Global Palestine: Contemporary Collisions

Given the tremendous lack of media coverage of the World Social Forum, held this year in Tunisia, I am reprinting the March 29 Declaration of the Social Movements Assembly. It deserves to be circulated and discussed widely, and something tells me we can't rely on CNN or even MSNBC (which likes to "lean forward" but not nearly far enough to reach the WSF) to do the job. 

Declaration of the Social Movements Assembly – World Social Forum 2013 - 29 March 2013, Tunisia

As the Social Movements Assembly of the World Social Forum of Tunisia, 2013, we are gathered here to affirm the fundamental contribution of peoples of Maghreb-Mashrek (from North Africa to the Middle East), in the construction of human civilization. We affirm that decolonization for oppressed peoples remains for us, the social movements of the world, a challenge of the greatest importance.

I am reprinting the following piece originally published today by Counterpunch, with permission, because it gets at some very important issues about structures of violence that resonate not only throughout the U.S., but also in Palestine (the normal topic of this blog).  One of the authors, George Ciccariello-Maher, is a St.

I’m fond of quoting Gil Scott-Heron’s sarcastic observation that “America leads the world in shock!”  It’s a concise way of expressing how easily people in a position of privilege can bury their heads in the sand for years…decades…generations…and then suddenly realize the obvious – and then expect everyone else to congratulate them for discovering it.  So it’s no surprise to find CNN expressing shock – shock! – at the content of The Gatekeepers, the Oscar-nominated documentary that features the perspectives of six former heads of the Shin Bet (Israel’s "internal security service").  In a January 28 blog post, CNN’s Samuel Burke breathlessly tells us that the film contains “stunning revelations.” Money quote:

Against the backdrop of the currently frozen peace process, all six argue – to varying degrees – that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is bad for the state of Israel.

In my previous post I began the process of thinking about lessons we can learn from looking at the discourse surrounding Israel’s recent “Operation Pillar of Cloud” (also known as “Pillar of Defense” - the name itself has prompted criticism) in Gaza.  Today, in the first of several posts addressing specific lessons, I want to want to highlight what is always the first lesson to be learned about how Palestine is represented in mainstream discourse, a lesson that remains as relevant today as it has been for decades.

Lesson #1: The vast majority of mainstream discourse on Israel/Palestine serves to hide the ongoing structural realities of colonization, specifically the settler colonization of Palestine by the Zionist movement and the state of Israel.