[LAAMN] Palestinian Resistance -- The Political, Social and Human Right of Self-Defense

[Romi Elnagar]

Palestinian Resistance -- The Political, Social and Human Right of Self-Defense
        * Submissions
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        * Purpose by Lynda Brayer 
This method of report­ing is part of con­tin­ued efforts of de-​legitimization 
of the Palestinian struggle for free­dom from the yoke of Zion­ist gen­o­cidal 
oppres­sion and viol­ence. Fur­ther­more, the con­dem­na­tions have not been 
accom­pan­ied by ref­er­ence to the his­tor­ical record: that the Zion­ist war, 
both cold and hot, against the Palestini­ans has not stopped for even one day 
since 1948, and that it went into relent­less high gear since 1967 and 
con­tin­ues unabated. This con­tinu­ous aggres­sion — admin­is­trat­ive and 
mil­it­ary — is never brought into the West­ern vis­ion or under­stand­ing, 
although a quick per­usal of the web­sites of the Palestine Cen­ter for Human 
Rights loc­ated in Gaza City, Mah­som Watch and Betselem provide chilling and 
detailed inform­a­tion of this con­tinu­ing quo­tidian warfare.
For any­one who has not suc­cumbed to Zion­ist pro­pa­ganda, it is a known fact 
that when rock­ets are fired from Gaza it is always in response to an Israeli 
attack, espe­cially when this attack is a blatant and poin­ted act of viol­ence 
given high vis­ib­il­ity by the Israelis. Although Israel had begun pound­ing 
Gaza on 13 Novem­ber 2012, which appar­ently led to a truce agree­ment being 
for­mu­lated, the assas­sin­a­tion of Ahmed Jabari on 14 Novem­ber 2012, the 
head of the Palestinian res­ist­ance forces, was executed in order to jus­tify 
full-​scale Israeli war­fare. High vis­ib­il­ity in this case was the cre­ation 
of a video of the event uploaded on the web­sites of the Israeli news out­lets 
so that the view­ers could enjoy a repeat per­form­ance! The reason for this 
latest attack is given on the Israel Defense Forces [sic] web blog:
On Novem­ber 14, the IDF embarked on Oper­a­tion Pil­lar of Defense[sic], meant 
to defend Israel’s civil­ians from the incess­ant rocket fire they’ve suffered 
dur­ing the past 12 years, and cripple the ter­ror organ­iz­a­tions in the Gaza 
Strip.
Their Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the name of the mil­it­ary oper­a­tion is 
inac­cur­ate, and I sus­pect that this is delib­er­ate. The name in Hebrew is 
‘Amud Ashan — Pil­lar of Smoke — a meta­phor cre­ated to eli­cit delib­er­ate 
com­par­ison in the Israeli mind with the pil­lar of fire and the pil­lar of 
clouds from the bib­lical story of the Exodus accord­ing to which God led the 
Chil­dren of Israel out of their slavery in Egypt on their jour­ney to free­dom 
in the Prom­ised Land! Of neces­sity, this name and this image brings about an 
inver­sion of the roles of the Israelis and the Palestini­ans: the Israeli 
aggressor once again becomes the per­se­cuted vic­tim, as per the Exodus story, 
while the Palestini­ans, immob­il­ized and strangled in the ghetto-​prison of 
Gaza, enclosed within elec­tri­fied walls and fences, are trans­mog­ri­fied 
into the pharaonic ter­ror­ists relent­lessly and
 heart­lessly per­se­cut­ing the inno­cent Israeli vic­tims. This inver­sion 
involves more than labels: besides invert­ing the moral order and the facts of 
real­ity, it serves, once again, to rein­force the image of the Palestinian as 
enemy, as demon, as sub-​human, an entity not entitled to any respect or 
con­sid­er­a­tion! It is a tried and tested for­mula for dis­tract­ing 
atten­tion and blame from the real per­pet­rat­ors of death and destruc­tion on 
to the vic­tims of those acts of aggressions.
Polit­ical assas­sin­a­tion is the spe­cialty du jour of Israel, a praxis 
adop­ted whole­heartedly by Pres­id­ent Obama and his own per­sonal drone “kill 
list”. Using murder to delib­er­ately under­mine the polit­ical ech­elon in the 
hope of weak­en­ing it with respect to the pos­sib­il­ity of polit­ical 
recu­per­a­tion after a war is an act which viol­ates the third prin­ciple of 
legit­im­acy of the laws of war — the prin­ciple of chiv­alry — a prin­ciple 
recog­niz­ing the human­ity of the enemy. The enemy must be treated with 
respect in order for nor­mal social life to be com­menced or resumed at the end 
of hostilities.
