By Hannah Mermelstein

I saw this sign as I was entering Nablus last week, again on my way to Ramallah, and again near Bethlehem. The phrase is printed in Hebrew, presumably by Israeli settlers, on huge signs throughout the West Bank. Israeli racism rarely shocks me anymore, but its blatant display still makes me stop and catch my breath as I translate it into other contexts. Imagine driving through the middle of a predominantly black neighborhood in a U.S. city or town and seeing an enormous sign that says, “The war is with the Blacks.”

I think about security. Israel’s abuse of the word has rendered the concept almost meaningless in the region, but the importance of security on individual and communal levels cannot be underestimated. However, most discussions I see in the media about security ignore the Palestinian people’s right to security. “The war is with the Arabs” is a new sign, as far as I know, but for years in the West Bank I have seen stars of David scrawled on Palestinian shops and homes, and signs like “Death to Arabs” and “Kahane was right” (Kahane was an extremist political leader who promoted ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people; this sign is essentially equivalent to “Hitler was right” in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood).

But signs are not only created; they are also destroyed. Since 1948, Palestinian people inside Israel have experienced erasure and denial of their identities that is perhaps stronger than that of any other group of Palestinian people. I visited a friend in Lyd last week who lives on Giborai Yisrael (“Heroes of Israel”) Street. Driving around the Palestinian neighborhoods in Lyd, we passed roads bearing the names of Herzl, Jabotinsky, and other Zionist leaders. None of the old Arabic street names remain. Even large cities with considerable Palestinian populations are now seeing Arabic names officially erased from signs. In Arabic script, “Yaffa” will become “Yafo,” “Nasra” will become “Natzeret,” and “Al Quds” will become “Yerushalayim.”

Lack of security goes beyond denial of identity and history as visually expressed through signs. A Palestinian friend with Israeli citizenship told me he has heard a rumor that a huge piece of land in Jordan is being cleared and built up for the eventual arrival of the Palestinian population of Israel after they are transferred from their homes. “It may be conspiracy theory,” he said, “but I don’t know.”

“I’d like to think that Israel couldn’t get away with that,” I responded.

“Of course they can,” another friend from Lyd said, “and if the conditions are right, they will.”

Imagine living day to day thinking you might be expelled from your country in the near future. Or in Gaza, wondering if you will be killed tomorrow, or if you will ever be able to come in and out of your country at will. Or in the West Bank, if your son will be arrested, or if you will be able to get through the checkpoint in the morning to get to work. Or in Jerusalem, if your residency will be stripped or your house destroyed.

Imagine little correlation between choice and consequence, an arbitrary relationship between cause and effect. If you are just as likely to get shot and killed sipping tea in your doorway, or sitting in your fourth grade classroom, or participating in a demonstration, or joining the armed resistance, is it any surprise that some choose each?

A friend of mine from the West Bank once told me that she never feels safe, so safety is not a consideration for her in making decisions. As much as I may try, I cannot truly imagine this lack of control.

I met a woman in Jerusalem who was displaced from her home by settlers, physically removed from her house by dozens of Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night. Twice a refugee (1948 and 2008), Um Kamel currently lives in a tent near her house that has been destroyed and re-pitched six times in the past six months. This is perhaps the height of insecurity, yet Um Kamel stays strong and determined. Many in Palestine would call it sumoud, or steadfastness.

This kind of strength is seen remarkably often in Palestine, and indicates a deeper security that comes in part from faith. Faith in God, sometimes, but also faith in each other, in the justice of one’s cause, in the tide of history that has shown that no single occupation in Palestine lasts forever. This, of course, is also Israel’s deepest fear. That no matter how many walls they build, how many people they imprison, how many homes they destroy, how many signs they erase, and how many people they expel, true security will remain elusive, and eventually, Zionism will fail. As many older Palestinian people have said to me, with security, “We have lived through many occupations. This too shall pass.”

— Hannah Mermelstein is co-founder of Birthright Unplugged a
nd Students Boycott Apartheid. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and works with the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel and the Palestine Education Project. She can be reached at hmermels@hotmail.com. This article appeared in CounterPunch.org.

By Sohail Parwaz

The foundation of Iran’s nuclear programme was laid in 1960 during the Shah of Iran Reza Pahlavi’s era under the patronage of the U.S. within the framework of a bilateral accord between the two countries. The late Shah had a plan to build a couple of nuclear power reactors.

