التصنيف: estaql

They dart across the football pitch in a blur of red, white, black and green, the colours of their jerseys echoing the Palestinian flags waving in the stands.

But the players of Club Deportivo Palestino are almost as far from Palestine as it is possible to be.

Located more than 13,000 kilometres (8,200 miles) away, the football club finds its home in La Cisterna, a suburb of Santiago, Chile — a sign of the unique role the South American country plays in the Palestinian diaspora.

Chile is home to the largest Palestinian population outside of the Middle East, with approximately 500,000 citizens of Palestinian descent. And as the latest war in Gaza unfolds, the rising death toll has hit close to home for many Chileans, for whom Palestinian culture is threaded into everyday life.

“We’re all subjects of this story,” Chilean rapper and musician Ana Tijoux told Al Jazeera, as she reflected on the ongoing war. “We all have to stand up.”

The conflict began on October 7, when the armed group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing 1,400 people and capturing hundreds more.

Ever since, Israel has led a bombing campaign against Gaza, the narrow Palestinian territory home to an estimated 2.3 million people. Supplies have been cut off. Hospitals have shut down. And more than 10,000 Palestinians have died in the blasts, with nowhere to go for safety.

Tijoux, a Latin Grammy winner, has participated in one of the country’s largest pro-Palestinian rallies to date, a concert to raise funds for the remaining hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank.

The history of violence and displacement that Palestinians have faced resonates with Tijoux, who has Indigenous roots in Chile.

One of the best-selling Spanish-language rappers of all time, Tijoux has even collaborated with the Palestinian British artist Shadia Mansour, with whom she released an Arabic-Spanish protest anthem, 2014’s Somos Sur.

“Why does what is happening in Palestine affect us? It has to do with colonisation, genocide, racism and ethnic cleansing. The same patterns of imperialism repeat,” Tijoux said.

Those patterns have, in part, shaped the large Palestinian diaspora in Chile. Three waves of migration have occurred since the end of the 19th century, according to Ricardo Marzuco, a professor at the Center for Arab Studies at the University of Chile.

The first came with the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s, as Palestinian merchants sought opportunities in Latin America. After the empire’s collapse, in the interwar period, a second outpouring occurred.

Then another major exodus began in 1948, when the state of Israel was formed and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced, in an event they refer to as the Nakba or “catastrophe”.

As a result of the economic losses, instability and political persecution they faced, many Palestinians travelled to the Americas to seek opportunities in emerging economies.

“It was the idea of the American dream,” said Marzuco.

Each successive generation that arrived in Chile created opportunities for more to follow, he added.

“It is related to the Arabic concept of extended family, the profound feeling of hospitality and solidarity,” Marzuco said. “The first that arrived and prospered invited relatives to work in their businesses, consolidating into an important community.”

A second-generation Palestinian Chilean, Marzuco said many Palestinians were also attracted to Chile for its mild coastal climate, similar to the Mediterranean environment of their homeland.

“They adapted well in Chile,” Marcuzo said. “There was an affinity with the weather, the environment, and certain elements that belonged to the Chilean landscape.”

Those early waves of Palestinian arrivals encountered xenophobia and racism in Chile, though. They were often lumped together with other Arab immigrants as “Turcos” or “Turks”, a term that grew to have a pejorative meaning.

But nowadays, Chileans of Palestinian descent are represented in some of the highest government offices. They include current mayor and former presidential candidate Daniel Jadue and Senator Francisco Javier Chahuán — politicians from opposite sides of the political spectrum. One is communist, the other right-wing.

“Solidarity with Palestine is expressed across political sectors,” said Marzuco.

Football also served as a means to build acceptance, according to Diego Khamis, the executive director of the Palestinian Community in Chile, an umbrella organisation that represents different Palestinian groups and businesses across the country.

Khamis is a loyal supporter of the Club Deportivo Palestino, a team founded by Palestinian immigrants in the 1920s.

“They thought one of the best ways to make Palestine visible is by creating a professional football club, so that ‘Palestine’ will appear in the newspaper at least once a week,” Khamis explained.

The team is part of the Palestinian Community in Chile. Since 1947, it has competed in the professional leagues and is regularly a leading contender in Chile’s Primera División, the country’s top league.

That gives it a platform to braid together Palestinian activism with football fandom, making slogans like “Free Palestine” a part of everyday life for its legions of supporters.

