Dispatches from South Africa: Neoliberalism and post apartheid South Africa

Despite the government having replaced the predations of apartheid with one of the most inclusive and progressive constitutions on earth, neoliberal capitalism has stalled the rights of ordinary people in South Africa"
Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing, p 135

My colleague and friend Gavin Mooney is currently in South Africa where he wrote this meditation on the significance of the 50th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in contemporary South Africa. This piece follows an earlier piece I wrote on the anniversary.

Remembering Sharpeville

By Gavin Mooney

The 50th anniversary last week of the Sharpeville massacre left a bitter taste in the mouth. For my generation- I was 17 at the time- it was a truly horrendous barbaric event and it was seen as such by many across the globe. Sixty nine people killed, mown down in cold blood standing up for their rights. Horrific- and 50 years on I can still vividly remember how tangible was the outrage.

Here in South Africa at present for a few weeks, what does the memory of Sharpeville convey? Perhaps more than anything a great sadness arising not so much from the massacre itself but from events in the years since.

Enormous hope was kindled by the release of Mandela and the ensuing democratic elections of 1994. The hope continued as, in the initial years of black rule, some attempts were made to bring about elements of social justice in this country. There was an economic policy called GEAR which at least had R for redistribution in it. But then the neolibs re-established themselves and Mbeki set out to show he was just as capable of running an economy along neoliberal lines as any white man. And he did.

As a result poverty remains horrendous in this country; and inequality is now worse than in 1994. Let me repeat that. The inequality today is worse than it was in the apartheid years. South Africa now competes to be the most unequal society on the planet.

Yet the world still sees South Africa as free, as democratic, with a (genuinely) wonderful constitution. This 'wonderful' constitution in this 'liberal democracy' has failed to deliver either freedom or justice to the people.

Sad how the world could condemn the evils of apartheid- and rightly so- but passes by on the other side when the perpetrators of oppression are driven by neoliberalism and not race. Is it any more obscene? Has the world become just too bored with all the poverty and inequality to care any longer? Have individualism and materialism become so dominant globally that compassion and concern for the vulnerable and oppressed are now passe?.

To me the real sadness today is that no one would seem to care enough to listen if South Africans were to protest and bring about another Sharpeville. Why would the poor of South Africa risk provoking another massacre when they know that no one cares any longer? Then the 'enemy' was clearly identifiable as white supremacy; today when neo-liberal ideology is 'the enemy'...?

The Rossport struggle: a community resisting corporatate exploitation

The small town of Rossport, County Mayo in the northwest of Ireland is the front line for a decade long struggle between a local community wanting responsible development and a predatory multinational resource company looking to exploit natural resources for profit. The fallout from the Rossport struggle has been to criminalize a community for its dissent and opposition to corporate and state power.

In February, Pat O'Donnell a local fisherman in Rossport was jailed for 7 months on charges of "breach of the peace" and obstruction of Police, charges resulting from his role in a long running local campaign to prevent Shell from constructing a refinery and a high pressure gas pipeline through the town. O'Donnell continues a long line of farmers, residents, and fishermen imprisoned for opposing Shell and the Irish Government plans in Rossport.

The Rossport struggle is yet another example of a large multinational resource company getting governments to give them the right to resources and allowing them to ride roughshod over the community and then using the institutions of the state to suppress local opposition.

In 1996 large reserves of gas were discovered in the Coorib fields 80km off the coast. Instead of processing gas at sea, Shell proposed a cheaper, more experimental method to bring the gas ashore by a high pressure pipeline to carry raw gas through the community of Rossport to an inland refinery. This would save Shell hundreds of millions of dollars but placed local houses within 200 metres of the pipeline. In late 2009 the pipeline was found to unacceptable on safety grounds and presented a major risk to the local community in the case of leak, rupture or explosion.

For over 11 years the local community has opposed Shell's construction of the pipeline through the town and refinery nearby to process gas from the offshore Corrib gas fields. In 2005 five locals (the Rossport 5) were jailed for 94 days for refusing to allow Shell access to their land. Shell had been awarded a Compulsory Acquisition Order to build the gas pipeline on their land.

Dozens of others have received fines, bans or custodial sentences. In 2009 there were over 300 Police, 200 private security staff, 2 Irish navy gunboats and an Irish Air Force plane present to control and suppress resistance and opposition to the pipeline's construction.

