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Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
December 12, 2003
Josh Frank
Halliburton,
Timber and Dean
Chris Floyd
The
Inhuman Stain
Dave Lindorff
Infanticide
as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies
Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?
Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva
Accords
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
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Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
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Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
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Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
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20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
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Sheldon
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True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
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Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
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The
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
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Weekend
Edition
December 13 / 14, 2003
Relative Humanity
The
Essential Obstacle to a Just Peace in Palestine
By OMAR BARGHOUTI
'[A] Conquest may be fraught with evil
or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth
of the conquering and conquered peoples.'
Theodore Roosevelt
Good riddance! The two-state solution for the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finally dead. But someone has
to issue an official death certificate before the rotting corpse
is given a proper burial and we can all move on and explore the
more just, moral and therefore enduring alternative for peaceful
coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Mandate Palestine: the
one-state solution.
Blinded by the arrogance of power and
the ephemeral comfort of impunity, Israel, against its strategic
Zionist interests, failed to control its insatiable appetite
for expansion, and went ahead with devouring the very last bit
of land that was supposed to form the material foundation for
an independent Palestinian state.
Since the eruption of the second Palestinian
intifada Israel has entered a new critical phase where its military
repression against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank
and Gaza has reached new lows, and its flouting of UN resolutions
new heights, where its incessant land grab has led it to erect
a wall around Palestinian population centers, separating Palestinians
from their lands -- thus dispossessing them yet again -- and
where moral corruption and racial discrimination have more lucidly
eroded the internal coherence of Israeli society as well as its
marketed image as a "democracy." As a result, Israel's
standing in world public opinion has nose-dived, bringing it
closer to the status of a pariah state.
This phase has all the emblematic properties
of what may be considered the final chapter of the Zionist project.
We are witnessing the rapid demise of Zionism, and nothing can
be done to save it, for Zionism is intent on killing itself.
Going back to the two-state solution,
besides having passed its expiry date, it was never a moral solution
to start with. In the best-case scenario, if UN resolution 242
were meticulously implemented, it would have addressed most
of the legitimate rights of less than a third of the Palestinian
people over less than a fifth of their ancestral land.
More than two thirds of the Palestinians, refugees plus
the Palestinian citizens of Israel, have been dubiously and shortsightedly
expunged out of the definition of the Palestinians. Such
exclusion can only guarantee the perpetuation of conflict.
But who is offering the "best-case"
scenario to start with? No one, as a matter of fact. The best
offer so far falls significantly short of even 242 -- not to
mention the basic principles of morality. After decades of trying
to convince the Palestinians to give up their rights to the properties
they had lost during the Nakba (1948 catastrophe of dispossession
and exile) in return for a sovereign, fully independent state
on all the lands that were occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem,
Israel has shown that it really never had any intention to return
all those illegally acquired lands. From Camp David II to Taba
to Geneva, the most "generous" Israeli offer was always
well below the minimal requirements of successive UN resolutions
and the basic tenets of justice. Admitting that justice is not
fully served by his government's offer at Camp David, for instance,
former Israeli foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami gave the Palestinian
a choice between "justice or peace."
Peace decoupled from justice, though,
is not only morally reprehensible but pragmatically unwise as
well. It may survive for a while, but only after it has been
stripped of its essence, becoming a mere stabilization of an
oppressive order, or what I call the master-slave peace, where
the slave has no power and/or will to resist and therefore submits
to the dictates of the master, passively, obediently, without
a semblance of human dignity. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote:
The strongest man is never strong enough
to be master all the time, unless he transforms force into right
and obedience into duty. ... Force is a physical power; I do
not see how its effects could produce morality. To yield to
force is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at best an act
of prudence. In what sense can it be a moral duty?
Well, the Palestinians' "prudence"
is running out. The yielding of their official leadership to
force merely led to more colonization, and promises for yet more
to come.
2. Relative Humanity
and the Conflict
From the onset, the two main pretences
given by the Zionists to justify their colonization of Palestine
were:
A) Palestine was a land without a people,
an uncivilized wasteland;
B) Jews had a divine right to "redeem"
Palestine, in accordance with a promise from no less an authority
than God, and because, according to the Bible, the Israelites'
built their kingdoms all over the Land of Canaan a couple of
thousand years ago, giving them historical rights to the place.
Thus, any dispossession of the natives of Palestine, if they
existed, was an acceptable collateral damage to the implementation
of God's will. If this sounds too close to Bush's jargon, it
is mere coincidence.
