International
mediators have renewed negotiations with Hamas and Israel to halt the conflict
in Gaza, according to the militant group’s senior official, Bassem Naim, as
cited by the Associated Press.
Qatar
halted mediation in November, citing frustration over a lack of progress and
suggesting that the parties were not negotiating in good faith.
There
has been a “reactivation” of efforts in recent days to stop the fighting,
release hostages from Gaza, and free Palestinian prisoners in Israel, Naim told
AP in Türkiye, expressing hope that a deal to end the hostilities was within
reach.
“I
think it is not a big challenge to reach a deal… if there are intentions on the
other side,” the official said, emphasizing that no “solid, well-formed”
new ceasefire proposal has yet been presented to Hamas.
According
to another official who spoke with AP on condition of anonymity, Qatari
mediators have returned to the talks.
In
an interview with British broadcaster Sky News on Wednesday, Qatari Prime
Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani said officials in his
country are planning to reach a ceasefire before US President-elect Donald
Trump takes office on January 20.
Previous
rounds of peace talks between Hamas and Israel were concentrated on variations
of a proposal calling for a multi-phased ceasefire. It would start with a
preliminary six-week halt in fighting during which female, elderly, and sick
hostages could be freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. At the same
time, Israel would pull back some of its military forces, allowing displaced
Palestinians to return home.
The
next phase was expected to include the full withdrawal of Israeli forces, the
release of the remaining hostages, and agreement on the terms of a permanent
end to the war. A final phase was suggested to focus on reconstruction.
Over
44,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the fighting broke out
between Hamas and Israel 14 months ago. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF)
operation in the Palestinian enclave was triggered by a surprise Hamas attack
on October 7, 2023, which left around 1,200 Israelis dead. The group took more
than 250 hostages, around 100 of whom are believed to still be held in Gaza.
Earlier
this week, Reuters cited sources close to the matter as reporting that Trump’s
incoming Middle East envoy had traveled to Qatar and Israel to kick-start the
president-elect’s diplomatic push to reach a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release
deal before his inauguration.
Naim
also said that he believes that the incoming US administration could “affect
the situation positively” given that Trump, a stalwart supporter of Israel, had
made halting wars in the region part of his election campaign.
Finian Cunningham
The charade of Western democracy is
rapidly unraveling as so-called leaders and their dutiful media show themselves
to be brazenly unaccountable to citizens while pursuing elitist, criminal
interests.
Biden using presidential powers to
pardon his drug-addict felonious son – after promising he wouldn’t. Western
media claims that the upsurge in conflict in Syria is a “civil war” and not due
to NATO-backed terrorist proxies. Western support for genocide in Gaza and a
fascist Israeli leader who is mass murdering his way to avoid court prosecution
for years of corruption. Western support for a money-laundering Neo-Nazi regime
in Kiev whose proxy war against Russia could spiral into nuclear annihilation.
Western sponsoring of anti-government violence in Georgia after pro-EU groups
lost an election there. The pro-West South Korean leader declaring police state
powers to avoid prosecution for corruption.
That’s just a quick sample of
something more ample in the West’s decaying image.
The visit to China this week by
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was another revealing fiasco. The
obsessively anti-Russia Baerbock landed in Beijing not to prioritize improving
trade relations with the European Union’s biggest global partner but rather to
browbeat China with tedious allegations that it was helping Russia’s war effort
in Ukraine.
What’s more important? Getting along
with China to bolster trade and jobs for millions of Germans and Europeans, or
gratuitously grandstand over a wanton proxy war in Ukraine?
Understandably, the Chinese
authorities were not pleased by Baerbock’s insolence and gave her short shrift.
She was snubbed by China’s foreign minister Wang Yi not affording a customary
joint press conference after more than three hours of discussions. In a
separate statement, China again rejected claims that it was aiding Russia
militarily in Ukraine.
So here we have Germany’s top
diplomat who is soon out of a job because her coalition government has
collapsed and is facing new elections – but she flies to Beijing on taxpayer
money to aggravate relations with China, whose annual trade with the EU amounts
to over $700 billion.
