See end of review for chance to win La Grande Illusion on DVD

In the canon of war cinema, Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion is a rarity: a film with no fighting, where the frontline is never seen. A brilliant work whose only real moment of violence is the shooting of a prancing man armed with nothing but a flute, it depicts the fragility and resilience of human relationships in the absurdity of war.
La Grande Illusion tells the tale of a band of French soldiers captured as prisoners of war by German forces during WWI. At the centre of the drama is a trio of characters who embody the French tricolore; markedly different, they are at once an acknowledgement of the divisions in French society and a hopeful rallying cry of fraternité.
Maréchal is a straight-talking and rough-edged Parisian, loyal and with a common touch. His unlikely companion is de Boeldieu, an aristocratic captain aloof from his comrades who observes social formalities until the end. Finally there is Rosenthal, a banker from a rich Jewish immigrant family, a man whose opulence and generosity never deserts him – even behind enemy lines.
Defiance of the genre’s clichés is the hallmark of Renoir’s masterpiece. In a refreshing departure from the mould of war films, the enemy Boche are not portrayed as universally villainous. Artur, the camp guard, is stern but not cruel; he speaks with sincerity when he wishes the departing prisoners ‘see their wives soon’.

When Maréchal is thrown into solitary confinement, his sole comforter is an elderly German guard, who, after offering the despairing prisoner cigarettes and a harmonica in a gesture of consolation, can only utter ‘this war has gone on too long’. The intention is deeply anti-nationalistic.
In a similar manner, Renoir dispenses with the traditional cinematic conventions of narrative. In place of a single linear plot leading to a climax, the film is devised in three connected episodes. Alongside the themes of loneliness and boredom, this format injects a dose of realism. First, our heroes find themselves in the confines of a largely agreeable POW camp, where in comedic fashion they plan their escape, only to be foiled at the last minute. This is followed by their removal to a higher security facility due to multiple attempts at escape – all of which unseen by the audience – and then finally by Maréchal and Rosenthal’s comic and tortuous route to escape.

With a deft touch, Renoir uses The Great War as a prism through which to view other changes that coursed through Europe’s social fabric during this era of upheaval. Although the cross-section of French society in the POW barracks borders on caricature at times, it is revealing of class tensions and divisions in society which most war films gloss over in favour of a cheap and easy patriotism.
Perhaps the greatest poignancy comes in the rapport struck up between de Boeldieu and German general Rauffenstein. The pair share a common cultural grounding and solidarity through their aristocratic backgrounds, but a painful dissonance emerges due to their captor-prisoner relationship. Here, Renoir laments the dying of a gentlemanly nobility whose illusion of a shared heritage is dashed by the hard pragmatism of modern warfare; a symbol of the wind of political change shaking Old Europe to its roots.
An entertaining and moving work, La Grande Illusion eschews both jingoism and the smug morality of the victor to convey a subtle, yet powerful, anti-war message. In this end this comes not through barbarism, torture or atrocity, but by tearing down the illusory barrier that war creates between adversaries.
A digital restoration of La Grande Illusion was released by StudioCanal on DVD and Blu-ray on 23 April.
Red Pepper has three copies of the DVD  to give away. Simply email office@redpepper.org.uk with “Grand Illusion Prize” in the subject line. Closing date: 3 May. Winners will be selected at random.

For the past ten years Polly has campaigned to have ecocide recognised by the UN as the fifth ‘crime against peace’. This would place it on a par with genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression. Defined as ‘the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of an ecosystem that results in inhabitants losing their peaceful enjoyment of the territory’, our planet abounds with examples of human-caused ecocide – from the BP Mexican Gulf oil spill to shale gas ‘fracking’ exploration taking place in Lancashire.

Best way forward

Where political and economic initiatives like the Kyoto Protocol and COP15 accords have failed spectacularly, in her 2010 book Eradicating Ecocide Polly argued that employing international legal instruments is now our best way forward.

The idea is simple: create an international law, applying to all governments, companies and individuals, that prohibits ecologically destructive industrial practices. This would apply equally to damaging local ecosystems as to emissions contributing to climate change. Rather than imposing fines – which can be easily calculated by large businesses as ‘externality’ costs and offset against profits – crucially, the law would attatch criminal sanctions to individuals.

