Serco using imported labour to oppress refugees in Australia

Posted: 31 May 2011

This is what privatisation does; forces corporations to manage situations without accountability or care to the human beings in the situation:

Dozens of foreign workers have been shipped to Australia to work at immigration detention centres.
Serco has imported 58 staff members, most from England, to staff detention centres it charges hundreds of millions of dollars to run for the Government.
They are employed on generous contracts after short training courses.
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen defended the use of imported labour.
“The detention services provider is subject to the same conditions regarding employing foreign workers as any other company operating in Australia,” a spokeswoman for Mr Bowen said.
“Detention centres across Australia employ numerous local workers where possible. For example, Pontville detention centre in Tasmania will employ 100 locals, 50 of whom are currently undergoing training.”
He said the workers, who are mostly in consultancy and management roles, were employed on work visas and paid the same rate as Serco’s Australian workers.
A Serco spokesman said the workers typically stayed in Australia for about six months.
“To ensure best practice is shared across the globe and to deliver value for our customers, we will from time to time second employees to other parts of the business,” he said.
“This means that staff from Serco Australia travel to work overseas, just as staff come here from abroad.
“Serco ensures all its overseas workers come to Australia on the appropriate work visa.”
Experts say the Government will pay Serco close to $1 billion to run Australia’s detention centres.

Palestine rises while Israel lobby grumbles into its beer

Posted: 31 May 2011

While the Australian Zionist lobby continues to attack anybody who dares challenge the Israeli government (or settlements, or the siege on Gaza or Zionism in general) – AIJAC slams me for my recent appearances at the Sydney Writer’s Festival; yes, I dared talk about not believing in a racially discriminatory Jewish state – the Economist just published this. Welcome to the new reality, Zionists:

For many years now, we’ve heard American commentators bemoan the violence of the Palestinian national movement. If only Palestinians had learned the lessons of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, we hear, they’d have had their state long ago. Surely no Israeli government would have violently suppressed a non-violent Palestinian movement of national liberation seeking only the universally recognised right of self-determination.
Palestinian commentators and organisers, including Fadi Elsalameen and Moustafa Barghouthi, have spent the last couple of years pointing out that these complaints resolutely ignore the actual and growing Palestinian non-violent resistance movement. For that matter, they elide the fact that the first intifada, which broke out in 1987, was initially as close to non-violent as could be reasonably expected. For the most part, it consisted of general strikes and protest marches. In addition, there was a fair amount of kids throwing rocks, as well as the continuing threat of low-level terrorism, mainly from organisations based abroad; the Israelis conflated the autochthonous protest movement with the terrorism and responded brutally, and the intifada quickly lost its non-violent character. That’s not that different from what has happened over the past couple of months in Libya; it shows that it’s very hard to keep a non-violent movement non-violent when the government you’re demonstrating against subjects you to gunfire for a sustained period of time.
In any case, if you’re among those who have made the argument that Israelis would give Palestinians a state if only the Palestinians would learn to employ Ghandhian tactics of non-violent protest, it appears your moment of truth has arrived. As my colleague writes, what happened on Nakba Day was Israel’s “nightmare scenario: masses of Palestinians marching, unarmed, towards the borders of the Jewish state, demanding the redress of their decades-old national grievance.” Peter Beinart writes that this represents “Israel’s Palestinian Arab Spring”: the tactics of mass non-violent protest that brought down the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, and are threatening to bring down those of Libya, Yemen and Syria, are now being used in the Palestinian cause.
So now we have an opportunity to see how Americans will react. We’ve asked the Palestinians to lay down their arms. We’ve told them their lack of a state is their own fault; if only they would embrace non-violence, a reasonable and unprejudiced world would see the merit of their claims. Over the weekend, tens of thousands of them did just that, and it seems likely to continue. If crowds of tens of thousands of non-violent Palestinian protestors continue to march, and if Israel continues to shoot at them, what will we do? Will we make good on our rhetoric, and press Israel to give them their state? Or will it turn out that our paeans to non-violence were just cynical tactics in an amoral international power contest staged by militaristic Israeli and American right-wing groups whose elective affinities lead them to shape a common narrative of the alien Arab/Muslim threat? Will we even bother to acknowledge that the Palestinians are protesting non-violently? Or will we soldier on with the same empty decades-old rhetoric, now drained of any truth or meaning, because it protects established relationships of power? What will it take to make Americans recognise that the real Martin Luther King-style non-violent Palestinian protestors have arrived, and that Israeli soldiers are shooting them with real bullets?

