What Israel Has Done
05/05/2002
- Opinión
Despite Israel's effort to restrict coverage of its destructive
invasion of the West Bank's Palestinian towns and refugee camps,
information and images have nevertheless seeped through. The Internet
has provided hundreds of verbal as well as pictorial eyewitness
reports, as have Arab and European TV coverage, most of it unavailable
or blocked or spun out of existence from the mainstream US media. That
evidence provides stunning proof of what Israel's campaign has
actually--has always--been about: the irreversible conquest of
Palestinian land and society. The official line (which Washington has
basically supported, along with nearly every US media commentator) is
that Israel has been defending itself by retaliating against the
suicide bombings that have undermined its security and even threatened
its existence. That claim has gained the status of an absolute truth,
moderated neither by what Israel has done nor by what in fact has been
done to it.
Phrases such as "plucking out the terrorist network," "destroying the
terrorist infrastructure" and "attacking terrorist nests" (note the
total dehumanization involved) are repeated so often and so
unthinkingly that they have given Israel the right to destroy
Palestinian civil life, with a shocking degree of sheer wanton
destruction, killing, humiliation and vandalism.
There are signs, however, that Israel's amazing, not to say grotesque,
claim to be fighting for its existence is slowly being eroded by the
devastation wrought by the Jewish state and its homicidal prime
minister, Ariel Sharon. Take this front-page New York Times report,
"Attacks Turn Palestinian Plans Into Bent Metal and Piles of Dust," by
Serge Schmemann (no Palestinian propagandist) on April 11: "There is no
way to assess the full extent of the damage to the cities and towns--
Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Nablus and Jenin--while they
remain under a tight siege, with patrols and snipers firing in the
streets. But it is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself
and of any future Palestinian state--roads, schools, electricity
pylons, water pipes, telephone lines--has been devastated."
By what inhuman calculus did Israel's army, using dozens of tanks and
armored personnel carriers, along with hundreds of missile strikes from
US-supplied Apache helicopter gunships, besiege Jenin's refugee camp
for over a week, a one-square-kilometer patch of shacks housing 15,000
refugees and a few dozen men armed with automatic rifles and no
missiles or tanks, and call it a response to terrorist violence and a
threat to Israel's survival? There are reported to be hundreds buried
in the rubble, which Israeli bulldozers began heaping over the camp's
ruins after the fighting ended. Are Palestinian civilian men, women
and children no more than rats or cockroaches that can be attacked and
killed in the thousands without so much as a word of compassion or in
their defense? And what about the capture of thousands of men who have
been taken off by Israeli soldiers, the destitution and homelessness of
so many ordinary people trying to survive in the ruins created by
Israeli bulldozer! s all over the West Bank, the siege that has now
gone on for months and months, the cutting off of electricity and water
in Palestinian towns, the long days of total curfew, the shortage of
food and medicine, the wounded who have bled to death, the systematic
attacks on ambulances and aid workers that even the mild-mannered Kofi
Annan has decried as outrageous? Those actions will not be pushed so
easily into the memory hole. Its friends must ask Israel how its
suicidal policies can possibly gain it peace, acceptance and security.
The monstrous transformation of an entire people by a formidable and
feared propaganda machine into little more than militants and
terrorists has allowed not just Israel's military but its fleet of
writers and defenders to efface a terrible history of injustice,
suffering and abuse in order to destroy the civil existence of the
Palestinian people with impunity. Gone from public memory are the
destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the creation of a
dispossessed people; the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza and their
military occupation since 1967; the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, with
its 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinian dead and the Sabra and Shatila
massacres; the continuous assault on Palestinian schools, refugee
camps, hospitals, civil installations of every kind. What
antiterrorist purpose is served by destroying the building and then
removing the records of the ministry of education; the Ramallah
municipality; the Central Bureau of Statistics; various institutes !
specializing in civil rights, health, culture and economic development;
hospitals, radio and TV stations? Isn't it clear that Sharon is bent
not only on breaking the Palestinians but on trying to eliminate them
as a people with national institutions?
In such a context of disparity and asymmetrical power it seems deranged
to keep asking the Palestinians, who have no army, air force, tanks or
functioning leadership, to renounce violence, and to require no
comparable limitation on Israel's actions. It certainly obscures
Israel's systematic use of lethal force against unarmed civilians,
copiously documented by all the major human rights organizations. Even
the matter of suicide bombers, which I have always opposed, cannot be
examined from a viewpoint that permits a hidden racist standard to
value Israeli lives over the many more Palestinian lives that have been
lost, maimed, distorted and foreshortened by longstanding military
occupation and the systematic barbarity openly used by Sharon against
Palestinians since the beginning of his career.
