Rene — GAZA: THE LOGIC OF COLONIAL POWER
Topic(s): Palestine / Israel | Comments Off on Rene — GAZA: THE LOGIC OF COLONIAL POWERGAZA: THE LOGIC OF COLONIAL POWER
by Nir Rosen
The Guardian
December 29, 2008 UK
As so often, the term ‘terrorism’ has proved a rhetorical smokescreen
under cover of which the strong crush the weak
I have spent most of the Bush administration’s tenure reporting
from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and other conflicts. I have
been published by most major publications. I have been interviewed
by most major networks and I have even testified before the senate
foreign relations committee. The Bush administration began its tenure
with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel committing
one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying
Palestinian land. Bush’s final visit to the country he chose to occupy
ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes at him,
expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its dictators
who have imprudently attached themselves to a hated American regime.
Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population
of Gaza.
The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and
online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action. Even some
Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with the might
of the Israeli military machine. And none of this is a surprise. The
Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public relations campaign
to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration
of Arab states like Egypt.
The international community is directly guilty for this latest
massacre. Will it remain immune from the wrath of a desperate
people? So far, there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon,
Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The people of the Arab world
will not forget. The Palestinians will not forget.
“All that you have done to our people is registered in our notebooks,”
as the poet Mahmoud Darwish said.
I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those
stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think
America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the
Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in
American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the
American government could bring about the needed changes. An American
journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether
terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My
answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether
attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for
the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi
Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty
word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the
Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America,
Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as
terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing
of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians,
the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of
thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the
title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising
them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another
way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror
and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power
determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal
prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist
is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and
used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of
the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually
undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international
institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that
the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely
to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their
occupation and colonialism.
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and ba sic method
of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent
eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the
expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is
being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated
day after day.
As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure
on Israel.
Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to
claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians
in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the
Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is
an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity
with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to
resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian
man from Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an
intersection. “The terrorist”, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz
called him, was shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July,
Palestinians from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The
attackers were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian
men were also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes
to be demolished. In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a
Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye when she threw
acid n his face. “The=2 0terrorist was arrested by security forces,”
the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying soldier,
and she is the terrorist?
In September, Bush spoke at the United Nations. No cause could
justify the deliberate taking of human life, he said. Yet the
US has killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes on populated
areas. When you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will
be some “collateral” civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it,
then it is deliberate. When you impose sanctions, as the US did on
Saddam era Iraq, that kill hundreds of thousands, and then say their
deaths were worth it, as secretary of state Albright did, then you
are deliberately killing people for a political goal. When you seek to
“shock and awe”, as president Bush did, when he bombed Iraq, you are
engaging in terrorism.
Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans
under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of
reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the
victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately
cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their
villages were destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists,
who went on to deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war
against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements
the Palestinians established around the world. Every day, more of
Palestine is st olen, more Palestinians are killed. To call oneself an
Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of entire people. It
is not that, qua Palestinians, they have the right to use any means
necessary, it is because they are weak.
The weak have much less power than the strong, and can do much less
damage. The Palestinians would not have ever bombed cafes or used
home-made missiles if they had tanks and airplanes. It is only in
the current context that their actions are justified, and there are
obvious limits.
It is impossible to make a universal ethical claim or establish
a Kantian principle justifying any act to resist colonialism or
domination by overwhelming power. And there are other questions I have
trouble answering. Can an Iraqi be justified in attacking the United
States? After all, his country was attacked without provocation, and
destroyed, with millions of refugees created, hundreds of thousands
of dead. And this, after 12 years of bombings and sanctions, which
killed many and destroyed the lives of many others.
I could argue that all Americans are benefiting from their country’s
exploits without having to pay the price, and that, in today’s world,
the imperial machine is not merely the military but a military-civilian
network. And I could also say that Americans elected the Bush
administration twice and elected representatives who did nothing to
stop the war, and the American people themselves did=2 0nothing. From
the perspective of an American, or an Israeli, or other powerful
aggressors, if you are strong, everything you do is justifiable,
and nothing the weak do is legitimate. It’s merely a question of what
side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of the weak.
Israel and its allies in the west and in Arab regimes such as Egypt,
Jordan and Saudi Arabia have managed to corrupt the PLO leadership,
to suborn them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty
for their people, creating a first – a liberation movement that
collaborated with the occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and,
as usual, these elections are accompanied by war to bolster the
candidates. You cannot be prime minister of Israel without enough
Arab blood on your hands. An Israeli general has threatened to
set Gaza back decades, just as they threatened to set Lebanon back
decades in 2006. As if strangling Gaza and denying its people fuel,
power or food had not set it back decades already.
The democratically elected Hamas government was targeted for
destruction from the day it won the elections in 2006. The world
told the Palestinians that they cannot have democracy, as if
the goal was to radicalise them further and as if that would not
have a consequence. Israel claims it is targeting Hamas’s military
forces. This is not true. It is targeting Palestinian police forces
and killing them, including some such20as the chief of police, Tawfiq
Jaber, who was actually a former Fatah official who stayed on in his
post after Hamas took control of Gaza. What will happen to a society
with no security forces?
What do the Israelis expect to happen when forces more radical than
Hamas gain power?
A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli
settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long
since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one
state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be
confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards
an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, a la
post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy
as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave.
Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been
exterminated.
But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who
flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise
and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further
radicalise them?
Do not be deceived: the persistence of the Palestine problem is the
main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and
beyond. But now the Bush administration has added Iraq and Afghanistan
as additional grievances. America has lost its influence on the Arab
masses, even if it can still apply pressure on Arab re gimes. But
reformists and elites in the Arab world want nothing to do with
America.
A failed American administration departs, the promise of a
Palestinian state a lie, as more Palestinians are murdered. A new
president comes to power, but the people of the Middle East have
too much bitter experience of US administrations to have any hope
for change. President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden and
incoming secretary of state Hillary Clinton have not demonstrated
that their view of the Middle East is at all different from previous
administrations. As the world prepares to celebrate a new year, how
long before it is once again made to feel the pain of those whose
oppression it either ignores or supports?
Nir Rosen is a journalist specialising in US foreign policy in the
Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. A fellow at the New York university
center on law and security, his work has appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone
magazine, Harper’s Magazine, the New Republic and Mother Jones. His
book on postwar Iraq, The Triumph of the Martyrs: A Reporter’s Journey
into Occupied Iraq , was published in 2006. His articles are available
at nirrosen.com