"Maccabi, the chain level of war machinery"
- This week several anti-militarist, internationalist and refugee support groups have set up a conference in Vitoria-Gasteiz to put the weapons of Euskal Herria on the table. Under the motto “Armas Eusko Label de Guerra”, the organizers wanted to denounce that while the military team that is being produced here is used to crush human rights in distant armed conflicts, people fleeing these conflicts are denied civic acceptance.
And that is that the wars that take place thousands of miles from us, that push 70 million people into exile every year, have their origin in our own country. More than 100 Basque companies engaged in the arms industry in the Basque Country generate an annual profit of more than EUR 500 million.
The list is long. There are people working in the aerospace field, such as ITP or Aernova; who drive production towards the missile and military electronics, such as SENER; who manufacture war tanks and military vehicles, such as SAPA; or who, like SIDENOR, sell raw materials for weapons…
But in an increasingly globalized world, we don't just feed the machinery of war by selling weapons or their components. The University of War also feeds it, allocating its resources to research and military production; and the Basque Government, supporting official budgets with a sustained growth in military spending; and the banks, financing and investing the arms industry… The distance wars touch us more than we imagine.
We might think that humble citizens have little ability to intervene in this structure that warms up the gear of war, that we have little to say in the actions of those private companies and public entities that fill their pockets selling death. But we too have a great responsibility by dismantling the business of war and the strategy of ideological judicialization that justifies its consequences.
Next week, on 31st, one of the priority customers of this Basque labouring industry, Israel, will send one of its representatives to the Basque Country: The Maccabi of Tel Aviv. The solidarity movement with Palestine has denounced for over a decade that Maccabi is not just a sports team, but is a determining factor in the normalisation of the Israeli apartheid regime.
In particular, the Maccabi sports club has intervened directly in several war campaigns by the Israeli army; and the UN Human Rights Rapporteur, in his Goldstone report, has described these deadly Maccabites as war crimes.
In particular, in 2009, the Israeli group participated in a propaganda campaign in favour of the army, around the text of the military operation "Berun Urtua". The operation in which nearly 1400 people died in the northern Gaza Strip. In 2014 they organized a charity party in favor of the Association of Friends of the Army, in the days after the military operation “Barrier to Protection”. This operation resulted in the deaths of 2202 people in the region of the Palestine Strip.
To accept all this normally guarantees legitimacy to these war crimes, to those war crimes fuelled by our industry and the arms institutions. Like ruthless businessmen who sell arms or components of arms and raw materials with Basque label, those who justify the massacres caused by these weapons are also essential in the war machinery.
On 31 January, in Vitoria-Gasteiz, we have the opportunity to break that strategy of normalizing the war, turning Maccabi’s visit into an abnormal visit.
This article has been published by Halabedi Irratia and we have brought it to ARGIA thanks to the CC-by-sa license.
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