http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21588.htm
Gaza: The Logic of Colonial Power
As so often, the term 'terrorism' has proved a rhetorical smokescreen
under cover of which the strong crush the weak
By Nir Rosen
December 31, 2008 "The Guardian" -- I have spent most of the Bush
administration's tenure reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia
and other conflicts. I have been published by most major publications. I
have been interviewed by most major networks and I have even testified
before the senate foreign relations committee. The Bush administration began
its tenure with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel
committing one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of
occupying Palestinian land. Bush's final visit to the country he chose to
occupy ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes at
him, expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its dictators who
have imprudently attached themselves to a hated American regime.
Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population
of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and
online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action. Even some Arab
outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with the might of the
Israeli military machine. And none of this is a surprise. The Israelis just
concluded a round-the-world public relations campaign to gather support for
their assault, even gaining the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt.
The international community is directly guilty for this latest
massacre. Will it remain immune from the wrath of a desperate people? So
far, there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt,
Syria and Iraq. The people of the Arab world will not forget. The
Palestinians will not forget. "All that you have done to our people is
registered in our notebooks," as the poet Mahmoud Darwish said.
I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those
stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America
should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It
too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would
be required that only a true revolution in the American government could
bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to
contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against
civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal
should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified.
This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for
the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty
word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the
Other does, not what we do. The powerful - whether Israel, America, Russia
or China - will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but
the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow
slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan - with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed . these
will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and
terrorising them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another
way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and
intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power
determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal
prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is
illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used
normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the
oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines
legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as
the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make
the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that
serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of
resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The
Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they
will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day;
the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they
respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial
powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and
dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or
Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the
native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking
away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then
they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian man from
Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an intersection. "The
terrorist", as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called him, was shot and
killed. In two separate incidents last July, Palestinians from Jerusalem
also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The attackers were not part of an
organisation. Although those Palestinian men were also killed, senior
Israeli officials called for their homes to be demolished. In a separate
incident, Haaretz reported that a Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli
soldier in one eye when she threw acid n his face. "The terrorist was
arrested by security forces," the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an
occupying soldier, and she is the terrorist?
In September, Bush spoke at the United Nations. No cause could justify
the deliberate taking of human life, he said. Yet the US has killed
thousands of civilians in airstrikes on populated areas. When you drop bombs
on populated areas knowing there will be some "collateral" civilian damage,
but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate. When you impose
sanctions, as the US did on Saddam era Iraq, that kill hundreds of
thousands, and then say their deaths were worth it, as secretary of state
Albright did, then you are deliberately killing people for a political goal.
When you seek to "shock and awe", as president Bush did, when he bombed
Iraq, you are engaging in terrorism.
Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans
under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of
reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the
victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed
and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were
destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists, who went on to deny
their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives
and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around
the world. Every day, more of Palestine is stolen, more Palestinians are
killed. To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession
of entire people. It is not that, qua Palestinians, they have the right to
use any means necessary, it is because they are weak. The weak have much
less power than the strong, and can do much less damage. The Palestinians
would not have ever bombed cafes or used home-made missiles if they had
tanks and airplanes. It is only in the current context that their actions
are justified, and there are obvious limits.
It is impossible to make a universal ethical claim or establish a
Kantian principle justifying any act to resist colonialism or domination by
overwhelming power. And there are other questions I have trouble answering.
Can an Iraqi be justified in attacking the United States? After all, his
country was attacked without provocation, and destroyed, with millions of
refugees created, hundreds of thousands of dead. And this, after 12 years of
bombings and sanctions, which killed many and destroyed the lives of many
others.
I could argue that all Americans are benefiting from their country's
exploits without having to pay the price, and that, in today's world, the
imperial machine is not merely the military but a military-civilian network.
And I could also say that Americans elected the Bush administration twice
and elected representatives who did nothing to stop the war, and the
American people themselves did nothing. From the perspective of an American,
or an Israeli, or other powerful aggressors, if you are strong, everything
you do is justifiable, and nothing the weak do is legitimate. It's merely a
question of what side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of the
weak.
Israel and its allies in the west and in Arab regimes such as Egypt,
Jordan and Saudi Arabia have managed to corrupt the PLO leadership, to
suborn them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their
people, creating a first - a liberation movement that collaborated with the
occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and, as usual, these elections are
accompanied by war to bolster the candidates. You cannot be prime minister
of Israel without enough Arab blood on your hands. An Israeli general has
threatened to set Gaza back decades, just as they threatened to set Lebanon
back decades in 2006. As if strangling Gaza and denying its people fuel,
power or food had not set it back decades already.
The democratically elected Hamas government was targeted for
destruction from the day it won the elections in 2006. The world told the
Palestinians that they cannot have democracy, as if the goal was to
radicalise them further and as if that would not have a consequence. Israel
claims it is targeting Hamas's military forces. This is not true. It is
targeting Palestinian police forces and killing them, including some such as
the chief of police, Tawfiq Jaber, who was actually a former Fatah official
who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza. What will happen
to a society with no security forces? What do the Israelis expect to happen
when forces more radical than Hamas gain power?
A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli
settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made
a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic
Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with two options.
Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians
are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they
continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be
forced to leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have
been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who
flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and
seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further radicalise
them?
Do not be deceived: the persistence of the Palestine problem is the
main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond.
But now the Bush administration has added Iraq and Afghanistan as additional
grievances. America has lost its influence on the Arab masses, even if it
can still apply pressure on Arab regimes. But reformists and elites in the
Arab world want nothing to do with America.
A failed American administration departs, the promise of a Palestinian
state a lie, as more Palestinians are murdered. A new president comes to
power, but the people of the Middle East have too much bitter experience of
US administrations to have any hope for change. President-elect Obama, Vice
President-elect Biden and incoming secretary of state Hillary Clinton have
not demonstrated that their view of the Middle East is at all different from
previous administrations. As the world prepares to celebrate a new year, how
long before it is once again made to feel the pain of those whose oppression
it either ignores or supports?
a.. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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