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Subject: [ei] Op/Ed: Judging the Intifada | Special
Gaza Section
Date: Wed 10/06/04 06:01 PM
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UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
January 2004 -- PM CST
_______________________________
Opinion/Editorial
JUDGING THE INTIFADA
Hasan Abu Nimah & Ali Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada, 6 October 2004
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3166.shtml
The fourth anniversary of Israel's violent crackdown
on
the Palestinian uprising, which coincided with its
latest massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,
occasioned a number of analyses, many concluding -
wishfully - that the Intifada has been
"counterproductive" for the Palestinians, or even a
"failure."
Ha'aretz analyst Bradley Burston wrote an article
headlined, "The war that Palestine couldn't lose - and
did." US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, asked on
Al-Jazeera, "What has [the Intifada] accomplished for
the Palestinian people? Has it produced progress
toward a Palestinian state? Has it defeated Israel on
the
battlefield?" Concluding it had not, he declared, "it
is time to end this process. It is time to end the
Intifada."
The standard that Mr. Powell set for assessing
Palestinian success or failure is disengenuous and
absurd. No one expected that Palestinians could defeat
Israel's astronomically superior, US-backed armed
forces. But as the ongoing resistance, both nonviolent
and armed, demonstrates every day, the Palestinians
are not close to defeat, nor are the Israelis close to
victory. Despite all of Israel's killing and cruelty
for decades, the Palestinians are unbroken; they have
neither abandoned their rights, nor resigned
themselves to living permanently under Israeli
dictatorship.
Palestinians have indeed paid a heartbreaking price
during the past four years in death and destruction
inflicted by Israel. But that is not the only way they
measure the Intifada. Mr. Powell failed to ask how
much the Palestinians had gained from more than a
decade of the American-sponsored "peace process" and
the "roadmap." He knows the answer: throughout the
period, Israel continued, with American connivance, to
steal and colonize the little left of their land at an
accelerating pace, extinguishing the prospects for a
truly independent Palestinian state even as the US
claimed to be supporting it. The Intifada did not
interrupt and "derail" the peace process as
revisionists argue; it came long after the peace
process failed, and as a direct result of this
failure. As long as Palestinians see that no outside
powers will fairly uphold their rights, or
international law, some will always conclude that
their only course is to impose as a high cost as
possible on Israel, no matter the cost to themselves.
This is what fuels support for counterattacks on
Israeli civilians, and indeed the willingness to die
carrying them out. In a context where Israel has left
them nothing to lose, some Palestinians feel such
attacks are the only means they have to even the
killing field.
Powell also did not ask Israel how much its
unrelenting
brutality and colonization has allowed Israelis to
relax and enjoy the fruits of dispossessing the
Palestinians and depriving them of their basic rights.
In addition to losing more than one thousand people,
Israel is wracked with corruption, unemployment,
poverty and mass emigration as a direct result of its
war to keep the Palestinians under occupation.
It is nevertheless fashionable to point to the
precipitous drop in Palestinian living standards as
further evidence of the failure of the Intifada, as
New York Times reporter Steven Erlanger did in an
October 3 column. This economic collapse, as numerous
UN, EU and other bodies have reported over many years,
is the direct result of Israel's collective punishment
of the population. But rather than condemning the
illegal measures of the occupier, some seek to blame
the victims for bringing it on themselves.
Erlanger quoted a recent report by the International
Crisis Group (ICG) that "although the occupation and
the confrontation with Israel that is entering its
fifth year provide the context, today's Palestinian
predicament is decidedly domestic." The ICG, which
seems to exist solely to lend false credibility to the
most shallow, power-serving clich�s, has once again
issued a report in which the hypothetical ideal is
offered as the alternative to grim reality, but
without a single plausible suggestion for how to get
there, and with virtually all responsibility for
action lying at the door of the weakest party.
Such transparent apologia for Israel is nothing new.
>From the first days of what began as a peaceful
uprising, to which Israel responded with one million
bullets in the first month of protests, Israeli and
American analysts have been declaring that the efforts
to stop all resistance would soon succeed. A few more
assassinations, a few more missiles, a few thousand
more arrests, a bit more torture, a few hundred more
demolitions, a little more hunger and darkness - and
the Palestinians will get the message and realize that
their best option is servitude under occupation.
