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Why Israel won't survive

Ali Abunimah | 19.01.2009 23:49 | Analysis | Anti-racism | Palestine | Sheffield | World

The merciless Israeli bombardment of Gaza has stopped -- for now -- but the death toll keeps rising as more bodies are pulled from carpet- bombed neighborhoods.

What Israel perpetrated in Gaza, starting at 11:30am on 27 December 2008, will remain forever engraved in history and memory. Tel al-Hawa, Hayy al-Zeitoun, Khuzaa and other sites of Israeli massacres will join a long mournful list that includes Deir Yasin, Qibya, Kufr Qasim, Sabra and Shatila, Qana, and Jenin.

Once again, Israel demonstrated that it possesses the power and the lack of moral restraint necessary to commit atrocities against a population of destitute refugees it has caged and starved.

The dehumanization and demonization of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims has escalated to the point where Israel can with full self- righteousness bomb their homes, places of worship, schools, universities, factories, fishing boats, police stations -- in short everything that sustains civilized and orderly life -- and claim it is conducting a war against terrorism.

Yet paradoxically, it is Israel as a Zionist state, not Palestine or the Palestinian people, that cannot survive this attempted genocide.

Israel's "war" was not about rockets -- they served the same role in its narrative as the non-existent weapons of mass destruction did as the pretext for the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Israel's real goals were to restore its "deterrence" fatally damaged after its 2006 defeat in Lebanon (translation: its ability to massacre and terrorize entire populations into submission) and to destroy any Palestinian resistance to total Israeli-Jewish control over historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

With Hamas and other resistance factions removed or fatally weakened, Israel hoped the way would be clear to sign a "peace" deal with chief Palestinian collaborator Mahmoud Abbas to manage Palestinians on Israel's behalf until they could be forced out once and for all.

The US-backed "moderate" dictatorships and absolute monarchies led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia supported the Israeli plan hoping to demonstrate to their own people that resistance -- whether against Israel or their own bankrupt regimes -- was futile.

To win, Israel had to break Palestinian resistance. It failed. On the contrary, it galvanized and unified Palestinians like never before. All factions united and fought heroically for 23 days. According to well-informed and credible sources Israel did little harm to the modest but determined military capacity of the resistance. So instead Israel did what it does best: it massacred civilians in the hope that the population would turn against those fighting the occupier.

Israel not only unified the resistance factions in Gaza; its brutality rallied all Palestinians and Arabs.

It is often claimed that Arab regimes whip up anti-Israel anger to distract their populations from their own failings. Actually, Israel, the US and subservient Arab regimes tried everything -- especially demonizing Iran and inciting sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims -- to distract their populations from Palestine.

All this failed as millions of people across the region marched in support of Palestinian resistance, and the Arab regimes who hoped to benefit from the slaughter in Gaza have been exposed as partners in the Israeli atrocities. In popular esteem, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions earned their place alongside Hizballah as effective bulwarks against Israeli and Western colonialism.

If there was ever a moment when the peoples of the region would accept Israel as a Zionist state in their midst, that has passed forever.

But anyone surveying the catastrophe in Gaza -- the mass destruction, the death toll of more than 100 Palestinians for every Israeli, the thousands of sadistic injuries -- would surely conclude that Palestinians could never overcome Israel and resistance is a delusion at best.

True, in terms of ability to murder and destroy, Israel is unmatched. But Israel's problem is not, as its propaganda insists, "terrorism" to be defeated by sufficient application of high explosives. Its problem is legitimacy, or rather a profound and irreversible lack of it. Israel simply cannot bomb its way to legitimacy.

Israel was founded as a "Jewish state" through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's non-Jewish majority Arab population. It has been maintained in existence only through Western support and constant use of violence to prevent the surviving indigenous population from exercising political rights within the country, or returning from forced exile.

Despite this, today, 50 percent of the people living under Israeli rule in historic Palestine (Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip) are Palestinians, not Jews. And their numbers are growing rapidly. Like Nationalists in Northern Ireland or non-whites in South Africa, Palestinians will never recognize the "right" of a settler-colonial society to maintain an ethnocractic state at their expense through violence, repression and racism.

For years, the goal of the so-called peace process was to normalize Israel as a "Jewish state" and gain Palestinians' blessing for their own dispossession and subjugation. When this failed, Israel tried "disengagement" in Gaza -- essentially a ruse to convince the rest of the world that the 1.5 million Palestinians caged in there should no longer be counted as part of the population. They were in Israel's definition a "hostile entity."

In his notorious May 2004 interview with The Jerusalem Post, Arnon Soffer, an architect of the 2005 disengagement explained that the approach "doesn't guarantee 'peace,' it guarantees a Jewish- Zionist state with an overwhelming majority of Jews." Soffer predicted that in the future "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. The pressure at the border will be awful."

He was unambiguous about what Israel would have to do to maintain this status quo: "If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day." Soffer hoped that eventually, Palestinians would give up and leave Gaza altogether.

Through their resistance, steadfastness and sacrifice, Palestinians in Gaza have defeated this policy and reasserted that they are an inseparable part of Palestine, its people, its history and its future.