The most interesting thing is that the Tehran Nuclear Research Centre (TNRC) was equipped with a U.S.-supplied 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor in 1967 and was run by the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI). Iran signed and ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968.

Since Iran’s atomic agency was established and the NPT was signed, the Shah of Iran planned to construct 23 nuclear power stations across the country with the help of the U.S.. by the year 2000.

The Iranian nuclear programme faced setbacks twice and was brought to a standstill. When the Shah of Iran was deposed after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and during the Iran-Iraq war, two unfinished power reactors were bombed and ruined by the Iraqis in Bushehr on the coast of the Persian Gulf.

Although all the nuclear activities were suspended after the 1979 revolution, the work was resumed on a modest scale subsequently. Iran always claimed that it was trying to establish a complete nuclear fuel cycle to support a civilian energy programme, but U.S. and the European countries feared that the same fuel cycle would be applicable to a nuclear weapons’ programme.

Iran appears to have spread its nuclear activities around a number of sites to reduce the risk of detection and attack. It is generally believed that Iran’s efforts were focused on uranium enrichment.

Interestingly, the issues on which the U.S., France, and the UK are making a hue and cry were once hatched and sponsored by them. How could one forget that it was the U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who had signed the National Security Decision Memorandum 292 titled, ‘U.S.-Iran Nuclear Cooperation’ in 1975, which very generously laid out the niceties of the sale of nuclear energy equipment to Iran to bring home more than $ 6 billion as revenue? This cooperation did not stop in the following year (1976) when U.S. President Gerald Ford signed a directive offering Tehran a chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel.

The deal was for a complete nuclear fuel cycle. Besides this, numerous other contracts were signed with various Western firms, including a German firm that began the construction of the Bushehr power plant. Work was halted after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the German firm withdrew from the project.

Shortly afterwards, Iraq invaded Iran and the nuclear programme was stopped until the end of the war. In 1990, Iran began to look towards partners for its nuclear programme. Due to a radically different political climate and punitive U.S. economic sanctions, few candidates existed at that time. In 1995, Iran signed a contract with Russia to resume work on the incomplete Bushehr plant. It was not until 2002 that the U.S. began to question Iran’s nuclear intentions after Masud Rajavi’s Mujahideen-e-Khalq Organisation of Iran revealed the existence of the Natanz and Arak facilities.

The Iranian nuclear programme has become the talk of these days. It appears that the Western world has come together to oppose Iran’s right to enrich uranium for vested interests best known to Europe and the U.S. It is an open secret now that Iran’s nuclear programme was founded during the Shah of Iran’s rule. After seeing the lows and highs of the time, it has reached a stage where it is not acceptable to the Western world.

Things were sailing smoothly when on one fine morning of February 9, 2003 the then Iranian President Mohammad Khatami disclosed publicly the existence of Natanz and some other nuclear facilities on Iranian television and invited the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit them. He revealed the details about the Iranian programme for enriching uranium at Natanz and other locations. On the Iranian president’s invitation, Dr Muhammad El-Baradei, the head of the IAEA, accompanied by a team of inspectors visited Iran somewhere in late February 2003. Since then the IAEA’s experts and inspectors have visited Iran many times.

On the basis of the observations made during these visits, the IAEA released a prelude in July the same year with a follow-up report on August 26, 2003. These reports were sufficient for the IAEA authorities to be convinced about Iran’s nuclear activities. Thus on September 12, 2003, a formal ultimatum was handed over to Iran by the IAEA to reveal all details on the proceedings in the field with a deadline of October 31, 2003. The Bush administration objected to Iran’s nuclear programme asking why a country that has vast oil and natural gas reserves is striving for nuclear energy.

The most interesting thing is that the logic given now did not strike the American minds back in the 60s when the TNRC was equipped with a first ever U.S.-supplied 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor in 1967. It was before 9/11. The history of the Iranian nuclear programme has to be understood besides finding reasons about what has actually started bothering the West, especially the U.S.

— Sohail Parwaz is columnist, media strategist, and playwright in Pakistan.