She explains how it would function: “If you make policies that allow the destruction to go on then you will have to answer in an international court of law and the offence is sanctionable by being put in prison. The minimum [custodial] sentence under international law is two year and it would apply to ministers, CEOs and investors. This is about individuals taking responsibility.”

“A corporation at the end of the day is just a piece of paper – human beings commit crimes, not fictional entities, so you can’t hide behind the corporate veil.”

As with other international crimes, the law would fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. However there are obvious limitations. Environmental claims often take years to reach trial and in cases of genocide the ICC only applies its justice retrospectively, offering scant consolation to victims. And so far, the justice it dispenses has been uneven: while Milosevic and Taylor have appeared in the dock, we are yet to see Blair and Bush.

Restorative justice

Telling me that “ultimately locking up people is unsatisfactory”, Polly outlines her vision of a ‘restorative justice’ model for ecocide. Moving away from adversarial courtroom encounters and the deprivation of liberty, this progressive philosophy encourages conciliation and dialogue between parties in order to right wrongs – insofar as possible.

“This means accepting your guilt,” Polly says. “It could be anything from the company working with the community to restore and ameliorate the area. It’s certainly more than just giving a community money; it’s about how can we make good the damage and destruction we have done.”

But questions arise when we arrive at the intractable tension that always surfaces when environmental protection comes up against economics.

No business as usual

Polly says that it is not time for “business as usual”. Yet surely, I ask her, outlawing harmful processes on which industrial production relies would precipitate a collapse in manufacturing, mass job losses and a nosedive in living standards?

“There are certain times in history when we say the moral has to trump the economic. We did it with the abolition of slavery, even though all our economies ran on it. We did it again with the civil rights movement and the ending of apartheid, because a lot of people made a lot of money out of that.”

Despite climate change slipping down the political agenda since economic slowdown began, she thinks her proposals will prove popular, telling me it will be the “biggest job creation scheme in the history of civilization and a vote-winner for governments”.

Green conversion

In order for a smooth transition, Polly’s blueprint involves a five-year amnesty period alongside subsidies to help companies make the conversion to renewable and non-polluting technologies. While currently few businesses are willing to take the plunge into environmental sustainability for fear of it harming profitability, she believes that the disincentive of criminality will act as a lever, forcing corporations to change their method of planning from one based on “risk analysis” (focused on losing opportunities and advantages to competitors) to “consequence analysis” (looking at the impact on the environment outside of the business itself). Investment in the ‘green economy’ will inevitably flow as a result of the criminalisation of financing destructive practice, leading to “innovative and resilient growth in a very different direction”.

Getting corporations on board is one of the central themes of Polly’s new book, The Earth Is Our Business. She explains why, unlike many environmentalists, she doesn’t take an anti-business approach: “These companies have great infrastructure, they just need to turn around very fast. The beauty is that corporations work very well with legislation and their wheels turn quickly. So give them the assistance they need.”

Contradictions

This position distinguishes her from the more radical end of the green movement, where the expansionary and accumulative nature of capitalism itself is posited as the cause of environmental degradation.

But like other liberal reforms to tackle climate change, the logic relies on businesses voluntarily turning towards benign industries in the hope that they will adequately provide for human needs. At the same time, it skirts uneasily around the edges of the contradiction between an economic system based on infinite growth and a planet of limited resources.

At things stand, it is hard to see why any company or nation would willingly give up lucrative extraction industries. Corporate lobbying notoriously helped to derail COP15, while rogue nations like the USA refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol – leading to the suspicion that both states and corporations would do their utmost to prevent ecocide reaching the UN’s statute books.

But Polly is adamant and her faith unshakeable: “Just as our right to life needs to be protected, so does the earth’s right to life. It works when you say that I prohibit [environmental destruction]. You don’t get a permit allocation for genocide.”

The shimmering steel and glass of Canary Wharf bear testament to the financial centre’s opulence. But while billions of pounds pour through its banks each day, it is also the workplace of some of the country’s lowest paid workers – who are now demanding a ‘living wage’.

A group of men stand huddled outside Canary Wharf underground station as commuters rush by, speaking in a slow South American Spanish. They ask not to be named for fear of reprisal by their employer.

As cleaners at Exchange Tower – a fifteen storey building home to Barclays, HSBC and even government regulator the Financial Services Authority – they are paid just 18 pence above the legal national minimum wage of £6.08 an hour. All of the fifteen-strong work crew, originally from South America or Africa, travel from various parts of inner London to get to work.

They say the low level of pay means they struggle to make a living.

