World Bank to West Bank

The movement written off after September 11 is demonstrating its worth in Palestine

>George Monbiot
>Tuesday April 9, 2002
>http://www.guardian.co.uk;The Guardian
>
>Two sets of human shields are in use in the West Bank. The first is less
>than willing. The Israeli army, like some of the terrorist groups it has
>fought, has been taking hostages. Its soldiers have been propelling
>Palestinian civilians through the doors of suspect buildings, so that the
>gunmen they might harbour have to kill them first if they want to fight
>back.
>
>The second set of human shields has deliberately placed itself in the line
>of fire. Since the army's offensive in the West Bank began, hundreds of
>Israeli peace campaigners and foreign activists have been seeking to put
>themselves in its way. At great personal risk, members of the International
>Solidarity Movement have sought to protect civilians by making hostages of
>themselves. It is a display of extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice. It
>is also the latest incarnation of a movement which just months ago was left
>for dead.
>
>The movement to which many of the peace activists risking their lives in
>Ramallah and Bethlehem belong has no name. Some people have called it an
>anti-globalisation or anti-corporate or anti-capitalist campaign. Others
>prefer to emphasise its positive agenda, calling it a democracy or 
>internationalist movement. But, because they have always put practice first 
>and theory second, its members have proved impossible to categorise. 
>Whenever it appears to have assumed an identity outsiders believe they can 
>grasp, it morphs into something else. It is driven by a new, responsive 
>politics, informed not by ideology but by need.
>
>After September 11, this nameless thing appeared to vanish as swiftly as it
>had emerged. The huge demonstrations planned for the end of September 
>against the World Bank and IMF in Washington became a small and rather 
>timorous march for peace. Most US activists, cowed by the new McCarthyism 
>which has dominated American discourse since the attack on New York, kept 
>their heads down. Commentators dismissed the movement as a passing fad 
>which had rippled through the world's youth, as widespread and as 
>insubstantial as Diet Coke or the Nike swoosh.
>
>But those who dismissed it had failed to grasp either the seriousness of 
>its intent or the breadth of its support. The television cameras always 
>focused on a few hundred young men dressed in black and running riot, 
>intercut occasionally with the wider carnival of protest. But they seldom
>permitted its participants to explain the sense of purpose which propelled 
>them. So most outsiders failed to see that the commitment of many of the 
>people involved in these protests is non-negotiable. The movement is no 
>more likely to go away than the governments and corporations it confronts. 
>Its survival is assured by its ability to become whatever it needs to be.
>
>Last month 250,000 protesters trav elled to Barcelona to contest the 
>assault on employment laws and the public sector being led by Tony Blair, 
>Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar. This month some of them moved to 
>Palestine. Among those in the British contingent are people who have helped 
>to run campaigns against corporate power, genetic engineering and climate 
>change. They were joined this week by members of the Italian organisation 
>Ya Basta, which helped to coordinate the protests in Genoa. For the 
>movement which came of age in Seattle, the World Bank and the West Bank 
>belong to the same political territory.
>
>If the protesters simply shifted as a mob from one location to another, 
>their efforts would be worse than useless. But one of the key lessons this 
>rapidly maturing movement has learned is that protest is effective only if 
>it builds on the efforts of specialists. Like most of the Earth's people, 
>the foreigners on the West Bank became visible when they began to bleed 
>(five British campaigners were injured last week by the Israeli army's 
>illegal fragmentation bullets), but some outsiders have been working there 
>for decades. New arrivals join long-established networks and do what they 
>are told. Among the bullets and the bulldozers, the movement is discovering 
>a courage long suspected but seldom tried.
>
>Protesters have moved into the homes of people threatened with bombardment 
>by the Israeli army, ensuring that the soldiers cannot attack Palestinians 
>without attacking foreigners too. They have been sitting in the ambulances 
>taking sick or injured people to hospital, in the hope of speeding their
>passage through Israeli checkpoints and preventing the soldiers from 
>beating up the occupants. They have been trying to run convoys of food and 
>medicine into neighbourhoods deprived of supplies; and seeking to encourage 
>both sides to lay down their arms in favour of non-violent solutions. They 
>are becoming, in other words, a sort of grassroots United Nations, trying 
>with their puny resources to keep the promises their governments have 
>broken.
>
>Perhaps most importantly, the peace campaigners are the only foreign 
>witnesses in some places to the atrocities being committed. Using 
>alternative news networks such as Indymedia and Allsorts, they have been 
>able to draw attention to events most journalists have missed.
>
>They have seen how Palestinians, told by the Israeli army that the curfew 
>had been lifted, have been either shot dead when they stepped outside or 
>seized and used as human shields. They have witnessed the sacking of homes 
>and the deliberate destruction of people's food supplies. They have seen 
>ambulances and aid trucks being stopped and crushed. On March 28 one peace 
>protester watched Israeli soldiers in jeeps hunting women and children who 
>were fleeing across the fields on the outskirts of Ramallah, trying to 
>shoot them down in cold blood. And, by becoming the story themselves, as 
>they are beaten and shot, the foreigners have brought it home to people who 
>were dismissive of the murder and maiming of indigenous civilians.
>
>The movement's arrival on the West Bank is an organic development of its 
>activities elsewhere. For years it has been contesting the destructive 
>foreign policies of the world's most powerful governments, and the 
>corresponding failures of the multilateral institutions to contain them. 
>Rather than echo the thunderous but effete demand of commentators on both 
>sides of the Atlantic that Yasser Arafat (a man currently unable to use a 
>flushing toilet) should stamp out the terror in the Middle East, the 
>campaigners are, as ever, addressing those who wield real power: Israel and 
>the governments who supply the money and weaponry which permit it to occupy 
>the West Bank. The movement has always been a pragmatic one, as ready to 
>protest against Burma's treatment of its tribal people or China's 
>dispossession of the Tibetans as the IMF's handling of Argentina. In 
>Palestine, as elsewhere, it is seeking to place itself between power and 
>those whom power afflicts.
>
>Everyone else is demanding that somebody should do something about the 
>conflict in the Middle East. The peace campaigners are doing it.

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