A Sudanese worker inspects the damage to an oil-processing facility in Heglig last month. South Sudan seized Sudan’s main oil field in the town in April, sparking intense fighting. Under strong international pressure, South Sudan withdrew. (Ashraf Shazly, AFP/Getty Images / April 23, 2012)

Once again Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir waved his walking stick in the air. Once again he spoke of splendid victories over his enemies as thousands of jubilant supporters danced and cheered. But this time around the stakes are too high.

An all-out war against newly independent South Sudan might not be in Sudan’s best interest. South Sudan’s saber-rattling is not an entirely independent initiative; its most recent territorial transgressions – which saw the occupation of Sudan’s largest oil field in Heglig on April 10, followed by a hasty retreat ten days later – might have been a calculated move aimed at drawing Sudan into a larger conflict.

Stunted by the capture of Heglig, which, according to some estimates, provides nearly half of the country’s oil production, Bashir promised victory over Juba. Speaking to large crowd in the capital of North Kordofan, El-Obeid, Bashir affectively declared war. “Heglig isn’t the end, it is the beginning,” he said, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Bashir also declared a desire to ‘liberate’ the people of South Sudan from a government composed of ‘insects.’ Even when Heglig was declared a liberated region by Sudan’s defence minister, the humiliation of defeat was simply replaced by the fervor of victory. “They started the fighting and we will announce when it will end, and our advance will never stop,” Bashir announced on April 20.

Statements issued by the government of South Sudan are clearly more measured, with an international target audience in mind. Salva Kiir, President of South Sudan, simply said that his forces departed the region following appeals made by the international community. This includes a statement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which described the attack on Heglig as “an infringement on the sovereignty of Sudan and a clearly illegal act” (Reuters, April 19). A day before the hasty withdrawal, South Sudan government spokesman Barnaba Marial Benjamin claimed there had been no conflict in the first place. His statement was both bewildering and patronizing. He considered Sudan, which was then rallying for war to recapture its oil-rich area, a neighbor and “friendly nation”, and claimed that “up to now we have not crossed even an inch into Sudan” (Associated Press, April 19).

The fact remains, however, that wherever there is oil, political narratives cannot possibly be so simple. Sudan is caught in a multidimensional conflict involving weapons trade, internal instabilities, multiple civil wars and the reality of outside players with their own interests. None of this is enough to excuse the readiness for war on behalf of Khartoum and Juba, but it certainly presents serious obstacles to any attempt aimed at rectifying the situation.

Stirring Conflict

In a statement published last July, Amnesty International called on UN member states to control arm shipments to both Sudan and South Sudan. It accused the US, Russia and China of fueling violations in the Sudan conflict through the arms trade. While China was reportedly supplying the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) with conventional weapons, Russia provided Antonov aircraft and Sukhoi SU-25 fighters.

US support of South Sudan is already well-known. “The US reportedly provided $100 million-a-year in military assistance to the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army),” reported Russia Today on April 19, citing a December 2009 diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks.”

The same cable was used by Amnesty to argue against arming both sides of a potentially volatile conflict.

A day after Amnesty’s call was issued, South Sudan became a sovereign nation, and soon after it became a member of the United Nations and the Africa Union. A hyped sense of achievement was celebrated by the countries that supported the SPLA in Sudan’s long and bloody civil war between 1983 and 2005, which cost an estimated 2.5 million lives. Both Sudanese governments had then promised a new dawn of political freedom and economic prosperity.

Neither the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement nor the January 9-15, 2011 referendum managed to actually redeem the many disputes between both countries. In fact, even before South Sudan gained its independence in July, a conflict in South Kordofan broke out between the Sudanese army and the SPLA. Both sides reportedly committed crimes against civilians.

Various international institutions and media continue to warn of possible starvation in the tumultuous region.

Deadly Embrace

With a single act of aggression, a whole set of conflicts are prone to flaring up. It is the nature of proxy politics, as many armed groups seek opportunities for territorial advances and financial gains. News reports already speak of a possible involvement of Uganda should the fledging war between Khartoum and Juba cross conventional boundaries. “As the possibility of a full-fledged war became unnervingly higher, General Aronda Nyakairima, chief of Uganda’s defense forces, said that his army might be compelled to intervene if Bashir did overthrow South Sudan’s regime,” reported Alexis Okeowo in the New Yorker website (April 20).

Both Sudans are fighting their own war against various rebel groups. Despite the lack of basic food in parts of the region, plenty of weapons effortlessly find inroads to wherever there is potential strife.

According to political author and columnist Reason Wafawarova, US interest in South Sudan is neither accidental nor motivated by humanitarian issues. He told Russia Today, “It would not be surprising if the US is trying to capitalize on the vulnerability of South Sudan in its efforts to establish the AFRICOM base somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.” RT goes on to reference Sudan’s Al-Intibaha newspaper for its reports on Israeli weapon supplies to Juba.

US and Israeli military support of Juba is not a new phenomenon. Sudan’s civil war (1983-2005) could not have lasted as long as it did without steady sources of military funding. And while the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the January 9-15, 2011 referendum, and finally the independence of South Sudan in July were all meant to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation, none actualized. Sudan’s territorial concessions proved most costly, and South Sudan, destroyed and landlocked, was ripe for outside exploitation.

Both countries are now caught in a deadly embrace. They can neither part ways completely, nor cooperate successfully without a risk of war at every turn. Bashir also knows he is running out of options. While Khartoum has already “lost three-quarters of its oil revenue after the secession,” according Egypt’s Al Ahram Weekly, “now it is poised to lose the rest.”

Way Out?

The crisis in the Sudans cannot be resolved by empty gestures and reassuring statements. The conflict in that region has been festering for decades, and war has been the only common language. Powerful countries, including the US, Russia, China, but also regional Arab and Africa players, have often exploited the conflict to their advantage. In a recent analysis, the International Crisis Group in Brussels advised that a “new strategy is needed to avert an even bigger crisis.”

The bigger crisis lies in the fact that Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party (NCP) is facing political instability at home, preventing any real commitment previous agreements. The crisis group recommends that the “UN Security Council must reassert itself to preserve international peace and security, including the implementation of border monitoring tasks as outlined by UN Interim Security Force in Abyei.”

Expecting the Security Council to act in political tandem seems a bit too optimistic. Considering that the US is arming and supporting South Sudan, and that Russia and China continue to support Khartoum, the rivalry in fact exists within the UN itself.

While UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s did condemn the south’s seizure of the oil field, much more is needed. For a sustainable future peace arrangement, Sudan’s territorial integrity must be respected, and South Sudan must not be pushed to the brink of desperation. Rivalries between the US, China and Russia cannot continue at the expense of nations that teeter between starvation and civil wars. And whatever hidden hands continue to exploit Sudan’s woes now need to be exposed and isolated.

“Under Narey’s supervision, the mass rape and torture of children was allowed to continue with a level of institutional complicity that would shock even those most cynical of the prison service. “

A small but revealing sidenote to the recent media furore over “Asian grooming” was added last week by Martin Narey, former head of Barnado’s. On BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, Narey said: “For this particular type of crime, the street grooming of teenage girls in northern towns … there is very troubling evidence that Asians are overwhelmingly represented in the prosecutions for such offences.”

His comments, criticising the government for ignoring the racial element to this abuse (as opposed to the instances of abuse committed by white Britons, which of course carry no racial connotations, whiteness being defined — as Gary Younge has shown us — as the absence of race) were picked up by the media. They were used to support a racialised moral panic whose sheer brashness was reminiscent of an earlier time in British history.

What was missing from this coverage was any mention of Martin Narey’s history. The Guardian, which uncritically reported Narey’s comments, apparently did not refer to their own excellent investigation carried out a month earlier by journalists Eric Allison and Simon Hattenstone. The investigation, titled ‘A true horror story: The abuse of teenage boys in a detention centre’, interviewed the many victims of Neville Husband, a prison officer who raped, tortured and abused a large number of boys who had been confined to young offender’s institutions. (The victims state that Husband was not alone in his actions.)

Given the predominance of the term “abuse” in such cases, it is worth going into a couple of the details about what took place under state supervision. One victim noted: “I was raped repeatedly, tied up and ligatured [around the neck]. It was the worst of the worst.” The same boy was gang-raped repeatedly, while tied up, at the house of Neville Husband. “He opened my mouth and spat into it time and time again.” The gruesome details continue, with multiple victims. Dr Elie Godsi, a former senior psychologist for the Home Office, stated: “This is one of the worst cases of sexual abuse I have come across in 17 years of working for the Home Office.” What is being described here is rape and torture, of course, terms which in the English language are somewhat more specific than “abuse.” Some children were driven to suicide while they were still in prison. It is not known how many eventually did so as adults.

Husband’s case was so outrageous, and so distressing to its victims, due to the level of rampant institutional complicity that it involved. At a number of stages the police and prison services were made aware of the rape of children in their care. One boy went immediately to a police station on being released (in 1977) to report the rape, only to be immediately dismissed. The police “had evidence of his obsession with child pornography dating back decades”, and “Husband’s interest in young boys was known as far back as 1969, 34 years before he was convicted.” It was only in 2003 that Husband was finally convicted of sexually abusing five young male inmates between 1974 and 1984. There has never been an inquiry into Medomsley Detention Centre, where some of the worst instances of abuse took place.

What connection does this have with the recent “grooming” case? It turns out that Martin Narey, who bravely came forward to confront the Asian community, was director general of the prison service when Narey was convicted in 2003. He had been the assistant governor at both Frankland and Deerbolt Young Offenders Institutions, in which capacity Neville Husband had been under his supervision. From 1998 to 2003, Narey was director-general of the prison service. Last month, following the Guardian’s investigation, Narey admitted that, according to the Guardian, “the service dealt inadequately with sexual abuse during his tenure.”

