<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-top-anchor"></div>
<div id="gmail-toolbar" class="gmail-toolbar-container">
</div><div class="gmail-container" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
<div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element">
<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/when-will-the-west-publicly-endorse-the-right-of-the-palestinians-to-defend-themselves/">palestinechronicle.com</a>
<div class="gmail-domain-border"></div>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">When Will the West Publicly Endorse the Right of the Palestinians to Defend Themselves?</h1>August 11, 2022</div>
<hr>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<img src="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Mourn-678x455.png" alt="" title="Mourn" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="458" height="307">
A Palestinian mother and daughter
mourn the loss of their beloved son and brother during the latest
Israeli assault on Gaza. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine
Chronicle)
<p><strong>By <a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/ilan-pappe" title="Display all articles for Ilan Pappe">Ilan Pappe</a></strong></p><p>The
last Israeli brutal assault on the Gaza Strip exposed once more the
hypocritical and immoral response of the West to the ongoing genocidal
policies of Israel in the occupied territories. The continuation of the
callous policies and the Western governments’ responses, in particular
the American and British ones, can naturally lead to desperation and
paralysis.</p>
<p>However, despair and inaction are a luxury Palestinians under
apartheid, siege and occupation cannot afford; therefore, the solidarity
movement as well should do its best not to give in to a sense of
helplessness of hopelessness. It is important to record the continued
insincerity of the West, as it transpired once more this time, condemn
this duplicity and counter it by exposing the fabrications and
distortions on which it is based.</p>
<p>The American President, the State Department, and the American envoy
to the United Nations “supported Israel’s right to defend itself” in
reaction to the Israeli assault as did the British foreign secretary,
who will probably be the next prime minister in September. It is quite
incredible to hear these statements: at a time when every major human
and civil rights organization on the globe defined Israel as an
apartheid state, the Western political elites chose to hail its right to
self-defense.</p>
<p>We should not tire and remind the world that the people who have the
right to defend themselves are the Palestinians and that they possess
very limited means to do so, whether by armed struggle or by appealing
to international law and institutions. In many cases, they were unable
to defend themselves, neither in Gaza this month, nor anywhere else in
historical Palestine since 1948. When they do succeed in doing so, they
are accused of being terrorists.</p>
<p>The Western governments seem to care very little for the Palestinian
right to life, dignity, and property. The UN committed to doing so in
Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, and stood by when all these rights
were violated during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Since then, and
in particular since 1967, none of the Western governments ever attempted
to protect the Palestinians, when the Israeli army shot, killed or
wounded them – with weapons supplied by the West or developed with its
help. It also did nothing when their houses were demolished, their
livelihood destroyed or when they were ethnically cleansed.</p>
<p>We can look at July 2022 alone and record some of the Palestinian
victims whose right to self-defense has not been recognized by the
President of the USA or the Foreign Minister of Britain. These
politicians were silent when, during this month, Saadia
Faragallah-Mattar, a 64-year-old mother of 8 and a grandmother of 28,
died in the Damon jail, where she had already spent 6 months detained
without trial. No one defended or acknowledged the right to life, in
this very same month, of Amjad Abu Aliya, a 16-year-old boy who was shot
by Israeli soldiers.</p>
<p>The list of those murdered just this month is long. It includes Nabil
Gahnem, 53 years old, who tried to return home safely from working in
Israel and was shot dead by Israeli soldiers last July, and Taher Khalil
Mohammad Maslat, a 16-year-old boy shot on his way to school by Israeli
snipers who aimed at him from a distance of 100 meters and killed him.
