Rene — KATHLEEN CHRISTISON: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PALESTINE?
Topic(s): Palestine / Israel | Comments Off on Rene — KATHLEEN CHRISTISON: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PALESTINE?This is an interesting article in relation to the anti-war effort. –rg
KATHLEEN CHRISTISON: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PALESTINE?
By Kathleen Christison
PalestineChronicle.com
Saturday September 22, 2007
Has the anti-war movement abandoned Palestine and the Palestinian
people to the Israeli-U.S. pro-war machine?
A group of anti-war leaders held a conference call at the end of
August under the sponsorship of Michael Lerner’s Network of Spiritual
Progressives to do some long-term strategic planning for the anti-war
movement. The discussants included leaders of the country’s best known
peace groups — United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink, Pax Christi,
the Department of Peace, and others — as well as Lerner himself and
Democratic Congressmen Lynn Woolsey and Jim Moran. They talked about
Iraq, of course, but of virtually nothing else. There was a bit about
“peace and justice” in general, one passing mention of trying to stop
an attack on Iran, and a whole lot of talk about avoiding action
on all issues, including even Iraq, until Woolsey and a couple of
progressive colleagues try their hands at manipulating weak-kneed
congressional Democrats into “showing some backbone” on a withdrawal
from Iraq. This must be a new concept in opposing war: do nothing.
You would think there was nothing else wrong in the world. There was
no talk of the U.S. aggression in Afghanistan (which is assumed even
by the anti-war movement to be a “good” war, despite the excessive
number of innocent civilians — never remembered — who have been
killed there). There was nothing about safeguarding Lebanon from
frequent Israeli attack and nothing, of course, about supporting
Palestinian human and national rights or opposing Israel’s gross
violation of these rights. There was nothing, in short, about any
of the massive injustices perpetrated around the world by the United
States, primarily as part of the so-called war on terror, and ignored
by the anti-war/peace movement. This is a peace movement but apparently
not a justice movement.
Interestingly, two of the discussants, Lerner and Rick Ufford-Chase, a
representative of the Presbyterian Church (USA), now lead organizations
formed after earlier efforts to address the Palestinian-Israeli issue
failed in the face of strong opposition from Israeli supporters. Lerner
formed the Network of Spiritual Progressives after his Tikkun
Communities faced too much opposition from the Jewish community
over the Tikkun effort to tread a middle path between Israel and the
Palestinians. Ufford-Chase was the principal Presbyterian spokesman
when the church launched a campaign in 2004 to divest from companies
supporting Israel’s occupation, but after the church backed away from
that position in 2006 under heavy attack from Israeli supporters,
the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, headed by Ufford-Chase, formed a
new organization focused specifically on Iraq, called Christian Peace
Witness for Iraq.
Thus has the anti-war movement abandoned Palestine and the Palestinians
to the Israeli-U.S. pro-war machine. This abandonment is not new by
any means; it just gets more and more unjust with time. United for
Peace and Justice has always been chary of speaking out on behalf of
the Palestinians. It organized a demonstration in June opposing the
Israeli occupation timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the
occupation, but this was such a pro forma event that the section of
UFPJ’s website dealing with its “Palestine/Israel Just Peace Campaign”
has not been updated since mid-2004. Pax Christi regularly tackles
nuclear disarmament, the School of the Americas, Iraq, immigration,
Haiti — as, of course, it should — but Palestine? Rarely if ever. And
so on, with a few notable exceptions, through the catalogue of peace
movements.
Scott Ritter’s latest book on strategizing for the anti-war movement,
Waging Peace, makes no mention of the very unpeaceful situation in
Palestine-Israel.
MoveOn.org and other political organizations give little indication
that they have ever even heard of Palestine. The same for liberal
talk radio hosts on Air America, particularly Thom Hartmann and Randi
Rhodes. Grassroots initiatives such as the Declaration of Peace make
no mention of Palestine and the very preventable tragedy evolving
there. None of the excellent films about the Bush administration’s
aggression around the world — neither Fahrenheit 9/11, nor Uncovered,
nor Hijacking Catastrophe, nor No End in Sight, nor any of the others
that have come out in the last several years — contains a word
about the very large part Israel plays in the U.S. imperial machine
or about the carte blanche that U.S. war-mongering has given Israel
to step up its oppression of the Palestinians and its murder of the
Palestinian nation.