By now, both the political and the religious
arguments were shown to be no more than unfounded myths, thanks
in no small part to the diligent work of Israeli historians and
archaeologists .
Doing away with both political fabrication
and Biblical mythology, Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's
Colonization Department in 1940, explained the truth about how
this "redemption" was to be carried out:
Between ourselves it must be clear that
there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We
shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country.
There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to
neighboring countries--all of them. Not one village, not one
tribe should be left.
At the very core of the rationalization
of such an expulsion lies an entrenched colonial belief in the
irrelevance, or comparative worthlessness, of the rights, the
needs and aspirations of the native Palestinians. For instance,
the author of the Balfour Declaration wrote:
The four Great Powers are committed to
Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted
in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of
far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the
700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
It is a classic case of what I call relative-humanization.
I define Relative humanity as
the belief, and the practice based on that belief, that certain
human beings, to the extent that they share a common religious,
ethnic, cultural or other similarly substantial identity attribute,
lack one or more of the necessary attributes of being human,
and are therefore human only in the relative sense, not absolutely,
and not unequivocally. Accordingly, such relative humans
are entitled to only a subset of the otherwise inalienable rights
that are due to "full" humans.
Perceiving the Palestinians as relative
humans can explain why Israel -- supported by the US and in many
cases by Europe too -- has got away with a taken-for-granted
attitude towards the Palestinians that assumes that they cannot,
indeed ought not, have equal needs, aspirations or rights to
Israeli Jews. This factor has played a fundamental role in inhibiting
the evolution of a unitary state solution, as will be shown below.
Besides relative-humanization, there
are many impediments on the way to that morally superior solution.
Given the current level of violence, mutual distrust and hate
between the two sides, for example, how can such a solution ever
come true? Besides, with the power gap between Israel and the
Palestinians being so immense, why would Israeli Jews accept
this unitary state, where, by definition, Jews will be a minority?
Is Israeli consent really necessary as a first step, or can it
be eventually achieved through a combination of intensive pressure
and lack of viable alternatives, just as in the South African
case?
These concerns are indeed valid and crucial
to address, but rather than delving into each one of them, I
shall limit myself to showing how the alternatives to the one-state
solution are less likely to solve the conflict, partially because
the principle of equal human worth, which is the fundamental
ingredient in any lasting and just peace, is conspicuously ignored,
breached or repressed in each of them. This in itself may not
logically prove that the one-state solution is the only way out
of the current abyss, but it should at least show that the it
certainly deserves serious consideration as a real alternative.
3. Paths to Ending
the Conflict
At the time, and given the impossibility
of achieving a negotiated two-state solution that can give Palestinians
their minimal inalienable rights, there are three logical paths
that can be pursued:
(1) Maintaining the status quo, keeping
some form of the two-state solution alive, if only on paper;
(2) "Finishing the job," or
reaching the logical end of Zionism, by implementing full ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinians out of the entire Mandate Palestine.
Since genocide of the scale committed to rid America or Australia
of their respective natives is not politically viable nowadays,
ethnic cleansing is the closest approximation;
(3) Launch new visionary and practical
processes that will lead to the establishment of a unitary democratic
state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
Let us explore each of the three options:
3.1 Maintaining the
Status Quo
Above everything else, the status quo
is characterized by three attributes:
A. Denial of the Palestinian Refugee'
Rights,
B. Military Occupation and repression in the West Bank and Gaza,
and
C. Zionist version of apartheid in Israel proper.
3.1.A. Denial of
Palestinian Refugees' Rights
Far from admitting its guilt in creating
the world's oldest and largest refugee problem, and despite overwhelming
incriminating evidence, Israel has systematically evaded any
responsibility. The most peculiar dimension in the popular Israeli
discourse about the "birth" of the state is the almost
wall-to-wall denial of any wrongdoing. Israelis by and large
regard as their "independence" the ruthless destruction
of Palestinian society and the dispossession of the Palestinian
people. Even committed "leftists" often grieve over
the loss of Israel's "moral superiority" after
occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, as if prior
to that Israel were as civil, legitimate and law-abiding
as Finland!
In a classic self-fulfilling prophecy,
Israelis have always yearned for being a normal state
to the extent that they actually started believing that it was.
It is as if most of those Israelis who actively participated
or bore witness to the Nakba were collectively infected by some
chronic selective amnesia.
