WE ARE ALL PALESTINIANS NOW
Today we are all Palestinians.
Protests across the world have affirmed that despite the huge propaganda offensive which Israel has unleashed in recent days to justify its barbaric, atavistic assault on civilians and civilian targets in Gaza, and despite the considerable exertions of a largely compliant mainstream media in echoing this justification, people are rising up with one voice in condemnation of Israel’s brutal attack and in active solidarity with its victims – the Palestinians.
Commentator after commentator has attempted to browbeat Palestinian spokespeople with the same question: Why are Hamas launching these homemade rockets? The answer, in truth, is really very simple: Because they do not have Merkava tanks, Hellfire missiles, and F16 fighter aircraft at their disposal.
With its usual, come-to-be-expected pusillanimity our trusty mainstream journalists have sought to portray this is a conflict between two equal sides. Yet thinking about it for a moment, you really can’t blame them, can you? After all, on one side you have the state of Israel with a population in 2007 of just over 7 million; a per capita GDP of around $26,600; a military budget of some $8 billion enabling it to amass the 4th largest and one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world, including 450 aircraft and a nuclear arsenal comprising an estimated 200 warheads.
On the other side you have Palestine with a population of around 4 million, 1.5 million of whom are currently under siege in the Gaza Strip, in addition to another estimated 5.5 million refugees scattered around the world, predominately in the Middle East; a per capita GDP of $830 (after the usual remittances are siphoned off to the Israeli government for the pleasure of allowing Palestinian exports to pass through its hands); and no military budget to speak of, thus enabling it to amass a deadly arsenal of homemade rockets, stones and petrol bombs, including an unknown number of slingshots.
It is this Palestinian military might, built up over many years with the kind of sneakiness of which only the Arabs are capable, which constitutes the clear and existential threat to the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East responsible for a state policy of mass murder masquerading as self defence. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to state that the Palestinian people with their insistence on survival constitute a clear and existential threat to civilisation itself.
And yet perhaps not. Perhaps in their reluctance to be ground into the dust the Palestinians of Gaza are only following the advice of no less a heroic figure than the first Prime Minister of Israel, one David Ben-Gurion, who said just before he died:
“Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”
Zionism, beginning as a self consciously secular, nationalist movement, had by this point absorbed the religious justification for Israel’s existence, evidenced in the section of the aforementioned quote in which Ben-Gurion, in the manner of an aside, promulgates the view that God promised the land to the Jewish people. Interestingly, as we fast approach 2009 this is a view which still enjoys common currency not only in Israeli society but in capitals throughout the West. Indeed our very own Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, in a speech to the Israeli Knesset earlier in the year to mark the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel, said:
“I am especially pleased - as the first British Prime Minister to address the Knesset - to congratulate you at this sixtieth anniversary on the achievement of 1948: the centuries of exile ended, the age-long dream realised, the ancient promise redeemed - the promise that even amidst suffering, you will find your way home to the fields and shorelines where your ancestors walked.”
He went on to say in the same speech:
“And you proved that while repression can subjugate it can never silence; while hearts can be broken hope is unbreakable; while lives can be lost the dream could never die; that - in the words of the prophet Amos - ‘justice would roll down like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’.”
Now I don’t know about you, but in the world I live in people who hold such beliefs of divine exceptionalism are not in need of their own land, they’re in need of psychiatric care.
To put it another way, imagine smashing down the door of a stranger’s house, informing him that you and your family have been promised his house by God, preparatory to forcing him and his family into the boxroom, and then calling in the police when he tries to force his way out again. In any civilised society you wouldn’t just be arrested for such a crime, you’d be sectioned.
Yet this in microcosm describes the fate of the Palestinian people, though with one significant caveat. Rather than those who have invaded their home the ones criminalised, it is the Palestinians who’ve been not only criminalised but demonised for daring to resist.
The militant protests that have already taken place in London outside the Israeli Embassy against Israel’s assault on civilians in Gaza reflect a mood of determination and anger when it comes to Palestinian solidarity that is long overdue. Watching news reports of protestors pushing the police back was a sight to gladden the eye of anyone interested in universal human rights and justice. In the coming days, with protests planned to continue around the country, let’s ensure that the pro-Israel consensus which currently and egregiously dominates the body politic in this country is rocked to its very foundations. Let’s ensure also that the international campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel called for by Palestinian civil society is placed at the heart of every organisation’s solidarity work with the Palestinian people from here on in.
