Since the 1970s, the Palestinian town of al-Khalil, known as Hebron, has become the blatant example of Israel’s colonization policy. A group of extremist Jews moved into the center of the city where they have since refused to leave. There are about 500 to 1000 settlers in the center, where about 40,000 Palestinians live. In addition, other Israeli settlements soon sprang up around the city, effectively sealing it off from the rest of the Jordan Bank.

What happened next, was the all too familiar cycle of dispossession. Under the pretext of protecting a few hundred civilians, the Israeli army sent thousands of soldiers to Hebron and divided the city into segregated zones. For Palestinians, this meant many checkpoints, random searches, detentions and arrests that continue to this day. To make matters worse, Israeli authorities responded to a series of attacks by Palestinians in 2015 with house evictions accompanied by construction projects, allowing more settlers to move to Hebron and slowly take over the city.

What happened next, was the all too familiar cycle of dispossession.

Since then, Hebron has been a symbol of the apartheid regime in the West Bank. Your ethnic background determines where, when and how much you can move around the city. There is no rule of law: as of 2015, the city has been declared a closed military zone. As a result, the army operates with impunity.

Women of Hebron

AEI, an NGO that accompanies Muslim and Christian pilgrims in al-Khalil, wants to draw attention to the colonial violence that Palestinian women have to endure under the occupation. With support from Het Actiefonds, the organization collects stories from women that they display on posters near checkpoints downtown. They take pictures of these stories and post them on social media, hoping that people around the world can read about what the women of al-Khalil are going through and thus put pressure on the Israeli government.

These women attest of the gender based violence committed under the name of security.

These women attest of the gender based violence committed under the name of security. Consider the humiliation they must endure at checkpoints, where they are scolded or forced to remove their clothes. In addition, about ten percent of Palestinian women give birth at checkpoints. Also, many pregnancies suffer from the inhalation of tear gas, which is regularly fired by the Israeli army.

With this project, AEI wants to give these women a chance to tell their own story, which is not obvious in this socially conservative zone of the West Bank. In this way, they hope to raise awareness among both residents of al-Khalil and the international community about the colonial and sexist violence of the Israeli occupation.

Image: ISM Palestine on Flickr.com

Make Poland Queer Again is an international action group that was created to fight back against this growing culture of homophobia and violence towards the LGBTQIA+ community in Eastern Europe. The group claims that a new, more radical protest culture is necessary with international, transborder solidarity, direct action, and civil disobedience, as we know for example within climate activism. Their goal is to break away from the well-known, peaceful protest march and create new, creative forms of direct action to destabilize the status quo and create a network of safe spaces for the queer community.

Their plan consists of creating a strong, internationally organized network of activists that together plan and execute direct actions. Part of this will be the solidarity bus from Berlin to several Polish pride marches, to mobilize activists at an international level and together take part in creating disruptive actions during the Polish prides. Next to that, they want to create workshops and toolkits around executing direct action to empower local communities and give them the tools to mobilize, organize and join the international movement.

Het Actiefonds is strongly against the repressive and fascist developments in Poland and therefore supports the group Make Poland Queer Again.

Revenge of Lukashenko
The border is heavily guarded by about 15,000 military personnel. Poland and the European Union accuse Lukashenko of sending the migrants to Poland’s border areas in retaliation for Western sanctions against his bloodthirsty regime. A few months ago, Het Actiefonds spoke with an anonymous activist about life in a dictatorship.

Stop illegal pushbacks
A collective in the Czech Republic is taking action against the illegal pushbacks that continue to take place. Countless migrants are mistreated and forcibly sent back to other countries. With a confrontational performance, these Czech activists want to put political pressure on the Polish and Belarusian embassies. In the performance they play militias and a group of refugees; the ‘refugees’ try to come to the embassy to apply for asylum, but they are attacked by the ‘militias’.

Confrontational street theater
The scene will be repeated several times. The performance will take place in the public space between the two embassies and will therefore attract a lot of attention. The performance is recorded and also distributed via social media. The collective uses the subsidy of Het Actiefonds to buy fake blood, make-up, uniforms and (fake) batons. The aim of the group is to draw attention to the subject in Czech media discourse.

The demands of het Woonverzet in The Hague are the same as the earlier compiled Housing manifest. A shared manifest, created by the organizations of het Woonprotest, de Woonopstand, and several action groups, to demand a radically different housing policy.

1. Make cobatting (imminent) homelessness a top priority
2. Provide widely accessible public housing
3. Guarantee affordability
4. Guarantee housing security
5. Diminish housing inequality between tenants and home owners
6. Assure equal access to housing
7. Grant residents an equal say over their environment
8. End housing speculation
9. Don’t give slumlords and rogue brokers a chance
10. Put vacant properties to good use and decriminalize squatting

Het Actiefonds supported het Woonprotest and de Woonopstand and is happy to contribute again to the Dutch housing movement by supporting Woonverzet. We support the demands and call on everyone to come to The Hague and join the march on the 14th of November!