Odeh Mahmoud Odeh was shot dead in July, in al-Midya, a village near
Ramallah, in a week that also saw the killing of Ayman Mahmoud Muhsein,
aged 29, a father of 3 and a political prisoner for 3 years, who was
killed in the Dheisheh camp near Bethlehem, and Bilal Awad Qabha, aged
24, killed in Yabad.</p>
<p>As the month just started, Muhammad Abdulla Salah Suleiman, a boy
from Silwan, was shot on Route 60, a settler apartheid road, by Israeli
soldiers sitting on a watchtower. He was left to bleed for about two
hours, with Israeli soldiers preventing a Palestinian ambulance to reach
him, by firing on anyone approaching him. Muhammad died later from his
wounds.</p>
<p>Israeli watchtowers are also spread near the Gaza Strip fence, but
they are not manned. They are loaded with machine guns operated from the
distance by young Israeli women soldiers, who were hailed by the
Israeli Radio as heroines defending their homeland when they explained
how they use a joystick on their computer to kill anyone approaching the
fence.</p>
<p>Since January 1, 2022, and until the Israeli assassination of Shireen
Abu Akleh, Israel forces killed 61 Palestinians; these killings were
part of what local and international human rights organizations
described as a “shoot-to-kill policy” against Palestinians; prodded by
the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Naftali Bennett, to use lethal
force at Palestinians who did not pose an imminent threat. Hundreds were
wounded during Ramadan this year, in particular at Haram al-Sharif.</p>
<p>And the death toll grew in this last attack. Children such as Momen
Salem, aged 5, and Ahmad al-Nairab, aged 11, in Jabaliya were killed
together with another 14 children between the ages of 4 to 16.</p>
<p>Palestinian children also die because of Israel’s policy of denying
medical permits to Gaza’s children. Around 840 children have died while
awaiting permits between 2008 and 2021.</p>
<p>Nobody in the Western media or mainstream politics talked about the
right of the Palestinians who were maimed by Israeli shots this month to
defend themselves. Nassim Shuman, a student walking on a sideroad near
Ramallah, lost a leg and his friend Ussayed Hamail was left paralyzed in
a wheelchair after they were shot by Israeli soldiers. A similar fate,
this month, awaited Harun Abu Aram from Yatta, who remained paralyzed
from head to toes after he tried to prevent the soldiers from stealing
his neighbor’s generator.</p>
<p>Similar silence was heard loud and clear when the Palestinian
community of Ras al-Tin, 18 families, were expelled from their homes
last July and when families in Masafer Yatta became targets for the
Israeli military training. Nobody in London or Washington last July
talked about the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves in the
wake of the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to approve the army’s plan
to expel about one thousand Palestinians from the Masafer Yatta region.</p>
<p>And nobody in the official West talked about the right of those
Palestinians who are tortured by Israel to defend themselves. Last July,
we learned from “the Public Committee against Torture in Israel”
(PCATI) that the situation has become so bad that it decided to refer
Israel to the International Criminal Court. PCATI concluded that Israel
“is not interested and unable to stop the use of torture against
Palestinians”; a policy that constituted a war crime. It said that after
30 years of fighting torture it had “reached the unfortunate
conclusion” that Israel has no wish to end torture, honestly investigate
victims’ complaints and prosecute those responsible”.</p>
<p>In July, we were exposed to the horror tale of Ahmad Manasra, jailed
when he was 13 years old, suffering from a mental breakdown. Despite
calls by the UN to release him, Israel responded by putting him in
solitary confinement.</p>
<p>And we do not have time to enumerate those Palestinians used as human
shields, whose houses were demolished, their fields burnt, and their
businesses destroyed.</p>
<p>Surely, they all had the right to defend themselves – but who
defended them? Not the international community, not the Palestinian
Authority, not the PLO wherever it is, not the Palestinian leaders
inside Israel, not the Arab world. Were they supposed to remain without
any defense at all then, and are they expected to do so in the future?</p>
<p>Israel now offers Hamas what it offered the PA – a model of an open
prison, where those incarcerated would be at the mercy of the Israeli
jailers – offered limited basic rights to live and work in return for
“good behavior”. Any attempt to live a liberated normal life is
immediately branded as terrorism, and the might of the army is instantly
activated. The “open prison” model is replaced with a “maximum security
prison” model, where collective punishment appears in the form of
aerial bombardment, siege, and a long list of war crimes and crimes
against humanity.</p>
<p>I ask again, who will defend the Palestinians from the need to choose
between two callous options in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? No one
offers a third option. When will the leaders of the West publicly
endorse the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves – as they do
for instance in Ukraine? And when will we in the solidarity movement
succeed in pressuring those leaders into doing it, so that we will all
be able to prevent the next killing, maiming, and expelling of innocent
Palestinians? Hopefully soon, before it is too late.</p>
<p><span>Until then, the Palestinians who defend themselves should have our full support and admiration. </span></p>
<div><p><br></p><p><span></span></p><p><em>-
Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a
senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is
the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East,
A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths
about Israel. Pappé is described as one of Israel’s 'New Historians'
who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government
documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of
Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine
Chronicle.</em></p><p></p></div>
</div></div></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
<div></div>
</div>
</div>