At her solo press conference in
Beijing, Baerbock doubled down in her arrogance, accusing China of jeopardizing
peace and security in Europe because it supports Russia.
She claimed that Russian President
Vladimir Putin was dragging Asia into the war with Ukraine.
The doublethink is astounding.
Germany, the European Union, NATO, and the United States have done everything
to drag the whole world into a war because of its reckless proxy machinations
in Ukraine against Russia. The utter failure of that gamble has cost European
and American taxpayers a combined $200 billion and could frighteningly escalate
into a nuclear conflagration.
Baerbock turned reality on its head
when she accused Russia of pulling Asia into the war in Ukraine. It is the
United States, NATO, and European Atlanticist leaders who are expanding the
proxy war to other regions, including the Middle East and Asia.
Western so-called democracies and
NATO are supporting the upsurge in violence in Syria by terrorist militias
under the banner of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an internationally proscribed
terror organization affiliated with Al Qaeda. Ukrainian military personnel and
Turkey (which means NATO personnel) are reliably reported to be assisting the
militants in Syria with drone technology.
Evidently, the U.S.-led NATO proxy
war in Ukraine is going badly as Russian forces steadily advance against the
crumbling Kiev regime. Flaring up the dormant NATO proxy war in Syria is a
desperate measure to divert Russian forces to assist its ally, President Bashar
al-Assad.
The lame-duck U.S. President Joe
Biden is desperately throwing billions of dollars to prop up the Kiev regime
before he leaves the White House next month. This is despite Americans voting
him out of office partly because they are disgusted by his failed warmongering
in Ukraine.
This is the same president who this
week pardoned his son’s criminal convictions and spared him from several years
in jail.
How much more evidence is needed to
show that Western democracies have descended into oligarchies run by elitist
politicians who consider themselves above the law and have nothing but contempt
for representing ordinary citizens’ interests?
The entire European Union has been
captured by Atlanticist elites who have imposed policies that serve hegemonic
Western interests and not the interests of ordinary citizens. That’s a
definition of treason.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron,
Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Commission President Ursula Von
der Leyen are some of the other bought-and-paid-for politicians who embody the
Atlanticist tyranny. Former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who is now NATO
secretary-general (sinecures and pay-offs are us), and Polish Premier Donald
Tusk are other examples. The feeble Danish, Finnish, Swedish and Baltic leaders
are also part of the U.S. vassals club.
Imbued with elitist ideology and
deep-seated Russophobia, seduced by bribery, or coerced by the CIA blackmail,
all these political prostitutes have been played to betray the interests of
European citizens and to make life for the masses incredibly harsh. Russian
energy has been cut off leaving European economies shattered. Germany is the
most salient case in point where its vital auto industries are collapsing due
to higher energy costs.
Another absurd elitist puppet is
Kaja Kallas, the former Estonian Premier, who is now the European Union’s
foreign minister, taking over from that other Atlanticist tool, Josep Borrell.
On her first day in office this week, Kallas visited Kiev to pledge more
financial and military aid for the corrupt NeoNazi regime. That’s right. She
goes to a NeoNazi regime whose expired president canceled elections, imprisons
opposition politicians, censors critical, independent media, and forces
military conscription on citizens who want the conflict with Russia to end.
Don’t you think Kallas would have been better visiting the EU’s biggest trade
partner, China, to repair relations?
While in Kiev, Kallas coordinated
with Germany’s Baerbock in Beijing by repeating baseless condemnation of China
for its strategic partnership with Russia.
Kallas accused China of prolonging
the war in Ukraine simply by maintaining trade relations with Russia, buying
Russian gas, and so on.
This politician from a tiny Baltic
state of less than 1.5 million people is now running the foreign policy of the
EU whose total population is 450 million.
Kallas, who is obsessed with the
Russophobia typical of the Atlanticist elites, has threatened to impose higher
trade tariffs on China over tenuous allegations of supporting Russia.
The EU has already shot itself in
both feet from slavishly following the U.S. imperialist agenda to
“strategically defeat” Russia. Now, these same elitist politicians want to
compound their treasonous betrayal of European interests by destroying relations
with China.
