Archive for the ‘Palestine’ Category
To Gaza: When is self defence not self defence
Everyone who saw the brutal treatment of the passengers of the freedom flotilla attempting to break the blockade of Gaza, and heard the Israeli propaganda machine claiming this was done in ‘self defence’ should understand that this self justification has a long history.
As an Israeli child, I grew up on myths of ‘self defence’ and of ‘the few against the many’, which were the building blocks of Israeli state and society from its very inception. Israeli literary scholar Nurit Gertz identifies three ‘ideological narratives’ aimed at conserving the hegemonic power relations. The first myth is the ‘few against the many’ narrative, according to which a Jewish ‘David’ was attacked by an Arab ‘Goliath’, the second is the struggle between the enlightened (Jewish) Europeans and the backwards (Arab) Orientals and the ensuing myth about Palestine being a ‘desert’ which the Zionists made ‘bloom’, and the third is the struggle between the isolated Jewish nation and an uncaring world, a narrative strengthened by the indifference of the world in face of the Nazi genocide. A fourth myth is that of Israel as European, and a fifth – perhaps the strongest myth – was the belief that all Israel’s wars and brutalities are fought in self defence.
Since the early days of the state, all Israel’s wars, including its participation in the imperialist 1956 Suez war, the invasions of Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, and the recent war against blockaded Gaza, were rationalised by the argument that after all, ‘peace loving’ Israel is only acting in ‘self defence’ and that if only the Palestinians agree to its conditions, they could have their tiny state albeit criss-crossed by walls and roadblocks, but that meanwhile, Israel has ‘no partner for peace’.
The fate of the Palestinians, 750,000 of whom were forced to flee or escape their homes during the 1948 war, was never part of the equation. Nor was the fate of those Palestinians exiled a second time, to the West Bank and Gaza in what was the expansionist 1967 war part of the equation. Throughout the occupation and the settlement of hundreds of thousands Jews in occupied West Bank and Golan Heights, Israel kept perpetuating the ‘self defence’ myth.
This is despite scholarship by Israeli and Palestinian historians and sociologists, exposing the extent of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, particularly, but not exclusively, during and after the 1948 war. Scholars describe Israel as a settler colonial society and a racial state, who colonised Palestine – the biblical birthplace of the Jewish people, but also of a variety of local tribes, including the Palestinians – and then ethnically cleansed as many of its indigenous people as was possible, confining the rest to life in besieged reservations.
Yet, when the occupied subjects try to resist, they are labeled ‘terrorists’, and Israel, the coloniser, claims that its brutal violence is merely ‘self defence’. After all, Israelis say to themselves, ‘the whole world is against us’ (as it has always been), and ‘we are the only Jewish state in a sea of Arab states’ and, of course, ‘the only democracy in the Middle east’.
The mantra of ‘self defence’ is so deeply ingrained that Israeli soldiers believe that stone throwing teenagers and international demonstrators (including Irish Nobel Prize winner Mairead Maguire who was hit by Israeli rubber bullets while demonstrating in Bil’in on 20 April) are fair game. After all, Israelis tell their teenage soldiers, we are only acting in ‘self defence’. Thus the propaganda stories about MV Marmara attacking the poor Israeli commandos while they were abseiling from helicopters – so ‘vulnerable’, according to Defence Minister Ehud Barak – make perfect sense to the Israeli psyche.
The heroic Gaza flotilla passengers and their supporters deserve our admiration and support. However, I am afraid that despite the universal condemnations, Israel will only lift the Gaza blockade if told to do so by the USA, or if deprived of US billions, self defence or no self defence.
Crocodile tears in the Unites Nations
Eli Aminov November 09
Shortly after the UN Commission on Human Rights adopted the Goldstone Report the Israeli Ambassadress to the United Nations started a whining, emotional blackmailing attack against the commission: “Israel is the only state in the world which is being discriminated against by the commission and criticized more than any other state in the world!” she complained.
Her Excellency the Ambassadress should be reminded of what really makes Israel so unique globally.
Israel is the only state in the world that apparently was established based on a United Nations resolution but whereas the said resolution was about the establishment of two states, a Jewish one and a Palestinian one, the resolution was immediately breached by Israel which took over most of the territory designated for the Arab state.
Israel is the only state in the world which was established during the 20th century on the ruins of another people, which expelled two thirds of an indigenous population out of the territory it had concurred turning them into refugees and refusing to allow their return in direct contradiction to a UN resolution on this matter.
Israel is the only state in the world that defined the remains of the indigenous population over whose territory she had settled as “foreigners” and subjected them to its peculiar immigration laws as if they had just landed in the state from far and beyond.
Israel is the only state in the world that had managed to annul a fully justified UN resolution that defined Zionism as racism.
