Israel doesn’t do retaliation, just more of the same
by aletho
By Ibrahim Hewitt | MEMO | December 25, 2013
Ibrahim
HewittOnce again we hear that Israel has bombed the Palestinians in the
Gaza Strip "in retaliation" for something that they've done against
Israelis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his country will
"respond". Many people would agree that a person in his position has a
duty to protect his citizens. Certainly, those in the White House and
Downing Street do, which is why Israel gets away with murder, quite
literally. It's all down to legitimate self-defence; or so we are led to
believe.
What,
though, is the reality? Why is that right of self-defence never
extended to the people of Palestine? After all, it is their land which
is under occupation; it is their land which is being stolen and
colonised; it is their land from which they are being excluded in a
decades-long act of ethnic cleansing that its proponents hope will never
end.
If
retaliation and responses are the effects, then the occupation and
colonisation of Palestine have to be the causes. There is no other way
to look at the asymmetric conflict in the Holy Land. Despite what Israel
and its apologists would have us believe, this is not a clash of
equals, nor is it a case of a defenceless state struggling for its very
existence in the face of overwhelming odds. It is, in fact, a
nuclear-armed state, backed by the word's superpowers and armed to the
teeth with conventional weapons, most of them self-produced (and sold to
the world for a staggering $7 billion a year boost to Israel's
economy), occupying, colonising and threatening a largely civilian
population armed, at best, with AK47s and other small arms.
Israel
is an occupying power; its occupation of somebody else's land is the
cause, and the resistance to the occupation by the Palestinians is the
very legitimate effect; Israel doesn't do retaliation, it is merely
continuing to do what it has done for sixty-five years and counting,
killing Palestinians and taking their land. That is the ugly reality of
the situation. It is all very well for Netanyahu to say that his country
will "respond" to acts of resistance by the Palestinians, but it is
much more valid and legitimate for Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail
Haniyeh to say that action from Gaza is his people's response to
Israel's brutal military occupation. That is a more accurate narrative
for us to follow and accept.
Should
anyone still doubt this, it is worth looking to history for further
confirmation. It is reasonable, I think, to start not with Theodor
Herzl's The Jewish State, published in 1896, as he did not advocate a
state in Palestine, but with the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917.
This letter sent from the then British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James
Balfour, to Zionist leader Lord Rothschild was a "declaration of
sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to and
approved by the Cabinet". The issue was never discussed and approved by
parliament and it has no legal status, then or now. Balfour told
Rothschild that the British government "view with favour the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people… it
being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice
the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in
Palestine…" It was written a month before the British army entered
Jerusalem during the First World War and does not mention a state, just a
"national home". Such ambiguity was quite possibly deliberate. In any
case, it is interesting that the Palestinians are described by what they
are not ("non-Jewish") rather than what they are; a typically-demeaning
imperialist tactic to describe the Other as not being of Us.
In
1919, the US-established King-Crane Commission determined that "a
national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making
Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish
State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." That
has to be one of the most accurate of political prophecies of all time.
A
year later, on 1 July 1920, the first British High Commissioner for
Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, a Jew openly sympathetic to the Zionist
cause, read a message from King George "to the people of Palestine". In
it, the king assured the Palestinians that despite the existence of the
Balfour Declaration and "measures" to be taken to put it into practice,
such measures "will not in any way affect the civil or religious rights
or diminish the prosperity of the general population of Palestine".
Samuel
went on to say, in 1921, that the British government would never
consent to a policy which takes Palestinian-owned land and gives it to
"strangers". HM Government, he insisted, "would never impose upon [the
people of Palestine] a policy which that people had reason to think was
contrary to their religious, their political and their economic
interests."
The
Zionists had other ideas and the result is that there is now a state in
Palestine whose founders declared it to be a "Jewish State" in 1948 and
which insists that the Palestinians, upon whose land the state was
built, recognise it as such as a precursor to any meaningful peace
agreement. What will happen to the 20 per cent of Israeli citizens who
are Palestinians in such a "Jewish State" has never been explained; some
on the Israeli right want to expel them to Jordan, completing the
ethnic cleansing started in 1948. Whatever happens, they certainly won't
be treated with justice as Israeli apartheid sinks its roots ever
deeper in occupied Palestine.
Cause
and effect; action and reaction; decide for yourself: whose land was
taken from them and given to another people? Whose land has been
colonised? Whose land is being stolen from them on a daily basis? Who
are the aggressors and who are more justified in asserting their right
of self-defence; Israelis or Palestinians?
By
any reasonable legal and moral yardstick, it is the Palestinians who
are responding to Israeli aggression; Israel cannot claim with any
justification whatsoever that when it bombs an overcrowded refugee camp,
as it did this week, and kills Palestinians, it is merely "retaliating"
for something done by Palestinians resisting the occupation. Israel
doesn't do retaliation, it never has. It just does more of the same and
what it has been doing for more than 65 years: taking Palestinian land
and lives through violent and illegal means. The sooner that journalists
and politicians acknowledge this and start to deal with the conflict in
a fair and balanced way the sooner that a just and lasting peace may be
possible.
Until
then, we will no doubt continue to see Israel's aggressive and
expansionist colonialism dressed-up as the acts of a democratic state
desperate for peace with its unreasonable neighbours. Nothing could be
further from the truth.
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