And this is the key point: Israel’s war machine is essentially a part
of the U.S. war machine, Israel’s assault on Palestinians is part
of the U.S. “war on terror,” the U.S. and Israel do not go to war
anywhere in the region without close coordination and cooperation. The
U.S. enables Israel’s occupation and oppression of Palestinians;
Israel facilitates and pushes U.S. war policy.
One does not act without the other, and the Palestinian plight cannot
therefore be separated from whatever other atrocities this war machine
perpetrates elsewhere in the Middle East, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Lebanon, or Iran.
Although Israeli supporters roundly condemn any attempt to link
Israel to planning for the war in Iraq, they never hesitate to link
the Palestinians to the “terrorists” against whom the Iraq war and the
“war on terror” are supposedly being fought.
In their new book on the Israel lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen
Walt provide masses of evidence revealing Israel’s and the lobby’s role
in pushing for and enthusiastically backing the Iraq war. Indeed, the
war was heralded by its neocon proponents as a path to Palestinian
capitulation (“the path to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad”) —
the idea being that by defeating and humiliating Saddam Hussein and
Iraq, the U.S. would so intimidate the Palestinians that they would
surrender easily to Israel. But the peace community studiously avoids
recognizing the Israeli connection to the war. It also studiously
ignores the interlocking realities of the U.S.-Israeli relationship
when it argues that the Iraq war is the urgent issue these days,
that this is where Americans are being killed and this is where
protest efforts must be concentrated.
One wonders why “peace and justice” did not concern this peace
community before the Iraq war, when Palestinians had already been
suffering injustice and oppression at the hands of Israel and the
U.S. for decades.
Outside the U.S., the interrelationship between conflict in
Palestine-Israel and turmoil in the rest of the region is well
understood. Public opinion polls in Europe and the Middle East have
demonstrated repeatedly that U.S. support for Israel is the principal
cause of increasing anti-Americanism everywhere. In Ireland, according
to the chairman of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity C ommittee,
James Bowen, writing in Haaretz, “disgust” with Israel’s injustices
perpetrated against the Palestinians — and particularly with the
land confiscations and home demolitions so reminiscent of British
practices in Ireland a century ago– has reached “such a level that
even highly conservative institutions that normally try to avoid
politics are driven to express concern.”
A state-sponsored Irish academy of artists, usually apolitical,
issued a call early this year encouraging Irish artists and
cultural institutions to “reflect deeply” before cooperating with
state-sponsored Israeli cultural events and institutions. “Detestation
is spreading around the world,” Bowen wrote. In Britain as well,
academic, cultural, and labor boycotts of Israel have been called by
various organizations.
But not in America. Despite disgust in Ireland, boycotts in England,
detestation around the world over Israel’s U.S.-financed oppression
of another people, the peace community and the anti-war movement in
the U.S. are unfazed.
Gross injustice to the Palestinians raises little concern among those
concentrated on the urgent problem in Iraq. Yet the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, specifically the dire situation of the Palestinians, is now,
and has been since well before Iraq became urgent, the central issue
in Middle East politics, the volatile center of the most volatile
region in the world. It forms the basis for the Arab people’s
strongest grievance — a grievance against Israel as perpetrator,
against the U.S. as Israel’s armorer and benefactor, against the Arab
state leaders who have failed to help or stand up for the Palestinians.
The anti-war movement ignores the most explosive issue, the one
underlying all others, when it turns its back on the Palestinians and
ignores Israel’s increasingly brutal treatment. By looking away from
Palestine, it is looking away from justice toward a false, at best
incomplete peace.
