On Criticizing Israel

On Criticizing Israel

In the past few weeks I’ve had conversations with three Jewish friends about the ethics of criticizing Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel is a pariah state; the world pays much more attention to its many wrongdoings than to the terrible events than occur in many other parts of the world. I believe that the inordinate amount of attention paid to Israel in the United Nations, especially in the Human Rights Council (so-called) is partly caused by anti-Semitism. Also, as one friend pointed out, Israel is a democracy, and there’s lots of criticism of its policies from the press, academics, and activists. So there’s lots of information for the Human Rights Council and other agencies to draw on.  

Many critics also think of Israel as the last Western colony. People who hold this view often think that all Jews in Israel are from the West. But many Israeli Jews, or their immediate ancestors, are or were from the Middle East. At one point, for example, there was a large Jewish community in Baghdad, which centuries ago was a centre of Jewish learning. Critics of Israel should be aware of the many Middle Eastern Jews who live there and should accept that as the cradle of the three Abrahamic faiths, the Middle East for centuries housed Muslims, Jews and Christians living together. The ethno-religious cleansing facing Christians in some Middle Eastern countries today is another aspect of the tragedy there.

Jewish activists claim that as many as 800,000 Jews were expelled from Middle Eastern countries after the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel before and after Israeli independence in 1948 (on this, see Ian Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, London, Oneworld Publications, 2006). Some activists think that reparations to Palestinians for their expulsion from Israel should be tied to reparations to Jews for their expulsion from other Middle Eastern countries. I disagree with this point of view: Israel is a sovereign state and it is responsible for what it does, regardless of what other states do. As a pragmatic matter, financial reparation to displaced Palestinians is a crucial aspect of the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Another criticism that bothers me is comparison of Israel to Nazism. A couple of years ago, some students at my university staging “Israel Apartheid Week” put up a poster of a man in striped pajamas lying behind a fence: the idea was to compare the situation of Palestinians to that of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. As one of the students said to me, “Oppression is oppression, right?” But she wasn’t right. If Israel were a Nazi state, there would be no Palestinian problem. The Palestinians under Israeli control would have been long-since murdered. Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli attack on the Gaza strip in 2008-9, would have killed one and a half million people, not (at the upper estimate) 1400. We should be able to criticize Israel without making such a nefarious comparison.

Israeli apartheid week is a week to suggest that Israel is imposing apartheid on Palestinians. Indeed, some aspects of Israeli control of the West Bank resemble apartheid, especially the existence of Jewish-only settlements and the existence of segregated roads (about which I wrote in my post of May 17, 2013) on which Jewish, but not Palestinian, residents of the West Bank can travel. There is also de facto and de jure discrimination against Palestinian citizens within Israel. I oppose all these measures, as I also oppose declaration of Israel as a Jewish state. I am against all full or partial theocracies, even though Israel does not prevent citizens from other religions from practicing their own faith.

But as one of my Jewish friends, originally from South Africa, said to me, apartheid there was a much more pervasive system. Blacks could not vote or form political parties. They were not allowed in “White” cities without passes. And families were often split up, with mothers and children legally confined to Bantustans while fathers worked in the cities or the mines. Everyone was racially classified: families were split up if the government deemed that members did not all belong to the same “race.” This is not a defense of the many discriminatory aspects of life for Palestinian citizens of Israel, but it does point out some of the differences.  Palestinians in Israel can vote, can form political parties, and they do have freedom of movement. The government does not deliberately separate their families or use “racial” criteria to judge who can live with whom.

Another criticism of Israel is the contention that Zionism is racism. I am sure there are some Zionists who are indeed racists against Arabs. But Zionism is principally a philosophy that argues for a Jewish homeland. Some Zionists think that means they should be allowed to take over the West Bank, which they call Judea and Samaria. I don’t think they should: again, Israel is a sovereign state, and it should follow international law, which says that its settlements in the West Bank are illegal; indeed, they are theft of Arab land and water.  But the key here is, indeed, land, not race. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about land, although it’s also morphed partially into a religious conflict, in part because of the world-wide rise of Islamism. 

So these criticisms of Israel: that Israel is a Western colony; that Israelis are like Nazis; that Israel is an apartheid state; and that Zionism is racism, all have serious flaws. They are rhetorical exaggerations that don’t help to solve the very real problems of Israel’s increasing occupation of the West Bank and its control over Gaza. I don’t like Israel’s policies, but I think the best way to criticize it is to refer to international human rights, humanitarian law, and the laws of occupation. Israel is a state that has the right to exist without being attacked, but as a state, it has to follow the same laws as any other state. We shouldn’t demonize Israel.

Henry Morgentaler: Canadian Abortion Rights Pioneer

Henry Morgentaler (right) with NDP leader Jack Layton (left), 2005,
Wikimedia Commons

Henry Morgentaler died this week at the age of 90. Morgentaler was a hero of Canada’s abortion rights movement. A medical doctor, he began giving safe, clean and relatively inexpensive abortions in his office in Montreal in the late 1960s, at a time when all abortions were illegal. He opened abortion clinics in Montreal, Toronto and elsewhere when abortions became legal but only under very restricted conditions: women had to go before a board of three doctors (usually all men, since there were very few women doctors in those days). He underwent numerous legal battles to enlarge women’s rights to abortion on demand, without the humiliation of going before three doctors for approval. Three juries in the province of Quebec refused to convict him of illegally providing abortions. In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada outlawed all restrictions on abortions, although abortions are still provincially regulated and subject to doctors’ codes of ethics. During this long battle, Morgentaler even spent a brief stint in jail.