Clause­witz’ aph­or­ism — that war is a con­tinu­ation of polit­ics — is not 
descript­ive but pre­script­ive. Nego­ti­ations lead­ing to peace must be the 
pur­pose of a legit­im­ate war of defense. It is in this light that one should 
under­stand the inform­a­tion released by Ger­s­hon Baskin, an Israeli 
polit­ical act­iv­ist, that the Palestinian lead­er­ship in Gaza, includ­ing 
Ahmed Jabari, had received a draft for a truce agree­ment just hours before his 
assas­sin­a­tion. It is there­fore obvi­ous that the assas­sin­a­tion was 
executed for the spe­cific pur­pose of pre­vent­ing such a truce. What this 
indic­ates, at the very least, is flag­rant bad faith on the part of the 
Israelis, but more import­antly, it is another instance of pro­voc­at­ive 
treach­ery, a sub­ject which deserves a sep­ar­ate ana­lysis.
The right to pro­tect human life is abso­lute, even if the means used are 
con­di­tioned. There­fore, accord­ing to all human norms, nat­ural law, legal 
norms and inter­na­tional law and jur­is­pru­dence, the Palestini­ans have a 
legit­im­ate right of response. It must be remembered how­ever, that the 
Palestini­ans have been denied a state and an accom­pa­ny­ing army by Israel 
and the United States. There­fore the response avail­able to the Palestini­ans 
in Gaza is extremely lim­ited and is con­fined to rock­ets fired into Israel. 
These rock­ets are prim­it­ive weapons and not extremely accur­ate which is why 
they have been defined as fire­works. But that is all that the Palestini­ans 
have for their defense. This response is the only avenue open for a soci­ety 
under mil­it­ary attack to try and force the ces­sa­tion of such an attack when 
the aggressor will not nego­ti­ate with you in good faith.
The Israelis are proud of the fact that their army is the fourth largest in the 
world, and as far as they are con­cerned, also the best, the most effect­ive 
and the most moral! Because of the expo­nen­tially huge dis­pro­por­tion in 
power between Israel and the Palestini­ans, the Palestini­ans simply can­not 
afford to react to each and every attack against them. They have to care­fully 
and pruden­tially weigh their pos­sib­il­it­ies of response which is the reason 
why the Israelis never have to cease their relent­less attacks of vary­ing 
intens­ity. But it is also the dis­pro­por­tion­ate attacks by the Israeli army 
that viol­ate the prin­ciple of pro­por­tion­al­ity under­ly­ing legit­im­ate 
warfare.
The Right of Res­ist­ance is the Right of Self-​Defense
It can be argued cogently that since the right to self-​determination was 
delib­er­ately and expli­citly denied the Palestinian people fol­low­ing the 
col­lapse of the Otto­man Empire, with no right or jus­ti­fic­a­tion 
what­so­ever in the cir­cum­stances, the Palestini­ans are still entitled to 
demand and fight for such rights. (see endnote).
Instead of free­dom, they were faced with a real­ity of the col­on­iz­a­tion of 
Palestine by for­eign­ers against the wishes of the local pop­u­la­tion, a 
col­on­iz­a­tion which ulti­mately led to an expul­sion of nearly 90% of the 
indi­gen­ous Palestinian pop­u­la­tion cre­at­ing a long-​festering and 
long-​suffering Palestinian refugee prob­lem. A struggle for 
self-​determination is legit­im­ate in inter­na­tional law, as it expresses a 
struggle for free­dom, the basic qual­ity of life neces­sary in order for human 
beings to be able to ful­fill their poten­tial as indi­vidual per­sons and as 
social beings. Those who deny such self-​determination are guilty of 
viol­at­ing that same inter­na­tional law. That this denial of such a right is 
the case with respect to Palestini­ans can be found in sev­eral let­ters of 
cor­res­pond­ence of Brit­ish min­is­ters. In a let­ter to the Prime Min­is­ter 
by
 Lord Arthur Balfour dated 19th Feb­ru­ary [1919 LB] he states:
… The weak point of our pos­i­tion of course is that in the case of Palestine 
we delib­er­ately and rightly [sic LB] decline to accept the prin­ciple of 
self-​determination. If the present inhab­it­ants were con­sul­ted they would 
unques­tion­ably give an anti-​Jewish ver­dict. Our jus­ti­fic­a­tion for our 
policy is that we regard Palestine as being abso­lutely excep­tional; that we 
con­sider the ques­tion of the Jews out­side Palestine as one of world 
import­ance and that we con­ceive the Jews to have an his­toric claim to a home 
in their ancient land; provided that home can be given them without either 
dis­pos­sess­ing or oppress­ing the present inhabitants…
In a later memor­andum addressed to Lord Curzon by Lord Balfour on 11 August 
1919 a sim­ilar notion is repeated:
… The con­tra­dic­tion between the let­ters of the Cov­en­ant [League of 
Nations Cov­en­ant LB] and the Policy of the Allies is even more flag­rant in 
the case of the ‘inde­pend­ent nation’ of Palestine than in that of the 
‘inde­pend­ent nation’ of Syria. For in Palestine we do not pro­pose even to go 
through the form of con­sult­ing the wishes of the present inhab­it­ants of the 
coun­try, though the Amer­ican Com­mis­sion has been going through the form of 
ask­ing what they are.