“At a time when the world was saying that Palestinians didn’t exist, in Chile, we knew it did. How can you say that something doesn’t exist when it’s so present here?” Khamis said.

The visibility of Chile’s Palestinian community has in turn shaped the country’s foreign policy, particularly in recent weeks.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric has repeatedly expressed support for Palestinian human rights since his inauguration in 2022, even withdrawing the country’s ambassador to Israel in condemnation of the current military offensive in Gaza.

“They’ve been among the first to take diplomatic action to protest what is happening,” Khamis said of Boric and his government.

Agustina Manzur, a 24-year-old makeup artist, has been surprised at just how great the outpouring of support has been since the start of the war.

A fourth-generation Chilean of Palestinian descent, she recently attended a protest outside the Israeli embassy in Santiago, Chile.

Dressed in her keffiyeh — a traditional Palestinian scarf — and carrying a Palestine flag, she arrived early. She was stunned to see the number of protesters already there.

Hundreds of people had gathered outside the embassy. The crowd grew so large that protesters spilled off the sidewalk and onto the busy road, cutting off traffic.

“It was comforting to see so many of us fighting for the same cause,” Manzur said. Lately, her social media has been awash with the devastation from Israeli attacks. “I couldn’t sleep. It totally consumed me.”

But she has found hope among members of Chile’s large Palestinian community and its supporters, all raising their voices against the war. She plans to protest again soon.

“We have to speak up because people in Gaza cannot. They don’t even have internet, light, or water,” Manzur said. “We cannot physically get Palestinians out, so the least we can do is protest for them.”

October 2023 has been a month of many victims. Bombs are raining on civilians in Sudan and Gaza while much less reported-on crises in Syria and Afghanistan continue to simmer with periods of uneasy silence punctuated by sharp bursts of violence. Armed conflict has led to record levels of death and displacement, and a reckoning of sorts is now facing the so-called international order. Each of these crises has an individual context and narrative that deserves to be understood on its own terms, but together they have raised overarching questions about the present and the future of international relations broadly, and international human rights (IHRL), humanitarian (IHL) and criminal law (ICL) more specifically. For possibly the first time since the Rwandan genocide and the break up of Yugoslavia, everyday people across the globe are trying to understand what international law is, why it matters, and why it feels as if it is doing nothing at this moment when we need it the most.

As practitioners in this space, we have been too slow to come to a coordinated defence of this admittedly fluid and politically complex area of law. That the political leaders of some of the wealthiest nations in the world initially refused, then tiptoed around, invoking international law as a red line for the Israeli armed forces in Gaza is a bleak development that is sure to have ramifications beyond the Middle East. It has taken simply too long for the United States and many of its European allies to offer tepid, overly qualified defences the value of international law in the context of Gaza. Witnessing this choice while reading news of escalated fighting in Syria, Sudan, Haiti, and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo caused a shiver down the spine of anyone who has ever walked into a war zone to try and help civilians while armed only with a manual on the laws of war and a flak jacket. As experts in genocide and international law have been pointing out, we are crossing a rubicon into a present and a future that none of these political leaders seem to have fully contemplated.

Those of us who work within these bodies of international law are accustomed to healthy doses of public cynicism about our chosen profession. Unlike domestic law, for example, there is no standing international police force that has the power to arrest or detain and so we are accustomed to being asked what power of enforcement such a law could have. While there are international tribunals like the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the inner workings of these institutions are poorly understood even by our peers who work in other areas of the law, who might not understand for example why the ICC can only prosecute individuals, or the ICJ can only deal with disputes between nations. And the long history of powerful nations opting out of even the most basic systems of responsibility and accountability within these bodies of law often leaves us fielding questions about whether this is merely a concept designed to constrain poor nations and not rich. There isn’t a version of these and other criticisms that you can come up with that we haven’t heard and debated at length.

But in many ways that is what makes international law a more compelling body of law, certainly for practice. It represents something that domestic law doesn’t – consensus. States agree to be bound by certain principles even if they know that there is limited power of enforcement because we have collectively experienced what life is like without these principles. States and other political entities willingly opt out of that grim reality. We have theories about why individuals obey domestic law and enter into social contracts, but with international law, we have the documented evidence through preparatory documents and conference proceedings of why states willingly agree to be bound by these ideas. It is naïve to suggest that at times it is not just a question of political expediency – many governments agree to these rules because they think they will never be affected by them. But for the vast majority of countries international law represents an ideal or an aspiration of how they would like international relations to be conducted.