I remember well what it meant for women to have no rights whatsoever to abortion. I was an undergraduate student at McGill University in Montreal from 1965 to 1969.  From 1965 to 1967 I lived in McGill’s extremely strict women’s residence, Royal Victoria College, where there were curfews, no men were allowed in your room, and the woman in charge of us all was called the “warden.”  In my first year there, one of the girls down the hall from me was caught by police in a raid, in the middle of her abortion. The warden expelled her from the residence, which meant she was expelled from the university too, and her friends were told not to come back the next year.

Henry Morgentaler during a December 1983 freedom of
choice rally in Ottawa
Source: Vancouver Sun, http://www.vancouversun.com/news/
commitment+womens+right+choose/8453944/story.html

Later that year another girl I knew told me she was pregnant. I tried to help her by calling the local Unitarian Minister for information: he gave me Dr. Morgentaler’s name, which I passed on, but my friend didn’t follow up. Eventually she went for a back street abortion.

In 1968 another girl I knew needed an abortion. I went with her in a taxi to an address she had been given: she went into the house but came right back out again, saying the place was filthy. Then, fortunately, someone reminded me of Morgentaler again. My friend went to him instead: the price was $300, his clinic was clean and safe, and there was a nurse there to help. My friend came back with an expression of great relief on her face and nothing but praise for Morgentaler and his nurse.

I mention the price because Morgentaler was a Jew, a survivor of Auschwitz who arrived in Canada in 1950. Occasionally I’ve heard or read accusations about how his clinics were dirty (not true) or about how he was in the abortion business to make money. These are common stereotypes about Jews, and it’s a shame to see the debate about abortion sullied by these untrue accusations.

I’m not happy that women still have to have abortions. I think abortion is a social tragedy, and I would much rather live in a world in which no woman or girl ever had to have an abortion.  Among other things, the more rights women have, and the more access both males and females have to sex education and birth control, the fewer unwanted pregnancies—hence the fewer demands for abortion. But we certainly don’t live yet in a world where all these conditions obtain, and even if we did, women are always subject to coerced sexual relations. Until we do, women need the right to abortion on demand.

 So I, for one, am extremely grateful not only for the clean, safe and relatively inexpensive abortion services Henry Morgentaler provided, but also for his willingness to engage in legal battles and even go to jail on behalf of women’s right to abortion. I know he didn’t do this alone: it took decades of feminist activity to obtain this right in Canada, and we are still in danger that it will be revoked. But I will always remember the relief my friend at McGill felt after her safe, clean, and compassionate treatment at Henry Morgentaler’s clinic in 1968.

Property Rights of West Bank Palestinians

Property Rights of West Bank Palestinians

A rather neglected aspect of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is Article 17,  “Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others: No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.” This is a right that the state of Israel has denied to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 1967.



Israeli Separation Wall to West Bank. The graffiti is German for "I am a Berliner", a reference to US President John F. Kennedy's 26 June 1963 speech in Berlin where he expressed solidarity with West Berliners over the Berlin Wall which separated West and East Berlin (1961 to 1989), Wikimedia Commons

I’m interested in this problem because I am working on causes of the high rate of malnutrition among Palestinians, as part of my larger research project on the right to food (other case studies are North Korea, Zimbabwe and Venezuela).  According to figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization, the percentage of people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories who were undernourished increased from 18 in 1990 to 31 in 2010; the percentage of people who suffered from food inadequacy (a measurement of food deficiency for normal physical activity) increased from 26.6 in 1990 to 42.4 in 2010.  One reason for this malnutrition is that Israeli authorities and Jewish settlers have taken over Palestinian farmlands in the West Bank.

Israeli and other Jews settle in the West Bank because of their beliefs in political Zionism, because they believe that the West Bank is actually Jewish holy land, or simply because housing is cheaper in the West Bank than in Israel proper. By 2011 it was estimated that 325,000 Jewish settlers lived in the West Bank. The Israeli government actively encourages these settlements, although it sometimes tears down ones that it considers illegal. For example, it offers tax exemptions, grants and loans to settlers.

These arbitrary settlements and expropriations mean that West Bank Palestinians enjoy no property rights. Without property rights, their farms, grazing lands, citrus and olive groves are routinely expropriated without any compensation. Subsistence cultivation is thus undermined. Land seizures also affect Palestinians who cultivate food for commercial purposes, exporting it and using the earnings to feed their families.

Since 2000 things have become worse, as Israel has built a wall to separate Israel—and illegally settled Jewish territory—from Palestinians. In 2004 the International Court of Justice declared it illegal for Israel to build this wall on Palestinian territory, but Israel paid no attention. The wall meanders through Palestinian territory, often cutting off Palestinians from their own farms. There’s also a “seam zone” between the legal borders of Israel and the wall, and Palestinians living in that zone are cut off from their land. Segregated Jewish-only settlement areas, and highways on which Jewish residents of the West Bank can travel but Palestinian residents can't, also take over land and cut off Palestinians from their farms.

Yet expropriation of private property by an occupying power is illegal except for military needs. The 1907 Hague Convention, Article 46, states “Private property cannot be confiscated.” Although the Israelis claim otherwise, The Hague conventions are part of international customary law, meaning that they are binding on all states. Nor is the Israeli argument that settlements improve Israel’s security, and are therefore legal, acceptable under international law, although many settlements are built on hilltops and thus serve the function of surveillance over Palestinian lands below.  