However, the crass servility to an
Atlanticist ideology of bankrupt democratic pretensions is rebounding with
self-destruction. Western governments (in reality, regimes) and their
discredited elitist charlatans are being run out of office due to growing popular
disgust over lies and contradictions.
Every Western state is being shaken
to its core as more of its people see rank corruption and deception that for
decades masqueraded as “democracy”.
Western ‘democracy’ is like a
vampire. It sucked the blood of too many people for too many years – all with
impunity under the cloak of being virtuous. But in the light of truth, it is
decaying and crumbling.
Joziah
Thayer
The
Qualitative Military Edge agreement between the United States and Israel has
cost U.S. taxpayers $310 billion since Israel was founded. Many people in the
United States and around the world are upset with how the United States
continues to support Israel as they besiege and bombard Gaza, resulting in what
some estimates say are 200,000 deaths. What people may not be aware of is that
it is U.S. law to defend and sustain Israel’s hegemony. The QME agreement
between the United States and Israel has its roots in the 1960s during the peak
of Cold War tensions. The U.S. saw Israel as an invaluable geopolitical ally to
combat the expansion of Soviet influence into the Middle East. Lydon B. Johnson
was the first president to speak publicly about arms deals with Israel.
The
Six-Day War in 1967 proved Israel’s military capabilities, and the U.S. felt
that Israel could be a valuable partner in combating Soviet influence in the
Middle East. Following the Six-Day War, there was a spike in military and
financial transfers to Israel using the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. The QME
was further solidified during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 when a U.S. airlift of
military supplies to Israel was critical in turning the tide of the conflict.
In
2008, in the last months of the Bush administration, the QME agreement between
the U.S. and Israel became an official U.S. law by amending the Foreign
Assistance Act of 1961 and the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 to become the
Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008. This law made it a legal requirement for the
U.S. to ensure that any arms sales to Middle Eastern countries do not
compromise Israel’s military superiority.
Legacy
media will tell us that this legislation enjoyed bipartisan support, driven by
a recognition of Israel’s strategic role in the region when, in truth, it was
driven by AIPAC and Senator Joe Liberman, while one of the biggest opponents of
the bill was Senator Rand Paul who railed against the budget of this bill
especially as domestic debt soared and argued he for a more balanced approach
that would not alienate Arab allies, in a time when the U.S. sought to
stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan.
In
response to what the U.S. government called a failed state in Syria and a rise
in ISIS and Al-Qaeda, the U.S. gave Israel F-35 fighter jets America’s most
advanced stealth fighters, making Israel the only country at the time outside
of the U.S. to operate the F-35. These jets made Israel a regional superpower
because no other nation in the region had this capability. The decision to
equip Israel with F-35s is not a secret; we were told this move was to counter
Iran’s regional influence, while the real reason at the time was to put Israel
on an even playing field with Russia in Syria.
The
Naval Transfer Act of 2008 legally required the United States to ensure that
Israel maintains a qualitative military edge over its adversaries.
Specifically, it mandates that any sale of arms to Middle Eastern countries
must undergo a rigorous review to confirm that it does not compromise Israel’s
QME. The law defines QME as the capability to “counter and defeat any credible
conventional military threat” with minimal damage to Israel’s forces and
resources. The QME is a legal commitment from the U.S. to ensure that Israel is
not only victorious in battle but will be able to win decisively. This law is
reaffirmed by congressional vote year after year, with Congress passing various
recent provisions that mandate the Department of Defense to report on Israel’s
QME status periodically.
Israel
is often called America’s greatest ally when, in truth, Israel is really
America’s greatest overseas asset. Since 1958, the United States has been
funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to Israel. American tax dollars built
the democratic state of Israel, and while this issue is often seen as a policy
decision, since 2008, it has been official U.S. law. Before 2008, it was just
an unwritten rule that republican and democratic administrations signed off on
for decades. Politicians and talking heads can repeatedly claim that Israel is
an ally, which they are, but at what cost?
