From: Rewand Nakad <rewandn@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: ews1@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [BRC-NEWS] Occupation is the Atrocity
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 06:04:03 -0400 (EDT)
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/547/op2.htm
Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo)
16-22 August 2001 [Issue No. 547]
[What the Palestinians need now, writes Edward Said, is a
united leadership that takes positions and plans mass
actions designed not to return to Oslo but to press on with
resistance and liberation.]
Occupation is the Atrocity
By Edward Said <ews1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
In the United States, where Israel has its main political
base and from which it has received over $92 billion in aid
since 1967, the terrible human cost of Thursday's Jerusalem
restaurant bombing and Monday's Haifa disaster settles
quickly into a familiar explanatory framework. 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 has 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 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 6,000th 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
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 fantastically cruel confinement of
1.3 million people jammed like so many human sardines into
the Gaza strip, plus the nearly two 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 used against Palestinians
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 as thieves, snakes, cockroaches
and 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 $2 a day); they cannot travel from one
place to the next; they must endure long lines at Israeli
checkpoints that 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;
2,000 of their houses demolished; acres of their land either
destroyed or expropriated for military settlement purposes.
Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began late last September, 609
Palestinians have been killed (four times more than Israeli
fatalities) and 15,000 wounded (a dozen times more than on
the other side). Regular Israeli army assassinations have
picked off alleged terrorists at will, most of the time
killing innocents like so many flies. Last week, 14
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 -- 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 the Palestinians 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
mid-'80s 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 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 "Judaised" 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 a couple of weeks after Ariel
Sharon's gratuitously arrogant visit to Jerusalem's Haram
Al-Sharif on 28 September, with 1,000 soldiers and guards
supplied by Prime Minister Barak, Israel was condemned for
this action by a unanimous Security Council resolution.
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 30 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 dehumanise
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
terrorise 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
"victimisation," constructed with such premeditated care and
evil intent for months now. Language has been sundered from
reality. Pity not the inept Arab governments who can and
will do nothing to stop Israel: pity the people who bear the
wounds in their flesh and the 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 coloniser is in the
grip of "false and selfish pre- occupations 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 defense of a false position." All
colonisers 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 and Company 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? What we need
is a unified leadership of people who are on the ground, who
are actually doing the resisting, who are really with and of
their people, not the fat, cigar-chomping bureaucrats who
want their business deals preserved and their VIP passes
renewed, and who have lost all trace of decency or
credibility. A united leadership that takes positions and
plans mass actions designed not to return to Oslo (can you
believe the folly of that idea?) but to press on with
resistance and liberation, instead of confusing people with
talk of negotiations and the stupid Mitchell Plan.
Arafat is finished: why don't we admit that he can neither
lead, nor plan, nor do anything that makes any difference
except to him and his Oslo cronies who have benefited
materially from their people's misery? All the polls show
that his presence blocks whatever forward movement might be
possible. We need a united leadership to make decisions, not
simply to grovel before the Pope and the moronic George W
Bush, even as the Israelis are killing his heroic people
with impunity. A leader must lead the resistance, reflect
the realities on the ground, respond to his people's needs,
plan, think, and expose himself to the same dangers and
difficulties that everyone experiences. The struggle for
liberation from Israeli occupation is where every
Palestinian worth anything now stands: Oslo cannot be
restored or re-packaged as Arafat and Company might desire.
It's over for them and the sooner they pack and get out, the
better for everyone.
Copyright (c) 2001 Al-Ahram Weekly. All Rights Reserved.
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