Article by Said

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

What Israel has done


by Edward Said

Despite Israel's effort to restrict coverage of its extraordinarily
destructive invasion of the West Bank's Palestinian towns and refugee camps,
information and images have nevertheless seeped through. The Internet has
provided hundreds of verbal as well as pictorial eyewitness reports, as has
Arab and European TV coverage, most of it unavailable or blocked or spun out
of existence from the mainstream US media. That evidence provides stunning
proof of what Israel's campaign has actually (has always) been about: the
irreversible conquest of Palestinian land and society. The official line
(which the US, along with nearly every American media commentator has
basically supported) is that Israel has been defending itself by retaliating
for the suicide bombings that have undermined its security and even
threatened its existence. That claim has gained the status of an absolute
truth moderated neither by what Israel has done nor by what in fact has been
done to it.

Plucking out the terrorist network, destroying the terrorist infrastructure,
attacking terrorist nests (note the total dehumanisation involved in every
one of these phrases): the words are repeated so often and so unthinkingly
that they have therefore given Israel the right to do what it has wanted to
do, which in effect is to destroy Palestinian civil life with as much
damage, as much sheer wanton destruction, killing, humiliation, vandalism,
purposeless but overwhelming technological violence as possible. No other
state on earth could have done what Israel has done with as much approbation
and support as the US has given it. None has been more intransigent and
destructive, less out of touch with its own realities, than Israel.

There are signs, however, that the amazing, not to say grotesque, nature of
these claims (its "fight for existence") is slowly being eroded by the harsh
and nearly unimaginable devastation wrought by the Jewish state and its
homicidal prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Take this front-page report,
"Attacks Turn Palestinian Plans Into Bent Metal and Piles of Dust" by the
New York Times's Serge Schmemann (no Palestinian propagandist) on 11 April:
"There is no way to assess the full extent of the damage to the cities and
towns -- Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Nablus, and Jenin -- while
they remain under a tight siege, with patrols and snipers firing in the
streets. But it is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of
any future Palestinian state -- roads, schools, electricity pylons, water
pipes, telephone lines -- has been devastated." By what inhuman calculus did
Israel's army, using 50 tanks, 250 missile strikes a day, and dozens of F-16
sorties, besiege Jenin's refugee camp for over a week, a one square
kilometre patch of shacks housing 15,000 refugees and a few dozen men armed
with automatic rifles and with no defences whatever, no leaders, no
missiles, no tanks, nothing, and call it a response to terrorist violence
and the threat to Israel's survival? There are reported to be hundreds
buried in the rubble Israeli bulldozers are now trying to heap over the
camp's ruins.

Are Palestinian civilians, men, women, children, no more than rats or
cockroaches that can be killed and attacked in the thousands without so much
as a word of compassion or in their defence? And what about the capture of
thousands of Palestinian men who have been taken off by Israeli soldiers
without a trace, the destitution and homelessness of so many ordinary people
trying to survive in the ruins created by Israeli bulldozers all over the
West Bank, the siege that has now gone on for months and months, the cutting
off of electricity and water in all Palestinian towns, the long days of
total curfew, the shortage of food and medicine, the wounded who have bled
to death, the systematic attacks on ambulances and aid workers that even the
mild-mannered Kofi Annan has decried as outrageous? Those actions will not
be pushed so easily into the memory hole. Its friends must ask Israel how
its suicidal policies can possibly gain it peace, acceptance and security.

A monstrous transformation of an entire people by the most formidable and
feared propaganda machine in the world into little more than "militants" and
"terrorists" has allowed not just Israel's military but its fleet of writers
and defenders to efface a terrible history of suffering and abuse in order
to destroy the civil existence of the Palestinian people with impunity. Gone
from public memory are the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and
the creation of a dispossessed people; the conquest of the West Bank and
Gaza and their military occupation since 1967; the invasion of 1982 with its
17,500 Lebanese and Palestinian dead and the Sabra and Shatila massacres;
the continuous assault on Palestinian schools, refugee camps, hospitals,
civil installations of every kind. What anti-terrorist purpose is served by
destroying the building and then removing the records of the Ministry of
Education, the Ramallah Municipality, the Central Bureau of Statistics,
various institutes specialising in civil rights, health and economic
development, hospitals, radio and television stations? Is it not clear that
Sharon is bent not only on "breaking" the Palestinians, but on trying to
eliminate them as a people with national institutions?

In such a context of disparity and asymmetrical power, it seems deranged to
keep asking the Palestinians, who have neither army, nor air force, nor
tanks, nor defences of any kind, nor functioning leadership, to "renounce"
violence, and to require no comparable limitation on Israel's actions. Even
the matter of suicide bombers, which I have always opposed, cannot be
examined from a view point that permits a hidden racist standard to value
Israeli lives over the many more Palestinian lives that have been lost,
maimed, distorted and foreshortened by long- standing Israeli military
occupation, and the systematic barbarity openly used by Sharon against
Palestinians from the beginning of his career in the 1950s until now.