What Israel’s blockade of Gaza is really about (and it’s not Hamas)

Posted: 31 May 2011

Palestine’s Gandhi: Omar Barghouti, BDS and international law

Posted: 31 May 2011

My following article is published today in Overland journal and was co-written with John Docker and Ned Curthoys:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world, the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which non-Jews have a lesser status than Jews, and in which the ideal is racist and exclusivist.
– IF Stone
On 14 December 2010, the Marrickville Council in inner-west Sydney, led by its Greens mayor Fiona Byrne, expressed its support for, in her words, ‘the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, to exert peaceful pressure on the government of Israel to honour its human rights obligations to the Palestinians’ (Fiona Byrne, ‘Rates, roads – and justice in Gaza’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 2011). As is well known, the council’s now failed proposal (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 2011) to support BDS was controversial and widely ridiculed, and not only in the feral newspaper The Australian. In conversation, friends and acquaintances who live in the Marrickville municipal area made it clear to us that while they are sympathetic to the Palestinians, they feel such an action is rather absurd and silly for a local council so far from the Middle East. They also thought the Council hadn’t provided its constituents with necessary information. They have a point in terms of the council’s failure to communicate the rationale of a BDS. But was the Marrickville Council support for BDS really so ridiculous? In this essay we try to provide information about BDS that can help stimulate discussion and debate. We contend that supporting BDS is not only necessary in order to help save the Palestinian people from an ongoing catastrophe, but vitally important for the self-respect of the international community.
As anti-Zionist Jews, we support the BDS, and agree with Sonja Karkar of Australians for Palestine (‘Report on BDS Vote in Marrickville’, 21 April 2011) that the Marrickville Council action spectacularly succeeded in bringing nation-wide attention to the existence of the international boycott-Israel movement.
We have our own ideas about what is absurd, and what is allegedly ‘extreme’ on issues to do with Israel/Palestine. It’s clear that not much is known about BDS in Australia, which is not surprising, given the crippled state of the print media in this country and its near-blanket censorship – what other name is there for it? – of views critical of Israel, especially the views of Palestinian, Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals. On this issue the media in Australia make a mockery of democracy, media diversity, and intelligent and empirically informed journalism (Antony Loewenstein). Compared to the UK – think the Guardian and Independent – the print media in Australia is second-rate, and, given the near monopoly of the Murdoch press, getting worse. It’s stunning that so many Australian ‘journalists’ can accept money from the Israeli government, or from Zionist organizations in Australia dedicated to providing active support for the Israeli state, to visit Israel. It’s clear that upon their return they act as advocates and agents of influence for Israel, uncritically enunciating the policy concerns and worldview of an ethnocentric state with a racist immigration policy, a state that supports and subsidizes the ongoing colonisation of Palestine, illegal under international law; a state that is opposed to Australia’s own values as a secular, non-racial, pluralistic society. Aren’t journalists supposed to be independent of the state – any state? Isn’t this situation absurd?
There are, however, and thankfully, alternative sources of information. Here we focus on Omar Barghouti, whose 2011 bookBDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights draws attention to the epigraphs we’ve used above from Gandhi and I.F. Stone (pp.1, 78). Barghouti is in the great tradition of Palestinian intellectuals, historians and poets like Edward W. Said, Walid Khalidi, and Mahmoud Darwish, maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the Jewish diaspora and the Israeli people while advocating Palestinian rights in the most eloquent terms possible. With postgraduate degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University and in philosophy from Tel Aviv University, he works in Palestine as a dance choreographer. Barghouti is a founding member of both PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which made its first call for boycott in April 2004, and the general Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which made its call a year later, in 2005.