There can be no conceivable peace that doesn't tackle the real issue,
which is Israel's utter refusal to accept the sovereign existence of a
Palestinian people that is entitled to rights over what Sharon and most
of his supporters consider to be the land of Greater Israel, i.e., the
West Bank and Gaza. A profile of Sharon in the April 5 Financial Times
concluded with this telling extract from his autobiography, which the
FT prefaced with, "He has written with pride of his parents' belief
that Jews and Arabs could be citizens side by side." Then the relevant
passage from Sharon's book: "But they believed without question that
only they had rights over the land. And no one was going to force them
out, regardless of terror or anything else. When the land belongs to
you physically...that is when you have power, not just physical power
but spiritual power."
In 1988 the PLO made the concession of accepting partition of Palestine
into two states. This was reaffirmed on numerous occasions, and
certainly in the Oslo documents. But only the Palestinians explicitly
recognized the notion of partition. Israel never has. This is why
there are now more than 170 settlements on Palestinian land, why there
is a 300-mile road network connecting them to each other and totally
impeding Palestinian movement (according to Jeff Halper of The Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions, it costs $3 billion and has been
funded by the United States), and why no Israeli prime minister has
ever conceded any real sovereignty to the Palestinians, and why the
settlements have grown on an annual basis. The merest glance at the
accompanying map reveals what Israel has been doing throughout the
peace process, and what the consequent geographical discontinuity and
shrinkage in Palestinian life has been. In effect, Israel considers
itself and the Jewish people ! to own all of Palestine. There are land
ownership laws in Israel itself guaranteeing this, but in the West Bank
and Gaza the settlements, roads and refusal to concede sovereign land
rights to the Palestinians serve the same function.
What boggles the mind is that no official--no US, no Palestinian, no
Arab, no UN, no European, or anyone else--has challenged Israel on this
point, which has been threaded through all of the Oslo agreements.
Which is why, after nearly ten years of peace negotiations, Israel
still controls the West Bank and Gaza. They are more directly
controlled by more than 1,000 Israeli tanks and thousands of soldiers
today, but the underlying principle is the same. No Israeli leader
(and certainly not Sharon and his Land of Israel supporters, who are
the majority in his government) has either officially recognized the
occupied territories as occupied or gone on to recognize that
Palestinians could or might theoretically have sovereign rights--that
is, without Israeli control over borders, water, air or security--to
what most of the world considers Palestinian land. So to speak about
the vision of a Palestinian state, as has become fashionable, is a mere
vision unless the question of land ow! nership and sovereignty is
openly and officially conceded by the Israeli government. None ever
has and, if I am right, none will in the near future. It should be
remembered that Israel is the only state in the world today that has
never had internationally declared borders; the only state not the
state of its citizens but of the whole Jewish people; the only state
where more than 90 percent of the land is held in trust for the use
only of the Jewish people. That Israel has systematically flouted
international law (as argued last week in these pages by Richard Falk)
suggests the depth and structural knottiness of the absolute
rejectionism that Palestinians have had to face.
This is why I have been skeptical about discussions and meetings about
peace, which is a lovely word but in the present context usually means
Palestinians are told to stop resisting Israeli control over their
land. It is among the many deficiencies of Arafat's terrible
leadership (to say nothing of the even more lamentable Arab leaders in
general) that he neither made the decadelong Oslo negotiations ever
focus on land ownership, thus never putting the onus on Israel to
declare itself willing to give up title to Palestinian land, nor asked
that Israel be required to deal with any of its responsibility for the
sufferings of his people. Now I worry that he may simply be trying to
save himself again, whereas what we really need are international
monitors to protect us, as well as new elections to assure a real
political future for the Palestinian people.
The profound question facing Israel and its people is this: Is it
willing to assume the rights and obligations of being a country like
any other, and forswear the kind of impossible colonial assertions for
which Sharon and his parents and soldiers have been fighting since day
one? In 1948 Palestinians lost 78 percent of Palestine. In 1967 they
lost the remaining 22 percent. Now the international community must
lay upon Israel the obligation to accept the principle of real, as
opposed to fictional, partition, and to accept the principle of
limiting Israel's extraterritorial claims, those absurd, biblically
based pretensions and laws that have so far allowed it to override
another people. Why is that kind of fundamentalism unquestioningly
tolerated? But so far all we hear is that Palestinians must give up
violence and condemn terror. Is nothing substantive ever demanded of
Israel, and can it go on doing what it has without a thought for the
consequences? That is the real questio! n of its existence, whether it
can exist as a state like all others, or must always be above the
constraints and duties of other states. The record is not reassuring.
https://www.alainet.org/es/node/106125?language=es
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- ¿Qué está pasando en Estados Unidos? 28/04/2003
- La crisis de los judíos estadounidenses 30/05/2002
- What Israel Has Done 05/05/2002
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