So the anti-war movement essentially contents itself with protesting
the Iraq war for self-centered reasons, because it is killing Americans
and diverting huge monies from domestic needs. The anti-war movement in
many ways reflects the thinking and feelings of society at large, and
the fear among protesters, as among Democratic politicians, of being
perceived to be not “supporting the troops,” not adequately supporting
America, and therefore not properly patriotic, is strong and pervasive
because society in general has set up this issue as a major focus.
But an even larger problem for the anti-war movement is the fear
of being labeled soft on terrorism and soft on Islam. In an era in
which the right wing is manufacturing a “clash of civilizations”
between the West and the Muslim world and a strong anti-Muslim bias
increasingly colors public discourse, it is simply too uncomfortable
for many on the left to be caught on the wrong side of the barricades,
advocating justice for Palestinians or any Arabs and Muslims. Anti-war
protesters fear being associated with Iraqi insurgents and even more
with Palestinians, who are all considered “insurgents” and “terrorists”
against Israel. Many who never caviled at being labeled communists
for supporting the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war now fear being
labeled Islamo-fascists (whatever that is) or terrorists or, horror
of horrors, PLO lovers.
Being seen to support Muslim or Arab rights at a time when Muslims
are opposing Americans in Iraq and Israelis in Palestine and elsewhere
is simply intolerable for most on the left. And so the us-versus-them
attitude of the Bush neocons has in many ways overtaken the anti-war
movement as well, even when this means allowing injustice to flourish.
Justice First Some people call this racism. Israeli-British jazz
musician and activist Gilad Atzmon, an irreverent anti-Zionist
who comments frequently on Middle East issues, gave a talk at
the University of Denver in April in which he castigated Western
society in general for its “collective indifference” to crimes
committed in the Middle East “on our behalf and in our names” and
charged the anti-war movement with a self-indulgence that makes it
indifferent as well to the worst injustices. Noting that there is a
“common denominator between Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan” largely
attributable to the influence over U.S. policy exerted by Israel and
its supporters (“America has been operating officially as an Israeli
mission force . . . currently fight[ing] the last sovereign pockets of
Muslim resistance”), Atzmon pointedly accused Americans and Europeans
in general of caring about Muslims only “as long as they stop being
Muslims.” The notion of a clash of cultures and civilizations, he said,
has resonance even in the solidarity movement.
“Naturally, we tend to expect the subject of our solidarity to endorse
our views while dumping his own. As much as Blair and Bush insist
upon democratizing the Muslim world, we, the so-called left humanists,
have our own various agendas for the region and its people. In Europe
some archaic Marxists are convinced that ‘working class politics’
is the only viable outlook of the conflict and its solution. Some
other deluded socialists and egalitarians are talking about liberating
the Muslims of their religious traits. The cosmopolitans within the
solidarity movement would suggest to Palestinians that nationalism
and national identity belong to the past. Noticeably, many of us love
Muslims and Arabs as long as they act as white, post-enlightenment
Europeans.”
Western society, including the anti-war movement, Atzmon charged,
has “managed to continuously fail to act for the people of Iraq,
Palestine, and Afghanistan.” Supporting Muslims is “probably a bridge
too far for most Westerners.”
We cannot accept the “otherness” of Muslims, and so we “self indulge
with peace ideologies at the expense of other people’s pain.”
This is a harsh indictment, but in fact, the truth is that the anti-war
movement today cares little about justice for those who are different,
whom it considers “other,” and this gravely undermines the movement’s
impact. It cares least of all about justice for those whom Israel
considers enemies.
Ultimately, a little outrage is in order. The anti-war movement
needs a new focus, concentrated on achieving universal justice around
the world first, as a prerequisite for a true peace. Only this new
approach can accomplish the peace community’s aims.
When CounterPunch published Bill Christison’s article, “A Global
Justice Movement” on August 27, he received numerous comments
in a favorable vein indicating that the concept of “justice as
a prerequisite for peace” or “justice before peace” was a new and
revolutionary idea, coming as a kind of epiphany for many people. This
is an indication of how little justice enters into the thinking
of ordinary citizens and peace activists. It should not be such a
novel concept.