>The Four Great Powers are com­mit­ted to Zion­ism. And Zion­ism, be it right 
>or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-​long tra­di­tions, in present needs, 
>in future hopes, of far pro­founder import than the desires and pre­ju­dices 
>of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
>In my opin­ion that is right. What I have never been able to under­stand is 
>how it can be har­mon­ized with the declar­a­tion [Anglo-​French of Novem­ber 
>1918], the Cov­en­ant or the instruc­tions to the Com­mis­sion of Enquiry.
>I do not think that Zion­ism will hurt the Arabs, but they will never say they 
>want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine it is not now an ‘inde­pend­ent 
>nation,’ nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever defer­ence should be 
>paid to the views of those liv­ing there, the Powers in their selec­tion of a 
>man­dat­ory do not pro­pose, as I under­stand the mat­ter, to con­sult them. 
>In short, so far as Palestine is con­cerned, the Powers have made no 
>declar­a­tion of policy which, at least in the let­ter, they have not always 
>inten­ded to violate…
>(Doreen Ingrams,Palestine Papers 1917 – 1922 Seeds of Con­flict [Lon­don 1972] 
>pp. 61 and 73).
Des­pite the Great Powers flag­rant denial of Palestinian rights at the time, 
such denial did not and does not give rise to either their loss or their 
fall­ing into desu­et­ude. As long as a people wish to real­ize such rights, 
they have the right to demand their real­iz­a­tion. The Palestini­ans never 
relin­quished these rights, although they have made innu­mer­able attempts to 
reach a modus vivendi with the Zion­ist state. Their accom­mod­a­tion has been 
rejec­ted for the very reason that a com­prom­ise and shared con­domin­ium in 
Palestine is not part of the Zion­ist pro­gram and never was.
We could there­fore come to the fol­low­ing con­clu­sion at this point. The 
Palestini­ans have the right to res­ist Palestinian attacks on sev­eral 
grounds. Firstly in response to the Israeli pro­voca­tion in the form of the 
assas­sin­a­tion of Ahmed Jabari . (We can ima­gine an Israeli response to an 
assas­sin­a­tion of Ehud Barak or any other min­is­ter). Secondly they have the 
right of res­ist­ance to the actual dec­ades long Israeli gen­o­cidal con­trol 
over Gaza which is bring­ing about the actual phys­ical demise of the 
pop­u­la­tion which exhib­its a gen­eral level of ill-​health attrib­ut­able 
dir­ectly to the Israeli strangle­hold over the ter­rit­ory. Thirdly, they have 
the right of res­ist­ance against the con­tinu­ing incur­sions, raids, arrests, 
impris­on­ments, and sup­pres­sion of eco­nomic activ­ity in the West 
Bank/​East Jer­u­s­alem. And fourthly, the actual fact of their being
 for­cibly denied their polit­ical rights jus­ti­fies resistance.
So why are the Palestini­ans in gen­eral, and Hamas in par­tic­u­lar, depic­ted 
as Terrorists?
The term ‘ter­ror­ist’ is not a legal term and has no legal ref­er­ence. It has 
been man­u­fac­tured in order to bypass the lim­it­a­tions that inter­na­tional 
law imposes with respect to the man­ner of deal­ing with an adversary. It is 
used to demon­ize those people who do not agree with the US/​Israel/​European 
hege­monic demand and rule of the world and it is espe­cially used in order to 
deny such people the right of res­ist­ance, the right to struggle as free­dom 
fight­ers. It is this ter­min­o­logy which has cre­ated such con­fu­sion and 
dis­crep­ancy in the gen­eral public’s under­stand­ing with respect to the 
real­ity in Palestine and the actual state of affairs that pre­vails there. But 
we may ask the fur­ther ques­tion as to why Palestini­ans are seen in the West 
as “ter­ror­ists” and intransigent mur­der­ers, a people who under­stand only 
viol­ence and not peace.