It’s worth recalling that the most universally accepted documents of international humanitarian and human rights law at least are developed on the back of some of the worst atrocities in history. The Geneva Conventions came after the Battle of Solferino and the horrific suffering that soldiers and civilians endured even when they were not actively involved in the fighting. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide was a response to the Holocaust, and the 1951 UNHCR Convention on Refugees came after the nations of Europe and North America denied Jewish people fleeing that atrocity safety at their borders. The Rome Convention that led to the International Criminal Court was a response to the need for a permanent place to resolve the kind of mass suffering created by genocide and war in Rwanda and the Former Republics of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

It’s not that people didn’t know that they were doing bad things before these rules existed. Rather these treaties and conventions represent the need to make that knowledge explicit and to rally people around the idea that they must never be tolerated again. These bodies of international law represent the aspiration to conduct humanity in a different way from the worst ways we have behaved towards each other in the past. To reformulate a quote attributed to Dag Hammarskjold at the UN: the purpose of international law is not to get us into heaven but to save us from hell.

Similarly, in as much as those of us who study international law in university are primarily immersed in the Western canon, international humanitarian law is not a Western endeavour. In his searing speech at the Cairo Peace Forum in October, Jordan’s King Abdullah reminded listeners that Islam has long prohibited the targeting of non-combatants in the Pact of Umar, an edict issued in Jerusalem in the 7th century that prohibited Muslim soldiers from killing children, women, the elderly, from destroying the natural environment or harming priests or churches. I admit, I didn’t know about the edict before I listened to this speech, but it struck me as yet another situation in which a law may be codified or written out in a specific document at a specific time, but it actually represents a more universal underlying principle that all societies recognise and abide by, regardless. The underlying principle that unites both the Pact of Umar and the Geneva Conventions signed almost a thousand years later is that war is always a tragedy and we must do whatever we can to restrict the number of civilians who are affected by it.

The point of these bodies of international law is not universal compliance but universal aspiration towards compliance. In addition to the devastating loss of life, this underlying aspiration has been so publicly and seriously undermined by every single government and institution that has waited too long to demand that armed actors in Israel and Gaza abide by international law. These laws represent the belief that humanity is capable of better and that whatever that better is, it is worth orienting and coordinating all of our efforts towards it. If they cannot be defended in times like this then we are endorsing something truly ugly about what it means to be human. And we do this at the expense of every person who is depending on us to use them to reorient the behaviour of belligerents towards more humane conduct within the tragedy of war. International humanitarian law urges us to believe that there will be peace one day and when that peace comes, even those who are active in conflict deserve to be able to look at themselves in the mirror and not feel crushed by the weight of what they did while they were fighting.

Several governments in the global majority have rightfully drawn from these rules to try and prevent armed actors from becoming the worst versions of themselves in Sudan, Israel, Gaza and beyond. Those governments that are still tiptoeing around the issue may find it worthwhile to zoom out and look at the world in October beyond the Middle East for the bleak future we are facing without these principles. Belligerents in Sudan’s civil war have continued to bomb civilian neighbourhoods and add to the estimated seven million people already displaced in that conflict. In the DRC, rebels in parts of the east have taken to fighting again and the risk of spiralling is high as elections are planned for December. On October 22 in Ukraine, six people were killed in Kharkiv when the local post office was bombed, as that war continues. There are Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Afghanistan, fighting across the Sahel, Myanmar, and a long list of other places where we have to be able to ask people to protect civilian life, not just because they will be punished, but because we all agree that it is the right thing to do. In the same month that so many political leaders in the global minority have failed to do the bare minimum – to remind each other that these rules exist – the most fragile contexts in the world need them desperately to prevent further descent into hell.

History not learned from is bound to be repeated. These bodies of international law, for all their complexities, silences and limitations, are a prime example of human beings trying to learn from history. Those who wield power in the world have an obligation to be caretakers of our aspirations to be better. Abiding by these rules is the ideal but defending these previously agreed-upon principles is the bare minimum that we demand from governments around the world. And we who claim to be practitioners in this field have an obligation to voice this demand publicly and vocally. If we can’t achieve this bare minimum, then what are we doing? We have learned nothing and we are no better than the worst that came before us.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Al-Shifa Hospital director confirms deaths after Al-Buraq School was targeted.

