Kana’an Online

Fidel Castro

Lo conocí en Managua en julio de 1980, hace 30 años, durante la conmemoración del primer aniversario de la Revolución Sandinista, gracias a mis contactos con los partidarios de la Teología de la Liberación, que se iniciaron en Chile cuando en el año 1971 visité al presidente Allende.

Por Frei Betto sabía quién era Lula, un líder obrero en el que los cristianos de izquierda ponían desde temprano sus esperanzas.

Se trataba de un humilde obrero de la industria metalúrgica que se destacaba por su inteligencia y prestigio entre los sindicatos, en la gran nación que emergía de las tinieblas de la dictadura militar impuesta por el imperio yanki, en la década del 60.

Las relaciones de Brasil con Cuba habían sido excelentes hasta que el poder dominante en el hemisferio, las hizo sucumbir. Pasaron décadas desde entonces hasta que volviesen lentamente a ser lo que son hoy.

Cada país vivió su historia. Nuestra patria soportó inusitadas presiones en las etapas increíbles vividas desde 1959, en su lucha frente a las agresiones del más poderoso imperio que ha existido en la historia.

Por ello, tiene para nosotros una enorme trascendencia la reunión que se acaba de efectuar en Cancún y la decisión de crear una Comunidad de Estados de América Latina y el Caribe. Ningún otro hecho institucional de nuestro hemisferio durante el último siglo refleja similar trascendencia.

El acuerdo se alcanza en medio de la más grave crisis económica que ha tenido lugar en el mundo globalizado, coincidiendo con el mayor peligro de catástrofe ecológica de nuestra especie y a la vez con el terremoto que destruyó a Puerto Príncipe, capital de Haití, el más doloroso desastre humano de la historia de nuestro hemisferio, en el país más pobre del continente y el primero donde se erradicó la esclavitud.

Cuando escribía esta Reflexión, a sólo seis semanas de la muerte de más de doscientas mil personas de acuerdo a cifras oficiales en aquel país, llegaron noticias dramáticas de los daños causados por otro sismo en Chile, que ocasionó la muerte de personas cuyo número se acerca ya a mil, según cifras de las autoridades, y enormes daños materiales. Conmovían especialmente las imágenes de los sufrimientos de millones de chilenos afectados material o emocionalmente por aquel golpe cruel de la naturaleza. Chile, afortunadamente, es un país con más experiencia frente a ese tipo de fenómeno, mucho más desarrollado económicamente y con más recursos. De no haber contado con infraestructuras y edificaciones más sólidas, un incalculable número de personas, tal vez decenas o incluso cientos de miles de chilenos, habrían perecido. Se habla de dos millones de damnificados y posibles pérdidas que oscilan entre 15 y 30 mil millones de dólares. En su tragedia cuenta también con la solidaridad y las simpatías de los pueblos, entre ellos el nuestro, aunque dado el tipo de cooperación que necesita es poco lo que puede hacer Cuba, cuyo gobierno fue uno de los primeros en expresar al de Chile sus sentimientos de solidaridad, cuando las comunicaciones estaban aún colapsadas.

El país que hoy pone a prueba la capacidad del mundo para enfrentar el cambio climático y garantizar la supervivencia de la especie humana es sin duda Haití, por constituir un símbolo de la pobreza que hoy padecen miles de millones de personas en el mundo, incluida una parte importante de los pueblos de nuestro continente.

Lo ocurrido en Chile con el terremoto de la increíble intensidad de 8,8 en la escala de Richter, aunque afortunadamente a más profundidad que el que destruyó Puerto Príncipe, me obliga a enfatizar la importancia y el deber de estimular los pasos de unidad logrados en Cancún, aunque no me hago ilusiones sobre lo difícil y compleja que será nuestra lucha de ideas frente al esfuerzo del imperio y sus aliados dentro y fuera de nuestros países por frustrar la tarea unitaria e independentista de nuestros pueblos.

Deseo dejar constancia escrita de la importancia y el simbolismo que para mí tuvo la visita y el último encuentro con Lula, desde el punto de vista personal y revolucionario. Él dijo que, próximo ya a finalizar su mandato, deseaba visitar a su amigo Fidel; calificativo honroso que recibí de su parte. Creo conocerlo bien. No pocas veces conversamos fraternalmente dentro y fuera de Cuba.

Una vez tuve el honor de visitarlo en su casa, situada en un modesto barrio de Sao Paulo, donde residía con su familia. Fue para mí un emotivo encuentro con él, su esposa y sus hijos. No olvidaré nunca la atmósfera familiar y sana de aquel hogar, y el sincero afecto con que lo abordaban sus vecinos, cuando Lula era ya un prestigioso líder obrero y político. Nadie sabía entonces si llegaría o no a la Presidencia de Brasil, pues los intereses y fuerzas que se le oponían eran muy grandes, pero me agradaba hablar con él. A Lula tampoco le importaba mucho el cargo; le satisfacía, sobre todo, el placer de luchar y lo hacía con intachable modestia; que demostró sobradamente cuando, habiendo sido vencido tres veces por sus poderosos adversarios, sólo accedió a permitir la postulación del Partido de los Trabajadores en una cuarta ocasión por fuerte presión de sus más sinceros amigos.

No intentaré hacer recuento de las veces que hablamos antes de que lo eligieran Presidente; una de ellas, entre las primeras, fue a mediados de la década de los 80 cuando luchábamos en La Habana contra la deuda externa de América Latina, que entonces ascendía a 300 mil millones de dólares y había sido más de una vez pagada. Es un luchador nato.

Tres veces, como dije, sus adversarios, apoyados en enormes recursos económicos y mediáticos, lo derrotaron en las urnas. Sus más cercanos colaboradores y amigos sabíamos sin embargo que había llegado la hora de que aquel humilde obrero fuese el candidato del Partido de los Trabajadores y de las fuerzas de izquierda.

Con seguridad sus oponentes lo subestimaron, pensaron que no podría contar con mayoría alguna en el órgano legislativo. No existía ya la URSS. ¿Qué podía significar Lula al frente de Brasil, una nación de grandes riquezas, pero de escaso desarrollo en manos de una burguesía rica e influyente?

Sin embargo, el neoliberalismo entraba en crisis, la Revolución Bolivariana había triunfado en Venezuela, Menem estaba en caída vertical, Pinochet había desaparecido de la escena y Cuba resistía. Pero Lula es electo cuando Bush triunfa fraudulentamente en Estados Unidos, despojando a su rival Al Gore de la victoria.

Se iniciaba una etapa difícil. Impulsar la carrera armamentista y con ella el papel del Complejo Militar Industrial, y reducir los impuestos a los sectores ricos, fueron los primeros pasos del nuevo Presidente de Estados Unidos.

Con el pretexto de la lucha contra el terrorismo, reinició las guerras de conquista e institucionalizó el asesinato y las torturas como instrumento de dominio imperialista. Son impublicables los hechos relacionados con las cárceles secretas, que delataban la complicidad de los aliados de Estados Unidos con esa política. De este modo, se aceleró la peor crisis económica de las que en forma cíclica y creciente acompañan al capitalismo desarrollado, pero esta vez con los privilegios de Bretton Woods y sin ninguno de sus compromisos.

Brasil, por su parte, en los últimos ocho años bajo la dirección de Lula, vencía obstáculos, incrementaba su desarrollo tecnológico, y potenciaba el peso de la economía brasileña. La parte más difícil fue su primer período, pero tuvo éxito y ganó experiencia. Con su incansable batallar, serenidad, sangre fría y creciente consagración a la tarea, en condiciones internacionales tan difíciles, Brasil alcanzó un PIB que se aproxima a los dos millones de millones de dólares. Los datos varían según las fuentes, pero todas lo sitúan entre las 10 mayores economías del mundo. A pesar de eso, con una superficie de 8 millones 524 mil kilómetros cuadrados, frente a Estados Unidos, que apenas posee algo más de territorio, Brasil sólo alcanza aproximadamente el 12% del Producto Interno Bruto de ese país imperialista que saquea al mundo y despliega sus fuerzas armadas en más de mil bases militares de todo el planeta.

Tuve el privilegio de asistir a su toma de posesión a fines del 2002. También estuvo Hugo Chávez, que acababa de enfrentar el golpe de Estado traidor del 11 de abril de ese año, y posteriormente el golpe petrolero organizado por Washington. Ya Bush era Presidente. Las relaciones entre Brasil, la República Bolivariana y Cuba siempre fueron buenas y de mutuo respeto.

Yo tuve un accidente serio en octubre del 2004, que limitó seriamente mis actividades durante meses, y enfermé gravemente a fines de julio del 2006, en virtud de lo cual no vacilé en delegar mis funciones al frente del Partido y del Estado en la proclama del 31 de julio de ese año, con carácter provisional, al que pronto le asigné carácter definitivo cuando comprendí que no estaría en condiciones de asumirlas nuevamente.

En cuanto la gravedad de mi salud me permitió estudiar y meditar, me consagré a eso y a revisar materiales de nuestra Revolución, y de vez en cuando a publicar algunas Reflexiones.

Después que enfermé he tenido el privilegio de ser visitado por Lula cuantas veces ha viajado a nuestra Patria y de conversar ampliamente con él. No diré que siempre coincidí con toda su política. Soy, por principio, opuesto a la producción de biocombustible a partir de productos que puedan ser utilizados como alimentos, consciente de que el hambre es y podrá ser cada vez más una gran tragedia para la humanidad.

Este sin embargo -lo expreso con toda franqueza- no es un problema creado por Brasil y mucho menos por Lula. Forma parte inseparable de la economía mundial impuesta por el imperialismo y sus aliados ricos que, subsidiando sus producciones agrícolas, protegen sus mercados internos y compiten en el mercado mundial con las exportaciones alimentarias de los países del Tercer Mundo, obligados a importar en cambio los artículos industriales producidos con las materias primas y los recursos energéticos de ellos mismos que heredaron la pobreza de siglos de colonialismo. Comprendo perfectamente que Brasil no tenía otra alternativa, frente a la competencia desleal y los subsidios de Estados Unidos y Europa, que incrementar la producción de etanol.

La tasa de mortalidad infantil todavía en Brasil es de 23,3 por cada mil nacidos vivos y la materna de 110 por cada 100 mil partos, mientras en los países industrializados y ricos es menos de 5 y 15 respectivamente. Otros muchos datos similares podrían citarse.