The 1949 Geneva Convention further outlaws destruction of property in the occupied area. Settlements and any purchase of land by settlers are illegal, even if the settlers purchase land from an individual who was ostensibly willing to sell. Moreover, the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits transfers of part of the occupiers’ civilian population into the territory it occupies. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court describes “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” as a war crime. It also states that “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” is a war crime.  Israel, though, is not a party to the Rome Statute.

Some people think it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories. It isn’t. Israel is a state: like any other state, it must obey international law. Many Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere, are opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its brutal treatment of Palestinians.

          For more on the right to own property, see my forthcoming “Reconsidering the Right to Own Property,” in Journal of Human Rights, vol. 12, no. 2 or 3, 2013. Or email me at hassmann@wlu.ca for a copy. In this article my examples are Zimbabwe and Venezuela, not Palestine.

The Magdalene Laundries: Forced Labor by the Irish Catholic Church (or was it Slavery?)

The Magdalene Laundries: Forced Labor by the Irish Catholic Church (or was it Slavery?)

This post is about what used to happen to young women who were thought to be, or in danger of becoming, promiscious. In Ireland, such young women were called "Magdalenes" and were locked up in Roman Catholic institutions.

When I was a teenager, there were “good” girls and “bad” girls. Bad girls had sex before marriage, and if they became pregnant they were often sent away in shame to have their babies in secret (this happened to a couple of women I know, now both professors). Or, the girl and the father were coerced into marriage. There was no welfare available then for unmarried mothers, so pregnant girls who didn’t marry normally had to give up their babies for adoption (abortion was illegal as well in those days, as was birth control for unmarried women). Really “bad” girls, if I remember correctly, were considered promiscuous and incorrigible, and some were institutionalized to keep them out of harm’s way. That was right here in southern Ontario, Canada, where I still live.



Magdalene Laundry in Ireland, Wikimedia Commons

 Three months ago in Ireland, on February 19, 2013, the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) apologized to women who suffered a far worse fate than the “bad” girls who were around when I grew up in Canada. You can find his apology at the political apologies website that my research assistants and I maintain, at
http://political-apologies.wlu.ca/details.php?table=doc_press&id=835 .

The Catholic Church of Ireland maintained institutions known as the Magdalene Laundries (Mary Magdalene was an important follower of Jesus Christ, but for centuries she was thought to have been a “fallen woman,” a repentant prostitute, and was pictured as such in much Western art: the fact that Jesus respected her was ignored by the same misogynistic Western culture). Girls and women were sent to live and work at the Magdalene Laundries if the authorities, either secular or Church, thought they had been, or were in danger of becoming, sexual deviants: that is, women who had sexual relations outside of marriage. Others were referred to the laundries because they had played truant from school or came from dysfunctional families. In general, the Laundries were a safe place to store women who didn’t conform to the restrictive social norms of Catholic Ireland.

I heard one survivor of incarceration in these laundries interviewed on As It Happens, a radio program of the Canadian Broadcasting Company. She was incarcerated in the laundries merely because she had a boyfriend and the Church thought she might have sexual relations with him outside of marriage. Apparently it didn’t occur to the Church that she and the boy were in love and might get married. She used to see her boyfriend out the window of the laundry but she couldn’t speak to him. She is one of about 800-1,000 women still in Ireland who are survivors of the Laundries.

The girls and women incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundries were forced to work all day long doing laundry for hotels, restaurants, and prisons. They weren’t paid; the money they made went to the Church. If they escaped, they were easily recognizable in their uniforms and would be returned to the Laundries, which were overseen by nuns. Not that the nuns would have benefitted much from this system either, since they had to turn the money over to the Church.

So this was undoubtedly forced labor. These girls and women were incarcerated against their will, they couldn’t escape, they had to work whether they wanted to or not, and they were not paid. The Irish government has recognized this and intends to pay them compensation, as well as erecting some sort of memorial to them. This is the right thing to do.

But I wonder if rather than referring to the inmates of the Magdalene Laundries as forced laborers, we shouldn’t call them slaves? The Forced Labor Convention of 1930 defines forced labor as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.” This seems to describe the Magdalenes, who did not offer themselves voluntarily for unpaid work in the laundries.

The 1926 Slavery Convention, still the most relevant legal document, defines slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” The Catholic Church didn’t claim to own the Magdalene woman, but it did exercise de facto ownership. Not only were they forced to work without pay, some of the women spent their entire lives in the laundries, never released. The government, moreover, was complicit in their incarceration, handing them over to the authority of the Catholic Church. You might object that they weren’t sold, but being available for sale isn’t a necessary aspect of slavery; you can be enslaved without being part of the slave trade.

Nowadays, we know a lot about sex slavery and human trafficking, a huge problem in the globalized world and one of the worst consequences of poverty. The Magdalenes were enslaved to keep them away from sex, not to force them into it (though since everywhere else that people were institutionalized by the Church, in every country of the world,  a lot of sexual abuse went on, it probably did in the Laundries too). It’s not clear when forced labor morphs into slavery, but the treatment of the Magdalenes certainly raises the question.

There’s a great 2002 movie, the Magdalene Sisters, about the laundries. It’s fiction, but the DVD I saw it on included a documentary featuring some of the real Magdalene survivors. It’s useful to keep this shameful episode in Ireland in mind when we read about the treatment of “fallen” women in other parts of the world today.  