At least 25 people were killed in Israeli attacks on a Gaza City school, said the director of Al-Shifa Hospital where the casualties were taken.

“We received 25 martyrs from Al-Buraq School after missile and artillery strikes targeted the school this morning,” director Mohammad Abu Salmiya of Gaza’s largest hospital complex told Al Jazeera on Friday.

While the Reuters news agency reported the director as saying at least 20 Palestinians had been killed, AFP news agency put the number at about 50 people.

Video footage shared on social media showed dozens of bodies strewn across the school in the Al-Nasr neighbourhood in the aftermath of the attack. People whose homes had been destroyed were sheltering in the school.

The Israeli army has intensified its bombardment of the Gaza Strip, repeatedly targeting schools, mosques and hospitals.

Last week, an Israeli air missile struck the Al-Fakhoora School run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing at least 15 people and injuring 54, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Thousands of people displaced due to Israel’s relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip had taken refuge at the Al-Fakhoora School. That was the third major attack on the Jabalia camp.

It came hours after a deadly strike on the Osama bin Zaid School sheltering displaced families in the Al-Saftawi area north of Gaza City, killing at least 20 people, according to local media.

At least 11,078 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. In Israel, the death toll stands at more than 1,400.

The Israeli strikes have damaged more than 50 percent of housing units across Gaza, according to officials. The United Nations humanitarian office said in a statement that if there is a “hell on Earth, it is northern Gaza”.

East Java, Indonesia – Umar Patek was released from prison last December after serving just over half of a 20-year jail sentence for the Bali holiday island bombings in 2002, which killed 202 people. He was also convicted for a series of bomb attacks on Christian churches on Christmas Eve, 2000, that left 18 dead.

On the run for almost a decade, 57-year-old Patek from Central Java was arrested in 2011 in Abbottabad in Pakistan and extradited to Indonesia where he was found guilty of bomb making and murder the following year. The US State Department had offered a reward of $1m for any information leading to his capture.

Patek’s early prison release for good behaviour in 2022 was sharply criticised by Australian officials and the relatives of the hundreds of victims of the Bali bombing.

Al Jazeera recently interviewed Patek at his home in East Java where he spoke about his role in Bali and revealed that the horrific bomb attack two decades ago was an act of revenge for the violence inflicted on Palestinian people by Israeli forces.

He also talked about repentance and of being unsure whether God would forgive him for killing so many civilians.

Al Jazeera: How did you become involved with Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the armed group behind the Bali Bombings? 

Umar Patek: In 1991, I was working in Malaysia and met Mukhlas [a senior JI figure who was sentenced to death and executed in 2008 for masterminding the Bali bombings] in Johor Bahru at the Lukman Hakim Islamic Boarding School.

I worked on a plantation in Malaysia, and would go to religious classes in the evening at the school. Then Mukhlas asked me to work at the school, so I moved in. After three months at the school, he offered me the chance to go to Pakistan. I wanted to study and he said I could study religion there.

I first went to Peshawar and then to Sadda, a tribal area in Pakistan which is close to the border with Afghanistan, where there was a military academy that trained people to be mujahideen [Islamic fighters]. From there I moved to a military academy in Torkham in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, I was in the same class as [Bali bomber] Ali Imron. In total, I was away for five years from 1991 to 1995.

We learned everything at the military academy to train us to be mujahideen, such as how to use weapons, map reading and bomb making. We practised blowing up bombs in areas where there were no people, like in caves or on hillsides, so that there would not be any fatalities.

We also wanted to make sure that no goats were accidentally killed because lots of people tend goats in Afghanistan.

 

When I finished my military training in 1995, I went to the Philippines to join the Moro Islamic Liberation Front because I supported their cause as a Muslim.

From 1995 to 2000, I lived at Camp Abubakar in the Bangsamoro region in the Philippines, but the camp was captured by the Philippine Army in July 2000 and I was told to leave because I looked like I came from the Middle East.

My family is originally from Yemen, although I am the fourth generation of my family to be born in Indonesia. My face didn’t look like the people in Moro.

