[News] A License to Kill: “Israel Right to Defend Itself”

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  A License to Kill: “Israel Right to Defend Itself”

*http://www.turkeyagenda.com/a-license-to-kill-israel-right-to-defend-itself-933.html
July 23, 2014
*

Western politicians’ repeated canard that “Israel has the right to 
defend itself” against the Occupied Palestinian population has to be 
understood as an open license to maim and kill anyone in range. Voices 
from across the political spectrum repeat this utterance, which I am 
sure is handed down to them from Israeli public relations outfits 
intended to shore-up support at a moment of crisis.

 From President Obama and French President Francois Hollande to U.K. 
Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and 
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper all have stated in one way or 
another, that Israel has “the right to defend itself” against terrorism 
and rockets being fired at cities. Not one could accept rockets raining 
down upon their cities and homes, yet this has been the Palestinian 
feeling and for the past 67 years. The above countries and successive 
leaders have been complicit in arming Israel making it possible for its 
military to bomb Palestinians cities and towns with ease.

However, we must ask the question as to why it is that Western 
leadership sees fit to support a powerful Israel, the Occupying power, 
against the Occupied Palestinians? Also, how is it possible in the face 
of a massive and well-documented dehumanization colonial project 67 
years in the making that Western leaders and governments continue 
repeating the same canard of self-defense? Are they ignorant or ill 
informed about Palestine?

Let’s be clear and direct for once on this issue. Israel is a child of 
Western colonization and a maliciously celebrated “atonement” project 
for classical Christian anti-Semitism and WWII crimes. Also, Israel 
emerged in the middle of contestation for the spoils of the Ottoman 
territories in pre and post WWI. A racist British political leadership 
that wanted to solve the “Jewish Question” once and for all offered 
Palestine to the Zionist and with it managed to transplant a settler 
colonial project in Palestine.

Western attitudes and relations with Israel are rooted in the above 
epistemic foundations that regulate the one-sided commitment to a 
colonial settler state. Lurking also in the background is a Western 
world that has deep-seated anti-Muslim sentiments that are reflected 
historically in words and deeds. The Crusades have a considerable hold 
on Western imaginary when it comes to thinking about Islam and Muslims, 
which impacts how Palestine is framed.

Furthermore, we must account for Christian religious ethos that is 
connected to Palestine, which get manipulated into supporting a settler 
colonial project clothed in divine purpose. For the Christian religious 
right, support for Israel serves as the needed stepping stone for the 
Second Coming of Jesus and the Palestinians are dispensable “sub-humans” 
to be pushed aside for a greater history to emerge. Palestinians are not 
included in this narrative and have to accept Zionism and the Christian 
Right’s “manifest destiny” for greater things are at stake than the few 
Palestinians currently living on the land.

The current war is an Israeli war fought with American and European 
manufactured and freely provided weapons. Also, this war is an American, 
European, Arab and Muslim world war fought in the corridors of power 
that continue to facilitate an Israeli siege on 1.8 million 
Palestinians. Nay, the Western, Arab and Muslim world leaders are not 
only watching, they are knee deep in assisting the Occupier over the 
Occupied. International law and Fourth Geneva Convention do not apply to 
the darker complexion section of the human family.

“A land for a people for a people without a land” is not a mere slogan, 
but a commitment of actualization by means of death, destruction and 
genocide against the indigenous Palestinian population. The Western 
powers that signed on the Zionist project starting at the end of WWI, 
were not ignorant of what they committed themselves to, a colonization 
program supported by the power of the British. At the end of WWI around 
75% of the world population was living the colonial project nightmare; 
thus Palestine was incorporated into this existing Western epistemic 
global structure.

Israel, for Western powers, represents a success story connected to a 
biblical re-enactment of arrival at the “Holy Land” and re-building the 
“Kingdom of God” that will usher-in a new peaceful and hopeful period. 
While secularity at present is argued to be foundational in the West; 
nevertheless religious ethos continue to have a strong hold when 
thinking and acting in relations to Israel.

The constant and unconditional support for Israel by Western leaders is 
not accidental nor unplanned for it reflects long standing political and 
economic interests (oil plays a major role) in the region as well as a 
distorted religious rationalization intended to cement public support. 
“Israel’s right to defend itself” is paradigmatic of colonial discourses 
where maximum power is deployed against a resisting indigenous 
population refusing to step aside and acquiesce to wholesale 
dispossession. Western leaders have been committed to this project from 
its inception for it provided a fertile ground for a divide and conquer 
strategy with all the needed rationale to continue intervention in the 
Arab and Muslim world.

