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<font size=3 color="#191919">Judging the Intifada<br>
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3166.shtml" eudora="autourl">http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3166.shtml<br>
</a>Hasan Abu Nimah & Ali Abunimah, <i>The Electronic Intifada,</i> 6
October 2004<br><br>
<img src="cid:6.1.2.0.2.20041006055822.02c0d868@66.103.156.66.0" width=483 height=326 alt="23c029.jpg"><br>
Fruit of the Loom: A young Palestinian, who has only known a life under
military occupation, strides with rocks to confront Israeli rifles on the
edge of Bethlehem. (Photo: <a href="??">Nigel Parry</a>)<br><br>
The fourth anniversary of Israel's violent crackdown on the Palestinian
uprising, which coincided with its latest massacre of Palestinians in the
Gaza Strip, occasioned a number of analyses, many concluding wishfully
that the Intifada has been "counterproductive" for the
Palestinians, or even a "failure."<br><br>
<i>Ha'aretz</i> analyst Bradley Burston wrote an article headlined,
"The war that Palestine couldn't lose - and did." US Secretary
of State, Colin Powell, asked on Al-Jazeera, "What has [the
Intifada] accomplished for the Palestinian people? Has it produced
progress toward a Palestinian state? Has it defeated Israel on the
battlefield?" Concluding it had not, he declared, "it is time
to end this process. It is time to end the Intifada." <br><br>
The standard that Mr. Powell set for assessing Palestinian success or
failure is disengenuous and absurd. No one expected that Palestinians
could defeat Israel's astronomically superior, US-backed armed forces.
But as the ongoing resistance, both nonviolent and armed, demonstrates
every day, the Palestinians are not close to defeat, nor are the Israelis
close to victory. Despite all of Israel's killing and cruelty for
decades, the Palestinians are unbroken; they have neither abandoned their
rights, nor resigned themselves to living permanently under Israeli
dictatorship. <br><br>
Palestinians have indeed paid a heartbreaking price during the past four
years in death and destruction inflicted by Israel. But that is not the
only way they measure the Intifada. Mr. Powell failed to ask how much the
Palestinians had gained from more than a decade of the American-sponsored
"peace process" and the "roadmap." He knows the
answer: throughout the period, Israel continued, with American
connivance, to steal and colonize the little left of their land at an
accelerating pace, extinguishing the prospects for a truly independent
Palestinian state even as the US claimed to be supporting it. The
Intifada did not interrupt and "derail" the peace process as
revisionists argue; it came long after the peace process failed, and as a
direct result of this failure. As long as Palestinians see that no
outside powers will fairly uphold their rights, or international law,
some will always conclude that their only course is to impose as a high
cost as possible on Israel, no matter the cost to themselves. This is
what fuels support for counterattacks on Israeli civilians, and indeed
the willingness to die carrying them out. In a context where Israel has
left them nothing to lose, some Palestinians feel such attacks are the
only means they have to even the killing field.<br><br>
Powell also did not ask Israel how much its unrelenting brutality and
colonization has allowed Israelis to relax and enjoy the fruits of
dispossessing the Palestinians and depriving them of their basic rights.
In addition to losing more than one thousand people, Israel is wracked
with corruption, unemployment, poverty and mass emigration as a direct
result of its war to keep the Palestinians under occupation.<br><br>
It is nevertheless fashionable to point to the precipitous drop in
Palestinian living standards as further evidence of the failure of the
Intifada, as <i>New York Times</i> reporter Steven Erlanger did in an
October 3 column. This economic collapse, as numerous UN, EU and other
bodies have reported over many years, is the direct result of Israel's
collective punishment of the population. But rather than condemning the
illegal measures of the occupier, some seek to blame the victims for
bringing it on themselves. Erlanger quoted a recent report by the
International Crisis Group (ICG) that "although the occupation and
the confrontation with Israel that is entering its fifth year provide the
context, today's Palestinian predicament is decidedly domestic." The
ICG, which seems to exist solely to lend false credibility to the most
shallow, power-serving clichés, has once again issued a report in which
the hypothetical ideal is offered as the alternative to grim reality, but
without a single plausible suggestion for how to get there, and with
virtually all responsibility for action lying at the door of the weakest
party.<br><br>
Such transparent apologia for Israel is nothing new. From the first days
of what began as a peaceful uprising, to which Israel responded with one
million bullets in the first month of protests, Israeli and American
analysts have been declaring that the efforts to stop all resistance
would soon succeed. A few more assassinations, a few more missiles, a few
thousand more arrests, a bit more torture, a few hundred more
demolitions, a little more hunger and darkness and the Palestinians