There were also a few comments from critics who claimed that the idea
of putting peace in a secondary position after justice was wrong
because Gandhi and Martin Luther King always worked for peace. But
this is a misunderstanding of Gandhian thinking and purpose. Gandhi
very clearly did not struggle for peace at the price of injustice,
for peace at any price. He already had that; India was peaceful under
British rule, but it was not just. The essence of Gandhi’s satyagraha,
and of King’s civil rights movement, was resistance to injustice
through nonviolent civil disobedience — precisely, in other words,
to disturb the peace by conducting direct nonviolent action against
unjust laws.
But the idea of justice first is a novel thought in most people’s
minds.
Think how many anti-war organizations list only peace or “peace
and justice,” in that order, in their names. United for Peace and
Justice comes to mind. But what if we reversed priorities and spoke
of “justice and peace” instead? Think of the much-touted Middle East
“peace process” as instead the Middle East “justice process,” and a new
light is cast on the issue, forcing us to r ecognize that, no matter
how much we may all talk about “peace and justice,” few of us truly
have much concern for the justice half of that equation. And justice
fades away altogether as a concern when the perpetrator of injustice
is Israel; few, even in the active peace and anti-war community, will
deal in any way with Israeli injustice. The anti-war movement is a
“peace-at-any-price community,” and for most activists, achieving
peace without achieving true justice for all peoples would suffice.
But the mere end of shooting is not peace. Justice does not simply
come along with peace as a kind of side benefit; justice must be
actively worked for, and it must be achieved before there can be real
peace. Peace is an empty concept without justice. The oppressed never
call for peace; their struggle is always for justice. Ending the war in
Iraq without bringing justice to the Iraqi people will not bring real
peace and, even more important, ending the U.S. role in Iraq will most
definitely not bring justice or true peace to the Palestinian people.
The concept of “justice” is not easy to define, but there do exist
standards of justice in international law and custom that limit the
concept and make an agreed definition readily discernible. The body
of international human rights laws drafted after World War II provides
an enlightened guide to ensuring the dignity and worth of individuals
and to guaranteeing the rights that “are considered vital to life in a
just society,” as the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem puts
it. These laws include the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
which defines the rights of individuals and the obligations of states
toward those individuals, as well as various covenants and conventions
on political and civil rights. In addition, humanitarian laws, such
as the Hague and Geneva conventions, governing the conduct of war,
particularly the conduct of combatants and occupying powers in war.
Similar standards of “peace” do not exist either in law or in
custom. “Peace” means something different for everyone, and one
person’s peace is often another person’s injustice. For Israel, peace
means security — even if, and perhaps particularly if, Palestinians
are disadvantaged and denied justice. For Palestinians, peace means
a redress of injustices done to them for almost 60 years.
Many of history’s most epic struggles for good have been struggles
not for peace but for justice. Why, for instance, have humanists
opposed bigotry and racism in modern times? Not primarily because
these fundamental violations of human decency impede peace, but
because they violate common standards of justice. White South Africa
lived peacefully during much of the apartheid period.
Southern slaveholders in the pre-Civil War United States lived in
peace while oppressing blacks. Israel has enjoyed peace for most of
its nearly 60 years, even while dispossessing the Palestinian people,
occupying Palestinian territory, killing and ethnically cleansing
Palestinians. But South African blacks and American slaves had no
justice despite living in peace. Palestinians have had no justice
since Israel’s creation.
If we think about justice as the first priority and allow the
principles of justice to be the guide in moving toward a just and
peaceful end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, we gain a clearer
picture of the situation and the only way out of it. We are led back
inevitably to 1948 and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, the
only time and event where justice rendered will ultimately resolve
this conflict. The Palestinians’ dispossession is a fundamental
injustice from which all subsequent injustices have sprung, one that
can only be rectified by some mutual agreement on the Palestinian
right of return. This is the only way to true peace. It is important
to understand that Israel exists as a Jewish state only because it was
founded in 1948 on a grave injustice to the Palestinian people. It
is also critical to understand that Jews will not be “thrown into
the sea” if Zionism and its injustices are ended — any more than
dismantling apartheid South Africa meant throwing whites into the
sea. (See the Appendix for a description of some of the specific
ways in which Israel perpetrates injustice against Palestinians.)
