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Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch.

On Sunday, January 8, president of the Sanaa-based government in Yemen, Mahdi al-Mashat, congratulated the thousands of protesters who participated in the “siege is war” rallies held across the country a day earlier to denounce the Saudi-led war and blockade.

Al-Mashat said that by participating in the rallies, the Yemeni people had once again shown their united opposition to the external aggression directed at their country and the suffering that the war has unleashed on millions of people.

Al-Masirah reported that thousands of Yemenis took to the streets in capital Sanaa and several other cities on Saturday, January 7, denouncing the Saudi Arabia-led and U.S.-assisted aggression and blockade of Yemen.

The protesters carried banners and posters denouncing the U.S.-Saudi collaboration in the war against Yemen and demanded an immediate end to the siege of the country. Protesters asserted that the blockade was another form of warfare against the people of Yemen.

Protesters also raised the issue of the uncertainty created following the collapse of a rare UN-led ceasefire in October. Speaking at the protests, Sa’ada Governor Mohammad Jaber Awad said that the “status of no war and no peace” should end as soon as possible as it allows the continued looting of the country’s natural resources, Press TV reported.

Ever since the Houthis took control of Sanaa, a Saudi Arabia-led international military coalition has been waging a war in Yemen, calling the Houthis an Iranian proxy. The coalition has also imposed a comprehensive land, sea, and air blockade of Yemen, preventing the movement of both people and goods. The war and the siege have killed thousands of people and caused massive suffering for millions.

According to UN estimates, over 377,000 people have been killed in the war so far and millions have been displaced from their homes. Over seven years of war have also severely devastated the health and other civilian infrastructure of Yemen, already the poorest country in the Arab world. According to one estimate, despite the ceasefire, over 3,000 Yemenis were killed or injured last year alone.

The United States has been supplying weapons worth billions of dollars to Saudi Arabia and its allies and has provided technical and other forms of assistance to the coalition forces in the war. After facing global criticism for its role in creating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, newly elected President Joe Biden decided to end the U.S. role in the war in Yemen in February 2021.

However, despite publicly announcing the end of its role in the war, the United States has continued supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia and its allies. There are also reports of its forces being involved in implementing the siege on Yemen.

EAST JERUSALEM — Surrounded by bulldozers, Ola Nababta clung to her son’s grave to prevent Israeli authorities from razing his remains.

“Pour the earth over me and bury me beside him,” the 54-year-old told Israeli soldiers.

شاهد| المقدسية أم علاء نبابتة تحتضن قبر ابنها لحمايته من عمليات النبش والتجريف التي يجريها الاحتلال في المقبرة اليوسفية في القدس المحتلة. pic.twitter.com/ER2n0fJ3vD

— المركز الفلسطيني للإعلام (@PalinfoAr) October 25, 2021

That particular day in October, she was successful in stopping the Israeli government from exhuming her son’s grave. But more than six months later, al-Yusufiya cemetery in East Jerusalem remains under threat as the city’s government plans to build a promenade over the land, as part of a proposed “Bible Trail,” a string of national parks.

In February, the Jerusalem Municipality’s planning board rejected objections from Muslim religious authorities and Palestinian landowners against the municipality’s seizure order for part of the cemetery to construct the park. Court hearings are still ongoing as the parties debate the ownership of the cemetery and objections to the confiscation order.

‘Picnics Alongside Graves’

Mustafa Abu Zahra, head of the Committee for the Care of Islamic Cemeteries, described the municipality’s actions as an attack against graveyards and a violation of the Palestinian people’s rights.

“How can people go and have picnics on the side of graves?” Abu Zahra told Toward Freedom.

According to Abu Zahra, seven graves are located in the area set to be expropriated, with many more that are unmarked.

Part of the cemetery belongs to the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, a Muslim body responsible for managing holy sites in East Jerusalem. The other section belongs to the el-Uweisat family. While the family’s section was a sheep market during most of the 20th century, it has since become a parking lot.

The Jerusalem Development Authority together with Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) began construction in the cemetery last year, telling Toward Freedom they have received all of the necessary permits and court approvals for construction. In October, human bones were found during excavation works at the cemetery, sparking widespread protest. Nababta was one of those protecting their loved ones’ graves from Israeli bulldozers. Despite Palestinian resistance to the project, authorities finished building a fence dividing the cemetery and demolished a staircase in late 2021.

The municipality argues the area in question is defined as a public green space. “The graves that were shown in the media were built in the open public area outside the cemetery,” a spokesperson for the Jerusalem municipality told Toward Freedom. In 2014, Israel banned Palestinians from being buried in the cemetery and later poured concrete over around 40 graves.

“Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that no tomb was damaged during the works, and there is no intention to displace any grave, even if built illegally,” the spokesperson continued, adding the park is meant to improve Muslim residents’ quality of life and make the area more accessible.