El azúcar de remolacha, subsidiada por Europa, arrebató a nuestro país el mercado azucarero, derivado de la caña de azúcar, trabajo agrícola e industrial precario y eventual que mantenía en el desempleo gran parte del tiempo a los trabajadores azucareros. Estados Unidos por su parte, se apoderó también de nuestras mejores tierras y sus empresas eran dueñas de la industria. Un día, abruptamente, nos despojaron de la cuota azucarera y bloquearon a nuestro país para aplastar la Revolución y la independencia de Cuba.

Hoy Brasil ha desarrollado el cultivo de la caña de azúcar, la soya y el maíz con máquinas de alto rendimiento que pueden emplearse en esos cultivos con altísima productividad. Cuando un día observé la filmación de una extensión de 40 mil hectáreas de tierra en Ciego de Ávila dedicada al cultivo de soya en rotación con maíz donde se tratará de laborar durante todo el año, exclamé: es el ideal de una empresa agrícola socialista, altamente mecanizada con elevada productividad por hombre y por hectárea.

Los problemas de la agricultura y sus instalaciones en el Caribe son los huracanes que, en número creciente, arrasan su territorio.

También nuestro país ha elaborado y firmado con Brasil la financiación y construcción de un modernísimo puerto en el Mariel, que será de enorme importancia para nuestra economía.

En Venezuela están utilizando la tecnología agrícola e industrial brasileña para producir azúcar y utilizar el bagazo como fuente de energía termoeléctrica. Son equipos de avanzada que laboran en una empresa también socialista. En la República Bolivariana utilizan el etanol para mejorar el efecto ambientalmente nocivo de la gasolina.

El capitalismo desarrolló las sociedades de consumo y también el derroche de combustible que engendró el riesgo de un dramático cambio climático. La naturaleza tardó 400 millones de años en crear lo que nuestra especie está consumiendo en apenas dos siglos. La ciencia no ha resuelto todavía el problema de la energía que sustituirá a la que hoy genera el petróleo; nadie sabe cuánto tiempo requerirá y cuánto costaría resolverlo a tiempo. ¿Dispondrá de él? Eso fue lo que se discutió en Copenhague y la Cumbre resultó un fracaso total.

Lula me contó que cuando el etanol cuesta un 70% del valor de la gasolina, ya no es negocio producirlo. Expresó que disponiendo Brasil del mayor bosque del planeta, reducirá progresivamente la tala actual en un 80%.

Hoy posee la mayor tecnología del mundo para perforar en el mar, y puede extraer combustible situado a una profundidad de siete mil metros de agua y fondo marino. Hace 30 años habría parecido historia de ciencia ficción.

Explicó los programas educacionales de alto nivel que Brasil se propone llevar adelante. Valora altamente el papel de China en la esfera mundial. Declaró con orgullo que el intercambio comercial con ese país se eleva a 40 mil millones de dólares.

Una cosa es indiscutible: el obrero metalúrgico se ha convertido actualmente en un estadista destacado y prestigioso cuya voz se escucha con respeto en todas las reuniones internacionales.

Está orgulloso por haber recibido el honor de los Juegos Olímpicos para Brasil en el 2016 en virtud del excelente programa presentado en Dinamarca. Será sede también del Mundial de Fútbol en el 2014. Todo ha sido fruto de los proyectos presentados por Brasil, que superaron a los de sus competidores.

Una gran prueba de su desinterés fue la renuncia a buscar la reelección, y confía en que el Partido de los Trabajadores continuará gobernando a Brasil.

Algunos envidiosos de su prestigio y de su gloria, y peor aún, los que están al servicio del imperio, lo criticaron por visitar Cuba. Utilizaron para ello las viles calumnias que desde hace medio siglo se usan contra Cuba.

Lula conoce desde hace muchos años que en nuestro país jamás se torturó a nadie, jamás se ordenó el asesinato de un adversario, jamás se mintió al pueblo. Tiene la seguridad de que la verdad es compañera inseparable de sus amigos cubanos.

De Cuba partió rumbo a nuestro vecino Haití. A él le informamos nuestras ideas sobre lo que proponemos con relación a un programa sostenible, eficiente, especialmente importante y muy económico para Haití. Conoce que más de cien mil haitianos fueron atendidos por nuestros médicos y los graduados de la Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina después del terremoto. Hablamos cosas serias, conozco sus ardientes deseos de ayudar a ese noble y sufrido pueblo.

Guardaré un imborrable recuerdo de mi último encuentro con el Presidente de Brasil y no vacilo en proclamarlo.

Fidel Castro Ruz

Marzo 1 de 2010

12 y 15 p.m.

http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu

Thanks Netherlands!

By Adel Samara

(Kana’an eBulletin - Volume X - Issue 2166)

When the Palestinian Authority (PA) arrested Ahmad Sa’adat, PFLP general Secretary, and other members of Fath militant group and jailed them in Jericho prison a few years ago, few people were aware of some important facts, to mention some:

· Although the capital of the PA is Ramallah they were arrested in Jericho, because, according to Oslo Accords, the PA can spread its rule on Gaza and Jericho only. That was, and still is, the real spirit of the so called ‘Gaza-Jericho First’.

· The guards of that jail were US and British police subjected to the Zionist Ashkenazi Regime (ZAR) authorities.

At the time of the incident I wrote in Kanaanonline a bulletin concluding that Jericho jail is the first global jail in the world.

On 23 December 2009 the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) advertised, in AL-AYYAM Daily Newspaper, a bid for the local contractors for building a prison in Jericho. The prison, which is aimed to be used by the PA, will be financed by the Netherlands’s Government.

Thanks Netherlands! Thanks again, as a regime and a civil society! Netherlands, like the rest of the capitalist European countries, plays its part in the international formal division of labour against the Palestinian people. The donor countries are specialized in different fields of support e.g. Netherlands is specialized in building jails, the USA in finding repressive apparatuses to terminate any resistance and to protect the ZAR, the EU in providing technical training, Japan in building infrastructure, Turkey in establishing industrial zones on the 1967 borders similar to the Maquiladoras between the USA and Mexico. What a fantastic cooperation?! The USA takes the responsibility of assassinating the Palestinian resistance members while Netherlands prepares jails for those who will be arrested. What an end for the resistance groups who sacrifice their lives for liberating their country! “Jail is the natural place for a militant, freeman in a slavery nation”, the former Indian Prime Minister Jawaher Lal Nehru said.

Netherlands, the country who has a long and brutal history of colonization, first built the barrier between the inhabitants, the Red Indians, of what later became the USA and the white settlers whose actions against those inhabitants was no less than an ethnic cleansing. Later, the same barrier became the well known financial castle, “Wall Street”. Netherlands colonialism started during the Mercantilist era i.e. before Britain. Its colonialism retreated when the new colonial powers, Britain and France, rose and Netherlands was severely defeated by Britain in Boer war in 1895.

In the West Bank (WB) and Gaza, Netherlands was the first country who bribed local grassroots organizations to welcome foreign NGOs finance through its Zionist NGO (NOVIB) in 1975. What an honourable contribution to attract/lure leftist militants to renegade against class and national struggle!

Does the PA Need Jails?

Jails are the last thing we need in the occupied Palestinian territories. The ZAR built jails that ‘welcomed’ 800,000 Palestinian women, children, youth…etc. Logically, when the occupation leaves the occupied country jails diminish naturally. The PA’s demand for more jails reflects the fact that more people will be jailed, which means that being given a free Palestinian state is a mere myth.

People who have little or even no information about the ZAR’s occupation of the WB and Gaza might think that there were no jails under the occupation. Perhaps, they think that the Israeli occupation is a very democratic and civilized one, if any occupation can be, and as a consequence the prisons built for the PA are the first prisons to be ever built in the WB and Gaza.

In an era of nation-building, people need development strategy. The WB and Gaza are still in an era between occupation and independence; the economy is devastated and unemployment increases on daily basis. The so-called national bourgeois cooperate with the ZAR capitalists more than doing business in the WB and Gaza. So, if we are to choose between alternatives should priority be given to development or establishing jails?

One last question needs to be raised; why have the prisons been established in Jericho rather than Ramallah? The only explanation for this question is that the PA has Self Rule over Gaza and Jericho only. Does that mean that the new Palestinian state will be established in Gaza-Jericho only or might the Israelis be generous with the PA negotiators and give them a few kilometres more?!

(Boletín electrónico de Kana’an - Volumen X - Número 2162)

Me gustaba la historia como a casi todos los muchachos. También las guerras, una cultura que la sociedad sembraba en los niños del sexo mas culino. Todos los juguetes que nos ofrecían eran armas.

En mi época de niño me enviaron para una ciudad donde nunca me llevaron al cine. Entonces no existía la televisión y en la casa donde vivía no había radio. Tenía que usar la imaginación.

En el primer colegio adonde me llevaron interno, leía con asombro sobre el Diluvio Universal y el Arca de Noé. Más tarde consideré que era quizás un vestigio que la humanidad guardaba del último cambio climático en la historia de nuestra especie. Fue, posiblemente, el final del último período glacial, que se supone tuvo lugar hace muchos miles de años.

Como es de suponer, más tarde leí con avidez las historias de Alejandro, César, Aníbal, Bonaparte y, por supuesto, todo cuanto libro caía en mis manos sobre Maceo, Gómez, Agramonte y demás grandes soldados que lucharon por nuestra independencia. No poseía cultura suficiente para comprender lo que había detrás de la historia.

Más adelante centré mi interés en Martí. A él le debo en realidad mis sentimientos patrióticos y el concepto profundo de que “Patria es humanidad”. La audacia, la belleza, el valor y la ética de su pensamiento me ayudaron a convertirme en lo que creo que soy: un revolucionario. Sin ser martiano, no se puede ser bolivariano; sin ser martiano y bolivariano, no se puede ser marxista, y sin ser martiano, bolivariano y marxista, no se puede ser antiimperialista; sin ser las tres cosas no se podía concebir en nuestra época una Revolución en Cuba.

Hace casi dos siglos, Bolívar quiso enviar una expedición al mando de Sucre para liberar a Cuba, que mucho lo necesitaba, en la década de 1820, como colonia azucarera y cafetalera española, con 300 mil esclavos trabajando para sus propietarios blancos.

Frustrada la independencia y convertida en neocolonia, no se podía en Cuba alcanzar jamás la dignidad plena del hombre, sin una revolución que pusiera fin a la explotación del hombre por el hombre.

“…yo quiero que la ley primera de nuestra república sea el culto de los cubanos a la dignidad plena del hombre.”