Importantly, Barghouti points out in BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions that the ‘BDS movement as such does not adopt any specific political formula’, for example, it steers away from the ‘one-state-versus-two-states debate, focusing instead on universal rights and international law’ (pp.51-52). He does, however, offer his own personal vision. He tells us that on ‘a personal level, not as a representative of the BDS movement’, he has for over twenty-five years consistently supported the one-state solution, ‘a secular, democratic state: one person, one vote – regardless of ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, and so on’. Such a state can ‘reconcile our inalienable rights as indigenous Palestinians with the acquired rights of Israeli Jews as colonial settlers, once they’ve shed their colonial character and privileges and accepted justice and international law’ (p.178).
He opposes violence: ‘Even when it is in reaction to colonial violence, an indiscriminate attack on the civilian community of the oppressors is morally unjustifiable, in my opinion’; international law ‘never condones deliberate or criminally negligent attacks against civilians. I fully endorse that’ (p.130). So do we. Barghouti sees BDS as part of the tradition of non-violence whose most famous representatives are Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, though the majority of Palestinians have always engaged in ‘non-violent resistance even before the inspiration of Gandhi, King, and Mandela’ (p.174). Mandela and Archbishop Tutu, he reminds us, liken Israeli occupation practices to apartheid South Africa. The present BDS campaign itself is ‘largely inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa’, though he does not suggest that the two situations are identical. The analogy is worthwhile, however, since ‘Israel’s system of bestowing rights and privileges according to ethnic and religious identity’, including allowing Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories to vote in Israeli elections and creating infrastructure, including modern highway systems, designed for the near exclusive use of those settlers, fits both the UN definition of apartheid in its Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1973 and the International Criminal Court’s Rome statute of 2002.
Barghouti describes Zionism and the Israeli state – and such a description should make all Australians think of our own history of colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands – as one of ‘settler colonialism’ (p.4). He regards Zionism as a form of racism, and refers to the Israeli state as ‘ethnocentric, racist, and exclusivist’. Drawing on Ilan Pappé’s 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, he recalls that Israel’s creation in 1948 involved ‘massive ethnic cleansing, massacres, rape, wanton destruction of hundreds of villages’ by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army. Such brutality was ‘premeditated’ and ‘meticulously planned’ by Zionist leaders, including David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s first prime minister). Over 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed and uprooted and more than four hundred villages were ‘methodically destroyed to prevent the return of the refugees’. Now refugees and internally displaced persons, the majority of the population of Gaza (something ignored by the pro-Israeli media who are deliberately ahistorical about these issues), make up two-thirds of the Palestinian population.
Barghouti believes that the BDS movement, appealing to people of conscience everywhere, is necessary ‘to avert genocide’, by which he means Israel’s ongoing assault on the Palestinians as a people, enacted through the annexation of Palestinian land, alienation of Palestinian farmers from their arable lands, restrictions on Palestinian housing and construction permits, attacks on Palestinian olive crops, attacks on Palestinian rights of assembly, cultural expression and schooling, the mass imprisonment of young Palestinian men and boys, removal of Palestinian populations from East Jerusalem and Area C of the West Bank, onerous military curfews, attacks on Palestinian freedom of movement, and a crippling undermining of the Palestinian economy.
In Gaza, Barghouti writes, the situation is desperate. He quotes the international law expert Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, who argued in 2007 that what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza reveals a ‘deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty’. Falk urges the governments of the world and international public opinion to ‘act urgently to prevent these genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy’. Barghouti also quotes the Goldstone Report (more on the unfortunate Richard Goldstone in a moment) on the December 2008-January 2009 war on Gaza saying that the Israeli assault was a ‘deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’. Both Falk and the Goldstone Report emphasise that the Israeli mistreatment of the people of Gaza, which has included the destruction of their schools, wells, electricity generators, crops, and factories, reveals deliberate intention and systematic policy (pp.36-37, 46).