Pat O'Donnell and his family have suffered for their defiance. O'Donnell has opposed Shell since 2005 and refused payments of 300,000 Euros made by Shell to other fishermen. He has been arrested while fishing, detained in custody (while fishing gear was torn from his sea moorings) and assaulted, sustaining facial injuries and broken teeth. In June 2009 his fishing boat was boarded in mysterious circumstances by 4 masked men, 2 of whom held him and his crew at gunpoint while the others scuttled the boat. The boat eventually sank and O' Donnell and his crew had to be rescued from their lifeboat.

Since the jailing of O'Donnell in February national and international pressure has intensified with protest rallies taking place across the UK. You can read more here at the website of the Shell to Sea campaign.

Jeremy Scahill: an example of what journalism should be about

The American reporter and journalist Jeremy Scahill has almost single handedly been responsible for uncovering the shocking history of Blackwater, the world's leading corporate mercenary army.Scahill has shown that Blackwater acts a covert and secret arm of the US military and intelligence agencies.

Blackwater (now known as Xe services LLC) is a private US corporation that essentially operates as a "corporate"arm of the US military, defense and intelligence establishment. Blackwater has become the "go to man" for covert and illegal activities where the US government is unwilling or unable to use its own forces.

Scahill, whose work can be read on his site Rebel Reports, has recently been awarded the "Izzy Award" for outstanding achievement in independent journalism in the USA.

Scahill's brilliant and revealing book "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's most Powerful Mercenary army" and his subsequent reporting on Blackwater has shown the corporation's immense power and profitability and its role as an private military extension of the US Government. In recent articles Scahill has documented Blackwater's secret role and presence in Pakistan, its conduct of targeted assassinations for the US Government, its conduct of illegal covert activity on behalf of the US Government in sovereign countries and its involvement in massacres, assassinations and murder of civilians, including children.

There is an excellent interview with Scahill on the US site Alternet. Some extracts from that interview:

" You have this nexus of the iron fist of US militarism that is backing up the so called "hidden hand" of the free market. And so what we see is that the United States will economically target countries, then have that targeting of them with economic neo-liberalism backed up by brute military force- by supporting military dictatorships, by interfering in elections"......

" One of the unfortunate but predictable realities of the political moment that we're living now is that the Obama administration has continued some of the most atrocious policies of the Bush administration- and unfortunately has implemented policies that, in some cases, are worse than those of the Bush administration. If you look at the Obama administration's position on prisoner rights issues, on civil liberties issues, on domestic spying issues, on issues of war and peace, the Obama administration in some ways is worse than the Bush administration".

I have written earlier pieces about Jeremy Scahill's work here.

In memory of Charles Moore civil rights photographer

Martin Luther King taken into custody Montgomery Alabama 1958
photo copyright Charles Moore/Black Star

Fire hoses turned on demonstrators Birmingham 1963
photo copyright Charles Moore/Black Star


Sad to hear of the death recently of the American photojournalist and photographer Charles Moore who died on March 19 aged 79. Charles Moore was perhaps the most influential photographer of the American civil rights movement. His black and white photos captured the hatred of southerners and the violence inflicted by police and white authorities on African American protesters. To capture his photographs Moore immersed himself in events as they unfolded, often at great physical peril. Moore's photos were instrumental in generating national and international support for the civil rights movement.

There are excellent pieces on Charles Moore in the New York Times here, and here

A selection of his civil rights photos can be viewed here

Political symbolism and Health Care Reform in the US

Cartoon by Mr Fish TruthDig

Just how historic is the passage of the Obama and Democrats Health Care Reform Bill? Here are two US commentators whose views I respect.

Firstly here is Ralph Nader (from a piece in the New York Times):

The health insurance legislation is a major political symbol wrapped around a shredded substance. It does not provide coverage that is universal, comprehensive or affordable. It is a remnant even of its own initially compromised self — bereft of any public option, any safeguard for states desiring a single payer approach, any adequate antitrust protections, any shift of power toward consumers to defend themselves, any regulation of insurance prices, any authority for Uncle Sam to bargain with drug companies, and any reimportation of lower-priced drugs.