14/11, 14:00, Woonverzet, Koekamp Den Haag

Facebook event for more info

Stigmatization
The endlessly conservative Poland has been taking systematic steps to obsessively control women’s bodies for years. One of those steps – in addition to virtually banning abortion – was to make it impossible to get the morning-after pill without a doctor’s prescription. Doctors are now allowed to refuse the pill to women who request it, on the basis of their personal beliefs. This is just one example of the ongoing stigmatization of contraception.

Pills from abroad
The collective Dzién Po (‘the morning-after’) provides access to emergency contraception for everyone who needs it; regardless of their age, nationality or financial means. Thanks to international feminist friendships and support from other collectives, the activists manage to maintain a fairly steady flow of morning-after pills from abroad. Dzién Po has been doing this work for three years now, but this year the collective wanted to give more visibility to this important issue. Het Actiefonds was able to contribute to this.

International movement
With the help of Het Actiefonds, Dzién Po was able to create a zine about self-help, D.I.Y. resistance and bottom-up strategies to regain control of your own sexual health. These zines were distributed along with morning after pills. The purpose of the publication is to spread knowledge about the history of self-help in accessing contraception and abortion and to normalize contraception, emergency contraception and abortion. In addition, the zine contains a practical guide to the different types of morning-after pills and their prices and availability. During the research and creation of the publication, Dzién Po collaborated with members of Abortion Without Borders and Women Help Women. The magazine has become part of the international movement of autonomous feminist groups. Het Actiefonds is thankful to be able to help and continues to support the movement in Poland in their hugely important and urgent struggle.

Check out their zine here!

Humanity is facing the most pressing existential crisis of our time. We have less than one decade left to limit climate catastrophe. The Netherlands lags behind when it comes to climate leadership, enabling and promoting Shell’s business as a key player that keeps the Dutch economy up and running.

Fossil Free Culture NL already has a successful history of eradicating fossil fuel funding to
cultural institutions in The Netherlands. No less than the Van Gogh Museum, the Concertgebouw and NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam already cut their ties with fossil fuels after a targeted campaign by Fossil Free Culture NL.

This time around, the artists and activists will focus on the Groninger Museum, sponsored by the natural gas extraction company GasTerra that has terrorized the inhabitants of the region with its activities. The natural gas extraction has caused thousands of earthquakes since the mid-1980s, damaging houses and traumatizing residents in exchange of more pollution. Just to stuff the pockets of the company with some more money.

With this campaign, Fossil Fuel Culture NL aims to hold cultural institutions accountable for enabling these harms, and further erode the “gas as the transition fuel” narrative. For this, we will work with the Gastivist Network and local frontline groups resisting gas extraction.

The performances that they will execute will centre the voices of the most impacted and marginalized communities. They will connect local stories of gas resistance with stories of the communities resisting gas extraction in the so-called Global South, like Mozambique and Argentina. At the same time, it will show up artwashing as a dangerous and deceiving practice that upholds the fossil fuel industry’s power and legitimizes its immoral activities.

Het Actiefonds is proud to contribute to the campaign against Gasterra’s sponsorship of the Groninger Museum!

The Sápara nation has been threatened for decades. Within one century, their population shrank from 20.000 to only 1500 because of the consequences of rubber plantations and the slavery that they involved. Because of the presence of several oil wells and the possible exploitation of wood, the nation has to defend the forest and its territory against companies and politicians with conflicting interests until this day. As earlier this year, when the ministry of agriculture decided to give away 70% of the nation’s territory to a group of people that don’t carry the Sápara nationality nor share the same interest to protect the forest against pollution, extraction, and destruction. The nation that had so far been successful at keeping out oil extractors, would lose control over a large part of their ancestral territory.

Nación Sapara Del Ecuador (NASE) took action to secure the survival of their culture and community. With the support of het Actiefonds the group has been mobilizing people and taking action between the decision of the ministry in May and the court ruling against it in October this year. With success, because on the 19th of October, the court ruled that the Sápara nation can keep control over their ancestral grounds and with that reverses the decision made by the Ministry of Agriculture. We congratulate the community on their victory and are happy to have contributed to their fight for their rightful territory.

#ResistenciaSapara

Action group ‘Avon Against the Badger Cull’ (AABC)‘ fights against the annual badger cull by blocking the hunters during their hunt through legal action. They do this by actively searching for badgers and badger hunters on public property at night. By staying close to wild badgers, their setts, and the hunters that hunt them, they are legally blocking the shooting of the animals by causing a possible safety issue. The volunteers of AABC monitor the badger population, map their setts, document any illicit activities such as tampering or destroying setts, and bring awareness to local farmers, landowners, and the government about the resistance against badger culling and their animal-friendly alternatives.

