Happy May Day, Everyone!
I have been asked by John Tracey what does self-determination for the Palestinians look like.
Let’s start with UN Resolution 242 that clearly affirms “a just settlement of the refugees” as well as Resolution 194, which states that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”
On 29 October 2000, a Palestinian child, Faris Odeh, threw a stone at an Israeli tank in the Gaza Strip shown in this photo. On 8 November, Odeh was again throwing stones at the Karni crossing in Gaza. In reprisal, an Israeli sniper shot Faris in the neck, killing him.
This is just one incident among many that Oslo gave Palestinian children, their mothers, fathers, uncles and aunties. The power of the gun over the stone. Clinton created collaborative structures against Palestinian interests. No agreement in Beijing can restore those collaborative structures. The destiny of the people in Gaza lies in Palestinian hands.
They do not need the Chinese elite, the American ruling party, the Saudi royal family. Faris and many others proved that. The Palestinian children that remain will rebuild Palestine.
As for Israel, it did not exist when my grandfather went to Palestine. It may not exist much longer, I may even see its end before I die. Over 500,000 Israelis have already left. More and more will do so in the coming weeks and years. How can you live in a graveyard created by monsters?
Palestinian uncles and aunties of those children have sought unity demanded by the people in Nablus, in Jenin, in Raffah, and so forth.
Here are the refugees of Nablus calling for unity between Hamas and Fatah in 2011 (video shot by a friend Khalil Hamdan from a precinct of Jaffa).
They cry out on the streets of Nablus:
People want to end the split National Unity, National Unity! Unity is the demand of all the people Put an end to the split So that we can face the aggressors
The rich elites hide in their gated communities … the Palestinian Liberation Organisation is being re-created under their very noses. And they have every reason to fear it. It is called self-determination. It is a rock thrown at a tank, it is a call for unity, it is a doctor repairing a wounded child, it is a mother cooking bread on an open fire in Gaza beside the rubble. People may not understand it, but it is there nonetheless.
Ian Curr
1 May 2025
My question arose in discussion of the Chinese peace plan for a Palestinian unity government in a two state solution. Do you think this is a step towards self determination?
The following was to be my reply to your comment on the other thread but I’ll put it here.
Happy Beltane.
Yes the PLO is indeed rebuilding itself – with the support of China. The PA is now a member of BRICS.
You see Palestine and Israel from the perspective of the people, I get that. However Israel does not exist for Israeli people, they are just the occupation force to secure the US’s military and trade dominance in the Middle East. The corporations that invest in Israel and the US military industrial complex do not care how many Israeli’s flee the conflict. It is about control of the land and sea, not the people. Same with the present Gaza genocide, its goal is not to destroy the Palestinian people, it is to control the land and sea and create market stability. The genocide is just a means to an end. These global economic forces are the cause of Palestinian dispossession and suffering. There can be no liberation, healing and self determination without a rearrangement of the global economic forces. I agree with the Iranian narrative – Israel is not the enemy, the US is the enemy and Israel is just a puppet of the US. The real war is to defeat US dominance, not to defeat Israel – this is the Arab nations consensus. BRICS is the way to defeat US dominance of the Middle East and to force Israel into a two state solution – with security guarantees based on mutual interests in gas and shipping infrastructure and trade – the China peace plan. This is happening, it is not hypothetical. The obstruction is the US (Biden and Trump), not Israel.
Israel bombed Damascus today (1 May 2025) under the pretext that it was defending the Druze population in Syria. This is ironic given that, in July 2024, Syrian children on a playing field were killed by a rocket. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who came to visit the site of the attack, was berated by local residents who called him a “criminal” and a “murderer”. [ Fisher, Aaron (28 July 2024). “‘You criminal, you murderer‘: Residents berate Israeli official at site of deadly rocket attack“. CNN.]
Fact Check: The Palestinian people called for unity in March 2011.
That is 14 years before China showed any interest in brokering an agreement between Fatah and Hamas.
China has no interest in Palestinian self-determination.
China opposes the Yemenis blockade of Israel in the Gulf. Yemen is the only country upholding international law at the moment by attempting to prevent Israeli shipping providing support for the genocide outlawed by the ICJ.
