[News] Who will save Palestine?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Who will save Palestine?
Sonja Karkar, The Electronic Intifada, 11 July 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7095.shtml


After Israel approved the release of 250 Palestinian prisoners from 
the Fatah movement, relatives of Palestinian prisoners not included 
in the 250 protest outside the Red Cross offices in Gaza City, 9 July 
2007. (Wissam Nassar/<http://maanimages.com>MaanImages)

These days the Hamas acting government and Fatah "emergency 
government" are sapping the interest from any news story that might 
report on Israel's criminal acts inside Gaza and the West Bank. Both 
these Palestinian enclaves are still under Israel's military 
occupation -- one shunned and isolated by political intrigue and the 
other apparently working at cooperating with the occupier, and 
there's the tragedy of it all. Nothing that has happened in the last 
fortnight has stopped Israel in its tracks. Life for the Palestinians 
in the occupied territories is just as bitter and just as terrifying 
as it ever was only with a new dimension -- no one knows whom to 
believe or if there is a viable Palestinian Liberation Organization 
(PLO) left to champion their struggle against Israel's unrelenting 
land theft, apartheid practices and violent human rights abuses.

Israel swaggers on the world stage as if it has had no hand in the 
whole miserable Palestinian drama. This archenemy -- never given to 
negotiating a genuine peace -- is now being sought out as a 
negotiating partner when it has never accepted any Palestinian leader 
on an equal footing, much less given an inch. Its highly vaunted 
disengagement from Gaza did not give the Palestinians their freedom: 
instead, they found themselves in a vice-like grip from outside. In 
the West Bank, Israel has continued its settlement expansion 
uninterrupted, and for all the talks, Palestinians have only ever 
seen their land and property rights taken away and their freedom 
further curtailed. For the Palestinians to forget that in the current 
climate, would truly spell the end of the final status issues for 
which so many have given their lives and so many others have waited 
decades to see justly resolved. If such a travesty of justice were to 
occur, peace would be forever elusive.

It would be nice to think that Israel is simply weary of occupying 
four million people after 40 years, but Israel's economy is booming 
and there is a chilling reason for the rapid growth in what Israel 
calls the homeland security sector. Writing in The Guardian (16 June 
2007), Naomi Klein says that "Israel has learned to turn endless war 
into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and 
containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in 
the 'global war on terror.'" How that will marry with the new 
political developments that should see Israel ease the punishing 
restrictions in the West Bank and opening the way for a Palestinian 
state, is anyone's guess. Chaos in the occupied territories has been 
extremely lucrative for Israel, enabling it to experiment with 
ever-more rigorous methods of population control using hi-tech 
surveillance systems. And a majority in Israel are not in the least 
perturbed by the mess of humanity squirming under the state's 
formidable "security" matrix, as long as the demographic threat is 
controlled, even eliminated.

If we take just the past week when Israel's Prime Minister Ehud 
Olmert and the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with other 
leaders in Sharm el-Sheikh to discuss the way forward for 
Palestinians, what emerged was the usual proviso -- any concessions 
made by Israel would depend on Abbas' progress in bringing an end to 
violence. This completely ignores the ongoing violence of Israel's 
occupation and, in effect, requires the Palestinians to submit to 
that occupation before they will get any concessions from Israel. A 
cursory glance at the realities on the ground in the occupied 
territories would show just why Abbas would find that as difficult to 
achieve as his predecessor Arafat. Even as these leaders spoke and 
smiled for the world's cameras, Israeli army tanks lumbered into the 
Gaza Strip backed by Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter planes while 
around 80 Israeli army jeeps rolled into Nablus city in the northern 
West Bank. In Gaza, 14 Palestinians were killed and many more were 
injured; in Nablus some 30 Palestinians were arrested after Israeli 
soldiers began randomly shooting and blowing open the front doors of 
homes as they went from house to house in search of militants.