This is putting it somewhat lightly. Under Narey’s supervision, the mass rape and torture of children was allowed to continue with a level of institutional complicity that would shock even those most cynical of the prison service. Many would argue (myself included) that Narey himself carries some direct complicity. (His career, by the way, didn’t end there: Narey moved from the prison service to become the head of Barnado’s in 2005, a charity which decided six years later to work with the UK Border Agency in running a detention facility for the children of migrants and refugees.) All this, I should add, is not mere historical detail. Many victims of rape in Young Offender’s Institutions are still very much alive; they were consistently refused government compensation until 2009. Government resistance went as far as bringing doctors to testify in court that the child victims of rape were “genetically predisposed to being abused”.

The recent sexual abuse and rape “grooming” cases are, of course, horrific. Any failings of the police, social services and CPS to investigate should be carefully analysed and rectified, and those responsible should be held accountable. But we might excuse some of the victims of Neville Husband and his friends in the police force, prison service and justice system for treating Martin Narey’s comments with derision. They might legitimately ask that Narey concern himself not with the complicity of the “Asian community” (an absurdly and deliberately nebulous term) in abuse and rape, but with his own complicity and the institutions for which he worked at a high level in abuse and rape on a greater scale, over a longer time period, with even younger victims who — being confined in prison, and children — had no way out.

And if these victims argue that Martin Narey should be answering questions at an inquiry, rather than offering his comments on recent abuse cases, it would be difficult to disagree with them. Still, there is some benefit to be gained from Narey’s recent media appearances. It seems the general rule of invoking racism to deflect attention from one’s own complicity in crimes still holds: and as a case study this might prove useful to others who carry similar levels of complicity, or perhaps to academics studying race.

After all, it would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest Husband’s case demonstrates that large swathes of Britain’s criminal justice system have proved themselves to be institutionally and deliberately complicit in the worst imaginable kinds of abuse, rape, and torture of children. The “invoking-race-as-distraction” trick — which has an illustrious history in England, from Elizabethan antisemitism to the English Defence League — might, in this context, be a highly useful method of preventing serious questions about institutional complicity arising.

Ilan Pappe (Photo: Paula Geraghty)

I have been a political activist for most of my adult life. In all these years, I have believed deeply that the unbearable and unacceptable reality of Israel and Palestine could only be changed from within. This is why I have been ceaselessly devoted to persuading Jewish society—to which I belong and into which I was born—that its basic policy in the land was wrong and disastrous.

As for so many others, the options for me were clear: I could either join politics from above, or counter it from below. I began by joining the Labor Party in the 1980s, and then the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash), when I declined an offer to join the Knesset.

At the same time, I focused my energies on working alongside others within educational and peace NGOs, even chairing two such institutions: the left-Zionist Institute for Peace Studies in Givat Haviva, and the non-Zionist Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies. In both circles, veteran and younger colleagues alike sought to create constructive dialogue with our compatriots, in the hope of influencing present policy for future reconciliation. It was mainly a campaign of information about crimes and atrocities committed by Israel since 1948, and a plea for a future based on equal human and civil rights.

For an activist, the realization that change from within is unattainable not only grows from an intellectual or political process, but is more than anything else an admission of defeat. And it was this fear of defeatism that prevented me from adopting a more resolute position for a very long time.
After almost thirty years of activism and historical research, I became convinced that the balance of power in Palestine and Israel pre-empted any possibility for a transformation within Jewish Israeli society in the foreseeable future. Though rather late in the game, I came to realize that the problem was not a particular policy or a specific government, but one more deeply rooted in the ideological infrastructure informing Israeli decisions on Palestine and the Palestinians ever since 1948. I have described this ideology elsewhere as a hybrid between colonialism and romantic nationalism.[1]

Today, Israel is a formidable settler-colonialist state, unwilling to transform or compromise, and eager to crush by whatever means necessary any resistance to its control and rule in historical Palestine. Beginning with the ethnic cleansing of 80 percent of Palestine in 1948, and Israel’s occupation of the remaining 20 percent of the land in 1967, Palestinians in Israel are now enclaved in mega-prisons, bantustans, and besieged cantons, and singled out through discriminatory policies.

Meanwhile, millions of Palestinian refugees around the world have no way to return home, and time has only weakened, if not annihilated, all internal challenges to this ideological infrastructure. Even as I write, the Israeli settler state continues to further colonize and uproot the indigenous people of Palestine.

Admittedly, Israel is not a straightforward case study in colonialism,[2] nor can the solutions to either the 1967 occupation or the question of Palestine as a whole be easily described as decolonization. Unlike most colonialist projects, the Zionist movement had no clear metropolis, and because it far predates the age of colonialism, describing it in that way would be anachronistic. But these paradigms are still highly relevant to the situation, for two reasons. The first is that diplomatic efforts in Palestine since 1936 and the peace process that began in 1967 have only increased the number of Israeli settlements in Palestine, from less than 10 percent of Palestine in 1936 to over 90 per cent of the country today.

Thus it seems that the message from the peace brokers, mainly Americans ever since 1970, is that peace can be achieved without any significant limit being placed on the settlements, or colonies, in Palestine. True, settlers have periodically been evicted from Gaza settlements and some other isolated outposts, but this did not alter the overall matrix of colonial control, with all its systematic daily abuses of civil and human rights.

The occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the oppression of the Palestinians inside Israel, and the denial of the refugees’ right of return will continue as long as these policies (occupation, oppression, and denial) were packaged as a comprehensive peace settlement to be endorsed by obedient Palestinian and Arab partners.

The second reason for viewing the situation through the lens of colonialism and anti-colonialism is that it allows us a fresh look at the raison d’être of the peace process. The basic objective, apart from the creation of two separate states, is for Israel to withdraw from areas it occupied in 1967.

But this is contingent upon Israeli security concerns being satisfied, which Prime Minister Netanyahu has articulated as the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and the rest of Israel’s political center has articulated as the existence of a demilitarized future Palestinian state only in parts of the occupied territories. The consensus is that, after withdrawal, the army will still keep an eye on Palestine from the Jewish settlement blocs, East Jerusalem, the Jordanian border, and the other side of the walls and fences surrounding the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Whether or not the Quartet, or even the present US administration, seeks a more comprehensive withdrawal and a more sovereign Palestinian state, no one in the international community has seriously challenged the Israeli demand that its concerns first be satisfied. The peace process only requires a change in the Palestinian agenda, leaving the Israeli agenda untouched.

In other words, the message from abroad to Israel is that peace does not require any transformation from within. In fact, it even leaves Israel room for interpretation: the Israeli government, apprehensive of the reaction of hardline settlers, was unwilling to evict them from isolated posts in the occupied territories. That even the weak Palestinian leadership has refused to accept this rationale has allowed the Israelis to claim that the Palestinians are stubborn and inflexible, and therefore that Israel is entitled to pursue unilateral policies to safeguard its national security (the infamous “ingathering policy,” as coined by Ehud Olmert).[3]

Therefore, it seems safe to conclude that the peace process has actually deterred the colonizer and occupier from transforming its mentality and ideology. As long as the international community waits for the oppressed to transform their positions, while validating those upheld by the oppressor since 1967, this will remain the most brutal occupation the world has seen since World War II.

The annals of colonialism and decolonization teach us that an end to the military presence and occupation was a condition sine qua non for meaningful negotiations between colonizer and colonized even to begin.
An unconditional end to Israel’s military presence in the lives of more than three million Palestinians should be the precondition for any negotiations, which can only develop when the relationship between the two sides is not oppressive but equal.

In most cases, occupiers have not decided to leave. They were forced out, usually through a prolonged and bloody armed struggle. This has been attempted with very little success in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In fewer cases, success was achieved by applying external pressure on the rogue power or state in the very last stage of decolonization. The latter strategy is more attractive. In any case, the Israeli paradigm of “peace” is not going to shift unless it is pressured from the outside, or forced to do so on the ground.

Even before one begins to define more specifically what such outside pressure entails, it is essential not to confuse the means (pressure) with the objective (finding a formula for joint living). In other words, it is important to emphasize that pressure is meant to trigger meaningful negotiations, not take their place. So while I still believe that change from within is key to bringing about a lasting solution to the question of the refugees, the predicament of the Palestinian minority in Israel, and the future of Jerusalem, other steps must first be taken for this to be achieved.

What kind a pressure is necessary? South Africa has provided the most illuminating and inspiring historical example for those leading this debate, while, on the ground, activists and NGOs under occupation have sought nonviolent means both to resist the occupation and to expand the forms of resistance beyond suicide bombing and the %ring of Qassam missiles from Gaza. These two impulses produced the BDS campaign against Israel. It is not a coordinated campaign operated by some secret cabal. It began as a call from within the civil society under occupation, endorsed by other Palestinian groups, and translated into individual and collective actions worldwide.

These actions vary in focus and form, from boycotting Israeli products to severing ties with academic institutes in Israel.

Some are individual displays of protest; others are organized campaigns. What they have in common is their message of outrage against the atrocities on the ground in Palestine—but the campaign’s elasticity has made it into a broad process powerful enough to produce a new public mood and atmosphere, without any clear focal point.

For the few Israelis who sponsored the campaign early on, it was a definitive moment that clearly stated our position vis-à-vis the origins, nature, and policies of our state. But in hindsight, it also seems to have provided moral sponsorship, which has been helpful for the success of the campaign.

Supporting BDS remains a drastic act for an Israeli peace activist. It excludes one immediately from the consensus and from the accepted discourse in Israel. Palestinians pay a higher price for the struggle, and those of us who choose this path should not expect to be rewarded or even praised. But it does involve putting yourself in direct confrontation with the state, your own society, and quite often friends and family. For all intents and purposes, this is to cross the final red line—to say farewell to the tribe.

This is why any one of us deciding to join the call should make such a decision wholeheartedly, and with a clear sense of its implications.

