External resources relating to Racism and citizenship

Israeli military companies such as Elbit Systems appear invincible, yet Israel’s arms industry is more vulnerable than it seems. Al-Shabaka guest author Maren Mantovani and Policy Advisor Jamal Juma’ examine both national and global trends and identify avenues for human rights activists to pursue to hold Israel accountable under international law.

Israel’s biggest military companies last year rang alarm bells over a decline in international contracts, citing smaller budgets, more competition, and less desire for Israeli-made products as among the reasons. Is this an indicator that Israel’s arms industry might not be as invincible as it seems? What led arms deals with Israeli companies to fall through? What was the role of the Palestinian-led movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), which has called for military sanctions as part of its campaign to promote human rights? 1

In this Al-Shabaka policy brief, Maren Mantovani and Jamal Juma analyze some of the trends facing Israel’s military industrial complex with a particular focus on the campaign against Elbit Systems. The brief examines the tough times facing the industry, the myth of Israeli technological superiority, the industry’s local and global shifts, and the alliances emerging to reverse the militarization and securitization of societies. Based on this analysis, they draw valuable lessons and identify avenues for the global Palestine solidarity movement to pursue.

Neill Franklin is a black man. But he'll admit that after decades of working at the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland State Police, he harbored a strong bias against young black men.

Franklin, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs, previously explained, "When I'd see a young black male in a particular neighborhood, or his pants were sagging a little bit, or he walked a certain way … my first thoughts were, 'Oh, I wonder if he's selling drugs.'"

As an organization dedicated to peace, justice and nonviolent liberation, the War Resisters League stands firmly in solidarity with the Movement For Black Lives' newly released Vision for Black Lives Platform...

#Boycott

It is time for European citizens to demand not a penny more of their tax money be spent on Israeli military and security corporations.

On March 30 of this year, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) endorsed Donald Trump, effectively backing his bid for the presidency of the United States. NBPC president Brandon Judd heads the organization, which describes itself online as “the exclusive representative of approximately 18,000 Border Patrol Agents and support personnel assigned to the U.S. Border Patrol.” Judd himself published the NBPC’s pro-Trump communiqué, asserting that “if we do not secure our borders, American communities will continue to suffer at the hands of gangs, cartels and violent criminals preying on the innocent. The lives and security of the American people are at stake… There is no greater physical or economic threat to Americans today than our open border.”

Who Profits Research Center and the Coalition of Women for Peace have joined together to publish this up-to-date position paper on Palestinian women’s struggle against the Israeli control of population, manifested in the checkpoint industry. The following paper sheds light on both government and corporate practices and their repercussions on the ground. This will also be reflected through recent testimonies of Palestinian women confronting checkpoints on a day-to-day basis.

While many Civil Society Organizations have been addressing the political context that governs women’s lives under occupation, the economic factors that engineer the political system and perpetuate the power relations at hand are still in need of greater attention. The Israeli checkpoints, as military structures, have been a symbol of the Israeli control of the Palestinian population. Yet, underneath these structures lies an economic infrastructure generated by corporate profit. The vast checkpoints industry includes the construction of checkpoints, security personnel and equipment provided by Israeli and international companies.

The following pages address the checkpoint industry in the occupied West Bank as a case study of the integral part played by corporate stakeholders in oppressing Palestinian population and women specifically.

La Guajira, Colombia: On Wednesday 24 February, the last family of villagers who had returned to the old village site at Roche out of frustration at conditions in the new settlement constructed by Cerrejon Coal were brutally evicted by Colombian police. The wholly unnecessary violence was reminiscent of the notorious eviction of the village of Tabaco in 2001 – an event the like of which we had hoped would never occur again.

The refugee crisis has illuminated how “Fortress Europe” acts as the complementary side of a neoliberal, deeply antidemocratic, and authoritarian “European integration.” It has killed the hopes of a left which believed it was possible to break from neoliberalism within the framework of the EU, as “European values” became an alibi for the display of imperialist violence and hypocrisy.

The Mediterranean’s role as the graveyard of Fortress Europe — and southern Europe’s role as its guards — is not new. The “externalization” of the EU border started in the early 1990s and acts as the indispensable supplement to the “free movement of capital, goods, and people” inside the EU — with the movement of “people” always posing the most problems.