In order to under­stand this conun­drum, it is neces­sary to under­stand the 
nature of Amer­ican soci­ety in par­tic­u­lar, and its mech­an­isms of 
con­trol. The United States is a cap­it­al­ist soci­ety in which power is 
exer­cised by the financial-​media-​military-​industrial com­plex. A main 
source of cap­it­al­ist exploit­a­tion is the oil depos­its in the Middle East, 
its refine­ment and dis­tri­bu­tion to the rest of the world. It is a sine qua 
non for the con­trolling cap­it­al­ist elite that it con­trols these resources 
and their dis­pos­i­tion. Such con­trol is not in the interests of the local 
pop­u­la­tions of the ter­rit­or­ies in which the oil is depos­ited, who are 
nearly all Muslims.
In order to min­im­ize, if not elim­in­ate, the crit­ics and cri­tiques of 
cap­it­al­ist exploit­a­tion, the United States uses the media to manip­u­late 
the minds of its pop­u­la­tion, as Pro­fess­ors Noam Chom­sky and Edward 
Her­man explained in their book Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent. How­ever, since the 
second Bush admin­is­tra­tion, the Depart­ment of Home­land Secur­ity (DHS) — a 
title straight out of George Orwell’s 1984 — was formed to exer­cise fur­ther 
con­trol over the pop­u­la­tion through the use of poli­cing power. The events 
of 9/​11 have been exploited expo­nen­tially by both the media and the DHS 
towards the demon­iz­a­tion of Islam and Muslims, and Palestini­ans 
auto­mat­ic­ally fall into this cat­egory. All are deemed to be ter­ror­ists or 
poten­tial ter­ror­ists, and there­fore they are, by defin­i­tion, the enemy. 
The level of pro­pa­ganda gen­er­ated by the media
 branch of this com­plex, to which the pop­u­la­tions in the West are sub­ject, 
in par­tic­u­lar in the United States and Israel, has brain­washed the 
pop­u­la­tion into an auto­matic neg­at­ive response to all Muslims, 
Palestini­ans included.
The Muslims as ter­ror­ist, Islam as a reli­gion of viol­ence and hatred, the 
Jew as eternal vic­tim, the Holo­caust as a unique his­tor­ical event, the 
unique­ness of which is echoed in the polit­ical mani­festo of ‘mani­fest 
des­tiny’ and ‘excep­tion­al­ism’ of the United States of Amer­ica, the ‘good 
guys” of World Wars I and II, con­sti­tutes the cur­rent pro­pa­ganda pas­tiche 
determ­in­ing the lim­its of polit­ic­ally cor­rect dis­course. Any cri­ti­cism 
against Israel is auto­mat­ic­ally trans­lated into anti-​Semitism and 
cri­ti­cism of the United States is unpat­ri­otic or even treason.
The Palestinian polit­ical party of Hamas is on the ter­ror­ist list in the US 
and sev­eral Muslims have been con­victed and imprisoned for exten­ded 
peri­ods, in one case for more than twenty years, for the crime of aid­ing and 
abet­ting ter­ror­ists by send­ing human­it­arian aid to Palestine. Israel has 
never ceased to refer to Palestini­ans as ter­ror­ists and treats them as such 
accord­ingly. As men­tioned earlier, it has broken and/​or under­mined all its 
agree­ments with the Palestini­ans, the most egre­gious viol­a­tion being the 
con­tinu­ation of the build­ing of Jew­ish set­tle­ments in the West Bank 
conquered in 1967, becom­ing a col­on­iz­ing power, which is in dir­ect 
viol­a­tion of inter­na­tional law. In addi­tion, Israel has viol­ated all 
United Nations Res­ol­u­tions but is pro­tec­ted by the US veto, thus 
provid­ing it with a long leash to do what it wants in Palestine. The real­ity 
of
 Israeli force, the real­ity of its illeg­al­it­ies con­sti­tutes a viol­a­tion 
of both the moral and the legal order. It is known by both Israel and the US 
and there­fore there is such vicious con­tinu­ing pro­pa­ganda against Arabs, 
Muslims and Palestinians.
