‘Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering
under military occupation for forty-five years against occupation force’: the
words of General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence,
in 1993.
December 30, 2008
Official Apathy
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant
By TARIQ ALI
http://www.counterpunch.org/tariq12302008.html
The assault on the Gaza Ghetto, planned over six months and executed with
perfect timing was designed largely to help the incumbent parties triumph in
the forthcoming Israeli elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than
election fodder in a cynical contest between the Right and the Far Right in
Israel. Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to be
assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon a few years, sit back and watch.
Washington, as is its wont, blames the pro-Hamas Palestinians, with Obama and
Bush singing from the same AIPAC hymn sheet.
The EU politicians, having observed the build-up, the siege, the collective
punishment inflicted on Gaza, the targeting of civilians, etc [See Harvard
scholar Sara Roy’s chilling essay in the latest LRB] were convinced that it was
the rocket attacks that had ‘provoked’ Israel but called on both sides to end
the violence, with nil effect. The moth-eaten Mubarik dictatorship in Egypt and
NATO’s favourite Islamists in Ankara, failed to even register a symbolic
protest by recalling their Ambassadors from Israel. China and Russia did not
convene a meeting of the UNSC to discuss the crisis.
As result of official apathy, one outcome of this latest attack will be to
inflame Muslim communities throughout the world and swell the ranks of those
very organisations that the West claims it is combating in the ‘war against
terror’.
The bloodshed in Gaza raises broader strategic questions for both sides, issues
related to recent history. One fact that needs to be recognised is that there
is no Palestinian Authority. There never was one. The Oslo Accords were an
unmitigated disaster for the Palestinians, creating a set of disconnected and
shrivelled Palestinian ghettoes under the permanent watch of a brutal enforcer.
The PLO, once the repository of Palestinian hope, became little more than a
supplicant for EU money. Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those
opposed to its policies are elected to office. The West and Israel tried
everything to secure a Fatah victory: Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted
threats and bribes of the ‘international community’ in a campaign that saw
Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the
IDF, their posters confiscated or destroyed, us and EU funds channelled into
the Fatah campaign, and US Congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be
allowed to run. Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to
rig the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January
2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza—in the words of an
Egyptian intelligence officer: ‘the public will then support the Authority
against Hamas’. Popular desire for a clean
broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved
stronger than all of this.
Hamas’s electoral triumph was treated as an ominous sign of rising
fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace with Israel, by
rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world. Immediate financial and
diplomatic pressures were applied to force Hamas to adopt the same policies as
those whom it defeated at the polls.
Uncompromised by the Palestinian Authority’s combination of greed and
dependency, the self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and policemen, and
their acquiescence in a ‘peace process’ that has brought only further
expropriation and misery to the population under them, Hamas offered the
alternative of a simple example. Without any of the resources of its rival, it
set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training and welfare programmes
for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary
people. It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad
basis of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran.
How far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional degree of
credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like those of Fatah’s
Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been retaliations against an
occupation far more deadly than any actions it has ever undertaken. Measured on
the scale of IDF killings, Palestinian strikes have been few and far between.
The asymmetry was starkly exposed during Hamas’s unilateral ceasefire, begun in
June 2003, and maintained throughout the summer despite the Israeli campaign of
raids and mass arrests, which followed, in which some three hundred Hamas
cadres were seized from the West Bank. On 19 August 2003 a self-proclaimed
‘Hamas’ cell from Hebron, disowned and denounced by the official leadership,
blew up a bus in West Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the
Hamas ceasefire’s negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas in turn responded. In
return, the Palestinian
Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and, in September 2003,
the EU declared the whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization—a
long-standing demand of Tel Aviv.
What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not
dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups resorted, but
its superior discipline—demonstrated by its ability to enforce a self-declared
ceasefire against Israel over the past year. All civilian deaths are to be
condemned, but since Israel is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant
serves only to expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is
on the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped
with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest armed oppression of modern
history. ‘Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been
suffering under military occupation for forty-five years against occupation
force’: the words of General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military
intelligence, in 1993.
The real grievance of the EU and US against Hamas is that it refused to accept
the capitulation of the Oslo Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort,
from Taba to Geneva, to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The
West’s priority ever since was to break this resistance. Cutting off funding to
the Palestinian Authority is an obvious weapon with which to bludgeon Hamas
into submission. Boosting the presidential powers of Abbas—as publicly picked
for his post by Washington, as was Karzai in Kabul—at the expense of the
Legislative Council is another.
No serious efforts were made to negotiate with the elected Palestinian
leadership. I doubt if Hamas could have been rapidly suborned to Western and
Israel but it would not have been unprecedented. Hamas’s programmatic heritage
remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the
belief that the political choices before it are either rejection of the
existence of Israel altogether, or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a
fifth of the country. From the fantasy maximalism of the first to the pathetic
minimalism of the second, the path is all too short, as the history of Fatah
has shown. The test for Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the
satisfaction of Western opinion, but whether it can break with this crippling
tradition. Soon after the Hamas victory I was asked in public by a Palestinian
what I would do in their place. ‘Dissolve the Palestinian Authority’, was my
response and end the make-belief. To do
so would situate the Palestinian national cause on its proper basis, with the
demand that the country and its resources be divided equitably, in proportion
to two populations that are equal in size—not 80 per cent to one and 20 per
cent to the other, a dispossession of such iniquity that no self-respecting
people will ever submit to it in the long run. The only acceptable alternative
is a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike, in which the exactions of
Zionism are repaired.
There is no other way. And Israeli citizens might ponder the following words
from Shakespeare [The Merchant of Venice] that I have slightly altered:
‘I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt
with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us,
do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not
die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest,
we will resemble you in that…the villainy you teach me, I will execute; and it
shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’
Tariq Ali’s latest book, ‘The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American
Power’ is published by Scribner.
With Regards
Abi