“Pay is less than £200 a week. How can you pay the bills, council tax, transport? You are forced to live in poverty,” one man explains.

“I have three daughters – it is not enough to live on.”

Another says he is forced to take other part-time jobs in order to make ends meet, and that it is not unusual to work up to 16 hours a day.

With the cost-of-living soaring in London – average rents have shot up by 12 per cent in the space of a year – and a recent study showing the city to have the most expensive public transport system in the world, they are among the section of the workforce most feeling the squeeze.

Now they are calling on their employers, LCC Support Services, to pay them the London Living Wage, a non-binding standard set by the Greater London Authority at £8.30 per hour in recognition of the high living costs of the capital.

Research by the Greater London Assembly shows that somebody earning less than £7.25 an hour in London will be living in poverty, even after taking benefits and tax credits into account. Nevertheless workforce statistics suggest that six out of every hundred full-time employees in the capital earn below this poverty threshold, with the proportion increasing to nearly 30 per cent of those in part-time hours.

Alberto Durango, organiser at the cleaners’ union, Industrial Workers of the World, says the cleaners’ company refuses to engage in meaningful negotiation.

“In November they offered £6.26 [per hour] – they say this is all the building management will agree to – but since then there has been no further dialogue. This is not enough; we want a decent pay, the living wage. We also want guarantees that in the case of a pay increase they will not reduce staffing levels.”

When contacted, LCC declined to comment. Behind this reticence the company appears in a healthy state. In July last year it was reported that the LCC Support Services, which runs operations nationwide for The Arts Council, Land Registry offices and Royal Mail, had seen its business grow at a rate of £1m per month over the previous seven months.

And their current stance on pay seems at odds with sentiments expressed in a 2008 article by Executive Chairman Bob Vincent. He wrote: “cutting corners with staff salaries is the most effective way of committing suicide…[I]n some areas where housing rents are high, increased wages are paid to the cleaners…”.

This refusal to grant what they see as the minimum required to survive in the city has angered the cleaners. One of them says: “There is a lady who has been working there for fifteen years, always on minimum wage. She has shown loyalty but has not been rewarded.”

There is also resentment that other cleaners on the estate are paid more.

“Cleaners who work in other towers earn £7.25 [an hour],” one man adds. “So why not us?”

“What they pay us is impossible to live on,” says another one of the men, visibly frustrated. “This is supposed to be one of the richest areas in the country – there is no logic”.

That was back in December. A month later and a group of supporters are distributing flyers calling on the living wage to be implemented.

The building management have other ideas, and within a few minutes the group are forcibly ejected by security guards who say they are obstructing private property. Technically this is true: all of the Canary Wharf estate is private property, rather than public realm, and therefore owners can lawfully ask people to leave. Instead, informs the building manager, they can stand at the nearest public space – an overground station situated some 500 yards away – all but thwarting their aim of speaking with people on their way out of the tower.

Alberto explains the stumbling block is the building management company, MGPA, who ultimately decide the value of the contract.

“We were given positive indications they would meet the demand but we are still waiting to hear any formal communication.”

For a company that boasts of managing a private equity property portfolio worth $11bn, this would appear no more than crumbs from the table. When contacted to speak about the matter MGPA declined to comment.

Despite the impasse, members of the union who come to show their support are buoyed by victories at other sites that have traditionally not been unionised.

“We have had success with cleaners working for [contractor] Sodexo at the City of London Corporation,” says Luke Carver, an IWW member who works as a teaching assistant. “There was bullying and harassment but we had people reinstated after 12 hours. I think the employers are surprised; they don’t expect this section of the working class to be organised”.

The cleaners’ campaign is supported by Labour MP John McDonnell, who has tabled House of Commons EDM 2411 calling on the employers to respect the living wage.  Email your MP to urge them to sign up.

On 24 January 1986, 6,000 newspaper workers at Murdoch’s News International (NI) – including printers, engineers, electricians, journalists and clerical staff – went on strike following stalled negotiations over a move to the newly-built Wapping plant. The response of management was to dismiss all of those involved; and so began one of the most protracted disputes in British labour industrial history, taking more than a year for the exhausted unions to finally admit defeat.

Wapping: 25 Years On challenges the mainstream account of the dispute. Delving into the long year of struggle from behind the barricades, it gives the workers’ perspective through an excellent collection of photos and union publications and detailed exhibits. Most importantly it recalls events crucial to the lead-up to the confrontation that are often forgotten in the official version of events.

