To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
--- George Orwell
Monday, October 19, 2015
50 Years Into Israeli Occupation, Can You Really Blame Young Palestinians For Doing What A Lot Of Americans Would Probably Do?
It’s
a bit rich to hear right wing Israelis and their echo chamber in the lobby here
describe Palestinians mounting violent attacks in Jerusalem as being consumed
by “a blood fetish” or “seized by a communal psychosis.” As Georgetown scholar
Bruce Hoffman points out in his recent book, Anonymous
Soldiers, Zionist terrorism played a significant role in driving the
British from Palestine in the late 1940’s, clearing the way for the as the
Jewish state to come into being. Zionist Terror tactics also encouraged 700,000
Palestinians to flee in fear for their lives during the Israeli War for
Independence in 1948. Those Palestinians have never been allowed back into the
country, a violation of international law that stands uncorrected.
Still,
anyone who has seen or smelled the aftermath of a terrorist bombing can’t cheer
the prospect of lone wolf stabbings, spontaneous rioting and outbursts of
stone-throwing at Israeli authorities escalating
into the organized suicide bombings and gun attacks that marked the Second
Intifada in the early 2000’s. It’s also pretty accurate to argue that the
second Intifada actually made conditions in the West Bank more severe: More
checkpoints and less freedom of movement, with almost four million Palestinians
sealed off behind an imposing, highly fortified Partition Wall in what Columbia University’s Rashid Khalili has
called “The Iron Cage.” The Second Intifada is also widely blamed for traumatizing
the collective Israeli psyche, reducing empathy in the general Israeli pubic
and making it more likely to shrug at government military actions that enact
collective punishment on Palestinians for challenging Jewish domination. In
other words, that harsh treatment is a “fitting Zionist response,” as heel-clicking
Israeli right-wingers like to say.
Of
course it would be much better if Palestinians embraced nonviolent civil
disobedience and took a leaf from Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The growing worldwide
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) shows that Palestinians understand
this, at least on the international front. But BDS won’t show any impact on the everyday lives of
Palestinians in the occupied territories for quite some time, no matter how
much potential BDS holds for forcing Israel to loosen its grip.
After
50 years of Israeli military occupation, a shell of an economy and a peace
process that has gone nowhere however, who can blame Palestinian teenagers for
throwing stones at the IDF, burning rubber tires at makeshift roadblocks or
standing in the middle of the street and taunting Israeli soldiers to shoot
them? While individual teens attacking Jewish bus passengers, IDF conscripts or
police officers seemingly at random fits a definition of terror, why should
that kind of terrorism be seen as something apart from the material conditions
that any detached comprehensive analysis would bring into the discussion? This
isn’t to justify this kind of violence, or attacks allegedly orchestrated by
Hamas such as the drive-by shooting of a young Israeli settler couple as they
drove with their children in the backseat. But it is to explain it, especially
when it the violence is coming from teenagers with no record of terrorist
connections.
In
addition to the heavy handed presence of the Israeli military, the occupation
has also allowed a government-sponsored influx of more than 500,000 armed and
antagonistic Jewish settlers into Palestinian territory, in full violation of
international law. Settler “prince tag” attacks on Palestinians are routine
now, amid wider concern for the rise of Jewish terrorism. In one such “price
tag” attack last summer, Jewish radicals firebombed a Palestinian home on the
West Bank in the middle of the night, burning an infant alive and killing her
parents from their injuries in the days after. According to the New Yorker, Israeli journalists say
that this prospective third intifada should be called the “settler intifada” ---a
violent response to the often violent provocations of that increasingly
powerful faction of hardline Jews.
The
kind of volcanic grassroots violence in Jerusalem these past two weeks, which
is really more like a leaderless revolt engaging in uncoordinated daily attacks
than terrorism as it is more often seen, is almost mathematically inevitable. It
flows out of the toxic combination of desperation, humiliation and rage that
has been pent up on the West Bank since the last uprising a dozen years ago, exploding
with cumulative force. The children who came to consciousness watching their
older siblings, cousins and neighbors being beaten and arrested or shot dead in
a clashes back in 2002 or 2003 are themselves in their teens and early
twenties, with most having no record of terrorist involvement. They’ve grown up
knowing nothing but military occupation, joblessness, the depredations of Jewish
settlers and the political impotence of their own Palestinian leadership, with
little prospect of gaining their own state, or being accorded political rights
within a larger binational Israeli state. In fact, many young Palestinians have
given up on the dream of full Palestinian independence and prefer to become
Israeli citizens with full political rights. Israel, obsessed with preserving the Jewishness of the Jewish
state, doesn’t seem to be too ready to allow that.
Put
in an analogous position, I’m pretty confident that a lot Americans would
probably throw a few rocks and light a few bonfires too. Bad enough to have to live with the grinding
indignities of occupation as well as the intimidating presence of armed
settlers driven by religious messianism and the racial supremacy that accompanies
it. But to have to endure such things for 50
years just seems too much to expect any person or any people to withstand
without lashing back. Would that
it not be the case, but unfortunately that is the case. Cause has its effect; action
prompts reaction---elementary political physics. In other words, context is essential, especially fifty years of it, compounded day after
day.
*****
The oppressive centrality of occupation
in the lives of Palestinians on the West Bank was very simply and eloquently
described by Hussein Ibish, of the American Task Force on Palestine at a panel discussion at Columbia last December. The panel was focused
on the question of whether Israel’s policies toward Palestinians were justified
in light of the security issue it faces.
