Housing Is A Human Right!
Article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 11.1 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights establish this.
Hello Friends and Comrades,
Here are our podcasts for the past month:
SNV Holiday Special Report 2023:
SNV Special Interview: Gertrude Brown Community Land Trust:
SNV Special Interview: Integrated Activism And New Simple Harvester:
BDS: Socialist News And Views Episode # 54:
The first podcast of the last month was our Holiday Special to finish out 2023. We discussed some basic ideas of Islamic teaching, including The Five Pillars of Islam. Also included as an important part of this Special was Zionist Logic By Malcolm X (1964), which discussed Israeli Zionists which it said “successfully camouflaged their new kind of colonialism.” We also included a recipe for Lokma, and Swedish music in solidarity with Palestine from the 70s and 80s band Kofia.
Malcolm X wrote Zionist Logic the same year he made a Hajj to Mecca. In its last section titled “Messiah?” he writes in part:
Did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves just based on the "religious" claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago? Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain. Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a new Moroccan nation...where Spain used to be, as the European Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?
To be clear, the answer to these rhetorical questions is a strong “NO!” Even by the Capitalist World Powers own supposed international laws, this dispossession is against humanity. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 reads:
1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
The Nakba, or “Catastrophe,” for Palestinians started before this proclamation by the United Nations General Assembly, but the displacement continued long after, and as we can see now in Gaza, is still ongoing.
Indigenous people here in Minnesota and Minneapolis also continue to face displacement and dispossession of their ancestral lands. We see this mostly clearly with the ongoing sweeps and forced relocation of Camp Nenookaasi. The vast majority of those residing in the camp are Indigenous people.
For our second podcast of the last month, we spoke with two Founders and Organizers with Gertrude Brown Community Land Trust (GBCLT). They are just getting started with fundraising and planning to buy land and build a tiny house community on the North Side of Minneapolis. They originally organized to provide housing for the Near North Encampment. They plan to give these houses free or for a nominal $1 purchase price to unhoused folks,
“We need an exit plan that will put the land back in the hands of the original stewards of this land,” said Manuel, one of the founders of GBCLT. Manuel supports a diversity of tactics and a united front to use multiple approaches to solve the housing crisis for residents in the Twin Cities. The Red Road Village that Little Earth and American Indian Movement (AIM) are working on, is one example of similar work that is happening to provide housing to residents and relatives in the Twin Cities. Look out for more events, fundraisers, and involvement opportunities with Gertrude Brown Community Land Trust, Red Road Village, Camp Nenookaasi and others that are working in the community to house our neighbors.
In our third Special this past month, we spoke with Alexis Zeigler, a Founder of Living Energy Farm in Virginia and writer who published the book Integrated Activism - Applying the Hidden Connections Between Ecology, Economics, Politics, and Social Progress. That book says:
Political changes move on a short curve. The pendulum swinging one way and then another in relatively short spans of time. Ecological changes move on a long curve with large powerful changes occurring over great spans of time. One of the primary purposes of this book has been to show that there is an intimate if often invisible relationship between the short curve and the long curve. The short curve of change compels our attention. The long curve moves like a silent mighty wave under the surface.
For at least the last century the long curve has been moving in the same direction of the short curve of politics. To say that differently the expansion of the fossil fuel industrial economy has supported the expansion of the number of people who participate in democratic processes. Economic growth has supported the expansion of civil liberty. This has reinforced our tendency to look at the short curve as being independent of the long curve. By all appearances victory comes from winning the political argument.
We are focused on the short curve but the long curve absolutely trumps the short curve over time and the long curve is turning.
Ultimately, this is the reason we all feel so desperate and helpless. The material conditions we are confronted with ecologically are restricting our political possibilities as a global society. Fossil fuel-based capitalist, imperialist, colonialism is butting up against the constraints of our environment. We are heading into a more and more serious version of what Engels and Marx called "the enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces" in the Communist Manifesto.