The trigger for the strike ballot came in November 1985, when NI offered a take-it-or-leave-it deal to the unions – SOGAT, NGA, AUEW and the NUJ – stipulating the surrender of all trade union rights while giving management unfettered power over employees.

A move to Wapping, with its new, efficient and labour-saving print technology, would have inevitably meant hundreds of redundancies. Unsurprising therefore that in public memory the dispute is primarily preserved as a clash between intransigent unions and the inexorable forces of modernisation. Yet central to the exhibition is the charge that these technological changes were used as a smokescreen for Murdoch’s real plan, which was to emasculate the workforce in order to lower costs and boost profits – an objective he would achieve by deception of the workforce.

After early negotiations had come to a standstill, NI management assured the unions that the Wapping plant would be used to produce a new newspaper, The London Post, that was in the offing. But in the meantime they secretly manned the plant by recruiting through electricians’ union EETPU. From January 1986 EETPU workers, protected by the police, would cross picket lines to ensure that not a single day’s production of the four titles – The Sun, The News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times – was lost.

The London Post never hit the newsstands. And, shortly into the dispute, the extent of the management conspiracy was revealed in a leaked letter in which NI’s lawyers advised the company to catch workers on the hoof by issuing “piles of dismissal letters at exit doors” as soon as the strike began. Murdoch’s plan all along, say the organisers of the exhibition, was to move production of all the NI newspapers to Wapping – without the existing, heavily unionised workforce.

As with the miners’ strike the preceding year, the entwinement of industrial relations with politics was fully derobed at Wapping. Not only were the array of Thatcher’s anti-union laws wielded to limit pickets to six and bar other workers taking solidarity action, but protests were marked by scenes of brutal police violence as they guaranteed the passage of newspaper-laden trucks out of ‘Fortress Wapping’. In their most naked form the forces of law and order were visible in their role of defending the interests of capital against labour.

On another level the exhibition is a celebration of the courage of strikers and their families, as well as the local people and trade unionists from around the country that attended demonstrations in their droves. Images of women linked arm-in-arm and young children wrapped up against the cold serve as a reminder of the human tragedy caused by the destruction of livelihoods.

A criticism that could be fairly levelled is that it glosses over the issue of technology as well as ignoring the reputation of print workers, held by some, as greedy and abusive of their industrial power.

But for Anne Field, who was on the national executive committee of SOGAT at the time, it is a question of setting the record straight:

“This is the story of the workforce, whose account of the dispute has been written out of history. We want to give an unsanitised version of what happened from those who went on strike, their families and the local people who supported us.

“It was the employers who committed the sin and we want to try to rebalance the view of what really happened”.

The legacy of Wapping can be seen as twofold. Most memorably it was the last stand of militant organized labour in the country, ringing the death knell of the powerful trade union movement that stood as a bulwark against Thatcherite policies. Yet at the same time it ushered in an era of intimate cooperation – and arguably a closer aligning of political interests – between the press, government and police: a cosy and corruptible arrangement that would unravel with this summer’s News of the World phone hacking scandal.

Available at the exhibition is a commemorative edition of the Wapping Post – the mock red-top newspaper produced by strikers for strikers – which draws lessons of how the events of yesterday came to have a bearing on the press and politics of today.

Wapping: The Workers’ Perspective will be touring the country. 

The exhibition is currently in Manchester at the People’s History Museum where it will be running daily until 18 November. Future dates and venues:

BRIGHTON: 28 November – 1 December, Unite national sector conferences

LONDON: 5-16 December, weekdays only, Unite London + Eastern regional sector conferences.

LONDON: 9-31 January 2012, Bishopsgate Institute

For more information see:

www.cpbf.org.uk

www.unitetheunion.org

www.nuj.org.uk

The exhibition is organised by Unite the Union/GPM Sector, National Union of Journalists, Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom and the Marx Memorial Library.  Photo by Andrew Ward (Report).

The young men and women dressed in khaki uniforms, semi-automatic rifles slung over shoulders, turn not a single head as they stream out of Tel Aviv’s busy central bus station. In any of Israel’s large towns this is a prosaic sight; with military service compulsory for all citizens over the age of eighteen – three years for men and two for women – everybody knows someone in the army. Yet while the embedding of the military in everyday life is manifest on the surface, its reality is not one readily acknowledged.