Security
in the Middle East or Peace in the Middle East are just catchphrases used to
perpetuate this false notion that only through Israel can we attain peace in
the Middle East. Iraq, Syria, and Yemen were all conflicts that Israel
vehemently pushed the international community to pursue. Netanyahu lied to
Congress about WMDs in Iraq, moved mountains to destabilize Syria, and then
cried to the UN about the Houthis in 2014.
The
original basis of the Israeli QME was to use Israel to combat Soviet expansion
into the Middle East, and this policy has not changed over the last 70-plus
years. The Iranian Revolution in 1979 shifted the focus of the QME a bit to
containing a new threat from Iran. Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan was in part
to maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region, and we know how
that ended. The United States cannot allow Russia or China to build
relationships with Middle Eastern countries because the U.S. will not be able
to guarantee Israel’s qualitative military edge if they allow Russia and China
to advance the militaries and economies of nations in the Middle East.
The
current status quo policy on Russian or Chinese influence in the Middle East is
not to prevent Russia or China from threatening America’s interests in the
region; It’s about protecting Israel’s security under the guise of perpetuating
Western ideology and control. Allowing this law to remain on the books codifies
into public law that U.S. lawmakers in both Democratic and Republican
administrations are beholden to Israel, no matter what. The international stage
is far too dynamic to have policy decisions adhere to such a static law.
The
price of war is always paid by the people of those nations, not the governments
that orchestrate conflicts. American taxpayers have shouldered the burden of
the war machine for far too long without reaping any rewards from so-called
assets overseas the military-industrial complex claims to protect. We have
built infrastructure in other nations as ours crumbles and assure the security
of foreign lands as ours dwindles, but it seems as soon as someone mentions
Russia or Muslim extremists, people forget all of this, standing in line with a
war drum strapped to their chest, pounding away robotically.
Qassam Muaddi
December 5, 2024
Leading international human rights
organization Amnesty International has concluded, in a report it released on
Wednesday, that Israel was responsible for acts of genocide against the
Palestinian people in the Gaza strip.
Displaced Palestinians inspect the damage at a makeshift camp that was
hit in Israeli strikes near the Abu Hmayseh school at the Bureij refugee
camp in the central Gaza Strip on December 4, 2024. (Omar Ashtawy
/apaimages)
The group said that it had been
analyzing events and statements by Israeli officials for months, concluding
that the legal threshold for the crime of genocide has been met. It is the
first time that Amnesty has reached such a conclusion during an ongoing
conflict.
Amnesty’s chief Agnes Callamard said
in a statement on Wednesday that “month after month, Israel has treated
Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity,
demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” adding that “Our damning
findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is
genocide. It must stop now.”
The report comes more than a year
after Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip following the Hamas-led
October 7 attacks. At the time of the report’s release, the death toll in Gaza
had surpassed 44,500, including 60% women, children and elderly, according to
the Palestinian health ministry.
Amnesty’s report arrives also a year
after South Africa filed its case against Israel before the International Court
of Justice, for charges of breaching the convention on the prevention and
punishment of the crime of genocide. The ICJ ruled that Israel was “plausibly committing
genocide,” and ordered Israel to take measures to prevent it, though according
to experts, no such measures have been taken, and Israel has in fact continued
its genocidal attacks on Gaza for months after the ICJ ruling.
Amnesty’s own branch in Israel
dissociated itself from the findings of its parent organization, clarifying in
a long statement that it does not believe Israel is committing genocide in
Gaza. However, it said that the killing and destruction in Gaza has reached
“horrifying levels,” and called for investigation into possible crimes against
humanity.
Israel, for its part, rejected the
report. The spokesperson of the Israeli foreign minister, Oren Marmorstein
called Amnesty “fanatical,” in a post on ‘X’, and called the report
“fabricated” and “based on lies.”
The report comes a few days after
former Israeli chief of staff and war minister, Moshe Yaalon sparked
controversy in Israel after saying in a local TV interview that Israel is
committing ethnic cleansing in Gaza, especially in the north of the strip, where
since early October Israeli forces have killed and injured thousands, and
forced tens of thousands more to leave south. Only 70,000 Palestinians remain
in the north of Gaza, in comparison to more than 350,000 before October 7 of
last year.*
Currently, around 1.8 million
Palestinians, more than 98% of the population of the Gaza Strip, have been
displaced multiple times during last year. The secretary general of the UN,
Antonio Guterres described the situation in Gaza as “apocalyptic,” and has
reiterated calls for an immediate ceasefire.
