[News] Why Biden’s Fist Bump Diplomacy is Extending Violence on Palestinians?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Why
Biden’s Fist Bump Diplomacy is Extending Violence on Palestinians?
Prof. Hatem Bazian - July 19, 2022
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Biden, the “Emperor has no clothes” president, came to the Middle East, saw
and approved of the ongoing Apartheid state, while unapologetically
declaring his commitment to Zionism and Israel’s security (a threat of war
on Iran included). Biden chainsaw fist pumps was for oil production
increase and expanding Israel’s footprint through Abraham Accords in a
regional tour that provided the needed backdrop for a presidency that is
defined by lack of real accomplishments.

Palestine and the Palestinians are the ever present-absented in all these
regional gatherings with the focus on how to bring about their total
erasure. The real winner of Biden’s tour is Israel with Saudi airspace
opened for all their flights in exchange closing the file on the chainsaw
murder of Jamal Kashoggi. Don’t get worked-up about Biden’s fist pump and
agreement with Saudi Arabia or Israel, since the US record on
assassination, coup d’etat, death, mayhem and destruction is in a class of
its own (Iraq just for most recent reference). How to think of Palestine
and the constant machination against its people?

*Palestine: A Gnawing Wound*

Palestine, a gnawing wound eating away at the exposed soul and flesh of
Palestinians living under occupation, is facing, yet, another orchestrated
episode of Israeli military and settler’s violence. The level and intensity
of violence is unprecedented but also the utter silence of the complicit
international community. Where to begin the story in this well-designed
Greek commissioned and paid for Western tragedy!

Image from
https://politpost.com/2022/07/14/biden-heads-to-west-bank-with-little-to-offer-palestinians/

We have multiple beginnings, detours, reverses, but for sure, no end in
sight. Even if, a possible end draws near, destruction is unleashed faster
than lightning. Now, the news outlets are interested in what is going on
since “violence has returned” implying that it was on vacation, possibly
attending the United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York or
getting ready for the new soccer, football or basketball seasons. Violence
just came back from vacation in time to cause death and mayhem. Violence
never left Palestine and in fact, has been sitting center stage daily
eating away at the insides of people; but no one notices and no one cares.
Violence only gets recognized and play on TV screens when anyone in Israel
gets hurt or impacted but daily Palestinian suffering is erased and not
registered on the human importance scale.

You see violence is a very difficult word to comprehend when it comes to
Palestine. The reality is that “violence” has been imprinted onto
Palestinian minds and regulates their daily lives. Violence is the norm
since the Israeli occupation injures and peals away parts of Palestinians’
souls on a daily basis in a methodically sadistic way. Israel’s structured
violence reaches Palestinians’ innermost being and attempts to deny the
existence of a free, independent and dignified human who are
named–Palestinians. The Israeli violence is the type that denies the
existence of a people and creates an absence despite the physical presence.
Palestinians face Israel’s atmospheric violence on daily basis, which is
not only the one with bullets and guns but the constant brutality that
pierces the depth of the soul.

*Violence and Erasure*

The Palestinians face the violence of erasure that manages to wipe out the
violence that is committed against them. They are an occupied and
dispossessed population. More insidiously, Israel’s violence is normalized
and regularized while granted “legal” lease by the international community
to pummel the occupied population under the rubric of “self-defense”
against its captive/imprisoned victims.

One would not permit or praise prison guards when they pummel shackled
prisoners, but indeed, this is what is done when Israel unleashes violence
upon the Palestinians with weapons and funds provided by the international
community! Palestinians are seeking protection from an international
community that has become accustomed to selling bombs and weapons to
Israel, as well as, provide protection in legal bodies that might
investigate repeated war crimes against an occupied population.
Palestinians face the violence of indifference and the false of premise of
concern for a population that is spoken about and for but never with in its
own voice and narrative.

Image from
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/palestinians-pin-scant-hope-biden-visit-after-setbacks-under-trump-2022-07-01/

It is the kind of sadistic violence of a bully edged on by all participants
who fake concern for the victim but all along reach out and encourage
further beatings. An occupying power, asserting the right to self-defense
against an occupied population that it exercises total control over and
regulates every minuscule detail of his/hers daily life, should be seen as
a mockery to the logic of self-defense.

Choking a person to death, then claiming self-defense when the person in
vain attempts to save his life by kicking and screaming, is not a valid
excuse nor should stand under the scrutiny of international law. But alas,
the guardians of the law have implicated themselves in the crime, they send
the weapons to make it easier to break the bones of the Palestinians.
Indeed, the real problem is that international law and the agents acting
upon it provide the tools and weapons for the murderer to choke the victim
in a professional and well-tested manner.