This denial has its roots in the Holocaust
and in the unique circumstances created as a result of it, which
allowed Israel to argue that, unlike any other state, it was
obliged to deny Palestinian refugees their unequivocal right
to return to their homes and lands. Preserving the Jewish
character of the state, the argument went, was the only way
to maintain a safe haven for the world Jewry, the "super-victims,"
who are unsafe among the Gentiles, and that of course
was of much more import than the mere rights of the Palestinians.
Even if we ignore the compelling comparison between the safety
of Jews in Israel vs. in France, Morocco, Spain, the United States,
or, for that matter, Germany, we cannot overlook the fact that
no other country on Earth today can ever get away with a similarly
overt, racist attitude about its right to ethnic purity.
Besides being morally indefensible, Israel's
denial of the right of return also betrays a level of moral inconsistency
that is in many ways unique.
The Israeli law of return for Jews, for
instance, is based on the principle that since they were expelled
from Palestine over 2,000 years ago, they had a right to return
to it. So by denying the rights of Palestinian refugees, whose
55-year-old exile is a much younger injustice, to say the least,
Israel is essentially saying that Palestinians cannot have the
same right because they are just not equally human.
Here are some more examples of this moral
inconsistency:
- Thousands of Israelis whose grandparents
were German citizens have successfully applied for their
right to return to Germany, to gain German citizenship and receive
full compensation for pillaged property. The result was that
the Jewish population of Germany jumped from 27,000 in the early
90's to over 100,000 last year.
- Belgium has also passed a law
'enabling properties that belonged to Jewish families to be returned
to their owners.' It also agreed to pay the local Jewish community
55 million euros in restitution for stolen property that 'cannot
be returned' and for 'unclaimed insurance policies belonging
to Holocaust victims.'
But the quintessence of moral hypocrisy
is betrayed by the following example reported in Ha'aretz:
More than five centuries after their
ancestors were expelled from Spain, Jews of Spanish origin called
on the Spanish government and parliament to grant them Spanish
nationality... Spain should pass a law 'to recognize that the
descendants of the expelled Jews belong to Spain and to rehabilitate
them,' said Nessim Gaon, president of the World Sephardic Federation.
Some Sephardic Jews have even preserved the keys to their forefathers'
houses in Spain.
Since supporting the right of return
of Palestinian refugees to their homes is, in my view, the litmus
test of morality for anyone suggesting a just and enduring
solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, many, including
Bill Clinton, and the entire spectrum of the official Left in
Israel, have flunked the test.
Left and right are relative terms everywhere,
but in Israel the distinction can be totally blurred at times.
On the issues of ethnic purity, demography and chauvinism, Israeli
politicians and intellectuals on the left, even those self-proclaimed
as "the left," have made the far-right parties of
Europe sound as humane as Mother Teresa. The crucial difference,
however, is that in the case of Israel, the immorality is aggravated
by the fact that, unlike the foreign immigrants to Europe, the
other is in fact the natives of the land.
Despite the above, one must not deny
that the right of return of Palestinian refugees does contradict
the requirements of a negotiated two-state solution. Israel
simply will never accept it, making it the Achilles' heel of
any negotiated two-state solution, as the record has amply shown.
It has nothing to do with the merits or skills of the Palestinian
negotiators, as lacking as they may have been, but rather with
a staggering imbalance of power that allows an ethnocentric and
colonial state to safeguard its exclusivist nature by dictating
conditions on a pathetically weaker interlocutor. This is precisely
why the right of return cannot really be achieved except in a
one-state solution. That would allow the Palestinian weakness
to be turned into strength, if they decide to adopt a non-violent
path to establishing a secular democratic state, thereby gaining
crucial international backing and transforming the conflict into
a non-dichotomous struggle for freedom, democracy, equality and
unmitigated justice. Again, South Africa's model has to be tapped
into for inspiration in this regard.
3.1.B. Military Occupation:
War Crimes , Large and Small
Following a visit to the completely fenced
Gaza Strip, Oona King, a Jewish member of the British parliament
commented on the irony that Israeli Jews face today, saying:
'in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated
another people in a hell similar in its nature--though not its
extent--to the Warsaw ghetto.'
Any human being with conscience who has
recently visited the occupied territories cannot but agree with
King. Faced with the Palestinians' seemingly inextinguishable
aspiration for justice and emancipation, Israel has resumed for
the last three years a campaign of wanton destruction, indiscriminate
atrocities and medieval-like sieges with the clear intention
of collectively punishing the Palestinians, potentially forcing
them to abandon their lands en masse. The rest are mere details,
painful and tormenting as they may be.
