The Zero State One Nation Solution: Terra Nullius

Posted on 30th December 2014 in Nonviolence Resistance, Peace, Peace Pedagogy, Self Determination, Theory
by H. Gibrain

A viable solution which would respect the human rights of all concerned and which would solve the problem of borders and resources, as well as demographics and the right to return for all peoples, Palestinian and otherwise, would be to declare the geographic boundaries defined by the Palestine Mandate as terra nullius – no one’s land.

Since this “disputed” land (annexed and occupied by the UN and Israel and the US and others by proxy) is really the last great colonial product of the British Empire – now perpetuated by the US and the other former colonized British states – let it be the first place on earth where there is no state control based on any discriminatory factor, where no one owns the land and where all people are seen as equal under the moral code of the nation as determined by what could be a stateless nation with a constitution (not defining a government structure, per se, but defining a moral code analogous to the Bill of Rights in the US and other international declarations based on equality, peace, justice, liberty, freedom, truth, dignity, trust and the rest of the virtues.

Such a move will require a great deal of courage from the United Nations organs and member states who are willing to uphold the law through their words and actions, an organized popular resistance from Palestinian civil society – and potentially the PA (as, say, exhibited in Abbas’ speech at the UN (in 2011 I think it might have been), and the international solidarity movement through BDS and other means of non-violent popular struggle.

The UN, in order to overcome the inertia of the security council and other organs that prevent the UN organizations – as an expression of its member states – to carry out its functions as prescribed by international law, the UN will likely need to change the structure since the current structure is not properly carrying out its function. The possibility and effects of a Second UN Charter convention should be seriously contemplated by the General Assembly and other appropriate bodies of the UN. Primarily, a restructuring or elimination of the Security Council, the veto, or how it can be used needs to be evaluated and the creation of some body representing civil society needs to take place – a people’s parliament.

In a Newtonian sense, when there are forces acting on a body creating a certain trajectory, in order to alter that trajectory and get it to go in the direction of an international law and human rights based system, the right actions need to take place from the right forces. In this case, as history has shown, there is no political will or skill from the main stakeholders to change the trajectory, so the Palestinian civil society and the respective civil societies of the world need to learn the principles and practices of non-violent popular struggle – which has shown, historically, to be a much more effective means of conflict transformation. It is not the military might that will win the struggle for legitimacy, it is the struggle for equality and justice from international solidarity with the Palestinians that will usher in a durable peace.

 

 

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MSMBS Breaking News: Israel puts travel ban on domestic and feral animals: Scorpion detained at border, Falcon shot down.

Posted on 3rd August 2014 in Animal Rights, Articles, MSMBS, Stories

In a latest decision by the Israeli Knesset, legislation was passed forbidding anyone born in the Palestinian Territories from entering Israel until they’re done bombing Gaza. While the new legislation does not explicitly prohibit the travel and migration of other than human animals into Israel’s walled off enclave, there have been numerous reports indicating that this legislation does not explicitly not ban cross border travel for other than human animals. Earlier this morning there was an incident reported at the Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem in which a Falcon, presumably Palestinian according to the IDF soldier, attempted to fly across the border into Israel.

“While there is no real way of telling if this is a Palestinian Falcon or an Israeli Falcon, we can’t take the risk. It is worth it to sacrifice one of our own for the sake of preventing… well, I’m not really sure but who cares. If it’s Palestinian, it has no right to be in Israel.”

At another less frequented checkpoint where most of the traffic are settlers going in and out of the illegal settlements in and out of Israel proper, a scorpion was detained, questioned and released back in the direction West Bank as it was attempting to cross the checkpoint. The same scorpion, it was presumed, later attempted to cross again and this time was shot by an IDF soldier.

“We will have none of this. This person was detained, questioned and sent back. At the second attempt to cross the border it was immediately considered a security threat and neutralized,” said the IDF soldier who asked to remain anonymous.

Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed a grave concern for such measures indicating a greater isolation for Israel among the member states to the UN Charter.

“While such measures do indicate that Israel is ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to extending the right of legal personhood to non-human species, we are concerned since these measures seem to be used only as a means to further isolate and discriminate against the indigenous population. However, seeing as we are the UN, based on our current structure we are powerless to do anything against this decision and until the UN has a second charter convention and gets rid of the security council you can expect that Israel will continue to act with impunity… oh, and so will the US, Russia, China, France, the UK and so on.”

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Towards A Vegan Essene State

Posted on 31st July 2014 in Animal Rights, Articles, Self Determination

Vegans, for as long as the word existed, have been persecuted around the world. You know, you’ve done it yourself. We’re tired of having wieners waved in our faces, we’re tired of stupid questions like “where do you get your protein?” and “so you don’t eat chicken” as if chicken were a vegetable, fungi, prokaryote or other colonial organism. We’re fed up – so to speak.