Martí, con su pensamiento, inspiró el valor y la convicción que llevó a nuestro Movimiento al asalto de la fortaleza del Moncada, lo que jamás habría pasado por nuestras mentes sin las ideas de otros grandes pensadores como Marx y Lenin, que nos hicieron ver y comprender las realidades tan distintas de la nueva era que estábamos viviendo.

Durante siglos, en nombre del progreso y el desarrollo, se justificó en Cuba la odiosa propiedad latifundista y la fuerza de trabajo esclava, que había sido precedida por el exterminio de los antiguos habitantes de estas islas.

De Bolívar, Martí dijo algo maravilloso y digno de su gloriosa vida:

“…lo que él no dejó hecho, sin hacer está hasta hoy: porque Bolívar tiene que hacer en América todavía.”

“Déme Venezuela en qué servirla: ella tiene en mí un hijo.”

En Venezuela, como en las Antillas hicieron otras, la potencia colonial sembró caña, café, cacao, y llevó también como esclavos a hombres y mujeres de África. La resistencia heroica de sus indígenas, apoyándose en la naturaleza y extensión del suelo venezolano, impidió el aniquilamiento de los habitantes originales.

Con excepción de una parte al Norte del hemisferio, el inmenso territorio de Nuestra América quedó en manos de dos reyes de la Península Ibérica.

Sin temor puede afirmarse que, durante siglos, nuestros países y los frutos del trabajo de sus pueblos han sido saqueados, y continúan siéndolo por las grandes empresas transnacionales y las oligarquías que están a su servicio.

A lo largo de los siglos XIX y XX, es decir, durante casi 200 años después de la independencia formal de la América Ibérica, nada cambió en esencia. Estados Unidos, a partir de las 13 colonias inglesas que se rebelaron, se expandió hacia el Oeste y el Sur. Compró Luisiana y Florida, le arrebató más de la mitad de su territorio a México, intervino en Centroamérica y se apoderó del área del futuro Canal de Panamá, que uniría los grandes océanos al Este y el Oeste del continente por el punto donde Bolívar deseaba crear la capital de la mayor de las repúblicas que nacería de la independencia de las naciones de América.

En aquella época, el petróleo y el etanol no se comercializaban en el mundo, ni existía OMC. La caña, el algodón y el maíz eran cultivados por esclavos. Las máquinas estaban por inventarse. Avanzaba con fuerza la industrialización a partir del carbón.

Las guerras impulsaron la civilización, y la civilización impulsó las guerras. Estas cambiaron de carácter, y se hicieron más terribles. Finalmente se convirtieron en conflictos mundiales

Por fin éramos un mundo civilizado. Incluso, lo creemos como cuestión de principios.

Pero no sabemos qué hacer con la civilización alcanzada. El ser humano se ha equipado con armas nucleares de inconcebible certeza y aniquiladora potencia, mientras desde el punto de vista moral y político, ha retrocedido bochornosamente. Política y socialmente, estamos más subdesarrollados que nunca. Los autómatas están sustituyendo a los soldados, los medios masivos a los educadores, y los gobiernos empiezan a ser sobrepasados por los acontecimientos sin saber qué hacer. En la desesperación de muchos líderes políticos internacionales se aprecia la impotencia ante los problemas que se acumulan en sus despachos de trabajo y las reuniones internacionales cada vez más frecuentes.

En esas circunstancias, tiene lugar en Haití una catástrofe sin precedentes, mientras en el lado opuesto del planeta continúan desarrollándose tres guerras y una carrera armamentista, en medio de la crisis económica y conflictos crecientes, que consume más del 2,5% del PIB mundial, una cifra con la que podrían desarrollarse en poco tiempo todos los países del Tercer Mundo y tal vez evitar el cambio climático, consagrando los recursos económicos y científicos que son imprescindibles para ese objetivo.

La credibilidad de la comunidad mundial acaba de recibir un duro golpe en Copenhague, y nuestra especie no está mostrando su capacidad para sobrevivir.

La tragedia de Haití me permite exponer este punto de vista a partir de lo que Venezuela ha hecho con los países del Caribe. Mientras en Montreal las grandes instituciones financieras vacilan sobre qué hacer en Haití, Venezuela no vacila un minuto en condonarle la deuda económica, de 167 millones de dólares.

Durante casi un siglo las mayores transnacionales extrajeron y exportaron el petróleo venezolano a ínfimos precios. Venezuela se constituyó durante decenios en el mayor exportador mundial de petróleo.

Es conocido que cuando Estados Unidos gastó cientos de miles de millones de dólares en su guerra genocida de Vietnam, matando e invalidando millones de hijos de ese heroico pueblo, también rompió unilateralmente el acuerdo de Bretton Woods suspendiendo la conversión en oro del dólar, como estipulaba el acuerdo, y lanzando sobre la economía mundial el costo de esa sucia guerra. La moneda norteamericana se devaluó y el ingreso en divisas de los países caribeños no alcanzaba para pagar el petróleo. Sus economías se basan en el turismo y las exportaciones de azúcar, café, cacao y otros productos agrícolas. Un golpe anonadante amenazaba las economías de los Estados del Caribe, con excepción de dos de ellos exportadores de energía.

Otros países desarrollados eliminaron las preferencias arancelarias a exportaciones agrícolas caribeñas, como el banano; Venezuela tuvo un gesto sin precedentes: le garantizó a la mayoría de esos países suministros seguros de petróleo y facilidades especiales de pago.

Nadie se preocupó, en cambio, por el destino de esos pueblos. De no haber sido por la República Bolivariana una terrible crisis habría golpeado a los Estados independientes del Caribe, con excepción de Trinidad-Tobago y Barbados. En el caso de Cuba, después que la URSS colapsó, el Gobierno Bolivariano impulsó un crecimiento extraordinario del comercio entre ambos países, que incluía el intercambio de bienes y servicios, que nos permitió enfrentar uno de los períodos más duros de nuestra gloriosa historia revolucionaria.

El mejor aliado de Estados Unidos, y a la vez el más bajo y vil enemigo del pueblo, fue el farsante y simulador Rómulo Betancourt, Presidente electo de Venezuela cuando triunfó la Revolución en Cuba en 1959.

Fue el principal cómplice de los ataques piratas, los actos terroristas, las agresiones y el bloqueo económico a nuestra patria.

Cuando más lo necesitaba nuestra América, estalló finalmente la Revolución Bolivariana.

Invitados a Caracas por Hugo Chávez, los miembros del ALBA se comprometieron a prestar el máximo apoyo al pueblo haitiano en el momento más triste de la historia de ese legendario pueblo que llevó a cabo la primera Revolución social victoriosa en la historia del mundo, cuando cientos de miles de africanos al sublevarse y crear en Haití una República a miles de millas de sus tierras natales, llevaron a cabo una de las más gloriosas acciones revolucionarias de este hemisferio. En Haití hay sangre negra, india y blanca; la República nació de los conceptos de equidad, justicia y libertad para todos los seres humanos.

Hace 10 años, en instantes en que el Caribe y Centroamérica perdieron decenas de miles de vidas durante la tragedia del huracán Mitch, se creó en Cuba la ELAM para formar médicos latinoamericanos y caribeños que un día salvarían millones de vidas, pero en especial y por encima de todo, servirían como ejemplo en el noble ejercicio de la profesión médica. Junto a los cubanos estarán en Haití decenas de jóvenes venezolanos y otros latinoamericanos graduados en la ELAM. De todos los rincones del continente han llegado noticias de muchos compañeros que estudiaron en la ELAM, que desean colaborar junto a ellos en la noble tarea de salvar vidas de niños, mujeres y hombres, jóvenes y ancianos.

Habrá decenas de hospitales de campaña, centros de rehabilitación y hospitales, donde prestarán servicios más de mil médicos y estudiantes de los últimos años de la carrera de Medicina, procedentes de Haití, Venezuela, Santo Domingo, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Brasil, Chile y los demás países hermanos. Tenemos el honor de contar ya con un número de médicos norteamericanos que también estudiaron en la ELAM. Estamos dispuestos a cooperar con aquellos países e instituciones que deseen participar en estos esfuerzos para prestar servicios médicos en Haití.

Venezuela aportó ya casas de campaña, equipos médicos, medicamentos y alimentos. El gobierno de Haití ha brindado toda su cooperación y apoyo a este esfuerzo por llevar los servicios de salud gratuitamente al mayor número posible de haitianos. Será para todos un consuelo en medio de la mayor tragedia que ha tenido lugar en nuestro hemisferio.

Fidel Castro Ruz

Febrero 7 de 2010

8 y 46 p.m.

Reflections of Fidel Castro

TWO days ago, at almost six o’clock in the evening Cuban time and when, given its geographical location, night had already fallen in Haiti, television stations began to broadcast the news that a violent earthquake - measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale - had severely struck Port-au-Prince. The seismic phenomenon originated from a tectonic fault located in the sea just 15 kilometers from the Haitian capital, a city where 80% of the population inhabit fragile homes built of adobe and mud.

The news continued almost without interruption for hours. There was no footage, but it was confirmed that many public buildings, hospitals, schools and more solidly-constructed facilities were reported collapsed. I have read that an earthquake of the magnitude of 7.3 is equivalent to the energy released by an explosion of 400,000 tons of TNT.

Tragic descriptions were transmitted. Wounded people in the streets were crying out for medical help, surrounded by ruins under which their relatives were buried. No one, however, was able to broadcast a single image for several hours.

The news took all of us by surprise. Many of us have frequently heard about hurricanes and severe flooding in Haiti, but were not aware of the fact that this neighboring country ran the risk of a massive earthquake. It has come to light on this occasion that 200 years ago, a massive earthquake similarly affected this city, which would have been the home of just a few thousand inhabitants at that time.

At midnight, there was still no mention of an approximate figure in terms of victims. High-ranking United Nations officials and several heads of government discussed the moving events and announced that they would send emergency brigades to help. Given that MINUSTAH (United Stabilization Mission in Haiti) troops are deployed there - UN forces from various countries - some defense ministers were talking about possible casualties among their personnel.

It was only yesterday, Wednesday morning, when the sad news began to arrive of enormous human losses among the population, and even institutions such as the United Nations mentioned that some of their buildings in that country had collapsed, a word that does not say anything in itself but could mean a lot.

For hours, increasingly more traumatic news continued to arrive about the situation in this sister nation. Figures related to the number of fatal victims were discussed, which fluctuated, according to various versions, between 30,000 and 100,000. The images are devastating; it is evident that the catastrophic event has been given widespread coverage around the world, and many governments, sincerely moved by the disaster, are making efforts to cooperate according to their resources.

