[News] Israel's right to defend itself
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Jan 20 13:02:49 EST 2009
Israel's right to defend itself
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10221.shtml
Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 20 January 2009
Common Western political wisdom has it that when
Western countries support Israeli military action
against Arab countries or the Palestinian people,
they do so because they support Israel's right to
defend itself against its enemies.
This has always been established wisdom in Israel
itself, even before the colonial settlement was
established, wherein its predatory army is
ironically named the Israel Defense Forces, not
unlike the South African apartheid army, which
was also known as the South African Defense
Forces. This defensive nomenclature is hardly
exclusive to Israel and South Africa, as many
countries rushed after World War II to rename
their Ministries of "War" as Ministries of
"Defense." Still, Israel's allegedly defensive
actions define every single war the colonial
settlement has ever engaged in, even and
especially when it starts these wars, which it
has done in all cases except in 1973.
Thus the war of 1948 which Zionist militias
started against the Palestinian people on 30
November 1947, a day after a Western-controlled
Untied Nations General Assembly issued the
Partition Plan, is presented as "defensive," as
was its expulsion of about 400,000 Palestinians
before 15 May 1948, i.e. before the day on which
three Arab armies (the Egyptian, Syrian, and
Iraqi armies) invaded the area that became Israel
(Lebanon hardly had an army to invade with and
hardly managed to retrieve two Lebanese villages
that Israel had occupied, and Jordanian forces
only entered the areas designated by the UN plan
for the Palestinian state, and East Jerusalem
which was projected to fall under UN jurisdiction).
Yet until this very day, Israel, its Western and
Arab and Palestinian allies, seem to agree with
the major Israeli lie that the refugee "problem"
resulted from the 1948 war which Israel fought as
a "defensive" war and that the responsibility of
the refugees lies with the Arab governments who
"started" the war. While the remaining 370,000
Palestinians Israel expelled were driven out
after 15 May 1948 and before the end of January
1949 (when armistice talks began), they could
ostensibly be included in the argument that their
expulsion was a result of the war, but it remains
unclear why the first 400,000 would be included
in that category. The thousands of Palestinians
who would be expelled after the armistice
agreements were signed, especially those of the
city of Majdal, now Ashkelon, whose population
was loaded onto trucks and expelled to Gaza, does
not even enter these calculations.
The argument in fact must be extended to the
post-15 May refugees. After all, it was Zionist
expulsions of the Palestinians for over five
months prior to the Arab armies' intervention in
May 1948 that was used as a casus belli for the
Arab armies whose intervention was carried out
under the banner of defending Palestine and the
Palestinians against Zionist aggression. None of
this however seems to matter and Zionist
aggression against the Palestinian people and
their UN-designated state continues to be
presented as part of "Israel's right to defend itself."
Ironically, Israel's unprovoked invasion of Egypt
in 1956 and occupation of Sinai also seems to
fall under the category of Israel's right to
defend itself as far as the Israelis were
concerned, although United States President
Dwight Eisenhower and the Soviet Union thought
otherwise at the time, which forced Israel to
withdraw. Israel's massive invasions of three
Arab countries in 1967 was/is also presented as
another defensive war, wherein if it is ever
admitted that Israel is the party that started
the war, the admission is quickly followed by the
"explanation" (hasbara in Hebrew, which is also
the word for "propaganda") that it was a
"preemptive" war in which Israel was "defending"
itself. This also applies to Israel's 1978 and
1982 and 2006 invasions of Lebanon, its continued
occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem
and the Golan Heights, its siege of Gaza, and its
massacres against the Palestinians there in the last three weeks.
The logic goes as follows: Israel has the right
to occupy Palestinian land, lay siege to
Palestinian populations in Bantustans surrounded
by an apartheid wall, starve the population, cut
them off from fuel and electricity, uproot their
trees and crops, and launch periodic raids and
targeted assassinations against them and their
elected leadership, and if this population
resists these massive Israeli attacks against
their lives and the fabric of their society and
Israel responds by slaughtering them en masse,
Israel would simply be "defending" itself as it must and should.