Further, we want to live in a state where no animals are cruelly treated: used in factory farming or raised as commodities for human benefit; used in testing for the safety of human ego glamor products; used to test farmaceuticals to cure the ills that humans bring upon themselves from poor attitudes, bad diet and a disconnect from the very land which gives them life.

Vegans deserve a place where they don’t have to put up with inflated vegetable prices resulting from farm subsidies to the animal slaughter industry. Vegans don’t want to smell the burning carnage billowing out of restaurants as they walk down the streets of their communities. Vegans don’t want to have to breath in the dead skin cells of the omnivorous counterparts and would like to bring that cell count to a minimum.

For our homeland we propose that we create a state within a state within a state – we can be given land in Israel – perhaps the Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, Jerusalem or maybe somewhere in the Negev since they were going to take that place form the Bedouins recently.

We choose this place because we, as vegan Essenes, follow the same beliefs that Jesus did – according to the dead sea scrolls Jesus was an Essene and therefore a vegan. Since Jesus was a Jew, since an entire religion created in his name, and since that is where the 3 or so major religions claim as there homeland, we feel we should have a homeland too.

We hope the state of Israel, created as a homeland for an oppressed, persecuted and dispossessed peoples, will understand our plight and will give us a piece of the land that was given to them by the former empires of the world on a land where other people were living. They should be able to relate to that and empathize with us.

We will soon be petitioning the UN for the right to legal veganhood and seeking funding through the Vegan Defense Fund. We shall soon be publishing a complete manifesto of how we shall go about funding this large scale emigration, assimilation into the existent community and security concerns.

 

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Breaking In/Out to/of Israel

Posted on 20th March 2014 in Articles, Nonviolence Resistance, Reflections, Self Determination

Israel, a w(W)hite W(w)estern Jewish democracy (Orwellian Newspeak), is not always that easy to get into. You have to be crafty to break into such a fortress (aka Enchanted Prison). Those amongst we holy wanderers, political dissidents and ignorant travelers have different types of preparation to perpetrate. Some just have to pack their clothes and get on and off of a plane or two. Others have to clean up their facebook accounts, look tired, and prepare names and phone numbers of friends or friends of friends or acquaintances of friends and/or family and their friends and/or associates who might lend a phone number and rough location along with a corroborative report. Others, I’m certain, spend a little extra money on the latest grunge fads to like they are already a part of the Tel Aviv hipster crowd.

 

When you arrive, your boyfriend may not be allowed to enter. He will call you when he is at the gate departing with the news that he is being sent back and he is not exactly sure why and neither were the Israeli’s who are making him go back. You might get asked a series of questions pertaining to your travel intentions, who you’re staying with, and how long you’ll be there. You might have to provide a phone number and an address or two and watch as they call the number to make sure your story holds water. If you are a known activist or know any known activists you might likely be taken to another room and undergo an interrogation. You may be asked to strip. You may be asked to open your computer and login to your accounts so they can see what you’ve been up to. You might get a stamp on your passport indicating you are not welcome back to Israel for a decade – presumably when the social and political order is a bit more chill.

 

Whether you are entering or leaving, if you are actually acting with dubious intentions (maybe you’re an intellectual studying Palestinian Art as a form of resistance, or your teaching Pal children to build skateboard parks and learn how to skate, or your a young German girl working for the UN in Ramallah), you’ve gotta do a minimum of two things to enter safely: you have to have a viable story worked out and you’ve got to de-arabize or de-palestinianize your travel articles. Maybe you won’t abring Said’s book on the Question of Palestine or the book on Dabka but would rather grab yourself a copy of Hertzl’s Jewish State and pretend your coming to visit the holy sites and explore your Jewish or Christian roots. Maybe your contemplating Aliyah to get some of your tax dollars back. You’ll learn a couple of Hebrew words to pretend your on in being in on the know. Most of all, deep down inside, you’re prepared to be carted and cordoned off, questioned, cross examined, caressed, and sent back across the Mediterranean lest you be suspected of seeking a dialogue with like minded humanists (Allah forbid they be Arabs), learning a little bit about the cultures of both sides: the indigenous Arab populations and the mostly white implants (read colonizers) in Israel proper. [Note: everyone should have the right to a decent and safe place to live but the history of colonization implies dispossessing others of their homes and land and that tends to piss people off and cause protracted conflicts – something Hertzl was well aware of and wrote about].