*International Community is Complicit*

The US, EU, Russia, China, India, Arab and Muslim states, as well as other
international actors, are pre-occupied in working out their own strategic
interests and Israel is intertwined with all of them in all types of
machinations, weapons sales, covert operations and dirty games. Open air
space, purchase of spyware, assistance in targeting opposition at home and
abroad, are the price for allowing Israeli open-ended season of violence on
a defenseless population.

Palestinians face Israel’s violence and erasure, Arab and Muslim world
machinations (for their own distorted lease on seats of power) and US and
EU imperial designs in the region for oil and strategic positioning against
Russia and China. Palestine faces repeated and multiple acts of violence,
but are only brought into the global discussion to be asked about violence
and how they need to provide protection to their tormentors: the Israeli
occupying power and all their settlers.

Image from https://sgp.fas.org/crs/mideast/R44984.pdf

The news flashes back and forth posing the question whether the new “cycle
of violence” is the start of the 3rd intifada, but not bothering to stop
and think of the names, faces, stories, dreams and aspiration of a people
who have been crushed way too many times to count, and double-crossed by
friend and foe alike enough times to die while living.

Third intifada or 14th, is not the issue, but focusing on the event as if
the media and talking heads are looking forward to another Super Bowl or
World Cup, wall to wall coverage with the outcome already known and not in
any doubt. Covering Palestine while erasing it is a skill and a talent that
is honed by reporters and media outlets attuned to the global market and
job security, whereby, Palestinians are the props for narrating Israel and
its stories rather than its victims. The story is about Palestine, but
Palestinians are spoken for, and never allowed to speak on their own accord.

Here we have an occupied Palestinian population facing the fourth or
possibly fifth most powerful army in the world equipped with every possible
death machine the world has made including 500–600 nuclear warheads, and
yet, we expect a different outcome. Pummeling Palestinians has become a
sadistic pastime endeavor for an Israeli government, and militarized
society that has turned fascistically callous toward the daily pain and
suffering inflicted on its captive prey. What else can one call the utter
disdain and total disregard for the value of a Palestinian life other than
sadistic fascism that is clothed in “moral” purpose!

*Little David and the Zionist Goliath*

In reality, the Palestinians are the little David who were part of a
colonized third world, indigenous, pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, agrarian
and shared cropping agricultural based society with a highly distorted,
colonially appointed and dysfunctional leadership facing the Zionist
Goliath supported initially by the British Goliath, then adopted by an
American empire, to be funded and nurtured into hegemonic power by the
combined wealth and strength of multiple Goliaths, including those in the
Arab and Muslim world who worked to strike their own deals to secure seats
of power at the expense of the Palestinians.

If honesty on the global stage could be entertained for a brief moment,
then the real surprise and shock for many is that the little Palestinian
David is still hanging around, standing and making noise after facing such
overwhelming odds.

I don’t see a cycle of violence, rather a pure and capable structured state
operated violence that is meted against the Palestinian population daily
and intended to humiliate, belittle, degrade and cause a slow and
methodical genocide. The Apartheid Wall is a structured violence that is
dissecting Palestinian towns, villages and cities like a razorblade cutting
the metaphorical collective Palestinian body. Just like the little bully
standing tall over an anthill, the Apartheid Wall is the symbol of the
permanent Israeli bully engaged in taunting, stealing and devouring
Palestine at every corner.

Violence of the settlements and settlers who are daily goading the
Palestinians by burning crops, stealing water, taking land and building
incoherent structures that protrude like a sore thumb on the environment
and the surroundings.

Architecture of occupation emerges from the confines of colonial discourses
rooted in racism, power, control and domination, while exuding an
all-around ugliness of taste and a corruption of the human spirit. A type
of violence that is committed against the land itself, topography,
mountains and valleys that are transfigured in the occupation process and
correspond to the epistemic that shaped the crime in the first place. The
ultimate sign of Israel’s ethical and moral bankruptcy is visible in the
violence committed against olive trees and grape orchards but yet
environmentalists in the West are silent about it.

Violence is ever-present in Israel’s actions toward the Palestinians. The
violence in the color coding of car license plates, I.D. cards and systems
of control that are designed to count the number while discounting the
person indicated by the document. This is the violence of being counted as
a biological substance and discounted as a human, at the same moment, by a
young soldier acting out his sense of control and power over men and women
the age of his parents and grandparents.