‘Zero Trust’

Al-Yusufiya cemetery was established at the beginning of Muslim rule over Jerusalem and expanded during the reign of Al-Nasir Salah Al-Din Yusuf—the landmark’s namesake. The graveyard is an extension of Bab al-Rahma cemetery, located next to Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound. It became known as Martyrs’ Cemetery after Palestinian and Jordanian soldiers who fought during the 1967 Six-Day War were buried there. A monument to the deceased soldiers is located inside the graveyard.

Abu Zahra explained the Waqf has a document dated before 1967 from the Arab municipality of Jerusalem’s master plan stating the land surrounding Al-Aqsa will be designated as a burial site. Israeli authorities, however, are using evidence from before 1963 in court. Abu Zahra asserted the master plan is the latest decision, thereby eliminating all prior rulings.

Nababta, a widow whose husband and son are buried in al-Yusufiya cemetery and whose other two sons are buried in Bab al-Rahma, said she received permits from the Waqf to bury her relatives in the graveyards. Even with the legal documentation, INPA spent years summoning Nababta for interrogation about her sons’ graves. The Israeli authorities alleged her sons were buried on property belonging to INPA.

After her son, Alaa Nababta, was laid to rest in al-Yusufiya in 2017, the Israeli Ministry of Health contacted her, demanding her son’s body be removed.

The communications stopped, though, when her husband passed away in 2019. Then, in 2021, her concerns resumed when she saw Israeli authorities exhuming graves on social media.

“Most of my sons were ex-prisoners. They suffered. One of them was killed [by Israeli forces]. One of my sons was a prominent activist within Jerusalem. So, I know all of these stories and I have zero trust toward Israelis,” Nababta said.

‘We’re Always Threatened’

Since Israel’s establishment in 1948, authorities have confiscated roughly 70 percent of Mamilla cemetery, a burial ground in West Jerusalem, to create a municipal park called Independence Park, plus main roads and a school. In recent years, the government has built tourist facilities and begun constructing the Museum of Tolerance over the burial ground.

Several other cemeteries have also been dug up around Jerusalem.

“We’re always threatened, even when we are dead,” Nababta said.

While construction in al-Yusufiya cemetery has subsided, the 54-year-old mother said she will not stay silent if the bulldozers return.

“[Israel] says it’s a park and I’m not sure who it’s going to be serving,” she said. “But what I know now is that, as Muslims, it’s serving us as a graveyard.”

Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist reporting on Palestine and the Israeli occupation. You can follow her on Twitter at @jess_buxbaum.

 

Editor’s Note: The following opinion was originally published in Black Agenda Report.

It is an exhilarating time for the “leftists” of the Americas. This past week, at the 77th meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, leader after Latin American leader made grand statements against U.S. and Western imperialism, the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, the violations of human rights, and the West’s assault on the sovereignty of smaller nations. Colombia’s brand-new president, Gustavo Petro, made an impassioned plea against the genocidal “War on Drugs.” Cuba’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla, rejected the attacks on the sovereignty of China and Russia. Venezuela’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Faría railed against the Western sanctions against Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran and Russia. Honduran President Xiomara Castro demanded that the United States stop its attempts at destabilizing her country and strongly pushed against Western policies of intervention in the region. Nicaragua’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Denis Ronaldo Moncada Colindres, made perhaps the most explosive claims when he stated :

“The assault, the robbery, the disgraceful abominable depredation, the looting and the genocides unleashed by the colonialists and imperialists of the Earth, are the real crimes and they are the real criminals against humanity, and we denounce this… It’s time to say enough to hypocritical imperialism that politicizes, falsifies and denigrates the very human rights which they themselves violate and deny on a daily basis.”

Most of these leaders spoke to the urgent question of Cuba, calling for the lifting of the economic blockade against the country and for Cuba’s removal from the U.S.-created list of countries that supposedly “sponsor terrorism.”

Yet, for all the eloquent denunciations of imperialism and the impassioned defenses of Latin American and Caribbean sovereignty and independence, one country was conspicuously avoided: Haiti. Not a single one of these countries applied their critiques of imperialism to Haiti. Sure, Cuba and Venezuela mentioned Haiti. Cuba’s representative called for reparations for the Caribbean for slavery, said that humanity owed a debt to the Haitian revolution, and stressed that Haiti needed international support “through a special contribution for its reconstruction and development.” Venezuela’s representative name-dropped Haiti within a list of countries, which have suffered bloodshed from “imperialism and supremacism.”

Beyond the casual mentions, the hollow rhetorics, and the empty invocations, there were no concrete critiques of the current imperial machinations in Haiti—of Haiti’s complete loss of sovereignty through the ongoing destruction of the Haitian state apparatus, of the current occupation of the country by the Western-led Core Group, and of the repression (and violent misrepresentation) of the Haitian people as they have taken to the streets to demand their sovereignty and call for an end to foreign intervention. Instead, the extension and intensification of foreign intervention appears to be the strategic end goal of not only the usual suspects of the West, but our supposed Leftist allies in the Americas.