“You don’t speak about the army when you come home to your family,” says Eran Efrati, a well-built man in his late twenties. “They [the army] tell you that they don’t need to hear about it, that it might upset them. So it is ignored and denied and you pretend to go back to ordinary life”.

For Eran this denial is one of the ways in which the true nature of the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories is masked within Israeli society.

His chance to speak out came through Breaking the Silence (BtS), an organisation of former soldiers that since 2004 has interviewed hundreds of ex-combatants anonymously about their experiences of active service in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Their aim is to shed light on what really goes on in the occupied territories with the aim of stimulating public debate about the role of young soldiers in controlling the lives of a civilian population.

Full of tales of abductions, humiliation within homes and the beating of children perpetrated by soldiers, the testimonies make for shocking and at times harrowing reading. In doing so they uncompromisingly reveal the day-to-day of life under occupation for Palestinians – subject to measures justified under the banner of ‘security’ – from the unusual perspective of those meting the treatment. The severity of these accounts ranges from the mundane – the long delays inflicted at the checkpoints which carve up the West Bank; to the truly horrific – as recounted in the shock and awe tactics of warfare deployed during the bombardment of Gaza in 2009.

An ordinary soldier

By his own account Eran was an ordinary Israeli serving in the army until a series of incidents led him to question not only what he was doing but the role of the army.

“I went to a Medicins Sans Frontieres demonstration and a doctor asked me to take a pass to a family in Hebron, so that they could cross checkpoints in order for a grandparent to gain treatment. It struck a human chord with me as my mother was ill at the time, so I took it to them.”

On returning to base he was punished for this breach of security with two weeks incarceration in military prison. This would mark the beginning of a journey of disillusionment that almost ended in official disgrace. From thereon throwaway comments by colleagues and behaviour to which before he paid little attention began to take on a new significance, revealing something darker about the nature of the army operation.

“In Hebron one of our jobs was to survey houses in order to make detailed plans of living arrangements and rooms in the case of a suspected terrorist,” he continues. “We sometimes woke people up in the middle of the night and marched them outdoors – men, women and children – to do this. One day I asked my Sergeant what happened to the drawings and he replied: ‘We have had Hebron since 1967. Do you think you are the first to do the surveys?’”.

“I couldn’t believe this, as we had always been made to think that what we were doing was important work”.

‘Searing of consciousness’

On another occasion Eran heard members of a neighbouring unit laughing about an incident in which a Palestinian standing on a porch with a broom was mistakenly perceived to be bearing an arm and was shot dead by soldiers.

“The press reported it inaccurately, saying that a terrorist had been neutralised and that fortunately no soldiers had been hurt. I thought to myself ‘this is wrong, the public needs to know the truth’. So I went to my commanding officer to say that we must speak to the media and set the record straight. He just laughed in my face.”

According to the authors of the introduction to the BtS publication Israeli Soldier Testimonies: 2000-2010, the real purpose of many such routine counter-terror operations is not the flushing out known terrorists or maintaining security. They are, it is argued, intended to ‘punish, deter or tighten control over the Palestinian population’ with the term ‘prevention of terror’ stretched beyond its normal meaning to cover all offensives – in the process disregarding any distinction between civil and paramilitary targets. Other frequent examples cited are detention without charge, the destruction of infrastructure and property extra-judicial assassinations.

While the accounts themselves are stark and without analysis, the BtS authors argue that the overall objective of these aggressive methods is the deliberate strategy of ‘searing of consciousness’, pursued by army commanders. In effect this means proving to the Palestinian population as a whole that opposition is futile. This interpretation is evidenced by accounts of everyday ‘demonstration of presence’ exercises – a term describing tactics of intimidation designed to stamp the army’s authority and instill fear. Under the military euphemism of ‘disruption of normalcy’, soldiers recount night patrols waking up villages at night by firing into the air, searching houses and throwing sound bombs – often without any intelligence linking sites with terrorist activity.

No questions, please

The recurring themes of arbitrary punishment and intimidation indicate that this strategy goes to the heart of the occupation itself; underscoring at the same time the contradiction between the rhetoric of security and reality of violent colonisation. Yet even within the ranks of the IDF this not admitted. Eran recounts how, during an officer training programme, one classmate questioned the logic of the deployment of troops throughout the entire West Bank.