By any standard, in a war between a colonial occupier
and an indigenous people, the Palestinians are in a
comparable state to those who have trodden this path
before them. In Southeast Asia, the United States
killed approximately fifty Vietnamese, Laotians and
Cambodians for every American who died in that war,
and still the Americans suffered a total strategic
defeat. In Algeria, the French killed on a similar
scale and were defeated. In South Africa, the
apartheid regime killed hundreds of black South
Africans for every white person killed, and that
regime no longer exists. Nor did massacres and
atrocities in Iraq in the 1920s, or India in the
1940s, save British rule there. In colonial wars, the
colonized always pay a much higher price than their
foreign rulers. The Americans
and British are learning afresh in the "New" Iraq that
massive military dominance is not the same thing as
victory.
Israel, though, stubbornly refuses to learn any
lessons
and thus spare Jewish and Arab lives. As its situation
has deteriorated, it has used ever more brutality
against the Palestinians, with increasingly meagre
results from its perspective. Strategically, Israel
remains at an absolute dead end. Despite all the talk
of "disengagement," Israel has thrust deeper into
Gaza. It can neither afford to stay there, nor can it
afford to leave. Sharon's only reason for ever
speaking of a withdrawal from Gaza was to reduce the
cost of the occupation to Israel and to consolidate
Israel's conquests in the West Bank. But the tenacity
of
the resistance in Gaza and the West Bank shows that as
long as Israel is determined to colonize any inch of
the occupied territories, it is necessarily committed
to staying in all of them. The logic of Israeli policy
demands ever deeper penetration and ever more savage
measures.
South African law professor John Dugard, the UN
special
rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian
territories, wrote in a report to the General Assembly
last August that Israel has created, "an apartheid
regime" in the occupied territories "worse than the
one that existed in South Africa." Dugard is in a good
position to know, since he was a member his country's
post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Contrasting with Dugard's forthrightness is the utter
cowardice of those who talk loudest about
international
law and human rights in the abstract. The United
States' pro-Israel position is the most extreme and
biased, but has lost the power to shock or disappoint.
Yet the European Union, which has for years posed as
an
even-handed force in the conflict, has long since
abandoned all serious efforts. European states now
make
empty statements about adhering to the "roadmap" and
calling for Palestinian "reform," not because they
believe genuinely that such things are in any remote
way related to a solution, but because they realize
that exposing the real problem - Israel's
intransigence - will lead to embarassing calls for
sanctions against an outlaw regime that recognizes no
boundaries for its conduct.
Recently, UK prime minister Tony Blair, the champion
of
democracy, human rights and freedom in Iraq, made a
personal committment to do everything possible to
resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict. Before the Iraq
invasion, he made the same promise on the BBC Arabic
Service, responding to doubts about the West's past
performance by saying that a skeptical Arab public
should just wait, and judge him by his actions. More
than a year has passed and Blair has done absolutely
nothing except vigorously oppose Palestinian efforts
to win their rights through the peaceful forum of the
International Court of Justice at The Hague.
The result of all this is that Israel is ever
emboldened, confident that it can do as it pleases.
Other than bleats of displeasure from Arab and
international officials, no one will act against it.
Never has Ben-Gurion's infamous maxim been more apt:
"What matters is not what the Gentiles will say, but
what the Jews will do."
Those who wish to mark the anniversary of the Intifada
with a hard look at reality, rather than
self-delusion,
might make the following predictions: there will be no
Palestinian state alongside Israel, because such a
thing is impossible in the reality Israel has, with
the world's acquiescence, created. But in another four
years it will become clear that Israel can no longer
exist as a "Jewish state," superimposed on a
Palestinian majority that refuses to accept the
inferior status Israel has assigned it, and which
Palestinians will continue to resist with whatever
resources they have.
In the meantime, we can expect ever more horrifying
violence that will not be abated by ritual
condemnations. And, as Israel gets further into its
corner, the chances increase dramatically that it will
seek to resolve its existential problem not just at
the expense of the Palestinians, but by spreading the
conflict to its neighbors.
---
Ambassador Hasan Abu Nimah is former permanent
representative of Jordan at the United Nations. Ali
Abunimah is co-founder of the websites The Electronic
Intifada and Electronic Iraq.
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