[News] At 70, Israel is a bellicose regional giant

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://electronicintifada.net/content/70-israel-bellicose-regional-giant/24291 



  At 70, Israel is a bellicose regional giant

Ghada Karmi <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ghada-karmi> - 17 May 
2018

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Between 30 March and 11 May Israeli forces shot dead more than 40 
unarmed Palestinians and wounded over 2,000 during the Great March of 
Return series of protests in Gaza. On 14 May alone, in protests 
coinciding with the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli 
soldiers killed a further 58 Palestinians 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israel-slaughters-palestinians-marching-return> 
and wounded nearly 2,800.

Palestinians have not been the only target. On 12 April, a senior 
Israeli official, housing minister Yoav Galant, again called publicly 
for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to be assassinated, a call he 
first made last year. On 10 May, Israel attacked what it claimed were 
Iranian missile launchers inside Syria, a sovereign state, in the latest 
of more than 100 such attacks 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/omar-karmi/israel-strikes-syria-iran-target> 
on targets in Syria over the past few years.

Such words and deeds – enacted and expressed with impunity, unhindered 
by international sanction or even rebuke – represent the swaggering 
self-confidence of a state that fears no law or retribution.

Israel today has one of the world’s strongest militaries, some of the 
globe’s most advanced drone technology and is among the world’s top 
exporters of weapons. It enjoys the support of all Western states, 
especially the US, and has made significant political inroads into 
Africa, India, and to a certain extent, China. Its military, economic 
and political power has never been so great.

No one imagined in 1948 that the state created on the homeland of 
another people and at their expense – an ethnic cleansing justified as a 
moral act to salve the world’s conscience for crimes committed against 
the Jewish people – would grow into this terrifying and bellicose 
regional giant.


    A trauma still unappreciated

Certainly, no such thought was in our minds as we fled our homes during 
the Nakba of 1948. Mine was an ordinary family with ordinary lives until 
we found ourselves one day catapulted into a nightmare with no end. As 
children, we were three siblings, who did not understand why we had to 
leave all that was familiar and made up the life we knew – our house, 
our school, our family dog.

My memories of that time, fragmented as they are, are all of fear and 
anxiety, reflecting the feelings of my parents. Like all Palestinians at 
the time, we believed that we would soon return, when “things settled 
down.” The idea that we were losing everything we possessed to make way 
for a people alien to us so they could find refuge in the homes we had 
vacated was preposterous and unthinkable.

We fled to Damascus first and then to London. The view my parents clung 
to was that our exile was temporary and we would soon be back. But as 
the years passed the hope faded and then turned into an ideal we aspired 
to but feared would never be realized.

I used sometimes to wonder what the Jewish immigrants who were settled 
in our house in Jerusalem did with our belongings. Did they throw them 
away or keep them? And did they feel anything about the family whose 
place they had so obviously taken? Hundreds of thousands of other 
Palestinians like us must have had the same thought.

In the first years after the Nakba, Palestinians did nothing but 
struggle to survive. It was a trauma of a severity still unappreciated 
to this day, a time of sadness and loss. We were defeated and friendless 
until the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the 
resurrection of the Palestinian national movement.

There then followed a heady period of hope and self-assertion. It 
reached its zenith in the late 1970s, but Israel’s invasion of Beirut in 
1982 led to a decline in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s 
fortunes, and the Oslo accords of 1993 compounded that decline. The last 
20 years of Palestinian history have been punctuated by Palestinian 
uprisings and brutal Israeli repression, while Israel’s colonization has 
continued relentlessly. The Palestinians have been unable to stop it, 
their leadership divided and weak.


    An unstoppable wave

Today the Palestinians, who were a homogeneous society when I was born, 
are fragmented: nearly 5 million live under Israeli occupation in the 
West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza; some 1.5 million are 
second-class citizens in Israel; there are over 3 million refugees in 
Arab countries registered with the UN agency for Palestine refugees, 
UNRWA, and an unknown number of exiles further afield. Meanwhile, 
Israel, to us an illegitimate usurper and standing affront to all that 
was decent, has only grown in strength and international acceptance. Its 
defeat, economically prosperous as it is and basking in American 
adulation, seems far away.

Maintaining an optimistic outlook in the face of Israel’s blanket 
impunity is a difficult challenge. A disinterested observer of this 
scene in 2018 might well conclude that the Palestine cause is hopeless.

But that would be wrong.

While Israel has been consolidating its power, the Palestinians, in 
their different locations, have been increasingly asserting their 
existence and right to resist. It is as if they have awoken from a long 
torpor.

The last decade has seen an extraordinary revival of national 
consciousness. Each locality where Palestinians live has developed its 
own form of resistance activity, whether inside Palestine or out. The 
boycott, divestment and sanctions 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/bds> movement is but one of these. 
A ferment of creativity in Palestinian art, literature and culture has 
taken hold, and political activism has assumed new forms.

This wave, which is now unstoppable, draws on the young, a generation of 
fresh, committed supporters of the cause of their parents and 
grandparents. Seeing this in action has been the most uplifting 
experience of my life. It has infused new energy into a cause that may 
have faltered from time to time, but never died.

/Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian physician, academic and writer. Her latest 
book is entitled/ Return: A Palestinian Memoir.


-- 
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