“The [class] instructor told us that the army was here [in the West Bank] to ensure the security of Israel against terrorists. One guy asked whether it would be a better idea just to have a reinforced line of units along the border instead of loads of scattered inside [the territories] to prevent them from entering. It made sense; but instead he was removed from the class.”

It was at this point that belief in the morality of what he was doing started to unravel in Eran’s mind. Things came to a head when he was arrested at a weekly demonstration against the separation wall which divides many Palestinians from their land, for which he landed another two weeks in army prison and narrowly escaped a dishonorable discharge.

Psychology of the oppressor

While statistics on detentions and the kilometers of road blocks can draw a systematic overview of the occupation, the BtS testimonies are unique in offering deeply human impressions. As anecdotes they go some way to explaining the psychological edifice upon which the occupation is built; and it is their subjective quality which is most striking – especially since they come from the mouth of those whose structural role is that of oppressor.

Soldiers are told how the IDF is the “most moral army in the world”, respectful of human rights and there is no indication that overt racism is promoted within the ranks of the army. Yet Eran says that there is a slow and subtle process of indoctrination in Israeli society – starting in the family and education system – that at once perpetuates the occupation and commands unswerving loyalty from citizens. The corollary fear and suspicion of Arabs pervasive in Israeli society comes to an inevitable ugly head in the army, he recalls.

“You are trained for 8 months to expect a war and then as an 18 or 19 year old they drop you at a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere and you are face to face with Arabs for the first time in your life. Many of those guys [IDF soldiers] are young and scared. Army life makes you miserable and without knowing it you want to inflict this upon somebody else”.

While some witnesses express disgust at the excesses of their colleagues, overall there is a general sense of  detatchment from the barbarism of what takes place. This corrosive effect of the day-to-day drudgery on a soldier’s moral compass is laid bare in one unsettling account: “The standards of good and evil deteriorate there…I can’t tell you what’s good and what isn’t, because I don’t have all of the tools.”

The reader quickly infers that a normalisation of violence never lurks far away – degrading not only the victims but, in a different way, the soldiers themselves.

Hostile reception

In a country that has always responded militarily to a (perceived or real) existential threat since its establishment, the reception to BtS is, predictably, not a warm one.

Critics have lambasted BtS as ‘terror supporters’ and for seeking to aid the ‘delegitimisation’ of Israel. The Israeli government sees them as such a threat that in 2009 it sought to persuade the Dutch foreign ministry to withdraw funding issued by its embassy.

Those critical of the occupation are on the fringe of Israeli society and treated with contempt in many quarters, and for people like Eran speaking out can mean accusations of betrayal, estrangement from family and social stigma.

Yet in spite of the the bulk of public opinion a recent article in the liberal newspaper Haaretz shows that there are cracks starting to appear in mainstream discourse.

In an impassioned review of BtS publications Ilana Hammerman decried the ‘logic of the absurd’ that sustains the occupation. This, she wrote, consists of a breakdown of “the mental and moral borders between what is permissible and what is forbidden, between good and evil, between stupidity and wickedness, between the humiliated and those who humiliate”.

You can read the testimonies and download PDF versions of Breaking the Silence’s publications in English at: http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/ 

Eran Efrati now lives in New York where he gives lectures on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the ‘Israeli Apartheid’

Across the rocky ravine Mohammed points to a handful of tents and small wooden structures covered in tarpaulins that sit behind a wire fence.

‘We had to rebuild inside the cemetery this time. We know the Israelis won’t demolish there; it is the only amount of respect they show us.’

Appearing on no published map, the village of Al-Arakib lies down an unmaintained track that veers sharply off the side of a motorway in Israel’s southern Negev desert. As one of over 40 ‘unrecognised’ villages in the region not only is its existence ignored by the state, but as if to affirm its official invisibility the authorities have subjected it to repeated demolitions in the last twelve months, on each occasion met with a reconstruction effort by local villagers who refuse to give up their land.

While portrayed by the authorities as an isolated dispute over planning laws, campaigners argue that the plight of Al-Arakib illustrates a deliberate strategy pursued by Israel to remove the indigenous Palestinian Bedouin population.

The history of the matter can be traced back to a 1965 planning law that devised a register of towns and villages throughout the country. While innocuous in appearance, ignored by the survey were 123 Palestinian villages which as a result became classified as ‘unrecognised’. Of these, 45 were villages home to Bedouin Arabs in the Negev desert. In conjunction with a 1953 law that transferred over 90 per cent of Negev land to the ownership of the state, the presence of the Bedouin and their buildings was consequently considered illegal – despite having been there long before the creation of Israel.