Israel's Apartheid
Wall, Palestinian Human Rights v. Israeli Animal & Plant
Rights:
Although Israel is now trying
to present the Wall as a security barrier to "fend off suicide
bombers," the truth is that the current path of the Wall
is anything but new. It has been recommended to Ariel Sharon
by the infamous "prophet of the Arab demographic threat,"
Israeli demographer, Arnon Sofer, who insists that the implemented
map was all his. And unlike the slick Israeli politicians, Sofer
unabashedly confesses that the Wall's path was drawn with one
specific goal in mind: maximizing the land to be annexed to Israel,
while minimizing the number of "Arabs" that would have
to come along.
But Sofer may be taking too much credit
for himself. Ron Nahman, the mayor of the West Bank settlement
of Ariel, has revealed to the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth
that: 'the map of the fence, the sketch of which you see here,
is the same map I saw during every visit [Ariel Sharon] made
here since 1978. He told me he has been thinking about it since
1973.' There weren't many "suicide bombings" going
around then!
Four years ago, well before the intifada
started, Ariel Sharon himself, it turned out, had evocatively
called the Wall project the "Bantustan plan," according
to Ha'aretz.
Despite the Wall's grave transgression
against Palestinian livelihood, environment, and political rights,
a "near total consensus" exists amongst Israeli Jews
in supporting it. Several official and non-governmental bodies
in Israel, however, are concerned about the adverse effects the
Wall might have on animals and plants.
The Israeli environment minister Yehudit
Naot protested the wall, saying:
The separation fence severs the continuity
of open areas and is harmful to the landscape, the flora and
fauna, the ecological corridors and the drainage of the creeks.
The protective system will irreversibly affect the land resource
and create enclaves of communities [of animals, of course] that
are cut off from their surroundings. I certainly don't want to
stop or delay the building of the fence, because it is essential
and will save lives.... On the other hand, I am disturbed by
the environmental damage involved.
Her ministry and the National Parks Protection
Authority mounted diligent rescue efforts to save an affected
reserve of irises by moving it to an alternative reserve.
They've also created tiny passages for animals and enabled the
continuation of the water flow in the creeks.
Still, the spokesperson for the parks
authority was not satisfied. He complained:
The animals don't know that there is
now a border. They are used to a certain living space, and what
we are concerned about is that their genetic diversity will be
affected because different population groups will not be able
to mate and reproduce. Isolating the populations on two sides
of a fence definitely creates a genetic problem.
Even Thomas Friedman, has predicted --
quite accurately, in my view -- in the New York Times that the
wall will eventually "kill" the two-state solution,
thereby becoming 'the mother of all unintended consequences.'
Smaller Crimes of
the Occupation:
Not all the crimes of the Israeli military
occupation are as overbearing as the Wall. I shall address below
only four examples of smaller, yet rampant, war crimes:
i- Birth and Death
at an Israeli Military Checkpoint:
Rula, a Palestinian woman, was in the
last stages of labor. Her husband, Daoud, could not convince
the soldiers at a typical military checkpoint to let them through
to meet the ambulance that was held up by the same soldiers on
the other side. After a long wait, Rula could no longer hold
it. She started screaming in pain, to the total apathy of the
soldiers. Daoud described the traumatic experience to Ha'aretz's
exceptionally conscientious reporter Gideon Levy, saying:
Next to the barbed wire there was a rock.
My wife started to crawl toward the rock and she lay down on
it. And I'm still talking with the soldiers. Only one of them
paid any attention, the rest didn't even look. She tried to hide
behind the rock. She didn't feel comfortable having them see
her in her condition. She started to yell and yell. The soldiers
said: `Pull her in our direction, don't let her get too far away.'
And she was yelling more and more. It didn't move him. Suddenly,
she shouted: `I gave birth, Daoud! I gave birth!' I started repeating
what she said so the soldiers would hear. In Hebrew and Arabic.
They heard.
Rula later shouted: 'The girl died! The
girl died!' Daoud, distraught and fearing for his wife's own
life, was forced to cut the umbilical cord with a rock. Later,
the doctor who examined the little corpse at the hospital revealed
that the baby girl had died 'from a serious blunt force injury
received when she shot out of the birth canal.'
