[A-List] Paul Foot on Palestine

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Palestine's partisans

Paul Foot
Wednesday August 21, 2002
The Guardian

The unquenchable defiance of the Palestinian people inspired the furious
speech from the dock last week by the handcuffed Palestinian leader
Marwan Barghouti. In a single sentence, repeated with great passion, he
summed up the one absolutely undeniable truth about Palestine: that
there can be "no peace with occupation". In other words, whatever the
vacillations of Zionist intellectuals in the west, whatever the
reactions to the suicide bombings, the plain fact remains that there is
no hope for peace in the region as long as Israel maintains its illegal
and brutal occupation of other people's territory.

Mr Barghouti was seized by military force in Ramallah, where, even
according to the miserable treaties already agreed, criminal justice is
a matter for the Palestinian authority. His illegal capture and trial is
yet another pathetic attempt by the Israeli authorities to pretend that
their military occupation and enforced settlement of other people's land
has something to do with justice and democracy.

While Mr Barghouti waits for his trial to start, two other powerful
voices have been raised to haunt the Israeli authorities. The first is
that of Nelson Mandela, who says he will be closely following the trial
proceedings. His involvement is a reminder of the similarities between
the bantustans for South African black people under apartheid, and the
occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza. The other voice was that
of Marek Edelman, who was deputy commander of the historic Warsaw ghetto
uprising of the Jews against the Nazis in 1943.

Now in his 80s, Mr Edelman wrote a letter early this month to
Palestinian leaders. Though the letter criticised the suicide bombers,
its tone infuriated the Israeli government and its press. He wrote in a
spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance fighter, as a former
leader of a Jewish uprising not dissimilar in desperation to the
Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories. He addressed his
letter to "commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and
partisan operations - to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting
organisations".

This set up a howl of rage in the Zionist press, who reminded their
readers that Mr Edelman, despite his heroism in the 1940s, is a former
supporter of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund, and can therefore not be
trusted. Nothing infuriates Zionists more than the arguments of
anti-Zionist Jews, who have such a courageous and principled history.
The essence of the intellectual case for Zionism is that its opponents
are anti-semitic. But when Jews, especially heroic Jews such as Marek
Edelman, speak out against Zionism, and especially if they denounce
Israeli imperialism and defend the victims of it, how can they be
accused of anti-semitism? What a boost it would be for the Palestinians
and their cause - and for peace in the Middle East - if Marek Edelman
could attend the Barghouti trial.