The tragedy has genuinely moved a significant number of people, particularly those in which that quality is innate. But perhaps very few of them have stopped to consider why Haiti is such a poor country. Why does almost 50% of its population depend on family remittances sent from abroad? Why not analyze the realities that led Haiti to its current situation and this enormous suffering as well?

The most curious aspect of this story is that no one has said a single word to recall the fact that Haiti was the first country in which 400,000 Africans, enslaved and trafficked by Europeans, rose up against 30,000 white slave masters on the sugar and coffee plantations, thus undertaking the first great social revolution in our hemisphere. Pages of insurmountable glory were written there. Napoleon’s most eminent general was defeated there. Haiti is the net product of colonialism and imperialism, of more than one century of the employment of its human resources in the toughest forms of work, of military interventions and the extraction of its natural resources.

This historic oversight would not be so serious if it were not for the real fact that Haiti constitutes the disgrace of our era, in a world where the exploitation and pillage of the vast majority of the planet’s inhabitants prevails.

Billions of people in Latin American, Africa and Asia are suffering similar shortages although perhaps not to such a degree as in the case of Haiti.

Situations like that of that country should not exist in any part of the planet, where tens of thousands of cities and towns abound in similar or worse conditions, by virtue of an unjust international economic and political order imposed on the world. The world population is not only threatened by natural disasters such as that of Haiti, which is a just a pallid shadow of what could take place in the planet as a result of climate change, which really was the object of ridicule, derision, and deception in Copenhagen.

It is only just to say to all the countries and institutions that have lost citizens or personnel because of the natural disaster in Haiti: we do not doubt that in this case, the greatest effort will be made to save human lives and alleviate the pain of this long-suffering people. We cannot blame them for the natural phenomenon that has taken place there, even if we do not agree with the policy adopted with Haiti.

But I have to express the opinion that it is now time to look for real and lasting solutions for that sister nation.

In the field of healthcare and other areas, Cuba - despite being a poor and blockaded country - has been cooperating with the Haitian people for many years. Around 400 doctors and healthcare experts are offering their services free of charge to the Haitian people. Our doctors are working every day in 227 of the country’s 337 communes. On the other hand, at least 400 young Haitians have trained as doctors in our homeland. They will now work with the reinforcement brigade which traveled there yesterday to save lives in this critical situation. Thus, without any special effort being made, up to 1,000 doctors and healthcare experts can be mobilized, almost all of whom are already there willing to cooperate with any other state that wishes to save the lives of the Haitian people and rehabilitate the injured.

Another significant number of young Haitians are currently studying medicine in Cuba.

We are also cooperating with the Haitian people in other areas within our reach. However, there can be no other form of cooperation worthy of being described as such than fighting in the field of ideas and political action in order to put an end to the limitless tragedy suffered by a large number of nations such as Haiti.

The head of our medical brigade reported: “The situation is difficult, but we have already started saving lives.” He made that statement in a succinct message hours after his arrival yesterday in Port-au-Prince with additional medical reinforcements.

Later that night, he reported that Cuban doctors and ELAM’s Haitian graduates were being deployed throughout the country. They had already seen more than 1,000 patients in Port-au-Prince, immediately establishing and putting into operation a hospital that had not collapsed and using field hospitals where necessary. They were preparing to swiftly set up other centers for emergency care.

We feel a wholesome pride for the cooperation that, in these tragic instances, Cuba doctors and young Haitian doctors who trained in Cuba are offering our brothers and sisters in Haiti!

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Granma

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2010/enero/vier15/Reflections-14enero.html

Joseph Massad*

(Kana’an eBulletin - Volume X - Issue 2141)

The Oslo agreement did not only usher in a new era of Palestinian-Israeli relations but has had a much more lasting effect in transforming the very language through which these relations have been governed internationally and the way the Palestinian leadership viewed them. Not only was the Palestinian vocabulary of liberation, end of colonialism, resistance, fighting racism, ending Israeli violence and theft of the land, independence, the right of return, justice and international law supplanted by new terms like negotiations, agreements, compromise, pragmatism, security assurances, moderation and recognition, all of which had been part of Israel’s vocabulary before Oslo and remain so, but also Oslo instituted itself as the language of peace that ipso facto de-legitimises any attempt to resist it as one that supports war, and dismisses all opponents of its surrender of Palestinian rights as opponents of peace. Making the language of surrender of rights the language of peace has also been part of Israel’s strategy before and after Oslo, and is also the language of US imperial power, in which Arabs and Muslims were instructed by President Barack Obama in his speech in Cairo last June. Thus the transformation that Oslo brought about was not only a transformation of language as such, but also of the Palestinian language and perspective through which the nature of Palestinian-Israeli relations were viewed by the Palestinian leadership, and that institutionalised instead the Israeli perspective and Israel’s vocabulary as neutral and objective. What Oslo aimed to do, therefore, was change the very goal of Palestinian politics from national independence from Israeli colonialism and occupation to one where Palestinians become fully dependent for their political and national survival on Israel and its sponsors in the interest of peace and security for their occupiers.

The key transformative formula of the Oslo agreement enshrined in the Declaration of Principles of 13 September 1993 is “Land for Peace”. This detrimental formula to internationally recognised Palestinian rights remains the guiding and delimiting approach of all subsequent agreements — and disagreements — between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and successive Israeli governments. This formula alone prejudices the entire process by presupposing that Israel has “land” which it would be willing to give to the “Arabs”, and that the “Arabs” — seen as responsible for the state of war with Israel — can grant Israel the peace for which it has longed for decades. Placing the responsibility of the Arab-Israeli wars on the “Arabs” is a standard view that is never questioned in the Western media or by Western governments. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) concession, however, has finally ensured that official Palestinians and other official Arabs, too, will not question it. Despite its surface appearance as a political compromise, this formula is in fact a reflection of the racial views characterising (European Jewish) Israelis and Palestinian and other Arabs. Whereas the Israelis are asked and are ostensibly (presented as) willing to negotiate about property, the recognised (Western) bourgeois right par excellence, Palestinians and other Arabs are asked to give up violence — or more precisely “their” violent means — as illegitimate and attributable only to uncivilised barbarians. The fact that Palestinians have already given up their rightful claim to 77 per cent of Palestine and were negotiating about their future sovereignty over a mere 23 per cent of their homeland did not qualify for a formula of “land for land” on which to base the “peace process”. In fact, the objective formula for any negotiations would be a “land for peace” formula whereby it is Palestinians who are giving up their rights to their historic homeland in exchange for an end to Israeli oppression of — and colonial violence against — their people.

The PLO, Israel, and the Western media hailed the Oslo agreement as “mutual recognition”. This, however, contradicts the actual words uttered by both parties, and the projected actions based on these words. Whereas the PLO (which wrote the first letter) recognised “the right of the state of Israel to exist in peace and security,” the Israeli government, “in response” to Yasser Arafat’s letter, “has decided to recognise the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations with the PLO within the Middle East peace process.” But this is not mutual recognition, as the Israelis did not recognise the Palestinian people’s right to exist in a state of their own in peace and security as the PLO had done vis-à-vis Israel. Had the PLO only recognised the Rabin government as the representative of the Israeli people, without necessarily granting any “right” to the Israeli state to exist in peace and security, then the PLO’s recognition would have been on a par with Israel’s. The actual agreement, therefore, did not amount to mutual recognition; rather, it amounted to the legitimation of the Jewish state by the very people against whom its racist colonial policies have been — and continue to be –practised, with the Israelis committing to nothing substantively new. Granting the PLO recognition as the representative of the Palestinians (something the majority of the world — except the US — had recognised since the mid-1970s) committed Israel to no concessions to the Palestinian people. It committed Israel only to a scenario whereby since the Israeli government was inclined to speak to “representatives” of the Palestinians, it would talk to the PLO, as it now recognised that party as their representative, whereas before it did not. This is precisely why successive Israeli governments and leaders have vacillated on whether they would grant the Palestinians the right to establish an independent state and always refer back to Oslo and subsequent agreements in which they made no such pledge.

Having exacted a precious recognition of their legitimacy from their victims, the Israelis moved forward through the mechanism of the Oslo peace process to divide the Palestinians into different groupings, the majority of whom would be expelled outside the peace process. By transforming the PLO, which represented all Palestinians in the Diaspora and in Israel and the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, into the Palestinian Authority (PA) which could only hope to represent Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, constituting one third of the Palestinian people, the Oslo agreements engineered a major demographic reduction of the Palestinian people, dividing them by a factor of three while bringing about a major demographic expansion of the Jewish population of Israel, multiplying their number by a factor of three. The insidious part of this process is how the PA, conscious of this transformation, continues to speak of the “Palestinian people”, which had been reduced through the Oslo Accords to those West Bank and Gaza Palestinians it now claims to represent. Diaspora Palestinians are simply referred to, in accordance with US and Israeli parlance, as “refugees”, and Israeli Palestinians are referred to by Israeli diktat as “Israeli Arabs”. In doing so, not only has the scope of the Palestinian leadership and its representative status of the whole Palestinian people been substantially reduced, but the Palestinian people themselves were diminished demographically by the PA’s appropriation of the designation “Palestinian people” to refer to a mere third of Palestinians.

In the meantime, the Oslo process which produced phantom agreements like the Geneva Accords, among others, has pushed forward the Israeli claim that Palestinians must recognise Israel’s right to exist not only in peace and security but also as a Jewish state, meaning a state that is racist by law and discriminates by law and governance against non-Jewish citizens, and one that encompasses not only its Jewish citizens but Jews everywhere. This is something that has been pushed by the Clinton, Bush, and more recently the Obama administrations. Indeed Obama does not miss an opportunity to reiterate his administration’s commitment to force the Palestinians to recognise Israel’s right to be a “Jewish state”. While Israel has no legitimacy and is not recognised by any international body as a “representative” of Jews worldwide, but rather as the state of the Israeli people, who are citizens of it, the PLO and the PA are called upon to recognise Israel’s jurisdiction over world Jewry. As such, the internationally recognised status of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people has been reduced to one third of Palestinians since Oslo, while the representative status of the Israeli government has been expanded threefold as recognised by the PA’s unofficial representatives in Geneva. Binyamin Netanyahu is insistent that no progress will take place in the so-called peace process unless the Palestinians officially recognise Israel’s right to be a racist Jewish state. President Obama has also called on all Arabs to ratify this recognition officially. This has been done despite the fact that the majority of Jews living outside Israel are not Israeli citizens and that no bodies representing them ever endowed the Israeli state with representative powers on their behalf.

