Thanks to teds "comment on Zionism Discussion" post for finally beginning to address some of it.
Well in the interest of once again pissing off some of the liberals on the list by daring to break with the dumbed-down 'politically correct' liberal consensus that passes for a left in the US (and no doubt freakin said liberals out to no end given their fear/obsessive paranoia about what the Democrats might say about them come next election) I thought i might post the following article by the Indian scholar Aijaz Ahmad containing the following gem:
". . .To dissent from this view of Israel is to lay yourself open, if you are not Jewish, to the charge of being anti-semitic. If you are Jewish but also anti-Zionist, like Noam Chomsky, you will be portrayed as a "self-hating Jew". Thanks to the Israeli milit ary capability which keeps the whole of the middle eastern and north African oil-producing world at bay, and thanks to the Zionist success in portraying the state of Israel as the state of the survivors of Nazi death camps, which then naturally evokes al l kinds of sympathy for it, Israel commands in the western world, and increasingly on the global scale, a matchless propaganda machinery.
Israel is quite possibly the most savage of the existing nation-states, and surely the one where "nation" is so very thoroughly identified with race and religion; even in Iran "nation" is not identified with "race". Yet it is very difficult to be believe d if one says - and documents - that Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for some half a century what the various ethnic militias in the former Yugoslavia have learned to do only within the last decade, after the breakdown of the socialist state th ere, and that in some respects the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians bear a marked resemblance to the Nazi atrocities against the Jewish people themselves."
enjoy . . .
******************************* Volume 17 - Issue 23, Nov. 11 - 24, 2000 India's National Magazine on indiaserver.com from the publishers of THE HINDU
ESSAY
Israel's killing fields
The structural reasons for the Palestinian uprising and the Israeli terror are connected not only with the consequences of the Oslo Accords of 1993 but also the very nature of the Israeli state and the support it
gets from the United States.
AIJAZ AHMAD
IT is very difficult to write about Israel now, in the ideological climate currently prevailing in India. For several decades, when anti-colonialism was a substantial ingredient in the secular nationalism
that informed even India's foreign policy, distan ce from Israel as a settler-colonial state and close relationship with the Palestinian national movement as representing the victims of that settler-colonialism was taken for granted in the polity. So was India's solidarity with the anti-imperialist curr ents in the Arab world in general - be it the war of national liberation in Algeria, the Nasserist
commitments to non-alignment, or some other current of that kind. This aspect of Indian foreign policy was noted and admired, I might add, by Arab diplomats and intellectuals. I remember visiting a number of the Arab countries and regularly meeting a broad cross-section of the intellectuals there, in the 1960s and 1970 s. I was very young then and it was always very striking to me that Pakistan's support for Palestine was usually seen as shallow and Islamicist, whereas the Indian solidarity with the Palestinian cause was regarded as a natural and secular, non-religious response from a country that had played so seminal a role in the making of the non-aligned movement.
I was therefore very surprised when I read the statement of Jaswant Singh, during the course of his recent visit to Israel, that India's foreign policy in the past decades was held hostage by the Muslim vote bank and that the government was now going to correct that error. India's anti-colonialist past was simply being erased, and what even Arab intellectuals, from their great distance, could see as an expression of India's secular solidarity with anti-Zionist forces in Palestine was now being presented , by a suave and insufferable Foreign Minister, as an error forced by the Muslim minority in the country upon those whom the Bharatiya Janata Party is fond of calling "pseudo-secularists". Hindutva was now going to undo all that and make a
strategic alli ance with its natural counterpart: Zionism.
What, then, about the current uprising in Palestine? It is said that the
uprising, which the Palestinians themselves are calling "Al-Aqsa Intifada", was triggered by the visit of Ariel Sharon, the Likud Party leader, to Al-Aqsa, the holiest Muslim shrine in Palestine (known to the
Jewish people as Temple Mount), with the announced purpose of demonstrating "Jewish sovereignty" over the Al-Aqsa compound. The visit was clearly authorised by the Ehud Barak government, which also provided
more than 1,000 arm ed policemen to protect Sharon.
It is important to recall, though, that the Palestinian agitation did not begin with that Thursday visit. Rather, the agitation came the next day, when Israeli security forces were massed in the compound at the time of Friday prayers, in a calculated pro vocation when a large crowd was present and someone or the other could be trusted to fan the flames.
That is when the Israelis started shooting. It is also worth remarking that during the first couple of days the Palestinian agitation was restricted to s logan-shouting and stone-throwing. Palestinian gunmen entered the fray only after the corpses had begun to mount, at the hands
of the Israeli sharpshooters who were clearly under orders to kill. The ratio of the Palestinians and Israelis killed is still about 20 to 1.
There was, in other words, a deeper design which seems to have been prepared many months ago. Saeb Arikaat, a senior Palestinian negotiator,
has said that he and Arafat went personally to Barak's house to persuade
him not to grant permission to Sharon to make the visit and to warn of the possible consequences; Faisal Husseini, another senior leader of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), says that he too appealed personally to Barak. Barak rejected all such requests, knowing well that
among Pale stinians Sharon was the most hated man. To understand the motivation, we need to understand something about Sharon and Barak, and then reflect also on the consequences of the Oslo Accords and on that monstrosity which is represented in the media as the " peace process".
ON March 23 this year, well before the latest uprising, Professor Tanya Reinhart of Tel Aviv University, wrote in the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharanot: "Barak is the most dangerous Prime Minister in the history of Israel. Already in 1982 he prop osed to extend the Lebanon war to a total war on Syria. Then he explained (in a memorandum to Sharon) that the best way to do that is without sharing the plans with the government. Today he is consulting only with the heads of the army and the security s ervices. Never had the army as much grip on Israeli politics as in the times of Barak."
