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<hgroup id="masthead"> <span class="timestamp today"><span>7/29/14
</span><time datetime="20140729" itemprop="datePublished">4:19
pm</time></span>
<h1 itemprop="name headline">Collective Punishment in Gaza</h1>
<h3>By <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/?post_type=contributor&p=2676202"
title="Rashid Khalidi" rel="author" itemprop="author">Rashid
Khalidi</a></h3>
<p><b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/collective-punishment-gaza">http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/collective-punishment-gaza</a></small></small></b><br>
</p>
</hgroup>
<p>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 <em>Times
of Israel,</em> “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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><span id="more-2676162"></span></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><i>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.”</i></p>
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