Dividing and reducing the Palestinian people demographically has gone hand in hand with the territorial reduction of Palestine, or the parts of it that Israel is willing to negotiate over after redeploying its colonial occupation army around. Aside from the removal of the illegally expanded, occupied and colonised East Jerusalem (now expanded to many times its original size at the expense of West Bank lands) from the territories over which Israel would negotiate its redeployment, the West Bank itself has been subdivided into cantons that exclude Jewish colonial settlements and Jewish-only highways connecting them, as well as imposed nature reserves, military bases and closed areas. But this is not all. Israel also built the apartheid wall inside Palestinian land, effectively removing another 10 per cent of the West Bank from the negotiating table and its army redeployment. Another of the more important measures that the Israeli and Palestinian architects of the Oslo agreement took in order to guarantee the structural survival of the Oslo “peace process” was the creation of structures, institutions and classes that would be directly connected to it, and that can survive the collapse of the Oslo agreement itself while preserving the “process” that the agreement generated. This guarantee was enshrined in law and upheld by international funding predicated on the continuation of the “Oslo process”, as long as the latter continued to serve Israeli and US interests as well as the interests of the corrupt Palestinian elite that acquiesced in it.

The five main classes that the architects of Oslo created to ensure that the “process” survives are: a political class, divided between those elected to serve the Oslo process, whether to the Legislative Council or the executive branch (essentially the position of president of the PA), and those who are appointed to serve those who are elected, whether in the ministries, or in the presidential office; a policing class, numbering in the tens of thousands, whose function is to defend the Oslo process against all Palestinians who try to undermine it. It is divided into a number of security and intelligence bodies competing with one another, all vying to prove that they are most adept at neutralising any threat to the Oslo process. Under Arafat’s authority, members of this class inaugurated their services by shooting and killing 14 Palestinians they deemed enemies of the “process” in Gaza in 1994 — an achievement that earned them the initial respect of the Americans and the Israelis who insisted that the policing class should use more repression to be most effective. Their performance last summer in Jenin of killing Hamas members and unaffiliated bystanders to impress President Obama who asked the Palestinian leadership to keep their security part of the deal is the most recent example of this function.

Also: a bureaucratic class attached to the political class and the policing class and that constitutes an administrative body of tens of thousands who execute the orders of those elected and appointed to serve the “process”; an NGO class: another bureaucratic and technical class whose finances fully depend on their serving the Oslo process and ensuring its success through planning and services; and, a business class composed of expatriate Palestinian businessmen as well as local businessmen — including especially members of the political, policing and bureaucratic classes — whose income is derived from financial investment in the Oslo process and from profit-making deals that the PA can make possible. While the NGO class mostly does not receive money from the PA, being the beneficiary of foreign governmental and non- governmental financial largesse that is structurally connected to the Oslo process, the political, policing, and bureaucratic classes receive all their legitimate and illegitimate income from the PA directly.

By linking the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the Oslo process, the architects had given them a crucial stake in its survivability, even and especially if it failed to produce any political results. For the Palestinian elite that took charge of the PA, the main task all along was to ensure that the Oslo process continues and that the elite remain in control of all the institutions that guarantee the survival of the “process”. What the elite did not anticipate was that they could lose control to Hamas, a public opponent of the Oslo process that in accordance with expectations had boycotted the 1994 gerrymandered and Fatah- controlled elections. The 2006 elections, which Fatah was confident it would win, constituted an earthquake that could destroy all these structural guarantees and with them the “process” they were designed to protect. Hence the panic of the Americans who engineered the coup with the aid of Israel and PA security under Mohamed Dahlan to topple the Hamas government, which included kidnapping its members of parliament, government ministers, and politicians and holding them hostage in Israeli jails, and finally staging a violent takeover of Gaza that backfired. All attempts since the American failed coup in Gaza have focussed on perpetuating the peace process through maintenance of its structures under PA control and away from the democratically elected Hamas.

Indeed, the destruction of Palestinian democracy was a necessary price to pay, insisted Israel and the Americans, pushed forward by the military efforts of Lieutenant General Keith Dayton. This situation became possible because of the funding strategy of the US, Israel and Arab oil producing states towards the Palestinian struggle. The story of the Palestinian national movement can only be told through the ways and means that different Arab and non-Arab governments have tried to control it. While the PLO was established and controlled principally by the regime of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the 1967 defeat weakened that arrangement leading to the revolutionary guerrillas takeover of the organisation in 1969. With Fatah and the leftist Palestinian guerrillas at the helm, the revolutionary potential of the PLO constituted such a threat that it precipitated an all-out war in Jordan in 1970, a situation that powerful and repressive Arab regimes did not want to see repeated. It is in this context that Arab oil money (from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq) began to pour into the coffers of the PLO, primarily to ensure that it would not encourage revolutionary change in Arab countries and that insofar as it did not compromise Arab regime interests its weapons should only be directed towards Israel. The Lebanese civil war and the PLO role in it in the second half of the 1970s remained a problem but, as far as they were concerned, it was a problem that Arab regimes were able to contain.

With the onset of the 1980s and the military defeat of the PLO in 1982 in Beirut, Arab funding for the PLO was no longer conditioned on its not turning its weapons against them only, but that the organisation would also no longer target Israel. The various attempts at agreements between the PLO and King Hussein in the mid- 1980s were part of that plan. With continued Israeli and US refusal to deal with the PLO no matter how much its policy and ideology had changed, the situation remained frozen until the first Palestinian uprising in 1987 gave the PLO the bargaining opportunity to lay down its weapons against Israel. The formalisation of this transformation took place in Algiers in 1988 and later at the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991.

As oil funding dried up after the Gulf War of 1990-91, the PLO needed new funders. Enter the United States and its allies whose terms did not only include the Oslo agreement but also that the newly created and Fatah-controlled PA be indeed armed but that its weapons should have a new target: the Palestinian people themselves. The PA obliged and continued to receive its funding until the second Intifada when, contra their raison d’être, some of its security forces did engage the Israelis in gunfire when the Israelis attacked Palestinians. Funding was intermittently stopped, Arafat was placed under house arrest, and the Israelis reinvaded. A resumption of steady funding continued after Arafat’s death conditional upon Mahmoud Abbas’s “seriousness” in pointing Palestinian guns at the Palestinians themselves, which he and the PA’s thuggish security apparatuses have done. However, they have not been as effective as the US and Israel had wished, which is why General Dayton is assuming full control of the military situation on the ground in order to “assist” the Palestinians to deliver their peace part of the bargain to Israel.

Note that throughout the last 16 years, Israeli leaders have consistently said, in line with the formula of land for peace, that they want and seek peace with the Palestinians, but not the establishment of a Palestinian state, nor in order to ensure the Palestinians’ right to self- determination. Indeed, not only has Israel multiplied the number of settlements and more than doubled the Jewish colonial settler population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, chipping away at more of the land that was said to be under negotiations, it has done so while consistently exacting more Palestinian concessions to ensure Israeli “security” in order for the Palestinians to give Israel the “peace” on which the formula of “land for peace” is based. The Americans and the Europeans have also insisted that the Palestinians must give Israel peace before it can decide which lands to give them back and under whichever arrangement it finds most ensuring of this “peace”. Therefore, what land for peace — despite or because of its definitional prejudice against the Palestinian people — has brought about is a perpetual deferment of the return of land with insistent demands of advance payments on the peace the Palestinians must deliver. While the redeployment around Gaza and laying siege to its population, starving and bombarding them, is marketed as Israel’s compromising by returning land, the reality remains that the Gaza Strip has been transformed from a prison policed by the Israelis into a concentration camp guarded and surrounded by them from the outside with infiltration inside as the need arises, as it did last winter.

Ultimately then, what the Oslo agreement and the process it generated have achieved is a foreclosure of any real or imagined future independence of the Palestinian leadership, or even national independence for one third of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who are, at any rate, the only Palestinians that the Oslo agreement claims to want to help achieve it. By mortgaging the Palestinian leadership to US and Israeli sponsorship, by creating and maintaining administrative, legal and financial structures that will ensure this dependence, Oslo has been what it was designed to be from the start: the mechanism of ending the Palestinian quest to end Israeli colonialism and occupation, and the legitimation of Israel’s racist nature by the very people over whom it exercises its colonial and racist dominion. Anyone who questions these strictures can be fought with the ideological weapon of pragmatism. Opposing Oslo makes one a utopian extremist and rejectionist, while participating in its structure makes one a pragmatist moderate person working for peace. The most effective ideological weapon that Oslo has deployed since 1993 is precisely that anyone who opposes its full surrender of Palestinian national rights is a proponent of war and an opponent of peace. In short, the goal of the Oslo process, which has been reached with much success, is not the establishment of Palestinian independence from Israel’s illegal occupation, but rather to end Palestinian independence as a future goal and as a current reality. Seen from this angle, Oslo continues to be a resounding success.

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Al-Ahram Weekly

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/982/re7.htm

* The writer teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. This is the text of a speech he delivered at a conference in Oslo in 2009.

Eliades Acosta Matos

(Boletín electrónico de Kana’an - Volumen X - Número 2122)

Las relaciones entre el sionismo y el neoconservatismo norteamericano son tan carnales y antiguas que no pocos se preguntan si la misión de gendarme letal que esta última nación he tomado sobre sus hombros, especialmente en el Medio Oriente, y teniendo a la vista las guerras de Irak y Afganistán y las amenazas contra Irán, no son las guerras que necesitaba librar el estado de Israel, pero a través de otro. ¿Acaso el poderoso lobby sionista los Estadios Unidos no es capaz de eso y mucho más?

Ya son míticos los días en que un grupo de desilusionados intelectuales judíos de New York, hará cerca de 70 años, se comenzó a agrupar alrededor de un grupo de ideas y tradiciones sobre las cuales no tardaría en erigirse el edifico neoconservador, reverenciando también, con mítica unción, las doctrina sionistas contendidas en la filosofía de Leo Strauss . Desertores de la izquierda, ex trostkystas, ex comunistas, sindicalistas y simples opositores al estalinismo, no tardaron en pasarse con armas y bagaje a las filas de quienes consideraban, hasta las vísperas, sus enemigos de clase. Pronto aquellos electrones libres serían fichados, organizados y financiados bajo cuerda por el complejo militar-industrial, las grandes corporaciones, el lobby sionista y las agencias de inteligencia empeñadas entonces en vertebrar las campañas ideológicas y culturales del capitalismo en los años de la Guerra Fría, de enfrentamiento y contención a los avances del comunismo y la URSS.