Book Note: Izzeldin Abuelaish's I Shall Not Hate

Book Note:

 Izzeldin Abuelaish’s I Shall Not Hate

This past month I started research on the causes of the high rates of malnutrition in Gaza and the West Bank and decided to read Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish’s I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2011). Abuelaish is an obstetrician/gynecologist who has practiced in Israel with Jewish Israeli colleagues: currently he lives in Canada.

As you might remember, Israel fought a brief war in Gaza in 2008-09, in which from about 1150 to 1450 Palestinians were killed, according to the Abuelaish and the Goldstone Report on the war. Abuelaish stayed at home in Gaza during this war with his eight children and various relatives (his wife had died of leukemia a few months earlier). In the afternoon of January 15, 2009, several of his daughters and nieces went to their bedroom to read and do homework. Suddenly, a rocket hit their room. Three daughters and a niece ware killed. Abuelaish saw his daughters’ body parts all over the room; one daughter was decapitated. Another daughter was alive, but standing with one eye on her cheek and and one finger dangling from its skin. Because of his contacts with the Israeli media and his medical colleagues, Abuelaish was able to get his daughter and one of her injured cousins to hospital in Israel and save his daughter’s eyesight. Most Palestinians were not as fortunate.  Abuelaish describes in horrifying detail what it’s like to live under bombardment, afraid to go out, afraid at any moment that one will be attacked.

Abuelaish also describes the day-to-day humiliation and harassment of Palestinians from Gaza trying to live ordinary lives. Even as a doctor who, as the border guards knew, worked in an Israeli hospital, he was frequently harassed, forced to spend hours waiting before he could cross into Israel each Monday and return home each Thursday. When his wife was dying, he was in Europe.  Obliged to return earlier than expected, he had to get multiple new travel permits. As a Palestinian, he was not allowed to fly directly into Israel and had to go to Jordan instead, then cross the border. What should have been a very short journey took him hours and hours, as various guards and officials calmly ignore his pleas to get to his wife’s bedside as soon as possible.

I usually find bromides such as “the torturer is degraded as much as the tortured”  irritating.  I think there are a lot of people out there who live very happy lives despite the awful work they do, as Robert Jay Lifton explained in 1986 through his concept of “doubling” which explained why SS doctors could oversee the mass murder of Jews every day, then happily go home to a normal family life in the evening (see Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors; Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, New York: Basic Books, 1986).  But I think the Israeli-Arab conflict has indeed degraded Israeli soldiers. Yes, there is a genuine problem of security because of suicide bombings and rockets sent from Gaza into southern Israel (both of which Abuelaish opposes). But there are also people trying to cross from Gaza to Israel to obtain emergency medical treatment, detained for hours at a stretch, and women giving birth at the border post because they can’t get across to the Israeli hospital. Abulaish’s intimate description of the humiliating treatment with which he had to put up, even as a doctor, gives only a hint of what less well-known Palestinians must experience. The Israeli guards sound arrogant, cruel, and full of hate; they seem to enjoy causing unnecessary suffering.  This is indeed degradation, and one wonders what its long-term effects are on Israelis, since so many people spend some time in compulsory military service when they are young. (Super-religious Jews don’t have to serve in the military, but that’s another story).

In my last post I wrote about Holocaust reparations, and how fragile reconciliation can be. The Israeli government admitted that the attack on Abuelaish’s house had been a mistake, and promised him compensation for his daughters’ deaths, but as of the time of publication of his book he had not received anything. And the Israeli government did not apologize: it should have. It is amazing that Dr. Abuelaish can say, “I shall not hate.” In his circumstances, I certainly would.

I will write more on Israel/Palestine as I learn more.

How (Not) to Pay Reparations

How (Not) to Pay Reparations

APRIL 17, 2013. IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO READERS: PLEASE READ THIS WHOLE POST. IT TURNS OUT HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS DO NOT HAVE TO PAY TAXES ON THEIR REPARATIONS MONEY TO GERMANY: I AM GRATEFUL TO DR. ANJA MIHR FOR FIGURING THIS OUT FOR ME.

A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with an acquaintance about reparations from Germany for the Holocaust. Miriam (not her real name) was still recovering from the death of her husband Jake (not his real name either) a few months earlier. Jake, who was Jewish, had been a child spy. At the age of nine, he saw his father shot dead in the street. Then his mother and sister fled and he was taken to live in the forest, where he stayed for 18 months, sometimes visiting his Polish home town during the day to gather information about the German occupiers. Later, Jake was taken in by a Czech officer in the Red Army and continued his career as both a child spy and a child soldier. When the SS captured him and tortured him to give up the location of his Red Army unit, he instead led 120 Germans into an ambush.

Jake received reparations from the German government. A few weeks ago, out of the blue, Miriam received a letter from German authorities telling her that Jake’s estate owed taxes on the reparations, going back to 2005, when apparently a law had been passed that recipients of reparations now had to pay taxes on them. Miriam received a lot of paperwork, all of it in German except one piece of paper in English describing how to pay the taxes. A friend of Miriam’s received the same notification of back taxes.

Needless to say, Miriam was outraged. She reacted the way every Jewish person who received this notification probably reacted, “He’s already paid!”  Every surviving victim of the Holocaust receiving reparations could cite family members killed, starvation and torture endured, property lost, and so on. I doubt that anyone ever expected to be taxed by the Germany government on money it owed to victims of the Nazis.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Wikimedia Commons

Incensed, Miriam telephoned Germany twice: both times the people on the other end refused to speak English to her. Perhaps they didn’t know English. But that doesn’t explain the employee of the German Embassy in Ottawa who also told Miriam she should speak German, since she was “taking” money from the German government. Miriam pointed out that the Embassy was in Canada, where the official languages are English and French.