Most of the health insurance coverage mandated by this legislation does not come into effect until 2014, by which time 180,000 Americans will die because they were unable to afford health insurance to cover treatment and diagnosis, according to Harvard Medical School researchers.

In his Truth Dig column Chris Hedges has this to say about the Bill:

The claims made by the proponents of the bill are the usual deceptive corporate advertising. The bill will not expand coverage to 30 million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect until 2014. Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors. The $1.055 trillion spent over the next decade will add new layers of bureaucratic red tape to what is an unmanageable and ultimately unsustainable system.

This bill is not about fiscal responsibility or the common good. The bill is about increasing corporate profit at taxpayer expense. It is the health care industry’s version of the Wall Street bailout. It lavishes hundreds of billions in government subsidies on insurance and drug companies. The some 3,000 health care lobbyists in Washington, whose dirty little hands are all over the bill, have once more betrayed the American people for money. The bill is another example of why change will never come from within the Democratic Party. The party is owned and managed by corporations. The five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of 2009."

50th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre

Sharpeville
Dennis Brutus

What is important
about Sharpeville
is not that seventy died:
nor even that they were shot in the back
retreating, unarmed, defenseless
and certainly not
the heavy caliber slug
that tore through a mother’s back
and ripped through the child in her arms
killing it

Remember Sharpeville
bullet-in-the-back day
Because it epitomized oppression
and the nature of society
more clearly than anything else;
it was the classic event

Nowhere is racial dominance
more clearly defined
nowhere the will to oppress
more clearly demonstrated

what the world whispers
apartheid with snarling guns
the blood lust after
South Africa spills in the dust

Remember Sharpeville
Remember bullet-in-the-back day

And remember the unquenchable will for freedom
Remember the dead
and be glad.

© Dennis Brutus

Monday this week- the 21st March- marked the 50th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre, an event that proved to be a turning point in the struggle to overthrow the South African apartheid regime. Survivors and families of victims met in Sharpeville to remember the events that occurred over 50 years ago and lay wreaths at the cemetery on the gravestones of those killed.

On March 21 1960 some 7000 demonstrators rallied at the township of Sharpeville in the Transvaal to protest the hated pass laws that required black and colored South Africans to carry a pass book. Police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing 69 and injuring over 200. Many of the victims were women and children.

The massacre proved to be a catalyst for armed resistance and international condemnation of the Apartheid regime.

What is interesting about Sharpeville is that the demonstrations were organized not by the African National Congress (ANC), but by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) , a break away group dissatisfied with the pace and intensity of the ANC's campaigns. The PAC proved to be the party of action in the struggle against apartheid. The PAC still exists in South Africa but is struggling to survive as a political force.

Ironic to note as well that the 50 years after the Sharpeville massacre the celebrations are taking place amidst a backdrop pf protests and demonstrations by impoverished black communities demanding basic services such as clean water, housing and electricity that the ANC government has failed to deliver.

In South Africa since 1994 March 21 is Human Rights Day. March 21 is also the International Day for Elimination of Racial Discrimination in memory of the massacre.

The UK Guardian has an audio sideshow that relives the events of March 21 1950 through the account of survivor Ikabot 'Ike' Makiki.

The story of Rachel Corrie

Image by Robert Shetterly, from Americans Who Tell the Truth

"The international media and our government are not going to tell us that we are effective, important, justified in our work, courageous, intelligent, valuable. We have to do that for each other, and one way we can do that is by continuing our work, visibly. People without privilege will be doing this work no matter what, because they are working for their lives. We can work with them, and they know that we work with them, or we can leave them to do this work themselves and curse us for our complicity in killing them.”

Rachel Corrie, activist and writer (1979–2003)

Rachel Corrie was just 24 years old when she died; crushed by an Israeli bulldozer operated by Israeli Defence Forces while protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes in the Gaza strip. Corrie was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement at the time and was trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a Palestinian family- a pharmacist, accountant, their wives, and five young children.

Five years ago her parents and family initiated a criminal lawsuit against the state of Israel claiming unlawful and wrongful death and seeking to hold the Israel military liable for Rachel's death. A civil court trial finally got underway in Haifa this week.Due to Israeli border policies, no Palestinians from Gaza will be allowed to attend, including the physician who treated the injured Rachel Corrie and also certified her death.