Yet, what is more violent, is the insistence of this young soldier to
intentionally call the old man with a feminine pronoun and the women with a
masculine one, while all the while, wearing a smirk as if he/she had
conquered the seven heavens. How do you measure this violence and why could
we record or indicate the daily un-cycle, pro-active, one-sided cycle of
violence perpetrated on the Palestinians!

The violence of the checkpoints is the cancer of the occupation setting on
top of the metaphorical Palestinian chest and preventing it from breathing
and leading to slow suffocating death. Freedom of movement is a basic human
right- this is indubitably denied to Palestinians. This includes in their
own private lands you find settlers and soldiers alike interfering to make
sure that Israel’s otherization and racism toward them is felt by every
individual young or old. Viewing long lines upon long lines waiting for
hours to go through metal gates and corralling pens that had it been made
for cattle they would have complained that they are unfit for them and
damages the capacity of the animal to be healthy and normal.

Hours upon hours, young and old, sick or healthy, running late or arriving
early, the checkpoints are intended to stick the sharp nails of the
occupation into the depth of people’s minds and souls. Dominating the time,
space and bodies of Palestinians is the atmospheric violence that leaves
nothing untouched. You are not human, not even a cattle but a biological
material that is reduced to nothingness at the hands of Israeli soldiers
who are well acquainted to the task of dehumanization, and worst yet, they
consider it a religious or national duty.

*Palestinian Courage and Resistance*

In the face of all this, one would expect Palestinians to lose their
humanity and become that which the occupation has ascribed to them–a
nameless and faceless people emptied of meaning; but this is not the case.
The Palestinians continue to write chapter after chapter in creativity, in
living and resisting, as well as, the ability to be global while confined
to the local prisons of Israel and its clients-the PA, the Arab and Muslim
worlds. Even in the middle of this 74 year old colonial dispossession and
layered violence, the Palestinians always manage to think of the struggles
of others and express meaningful solidarity whether in South Africa, El
Salvador, Vietnam, and Ireland in the past and Syria, Iraq, Libya, Kashmir,
India, Somalia, and Yemen to name the few in the present.

More critically, Palestinians have always expressed a close affinity to the
cause of Blacks and Native Americans, a concern and a solidarity that has a
long and complex history to it, including Malcolm X’s memorable visit to
the Gaza Strip in 1964. It is the mark of strength and greatness to think
and act in solidarity with others while facing the darkest moments and the
multiple brutalities and erasures in one’s own history. Palestine has been
the site of building and reaffirming global solidarity that is rooted in
calls for freedom, dignity and economic wellbeing for all and not only for
the few.

The prisons, checkpoints, settlements, bypass roads, color-coding and
Apartheid Wall are symbols of bankruptcy of thought and spirit, of a
colonial occupation that is following the brutal logic of its European
predecessors that failed to crush a people’s spirit. When emptiness of
thought and brute force becomes the only logic supporting a colonial
enterprise then the failure and collapse is a forgone conclusion.

While the violence is difficult and exerting a heavy daily tool on people’s
lives, nevertheless, Israel has not succeeded in crushing the Palestinian
spirit and it will never be able to do so. How to respond and end the
ongoing brutalization of the Palestinians should be the only focus of
conversations and discussions! Gone are the days of approaching Palestine
with a symmetry lens that equates between occupiers and occupied while
asserting a call for equality of narrative between the sadistic torturer
and its tortured prisoners.

Palestinians are physically occupied but mentally are a free people. What
Palestinians ask of the global solidarity movement is to break away from
their own psychologically constructed occupations and act to free
themselves, so as to end their own government’s complicity that enables
funds and protects the Israeli occupation at every turn.

The Abraham Accords are a violent tool intended to delay and divert
Palestinian aspiration for freedom and liberation. Yes, express sympathies
and shed tears for Palestine, but more valuable, work to counter the
multiple violent Israeli structures that kill and maim Palestinians– and do
so, at the local level. Don’t focus on whether this is the 3rd of 14th
intifada, rather, the time has come for each and everyone to express in
deeds, a commitment for a free Palestine and an end to the siege on Gaza.
In this regard, the time is right for a more intense engagement with the
boycott, divestment and sanctions, as well as, creating programs and
projects that can break the walls of oppression and indifference towards
Palestine in every city and alleyway across the world.

In every corner of the world, there is a persecuted people waiting to be
free and the time is now and the call for all to join this effort to act
locally to bring a global change. Lastly, if you can’t or unwilling to help
an oppressed people, then the least you can do is not assist the oppressor.
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