Hoy, lo sembrado por aquel puñado de doctrinarios militantes que usaban una jerga a mitad de camino entre el bolchevismo y la exaltación de las bondades de la libre empresa, se ha enquistado en el corazón de ese frondoso árbol imperialista que es el movimiento neoconservador, capaz no solo de preparar el advenimiento y respaldar a los gobiernos republicanos, desde Reagan a George W Bush, sino de tener a su merced al gobierno de Obama, mediante pactos onerosos, acoso despiadado y mediatizaciones de sus topos sembrados en los diferentes niveles del “Gabinete del Cambio”. Y amagando con volver por sus fueros en el 2012.

Pero, lo mismo que el capital y el imperialismo, el neoconservatismo que los expresa tiene una marcada vocación globalizadora que lo ha hecho abrir filiales de pensamiento y establecer alianzas ideológicas y políticas por medio mundo. Neoconservadores militantes hay entre los jóvenes abogados y políticos revanchistas japoneses de la “NeoDefense School”, y lo es Peter Reith, ex ministro australiano de Defensa, como también el Center for Social Cohesion y el “Cambridge Group”, del Reino Unido, y ese tremebundo clon folclórico y flamenco, mala copia del American Entreprise Institute o de Heritage Foundation, que es la Fundación para el Análisis y los Estudios Sociales (FAES) que anima un no menos esperpéntico José María Aznar.

FAES, por ejemplo, mantiene vasos comunicantes con un puñado de organizaciones afines en América Latina, a través de las cuales se derrama la Buena Nueva neoconservadora de la restauración neoliberal capitalista y de enfrentamiento a los procesos democráticos y populares de cambio que viven los pueblos de la región. Entres sus corresponsales, que son, por transición corresponsales de quienes veneran el legado del Proyecto para un Nuevo Siglo Americano, están Súmate en Venezuela, la Fundación Ecuador Libre, Podemos, en Bolivia, la Fundación Renovación en Libertad, de Colombia, Red Libertad, de Argentina, el Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo, de Chile y hasta un puñado de avispados criollos, dizque disidentes, que en Cuba trabajan por la derrota de la Revolución y el regreso del capitalismo, y que tiene sembrado en su ADN tanto plattismo como para afirmar, en la expresión marginal de uno de ellos, … ” que contra el Yuma no se puede”.

Y del sionismo, ¿qué?

Pues navega ufano por aguas latinoamericanas mezclado con la construcción de las filiales neoconservadoras, y especialmente unido a una visible penetración del complejo militar-industrial israelí en las estructuras militares y de seguridad de la región. Fantasmagórica empresas israelíes, como Global CST, dirigida por los generales® Israel Ziv y Yosi Kuperwasser lo mismo entrenan a los soldados peruanos que combaten los remanentes de Sendero Luminoso, que venden anualmente 450 millones de dólares en armamento al gobierno de Uribe, en Colombia y participan en el diseño y ejecución de la operación Jaque, que liberó a Ingrid Betancourt y otros rehenes de las FARC. Un no menos fantasmagórico Yehuda Leitner ex oficial de inteligencia israelí, devenido empresario y traficante de armas en Honduras desde los tiempos de Posada, Félix Rodríguez y el escándalo Irán-contra, es quien ha suministrado los gases tóxicos, los cañones sónicos, los asesores y buena parte de la bien surtida panoplia con que los golpistas hondureños apalean, matan y desparecen al pueblo que resiste y lucha por la democracia escarnecida.

En esta simbiosis entre el sionismo y el movimiento neoconservador norteamericano, no solo se expresa, como se está evidenciando, en el apoyo ultramontano norteamericano a las genocidas políticas israelíes contra el pueblo palestino, sino también en la ejecución del trabajo sucio del imperialismo yanqui en América Latina. No solo son ideas, también los socios se están distribuyendo cuotas de muerte y represión, a tanto por cabeza,… “y yo te hago el trabajo allá, y tú me lo haces acá”.

Este maridaje, tan peligroso, no solo se expresa en la mística y las leyendas de los cabales padres fundadores del neoconservatismo; no solo en artículos tremebundos como el firmado por Norman Podhoretz, el Neo Patriarca, y publicado el pasado mayo en las páginas de la pro-sionista revista “Commentary” titulado “How Obama´s America Migth Threaten Israel”, sino también en la planificada colaboración militar y de inteligencia norteamericano-israelí en diferentes regiones del planeta, como América Latina.

Insertados en la nueva distribución de las tareas imperiales, militares israelíes participan jubilosamente en la privatización de la guerra y la represión contra los pueblos latinoamericanos, mientras que pensadores sionistas recomiendan restauraciones y privatizaciones neoliberales, en esta aún incipiente contraofensiva neoconservadora por recuperar la hegemonía en su traspatio.

Mientras las viejas y nefastas doctrinas de la Seguridad Nacional se reciclan en novedosas y no menos nefastas Doctrinas Antiterroristas, no es de dudar que empiecen a regresar las picanas eléctricas fabricadas esta vez por algún consorcio israelí. Y que los herederos postmodernos de Dan Mitrione, aquel experto en torturas de la CIA ajusticiado por los Tupamaros en Uruguay, lleguen a las salas de tormento encapuchados y con una de las obras de Leo Strauss bajo el brazo.

Milagros de la globalización y de esta nueva Entente del terror imperialista.

(Kana’an eBulletin - Volume IX - Issue 2106)

On Dec 23, 2009, Professor Abdul Sattar Kassem will appear in court in Nablus for a couple of trials. One has to do with an allegation of distorting the image of a Palestinian intelligence recruit by saying that he was the one who burned my car; and the other has to do with distorting a preventive security recruit by saying that the one who shot at sheikh al-Beetawi is an Israeli agent.

I appeared before the court before, but neither the alligator nor the witnesses showed up.

It is worth noting that I wrote to the European countries that are financing the Palestinian Authority demanding compensation for my cars because they are enabling the Authority to do harm to my property and family by financing it. The Europeans should deduct the compensation from the money they send to the authority.

It is worth noting that I spent my sabbatical in 2000 in jail for no declared reasons. It is the first example and the only one so far in history that an academic spends his sabbatical in jail.

The Audacity of Ethnic Cleansing

By Mike Whitney

(Kana’an eBulletin - Volume IX - Issue 2102)

“Today, we Afghans remain trapped between two enemies: the Taliban on one side and US/NATO forces and their warlord hirelings on the other.” Malalai Joya “A Woman Among the Warlords” Scribner Publishing, New York

The Bush administration never had any intention of liberating Afghanistan or establishing democracy. The real aim was to remove the politically-intractable Taliban and replace them with a puppet regime run by a former-CIA asset. The rest of Afghanistan would be parceled-off to the warlords who assisted in the invasion and who had agreed to do much of the United States dirty-work on the ground. In the eight years of military occupation which followed, that basic strategy has never changed. The U.S. is just as committed now as it was at the war’s inception to establish a beachhead in Central Asia to oversee the growth of China, to execute disruptive/covert operations against Russia, to control vital pipeline routes from the Caspian Basin, and to maintain a heavy military presence in the most critical geopolitical area in the world today.

The objectives were briefly stated in a recent CounterPunch article by Tariq Ali:

“It’s now obvious to everyone that this is not a ‘good’ war designed to eliminate the opium trade, discrimination against women and everything bad - apart from poverty, of course. So what is Nato doing in Afghanistan? Has this become a war to save Nato as an institution? Or is it more strategic, as was suggested in the spring 2005 issue of Nato Review:

The centre of gravity of power on this planet is moving inexorably eastward … The Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and positive to this world, but as yet the rapid change therein is neither stable nor embedded in stable institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the strategic responsibility of Europeans and North Americans, and the institutions they have built, to lead the way … security effectiveness in such a world is impossible without both legitimacy and capability.” (”Short Cuts in Afghanistan”, Tariq Ali, counterpunch)

President Barak Obama’s speech at West Point was merely a reiteration of US original commitment to strengthen the loose confederation of warlords–many of who are either in the Afghan Parliament or hold high political office–to pacify nationalist elements, and to expand the war into Pakistan. Obama is just a cog in a much larger imperial wheel which moves forward with or without his impressive oratory skills. So far, he has been much more successful in concealing the real motives behind military escalation than his predecessor George W. Bush. It’s doubtful that Obama could stop current operations even if he wanted to, and there is no evidence that he wants to.

The Pentagon has settled on a new counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) which it intends to implement in Afghanistan. The program will integrate psyops, special forces, NGOs, psychologists, media, anthropologists, humanitarian agencies, public relations, reconstruction, and conventional forces to rout the Taliban, assert control over the South and the tribal areas, and to quash any indigenous resistance. Clandestine activity and unmanned drone attacks will increase, while a “civilian surge” will be launched to try to win hearts and minds in the densely populated areas. Militarily, the goal is to pit one ethnicity against the other, to incite civil war, and to split the country in smaller units that can be controlled by warlords working with Washington. Where agricultural specialists, educators, engineers, lawyers, relief agencies and NGOs can be used, they will be. Where results depend on the application of extreme violence; it will also be…unsparingly. This is the plan going forward, a plan designed for conquest, subjugation and resource-stripping. Here is an excerpt from Zoltan Grossman’s article in counterpunch “Afghanistan: The Roach Motel of Empires” which details the balkenization strategy:

“We are arming and financing the same vicious men (the Northern Alliance) who brought fundamentalism to Kabul in the first place….Like the Soviets, the Americans do not understand that the insurgency is driven not only by Islamist fundamentalism, but also by ethnic nationalism. In the case of the Taliban, they are representing the grievances of the Pashtuns who have seen the artificial colonial “Durand Line” divide their homeland between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The best way to defuse the Taliban is to recognize the legitimacy of this historical grievance, and incorporate Pashtun civil society into both governments.

But instead of unifying the different ethnic regions of Afghanistan, the NATO occupation seems headed more toward a de facto partition of these regions. The foreign policy team that President Obama has assembled includes some of the same figures who advocated the ethnic-sectarian partition of Yugoslavia and Iraq. Obama’s Special Envoy to Af-Pak, Richard Holbrooke, authored the agreement that partioned Bosnia into Serb and Muslim-Croat republics in 1995, in effect rubberstamping the ethnic cleansing that had forcibly removed populations during a three-year civil war. He also turned a blind eye when Serb civilians were expelled from Croatia the same year, and from Kosovo in 1999.

