[News] If Hamas Did Not Exist
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Fri Jan 2 10:49:34 EST 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/
January 1 , 2009
Israel Has No Intention of Granting a Palestinian State
If Hamas Did Not Exist
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Let us get one thing perfectly straight. If the
wholesale mutilation and degradation of the Gaza
Strip is going to continue; if Israels will is
at one with that of the United States; if the
European Union, Russia, the United Nations and
all the international legal agencies and
organizations spread across the globe are going
to continue to sit by like hollow mannequins
doing nothing but making repeated calls for a
ceasefire on both sides; if the cowardly,
obsequious and supine Arab States are going to
stand by watching their brethren get slaughtered
by the hour while the worlds bullying Superpower
eyes them threateningly from Washington lest they
say something a little to their disliking; then
let us at least tell the truth why this hell on earth is taking place.
The state terror unleashed from the skies and on
the ground against the Gaza Strip as we speak has
nothing to do with Hamas. It has nothing to do
with Terror. It has nothing to do with the
long-term security of the Jewish State or with
Hizbullah or Syria or Iran except insofar as it
is aggravating the conditions that have led up to
this crisis today. It has nothing to do with some
conjured-up war a cynical and overused
euphemism that amounts to little more the
wholesale enslavement of any nation that dares
claim its sovereign rights; that dares assert
that its resources are its own; that doesnt want
one of the Empires obscene military bases sitting on its cherished land.
This crisis has nothing to do with freedom,
democracy, justice or peace. It is not about
Mahmoud Zahhar or Khalid Mashal or Ismail
Haniyeh. It is not about Hassan Nasrallah or
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are all circumstantial
players who have gained a role in the current
tempest only now that the situation has been
allowed for 61 years to develop into the
catastrophe that it is today. The Islamist factor
has colored and will continue to color the
atmosphere of the crisis; it has enlisted the
current leaders and mobilized wide sectors of the
worlds population. The primary symbols today are
Islamic the mosques, the Quran, the references
to the Prophet Muhammad and to Jihad. But these
symbols could disappear and the impasse would continue.
There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the
day; when few Palestinians wanted anything to do
with Islamist policies and politics. Such
politics have nothing to do with primitive
rockets being fired over the border, or smuggling
tunnels and black-market weapons; just as
Arafats Fatah had little to do with stones and
suicide bombings. The associations are
coincidental; the creations of a given political
environment. They are the result of something
entirely different than what the lying
politicians and their analysts are telling you.
They have become part of the landscape of human
events in the modern Middle East today; but
incidentals wholly as lethal, or as recalcitrant,
deadly, angry or incorrigible could just as soon have been in their places.
Strip away the clichés and the vacuous newspeak
blaring out across the servile media and its
pathetic corps of voluntary state servants in the
Western world and what you will find is the naked
desire for hegemony; for power over the weak and
dominion over the worlds wealth. Worse yet you
will find that the selfishness, the hatred and
indifference, the racism and bigotry, the egotism
and hedonism that we try so hard to cover up with
our sophisticated jargon, our refined academic
theories and models actually help to guide our
basest and ugliest desires. The callousness with
which we in indulge in them all are endemic to
our very culture; thriving here like flies on a corpse.
Strip away the current symbols and language of
the victims of our selfish and devastating whims
and you will find the simple, impassioned and
unaffected cries of the downtrodden; of the
wretched of the earth begging you to cease your
cold aggression against their children and their
homes; their families and their villages; begging
you to leave them alone to have their fish and
their bread, their oranges, their olives and
their thyme; asking you first politely and then
with increasing disbelief why you cannot let them
live undisturbed on the land of their ancestors;
unexploited, free of the fear of expulsion; of
ravishment and devastation; free of permits and
roadblocks and checkpoints and crossings; of
monstrous concrete walls, guard towers, concrete
bunkers, and barbed wire; of tanks and prisons
and torture and death. Why is life without these
policies and instruments of hell impossible?
