Many Peoples, One Struggle

Many Peoples, One Struggle
By Omar Hamed

The Palestinian victims of Israel's war of occupation and settlement since the 'withdrawal' from the Gaza Strip on August 20, 2005, now number 572 Killed. Israeli tank shells in Palestine killed a fourteen year old the day before I wrote this.

The recent intifada or conflict in the occupied territories has dragged on for six long years now with many innocent people on both sides of the border killed. However a new current in Palestine and Israel is emerging, which views the struggle against the occupation, the annexation wall, the confiscation of Jerusalem and the displacement of millions of Palestinian refugees as a human rights struggle not simply religious fighting or a land dispute.

In Palestine and Israel organisations dedicated to non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation and the continued building of the 670km separation wall which criminally annexes large portions of the West Bank are building a movement of solidarity and humanity to try and break the cycle of violence and hatred in the promised land.

Israeli organisations like the Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD), Anarchists against the Wall (AATW) and Gush Shalom frequently take part alongside Palestinians in non-violent direct action and symbolic demonstrations. In Bil’in, in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers have injured and killed many Israelis and Palestinians taking part in the joint struggle against the apartheid wall. In August an Israeli anarchist was permanently disabled while taking part in a peaceful demonstration.

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is another organisation that uses non-violent direct action against the occupation. International activists under Palestinian leadership take part in direct action; dismantling checkpoints, tearing down illegal Israeli roadblocks, acting as human shields and helping Palestinians harvest their olives on their confiscated lands. ISM, AATW and ICAHD represent the new resistance to occupation who many believe hold the key to both Palestinian and Israeli hopes for a just and peaceful situation in the Middle East.

Ali from Aotearoa Jews from Justice and ex-pat Israeli said at a demonstration in Wellington three weeks ago, “Israel does not speak for all Jews. There are Jews all over the world who oppose the Israeli government’s dispossession of Palestinian people… They’re the people refusing to serve in the criminal Israeli Defence Force, they’re the people who go to the West Bank to protest Israel’s annexation wall, designed to separate Palestinians from their land and livelihood, they’re the people who rebuild the homes of Palestinians after the Israeli government demolishes them.”

Her words remind us that in Palestine and Israel today there are many peoples and one struggle.

Student Unions: Would you like change with that?

Student unions: Would you like change with that?
By Omar Hamed
Left: Greek students fight the police in 2006.

It is always interesting times when I start agreeing with anyone from Act on Campus. But the times are indeed interesting and I do indeed find myself agreeing with David Seymour from Act on Campus. I wouldn’t agree with all of what he wrote in his article A New Way for AUSA, (Craccum #18) but for the most part he spelt out a phenomenon that anyone with one or more eyes is able to see.

Seymour spelt out how the Auckland University Students Association (AUSA) has become a “service model union” and is engaged in a “partnership” with the University administration. What Seymour described can be summed up using these terms, which describe types of unions. Basically these terms originated in trade union circles to describe unions which offer services to their members by working in partnership with employers. Instead of organising workers to campaign for better conditions, as had traditionally been the role of unions, the “service model” focused on providing services to their members such as life insurance, subsidised health care and holiday homes on the Gold Coast.

Well the same terminology can be used to explain students associations. AUSA as Seymour pointed out is “in the University’s pocket” just like any good service-model union should be. This allows it to focus on what it perceives as its real job; making sure orientation is cool and that our radio station, student magazine, cheap beer, free events keep on flowing. I heard Dan the Prez himself say exactly that at a SRC meeting this year. Someone got some debate going about the Louise Nicholas rape allegations and Dan moved to shut it down stating that AUSA is about providing services rather than “wasting time” on issues like women’s rights. (Interestingly and sickeningly enough I heard that Victoria University Student’s Association President Nick Kelly has opened up betting on whether the Womensfest down there will make a profit.) So you see, that students associations now see themselves as merely service providers making sure we get as much change as possible from a fiver when we ask for a beer at Shadows rather than trying to change anything themselves.

Now I thoroughly agree with Seymour when he says we have to be more like the Unite! Union and stop letting AUSA be a “training ground for the politically ambitious”. Unite! is one of the foremost exponents of the “organising model” in Aotearoa and their embracing of this style of unionism is the reason their members in KFC, Pizza Hut and Starbucks were able to “beat the brands” as one Unite! organiser put it.

The organising-model in contrast to the service-model is about giving power to union members and a strong focus on recruiting and creative militant and high profile campaigning that seeks to build community support for unionism and build a strong community base for workers rights and support to struggle for improved conditions. This model, while not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, is much more preferable to the service model.