Commenting on the similar death of another
Palestinian newborn at another Israeli checkpoint, a spokeswoman
for the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights said:
We don't know how many have died like
this because many people don't even bother to set out for hospital,
knowing the soldiers will stop them. These people offer no threat
to Israel. Those who do, like the suicide bombers, of course
never go through roadblocks, which exist only to control, subjugate
and humiliate ordinary people. It is like a routine terrorism.
ii- Hunting Children
for Sport:
The veteran American journalist Chris
Hedges exposed in Harper's Magazine how Israeli troops in Gaza
had systematically curse and provoke Palestinian children playing
in the dunes of southern Gaza. Then when the boys finally get
irritated enough and start throwing stones, the soldiers premeditatedly
respond with live ammunition from rifles fitted with silencers.
'Later,' writes Hedges,
'in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs
ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos." He then
concludes, "Children have been shot in other conflicts I
have covered, but I have never before watched soldiers entice
children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.'
iii- Patients &
the Siege:
Reporting on a particularly appalling
incident, Gideon Levy writes in Ha'aretz:
The soldiers made Bassam Jarar, a double
amputee with kidney disease, and Mohammed Asasa, who is blind
in both eyes, get out of the ambulance. Both men had come from
dialysis treatment. About half an hour passed, and then blood
started to drip from the tube that is permanently inserted in
Jarar's lower abdomen.
"I told the soldier on the tank
that I was bleeding. He told me to sit there and that they'd
take me to a doctor. We sat there in the sun for almost an hour."
The bleeding increased. After about an hour, two soldiers came
and lifted up Jarar and placed him on the floor of their jeep.
"I told them that I couldn't travel in a jeep. They said
that's all there was and that they were going to take me to a
doctor. The guy drove like a maniac and I was bouncing up and
down and my whole body hurt. I told them that it hurt. They said,
`Don't be afraid, you're not going to die.' There were four soldiers
in the jeep and I was on the floor. He wouldn't slow down. And
the soldiers were laughing and not looking at me at all.
iv- Sexual Assault:
In another crime, two Israeli Border
Police officers coerced a Palestinian shepherd to wear on his
back the saddle of his donkey and walk back and forth before
them; and then, at gunpoint, one of the two forced him to have
sex with his donkey for half an hour, as documented by B'Tselem.
Based on this culture of relative-humanization
of "the other," Nathan Lewin, a potential candidate
for a federal judgeship in Washington, and former president of
the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists writes:
If executing some suicide-bomber families
saves the lives of even an equal number of potential civilian
victims, the exchange is, I believe, ethically permissible.
It is a policy born of necessity--the need to find a true deterrent
when capital punishment is demonstrably ineffective.
Diplomacy aside, "civilian"
here stands for "Jewish" only, of course.
Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz
has likewise advised Israel to entirely level any Palestinian
village that harbors a suicide bomber.
Little wonder, then, someone as morally
consistent as Shulamit Aloni, the former member of Knesset, finds
it necessary to say: 'We do not have gas chambers and crematoria,
but there is no one fixed method for genocide.'
Do Israelis Know?
In my view, the British journalist Jonathan
Cook hit it right on when he wrote:
[Israelis] know exactly what happens:
their Zionist training simply blinds them to its significance.
As long as the enemy is Arab, as long as the catch-all excuse
of security can be invoked, and as long as they believe anti-Semitism
lurks everywhere, then the Israeli public can sleep easy as another
[Palestinian] child is shot riding his bike, another family's
house is bulldozed, another woman miscarries at a checkpoint.
It seems that a people raised to believe that anything can be
done in its name -- as long as it serves the interests of Jews
and their state -- has no need of ignorance. It can commit atrocities
with eyes wide open.
And this is not new. Zionist thinker,
Ahad Ha'am, described the anti-Arab attitude of the Jewish settlers
that came to Palestine to escape repression in Europe, long before
Israel was created, as follows:
Serfs they were in the lands of the Diaspora,
and suddenly they find themselves in freedom [in Palestine];
and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism.
They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them
of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of
these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and
dangerous inclination.
But if that's the case, then two possible
explanations -- not necessarily mutually exclusive -- may be
put forth to explain the Israelis' acceptance of, and sometimes
fervent support for, this systematic violation of basic human
rights:
(1) Widespread belief that their demographic
war against the Palestinians could be won by implementing the
suggestion of cabinet minister, Benny Elon, who called for intensifying
the siege and repression in order to: 'make their life so bitter
that they will transfer themselves willingly.'
(2) Secular or not, the root of the entrenched
Israeli perception of the Palestinians as less human is nourished
by a racist colonial tradition and rising Jewish fundamentalism.
I'll expand a bit on this last point.