Our most distressing, obvious, and glaring example of our inability to significantly stop or slow the current era of this capitalist, imperialist, colonial, barbarism is the ongoing assault by Zionist Unites States and Israel on the innocent civilians of Gaza. The ongoing mass killing of civilians, and destruction of houses, universities, mosques, churches, markets, media outlets, and even graveyards.
Which brings us to our most recent Regular Episode - BDS: Socialist News And Views Episode # 54. The episode includes a reading of Abe Louise Young: New Seeds for Old Stories. It reads in part:
Today, I learn that the editor of the Jerusalem desk for the New York Times lives in a house built above a house stolen from a Palestinian editor and BBC Arabic Service journalist named Hasan Karmi. Hasan was forced under threat of death to leave his home, lemon trees, birds, words, books, world. The Karmi family became refugees from Palestine in 1948 so a Jew fleeing Nazi Europe could move into their house (free of charge), could call it his own address and refuge: Israel.
Again, this is the same year the United Nations decided that housing is a human right - which it says includes “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services”.
The Episode also includes a speech entitled, Divestment: A Strategy to End the US-backed Israeli Occupation by Sherry Wolf. The speech is from 2011, but the fact that the displacement of Palestinians has been going on for decades, means much of the speech is just as relevant today. The accusation that anyone who disagrees with Israel is “antisemitic” or “a self-hating Jew” is also familiar. Beyond simply an awareness campaign of the “humanitarian crises” for Palestinians, which is funded by the United States, Wolf says “we have to take the sentiment and turn it into active opposition to the State of Israel and a defunding campaign from the US.” She said, at that time, Israel received $13,000 per capita in support from the US. The US, she says, gives the State of Israel credibility, as it is necessary for the Unites States’ imperialist project, but, Wolf says, we need to make Israel “a pariah” on the world stage.
We also discuss the recent charges of Genocide brought by South Africa against the State of Israel at the International Court of Justice, which were signed on December 28, 2023. Even in December, the Application Instituting Proceedings read, “Over 355,000 homes equivalent to more than 60 per cent of Gaza’s housing stock in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed. 1.9 million Palestinians — approximately 85 per cent of the total population — have been internally displaced.”
And yet the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, first signed in 1966, says in Article 11.1 it recognizes “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.” In Article 11.2, it recognizes “the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger.”
The December Application by South Africa states, “Most of the Palestinian people in Gaza are now starving, with levels of starvation rising daily.” This starvation continues and worsens to this day.
Even though this international human right to housing has been well established, the United States continues to fully support Israel in depriving Palestinian people of housing, and many other basic fundamental rights, like food. The United States Government also continues to displace and deprive people of housing here at home.
Unfortunately, the “international community” which, for all intents and purposes, represents the international governments of the world, and primarily the most powerful imperialist powers, has failed to find a way to solve this crisis that impinges on what they even recognize as our most fundamental human rights. Even a finding of genocide at the International Court of Justice will likely not change the situation. Only the working people of the world will, ultimately, be able to join together and force the powerful of the world to see us all as human beings. If this is done, it will likely be done with a diversity of tactics, including education, strikes, boycotts, protests, and other strategies we may not have even dreamed up yet.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day was this month, and in The Social Organization of Nonviolence in 1959, Dr. King wrote in part:
Our present urgent necessity is to cease our internal fighting and to turn outward to the enemy, using every form of mass action yet known--create new forms--and resolve never to let them rest. This is the social lever which will force open the door to freedom. Our powerful weapons are the voices, the feet, and the bodies of dedicated, united people, moving without rest toward a just goal.
MLK was speaking of defeating southern segregationists, specifically, at this time, but the basic concepts still apply.
I encourage all readers to find a way to plug in to the fight for a Free Palestine, Human Rights and Workers Rights!
Solidarity,
Nick Shillingford - Host - Socialist News and Views
P.S. Check out this SPEECH at the March for Gaza in Washington D.C. from Civil Rights Leaders Dr. Cornel West.