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe observed in his 2004 book A History
of Modern Palestine — a history of struggle in Palestine from the
people’s perspective, which stands out as a kind of Israeli version
of Howard Zinn’s classic A People’s History of the United States —
that “for any political peace initiative to succeed, the chapter of
Palestine’s dispossession needs to be closed.”
Far from closing this chapter, he noted, the Oslo peace process rather
asked the Palestinians to forsake remembrance of that dispossession,
“the only reason for their struggle since 1948.” An historian with a
rare sense of compassion and an even rarer sense of justice, Pappe
went on to envision a future of justice and peace for Palestinians
and Jews in Palestine: “Recognizing the very act of dispossession —
by accepting in principle the Palestinian refugees’ right of return
— could be the crucial act that opens the gate to the road out of
conflict. A direct dialogue between the dispossessed and the state
that expelled them can refresh the discourse of peace and may lead
people and leaderships alike to acknowledge the need to seek a united
political structure which, at different historical junctures in this
story, has seemed possible.”
This is the hope and the promise of justice accorded to both sides.
Palestine stands as a challenge to the anti-war movement in this
country. The Palestinian situation is a monstrous humanitarian
catastrophe, of literally breathtaking scope. Until the anti-war
movement begins to seek justice for the Palestinians and not merely
some vague, undefined, and highly politicized “peace,” it will never be
respected throughout the world. Only when it honestly begins to protest
injustice perpetrated against all peoples in the world regardless of
their ethnicity and religion — whether they are Palestinians, Iraqis,
Israelis, Americans, or anyone else — will the world look to Americans
as a decent people. Until that day comes, the world can expect global
injustice to deepen. The unfolding catastrophe created by U.S. policies
will only worsen, wars will be endless, peace will never be achieved.
Appendix — A Catalog of Injustices Put plainly, Israel — encouraged
and supported morally, politically, and financially by the United
States — is doing grave injustice to the Palestinian people, and has
been for 60 years. The first and most grievous injustice occurred in
1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes —
either because of fighting in their towns and villages or because
they were deliberately expelled by Zionist/Israeli forces — and
were neither allowed to return to their homes nor compensated. Ilan
Pappe describes in grim detail the Zionists’ carefully laid-out
and efficiently implemented plans for the Palestinians’ expulsion
and dispossession in his latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of
Palestine. Until these refugees, now with their descendants numbering
over four million, receive justice by being allowed to return and/or
being compensated under a mutually agreed formula, neither Palestinians
nor Israelis will ever enjoy true peace and stability.
UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948 — which stated
that Palestinian refugees “wishing to return to their homes and
live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at
the earliest practicable date” or should be compensated — was the
first of numerous international affirmations of what has come to be
referred to as the Palestinian right of return.
Justice will not be served, nor peace achieved, until this issue is
resolved equitably and democratically, in a manner satisfactory to
the human rights and the national aspirations of both Palestinians,
including those living in refu gee camps outside Palestine, and
Israeli Jews.
Since Israel’s creation in 1948, justice for Israelis has come at
the cost of a succession of injustices to the Palestinians. In
Palestine-Israel today, it is the Palestinians who live without
justice. Simply by virtue of the fact that Israel enjoys total
dominance over the Palestinians and over all the land of Palestine,
there cannot be full impartial justice for Palestinians. The absence
of justice in Israeli domination over the Palestinians is clear when
one examines individual aspects of the Palestinian situation. The
international community’s demand, for instance, that any Palestinian
governing authority accept three pre-conditions to negotiations —
recognition of Israel’s right to exist, renunciation of violence,
and adherence to past Palestinian-Israeli agreements — without
a reciprocal Israeli acceptance of the same conditions, cannot
constitute impartial justice. True peace cannot be achieved until
Israel is required to do equal justice to the Palestinians on these
issues by recognizing the Palestinian people’s right to exist as a
viable nation, by renouncing its own violence, and by agreeing to
adhere to all past agreements.