President Karzai recently instituted a series of laws on women in Shia communities, causing an outcry from women’s rights groups. Hardly unnoticed was his application of different legal standards to different sectarian territories-a sign of de facto (informal) partition. Various “peace” proposals have advocated ceding control of some Pashtun provinces to the Taliban. Far from bringing peace, such an ethnic-sectarian partition would exacerbate the violent “cleansing” of mixed territories to drive out those civilians who are not of the dominant group-the process that brought the “peace of the graveyard” to Bosnia, Kosovo, and much of Iraq.” ( Zoltan Grossman, “Afghanistan: The Roach Motel of Empires” counterpunch)

If Grossman is correct, than Obama’s professed commitment to Afghan liberation merely masks a vicious counterinsurgency strategy that will ethnically cleanse areas in the south while driving tens of thousands of innocent people from their homes. This is essentially what took place in Baghdad during the so-called “surge”; over a million Sunnis were forced from the city by death squads and Shia militia under the watchful eye of US troops. US counterinsurgency wunderkind Gen Stanley McChrystal played a pivotal role in pacifying Iraq, which is why he was chosen by Obama to oversee military operations in Afghanistan. Here’s a clip from an article by Ulrich Rippert “Europe backs Afghanistan strategy aimed at “regionalization”‘ on the World Socialist Web Site which provides more details on the plan to Balkenize Afghanistan:

“During his inaugural visit to Washington, new German defense secretary, Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg said it was necessary to put aside “the romantic idea of democratization of the whole country along the lines of the western model” and instead “transfer control of individual provinces step by step to the Afghan security forces.”

The new strategy of “regionalization” is aimed at dividing Afghanistan into individual cantons-in a similar manner to what took place in Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia. Up to now the US-NATO occupation supported the government of Hamid Karzai and sold the process to the public as “democratization”. However, occupation forces are moving increasingly to hand over power directly to regional warlords and their militias-on the assumption that such regional forces will follow the orders of their imperial masters. As soon as there is no more danger in a specific province, Guttenberg declared, then the international troops should be withdrawn from that area.” (Ulrich Rippert “Europe backs Afghanistan strategy aimed at “regionalization”‘, World Socialist Web Site)

Obama’s escalation is not aimed at strengthening democracy, liberating women or bringing an end to the brutal, misogynist rule of religious fanatics. It is pure, unalloyed imperial politics, the rearranging of the map and its people to serve Washington’s interests. As journalist Alex Lantier notes on the World Socialist Web Site, the plan does not end with Afghanistan, but stretches across the globe. The hard-right policymakers behind Obama, still have not abandoned their dream of global rule. Here’s an excerpt:

“As Obama indicated elsewhere in his speech, this escalation is one step in plans for even broader wars. “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly,” he said, “and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Mentioning Somalia and Yemen as potential targets, he added, “our effort will involve disorderly regions and diffuse enemies.”

The inclusion of this passage made clear that Obama was basing his Afghan policy on a report issued last month by Anthony Cordesman of the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Cordesman wrote: “The President must be frank about the fact that any form of victory in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be part of a much wider and longer struggle. He must make it clear that the ideological, demographic, governance, economic, and other pressures that divide the Islamic world mean the world will face threats in many other nations that will endure indefinitely into the future. He should mention the risks in Yemen and Somalia, make it clear that the Iraq war is not over, and warn that we will still face both a domestic threat and a combination of insurgency and terrorism that will continue to extend from Morocco to the Philippines, and from Central Asia deep into Africa, regardless of how well we do in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

He added: “…the present level of US, allied, Afghan and Pakistani casualties will almost certainly double and probably more than triple before something approaching victory is won.” (Alex Lantier “Obama’s speech on Afghanistan: A compendium of lies” World Socialist web Site)

In the years ahead, we can expect to see relief and reconstruction efforts stepped up to provide security in the heavily-populated areas while the war in the south is expanded and intensified. Tajiks and Uzbeks, in the Afghan military will be enlisted to fight or expel their Pashtun countrymen, while warlords, druglords and human rights abusers are handed over large swathes of the countryside. 30,000 more troops is not enough to lock-down all of Afghanistan, but it may be enough to force hundreds of thousands of people into regional bantustans where they can be controlled by bloodthirsty chieftains, the very same men who leveled Kabul on April 28, 1992, killing 80,000 Afghan civilians.

This is Obama’s plan for Afghanistan, a carbon-copy of George Bush’s.

:::::

Source:Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)

http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2009/12/04/obama-plan-for-afghanistan-a-carbon-copy-of-george-bushand-8217-s.html

(Kana’an eBulletin - Volume IX - Issue 2102)

In the final paragraphs of a Reflection entitled “The Bells Are Tolling For the Dollar,” published two months ago, on October 9, I mentioned the climate change problem brought on humanity by imperialist capitalism.

With regards to carbon emissions I said: “The United States is not making any real effort but accepting just a 4% reduction with respect to the year 1990.” At that moment, scientists were demanding a minimum of 25 to 40 percent by the year 2020.

Then I added: “In the morning of this Friday 9, the world woke up to the news that “the good Obama” of the riddle -as explained by Bolivarian President Hugo Chavez Frias at the United Nations-had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I do not always agree with the positions of that institution but I must admit that, at this moment it was, in my view, a positive action. It compensates the setback sustained by Obama in Copenhagen when Rio de Janeiro, and not Chicago, was chosen as the venue of the 2016 Olympics, a choice that elicited heated attacks from his right-wing adversaries.

“Many will feel that he has yet to earn the right to receive such an award. Rather than a prize to the President of the United States, we choose to see that decision as a criticism of the genocidal policy pursued by more than a few presidents of that country who took that nation to the crossroads where it is today. That is, as a call for peace and for the pursuit of solutions conducive to the survival of the species.”

Obviously, I was carefully watching the black president, elected in a racist country afflicted by a deep economic crisis; however, I avoided prejudiced judgments based on his campaign statements and his position as leader of the Yankee executive.

Nearly one month later, in another Reflection entitled “A Science Fiction Story,” I wrote that:

“The American people are not the culprits but rather the victims of a system that is not only unsustainable but worse still: it is incompatible with the life of humanity.

“The smart and rebellious Obama who suffered humiliation and racism in his childhood and youth understands this, but the Obama educated by the system and committed to it and to the methods that took him to the US presidency cannot resist the temptation to pressure, to threaten and even to deceive others.”

And immediately added: “He is a workaholic. Perhaps no other American president would dare to engage in such an intense program as he intends to carry out in the next eight days.”

As it shows in that Reflection, I analyzed the complexity and contradictions of his long journey through Southeast Asia and I wondered: “What is our distinguished friend planning to discuss during his intense journey?” His advisors had claimed that he would be discussing every issue with China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and so on, and so forth.

It is clear now that Obama was paving the way for his remarks of December 1st, 2009, in West Point. That day he made a thorough analysis. He carefully chose and produced 169 phrases aimed at pressing the right “keys” that would win him the support of the American people for a certain war strategy. Cicero’s diatribes would pale beside his assumed postures. That day I had the impression to be listening to George W. Bush. His arguments were no different from the philosophy of his predecessor, except for a fig leaf: Obama was opposed to torture.

The main leader of the organization blamed for the terrorist act of 9/11 had been recruited and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency to fight the Soviet troops, even when he was not an Afghan.

Cuba’s condemnation of the terrorist action and other additional measures were made public that same day. We also warned that the way to fight terrorism was not through war.

The organization of the Taliban -a word meaning student-sprang up from the Afghan forces fighting the USSR; they were no enemies of the United States. An honest analysis would lead to the true story behind that war.

Today, it is not the Soviet troops but the US’s and NATO’s that are occupying that country with great violence. The policy that the new US Administration is offering the American people is the same as that of George W. Bush, who ordered the invasion of Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with the attack on the Twin Towers.

The President of the United States is not saying a word of the hundreds of thousands of people, children and elders included, who have perished in Iraq and Afghanistan or of the millions of Iraqis and Afghans suffering from the consequences of the war, even when they had no responsibility whatsoever with the events of New York. Rather than a wish, the final phrase of his speech, “God bless America,” sounded like an order to heaven.

Why did Obama accept the Nobel Peace Prize if he had already decided to fight the war in Afghanistan to the very end? His cynical action was uncalled-for.

He later announced that he would be receiving the Prize in the Norwegian capital on December 11, and then travel to the Copenhagen Summit on the 18th.

Now, we should expect another dramatic speech in Oslo; a new textbook of phrases hiding the real existence of an imperial superpower with hundreds of military basis deployed all over the world; two-hundred years of military interventions in our hemisphere; and, over a century of genocidal actions in countries like Vietnam, Laos and others in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and elsewhere on Earth.

The problem with Obama and his wealthiest allies now is that the planet they dominate with an iron fist is just falling apart.

The crime against humanity committed by Bush is well known, as he ignored the Kyoto Protocol and failed to do for ten years what should have been done long before that. Obama is not an ignorant. He is aware –as Gore was– of the grave danger threatening us all, but he hesitates and shows weakness vis-à-vis that country’s blind and irresponsible oligarchy. He does not act like Lincoln did in 1861 to resolve the slavery issue and preserve national integrity, or like Roosevelt to cope with the economic crisis and with fascism. On Tuesday, he merely cast a timid stone in the troubled waters of international opinion. The manager of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, has stated that the threats to the American people’s health and wellbeing posed by global warming make it possible for Obama to take action without consulting Congress.

None of the wars known to history pose a greater danger.

The wealthiest nations will try to place on the poorest ones the bulk of the burden to save the human species. The wealthiest should be asked to make the greatest sacrifices, be most rational in the use of resources and bring a maximum of justice to human beings.

It is likely that in Copenhagen only a minimum of time will be bought to reach a binding agreement that can really help to find solutions. If that were the case, the Summit could at least be considered a modest step forward.

Let’s see what happens!

Fidel Castro Ruz

December 9, 2009

12:34 PM

Source: Cuba Now

http://www.cubanow.net/pages/loader.php?sec=24&t=2&item=8057

by Raymond Deane

(Kana’an eBulletin - Volume IX - Issue 2102)

As a classical musician involved in pro-Palestinian activism, I frequently encounter the assumption that I am an unconditional admirer of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (WEDO). My reservations on this score tend to produce shocked disapproval: How could I not enthuse about such an idealistic project, particularly since it was co-founded by the late Edward Said, a figure for whom I have frequently expressed respect and admiration?

In truth, I have always been a little wary of Said’s veneration for the eighteenth/nineteenth century canon of European classical music. I look in vain in his writings on the subject[1] for a historical and political contextualisation of music comparable of that to which he so perceptively subjected literature in his indispensable Culture and Imperialism.[2]

In his 2002 speech accepting the Principe de Asturias Prize, Said claimed that he and his friend the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim founded the WEDO “for humanistic rather than political reasons”. This surprising dualism implies that music belongs to a utopian sphere somehow removed from the dialectical hurly-burly of hegemony and resistance.