*In previous reports we indicated
that the north of Gaza had 700,000 before October 7 of 2023. That number refers
to all of the northern part of the strip including Gaza city, and not the area
besieged since early October, which does not include Gaza City.
Vijayh
Prashad
December
4, 2024
Dear
friends,
Greetings
from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Emily Karaka (Aotearoa), Parallel Process:
Palestinian Horizon, 2024. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation.
Installation view: Ka Awatea, A New Dawn, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah,
2024.
Finally,
before history ends, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest
warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence
Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The
indictment stated that there ‘are reasonable grounds to believe that both
individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in
Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and
medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity’. The court
found sufficient reasons to believe that the two men ‘bear criminal
responsibility’ for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, the
crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, and
the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against a civilian
population. Almost immediately, U.S. President Joe Biden condemned the court’s
actions, stating that the ‘ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli
leaders is outrageous’. The United States, Biden said, ‘will always stand with
Israel’.
A
short walk from Biden’s White House sits Freedom House, an institution set up
in 1941 and predominantly funded by the U.S. State Department. Each year,
Freedom House releases its Freedom in the World index, which uses various data
points to adjudge whether a country is ‘free’, ‘partly free’, or ‘not free’.
Adversaries of the United States—such as China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and
Russia—are consistently found to be ‘not free’, even if they have electoral
processes and legislative bodies of various kinds (in Iran’s 2024 legislative
elections, for example, 15,200 candidates ran for 290 seats in the Consultative
Assembly; while last year in Cuba, the 470 seats in the National Assembly of
People’s Power were elected by 75.87% of eligible voters). Meanwhile, the 2024
index accords Israel with a ‘global freedom score’ of 74/100 and proclaims it
to be the only ‘free’ state in the region, despite the authors noting that in
Israel ‘the political leadership and many in society have discriminated against
Arab and other ethnic or religious minority populations, resulting in systemic
disparities in areas including infrastructure, criminal justice, education, and
economic opportunity’. According to the measurements of this U.S. State
Department-funded index, which is routinely used to disparage countries around
the world that it deems unfree, an apartheid system built on occupation and now
genocide is considered an exemplary democracy.
Indices,
such as the one from Freedom House, are not as innocent as they may appear. The
design of the index—built on the subjective assessments of analysts and
advisors selected from the world of Western establishment think tanks—produces
outcomes that are often prescribed. While Freedom House claims to draw from the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), it ignores the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966). The
latter would necessitate understanding democracy in a far more capacious way
than the mere holding of elections and existence of multiple political parties.
Article 11 of the second covenant, alone, would expand the idea of democracy to
include the right to housing and the right to be free from hunger. As Article 4
notes, the purpose of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is
to promote ‘the general welfare in a democratic society’. Democracy here is
used with the broadest understanding, extending far beyond simple electoralism.
And even with regard to electoralism, there is scant concern in the Freedom
House index for the high rates of abstention across liberal democracies and for
the collapse of a vibrant media culture to hold political parties and leaders
to account.
But
then, what do those behind such indices care? They think themselves masters of
the universe. The reactions to the ICC indictment from the United States and
Germany—the two countries with the largest arms transfers to Israel during this
genocide—have been expected, but nonetheless shocking. Biden’s cavalier
reaction confirms that the United States either does not understand or does not
care about the gravity of its callousness and that the United States fails to
grasp that its rejection of the ICC warrants is the final nail in the coffin of
the US’s ‘rules-based international order’. On the issue of callousness: ahead
of the 2024 U.S. presidential election the Biden administration said that
Israel had to allow aid into Gaza within thirty days or it would face a
weapons’ freeze, but this deadline came and went without much concern. The
‘rules-based international order’ was always a bit of a farce. In 2002, during
the U.S.-driven War on Terror, the U.S. Congress debated the possibility that a
U.S. soldier or CIA agent could be charged with a war crime. To immunise that
soldier or agent, the U.S. Congress passed the American Servicemembers’
Protection Act, which has been widely called the ‘Hague Invasion Act’. Although
the act does not say that the U.S. can invade the Netherlands to free its
personnel from the ICC, it does say that the U.S. president ‘is authorised to
use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any
person… who is being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request
of the International Criminal Court’. Around the time of the passage of this
act, the United States formally withdrew from the Rome Statute (1998) that set
up the ICC.