What does this tell us about how not to pay reparations? Despite all the talk these days in the human rights community about transitional justice and reconciliation, it takes an awfully long time to “reconcile,” to build up trust between the former perpetrators and the former victims of genocide. Time may pass, but to the victims it’s as if everything happened yesterday.

Apologies by perpetrators to victims of mass atrocities are an important part of reconciliation. I’ve published an on-line, open-access article called “Official Apologies” in Transitional Justice Review, (vol.1, no. 1, 2012) which you can find here http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/tjreview/vol1/iss1/9. In it, I argue that the chief function of an apology is “the restoration of civil relationships between the apologizer and recipients.” This is a thin form of reconciliation: the former perpetrators and the former victims can get along in the public sphere, in work, in the marketplace, in schools, and so forth.  But even to get along on this thin level, certain steps must be undertaken.

An important part of reconciliation is acknowledgement of the crime that was committed: the perpetrators must acknowledge their actions. The Embassy employee who told Miriam that she was “taking” money from Germany “de-acknowledged” the Holocaust. As a representative of the German government, she should have known about the Nazi crimes and she should have been trained to treat every Jewish person who contacted her about reparations with respect.  Perhaps she was young, and considered the Nazi period ancient history.

If reconciliation is to last, it’s also important that the former victims be able to trust the representatives of the former perpetrators. All German governments since 1945 have been successor governments to the Nazis. The people who work for these successor governments are responsible to try to rectify the Nazi crimes as best they can. I don’t know if Miriam or the other people who received letters about back taxes trusted the German government before they received them, but my guess is that it’s hard for them to trust it now. The Germans have broken an implicit apology and promise: we know we harmed you, we are sorry, we want to make amends and we will do so in part by paying you reparations for all that you have lost. A real apology contains remorse, but the German bureaucrats—and especially the Embassy employee--who refused to respond to Miriam in English were not at all remorseful.

My guess is that it is not only Miriam who has lost trust in the German government; every Jewish person she told this story to has also lost trust. Survivors of the Holocaust have already paid the Germans, a thousand times over. Reparations are supposed to repair damaged relationships: The German expression is “wiedergutmachung,” making things good again. For Miriam, her friend, and other Jewish people who received the tax letter, the German government is making things bad again; it’s turning pain and suffering into a taxable financial transaction.

So this is an example of how not to reconcile and how not to pay reparations.

IMPORTANT UPDATE AND CORRECTION

After I posted the entry above, I sent it to a German colleague and scholar of human rights, Dr. Anja Mihr, www.anjamihr.com. . She very kindly did some research and sent me the following information:

“[T] German parliament has changed laws for all people receiving money from German pensions funds, regardless whether they live in Germany or abroad. Pensions are taxed nowadays for everybody. Thus all people receive these letters in German and since Holocaust victims get their compensations out of the German pension funds…these letters were sent in German. Victims of the Holocaust and forced labor, survivors of concentration camps and others are exempted from this tax but need to write an exemption clause to the embassy. A quick look at the website explains, in English and French.

http://www.canada.diplo.de/Vertretung/kanada/en/02/pension/compensation/compensation__taxation.html#topic10  “

Dr. Anja Mihr, www.anjamihr.com

Thus, the good news, as Anja explains, is that people receiving reparations for the Holocaust or forced labour don’t have to pay taxes on them after all. I will certainly tell Miriam this and explain to her how to get an exemption. But this still doesn’t explain the insensitivity of the whole affair. Why did the German pension administrators send these letters to survivors in the first place? Surely they have a master list of survivors who receive reparations. Instead of frightening survivors with correspondence in German which seemed to suggest they had to pay taxes, they could just have consulted this master list and not send letters to these people. (Anja also told me that normally, the German foundations that administer reparations communicate with recipients in their own languages, whatever they may be.) And why weren’t all employees at the Ottawa Embassy instructed to assist survivors or family members who telephoned about these tax letters?  I’ve just tried to access the website Anja pointed me to, without success: most survivors are much older than I am and would probably find accessing a website more difficult than I do (if they know how to do this at all.)

Miriam’s reaction to the letter she received was “He’s already paid.” She was extremely angry and hurt because—she thought—the German government was taxing the reparations Jake had received. Perhaps it would be a good idea for the German Government to remedy this affair by being pro-active. It could simply delete the names of all recipients of reparations from the list of pensioners obliged to pay taxes, instead of expecting these elderly people to figure out the correspondence they received. Then the Embassy in Ottawa could send letters to all survivors who’ve received these letters explaining in languages they understand—presumably English or French for most in Canada—that they do not have to pay taxes after all. And the German government could apologize for putting the survivors and their families through this upsetting procedure.

 

Cannibalism in North Korea

Cannibalism in North Korea

There’s a group of very brave people in North Korea working clandestinely as journalists. They were trained and are sponsored by AsiaPress, based in Japan, and if they are caught they face imprisonment, starvation, and worse in North Korea’s system of punitive prison camps. The people they interview are also very brave (for information on the prison camps, contact me at hassmann@wlu.ca for a copy of my unpublished article “State Enslavement in North Korea”.)