Justice is also violated as long as Israel retains control of land and
property inside the West Bank expropriated unilaterally and without
compensation from private and communal Palestinian ownership for the
purpose of building colonies and roads for the exclusive use of Jewish
citizens of Israel.
Uncompensated seizure of land from one people for any use,
and particularly for the exclusive use of a specific ethnic or
religious population, cannot possibly be characterized as impartial
justice. No peace will be possible until this grave injustice is
first rectified. The Israeli organization Peace Now issued a report
in November 2006, updated in March 2007, on the construction of
Israeli colonies, or settlements, on privately owned Palestinian
land. Entitled “G-U-I-L-T-Y!: Construction of Settlements upon Private
Land — Official Data,” the report concludes that almost 32 percent
of land appropriated by settlements is actually privately owned
by Palestinians. A total of 131 Israeli colonies sit entirely or
partially on private Palestinian land . An earlier Peace Now report,
entitled “Apartheid Roads,” was issued in October 2005, describing
the extensive network of limited-access roads throughout the West
Bank, also built on Palestinian land and accessible only to Israelis,
that connect Israeli colonies to each other.
Virtually all aspects of Israel’s continued presence in and control
over occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza ultimately
deprive Palestinians of justice, as defined in international human
rights law. International law requires, for instance, that Israel as
an occupying power respect the right of Palestinians to move freely in
the occupied territories. This right is recognized under the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, as well as in the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem
has published a report, entitled “Restrictions on Movement,” on these
and other rights denied to Palestinians. The report also contains links
to pertinent international laws. A more recent report, “Ground to a
Halt: Denial of Palestinians’ Freedom of Movement in the West Bank,”
was published in August 2007.
Another, fuller B’Tselem report, entitled “International
Law,” describes how international law applies to the occupied
territories. The reports provide links to a variety of international
human rights and humanitarian laws, including the four Geneva
Conventions of 1949, which provide for the protection of civilians
during war and under occupation (and which Israel signed). The Fourth
Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons
in Time of War in particular applies to Palestinians living in the
occupied territories and the conduct of the Israeli occupier. It
prohibits, among other practices, collective punishment, deportation
of the occupied population, settlement of the occupier’s population
in the occupied territory, and the confiscation of property belonging
to the occupied population — all of which Israel has carried out in
occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.
The separation wall that Israel has been constructing inside the
occupied West Bank since 2002 constitutes a grave human rights
violation against the Palestinians and a denial of justice. The wall
— composed for most of its length of a 50- to 100-yard-wide expanse
including patrol roads, trenches, and coils of barbed wire on both
sides of an electronic fence, as well as in urban areas a 26-foot-high
concrete wall — is built almost entirely on Palestinian land inside
the occupied territory. It appropriates approximately 10 percent of
the West Bank by placing this land on the Israeli side, where most
of it is inaccessible to Palestinians. Many Palestinian villages are
separated from their agricultural lands by the wall. As many as 50
Palestinian communities, home to 245,000 people, are surrounded by
the wall on three and in some cases four sides; entry or exit to some
of these communities is only permitted on foot, while the remainder
can be reached only by one Israeli-controlled road.
More than half — up to 90 percent, according to some estimates —
of the Palestinians’ fresh water wells are on the Israeli side. Scores
of Palestinian homes have been demolished to make way for the wall.
The wall surrounds occupied Arab East Jerusalem, placing some 200,000
Palestinian Jerusalemites on Israel’s side of the barrier and cutting
them off from their West Bank hinterland. The wall around Jerusalem
also cuts off most West Bank Palestinians from their religious,
political, and economic capital in Jerusalem. Altogether, the wall
directly affects half a million Palestinians, cutting people off from
schools, jobs, hospitals and destroying commerce. The Israeli human
rights group B’Tselem has issued a detailed report, with several
subsections, on the wall’s consequences, entitled “Separation Barrier”.