The panel was sponsored by a number of student groups as well as the
Sheldon Adelson-funded Values Network, whose director, Rabbi Shmuley
Boteach---America’s Rabbi to some---served as moderator. In addition to Ibish
the other panelists were Bret Stephens, the very pro Israel foreign affairs
columnist of the Wall Street Journal, Peter Beinart, a liberal Zionist opposed
to the occupation.
What
Ibish stressed was that the Jewish democratic state of Israel was in fact, not
that at all in that it
“completely disenfranchises” at least 4.5 million people living under its
jurisdiction in the occupied territories. There was nothing like Israel’s
occupation that he could think of anywhere else in the world today, Ibish
declared, citing “intolerable conditions of disenfranchisement and
discrimination.”
Everything you
can do in the occupied territories depends on whether the Israeli government
classifies you as a Jewish settler or an occupied Palestinian. Every single
aspect of daily life is determined by this inevitably ethnic distinction. Where
you may live, what roads you can drive on, whether you can be armed for self
defense or not, how much water and other basic necessities you get per capita,
what type of education your children will have, whether you can travel freely
around your own country or leave it with the normal confidence of being allowed
to return, or whether you need the permission of foreign soldiers, many of them
just out of high school, to go from one village to another, whether you may be
subjected to midnight house raids, what laws you live under, etc.
I could go on
till midnight, I really could.
Does this
arrangement sound like the basis for a reasonable security policy to you? I
mean, really? Because that’s how it’s conceptualized– as forward bases in enemy
territory. “This is Israel’s strategic depth.” We hear that all the time from
people, except Israeli security professionals, who don’t see it that way.
The bottom line is
that in the occupied territories, Palestinians, who are citizens of no state,
live under one set of laws and conditions, and... Israeli settlers even
standing next to each other live under another. Settlers are Israeli citizens,
with all the rights and responsibilities that come with that. The Palestinians
have neither.
Millions of
people have been living like this for almost 50 years, the vast majority of the
history of the modern Israeli state. Now I want to put it to you, There’s not a
single person in this room, not one of you– not one of you– who would accept to
live like that, generation after generation, decade after decade, with no end
in sight. You would resist, in an intelligent manner hopefully. And you would
not put up with it. And if you think you would put up with it, you’re lying to
yourselves.
As direct and intuitive as Ibish’s observations were,
most Zionists here and in Israel reject any suggestion that Palestinian
resistance should be contextualized, preferring to see it as expression of a
history of “hate” triggered by “incitement” on the part of Palestinian leaders
or Muslim clergy. It’s analogous to the way that Zionists denied any connection
between the rising tide of anti Semitism among European Muslims and the Israeli
military actions in Gaza, which killed almost 1500 noncombatant civilians, many
of them women and very small children. It’s far more convenient and exculpating
to see anti Israel actions as being a function of anti Semitism---"The Devil That Never Dies,” as Holocaust scholar Daniel Goldhagen titled his most recent
book--- than in acknowledging that anti Israel hostility springs from actions
that Israel itself has taken: house demolitions, evictions, expulsions, summary
executions, live fire attacks from Israeli snipers, to cite just the beginning
of a long list.
Last week during the Q&A of a Harvard appearance,
Secretary of State John Kerry stepped on this political landmine, specifically
the issue of Israeli settlements. “There’s been a massive increase in
settlements over the course of the last years, and there’s an increase in the
violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing,” Kerry noted. He
added that most people involved in the peace process “have a pretty damn good
sense of what has to be done,”
but implied that there was a lack of “courage” to do what was needed. Comments like this were a way of
“Blaming Israel” for the “Terror Wave” as the Times of Israel phrased the
Zionist reaction. Kerry backpeddled pretty quickly, explaining through his
spokesman that even if settlements were a source of frustration for
Palestinians settlement
activity was not “the cause for the effect we're seeing,” and that he was not
“affixing blame on either side here for the violence.”
Wall Street Journal "Global Affairs" columnist Bret Stephens had no real response to Ibish’s
remarks that night up at Columbia. But he certainly showed his contempt for
those citing “context” in his column this week, indulging tribal
generalizations and highlighting his own lack of human empathy even as he
condemned the Palestinians for the very same thing. Ridiculing those citing
Palestinian despair at the peace process or ragged economy, Stephens declared
that it was “time to
stop furnishing Palestinians with the excuses they barely bother making for
themselves.”
The significant
question is why so many Palestinians have been seized by their present blood
lust—by a communal psychosis in which plunging knives into the necks of Jewish
women, children, soldiers and civilians is seen as a religious and patriotic
duty, a moral fulfillment.
Above all, it’s
time to give hatred its due. We understand its explanatory power when it comes
to American slavery, or the Holocaust. We understand it especially when it is
the hatred of the powerful against the weak. Yet we fail to see it when the
hatred disturbs comforting fictions about all people being basically good, or
wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of empathy.
Today in Israel,
Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one at a time.
This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve as an
apologist, and an accomplice.
It was significant that Stephens failed to mention the
words “settlements,” “settlers,” “occupation,” and made no reference to the
civilian death toll in Gaza last summer or the rising tide of Jewish terrorism
against Palestinian civilians, among many other factors anyone with a sense of
simple cause and effect would cite. To ignore or to underplay these factors
represents an its own apology for violence and exposes one to the charge of
complicity too, especially after 50 years. Indeed, it may not be psychotic, but it is in its own way pathological, demonstrating that the Iron Cage
that Israel has built for its restive Palestinians has an analogue in the iron
cage Zionism has built around itself to protect the movement’s ideological
certitudes from the political realities now challenging them.
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