File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0108, message 56


Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 01:12:56 -0600 (MDT)
From: Muhammad Deeb <mdeeb-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: Edward Said: Israel's unrelenting war 




Israel's unrelenting war

By Edward W. Said

Source: Dawn: August 27,2001
(www.dawn.com)

In the United States, where Israel has its main political base and from
which it has received over 92 billion dollars in aid since 1967, the
terrible human cost of the recent Jerusalem restaurant bombing and Haifa
disaster settles quickly into a familiar explanatory framework.

The framework is: Arafat hasn't done enough to control his terrorists;
suicidal Islamic extremists are to be found everywhere, bringing harm on
"us" and our strongest allies, driven by sheer human hatred; Israel must
defend its security. A thoughtful individual might add: these people have
been fighting tiresomely for thousands of years anyway; the violence must
be stopped; there's been too much suffering on both sides, although the
way Palestinians send their children into battle is another sign of how
much Israel has to put up with.

And so, exasperated but still restrained, Israel invades unfortified and
undefended Jenin with bulldozers and tanks, destroys the Palestine
Authority's police buildings plus several others, and then sends out its
propagandists to say that it has sent a message to Yasir Arafat to curb
his terrorists. In the meantime, he and his coterie are begging for
American protection, doubtless forgetting that Israel is the one with US
protection and that all he will get, for the 6000th time, is an injunction
to stop the violence.

The fact is that in America, Israel has pretty much won the propaganda
war, and America is where it's about to put up several more million
dollars into a public relations campaign (using stars like Zubin Mehta,
Yitzhak Pearlman, and Amos Oz) to further improve its image. But consider
what Israel's unrelenting war against the undefended, basically unarmed,
stateless and poorly led Palestinian people has already achieved. The
disparity in power is so vast that it makes you cry.

Equipped with the latest in American-built (and freely given) air power,
helicopter gunships, uncountable tanks and missiles, and a superb navy as
well as a state of the art intelligence service, Israel is a nuclear power
abusing a people without any armour or artillery, no air force (its one
pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled by Israel) or navy or army, none
of the institutions of a modern state.

The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's 34-year-old military
occupation (the second longest in modern history) of illegally conquered
Palestinian land has been obliterated from public memory nearly
everywhere, as has been the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and
the expulsion of 68 per cent of its native people, of whom 4.5 million
remain refugees today.

Behind the reams of newspeak, the stark outlines of Israel's decades-long
daily pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happened to be
there, in Israel's way, is staggeringly perceptible in its inhuman sadism.
The cruel confinement of 1.3 million people jammed like so many human
sardines into the Gaza strip, plus the nearly 2 million Palestinian
residents of the West Bank has no parallel in the annals of apartheid or
colonialism.

F-16 jets were never used to bomb South African homelands. They are
against Palestinian towns and villages. All entrances and exits to the
territories are controlled by Israel (Gaza is completely surrounded by a
barbed wire fence), which also controls the entire water supply.

Divided into about 63 non-contiguous cantons, completely encircled and
besieged by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140 settlements (many of them
built under Ehud Barak's premiership) with their own road network banned
to "non-Jews," as Arabs are referred to along with such unflattering
epithets like thieves, snakes, cockroaches, grasshoppers, Palestinians
under occupation have now been reduced to 60 per cent unemployment and a
poverty rate of 50 per cent (half the people of Gaza and the West Bank
live on less than two dollars a day). They can neither travel from one
place to the next; they must endure long lines at Israeli checkpoints
which detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick, the student, and the
cleric for hours on end; 150,000 of their olive and citrus trees have been
punitively uprooted; 2000 of their houses demolished; acres of their land
either destroyed or expropriated for military settlement purposes.

Since the Aqsa intifada began late last September, 609 Palestinians have
been killed (four times more than Israeli fatalities), 15,000 wounded, a
dozen times more than on the other side. Regular Israeli army assassins
have picked off alleged terrorists at will, most of the time killing
innocents like so many flies.

A fortnight ago, fourteen Palestinians were murdered openly by Israeli
forces using helicopter gunships and missiles. They were thus "prevented"
from killing Israelis, although at least two children and five innocents
were also murdered, to say nothing of many wounded civilians and several
destroyed buildings that were part of the somehow acceptable collateral
damage. Nameless and faceless, Israel's daily Palestinian victims barely
rate a mention on America's news programmes, even though - for reasons
that I simply cannot understand - Arafat is still hoping that the
Americans will rescue him and his crumbling regime.

