Resistance Studies

Stellan Vinthagen December 6th, 2009

A report with over 100 pages has been released, documenting the development of Palestinian (mainly nonviolent) resistance to the (illegal, according to the International Court of Justice) separation wall. The report document the resistance being done mainly by a number of Palestinian border villages (e.g. Nilin and Bilin) and the repression against the resistance.

The report was published in July 2009 and is now online on the website of the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, with a summary and in full, possible to download.

• Literature , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Resistance , Violence , subaltern agency
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Stellan Vinthagen November 15th, 2009

There is an ongoing wave of student occupations and protest for a free and better university education, and against privatization policies at several European universities, mainly in Germany and Austria. (Not in France yet …).

The occupations started at Vienna University the 22 Oct, and has since then spread throughout Austria, and to other countries. See some reports at sites like these: site 1, site 2. It is interesting to note that the occupations are not mentioned as far as I can find in New York Times or BBC …

Last time we did see a wave of student occupations were in connection to the Gaza massacre in January, and then that happend mainly in the UK.

Historically radical student activism has played an important role in the creation of broader social movements, e.g. in the 1968 world rebellion.

There is a map of presently occupied universities, occupations that the police brooken up and other forms of protests by students. See here.

• Academia , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Police , Protest
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jj October 4th, 2009

Al Jazeera reports that the tension in Jerusalem is growing.

Israeli security forces have closed off the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jersualem as more than 200 Palestinians stage a sit-in at the site.

Sporadic clashes broke out on Sunday as military and police checkpoints were set up around the site, known as the Haram al-Sharif to Muslims and the Temple Mount to Jews.

At least seven people were wounded and seven arrested as clashes broke out at the Lion’s Gate entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem.

Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros, reporting from Jerusalem, said that the mosque was being protected by worshippers who wanted to stop Jewish hardliners from entering the compound.
“They are very keen that what happened in Hebron, where hardliners did in fact storm and take over a mosque there, doesn’t happen here in this very holy site,” she said.

She said that there was a lot of tension in the city because of the standoff.

“It could, of course, boil over if we hear of clashes between the police and those at the sit-in at the al-Aqsa compound,” she said.

Palestinian officials told Al Jazeera that Muslim worshippers entered the mosque late on Saturday to prevent a repeat of last Sunday’s clashes in the area.

In that incident, at least 13 Palestinians were injured and seven detained when fighting broke when Israeli Jews apparently attempted to enter the mosque.

Police fired tear gas and stun grenades at hundreds of Palestinians, while stones, chairs and other objects were reportedly thrown.

Israeli version

Describing the latest clashes, Shmuel Ben-Ruby, the Israeli police spokesman for Jerusalem, said that about 150 demonstrators were dispersed from one area near the al-Aqsa compound on Sunday, but unrest was continuing in nearby East Jerusalem.

He said some had thrown bottles and rocks.

Micky Rosenfeld, another Israeli police spokesman, confirmed that the compound had been “shut to visitors” this week.

He said that Israeli authorities had also detained Khatem Abdel Khader, an adviser to the Palestinian prime minister on Jerusalem affairs, on suspicion he was trying to incite protests at the site.

Israeli security forces have said that the restrictions will stay in place until the Palestinian protesters turn themselves to authorities.

Israel captured and annexed the Old City with its holy sites, along with the rest of Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, in the war of 1967.

• Civil Disobedience , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Protest , Resistance , Violence
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Stellan Vinthagen January 4th, 2009

Some people in the network have been discussing an idea of a “Ship to Gaza”: breaking the inhumane and criminal blockade of Gaza’s 1,5 million people by sailing a boat into Gaza. The idea is to create a “people-to-people” solidarity by involving a broad coalition of people movements (from various political and religious strands) and collect materials that are needed in Gaza (medicine, clothes, seeds, toys, etc.).

The boat would take off from Sweden and travel during several weeks through a number of harbors (Glasgow, Amsterdam, etc.) and collect supplies to the people in Gaza, as well as hold political and cultural events in these towns. In order to get more media attention and to create a necessary protection against aggressive attacks from Israel there is a need to have a number of international VIP on board. If we would succeed to have e.g. Desmond Tutu on board the last part of the trip from Cyprus to Gaza it would be very, very difficult for the Israeli Navy to sink the ship. The broad civil society involvement created by various groups and the media attention created would hopefully help to create a pressure on the politicians in Europe. We have contacts in Gaza and Palestine and will collaborate with them in the work. Still, the Ship to Gaza is not an act of solidarity with Hamas. It is an act of solidarity with the people in Gaza. It is thought of as a political people-to-people solidarity act, against the inhumane and criminal acts of Israel as shown in several UN resolutions and by e.g. the UN Human Rights officer for Palestine, Richard Falk.

The “Free Gaza Movement” has already brought six smaller boats on such missions the last months. Five have reached Gaza despite threats from the Israeli Navy. The last one, “rammed a Israeli Navy ship which was damaged”, according to the spokes-woman from Israel…, i.e. the small Free Gaza boat was so badly damaged by the aggressive Navy attack that it started to leak water and had to turn to Lebanon. Now the Free Gaza Movement is asking for more international participants for coming boats in the near future.

Our idea of a larger boat with several containers with supplies to Gaza will take time, money, and a lot of organising.  We don’t know if we will find the needed interest and resources to make it happen. But in these days of the war crimes in Gaza it feels even more compelling to act.

At this initial stage we welcome suggestions, criticism, contacts, information, or volunteers who would like to join us. Please feel free to comment here or send an email directly to stellan.vinthagen[at]resistancestudies.org

There will be first meetings in Stockholm (11 25 Jan) and Gothenburg (18 25 Jan 8 Feb) in which it will become clear if enough people are willing to organise this needed resistance.

• Civil Disobedience , Occupation , Protest , Resistance , Terrorism , War
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jj December 9th, 2008

A new impressive Encyclopedia is soon out. In eight volumes the editor Immanuel Ness has collected articles on Revolutions and Protests the last 500 years. This work is a must for all institutions and researchers with focus on resistance, history, social movements, and/or democracy. The books will be presented and discussed at one of the Resistance Studies Seminars in 2009.

If you want to check it out take a look here: http://www.revolutionprotestencyclopedia.com/

• Academia , Civil Disobedience , Democracy , Gender , Literature , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Protest , Resistance , Resistance Studies , Revolution , Violence
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jj April 20th, 2008

In the nineties we saw an interesting move from parts of global civil society; they used the Top Level Summits to empower themselves, protest, and reach the media headlines. This year we have seen a number of actors within civil society using the opportunity of the visits of the Olympic Torch to make their voice heard. Tibet is only one of the issues we have seen on these occasions and much more is expected until and during the games begin on August 8th. While Joseph Goebbels used the 1936 Games for promoting Nazism and Black Panther made the 1968 games in Mexico worth remembering we now see huge masses of people taking to the streets with a wide range of agendas.

Torch Protest in Dharamsala
Tens of thousands of police and military troops to guard the “symbol of peace and cooperation” is difficult to explain without trying to understand why these people are on the streets. When the actual Games begin we can expect even more demonstrations; and probably not only in Beijing. With other words: En excellent time and arena for anyone who wants be visible in international media.

Interesting enough we have in recent days seen demonstrations from supporters of the Chinese politics protesting against the demonstrations in Paris, Buenos Aires, London, Delhi and elsewhere. These dynamics of en emerging Chinese nationalism, maybe due to protests against the regime would be a fascinating filed to research. As China grows economically and militarily and open up to the rest of the world the role of an emerging civil society within China should be followed by people interested in Resistance studies and Civil Societies.

The future Olympics Games will have several opportunities for a number of groups to take the opportunity. In 2010 the Olympic Games will take place in Canada. And already have aboriginal leaders in Canada´s First Nation started planning to disrupt the Games over poverty and land claims. Several North American Indian bands in westernmost British Columbia province are threatening bridge blockades, airport disruptions and other protests if no progress is made to curb extreme poverty in native communities and to resolve their outstanding land claims. “I wouldn’t rule out blockades, I wouldn’t rule out demonstrations,” David Dennis, vice president of the United Native Nations, told the daily Globe and Mail.

He said the protests could kick off as early as next February, one year before the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver on Canada’s Pacific Coast.

“The situation here is compelling enough to convince Canadians that while it is okay and right for them to express outrage with the Chinese government’s position against Tibet and the Tibetans, they should be just as outraged, if not more so, about our situation here,” Phil Fontaine, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said Thursday at a press conference.