This year I watched in horror as AUSA went through the motions of unionism without actually doing anything. Our campaign against international students fee raises was a joke, which amounted to putting up a thousand posters and issuing a media release. That’s not even a campaign! However the AUSA executive are much too busy working on increasing student services to run proper campaigns. A better strategy would have been an occupation of the entire campus followed by mass marches through the city center and roadblocks surrounding the campus. That’s what student unions do in places like Chile where students have been fighting running battles with riot police as part of a campaign for subsidised bus travel. They (the students) are armed with homemade rocket launchers not “Just say No!” posters and a badly written media release. Neither do the supermarket distribution workers I’ve just spent the afternoon with in South Auckland, where we were picketing supermarkets and blockading illegal distribution depots.

In order to reclaim our student union from the aspiring politicos we need a grassroots network of students who believe in union democracy and organising campaigns that are relevant to students. The organising-model is also tied closely to progressive social movements like the anti-war movement, the global justice movement and the environmental movement, which would help dispel all those folk who go around shouting “student apathy” everywhere as organising for change helps promote collective identity and politicisation.

The 2007 bunch of AUSA executives seem much like the old and the only hope I would see for next year is from a grassroots student uprising against union bureaucracy and for a program of social change and student involvement. Pressuring AUSA for campaigns, building strong clubs that organise students for progressive causes like Students for Justice in Palestine and Greens on Campus do, building the student movement off campus in workplaces and communities and never giving up hope of having a student union based around people not profit. We can all contribute to a better student union if we remember that those on the executive are our delegates and not our representatives and ultimately it is the people who have the power.
Published in Craccum September 11

We really are everywhere

We really are everywhere
By Omar Hamed
"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a human stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, they send forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert F. Kennedy
Out here in the middle of the south Pacific, thousands of miles from the daily bombings, shootings, demolitions and harassment that occurs in the occupied territories it can sometimes seem like what we do in this small corner of the world will have no impact on stopping the Israeli apartheid. The reality is very different however. Across the globe people have been coming together and resisting this injustice. These people seek out one another, smashing down walls that separate people and meeting more people and breaking down bigger, stronger, more oppressive walls. The struggle for liberation in Palestine is a global one and those who walk with the Palestinians are everywhere.
In 2003 a group of students at a university near Washington, D.C. hosted what they called a "Week of Awareness for Refugees of Palestine." Events during the week, held at the University of Maryland campus, included an art exhibition, music concerts and a film festival. The centrepiece of the week was a Palestinian refugee camp constructed in a high traffic area in the middle of the campus. "Basically we have four huts constructed of wood, and the four huts are about 4 feet [1 meter] deep and eight feet [2.5 meters] tall," said Sami Meaddi, 18, a freshman at the school who has spent a lot of time at the refugee camp. "It pretty much simulates what refugee camps are like. Some of them leak, and they are very cold at night." The university supported the construction of the camp, which was surrounded with information displays, articles and lists statistics about Palestinian refugee camps and included a huge wall, nine meters long and 2.5 meters high.

Last year SJP at DePaul University in the US organised a hip-hop lyrics for liberty concert with all proceeds going to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

On May 15th in 2002 a small group of protesters from Jews For a Free Palestine protested against the Jewish Community Federation meeting inside by unfurling inside the conference a banner protesting aid to Israel and linked arms. Police arrived and the protesters were taken away.

At Berkley University in 2002 the University suspended SJP, after hundreds of students occupied a building and demanded a meeting with the school chancellor to force the Uni to stop investing in and supporting Israel. Police dragged protesters out of the building and over 79 people were arrested. The group was suspended for “disrupting classes”, disruption that included Palestinian children's art, so people could see what the kids there are drawing, what's on their minds and a big white roll of butcher paper that went from the plaza all the way down the street, with the names of all the villages destroyed in 1948 in the founding of Israel. Some students put on kaffiyehs, bound our hands, and were blindfolded, and had a grocery bag with clothes. People walking by said `who are these people?' They were representing people who were told by the IDF to grab a few things before they destroyed their homes and detained them. One science Professor even told his “disrupted” class to go out and join the protestors.

In 2005 a group of sixty prominent British architects and planners threatened to boycott the Israeli construction industry over the erection of the Occupation Wall and practices in the occupied territories. Following a meeting hosted by the architects behind the Millennium Dome, Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine announced its plan. The group called for an economic boycott of Israeli construction industries in protest of the building of the settlements and the separation wall in the Occupied Palestinians Territories.

At the same time the Church of England's overwhelming vote in favour of divesting its £2.2 million shares from bulldozer manufacturer Caterpillar. The vote, supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, sends a clear message to Caterpillar that profiting from human rights violations is not compatible with socially responsible business practice.
Keeping with the good news, seven activists who blockaded the British distribution centre of Israel’s biggest state-owned agricultural export company Agrexco in November 2004 with chicken wire fences and bicycle D-Locks were acquitted of all charges on January 26. The activists had been charged with aggravated trespass. According to Agrexco, it lost £100,000 as a result of the eight-hour blockade. The international campaign to boycott Israeli goods is growing across Europe. In December 2005 a whole region of Norway voted to cut economic relations with Israel. One of the more bizarre acts of resistance to Zionism must be from the San Francisco group Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT) which “settled” a downtown Starbucks in a protest against Starbucks founder and CEO, Howard Shultz, a major supporter of the Israeli state. “Since Mr. Shultz clearly believes it is okay for one group of people to grab land belonging to another and say they have a right to it, we figure he won’t mind if we take some of his,” a QUIT leaflet explained.