“Israel’s right to defend itself” is meant to give the green light for 
an old fashion Western slaughter against the darker “inferior” races 
inhabiting the southern hemisphere. Numbers are not important, severity 
not an issue and targeting civilians for punishment is the only way to 
bring the “plantation slaves” to their knees and accept the fait 
accompli. Who are Palestinians to object and refuse what the “civilized 
north” determined for the redemption of the Holy Land?

The Arab and Muslim world in the most recent past have been the sites of 
a new and extreme re-colonization and Zionization project that is still 
unfolding in front of our own eyes. From the Atlantic shores of Morocco 
passing through Libya and Egypt to Iraq and Afghanistan we are witness 
to a re-colonization project that is made possible by structured 
violence in all spheres. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well 
as the current wars in the region are part of constructive chaos 
intended to deplete people’s resistance reservoirs and for them to 
accept a new world where they are mere commodities to be bought and sold 
by the highest bidder.

In this context, Palestinian resistance stands in the way and prevents 
the completion of the re-colonization project and precisely because of 
this we find an international effort directed at crushing them literally 
in their own homes in Gaza. Palestinians are a “throwback” to bygone 
years of dignity, freedom and resistance to colonization. In the view of 
Western leaders and the appointed Arab hands, the Palestinians 
ingratitude to Zionism success, as a Western implanted project, must be 
countered by extreme violence, “the only language they understand.” 
Palestinians must be crushed for having the audacity to resist. In the 
same way, the rebelling slave was violently disciplined so as to bring 
him/her into a mental acceptance of the master’s superiority; Western 
leaders give Israel the free hand to finish the job and crush the 
resisting Palestinians once and for all.

Palestinians, as a “sub-human group,” are not accorded the right to 
resist their occupier, the Western world implant on their land. 
Recognition of this right implies that the Western leadership and its 
foreign implant in the region are a historical mistake that must be 
corrected. More critically, recognition of Palestinian resistance 
carries with it an independent agency for the indigenous occupied people 
causing in the process a total demolition of the “racial classification” 
that is foundational to colonization and Zionism alike.

“Israel’s right to defend itself” is intended to maintain a “racial 
classification” and accord differing categorization to the use of 
violence in the conflict. Western leaders are identifying with Israel 
and it is constituted as part of “us,” while Palestinians are an 
irrational and barbaric “other” engaged in “futile” resistance and 
violence. Added to this racial demarcation is an important fact: Western 
leaders have provided Israel with all the sophisticated modern weapons 
to be efficient in killing the Palestinians. Furthermore, Western 
leaders provide the “legal” protection in the halls of power and 
influence to make it possible for the slow and deliberate genocide to go 
unpunished.

International law, in the hands of Western leaders, has become an 
instrument of control, domination and legal thievery. As Israel builds 
settlements creating facts on the ground, Western leaders forge 
international law that becomes “legal norms and facts” constricting the 
bodies and movements of indigenous, occupied and colonized people across 
the world.

When Western diplomats arrive at the seen the best strategy is to head 
directly to the exits, for their role is to extract from the indigenous 
population political, economic, social and security concessions that 
were untenable by violence due to strong resistance. The concern they 
show is for the Occupier’s wellbeing, his property and person with a 
laser focused at negotiating a more favorable status quo after clear 
defeats on the ground.

Palestinians, as a group, possibly are among the few in the world that 
can list Western Foreign Ministers and US Secretary of State names for 
the past 100 years and each and every UN General Secretary since the 
organizations inception: they had the misfortune to meet all of them as 
they worked hard to help Israel complete and legalize its dispossession 
of the Palestinians. As diplomats shuttle into the region to “forge” a 
ceasefire, their agenda is focused on helping Israel “defend itself” by 
means of a new agreement intended to create “legal facts” on the ground 
and weaken the Palestinian resistance. The next few days are critical 
and we will see if the Palestinians are able to withstand the 
international team of sharks that is ready to attack them from within 
the confines of the global legal colonial structure.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20140725/f1e87b71/attachment.htm>