There can be no conceivable peace, in my opinion, that does not tackle the
real issue: Israel's utter refusal to accept the sovereign existence of a
Palestinian people that is entitled to rights over what Sharon and most of
the people supporting him consider exclusively to be the land of Greater
Israel, i.e. the West Bank and Gaza. A profile of Sharon in the 6-7 April
issue of the Financial Times concluded with this extremely telling extract
from his autobiography, which the FT prefaced with "he has written with
pride of his parents' belief that Jews and Arabs could live side by side."
Then the relevant quote from Sharon's book: "But they believed without
question that only they had rights over the land. And no one was going to
force them out, regardless of terror or anything else. When the land belongs
to you physically... that is when you have power, not just physical power
but spiritual power."

In l988, the PLO made the concession that the partition of historical
Palestine into two states would be acceptable. This was reaffirmed on
numerous occasions and certainly again in the Oslo documents. But only the
Palestinians explicitly recognised the notion of partition. Israel never
has. This is why there are now over 170 settlements on Palestinian lands,
why a 300-mile network of roads connecting them to each other and totally
impeding Palestinian movement exists (according to Jeff Halper of the
Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, it has cost $3 billion and has
been funded by the US), why no Israeli prime minister, from Rabin on, has
ever conceded any real Palestinian sovereignty to the Palestinians, and why
of course the settlements have increased on an annual basis. The merest
glance at a recent map of the territories reveals what Israel has been doing
throughout the peace process, and what the consequent geographical
discontinuity and shrinkage in Palestinian life has been. In effect, then,
Israel considers itself and the Jewish people to own the land of Israel in
its entirety: there are land ownership laws in Israel itself guaranteeing
this, but on the West Bank and Gaza the network of settlements, roads, and
no concessions whatever on sovereign land rights to the Palestinians serve
the same function.

What boggles the mind is that no official -- US, Palestinian, Arab, UN,
European, or anyone else -- has challenged Israel on this point, which has
been threaded through all of the Oslo documents, procedures and agreements.
That is why, of course, after nearly 10 years of "peace negotiations,"
Israel still controls the West Bank and Gaza. They are more directly
controlled (owned?) by over 1,000 Israeli tanks and thousands of soldiers
today, but the underlying principle is the same. No Israeli leader (and
certainly not Sharon and his Land of Israel supporters who are the majority
in his government) has either officially recognised the occupied territories
as occupied territories or gone on to recognise that Palestinians could or
might theoretically have sovereign rights -- that is, without Israeli
control over borders, water, air, security on what most of the world
considers Palestinian land. So to speak about the "vision" of a Palestinian
state, as has become fashionable, is mere vision alas, unless the question
of land ownership and sovereignty is openly and officially conceded by the
Israeli government. No Israeli government ever has made this concession and,
if I am right, none will in the near future. It needs to be remembered that
Israel is the only state in the world today that has never had
internationally declared borders; the only state not the state of its
citizens but of the whole Jewish people; the only state where over 90 per
cent of the land is held in trust for the exclusive use of the Jewish
people. That it is also the only state in the world never to have recognised
any of the main provisions of international law (as argued recently in these
pages by Richard Falk) suggests the depth and structural knottiness of the
absolute rejectionism that Palestinians have had to face.

This is why I have been sceptical about discussions and meetings about
peace, which is a lovely word but in the present context simply means that
Palestinians will have to stop resisting Israeli control over their land. It
is among the many deficiencies of Arafat's terrible leadership (to say
nothing of the even more lamentable Arab leaders in general) that he never
made the decade-long Oslo negotiations focus on land ownership, and thus
never put the onus on Israel to declare itself constitutively willing to
give up title to Palestinian land; nor did he ever ask that Israel be
required to deal with any of its responsibility for the sufferings of his
people. Now I worry that he may simply be trying to save himself again,
whereas what we really need are international monitors to protect us, as
well as elections to assure a real political future for the Palestinian
people.

The profound question facing Israel and its people is this: is it willing
juridically to assume the rights and obligations of being a country like any
other, and forswear the kind of impossible land ownership assertions for
which Sharon and his parents and his soldiers have been fighting since day
one? In 1948 Palestinians lost 78 per cent of Palestine. In 1967 they lost
the last 22 per cent, both times to Israel. Now the international community
must lay upon Israel the obligation to accept the principle of real, as
opposed to fictional, partition, and to accept the principle of limiting
Israel's untenable extra-territorial claims, those absurd Biblically-based
pretensions, and laws that have so far allowed it to override another people
completely. Why is that kind of fundamentalism tolerated unquestioningly?
But so far all we hear is that Palestinians must give up violence and
condemn terror. Is nothing substantive ever demanded of Israel? Can it go on
doing what it has without a thought for the consequences? That is the real
question of its existence: whether it can exist as a state like all others,
or must always be above the constraints and duties of all other states in
the world today. The record is not reassuring.

Source:

by courtesy & © 2002 Al-Ahram weekly & Edward Said