English Al-Jazeera
When George Bush, the US president, first entered the White
House as the commander-in-chief in 2001, Palestinians were
being killed in the al-Aqsa intifada.
Eight years later, as Bush prepares to leave office, Israel
is carrying out one of the largest massacres in its 60-year
occupation of Palestine.
The US, then and now, strongly backs Israel's offensive,
justifying it as being, in fact, defensive.
An Israeli general recently threatened to use military
force to set Gaza back decades in much the same language
used before the invasion of Lebanon in 2006.
But despite the Israeli devastation of Lebanon, Hezbollah
emerged victorious and the Shia resistance and social
movement emerged a hero to the Arab world.
Israel is about to make the same mistake with Hamas.
Its notion of a truce with Hamas was that the Palestinians
would quietly accept the siege. Israel would deny them the
basic means of survival, let alone the basic means to
create a functioning society.
If the Palestinians attempted to resist, they would be
crushed.
As in Lebanon, Israel should have learned years ago that
military might cannot crush Palestinian resistance
movements.
Media matters
While the Israeli military again bombs the starving and
imprisoned population of 1.5 million Gazans, the world
watches their plight live as Western media scrambles to
explain and, in some cases, justify the ongoing carnage.
Even some Arab outlets have attempted to equate Palestinian
resistance - and homemade rockets - with the might of the
Israeli military machine.
However, none of this is a surprise; the Israelis just
concluded a global public relations campaign to gather
support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration
of some Arab states.
An American periodical once asked me to contribute to a
discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against
civilians could ever be justified.
My answer was that an American journal should not be asking
whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is
a question for the weak, such as the Native Americans 150
years ago, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Palestinians
today, to answer.
Terrorism is a normative term which is used to describe
what the 'other' does, not what 'we' do.
Powerful nations such as Israel, the US, Russia or China
will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism.
However, they fail to acknowledge as acts of terror the
destruction of Chechnya, the slow slaughter of the
remaining Palestinians, the repression of Tibetans, and the
US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Normative rules and what is legal and permissible are
determined by the powerful. They formulate the concept of
terrorism in normative terms and make it appear as if a
neutral court derived such definitions instead of the
oppressors.
For the weak to resist becomes illegal by definition.
This excessive use of legal jargon actually undermines the
fundamentals of what is truly legal and diminishes the
credibility of international institutions such as the UN.
The law becomes the enemy of those who struggle.
It becomes apparent that the powerful - those who make the
rules -insist on legality merely to preserve the power
relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation
and colonialism.
Desperate resistance
Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them
to claim land and dispossess the natives, be they
indigenous populations in North America or Palestinians in
what are today Israel and the Occupied Palestinian
Territories.
Attacking civilians, then, becomes the last, most desperate
and basic method of resistance in the face of overwhelming
odds and imminent eradication.
The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the
expectation that such violence will destroy or defeat
Israel.
When the native population understands that there is an
irreversible dynamic stripping them of their land and
identity with the support of an overwhelming power then
they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance
they can muster.
PLO, then Hamas
In 1948, when Israel was being established as a new state,
750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and
expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages
were destroyed.
Their lands were settled by colonists who even today deny
their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the
remaining natives and the national liberation movements the
Palestinians established around the world.
Israel, its allies in the West and some regional Arab
countries have managed to corrupt the leadership of the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and entice them
with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for
their people.
This eventually neutralised and transformed the PLO into a
liberation movement which collaborates with the occupier.
The focus then shifted to Hamas, a movement which won
legislative elections nearly three years ago and thus
became a target for the Israelis.
By enforcing an embargo and allowing Israel's siege of
Gaza, the world has effectively told the Palestinians that
they are unfit for democracy.
Isolation and radicalisation
By informing them that they are not free to choose the
leaders they trust but must conform to the requirements set
in place by others, the world community is only further
isolating and radicalising the Palestinians.
This radicalisation has increased several-fold as Israel
pounds Palestinian infrastructure, saying it is solely
targeting Hamas targets.
This is not true, however; Israeli forces have targeted
Palestinian police forces, killing some such as Tawfiq
Jaber, the chief of police - a former PLO official who
stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza.
With the vestiges of security and order debilitated in
successive Israeli military campaigns, chaos will prevail
in Gaza. If Hamas is weakened it will not be a more
moderate Palestinian group which will take the helm.
It will not be the weakened, corrupted and unpopular Fatah,
but a more extreme group who have been persuaded through
blockades and incessant Israeli attacks that compromise and
negotiations with Tel Aviv are ill-fated.
Failed policies
In the past 60 years, Israeli leaders have toed the line
that 'the only language Arabs understand is force'.
However, it is Israel that has routinely used violence to
solve problems. During the 2002 Arab Summit in Beirut, the
Arab League collectively offered Israel a framework to end
the bloodshed and move towards a comprehensive regional
peace deal. Israel responded by invading Jenin and killing
hundreds.
Last month, Fatah launched a media campaign to revive the
2002 peace initiative, but this, too, has been answered
with Israel's extreme brutality.
A Zionist Israel is no longer a viable long-term project.
Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation
barriers have long since made a two-state solution
impossible.
There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In
coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with a
fundamental question - whether to ensure the peaceful
transition towards an egalitarian society in which
Palestinians are given the same rights as Jews.
The alternative in a few years will become untenable.
History has shown that colonialism has only worked when
most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as
in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee.
Eventually the Palestinians will not be willing to
compromise and accept one state for both people, and the
Jewish colonists will be forced to leave.
Restoring Palestine
Despite its lack of initiative for the Middle East peace
process, the White House has in recent years been unable to
dislodge the occupation of Palestine as the main motive for
every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond.
It is the common denominator by which Arab populist
policies are shaped. Invading Iraq or offering economic
benefits to frontline states will not make the Palestinian
issue go away.
During my travels and research, I have spoken with
jihadists in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia and
elsewhere; they all mentioned the Palestinian struggle as
one of their motivations.
The US will pay a price for backing Israel. Soon the
so-called moderate Arab dictatorships that collaborate with
the US hegemony in the region will find themselves in
untenable positions.
Loss of credibility
Already we see tensions increasing in the region. Damascus
has pulled out of third-party talks with Tel Aviv and Arab
anger has been mounting not just at Israel, and not just at
America, but also at their own regimes which have
collaborated with Washington.
Some Israelis have started to realise their government's
flawed approach. While 81 per cent of Israelis support the
military campaign, a poll has showed only 39 per cent
believe it will succeed in removing Hamas or reducing
violence.
An editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli daily, even went so far
as to label Israel "the region's bully".
Barack Obama, the US president-elect, remains silent as
Israel kills Palestinians with impunity. In his silence he
expresses his complicity.
Nir Rosen is a Beirut-based journalist, fellow at the New
York University Center on Law and Security and the author
of The Triumph of the Martyrs: A Reporter's Journey into
Occupied Iraq.
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