The Israeli authorities have always claimed that the death was accidental and that Corrie was acting illegally and with reckless disregard for her own life, even claiming she was a human shield for the smuggling of weapons. At the time the area was targeted by the Israeli military because it was located near the Egyptian border through which they claimed weapons were being smuggled.

Eye witnesses have always claimed that the bulldozer deliberately ran over Corrie and then reversed over her.

In Israel there are very different responses to the Rachel Corrie case. Israeli activist and political commentator Neve Gordon has written a piece about the significance of the civil case being pursued by Rachel Corrie's family. Gordon points out that the Israeli government is particularly sensitive to stories- like Rachel Corrie's death- and is doing all it can to control and shape the narrative of this story. Others have reported on the villification of the Corrie family by some Israeli citizens.

In Tel Aviv this week Simone Bitton's movie Rachel was shown. The movie is a cinematic inquiry into Rachel Corrie's death.

Other pieces about the trial and the case can be read here.

Chris Abani: Harrowing poem of the death of a 14 year old political prisoner

Chris Abani's poem Ode to Joy on a wall of the building in the city of Leiden, The Netherlands The image is courtsey of Wikipedia Commons

The first time I heard Chris Abani was on Radio National's Late Night Live where he was interviewed by Phillip Adams. It was one of the most remarkable interviews I have heard.

Chris Abani is a Nigerian born poet, author and musician who wrote his first novel aged 16. In 1985, aged 18, he was imprisoned by the Nigerian government who believed his novel was a blueprint for a coup. Over the next 6 years Abani was imprisoned many times by the Nigerian authorities for his writings and political activism and in 1991 he went into exile in London, and eventually the USA, where he now lives. Abani takes the experiences and trauma of his time spent as a political prisoner and turns it into powerful poetry and prose.

The poem Ode to Joy, like many of his poems are about people he saw tortured and murdered in prison. It tells a story that is profoundly shocking and alarming.

Ode to Joy by Chris Abani

John James,14,
refused to serve his conscience up
to indict an innocent man.
Handcuffed to chair, they tacked his penis
to the table
with a six inch nail
and left him there

to drip
to death
3 days later.

Risking death, an act insignificant
in the face of this child’s courage,
we sang:

Oje wai wai,
Moje oje wai, wai.

Incensed
they went
on a
killing rampage.

Guns
knives
truncheons

even canisters of tear-gas,
fired close up or
directly into mouths, will
take the back
of
your head off
and many men
died singing,
that night.

Notes caught,
surprised,
suspended
as blows bloodied mouths,
clotting into silence.

Random thoughts*: the barbarism of neoliberalism

image courtesy of Education Notes Online

"The age of neo-liberalism is still with us despite everything.... no major figure of the neo-liberal cause, anywhere in the world, has recanted or acknowledged the disastrous consequences of their failed revolution.

The citadels of power, status and wealth across the globe still hum to the dynamics, logics and cliches of neo-liberalism despite the devastation they have wrought both recently, and across the whole of the last thirty years".

Gerry Hassan, The Future of the Left and neo-liberalism's failed appeal as a liberation movement

* Random thoughts is a weekly attempt to use the words and thoughts of others to illuminate aspects of contemporary life here in Australia and Western Australia.

Challenging the Market

Over on one of the other blogs I edit- Challenging the Market- are two new pieces by West Australians who write on contemporary social and political issues.

Susie Byers shows that a publicly run woman's prison can deliver successful outcomes in terms of rehabilitation and integration of prisoners into the community. Sarah Burnside critiques the market logic and contradictions involved in Opposition Leader Tony Abbot's plans to reform the Disability support pension.

Challenging the Market is an initiative of the WA Social Justice Network (of which I am the co-convenor) to publicize the writings of Western Australian citizens and activists who support economic, environmental, racial and social justice. The extension of market, corporate and business values into so many spheres of daily life is detrimental to the wellbeing and social fabric of WA. Relying on the market to solve social and environmental problems it has created is shortsighted and dangerous.

The blog provides a space for people concerned about the extension of market, corporate and business values into so many spheres of daily life with the resulting debasement of democracy, public policy, civic life and political debate. The blog is part of a larger project to challenge the dominant market and corporate worldviews.

