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The Ideology of Occupation
Israel Tries to Excuse the Inexcusable
(1)
by Ran HaCohen
In an excellent
recent article,
leading Palestinian intellectual Edward Said cites the "astounding result"
of a poll
conducted among US citizens by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination
Committee, according to which less than three or four percent of the
sample had any idea that there was an Israeli occupation. This seems to
confirm a general rule: as far as the Middle East is concerned, American
public consciousness lags decades behind Israel's. Obsolete
Zionist propaganda, based on manufactured "facts" that no one in
Israel would use anymore, is recycled by prominent American columnists (of
the subspecies
Thomas Friedman) as uncontroversial truth. "The main narrative model
that dominates American thinking still seems to be
Leon Uris' 1950 novel
Exodus," says Edward Said: a narrative that collapsed in Israel
itself about two decades ago.
In some senses, the
Oslo "peace process" was a huge success for Israeli colonialism. The
"ongoing negotiations" which allow the Palestinians to choose between
either willingly accepting Israel's terms or having them imposed on them
unilaterally enabled Israel to expand its settlements on Palestinian
lands with virtually no resistance. The Israeli "peace camp" was
effectively soothed by false promises of "peace with settlements,"
American hegemony in the world media silenced any international criticism,
and the "process" that was supposed to end Israeli colonialism broke down
violently, with about twice as many Israeli settlers as seven years
earlier.
However, not all the malicious
objectives of the "peace process" succeeded so well. The attempt to take
the Palestinian issue off the international agenda was not very successful
and got crushed completely when the Intifada broke out. The Israeli
attempt to convince the world that the occupation has ended and that the
Palestinians are now free and thus responsible for their own suffering
failed too. It failed thanks to perhaps the single wise step (not) taken
by
Arafat during these seven years, i.e. his refusal to declare his
besieged enclaves "an independent Palestinian state." Such a declaration
would have been disastrous to the Palestinians because their struggle
against the Occupation would have been supplanted by a standard
border-conflict between Israel and "Palestine" as two independent states
a safe way to bury the conflict altogether. Even the zealous attempts of
pseudo-dovish Israeli intellectuals, such as writer
Amos Oz, who in 1996 claimed the Palestinians were already free and
independent, failed to obscure the basic fact that the Palestinians are
living under a cruel Israeli occupation.
This may surprise 96 percent
of Americans, but it is a known and accepted fact in Israel so much so,
that, recently, a "moderate" settler David Moriah, chairman of the "Efrat
settlers' committee" published an interesting ten-point article (in
Hebrew only) explaining not why the Occupation is not an occupation
but why it is "one of the most justified cases of occupation in world
history." Since his eloquent arguments concisely comprise almost the
entire ideological arsenal of the non-fundamentalist Israeli hawks (and
mainstreamers, and, ludicrously enough, of many "doves" as well), and
since his arguments have been propagated worldwide, it is worthwhile to
consider them one by one.
"1. The Occupation was an
act of self-defence against an aggressor that rejected the international
resolutions to divide the land."
This argument and several of
the following ones too represent a universally popular strategy:
distracting the discussion from the present to the past. History contains
a myriad of details; you can always find some detail that will embarrass
your opponent. And if you can't find one, invent one who can check?
Moreover, there are always several competing historical narratives for any
set of events. Israelis (or Palestinians) first endorse the Israeli (or
Palestinian) historical narrative, and then surprise, surprise they
find out that all the Israeli (or Palestinian) claims are perfectly
anchored in history. It is a vicious circle.
We shall not fall into this
historical trap here. Historical arguments will be dealt with only en
passant; critical Israeli historians and sociologists have done a
great deal of work exposing the myths and lies of the Zionist historical
narrative, but we shall not use their results here. A short remark
concerning Israel's selective hearing will have to suffice. The celebrated
UN resolution on the establishment of a Jewish state (every Israeli town
has a street called "November 29th," commemorating the day in 1947 when
the resolution was adopted) had a second part, calling for the
establishment of a Palestinian (Arab) state too. Israel has been rejecting
this part ever since. Deriving legitimacy for Israel's own existence from
half a resolution is problematic enough; deriving legitimacy for the
Occupation of the Palestinians from the very resolution that granted them
a state, is utterly absurd.
And, by the way, if
"international resolutions" are the ultimate code of virtuous national
conduct, how about several other ones, like Security Council
Resolutions 242 and
338, calling on Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, or
the idiotic declaration that was canceled, and is
being revived now in Durban, equating Zionism with Racism?