But there is really no other alternative. Any other option—from indifference, through soft criticism, and up to full endorsement of Israeli policy—is a wilful decision to be an accomplice to crimes against humanity. The closing of the public mind in Israel, the persistent hold of the settlers over Israeli society, the inbuilt racism within the Jewish population, the dehumanization of the Palestinians, and the vested interests of the army and industry in keeping the occupied territories—all of these mean that we are in for a very long period of callous and oppressive occupation. Thus, the responsibility of Israeli Jews is far greater than that of anyone else involved in advancing peace in Israel and Palestine. Israeli Jews are coming to realize this fact, and this is why the number who support pressuring Israel from the outside is growing by the day. It is still a very small group, but it does form the nucleus of the future Israeli peace camp.

Much can be learned from the Oslo process. There, the Israelis employed the discourse of peace as a convenient way of maintaining the occupation (aided for a while by Palestinian leaders who fell prey to US–Israeli deception tactics). This meant that an end to the occupation was vetoed not only by the “hawks,” but also the “doves,” who were not really interested in stopping it. That is why concentrated and effective pressure on Israel needs to be applied by the world at large. Such pressure proved successful in the past, particularly in the case of South Africa; and pressure is also necessary to prevent the worst scenarios from becoming realities.

After the massacre in Gaza in January 2009, it was hard to see how things could get worse, but they can—with no halt to the expansion of settlements, and continuing assaults on Gaza, the Israeli repertoire of evil has not yet been exhausted. The problem is that the governments of Europe, and especially the US, are not likely to endorse the BDS campaign. But one is reminded of the trials and tribulations of the boycott campaign against South Africa, which emanated from civil societies and not from the corridors of power.

In many ways, the most encouraging news comes from the most unlikely quarter: US campuses. The enthusiasm and commitment of hundreds of local students have helped in the last decade to bring the idea of divestment to US society—a society that was regarded as a lost cause by the global campaign for Palestine. They have faced formidable foes: both the effective and cynical AIPAC, and the fanatical Christian Zionists. But they offer a new way of engaging with Israel, not only for the sake of Palestinians, but also for Jews worldwide.

In Europe, an admirable coalition of Muslims, Jews, and Christians is advancing this agenda against fierce accusations of anti-Semitism. The presence of a few Israelis among them has helped to fend off these vicious and totally false allegations. I do not regard the moral and active support of Israelis like myself as the most important ingredient in this campaign. But connections with progressive and radical Jewish dissidents in Israel are vital to the campaign. They are a bridge to a wider public in Israel, which will eventually have to be incorporated. Pariah status will hopefully persuade Israel to abandon its policies of war crimes and abuses of human rights. We hope to empower those on the outside who are now engaged in the campaign, and we are empowered ourselves by their actions.

All of us, it seems, need clear targets, and to remain vigilant against simplistic generalizations about the boycott being against Israel for being Jewish, or against the Jews for being in Israel. That is simply not true. The millions of Jews in Israel must be reckoned with. It is a living organism that will remain part of any future solution. However, it is first our sacred duty to end the oppressive occupation and to prevent another Nakba—and the best means for achieving this is a sustained boycott and divestment campaign.

This article is an original extract from The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, published by Verso on 15th May 2012, in which a cast of international voices argue for boycott, divestment and sanctions. The book features contributions from: John Berger, Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, Mustafa Barghouti, Ken Loach, Neve Gordon, Naomi Klein, Omar Barghouti, Ilan Pappe and many more.

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel
Audrea Lim (Editor)
Publication: 15th May 2012
ISBN: 978 1 84467 450 3
Price: £9.99
256 pages
Publisher: Verso Books

British rock musician and Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters spray-paints the words “No thought control” on Israel’s West Bank separation barrier in Bethlehem. (Photo: AP)

As the world watched the Arab Spring, many Palestinians saw traces of Palestine’s revolution, particularly of the first Intifada—the popular uprising of 1987—and in the beautiful spirit of the young revolutionaries.

The fall of the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt was celebrated in Palestinian households not only because it promised a return of Arab resistance, a constant dimension of the Palestinian cause but hijacked by the dictatorships for so many years, but also because it was a reminder that Palestine continues to bring people together: those struggling in many places around the world against injustice of all kinds.

As we continue to watch the revolutions unfold—from Wall Street to Madrid, from London to Seattle—we can see Palestine in every Tahrir Square. The Egyptian spring is partly a result of the previous regime’s heavy complicity in maintaining Israeli occupation and colonization; the Egyptian student mobilizations in solidarity with Palestine during the second Intifada, in 2000, were important precursors to January 2011.

The injustice result-ing from Israel’s occupation, colonization, and enforcement of apartheid is heavily linked with corporate greed, environmental degradation, education cuts, and privatization of healthcare that are today being protested in North America and Europe. The channeling each year of billions in US tax dollars away from education, healthcare reform, and social services at home, to support Israel’s military machine, has linked the struggle for Palestinian rights with the causes of equality and social justice in the US and elsewhere.

The BDS movement has provided a way for us to break our collective chains. In 2005, one year after the International Court of Justice had ruled that Israel’s wall, built on occupied Palestinian territory, was illegal—and inspired by the South African anti-apartheid struggle—a majority of Palestinian civil society called upon people of conscience all over the world to impose broad BDS initiatives against Israel. The comprehensive rights-based approach of the call for BDS is perhaps its most important attribute. This is exemplified by the three demands that it makes: for an end to the occupation and return to the pre-1967 boundaries; for recognition of the fundamental human rights of Palestinian citizens; and for the right of Palestinian refugees to return. These demands address the injustice done to all Palestinian people, and do not reduce Israel’s oppression to occupation.

Twenty years of the sham “peace process” have given the false impression—often dominant even today—that the Palestinian people are only those in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and that Israel’s occupation is its only form of oppression of Palestinians. This has marginalized the majority of the Palestinian people—those inside Israel and in the diaspora—and their rights; and it has allowed Israel to get away, unquestioned, with its more severe and legally problematic forms of oppression.

The BDS movement has worked on changing the discourse addressing Palestinian rights to include the rights of all Palestinians. The movement has called for an end to Israel’s multi-tiered system of oppression, comprising occupation, colonization, and apartheid—the latter including systematic legal discrimination against Palestinians in Israel, and a sixty-three-year-old denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return.

Setting the record straight on Palestinian rights—and reinserting both Palestinian citizens of Israel and, crucially, Palestinian refugees, at the center of the debate—could not have been achieved without a strong Palestinian leadership. The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), established in April 2008, has emerged as the principal anchor of and reference for the global BDS movement. The BNC, the broadest Palestinian civil society coalition, is made up of the largest coalitions, networks, and unions of Palestinian citizens of Israel and refugees, as well as of those living in the West Bank and Gaza. The BNC has consistently provided a strong and unified Palestinian voice, and continues to lead and guide the global BDS movement, while fully respecting the principle of context sensitivity—the idea that the call for BDS should be implemented in each community in a way that suits the particular circumstances in the local environment, as decided by local activists.

Over the past six years, BDS has provided the most effective vehicle of solidarity with the Palestinian people and a successful way of challenging Israeli impunity. The victories the BDS campaign has achieved have exceeded all expectations for such a young movement, even when compared with South Africa’s BDS campaign. In particular, the campaign has grown rapidly in the wake of the 2008–09 Israeli massacre in Gaza and the attack on the Freedom Flotilla. The movement has now expanded far beyond the confines of a traditional solidarity movement to include active and dedicated participation from trade unions, faith groups, mainstream NGOs, and political parties.

A quick review of some of the largest and most successful campaigns reveals this growth. One of the most successful BDS campaigns is that against Veolia, a French multinational involved in developing the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR), an illegal tramway linking Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements, and cementing Israel’s hold on occupied territory, in addition to Israel’s involvement in a variety of waste and transport infrastructure services for illegal settlements. The French multinational has been successfully targeted all over the world, but especially in Europe.

In Stockholm, a civil society campaign led to Veolia losing out on a €3.5 billion contract for the operation of the city’s metro system. The determined and internationally coordinated campaign against Veolia has led to its loss of contracts totalling more than €5 billion in France, England, Wales, Ireland, and Australia combined. In late 2010, Veolia and Alstom, another French multinational involved in the JLR, announced that they would sell their shares in the operating consortium.

The fact that both Veolia and Alstom are being replaced by Israeli companies with little experience, rather than by well-known international companies that would be more qualified to take their place, can only be seen as a success for the campaign: no international companies are willing to become targets of our highly effective and visible movement.

The BDS movement is showing corporate supporters of Israeli apartheid that there is a price to pay for their active complicity. The campaigns against Veolia and Alstom will continue until they cease to be complicit, and provide appropriate reparations. Churches in the UK, Sweden, the US, and beyond are investigating and implementing their own BDS campaigns, largely in response to the Kairos document—a document prepared by prominent Palestinian leaders calling on churches around the world “to say a word of truth and to take a position of truth with regard to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.”

Kairos Palestine unambiguously endorses BDS as one of the key nonviolent forms of solidarity that international faith-based organizations are urged to adopt: “We see boycott and disinvestment as tools of justice, peace and security.” Trade unions have historically been at the forefront of struggles against injustice, particularly that against South African apartheid. Trade unions in South Africa, France, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, Italy, Australia, Canada, Brazil, India, Norway, and elsewhere have recently adopted aspects of the BDS campaign.

In the UK, the Trades Union Congress, representing seven million workers, is about to embark on activities to educate its entire membership about the necessity of boycotting Israeli apartheid. The trade union congresses of South Africa, Ireland, Scotland, and Brazil, and many individual unions around the world are in the process of severing links with the racist Histadrut labor federation. Just days after Israel’s attack on the Freedom Flotilla in May 2010, the Swedish Dockworkers Union, heeding the Palestinian trade union movement’s call to block Israeli ships, blocked five hundred tons of cargo coming from Israel.

