Israel's War against the Palestinians Is the Real Outrage
by Robin Miller
When it comes to the
Middle East, Americans have it all wrong.
The root cause of the
Mideast conflict is not Palestinian "terrorism." It is Israel's
occupation of the West Bank--including East Jerusalem--and the Gaza
Strip.
The Palestinians have
lived under Israeli military occupation for 34 years. What part of
that sentence do Americans not understand?
Amnesty International
recently described the "human rights violations and grave breaches
of the Geneva Conventions which, over the past 18 months, have been
committed daily, hourly, even every minute, by the Israeli
authorities against Palestinians."[1]
Absorb that: "Every
minute" the Palestinians are subjected to "human rights violations
and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions."
Now think about how long
34 years is, and contemplate what it has been like for the
Palestinians to suffer for over three decades.
Consider how many
Palestinians have lived
their entire lives under the boot of
Israeli soldiers.
And yet many Americans
condemn those struggling for their freedom while applauding the
oppressor.
The Palestinians have
the right to resist their occupation. And Israel, as the occupier,
can have no right whatsoever to protest the means employed by the
Palestinians.
It's preposterous to
suggest otherwise. Did the Nazis have the right to condemn the
tactics of the French Resistance?
If Kuwait had been able
to defend itself against Iraq's attack, would the world have
listened to Iraqi denunciations of Kuwaiti "terrorism"?
No, the world simply
told both countries to get out of the occupied lands.
These matters are so
perfectly clear that it shouldn't be necessary to state them.
But, in America, it
seems, it is.
The principle extends
further. Those who have aided and abetted Israel's occupation--and
that means, first and foremost, the U.S. government--similarly have
forfeited the right to pass moral judgment on the Palestinian
resistance.
Make no mistake about
the singular importance of Washington's role in shielding Israel
from the consequences of its 53-year-long assault on the Palestinian
people that began with the ethnic cleansing in 1948 of Palestinians
from what is now Israel.
And ethnic cleansing it
was.
When the United Nations
created Israel by partitioning Palestine, Jews comprised only
one-third of the population of Palestine, which held some 608,000
Jews and 1,237,000 Arabs. Even within the area designated for Israel
under the U.N. partition plan, the population consisted of some
500,000 Jews and 330,000 Arabs.[2]
The new Israelis solved
that problem by directly expelling many of the Palestinians and
embarking on a deliberate terror campaign to induce the remainder to
leave. The Israeli government attempted to make this dispossession
permanent when it declared, on June 16, 1948--just a month after
Israel had declared independence, and before half of the refugees
had even left--that it would not permit the Palestinians to return
to their homeland.[3]
Today, Israel refuses to
recognize the Palestinians' right to return to their home--a right
guaranteed by international law--because their return would "change
the demographics" of the racially-defined Jewish state.[4]
In other words, to the
Israelis, ethnic cleansing is a good thing, so long as the people
cleansed are the Palestinians, those interlopers in "Eretz Israel."
Despite the moral
clarity that emerges from any fair reading of this history, many
Americans see the Palestinians--not the perpetrators of the
53-year-long crime against them--as the aggressors.
This is an unfathomable
disconnect from reality and an abandonment of any pretense of
principle.
Perhaps the most
revealing aspect of the past week has been Israel's reaction to the
Arab League summit in Beirut, at which the entire Arab world,
including the Palestinian Authority, offered Israel a complete
peace. Israel's massive invasion of the West Bank followed
the very next day.
Israel could not have
more clearly rejected peace.
And yet, in our
government's view, the war is all Arafat's fault. Even though he's
imprisoned in two rooms within a building surrounded by barbed wire,
reading by candlelight and communicating via a dying cell phone, the
horrors would all be over if he would just "do 100 percent."
Decent Americans can
only stare in stunned silence at the vapidity of such thoughts.
Notes:
[1]
Amnesty International, "Statement to the UN Commission on Human Rights, Israel and
Occupied Territories," April 2, 2002. Available
here.
[2] See pp. 675-677 of "Binationalism
not Partition," in Walid Khalidi (ed.),
From Haven to Conquest, Beirut: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971, pp.
645-702. "Binationalism not Partition" is a report submitted by a United Nations
subcommittee on Nov. 11, 1947, as part of the U.N.'s decision-making process on Palestine. The
report estimated the population of the territory to be assigned to Israel as
having 498,000 Jews, 407,000 Arabs other than Bedouin, and 105,000 of the
nomadic Bedouin. According to Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and
Realities, NY: Pantheon
Books, 1987, p. 83, n. 2, final
changes to the boundaries called for in the
partition plan reduced the Arab population of the Jewish
state by some 180,000. This leaves a total
of 332,000.
[3] For a discussion of
this vital issue, see my "The Expulsion of the Palestinians,
1947-1948," October, 2001. Available
here.
[4] On the Palestinians'
right of return, see:
Amnesty International,
"The Right to Return: The Case of the Palestinians," March 30, 2001.
Available
here.
Human Rights Watch,
"Human Rights Watch Policy on the Right to Return," undated.
Available here.
by the same author:
