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<span style="background-color: #0c343d;"><span style="color:
orange;">When the smoke clears in Gaza<br>
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<i><b><a href="http://mondoweiss.net/author/robin-d-g-kelley"
rel="author" title="Posts by Robin D. G. Kelley">Robin D. G.
Kelley</a></b> </i></div>
<div class="entry-meta">
<i>August 8, 2014<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://blackeducator.blogspot.com/2014/08/gaza-massacre-continues-us-academia-and.html">http://blackeducator.blogspot.com/2014/08/gaza-massacre-continues-us-academia-and.html</a></small></small></b>
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<i>“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the
freedom of the Palestinians” –Nelson Mandela</i><br>
<br>
Israel’s illegal, genocidal war on the people of Gaza has the
characteristics of a massive tsunami.<br>
Waged with even greater ferocity than Operation Cast Lead or any
other assault since the Nakba of 1948 or the 1967 War, its
destructive impact may even be worse. Masked as a war of
“self-defense,” the euphemistically-named “Operation Protective
Edge” is state violence at warp speed; it is completely
indiscriminate yet calculated in its targeting of children and adult
civilians, hospitals, schools, shelters, markets, and neighborhoods.
So massive the onslaught, so swift the reports on social media, that
my twitter feed resembles a ticker-tape machine. No one can write or
speak fast enough to keep up with the body count.<br>
<br>
As I write now, the Palestinian dead is inching toward the 2,000
mark, the injured close to 10,000; a quarter of Gaza’s population is
displaced; about 10,000 homes were destroyed—including 141 schools;
entire neighborhoods have been razed to the ground; morgues are
filled to capacity as dead bodies lay strewn in streets, under
rubble or placed in vegetable refrigerators or commercial ice cream
freezers. The lack of electricity, clean water, food, sanitation,
medical supplies, among other things, means a variety of infectious,
nutritional and water-borne diseases are imminent.<br>
<br>
If you are reading this, you’re probably familiar with these
terrifying facts.<br>
<br>
Thanks to fearless journalists and activists by way of social media,
the consequences of the war have slipped past the cordon of
corporate U.S. media obliged to “balance” horrific images of dead
civilians with the Orwellian propaganda of Prime Minister Netanyahu
and IDF spokesman Lt. Colonel Peter Lerner, the enthusiastic
cheerleading of National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and President
Obama whose fidelity to Israel’s “security” manifestly overrides any
expressed concerns over the slaughter of children.<br>
<br>
However heartbroken members of the Obama administration or Congress
might be over the killing of innocents, they enthusiastically backed
re-arming Israel with no conditions whatsoever. Obama did not flinch
when he approved an additional $225 million in “emergency aid” for
Israel’s “Iron Dome.” He absolutely refuses to recognize Israel’s
attacks on Gaza as a massacre, apparently missing the irony in his<a
href="http://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/5981449/president-obamas-full-statement-on-the-iraq-crisis">
recent press statement justifying air strikes and dropping
humanitarian aid in Iraq</a>: “[W]hen we have the unique
capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United
States of America cannot turn a blind eye. We can act, carefully and
responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide.”<br>
<br>
The U.S. did not act carefully or responsibly with regard to Israel.
Instead, the president was an enabler. He knew full well that the
attack on Gaza was not about the kidnapping of three Israeli
students or the so-called terror tunnels running from the Gaza Strip
into Israel.<a
href="http://www.democracynow.org/2014/8/5/ceasefire_after_gaza_assault_leaves_1800">
As Norman Finkelstein recently pointed out on<i> Democracy Now!</i></a>,
Israel could have easily sealed off the tunnels from within their
own borders without firing a shot. The war was an aggressive act of
collective punishment (a blatant violation of the Fourth Geneva
Convention) intended to intimidate Palestinians for supporting
Hamas, undermine prospects for a unity government, completely disarm
the territory, and tighten its control of the occupation.<br>
<br>
In the course of the last three weeks, I’ve encountered more and
more people who only a year ago had little to say about Palestine
now describing Gaza as the largest open-air prison in the world, or
citing the fact that our taxes subsidize Israel’s garrison state to
the tune of 6 million dollars a day, and that U.S. aid to Israel
since 1949 has exceeded 121 billion dollars. They also know that the
U.S. has consistently vetoed U.N. resolutions condemning Israel’s
abuses of human rights. The most sophisticated readers understand
that the wars in Gaza, not to mention IDF attacks and home
demolitions in the West Bank, violate our own Arms Export Control
Act, which prohibits the use of U.S. weapons and military aid
against civilians, particularly in occupied territories.<br>
<br>
The growing number of “heartbroken” Americans among us are beginning
to read <i>Ma’an News, The Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss,
Jadaliyya, Counterpunch, The Middle East Monitor, The Link</i>,
download reports from the Institute for Middle East Understanding
(IMEU), listen to Democracy Now!, follow the tweets of Gaza
journalists such as Mohammed Omer, or simply take notice of the
steadfast activism of Jewish Voice for Peace, International
Solidarity Movement (Palestine), Students for Justice in Palestine,
Codepink, U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, USACBI, to
name but a few. The latest carnage in Gaza is the turning point, we
are told; the age-old knee-jerk charges of anti-Semitism no longer
work to stifle criticism of Israel. (Though apparently no one has
told the Congressional Black Caucus—with the possible exception of
Keith Ellison—or so-called African American leaders or their
self-appointed punditocracy, whose cowardly silence on Palestine has
become commonplace.)<br>
<br>
And best of all, fewer critics are framing Palestinian oppression in
terms of alleged ancient Jewish-Arab hostilities or even an
Israeli-Palestinian “conflict,” but rather as a colonial occupation
and violation of international law and human rights, subsidized by
the United States.<br>
<br>
Besides the news that Spain had imposed an arms embargo on Israel,
and Latin American nations have severed diplomatic ties in response
to the attack on Gaza, the increase in Americans critical of Israel
may be the only silver lining in this horrific episode. And still, I
worry. We’ve been here before. During Operation Cast Lead when
Israeli forces were shelling hospitals, mosques, schools,
businesses, infrastructure, and U.N. facilities, and children were
blown to bits, the world—including many Americans—were rightfully
outraged.<br>
<br>
When the smoke cleared, 1,419 Palestinians were dead (82.2%
civilians), at least 5,300 were injured, and large swaths of Gaza
lay in near ruins. Protests swelled, petitions circulated, and poets
turned despair into resistance. The Goldstone Report appeared soon
thereafter, exposing a litany of war crimes and violations of
international law and human rights.<a
href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/gaza-remembering-operation-cast-lead/28382">
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights filed 490 separate
criminal complaints to Israeli authorities on behalf of 1,046
victims</a> demanding prosecution and redress for what were
clearly documented war crimes, but these were ignored. Instead,<a
href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/gaza-remembering-operation-cast-lead/28382">
the Israeli military conducted its own internal investigation,
exonerating itself</a>: “[T]hroughout the fighting in Gaza, the
IDF operated in accordance with international law.<br>
<br>
The IDF maintained a high professional and moral level while facing
an enemy that aimed to terrorize Israeli civilians whilst taking
cover amidst uninvolved civilians in the Gaza strip and using them
as human shields.” Eventually mass indignation receded, leaving only
the die-hard activists and the Palestinian people as a whole faced
with the prospect of dying a slow death under occupation and
systematic strangulation.<br>
<br>
Action in support of Gaza, and Palestine more generally, tends to
rise in proportion to spectacular violence. The IDF attack on the
Gaza flotilla in 2010—the infamous assault on the MV Marvi
Marmara—generated a surge of international condemnation. Two years
later, when Israeli air strikes resumed under <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2012_Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_clashes">“Operation
Returning Echo,”</a> protests broke out everywhere fearing a
repeat of 2008-2009. The latest criminal war on Gaza has thus far
produced the most casualties, the most material damage, and the
greatest moral outrage. Images of infant corpses, young men
succumbing to sniper bullets, and entire families being pulled from
the rubble generate feelings of anger and sympathy, while propaganda
efforts to portray Israelis as vulnerable, terrified victims of
Hamas rockets have largely backfired.<br>
<br>
Spectacular violence in Gaza and the West Bank has certainly swelled
the ranks of the BDS movement, but in the lull between
well-publicized crises, the struggle for Palestinian justice tends
to be difficult and isolating. Less than a year ago, the<a