Based on these journalists’ work, AsiaPress issued a report in January 2013 “Report on the Famine in the Hwanghae Provinces and the Food Situation 2012”. You can find the report here: http://www.asiapress.org/rimjingang/english/archive/pdf/2012-2013_Hwanghae_Report_ASIAPRESS_North_Korea_Reporting_Team_V004.pdf . The North and South Hwanghae provinces are very close to the capital, Pyongyang, and that appears to be their misfortune. Since he succeeded his deceased father as North Korea’s leader in late 2011, Kim Jong-un has decided to spruce up Pyongyang with massive building projects, including enormous high rise towers, an aquarium for dolphins, and a huge amusement park. These projects require thousands and thousands of construction workers, who must be fed. Kim Jong-un also has to make sure two key constituencies who support his rule are well fed; the people of Pyongyang, and the military. (Though he isn’t doing too well with the military: the AsiaPress report includes a photo of tiny—probably previously malnourished--starving soldiers.)

Starving North Korean soldiers, Asia Press

Lately the food for these three groups of people comes from Hwangwe provinces, known as the breadbasket of  North Korea, where despite horrendously inefficient agricultural policies the people are usually not likely to starve. AsiaPress’ reporters have talked to people from the two provinces and done statistical calculations, and come to the conclusion that last year between January and May, at least 10,000 people died there. There was no grass on the ground in the spring because people were picking every shoot and eating it. Entire families were dying, and people were abandoning their elderly parents and young children.

The witnesses also reported hearing rumors of cannibalism. One frequently reported story was of a man who was executed after his wife came home to discover he had killed their children and was cooking their flesh, telling her proudly that he had procured some meat. Another story was of a grandfather who dug up his deceased grandchild and ate the remains. Another man killed eleven people and then sold their flesh as pork in the marketplace: he was also executed

These may sound as if they are just rumors, but cannibalism was verified in North Korea during the famine of the 1990s (there were verified reports of  “special meat” being sold in the markets during the 1990s famine). People do eat each other when they are starving: at a certain point your  morality gives way and all you can think of is food.  There are verified stories of cannibalism from other famines, for example the Ukrainian famine in the Soviet Union in 1932-33, in which about 3 million people starved to death in Ukraine alone, and perhaps another million in Kazakhstan. Cannibalism is something people don’t want to think about, but it happens. In North Korea, the cause is not individual criminals (though the government executes them as such) but deliberate state policy that undermines agricultural production and steals food from farmers.

The system in North Korea is that farmers have to give a fixed amount of harvest to the state, regardless of how big or small the harvest is and how much is left over for farmers to feed themselves and their families. Last year, there just wasn’t enough food left over in these two provinces once the state had collected its share. Soldiers guarded the fields and threshing floors to make sure the farmers did not take any food during the harvest. And they went into people’s dwellings to remove any food they had in their larders or even hidden in toilets. Apparently when Kim Jong-un was told people were starving in Hwangwe provinces, he ordered a little food to be sent to them, but then forgot about them.

In passing: Recently Dennis Rodman, one of the stars of the Chicago Bulls basketball team in the 1990s, visited North Korea to hang out with Kim Jong-un. I’m not exactly a huge basketball fan, but I used to enjoy watching Rodman and his cross-dressing antics. No longer. Now Rodman is  defending Kim, saying he’s just a kid, a regular guy, while Kim steals food from peasants. Rodman ought to be ashamed of himself. Or he could redeem himself by using his popularity and visits to TV shows to tell the truth about the “regular guy” he visited. The proper place for Kim Jong-un to be is in a jail cell at The Hague awaiting trial in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity; it’s not hanging out with American basketball stars in Pyongyang.

For more information on North Korea’s famines, see my article “State-Induced Famine and Penal Starvation in North Korea,” Genocide Studies and Prevention, vol.7, nos. 2/3, August/December 2012), pp. 147-75.

Hugo Chavez and the Right to Food in Venezuela

Hugo Chavez and the Right to Food in Venezuela

Hugo Chavez, Getty Images, retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
2012/03/05/hugo-chavez-dead_n_2296423.html

Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela since 1999, died on March 5, 2013. I’ve been reading about Chávez lately as part of my big research project on state food crimes. I was interested in him because Chávez seemed to be a political leader who really cared about the poor, yet by the time of his death he was overseeing policies that meant the poor were becoming worse off.

In 2003 Chávez started “missions” (misiones) to improve the health, education, and nutritional status of Venezuela’s poor. He established a network of state-owned stores (Mercals) where people could buy food at subsidized prices, often as low as 40 per cent of the market price; by 2007 about nine million people out of a total population of 28 million shopped at the Mercals. He also instituted a system of community kitchens where local women cooked meals for those who couldn’t cook for themselves, and he vastly expanded the program of school meals, eventually providing breakfast, lunch and snacks for almost four million children. He funded all these programs with Venezuela’s vast oil wealth.

All these sound like wonderful policies, and in fact, World Bank data show that the health of Venezuelans improved under Chávez’s rule. Inequality was also reduced. The poor showed their appreciation by re-electing Chávez several times, most recently in autumn 2012- or at least, so we think. Venezuela’s more recent elections were “free, but not fair”. Chávez manipulated the elections by hogging air time and denying his opponents access to the media; by threatening to fire public sector workers who didn’t vote for him; and by controlling the electoral commission.  So it’s not altogether sure that the poor, as a group, supported him. Some didn’t, because Chávez tended to hand out goodies such as housing to his supporters. Nevertheless, the missions he started were so popular that the opposition had to assure the people that it would continue them once in power, only more efficiently.

