-Caveat Lector-
From
}}}>Begin
September 20, 2001
Occupation
and Resistance
By Carl Estabrook
[Note: This was written before the attacks on New York and the
Pentagon, but it deals with an issue that is bound up with the
attacks and with the war that Washington seems about to loose upon
the world. It occurs to me to send it around now because of a
report carried by Agence France Presse last Friday, quoting an
interview by Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer with the
newspaper Yediot Aharonot. He noted that "the international
community has been silent about the recent Israeli killing of
Palestinians in the West Bank" because of the attacks on the US. "It
is a fact that we have killed 14 Palestinians in Jenin, Kabatyeh and
Tammun, with the world remaining absolutely silent. It's a disaster
for Arafat," Ben Eliezer told the Yediot. It seems more important
now than it's been in a while for us to try to understand the real
situation in the US and it client states -- rejecting the propaganda
persistently propounded by pundit and professor.-CGE]
Each day the media bring us new accounts of killings in the Middle
East, described as the result of "fighting between Israelis and
Palestinians," and we wonder why these people can't simply be
reasonable, like us, and stop it. The news reports rarely point out
that on one side stands perhaps the second-strongest military in the
world, armed and supplied by US money, and on the other a subject
people with no army or heavy weapons, but who do have the weapon of
the powerless -- their willingness to die. And the media hardly ever
point out that the killing goes on in a region under military
occupation by Israel, a military occupation that is not only brutal,
as military occupations often are, but entirely illegal under
international law.
It could be argued that Israel's military occupation of the "West
Bank" (of the Jordan River) and the "Gaza Strip" (a parcel of land at
Israel's southwest corner) are even more clearly illegal than, say,
Germany's military occupation of France in World War II. In June of
1940, after a rapid invasion, the German army occupied three-fifths
of France and secured the collaboration of the French government
at Vichy that controlled the rest of the country. In June of 1967,
after a rapid invasion, the Israeli army occupied the West Bank and
Gaza, and, with the Oslo Accords of 1993, secured the collaboration
of the Palestinian Authority that now controls some parts of the
occupied territories. But UN Security Council Resolution 242 in
1967 demanded the complete withdrawal of Israel from the occupied
territories; instead, Israeli governments continued the occupation
and continued to establish settlements of its citizens throughout the
occupied region, settlements in violation of international law as
stated in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which was designed
precisely to make illegal what Germany had done in the Second World
War.
In France, to the dismay of the Vichy government, a resistance
movement (maquis) grew up against the invaders almost immediately.
In Palestine, the resistance has been much more sporadic, in part
because of the far tighter control the Israeli army was able to
exercise: in 1987 a resistance movement (intifada) broke out in the
Jebalia refugee camp in Gaza, spread to the rest of the occupied
Territories, and lasted until 1993 -- a popular uprising, it came as
a surprise to the PLO, then in exile in Tunisia; and then a year
ago, popular resistance against occupation broke out again, out of
the control of the Palestinian
Authority.
We honor the French Resistance, because it can hardly be doubted
that there is a right to resist illegal military occupation. The
German rule in France was famously brutal, especially after the
Germans occupied the rest of the country (as many American
columnists are now advising the Israelis to do). Thousands were
said to have been killed by the occupying forces in reprisals for
attacks on members of the occupying army, although of course many of
the French collaborated with the invaders as well.
Outside the area "served" by the US media, the real situation today
in the Middle East is known to be similar. At a large meeting of
NGOs ("non-governmental organizations" -- service groups actually
involved in alleviating suffering around the world) parallel to the
recent World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa,
3,000 delegates from 44 regions agreed to a resolution referring to
Israel as a "racist apartheid state" guilty of "war crimes, acts of
genocide and ethnic cleansing."
At the racism conference itself, the careful and diplomatic
Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, made an important comment in
his opening address. (He has to be careful and diplomatic on these
issues: his predecessor, also an eminently careful and diplomatic
man, was thrown out of his UN job by the Clinton Administration
because they deemed his support for Israel tepid at the time the
Israelis carried out a massacre at Qana.) On the suggestion that
anti-Semitism somehow justifies Israel's crimes in the Middle East,
Annan said, "We cannot expect Palestinians to accept [the killing of
Jews in World War II] as a reason why the wrongs done to them --
displacement, occupation, blockade, and now extra-judicial killings -
- should be ignored." (The "extra-judicial killings" are the
assassinations -- forbidden by international law since 1907 -- that
Israel carries out in the Occupied Territories, as the Germans
assassinated maquis.) It was the only line in the address that
prompted interruption by applause.
Some American progressives say that the US approach to Israel and
Palestine should be "even-handed," which of course it surely has not
been. Since the 1967 war, the US has regarded Israel as its cop on
the block, guarding "our" oil. A decade later the Carter
Administration increased aid to Israel to half of total US aid to
the world as part of the Camp David settlement (and used a good bit
of the rest to buy off Egypt, as we continue to do.) With the US
money, Israel was able to consolidate its occupation and launch an
attack against its northern neighbor. For the next 22 years, Israel
also occupied Southern Lebanon in violation of a Security Council
resolution and killed perhaps 45,000 people.
US support continues through the current uprising, as Palestinian
towns and neighborhoods are attacked by the latest American
helicopters, rushed to Israel by the Clinton administration when the
resistance began a year ago. And the US and Israel are quite
concerned that the rest of the world be prevented from even knowing
the extent of the repression: at the end of August the US blocked
proposals in the UN Security Council that would have provided
international monitors (as the Palestinians have requested) for the
region. Neither the helicopters not the Security Council proposals
were discussed in the US media.
To the suggestion that US policy should be "even-handed" in regard
to Israel and the Palestinians, we might ask, Should the US have been
even-handed between the German army and the French Resistance in
1941? CP
End<{{{
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