This is Israeli violence which apparently does not need to be reined 
in -- a violence the Palestinians are living with daily. People are 
constantly being arrested in large numbers: Israeli jails are 
overflowing with more than 11,000 Palestinian prisoners, amongst them 
women and children. People can be held for up to 18 days without 
charge and with no way of telling their families; they have no 
recourse to a fair trial and many are tortured. It makes a mockery of 
the 250 prisoners from the Fatah party whom Olmert has offered as a 
goodwill gesture to Abbas' "emergency government." Abbas may well 
find himself in the same position as Arafat when he was given the 
role of policing his own people after Oslo. Then, Arafat's police 
force was constantly subjected to arrests and attacks from the 
Israeli military in what soon became clear was a deliberate attempt 
by Israel to dismantle Arafat's administration. Emasculated, Arafat 
was unable to stop Palestinian armed resistance to the occupation and 
Israel took matters into its own hands and punished the Palestinians. 
Last week, Israel did not even bother to wait for Abbas to stabilise 
the situation in the West Bank. Its military decided to enforce 
"order" arbitrarily by raiding homes and arresting those it suspected 
of armed resistance. As long as the Palestinians remain under such 
belligerent occupation, Abbas or anyone else, will find it very 
difficult to build good governance as every attempt is sure to be 
undermined by Israel.

If Abbas needs a more recent reminder of just how impossible it is to 
normalize the governance of his people under Israel's conditions, he 
need look no further than the ceasefire he and former Israeli Prime 
Minister Sharon announced in 2005 to kick start US President Bush's 
"Road Map" negotiations and the eventual establishment of a 
Palestinian state. Abbas was required to end violence and suppress 
all armed resistance to Israel; Sharon agreed to end "operations." 
Well, Israel's belligerence did not stop even and it continued to 
take Palestinian land. That week, the Israeli government announced 
the construction of 400 housing units in a new illegal Jewish 
settlement near Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem just after the Israeli 
High Court had decided to allow building to continue on the Apartheid 
Wall, contrary to the opinion of the International Court of Justice 
(ICJ). Weeks later, Israel announced another 3,500 housing units in 
the largest illegal settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, effectively cutting 
Jerusalem off from the West Bank. And to put that in perspective, 
every one of those housing units and every addition to the Wall, has 
taken land away from the Palestinians and has made more Palestinians 
homeless. They have had to watch their homes being demolished, crops 
and trees uprooted, land razed and not a single penny paid in compensation.

Interestingly, Hamas did agree to a ceasefire or hudna which they 
held for 18 months, and other militant groups also complied, but it 
made no difference. Israel refused to enter into this ceasefire with 
Hamas and continued to assassinate its leaders even though Hamas held 
resolutely to the ceasefire. It was Hamas that held out the olive 
branch and Israel that rejected it. None of this should give any 
Palestinian party confidence in Israel's current promises or 
offerings. Over and over again, Israel has demonstrated a complete 
disdain for negotiating peace with the Palestinians.

The danger in cooperating with Israel when it is continuing to 
violate international law and ignore the ICJ advisory opinion is that 
it actually "normalizes" Israel's colonial efforts and may also 
prejudice any final status negotiations. Israel has been repeatedly 
told by the UN and the US to freeze all settlement activity, but it 
has not done so and has not been pressed to do so. Neither is Israel 
admonished nor held to account. The attempts to treat the Wall as a 
humanitarian rather than a political issue by the UN, also takes the 
pressure off Israel. There has been little talk of bringing the Wall 
down as advised by the ICJ, but plenty of talk about its path; 
without anyone realizing it, the Wall becomes "normalized." Every 
official discourse has edged away from insisting that the Wall 
violates international law: it has become expedient to ignore the 
rule of law, especially amongst those who should be upholding it. 
Without checks and balances in place and adhered to by everyone, 
Israel will always do what it wants and it is very evident from 
Israel's unresponsive past that waiting for Israel's cooperation 
alone will not be enough gain its compliance.

The situation is so dire now that Palestinians and their supporters 
are finding other ways of forcing Israel's compliance. Already, there 
is a growing move towards boycotts and sanctions which is being taken 
up globally, despite nasty campaigns to intimidate those prepared to 
take such nonviolent action. This form of resistance is very powerful 
because it is really the only effective way of bringing Israel's 
economic boom to a halt, particularly in the area of homeland 
security which impacts so drastically on the Palestinians under 
occupation. That is not in anyway to minimize the courageous 
non-violent resistance against the Apartheid Wall and other Israeli 
violations in communities affected all over the West Bank. The 
Palestinians' on-the-ground experience of the Wall's insidious 
effects on their personal lives and society has mobilized them as 
neither the Palestinian Authority nor the PLO has been able to do. 
They are refusing to accept any "normalization" of the Wall's 
presence, not just its path. The ICJ opinion is very clear on that -- 
the wall must be dismantled. Their nonviolent, but determined 
protests challenge its legitimacy with barely a mention in the 
Western media, if at all. In response, Israel uses tear gas, rubber 
bullets, beatings and arrests. This is what ought to be making the 
headlines, not whether Abbas or Hamas are fit partners for "peace."