We can only lament Goldstone’s recent ‘turn’ here. While the meticulous research and legal judgements of the Report still stand, Goldstone’s reputation is irreparably damaged (Richard Falk, ‘What Future for the Goldstone Report? Beyond the Name’, 20 April 2011). In our view, Goldstone’s stumbling retreat from the Report reveals the acute dilemma facing many progressive Jews with a residual sympathy for Israel: the choice between supporting international humanitarian law, or a repugnant Israeli state dedicated to stonewalling and undermining the principles of international humanitarian law. The latter is a trait of the Israeli state at least since the late 1940s when it refused to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as required by international law (UN General Assembly resolution 194, 1948). Goldstone chose to support the Israeli state, thereby betraying the Palestinian people, his colleagues in international law, and the traditions of Jewish humanism and universalism that inspired him to investigate the events in Gaza in the first place. Despite Goldstone’s reversal, those traditions are now re-asserting themselves across the world, exampled by the inspiring support given to the BDS movement by leading Jewish intellectuals and activists such as Judith Butler and Naomi Klein. Richard Falk himself, who is Jewish, deserves very honourable mention in this respect as well.
Barghouti argues that the Palestinian call for BDS demands Israel observe the fundamental human right to full equality, ending its ‘system of racial discrimination against its Palestinian citizens’. He sees recognition of the Palestinian right of return as ‘the litmus test of morality for anyone suggesting a just and enduring solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict’. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 war, including the West Bank of which East Jerusalem is a part, is illegal in international law. All Israeli settlements established in the occupied territories are a violation of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which Barghouti quotes: ‘The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies’. An example in the academic sphere is the Hebrew University, which has moved Israeli staff and students into illegally confiscated land in East Jerusalem. On 9 July 2004, The International Court of Justice in The Hague declared that Israel’s construction of the infamous apartheid wall is illegal because it annexes Palestinian land and separates Palestinians from their lands, as it was surely designed to do.
BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions dismisses any accusation that the boycott campaign is anti-Semitic (pp.82-83). For one thing, as part of the struggle for ‘universal rights’, BDS is opposed to ‘all forms of racism and racist ideologies, including anti-Semitism’. For another, as we have suggested, there is growing support for the Palestinian-led BDS from Jews inside and outside Israel. In Israel, on 27 June 2010, following the Palestinian Queers for BDS initiative, ‘an Israeli LGBT’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) call endorsed BDS. Israeli groups of Palestinians and Jews that have endorsed the BDS call include the Alternative Information Centre, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, and Who Profits from the Occupation? which is a project of the Coalition of Women for Peace. Who Profits? keeps a database of Israeli and international corporations involved in the occupation. There is also the ‘courageous Israeli BDS group Boycott from Within’.
Outside Israel, there is accelerating Jewish support for the BDS campaign, beginning with the famous letter from Steven Rose and Hilary Rose to the Guardian on 6 April 2002 calling for a moratorium on EU funding of research collaboration with Israel, funding which is meant to be predicated on respect for human rights. In September 2010, more than 150 US and British theatre, film, and TV artists issued a statement initiated by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), supporting the boycott movement. In October 2010 Israeli-British architect, Abe Hayreem, founder of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, described how Israeli architecture and planning are instruments of the occupation. Jewish intellectuals mentioned by Barghouti who have been prominent worldwide in supporting BDS include Judith Butler, Mike Leigh, Richard Falk, Naomi Klein, Ilan Pappé, and Ronnie Kasrils. In the United States, issues like the BDS movement and Israel’s increasing distance from an American self-image of an inclusive liberal democracy based on human rights, are beginning to seriously fracture the Jewish community.