They were joined by the heroic action on the part of ILWU Local 10’s dockworkers in Oakland, California, who blocked an Israeli ship from docking for twenty-four hours, and by dockworkers in South Africa, India, Turkey, and beyond. The CUT—the largest and most important trade union in Brazil, representing over 20 million workers, has recently endorsed BDS as the basis for its solidarity activism, and is working on a program to spread BDS among its membership.

Labor-led sanctions within the BDS framework have become the leading form of solidarity with the Palestinian people within the international trade union network. The academic boycott—arguably the most challenging of all forms of boycott—has widely spread the debate on the entrenched complicity of Israeli academic institutions in planning, justifying, and perpetuating the state’s colonial and apartheid policies, including its war crimes in Gaza, Jerusalem, and beyond. The May 2010 Congress of the British University and College Union (UCU) made history by voting to boycott the Ariel University Center of Samaria (AUCS), an Israeli colony-college in occupied Palestinian territory, and to sever all relations with Histadrut, the racist Israeli labor body that is a key pillar of the Israeli state’s apartheid policies.

University workers in the Canadian Union of Public Employees passed a motion calling for an academic boycott of Israel in February 2009. Academics also vowed to pressure their institutions to sever financial relationships with Israel. Recently, the University of Johannesburg made history by severing links with the University of Ben-Gurion, becoming the first university in the world to sever links with an Israeli academic institution.

Students in the US, the UK, and elsewhere have organized campaigns for the boycott of Israeli products, and for divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation. In the wake of Israel’s attack on Gaza in January 2009, students in thirty-three college campuses in the UK “occupied” parts of their campus demanding, among other things, divestment from Israeli companies and companies profiting from the occupation.

In February 2009, Hampshire College in the US became the first to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s occupation, just as it had been the first in the US to divest from apartheid South Africa. In 2010, students at UC Berkeley worked on a well-organized and publicized divestment campaign, winning support from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Hedy Epstein, and other notable figures. Jewish Voice for Peace has organized a campaign calling on pension giant TIAA-CREF to divest from five companies supporting the occupation. Their campaign has been endorsed by a number of organizations and student groups across the US.

Creative consumer boycott campaigns have provided an excellent way to engage wider sectors of the general public in the BDS movement. Code Pink’s “Stolen Beauty” campaign targeting Ahava, an Israeli cosmetics company manufacturing its products in a settlement, has been successful in convincing a number of retailers to drop Ahava in the US, Canada, and the UK. The campaign has spread to Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe as a result of its creative protests and use of social media.

In France, a large coalition of more than a hundred NGOs and five political parties has organized a campaign for the boycott of Agrexco, Israel’s largest exporter of agricultural produce. Agrexco has been targeted with popular boycotts, blockades, demonstrations, and direct action throughout Europe. In Italy and the UK, campaigners took direct action pressuring supermarkets to drop the Agrexco brand. In September 2011, Agrexco was ordered into liquidation.

As with South Africa, sanctions by governments and official bodies have been implemented only after boycott and divestment have become wide-spread at the grassroots level. In the six short years of the Palestinian BDS campaign, we have witnessed a number of government actions in the form of sanctions. To name a few, an Israeli academic team from Ariel College was excluded from a prestigious competition on sustainable architecture organized by the Spanish Government in 2009, because the college is located in a settlement in the West Bank.

The Norwegian government’s pension fund, the third-largest in the world, divested from Elbit Systems in 2009 at the recommendation of the ethical council, due to the company’s involvement in supplying Israel’s illegal wall with security appliances, and the Israeli army with drones. A year later, the Norwegian government’s pension fund divested from two other Israeli companies as a result of their activities in the settlements. Deutsche Bahn, a government-owned German railway operator, has ceased its involvement with the Israeli A1 rail project, which cuts through the occupied West Bank.

Perhaps the most visible form of BDS action is in the realm of cultural boycotts. Far from being “above politics,” Israeli cultural institutions play a key role in the “Brand Israel” campaign of the Israeli foreign ministry, boosting the state’s image and whitewashing its colonial policies and war crimes. A growing number of cultural superstars have joined the cultural boycott of Israel and are refusing to provide cultural cover for Israeli apartheid.

Artists that have cancelled concerts and events in Israel include, among others, the late Gil Scott-Heron, Elvis Costello, the Pixies, Mike Leigh, Klaxons, and Gorillaz Sound System. Most significantly, Hollywood superstars Meg Ryan and Dustin Hoffman cancelled their attendance at the 2010 Jerusalem Film Festival following the attack on the Freedom Flotilla. In addition, cultural figures such as John Berger, Roger Waters, Ken Loach, Judith Butler, Naomi Klein, the Yes Men, Sarah Schulman, Aharon Shabtai, Udi Aloni, John Greyson, the late Adrienne Rich, and John Williams have explicitly supported the Palestinian cultural boycott of Israel.

A number of cultural figures have also refused to participate in Israel’s official cultural events for political reasons, including Augusto Boal, Roger Waters, André Brink, Vincenzo Consolo, and Nigel Kennedy; and cultural figures such as Bono, Björk, Jean-Luc Godard, Snoop Dogg, and others have declined offers to take part in events in Israel—or have agreed but then cancelled without giving explicit political reasons.

Another measure of success for the global BDS movement can be gauged from Israeli reactions to the BDS campaign. In July 2011, the Israeli Knesset passed a law that essentially criminalizes boycotts of Israel, as well as individuals and organizations calling for them. The Reut Institute, a prominent Israeli think tank, has categorized the BDS campaign as a “strategic threat” that could turn into an existential threat. Furthermore, key Israeli politicians have issued alarmist statements about the growth of the BDS movement and the isolation of Israel.

After Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress in May 2011, he spoke with Knesset member Binyamin “Fuad” Ben-Eliezer. “Listen, Bibi,” growled Ben-Eliezer, “I congratulate you on your hug from Congress, but it will not take us off the path to confrontation. Our situation in Europe is very bad. President Obama said everything we wanted him to say … As a former industry and trade minister, I tell you: the markets are closing. We will suffer a devastating economic blow.”

President Shimon Peres has also voiced fear that Israel might be subjected to economic boycotts and sanctions. “There’s no need for boycotts,” he said. “It would suffice for ports in Europe or Canada to stop unloading Israeli merchandise. It’s already beginning.” Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Barak has also chimed in on the subject. “There are elements in the world, quite powerful, in various countries, including friendly ones, in trade unions, [among] academics, consumers, green political parties,” he warned, “and this impetus has culminated in a broad movement called BDS … which is what was done with South Africa.”

Since its initiation, the BDS movement has expanded and achieved effectiveness far beyond what was originally imagined to be possible in just over six years. The call of the movement is increasingly being answered by mainstream and powerful actors. Cultural superstars, global financial institutions, major trade unions, faith groups, political parties, governments, and individuals of conscience of every kind—all are beginning to take action. Our global movement has in fact begun to isolate Israel.

This article is an original extract from The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, published by Verso on 15th May 2012, in which a cast of international voices argue for boycott, divestment and sanctions. The book features contributions from: John Berger, Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, Mustafa Barghouti, Ken Loach, Neve Gordon, Naomi Klein, Omar Barghouti, Ilan Pappe and many more.

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel
Audrea Lim (Editor)
Publication: 15th May 2012
ISBN: 978 1 84467 450 3
Price: £9.99
256 pages
Publisher: Verso Books

Members of the Swadhyaya Parivar, or self-awareness community, assemble at a “Women Self-Development Meet 2004″ in Ahmadabad, India. (Source: cellar.com)

Global justice is a topic that has permeated the mainstream for many years; however, its current manifestation in the likes of Stop Kony 2012 or the selective support for regime change in the Middle East is clearly problematic through the manner in which it furthers the interests of the United States and its allies. But Motta, Nilson et al. take their analysis further, by focusing on grassroots social movements in the Global South, and their relationship with intellectuals.

Adopting the role of ‘activist scholar’, these academics often visit social movements for long periods of time, to not only research, write and analyse the politics of the movement, but to also contribute to its progress. The book draws strength from the wealth of experience the different contributors are able to offer.

The ‘pink tide’ of socialist movements in Latin America, revered by much of the left, is interrogated at the grass-roots level, giving the reader an insight into the everyday workings of organisers making exciting changes in Venezuela.

The book addresses fundamental questions such as why “exploitation and oppression sometimes demobilise, and at other times spark collective action” brings the theoretical analyses of Gramscian hegemony and counter-hegemony into the 21st century in a way that many modern theorists struggle to frame adequately.

Readers hoping for accounts of organising similar to the books by radical/anti-colonial activists such as Stokely Carmichael or Trevor Ngwane may find some sections a challenging read. Prior knowledge of theoretical concepts is sometimes assumed, making the book more of a highly engaging academic text, rather than a narrative of social movements for those less familiar with some of the related philosophical concepts.

Competing intellectual visions of anti-state and state-centric anti-capitalist revolutions offer compelling arguments on a theme that has often divided the radical left.

Nonetheless, an insight into organising in Egypt in the run-up to the mass uprising and the removal of Mubarak offers a far more robust description than the mainstream reports of crisis, disorder and online social media. Whereas much of the press portrayed discontent in the region centring on unemployment, the book recalls that “Politics and workers’ rights are inseparable. Work is politics by itself”.

The way in which the more formal state-centric campaigns around legal cases and citizens’ rights overlaps with struggles for autonomy and social upheaval is portrayed in an enlightening chapter on South Africa. The role of NGOs and the pitfalls of what are perceived as ‘single-issue’ campaigns are deconstructed in other important chapters.

The exploration of contradictions in academic research within social movements based in Africa, Asia or Latin America is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Notions of class or national privilege are of huge significance, and navigating these challenges is essential for the many development students who graduate every year.

Further questioning the usefulness of academic work in these social movements, and how to avoid neglecting the voice and agency of local activists, is probably the biggest question facing those interested in ‘activist scholarship’. Ensuring that the knowledge produced by the activist scholar is simply an addition to the different forms of knowledge contributing to the progression of a social movement is well communicated by a number of the contributors.

