Palestine, Canadian militarism and the BDS campaign

An interview with Jon Elmer

Iftekhar Kabir

In late September of 2000, demonstrations erupted throughout the West Bank and Arab communities in Israel. What began as an expression of popular outrage, at the failure of the Oslo Peace Process, quickly transformed into calls for national liberation for Palestinians. The Israeli security forces greeted the protestors with a barrage of bullets, initiating a period of intensified violence. Known as the Second Intifada or Al-Aqsa Intifada, these clashes have been significant in shaping the conflict.

To mark the tenth anniversary of this event, Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) and the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) organized a talk by Jon Elmer at Beit Zatoun on November 8, 2010. Jon Elmer is a Canadian journalist and photographer, who has been living and working in Palestine since 2003. His work has appeared in publications such as Le Monde Diplomatique and Al Jazeera English. I met up with Jon after his talk to discuss the Second Intifada and the current state of Palestinian struggle.

Ryerson Free Press-Your arrival in Palestine coincided with the Second Intifada. What made it evident that a popular resistance movement had gained momentum?

John Elmer-I was in Southern Morocco when the Intifada began in September of 2000. Even the reactions from the people on the streets in Morocco would have made one realize that something unique was happening on the ground in Palestine.

It is now called the Second Intifada, but it is actually the third or fourth uprising against the Zionist project. The Oslo Peace process of the 1990s was launched as an effort to change the paradigm of the conflict after the first Palestinian uprising in 1987. It was an attempt at a diplomatic engagement in the conflict, which did not have anything to do with peace. It was a way of using the diplomatic arena as a tool in the occupation. This was Israel’s response as it realized that the first uprising had shifted the political landscape of the conflict.

By the time of the second Intifada, it was soon clear that this was a popular uprising. There were a lot of accusations that Yasser Arafat was in control of the Intifada. In reality, it was a popular movement that the leadership ran with for their own political expediency.

On the 28, 29, and 30 of September 2000, thousands of people throughout the West Bank and within Israel proper took to the streets. There was a cross-border uprising for national liberation. This part of the movement ended quickly, in large measure due to Israel’s military response. Palestinians realized that taking to the streets and protesting meant soldiers, tanks, and helicopters would fire them on. Helicopters and tanks were seen to be patrolling the streets of the West Bank by the first of October, firing on people to enforce curfew.

There is a perception of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as two people fighting over disputed territory. What you have, however, are Palestinian communities that are completely encircled by the state of Israel. So, the war took place inside these communities. As Amos Malka, the former Director of Military Intelligence for Israel said, “the Israelis fired 1.3 million bullets,” within the first month of the Intifada. This, he said, meant that, “we [Israel] are determining the height of the flames.” When Israel turned a popular uprising into a war, the militant response from the Palestinians was within the paradigm established by Israel.

RFP-You mentioned before that it was the children leading the charge. Is this dynamic at work often on the ground in Palestine? Or is there a very organized group who work to bring people to the streets?

JE-First, the Palestinian leadership has been decimated by Israeli campaigns throughout the Intifada of targeted assassination. They went deep within the Palestinian resistance community and quite literally dismantled its leadership.

The children you speak of are coming out on the streets on their own. Mostly, what they are doing is leading a defence of their community with anything they have. It is sometimes called symbolic when children throw stones at tanks. This is not a fair characterization. What is happening is that they use whatever means available to resist a war that is coming to their doorsteps. The vast majority of the stone-throwing confrontations happen when the Israeli soldiers come into the community.

During the Intifada, the Israelis were enforcing curfew two out of every three days. The tanks were patrolling the streets and coming to people’s front doors. So, a lot of the resistance is a reaction to the repression at people’s doorsteps. These children who are leading the charge grow up within this war and have never known anything else. This highlights the degree to which the Israelis control the everyday lives of Palestinians. Curfew meant everything was closed. It meant a shoot-to-kill policy on the streets. Any semblance of normal life was completely removed at the whims of the Israelis.

RFP-Struggle is a part of the everyday for Palestinians. What then marks the end of the Intifada and is there a significant shift in their strategies for resistance?

JE-Well, there is no end date to the Intifada. No leader was able to say that it had begun and no leader was able to declare its end. This is a testament to its popular nature.

However, if you look back you can see some trends that may help identify an end. Suicide bombings became one of the most talked about aspects of the Intifada. If you look at the numbers, you can see that they are concentrated between mid-2001 and early 2003. There was a precipitous drop in the number of bombings in late 2003. And apart from a couple of isolated attacks, there have been virtually none since 2004. This is an indicator.

An even clearer indicator of the end of the Intifada was Israel’s unilateral initiative at transferring the terrain of the conflict to the diplomatic arena. This happened through their announcing their withdrawal from Gaza. This was not a withdrawal, and Israel’s military never specifically referred to it as such. Rather, it was a re-deployment, where they moved their forces from bases inside Gaza to bases on the border. What they did do was remove 6,000 Jewish Settlers who were living amongst a million and-a-half Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This was the first territorial withdrawal from Palestinian land in the history of the conflict.

These actions were a response to the Intifada. The Israelis called it a security response. Ariel Sharon announced they were going to leave Gaza and wall off the West Bank, creating a series of “Gazaesque” territories. Israel’s response to the uprising was to wall off Palestinian communities and to affect a de-facto resolution, as the wall has no legal justification according to International Law.

