Sixty years of dispossession

Today, Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its founding, and I can think of no-one better to mark the occassion than the late, great Edward Said; speaking here ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary.

An excerpt:

"In the United States, celebrations of Israel's fifty years as a state have tried to project an image of the country that went out of fashion since the Palestinian Intifada (1987-92): a pioneering state, full of hope and promise for the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, a haven of enlightened liberalism in a sea of Arab fanaticism and reaction. On 15 April, for instance, CBS broadcast a two hour prime-time program from Hollywood hosted by Michael Douglas and Kevin Costner, featuring movie stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kathy Bates (who recited passages from Golda Meir minus, of course, her most celebrated remark that there were no Palestinians) and Winona Ryder. None of these luminaries are particularly known for their Middle Eastern expertise or enthusiasm, although all of them in one way or another praised Israel's greatness and enduring achievements. There was even time for a cameo appearance by President Bill Clinton, who provided perhaps the least edifying, most atavistic note of the evening by complimenting Israel, "a small oasis," for "making a once barren desert bloom," and for " building a thriving democracy in hostile terrain.""

Ironically enough, no such encomia were intoned on Israeli television, which has been broadcasting a 22-part series, Tkuma, on the country's history. This series has a decidedly more complicated content. Episodes on the l948 War, for instance, made use of archival sources unearthed by the new historians (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Schlaim, Tom Segev, et al) to demonstrate that the indigenous Palestinians were forcibly expelled, their villages destroyed, their land taken, their society eradicated. It was as if Israeli audiences had no need of all the palliatives provided for diasporic and international viewers, who still needed to be told that Israel was a cause for uncomplicated rejoicing and not, as it has been for Palestinians, the cause of a protracted, and still continuing dispossession of the country's indigenous people.

That the American celebration simply omitted any mention of the Palestinians indicated also how remorselessly an ideological mind-set can hold on, despite the facts, despite years of news and headlines, despite an extraordinary, if ultimately unsuccessful, effort to keep effacing Palestinians from the picture of Israel's untroubled sublimity. If they're not mentioned, therefore they don't exist. Even after fifty years of living the Palestinian exile I still find myself astonished at the lengths to which official Israel and its supporters will go to suppress the fact that a half century has gone by without Israeli restitution, recognition, or acknowledgment of Palestinian human rights and without, as the facts undoubtedly show, connecting that suspension of rights to Israel's official policies. Even when there is a vague buried awareness of the facts, as is the case with a front page New York Times story on April 23 by one Ethan Bronner, the Palestinian Nakba is characterized as a semi-fictional event (dutiful inverted commas around the word "catastrophe" for instance) caused by no one in particular. When Bronner quotes an uprooted Palestinian who describes his miseries, the man's testimony is qualified by "for most Israelis, the idea of Mr Shikaki staking claim to victimhood is chilling," a reaction made plausible as Bronner blithely leapfrogs over the man's uprooting and systematic deprivations and immediately tells us how his "rage" (for years the approved word for dealing with Palestinian history) has impelled his sons into joining Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Ergo, Palestinians are violent terrorists, whereas Israel can go on being a "vibrant and democratic regional superpower established on the ashes of Nazi genocide." But not on the ashes of Palestine, an obliteration that lingers on in measures taken by Israel to block Palestinian rights, domestically as well as in territories occupied in l967.