For the Olympic Games in London in 2012 we can expect protests from a number of former and present colonies. The British war on Argentine in the Falklands war, engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan etc can easily be focus for protests. Olympic Games in 2014 takes place in Sochi in Russia. With the autonomous Abkhazia as closest territory and South Ossetia who both struggles for independence from Georgia there will for sure be demonstrations and protests. Not far away is Chechnya, Dagestan, and other areas with people who want to cut their links to Moscow. The Russian empire have a long history of atrocities and the growing authoritarian tendencies with censorship and surveillance creates new conflicts regularly.

It is not a spectacular prophecy that the Olympic Games for some decades to come will be a platform for resistance. A lot of documentation and case studies to be done by researchers!

• Boycott , Censorship , China , Civil Disobedience , Media , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Police , Protest , Resistance , Surveillance
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jj April 5th, 2008

The “Boycott-Divest-Sanctions” National Committee has called for a boycott of celebrations planned by the state of Israel to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Israel’s creation in 1948. 104 organizations have signed on to the appeal, including civil society groups, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, popular committees and political organizations.

Will Resistance Studies Network support this appeal?

The appeal challenges the celebration of the creation of the state of Israel, saying that the project of Israel is a colonial project that completely disenfranchised the indigenous Palestinian population.

In addition, the appeal urges “international civil society in all its components, particularly institutions and individuals working in the arts, academia, sport, trade unions, and communities of faith” to boycott any events associated with the “Israel at 60” celebrations. The appeal states that support of these events undermines the Palestinian resistance, while strengthening the Israeli Occupation’s hold on Palestine.

The following is the text of the appeal, and the list of signatories:

Palestinian Appeal to International Civil Society

Sixty Years of Dispossession and Ethnic Cleansing

Boycott the “Israel at 60″ Celebrations!

30 March 2008

How can you celebrate? The establishment of the State of Israel sixty years ago was a settler-colonial project that systematically and violently uprooted more than 750 thousand Palestinian Arabs from their lands and homes. Sixty years ago, Zionist militias and gangs ransacked Palestinian properties and destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages. How can people of conscience celebrate this catastrophe.

Israel at 60 is a state that continues to deny Palestinian refugees their UN-sanctioned right to return to their homes and receive compensation, simply because they are “non-Jews.” It still illegally occupies Palestinian and other Arab lands, in violation of numerous UN resolutions. It persists in its blatant denial of fundamental Palestinian human rights, in contravention of international humanitarian law and human rights conventions. It still subjects its own Palestinian citizens to a system of institutionalized discrimination, strongly reminiscent of the defunct apartheid regime in South Africa. And Israel gets away with all this, thanks to the unprecedented immunity granted to it by the unlimited and munificent US and European economic, diplomatic, political, and academic support.

In view of this multi-faceted oppression that is the reality of Israel today, we regard any Arab or international participation, whether individual or institutional, in any activity that contributes, either directly or indirectly, to the “celebrations” of Israel’s establishment, as collusion in the perpetuation of the dispossession and uprooting of refugees, the prolongation of the occupation, and the deepening of Israeli apartheid. Inviting Israel as a “guest of honor” to the Turin and Paris book fairs, for example, is not only a deliberate betrayal of basic principles of human rights, including those enshrined in the laws of the European Union itself, but is also a deliberate attempt to cover up Israel’s crimes against the Arab people, especially its successive war crimes in Lebanon and Palestine, and its acts of slow genocide against a million and a half Palestinians in the besieged and collectively punished Gaza Strip. In short, celebrating “Israel at 60″ is tantamount to dancing on Palestinian graves.

We urge international civil society in all its components, particularly institutions and individuals working in the arts, academia, sport, trade unions, and communities of faith to boycott the “Israel at 60″ celebrations wherever they are held in the world.

These celebrations, by definition, insult our history, violate our rights, and deepen our oppression. They also render the path to justice, freedom, equality, and sustainable peace based on international law longer than ever before.

Institutional Endorsers:

Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)
Department of Refugee Affairs - PLO
Jerusalem-The Arab Cultural Capital Project, Jerusalem
Higher National Committee for the Defense of the Right to Return
The General Union of Palestinian Women
Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, PGFTU
Palestinian Farmers’ Union
Popular Committee Against the Siege (PCAS), Gaza
Federation of Palestinian Refugee Camp Youth Centers
Higher National Committee for the Commemoration of the Nakba, Palestine
Refugee Affairs Department, Mobilization and Organization, Fatah Movement
Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO)
Ittijah-Union of the Arab Community Based Organizations, Haifa
Palestinian Lawyers’ Syndicate
Palestinian Journalists’ Association, Jerusalem
Palestinian Engineers’ Syndicate, Jerusalem
Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, UPWC, Ramallah
Stop the Wall-the Grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign
Union of Employees at Private Schools-West Bank
Association of Residents of Depopulated Villages and Cities, Ramallah
General Federation of Cultural Centers, Gaza
Jerusalem Center for Social & Economic Rights JCSER, Jerusalem
Federation of Independent Workers Committees, Gaza
League of Palestinian Refugees in Europe
BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, Bethlehem
Occupied Palestine Golan heights Advocacy Initiative (OPGAI)
Al-Aswar Organization for Cultural and Social Development, Acre
University Teachers Association, Gaza
Joint Advocacy Initiative of the YMCA-YWCA (JAI), Jerusalem
General Union of Health Service Workers, Gaza
Aida Refugee Camp Social Center, Aida Refugee Camp
A’idoun Group, Syria
Palestinian Community in Scandinavia
Canadian Arab Federation
Palestinian Counseling Center, Jerusalem
Land Research Center, Palestine, Jerusalem
Muwatin the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy
Palestinian Association of Brantford–Canada
Center for the Defense of Freedoms and Civil Rights (Hurriyat)
Wihdah Democratic Action Institute (Wa’ad)–Bethlehem
Federation of Agricultural Action Committees
Canada Palestine Association, Vancouver
Addameer, Ramallah
Ma’an Development Center, Ramallah
Gaza Center for Culture and Arts
Voice of Palestine, Canada
Canadian Palestinian Association, Ontario, Canada
Taghrid Association for Culture, Development and Reconstruction, Gaza
Jabalya-al-Nazaleh Cultural Center, Jabalya Camp, Gaza
Federation of Agricultural Work Committees, Gaza
Turathuna Charitable Society, Gaza
The Popular Committee at al-Burayj Camp, Gaza
El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe, Al-Bireh
Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East, New York
General Union of Services and Trade Workers, Gaza Governorates
The National Council of Arab Americans - Metropolitan New York Chapter, NY
The Arab Muslim American Federation
The Palestinian American Congress, New York
Dramatists’ Federation
Society for the Development of Women, al-Burayj Camp, Gaza
Yanbou’ Cultural Forum, al-Reina
Palestinian Human Rights Monitor (Rassid), Gaza
Yabous Productions, Jerusalem
The Arab Student Observatory of Victims of Occupation and Blockade of the General Union of Arab Students (GUAS)
Arab Culture Society
Al-Siwar-Arab Feminist Movement to Support Victims of Sexual Assault, Haifa
Popular Art Centre, Al-Bireh
Federation of Working Women’s Committees
Palestinian Federation of Women’s Action Committees
Al-Najda Association for the Development of Palestinian Women
Teacher Creativity Center, Ramallah
Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA)
Al-Quds Information Bank, Gaza
Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counseling, Ramallah
The Palestinian Working Women’s Society for Development
Jimzo Charitable Society
Al-Lidd (Lydda) Charitable Society, Ramallah-Al-Bireh Governorate
Al-Lidd (Lydda) Social Association, Beitunia
Lifta Charitable Society, Palestine
Committee of Residents of Greater Masmiyya, Ramallah-Al-Bireh Governorate
Falsteen Al Gaad association – Deheisha refugee camp
Meethaq Center for Development, Alkahder
Women Development Center, Addoha, Bethlehem
Al Feeneeq Center, Duheisheh Refugee Camp
Palestinian Progressive Youth Union, Gaza
Palestinian Women’s Information and Media Center, Gaza
Said Mishal Foundation for Culture and Science, Gaza
Assala Association for Heritage and Development, Gaza
Jerusalem Center for Arabic Music, Jerusalem
International Academy of Art Palestine, Ramallah
Juthourr Cultural Society, Gaza
Women’s Research and Legal Counseling Center, Gaza
Media Forum for Women Affairs Advocacy, Gaza
Palestinian Cultural Center, Gaza
Refugees Popular Committee, Gaza
Workers Resource Center, Gaza
Progressive Union Work Society, Gaza
Friends of An-Nour Center Society, Gaza
Al-Aqsa Charitable Youth Welfare Society, Gaza
The One Democratic State Group, Gaza
Arab Cultural Forum, Gaza
Palestinian Democratic Union-Fida

• Academia , Boycott , Democracy , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Protest , Resistance , War
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jj March 26th, 2008

According to several press reports in the last 24 hours there are obviously a huge offensive going on against supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr in Basra and Sadr city. The six-months ceasefire was extended last month and it looked like there were some negotiating going on between the Sadrist movement and US/al-Maliki. Now it suddenly looks like the government and the occupiers are doing their best to crush Sadr and his people.

