[Marxism] A defeated policy, not a defeated people

["Nasir Khan" <nasir.khan@xxxxxxx>]

Republished: http://sudhan.wordpress.com and http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com
 
A defeated policy, not a defeated people
Ali Abunimah | Electric Intifada, March 7, 2008

Compared with the international silence that surrounded Israel's recent 
massacres of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Gaza Strip, condemnation and 
condolences for the victims of the shooting attack that killed eight students 
at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem has been swift. 

"I have just spoken with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert to extend my 
deepest condolences to the victims, their families, and to the people of 
Israel," US President George W. Bush said. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon 
added his "condemnation" and "condolences," as did EU High Representative 
Javier Solana.

The day before the Jerusalem attack, Amira Abu 'Aser was buried in Gaza. She 
had lived just 20 days on this earth before being shot in the head by Israeli 
occupation forces who attacked the house of friends she and her family were 
visiting. Needless to say, she had not been firing rockets at Sderot when she 
was killed. One of the house's inhabitants was found the next day, shot dead 
and his head crushed by an army jeep, an apparent victim of an extrajudicial 
murder by Israeli forces.

But confirming their status in the eyes of the "international community" as 
less than complete human beings, neither Amira's killing, nor any of the dozens 
of Palestinian civilian victims of Israel's onslaught in Gaza have merited 
condemnation or condolences.

The fallacy that lies behind the differential concern for the lives of innocent 
Israelis and Palestinians is that the massacre in Jerusalem and the massacres 
in Gaza can be separated. Israeli deaths are "terrorism," while Palestinian 
deaths are merely an unfortunate consequence of the fight against "terrorism." 
But the two are intricately linked, and what happened in Jerusalem is a direct 
consequence of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for decades.

Let me be clear that the killing of civilians, Israeli or Palestinian, is 
wrong, repugnant, and cannot bring this one-hundred-year war caused by the 
Zionist colonization of Palestine to an end. There will be an Israeli 
propaganda effort -- as always -- to present Palestinian violence as being 
simply motivated by hatred, and divorced from the context of brutal occupation 
that Palestinians live under. What greater proof could you need than an attack 
on religious students, devoting their life to the study of the Torah?

We cannot expect much analysis in the media of why the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva 
might have been chosen as a target. Was it mere coincidence that the school, 
named for Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and led after his death by his son Rabbi 
Zvi Yehuda Kook, is the ideological cradle of the militant, Jewish supremacist 
settler movement Gush Emunim?

Unlike other sects in Israel which sought exemption of their students from 
military service, Gush Emunim encouraged its followers to join the army and 
become the armed wing of religious nationalist Zionism. Gush Emunim settlers, 
many of them, like Moshe Levinger, graduates of Mercaz HaRav, founded the most 
extreme and racist settlements in the Occupied West Bank, including the 
notorious colonies in and near Hebron whose inhabitants have made life 
miserable for Palestinians in the city and forced many of them out of their 
homes. It is the militant settlers of Gush Emunim who still honor Baruch 
Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in February 1994. It is in 
Hebron that the Gush Emunim settlers spray "Arabs to the gas chambers" on 
Palestinian houses. 

It is possible that the Mercaz HaRav gunman did not know or care about any of 
this, that any target he could identify as Israeli would have satisfied his 
desire to exact revenge.

In 2002, Israeli army chief Moshe Yaalon declared that "the Palestinians must 
be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they 
are a defeated people." This would be achieved by the massive and constant 
application of force until they got the message. The same philosophy was 
elaborated in 2004 by Professor Arnon Soffer, one of the architects, with 
former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, of the 2005 Gaza "disengagement." 

Soffer, an avid supporter of turning Gaza into a hermetically-sealed pen for 
unwanted Palestinians, explained that if Palestinians fire a single rocket over 
the fence into Israel, "we will fire 10 in response. And women and children 
will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, 
Palestinian mothers won't allow their husbands to shoot Qassams [rockets], 
because they will know what's waiting for them."

Soffer predicted that in a few years' time, "when 2.5 million people live in a 
closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become 
even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane 
fundamentalist Islam." With Palestinians closed in, "The pressure at the border 
will be awful," Soffer predicted. "It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we 
want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every 
day."

To be fair, Soffer did display a human side: "The only thing that concerns me 
is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing 
will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings" 
("It's the demography, stupid," The Jerusalem Post, 21 May 2004).

For decades Israel has been exercizing with ever-escalating brutality this 
deliberate strategy to crush through force and starvation a civilian population 
in rebellion against colonial rule. To Israel's vexation, the Palestinians are 
not playing their part. After sixty years of expulsions, massacres, 
assassinations of their leaders, colonization, torture, and mass imprisonment, 
the Palestinians have utterly failed to understand that they are a "defeated 
people."

The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank endure 
unprecedented oppression by the Israeli army and settlers without resorting to 
violence in response, but they maintain an inextinguishable determination to 
endure until they regain their rights. If the methods the Palestinian 
resistance has sometimes used are reprehensible, they have also been typical 
for anti-colonial resistance movements throughout time, as William Polk shows 
in his book Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism and Guerilla 
War from the American Revolution to Iraq, and Robert Pape demonstrated through 
his study of suicide bombing in Dying to Win.

Is it not time for the rest of the world to step in and force Israel at last to 
understand the same thing, so that the senseless bloodshed can finally stop and 
all the people of the country -- Israelis and Palestinians -- can begin to 
imagine a future other than an endless parade of funerals?

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A 
Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
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