[News] Palestine- A defeated policy, not a defeated people

[Anti-Imperialist News]

A defeated policy, not a defeated people
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 7 March 2008

[]

Young relatives of newborn baby Amira Abu 'Aser mourn during her 
funeral in Gaza City, 5 March 2008. (Wissam 
Nassar/<http://www.maanimages.com/>MaanImages)

Compared with the international silence that surrounded Israel's 
recent massacres of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Gaza Strip, 
condemnation and condolences for the victims of the shooting attack 
that killed eight students at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem 
have been swift.

"I have just spoken with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert to 
extend my deepest condolences to the victims, their families, and to 
the people of Israel," US President George W. Bush said. UN 
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his "condemnation" and 
"condolences," as did EU High Representative Javier Solana.

The day before the Jerusalem attack, Amira Abu 'Aser was buried in 
Gaza. She had lived just 20 days on this earth before being 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9375.shtml>shot in the head 
by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house of friends she 
and her family were visiting. Needless to say, she had not been 
firing rockets at Sderot when she was killed. One of the house's 
inhabitants was found the next day, shot dead and his head crushed by 
an army jeep, an apparent victim of an extrajudicial murder by Israeli forces.

But confirming their status in the eyes of the "international 
community" as less than complete human beings, neither Amira's 
killing, nor any of the dozens of Palestinian civilian victims of 
Israel's onslaught in Gaza have merited condemnation or condolences.

The fallacy that lies behind the differential concern for the lives 
of innocent Israelis and Palestinians is that the massacre in 
Jerusalem and the massacres in Gaza can be separated. Israeli deaths 
are "terrorism," while Palestinian deaths are merely an unfortunate 
consequence of the fight against "terrorism." But the two are 
intricately linked, and what happened in Jerusalem is a direct 
consequence of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for decades.

Let me be clear that the killing of civilians, Israeli or 
Palestinian, is wrong, repugnant, and cannot bring this 
one-hundred-year war caused by the Zionist colonization of Palestine 
to an end. There will be an Israeli propaganda effort -- as always -- 
to present Palestinian violence as being simply motivated by hatred, 
and divorced from the context of brutal occupation that Palestinians 
live under. What greater proof could you need than an attack on 
religious students, devoting their life to the study of the Torah?

We cannot expect much analysis in the media of why the Mercaz HaRav 
yeshiva might have been chosen as a target. Was it mere coincidence 
that the school, named for Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and led after 
his death by his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is the ideological cradle 
of the militant, Jewish supremacist settler movement Gush Emunim?

Unlike other sects in Israel which sought exemption of their students 
from military service, Gush Emunim encouraged its followers to join 
the army and become the armed wing of religious nationalist Zionism. 
Gush Emunim settlers, many of them, like Moshe Levinger, graduates of 
Mercaz HaRav, founded the most extreme and racist settlements in the 
Occupied West Bank, including the notorious colonies in and near 
Hebron whose inhabitants have made life miserable for Palestinians in 
the city and forced many of them out of their homes. It is the 
militant settlers of Gush Emunim who still honor Baruch Goldstein who 
murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in February 1994. It is in Hebron 
that the Gush Emunim settlers spray "Arabs to the gas chambers" on 
Palestinian houses.

It is possible that the Mercaz HaRav gunman did not know or care 
about any of this, that any target he could identify as Israeli would 
have satisfied his desire to exact revenge.

In 2002, Israeli army chief Moshe Yaalon declared that "the 
Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of 
their consciousness that they are a defeated people." This would be 
achieved by the massive and constant application of force until they 
got the message. The same philosophy was elaborated in 2004 by 
Professor Arnon Soffer, one of the architects, with former Israeli 
prime minister Ariel Sharon, of the 2005 Gaza "disengagement."

Soffer, an avid supporter of turning Gaza into a hermetically-sealed 
pen for unwanted Palestinians, explained that if Palestinians fire a 
single rocket over the fence into Israel, "we will fire 10 in 
response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be 
destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won't 
allow their husbands to shoot Qassams [rockets], because they will 
know what's waiting for them."

Soffer predicted that in a few years' time, "when 2.5 million people 
live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. 
Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, 
with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam." With Palestinians 
closed in, "The pressure at the border will be awful," Soffer 
predicted. "It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain 
alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day."

To be fair, Soffer did display a human side: "The only thing that 
concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to 
have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families 
and be normal human beings" ("It's the demography, stupid," The 
Jerusalem Post, 21 May 2004).

For decades Israel has been exercizing with ever-escalating brutality 
this deliberate strategy to crush through force and starvation a 
civilian population in rebellion against colonial rule. To Israel's 
vexation, the Palestinians are not playing their part. After sixty 
years of expulsions, massacres, assassinations of their leaders, 
colonization, torture, and mass imprisonment, the Palestinians have 
utterly failed to understand that they are a "defeated people."

The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank endure 
unprecedented oppression by the Israeli army and settlers without 
resorting to violence in response, but they maintain an 
inextinguishable determination to endure until they regain their 
rights. If the methods the Palestinian resistance has sometimes used 
are reprehensible, they have also been typical for anti-colonial 
resistance movements throughout time, as William Polk shows in his 
book Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism and 
Guerilla War from the American Revolution to Iraq, and Robert Pape 
demonstrated through his study of suicide bombing in Dying to Win.

Is it not time for the rest of the world to step in and force Israel 
at last to understand the same thing, so that the senseless bloodshed 
can finally stop and all the people of the country -- Israelis and 
Palestinians -- can begin to imagine a future other than an endless 
parade of funerals?

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of 
<http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/store/548.shtml>One Country: A 
Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan 
Books, 2006).




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