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<font size=3 color="#191919">A defeated policy, not a defeated people
<br>
Ali Abunimah, <i>The Electronic Intifada,</i> 7 March 2008 <br><br>
<img src="http://electronicintifada.net/artman2/uploads/2/080307-abunimah-amira.jpg" width=483 height=319 alt="[]">
<br>
Young relatives of newborn baby Amira Abu 'Aser mourn during her funeral
in Gaza City, 5 March 2008. (Wissam
Nassar/<a href="http://www.maanimages.com/">MaanImages</a>) <br><br>
Compared with the international silence that surrounded Israel's recent
massacres of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Gaza Strip,
condemnation and condolences for the victims of the shooting attack that
killed eight students at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem have been
swift. <br><br>
"I have just spoken with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert to
extend my deepest condolences to the victims, their families, and to the
people of Israel," US President George W. Bush said. UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his "condemnation" and
"condolences," as did EU High Representative Javier
Solana.<br><br>
The day before the Jerusalem attack, Amira Abu 'Aser was buried in Gaza.
She had lived just 20 days on this earth before being
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9375.shtml">shot in the
head by Israeli occupation forces</a> who attacked the house of friends
she and her family were visiting. Needless to say, she had not been
firing rockets at Sderot when she was killed. One of the house's
inhabitants was found the next day, shot dead and his head crushed by an
army jeep, an apparent victim of an extrajudicial murder by Israeli
forces.<br><br>
But confirming their status in the eyes of the "international
community" as less than complete human beings, neither Amira's
killing, nor any of the dozens of Palestinian civilian victims of
Israel's onslaught in Gaza have merited condemnation or
condolences.<br><br>
The fallacy that lies behind the differential concern for the lives of
innocent Israelis and Palestinians is that the massacre in Jerusalem and
the massacres in Gaza can be separated. Israeli deaths are
"terrorism," while Palestinian deaths are merely an unfortunate
consequence of the fight against "terrorism." But the two are
intricately linked, and what happened in Jerusalem is a direct
consequence of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for
decades.<br><br>
Let me be clear that the killing of civilians, Israeli or Palestinian, is
wrong, repugnant, and cannot bring this one-hundred-year war caused by
the Zionist colonization of Palestine to an end. There will be an Israeli
propaganda effort -- as always -- to present Palestinian violence as
being simply motivated by hatred, and divorced from the context of brutal
occupation that Palestinians live under. What greater proof could you
need than an attack on religious students, devoting their life to the
study of the Torah?<br><br>
We cannot expect much analysis in the media of why the Mercaz HaRav
yeshiva might have been chosen as a target. Was it mere coincidence that
the school, named for Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and led after his death
by his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is the ideological cradle of the
militant, Jewish supremacist settler movement Gush Emunim?<br><br>
Unlike other sects in Israel which sought exemption of their students
from military service, Gush Emunim encouraged its followers to join the
army and become the armed wing of religious nationalist Zionism. Gush
Emunim settlers, many of them, like Moshe Levinger, graduates of Mercaz
HaRav, founded the most extreme and racist settlements in the Occupied
West Bank, including the notorious colonies in and near Hebron whose
inhabitants have made life miserable for Palestinians in the city and
forced many of them out of their homes. It is the militant settlers of
Gush Emunim who still honor Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinians
in Hebron in February 1994. It is in Hebron that the Gush Emunim settlers
spray "Arabs to the gas chambers" on Palestinian houses.
<br><br>
It is possible that the Mercaz HaRav gunman did not know or care about
any of this, that any target he could identify as Israeli would have
satisfied his desire to exact revenge.<br><br>
In 2002, Israeli army chief Moshe Yaalon declared that "the
Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their
consciousness that they are a defeated people." This would be
achieved by the massive and constant application of force until they got
the message. The same philosophy was elaborated in 2004 by Professor
Arnon Soffer, one of the architects, with former Israeli prime minister
Ariel Sharon, of the 2005 Gaza "disengagement." <br><br>
Soffer, an avid supporter of turning Gaza into a hermetically-sealed pen
for unwanted Palestinians, explained that if Palestinians fire a single
rocket over the fence into Israel, "we will fire 10 in response. And
women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After
the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won't allow their husbands
to shoot Qassams [rockets], because they will know what's waiting for
them."<br><br>
Soffer predicted that in a few years' time, "when 2.5 million people
live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those
people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid
of an insane fundamentalist Islam." With Palestinians closed in,
"The pressure at the border will be awful," Soffer predicted.
"It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we
will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day."<br><br>
To be fair, Soffer did display a human side: "The only thing that
concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have
to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be
normal human beings" ("It's the demography, stupid,"
<i>The Jerusalem Post</i>, 21 May 2004).<br><br>
For decades Israel has been exercizing with ever-escalating brutality
this deliberate strategy to crush through force and starvation a civilian
population in rebellion against colonial rule. To Israel's vexation, the
Palestinians are not playing their part. After sixty years of expulsions,
massacres, assassinations of their leaders, colonization, torture, and
mass imprisonment, the Palestinians have utterly failed to understand
that they are a "defeated people."<br><br>
The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank endure
unprecedented oppression by the Israeli army and settlers without
resorting to violence in response, but they maintain an inextinguishable
determination to endure until they regain their rights. If the methods
the Palestinian resistance has sometimes used are reprehensible, they
have also been typical for anti-colonial resistance movements throughout
time, as William Polk shows in his book <i>Violent Politics: A History of
Insurgency, Terrorism and Guerilla War from the American Revolution to
Iraq,</i> and Robert Pape demonstrated through his study of suicide
bombing in <i>Dying to Win.<br><br>
</i>Is it not time for the rest of the world to step in and force Israel
at last to understand the same thing, so that the senseless bloodshed can
finally stop and all the people of the country -- Israelis and
Palestinians -- can begin to imagine a future other than an endless
parade of funerals?<br><br>
<i>Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of
</i><a href="http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/store/548.shtml">One
Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse</a><i>
(Metropolitan Books, 2006).</i> <br><br>
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