The divisions that have caused so much bitterness internally threaten 
the national liberation framework. It is not helpful for Abbas to 
demand that the Hamas movement be isolated, especially since Hamas is 
calling for the resumption of the unity government. And, it does not 
look good that Israel's interference in Palestinian affairs is 
helping Abbas. Israeli Shin Bet interrogators have offered to release 
imprisoned Palestinian members of parliament and government 
officials, mostly from the Hamas party, only if they resign from 
their posts. They have refused. According to Palestinian Basic Law, 
it is the Legislative Council which must approve any new Cabinet or 
Prime Minister (Article 78) and with most of the members of 
parliament in Israeli prisons, no quorum can be formed to 
"legitimize" Abbas' "emergency government."

It would be far better for Abbas to urge both the Fatah and Hamas 
parties to come together in a show of solidarity and give the people 
some sense of resisting Israel's arrogant demands. Risking the 
disintegration of the Palestinian national agenda for a few crumbs 
will never satisfy the Palestinians: certainly, there is no reason to 
believe that cooperating with Israel will bring the final status 
issues any closer to the negotiating table. Olmert has already 
withdrawn his "peace" offer to Abbas that would have removed some 
roadblocks in the West Bank.

Any party that assumes the mantle of government must encourage unity 
and must recognize the human potential in every Palestinian 
regardless of religious or political affiliation. For it is in the 
people that Palestine has its strongest savior. Familial and 
community loyalty, their millennia-long history, their deep 
attachment to the land and their capacity to endure have made the 
Palestinians unbelievably resilient. Real leadership must build on 
that loyalty, not divide it. It means working with the people on a 
campaign of organized non-violent civil disobedience against Israel's 
inhuman abuses rather than the hopeless rounds of negotiations that 
have never delivered a single promise to the Palestinian people and 
have only further entrenched their occupation and tightened Israel's control.

Nonviolent civil disobedience inside Palestine will allow 
Palestinians in the Diaspora and their supporters to increase their 
own protests even more effectively and inspire others to become 
involved. We have already seen how horrified people were when they 
saw the brutality of Israel's actions in its war on Lebanon. Crying 
"war on terror," "victim," "Israel's security" and "Israel's right to 
exist" too many times is already beginning to rebound on those 
propagating Israel's "vulnerability" and people are asking what is 
the other side of the story. In many places now and through different 
media, people are beginning to listen to the Palestinian narrative, 
especially as people are becoming more and more sceptical about the 
honesty and motives of today's leaders.

One does not have to look far for inspiration to save Palestine. 
There are Palestinians in Beit Hanina, Beit Surik, Biddu, Dahya, Ram, 
Saffa, Beil'in, Hebron, Budrus -- and the list goes on -- who protest 
non-violently and creatively in organized groups against the Wall, 
against Israel's land theft and destruction, against the uprooting of 
trees, and against home demolitions. These grassroots movements 
should be emulated at every level of society until those who run the 
government have no choice but to listen and change. The smallest 
committed group can have a profound effect in influencing others and 
it is happening around the world. Churches have begun to divest from 
Israel; trade unions and universities have begun boycotts; doctors, 
members of parliament, writers and actors have signed petitions; 
retired ambassadors, statesmen and even a former US president are 
speaking out; and there are also Israelis who refuse to accept their 
government's policies and practices and are saying "not in our name."

There is more than the quivering of a movement. The awakening does 
not always happen immediately, but eventually the "butterfly 
effect"-- that notion that the flapping of a butterfly's wings will 
have a far-reaching ripple effect on events that seem impossibly 
removed in time and space -- takes hold. It already has. We can feel 
it here in distant Australia. One can only hope that this will give 
succour to the Palestinians struggling for liberation. If the leaders 
cannot do it, then the people themselves and everyone who believes in 
justice and peace the world over may yet indeed find a way to save 
Palestine -- and not before time.

Sonja Karkar is the founder and president of 
<http://www.womenforpalestine.com/>Women for Palestine in Melbourne, 
Australia.




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