href="http://www.theasa.net/from_the_editors/item/asa_members_vote_to_endorse_academic_boycott/">
American Studies Association faced relentless attacks for passing
a fairly mild resolution respecting the boycott of Israeli
academic institutions</a>. The backlash culminated in an open,
acrimonious attack on the BDS movement by nearly every major
university president across the country.<br>
<br>
And apparently the backlash within American academe continues, as
evidenced by the recent efforts by<a
href="http://palestinelegalsupport.org/2014/06/19/san-francisco-state-university-president-defends-professor-rabab-abdulhadis-travel-and-research-after-latest-mccarthyist-campaign/">
the AMCHA Initiative to fire <i><b>Professor Rabab Abdulhadi</b></i></a><i><b>
</b></i> (above) from her post at San Francisco State University
for leading a delegation of scholars to Palestine, and the decision
by University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Chancellor, Phyllis
Wise, to<a
href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/unremitting-slaughter-university.html">
fire Professor Steven Salaita for his searing critiques of Israel
on twitter</a>. And lest we forget,<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/16/empire-state-of-mind/">
the defenders of Alicia Keys were declaring victory over BDS
“bullies”</a> because she decided that performing in Tel Aviv,
normalizing and legitimizing the regime while it waged its own war
of attrition against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, was
perfectly consistent with her humanitarian aims of promoting global
children’s health.<br>
<br>
The ranks of BDS supporters continue to grow, due largely to
tireless organizing and partly to Israel’s attacks on Gaza and
dramatic stories of violence and dispossession in the West Bank. My
point is that reacting to spectacular violence cannot sustain a
movement, especially if the sole objective is the cessation of
hostilities. Peace is impossible without justice.<br>
<br>
The brilliant Egyptian writer,<a
href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-soueif-gaza-israel-20140801-story.html">
Adhaf Soueif, said it best in a recent editorial</a>: “The world
treated Gaza as a humanitarian case, as if what the Palestinians
needed was aid. What Gaza needs is freedom.”<br>
<br>
Freedom means much more than ending the blockade. Freedom means, at
minimum, ending the occupation, dismantling apartheid, eradicating
racism, and ensuring the right of Palestinians to return to their
native land. These are not abstract, pie-in-the-sky demands, but
constitute the necessary conditions for a Palestinian future and a
stable and secure region.<br>
<br>
As I write these words, Israel has rejected the ceasefire agreement
proposed by Palestinian representatives. Not surprisingly, the U.S.
and Israeli press are spinning the story as if Hamas rejected
Israel’s generous terms for a ceasefire.<a
href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/13227-palestinian-factions-agree-on-main-points-for-cease-fire">
What the Palestinians proposed is quite reasonable;</a> they are
asking for the cessation of violence, including Israeli incursions,
assassinations, infiltrations; ending the siege and opening borders
for the movement of people and goods; permission for Palestinian
fishermen to fish; reopening of the Gaza airport and the
establishment of a marine port; exonerating the West Bank protesters
who were or currently are detained since June 12; and launching
reconstruction efforts in Gaza headed by the national unity
government with assistance from the United Nations.<br>
<br>
Israel’s unilateral rejection opens the door for more bloodshed.
Even if Israel had agreed to the terms laid out by the Palestinians,
it would not end the occupation. It would have provided much needed
relief to the embattled, but it would have also been something akin
to a pyrrhic victory at best, a far cry from the ultimate objective:
a Free Palestine. And Israel understands this, which is why its
pundits, politicians, and military strategists are already preparing
for the next war on Gaza.<br>
<br>
Determining next steps requires that we go back many steps – before
the siege, before the election of Hamas, before the withdrawal of
Jewish settlements in Gaza, before the Oslo Accords, even before the
strip came under Israeli occupation in 1967. Often described as “the
largest open-air prison in the world,” Gaza is much closer to a
concentration camp than a prison. And despite a rich and ancient
history, its peculiar condition can be traced to the Nakba generated
by Israel’s creation in 1948.<br>
<br>
The 1.8 million currently locked inside Gaza are not there because
they were charged with a crime; on the contrary, they are crime
victims. Most Gazans are descendants of families driven from their
homes during Israel’s colonial/territorial wars of 1948 and 1967.