Indeed, as The New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman, the best friend of Israel and the Saudi
ruling family, has argued recently, in doing so,
Israel is engaged in a pedagogical exercise of
"educating" the Palestinians. Perhaps many of the
Arab businessmen's associations who regularly
invite Friedman to speak to their organizations
in a number of Arab countries and pay him an
astronomical speaking fee can invite him back to
educate them on Israel's pedagogical methods and
on The New York Times' war propaganda on behalf of Israel.
The major argument here is two-fold, namely that
while Israel has the right to defend itself, its
victims have no similar right to defend
themselves. In fact, the logic is even more
sinister than this and can be elucidated as
follows: Israel has the right to oppress the
Palestinians and does so to defend itself, but
were the Palestinians to defend themselves
against Israel's oppression, which they do not
have a right to do, Israel will then have the
right to defend itself against their illegitimate
defense of themselves against its legitimate
oppression of them, which it carries out anyway
in order to defend itself legitimately.
This is why, not only does Israel have the right
to arm itself and to be a nuclear power and to
have a military edge over the combined militaries
of the entire region in which it lives, but it
also must ensure that the military power of its
neighbors is used to quell the Palestinians and
not Israel, indeed to help Israel lay siege to
the resisting Palestinians. When and if
Palestinians try to arm themselves to defend
their lives against Israeli invasions and
slaughter, Israel makes every effort to prevent
them from doing so and considers this "illegal smuggling."
The recent signing of an agreement between Israel
and its US sponsor and the volunteering of
European countries (France, Britain, Germany,
Italy, and Spain) to police the waters and
borders of Gaza with Egypt to prevent the
Palestinians from "smuggling" arms to defend
themselves is the most recent application of this
understanding. Israel's US sponsor and European
allies are horrified by the Palestinians'
attempts to arm themselves (to which they have no
right) in order to defend their very lives
against Israel's right to slaughter them in order to defend itself.
Indeed, Israel has included the erstwhile
Palestinian leadership for the last 15 years in
its efforts to repress all Palestinians who
resist its right to defend itself by oppressing
them. This is precisely why the Palestinian
Authority (PA) was created in the first place.
The PA that the Oslo Agreement established on
paper in autumn 1993 and came to life in the form
of institutions and a collaborating Palestinian
elite in 1994 has finally, however, come to an
end in the winter of 2009. While the PA tried its
best to be a repressive force on behalf of Israel
and has killed scores of Palestinians who
resisted the occupation and PA collaboration
since 1994, its ability to control the surge of
Palestinian resistance was checked by its failure
to win the last elections and its failure to
defeat Hamas militarily. Fifteen years after its
establishment, the PA has run its course. In
Gaza, Israel destroyed all the bureaucratic and
administrative offices of the PA run by Hamas and
thus has returned Hamas by default to its
erstwhile status as the major Palestinian
guerrilla group resisting Israel's illegal
occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem,
Israel's criminal siege of Gaza, and Israel's
ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
In the West Bank, the process of finishing off
the PA has been more gradual. While an ambivalent
war against the PA started with Israel's
reinvasion of West Bank cities and towns (around
which it had redeployed earlier) in 2002, a
reassessment occurred after Yasser Arafat's death
and after his successors promised to collaborate
with Israel as much as Arafat used to before the
Camp David talks in the summer of 2000. Israel's
kidnapping of Hamas officials elected in January
2006 to the Palestinian Legislative Council and
its government ministers, followed by the war
launched against Hamas officials and rank and
file members by the Fatah leadership who lost the
elections, and by the illegal coup d'etat staged
in collaboration with the US and Israel against
Hamas with success in the West Bank and with
utter failure in Gaza by Mahmoud Abbas and his
cronies, have sealed the fate of the PA. The
final coup de grâce came in the last few days
when the term of Abbas in office ended on 9
January 2009, his ongoing illegal attempts to
extend his term for one more year notwithstanding.
Abbas was the only member of the collaborating
group in the West Bank that still had any
legitimate and legal status given to him by the
elections. Today, as a result, there is no longer
a Palestinian Authority as a legal entity or as
one that has any popular or juridical legitimacy.
The PA was born by Israeli fiat and a
collaborating Palestinian elite and has died by
Israeli fiat and the actions of the collaborating
Palestinian elite. Mahmoud Abbas's absence from
the Arab summit in Qatar a few days ago, which
convened to support the resisting Palestinians in
Gaza, and his characterization of the summit as
an "ambush" to divide the Palestinians have
exposed him further in the eyes of the
Palestinian people as an unrepentant collaborator
with the Israeli occupation and with the Arab
dictators allied with Israel and the United
States. His subsequent attendance of the Sharm
al-Sheikh summit with European powers that seek
to help Israel decimate the Palestinian people is therefore hardly surprising.
