[dead israeli tank in Lebanon 2006]
Why Israel won't survive
Ali Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada
19 January 2009
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.
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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