will get the message and realize that their best option is servitude
under occupation.<br><br>
By any standard, in a war between a colonial occupier and an indigenous
people, the Palestinians are in a comparable state to those who have
trodden this path before them. In Southeast Asia, the United States
killed approximately fifty Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians for every
American who died in that war, and still the Americans suffered a total
strategic defeat. In Algeria, the French killed on a similar scale and
were defeated. In South Africa, the apartheid regime killed hundreds of
black South Africans for every white person killed, and that regime no
longer exists. Nor did massacres and atrocities in Iraq in the 1920s, or
India in the 1940s, save British rule there. In colonial wars, the
colonized always pay a much higher price than their foreign rulers. The
Americans and British are learning afresh in the "New" Iraq
that massive military dominance is not the same thing as
victory.<br><br>
Israel, though, stubbornly refuses to learn any lessons and thus spare
Jewish and Arab lives. As its situation has deteriorated, it has used
ever more brutality against the Palestinians, with increasingly meagre
results from its perspective. Strategically, Israel remains at an
absolute dead end. Despite all the talk of "disengagement,"
Israel has thrust deeper into Gaza. It can neither afford to stay there,
nor can it afford to leave. Sharon's only reason for ever speaking of a
withdrawal from Gaza was to reduce the cost of the occupation to Israel
and to consolidate Israel's conquests in the West Bank. But the tenacity
of the resistance in Gaza and the West Bank shows that as long as Israel
is determined to colonize any inch of the occupied territories, it is
necessarily committed to staying in all of them. The logic of Israeli
policy demands ever deeper penetration and ever more savage
measures.<br><br>
South African law professor John Dugard, the UN special rapporteur for
human rights in the Palestinian territories, wrote in a report to the
General Assembly last August that Israel has created, "an apartheid
regime" in the occupied territories "worse than the one that
existed in South Africa." Dugard is in a good position to know,
since he was a member his country's post-apartheid Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. <br><br>
Contrasting with Dugard's forthrightness is the utter cowardice of those
who talk loudest about international law and human rights in the
abstract. The United States' pro-Israel position is the most extreme and
biased, but has lost the power to shock or disappoint. Yet the European
Union, which has for years posed as an even-handed force in the conflict,
has long since abandoned all serious efforts. European states now make
empty statements about adhering to the "roadmap" and calling
for Palestinian "reform," not because they believe genuinely
that such things are in any remote way related to a solution, but because
they realize that exposing the real problem Israel's intransigence
will lead to embarassing calls for sanctions against an outlaw regime
that recognizes no boundaries for its conduct.<br><br>
Recently, UK prime minister Tony Blair, the champion of democracy, human
rights and freedom in Iraq, made a personal committment to do everything
possible to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict. Before the Iraq
invasion, he made the same promise on the BBC Arabic Service, responding
to doubts about the West's past performance by saying that a skeptical
Arab public should just wait, and judge him by his actions. More than a
year has passed and Blair has done absolutely nothing except vigorously
oppose Palestinian efforts to win their rights through the peaceful forum
of the International Court of Justice at The Hague.<br><br>
The result of all this is that Israel is ever emboldened, confident that
it can do as it pleases. Other than bleats of displeasure from Arab and
international officials, no one will act against it. Never has
Ben-Gurion's infamous maxim been more apt: "What matters is not what
the Gentiles will say, but what the Jews will do."<br><br>
Those who wish to mark the anniversary of the Intifada with a hard look
at reality, rather than self-delusion, might make the following
predictions: there will be no Palestinian state alongside Israel, because
such a thing is impossible in the reality Israel has, with the world's
acquiescence, created. But in another four years it will become clear
that Israel can no longer exist as a "Jewish state,"
superimposed on a Palestinian majority that refuses to accept the
inferior status Israel has assigned it, and which Palestinians will
continue to resist with whatever resources they have. <br><br>
In the meantime, we can expect ever more horrifying violence that will
not be abated by ritual condemnations. And, as Israel gets further into
its corner, the chances increase dramatically that it will seek to
resolve its existential problem not just at the expense of the
Palestinians, but by spreading the conflict to its neighbors.<br><br>
<i>Ambassador Hasan Abu Nimah is former permanent representative of
Jordan at the United Nations. Ali Abunimah is co-founder of the websites
The Electronic Intifada and Electronic Iraq.</i> <br><br>
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