There can be little doubt that there is no easy solu­tion for the 
Palestini­ans. Des­pite their rights de iure as well as de facto and their 
legit­im­ate res­ist­ance and struggle and the use of weapons that do not come 
up to the min­imum stand­ards of a mod­ern army, it is only the vic­tim­ized 
people of the world who under­stand their plight together with those com­ing 
from the West who are termed rad­ic­als. At this junc­ture in his­tory the 
people have no power, but it behooves us to con­tinue the struggle for free­dom 
and justice in any way we can, without des­troy­ing the planet, as our friends 
the cap­it­al­ists are doing. If, how­ever, there is one iron law of life and 
exist­ence, which must sus­tain our hope and energy, it is that all 
insti­tu­tions, all powers, ulti­mately col­lapse because everything is 
chan­ging and tem­por­ary in our con­tin­gent world. Situ­ations can­not help 
but change. When such a
 change comes in the dis­tri­bu­tion of power, we should be ready to insti­tute 
a reign of justice and peace for the well-​being of all of mankind.
End note
The entire enter­prise of a Jew­ish state in Palestine is built upon an express 
rejec­tion of inter­na­tional law. The only legit­im­ate grounds for polit­ical 
sov­er­eignty of an indi­gent people are the laws of ius soli or ius san­guine 
as recog­nized in inter­na­tional law, which trans­lates into a right of 
sov­er­eignty based upon hab­it­a­tion in a par­tic­u­lar ter­rit­ory or being 
a des­cend­ent of someone in a par­tic­u­lar ter­rit­ory. The third option 
grant­ing a right to sov­er­eignty would be the dis­cov­ery of a terra nul­lius 
that is an unin­hab­ited ter­rit­ory. Palestine was never a terra nul­lius, and 
its inhab­it­ants were entitled to a sov­er­eign state in Palestine as part of 
Greater Syria, if they so chose, accord­ing to the ius soli fol­low­ing the 
demise of the Otto­man Empire at the end of World War I in 1917 and 1918. If 
their chil­dren were out of the coun­try at the time of
 its estab­lish­ment at a par­tic­u­lar time, then they would be gran­ted 
cit­izen­ship on the grounds of the ius san­guine if they had not been born in 
Palestine or Greater Syria.
European Jewry did not ful­fill either of these qual­i­fic­a­tions in 1917, 
when the Balfour Declar­a­tion, a doc­u­ment pre­pared by inter­na­tional 
Jew­ish lead­er­ship, and addressed by Lord Arthur Balfour, the United 
Kingdom’s For­eign sec­ret­ary at the time, to Lord Wal­ter Roth­schild, a 
scion of the lead­ing Jew­ish bank­ing fam­ily in the world, res­id­ent in 
Eng­land, was writ­ten sup­port­ing a Jew­ish home­land [sic]in Palestine.
The carving up of his­tor­ical Palestine to excise the bulk of its ter­rit­ory 
for an impor­ted unequi­voc­ally for­eign pop­u­la­tion at the expense of the 
indi­gen­ous soci­ety was recog­nized not to be a polit­ic­ally legit­im­ate 
action. Its destruct­ive con­sequences should have been obvi­ous a pri­ori, and 
his­tory has proved such expect­a­tion accur­ate. Such an excision has harmed 
the indi­gen­ous pop­u­la­tion in every and all aspects of its life: 
polit­ical, eco­nomic, social, edu­ca­tional, cul­tural, reli­gious, 
his­tor­ical and geo­graph­ical. The destruc­tion of Palestine, the expul­sion 
of the over­whelm­ing major­ity of its pop­u­la­tion and the delib­er­ate and 
con­tinu­ing gen­o­cidal attacks on the remain­ing pop­u­la­tion liv­ing under 
Jew­ish con­quest, only high­lights the ille­git­im­acy of the Jew­ish 
pres­ence and its con­tinu­ing aggres­sion against the
 Palestinians.
Lynda Burstein Brayer, a gradu­ate of the Hebrew Uni­ver­sity of Jer­u­s­alem 
Fac­ulty of Law, is a rad­ical polit­ical and legal com­ment­ator who 
prac­ticed human rights law in Palestine/​Israel rep­res­ent­ing Palestini­ans 
in their struggles against house demoli­tions, land theft, and fam­ily 
destruc­tion and in their efforts to obtain travel per­mits for health, study 
and fam­ily reas­ons. She lives in Haifa and can be reached at 
lyndabrayer@​ymail.​com
 
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