Take land and citizenship for instance. Approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled in 1948: they are now more than 4 million. Left behind were 120,000 (now one million) who subsequently became Israelis, a minority constituting about 18 per cent of the state's population, but not fully-fledged citizens in anything more than name. In addition there are now some 2.5 million Palestinians without sovereignty on the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is the only state in the world which is not the state of its actual citizens, but of the whole Jewish people who consequently have rights that non-Jews do not. Without a constitution, Israel is governed by Basic Laws of which one in particular, the Law of Return, makes it possible for any Jew anywhere to emigrate to Israel and become a citizen, at the same time that native-born Palestinians do not have the same right. 93 per cent of the land of the state is characterised as Jewish land, meaning that no non-Jew is allowed to lease, sell or buy it. Before 1948, the Jewish community in Palestine owned a little over 6 per cent of the land. A recent case in which a Palestinian Israeli, Adel Kaadan, wished to buy land but was refused because he was a non-Jew has become something of a cause célèbre in Israel, and has even made it to the Supreme Court which is supposed to but would prefer not to rule on it. Kaadan's lawyer has said that "as a Jew in Israel, I think that if a Jew somewhere else in the world was prohibited from buying state land, public land, owned by the federal government, because they're Jews, I believe there would have been an outcry in Israel." (New York Times, 1 March, l998). This anomaly about Israeli democracy, not well known and rarely cited, is compounded by the fact that, as I said above Israel's land in the first place was owned by Palestinians expelled in l948; since their forced exodus their property was legally turned into Jewish land by The Absentees' Property Law, the Law of the State's Property, and the Land Ordinance (the Acquisition of Land for Public Purposes). Now only Jewish citizens have access to that land, a fact that does not corroborate The Economist's extraordinarily sweeping statement on "Israel at 50" (25 April-1 May l998) that since the state's founding Palestinians "have enjoyed full political rights. ""

Read the rest here.

Suffer little children

In the week that Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary, spare a thought for some people with rather less cause for celebration: the children terrorised and starved by its government.

"Every once in a while Ibrahim Hawash, 42, calls his wife Noha from his nightshift job to make sure that she has followed the treatment course prescribed by their family doctor for the involuntary urination of their four children, who are in primary school. The doctor says that the four children lost their ability to control urination due to the fear they underwent when Israeli army jets bombed a home near theirs in the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip during the "Warm Winter" military campaign three weeks ago. The four children still remember the terrifying night when they woke frightened up to the sound of a thundering explosion in the area and found that the glass of their home's windows had fallen onto their bed. Hawash, who works in one of the Palestinian security agencies, says that his children refuse to sleep alone, insisting on sleeping in the same room as their parents because they are scared of the night. He adds that he exerted great efforts to convince two of his children to go back to school, for they were afraid that they would be killed in an Israeli bombing operation on their way there, or while at school. Thousands of Palestinian children have experienced what Hawash's four children are undergoing."

"Aish Samour, director of the Psychiatric Hospital in Gaza, says that 30 per cent of Palestinian children under 10 years of age suffer from involuntary urination due to deep-seated fear, and mentions other nervous problems such as nail- biting, nightmares, bodily pains of unknown cause, crying and introversion."

"According to a study conducted by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, each Palestinian child has been exposed to more than nine shocking events. The study says that 95.6 per cent of children have seen images of the wounded and killed, .... a total of 60 per cent of children have undergone moderate psychological shock..., and 33.3 per cent have undergone major psychological shock. The study notes that 15.6 per cent suffer from minor post-traumatic syndrome disorder, while 62.2 per cent suffer moderately and 20 per cent severely."

"Eyad Al-Sarraj, director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, says that Palestinian children have lost the two most important pillars in their lives: a sense of security that has been lost due to raids, bombings and destruction, and a sense of joy and happiness that is a staple of childhood. He says that when a child sees his father, "impotent and incapable of providing security", the child feels immediately "estranged". He adds that according to data gathered in a study his institution undertook, 45 per cent of children studied said that they had seen occupation soldiers beat their fathers and insult them before their eyes."

"Al-Sarraj points out that matters are made more complicated by the fact that due to the Gaza siege, Palestinian children suffer from a chronic state of malnutrition that affects their intellect. This is reflected in the fact that 15 per cent of Gaza's children suffer from impairments in their intellectual abilities due to malnutrition. He adds that repression and violence accumulated within the lives of Palestinian children affect their creative capacities and push them to resort to extreme acts that reflect the pain and frustration they feel."

Read the whole report, "Gaza's suffering children" by Saleh Al-Naami, here, at Al-Ahram Weekly.