And what of local authorities in various countries? The implication of the ridicule of the Marrickville Council proposal appears to be that this small local government was the only one in the world silly enough to think globally and support the BDS. On the contrary. In June 2010 the South African Municipal Workers Union, we read in BDS: Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions, initiated a campaign ‘to rid all municipalities in South Africa of Israeli products’ in order to make them apartheid-Israel free zones, a campaign that has ‘started firing the imagination of BDS activists elsewhere’. There has been local council support for the Palestinian and international campaign against the Jerusalem Light Rail, the Israeli project whereby two giant French firms, Veolia and Alstom, build a tram route serving Israel’s illegal colonies in and surrounding occupied East Jerusalem, in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
In the West Midlands, UK, the Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council decided not to consider further Veolia’s bid for the Waste Improvement Plan contract; Barghouti says that while the decision was presented as commercial, he is confident it was the result of BDS pressure. Furthermore, several local campaigns, from Hampshire County to Liverpool to Camden to South Yorkshire, have ‘sprouted to derail Veolia’ from large public works contracts. Barghouti welcomes BDS actions wherever they occur, however small or directed to one object: ‘As I’ve jokingly said in my talks’, even if a group ‘decides to launch a campaign targeting Israeli tomatoes only’, the Palestinians would be glad. He admires CodePink who have ‘chosen to focus their creative energies on boycotting AHAVA, the Israeli cosmetics company’ that manufactures in occupied Palestinian territory. Many campaigns in Europe, he adds, ‘have a narrow focus in their BDS targets, and that’s perfectly fine’.
We believe that support for BDS is crucial for the future of the international community if it is serious about upholding the principles of international law, which include non-aggression towards civilians, the illegality of occupying and annexing foreign territories, and the refusal to legitimise racist and apartheid systems of governance. The Western powers, including Australia, attempt to lead the world by relentlessly suggesting they alone act on behalf of universal principles of justice, human rights, and international law. Yet their cynicism in ignoring universal rights whenever it is convenient to do so in their own interests (think of Western intervention in Libya, yet no support for democracy in Bahrain) is glaringly revealed in the history of Israel/Palestine since 1948. Those powers blatantly protect the state of Israel, ignoring universal rights and international law, despite the fact that Israel’s self-conception, as I.F. Stone observed, is ‘racist and exclusivist’ (‘Holy War’,New York Review of Books, 3 August 1967); Israel is, according to its own preferred self-definition, a state that serves the prerogatives and interests of Jewish nationals rather than the entirety of its citizens. Consequently, while the Palestinians face a very bleak future that includes diminution of land and water rights and continuing exposure to military violence, the West generates anger and contempt for its egregious hypocrisy. We submit that BDS is indeed a litmus test for humanity, because it asks the world’s citizens to act to uphold universal human rights. If BDS fails, we are all diminished.

Armed Westerners in Libya helping “liberation”

Posted: 30 May 2011

 
More here.

Our post-legal and unaccountable society in the WOT

Posted: 30 May 2011

Barack Obama made a conscious choice when taking office to Look Forward and Not Back after eight years of illegal torture committed by the Bush administration.
Tom Engelhardt unpacks this legacy:

To put it another way, every CIA torturer, all those involved in acts of rendition, and all the officials who okayed such acts, as well as the lawyers who put their stamp of approval on them, are free to continue their lives untouched.  Recently, the Obama administration even went to court to “prevent a lawyer for a former CIA officer convicted in Italy in the kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric from privately sharing classified information about the case with a Federal District Court judge.”  (Yes, Virginia, elsewhere in the world a few Americans have been tried in absentia for Bush-era crimes.)  In response,wrote Scott Shane of the New York Times, the judge “pronounced herself ‘literally speechless.’”
The realities of our moment are simple enough: other than abusers too low-level (see England, Lynndie and Graner, Charles) to matter to our national security state, no one in the CIA, and certainly no official of any sort, is going to be prosecuted for the possible crimes Americans committed in the Bush years in pursuit of the Global War on Terror.