In December 2000, I went back to Indonesia and stayed with Dulmatin [a JI member and one of the most wanted men in Southeast Asia who was nicknamed “the Genius” because of his expertise in electronics for bombs]. Dulmatin asked me to go to Jakarta for work. He had a job selling cars and he said I could also look for work there, which is how I became involved in the Christmas Eve church bombings.

AJ: You admitted to mixing the chemicals for the bombs used in the Bali bombing in 2002 and the Christmas Eve church bombings in 2000. But you also said you didn’t know what the bombs would be used for. Where did you think the bombs would be planted?

Patek: I did not mix the bombs for the church bombings, I only knew about the bombs at the time of delivery. It was Eid al-Fitr [the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan] and Dulmatin said, “Let’s go home to Pemalang for the holiday and drop off some things along the way.”

We kept stopping at churches, although I did not get out of the car. Every time we stopped at a church, I grew more suspicious that we were dropping off bombs because the packages were packed in laptop bags.

I was sentenced for the bombings even though I did not make the bombs or get out of the car because I was there and I didn’t do anything to stop it. Dulmatin then asked me to go on a trip to Bali in October 2002. We went into a house which was already full of bomb making equipment.

I met with [JI members] Imam Samudra, Mukhlas, Idris and Dr Azahari. Imam Samudra said that they wanted revenge for the occupation of Palestine and the attack on Jenin [by Israeli forces in 2002 which killed more than 50 Palestinians as well as 23 Israeli soldiers], so they wanted to bomb Westerners in nightclubs in Bali. He ushered me into one of the rooms in the house where all the ingredients to make the bombs had been prepared.

I told them, if we wanted to get revenge for the atrocities committed against Muslims in Palestine, we should go to Palestine and not kill Westerners in Indonesia. I asked them, “What is the relationship between these people who will be victims and your motive of revenge for Muslims in Palestine?”

I told them that if they wanted to kill Westerners in large numbers using a one-tonne bomb, it would not just kill the people in front of it. It would explode everywhere. I told them that it would kill lots of other people who were not their target.

I said that a bomb would also likely cause Muslim casualties. I asked them, “Who will take responsibility in the next world [paradise] if there are Muslim victims because of this bomb?”

Imam Samudra said that, on the day of judgement, everyone would be judged individually for their actions based on their intentions.

I felt that there was no way I could refuse. Imam Samudra had locked the front door of the house so that no one could leave.

So I did it, and made the last 50kg [110lbs] of the bomb.

AJ: More than 200 people died in Bali as a result of the bomb you helped to make. How do you feel about killing so many people?

Patek: I felt guilty when I mixed the materials for the bomb and I felt I was sinning. I felt I was breaking Indonesian law but, more than that, I felt it was a sin against God.

AJ: Do you consider yourself to be a mass murderer?

Patek: Yes. I feel that I am a murderer and a sinner.

I have apologised to the victims of the Bali bombing several times and met with the families of the victims of the bombing, too. I told them I was sorry. Everyone who has met with me in person has forgiven me. When I meet victims, I say, “I am Umar Patek and I was involved in the Bali bombing,” then I explain why I was there, and apologise.

Some people don’t want to meet me and don’t want to forgive me, like people from Australia. That is their right, but my responsibility as a Muslim, and someone who has done wrong, is to apologise. I don’t know if I will be forgiven, only God knows that.

I did not say sorry to get out of prison early, but everything is always wrong in other people’s eyes. If I say sorry, people say I am pretending and it is a strategic choice. If I didn’t apologise, people would say I was arrogant.

AJ: Did you agree with the 20-year prison sentence that you were given?

Patek: I accepted it at the time. There is nothing fair in this life on Earth, justice will only come in the hereafter.

AJ: Your release from prison was highly controversial, particularly in Australia, as you only served 11 years of your 20-year sentence. Should you have been freed?

Patek: I fulfilled all the criteria according to Indonesian law to qualify for release in 2022. I had also been very opposed to the idea of the Bali bombing from the beginning. The witnesses at my trial all said the same, which is why I was sentenced to 20 years in prison [only]. The central people in the Bali bombing were sentenced to death or died in other ways like Dulmatin, who was shot by the police.

I last saw him in June 2009, when I came home from the Philippines to Jakarta. He asked me to go to a JI military academy in Aceh, but I said I didn’t want to. I had had enough. I told him I was just transiting in Indonesia to get my passport and visa to go to Afghanistan. I wanted to live there for the rest of my life and I asked him to come with me, but he refused.