In Auckland when we blockaded Oscmar, a weapons training manufacturer that exports to Israel we caused economic damage by emptying the offices for three afternoons in a row. All those on the blockade knew we were not alone; from San Francisco to Sweden resistance is fertile. We who today are ripples of resistance will tomorrow be the tidal wave that knocks down the walls of oppression and injustice. The question is-will you be a ripple or a wall?
Published in Intifada September 2006

Auckland University should cut its exchange program with Israel

Auckland University should cut its exchange program with Israel
By Omar Hamed

Auckland University Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) began a campaign on Thursday the 3rd of August to call on the University of Auckland to cut its student exchange program with Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology.

The campaign is in support of the over 170 Palestinian political parties, unions and other organization including the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions who issued a call in July 2005 for a global campaign of boycotts and divestment against the brutal policies of the Israeli occupation and the separation wall.The campaign is designed to educate students and faculty about the human rights abuses and disregard of international law that the state of Israel is committing in south Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories.SJP are calling for a termination of the student exchange program as a way of applying moral and political pressure on the inhumane policies of Israel. The war crimes being committed by Israel in Lebanon and Palestine yesterday, today and tomorrow mean we can not sit idly by as innocent people are turned into corpses by the Israeli war machine.
On 30 July, during the Israeli attack on Lebanon, Israeli airstrikes hit an apartment building in Qana. It has been confirmed by the Lebanese Red Cross that at least 28 people were killed, 16 of which were children. This attack provoked the campaign but it is also a channeling of our grief and anger over the many thousands more innocent Palestinians and Lebanese who would still be alive today if Israel abided by international law, United Nations resolutions and the Geneva Conventions. Israel has proved to the world that it is a rogue nation and a law unto itself. For this reason we must bring the full force of our moral condemnation against its barbaric actions.

SJP was inspired to do this action by the largest Canadian labor union the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) who on May 27, 2006 decided to “Support the international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”

After CUPE was accused of anti-Semitism, there was an outpouring of support from Jewish and Israeli peace activists with hundreds signing petitions in support of CUPE. The group Israeli seekers of Peace and Justice said to CUPE that they “honour your courageous initiative, and fervently hope that it will set an example for many others to follow.”

We at Students for Justice in Palestine have taken the advice of the Israeli anti-war movement and Palestinian civil society to heart and will using tactics that make the world’s attention focus on the brutal occupation of Palestine until there is a peace with justice in Palestine.

Twenty five years after the Springbok Tour shook New Zealand join us in ending Israeli apartheid: studentsforjusticeinpalestine@gmail.com

Published in Intifada September 2006

Dancing Poverty Wages into History

Dancing Poverty Wages into History
By Omar Hamed


In New Zealand, 16-17 year olds can be legally paid $8.20 an hour for the same work as an 18-year- old who gets at least $10.25. Under-16-year-olds can be paid whatever the employer decides. When myself and a ragged bunch of young workers and students grouped together we came to one conclusion.


Enough is Enough! Paying young people a lower wage for equal work is discrimination pure and simple. The issue of youth rates is similar to that of pay equality for women with men. In both cases, a member of a social grouping is discriminated against in the workplace because they are a member of that social grouping.

Over the last few months thousands of students and young people have taken to the streets to demand “Equal Work for Equal Pay”. We have marched, danced, sung, laughed, cheered and pulled together all our meager resources to create a campaign designed to abolish youth rates.

On Monday, March 20 at noon in the heart of Auckland¹s Central Business District, one thousand high school students who had walked out of school that morning rallied and marched up and down Queen Street. The students were demonstrating the power of collective direct action; using their feet to vote for the Green Party initiated Minimum Wage Amendment Bill that will scrap youth rates for sixteen and seventeen year olds, to be passed.
500 youth and their trade union allies marched down Queen Street to mark International Workers Day on May 1 this year to demand an end to discrimination based on age.

Just three days later the Ministry of Justice advised the government that youth rates is an abuse of the Bill of Rights Act, news that has been greeted with pleasant surprise from the emerging youth movement against low pay and discrimination.

The youth rates campaign has proved that youth do have the power. They have the power that rests in wrestling back control of our cities, communities and culture back from those who seek to turn us in to wage slaves, good for nothing but slaving away in McDonalds or Pizza Hut.
I am hopeful that youth rates will be history by the end of the year.
I am hopeful that this is just the beginning.
Watch
this
space.

Published in Morph #1 Community Arts Youth magazine of the Devonport Depot