[News] Israel's right to defend itself

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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).



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