He [Dulmatin] was shot in Pemulang in Tangerang [a city on the outskirts of Jakarta]. I wondered if he had repented for his sins before he died. I never heard him say he felt remorse or sadness about the victims of the Bali bombing and about people who were not the target of the bombing. He never said anything about that and never asked for forgiveness.

So I was sad for him.

AJ: Is the killing of civilians ever justified?

Patek: When I was in the Philippines with the [Moro front], I lived with [the chairman] Salamat Hashim and he would often preach to us. He strongly forbade mujahideen from attacking civilians, not just Muslims but also Christians. He said that that was not allowed, and that only members of the army, or civilians who were fighting with the army, and who were also carrying weapons, were allowed to be attacked.

He once said to me, “Why do you want to wage jihad in Indonesia, who do you want to fight there? The president is Muslim, the government is Muslim, the People’s Representative Council is mainly Muslim, lots of police are Muslim, the army is full of Muslims. It is haram [forbidden] to attack them because attacking Muslims is not allowed.”

He felt that it was not right to attack people in Indonesia, and I said that at the time of the Bali bombing, but no one wanted to listen to me.

AJ: What are your thoughts on the Israel-Gaza war?

Patek: In the opening section of the 1945 Indonesian Constitution, it says that “all colonialism must be abolished in this world”.

Occupation anywhere, not just in Palestine, is not allowed.

It is Hamas’s right to take back their land. The news that they are killing babies and children is a hoax perpetrated by the Western media. Indonesia used to be occupied by the Dutch colonialists. Would you call Indonesian heroes, who fought for their independence, terrorists? The Dutch would call them terrorists, but they were just taking back their land.

AJ: Are you deradicalised now?

Patek: What is radicalised? If a Christian wants to follow their religion according to the teachings of the Bible, would we call them radicalised?

I feel that the media has a false image of me as someone who is frightening and cruel. They always paint me as someone who is dangerous.

People often ask me why I don’t want to be a terrorist any more and why I am so cooperative. I also say that it is from my family. They are the ones who melted my heart and set me back to the right path.

I am the oldest of three brothers. All my family members are moderate Muslims, none of them have ever followed the same ideology I used to follow, and they have often confronted me about it over the years.

If my family had said they did not want to have anything more to do with me because of my old ideology, perhaps I would still be radical in my thinking, but fortunately they embraced me and that allowed me to change.

AJ: How do you feel about non-Muslims?

Patek: When I was a child growing up, all my neighbours were Chinese Christians. I always used to play with them. Since I was young, I have always been around non-Muslims.

I don’t hate Christians. My wife’s extended family are Christians and, when we got married, we had no problems and took photos together on our wedding day.

When I married my wife, I invited all of her family to the wedding at Camp Abubakar. In the beginning, they didn’t want to come because they were worried we would cut their heads off. I told them that the mujahideen did not harm civilians, and that we only attacked the police and the army. I said that I guaranteed their safety.

In the Moro tradition, when someone got married, mujahideen would shoot their weapons in the air to celebrate. But because my wife’s Christian family was there, I told my fellow mujahideen, “Don’t do the traditional celebration because we have Christians coming and it will scare them.

“They will think we are trying to kill them.”

Protests at shipping ports and a unique court case are bringing attention to Australian weapons exports to Israel amid the war on Gaza, a trade that critics describe as secretive and unaccountable.

“Few people know that Australia has one of the most secretive, unaccountable weapons export systems in the world,” Australian Greens Senator David Shoebridge told the Australian Senate on Tuesday.

A legal challenge launched in Australia’s high court on Monday by Palestinian and Australian human rights organisations is also seeking to shed light on the shadowy trade.

The case, which is a first of its kind in Australia, comes as Australian supporters of Palestine have joined the international “block the boat” movement to protest against arms shipments to Israel.

A protest at Sydney’s Port Botany expected on Saturday followed a similar protest at the Port of Melbourne on Wednesday where activists lay down in front of trucks carrying cargo for the Israeli shipping company Zim.

But determining whether shipments from Australia do, in fact, include weapons that are being sent to Israel is difficult due to a general lack of transparency around Australia’s growing military export industry.

