Israel's killing fields -- Part II
THE basic flaw of the Oslo Accords was simply that, as Robert Fisk, the award-winning British correspondent, has put it (The Independent, October 13): "The Palestinians were being forced by Americans and Israelis to sign a peace that would give th em neither a state nor an end to Jewish settlements on Arab land, nor a capital in Arab east Jerusalem... Many outstanding issues have been left to the final negotiations: water, the fate of the 3.6 million Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem a nd the Israeli settlements, and the extent of Palestinian sovereignty. After the agreed Israeli withdrawals have been completed, 59 per cent of the West Bank will still remain under Israeli control. Will the resulting Palestinian state be a "mini-state" with limited sovereignty?"
In other words, Arafat had written away all the gains of the 1987-1992 intifada for not much more than municipal authority over little patches of Palestinian land, while all else was left to a long-drawn process of negotiations in which the final settlement talks were postponed until six years later. Israel used this extended time to build so many Jewish settlements and security highways, dividing the West Bank into many pieces which are isolated from one another, that the Palestinian entity whic h finally results from the peace process would not be much more than a scattering of apartheid-style Bantustans.
Seven years after the Oslo Accords, Israel has security and administrative control of most of the West Bank and 20 per cent of the small principality of Gaza. As Amira Hass wrote in the prestigious Israeli daily Ha'aretz (October 18), Israel has b een able during this period to double the number of settlers in 10 years, to enlarge the settlements, to continue its discriminatory policy of cutting back water
quotas for three million Palestinians, to prevent Palestinian development in most of the are a of the West Bank, and to seal an entire
nation into restricted areas, imprisoned in a network of bypass roads meant only for Jews. During these days of strict internal restriction of
movement in the West Bank, one can see how carefully each road was pl anned: so that 200,000 Jews have freedom of movement, about three million Palestinians are locked into their Bantustans until they submit to Israeli demands. The bloodbath that has been going on for weeks is the natural outcome of seven years of lying an d deception, just as the first Intifada was the natural outcome of direct Israeli occupation.
In speaking of "200,000 Jews" Hass is obviously referring to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank alone; another 200,000 such settlers were introduced over the years into Jerusalem itself. We might add that the whole of the Gaza Strip is ringed by an electri fied fence and the airport, the strip's main contact with the outside world, is controlled by the Israelis. A Palestinian uprising there is basically a prison riot.
Putting an end to the so-called "peace process" at this point is important for Israel because it has gained from the Oslo Accords everything it had desired. And the next stage, aimed to bring about a final solution, would require it to make some basic ch anges in its historic positions, for which there is no consent in the broad Israeli population which, barring the small number of anti-Zionists, is very much in tune with the Baraks and the Sharons.
THIS brings us, then, to the very nature of Israeli society and state. The first thing to be said here is that Israel is the only nation-state in the world which derives the legitimacy of its existence, its claim to
territory and nationhood, the sanctity of its national language, its very identity as a "Jewish state", its claimed right to evict the Muslim
and Christian populations of historic Palestine and replace them with a Jewish population imported from the four corners of the globe - in short
its v ery raison d'etre - to a religious text, in this case the Old Testament.
Palestinians have no right to return to homes from which they have been evicted within the last half century, either because they don't exist (as Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister, once said) or because they are said to have left by their own accord for greener pastures (which is the
official position of the entire Zionist establishment and its supporters, inside Israel and the world over). By contrast, every Jewish
person living anywhere in the world has a permanent "right of return" because these are , after all, "the Biblical lands"; Palestine must therefore be re-named "Israel", and what the rest of the world knew simply as "the West Bank" must be re-named "Judea and Samaria" because those are the names used for these areas in the Old Testament. When Pakistanis call their country an Islamic Republic, Indians consider them
- quite rightly - obscurantist and anti-secular. When the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) claims that India must be turned into a "Hindu Rashtra" and mobilises its goons to a ttack the minorities as well as their churches and mosques, Indians call them - quite rightly - fascist.
Israel, by contrast, is free to be, in letter and spirit, a "Jewish state," with all the racial and religious meanings that the term implies, without coming in for any kind of criticism; it must always be considered modern, secular, democratic, beleagured by anti-semitism, "Islamic fundamentalism" and so on.
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.
But there is more.
Nelson Mandela, the man who heroically led the struggle of the South African peoples against what is commonly considered the most savage racist regime in the world, once said that the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is "worse than apartheid." Comin g from Mandela, this is as
severe an indictment as one can imagine. Unfortunately, the assessment is accurate.
Unlike Algeria or South Africa where the indigenous peoples managed to fight back against eviction and extermination, regaining sovereignty after heroic wars of liberation, Israel is the only successful settler colony of the 20th century, evicting the ma jority of the indigenous population, subjugating the remaining segment, and transplanting on the Palestinian land populations which originated elsewhere. The great majority of the Jewish population of Israel is descended from families that were not resid ent there 50 years ago.