The terrorism its ok to like

The Israeli government and its supporters often tell us that the difference between Israel and the Palestinian groups is Israel doesn't attack civilians. It takes some talent to say this with a straight face. The fact is that the targeting of ordinary Palestinians - the innocent and the defenceless - is an explicit Israeli policy.

The blockade of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, instituted as collective punishment when the people there voted the wrong way in a free election, and stepped up against the inhabitants of Gaza when Hamas had the temerity to fight off a US-backed coup attempt against the elected government, constitutes, by definition, the deliberate targeting of innocent people.

As Dov Weisglass, an senior Israeli government adviser, described the policy aim at the outset, "the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet". That's his way of saying - in a jokey, off-hand sort of a way - that the idea is to force Palestinian children into a state of malnutrition.

These news reports show some of the other effects of the I-plan "diet": raw sewage flowing in the streets because there's no electricity to work the treatment plants, cancer patients dying because routine treatments are being denied to them; violence to all intents and purposes, and as targeted at defenceless people as any suicide bombing.






It takes deep intellectual discipline - an assumption of the West's intrinisc benevolence completely impervious to the facts - to pretend that there is any qualitative difference between the Israeli blockade and outright terrorism.

Recall that the major Palestinian factions have offered Israel peace on the legitimate international borders; those it crossed in the 1967 war when it began the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. In the more immediate term, it has also been offered a mutual ceasefire to put an end to the current violence. Israel has rejected all of this, so we need not detain ourselves with the nonsense that it acts only in self-defence. What Israel and its British and American suppoters want is not peace but victory, and if Palestinian kids have to stay on their "diet" until victory is achieved, then so be it.

How grown-ups do politics

For the benefit of Messers Olmert, Bush, Cheney, Dr Rice, and many others, here's how the grown-ups do diplomacy.




Jimmy Carter, doing what 64 per cent of Israelis want to see done, but what their government and the oh-so "pro-Israeli" US government refuses to do: talking to Hamas.

For the uninitiated, talking to people is how armed conflicts are brought to a conclusion. The alternatives are trying to (a) obliterate your enemy, or (b) demand their total surrender and keep the killing going until they accept.

Since Carter has secured Hamas' consent to any future agreement between Israel and the PLO that resulted in a Palestinian state on the legitimate international borders, and that was ratified by the Palestinian public in a referendum, I think we can deduce that Carter's way works.

Of course, the comparison is a little unfair. Carter wants peace. The US and Israeli government want victory, and apparently don't much care how many people die before they get it (and they definitely don't want a return to the legitimate borders- they want to keep what they stole). But Carter's efforts have now exposed those governments' belligerence for all to see. They pretended they didn't have a "partner for peace" and their bluff has now been called.

See also Carter being interviewed by the BBC's Jeremy Paxman here. Paxman is not afraid to put the boot in when unimpressed with an interviewee. Carter's opponents have tried to paint him as beyond the pale for his peace efforts this past week. The gentle ride he gets from this branch of the Western establishment suggests that the need to talk to Hamas is becoming a mainstream position. US-Israeli rejectionism is becoming less and less tenable.

Renouncing Violence

"So we got hold of just some [10 year old] Palestinian kid nearby, we knew that he knew who it had been [a 15-year-old throwing stones]. Let's say we beat him a little, to put it mildly, until he told us. You know, the way it goes when your mind's already screwed up, and you have no more patience for Hebron and Arabs and Jews there.

"The kid was really scared, realising we were on to him. We had a commander with us who was a bit of a fanatic. We gave the boy over to this commander, and he really beat the shit out of him ... He showed him all kinds of holes in the ground along the way, asking him: 'Is it here you want to die? Or here?' The kid goes, 'No, no!'