The answer is because Israel has no intention of
allowing a viable, sovereign Palestinian state on
its borders. It had no intention of allowing it
in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land
than what it was allotted legally, if unfairly,
by UN Resolution 181. It had no intention of
allowing it throughout the massacres and ploys of
the 1950s. It had no intention of allowing two
states when it conquered the remaining 22 per
cent of historic Palestine in 1967 and
reinterpreted UN Security Council Resolution 248
to its own liking despite the overwhelming
international consensus stating that Israel would
receive full international recognition within
secure and recognized borders if it withdrew from
the lands it had only recently occupied.
It had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian
national rights at the United Nations in 1974,
when alone with the United Statesit voted
against a two-state solution. It had no intention
of allowing a comprehensive peace settlement when
Egypt stood ready to deliver but received, and
obediently accepted, a separate peace exclusive
of the rights of Palestinians and the remaining
peoples of the region. It had no intention of
working toward a just two-state solution in 1978
or 1982 when it invaded, fire-bombed, blasted and
bulldozed Beirut so that it might annex the West
Bank without hassle. It had no intention of
granting a Palestinian state in 1987 when the
first Intifada spread across occupied Palestine,
into the Diaspora and the into the spirits of the
global dispossessed, or when Israel deliberately
aided the newly formed Hamas movement so that it
might undermine the strength of the more secular-nationalist factions.
Israel had no intention of granting a Palestinian
state at Madrid or at Oslo where the PLO was
superseded by the quivering, quisling Palestinian
Authority, too many of whose cronies grasped at
the wealth and prestige it gave them at the
expense of their own kin. As Israel beamed into
the worlds satellites and microphones its desire
for peace and a two-state solution, it more than
doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements
on the ground in the West Bank and around East
Jerusalem, annexing them as it built and
continues to build a superstructure of bypass
roads and highways over the remaining, severed
cities and villages of earthly Palestine. It has
annexed the Jordan valley, the international
border of Jordan, expelling any locals
inhabiting that land. It speaks with a vipers
tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine
whose head shall soon be severed from its body in
the name of justice, peace and security.
Through the home demolitions, the assaults on
civil society that attempted to cast Palestinian
history and culture into a chasm of oblivion;
through the unspeakable destruction of the
refugee camp sieges and infrastructure
bombardments of the second Intifada, through
assassinations and summary executions, past the
grandiose farce of disengagement and up to the
nullification of free, fair and democratic
Palestinian elections Israel has made its view
known again and again in the strongest possible
language, the language of military might, of
threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.
Israel, with the unconditional and approving
support of the United States, has made it
dramatically clear to the entire world over and
over and over again, repeating in action after
action that it will accept no viable Palestinian
state next to its borders. What will it take for
the rest of us to hear? What will it take to end
the criminal silence of the international
community? What will it take to see past the
lies and indoctrination to what is taking place
before us day after day in full view of the eyes
of the world? The more horrific the actions on
the ground, the more insistent are the words of
peace. To listen and watch without hearing or
seeing allows the indifference, the ignorance and
complicity to continue and deepens with each grave our collective shame.
The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with
Hamas. Israel will accept no authority in the
Palestinian territories that it does not
ultimately control. Any individual, leader,
faction or movement that fails to accede to
Israels demands or that seeks genuine
sovereignty and the equality of all nations in
the region; any government or popular movement
that demands the applicability of international
humanitarian law and of the universal declaration
of human rights for its own people will be
unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming
of one state must be forced to ask themselves
what Israel would do to a population of 4 million
Palestinians within its borders when it commits
on a daily, if not hourly basis, crimes against
their collective humanity while they live
alongside its borders? What will suddenly make
the raison detre, the self-proclaimed purpose of
Israels reason for being change if the
Palestinian territories are annexed to it outright?
The lifeblood of the Palestinian National
Movement flows through the streets of Gaza today.
Every drop that falls waters the soil of
vengeance, bitterness and hatred not only in
Palestine but across the Middle East and much of
the world. We do have a choice over whether or
not this should continue. Now is the time to make it.
Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of
the Middle East Studies Program at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached at
<mailto:amadea311 at earthlink.net>amadea311 at earthlink.net
Freedom Archives
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San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
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