They have not received compensation for the unlawful seizure of
their property. They are there because they were in the way of
Israeli settlement policy—much like the Poles and the Czechs and the
Russians and all European Jews who got in the way of German designs
for lebensraum (living space). And like the victims of German
aggression, Gazans are subject to bombing raids on civilians,
chemical warfare, deliberate starvation and other unspeakable war
crimes—and for a much longer period of time.<br>
<br>
But unlike concentration camp inmates who resisted German
occupation, Gazans who resist are not portrayed as heroes in the
media or even in the most liberal, “sympathetic” accounts. Those who
fire hundreds of ineffectual rockets or throw thousands of
ineffectual rocks are rendered the aggressor, the source of the
conflict, the terrorist.<br>
<br>
If we recognize as the U.N. does, the illegal blockade and war on
Gaza, it is not unreasonable to imagine a U.N. “peace keeping” force
dispatched to suppress the violence and break the blockade. Of
course, when it comes to the “defense” of Israel, law and reason
yield to American power and its blind allegiance. A few rungs down
the ladder of appropriate, reasonable responses are international
sanctions, boycott and divestment. Yet, even some of the staunchest
critics of the occupation take issue with BDS, notably the
movement’s fourth demand: that Israel grants all Palestinians the
right to return as stipulated by UN Resolution 194. Leftists and
Progressives have largely embraced the other three demands: end the
occupation and the blockade of Gaza; dismantle the apartheid wall;
recognize the fundamental rights of all Palestinian-Arab/ &
Bedouin citizens of Israel for full equality. But once you open a
path to return, to restore stolen property, to repair nearly seventy
years of dispossession, Israel as it is currently constituted is
unsustainable.<br>
<br>
I do not believe this is merely a matter of living in denial that
the two-state solution is dead. It also has to do with the inability
on the part of a segment of the Left to see Israel as a colonial
project, specifically a settler colonial state founded on the
subjugation of indigenous people (Palestinians–Muslim and Christian;
Bedouin; Mizrahi Jews; and imported racialized labor) but with the
backing of international law.<br>
<br>
Why?<br>
<br>
For one thing, part of the answer lay in the unique historical
context for Israel’s founding, as well as the power of its founding
myths. There is the convergence between Israel’s Zionist roots – a
nationalist ideology generated partly in opposition to
racist/ethnic/religious oppression, but also motivated by an
imperative to bring modernization to a so-called backward Arab
world—and the post-Ottoman colonial domination of the region by
Britain and France. By colonial subjects I mean an indigenous people
(inhabitants of the Mandate known as Palestine—Muslims, Christians,
Mizrahim or Sephardic Jews) under British rule, alongside European
Jewish settlers after the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Ultimately,
this convergence put Jewish settlers in conflict with British
imperialism.<br>
<br>
Second, the Holocaust was critical, not just for the obvious reasons
that the genocide generated global indignation and sympathy for the
plight of Jews and justified Zionist arguments for a homeland, but
because, as Aime Cesaire argued in Discourse on Colonialism (1950)
(before Hannah Arendt), the Holocaust itself was a manifestation of
colonial violence. Therefore, in 1948, Israel comes into being as a
nation identified as victims of colonial/racist violence, through
armed insurrection against British imperialism. It is a narrative
that renders invisible the core violence of ethnic cleansing, the
Nakba, resulting in the destruction of some 380 Palestinian towns
and villages, producing the massive refugee population that settles
in the Gaza strip.<br>
<br>
The myth of Israel’s heroic war of liberation against the British
convinced even the most anti-colonial intellectuals to link Israel’s
independence with African independence and Third World liberation
(and at some point, even Israel’s ruling labor party pursued
alliances with newly independent African nations under the guise
that they, too, were part of the non-aligned movement). This began
to change in the early 1960s, when Israel had become cozy allies
with apartheid South Africa under Prime Minister Hendrik
Verwoerd–who observed in 1961, that,<a
href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/guest-writers/2545-apartheid-in-duplicate">
“Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”</a> Verwoerd
was right. After the Nakba expelled about 700,000 Palestinians,
Israel passed The Absentees’ Property Law (1950), effectively
transferring all property owned or used by Palestinian refugees to
the state, and then denied their right to return or reclaim their
losses. The land grab continued after the 1967 war and military
occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.<br>
<br>
Israel’s right to exist may be inscribed in law, but it functions as
a rogue state, one of the last nakedly colonial outposts operating
above the protocols of international law and human rights. Its
lawlessness is enabled by the United States. A complete end to the
blockade is but one small step in a protracted struggle to bring
Israel into compliance—and that is still not the entire task before
us. Even after the bombing stops and the smoke clears, we must
continue to build the BDS campaign; ramp up our opposition to racism
(including the assault on African immigrants and asylum seekers in
Israel); support an embattled Israeli and Palestinian Left; demand
that Israel’s war crimes be prosecuted and U.S. complicity in such
crimes rendered visible; fight for an arms embargo on Israel; oppose
the ongoing dispossession and home demolitions in the West Bank, the
use of administrative detention, jailing of minors, and political
repression; and demand the right of return and for just compensation
for one of the great colonial crimes of the last half century.<br>
<br>
To fight for a truly democratic, nonracist, humane, sustainable,
economically viable, safe and secure world for the people of
Palestine/Israel is merely to demand what we have been struggling to
achieve in this country for decades. As long as the lives of<a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/23/world/middleeast/palestinian-family-finds-missing-son-in-youtube-video-of-his-shooting.html?_r=0">
Salem Khaleel Shamaly</a> and<a
href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/what-killed-eric-garner"> Eric
Garner</a> and countless others can be snuffed out by the state or
vigilantes for merely being rendered a criminal threat, then none of
us are really free.
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