The idea that there is a hierarchy of knowledge is problematised, but often hard to reconcile, as it is rare (but not unheard of) for a movement’s activists to publish their own analysis.

Social Movements in the Global South is an important contribution to a critical discourse on international development, linking macro-economic and imperialist policies with the relationships between different actors in grass roots social movements.

Although often presenting new questions rather than offering answers, the book enters the terrain of some of the most exciting movements for liberation across the globe, while honestly self-criticising the discipline used to communicate such important stories.

Social Movements in the Global South
Dispossession, Development and Resistance
Edited by Sara C. Motta and Alf Gunvald Nilsen
(Rethinking International Development series)
296 pages, Hardback.
Palgrave Macmillan (2011)

A scene from Cymbeline, performed by South Sudanese Theatre Company at Shakespera Globe (Photo: Ellie Kurtlz)

Last week, on May 2nd, the United Nations Security Council issued a resolution threatening both South Sudan’s ruling SPLM and North Sudan’s Bashir government with non-military sanctions if either parties continued to militarily subvert the ongoing negotiations over issues such as citizenship rights, borders, oil and security. This action, coming on top of months of African Union-led attempts to make the official negotiations meaningful through mediation and diplomacy, is a signal of the severity of the threat of a return to full war for two parties that have rarely seen eye to eye, even since the signing of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that officially ended hostilities.

As the exchange of both gunfire and rhetoric escalates, it is clear to even the most optimistic observer that the separation made official on July 9th 2011 was not a definitive seal on a peace process but one milestone in a journey that may yet stretch for many years.

Nonetheless the world’s 193rd country and its people continue to strive to shape and assert their identity in the global arena, not least as a cultural force. This brings us to the work of the South Sudan Theatre Company, which brought its interpretation of Cymbeline to Shakespeare’s Globe in London earlier this month, on the very day the UNSC Resolution was passed. The co-directors, Joseph Abuk and Derik Uya Alfred, are both veterans of cultural organisations such as the Kwoto Centre and Skylark Dramatists that have, throughout the conflict, given support to South Sudanese artists. They formed SSTC upon independence to celebrate and promote dramatists from the new nation to the world, and have worked with an entirely South Sudanese cast to bring this newly translated script to life in the historic context of the Globe.

The performance, part of the ‘Globe to Globe’ season that sees 37 plays performed in as many languages, is delivered in Juba Arabic, a language borne of the interplay between the classical Arabic spoken in the region since the 7th century – which remains the lingua franca of the Sudanese state to the North – and other Central and Eastern African tongues. Between body language and sparing use of digital displays, with short summaries of each scene, sufficient steer was provided to ensure the audience was not left behind. In fact, in the performance’s best moments even this concession seemed superfluous to the enjoyment and infectious energy that the cast wrought from relatively difficult material.

Given that the basic plot of Cymbeline involves conflict between a strong willed smaller nation (in this case Britain) and its imperial master (Rome) it might be tempting to infer a straight analogy of the South Sudanese liberation experience from the stage.

However, given that the plot also includes poison, cross dressing, several farcical cases of mistaken identity and a king, the eponymous Cymbeline (Arkangelo Mako, displaying impeccable comic timing), who flops his way through proceedings, drawing more laughs than plaudits, and survives as much by accident as design, that temptation is easily tempered.

One imagines that even in English there would be a certain amount of misinterpretation on the part of audience and different highlights appealing to different sensibilities; but the subjectivity of any Shakespearean experience was slightly amplified by the additional language barrier.

The real core plotline – if one can be found – is the cause of much confusion, heartache and, at times, hilarity, to the protagonists, and involves the romance between Princess Imogen (Margaret Karwato) and Posthumus (Francis Paulino). This is reflective of the fashion in which the play veers between high tragedy and comedy, with little room to readjust from scene to scene as the mood dramatically switches. Nonetheless the quality of the production and performances give shape to a messy plot. There was a certain cognitive dissonance between the venue and the event at first. But the cast made the stage their own.

The simple but effective percussive accompaniment gives a sense of urgency to proceedings and the sparing use of props, beyond personal accessories such as the King’s staff, made scenes such as the bedroom theft of Imgoen’s jewelry by Jackimo (Burtus Peter) and the imprisonment and binding of Posthumus by British forces all the more striking in their use of a bed and ropes stretched across the stage respectively. In the latter instance the use of a modern military uniform and whip, a major contrast from the traditional clothes adorning the other characters, gave Posthumus’s guard an added element of malign authority.

Another notable scene was the attempted wooing (and rebuttal) of Imogen by Lachimo. In this instance great timing and interplay between the two actors were accentuated by the use of a tiny proportion of the expansive stage to increase tension. The fluid, confident use of space overall was exemplified by the exuberant finale, where the formal end of the play itself and the celebratory dancing of the cast themselves merge in a chaotic, uplifting moment.

The two main female actresses, Karwato and Esther Bagirasas (the latter as the domineering, plotting Queen in addition to a memorable piece of moonlighting as the Roman god Jupiter!) deserve special plaudits for their presence and consistent energy throughout. Imogen in particular has a large amount of stage time and Karwato dealt with the demands of the expansive and varied script with evident gusto.

Korino Justin, as Imogen’s simpering and well meaning servant Pisanio, shared amusing dialogues with both characters and was also a highlight. Ultimately, however Victor Lado, as Belarius, was the real revelation, bringing grace and gravitas to his role as the wrongly ostracised nobleman who had raised Imogens’ two long-lost brothers to believe in and fight for the King that has rejected him.

The significant South Sudanese contingent in the audience were best equipped to pick up on the nuances of the script, as well as the distinctive flourishes that peppered the performance, from the occasional nuggets of English dropped into dialogue to emphasise or mock an Arabic phrase, mirroring the language as actually spoken, to the penchant of some characters for cowboy hats, something familiar to anyone who has seen SPLM politicians in full regalia.

Cymbeline himself struts with all of the pomp but little of the dignity or eloquence characteristic of elders across South Sudan. Therein lies the most fascinating aspect of this choice of play, and its delivery. The patriarchal authority figure is exposed as easily duped, manipulated and undermined and yet he survives, retains his sovereignty and, in the somewhat rushed denouement, is able to tie up the numerous loose ends of the plot that reveal themselves to him, dispensing pardons and blessings.

There is no mythical epiphany or transcendence and certainly no infallible saviour figure, but there is laughter, life and hope shared by the royals and the commoners alike, there is a fair measure of humility and forgiveness and there is independence, for better or worse.

There is absolutely no doubt that SSTC made this material their own and recognition for Joseph Abuk’s translation of the script is richly deserved. Ironically, in working together to portray British and Roman characters, the cast were able to express themselves in a distinctly South Sudanese fashion. Nonetheless I look forward to seeing and hearing more from and by South Sudanese writers and performers, especially giving the incredible depth and diversity of arts and traditions from across the country.

Audiences here could very well benefit form that exposure, alongside undoubtedly countless more interpretations and reinterpretations of the classic themes so well covered by the Immortal Bard. Whilst it is very difficult in the final analysis to separate the issue of national pride and identity from the merits of the work in its own right, South Sudanese Theatre now has a world stage for the voices of its people to be heard on.

Neither tokenism nor propaganda, this production bodes well for the arts scene of the country as a whole and it is important that initiatives such as SSTC are supported and documented and that the interaction of the international community that South Sudan so recently joined is not reduced to paternalistic directives alone.

For more information on SSTC visit www.southsudantheatre.com.
To find out about the ‘Globe to Globe’ programme visit its website.
For regular news and commentary regarding Sudan and South Sudan
www.sudantribune.com.

Brother Ali performs at XOYO London, 11th May (Photo: Daniel Yang)

Brother Ali is a Hip Hop artist from Minneapolis, USA, commonly introduced with the words ‘big, bald and albino’. His tour in Europe showcases a refined Ali as he introduces his fifth album “Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color” to be released this August. I attended his show at XOYO in London, which he opened with his latest free song ‘Not A Day Goes By‘:

Being a ‘Muslim rapper’ is hardly uncommon and carries a whole host of stereotypes. Yet Brother Ali has a refreshing approach in expressing his faith as one part of who he is. Seemingly more open and accepting than ever, Ali booms down the mic “Whether you’re Muslim…or a Lesbian, these just define one aspect of us as human beings.” Similar to others, his trip to Islam’s holy site Mecca inspired an internal reform, visualised by little more than a thin white beard which drops from his chin.

First time I shed a tear at a hip hop gig when @BrotherAli was doing an acapella about his father and Eyedea passing.

— Illya S (@Illcutz) May 10, 2012

A previously unheard a capella on his progression through life was incredibly raw and touching. The audience were taken aback by the complete openness that Ali displayed in his words, speaking of his grandfather’s suicide and father’s death in a gripping rhyme which silenced all.

Beyond that, my favourite part of the night was Ali’s pause to, as he put it, ‘preach’, on the ills of our exploitative reality. This was carried through to unexpected performances of songs from his new album which carry a thread of revolutionary ideals and a much needed realisation of the global struggle: “The [August] uprisings you had here to Occupy to the revolutions in the Arab world – they are all linked.”

“I want to leave a better world for my son than what was left for me,” he says emphatically as he enters another track. After a fantastic mixture of performances from all of his works (including the notorious ‘Uncle Sam Goddamn‘), Ali ended on the closing track from the album ‘Us’:

“I started rhyming just to be somebody
found out that I already was
cause can’t nobody be free unless we’re all free
there’s no me and no you its just us.”

On promoting the new album, which he claims is his ‘best yet’, Ali emphasised his wish for people to find a way to the content – regardless of how. Watch out for the drop on August 13th.

You can download Brother Ali’s latest mixtape “The Bite Marked Heart EP” for free here.