As part of the Palestinian Arab population, the Bedouin were traditionally distinguished by their nomadic lifestyle, roaming according to the season for grazing purposes but often with a station to which they returned in winter. As this way of life gradually disappeared the villages eventually became their permanent bases.

‘Al-Arakib is over 100 years old,’ explains Mohammed. He adds that deeds conferring legal title to the land are disregarded by the authorities: ‘I have the papers to prove my family owns the land; it was bought by my great-grandfather in Ottoman times. But they don’t care.’

Due to their unrecognised status the villages are refused basic municipal services such as running water and electricity – despite the Bedouin being Israeli citizens. Until a year ago Al-Arakib operated autonomously with electricity provided by petrol generators and water transported to its 300 residents by the costly means of tanker-trucks.

But a year ago the Israel Land Authority (ILA), which claims ownership of the land, sought to resolve the dispute for once and all – by force. In an offensive that involved an estimated 1,500 police, helicopters and bulldozers, 46 structures were destroyed on 27 July 2010 as the village was razed to the ground, with tear gas and plastic bullets deployed t quell the villagers’ resistance. This would set the pattern of subsequent demolitions which have been repeated 24 times in one year.

‘My home was over there,’ points Mohammed to a wooden shack covered by a plastic sheet. ‘It cost me $20,000 to build and they demolished it and gave me no compensation. It is humiliation; sometimes they bring young Israeli children to watch and laugh. How are my children to live here, with no water to wash their clothes?’

Like many of the residents, Mohammed divides his time between the village and another home he has in a nearby town where he sends his children to school. For the situation of Al-Arakib villagers is not one of homelessness but one of forced displacement, as explains Oren of Active Stills, a photography collective that documents the occupation: ‘Many of the villagers live in other towns or stay with relatives. After 1948 it was Israel’s policy to force the Bedouin to move into concentration towns in order to force them from the land that the Zionists wanted for Jews exclusively’.

The realisation of this plan is borne out by demographic statistics: while the 180,000 Bedouin living in the Negev comprise 27 per cent of its population, they occupy only 5 per cent of its land. Half of them live in Israeli planned urban townships where there is no space for owning animals or growing food.

From the summit of the cemetery you can see a ring of green specks that encircle the village lands. These young trees are part of a multimillion pound forestry initiative, Blueprint Negev, intended to ‘make the desert bloom’. Their planting is another concerted step towards the uprooting of indigenous people in the Negev.

In the words of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) Blueprint Negev is a ‘major initiative to revitalise Irasel’s southern region’ through a ‘visionary plan to increase the population of the area and improve living standards for all its inhabitants’. Yet it evidently does not take into consideration the interests of all the Negev’s inhabitants. The $600m plan has been criticised by anti-occupation activists both as a cover to remove the indigenous inhabitants and an excuse to erase any traces of their villages. In turn the JNF, a para-legal organization which indirectly and directly manages 93% of Israeli state land, has been singled out by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign as an integral part of the Israeli colonisation process due to its discriminatory policy of refusing to lease land to non-Jews. Nevertheless the JNF continues to enjoy charitable status in scores of countries, including the UK.

In addition the ecological credentials of the plan have faced intense scrutiny. According to savethenegev.org, planting of a single species of non-native pine trees is unsustainable as it provides no support for other plant and animal species while the destruction of native species disturbs the equilibrium of the ecosystem.

This rings true in the experience of Mohammed: ‘Around the village there used to be hundreds of olive trees. But they uprooted them all’, he says with a sweeping gesture towards the open rocky plains, ‘and now there is nothing’.

The villagers’ resilience is being increasingly tested, according to an elderly woman who speaks through an interpreter. ‘My house was on flat land, so before we could rebuild it after each demolition. But now they have purposely dug up the land so it is no longer flat. Instead there are the trenches for the trees to be planted. We cannot receive any building materials because the Israelis threaten tractor drivers with fines or revocation of their licenses if they come, and the army takes away what they demolish’.

In parallel to the peaceful resistance of villagers on the ground – and the many Israeli and international solidarity activists who visit Al-Arakib to help defend and reconstruct homes – there is a long-running legal campaign fighting for the recognition of the villages.