Both
U.S. Senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham have invoked the Hague Invasion Act
in response to the ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant,
with Graham going so far as to say that the U.S. Senate should place sanctions,
even on allies such as Canada, for having the temerity to suggest that they
would uphold the warrants. If the U.S. throws the ICC warrants to the winds,
then it has told the world with finality that it does not believe in the rules,
or that the rules are only made to discipline others and not itself. It is
remarkable to see the list of international treaties that the United States
either never signed or never ratified. A few examples are sufficient to make
the case about its disregard for a genuine rules-based international order:
1.
Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of
the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1949, never signed).
2.
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951, never
signed).
3.
Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960, never
signed).
4.
Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and
Registration of Marriages (1962, signed but never ratified).
5.
Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to
War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity (1968, never signed).
6.
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982, never
signed).
7.
Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of
Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal (1989, signed but never ratified).
8.
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006,
signed but never ratified).
Even
more horrifying are the arms control conventions that the United States has
either refused to sign or from which it has unilaterally withdrawn:
1.
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (1972, withdrew in 2002).
2.
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (1987, withdrew
in 2019).
3.
Mine Ban Treaty (1997, never signed).
4.
Convention on Cluster Munitions (2008, never signed).
5.
Arms Trade Treaty (2013, signed but withdrew in 2019).
It
is because the U.S. unilaterally left the ABM Treaty and the INF Treaty that
the conflict over Ukraine has become so inflamed. Russia had made it clear on
several occasions that the absence of any arms control regime regarding
mid-range nuclear missiles would pose a threat to its major cities, were its
neighbours to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). On 18
November, in a provocative and dangerous move, Biden allowed Ukraine to use
intermediate-range missiles to strike Russian territory, which drew a powerful
response from Russia against Ukraine. If Russia had decided to fire one of
those missiles at a U.S. base in Germany in retaliation, for instance, we might
already be in midst of a nuclear winter. The U.S. disregard for the arms control
regime is only part of its absolute disregard for any international law, sealed
in place by its raised middle finger to the ICC.
In
1982, the South African freedom fighter and poet Mongane Wally Serote (born in
1944), who lived in Botswana and worked with the Medu Art Ensemble (about which
we wrote a dossier last year), published ‘Time has run out’ in his epic book
The Night Keeps Winking. ‘[M]any of us have gone mad’, he wrote, because ‘we
are human and this is our land’. Serote was writing of South Africa, but we can
expand his vision now to Palestine, and indeed to the entire earth. And then
Serote writes:
“Too much blood has been spilled
Please my countrymen, can someone say
a word of wisdom …
Ah, we’ve become familiar with horror
the heart of our country
when it makes its pulse
ticking time
wounds us
My countrymen, can someone who
understands that it is now too late
who knows that exploitation and
oppression are brains which being
insane only know violence
can someone teach us how to mount the
wounds and fight.”
It
is time to revisit the ‘great wound’, as Frantz Fanon wrote in 1959, to ride
the wound and fight.
Earlier
this year, Serote wrote a poem for Palestine, part of which I reproduce for the
International Day in Solidarity with Palestine (29 November); for this day, we
at Tricontinental are organising an exhibition featuring the artwork of
Palestinian artist Ibraheem Mohana and twenty children who he has been teaching
art to in Gaza in the midst of Israel’s genocide.
“We hear in our eyes the sounds of the
siren and of the explosion
As it blasts our eye and hearing
and the red fire
flares its coming in the air with the
power of a storm
The red-hot fire holds human flesh in
its red-hot dance
It was preceded by a thick black smoke
Which bellows and rages
On
Oh
Human race”
And
then it ends…
“Ah Palestine!
Be.”
Warmly,
Vijay
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