Israel is the only state in the world that invented a nation which can only be joined through a religious conversion.
Israel is today the only state in the world sustaining an Apartheid regime which discriminates against its own non-Jewish citizens through a complete set of laws and legislations, including property rules, nationality laws and security regulations.
Israel is in fact the only apparition in the developed world of an army which owns a state, an army whose commanders blatantly interfere to interrupt every move to end the conflict that might jeopardize the smooth run of their gravy train.
Israel is the only state in the world that instead of adhering to human code of conduct during its self initiated wars tries to convince the world that it deserves a special, different and more convenient set of war rules, rules that will not define the killing non-Jews as crime.
And so while the Israeli ambassadress to the United Nations tries to present herself and her masters as the Little Dutch Boy from the fairy tales who tries to stop the flood by sticking his little finger to the hole in the dam, indeed the only fill Israel can offer the world as a solution to unsolved issues is a dynamite stick.
Eli Aminov is a peace activist living and Jerusalem and a member of the committee for secular and democratic state.
http://www.onesdstate.blogspot.com/
Cry freedom
Last week, when Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of political science, published an article in The New York Times arguing that boycotting Israel is the only way to make any progress towards justice for Palestine, Israelis and Jews all over the world called for his dismissal. Their excuse for opposing boycott is ‘academic freedom’.
Yet, as philosophy professor in Tel Aviv University Anat Matar reminded Ha’aretz readers, only when well-heeled Israeli academics begin to pay a real price for the continuous occupation of Palestine, will they take genuine steps towards ending the occupation.
Academic freedom is relative. On the one side of the fence we have Gaza’s children beginning the school year in shattered classroom, with no building materials allowed by Israel to rebuild their bombed schools, without school books, notebooks or writing utensils that cannot be brought into Gaza because of the Israeli embargo – Israel can boycott Gaza’s school, yet no one protests.
In the West Bank hundreds of students are under arrest in Israeli jails, and the ‘separation fence’ (otherwise known as the ‘apartheid wall’) preventing students and lecturers from reaching classes, libraries and research labs. Conferences abroad are an impossibility – yes, Israel can boycott Palestinian universities and no one protests.
On the other side of the fence Israeli academics guard their freedom of research what the regime wants them to research, appointing former army officers to university positions. Tel Aviv University prides itself on having 55 of its research projects funded by the Israeli Ministry of Defence; the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Defence Department is funding nine other projects. All Israeli universities offer special study programmes for the military. Yes, Israel can conduct military research and no one protests, and only a small number of academics speak against the occupation. And when brave academics like Gordon and Matar call for a boycott, they are accused of opposing academic freedom.
As Obama, Mitchell, Netanyahu and Abbas eventually get together to rekindle the ‘peace process’, let’s spare a thought about freedom. What is the meaning of freedom when you cannot send your child to study in a school building rather than rubble? What is the meaning of freedom when you never know whether you will reach your university lecture on time, due to the interminable checkpoint regime? What is the meaning of freedom if, as a Palestinian Israeli citizen, you can be detained for hours in the airport before you can reach the conference you were invited to give a keynote lecture in abroad - as has happened to a number of my Palestinian colleagues? What is the meaning of freedom if, brave Israeli academics who call for boycotting the occupation regime are met with international calls for dismissal as happened in Gordon’s case? I am an Israeli citizen, and I believe that boycotting Israel is the first step towards freedom.
The Israeli racial state
Israeli policemen beat and arrest women at a demonstration held by the feminist movement New Profile in support of six activists from the group who were arrested from their homes by the police, 30 April 2009. (Shachaf Polakow/ActiveStills)
Who is next?
On the eve of Israel’s 61th Independence Day last week, the Israeli police arrested six Israeli Jewish feminist political activists, members of New Profile, the Movement for the Civil-isation of Israeli society, including a 70-year-old woman, for assisting young Israelis to evade conscription.
The police entered the activists’ home, confiscated their computers and the computers of their partners, detained them for questioning because of their support for young people who declare themselves conscientious objectors, a status not recognized by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Indeed, many draft dodgers have served jail sentences.
Dead babies and zones of exception
Just a day after the revelations about what Israeli soldiers really did in Gaza came the story about the Jaffa T shirt factory, where 500 T shirts per month with dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and a bombed-out mosque accompanies with slogans such as ‘better use Durex’ (next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby with his weeping mpther and a teddy bear beside him), ‘1 shot, 2 kills’, (beside a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s eye superimposed on her belly), and ‘no matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it’ (Uri Blau, Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009 - Haaretz - Israel News). Haaretz reports plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages, such as a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, ‘Bet you got raped!’
A few of the images describe actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as ‘confirming the kill’ (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim’s head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.