All these counter-arguments
may be true, but again: the discussion should concentrate on the present.
History is no escape. No matter how the Occupation was born 34 years ago
as self-defence or as aggression there is no justification whatsoever to
deprive millions of Palestinians living now of their basic human
and political rights. Punishing people for alleged sins of their ancestors
contradicts each and every moral principle. "Everyone shall die," says
Jeremiah (31:30), "for his own iniquity." As with some UN resolutions,
Israel is now implementing only the first part of Jeremiah's verse.
"2. It is obvious that the
aggressor was part of a struggle aimed at destroying the Israeli political
entity, and massacre of individual Jews was also most likely to occur.
(Let us not forget that leaders of that nation were willing to participate
in the final solution' for the Jews on behalf of Nazi Germany.)"
Again, the heart of the
argument is historical, and we shall not follow it back to the past. But
what is the function of such an argument for the present reader? It is
clearly meant to supplant the present power relations by their very
opposite. Israel has one of the strongest armies in the world, on a level
with those of superpowers like France or Britain. It possesses not only
the most sophisticated American weapons for air, sea and land warfare, but
also intelligence backup from outer space as well as atomic, chemical and
biological arsenals. It has some 100,000 regular soldiers and three or
four times more in reserve. Israel's military force has been built so as
to defeat all the Arab armies together. The Palestinians, on the other
hand, have about 30,000 to 40,000 lightly-armed men, defined in the
agreements as "policemen" and equipped accordingly. Their weapons include
pistols, revolvers and hand grenades, not to mention sharp knives and very
big stones. They have no artillery, no helicopters, no jets, no navy, no
tanks, no armoured vehicles and no bulldozers. They have no heavy weapons
of any kind except for homemade mortar shells and explosives, and probably
a limited smuggled stock of antitank missiles. They have no satellites, no
sophisticated communication systems and no super-computers and, unlike
Israel, they do not receive 3 billion dollars per year of American
military aid.
When the Israeli Goliath is
crushing Palestinian David with such an overwhelming superiority, an
especially strong ideological twist is necessary in order to turn these
power relations upside down. The manipulation starts with a hypothetical
"massacre of Jews" that could have happened but never did (unlike several
actual massacres of Palestinians, from 1948 to very recently), and ends
up, expectedly, by evoking Nazi Germany.
"3. There was no
independent nation in the occupied territories, but a mixture of
inhabitants, and the only country that had any linkage to the area
(Jordan) renounced it publicly."
Again, the past tense is used.
Golda Meir made the notorious claim that "there is no Palestinian people."
It is quite ironic that Jews, whose own nationhood has been denied by many
non-Jews and Jews alike (but emphasised consistently by Zionists and
anti-Semites) doubt the nationhood of others. Indeed, Israel has been
doing its very best to divide the Palestinians into numerous subgroups,
following the ancient Roman wisdom of "divide and rule." There are
Palestinians "within" (inside Israel, further divided into "Druze,"
"Bedouins," "Christians," "Moslems," etc., divisions strengthened and
constantly manipulated by Israel), Palestinians "without" (refugees
outside historical Palestine) and Palestinians in the occupied
territories, themselves divided by Israel, in contradiction to its
obligation to regard the Territories as a single unit, into scores of
disconnected enclaves ("areas" A, B, C, etc.). In spite of this brutal
policy of division, there seems to be little doubt that there is a
Palestinian people, definitely to a fuller extent than there is a Jewish
one.
But all of this is beside the
point. Human beings have rights including political rights even if
they are not a nation. Since 1967, Israel has been vetoing any settlement
that might grant political rights to the Palestinians. Israel offers the
Palestinians neither independence nor annexation. One could only applaud
the recent suggestion of the Libyan Foreign Minister Shalgam at Durban,
that "Jews and Arabs must learn to live together in one democratic and
non-racist state"; but Israel rejects this solution too: for fear of
losing Jewish majority, it never offered to annex the Palestinians. It is
interested only in robbing their land and natural resources, while
depriving them of any rights, both individually and collectively.
Ran HaCohen was
born in the Netherlands in 1964 and has grown up in Israel. He has B.A. in
Computer Science, M.A. in Comparative Literature and he presently works on
his PhD thesis. He lives in Tel-Aviv, teaches in the Department of
Comparative Literature in Tel-Aviv University. He also works as literary
translator (from German, English and Dutch), and as a literary critic for
the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronoth. His work
has been published widely in Israel. His column appears monthly at Antiwar.com.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2001
Antiwar.com & Ran HaCohen
by the same author:
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