When poetry comes to haunt you: The Distance between Two Doors

image courtesy of The Distance Between Two Doors

One of my favourite blogs has reappeared after a period off line. The blog The Distance Between Doors is dedicated to poetry and literature, particularly Arabic poetry and literature. The blog also publishes work of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish that is otherwise unavailable in Australia. For poetry fans the Distance Between Doors is an experience to savor.

A previous piece of mine about the blog can be found here. A recent post on Distance Between Doors contains this poem by Mahmoud Darwish.

I Used to Love Winter
By Mahmoud Darwish

In the past, I was inclined to love winter,
and I listen to my body.
Rain, rain, like a love letter pours licentiously
from the imprudent heavens.
Winter. A cry. An echo
hungry for the embrace of women.
In the distance, the steamy breath
of a horse carrying clouds...white, white.
I used to love winter, to walk joyfully to my
rendezvous in space drenched in water.
My love used to dry my short hair with
Long hair luxuriant with wheat and chestnuts.
She was not content with singing
I and winter love you,
so stay with us! She would warm my heart
on two hot gazelle fawns.
I used to love winter,
and I would listen to it,
drop by drop.
Rain, rain like an appeal to a lover,
Pour down my body!
Winter was not lament pointing
to the end of life. It was the beginning. It was hope.
So what shall I do, as life falls like hair?
What will I do this winter?

Lu Guang: photographer of pollution in China

a migrant worker washing in a polluted pond in the Chinese city of Guiyu which has been called the electronic waste capital of the world
photographs by Lu Guang from Chinahush.com

I have posted before about the chilling and haunting photographs of industrial pollution in China taken by photographer Lu Guang who was awarded the 2009 Eugene Smith grant in humanistic photography for his work. There is an interview with Lu Guang here where he talks about the side of China that Westerners don't see. Lu points out that the people whose villages have been destroyed by pollution have not benefited at all from the so called "miracle of the Chinese economy".

In the interview Lu explains the cause of the environmental destruction he has photographed:

"The root cause of pollution is businesses want to get more profits, business owners want to get more profits, put aside their own moral and destroy environment. They gained more profits, and that's it"

Here is a link to a New York Review of Books article on Lu Guang's photos by China specialist Orville Schell.

In my hands are new books by Patti Smith and Zygmunt Bauman

Just back from my favourite Perth bookshop Planet Books with two new books- Just Kids by Patti Smith and Living on Borrowed Time by Zygmunt Bauman.

I love the feel and look of new books and tonight I will start reading them both.

Patti Smith's book Just Kids is about her life in New York in the 1960's and 1970's and her relationship with photographer and artist Robert Mapplethorpe. An earlier piece on the book and some reviews can be read here along with other blog pieces on Patti Smith. There is also an earlier piece I wrote on Patti Smith's last album of covers.

Zygmunt Bauman's new book is organized around a series of conversations with Citali Rovirosa-Madrazo in which Bauman explores the causes and implication of the global financial crises and discusses some of the big contemporary moral and political issues.

Bauman, who is now aged 85, remains one of the most challenging and interesting social and political thinkers and writers around. He always challenges contemporary wisdom. I have been a big fan since the late 1980's after reading his masterly book Modernity and the Holocaust.

Commentary on both books will appear in later blogs.

Sunday's poem- "That world sold and bought"

I dream by night the horror
That I oppose by day.
The nation in its error
And by its work and play

Destroys its land, pollutes
Its streams, and desecrates
Air and light. From the roots
It dies upwards, our rights

Divinely given, plundered
And sold by purchased power
That dies from the head downward
Marketed hour by hour

That market is a grave
Where goods lie dead that ought
To live and grow and thrive,
The dear world sold and bought

To be destroyed by fire,
Forest and soil and stone.
The conscience put to hire
Rules over flesh and bone

To take the coal to burn
They overturn the world
And all the world has worn
Of grace, of heath. The gnarled

Clenched and forever shut
First of their greed makes small
The great life. Hollowed out,
The soul like the green hill

Yields to the force of dearth.
The crack in the despot's skull
Descends into the earth,
And what was bright turns dull

Wendell Berry from Leavings Poems

Here in Western Australia the conservative Barnett Government is planning to log 372 hectares of forest containing jarrah trees that are over 500 years old. The reason- to produce charcoal. This act of environmental vandalism and destruction will deliver $160,000 to taxpayers.