According to Agence France-Presse Sadr called for “all Iraqis to launch protests across all provinces. If the government does not respect these demands, the second step will be general civil disobedience in Baghdad and the Iraqi provinces.”

I wonder if any Arabic-skilled reader of this blog could check if this is an accurate translation? The ceasefire Moqtada al-Sadr announced was a surprise in itself, but if he does not lift it after this powerful military attack and ask his followers to use civil disobedience it is an amazing new strategy from his side. Something for a researcher of resistance strategies to look into!

• Civil Disobedience , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Protest , Resistance , War
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Christopher Kullenberg January 23rd, 2008

One aspect of Resistance studies is to look into the infrastructure of the social organization of practice. In 2007 Facebook became one of the largest Internet communities in the world, and now has more than 30 million users. One of the interesting features of this new “social utility” is the function of creating “events”. Demonstrations and protests are naturally events, and this function can thus be used very instrumentally. For example, on Saturday there is in Gothenburg a demonstration against the Israeli occupation of Gaza. A screenshot will say more than words:

This of course makes it easier to bring your friends and it is both cheaper and more convenient than posters, flyers and even text messages. It is also the perfect utility for an authoritarian State to know the names of every person taking to the streets…

• Anonymity , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Protest
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Tommy October 19th, 2007

The eviction of the Ungdomshuset, “house of the young”, on the first of March 2007 in Copenhagen was dramatic and was even aided by the military who flew the helicopter that deployed special police forces on the rooftop. The police breaks into the house and starts attacking the people inside and shoot teargas, the response by the around 30 people inside being to defend themselves and their.
In the same moment as the eviction starts, many hundreds or thousands of sms are sent to people in Denmark, but also people in Germany, Sweden and Norway and the game is on. The following three days see demonstrations with thousands of people in the streets, massive rioting to try to retake the house. After three days the house was destroyed and the rioting ceased.
Since March, there have been numerous occupations of houses but all of them have been evicted. The struggle has continued with different actions (during two months one every day), occasionally interrupted by eruptions of more intense fighting. Saturday the first of September marked six months since the eviction and Copenhagen saw once again widespread rioting and demonstrations with around 1000-2000 persons. Almost a year before the eviction there were protests as well as riots which started to build a tension, to make a ground for a massive and militant mobilisation.
So what was Ungdomshuset? It was a social center located centrally in the Danish capital Copenhagen, and it existed there for during 24 years. It is a kind of legal squat that was created in 1982 and that grew out of the radical squatters movement in Denmark, “the BZ”: It came into existence after several occupations in the city, after which this particular house could be kept. The house was self-organised by the squatters movement, and later on and in some cases even by the children of the original squatters.
The house used to be used by the workers movement since a long time back and it has been visited by both Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. The international women’s day, the 8th of March, was created in the house in 1910 during the second international women’s congress, which the German socialist Clara Zetkin took part in. The date of 8th of March was the day that the worker women of Russia went on strike in 1917 for bread and freedom, and helped to displace the tsar. So it has a long and “grand” history even internationally.
The house was sold to a Christian sect, which decided to tear down the house.

What is it about, according to the movement?
The formal demand is for a new house (without paying for it, of course) that is equal to the old one both in location and in size, and for this, thousands of people are willing to fight. The cost caused by the struggle is calculated to be no less than 15 million Euros, that´s ten times the cost of giving a new house. More than half of the population of Copenhagen supported at one point a political solution: that a new house should be given by the city (the support from people in the city may be less today).
The conflict is portrayed by the movement as being between the multitude of people in the city, and their needs, against the power of the state, against the incapacity of this society to fulfil what is desired by them.
Who participates?
From what I saw from the demonstrations the age and background of people taking part is mixed, especially on the big and mainly peaceful ones. Of course you have the punk-a-chien/punk-with-dog who seems to be about as common in the movement in Denmark as they are in Germany. Young people, a part of them immigrants, participated in the rioting (hard to know what generation).
The union of the construction workers managed to delay the tearing down of the house by claiming that it was not safe. This turned out to be true in a specific way when some company that helped tear down the house got some of their cars burned later on. The firms that worked on the building site concealed the plates and names on their equipment and cars in a vain attempt to prevent this from happening, and the workers at the site wore black masks to conceal their identity…
The people from Christiania are also very much present with their own big, visible demonstrations, and quite a lot of people have been crossing the borders to join in rioting and protest.
To say something of the size of the movement: One month after the eviction, a demonstration with 10 000 participants was held, in support of Christiania and Ungdomshuset. During the first three days just after the eviction, somewhere between 2000 and 6000 were on the streets each day.

What is Christiania?
It was a squatted area in the early seventies located centrally in Copenhagen. The area was created by the “flower children” of the sixties. It has a history of militancy but has also been criticized for harbouring a lot of middle class people that just want to live in this “cosy” part of town. During riots after the eviction Christiania was barricaded and cars were burned in the area, and there have also been riots as well as peaceful protests against the tearing down of an old house in Christiania where homeless people live. It gives a taste of the militancy that existed recently in Copenhagen. The solidarity between the Ungdomshuset and Christiania goes a long way back. We might see struggle in Christiania in response to the governments efforts to “normalise” the area, a process which may take years. On the other hand, Christiania seems to be a lot more integrated in the state than Ungdomshuset: it is involved in a legal contract with the state and it does not seem to facilitate the same population… If a struggle is to erupt over Christiania is is certain that it will be supported by the same people that have been taking active part in the Ungdomshuset movement.

What about the politicians?
Support has been coming from socialist politicians, by means of using their position to speak in favour of the demand. At present, Copenhagen is run by a social democratic mayor who refuses, together with more right wing parties, to give a new house to the young.
In the course of the struggle criticism has been directed not only towards the Christian sect that bought and tore down the old house, but also and especially especially against the politicians. Parties to the left have given some support but they are not the movement in the streets: by judging of it´s actions, it seems to be controlled by a more radical and street smart crew.

What about repression?
The police started to use teargas even before the eviction and the normal is now to use it. During the first three days after the eviction 850 people were arrested and many are facing jail time. In connection to the non-violent action day for a new house the police used an offensive strategy, which included a lot of teargas and clubs against non-violent protestors, and arrested over 400 people, the greatest number persons arrested at one time in Danish history.
Very young people have been kept in jail for exceptionally long periods of time. The state have also used other tactics such as using the schools in Copenhagen as places where they spread propaganda and try to warn the young not to participate in demonstrations. On Norrebro, where Ungdomshuset once existed, the police are doing preventive searches on people, and all the fighting in the area have been enough reason for some people to call it a war zone. The Danish police use of force has in fact been criticized by the UN.
This development is accompanied by an escalation in the use of force against the police, and by an increased tendency towards attacking private property. Molotov cocktails have been used on several occasions, something which was practically non-existent in Denmark before this, and stores have been looted on occasion.

What are the limits of this particular movement, and what are its strengths?
One major problem has to do with the demands: The formal demand is for a new house, and this seems reasonable in itself, but not by itself; that this is the only demand. What happens if they will get a new house, will the movement stop?
The concrete demand, in this case for a new house is important for uniting different groups, and one can only hope that all these people can continue their activity in a different way when or if a house is won; that is something that depends on their ability to overcome this very modest demand. How exactly this could materialise is hard for me to say though…
A great number of experienced activists from the Danish squatters’ movement has certainly helped the movement, and so have the activity of all kinds of people who participate in their own ways: There have been numerous groups of feminists, parents, punks, the people living in Christiania, who contribute to the struggle. The ones who cannot go out in the streets can, for example, fight repression.
The struggle seems to be, all in all, not relying on the support of politicians; the strength of the movement is sustained through autonomous activity. Of course there are the demand sent to the politicians to give away a house, but the movement is not afraid of simply trying to take what they want, something that is shown, for example, by the many (failed) squats made in the previous six months.
The fact that Ungdomshuset existed for so long in the middle of the city has rooted it in the minds of many people: it has been a real meeting place for many young who went there for concerts and other activities, and it has been a place where political activity has been planned.
On the other hand, some of the people taking part the fight seem not to have any real connection to the house. Ties can hopefully be made between groups of people that usually do not meet so frequently.
Internationally, this fight has received a lot of attention in the media and has also received a lot of support from other countries, especially Germany and the Nordic countries. All over Europe squatting is a phenomenon that is under threat and the squatters scene does not look the same as it used to: many houses have been evicted over the years.
A movement against the squatters have been coming to life in the area of Norrebro during the summer. They had months to organise, and they seem to protest against the violence and disturbances in the area caused by the protestors.
The bigger picture is that the Danish economy is experiencing a boom. There have been a number of successful strikes about wages and struggles against worsened conditions in the childcare system. In this context, it may seem strange that the city of Copenhagen could not give even an empty house to the young. The eviction issue has been very present in the media and in the minds of many Danes. It has become highly symbolic. It is not only a struggle over a house more or less, this struggle determines the perceived possibility of other struggles: It is certainly of importance for the people in power to not give in to the demands, because this could open the eyes of many others.