By the time Chávez died, there were severe food shortages in Venezuela.  In order to provide enough cheap food, Chávez imposed price controls on food producers, distributors and retailers. These controls meant that many people were expected to produce and sell food below the costs of production.  Chávez also threatened to imprison private food producers and retailers who sold food above the control price. As a result, many farmers, ranchers, importers of food, and retailers simply went out of business,

Add to this Chávez’s habit of nationalizing farms and ranches.  The nationalized farms and ranches did not produce as much food as the privately-owned ones had done. Chávez tried to promote more independent peasant production by redistributing nationalized land to ordinary Venezuelan citizens, but he didn’t make sure that these new peasant farmers had the supports they needed, such as agricultural credits.

Chávez ran these missions on his own: they weren’t subjected to the normal administrative oversight of government departments. He used oil wealth from Venezuela’s national oil industry, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) to finance them. The result was the PDVSA did not have enough resources for reinvestment and maintenance, and oil production declined. So Venezuela had to go into more and more debt to import more and more food.

By the time of Chávez’s death, severe shortages compromised the right to food in Venezuela. People had to line up for hours, or go from one Mercal to another, to find the inexpensive food they needed. Meanwhile, wealthier people could buy uncontrolled food products, such as cheese instead of milk, although in the last year of his rule Chávez imposed controls on hundreds more food items.

Plus, the economy was in such bad shape, with heavy borrowing and less and less oil produced, that Venezuelans’ long-run food security was also undermined: there was less money to import the food that Venezuelans were no longer producing. There will be an election in Venezuela for a new president in April 2013. Unless the new president makes the missions more efficient, lets government ministries oversee them, and rectifies the problems of under-performing nationalized industries, food shortages are likely to continue. And unless the managers of the PDVSA are allowed to do their job efficiently and retain money for reinvestment and repairs, there will be less oil to buy food.

Hugo Chávez improved Venezuelans’ right to food in the short run, but at the price of long-run food security.  To make sure that citizens’ basic needs are fulfilled, you can’t just redistribute resources, you have to have an efficient economy that will ensure the resources are always there.

If you’d like to read my (draft) chapter on Chávez and the right to food, email me at hassmann@wlu.ca and I will send it to you.

Cameron at Amritsar: Not Quite an Apology

(Note: a slightly altered version of this blog was published as an editorial in The Indian Express (Delhi) February 25, 2013: I am posting it in the blog with the permission of the editor)

On February 20, 2013 Prime Minister David Cameron of Great Britain visited the site of the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, where the British Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer fired on peaceful protesters, officially killing about 400 and possible killing as many as a thousand.  Cameron referred to the massacre as a “shameful event.” Since then many commentators in India and Britain have been discussing whether this was an apology and whether it should have been one.

A good political apology has several characteristics: it acknowledges the facts of the event, expresses sorrow and remorse, takes responsibility for the harm done, and promises non-repetition.  Cameron acknowledged the massacre and expressed sorrow by using the word “shameful.”  He did not, however, take responsibility for the harm done, implying that the UK government of the time had done so, condemning the massacre in 1920 and dismissing Brigadier-General Dyer. Nor did he promise non-repetition, which is unnecessary, as Britain is no longer the colonial ruler of India.  In a full political apology, though, Cameron would actually have used words such as “sorry” or “I apologize.” And the British government would have negotiated the words of the apology with the Indian government ahead of time. 

David Cameron outside the Golden Temple during a February 2013 visit
to the site of the Amritsar Massacre, retrieved from http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/barefoot-david-cameron-shows-respect-but-no-apology-for-the-monstrous-amritsar-massacre-8501977.html?action=gallery

A good political apology also contains symbolic, ceremonial and ritual elements that show sincerity. Cameron’s words and actions did seem to be sincere. He was the first sitting British Prime Minister to ever visit the site of the massacre, a symbolic event in itself. As a mark of respect he adopted partial Sikh dress for the occasion, appearing in a turban and shawl. He laid a wreath on the memorial and he observed a minute of silence—both Western symbols of mourning. Some reports said he got down on his knees or “bent on his knees.” To kneel is a very powerful act in Western culture, as shown when Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany went down on his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto—where Polish Jews had been held by the Nazis before being transported to extermination camps—in 1970.

No doubt Cameron chose his words carefully before he arrived at Amritsar. Someone must have found the 1920 quote from then Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill describing the massacre as monstrous (it’s surprising that Churchill said this, as he was an unrepentant colonialist, as shown by his indifference to the 1943 famine in Bengal). And because there are still living descendants of the victims at Amritsar, Cameron and his government might have been afraid that they would ask for compensation if he actually offered an apology. Recently, a group representing the Kenyan “Mau Mau” nationalist victims of the British in the 1950s were granted the right to pursue their claims for reparations in British courts. This might be why Cameron said he saw no point in reaching back in time to apologize for distant events that had occurred, in the case of Amritsar, long before he was born. His message was probably carefully calibrated to avoid legal liability.

During the same visit, David Cameron lays a wreath at the site
of the Amritsar Massacre, retrieved from http://www.standard.co.uk/
news/politics/barefoot-david-cameron-shows-respect-but-no-apology-
for-the-monstrous-amritsar-massacre-8501977.html?ction=gallery&ino=3

Some newspaper reports suggested that the real reason Cameron expressed sorrow was to help the Conservative Party gain votes from the 800,000-strong British Sikh community. The Sikh vote is particularly important in marginal ridings in London and Leicester. If this was one of his motives, it is similar to an “apology” that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, also a Conservative, delivered to a group of Indo-Canadians in 2008. On May 23, 1914, 376 Sikh would-be immigrants arrived in Vancouver on the ship the Komagata Maru. The Canadian authorities refused to allow the passengers to land and they were returned to India, where 38 people were killed and many more were imprisoned or transported.  Many commentators thought that Harper offered this apology because he was wooing the Indo-Canadian vote. In any event, his remarks seemed rather off-hand. Some felt that he should have apologized from the floor of the House of Parliament, as former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney did in 1988 when apologizing for the internment of Japanese Canadians during WWII, and as Harper himself did in 2008 when apologizing to aboriginal Canadians.