 

Then, of course, there is a sort of un-re-decolonizing of the mind/heart/spirit triad that has to take place. It goes something like this: you realize that your spending so much time coming up with stories so that you can continue to enter and exit Israel. You realize that realizing how much time and energy realizing it takes up more time and energy. You realize that it is this way intentionally. You realize that for a brief period of time you are Israel’s bitch because they’re forcing you to make unethical decisions – you feel boxed into lying. You invent the term “flying ethics” (once again, to mock the flying checkpoints that Palestinians are subject to): literally ethics on the fly, a tactic used to avoid telling incriminating truths in the face of arbitrary and unreasonable searches and seizures such as: I was in Hebron, I visited the Darwish Museum, I purchased olive soap and sweets in Nablus, I ate felafel in Birzeit, there is a really beautiful human being that I’ve fallen in love with that lives in East jerusalem, and/or I am an ardent supporter and promoter of human rights and I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

 

You realize its fuck all that you’re forced into this shituation to begin with and you can’t just smile and be honest and travel freely to visit a beautiful peoples in a beautiful culture in a not too beautiful circumstance. You realize that if you make it in or out you might not make it in or out again. You realize that this cycle is precisely what your being forced into again and you argue the virtues of honesty versus the virtues of lying knowing full well that they’re just toying with you and they know where you’ve been in any case and since they can’t really do to you what they do to the Palestinians at least they can have some fun with you, own your ass, watch you sweat, catalog the inventions that you’ve come up with, and determine whether or not you should be made an example of.

 

They know you’ve spent countless hours with your friends telling stories of what happened to them or people they know. They know you’ve been busy coming up with stories of your own. They know it doesn’t matter what you say, where you’re from or your station in life. If they want to fuck with you, in many splendid ways, they will. So, for just a little amount of time you are their bitch.

 

You can imagine the kind of intellectual tai chi chuan that is required to skate flawlessly through the system of checkpoints, questions and border crossings. It is, in many ways, however, like roulette. The outcome is seemingly random.

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Immodest Proposal

Posted on 6th February 2014 in Peace, Reflections, Self Determination

Due to the longevity of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the obvious lack of political will mixed with sheer political ineptitude – on a global scale, really – to properly transform the situation (at least to enforce international law) I’ve come up with a somewhat absurd partial solution towards transforming and transcending the conflict. The idea itself is nothing new – I’m not that creative or knowledgeable about the shituation: the boundaries of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories will be combined into a bi-national state. There are many reasons why this is favorable for Israelis, Palestinians and Peace (the rest of us) and that complex of simple reasons emerges as the answer to the following question: what would a Palestinian state of scattered and segregated lands look like as a result of settlements, the wall, and the harsh economic, political and military sanctions driving the Palestinians into a fragmented and isolated society?

In any case, my level, or style if you will, of creativity is in the naming of this new nation; a new name that will satisfy both cultures: PalIstein/stien. Its construction is obvious taking the first three letters of the word Palestine, the first two letters of Israel, and then changing the “stine” of Palestine into “stein/stien” so that it resonates with the suffix of many Jewish peoples names,  yet the pronunciation could be in dispute as to whether there is a hard “e” vowel sound or a hard “i” vowel sound (which, no doubt, would make Palestinians smile, even though it was at the sacrifice of switching the “e” in the English spelling of their countries name with the “i”, capitalized, from the English spelling of Israel). One country, one name with two pronunciations and still something to fight about.

As one nation, there will be a shared economy, a shared political system, shared roadways, shared schools, and above all and encompassing all, equality as citizens and all of the benefits that come with getting to know and love your neighbor. No doubt it will take a generation or two (or seven) to work things out, but under the current circumstances there is such a limited cultural exchange because of the inability of Palestinians and Israelis to freely move from the OPTs to the NonOPTs as well as the taboo of normalization for Pals to engage with Izzies in any way that legitimizes the regime of inequality. Since the respective and collective governments who are stakeholders in this process have proven incapable of establishing equality this task will have to be accomplished by Israeli and Palestinian civil societies who will, themselves, have to transcend the walls of normalization and the convolution of victim and perpetrator.

In addition to a new name, one other important piece of propaganda is essential to forging a new common narrative: a banner. At first thought it would be interesting to have a two faced flag with the Israeli flag on one side and the Palestinian flag on the other but after some immodest consideration I’m thinking the flag should be  a screen playing pixelated permutations of both flags along with other randomly generated visualizations. Let’s leave it at that.

For now, changing the name and flying the first kaleidobanner is enough. When people get use to seeing and hearing these new implants, civil society will begin to change and, again, in a generation or two when all of the old school dogmaticians die off, peace will begin to flourish. Let freedom reign. Pass the felafel, please.

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