Soon after the call by the Palestinian people in towns like Nablus, their leaders met in Cairo and promised to end the split. Israel and the United States immediately set about breaking the unity. So far they have failed. Hamas has agreed to resign from governing in Gaza if Israel permanently withdraws from Gaza.
It will not be BRICS that defeats the US nor does it wish to. China’s objective is , war. Modi and the BJP have entered into a military alliance with the US. India need the US because Pakistan has nuclear weapons. The US is supplying weapons to both sides. Brazil has a long history of military ties with the US.
Bear in mind that another member of BRICS, South Africa, was banned from the United Nations for far less a violation of international law that is currently being committed by Israel. That apartheid state has been starving Palestinians in Gaza for over 19 months, and before that, the calorie intake of those people was less than humanitarian organizations could stomach. There is a court case going on now in the ICJ about Israel’s refusal of all food into Gaza since last November and it’s of unwra. The state department from the United States is actually arguing that Israel has every right, as the occupying power, of disallowing a third party UNWRA from giving aid to starving people.
all this is irrelevant.
Only Cuba, Yemen, and Palestine remain steadfast against the US. Cuba has always supported Palestine.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Cuba joined BRICS this year.
Perhaps you misunderstand BRICS, in particular India’s role in it? BRICS is not a defence treaty it is purely a trade treaty. India is part of the Quad (US, Aus, Japan and India) which is a regional defense agreement, all these nations still trade with the main military threat China. India’s significance in BRICS is the size and rapid expansion of its consumer market. The combined new consumerism of China and India is the global power-house of BRICS trade, it is the market that is competing with the massive US/Europe affluent consumerism that until recently has dominated global trade.
BRICS is collapsing US dominance. Palestine and Cuba are part of BRICS. Why are you against BRICS? Get with the program. It is in the realm of global trade and recognising Palestine as a trading partner that Australia could play a real role in supporting Palestine. UN recognition and resolutions are meaningless now, the UN is irrelevant. Moral proclamations in the street are irrelevant, the only thing power respects is power. The real power is in the market – you are a Marxist, you should know that.
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The richer we have become materially the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly in the air like birds and swim in the sea like fish, but we haven’t learned the simple art of living together as brothers and sisters.”
Dr.Martin Luther King,jr.
Today is election day in Australia (as you may have noticed). Here is my brief reflection on that fact.
Re the election, the issue we have heard the most of, on billboards etc all over the city, is the so called “cost of living crisis”. Our million dollar homes are too expensive; our cranked up air conditioning and heaters are inflating electricity bills; our grocery carts full of food are too expensive. Vote for the right party and we will once again be able to stop worrying so much about the “cost of living”.
I could not agree more that there is a “cost of living crisis”. The cost of our selfish decadent western lifestyles has cost us our very souls!
Monday is also the Day of the annual workers march in Queensland, to celebrate May Day. Not to place blame on unions more than any other institution in our society, I love the quote form Simone Weil the French mystic who lived and wrote through WW2. She said the union movement appears to be in a situation where a boss gets a worker to sell his soul for Capitalism, and the Union steps in and says, “That’s terrible. His soul is worth twice that much!”
Selling our souls to the devil? What else can explain the endless talk about the “cost of living crisis” in one of the most affluent, decadent countries in the world?
Coincidentally, along with the election, and May Day, May 1st also marks the 92nd anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Worker movement. On May 1st 1933, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin wrote and handed out the first Catholic Worker newsletter during the Depression.
The Catholic worker solution to the real crisis in the US and elsewhere at the time, was not to vote for a politician, but embrace what they called “voluntary poverty”. Voluntary poverty was not a call to destitution, but a call, as someone else later coined the phrase to “Live Simply so others may simply live.”
While Australians moan about the cost of coffee and fuel, how many know that 30 million Sundanese are on the verge of starvation, and 11 million are internally displaced from a civil war fuelled by international arms dealers? The fact that we do not know, nor care is a further sign of the “Cost of living” crisis. We are too consumed by our consuming to even know about the real crises that much of the world’s population are living in.
I would suggest we find a way to get back our souls. I would suggest we embrace voluntary poverty.
If you know of a party that advocates voluntary poverty, I would suggest you race to a polling booth today to vote. Other than that I would suggest you don’t bother.
That is my humble election advice anyhow
Jim Dowling
2 May 2025
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