What now?
The negotiations between the movement and the local politicians seem to have started taking more serious and concrete form, after a day of mass non-violent action 6th of October where a thousand or two thousands of people tried to take a new house (inspired tactically by the recent G8-actions in Germany). It may be that the local politicians feel that they could get into negotiations with their pride intact (they do not negotiate with “violent troublemakers”).

To see videos of the struggle, go to youtube.com and search for Ungdomshuset. For English updates directly from the movement, see: www.ungdomshuset.dk

• Civil Disobedience , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Police , Protest , Violence
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Christopher Kullenberg September 14th, 2007

The last few days there have been protests in Bagdad against a wall built by the US military forces intended to separate shia and sunni muslims, while Bush announces a strategy for long term plans in Iraq. Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reports that Bagdad used to be a very heterogenous city. However, during the US occupation, it has become more and more divided because of the conflicts emerging from the unrest. The wall is, according to the US military, deployed in order to protect the Bagdad citizens from terrorist attacks and other dangerous activities. The protesters, on the other hand, argue that building walls only makes secterism, divisions and difference more possible, and a counter-productive strategy in making peace possible in Iraq.

I am very interested in walls, as they have popped up in for example Israel for basically the same purpose, and have severe conseqences for dividing cities in more than just one way. Muqtada al Sadr have urged the people of Bagdad to paint the wall in a fashion showing the world “The ugly face of the US-occupiers”, so in one way there is even semi-organized resistance taking place.

Walls, wars and territorialities fuel resistance movements. Yesterday the first Resistance Seminar took place in Gothenburg (see Seminar page) and I had a very interesting discussion with Jörgen on the complicated structure of resistance the Middle Eastern regions, especially since the military forces very often have to withdraw because the guerilla warfare is too hard to combat.

As walls are interesting I would like to ask if this hypothesis is reasonable: “Wherever there is a wall, there will be resistance”. Examples: Berlin, Jerusalem, Bagdad………..

• Occupation , Protest , Resistance , War
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jj September 8th, 2007

A number of actors around the world dislike the American Empire. The numbers of demonstrations, protests, articles and speeches against their dominance are probably higher than what any other empire in history have been confronted with. In addition there are wars on many fronts. Iraq and Afghanistan being the most intense once for the moment, but the real picture is better described by the fact that US have soldiers in 130 states around the world. The costs of these deployments are obviously regarded as necessary to protect their interests.

The military strengths of US are challenged on the battlefield these days. They are loosing in both Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the so called “War on Terrorism”. In these extreme asymmetric wars their military capacities proves to be unfit.
The most vulnerable side of the empire is probably their economy. With a deficit of 2 billion dollars a day they don’t have a sustainable future. The value of their dollar is falling dramatically and will probably do so for the time to come. The market is pricing the dollar mainly based on how many are using it. When Saddam Hussein changed from selling oil in dollar to do it in Euro he probably made more damage to the empire than his army ever could do. And many argue that this was the main reason for the US occupation in 2003.

This week Iran took their decision to sell oil to Nippon Oil in yen and not dollar. This will probably escalate the conflict between US and Iran. The picture drawn by main stream media of Iran is to a large degree a product of propaganda. And this will be more intense in the months to come. Dick Cheney’s office has recently issued “instructions” to conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute to start a drumbeat for attacking Iran.

How would an actual war be launched, given the expected opposition of the Democratic-controlled Congress? To that end, President Bush’s decision to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group provides an opportunity. If the IRGC, Iran’s alternate military, is a terrorist group, Bush could claim authority under the September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan to take action against Iran without Congressional approval, citing the AUMF’s broad provision that “the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.”

Everyone using dollars should be aware that to pay in US$ is a way of supporting the empire. A way to resist the empire is to trade in other currencies.

• Boycott , Occupation , Protest , Resistance , War
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jj September 6th, 2007

The US Forces Tried To Provoke the Demonstrators

The Anti-oil Law Front staged a demonstration in the center of Baghdad (Liberation Square) under Liberty Monument. The demonstrators raised slogans in English and Arabic denouncing the oil Law and chanted against the US administration and its appointed government. The US forces surrounded the rally for half an hour and took pictures of the demonstrators who carried the banners. They also blocked the traffic to prevent people joining the demonstration in an attempt to spread terror among whoever intends to join the rally. The area was filled with hundreds of police and National Guard of whom dozens sympathized with the demonstrators and the cause.

Also dozens of Arab, foreign and domestic media broadcasted the event live and conducted interviews with the leaders of the demonstration. The event has involved many speeches by Subhi Al-Badri president of the front and Chairman of IFC executive bureau, Sami Hassan, Political Bureau member of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq and Faleh Mactof secretary of Federation of workers councils and unions in Iraq.

The demonstrators raised banners with slogans saying “Down with the oil law, the oil law is the law of occupation; 26 million people reject the law of occupation, etc. . .”

This demonstration comes as part of the campaign launched by the Anti-oil Law Front, which comprised of sit-ins, strikes, conferences and gatherings.

• Civil Disobedience , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Resistance , War
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jj September 4th, 2007

From Haaretz

More info about Bili’in here .

The High Court of Justice Tuesday ordered the state to redraw, partially dismantle and rebuild the route of a 1.7 kilometer section of the West Bank separation fence, which was built on land belonging to Bili’in, a Palestinian village which has become a focus of opposition to the barrier.

For nearly three years, the fence has been at the focus of weekly demonstrations at Bili’in, punctuated by violent confrontations between protesters and soldiers and police deployed at the site.

The existing fence route is built around a part of the Matitiyahu East neighborhood of Modi’in Illit settlement. The government had argued that the route was necessary to protect residents of Modi’in Illit, and completed the section of fence that cut through Bilin despite the protests.
The three-judge panel, headed by Chief Justice Dorit Beinish, unanimously accepted an appeal petition by the head of the Bili’in local council against the route of the fence and its presence on land belonging to the village. They ordered defense planners to change the barrier’s route so it causes less harm
to the village’s residents

The fence occupies 260 dunams of village land. It also blocks access to another 1,700 dunams between the barrier and the pre-1967 Green Line border.

Residents of the village went to court arguing that the current route, built on village land, kept them from their fields and orchards, which remained on the other side of the barrier.

Rejecting the government’s argument, Beinish wrote in her decision that “We were not convinced that it is necessary for security-military reasons to retain the current route that passes on Bili’in’s lands.”

The judges specified that this will require destroying the existing fence in certain places and building a new one, and ordered the government to come up with a new route in a reasonable period of time.

Abdullah Abu Rahma, one of the leaders of the weekly protest at Bili’in, called the court decision “wonderful.”

“We want the decision to be implemented immediately,” he said.

The Defense Ministry said in a statement that it would study the ruling and respect it.

Israel began building the 680-kilometer (425-mile) barrier along the West Bank in 2002, crediting the fence with contribuiting to a decline in suicide bombings. But the barrier juts into West Bank territory, provoking Palestinian claims that Israel is using security arguments to mask a land grab.

• Civil Disobedience , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Resistance , War
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jj September 2nd, 2007

The Israeli army arrested 7 Israeli peace activists as they protested against a flying checkpoint placed at the entry of a Palestinian village in the northern West Bank city of Nablus on Friday afternoon.
Palestinian sources reported that the army set a flying checkpoint at one of the entrances to Surra village. The village’s main entrance was closed five years ago.

Protestors attempted to remove concrete blocks, but the soldiers prevented them, detained hundred of civilians and detained the Israeli left peace activists, later moving them from the area.

This protest was managed by Surra village residents and has ran for two consecutive weeks.

• Civil Disobedience , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Protest , Resistance , War
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jj September 2nd, 2007

Finkelstein is is a son of Holocaust survivors and has been targeted by critics because he “believes that some Jews have exploited the Holocaust,”.

DePaul University canceled the one remaining class taught by the controversial professor who has accused some Jews of improperly using the legacy of the Holocaust.

Norman Finkelstein, whose work led to a long-running public feud with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, says he may respond by committing civil disobedience when classes resume Sept. 5.

Finkelstein, 53, was denied tenure in June after six years on the DePaul faculty, but he was permitted to teach for the one year remaining on his contract.

On Friday, however, the university e-mailed students saying that Finkelstein’s sole political science course had been canceled. By Monday, the books for the course had been pulled from the DePaul bookstore’s shelves.