“Our government doesn’t tell us who we’re exporting weapons to; doesn’t tell us what the weapons are; doesn’t tell us who profits here in Australia from the sale of weapons,” Shoebridge said in the Senate this week.

The Australian government approves hundreds of military sales to Israel and we have no idea what the weapons are or how they are used. Even the US has more transparency on weapons sales than Australia. Time to tell the truth. pic.twitter.com/26FED23AvM

— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) November 7, 2023

 

Shoebridge said such information is much less available in Australia than in other countries, including the United States.

What is known is that Australia has issued 350 defence export permits to Israel since 2017, including 52 this year alone, according to the Australian Department of Defence. That information was only made publicly available after direct questions from Shoebridge during Senate hearings this year.

‘A large and growing arms industry’

Antony Loewenstein, an Australian journalist and author of the book, The Palestine Laboratory, said there is “damning evidence” that Western states, including Australia, have been selling weapons that are “potentially being used in Gaza as we speak”.

Loewenstein, who was based in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020, has investigated how Israeli weaponry and surveillance technology is used on Palestinians and exported around the world.

“There is bipartisan support [from major political parties] in Australia for a large and growing arms industry, regardless of the serious human rights concerns around that,” Loewenstein said.

“Secrecy benefits the arms industry”, he told Al Jazeera.

“What matters ultimately is making money,” he said.

“That’s all it’s about.”

Australia was the 15th largest exporter of major arms globally in 2022, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) which monitors global arms sales.

Like Shoebridge, Loewenstein has welcomed the legal challenge announced by Palestinian and Australian human rights organisations on Monday. He says it could be a “landmark case” that the Australian government will likely “fight furiously” in the courts.

Al-Haq, one of the three Palestinian human rights organisations involved in the court case, is also involved in other legal challenges, including another potential case focused on arms exports by the United Kingdom to Israel.

Last month Al-Haq and the UK-based Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) wrote to the UK Secretary of State for International Trade, Kemi Badenoch, asking her to “suspend all weapons export licences to Israel”.

If the export licences were not suspended, Al-Haq and GLAN said a judicial review challenge would be brought before the UK High Court.

In Australia, Al-Haq, along with the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), has launched legal action in the Federal Court of Australia with the support of the Australian Centre for International Justice (ACIJ).

Unlike in the UK, the Australian case is focused on accessing information about Australian defence export permits to Israel that have been granted by the Minister for Defence since October 7, 2023.

Rawan Arraf, the executive director of ACIJ, told Al Jazeera that access to the export information is required in order to establish if it will be possible to launch proceedings to seek a judicial review of Australian permits to determine if any have been “made in error”.

Such errors, Arraf says, could, for example, include whether Australia’s “Minister for Defence failed to consider criteria relevant to the risk that the export would be used to facilitate human rights abuses or may go to a country where they may be used contrary to Australia’s international obligations”.

The international obligations include the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention and other international human rights law, she said.

In the UK, information pertaining to companies that are making requests for export permits, as well as the nature of the exports, and “even the dollar amount”, is available, she added.

Asked about the legal action, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles told the Australian public broadcaster ABC on Tuesday that “Israel has not sought any weapons from Australia and we have not provided any”.

He added that he could not comment further while the matter was “before the court”.

Marles’s office sent a transcript of the interview to Al Jazeera when asked for the defence minister’s position on the case.

Port protests

Australian activists who protested at the Port of Melbourne on Wednesday stopped trucks, including those carrying cargo for the Israeli shipping company Zim.

The protests join other similar protests including one at the Port of Tacoma in the US and airport workers in Belgium who are refusing to handle military shipments to Israel.

Zim is a publicly listed Israeli shipping line, and it is not clear if any of the ships or trucks targeted by Australian protests have been carrying military equipment.

Organisers of the Sydney protest claimed Zim’s role “in the Israeli war machine, has been relentless”.

In an interview with Australian radio station 2GB about a protest planned at Sydney’s Port Botany on Saturday, the Premier of NSW Chris Minns described Israel as “a longstanding trading partner and ally of Australia”.

“It’s ridiculous to suggest or think that trade will be stopped because of the personal preferences of individual protesters,” he said.

“I didn’t see these people down the port when it comes to trading with Cuba, or Saudi Arabia or China or any other country there may be disagreements with,” Minns added.