[Marxism] Cockburn on Palestine: Its all over (and a few of the reasons why I disagree)

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Actually a very useful article from Counterpunch, but way too defeatist,
in my opinion.

I stick with the Palestinian people on this one.  And with my favorite
modern political philosopher Yogi Berra: It ain't over till its over.

For one thing, Israel's complete political, military and economic
dependency on the United States -- which keeps it from being a genuine
full-scale power on its own or from having anything like real
independence as a nation state -- means that Israel desperately needs US
victory against Iraq, against Iran, against Syria.  Even the fact that
the Pentagon's Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia has not gone well is a
danger sign for the Zionist regime.  As are also the Chavez and Morales
governments in Latin America.

Israel desperately needs US victories in the war against Islam (I mean
terrorism, of course).  And these are not forthcoming.  Syria is the
weakest link, but the fact that the occupation in Iraq is still
collapsing, and that the resistances in Iraq continue to grow stronger,
and that even the occupation government can't afford to act like one
shows that a more decisive defeat for Washington than most of us can
imagine is still approaching.  The occupation is being DEFEATED,
DEMORALIZED, AND DEGRADED IN ITS OWN EYES.

The end result still points to some kind of victory for those who have
been fighting the occupation, and a devastating defeat for the United
States.  Kind of premature to place the final gravestone over Palestine
-- or Iraq, by the way -- under those conditions.

Any strong new rise of the Palestinian struggle -- one that brings the
masses into motion and not just numerous individuals ready to give their
lives to make the destroyers of their nation pay -- will again pose the
question of a Palestinian state on part of the nation's territory at an
early stage.  And obtaining this will not end the fight.

Palestinian victory is not around the corner, but it has absolutely not
become an impossible dream. As sure as there is no apartheid regime
anymore, it is the wave of the future.
Fred Feldman




COUNTERPUNCH June 5
Population Transfers, Land Theft and Bankrupt Ghettos
Palestine: It's All Over

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The first item I ever wrote about Palestinians was around 1973, when I
was just starting a press column for a New York weekly called the
Village Voice. It concerned a story in the New York Times about a
"retaliatory" raid by the Israeli air force, after a couple of Al Fatah
guerillas had fired on an IDF unit. I'm not sure whether there any
fatalities. The planes flew north and dumped high explosive on a refugee
camp in Lebanon, killing a dozen or so men, women and children.

I wrote a little commentary, noting the usual lack of moral disquiet in
the Times' story about this lethal retaliation inflicted on innocent
refugees. Dan Wolf, the Voice's editor, called me in and suggested I
might want to reconsider. I think, that first time, the item got
dropped. But Dan's unwonted act of censorship riled me and I started
writing a fair amount about the lot of the Palestinians.

These were the days when Palestinians carried far less news value for
editors than Furbish's lousewort, and no politician ever held that this
beleagured plant didn't actually exist as a species, which is what Golda
Meir, Israel's prime minister said of Palestinians.

Back then you had to dig a little harder to excavate what Jewish
Israelis were actually doing to Palestinians. Lay out the facts about
institutionalized racism, land confiscations, torture and a hail of
abuse would pour through the mailbox, as when I published a long
interview in the Voice in 1980 with the late Israel Shahak, the intrepid
professor from Hebrew University.

It's slightly eerie now to look at what Shahak was saying back then and
at the accuracy of his analysis and predictions: "The basic trends were
established in '74 and '75, including settler organizations, mystical
ideology, and the great financial support of the United States to
Israel. Between summer '74 and summer '75 the key decisions were taken,
and from that time it's a straight line." Among these decisions, said
Shahak, was "to keep the occupied territories of Palestine," a detailed
development of much older designs consummated in 1967.

Gradually, through the 1980s, very often in the translations from the
Hebrew language press that Shahak used to send, the contours of the
Israeli plan emerged, like the keel and ribs and timbers of an old ship:
a road system that would bypass Palestinian towns and villages and link
the Jewish settlements and military posts; ever-expanding clusters of
settlements; a master plan for control of the whole region's water.

It wasn't hard to get vivid descriptions of the increasingly intolerable
conditions of life for Palestinians: the torture of prisoners, the
barriers to the simplest trip, the harassment of farmers and school
children, the house demolitions. Plenty of people came back from Israel
and the territories with harrowing accounts, though few ever made the
journey into a major newspaper or onto national tv.

And even in the testimonies that did get published here, what was
missing was any acknowledgement of the long-term plan to wipe the record
clean of all troublesome U.N. resolutions, crush Palestinian national
aspirations, steal their land and water, cram them into ever smaller
enclaves, ultimately balkanize them with the Wall, which was on the
drawing board many years ago. Indeed to write about any sort of master
plan was to incur further torrents of abuse for one's supposedly
"paranoid" fantasies about Israel' bad faith, with much pious invocation
of the "peace process".

But successive Israeli governments did have a long-term plan. No matter
who was in power, the roads got built, the water stolen, the olive and
fruit trees cut down (a million) the houses knocked over (12,000), the
settlements imposed (300) the shameless protestations of good faith
issued to the US press (beyond computation).

As the new millennium shambled forward, surely it became impossible to
believe any Israeli claim to be bargaining, or even to wish to bargain
in good faith. By now the "facts of the ground" in Israel and the
territories were as sharply in focus as one of Dali's surrealist
paintings.

In May of this year the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, comes to
Washington and addresses a joint session of Congress in which he
declares: "I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's
eternal and historic right to this entire land." In other words he
doesn't recognize the right of Palestinians to even the wretched cantons
currently envisaged in his "realignment". Why should Hamas believe a
syllable of Olmert's poppycock? When Arafat and the PLO gave worrisome
signs of being eager for an accommodation Israel's reply was to invade
Lebanon.

In Olmert's "realignment plan the "Separation Barrier," now scheduled to
be Israel's permanent "demographic border," annexes 10 per cent of the
West Bank, while melding into Israel vast settlements and half a million
settlers. The Palestinians lose their best agricultural land and the
water. Israel's greater Jerusalem finishes off all possible viability
for a viable, separate Palestinian state. This Palestinian
mini-archipelago of cantons is shuttered to the east by Israel's
security border in the Jordan Valley.

The press here, timid and ignorant, greets Olmert's "realignment" with
tranquil respect. In the meantime a frightful historical tragedy is in
its final chapters. With the connivance of what is sometimes laughably
referred to as the "world community"--notably the US and EU, Israel is
deliberately starving Palestinians into submission as the reward for
having democratically elected the party of their choice. Whole
communities are on the edge of starvation, cut off by Israel from food
and medicines. The World Bank predicts a poverty rate of over 67 percent
later this year. A UN Report issued in Geneva on May 30 says that four
out of 10 Palestinians in the territories live under the official
poverty line of less than $2.10 a day. The ILO estimates the jobless
rate to be 40.7 percent of the Palestinian labor force.

The end of the story? I'd say the basic strategy is what it was in 1948:
population transfer, to be achieved by making life so awful for
Palestinians that most of them will depart, leaving a few bankrupt
ghettoes behind as memorials to all those foolish hopes of a sovereign
Palestinian state.

Footnote: A shorter version of this column ran in the print edition of
The Nation that went to press last Wednesday


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