The paradoxes of Said’s position have been ably dissected by the British musicologist Rachel Beckles Willson.[3] She quotes her colleague Ben Etherington’s critique of Said’s tendency “to assert the intrinsic value of Western elite music without really exploring how that tradition escapes mediation.” Paraphrasing Said’s critique of literary scholars in his Humanism and Democratic Criticism[4] she convincingly claims that he “omitted to make ‘a radical examination of the ideology of the [musical performance] field itself.’” (Willson’s chain brackets).

Undoubtedly Barenboim has a less sublimated view of the classical repertoire than Said, and has been more broadminded than many of his superstar peers in his willingness to perform and advocate modern and “avant-garde” music. He has also displayed great independence and personal courage by criticising the Israeli establishment and repeatedly flouting Israeli laws to travel to the occupied West Bank - even bringing the orchestra to Ramallah in 2005.

In 2008, Barenboim accepted honourary Palestinian “citizenship” from the Palestinian Authority. The dissident Israeli journalist Amira Hass put this in context: “It could just as well have [been] said that the PA granted Barenboim citizenship of the moon, since the PA has no authority to grant citizenship… to anyone.”[5] She tellingly points out the broader political implications of such an action: “The PA is seen as a ’state’ with the sovereign right to grant ‘citizenship.’” The illusion of Palestinian statehood, fostered by the 1993 Oslo Accords, has served to absolve Israel from its obligations as an occupier under the 4^th Geneva Convention. The gesture towards Barenboim, although empty, was pregnant with propaganda value for the Israeli state and its PA accomplices.

Barenboim’s most recent book is confusingly entitled Music Quickens Time in the US and Everything is Connected in Europe[6]. Reflecting on the fact that Hitler loved classical music, he concludes that “there is not enough thought about music, only visceral reactions almost on an animal level.” “Listening,” he tells us, “is hearing with thought.” The idea that an analytical approach to music is potentially an antidote to its instrumentalisation by fascistic forces is a radical one, but Barenboim goes a clumsy step further by repeatedly depicting musical processes as metaphors for social and political structures. Thus the failure of the Oslo process is linked to the connection between musical content and tempo: “the relationship between content and time was erroneous.” “The education of the ear” - or “auditory intelligence” - is important “for the functioning of society, and therefore also of governments.” “A nation’s constitution could be compared to a score, and the politicians its interpreters” and can be “challenged and adapted” in a democracy, “becoming a kind of collectively composed symphony.”

Unfortunately, while Barenboim professes faith in the axiom that “everything is connected”, the score written by Zionism is premised on “estrangement and alienation”, in the words of the anti-Zionist eco-socialist Joel Kovel.[7] Barenboim buys into the Zionist narrative all along the line. “The Arab population of Palestine had been unsympathetic toward Jewish immigration from the very beginning”, he tells us, as if the indigenous Jewish population hadn’t been equally suspicious of Zionist colonisation - to call it by its proper name. The totalitarian “military rule” imposed by Israel on its Palestinian minority during the early years of statehood was “abominable”, admittedly, but “necessary for its self-preservation”. The renaming of Arab streets after Israeli generals represents “at best thoughtlessness and insensitivity… and at worst an utter lack of strategy in dealing with the question of Arabs in Israel”, rather than a symbolic linchpin of Zionist conquest and dispossession.

In the midst of Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead”, the onslaught on Gaza beginning in December 2008 that led to the killing of some 1400 Palestinians, Barenboim wrote a newspaper article that, while critical of the carnage, similarly repeated a number of Zionist propaganda tropes.[8] Hamas is “a terrorist organisation”, rather than a legitimate resistance movement, and must “realise that its interests are not best served by violence”, although this offensive followed the Israeli breach of a ceasefire long maintained by Hamas. The war in Palestine is “a conflict between two peoples who are both deeply convinced of their right to live on the same very small piece of land”, not a brutal colonial assault by a powerful state on a virtually imprisoned civilian population. Of course “it is self-evident that Israel has the right to defend itself”, a truism that, except possibly for the 1973 “Yom Kippur” war, has never had any bearing on Israel’s relentlessly belligerent actions against its neighbours.

This article almost certainly played a role in causing the cancellation of Barenboim’s projected attendance at an opera performance in Ramallah in July 2009, lest it be disrupted by demonstrations. Once again Amira Hass had her finger on the pulse: “The bulk of dissent across Ramallah was not just over the performance, but over the very existence of the Barenboim-Said Foundation”.[9]

This Foundation, which provided the Children & Youth Choir and theYouth Orchestra for the opera in question, was set up by Barenboim and Said shortly before the latter’s death in 2003, when its administration passed into the capable hands of Said’s widow Mariam. Hass quotes “[a] leading activist in the Palestinian movement for a cultural boycott of Israel” (PACBI) as stating that the Foundation “does not take any position against the Israeli occupation or apartheid policies. They talk about promoting mutual understanding and coexistence through dialogue, music, etc. This is an attempt to give a normal image to a very abnormal, colonial situation.”

Already in 2004 Barenboim stated that “[a]n hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get people interested in music. But an hour of violin lessons in Palestine is an hour away from violence and fundamentalism…”[10] This insulting formulation led the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM) to decline any further funding from the Foundation.

The ESNCM is a department of Birzeit University with branches in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem. Without funding from the Foundation it is forced to exist on a shoestring, yet it provides a wide range of instruction in both western classical and Arabic music for young Palestinians regardless of class, creed, or gender, while running its own ensembles and an orchestra - The Palestine Youth Orchestra - which it hopes to expand to 100 members by 2010.

In her introduction to An Orchestra Without Borders, a collection of testimonies from WEDO members, Barenboim’s assistant Elena Cheah claims that “[a]n orchestra is a microcosm of society.”[11] In terms of the Middle East, it would appear that while the ESNCM strives, with explicit political determination and an almost total lack of encouragement from the West, to be a microcosm of the whole of Palestinian society, the WEDO represents the Israeli bourgeoisie and the more privileged sectors of Arab (including Palestinian) society. Barenboim’s claim that “young musicians from the Middle East have the freedom of choice over whether or not to come to the West-Eastern Divan workshop”, as if this option were available to young musicians from Gaza or from Lebanese refugee camps, displays an almost hubristic alienation from reality.

Alas, the testimonies from Israeli WEDO members collected in the book suggest that a “utopian” emphasis on human interaction with their Arab colleagues has done little to enhance insight into the political realities surrounding them.

For Daniel Cohen, Barenboim has “the power to help Israelis understand where they are living, and to help the Arabs to accept our existence in Israel as our right…” Clearly the young violinist doesn’t see this as a somewhat lopsided combination.

Sharon Cohen describes an argument in which “The Arabs kept saying: ‘You don’t understand about the checkpoints and the humiliation,’ and the Israelis kept saying, ‘You don’t understand about being in the army.’” Similarly, oboist Meirav Kadichevski expresses her understanding of the Palestinian sense of repression by evoking her own feelings “when I was in the army - I also felt repressed.” Clearly for these former soldiers there is no incongruity in equating the oppressor’s discomfort with the horror of being at the oppressor’s mercy.

Yuval the trumpeter, whose attitudes are described as having been positively transformed by orchestra membership, opines that “Palestinians have to start feeling responsible for themselves…” instead of “always waiting for someone to recognise their pain.” A lecture from the Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah criticising the “two-state solution” provokes his sharp reaction that “…some people are saying we should make one nation, and it’s insane.”

The impression ultimately gleaned from Arabs and Israelis alike is that the real glue binding these young people together is ambition: the WEDO provides an exceptional opportunity to gain experience under Daniel Barenboim, a famous and influential conductor, and hence is a stepping-stone to professional advancement. In itself, of course, there is nothing reprehensible about this - but it is a far cry from stylising the orchestra as an exemplary space of reconciliation and understanding.

In a letter to the New York Review of Books last October the actor Vanessa Redgrave (once a stalwart advocate of Palestinian rights), the screenwriter Martin Sherman and the artist Julian Schnabel dissociated themselves from opposition to the Toronto Film Festival’s featuring of Tel Aviv in its “city to city” section. They closed their letter as follows:

“The year 2009 is the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Barenboim-Said West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. We hope that those who protest Israeli inclusion in film festivals will take note of this example of the power of art freely expressed and available to all, and reconsider their position.”[12]

This is a sad and timely demonstration of how the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra can be enlisted to demobilise meaningful solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians. While it would be crass to dismiss the WEDO as merely “a bad thing”, the reality is that it offers uncommitted Western liberals, for whom an uncompromising campaign of BDS is a step too far, a peg on which to hang their sentimental belief in an unpolitical reconciliation that costs nobody anything.

:::::

Raymond Deane is a composer and political activist

Images were removed.

Source: Irish Left Review, Published: December 9th, 2009

http://www.irishleftreview.org/2009/12/09/utopia-alibi-barenboim-divan-orchestra/

Notes

[1] Edward W. Said: Musical Elaborations (Columbia University Press, NY, 1991); Reflections on Exile (London, Granta Books, 2001); Music at the Limits (Columbia University Press, NY, 2007).

[2] Edward W. Said: Culture and Imperialism (Chatto & Windus Ltd, 1993; Vintage, 1994).

[3] Rachel Beckles Willson: Whose Utopia? (Music and Politics, Volume III, Number 2. http://www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics/archive/2009-2/beckles_willson.html, accessed 7/12/09)

[4] Edward W. Said: Humanism and Democratic Criticism (PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, Hampshire and NY, 2004).

[5] Amira Hass: Honorary Citizenship of the Moon (Ha’aretz, 26^th January 2009)

[6] Daniel Barenboim: Music Quickens Time (Verso, London/NY 2008); Everything is Connected (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 2008).

[7] Joel Kovel: Overcoming Zionism (London, Pluto Press, 2007).

[8] Daniel Barenboim: The Illusion of Victory (The Guardian, 1^st January 2009).

[9] Amira Hass: Palestinian anger with Barenboim forces him to cancel Ramallah visit (Ha’aretz, 17^th July, 2009).

[10] Luke Harding: Conductor brings harmony to Arabs [sic] (The Guardian, 30^th November, 2004).

[11] Elena Cheah: An Orchestra without Borders (Verson, London/NY, 2009).

[12] Redgrave, Schnabel, Sherman: Let Israeli Films be Shown (New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 16, 22^nd October, 2009).

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