'The Wolves Must No Longer Find Isolated Lambs To Prey Upon'

Qalandar Bux Memon

 

'The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers'.

Franz Fanon, The Wretched Of The Earth.

 

Fanon was writing in 1961.  And after the Bandung conference, and with the famous Tricontinental conference to follow in Havana in 1966, Fanon's comment, though hopeful, were not hyperbolic.  Today, our governments, on the whole, face US imperialism like stooges.  The ineffectual support for Lebanon is indicative but let me take the on going Palestinian conflict as illustrative.

Take the 25th of June, the day on which Cpl Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas operatives as a watershed.  What has happened since? 
Let me tell you:  260 Palestinians, including 64 children and 26 women have been killed, 1, 200 Palestinians have been injured, including 60 amputations, there have been more than 270 warplane raids on Gaza striking, among other things, at power stations and the foreign and information ministries, Israeli bombing has caused $1.8bn in damages to the electricity grid  (UN figure) and left more than a million people without regular access to clean drink water.   (The Independent - 8th September 2006)
This is to say nothing of the injudicious kidnapping of over 30 elected Palestinian Parliamentarians (Hamas) and the humiliating and economically crippling blockade on Gaza. 

Figures convey little of the experience of humiliation, the desperate poverty (the World Bank estimates that two thirds of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will be living in poverty in the near future, poverty here is defined as under $ 2 a day - contrast this Israeli GDP per capita in 2005 of $ 24, 600), which the Palestinian people experience daily.  Edward Said had predicted that the Oslo accords would lead to the Bantustanisation of the Gaza and the West Bank and sadly this is indeed the colonial reality that has been bombed, gunned, and with other forms of brute force and coercion, with the silence if not complicity of the 'international community', been shaped for the Palestinian people - defiant and resistant though they remain. 

The situation is exacerbated by the continued Israeli settlement building (let us call it what it is: COLONIZATION) in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.  Israeli government on 4th September arrogantly (in so far as it comes even before the debris of the attacks on Lebanon have been cleared) announced - to unanimous silence from the 'international community' - that it plans to build 700 new homes in two settlements blocs in the occupied West Bank.    It is important to remember that seventy-seven per cent of the land has already been taken from the Palestinians and forms what is today Israel (though, of course, its boarders are not declared!) and that there are now on the remaining twenty three per cent of the Post-1967 Palestinian land 400, 000 plus settlers is one of the substantial obstacles to peace.  In fact, the continued settlement building was a key factor in the failure of the Oslo peace process and with this failure came the increasing support for Hamas.  Ahd Al-Shafi, a prominent Palestinian diplomat, explains: 'my main criticism of Oslo is that it did not address the settlement issue.  Israel's settlement building was a clear violation of the very terms of reference of the peace process it made the process meaningless'.

Let me turn again to one of the ideas behind Tricontinental Third Worldism and again to Fanon, he writes, 'the future of every woman (man) today has relation of close dependency on the rest of the universe.  That is why the colonial peoples must redouble their vigilance and their vigour.  A new humanism can be achieved only at this price.  The wolves must no longer find isolated lambs to prey upon'.   These are perceptive remarks.  Whether, we buy the new Humanism or not what is important is the notion of strategic solidarity against Imperial power - this is as relevant today as it was in the 1960's.  Our history is littered with the dehumanizing effect of colonial power and today we see it in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine and lately in Lebanon.  To combat this, democratically, and make sure that 'The wolves no longer find isolated lambs to prey upon' we must demand our governments (those in Africa, in Asia, and in Latin-American, and why not, even in Britain) do not tolerate Imperial and Colonial expansion.  And if they fail to respond, we must indeed ask some crucial questions - what constitutional reforms in governmental structures can we work towards so that the popular will can be made effective?

In this regard the Naked Punch Editors declare that they stand in Solidarity with the Palestinian people and supports there right to a viable State.