It is commonplace to read about Islamic
fundamentalism and its militancy, anachronism and intrinsic hate
of "the other." Jewish fundamentalism, on the contrary,
is a taboo issue that virtually never gets mentioned at all in
the west for reasons that are beyond the scope of this essay.
But, since Jewish fundamentalism is increasingly gaining ground
in Israel, making the state, as the veteran British journalist
David Hirst describes it: 'not only extremist by temperament,
racist in practice, [but also] increasingly fundamentalist in
the ideology that drives it.'
For example, referring to Jewish Law,
or Halacha, Rabbi Ginsburg, the leader of a powerful Hassidic
sect, defended the 1994 massacre of Muslim worshippers in a mosque
in Hebron, saying:
Legally, if a Jew does kill a non-Jew,
he's not called a murderer. He didn't transgress the Sixth Commandment
There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish
life than non-Jewish life.
Rabbi Shaul Israeli, one of the highest
rabbinic authorities of the National Religious Party and of the
religious Zionism in general, justified the 1953 Qibya massacre,
perpetrated by an Israeli army unit led by Ariel Sharon, by also
citing Jewish law. He wrote:
We have established that there exists
a special term of 'war of revenge' and this is a war against
those who hate the Jews and [there are] special laws applying
to such war. In such a war there is absolutely no obligation
to take precautions during warlike acts in order that non-combatants
would not be hurt, because during a war both the righteous and
wicked are killed. the war of revenge is based on the example
of the war against the Midianites in which small children were
also executed, and we might wonder about this, for how they had
sinned? But we have already found in the sayings of our Sages,
of blessed memory, that little children have to die because of
the sin of their parents.
3.1.C. Israel's System of Racial
Discrimination: Intelligent, Nuanced but still Apartheid
US academic Edward Herman writes:
If Jews in France were required to carry
identification cards designating them Jews (even though French
citizens), could not acquire land or buy or rent homes in most
of the country, were not eligible for service in the armed forces,
and French law banned any political party or legislation calling
for equal rights for Jews, would France be widely praised in
the United States as a "symbol of human decency" (New
York Times) and paragon of democracy? Would there be a huge protest
if France, in consequence of such laws and practices, was declared
by a UN majority to be a racist state?
Advocating comprehensive and unequivocal
equality between Arabs and Jews in Israel has become tantamount
to sedition, if not treason. An Israeli High Court justice
has recently stated on record that: 'it is necessary to prevent
a Jew or Arab who calls for equality of rights for Arabs from
sitting in the Knesset or being elected to it.'
A recent survey by the Israel Democracy
Institute (IDI) reveals that 53% of Israeli Jews oppose full
equal rights for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and a staggering
57% believe they should be 'encouraged to emigrate.' One main
finding was that when Israeli Jews say "we" or "us"
they hardly ever include the Palestinian citizens of the state.
In land ownership rights, the inequality
is categorical. 'It is forbidden to sell apartments in the Land
of Israel to Gentiles,' said Israel's Chief Rabbi in 1986,
commenting on an attempt by a Palestinian to buy an apartment
owned by the Jewish National Fund in East Jerusalem.
In other vital areas of life, including
marriage laws, urban development and education, Israel has perfected
a comprehensive apparatus of racial discrimination against its
Palestinian citizens that is unparalleled anywhere today.
From all the above described dimensions
of the military occupation, the status quo is untenable, if not
because of Palestinian resistance, then due to rising international
condemnation.
4. Ethnic Cleansing:
Israel's Final Solution to the Palestinian Demographic Threat
Israeli politicians, intellectuals and
mass media outlets often passionately debate how best to face
the country's demographic "war" with the Palestinians.
Few Israelis dissent from the belief that such a war exists or
ought to exist. The popular call to subordinate democracy
to demography, however, has entailed the the adoption of reminiscent
population control mechanisms to keep the number of Palestinians
in check.
In a stark example of such mechanisms,
the Israel Council for Demography was reconvened last year to
'encourage the Jewish women of Israel -- and only them -- to
increase their child bearing; a project which, if we judge from
the activity of the previous council, will also attempt to stop
abortions,' as reported in Ha'aretz. This prestigious body, which
comprises top Israeli gynecologists, public figures, lawyers,
scientists and physicians, mainly focuses on how to increase
the ratio of Jews to Palestinians in Israel, by employing 'methods
to increase the Jewish fertility rate and prevent abortions.'
Besides demographic engineering, this
all-out "war" on Palestinian population growth has
always involved enticing non-Arabs, Jewish or not, from around
the world -- preferably, but not necessarily, the white
part of it -- to come to Israel, and be eventually Israelized.