Concretely, externalization means the militarization of the border, with the support of increasingly sophisticated electronic surveillance; and the transformation of the external and the internal periphery of the EU into a vast “buffer zone” which acts as a lethal barrier, a filter, and a prison for all those lives excluded from the full humanity of the white, European, Western citizenry...

Abstract: While the democratic paradigm of governance and its constituent political processes are well established in Australia, consistently negative media representations of people seeking asylum may be viewed as justification for institutional decisions allowing continued punitive treatment of people seeking asylum on Australian shores. Historically, notions of Australian sovereignty exist as a changing discourse with reference to land claims and the Australian Indigenous population (O’Dowd 2011; Due 2008). However, in terms of contemporary political claims about Australia’s need to enforce border protection policies, notions of sovereignty are consistently framed through the themes, images and language of military discourses. Media scholar, John Street suggests that although there is disagreement about whether specific political outcomes can be attributed to press influence, the role of television in politics has been more comprehensively established as shaping broader world views in regards to ideas, values and practices that are considered ‘common-sense’ (Street 2011; Craig 2013). This paper argues that the increasing role of the military in the treatment and processing of people seeking asylum may be justified, through repetitive negative media representations of asylum seekers which secures public support for such practices, thereby undermining the very principles of the democratic paradigm, and indeed the role of the media or ‘fourth estate’(Schultz 1998) in a functioning democracy.

In this epoch of economic and security crises, Brazil has embarked on the enormous task of hosting the 2016 Olympic Games. To improve its security issues, and consequently draw foreign direct investment, Brazil has expanded its security forces. Over the last decade, these forces have carried out numerous extrajudicial killings. The increase in their numbers has therefore heightened the potential for more police brutality, and Brazil is neglecting its obligation to protect the lives of its citizens.

Private security companies in Israel play an active role in the occupation of Palestinian land and control over Palestinian people. Private security guards operate checkpoints and guard settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These security guards have policing powers, they bear arms and are entitled to use force in performing their duties. In the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the private security guards, who are hired by the state of Israel to guard the settlements, de facto serve as a private police force that serves the settlers population. The employment of private security guards enables state authorities to provide security services only to the settlers, without acknowledging or meeting the security needs of the Palestinian communities around the settlements. This situation creates an inherent inequality between the Palestinian and the Jewish population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Under the severe military regime that has been in place in the occupied territories since 1967, some three and a half million Palestinians are denied basic rights and liberties and subjected to repressive violence by Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers, under the protection of different security bodies. The power of the Israeli authorities over the Palestinian people is imposed, among other means, by restrictions on the movement of Palestinians through various mechanisms, such as checkpoints, curfews and detentions.

In the West Bank, over two million Palestinians are divided between dozens of fragmented enclaves, which are surrounded by a system of roadblocks, walls and checkpoints, as well as by Israeli settlements and roads designated for the exclusive use of Israelis. The Palestinians who live in these enclaves are deprived of basic rights and needs, such as the right to have a home and a family and the right to work, acquire an education and have access to basic healthcare services. Large areas of the West Bank are either closed off to Palestinian movement altogether or require extremely rare entry permits.

The Israeli control over the occupied Palestinian territory (hereinafter: oPt) is implemented through various security and police forces. In recent decades, many military responsibilities were handed over to private civilian companies, turning the private security industry into one of the fastest growing industries in Israel. Private security companies guard settlements and construction sites in the oPt, and some are also in charge of the day-to-day operation, security and maintenance of Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza.

This report aims to expose and describe the involvement of private security companies in West Bank and East Jerusalem checkpoints and settlements. The report analyzes the privatization of the checkpoints, mainly along the Separation Wall, the operation of checkpoints and the outsourcing process in West Bank settlements. It highlights the role of private security guards in the systematic oppression of the Palestinian population.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced Wednesday that authorities had carried out more than 2,200 raids since a state of emergency was declared following the November 13 attacks that killed 130 people. Under the state of emergency, French police can raid any home without judicial oversight. In addition, police have held 263 people for questioning—nearly all have been detained. Another 330 people are under house arrest, and three mosques have also been shut down. The vast majority of those targeted in the raids have been Muslim. We speak with Yasser Louati, spokesperson and head of the International Relations Desk for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France.