Finkelstein’s most recent book, “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History,” is largely an attack on Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel.” In it, Finkelstein argues that Israel uses the outcry over perceived anti-Semitism as a weapon to stifle criticism.

Dershowitz, who threatened to sue Finkelstein’s publisher for libel, urged DePaul officials to reject Finkelstein’s tenure bid in June.

The American Association of University Professors is preparing a letter to the university protesting Finkelstein’s treatment as a serious violation of academic ethics, the Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday.

Finkelstein told the newspaper that he planned to wage his own campaign against the administration.

“I intend to go to my office on the first day of classes and, if my way is barred, to engage in civil disobedience,” Finkelstein said. “If arrested, I’ll go on a hunger strike. If released, I’ll do it all over again. I’ll fast in jail for as long as it takes.”

After he was denied tenure, Finkelstein, a son of Holocaust survivors, posted a letter on his Web site explaining the school officials’ reasons, including Finkelstein’s “deliberately hurtful” scholarship along, lack of involvement with the school and tendency for public clashes with other scholars.

“In the opinion of those opposing tenure, your unprofessional personal attacks divert the conversation away from consideration of ideas, and polarize and simplify conversations that deserve layered and subtle consideration,” school President Dennis Holtschneider wrote in a letter dated June 8. DePaul at the time verified the letter was authentic.

Denise Mattson, the university’s associate vice president for public affairs, released a statement saying Finkelstein was on administrative leave with full pay for the academic year.

“Administrative leave relieves professors from their teaching responsibilities. He was informed of the reasons that precipitated this leave last spring,” the statement said.

• Academia , Boycott , Civil Disobedience , Occupation , Resistance , War
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jj August 25th, 2007

At around 12:30pm, some 100 unarmed protestors congregated in the village of Al Walaja, near the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem. Local villagers met with Israeli and international peace activists, and communally held prayers together.

Al Walaja, like other Palestinian villages in the outskirts of Bethlehem, stands to lose some 50% of its land to make way for expanding Israeli settlements, the route of the annexation wall and the construction of a new settlers-only bypass road.

The protestors marched a short distance, close to the Christian Cremisan Monastery, which has recently had dozens of olive trees destroyed, and much of its lands confiscated by the Israeli military, where a force of 50 Israeli soldiers were waiting. The non-violent demonstration rallied nearby, on a local Palestinian street, while the soldiers watched at a distance from a nearby hillside.

After one incident where an Israeli jeep passed close by, provoking protestors, and detonating two stun grenades in the middle of the crowd, the demonstrators listened to speeches given by local community leaders, detailing the nature of the land theft taking place in the village.

The Israeli military placed a flying checkpoint on the main road connecting Bethlehem and Al Walaja, and prevented all vehicles from entering the village during the demonstration.

After the speeches, the demonstration dispersed, finding that the initial deployment of Israeli troops had been reinforced by a further seven armoured personnel carriers, in a typically-huge over reaction on behalf of the Israeli military to what is, every week, a small, non-violent popular demonstration.

From IMEMC

• Civil Disobedience , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Resistance , War
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Stellan Vinthagen August 6th, 2007

One of the few non-sectarian and non-violent forms of resistance in Iraq is conducted by the trade unions. And the trade unions are systematically repressed by the US occupation’s co-ordinated government of Iraq. As part of the attempt to not only privatize the oil industry in Iraq but also make it controlled by foreign transnational companies the government is trying to implement a new law - called the “thieves law” by the oil unions - the government is also trying to make the powerful oil unions illegal. The unions are resisting this and are seeking international support. Check out e.g. the website of The Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions at the site of the Basra Oil Union.
They need all kinds of support. Imagine how difficult their hopeful work is and how essential it is to support the unions of Iraq during an imperialist occupation which is challenged so hard by various sectarian groups’ terrorism against each other, the occupation troops and ordinary Iraqi citizens that it creates probably the worst contemporay war in the world ….If there is going to be any hope for a future of a democratic and progressive change in Iraq it has to come from such popular forces as unions, fighting for their rights as workers and citizens.

A number of support organisations exists; Hands of Iraqi Oil, Corporate Watch, Iraq Occupation Focus and War on Want. You will find them all here.

• Occupation , Resistance , Terrorism , Uncategorized , War
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jj July 21st, 2007

In our discussion on “What is Resistance Studies” one argument is that the resisters must play some sort of “under dog” in an asymmetric conflict. The case presented by International Middle East Media centre today is an interesting case for that discussion. These settlers can be regarded as part of the strong occupiers with IDF and the Israeli government OR they can be regarded as a small oppositional movement inside Israel.

Here is the story:
Israeli Media sources reported on Saturday that a right wing Israeli groups calling it self ” Homish first” is planning on Sunday to reoccupy a West Bank settlement in the northern part of the West Bank that was evacuated during the 2005 Israeli unilateral disengagement plan.

The group was planning to reoccupy the settlement last Tuesday, but due to heavy deployment of Israeli police and army around the settlement the organizers of the event said they will do it in Sunday. They plane on Tuesday was to reoccupy the settlement then build a Synagogue there then the activists will stay and live in the settlement.

The Israeli army refused to give permission to the settlers to protest in the location and said that the army and police will arrest anyone who tries to reach the location of the settlement.

Last year the same right wing group managed to reoccupy the same location and the Israeli police was there and did not stop the activists.

• Occupation , Police , Protest , Resistance , Resistance Studies , War
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jj July 15th, 2007

Stellan asked some days ago if we had examples of “low level terrorism”

Here is a case from International Middle East Media Center:

An Israeli military court has extended the detention of Nada Al Jaiousi, from Ramallah, for an additional eleven days.

Al Jaiousi, like thousands of Palestinians being held in prison by Israeli authorities, has not been charged with any crime. She is in what Israelis euphemistically call “administrative detention”, meaning that she can be held for an indefinite period of time lasting months, or even years, without ever being charged with a crime.Al Jaiousi, a mother of nine, was abducted from her home in Ramallah four days ago by Israeli soldiers. The military gave no reason for her abduction, though it is thought to be because she is the head of the Al Huda women’s charitable society.The Israeli military had ransacked the offices of the organization in May, claiming it had ‘terrorist affiliations‘. The group’s leaders said at the time that the Israeli claim was ridiculous, as their focus was on providing job training and childcare for women.The Nafha prisoner’s society has called for the immediate release of Al Jaiousi, adding that Al Jaiousi is “suffering tremendously due to the inhumane conditions in the prison in which she is being held.” The group added that this type of abduction and detention is in direct violation of international conventions and agreements that have been signed by Israel.

• Gender , Occupation , Resistance , Terrorism
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jj July 14th, 2007

This is an article by Rania Jawad earlier published in The Brooklyn Rail.

While the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel has been going on for decades, the cultural cleansing of Palestinian society is a relatively new phenomenon. These are the words of Juliano Mer Khamis, a Palestinian Jew with Israeli citizenship who was once active on the Israeli stage. In his words, he was forced to divorce himself from the Israeli audience because of the role that culture plays in politics. What happens—or one can ask, what happened—when culture becomes part of a larger racist politics? The discriminatory politics of the Israeli stage caused Juliano to leave his work as an actor in Israel and go to the West Bank to teach theater to Palestinian youth. The powerful role that culture can play in acts of oppression and resistance is clearly visible in Palestine/Israel.
Recently, New York Theatre Workshop, has begun highlighting Palestinian theater from a Palestinian perspective. Juliano told his story during his opening remarks for “Aswat: Voices of Palestine,” a two-day festival hosted in May by NYTW and Nibras, an Arab-American theater collective. The program included eight staged readings of plays from and about Palestine, as well as discussions moderated by scholars and theater artists. In July, NYTW will produce the New York premiere of Palestinian-American playwright Betty Shamieh’s The Black Eyed, a tragic-comedy about four women from across history brought together by their relationship to martyrdom.

Connecting his theater work in Palestine to the work on Palestinian theater here in NYC, Juliano defined culture as the regaining of our language as Palestinians through art—in other words, as the regaining of our discourse against the dominance of narratives that have labeled and imprisoned us. Aswat means “voices” in Arabic, and the festival’s program emphasized “unheard” voices from and about Palestine in its selections from the thirty-plus scripts submitted.

As Israel destroys the political, economic, and cultural infrastructure of Palestinians, Juliano said, there is a new generation of Palestinian youth who “have lost their language.” More than six years since the recent Intifada, Israel’s policies of collective punishment have created a generation of children suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Among the symptoms is the inability to speak. In addition to losing the ability to speak the Arabic language, the children have also lost a major outlet of personal expression. It is no wonder the children turn to throwing stones as a small act to express themselves; a small act that often costs them their lives.