Palestinian children mark Palestinian Prisoners Day in front of the Red Cross headquarters in Gaza (Photo: REUTERS/Suhaib Salem-Telegraph)

Belatedly, the West is at least taking minimal note of some extraordinary developments in the pattern of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s long occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

In recent years there has occurred a dramatic and notable shift in Palestinian resistance to tactics of nonviolence that is ignored by Western media. Although as yet there has not been a principled or total abandonment of armed struggle by the Palestinians, and there have been sporadic Palestinian reliance on violence, especially in the aftermath of Israeli provocations taking the form of targeted killings in Gaza or night arrests in the West Bank, there is a definite turn toward nonviolence both by Palestinians living under occupation and in the outlook of the Global Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

For years influential commentators in the West have been insisting that if only the Palestinians would shift their resistance to nonviolent forms, even if only for pragmatic reasons, it would lead to a breakthrough for peace and justice. The reasoning was based on the perception that Israel as a democratic and morally sensitive society would respond favourably being far more willing to risk a just peace with Palestinians who had renounced violence and conducted their struggle in strict accord with ethical and legal norms.

With typical Western condescending moral arrogance such stalwarts of the liberal establishment in the United States as Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof have been using their newspaper columns for years to give Palestinians the benefit of their guidance.

Kristof even had the audacity to choose the title, ‘Waiting for Gandhi,” for a column published in the NY Times back in July 2010. The mute response to these dramatic Palestinian hunger strikes should be an occasion of embarrassment for such liberal icons, but apparently isn’t, despite the absence of any show of responsiveness on Israel’s side and a sullen silence throughout the international community.

Only the spread of online protests, solidarity initiatives around the world, street demonstrations throughout Palestine, and most of all by the realization that the longer term hunger strikers are gathering at death’s door has led to ritual declaration of concern by such moral authority figures on the world scene as the UN Secretary General.

At the moment, the most significant expression of nonviolent resistance is this ongoing series of hunger strikes that was started a few months ago by two West Bank Palestinians brutally arrested in midnight raids on their homes and held under Israel’s administrative detention procedures – which allows indefinite imprisonment without charges and without even the disclosure of incriminating evidence.

Detention orders can last up to six months, and can be renewed indefinitely after each order expires. The first of these hunger strikers, Khader Adnan, was roughly arrested on December 17, 2011 by more than 50 Israeli soldiers in the presence of his two very young daughters and pregnant wife, and was then subjected to Israeli violence during a period of interrogation and humiliating prison conditions.

His refusal to eat or speak was immediately initiated, and lasted for 66 days, the same length as the famous IRA martyr, Bobby Sands, and was ended only because Israel agreed to release him early and pledged no renewal of administrative detention.

To demonstrate that his concerns were not just private, Adnan made it a point to visit the families of other administrative detainees before returning to his home in the village of Rabba near Jenin, and has also written an open letter to the people of the world appealing for support.

The second hunger striker, Hana Shalabi, inspired by the example set by Adnan, initiated her strike for similar reasons, refusing food for 43 days, and was released after reaching an agreement with Israeli prison officials, but with a punitive proviso: a deportation order that cruelly confined her to Gaza for three years, separated from her family and home village in the West Bank.

Adnan and Shalabi had been reported by independent medical examiners associated with Physicians for Human Rights-Israel to be in a critical life-threatening condition when they agreed to end their strikes.

These two strong displays of self-sacrifice and personal bravery led directly to a mass move toward protest against the practice of administrative detention and deplorable prison conditions by way of hunger strikes.

At present, as many as 1,600 Palestinians currently in Israeli prisons have committed themselves to ‘the battle of empty stomachs’ in the form of open-ended hunger strikes. Most of these Palestinians started their strikes on Prisoners Day, April 17th, although Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh, and a few others began earlier, and quite incredibly are still alive despite having refused food for more than 73 days.

The Israeli High Court denied petitions for their release, although in a judicial opinion that criticised the Israeli government for an excessive reliance on the administrative detention procedure and suggested that prison authorities in Israel might release them because of their medical condition, and thereby avoid a political backlash and damaging publicity should any of these strikers die.

The round-the-clock coverage given to Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese human rights activist who escaped from house arrest to the safety of the American Embassy, and was later released contrasts with the media neglect of the Palestinian hunger strikes.

From a strictly news perspective this is incomprehensible, given this unprecedented Palestinian challenge to the Israeli prison system in which the hunger strikers are sacrificing their bodies so as to make call attention to the abusive prison system.

These hunger strikes should also have been newsworthy as part a broader Palestinian strategic abandonment of armed resistance as their principal mode of struggle. In this new setting there is also an evident disillusionment with traditional diplomacy as capable of obtaining justice for the Palestinians or to achieve a sustainable peace between Israel and Palestine.

In the face of these frustrations, the Palestinians are resorting to other ways of upholding fundamental rights, as well as in relation to their underlying struggle for self-determination and statehood. The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmood Abbas, made an eloquent appeal to the UN General Assembly for the admission of Palestine as a ‘state’ to the UN last September, only to have the initiative sidelined by opposition led by the United States.

Given Palestinian diplomatic recognition by more than 100 governments it is only a geopolitical ploy that is capable of denying the Palestinian leaders the opportunity to participate fully in the UN System.

What is gained by their exclusion beyond silencing their political voice in the one global arena that is dedicated to the peaceful resolution of conflict, the essential undertaking of the United Nations? The occupation of Palestine has continued for 45 years, and has gradually become a permanent structure of partial annexation that imposes an apartheid form of legal and political administration.

To keep the Palestinians stateless, voiceless, and subjugated for such a long interval should be understood as a geopolitical scandal, and totally discredits Western claims to back the universal implementation of human rights.

Palestinian civil society is now wisely emphasising coercive measures of non-violence to register its dissatisfaction with the failures of the UN and the inability of inter-governmental diplomacy to produce a just and sustainable peace.

The main international expression of this embrace of nonviolence is the adoption of tactics used so successfully by the anti-apartheid campaign two decades ago to change the political climate in racist South Africa, which unexpectedly clearer a nonviolent path to multiracial constitutional democracy. At the present time the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaign (BDS) is hoping to achieve similar results despite all the obstacles.

Let us recall that Gandhi’s success involved nonviolent forms of coercive resistance, and not just fasts and marches. But let us also appreciate that nothing gave greater force to Gandhi’s challenge to British imperial rule than his repeated willingness to subject his body to open-ended hunger strike that ignited the moral imagination and released the political energies of the Indian masses and led the media to cast a sympathetic eye on this epic struggle against colonial rule.

These Palestinian hunger strikes have already produced a Gandhian Moment. The future will disclose whether a new stage of mobilisation and solidarity on behalf of the Palestinians will be forthcoming.

A Ugandan soldier serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) holds a rocket-propelled grenade at sunrise, on the frontline in Maslah Town, on the northern city limit of Mogadishu, 30 April 2012 (Photo: Stuart Price)

Since the intensification of armed conflict between government forces and clan-based opposition groups in 1988, Somalia has played host to some of the most horrific violence in East Africa. After thirty years of independence the Somali state collapsed in January 1991, bringing with it the fall of the militant Siad Barre and his efficient divide and rule policy for the nation’s clan systems (after having received generous support from the US and Western Europe in the ‘70s and ‘80s, thanks to the country’s strategic value and neighbouring shipping lanes).

As Somalia fractured further after the major clans declared themselves rulers of autonomous states, the northwest regions announced their independence as the Republic of Somaliland in May 1991, yet to be recognised by any international body. In March 1998, the northwest region declared independence as the Puntland State of Somalia. Then, in April 2002, the Southwest Somali State followed suit.

In August 2004, representatives of Somalia’s clans appointed 275 members of a new parliament – after holding numerous conferences in Kenya – electing Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed as president of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government. After consistent disagreements and confrontations with parliament, Yusuf resigned in December 2009, with Somalia being classified a ‘collapsed’ or ‘failed’ state, lacking a system of taxation, public schools, a public health system or social services (with a ‘successful’ state presumably being what the social philosopher John Dewey called ‘the shadow cast on society by big business’).

Writing for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Ken Menkhaus commented in 2004:

‘The virtual proxy war which Ethiopia and the Arab states have played out in Somalia has been especially damaging. Arab states seek a strong central Somali state to counterbalance and outflank Ethiopia; Ethiopia seeks a week, decentralised client state, and is willing to settle for ongoing state collapse rather than risk a revived Arab-backed government in Mogadishu. Both have provided military and financial support to their Somali clients, reinforcing the tendency towards violent political stalemate’ (Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 9).

Referred to in the past as Britain’s ‘Cinderella of Empire,’ David Cameron recently called Somalia ‘a failed state that directly threatens British interests’ – where the term ‘Britain’ refers not to the people but to the leading financial, oil and arms corporations deemed crucial to ‘the health of the economy’ (a self-serving notion which has changed little since William Langland spoke of ‘the common profit’ of the landed gentry in the medieval classic Piers Plowman).

Following the standard script of previous fruitless conferences, to his satisfaction Cameron held his own on February 23rd, inviting representatives of 40 governments and organisations to propose ‘peacekeeping’ measures. Included was Hilary Clinton who urged non-negotiation with anti-government forces, al-Shabaab, who have repeatedly engaged in human rights abuses such as beheadings and torture. Suicide bombings have also, on one occasion last October, taken the lives of over 100 students, parents and ministers outside a compound housing numerous government departments, such as the Ministry of Education. But, as with the Kony 2012 campaign, a closer look is useful.

Following a three-year civil war, in April 1992 the UN Security Council authorised a series of ‘peacekeeping’ operations under the umbrella UNOSOM. After the US sent its own force in December, UNITAF, a ceasefire was signed in March 1993 by the dominant warlords. Soon after the US was forced to pull out due to a number of devastating defeats, most notably the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident of October 1993 during the Battle of Mogadishu, involving the death of 18 US soldiers and with various estimates putting the number of Somalis killed at over 1,000. But as the commander of the operation, Marine Lieutenant General Anthony Zinni, commented to the press regarding Somali casualties: ‘I’m not counting bodies … I’m not interested.’