Israel is not the first settler-colonial entity to find itself in this position. When F.W. de Klerk, South Africa's last apartheid president, came to office in 1989, his generals calculated that solely with the overwhelming military force at their disposal, they could keep the regime in power for at least a decade. The casualties, however, would have run into hundreds of thousands, and South Africa would face ever greater isolation. Confronted with this reality, de Klerk took the decision to begin an orderly dismantling of apartheid.

What choice will Israel make? In the absence of any political and moral legitimacy the only arguments it has left are bullets and bombs. Left to its own devices Israel will certainly keep trying -- as it has for sixty years -- to massacre Palestinians into submission. Israel's achievement has been to make South Africa's apartheid leaders look wise, restrained and humane by comparison.

But what prevented South Africa's white supremacist government from escalating their own violence to Israeli levels of cruelty and audacity was not that they had greater scruples than the Zionist regime. It was recognition that they alone could not stand against a global anti-apartheid movement that was in solidarity with the internal resistance.

Israel's "military deterrent" has now been repeatedly discredited as a means to force Palestinians and other Arabs to accept Zionist supremacy as inevitable and permanent. Now, the other pillar of Israeli power -- Western support and complicity -- is starting to crack. We must do all we can to push it over.

Israel began its massacres with full support from its Western "friends." Then something amazing happened. Despite the official statements of support, despite the media censorship, despite the slick Israeli hasbara (propaganda) campaign, there was a massive, unprecedented public mobilization in Europe and even in North America expressing outrage and disgust.

Gaza will likely be seen as the turning point when Israeli propaganda lost its power to mystify, silence and intimidate as it has for so long. Even the Nazi Holocaust, long deployed by Zionists to silence Israel's critics, is becoming a liability; once unimaginable comparisons are now routinely heard. Jewish and Palestinian academics likened Israel's actions in Gaza to the Nazi massacre in the Warsaw Ghetto. A Vatican cardinal referred to Gaza as a "giant concentration camp." UK Member of Parliament Gerald Kaufman, once a staunch Zionist, told the House of Commons, "My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow, [Poland]. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed." Kaufman continued, "my grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza." He denounced the Israeli military spokesperson's justifications as the words "of a Nazi."

It wasn't only such statements, but the enormous demonstrations, the nonviolent direct actions, and the unprecedented expressions of support for boycott, divestment and sanctions from major trade unions in Italy, Canada and New Zealand. An all-party group of city councillors in Birmingham, Europe's second largest municipal government, urged the UK government to follow suit. Salma Yaqoub of the RESPECT Party explained that "One of the factors that helped bring an end to the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa was international pressure for economic, sporting and cultural boycotts. It is time that Israel started to feel similar pressure from world opinion."

Israel, its true nature as failed, brutal colonial project laid bare in Gaza, is extremely vulnerable to such a campaign. Little noticed amidst the carnage in Gaza, Israel took another momentous step towards formal apartheid when the Knesset elections committee voted to ban Arab parties from participating in upcoming elections. Zionism, an ideology of racial supremacy, extremism and hate, is a dying project, in retreat and failing to find new recruits. With enough pressure, and relatively quickly, Israelis too would likely produce their own de Klerk ready to negotiate a way out. Every new massacre makes it harder, but a de-zionized, decolonized, reintegrated Palestine affording equal rights to all who live in it, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and return for refugees is not a utopian dream.

It is within reach, in our lifetimes. But it is far from inevitable. We can be sure that Western and Arab governments will continue to support Israeli apartheid and Palestinian collaboration under the guise of the "peace process" unless decisively challenged. Israeli massacres will continue and escalate until the nightmare of an Israeli- style "peace" -- apartheid and further ethnic cleansing -- is fulfilled.

The mobilizations of the past three weeks showed that a different world is possible and within our grasp if we support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Although they will never get to see it, that world would be a fitting memorial for all of Israel's victims.

Ali Abunimah
- Homepage: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10215.shtml

Comments

Hide the following 7 comments

what has hamas to do with anti-racism?

20.01.2009 00:42

hamas doesnt seem to be such a progressive political option. they want a state run by bearded old men and i dont understand what this has to do with progressive politics or anti-racism. it is an anti-semitic and nationalist sect thats would like to see us all go back to the middle ages.

bad religion


Bad Religion

20.01.2009 07:17

Must have missed it, but where exactly did the poster say Hamas were progressive, or that they should be in charge?

enlighten me


"sacrifice"?

20.01.2009 09:36


"Through their resistance, steadfastness and sacrifice, Palestinians in Gaza have defeated this policy and reasserted that they are an inseparable part of Palestine, its people, its history and its future."

But you see "Palestinians" in Gaza haven't been resisting - according to all accounts they've been fleeing their homes and not taking on the IDF. This is perfectly sensible, as it would have meant certain death, as opposed to a high risk of death. So Hamas' calls for more martyrdom were largely ignored by the look of it. Cheerleading the slaughter on in any way ("sacrifice"), whoever you back, is pretty distasteful.