Juliano is now known for joining his mother Arna in opening a children’s theater for Palestinian youth in Jenin Refugee Camp in the Occupied West Bank. Established in 1993, destroyed by the Israeli army in 2002, and rebuilt in 2006, the Freedom Theater serves the children of the camp by offering them a space for pedagogical, creative, and social development work through the use of theater. They also stage performances open to the public. The children are currently working on a production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

In New York, the performances of the Aswat Festival presented not only Palestinian voices, but stories from Palestine, revealing the desire to preserve and circulate these narratives. In this way, theater performance becomes a form of oral history, documenting and writing certain histories that have been actively erased. Although only two of the plays were presented in their entirety, each performance stood on its own, giving voice to Palestinians from pre-1948 to those in the present-day. Despite the fact that the majority of the playwrights either grew up or now live outside of Palestine, nearly all of the plays took place in Palestine/Israel.

The excerpt from Nathalie Handal’s Deir Yassin: The Stonecutters showed the personal lives of three couples moments before the Zionist massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948; Afaf Shawwa’s stage adaptation of Suad Amiry’s novel, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, showed a series of near-absurd episodes that have come to represent the daily realities of Palestinians—the fact, for example, that her dog is easily issued the highly sought-after and rarely-issued Jerusalem ID, while Suad has been waiting for years now to acquire her own ID card; Lameece Isaaq and Jacob Kader’s Food and Fadwa was a humorous piece that opens as a cooking show from Palestine aired on American television, which only later do we learn is an act of imagination to help Fadwa, the lead character, cope with her fiancé’s absence.

Aswat’s program closed with Sami Metwasi’s Souvenir, similar in style to many of the pieces: comedy mixed with the harsh realities of Palestinian life and identity. Using the premise of the guided tour, two of the three Palestinians hired to enact the story of Jesus in Bethlehem attempt to insert their own people’s historical narratives into the ‘official’ script. A scene of Mary giving birth at an Israeli checkpoint is but one example of the many juxtapositions. The emphasis on the historical narrative combined with the need to directly address the audience shows the desire of Palestinian theater artists not merely to be heard, but to communicate. The theatrical mode of direct address becomes a necessity where the writers and actors are not merely seen, but rather see us, forging a direct confrontation with the audience. For it is we as spectators that also have a responsibility in the making of history.

The staged readings, which were written, performed and directed by over thirty Arab and non-Arab artists, including the American playwright Naomi Wallace, does not mark the beginning of Palestinian theater in NYC, but continues the work of theater artists who contest the representations of their reality by performing the daily realities of their lives. The performance of one’s condition is an act that highlights how we define ourselves and how we are defined by others, an act that in itself can begin a process of change. For her part, Betty Shamieh says she invites people to her plays about Arabs and shows them people. The Black Eyed is a piece of this time and beyond, not merely questioning but showing us that what we may think is new is indeed centuries old. For what is the biblical Samson, she says, but a suicide bomber? Her use of myth and humor capture the audience as the play directs issues of violence, seduction, and desire toward us as spectators.

Four women meet in the afterlife outside the “Martyrs Room,” connected in some way to the experience of martyrdom. Samson’s Delilah is there, along with a woman who lived during the Crusades, and two modern-day women: a Palestinian from Gaza and an Arab-American. Each woman has a story to tell and each seeks in the afterlife the words that she did not utter while she lived. In Shamieh’s most stylistically challenging play yet—written in free verse with a chorus—words are reflected off each character as they simultaneously support and challenge one another. “Welcome to heaven, where every-thing you believe to be true is true,” one speaks. “But we can’t control what we believe,” another adds. “That’s what makes our heaven such hell,” a third retorts.

The four stories, Shamieh says, eventually collapse into a challenge between the artist and the militant. Who makes more of a difference? And who has the choice to decide? Palestinian theater artists, here and abroad, are using theater to put both others and ourselves on stage in order to challenge representation and reality.

The Black Eyed runs July 17-August 19 at New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. (between 2nd Ave. and Bowery [Third Avenue]). Please visit for details.

• Art-related resistance , Occupation , War
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jj July 11th, 2007

In Palestine the local NGOs are facing a very difficult situation these days. Fighting for a strong civil society in an independent state is their main goal. As if the Israeli occupation and the International sanctions were not enough they now have to resist their own authorities as well.

The Palestinian Network of Non-governmental organization (PNGO) issued on Tuesday a statement expressing concern over the ongoing attacks against nongovernmental and civil society institutions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The PNGO stated that more attacks are being carried out by gunmen who breaking into these institutions, confiscating their belongings, and sabotaging them.

The Palestinian law, article number 1 for the year 2000 stresses on protecting the nongovernmental organizations, civil freedom and rights.

PNGO criticized an attack carried by the Hamas controlled executive force against the General laborers Union in Gaza, and several facilities and offices belonging to the union in several parts of the Gaza Strip.

It also criticized the attack against the Al Azhar University in Gaza, in addition to the burning and destruction of several charitable organizations in the West Bank. These attacks were carried by Fatah gunmen.

They stressed the following points;

1. All parties must avoid placing the civil institutions in any conflict and political disputes, and must protect these institutions in order to enable them perform their duties.

2. The PNGO rejects all attacks against civil society institutions, and calls for prosecuting the assailants.

3. Gunmen who occupied some institutions must evacuate them immediately, return the condition to what it was before, and allow these institutions to perform their duties.

4. All attacks against civil institutions are harming the Palestinian struggle, image and cause.

5. Law institutions must be allowed to perform their duties and must prosecute the assailants in accordance to the law.

6. The PNGO expresses its support to the important role of civil society institutions especially in strengthening the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and protecting freedom.

7. The PNGO reaffirms the role of civil society institutions in strengthening the Palestinian National Unity and reject any division, legal, political or geographical, between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

At the end of its statement, the PNGO demanded the leaders of all faction to protect the interests and achievements of the Palestinian people, and their legitimate resistance against the occupation.

• Occupation , Protest , Resistance , War
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Stellan Vinthagen July 8th, 2007

Resistance is, when it is studied, regularly understood firstly as a collective project; within a movement, a organisation or a “mass” of people. Secondly resistance is connected to dramatic and public confrontations. That might be because such resistance makes more noice, more headlines and through its very nature; disturbance on the public streets of urban environments. Both these assumptions might be wrong. James Scott has in his now classic work on resistance shown that resistance is, at least in severe oppressive situations (like serfdom, slavery, small farming in the country side in the Global South, in the cast system in India, or generally in authoritarian or totalitarian states) more likely to be hidden and disguised.

A strong statement showing how resistance might be entirely individual, yet massive in its scale, is the book by Martin Gilbert (www.martingilbert.com): The Righteous - The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (2002) (Bye for about $13 at Amazon). In it Gilbert vividly describe the stories of individual brave actors who, while risking their own life, saved Jews during the Nazi occupations in various European countries. He describe the general phenomenon of “the righteous” in the introductory and concluding chapters, and between them he goes through various stories structured according to the situation in various countries, like Poland, Germany and Hungary.

An amazing number of today 21 758 (see the list at Wikipedia) non-Jewish individuals have already been formally recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” (hasidei umot haolam) by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. And a lot more candidates are on the way being recognized (only in Lithuania another 2 000 individuals), while others don’t want to be public about their brave contributions (e.g. in Denmark the underground resistance movement has asked the whole collective to be named, not individual heroes).

I think about my own grand father, Gustaf Nilsson, who was a soldier in Sweden during the war and who ended up in a military prison after letting Jews who had arrived in a small boat (probably from Denmark) and walked through his guard at the South border of Sweden. He never talked about it, at least my my father and grand-mother never talked about it, even though my grand-father was a trade union activist and thus an out-spoken political individual. I just found out about it when I cleared out the house of my grand mother after she died. Then I found the court papers of the military. I guess there are a lot of people like him, people who for various reasons did not talk about it, people we probably never will know of, who made a life saving act but didn’t see it as much in the light of the war, the Holocaust and all the suffering that happened.

It is interesting to see that these brave individuals come from all kinds of social sectors (clergy, organized support groups, farmers, work camp guards, SS-soldiers, German supervisors, etc…). And it looks like more or less equal division between those who knew and had a good relation before the war/occupation to the Jews they saved, and those who saved strangers who just knocked on their door or were in a dangerous situation. (For more information check the website Holocaust Heroes).

The high number of individuals and their mainly isolated decision to risk torture, death and danger for their own family by helping people, without having anything to gain from it, is impressive and demands our interest. The thousands that did help become even more interesting to understand when we think about all the millions who did not make such brave acts, the many million Jews that were exterminated and tortured without getting any help…These “islands of exception” becomes a challenge to explain since even though six million Jews were murded, tens of thousands were saved.

Major Helmrich and his wife who helped Jews in Poland explained it by saying: “we decided that it would be better for our children to have dead parents than cowards as parents” (p. 526).

