Hundreds Attend Jeff Halper Events in Winnipeg

Top: Jeff Halper speaking at the Canadian Mennonite University on January 25.

Above: Photo of packed auditoirum at Canadian Mennonite University.

Several hundred people took part in events organized throughout Winnipeg from January 24-26 to hear Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper discuss the current Gaza crisis and the apartheid conditions facing Palestinians living in the occupied territories and within Israel.

Halper, who is a founding member of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), spoke to over 120 peace activists on January 24, and to a packed auditorium at the Canadian Mennonite University on January 25. On January 26, he spoke to students at CMU, the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba.

Halper stressed repeatedly that the assault on Gaza, combined with the siege Israel imposed following its “withdrawal” in August 2005, have created a humanitarian disaster.

He also noted that the Israeli military escalation has nothing to do with security and everything to do with further humiliating the Palestinian people.

Discussing the similarities between Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and South Africa apartheid-era policies, he concluded the main difference was that many Israeli policies were “far worse.”

“Israelis already use ‘hafrada’, the Hebrew word for ‘separate’, (which is what apartheid means in Afrikaans), to describe these policies. The reality is that within Israel there is no controversy over whether or not this is apartheid. It is the reality. Even the wall we are building is called not a security wall but a separation wall.”

Using maps to illustrate his point, Halper pointed out that the Israeli goal over the last two decades has been to isolate the Palestinians into small, Bantustan-like regions, cut off from other Palestinian villages by an extensive network of Israeli settlements. The entire effort has been undertaken to ensure that there is no possibility of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

For Palestinians to travel in and out of these isolated communities, he noted, they had to pass through part of what he described as Israel’s “matrix of control” – the hated checkpoints. “These are the scenes of countless humiliations,” he said, noting it is routine for IDF soldiers to deny the elderly and sick trying to access medical appointments through the checkpoints.

The “matrix of control” is so much more sophisticated in Israel than it was in South Africa, Halper noted, that police forces from around the world are trained by Israel in “warehousing” populations successfully.

“This is not just a regional issue,” he noted. “The techniques they have used to imprison over one and a half million people in Gaza are being exported around the world.”

This was Halper’s second visit to Winnipeg, and was jointly organized by a number of organizations.

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