Israeli scholar Boaz Evron writes:
Fear of the "demographic threat"
has haunted Zionism from the very beginning. In its name Ethiopians
were turned into Jews over the objections of rabbis. In its name
hundreds of thousands of Slavs came here wearing the Law of Return
as a fig leaf. In its name emissaries have gone out across the
world seeking out more and more Jews.
With the support of the Israeli government,
for example, one Zionist organization, Amatzia, has organized
the adoption of foreign children to Jewish families that have
fertility problems, insisting only on the condition of converting
all the children to Judaism upon arrival in Israel. Romania,
Russia, Guatemala, Ukraine and the Philippines were the main
sources of children; but now, after they've "dried up,"
India has become the source of choice, mainly for the relative
ease of acquiring the "goods" there. Amatzia's director,
Shulamit Wallfish, has sought children from the northern parts
of India in particular, 'where the children's skin is lighter,
which would better suit Israeli families,' according to her.
More concerned about the imminent rise
of an Arab majority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean
than with the oft invoked and sanctified "Jewish purity,"
Ariel Sharon has indeed called on religious leaders to smooth
the progress of the immigration and absorption of non-Arabs,
even if they weren't Jewish, in order to provide Israel with
'a buffer to the burgeoning Arab population,' reports the Guardian.
The Israeli government's view is that 'while the first generation
of each wave of immigration may have difficulty embracing Israel
and Jewishness, their sons and daughters frequently become enthusiastic
Zionists. In the present climate, they are also often very rightwing.'
Albeit vastly popular, such a policy
is not endorsed across the board. Eli Yishai, the leader of the
largest Sephardic Jewish party Shas, for example, who is particularly
alarmed at the influx of gentiles, hysterically forewarns:
By the end of the year 2010 the state
of Israel will lose its Jewish identity. A secular state will
bring ... hundreds of thousands of goyim who will build hundreds
of churches and will open more stores that sell pork. In every
city we will see Christmas trees.
The Israeli far-right minister, Effi
Eitam, prescribes yet another alternative: 'If you don't give
the Arabs the right to vote, the demographic problem solves itself.'
One conscientious Israeli who is revolted
by all this reminiscent language of demographic control
is Dr. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin of Ben-Gurion University. He writes:
'It's frightening when Jews talk about demography.'
Also dissenting from the mainstream Israeli
view, Boaz Evron argues that:
When we give up defining our national
essence by religious criteria, and forcing conversion on people
who are good Israeli citizens, and give up the effectively illegal
preferences afforded to Jews, it will suddenly become apparent
there is no need to worry about the 'demographic threat'.
But, by far, the all-time favourite mechanism
has always been ethnic cleansing.
Incessantly practiced, forever popular,
but persistently denied by the Zionists, ethnic cleansing has
in the last few years been resurrected from the gutters of Zionism
to occupy its very throne.
The famous historian, Benny Morris, has
recently argued that completely emptying Palestine of its indigenous
Arab inhabitants in 1948 might have led to peace in the Middle
East.
In response, Baruch Kimmerling, professor
at Hebrew University, wrote:
Let me extend Benny Morris's logic .
If the Nazi programme for the final solution of the Jewish problem
had been complete, for sure there would be peace today in Palestine.
Then why doesn't Israel act upon its
desire now, one may ask? Prof. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University
has a convincing answer:
'The constraints on Israeli behaviour
are not moral or ethical, but technical. How much can be done
without turning Israel into a pariah state? Without inciting
European sanctions, or making life too difficult for the Americans?'
Offering a diametrically opposing explanation,
Martin Van Creveld, Israel's most prominent military historian,
who supports ethnic cleansing, arrogantly shrugs off any concern
about world opinion, issuing the following formidable warning:
We possess several hundred atomic warheads
and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions,
perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for
our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: 'Israel must
be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.' Our armed forces
are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the
second or third. We have the capability to take the world down
with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel
goes under.
That should amply explain why Europeans
have lately ranked Israel first among the countries that
are considered a threat to world peace.
Yet a third explanation, which concurs
with Pappe's, is that Israel currently enjoys the best of both
worlds: it is implementing -- on the ground -- an elaborate
mesh of policies that are making the Palestinians' lives progressively
more intolerable, and therefore creating an environment conducive
to gradual ethnic cleansing, while at the same time not making
any dramatic -- Kosovo-like -- scene that would alarm the world,
inviting condemnation and possible sanctions.