Gilbert presents a number of reasons given by the “righteous” themselves but no clear common denominator seems to surface. Not Christian values, earlier friendship, opposition to the Nazi occupation or ideology, contempt for prejudice, a value for justice or any other reason seem to explain it fully. The almost universal “explanation” from the righteous was in the line of what a Lithuanian couple said: “We did the only thing a decent person would do…” (p. 525), does not explain it either. And maybe there is no single factor, or even a common combination of factors that unite the individuals who faced death while helping those who suffered and risked even more just because they happend to be Jews. Maybe individual resistance demands individual explanation?

But some interesting tendencis exist, e.g. the difference of numbers who helped in the various countries. In Bulgaria (where relatively few Jews where murded) only 17 individuals have been recognized, but in Poland (where a lot of Jews where murded and a general anti-Semitic sentiments existed, even before the Nazi occupation) there are at least 6 004 individual resisters (see Yad Vashem, and Gilbert p. 550).

So, when we do resistance studies it needs to recognize the extremly individual and hidden nature of some forms of resistance. Resistance studies need to investigate such resistance as well since it do matters; for each saved person or particular reduced oppression it means a lot, at least for those concerned, and, it might, taken together represent a massive resistance activity which in its effects actually seriously undermines oppressive structures. The difficult question, though, is HOW do we study such individualized and hidden resistance?

• Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Resistance , War , subaltern agency
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jj June 29th, 2007

The US State Department officially lists Hamas as a terrorist organization, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice apparently does not agree with that assessment.

In an interview with the New York Daily News earlier this month, Rice twice referred to Hamas as a “resistance movement.” Those remarks were left out of the resulting article, but did appear in a full transcript of the interview that later appeared on the State Department website.

The Israel Today picked this up and asked for reactions from their readers. (They are according to themselves a “Jerusalem-based news agency providing a biblical and objective perspective on local news”.) Very reliable with other words!

Here are some reactions from their readers:

So, she claims to be a Christian and yet supports satan and his murderers by calling the terrorists resisters. When the Bush administration is gone, will the new people be the same or worse?

What does one expect from her? Despite her education, she is one of the most deluded, ignorant and incompetent people ever to serve as secretary of state for the USA.
———————-

Language is very important in resistance studies. It make a big difference to be labeled “Terrorist” than “Resister”. And this goes for our academic writings as well as for the tabloids.

• Media , Occupation , Resistance , Terrorism
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jj June 24th, 2007

PSC welcomes the UNISON vote in support of Palestinian rights and in support for a campaign of boycott.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign Welcomes UNISON’s motion 53 on Palestine passed the 21st June at their conference in Brighton. UNISON represents 1.3 million National Health Service and other public service workers in the UK.

UNISON, one of the many National Trade Unions affiliates of the PSC, is thus leading the way for a just and peaceful solution to the Israeli occupation of Palestine now in its 40th year.

The PSC welcomes UNISON’s condemnation “of the economic sanctions imposed upon the Occupied Palestinian Territories following Palestinian Parliamentary Elections of 25 January 2006, which make worse the appalling economic circumstances of the occupation”. However, given the events of this week, PSC is deeply concerned that the sanctions are now being lifted to support one Palestinian faction against another, only to serve Israel’s and the West’s interests. This will have the result of further undermining Palestinian democracy and increasing poverty and hardship in Gaza.

The UNISON resolution acknowledges that a campaign of boycott is necessary, which was called for by members of the Palestinian Civil Society, until Israel complies with International Law and Universal Principles of Human Rights. “We, representative of Palestinian Civil Society, call upon international civil society organisations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied in South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your representative states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.” (for a full list of organisations visit http://www.stopthewall.org/download)

And what is the position of the Resistance Studies Network on this invitation to boycott Israel? I heard that is was discussed at the meeting some weeks ago, but would welcome a discussion on the blog. Let us at least list arguments in favor and against such a boycott. As academics interested in resistance we should not avoid the debate and when we are asked to take part in a boycott it would be proper to have a point of view.

• Academia , Boycott , Occupation , Resistance , The Network , War
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Christopher Kullenberg June 18th, 2007

On the Resistance Studies Network inauguration Kathy Ferguson spoke on resistance toward the military expansion, colonialism and appropriation in Hawaii. The video-streams are ready to be watched in four parts. Just click on the numbers to be redirected to Youtube: Part 1, 2, 3, 4.

• Academia , Occupation , Resistance , Seminar , The Network , Uncategorized , Video , subaltern agency
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jj June 5th, 2007

The British proposal to boycott Israeli Academic institutions is a hot topic and discussed several places. But I have not seen many voices from Scandinavian institutions. University of Gothenburg is silent. The Resistance Studies Network is silent. Swedish Academic Trade Unions are not saying anything.

Would be great to have more voices in this debate. Or to put it differently: It is embarrassing to “hear” the silence. I would hoped that we could be active in the debate and try to identify the main arguments pro et contra. Some relevant question: Should an action like this be done based on the probable outcome (long and/or short term)? Or is it mainly an important moral issue? Should the intentions be the main focus? Shall only those parts of Academia who are engaged with the occupation be boycotted or every academic initiative? Or is it a matter of principle? The list of questions are long. And few answers so far…

SGS/PADRIGU have long traditions of academic cooperation with Israeli (and Palestinian) Institutions. Have the issue been debated in any of the decision making bodies there? To abstain from a boycott is of course also a political decision, especially now when the suggestion is on the table.

The boycott of the Apartheid regime in South Africa is often referred to in the discussion. The unique thing with that boycott was that those who suffered most asked for it. The support for an international boycott of Israeli institutions are very weak from those Israelis who will be targeted. Are their support needed in order to justify a boycott?

Steven Rose argues below in favor of a boycott. I will not continue to publish more external voices on this blogg, but expect to have more voices from within the Resistance Studies Network taking part.

jj

Why Pick On Israel? Because Its Actions Are Wrong

Academic Freedom, It Appears, Applies To Israelis But Not To Palestinians
by Steven Rose

The University and College Union annual congress last week voted by a
two-thirds majority to organise a campus tour for Palestinian academic
trade unionists to explain why they had called for an academic and cultural
boycott of Israel, and to encourage UCU members to consider the moral
implications of links with Israeli universities. Not surprisingly, this
overwhelming vote met with a roar of hostility from what we have learned to
call the Israel lobby.

Our government, long accustomed to sitting on its hands when any serious
attempt to censure Israel is made, predictably joined the chorus. More
surprisingly, the Independent?s editorialist and its columnist Joan Smith
followed along. The boycott, we are told, damages academic freedom, picks
on Israel, and encourages anti-Semitism on British campuses.

Entirely suppressed in this harrumphing has been any thought about why
Palestinian university teachers and their union, as well as all the NGOs in
the Occupied Territories, have called for a boycott. Academic freedom, it
appears, applies to Israelis but not Palestinians, whose universities have
been arbitrarily closed, Bir Zeit for a full four years. Students and
teachers have been killed or imprisoned. Attendance at university is made
hazardous or impossible by the everyday imposition of checkpoints. Research
is blocked by Israeli refusal to allow books or equipment to be imported.

Even within Israel itself, some universities sit on illegally expropriated
land, Arab student unions are not recognised and there are increasing
covert restrictions on Arab-Israelis (20 per cent of the population)
entering university at all. No Israeli academic trade union or professional
association has expressed solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues a
few kilometres away across the wall, though the boycott call may finally
encourage them to do so.

When challenged, Israelis cite examples of collaboration with Palestinians:
bridges, not borders. Fine, but because Palestinian academics from Gaza or
the West bank are not permitted to enter pre-1967 Israel, how real can such
collaborations be? If academic freedom means anything, it must be
indivisible. And what are Palestinians to make of the uncensured insistence
by senior Israeli academics that their family size constitutes a
demographic threat to the Jewish state?

But why should academics, culture workers, architects and doctors in the
UK, who have all in recent months called for forms of boycott of Israel,
take such action? Why pick on Israel, we are asked. After all, as Joan
Smith points out, there are lots of ugly regimes around. How about
boycotting the UK until troops are removed from Iraq? But boycott is merely
a specific tactic, a non-violent weapon available to individual members of
civil society. It is only one form of protest: many boycott supporters are
at least as actively involved in the various campaigns against the UK?s
illegal war in Iraq as in any boycott of Israel.

No one asks those campaigning against China’s occupation of Tibet why not
Israel or Darfur? If opponents of our boycott call want to make a case for
boycotting Cuba (one boycott that Israel, following its American paymaster
at the UN, habitually supports) they are free to do so. The issue is not
“Why Israel?” but “Why not Israel?” Yet the secular western press, so
willing to express discomfort with states that describe themselves as
“Islamic Republics” is seemingly untroubled by the ethnic assumptions
underlying the claims of a Jewish republic.