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7836205.stm

"The BBC's Christian Fraser, in Rafah on the Gaza-Egypt border, says many of the 40,000 people who fled the town during the conflict, were returning to pick through the ruins of their homes on Sunday..."

AFer
- Homepage: http://www.libcom.org/library/%E2%80%9Csometimes-we-shoot-same-way%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-attack-gaza-internationalism-left


Are they perhaps by chance related?

20.01.2009 10:12

"There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Golda Meir - Sunday Times, 1969-06-15

"But you see "Palestinians" in Gaza haven't been resisting"
AFer 2009 Indymedia UK

If the AF had any credibility whatsoever after this debacle, I might have bothered to ask how exactly they think a civilian population might resist air bombardment. But I no longer have any desitre to hear their putrid thoughts on any subject.


No to Golda Meir - No to AF


"Palestinians" in Gaza haven't been resisting?

20.01.2009 10:52

AF'ers -- come on, get a grip -- Existence is Resistance in Gaza -- this is something that one of the founders of electronicintifada.net is clearly aware of, for example:

Existence is Resistance
Anna Baltzer writing from Nablus, occupied Palestine, Live from Palestine, 21 March 2007
 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6711.shtml

No the the AF no the the AWL


Eh?

20.01.2009 12:44

The point is very clear - "Hamas" and "the Palestinians" are not the same thing. Hamas may have been "resisting" by lobbing mortars and rockets at arab and jewish civilians on the other side of the border, but the ordinary Palestinian population having been doing the sensible thing of staying alive and not following Hamas' calls for more martyrdom.

What any of this has to do with Golda Meir is beyond me.

AFer


Resistance, survival and anarchy

20.01.2009 23:59

"Yet paradoxically, it is Israel as a Zionist state, not Palestine or the Palestinian people, that cannot survive this attempted genocide."
What happens why a state with two hundred nuclear weapons faces it's own extinction ?

"Israel simply cannot bomb its way to legitimacy."
Legitimacy simply will not bomb its way to Israel. The courts don't have an airforce anymore than the Palestinians do. The ICC just ruled that although the use of white phosphorus as in Gaza is a war crime that it was outwith the jurisdiction of the ICC because Israel hadn't signed up. The ICC could apply standard international law to bring Israel to trial but then they would have to start charging US and UK soldiers and politicians for war crimes, Russians and French and Chinese too for that matter. They won't do that - the great states don't pay more than lip service to the ICC or the ICJ for that matter. International law only applies to countries that one of the security council countries is prepared to bomb. I can't see any Hamas people being charged either as I doubt the Gazans would allow that if no Israelis were being charged. Israeli courts rarely even censure Israeli war criminals. What may happen is national sentences leading to the inability of the Israeli war criminals overseas travel without fear of arrest.

"The mobilizations of the past three weeks showed that a different world is possible and within our grasp if we support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement."

I think any boycott of Israel should also include a boycott of Egypt . Israeli sports teams should be included as with apartheid South Africa and until they are they should be targetted. From a local perspective seems to be as important how linked Gaza and arms manufacturers direct action. It was an obvious Israeli election move that has backfired politically as Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud are up in the polls.

"Hamas" and "the Palestinians" are not the same thing."
What is clear is Hamas and the Palestinian resistance aren't the same thing

"But you see "Palestinians" in Gaza haven't been resisting - according to all accounts they've been fleeing their homes and not taking on the IDF." - AFer


"“We were attacked by an army. But we are not an army, we have no way to defend ourselves,” said his brother. “We will go back to our home. We are not political but we will go on with Hamas. This is how it is.” [1]

Some Palestinians did die in combat with the Israelis, although it was obviously fleeing civilians who suffered the vast majority of the invading 'Defence' force. The term Palestinian resistance should not be equated to Hamas solely excepy in terms of civil servants. Some of these fighters will have died in missile,drone or airstikes on their homes but many of these Palestinians died fighting.
"Hamas... lost 48 fighters....Islamic Jihad, 34; People's Resistance Committees, 15; and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, 13.
Police forces that are controlled by the Islamists' government but are not formally part of Hamas have lost 162. " [2]

Across what remained of a road, a grocer named Muhammad Sadallah, his tearful daughter and three sons, were starting to clear the wreckage from their house, which had gaping shell-holes in the walls. He had returned to find the dismembered bodies of three Hamas fighters inside, with blood and flesh spattered on the walls. He found a leg with a boot on it. “I kissed the boot,” he said. “These martyrs had been trying to avenge the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people.” [3]

The idea that anarchy is a worthy and perhaps even necessary aim for the Holy Land is an admirable idea but it isn't necessary condition for peace - a two-state solution could stay peaceful. It will take you longer to reach a no-state solution than is acceptable for the Palestinians. The idea that you are going to persuade these two peoples to drop all religion, give any any territorial claims to land they have fought and died over for this length of time, and everyone would integrate well, that is naive and distracting from the real issues this massacre raises, you haven't managed a no state solution from the calm of the UK. Relief and justice and acts of protest/prevention are more urgent aims than making political pronouncements about the resistance.

[1]  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5549100.ece
[2]  http://en.rian.ru/world/20090119/119701880.html
[3]  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5549022.ece

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