Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS
Um Abed plants an olive tree in support of Palestinian farmers. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.
By Eva Bartlett
ZEITOUN, Gaza, Feb 10 (IPS) – Tawfiq Mandil, 45, stands amongst hundreds of Palestinian farmers, activists, and international supporters in the Gaza Strip’s eastern Zeitoun district, about half a kilometre from the border with Israel. They are renewing a call for the boycott of Israeli goods.“The Israeli army destroyed my house and my five dunums of land (a dunum is 1,000 square metres) on the last day of the attacks in 2009, as well as 20 other homes,” he says.
With signs reading ‘Boycott Israeli Agricultural Products’ and ‘Support Palestinian Farmers’, Mandil and others protesting Israeli oppression of Palestinian farmers joined together Saturday to plant olive trees on Israeli-razed farmland and to implore international supporters to join the boycott of Israeli agricultural produce.
Mandil believes that the boycott is his only hope for justice for Palestinian farmers being targeted by the Israeli army and oppressed by Israel. “We hope that it will put pressure on Israel to stop targeting us and allow us to farm our land as we used to.”
With an Israeli surveillance blimp hovering above and a nearby remotely-controlled machine gun tower open and ready to fire, the significance of the rally’s location near the ‘buffer zone’ was not lost. Israeli authorities prohibit Palestinians from accessing the 300 metres flanking the Gaza-Israel border. In reality, the Israeli army regularly attacks Palestinians up to two kilometres from the border in some areas, rendering more than 35 percent of Gaza’s farmland off-limits.
“By engaging in the trade of settlement produce, states are failing to comply with their obligation to actively cooperate in order to put the Israeli settlement enterprise to an end. Therefore, a ban on settlement produce must be considered amongst those actions that Third Party States should undertake in order to comply with their international law obligations.”
The Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq released a position paper last month condemning the Israeli settlement produce trade. The paper, ‘Feasting on the Occupation: Illegality of Settlement Produce and the Responsibility of EU Member States Under International Law’ highlights the means by which Israeli settlements benefit from the oppression of Palestinian farmers.
“While the EU has been quite outspoken in condemning settlements and their expansion, they continue to import produce from these same settlements and in doing so, help to sustain their very existence,” Al-Haq director general Shawan Jabarin notes in the Al-Haq press release.
“More than 80 Palestinians have been injured and at least four Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks in the border regions since the November 2012 ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian resistance,” says Adie Mormech, 35, a British activist living in Gaza. This is in addition to the many Palestinians killed and hundreds injured in previous years of Israeli army attacks on the border regions.
“There is simultaneous action happening in the occupied West Bank,” says Mormech. “They’re planting near Yitzhar colony, which is notorious for its violence against Palestinians. Around the world, an estimated 30 countries are holding actions in solidarity with Palestinian farmers and fishers.”
Um Abed, 65, from Zeitoun is defiant. “Today we’re planting olive trees. God willing next year we’ll plant lemon, date and palm trees. We grow, they bulldoze, we re-plant.”
The boycott action follows a growing number of initiatives emerging in recent years from the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian students in Gazan universities stepped up the Boycott call in 2012, releasing Youtube videos calling for political action, not aid, from international supporters.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has attracted international support, including the backing of numerous UK and North American universities and scholars.
Increasing numbers of cultural and religious associations, such as the Quakers’ Friends Fiduciary Corporation, are divesting from corporations that profit from or support Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. The United Church of Canada endorsed the boycott of goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in August 2012.
Dr Haidar Eid, professor at Gaza’s Al-Aqsa University and PACBI member, outlines what BDS entails.
“We are calling for implementation of UN Security Council resolution 242, which calls for withdrawal of occupation forces from the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and east Jerusalem. The second demand is the implementation of the United Nations resolution 194, the return of all Palestinian refugees to the towns and villages from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948. The third demand is the end to Israel’s apartheid policies in Palestine 1948. We want equality.”
While civil society and students have been in the forefront of BDS actions in the Gaza Strip, the Hamas government has also taken steps calling for boycott. Joe Catron, an American activist based in the Gaza Strip, explains one recent government-led campaign.
“The Adidas campaign began in March 2012, when Adidas was sponsoring a marathon through parts of Jerusalem, including parts that are internationally recognised as occupied. The Ministry of Youth and Sports here called upon the Arab League to boycott Adidas in response to this, which a number of countries did.”
In September 2012, Gaza’s Ministry of Agriculture decided to ban most Israeli fruits entering Gaza.
“Palestinian farmers can grow the fruits we consume,” said marketing director in the ministry Tahsen Al-Saqa. “We need to support and protect our own farmers. They’ve been economically devastated by the Israeli ban on exporting since 2006.”
“Boycott is the key, and it is growing,” says Adie Mormech. “The momentum is so much now that it is not going to stop. It’s going to be like South Africa.”
All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.
This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.

Ten Years On: Murder and Mayhem Prevail in Iraq
Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IDN
[Photo credit: bestgamewallpapers.com]
By Ernest Corea* | IDN-InDepth News Analysis
International news agencies reported that Baghdad was wracked by death and destruction on the tenth anniversary of the invasion. Over 50 people were reported dead in a wave of bombings that ripped through the capital and its environs.
Sporadic sectarian violence has continued throughout the post-Saddam period. So has corruption, as near-anarchy continues to dominate post-invasion Iraq. The Washington Post comments that “haunted by the ghosts of its brutal past, Iraq is teetering between progress and chaos, a country threatened by local and regional conflicts that could drag it back into the sustained bloodshed its citizens know so well.”