Nor is this all. Israel's plan is not just to hold land and fill it with
dreadful, murderous armed settlers who, defended by the army, wreak havoc
on Palestinian orchards, schoolchildren and homes; it is, as the American
researcher Sara Roy has named it, to de-develop Palestinian society, to
make life impossible so that they will leave, or give up somehow, or do
something crazy like blow themselves up. Since 1967, leaders have been
jailed and deported by the Israeli occupation regime, small businesses and
farms made unviable by confiscation and sheer destruction, students
prevented from studying, universities closed (in the middle 1980s
Palestinian universities on the West Bank were closed for four years).

No Palestinian farmer or business can export to any Arab country directly;
their products must pass through Israel. Taxes are paid to Israel. Even
after the Oslo peace process began in 1993, the occupation was simply
re-packaged, only 18 per cent of the land given to the corrupt Vichy-like
Authority of Yasir Arafat, whose mandate seems to have been only to police
and tax his people for Israel's sake.

After eight fruitless immiserating years of the Oslo negotiations
masterminded by an American team of former Israeli lobby staffers like
Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, Israel was still in control, the occupation
packaged more efficiently, the phrase "peace process" given a consecrated
halo that allowed more abuses, more settlements, more imprisonments, more
Palestinian suffering to go on than before. Including a "judaized" East
Jerusalem, with Orient House occupied and its contents looted or carted
off (there are invaluable records, land deeds, maps, that in a repetition
of what it did when it stole PLO archives from Beirut in 1982, Israel has
simply stolen) Israel has implanted no less than 400,000 settlers on
Palestinian land. To call them vigilantes and hoodlums is not an
exaggeration.

It is worth recalling that after Ariel Sharon's gratuitously arrogant
visit to Jerusalem's Haram al Sharif on September 28, with 1,000 soldiers
and guards supplied by Prime Minister Barak, Israel was condemned for this
action by a unanimous Security Council resolution a couple of weeks later.
Then, as even the merest child could have predicted, the anti-colonial
rebellion broke out, with eight killed Palestinians its first victims.
Sharon was swept to power essentially to "subdue" the Palestinians, teach
them a lesson, get rid of them.

His record as an Arab killer goes back thirty years before the Sabra and
Shatila massacres that his forces supervised in 1982, and for which he has
now been indicted in a Belgian court. Still, Arafat wants to negotiate
with him and come perhaps to a cozy arrangement with him so as to
safeguard the very Authority that Sharon is systematically dismantling,
destroying, razing to the ground.

But he isn't a fool either. With every Palestinian act of resistance, his
forces ratchet up the pressure a notch higher, tightening the siege more,
taking more land, making a habit of more and deeper incursions into
Palestinian towns like Jenin and Ramallah, cutting off more supplies,
openly assassinating Palestinian leaders, making life more intolerable,
redefining the terms of his government's actions, that it once made
"generous concessions" while "defending" itself, that it "prevents"
terrorism, that it "secures" areas, that it "re-establishes" control, and
so on. Meanwhile, he and his minions attack and dehumanize Arafat, even
saying that he is the "arch-terrorist" (although he literally can't move
without Israeli permission), and that "we" have no war with the
Palestinian people. What a boon for that people!

With such "restraint," why should a massive invasion, carefully bruited
about to terrorize the Palestinians even more sadistically, be necessary?
Israel knows that it can retake their buildings at will (witness the
wholesale theft of Jerusalem's Orient House, plus nine other buildings,
offices, libraries, archives there and in Abu Dis), just as it has all but
eliminated the Palestinians as a people.

This is the real story of Israel's pretended "victimization," constructed
with such premeditated care and evil intent for months now. Language has
been sundered from reality. Pity not the inept, clumsy, pathetic Arab
governments who can and will do nothing to stop Israel: pity the people
who bear the wounds in their flesh and emaciated bodies of their children
some of whom believe that martyrdom is the only way out for them. And
Israel, stuck in a futureless campaign, flailing about mercilessly? As
James Cousins, the Irish poet and critic said in 1925, the colonizer is in
the grip of "false and selfish preoccupations that stand in the way of its
attention to the natural evolution of its own national genius and pull[ed]
from the path of open rectitude into the twisted byways of dishonest
thought, speech, and action, in the artificial defence of a false
position."

All colonizers have gone that way, learning or stopping at nothing, until
at last, as Israel turned tail from its 22-year occupation of Lebanon,
they exit the territory, leaving behind an exhausted and crippled people.
If this was supposed to fulfil Jewish aspirations, why did it require so
many new victims from another people who had nothing to do with Jewish
exile and persecution in the first place?

With Arafat in command, there is no hope. What is the man doing,
grotesquely fetching up in the Vatican and Lagos and other miscellaneous
places, pleading without dignity or even intelligence for imaginary
observers, Arab aid, international support, instead of staying with his
people, trying to aid them with medical supplies, morale boosting measures
and real leadership?

-Copyright Edward W. Said, 2001



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