By Walid El Hourican

• Neda and Marwa: One becomes an icon, the other is unmentioned

On June 20th 2009, Neda Agha Soltan was shot dead during the post-election protests in Iran. The protests occupied the largest news segments around the world, with analysts and commentators predicting the fall of the Iranian regime and the dawn of freedom breaking in “the axis of evil.”

Neda’s death became an icon of the Iranian opposition and a symbol for millions of people of the injustice of the Iranian regime and the defiance of the protesters. Neda’s death was put in context. It was taken from the personal realm of the death of an individual to the public realm of the just cause of a whole society.

On July 1st Marwa El Sherbini, an Egyptian researcher living in Germany, was stabbed to death 18 times inside a courtroom in the city of Dresden, in front of her 3-year-old son. She had won a verdict against a German man of Russian descent who had verbally assaulted her because of her veil. Her husband, who rushed in to save her when she was attacked in the courtroom, was shot by the police. Marwa’s death was not reported by any Western news media until protests in Egypt erupted after her burial. The reporting that followed focused on the protests; the murder was presented as the act of a “lone wolf,” thus depriving it of its context and its social meaning.

The fact that media are biased and choose what to report according to their own agenda is not the issue in this case. What the comparison of the two murders shows, is that European and Western societies have failed to grasp the significance and the importance of the second murder in its social, political, and historical context.

The “lone wolf” who stabbed Marwa 18 times inside the courtroom is the product of the society he lives in. If anything, the murder of Marwa should raise the discussion about the latent (perhaps not so latent anymore) racism against Muslims that has been growing in European societies in the last few decades, and noticeably so since the mid-90s.

It would be difficult to avoid relating the crime to the discussions about the banning of the Niqab, or the previous discussions about the wearing of the veil. These issues and others pertaining to the Muslim immigration in Europe have been occupying large parts of the public debates in several European countries. It would also be difficult not to notice the rapid rise of right wing populist parties to power in several European countries in the last decade, all of which have built their discourse on the fear of Islam and the “immigration problem.”

The absence of reporting, or adequate reporting of the murder, and the alarm bells that did not ring after this murder, reflect the denial in which European societies and public discourse are immersed.

While Europe preaches freedom of expression and the need to accept otherness, and while Europe preaches about the dangers of racism and sectarianism in third world countries, and while Europe warns about hate speech and anti-Semitism, we see race-driven crime, prejudice, and hate speech gaining both legitimacy and power in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Denmark and other democracies in the old continent. Race-driven crimes are constantly presented as exceptions within a tolerant society. However, the recurrence of exceptions puts in question their exceptional nature.

The absence of Marwa’s story from the mainstream media and the failure to start a debate about the immediate dangers of present European anti-Muslim racism shows the depth of the problem and draws us to expect a gloomy future for Muslims in Europe. Muslims like Neda only get to the news if their story serves the dominant narrative that presents Islam as the primary threat to freedom, while Muslims like Marwa who expose the pervasive racism of the West and challenge the existing stereotypes fail to get their story told.

What is significant to note is that in Neda’s case the media accused the Iranian regime as the authority responsible for the context in which the crime was committed rather than looking for the person who actually shot her. The accused is the establishment or the institution rather than the individual shooter. However, in the case of Marwa’s murder the media were persistent in stressing on the individuality of the murderer, calling him a “lone wolf”, implying that he is a social outcast who holds no ties to the society he lives in. The murderer was given a name “Alex W.” and the institution, the society, and the establishment he lives in were taken away from the picture.

While Neda’s death enjoyed wide arrays of interpretations and readings in context, Marwa’s death was deprived of its context and was presented as a personal tragedy, featuring a madman and his victim. Meanwhile Europe ke
eps shifting to the right at an accelerating pace, and cultural stereotypes, failure to integrate (read: social and political alienation), miscommunication, and a growing financial crisis only nourish this trajectory and support the populist and chauvinistic discourse of various newborn and resurrected right wing parties.

In the 1930s, following the big economical crisis of the 1920s, a young populist right wing party suddenly rose to power in Germany and few predicted what was to follow. There is no realistic proof to say that Europe is a more tolerant society than any other, or to say that people necessarily learn from their history, or even that some societies are exempt from racist behavior. All the evidence points to the end of the European myth of post-war tolerance; and the media have yet to connect the dots before history repeats itself.

— Walid El Hourican be reached at: walid@menassat.com. This article appeared in CounterPunch.org.