Het Actiefonds supports the AABC with the purchase of a new thermal imaging camera. With this camera, it becomes easier for them to search for badgers and the hunters that hunt them. The hunters themselves also have thermal imaging cameras, so it is of great importance for the group to have similar equipment in order to have a fair fight.

If you travel by car through the German Rhineland, you can marvel at the enormous craters that dominate the landscape. The holes are so deep and large that for a moment you imagine you are on another planet. You see only dust and stone as far as the eye can see. The Garzweiler mine, for example, has an area of 48 square kilometers, twice the size of the city of Leiden. And that’s not even the largest. Right next door is the Hambach mine, with its 85 square kilometers one of the largest lignite mines in Europe.

Together these two mines are already responsible for 75 million tons of CO2 emissions per year. By comparison, that’s about half of the annual emissions of the Netherlands. Half. And if it’s up to the energy company RWE, that number won’t be going down anytime soon.

The last inhabitant of Lützerath

When Eckardt Heukamp walked out of his house this September, he was greeted by a ghost town. All the houses in his village of Lützerath are empty, bought up by RWE to wipe the village off the map in its quest for obsolete fossil fuels. The huge excavator gets closer every day. Six other villages preceded Lützerath. Where these villages once stood, the Garzweiler II mine is now to be built. Heukamp knows he won’t be able to stay in Lützerath for long. “They won’t dig around me” Heukamp tells the German magazine Taz: “the state has the power”.

In total, between 2015 and 2028, as many as 7618 residents of neighboring villages must make way for Garzweiler II. This is incompatible with Germany’s plans to permanently close its coal mines by 2045. Non-profit research firm DIW has already calculated that RWE can mine a maximum of 200 million tons of lignite in Hambach and Garzweiler II to stay within the Paris climate agreement, even though RWE plans to mine 780 million tons.

The emissions cannot be accounted for, let alone the eviction of residents. “It took me a lot of effort emotionally to leave Borschemich, fifteen years is quite something,” Heukamp says. Borschemich was one of the villages that had to make way for RWE. A video on Youtube shows how an excavator scraped the 400-year-old village church from the landscape. Heukamp moved to his native village, where the same fate now awaits him. “It’s even more intense here, because I grew up here too.”

One and a half degrees means: Lützerath stays!

As quiet as Lützerath was two months ago, that’s how booming it is now. Heukamp’s eviction was scheduled for this September, but he’s still there. With the help of activists from all over the world and people from the neighborhood, he is resisting the brutal expropriation policy of RWE and the German government. The activists have declared a ZAD (zone à défendre) on his land, an occupied area against development projects, from where they organize actions to occupy the mine, and create spaces for networking between activists and local residents.

For now, the authorities are not succeeding in clearing Lützerath. Het Actiefonds is proud to support the campaign to preserve Lützerath. With our help, the occupiers are building huts in the trees and on the ground so that the occupation can continue for as long as possible. Lützerath stays!

Vestia Rats!

This text appeared on the front of two houses on the De La Reystraat in the Tweebosbuurt on the 15th of April. The same building was squatted three times (and violently evicted) within a short period of time in 2020 as a protest against the demolition of the neighborhood. Vestia made sure that within 24 hours a cleaning crew appeared to clean off the message, but it has been all but forgotten.

Squatter collective Wielewaal will make sure that the message Vestia Rats will remain unforgotten and is starting a t-shirt action with the national housing demonstration Woonopstand coming up. The group will print 50 shirts with the picture of Joke Schot and by this will keep the message Vestia Rats and the important buildings on the De La Reystraat visible during the protest on Sunday the 17th of October. Another group has already started a sticker action as well with the message Vestia Ratten.

Last residents evicted

At the start of this month, after a long fight, the curtain fell for the last residents of the Tweebosbuurt. Residents who didn’t want to move out of their homes fought their eviction in court, which ruled in their favor. Vestia started an appeal against the ruling and both parties had to wait until later this year on a final ruling before eviction and demolition of the Tweebosbuurt could continue. But Vestia didn’t want to wait and started a new eviction process. On the 1st of October, this new case appeared in court and the judge ruled that the last residents have to leave their homes within 4 weeks so Vestia can continue its destructive mission.

Het Actiefonds shows solidarity with the residents of the Tweebosbuurt, supports squatter collective Wielewaal with their t-shirt action, and supports the organization of de Woonopstand on the 17th of October.

Follow @vestiaratten and @woonopstand on Instagram and sign-up for the #Woonopstand on the 17th of October!

Picture by Joke Schot