Ethiopia intervened in 2006 and pushed back the Islamists, who had, despite their al-Qaeda connections (since strengthened after repeated Western-backed interventions) nevertheless succeeded far more efficiently than the TFG in renovating the nation, trade and the main national airport and seaport, restoring public service to the extent that ordinary people felt safe doing business on the streets of Mogadishu (suggesting the unfit nature of the European nation-state in Somalia – a system of domination and control imposed on the global south by the European powers since the days of Columbus). The top UN official for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, regarded the six months of Islamist rule as Somalia’s ‘golden era,’ the single peaceful period in decades.

BBC Swahili’s Kevin Mwachiro wisely omits this crucial fact in a recent short video summary ‘Somalia’s future: What you need to know’ – a title with fitting overtones of the New York Times’ motto ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print.’ Indeed, the way he pronounces ‘Transitional Federal Government’ just after one minute into the video (in a manner of ‘impartiality’ the BBC prides itself on) makes it sound like he’s promoting an alternative to the Avengers rather than a government. Al-Shabaab’s actions are doubtless deplorable, but they maintain strong grassroots support from both Somalis and clan elders, such as the Hawiye. Most are in fact calling for al-Shabaab to be included in peace talks, since waging a war with them has only made life considerably worse for majority of the population.

With his impeccable choice of misleading words, Cameron touchingly revealed to his conference the tale of a fateful encounter:

‘Earlier this week I met with some of the Somali Diaspora here in Britain. Many had fled from fighting and famine and had grave concerns for their relatives left behind. Of course, it’s natural to want to help any country in such distress. But there’s another reason for the international community to help the Somali people. These problems in Somalia don’t just affect Somalia. They affect us all. … If the rest of us just sit back and look on, we will pay a price for doing so’. (foreign office)

Not worth consideration was the view of over half the residents of Mogadishu who, according to a UN-sponsored poll, believe foreign nations have in the past intervened in Somalia purely out of self-interest.

If we remembered to start the day with our ‘hypocrite’ pill, the prime minister’s concern for human rights will sit comfortably next to his repeated winks to our ally Ethiopia after its invasion into Eritrean territory in mid March (with Whitehall simply adding satirically that it was ‘deeply concerned,’ declining to censure Addis Ababa), with daily outrages over al-Shabaab’s crimes being a more popular topic for the media. Eritrea, supporting al-Shabaab, uses the failed state as a theatre for its proxy war against Ethiopia.

We spend our time well when we recall how the US takes an even more charitable approach to autocracy in the continent, supporting such ‘local cops on the beat’ as Paul Kagame of Rwanda (accused of war crimes in the Second Congo War), Idriss Déby of Chad, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Paul Biya of Cameroon (whose 28 years in power would fail to impress Cameron’s closest ally in the Gulf, the self-appointed guardian of global virtue Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said of Oman, who has been in power for almost 42 years and whose family have ruled since the mid-eighteenth century).

As things currently stand, al-Shabaab fighters have retreated from the capital and Kenyan troops control territory in the south (having entered the conflict last October in support of the TFG). The group have also lost control of key strategic areas in Deynile on the outskirts of the capital, such as an airstrip and hospital. In early April they moved north into Puntland in an effort to strengthen ties with al-Qaeda, having merged with the militant Islamist group in February.

Britain is also rumoured to be considering joint airstrike operations with the US on al-Shabaab, launched from its Djibouti base at Camp Lemonnier. Two days after Cameron’s conference, four al-Shabaab fighters were killed 60km south of Mogadishu by a US drone strike, destroying two vehicles in a convoy and a white Kenyan ‘civilian’ – evoking Noam Chomsky’s observation that, whereas George W. Bush’s favourite tactic was to torture people, Obama just kills them.

The likelihood of more ‘collateral damage’ in Somalia by the most ‘precise’ weapons in history is also rapidly escalating. In an innocent, perhaps even adorable expression of commitment to state violence, the CIA’s general counsel Stephen Preston suggested in a speech at Harvard Law School on April 10th that his agency is not legally bound to the laws of war, but will rather act ‘in a manner consistent with the … basic principles’ of the those laws.

As the legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch James Ross observes, Preston cautiously and purposefully generalises international law to make it seem more like a rough guideline than a set of legally binding constraints: ‘When the CIA general counsel says that the agency need only act in ‘a manner consistent’ with the ‘principles’ of international law, he is saying the laws of war aren’t really law at all’.

Human Rights Watch’s most recent annual ‘World Report’ also points to the ‘indiscriminate fire on civilian areas’ conducted by ‘TFG-affiliated militias in the border areas of Dhobley and Baardhere during clashes with al-Shabaab’. In late January TFG forces also fired into a crowd of bystanders in Mogadishu, killing up to 20 people and wounding 30. There have presently been no attempts to hold those responsible to account, a level of conscious ignorance which results in Addis Ababa, Washington and Whitehall feeling content, with Preston nodding sagely.

During the recent Libyan campaign (largely the effort to secure, alongside regional ‘stability,’ what the US ambassador Gene Cretz confessed to be ‘the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources’ – oil), NATO managed to extend its considerable list of war crimes by bombing universities, hospitals, schools and homes, giving a boost of confidence to Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague. It’s of no surprise (and of little moment to the media) that a World Bank and UN report ranks Somalia as the second most important country for unexploited oil reserves in North East Africa after Libya.

As a recent ‘Hands off Somalia’ campaign video revealed, Bauxite deposits have also been found in Mana Daimur, 250,000 tonnes of untapped atomic minerals exist in Alio Ghelle and the Bur region, and an estimated 10 million tonnes of Titanium reserves lie in the Jubba River. Charles Chinweizu adds that the ‘British firms BG Group, Tullow Oil, Premier Oil and Cove Energy, have acquired oil interests in Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania since 2010’ (‘Oil corporations rush to carve up Somalia,’ Revolutionary Communist Group, 6 February 2012).

Drawing on the nation’s economic history, Ioan Lewis of the London School of Economics (no dove) explained in his careful and illuminating Understanding Somalia that Siad Barre had exercised ‘a policy of state control of the economy. The export of the banana crop grown in the riverine areas south of Mogadishu was controlled by a state agency not greatly different from the monopoly established by previous civilian governments. Similarly grain production was controlled, farmers being allowed to keep a small quantity of grain for their own use and obliged to sell the rest at fixed prices to the Agricultural Development Corporation which stored it and arranged for its distribution and sale to the public. Imported goods were similarly regulated through a state agency.

The major local industries, the sugar factory at Jowhar and the meat processing plant at Kismagu, were likewise state enterprises’ (London: Hurst & Company, 2009, pp. 40-1). But if the Somali economy was so heavily centralised and regarded as ‘communist’ during its period of Soviet influence from the late ‘60s to the early ‘70s, why did the label disappear when Barre became an ally in the mid-‘70s, receiving a high degree of western ‘advise’ and arms? Barre himself regarded his Somali Democratic Republic as a ‘communist regime.’

An explanation can perhaps be found by drawing a parallel with Chile: The West regards Chile as a fine model of the free market, and yet its main export was nationalised in 1976. The Codelco corporation, the largest copper producing company in the world, is by far the country’s greatest export, from which the economy gains most of its strength. But there’s a difference between Chile and the likes of Venezuela and Cuba: Chile doesn’t step on the toes of the US or any other major western power, and so it escapes being branded ‘communist,’ ‘socialist,’ or any other scare-word the public relations industry decides to drain of all meaning.

The official goals of Cameron’s conference were to stop the spread of piracy in the Indian Ocean (created largely by Western firms dumping barrels of their nuclear waste in the seas of impoverished Somali fishermen), relieve the nation’s famine and end the civil war. Having in the past dedicated up to four frigates to Somalia in the battle against piracy (something which, like corruption, is the enemy of any multinational corporation seeking resourceful, streamlined profits), cuts to the Royal Navy have forced it to drop its anti-piracy policy, with only two frigates now being assigned a ‘part-time’ attention to the issue.

The tactics agreed to at the conference are to send in US drones (with their thirst for peace well testified by hundreds of ‘collateral’ Afghan civilians) and to provide the Transitional Federal Government with large international funds. But as Lewis recognised past intervention, as from 1993-5 and in early 2007, has been ‘costly and ineffective’ (p. ix). During the latter intervention, the commander of the small Ugandan-manned African Union mission in Somalia observed that the ‘peacekeeping’ intervention was premature since it presupposed the existence of peace and a visible government.

With the direct conflict decreasing in scale in the capital, signs of regeneration are to be found in Mogadishu, with house prices escalating and reconstruction beginning. Bakara, once the epicentre of violence, is in the process of revival. But ‘the scars of war remain clear, with hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in and around Mogadishu, many in basic rag-and-plastic shelters, some in the crumbling ruins of roofless houses. … As land prices increase and repairs are made, the cost of living rises too, a problem for many in this grossly impoverished city’.

Unmentioned at the conference, however, were the TFG’s human rights abuses. ‘International supporters of the TFG,’ Human Rights Watch reported a few days before the conference, ‘have not paid sufficient attention to human rights violations by the government, including recruitment and use of children as soldiers’ – something they share in common with al-Shabaab. The TFG ‘has also detained children perceived to be supporters of al-Shabaab instead of providing them with rehabilitation and protection in accordance with international standards’ (‘Somalia: Warring Parties Put Children at Grave Risk,’ HRW Report, 21 February 2012).

