[News] Collective Punishment in Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

7/29/14 4:19 pm


  Collective Punishment in Gaza


      By Rashid Khalidi
      <http://www.newyorker.com/?post_type=contributor&p=2676202>

*http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/collective-punishment-gaza*

Three days after the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched 
the current war in Gaza, he held a press conference in Tel Aviv during 
which he said, in Hebrew, according to the /Times of Israel,/ "I think 
the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot 
be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security 
control of the territory west of the River Jordan."

It's worth listening carefully when Netanyahu speaks to the Israeli 
people. What is going on in Palestine today is not really about Hamas. 
It is not about rockets. It is not about "human shields" or terrorism or 
tunnels. It is about Israel's permanent control over Palestinian land 
and Palestinian lives. That is what Netanyahu is really saying, and that 
is what he now admits he has "always" talked about. It is about an 
unswerving, decades-long Israeli policy of denying Palestine 
self-determination, freedom, and sovereignty.

What Israel is doing in Gaza now is collective punishment. It is 
punishment for Gaza's refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment 
for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other 
factions in responding to Israel's siege and its provocations with 
resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to 
unarmed protest with crushing force. Despite years of ceasefires and 
truces, the siege of Gaza has never been lifted.

As Netanyahu's own words show, however, Israel will accept nothing short 
of the acquiescence of Palestinians to their own subordination. It will 
accept only a Palestinian "state" that is stripped of all the attributes 
of a real state: control over security, borders, airspace, maritime 
limits, contiguity, and, therefore, sovereignty. The twenty-three-year 
charade of the "peace process" has shown that this is all Israel is 
offering, with the full approval of Washington. Whenever the 
Palestinians have resisted that pathetic fate (as any nation would), 
Israel has punished them for their insolence. This is not new.

Punishing Palestinians for existing has a long history. It was Israel's 
policy before Hamas and its rudimentary rockets were Israel's boogeyman 
of the moment, and before Israel turned Gaza into an open-air prison, 
punching bag, and weapons laboratory. In 1948, Israel killed thousands 
of innocents, and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands more, 
in the name of creating a Jewish-majority state in a land that was then 
sixty-five per cent Arab. In 1967, it displaced hundreds of thousands of 
Palestinians again, occupying territory that it still largely controls, 
forty-seven years later.

In 1982, in a quest to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization and 
extinguish Palestinian nationalism, Israel invaded Lebanon, killing 
seventeen thousand people, mostly civilians. Since the late 
nineteen-eighties, when Palestinians under occupation rose up, mostly by 
throwing stones and staging general strikes, Israel has arrested tens of 
thousands of Palestinians: over seven hundred and fifty thousand people 
have spent time in Israeli prisons since 1967, a number that amounts to 
forty per cent of the adult male population today. They have emerged 
with accounts of torture, which are substantiated by human-rights groups 
like B'tselem. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, Israel 
reinvaded the West Bank (it had never fully left). The occupation and 
colonization of Palestinian land continued unabated throughout the 
"peace process" of the nineteen-nineties, and continues to this day. And 
yet, in America, the discussion ignores this crucial, constantly 
oppressive context, and is instead too often limited to Israeli 
"self-defense" and the Palestinians' supposed responsibility for their 
own suffering.

In the past seven or more years, Israel has besieged, tormented, and 
regularly attacked the Gaza Strip. The pretexts change: they elected 
Hamas; they refused to be docile; they refused to recognize Israel; they 
fired rockets; they built tunnels to circumvent the siege; and on and 
on. But each pretext is a red herring, because the truth of 
ghettos---what happens when you imprison 1.8 million people in a hundred 
and forty square miles, about a third of the area of New York City, with 
no control of borders, almost no access to the sea for fishermen (three 
out of the twenty kilometres allowed by the Oslo accords), no real way 
in or out, and with drones buzzing overhead night and day---is that, 
eventually, the ghetto will fight back. It was true in Soweto and 
Belfast, and it is true in Gaza. We might not like Hamas or some of its 
methods, but that is not the same as accepting the proposition that 
Palestinians should supinely accept the denial of their right to exist 
as a free people in their ancestral homeland.

This is precisely why the United States' support of current Israeli 
policy is folly. Peace was achieved in Northern Ireland and in South 
Africa because the United States and the world realized that they had to 
put pressure on the stronger party, holding it accountable and ending 
its impunity. Northern Ireland and South Africa are far from perfect 
examples, but it is worth remembering that, to achieve a just outcome, 
it was necessary for the United States to deal with groups like the 
Irish Republican Army and the African National Congress, which engaged 
in guerrilla war and even terrorism. That was the only way to embark on 
a road toward true peace and reconciliation. The case of Palestine is 
not fundamentally different.

Instead, the United States puts its thumb on the scales in favor of the 
stronger party. In this surreal, upside-down vision of the world, it 
almost seems as if it is the Israelis who are occupied by the 
Palestinians, and not the other way around. In this skewed universe, the 
inmates of an open-air prison are besieging a nuclear-armed power with 
one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.

If we are to move away from this unreality, the U.S. must either reverse 
its policies or abandon its claim of being an "honest broker." If the 
U.S. government wants to fund and arm Israel and parrot its talking 
points that fly in the face of reason and international law, so be it. 
But it should not claim the moral high ground and intone solemnly about 
peace. And it should certainly not insult Palestinians by saying that it 
cares about them or their children, who are dying in Gaza today.

/Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia 
University and the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was 
an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid-Washington 
Palestinian-Israeli negotiations of 1991-93. His most recent book is 
"Brokers of Deceit."/

-- 
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