Further, it is precisely because Israel prides itself on its academic
prowess (just as South Africa did of its sporting prowess) that the idea of
an academic boycott is so painful. Israel has uniquely strong academic
links with Europe, and despite its Middle-East location and constant
breaches of European legislation on human rights, receives considerable
financial research support from the EU. That?s why the Israeli cabinet felt
it necessary to set up an anti-boycott committee under that well-known
campaigner for a greater Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, and why teams of
Israeli academics toured the UK before the UCU vote to try to block the
boycott call.

Lurking behind the thinking of even well-meaning opponents of the boycott
is that it is in some way anti-Semitic. This ignores the fact that the
boycott is of Israeli institutions, not individuals (so it would affect the
tiny number of Palestinian academics in Israeli institutions, but not a
Jewish Israeli working in the UK or US). Second, it ignores the fact that
the British Jewish community is itself intensely divided over Israel,
between those who will defend Israel at all costs, and the increasingly
vocal critics who insist ?not in our name?. Even a cursory look at the
signatories of the various boycott calls will show the large number of
prominent Jewish figures among them. It really isn’t good enough to attack
the messenger as anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew rather than deal with
the message itself, that Israel?s conduct is unacceptable.

What could be a more democratic way of bringing debate on to university
campuses than the instruction to the UCU to organise a campus tour for
Palestinian academic trade unionists to engage in discussion before UCU
members decide whether to support their call for a boycott? Those who
cherish the idea of the university as the house of reason will surely
welcome the opportunity for calm discussion of a controversial issue.

The writer is secretary of the British Committee for the Universities of
Palestine

• Academia , Boycott , Nonviolent Action , Occupation , Resistance , War
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jj June 4th, 2007

by Eli Kintisch.

• Academia , Boycott , Occupation , Resistance , War
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jj May 29th, 2007

by Timothy Seidel - palestinechronicle.com

The view from the Palestinian village of Nahhalin, in the west Bethlehem area, is sobering. This small village—along with the villages of Husan, Battir, Wadi Fuqin, and Al Walaja—are becoming more and more isolated from Bethlehem.

As Israeli colonization in the Etzion bloc grows and as the Wall continues to cut deeply into the West Bank strangulating these communities, these Palestinian villagers have little access to the rest of the Israeli occupied West Bank. Even now, Israel is burrowing out a tunnel under the major settler bypass road running through the Etzion bloc, that will provide “transportational contiguity” for thisone of many isolated islands of land on 40 to 50 percent of the West Bank that Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice want to sell to the world as “the state of Palestine.” [1]

Stuck between the “Green Line”—the 1949 Armistice Line that separates Israel from the West Bank—and the Wall, Palestinians from Nahhalin find themselves among some 60,000 Palestinians living in the “seam zone,” that is that western segregation zone between the Wall and the Green Line which includes roughly 11 percent of the West Bank and that will ultimately be annexed to the “state of Israel” in Israel’s unilateral plan to define its own borders.

When I last visited Nahhalin, I was joined by my friends at the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ). [2] ARIJ had begun a waste water treatment project in Nahhalin that will now be duplicated to provide rural Palestinian areas in the West Bank with new sources of water for irrigation. ARIJ’s water and environment research unit will install on-site waste water treatment systems for 180 homes, providing direct benefits to about 1,800 people. The project gets underway this year and will be completed in 2010.

Nader Sh. Hrimat from ARIJ pointed out to me that scarcity of fresh water supplies and restricted access to traditional water supplies creates ongoing shortages of water for agricultural purposes. These new systems will not only improve access to water, they improve management of waste water, said Nader, explaining that the re-use of treated wastewater for irrigation is now considered to be one of the most feasible and economical ways to utilize household waste water in a sanitary manner.

The anticipated success of expanding this project to 180 homes is expected to encourage more Palestinian villages to install on-site treatment systems. In addition to addressing water shortages and water pollution concerns, these systems are also expected to increase agricultural productivity and food security, a function all the more important considering that over a third of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are, with another 12 percent at risk of becoming, “food insecure.” [3] Treatment units will be manufactured locally and create much-needed employment opportunities here where rampant unemployment has contributed to a poverty rate of over 33 percent (with a quarter living in “deep poverty”). [4]

On the surface, this might simply appear to be another development project, one that is similar to many others around the world. However, in this context of ongoing Israeli colonization and occupation of Palestinian life and land, such simple acts of waste water treatment and sustainable development are not only peacebuilding initiatives in their own right but they also become powerful acts of nonviolent resistance.

Another example would be the next phase of a hydrology project in the northern part of the West Bank with the Palestinian Hydrology Group (PHG). [5] I recently joined Abdul-Latif from PHG in a field visit to the Palestinian villages of Jayyus and Kafr Jammal near Qalqilya where farmers are cut off from their agricultural lands by the Israeli separation barrier. This hydrology project in its various phases has sought to assist farmers in keeping a presence on their lands on the other side of the Wall, the “seam zone,” by maintaining well pumps and irrigation systems.

Projects such as these give Palestinian people greater control over their natural resources, explained Nader. Water resources, he noted, are particularly vulnerable because Israel controls over 80 percent of the Palestinian groundwater resources in the West Bank, restricting access to water for agricultural irrigation and other purposes. [6]

Abdul-Latif also pointed this out to me. With Israeli control over water resources, and Palestinians captive to Israeli water companies, Abdul-Latif asks, “Where is the infrastructure for this ‘Palestinian state’?” Abdul-Latif then pointed out to me the citrus lying on the ground having rotted off the trees as another sign of the economic strangulation on these communities. These fruits go unpicked because Palestinian farmers have very limited access to a market of any sort to sell their goods due to the Israeli closure system in the West Bank. And when they can sell their goods somewhere, Israel has flooded the market with cheap fruits from Israel (and Jordan) that these farmers simply cannot compete with.

These indicators point to what many see as the imminent demise of a “two-state” solution to this terrible conflict and the solidification—through this structure of occupation, colonization, and apartheid—of Israeli domination over the Occupied Territories. And with the absence of any viable economic infrastructure, those calling for investment in Palestinian society as a “positive” response to the “critical” call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions need to understand the context of this structure that holds Palestinians captive in “Bantustans” as cheap laborers and consumers—a structure that will not benefit Palestinians or Israelis in the long run.

A hydrology initiative such as this is the form that a relevant nonviolent resistance has taken in the Occupied Territories. And it goes unnoticed by many in North America because it is not as recognizable as demonstrations or sit-ins. But in a context where so many pressures are exerted on Palestinian communities to leave their homes due to economic, social, or political forces (or other softer forms of what is essentially ethnic cleansing), assistance by the international community to help these communities simply be, simply exist, is the most salient form of nonviolent resistance that Palestinians live out on a daily basis.

This is why when I hear people ask, “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi, or the Palestinian King, or the Palestinian Mandela?” (once again blaming the victim for their victimhood and absolving the oppressor by placing the responsibility and the initiative on the shoulders of the oppressed, which makesone want to respond with a “Where is the Israeli Mandela or de Klerk?”) I think of the Nader’s and Abdul-Latif’s of Palestine who exercise courage, persistence, and steadfastness in the face of all of these pressures of dispossession, colonization, occupation, and most recently international boycott, and through the seemingly mundane acts of farming, reclaiming land, and water and food security initiatives truly resist injustice and truly pursue a sustainable peace born of justice in this broken land.

-Timothy Seidel is a peace development worker with Mennonite Central Committee in the Occupied Palestinian Territories where he has lived for the past three years.

in the Occupied Palestinian Territories where he has lived for the past three years.

Notes:

1. See Jeff Halper’s recent comments on this in “The Livni-Rice Plan: Towards a Just Peace or Apartheid?” ICAHD.org, 2 May 2007, http://www.icahd.org/eng/news.asp?menu=5&submenu=1&item=433

2. See http://www.arij.org/

3. See the IRIN report, “One-third of Palestinians ‘food insecure’,” The Electronic Intifada, 22 March 2007, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6713.shtml and “Growing poverty, unemployment threaten Palestinians’ ability to feed their families,” UN News, 22 February 2007, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6583.shtml or “Poor Palestinians unable to purchase enough food,” WFP Press Release, 2 February 2007, http://www.wfp.org/english/?ModuleID=137&Key=2377

4. See “Financial boycott sends Palestinian poverty numbers soaring, finds UN report,” UN News, 24 November 2006, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=20725&Cr=Palestin&Cr1= and Rory McCarthy, “UN plea for millions in Palestinian aid amid fears of economic collapse,” The Guardian, 8 December 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1967251,00.html

5. See http://www.phg.org/

6. See the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department summary on water at http://www.nad-plo.org/listing.php?view=nego_permanent_water

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