Last November Human Rights Watch also urged the Kenyan minister of state for defense that his government should ‘promptly and impartially investigate recent incidents in which Kenyan forces may have violated international humanitarian or human rights law,’ such as attacking unarmed fishermen and an internationally displaced persons camp killing respectably four and five ‘unpeople’ (to use the term of the diplomatic historian Mark Curtis) (‘Kenya: Respect Law in Somalia Military Operations,’ HRW Report, 19 November 2011).

The focus of the conference was instead drawn laser-like on the crimes of the official enemy, al-Shabaab – a common theme, as history is well aware. Ken Menkaus comes to similar conclusions, and he comes to them for the right reasons: ‘The most egregious crimes (if measured in value stolen or lives lost) are committed by many of the country’s top political and business leaders, whom the international community convenes for peace conferences. This includes inciting communal violence for political purposes, the embezzlement of foreign aid funds, the introduction of counterfeit currency (which, by creating hyperinflation, robs average Somalis of most of their savings), huge land grabs, the export of charcoal (illegal under the past government and highly destructive environmentally), and involvement in piracy.

This criminal behaviour tends to get less attention than street crimes such as carjacking, murder and kidnapping, which are usually perpetuated by gangs or individuals. These crimes are at epidemic proportions in some places, but pale in comparison to the cost of ‘white-collar crimes’ by the political and business leadership’ (p. 33).

The TFG is expected to step down when its mandate expires in August, being replaced with a new, more representative government, with 30% of its members being female. Nevertheless, to stress Menkaus’ observation, ‘external mediation tends to focus on state-building, despite the fact that the average Somali needs – and benefits more immediately from – a state of peace than a revived central government’ (p. 31).

According to Alex de Waal, one of the leading experts on the conflict, the more popular self-governing regions of Somaliland and Puntland have succeeded ‘by turning their communities’ dynamic business sectors and traditional values – the clan system and Islam – into forces for stability. Partly because neither Somaliland nor Puntland is internationally recognized, they don’t get official foreign aid or military cooperation. But they’ve done pretty well relying on themselves’ (‘Getting Somalia right this time,’ New York Times, 21 February 2012).

Cameron’s focus on sending aid to the TFG’s disgraced politicians – who, writes Chinweizu, ‘have helped themselves to millions of dollars in tax revenues from Somalia’s air and sea ports, whilst millions suffer and die’ – should instead be replaced, de Waal suggests, by support for the functioning northern territories and the empowerment of ‘Somali businessmen with lines of credit and an improved system to regulate money transfers; Somalia needs a chamber of commerce before it needs a cabinet.’ But ‘whether the discussion is about the central state or sub-national administration,’ adds Menkhaus, ‘an enormous gulf separates foreigners and Somalis in the consideration and conception of central government’ (p. 28).

These concerns become especially vivid when we do what Whitehall and Washington failed to do in Afghanistan or Iraq; consider the position of the natives, as de Waal does: ‘Many Somalis don’t want a central government. Or, to be exact, they are so embittered by their experience of centralized power that they would rather have no government than the type that their African neighbors and the West have designed for them.’

Important lessons on the nature of state construction (or deconstruction) could be learnt, as always, from the anarchist peasants in the Spanish Civil War. A study of the anarchist collectives was published by the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, the anarcho-syndicalist labour unions) in 1937. The study describes the village of Membrilla in the province of Siudad Real, fraught by the destruction of Republican forces: ‘In its miserable huts live the poor inhabitants of a poor province; eight thousand people, but the streets are not paved, the town has no newspaper, no cinema, neither a cafe nor a library.

On the other hand, it has many churches that have been burned … Food, clothing, and tools were distributed equitably to the whole population. Money was abolished, work collectivized, all goods passed to the community, consumption was socialized. It was, however, not a socialization of wealth but of poverty’ (Collectivisations: l’oeuvre constructive de la revolution espagnole, 2nd ed. Toulouse, Editions C.N.T., 1965, cited in Noam Chomsky, ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,’ Chomsky on Anarchism, Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006, p. 73).

For Chomsky, ‘An account such as this, with its concern for human relations and the ideal of a just society, must appear very strange to the consciousness of the sophisticated intellectual, and it is therefore treated with scorn, or taken to be naive or primitive or otherwise irrational. Only when such prejudice is abandoned will it be possible for historians to undertake a serious study of the popular movement that transformed Republican Spain in one of the most remarkable social revolutions that history records’ (Ibid.).

If current scholarship and journalism continue on their current path, the same fate may befall any forces (militant or not) which attempt to direct Somalia away from the path Cameron’s conference hoped to direct it in: to be a source of enjoyment for BG Group, Tullow Oil, Premier Oil and other economic tyrannies. If the world’s most precious resources happen to be on the other side of the planet, it’s purely accidental – the US and Britain are native everywhere. The idea that the primary beneficiaries of a country’s resources should be the people of that country is outrageous to elite opinion. Democracy is a fine thing, the sensible man understands, so long as it accords with Western business interests.

Repeating standard colonial practice, the UN’s repeated ‘experiments’ of imposing a western-style nation-state on Somalia have given no serious thought, writes Lewis, ‘to considering how appropriate these would prove in the local setting, or above all in conjunction with the highly decentralised nature of transitional Somali political institutions’ (p. 34).

As numerous other analysts over the past two decades have stressed, unless these considerations are put before the needs of state-corporate power (a virtual impossibility, since corporations have a legal obligation to solely pursue profit, with the nanny state loyally protecting them from market forces), Somalia may continue to be little more than a ‘geographical expression.’

Phenomenal concentration: hats off to the performers of ‘Einstein on the Beach’ (Photo: Lucie Jansch)

Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s impressive but demanding spectacle (for want of a better word – opera, perhaps?) had its UK premiere at The Barbican last week.

A five-hour piece of song, dance and poetry supposedly related to the life and work of the world’s most iconic scientific figure, Einstein on the Beach has no narrative and a lot of very odd imagery and symbolism. Wilson claims, “You don’t have to understand anything. It’s a work where you go and you can get lost. That’s the idea.” This is wise advice. Searching for ‘meaning’ in Einstein and attempting to make sense of just why its performers are doing what they’re doing (and they certainly do ‘it’ incredibly well) can lead you into hairy territory.

But it is hard not to. When faced with such outrageous ‘artiness’, it gives some comfort to try and attain an element of understanding. Once the questions begin, however, they do not stop. “Why does that performer wear a red shirt, when all the others wear white?” “Why was there a Native American squaw at the first Trial Scene but not the second?” “Why does that woman who keeps shouting “No” look like ‘The Lady in the Radiator’ from David Lynch’s Eraserhead?” “Hang on a minute, this whole thing is quite Lynchian at times. Is that a direct reference?” A quick wiki check reveals that Eraserhead, Lynch’s debut film, was released a year after the first production of Einstein. There goes that theory. Etcetera.

Better to “get lost”. This is far easier than working it out so you may as well. Einstein is hypnotic, it is mesmerising. As well as being musically and visually repetitive, the libretto consists of apparently random phrases, speeches and numbers said over and over again. It is at its best when it becomes almost boring, when it seems appropriate to take advantage of being allowed to leave the auditorium for a break (at five hours with no intermission, there is probably a law against stopping you). Just when you work up the nerve to go sidling out through the rows, suddenly something changes: the chorus or a new baseline come in, the harmony sequence is extended higher, or a dancer, who has been repeating the same tortuous motion for fifteen minutes adds a new gesture to their sequence. When a change like this takes place, though subtle, it seems to be on a monumental scale as it wrenches you out of the pattern: it is very beautiful, almost profound.

The choreography, by Lucinda Childs (who also wrote some of the libretto) is genius. A lot of it is deeply unsettling. The performers move like the bowler-hatted man in ‘The Ministry of Funny Walks’ but with the soul and humour taken out. They sport rictus grins for much of the show. Helga Davis, one of the featured performers of the company, has a particularly good one, both when she is about to shoot someone in the Night Train scene, and when she is enjoying a lollipop in the second Trial Scene. That the same expression is pulled for both murder and sweeties is a good example of the strange dreamworld you enter into with Einstein.

The two Dances of the show are among its most captivating scenes. As most of the production is slow, incredibly slow, slow to the point of testing one’s sanity and patience, they come as a relief. Lasting at least a good twenty minutes each, the energy and strength of the eight dancers, all in blinding white, is as impressive as their skill. They pirouette and leap backwards and forwards across the stage, creating a strict and almost simple pattern out of the chaos of their movement.

Again, you find yourself asking questions: “Chaos, pattern…doesn’t that have something to do with physics and nature?” “Do the dancers represent the electrons that whirl around the fixed point of an atom’s nucleus? Atoms, surely being relevant as this is Einstein on the Beach…” No. Best to leave it. “Get lost” in the dance until the sheer joy of their energy becomes disturbing, as any joy that is so unnaturally sustained would.

Einstein ends where it began, with the same Knee Dance that opened it. These signature Wilson interludes are not actually dances, but little scenes that connect the otherwise disparate acts of Wilson’s works: knee as in joint. After the intensity of the experience, having felt as though you’ve lived through quite a lot, a return to the opening gives almost a sense of nostalgia, or deja vu, particularly when coupled with Glass’s moving, sequential score. Character 1’s speech at both beginning and end (recited by Kate Moran, a performer notable for her unbelievably captivating voice) includes the lines ‘These are the days, my friends, these are the days’. Perhaps encouraged by the aforementioned nostalgia, this line takes on a particular significance.

This Einstein is a faithful reproduction of the original 1976 version. Despite how imaginative and daring much of the direction is, it already seems strangely outdated. You walk away with an odd, somewhat patronising feeling of “Ah yes, all that seventies experimental formalism”. Einstein on the Beach is no longer the brave new world it once was: “those were the days.” Though perhaps the fact that it feels so unoriginal at times is a testament, if nothing else, to the huge influence that both Wilson and Glass have had on theatre and music over the past three decades.

Einstein on the Beach
An opera in Four Acts by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass
4 – 13 May 2012 / 18:00, 17:30, 16:00
Barbican Theatre