Cameron’s words in the visitor’s book were more than the Queen said when she visited Amritsar, merely calling the massacre a “distressing” episode, according to an article in the Indian Express commenting on Cameron’s visit. Like Cameron, the Queen must choose her words very carefully. When she visited South Africa, another former colony, in 1999, she said “we should remember with sadness the loss of life and suffering” of both blacks and whites during the Boer War. This might be seen as a form of acknowledgement or even regret, but it was certainly not an apology for the British war against the Dutch-origin Boers; moreover, the Queen did not go so far as to apologize for British conquest and maltreatment of Black South Africans.  

 So Cameron’s remarks and gestures weren’t quite an apology. They are probably as close as India and Sikhs worldwide will get to an apology, though. 

Book Note: The Graves are Walking by John Kelly

For the last few years I’ve been busy working on a book about governments that deliberately starve their own citizens, which is why I’ve been posting the occasional entry on North Korea on this blog.  As part of this project, I’ve been learning about faminogenesis—or state-induced famines—of the past.  In the twentieth century these included the Communist famines—3.3. million people starved to death in the Ukraine in 1932-3, somewhere between 30 and 45 million starved to death in China during its so-called “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 to 1961. 

The most well-known political famine of the 19^th century was the Irish “potato famine” from 1845 to 1851, during which it’s estimated one million of Irelands’ 8.2 million people starved while another two million emigrated, many hundreds of thousands to England and the rest to Canada and the United States.  John Kelly published a brilliant and horrific account of this famine in 2012 with Henry Holt, entitled The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People. Kelly uses memoirs and diaries of observers and relief officials who describe the horrible conditions in which the Irish lived and died. Some of these observers and officials were so upset at their inability to do anything to help the starving that they killed themselves. The descriptions of the Irish in Kelly’s book resemble descriptions of Jews in concentration camps during WWII, or of prisoners in the North Korean gulag right now.

The Irish famine wasn’t really state-induced, though, the way the Ukrainian and Chinese famines were. No one planned it or instituted policies that would make it happen.  Instead, potato blight arrived, ruining the 1845 and 1846 crops.  Irish peasants subsisted on potatoes and when that crop failed they had no cash to buy other products.  It is true that even as they starved, other kinds of food were sailing down the Shannon River from Ireland to England; this is why many people think that the Irish famine should be considered a kind of genocide.  On the other hand though, the British eventually did try to buy food for Ireland from America, but there was a worldwide shortage at the time and other famine-stricken European countries such as Belgium and Germany were also trying to buy food.  There was also a shortage of commercial shipping, though the British did consider-and rejected-the idea of using the Royal Navy to take food to Ireland.  So maybe this was famine by neglect.

Another way to look at it was as famine by ideology. There was a small group of influential men in the British cabinet and bureaucracy who adhered to a philosophy called “Moralism,” which meant that people should work hard and take responsibility for themselves. The Moralists thought that the famine would teach the “lazy’ and “indolent” Irish a lesson.  They thought that it was too easy to cultivate potatoes, so the Irish had never learned to work hard.

An ideology of market fundamentalism also helped starve the peasants.  The Economist, a journal that I read assiduously nowadays, said “It is no man’s business to provide for another,” while the Prime Minster, Lord John Russell, worried that if the British were to distribute free food, it would upset the markets and purveyors of food would not be able to make a profit.  He thought the peasants should work for their food, so for the first couple of years of the famine he established “public works” projects (breaking rocks to build useless roads) to provide employment.  “Lazy’ Irish men, starving and naked (they’d sold their clothes to buy food) marched miles every day to earn a pittance of a daily wage to buy food for themselves and their families, many dying en route.

Irish Famine (1845-1851) Memorial  in Dublin, Ireland. Retrieved from
Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Famine_memorial_dublin.jpg

Self-interest also played a big part in the British government policy.  Several members of the Cabinet were landowners in Ireland.  They thought the famine would be a great way to clear out peasants from their properties so that they could convert their land to large-scale commercial farming.  So they took the opportunity to engage in mass evictions of all the peasants who couldn’t pay their rent. They also wanted to get rid of the peasants because as landlords, they had to pay a “poor rate” (or tax) that steadily increased as the famine progressed, and they were also responsible to pay the rates on behalf of peasants. The fewer the peasants on their land, the less the tax they had to pay. 

Even after they left Ireland, the peasants continued to die of starvation and disease. Death rates on ships to Canada were 15 to 18 per cent.  Tickets to Canada were cheaper than tickets to the US (£3 as opposed to £5) because the British government only required boats to Canada to provide 10 square feet of space per person, whereas the Americans required 14 square feet. The Colonial Secretary didn’t want to raise the standard on the British boats because then the fare would d be more expensive and fewer Irish would go to settle in Canada.

What are the lessons here? Some people think that when food aid goes to the starving nowadays, it should be sold so as not to upset local markets. But what happens when the starving don’t have any money to buy the food? How do we make sure they get work, and how do we make sure they don’t lose all their property?   If they eat all their seed, as the Irish did, what do they have to plant after the official famine ends? And do we have an obligation to admit the starving millions into our protected and prosperous countries?