This infographic uses news stories from September and October 2015 to highlight key examples of excessive use of force by Israeli soldiers and police against Palestinians in the latest escalations across the OPT.

Universities and colleges are searching for ways to keep their students safe from violence, but excessive military equipment for police is not the answer...
 

Here in Canada and throughout the Americas, many governments have embraced resource extraction as the key sector to fuel economic growth, neglecting other sectors – or even at their expense. This is creating unprecedented demand for land and other resources, such as water and energy. In Latin America, economic dependency on intensive primary resource extraction has become known as ‘extractivism’.

Increasingly, when Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples, farmers, environmentalists, journalists, and other concerned citizens speak out against this model for economic growth, particular projects and/or their impacts, they become the targets of threats, accusations, and smears that attempt to label and punish them as enemies of the state, opponents of development, delinquents, criminals, and terrorists. In the worst cases, this leads to physical violence and murder.

Guatemala, Peru, and Mexico provide examples of intensified criminalization, where there has been little pause in neoliberal deregulation of the mining sector since the 1990s...

Meet the Israeli company that has a contract with the Organizing Olympic Committee for the 2016 Games in Rio / Conheça a empresa israelense que tem um contrato com o Comitê Organizador dos Jogos 2016 no Rio. [En/Pt]

On August 27, the new Australian Border Force (ABF) put out a press release explaining that, as part of something called Operation Fortitude, ABF officials would be stopping passers-by in inner-city Melbourne and demanding to see their visas...

Israeli riot police have fired stun grenades and water cannon on thousands of ethnic Ethiopian Jewish citizens in an attempt to clear one of the most violent protests in memory in the heart of Tel Aviv.

The protesters, Israeli Jews of Ethiopian origin, were demonstrating on Sunday against what they said was police racism and brutality after a video clip emerged last week showing policemen shoving and punching a black soldier.

The past year has been one of high-profile growth for Black-Palestinian solidarity. Out of the terror directed against us—from numerous attacks on Black life to Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and chokehold on the West Bank—strengthened resilience and joint-struggle have emerged between our movements. Palestinians on Twitter were among the first to provide international support for protesters in Ferguson, where St. Louis-based Palestinians gave support on the ground. Last November, a delegation of Palestinian students visited Black organizers in St. Louis, Atlanta, Detroit and more, just months before the Dream Defenders took representatives of Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, and other racial justice groups to Palestine. Throughout the year, Palestinians sent multiple letters of solidarity to us throughout protests in Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore. We offer this statement to continue the conversation between our movements.

Abstract: This article analyses a certain 'thickening of the border,' a term I coin to underscore a certain blurring of the insides and outsides of the United States with respect to Latin American, primarily Mexican, immigration.  In making this intervention, the article underscores the linkages among a dark legacy of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (ICRA), the militarization of Border Patrol policing practices in the southwestern United States, and "Secure Communities," a mammoth immigration policing programme across much of the United States.

Across the hemisphere, we have recently seen violent clashes between protesters and militarized police forces. Tipping point events—such as the clashes in Brazil in the summer of 2013 and in Ferguson, Missouri last month—have provoked public outrage and calls for “de-militarization” of police forces. While the outrage is sometimes too fleeting to compel change, the events make the public and the media aware of conditions that affected populations have known for decades. While the roots of police militarization in Brazil differ from those in Ferguson and other U.S. cities, the consequences are the same...

When tear-gas was first fired into the streets of Ferguson, Missouri at people angry at the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, Palestinian activists sent out messages on Twitter giving people tips for how to deal with tear gas’ effects.

And there was another direct connection between events in Missouri and the West Bank, as Palestinian activist Mariam Barghouti noted: the company that supplies the Israeli army with tear gas is the same company supplying the police in Ferguson.

Since the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police in Missouri last weekend, the people of Ferguson have been subjected to a military-style crackdown by a squadron of local police departments dressed like combat soldiers. This has prompted residents to liken the conditions on the ground in Ferguson to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine. 

And who can blame them? 

The dystopian scenes of paramilitary units in camouflage rampaging through the streets of Ferguson, pointing assault rifles at unarmed residents and launching tear gas into people’s front yards from behind armored personnel carriers (APCs), could easily be mistaken for a Tuesday afternoon in the occupied West Bank. 

And it’s no coincidence.