The wall was also controversial in Israel because the right-wing nationalist movement saw all of the territory in question as a part of greater Israel. To them, the Palestinians are a temporary annoyance, if you will, in the process of the realization of the greater Israel. When Sharon announced “the disengagement,” he started by saying, “we had a dream, but the dream could not be implemented.”

So, the end of the Intifada was really the announcement by Israel that it was withdrawing. But there were other factors that contributed. In three years of uprising, the Palestinian population paid a terrible price. Around 5,000 people died, thousands of houses were demolished, hundreds of acres of farmlands and produce were stolen and uprooted, and about 7,000 Palestinians were confined as political prisoners. This made it impossible to maintain the resistance.

RFP-What are your thoughts on the overt changes in Canadian foreign policy? Is the Harper government’s support for Israel and the increase in military ventures around the globe emblematic of new shift?

JE-First, it is important to note that the Liberal and Conservative parties are in consensus with regards to foreign policy. Harper’s rhetoric is simply more harsh and frank. But in terms of actual policy outcomes, there is no difference. In most cases when you are speaking of foreign policy, you are talking about major institutions and bureaucracies that function outside of the bent of this or that minority government.

What Harper has done is politicize what was always Canadian policy, which is support for Israel. Canada has had a part in every major UN body dealing with the conflict. Many leading politicians have been involved in the creation of key diplomatic initiatives and resolutions, such as resolution 242.

So, we do not want to focus too much on Harper and lose sight of the major trajectories. Similarly, we do not want to say that Canada’s posture, with the war in Afghanistan, the expeditionary disposition and global interventionist alignment, is presenting something new.

The Canadian military was always angry at this perception of Canada as a peacekeeper. That mythology was a political expedient created during the Cold War, when Canada was unable to interact otherwise. At a time when the major forces were preparing for mechanized tank battles in Central Europe, Canada couldn’t field 200 to 500 tanks. So Canada’s peacekeeping posture was a way for it to maintain its seat at the table. The seat is now better attained through an interventionist counter-insurgency disposition.

Insofar as any kind of foreign policy has to be rooted in domestic support and policies, projecting the peacekeeper narrative was an important way of keeping Canadians on board. We have seen, since the war in Afghanistan, a major shift in how Canada has projected its military forces. Now they repel down to drop the opening puck at a Leaf’s game. We witness an overt militaristic disposition being projected to rally popular support. The interventionist foreign policy cannot happen if Canadians reject it.

This is where the foreign policy work and the work in Palestine are connected. You connect the understanding of what is going on abroad with Canadian policy at home, and show Canadians how they are involved. You also show that we have the ability and the responsibility to interact with these issues, as it is our governments that are carrying out the most central aspects of these conflicts, which then manifest in street fighting in foreign lands. The realities on the ground in the areas where we intervene, and the histories of how those policies came about, should serve as potent and important material to begin a serious accounting of Canadian actions.

RFP-Has the Palestinian struggle moved to the diplomatic arena? And is it of utmost importance to convince the populations of Canada and the U.S. that they need to pressure their governments?

JE-Yes, and that should have happened long ago. This is one of the more interesting things about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in contrast to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). The BDS movement is taking place and really flourishing at a time when the political formations and movements in Palestine are in recovery. I think the potency of the BDS movement comes from the fact that it isolates Israel and shows the links between the local political and economic situation and the conflict. This provides a way for people to engage. So, the BDS campaign is doing the double work of pressuring governments abroad to act and creating space for Palestinians to carry out their own struggles.

It is very natural to ask: “How do we help Palestinians?” But to go there to provide bread and milk for the struggle is not effective. It is actually the most logistically and financially challenging way to help, let alone the political complications that arise from being involved in somebody else’s resistance struggle. These were challenges that the ISM had to navigate.

The BDS movement, on the other hand, is rooted in local communities, engaging the local body politic. That is where the success of the movement lies, as was seen in South Africa. So the BDS movement is in the fortuitous position of acting in solidarity with Palestinians by operating in our local communities at a time when Palestinians need a little bit of space to breathe. We can work to create a truly international movement, where there is a complementary component between the Palestinian struggle and local efforts.

Would you say people in Palestine feel the effects of the BDS campaign?

There is a legitimate skepticism on the part of the Palestinian body politic regarding international solidarity. Too often in Palestine bombs are falling with people asking: “How are people just watching this?” So, there is this bitter history with the so-called “international community.” The question is always this: how can they stand by and allow something like this to continue? This creates a level of legitimate skepticism amongst the Palestinian people.

However, when they look and see what is going on abroad, with the BDS movement, it buttresses the national sentiments of resistance. I don’t want to overstate its importance, but it is crucial to the realization of Palestinian rights and justice. The only way that Palestinian voices will be heard is if the international governments support their cause. That will only happen through pressure and popular outrage.

So, whenever Palestinians hear about pressure on governments from communities abroad, it creates a sense of optimism. The international community has to understand that struggle is part of everyday life in Palestine, so they need to sustain the pressure at all stages.

Visit Jon Elmer’s website at jonelmer.ca