‘A number of villages have been recognised in recent years,’ says a spokesperson for the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, ‘however, when you visit these villages it is difficult to see the difference in the standard of living between them and those that have not been recognised. Many of them still do not have an approved detailed local outline plan that would allow residents to obtain building permits and build legally.’

Furthermore a recent government plan to resolve the land conflict issue would result in the Bedouin receiving recognition to only 30-40 per cent of that to which they lay claim. ‘In short, there is still a long road ahead until justice is achieved in the Negev for all its residents’.

In the top corner of the perimeter fence of the Al-Arakib cemetery stand a clump of the distinctive white marble headstones that mark Muslim graves; for protection from the bulldozers the remaining villagers have decamped within its borders. Yet some say that they fear even this will not deter the demolitions.

‘Of course they will continue to demolish,’ says Mohammed, looking over as children throw rocks across the ravine. ‘But the people are strong. That is what is important’.

The main issues of the day are economic growth, unemployment and the raft of constitutional and judicial reforms proposed by the ruling AK (Justice and Development) Party.

One issue which has been largely sidelined from the debate is the government’s proposals to build Turkey’s first nuclear power plants, which they expect to provide a fifth of the country’s energy by 2020. But last Friday a group of environmental activists – from groups including Greenpeace and the Turkish Green Party – set up camp in Istanbul’s Taksin Square in opposition to the AK Party’s plans to build a nuclear reactor in partnership with the Russian government

Now numbering over two dozen tents and with more sleeping by night, the protestors are calling on the main political parties to withdraw the proposals which they argue are scientifically unsound, and to instead consider renewable energy alternative.

Onur Fidnngül, an activist staying at the camp, explained:

‘Permission for the construction of the reactor was given back in 1972, long before disasters such as Chernobyl and more recently Fukushima. There has been no reassessment of the safety of the plans nor evaluation of the risks it could pose to human health and the environment.

‘Since [approval was granted] two of the three independent scientists who put their name to it have died. The remaining one now wishes to withdraw his endorsement and has indicated that there was some degree of pressure at the time.’

Meanwhile there are fears over the suitability of the site for the reactor, with the proposed location situated around 180km from Adana – the city which was hit by an earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter Scale in 1999 – and a mere 25km from the Ecemiş seismic fault line. With renewed scrutiny following the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima plant, the government responded by stating that the reactor would be a newer generation build. Yet this did not dampen the criticism of the plant plans, with nuclear physicist Hayrettin Kilic – who campaigns against nuclear energy projects – arguing that the ‘Russian technology does not comply with Western standards’ while pointing out problems with its cooling systems.

Energy security is without doubt an issue of great political and economic importance in Turkey. A pattern of high economic growth over the last twelve months has seen the annual increase in energy demand hit 6-8%, far outstripping the global average of 2.1%. In an attempt to curb high reliance on imported gas and coal governments over the past ten years have embarked on large-scale hydroelectric dam projects which now provide 25% of electricity, but which have proved contentious due to the environmental damage they have caused.

On a political level, the nuclear aspirations form part of the nationalist rhetoric of the ruling AK Party, who are expected to be successful at Sunday’s polls. On massive billboards throughout the country they boast of their desire to make Turkey one of the most powerful eight nations in the world by 2023 – the centenary anniversary of the birth of the secular Republic – and nuclear credentials appear to underline this bid.

However the protestors reject both of these energy production avenues and say that only by increasing the meagre 4% of energy currently provided by renewables (excluding hydroelectric) can Turkey balance sustainable growth with environmental protection.

‘Turkey has massive potential for renewable energy,’ says Bilge Otturk of Greenpeace. ‘We have the location with the second largest wind power potential in the world but the government is not doing enough to exploit it’.

So far the response from the establishment towards the camp has been derisory, as Onur Fidnngül explains:

‘The Prime Minister said that this is simply a site of festivities and that you can’t change things by fun. And the energy minister has simply stated that the plans are to go ahead and the reactor will be closed by 2071′.

Three out of the four parties represented in parliament remain committed to the plans, despite an opinion poll which indicated that 68% of the population are opposed to nuclear power.

Meanwhile a law restricting political demonstrations twenty-four hours ahead of elections means that the camp could be ejected by Saturday. But in the words of Mehmet:

‘Already in the last week it has forced the issue onto the election agenda. We hope that us being here – something quite unusual which has attracted attention – will make people start to think about the ecological future of the country as well as the economic’.