By contrast, the majority of Palestinians were evicted from their homes in two waves, mainly at the time of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and then, on a relatively smaller scale, in the aftermath
of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Estima tes of the Palestinian diaspora,
scattered around the world, vary greatly, from six million to eight million. Over five million of them are concentrated in Jordan, Syria and
Lebanon, the states bordering on the territories of the historic Palestine, or i n the territories Israel captured in 1967 (the West Bank
and Gaza). A million or so live in Israel proper as internal refugees; Israel is by definition a "Jewish state," in which the non-Jew can only be a second-class citizen. In all, Palestinians are ac tually not very numerous. Yet, according to the United Nations, one in four of the world's refugees is a Palestinian.
Palestinian losses accruing from those evictions are estimated at $180 billion. U.N. Resolution 194 of 1948 affirms the right of all Palestinians either to return to their lost homes or elect to receive compensation. The same right has been re-affirmed i n Resolutions 242 and 338, and the U.N. General Assembly has re-affirmed this resolution over a hundred times. Israel has steadfastly rejected all these resolutions, however, and no Palestinian has ever been compensated for loss of ancestral property. In stead, some 90 per cent of the Israeli territory is reserved for Jewish settlement and some 70 per cent of the territories occupied in 1967 are - in addition to pre-1967 Israeli borders - already taken for establishing Israeli "settlements" or building r oads, military checkposts and so on. The so-called Palestinian Authority, to which Israel has assigned mainly municipal duties in civil affairs and whose police and paramilitary forces have been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to ensure Israeli security in the face of Palestinian anger, actually controls something like 12 per cent of the area of West Bank.
This is the arrangement that is sought to be stabilised by the new plan that Ehud Barak unveiled in late October, which he proposes as the basis
for a final settlement. As Noam Chomsky puts it, "This plan, extending U.S.-Israeli rejectionist proposals of earlier years, called for cantonization of the territories that Israel had conquered in 1967, with
mechanisms to ensure that usable land and resources (primarily water) remain largely in Israeli hands while the population is administered by a corrupt an d brutal Palestinian Authority, playing the role traditionally assigned to indigenous collaborators under the several varieties of imperial rule: the Black leadership of South Africa's Bantustans, to mention only the most obvious analogue."
The U.S. underwrites these atrocities militarily, financially, diplomatically. Thus, on October 3, after a week of bitter fighting and killing, the defence correspondent of Ha'aretz reported "the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Isr aeli Air Force in a decade",
an agreement with the U.S. to provide Israel with 35 Blackhawk military helicopters and spare parts at a cost of $525 million, along with jet fuel, following the purchase shortly earlier of patrol aircraft and Apache attack h elicopters. These are "the newest and most advanced multi-mission attack helicopters in the U.S. inventory," the Jerusalem Post adds. When asked whether these were "tools for crowd control," a Pentagon spokesman said that the U.S. weapons sales "d o not carry a stipulation that the weapons can't be used against civilians."
Meanwhile, on October 25, when Israel had settled down to its killing fields, Aluff Benn, the diplomatic correspondent of Ha'aretz, reported that Israel had asked the U.S. for an $800 million in emergency military
aid, "on top of the usual militar y aid package, which will total $1.98 billion next year." This is only the tip of the iceberg, considering that Israel has been the top U.S. aid recipient for several decades.
The same applies to the arena of diplomatic and moral support, where too
the U.S. defies all pressure from diverse quarters. Gush Shalom (the Israeli Peace Bloc) declared on October 9: "What is happening in Nazareth today is a pogrom, bearing all the hal lmarks which were well known to Jews in Czarist Russia." Already on October 3, Amnesty International had condemned the indiscriminate killings of civilians. "The dead civilians, among them young children, include those uninvolved
in the conflict and seek ing safety," it said, adding "the loss of civilian life is devastating and this is compounded by the fact that many appear to have been killed or injured as a result of the use of excessive or indiscriminate force... We have been saying for years that Is rael is killing civilians unlawfully by firing at them during demonstrations and riots." Even Jacques Chirac, the French President, accused Sharon of "irresponsible provocation." But not the U.S., where Madeleine Albright declared that Palestinians were the ones "laying siege to Israel."
On October 7, the U.N. Security Council voted 14 to 0 for a resolution condemning Israel's "excessive use of force against Palestinians" and deploring the "provocation" of Sharon's September 28 visit to Temple Mount. The U.S. was the only Security Counci l member to abstain from the vote. The outcome was generally interpreted as assigning most of the
responsibility for the violence to Israel. The conservative The Times (of London) called it on the editorial page a "stinging rebuff" (September 10, 2000). On October 19, when the U.N. Human Rights Commission passed a resolution condemning Israel for "widespread, systematic and gross violation of human rights" while describing some of
the Israeli atrocities as "war crimes", the U.S. and its principal allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) voted against the resolution.
The saddest part of this mess is that Yasser Arafat, once the symbol of Palestinian resistance, has settled down to the role of a quisling, begging the U.S. for largesse and handing over his own security apparatus to the CIA; Alu Ben reported in Ha'ar etzon October 18, regarding Arafat's promise at the Sharm El-Sheikh summit to do what he could for Israeli security: its implementation will be overseen by CIA chief George Tenet and the CIA representative in Tel Aviv. This agreement will, for the fi rst time, involve CIA observers in the field in addition to CIA participation in Israeli-Palestinian meetings."
Part of the Al-Aqsa Intifada is perhaps against Arafat himself and his bunch of corrupt cronies - "the Oslo class" as the rebellious Palestinian youth calls them.