5. Israel--The Untenable
Essential Contradictions
Israel's inherent racial exclusivity,
as demonstrated above, have convinced many Palestinian citizens
of the state that they are not just on the margins, but altogether
unwanted. Ameer Makhoul, the General Director of Ittijah, the
umbrella organization of Palestinian NGO's in Israel, writes:
The state of Israel has become the most
significant source of danger for the million Palestinians who
are citizens of the state that was forced upon them in 1948;
a state that was erected on the ruins of the Palestinian people
. The Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot defend themselves
by relying on the legal system and the Knesset. This public has
no trust in the state and its institutions, because the Israeli
rules of the game enable only discrimination, racism and repression
of collective aspirations.
Besides what Palestinians think or want,
the question should be posed: can a state that insists on ethnic
purity ever qualify as a democracy, without depriving this concept
of its essence? Even Israel's loyal friends have started losing
faith in its ability to reconcile the fundamentally irreconcilable:
modern liberal democracy and outdated ethnocentricity. Writing
in the New York Review of Books, New York University professor
Tony Judt affirms that:
In a world where nations and peoples
increasingly intermingle and intermarry, where cultural and national
impediments to communication have all but collapsed, where more
and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel
constrained if we had to answer to just one, in such a world,
Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism,
but a dysfunctional one. In today's "clash of cultures"
between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant,
faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into
the wrong camp.
Avraham Burg, a devoted Zionist leader
reached a similar conclusion . Attacking the Israeli leadership
as an 'amoral clique,' Burg asserts that Israel, which 'rests
on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression
and injustice,' must 'shed its illusions and choose between racist
oppression and democracy.'
6. Secular Democratic
State: New Horizons
No matter what our hypocrites, Uncle
Toms or "false prophets" may say, Israel, as an exclusivist
and settler-colonial state , has no hope of ever being
accepted or forgiven by its victims -- and as it should
know, those are the only ones whose forgiveness really
matters.
Despite the pain, the loss and the anger
which relative-humanization undoubtedly engenders in them, Palestinians
have an obligation to differentiate between justice and revenge,
for one entails an essentially moral decolonization,
whereas the other descends into a vicious cycle of immorality
and hopelessness. As the late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire
writes:
Dehumanization, which marks not only
those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different
way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation
of becoming more fully human. [The] Struggle [for humanization]
is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete
historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an
unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which
in turn dehumanizes the oppressed. In order for this struggle
to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain
their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn
oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity
of both.
Rejecting relative humanity from any
side, and insisting on ethical consistency, I believe that the
most moral means of achieving a just and enduring peace in the
ancient land of Palestine is to establish a secular democratic
state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, anchored in equal
humanity and, accordingly, equal rights. The one-state
solution, whether bi-national -- a notion which is largely based
on a false premise that the second nation in question is defined
-- or secular-democratic, offers a true chance for decolonization
of Palestine without turning the Palestinians into oppressors
of their former oppressors. The vicious cycle launched by the
Holocaust must come to an end altogether.
This new Palestine should:
(1) First and foremost allow and facilitate
the return of and compensation for all the Palestinian refugees,
as the only ethical restitution acceptable for the injustice
they've endured for decades. Such a process, however, must uphold
at all times the moral imperative of avoiding the infliction
of any unnecessary or unjust suffering on the Jewish community
in Palestine;
(2) Grant full, equal and unequivocal citizenship rights to all
the citizens, Jews or Arabs;
(3) Recognize, legitimize and even nourish the cultural, religious
and ethnic particularities and traditions of each respective
community.
As a general rule, I subscribe to what
Prof. Marcelo Dascal of Tel Aviv University insightfully proposes
"the majority has an obligation
to avoid as much as possible the identification of the state's
framework with traits that preclude the possibility of the minority's
commitment to it."
Israelis should recognize this moral
Palestinian challenge to their colonial existence not as an existential
threat to them but rather as an magnanimous invitation
to dismantle the colonial character of the state, to allow
the Jews in Palestine finally to enjoy normalcy, as equal humans
and equal citizens of a secular democratic state -- a truly promising
land, rather than a false Promised Land.
That would certainly confirm that Roosevelt
is not only dead but is also DEAD WRONG!
Omar Barghouti
is a Palestinian political analyst. His article "9.11 Putting
the Moment on Human Terms" was chosen among the "Best
of 2002" by the Guardian. His articles have appeared in
the Hartford Courant and Al-Ahram Weekly, among others. He can
be reached at: jenna@palnet.com
Weekend
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