Finally, let’s ensure that by the time we’re finished Gordon Brown, George Bush, and Ehud Olmert et al are left in no doubt that when it comes to our Palestinian brothers and sisters - the people have spoken.
picture : candle vigil in Manchester 29th December, by Richard Searle
60 years since the palestine was divided by the united nations. 60 years during which time the palestinians who fled at the urging of the invading Arab league armies, and fear of the israelis,have been forced to remain within ‘refugee camps’ denied citizenship, equality, or even work in the arab lands in which they have been resident in, and have been spied upon, mistrusted and manipulated by their ‘brother’ arab regimes. meanwhile tens of thousands of Jews expelled from their homes throughout the middle east, fleeing the death camps of europe and the gulags of Soviet tyranny, and starvation in Africa have been welcomed and accomidated and housed within the tiny land of Israel, a state that despite constant threat of destruction has remained a functioning and vigorous democracy.
By an odd quirk the only other democracies that exist within the middle east, the palestinian authority and the government of lebanon, have both been threatened and undermined by the fascist religiously justified fanatics of hesbollah and Hamas which are championed by a senile and bankrupt left, whose craven servility to the lies of Stalinism have now been replaced with a equally servile worship of any psychopath with a keffyiah and a kalashnikov.
The senile and bankrupt left have replaced belief in a socialist future, with a new ideology that mistakes anti-modernism; hatred for democracy, contempt for the values of the enlightenment, and a cult for martyrdom and hatred of life for a nefarious ‘Anti Imperialism’.
Comment by darren redstar — 30 December, 2008 @ 9:56 am
And Darren’s little story is all he needs to help him go off to sleep at night.
Goodnight, Darren! Goodnight, Gaza.
Comment by external bulletin — 30 December, 2008 @ 10:10 am
the febrile convulsions with this blog is reacting to the attack on Hamas might be excused as an understandable revulsion at the loss of human life. However a brief recourse to the search option shows that SU don’t give a toss about human life when it isn’t Islamists on the receiving end. Take for example your response to the Massacre in Mumbai in which despite the deaths of hundreds was to whinge at the reporting by the british press of comments by the Indian authorities that one or more of the killers might be british. nothing about the murder of hundreds, the torture of jewish men and women the handgrenadeing of hospitals the machine gunning of commuter trains.
Comment by darren redstar — 30 December, 2008 @ 10:40 am
Darren
The narrative you give here would embarass anyone except the most right wing opinion within Israel.
The story is much more complex on both sides.
For example the story of Israel constantly besieged ignores the very embarassing fact of the Lavon affaire, when Nasser offered to recognise Israel in about 1953 in exchange for greater compensation for expelled palestinians. This very promising peace offer was deliberately undermined by the Israeli military by a campaign of bombings by Israeli agents in Egypt against British and American targets. Only three years ago the Israeli government honoured the surviving terrorists. It was the Lavon affair that led to many Jews fleeing Egypt, not any action by the Egyptian government. To this day, the reasonable sizeable Jewish population in Iran are allowed uninhibited travel to and from Israel, guarabteed representtaion in the Iranian parliament, and some Jjews who have emigrated to Isreal from Iran have subsequently returned, due to the racism endemic in Israeli society.
I gather you have never visited the palestinian authority, when you write so stupidly about hamas seeking to undermine the democracy of the PA. During the last election, Israel refused to allow Palestinian politicians to travel between the West bank and Gaza, making any meaningful campaigning impossible. It was also the Israeli bad faith over Oslo that scuppered the electoral chances of Fatah, as they had promised great things from Oslo, but delivered nothing.
The reality of the occupation is much more shocking when you see it with your own eyes than you can imagine. I met women who had been forced to give birth at the roadside because IDF soldiers would not allow them through roadblocks to hospital. I met a man in Hebron whose son was beaten to death by the Zionist settler living next door. I spoke with trade unionists who describe how there have been waves of closures and redundancies in the quarry sector becasue of the freezing of money to the PA by israel, so that Palestinian businesses cannot get export licences. Sitting in a trade union office, pride of place was given to a photo one of their stoneworker members who had martyred himself in a military operation - not a member of hamas, but a working class trade unionist. I have spoken to children living in refugee camps in Bethlehem who have no prospects, who live overshadowed by the Wall, and who are daily humiliated by the occupation. Sometimes the IDF guards on the watchtowers take pot shots into the homes they overlook. They dream of visiting Jerusalam, but know they will never do so. It is five minutes away by car - but they will not be allowed there until they are 65 years old.
Israeli policy towards pallestine is never explicitly stated, but underlying it is the principle that they want to make life so unbearable, that the palestinisns give up the will to live and resist; in those circumstances people fight back.
Comment by Andy Newman — 30 December, 2008 @ 12:02 pm
A sinmple note to comment on the headline of this post; we are not all Palestinians. As far as I know Israel has not bombed John Wight’s home or the office of the Scottish PSC.
Comment by ross bradshaw — 31 December, 2008 @ 11:31 am