In July 2004, the United Nations’ International Court of Justice
found by a vote of 14 to 1 (the lone dissenting vote was cast by
the American judge) that construction of the wall is “contrary to
international law”. Israel has defied the ICJ injunctions. No peace
is possible as long as the injustice of the wall remains. Peace
cannot exist when one people believes it needs a wall of any sort
between itself and its neighbor. Building this wall deep inside the
neighbor’s territory is an even graver injustice, and the wall will
remain an insurmountable obstacle to peace unless it is dismantled
or at least entirely relocated inside Israel’s recognized borders.
A wall also surrounds the tiny 130-square-mile territory of Gaza,
and has done so since the beginning of the Oslo “peace process”
in the early 1990s.
Despite Israel’s so-called disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and the
removal of Israeli settlers and Israeli soldiers, Israel maintains
total control over Gaza, literally imprisoning its 1.3 million
inhabitants. Gaza’s population density makes it one of the most
heavily populated places on earth. Israel controls all four sides
of Gaza, not only its northern and eastern borders with Israel,
but also its southern border with Egypt and its coastline on the
Mediterranean. Gaza’s airspace is also controlled by Israel, and
there is no functioning airport or port. Neither people nor cargo
can enter or exit Gaza without Israeli permission, and in periods
deemed by Israel to be crisis periods, entry and exit points are closed
entirely, often for weeks on end, so that critical imports such as food
are stopped; products for export, particularly produce, are halted;
and Gaza’s inhabitants cannot leave for any purpose, including for
medical treatment and schooling. Israel controls, and occasionally
halts, the supply of gas and electricity to Gaza. B’Tselem has issued
a detailed report on the situation in Gaza, entitled “The Gaza Strip
after Disengagement” [www.btselem.org/English/Gaza_Strip/].
Palestinians do commit injustices against Israelis — primarily in
the form of suicide bombings against civilians and the firing of
rockets onto civilian areas in Israel, actions that must be condemned
— but as a non-sovereign governing authority with no security or
judicial control over Israel or Israelis and little way to exert
security control even over the Palestinian population, Palestinians
are incapable of committing the kind of systematic abuse of justice
that Israel perpetrates against them. Although Palestinian attacks
on civilians are to be condemned, fairness and balance dictate that
Israel’s government-perpetrated terrorism against civilians be equally
condemned, along with Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights.
As a matter of justice, the Palestinians have the right to resist
domination by Israel. Protocol 1 Additional to the Geneva Conventions
considers struggles against “colonial domination and alien occupation
and against racist regimes” to be legitimate as part of any people’s
right to self-determination. Ohio State international law expert
John Quigley has laid out a legal case for Palestinian resistance
in a 2005 book entitled The Case for Palestine: An International Law
Perspective. International law, Quigley makes clear, in the form of
the UN Charter and repeated UN Security Council and General Assembly
resolutions, affirms the right of peoples to enjoy self-determination
and to resist infringements on that right by all means necessary,
including force, but short of attacking civilians. In considering
other cases of foreign domination over colonial peoples, the Security
Council has even recognized a superior right by guerrilla organizations
to use force against colonial powers, and in resolutions during
the 1970s concerning Israeli reprisal attacks against Palestinian
guerrilla raids, the Council found the latter to be lawful and “dealt
with them as attacks by a colonized people entitled to the right of
self-determination,” according to Quigley.
The late Israeli sociologist and political commentator Baruch
Kimmerling, writing in Haaretz shortly after the al-Aqsa intifada began
in 2000, affirmed the Palestinians’ right to oppose the occupation
forcibly. The “continuing circumstances of occupation and repression,”
Kimmerling said, “give them [the Palestinians], by any measure, the
right to resist that occupation with any means at their disposal and
to rise up in violence against that occupation. This is a moral right
inherent to natural law and international law.”
-Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has
worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of
Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She
can be reached at _kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net_
(mailto:kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net) . (This article was
originally published at CounterPunch.org; reprinted with permission
from the author)