By Emma C. Johnson
Midland Daily News, 15
Nov 2019: A1.
FULL TEXT:
Speaker from Good Shepherd Collective to make two local
appearances
Emma C. Johnson for the Daily News
Published 1:00 am EST, Friday, November 15, 2019
This presentation is slated for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 19, at the Midland Church of the Brethren at 1717 E. Sugnet Road. There will also be a presentation at 7 p.m. Dec. 3 in the loft above the Live Oak Coffee Shop in Midland.
O’Rourke will give a broad overview of the situation in Palestine/Israel to contextualize GSC’s work, examine Israel's process of settler colonialism in the community of Um al-Khair, and talk about GSC.
Good Shepherd Collective
GSC is an organization that fights for human rights in Palestine/Israel using campaigning and activism across borders, bringing together Palestinians from the West Bank and Israeli-Palestinians.
"The organizational aim is to develop strategic advocacy campaigns on both winnable and meaningful targets," said O’Rourke.
Home demolitions in Um al-Khair
This year, the community has been “relatively lucky” compared to other years in that they had only one animal facility demolished, says O’Rourke. However, the Israeli Civil Administration rejected a master plan that would have allowed the Palestinian community in Area C to build needed housing.
Without the master plan, even the already-existing homes are under threat of demolition and the community remains vulnerable to Israeli settler groups annexing their land.
“As a result, the Israeli Civil Administration prepared to execute multiple demolitions, potentially leaving dozens of children and their families without shelter,” said O’Rourke.
“[W]e had to organize an eight-week international encampment of nonviolent resisters to deter an Israeli raid on the village until the community of Um al-Khair could submit an appeal,” O'Rourke said.
Structural inequalities in the law
O'Rourke says GSC “operates within a framework that understands the ongoing violence in Palestine/Israel as rooted in the structural inequalities of the law.”
“One of the things that the Good Shepherd Collective focuses on is changing the debate from being pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, and reframing the discussion in terms of systems of oppression,” said O’Rourke.
While even Palestinians who are Israeli citizens living inside the 1948 borders have more rights than their West Bank and Gaza counterparts, Palestinian-Israelis still have more than 60 laws that expressly discriminate against them.
One example is the Nakba Law. For many Palestinians, anti-Zionists Israelis, and Jews, the creation of the State of Israel is referred to as “The Catastrophe" because more than 450 Palestinian villages were razed and destroyed, displacing some 750,000 indigenous people.
The Nakba Law allows the Israeli government to fine institutions that recognize the historical trauma that the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 caused indigenous people.
Another example, says O’Rourke, is the Israeli State's Nation-State Bill, “which essentially canonized all non-Jews as second-class citizens and made colonialization of the West Bank a national priority.”
Recently, the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights called for Israel to repeal the law.
The constraints of a two-state solution
GSC raises the voices of local villages in the West Bank of Palestine/Israel by connecting them directly — unfiltered through the NGO system — to advocacy networks, according to O’Rourke.
“Almost all of the international aid that flows into the Israeli and Palestinian NGO regime mandates focusing on a Two-State Solution as a means for peace,” O’Rourke said. “Israel has effectively erased the prospects of a Palestinian state to emerge from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.”
Currently, 550,000 to 750,000 settlers are living on some 250 illegal Israeli settlements and outposts in the West Bank.
“Israel strategically developed this physical network of roads, military check points, and neighborhoods so that it ensured full control of the natural resources of the future,” O’Rourke said.
O’Rourke says dismantling all the settlements at this point is politically unrealistic.
Instead of a two-state solution, O’Rourke would like to see a move “towards a truly democratic model where everyone — regardless of gender, religion, race or sexual orientation — are protected equitably under the law.”
“[F]or hundreds of years under the Ottoman Empire, there was a relatively pluralistic society,” said O'Rourke. “These last 80 years have really been an historical aberration in terms of equality.”
Community projects
GSC runs several community-based projects, including a greenhouse, a community center and library, a honey project, and a travel program for internationals and Israelis to learn more about Um al-Khair and other communities in the South Hebron Hills. The workshops on livestock milking, baking Bedouin bread, and making traditional Bedouin textiles also generate revenue for the villages. O’Rourke says, however, the focus is on educating visitors.
“While the community does need financial support, what they really need is a broad movement of people working diligently to change the laws that keep them from naturally flourishing,” says O’Rourke.
A campaign for justice
“While a lot of people talk about the $3.8 billion of U.S. military aid that Israel receives every year, not a lot of focus is on the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the settler enterprise,” O’Rourke said. “Right now, we are taking a look which campaigns can directly disrupt the flow of U.S. charitable funds to right-wing Israeli settler organizations.”
“We are making an evidenced-based argument that this funneling of money from U.S. charities to Israeli organizations is not consistent with the IRS tax laws that govern charitable giving,” O’Rourke said.
Changing views
“Over the last year, I've been reminded of how quick people can change their perspective,” says O’Rourke. “In the Democratic Party, the primary candidates are going on the record saying they'd condition the $3.8 billion aid package the U.S. sends to Israel every year on their commitment to upholding basic human rights.”
Equal protection under the law
“[T]his isn't really about ‘Israelis versus Palestinians,’
but rather ushering in a legal regime that offers the same protections and
benefits for everyone,” says O’Rourke. “We also have to think about the
different layers of oppression that are operating. There are a lot of women's
voices that aren't being heard in these discussions. Even less are the rights
of the queer community and the Jews of color. These voices have been buried and
they are also an essential part of the conversation.”
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