behind the statistics and news bulletins.

But on Thursday we also heard about an example of the brave resistance to the effects of the occupation by grassroots Palestinian organisations.

We drove to the offices of the Stop the Wall campaign, a coalition which coordinates the work of 54 Popular Committees in villages which are being destroyed by the separation wall.

Grassroots activism

Stop the Wall organise weekly demonstrations. Most of these lead to arrests and violent efforts by the army to break them up.

I was enormously encouraged to hear that the campaign and similar initiatives were beginning to create a genuine social movement on the ground.

The number of activists was growing and annual conferences were being held. Stop the Wall described the movement to us as an ‘alternative to bullets.’ It was bringing supporters of Hamas and the PLO together at the local level.

We moved on to the offices of Al Haq, a human rights organisation in Ramallah, which was taking up the resistance through legal means.

Al Haq told us that there was no legal system that Palestinians could access to get justice for the assaults, false imprisonment, and abuse they suffered. This was because of the special provisions of military law applied to Palestinians.

Apartheid

We heard the comparison made between Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians and apartheid in South Africa.

The similarities of the two systems were hard to ignore: confinement of the indigenous people to ghettos, economic exploitation, violent denial of human rights and a policy of separation on ethnic grounds.

On the day of our visit lawyers working with Al Haq were taking a case to court in the UK which was challenging the government’s actions in assisting Israel in terms of selling arms when Israel was in breach of international law on the occupation and war on Gaza.

We discussed how more publicity could be achieved on such cases in the UK.

Arafat’s tomb

We left these discussions with grassroots campaigners and made our way to the tomb of Yasser Arafat for a meeting with the senior advisor to President Abbas.

Heavily guarded, the tomb is a memorial to the Palestinian leader. He was chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and president of the Palestinian Authority. Arafat had led the 1990s negotiations with the Israel government and in 1994 had received the Nobel peace prize.

Most Palestinian people, whatever their political opinion, revere him as a freedom fighter. But many Israelis view him as a terrorist.

As we walked around the tomb we saw the remains of his offices which had been destroyed by tanks during a long siege by the Israeli army in 2004. He died in November 2004.
Hope through solidarity

Rafiq Husseini, the senior advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas, met us in a preserved building in the compound.

He welcomed us and told us that the PLO had originally been in favour of a single, secular democratic state as a solution to the conflict in which Arabs and Jews would live as equals. They had then agreed to negotiations with the Israelis on a two state solution.

But if the Israeli government wanted two states then the settlements which had taken so much of the West Bank must be 'surgically removed' so there could be a viable Palestinian state.

The change of administration in the USA was a positive development, Mr. Husseini said. And he told us, as many others in Palestine had done, that the solidarity shown by the UK demonstrations against the war in Gaza earlier in the year had lifted their spirits.

Whenever I attend demonstrations in the future I will think back to the incredibly brave people I have met here and their varied means of resistance, keeping hope alive in intolerable conditions.

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