One has to ask: Do the leaders of the region even know what has been going on in Haiti? Surely they know about the 2004 U.S./Canada/France-led coup d’etat against Haiti’s democratically elected president, and the Chapter 7 deployment of a United Nations occupation force (euphemistically known as a “peacekeeping” force). Indeed, it was Lula’s Brazil that led the military wing of that occupation that brought nothing but violence and devastation to Haitian peoples. Brazil’s active participation in that occupation led to the migration of thousands of Haitian workers to Brazil, where they provided cheap labor to build the infrastructure for the Olympics and World Cup. The savage racism experienced by Haitian migrants in Brazil, combined with the disappearance of work, led them to flee overland through Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border in search of asylum.

The leaders of the Americas must also know about the Core Group—the self-selected, unelected group of foreigners, with representatives from the European Union, the United States, Brazil, Canada, that was created during the early months of the occupation. The Core Group continues to control Haiti’s internal political affairs. They certainly know that the UN still occupies Haiti; after all, it is the left’s “anti-imperialist” darling, Andrés Manual López Obrador (AMLO), who is serving, along with the United States, as “co-penholder” and writing the UN Security Council’s imperial policies on Haiti. Similar to Brazil, will Mexico’s bid to play power-broker in the region come at the expense of Haitian people and Haiti’s sovereignty?

AMLO must know what he’s doing. After all, even as it gets celebrated for its “leftist” credentials, the Mexican government continues to collude with the U.S. Border Patrol to militarize its southern border against migrants, and enforce the U.S. “Remain in Mexico” policy. Meanwhile, Haitian and other Black migrants continue to suffer racist abuse in Mexico.

It is not lost on me that there is a deep-seated, racist view of Haiti as exceptional—and therefore exceptionally difficult to engage. The constant refrain from anti-imperialist groupings in the West is that Haiti is so “complex” and its sociopolitical terrain so difficult that there’s no way to truly understand what’s going on there. During a recent webinar against U.S. imperialism in Latin America, I brought up the current UN/US occupation in Haiti, only to have the host soberly agree with me that this was, indeed, an important problem to engage, but that, perhaps, Haiti needed a separate webinar. Many webinars later, discussion of Haiti’s destruction by a brutal Western imperialism, continues to get short shrift.

While we celebrate the rise of another “Pink Tide” in Latin America, the emergence of a truly multipolar world, with new economic and political alignments, it seems clear that Haiti will continue to be on the outside of “leftist” imaginations—beyond, of course, the non-specific words of “solidarity” thrown its way.

In a discussion on Twitter about the ways that Haiti appears— and dismissed—in global discourses, a colleague, Vik Sohonie lamented , “Haiti is unfortunately where all good will, solidarity, and Third Worldism goes to die… The ‘international community’ that occupies it, as you know, is Nepali, Brazilian. You get looked at funny elsewhere in the Carib if you compliment Haiti. It’s astonishing.” He’s not wrong. One of the reasons that the brutal UN military occupation of Haiti could fly under the radar was because it was populated by a multi-national and multi-racial military and civilian force. The United States admitted as much, as revealed in the Wikileaks files. Former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson lauded the occupation force (MINUSTAH) as a cheap source of U.S. power in Haiti, as it is made up of a multinational coalition of Western and non-Western forces, including countries ranging from Benin and Kenya to Brazil and Ecuador, who seem all bent on using Haiti as their training ground.

Why is it so easy for these nonwhite and oppressed nations to come and serve U.S. and Western imperial interests in Haiti? Could it be that they, too, have imbibed the dehumanized and, frankly, racist views about Haitian people? Is Haiti’s Blackness seen as the root cause of its problems and struggles—even by many Black people? One would think so if one reviewed the recent actions of the leaders of CARICOM who, also, deploy the dehumanizing language and white supremacist assumptions about Haiti that is the foundation of Western imperialist actions in the country.

This wasn’t always the case, of course. Back in 2004, under the leadership of PJ Patterson, CARICOM at least spoke up against the U.S./France/Canada coup d’etat against elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide (and this was despite his often problematic public positions against him). Jamaica was even threatened with sanctions—by the Bush administration’s Condoleeza Rice—if it attempted to provide Aristide asylum. The other bold voice was Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who railed against the coup and later provided direct support to Haiti’s masses through the PetroCaribe fuel subsidies.

Where are those voices now?

Perhaps if people in the region saw Haiti less as an abstraction and more as a place with real humans, citizens of the world, with the same claims to rights and livelihood, confronting a white supremacist imperialism, they would recognize the current denial of its sovereignty. Until that time, the Leftists of the Americas are betraying a people that have given so much to the struggles for sovereignty and independence in the region.

Jemima Pierre is an editor and contributor to Black Agenda Report, the Haiti/Americas Co-Coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace, and a Black Studies and anthropology professor at UCLA.