Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
2 November
INSPIRING WORKERS' INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY
On this day in 2018, Nae Pasaran went on release, an inspiring film on the boycott of Chilean fighter aircraft by Scottish trade unionists, engineers in the Rolls-Royce factory in East Kilbride. Six months after the bloody coup of 11 September 1973, four Scots refused to service engines for the Chilean air force. BDS gold standard. The entire squadron of 29 Hawker Hunters was close to being grounded by the boycott because East Kilbride was the only place in the world where these engines could be properly repaired.
ايحاء التضامن الدولي للعمال
2 نوفمبر
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 2018 ، تم إطلاق فيلم (لن يمروا)، وهو فيلم ملهم حول مقاطعة النقابيين الأسكتلنديين والمهندسين في مصنع -رولز رويس في شرق كالبرايد للطائرات المقاتلة التشيلية. بعد ستة أشهر من الانقلاب الدموي في 11 سبتمبر 1973 ،رفض أربعة اسكتلنديين خدمة محركات مقاتلات القوات الجوية التشيلية.هذه هي القاعدة الذهبيه للمقاطعة ( ب د س) . اذ ان سرب بأكمله من 29 مقاتلة من نوع هوكر هنترز كان على وشك تعطيله بسبب المقاطعة لأن شرق كالبرايد هو المكان الوحيد في العالم الذي يمكن فيه إصلاح هذه المحركات بشكل صحيح.
The gold standard for using the weapon of boycott against a brutal regime
'They Shall Not Pass' is used here specifically as a Scottish variation on La Pasionaria's anti-Franco declaration at the time of the Spanish Civil War. It's an ideal slogan for Felipe Bustos Sierra's rousing documentary – his feature debut and an expansion of his 2013 short – made in conjunction with the Scottish Documentary Institute and BBC Scotland, and part funded by Kickstarter donors. Nae Pasaran tells a universally comprehensible story of ordinary Scottish workers who refused to work on military warplanes.
Archive footage sets the scene: the coming of General Pinochet's military junta in mid 70s Chile involves the bombing of government buildings by British Hawker Hunter aircraft. When the Rolls Royce engines of the planes arrive for repair in East Kilbride, the workers decide to 'black' the project, putting the engines into indefinite cold-storage. The issue becomes a political football, and although the rusted engines mysteriously find their way back to Chile, many lives have been touched in the process.
The son of a Chilean exile, Sierra interviewed the Scottish workers, then went to today's Chile to find out what impact their actions had. A suggestion that the engines were exchanged for refugees can't be authenticated, but it's clear that the gesture of non-compliance had a strong political resonance. The only real fault that can be found with Nae Pasaran as a film is that the scope is limited: Rolls Royce employees declined to be interviewed, and wider questions about British and American arms policy are alluded to rather than openly discussed.
Nae Pasaran is a highly emotive documentary that demonstrates the power of solidarity in democracy, while also showing that admissions of guilt are rare. Instead, Sierra celebrates an unassuming group of men who took on a powerful enemy of the people, and won a small but important moral victory.
Israel supplied weapons to Pinochet's Chile and to some of the worst human rights violators imaginable. In a recent interview with Haaretz’s Ayelett Shani, Chilean-born Lily Traubman described her efforts to demand the disclosure of Israel’s security and foreign relations with the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet, responsible for the kidnapping, murder and tortured of tens of thousands of citizens — including that of her father.
"All the weapons of the Chilean police and army were Israeli. In Chile I went around with a photograph of my brother in uniform. At checkpoints and in searches I would take out the picture and tell them that this was my brother, who was an officer in the IDF – even though he was a regular soldier – and that did the trick. The Chilean army greatly admired the Israeli army. When Pinochet wanted to visit Israel, he threatened that if he were not received here he would cancel a large arms deal. No dictator in the world, however bad he may be, can exist without international support. The dictatorship in Chile lasted as long as it did because there were countries that supported it, and Israel was one of them.
"…It’s clear that there is documentation of arms sales, and also obviously of the training provided to Chilean intelligence. There is information about the fate of the missing Jews in Chile. Maybe there is even information about my father. The people who tortured him, who killed him – who are they? Maybe they were here, in Israel? Maybe they received training from the Shin Bet [security service] here? When the documents are uncovered, we will be able to understand how the infrastructure of the dictatorship worked and how deeply involved Israel was."
Israel also sold weapons to the government of South Africa during apartheid; it sold arms to El Salvador during the civil war, where systemic and widespread human rights violations by the Salvadoran military were commonplace; and there is evidence that it sold weapons to the Hutu government as it was carrying out genocide against the Tutsi population of Rwanda (A Tel Aviv court rejected a petition to reveal documentation of arms exports to the Hutus).
Most recently, however, the spotlight has been on South Sudan, where Israel has continuously sent weapons and trained government forces since the country declared its independence in 2011. Itay Mack, an attorney and expert on the Israeli arms industry, appealed to the Defense Ministry to stop military exports to the country. His appeal was rejected.
In fact, in 2014 alone, Israeli arms companies registered a 40 percent increase in exports to African countries alone, raising further concerns that weapons may end up in the hands of either repressive governments or militants. The Israeli government does not publish details of all its weapons deals.
In a recent interview with Haaretz, Mack described how Israel is now filling in the gap that the United States and Europe left behind:
We know Israel is selling arms to Azerbaijan, South Sudan and Rwanda. Israel is training units guarding presidential regimes in African states. According to reports, this is happening in Cameroon, Togo and Equatorial Guinea – nondemocratic states, some of them dictatorships, that kill, plunder and oppress their citizens.
Israel’s competitive advantage in the arms trade is that it can sell combat-tested weapons, and military know-how, due to the fact that it has been holding a civilian population under military rule for almost 50 years. Or as Mack puts it: “The generals in Guatemala grasped that their confrontation with the [local] Indian population is very similar to the situation in Israel.”
6-minute video: how strong trade unions supported Chileans under dictatorship while Thatcher and Israel supported the torturers. (Corbyn was ridiculed in the media for opposing Pinichet's butchers, eg by the Times' Daniel Finkelstein.)