“Mission Accomplished,” President Bush?
Outcome of “Rash War”
In Iraq as elsewhere, recollections during the tenth anniversary of an invasion that was said to be characterized by “shock and awe” evoked sorrow over deaths and suffering, anger at the launching of a war on false grounds, and baffled introspection over how the US as a whole – the people, politicians, and the press – were bamboozled into supporting a “dumb war” and a “rash war” as then State Senator Barack Obama called it.
Looking back at the US invasion and its aftermath, perhaps the most cogent encapsulation has come from Hans Blix, the distinguished Swedish diplomat who was formerly his country’s foreign minister and who headed the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). In an Iraq retrospective published by CNN to mark the 10th anniversary of a deadly misadventure, Blix wrote:
“– The war aimed to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but there weren’t any.
– The war aimed to eliminate al Qaeda in Iraq, but the terrorist group didn’t exist in the country until after the invasion.
– The war aimed to make Iraq a model democracy based on law, but it replaced tyranny with anarchy and led America to practices that violated the laws of war.
– The war aimed to transform Iraq to a friendly base for U.S. troops capable to act, if needed, against Iran — but instead it gave Iran a new ally in Baghdad.”
Blix’s pithy summation provides a salutary warning to all those whose reaction to a conflict taking place beyond America’s shores is a yearning for direct intervention.
WMD were non-existent
Many influential supporters of the US invasion of Iraq remain hawkish, nevertheless. They have not shifted from their original positions and some of them are so committed to their own misadventure that they claim they would “do it all over again” if an opportunity arose.
Moreover, some remain faithful to the dubious proposition that the invasion was justified because at the time it was launched, intelligence agencies all over the world were convinced that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Some national intelligence agencies did, indeed, make this assumption from the safety of distance. UNMOVIC, which had deployed inspectors on the ground in Iraq, was not convinced.
As Blix told the UN Security Council and through it the world on Feb. 14, 2003, well ahead of the invasion:
“How much, if any, is left of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and related proscribed items and programs? So far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons, only a small number of empty chemical munitions, which should have been declared and destroyed.”
That was not just a “gut feeling,” or idle speculation. It was an assessment based on actual facts.
Evidence of Absence
Knowing that the Bush Administration was inexorably moving towards war although the justification it claimed did not exist, Blix, as well as others associated with UNMOVIC, sought to avert a disaster. They attempted to persuade Western leaders, among others, that potentially cataclysmic decisions were being approached on the basis of flawed assumptions.
Blix records, for instance, that “during a telephone chat with Tony Blair on February 20, I told the British prime minister that it would be paradoxical and absurd if a quarter of a million troops were to invade Iraq and find very little in the way of weapons. He (i.e. Blair) responded by telling me intelligence was clear that Saddam had reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction program.” (Readers will recall that Blair was as gung ho as President George W. Bush about the invasion.)
Blix shared his misgivings with others in high positions who might have been able to halt or slow down the drift towards war. He writes: “…suspicions are one thing and reality is quite another. U.N. inspectors were asked to search for, report and destroy real weapons.
“As we found no weapons and no evidence supporting the suspicions, we reported this. But U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed our reports with one of his wittier retorts: ‘The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’” Verbal dexterity is a helpful trait in a politician but does not supplant the need for realism in the decision-making process. Policy decisions on war and peace require more than comedic talent.
In yet another intervention, Blix writes, “on February 11 — less than five weeks before the invasion — I told U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice I wasn’t terribly impressed by the intelligence we had received from the U.S., and that there had been no weapons of mass destruction at any of the sites we had been recommended (to inspect) by American forces. Her response was that it was Iraq, and not the intelligence, that was on trial.” Oh, wow.
Fake premise, Real problems
A war launched on a cooked-up premise is likely, at best, to have mixed results. On the plus side, Iraq has the benefit of Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical – in some situations, brutal – regime having ended. Few but his closest associates mourned his eviction from power. The end of his regime has not, however, been an unmixed blessing for the people of Iraq.
Over 130,000 Iraqis died as a result of the invasion and its consequences. Families were disrupted as they are in any war, and the hope of a “new tomorrow” remains distant for the nation. Stable, democratic governance is yet to be achieved. Corruption has been woven into the fabric of life.
On the US side, over 4,000 deaths have been reported, with so many more injured. Military personnel have lost their limbs and, thereby, their capacity for employment. They, and many others, have become victims of emotional trauma.
A report on the Costs of War compiled by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University calculates that US war expenditures at over $2 trillion – yes, with a “t.” This upsurge of unfunded expenditure aggravated the recession from which the US has not fully recovered.
The world’s policymakers would be well advised to think deeply on the effects of the Bush Administration’s intervention in Iraq as they consider their responses to other regional and global problems that cry out for resolution.
*The writer has served as Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Canada, Cuba, Mexico, and the USA. He was Chairman of the Commonwealth Select Committee on the media and development, Editor of the Ceylon ‘Daily News’ and the Ceylon ‘Observer’, and was for a time Features Editor and Foreign Affairs columnist of the Singapore ‘Straits Times’. He is Global Editor of and Editorial Adviser to IDN-InDepthNews as well as President of the Media Task Force of Global Cooperation Council. [IDN-InDepthNews – March 21, 2013]
Photo credit: bestgamewallpapers.com
Copyright © 2013 IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters
This article should not be republished or redistributed without the permission of the original author or copyright holder.