Tag: Activism

Arab NGOs want Israel out of UN

A coalition of Arab human rights organizations are starting a movement to freeze Israel’s UN membership. I looked quickly through the list, and while some major ones are missing, the list does contain some of the most courageous rights groups in the region. Here’s an excerpt from their statement, and links to download the press release containing the full list of NGOs.

It is not longer possible that Arab human rights organizations ignore the governmental approach, both Arab and western, towards the Israeli practices considering them in isolation and overlooking the systematic policy they follow.
It is time we consolidate a more progressive and positive approach towards those practices and the continuous violations by the successive Israeli governments throughout their history.
We look forward to serious and tangible actions that aim to expose this Israeli state, isolate it and work towards freezing its membership in the UN.
We realize that this is a difficult and long term task that has to being by simple and slowly mounting, although clear and solid, actions.
We take this statement to be an initial and simple step on the way towards this achievement of this task. We wish it to be the beginning of an international campaign that may involve, among others, regional and international meetings and joint actions.

I leave it to readers to debate whether this is useful or not. You may want to keep in mind the current situation in Gaza.

English:
It is time to freeze Israel’s membership in the UN (1)-1.doc

Arabic:
تجميد عضوية اسرائيل-1.doc

Building dissent

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at Beirut’s Lebanese Arab University, got in a good sound bite in the New York Times today. Denying that Hizballah is a state within a state, she characterized the organization instead as “a state within a non-state.�

The piece reports on Hizballah’s rebuilding activities in the south, casting it as some kind of Iranian outreach program. Saad-Ghorayeb provides some balance, noting that Hezballah’s message is “We’re going to reconstruct. This has happened before. We will deliver,� but signally fails to note the content of her comment: that it has happened before, and that Hizballah did deliver (during and after the IDF / SLA’s occupation of the south).

Hizballah’s political organization is built on the provision of services (from schools to clinics to national defense) that were either not there in the first place or that the IAF and the IDF destroyed and that the Lebanese government failed to replace, and from this flows the political weight and staying power that no short term “torrent of money from oil-rich Iran� (as some NYT editor put it) could buy.

This has direct relevance to Maria Golia’s piece below on “new formulas for peaceful dissent.�

Large-scale peaceful protests aren’t going to happen spontaneously. Small demos may be an important showcase for state brutality, but they do not in themselves seem to be leading to anything bigger.

Providing services, however, is one way forward. Filling in as and where the state crumbles into non-state by providing clean water or a clinic or whatever (there is no shortage of areas in which this state fails its citizens), means developing administrative and communication capacity and building credibility and legitimacy. It also means building a constituency and opening up the kinds of opportunities to mobilize and to educate that will be required if the current demos are not only to grow, but to grow without becoming mobs.