As the PA continues to usurp political power in
the West Bank, it remains clear that nothing
short of a third Palestinian uprising there will
end the illegitimate rule of the PA whose
collaborators continue to refuse to pack up and
leave. Indeed, the new move by the US and
European allies of Israel is to shower money on
the PA in the form of reconstruction funds slated
for Gaza in the hope of seducing the
Israeli-impoverished, -butchered, and -devastated
Palestinians in Gaza to stop supporting Hamas and
switch allegiance to the illegitimate and
collaborationist PA whose European funds will be dangled before them as bait.
If a generation of Palestinian and Arab
intellectuals came to believe since the 1970s
that armed struggle would not be able to end the
Israeli occupation and that negotiations would be
the only way to do so, a whole new generation of
Palestinian and Arab intellectuals (some of whom
are liberal) now understand that negotiations
with Israel have only served to intensify the
occupation and will only serve to do so in the
future. The benefits of 18 years of negotiations
with Israel, as is evident for all to see, has
been not only more Jewish colonial settlement and
more massacres and more confiscation of land, but
also the destruction of the Palestinian national
movement through imploding it from within. It is
true that negotiations have enriched the
Palestinian business class in the West Bank and
Gaza as well as the comprador intellectuals and
the bureaucratic and military class that were
inducted in the PA game of non-governmental
funding via the so-called peace-process, but
these benefits have been delivered to the few by
taking away the livelihoods of the many.
What has ended then with Israel's ongoing
butchery in Gaza is not only the Palestinian
Collaborationist Authority but also negotiations
as a viable or a credible path to ending the
occupation. This is the situation that the
incoming rabidly pro-Israeli American President
Obama will be facing soon. The half-white and
fully Christian Obama, who, when denying the
accusation of being a Muslim assured Americans
that not only was he raised by his white
Christian mother and her family but also of his
belief that the blood of Jesus Christ will
"redeem" him, and that he prays to Jesus every
night, will continue, along with his pro-Israel
operatives, to support Israel's war crimes and to
buttress the illegal authority of the Palestinian
collaborators in the West Bank.
Israel destroyed the PA in Gaza because it could
no longer ensure its collaboration there after
Hamas was elected and assumed political power
there. After Hamas won the free elections, Israel
arrested the majority of Hamas elected officials
to ensure that the Fatah leadership continues to
collaborate unhindered. The PA survives as an
illegal entity in the West Bank today, because
Israel still banks on its collaboration, most
evident in PA police repression of demonstrations
across the West Bank which sought to show
solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Injecting
the illegitimate and illegal PA with more funds
with which to torture the Palestinian people and
stuff the pockets of its collaborators will
hardly make it a more attractive choice to the
majority of poor Palestinians who have been the
ultimate losers of PA rule and the Oslo Accords.
In the meantime, the West and Israel will
continue to defend Israel's right to defend
itself and to deny the Palestinians the right to
defend themselves. While some call this
international relations, in reality it is nothing
short of inter-racial relations wherein Jews, who
since World War II have been inducted into the
realm of whiteness, have rights that the
Palestinians, like their counterparts elsewhere
in the non-European world who are forever cast
outside the realm of whiteness, do not. Thomas
Friedman is right; Israel has been trying to
educate the Palestinians that it will punish all
their attempts to check its white colonial power
to oppress them and that they must understand
that they deserve to be punished and defeated for not being white.
The problem is that the Palestinians, students of
a universal humanism in which they consider
themselves equal to everyone else, keep failing
Israel's racial lessons and tests. What the
Palestinians ultimately insist on is that Israel
must be taught that it does not have the right to
defend its racial supremacy and that the
Palestinians have the right to defend their
universal humanity against Israel's racist
oppression. Will Israel and its allies ever learn
that lesson? Israeli history tells us that as
students of racial supremacy, Zionists have
always failed the test of universal humanism.
Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of modern
Arab politics and intellectual history at
Columbia University in New York. He is the author
of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge, 2006).
Freedom Archives
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