[News] The shortcut to peace

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The shortcut to peace

Hasan Abu Nimah, The Electronic Intifada, 28 January 2009

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10248.shtml

Because it is generally accepted by the so-called "international 
community" that Hamas is a major threat to Israel, and therefore to 
world peace and security, France has dispatched a frigate to 
participate in a new blockade of the Gaza Strip. The Sunday Times 
reported that United States naval ships hunting pirates in the Gulf 
of Aden have been instructed to track down Iranian arms shipments (25 
January). Many other European states offered their navies to assist. 
Indeed, United Nations Security Council resolution 1860 emphasized 
the need to prevent illicit trafficking in arms and ammunition.

Unfortunately not one European country offered to send its navy to 
render humanitarian assistance to the thousands of injured, hungry, 
cold and homeless people in Gaza rendered so as a result of Israel's 
attack. Perhaps helping children dying from white phosphorus burns, 
or just lack of clean water, would be seen as supporting "terrorism."

The perverse assumption behind all the offers of help to Israel seems 
to be that Hamas and other resistance groups in Gaza fired rockets at 
Israel merely because rockets were available. Therefore, the logic 
goes, peace would prevail if the supply of rockets were curtailed.

Another strange assumption is that Hamas was freely importing rockets 
from Iran or elsewhere because Gaza's borders were open and free of 
any control.

This ignores the fact that since Israel "disengaged" from Gaza in the 
summer of 2005, the coastal territory was never allowed any free 
access to the outside world. Gaza has been under varied forms of 
siege and blockade by land, sea and air. Fishermen were not even free 
to fish without constant attacks by the Israeli navy.

The Rafah crossing linking Gaza to Egypt was kept closed on Israeli 
insistence until a regime for strict Israeli proxy surveillance, with 
European monitors acting on Israel's behalf, was established for it.

If Hamas, despite the blockade and total financial and diplomatic 
boycott managed to import so many rockets or the materials to make 
them, what level of further siege would guarantee an end to arms 
importation now?

But the glaring moral and legal question is why the "international 
community" is mobilizing its navies and political efforts to protect 
the aggressor, preserve the occupation, and deny the victims any 
means to defend themselves? If they do not want Palestinians to 
resist, why do they not themselves confront the aggressor and force 
an end to the occupation, the siege and dispossession?

In the better past when war broke out in a region the immediate 
response was often to impose an arms embargo on all sides. But when 
the defenseless population in Gaza were under attack from the 
region's strongest army all calls were to prevent the victims from 
defending themselves. Meanwhile, endless supplies of sophisticated 
weaponry were sent to the occupier despite its already massive 
dominance and indiscriminate and criminal attacks on civilians.

Without objective and daring diagnosis of the conflict's root causes 
there is no chance of any effective treatment. Sadly this lesson has 
never been learned, although it has been written repeatedly with much 
innocent blood.

When Palestinians started their first unarmed uprising in 1987, 40 
years after their expulsion from their homes and 20 years after the 
brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip began, they had no 
rockets; they had only stones to confront heavily armed occupation 
forces. Israel used its guns and deliberate, sadistic bone-breaking 
against unarmed demonstrators killing almost 1,500 and injuring tens 
of thousands in its failed efforts to crush that uprising. Only with 
the 1993 Oslo accords was it possible to put an end to the uprising.

Hamas, as a resistance movement, was born in 1988. Israel, desperate 
to break the political monopoly of the Palestine Liberation 
Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian 
people, tacitly allowed Hamas to flourish.

Before any Palestinian fired a single shot at the start of the second 
uprising, in September 2000, Israel had already gunned down dozens of 
unarmed demonstrators. Palestinians learned these lessons well: 
Israel will meet any peaceful challenge with lethal force so one had 
better be prepared to fight back.

We need to recall these facts to understand the pure folly and 
detachment from reality of international politics today. The tendency 
has been to choose as the "cause" of the conflict to be addressed 
only what is politically expedient and easy, whether it is wrong or 
right, just or unjust, legal or illegal. The starting point of 
history is chosen not from the origins of the problem, but from 
whatever point suits the narrative of the strong.

It is utterly misleading and dishonest to pretend -- as so many now 
do -- that the sum total of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a 
confrontation over what expired Palestinian Authority President and 
Israeli puppet Mahmoud Abbas himself referred to as "silly rockets." 
To pretend that stopping the supply of rockets will make any 
difference to the course of a conflict that results from the historic 
dispossession -- the Nakba -- of an entire nation, and its 
replacement with a racist rogue state that has exiled, occupied and 
massacred the survivors for 61 years is the height of delusion.

It is convenient for the occupier and aggressor to forget all these 
things and talk only of rockets. And it is convenient for the cowards 
who dress themselves in diplomats' suits and don't dare utter the truth.

Should we not acknowledge -- if there is any real desire to resolve 
this conflict -- that the resistance did not fire rockets just 
because they had them, and Israel did not carry out its barbarous 
massacres in Gaza just because it wanted to stop them? Should we not 
acknowledge the indisputable truth that Hamas did not break the 
truce, but Israel did when it attacked across the border on 4 
November killing six Palestinians? Hamas did not refuse to renew the 
truce -- as Abbas and Egyptian officials confirmed. All they asked 
was that the halt to killing be extended to the West Bank (which 
Israel refused) and that the starvation siege that was quietly 
killing Palestinians in Gaza be lifted. Have we not been all along 
taught that blockade is an act of aggression and that occupation 
legitimizes resistance?

The gunboats that Europe is sending to police the inmates of the Gaza 
Ghetto are not manifestations of strength, neither are they -- or the 
recent shocking statements of European Union Humanitarian chief Louis 
Michel in Gaza blaming Hamas for Israel's crimes on 26 January -- 
acts of responsible diplomacy in pursuit of peace and stability; they 
are a new prescription, if not a clear endorsement, for further 
bloodshed and war crimes. They are signs of a moral weakness and 
corruption unparalleled since Europeans stood by silently at stations 
and watched as their compatriots were loaded onto Nazi trains. Who 
could have thought that in the 21st century such things would need to 
be said -- and to those we thought had overcome their terrible 
history? But silence is not, and should not be an option any more. 
For years we have been told we should learn from the darkest episode 
in Europe's history, but never make comparisons to it lest we 
diminish its enormity. But the horrifying atrocities in Gaza which an 
Israeli official proudly predicted last March would be a "bigger 
holocaust" compel us to cast our reservations aside.

There is a shortcut to calm, the elimination of violence and 
eventually peace. It is a lesson that should have been learned many 
years, and countless thousands of lives ago: justice.

Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at 
the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and 
is republished with the author's permission.



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