When Government regulation saves lives

image courtesy of Truth Dig









The conservatives, free marketers and corporate types constantly talk about the "dead weight of government regulation".

They like to blame government regulation for just about everything- stifling the entrepreneurial spirit, limiting profits, imposing unnecessary costs on corporations and business, and restricting freedom. They even blamed government regulation for the 2008-2009 economic tsunami that reaked havoc worldwide, even though it was the lack of financial and economic regulation that was the primary cause of the collapse.

But government regulation saves lives. This is one of the lessons of the recent Chilean earthquake where strict regulation of building codes and standards prevented massive loss of life. The tragic loss of 800 Chilean lives could have been much worse if not for the strict building codes introduced by the democratically elected socialist Allende government* in 1972.

As Joe Conason points out the Chilean earthquake was 500 more times powerful than the Haiti earthquake where over 200, 000 lives were lost and building regulations non-existent. The difference was that the Allende government and democratic governments elected in Chile after the Pinochet military dictatorship demanded that every building use a strong column structure to ensure it remained standing after earthquakes.



* I have written previously about the violent overthrow in 1973 of the democratically elected Allende government by elements of the military and US Government, military, intelligence and corporate authorities

Currently playing- Donny Hathaway

The African American soul singer Donny Hathaway who died in 1979, aged just 34, is recognized as one of the great soul singers. His work has had such a lasting impact. Best known for his duets with Roberta Flack, Hathaway is one of my favourite performers. His live album These Songs for You Live and his last studio masterpiece Extension of Man have been playing on my CD today. This is music of such emotional power.

Much of his solo music, previously unavailable on CD, is being re-released. The live album These Songs for You, LIVE includes songs from two live albums previously unavailable on CD, as well as unreleased live songs. This is a truly remarkable live CD that captures the musical inventiveness, power and beauty of Hathway's music. As well as his own compositions (Someday We will all Be Free,The Ghetto) Hathaway covers classic songs such as You've Got a Friend (Carole King), Song for You (Leon Russell), Yesterday (The Beatles), He ain't heavy he's my brother, What's Going on (Marvin Gaye) and Superwoman (Stevie Wonder).

Hathaway is such a fine interpreter of song. He brings a profound dignity and humanity to the songs,but he sings and plays with such funk. His piano introduction to the Leon Russell penned song "A Song for You" is one of the most evocative introductions to a song in contemporary music. Russell's song has been widely recorded by other performers, but Hathaway's interpretation is in my view the finest.

Israeli and Palestinian families stand together against the Occupation

John Pilger has written a moving piece in the New Statesman on Israelis Rami and Nurit Elhanan, the founders of Parents Circle- Families Forum a forum that brings together Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children during the conflict.

Pilger's piece tells how the Elhanan's lost their 14 year old daughter in a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem and how they are assisting a Palestinian family whose 10 year old daughter was killed by a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli soldier at point blank range.

Rani Elhanan has written a long piece on his personal story and how he came to be involved in the Forum. In it are these quotes:

"As the son of a holocaust survivor, I believe the world had a responsibility for what happened 60 years ago when my grandparents were sent to the gas chambers. The world also has a responsibility today as well, and the world’s behavior is a shame! Today, while these two crazy peoples are massacring each other without any mercy, the free and civilized world led by the US is not only stand aside but rather supporting one side unconditionally at the expense of both sides, prolonging the suffering of both sides. More pressure needs to be put on both sides and especially on the stronger side to return back to the negotiating table and sit down and talk instead of killing each other"

"As far as I’m concerned, the basic and most important thing about The Forum of Bereaved Families for Peace is that it is a joint venture of the two sides. It is a venture of people who paid the highest price possible yet are still able to put aside the anger and the natural will to retaliate by talking. They see this path as the only means of getting anywhere and breaking the endless and meaningless cycle of violence. And this is really the message, if we who lost our loved ones and paid the highest price possible… if we can talk to one another then anyone can. We are proud that this is not a political organization. We won’t tell the politicians where to draw the lines or how to phrase the articles of the peace treaty because this gives us enormous power to talk to anyone despite the very deep political divide in Israel"