During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when he wrote that notorious memorandum, Barak was merely an army general, albeit an important one, secretly suggesting that Israel create an excuse to invade Syria and destroy its army, to Ariel Sharon, th e Defence Minister at that time, who, as Noam Chomsky recently put it, "is the very symbol of Israeli state terror and aggression, with a rich record of atrocities going back to 1953." In the recent days, Barak, now the Labour Prime Minister of Israel, a nd Sharon, currently the head of the Likud Party and himself aspiring to become Prime Minister, have been negotiating the formation of a government of national unity.
To the matter of Barak we shall return in a moment, but who is Ariel Sharon? As the Israeli police and border guards train their guns at Palestinian demonstrators with orders to "shoot to kill," Uri Avnery, an
authoritative veteran of the peace movement in Israel, reminds us that
the practice itself is not new. It was used first by Ariel Sharon
in the first years of the occupation, when he instituted a reign of
terror in the Gaza Strip. As he told me himself afterwards, he gave
the order "not to take prisoners". Palestinians caug ht bearing
arms were killed on the spot. Later, the practice was employed by
the "Mista'arvim" ("Pretending to be Arabs") undercover units,
whose slogan was "ensure death". This was discovered when the
Mista'arvim killed one of their own men, mistaking h im for a
"terrorist". After wounding him, they dispatched him at very close
range with a shot in the head (A Lost War, October 9, 2000).
Avnery goes on to point out that - quite aside from tanks, helicopter gunships and other weapons of war of that kind - which the Israelis have
deployed against largely unarmed, stone-throwing demonstrators, the deadliest introduction in this phase of que lling the Palestinian uprising is the "sharpshooter" - a particular kind of soldier with a special kind of training whose task is to zero in on specific individuals, presumably 'leaders', in the demonstration and shoot them on the spot. This, he says, is in line with the policies Sharon framed some 30 years ago; the training for the latest deployments bagan, according to both Avnery and Reinhart, in June 2000.
Sharon, in fact, was the one who, as Minister for Agriculture, first planted the "settlements" of armed Israelis in the Palestinian "territories" occupied after the 1967 war, mostly members of the Far Right. As Minister for Defence, he pressed Prime Mini ster Menachem Begin to invade Lebanon, leading to the destruction of Beirut, the most cosmopolitan city in the Arab world, and the occupation of southern Lebanon. In all his diverse ministerial assignments, he has fixed the borders of annexation for whic h the present war is being fought. And he
was the one who ordered the massacres of the Sabra and Shattila camps in
1982. He fits, in other words, every conceivable definition of a war criminal. Today he is the head of Likud, the other major party in Isra eli politics which alternates with Labour as the ruling party, and he has been invited by Barak, "the most dangerous Prime Minister in the history of Israel," to form a government of national unity. How has this
situation come about? For the most recent background, we can take recourse to a lengthier quotation, also from Avnery:
Just a month ago, Barak was bankrupt; a politician at the end of his career. He had lost his majority in the Knesset, his partners had left him, the days of his government were numbered and it only managed to carry on because of the Knesset recess. The p olls predicted that he would lose the imminent elections by a large margin.
Ariel Sharon was in a similar situation. His career was nearing its end.
It was clear that his Likud Party would oust him and replace him with Netanyahu, who would win the elections.
And then, as if by a miracle, everything changed. Barak started to talk about the "holy places of the nation", because of which he could not agree to Palestinian sovereignty over the holy mosques. Sharon announced
that he was going to visit this Muslim c ompound. Barak took the visit under his wing and sent 1,200 police officers to accompany Sharon. The visit caused the expected explosion. The next day seven Palestinians were killed by Israeli policemen near the Al-Aqsa mosque.
The timing of the Barak-Sharon provocation was thus determined by their own political compulsions. On the one hand, Barak was expected to face and lose by a very wide margin a no-confidence motion in a Knesset session that was due in the last week of Oct ober. On the other hand, the Attorney-General had on September 27 dropped charges of corruption and bribery against Netanyahu, the former Likud Prime Minister and by far the most popular politician in Israel at the time, who was now free to reclaim the L ikud leadership from Sharon. The latter appeared in the
Al-Aqsa compound the next day and the killing began the day after that.
Once the methodical killing of Palestinians began, Barak's popularity ratings rose from 20 to 50 per cent and the very coalition partners who had deserted him began reassuring him that they would not press the no-confidence motion for at least a month. H aving come in the limelight
again, meanwhile, Sharon declared that he would join a government of national unity only if Barak forgoes the so-called "peace process" altogether. In her latest commentary, Professor Reinhart says that "in the Sharm El-Sheikh summit..., Barak got from the U.S. his green light to slaughter... There is talk about the Palestinian Kosovo, with 2,000 to 3,000 Palestinians dead. As usual, the blame for this slaughter is put in advance on Arafat, who, the story goes, wants his peop le to be slaughtered, to gain international sympathy."
The timing was thus surely determined by the political compulsions of Barak and Sharon. However, the structural reasons for both the uprising and the terror run much deeper and are connected, in the immediate past,
with the consequences of the Oslo Accor ds of 1993 and, in the larger perspective, with the very nature of the Israeli state and the unconditional material and moral support it gets from the United States.
Both these aspects should bear some commentary.
(Cont'd. in Part II)