"Anyway, the kid was stood up, and couldn't stay standing on his own two feet. He was already crying ... And the commander continues, 'Don't pretend' and kicks him some more. And then [name withheld], who always had a hard time with such things, went in, caught the squad commander and said, 'Don't touch him any more, that's it.' The commander goes, 'You've become a leftie, what?' And he answers, 'No, I just don't want to see such things.'

"We were right next to this, but did nothing. We were indifferent, you know. OK. Only after the fact you start thinking. Not right away. We were doing such things every day ... It had become a habit... "

And the parents saw it. The commander ordered [the mother], 'Don't get any closer.' He cocked his weapon, already had a bullet inside. She was frightened. He put his weapon literally inside the kid's mouth. 'Anyone gets close, I kill him. Don't bug me. I kill. I have no mercy.' So the father ... got hold of the mother and said, 'Calm down, let them be, so they'll leave him alone.'"

Former Israeli soldier, speaking anonymously to The Independent (many similar tesimonies can be found here).


"It seems to me that what Hamas needs to do is pretty clear. Renounc[ing] violence would be a good step towards showing you actually want peace"
US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

The Israeli military receives around $3billion a year in state aid from Dr Rice's government.

2nd worst President ever?

A recent poll of 109 US historians showed 61 per cent viewing George Bush as the worst President ever, and a practically unanimous 98 per cent describing his administration as a failure.

Said one:

"No individual president can compare to the second Bush. Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large"

Its tempting in light of this to view the post-Bush era as offering the prospect of some form of redemption for the United States government, least implausibly under the Presidency of Barack Obama. But as Clive Crook implies, this is not a good election to win, precisely because of this expectation that the end of Bush will be the end of the problems he created. In fact, the end of Bush will be the start of a hard process of paying the costs of his presidency; both for imperialists and for the victims of imperialism.

For example, it is highly unlikely that any Democratic President will raise taxes on America's wealthy to anything like the extent required to offset (a) the estimated trillions lost on the Iraq war and (b) the credit binge of the last 8 years. Probably much of the fiscal belt-tightening will be borne by the middle and lower classes, who will also be suffering from the US mortgage crisis and from the recession more generally. The next President will either have to continue Bush's fiscal recklessness or - and this is far more probable - be the person who makes the US public pay the consequences of that recklessness. Having to choose between being an idiot and being the bad guy is not a good position to be in.

The other main reason this is not a good election to win is Iraq. The "surge" of extra US troops into Iraq was supposed to reap political benefits for the US project. Without those having materialised, the escalation has served only to press the pause button on (the very worst of) a conflict which, as we've seen in Basra and Baghdad recently and as we will probably see in Kirkuk sooner rather than later, is a long way from being over. Much bloodletting will take place on the next President's watch, and their ability to blame it on Bush will diminish rapidly as time passes.

More broadly, Bush is passing to his successor a strategic catch-22 where failure appears to be the only option for the American Empire. I am assuming that, whoever wins the election, the central assumption that the US has the divinly-ordained right to run the world (provide "leadership" as its called) will continue to define US policy, albeit with some tactical modification. In that case, the bind the next President will be in is this: leave Iraq and you abandon a key square on the oil and gas chessboard to (at least) one of your bitterest rivals (Iran definitely, plus Russia and China in all likelihood); stay, and you continue to lose an unwinnable war, and continue to pay the fiscal consequences of doing so in a time of economic calamity.

In short, there is real scope for the next Presidency to end up being one that is seen as a very serious failure, and not entirely through fault of its own. A variety of disastrous consequences from the administration of Bush the Worst will be reaped by (in descending order of tragedy from high to zero) the people of Iraq, the people of the United States and the imperial project of the US governing class. Bottom line: this will not all be over come January 2007.

Its pro-Israel to talk to Hamas

Oh yes it is.

Paul Woodward at War in Context makes an excellent point. Since the majority of Israeli citizens support the idea of talking to Hamas, how can it be 'anti-Israel' to do so? Is it not the US and Israeli governments, and any others (like the UK) supporting the vicious and brain-dead policy of isolating and ignoring the Palestinians' elected representatives, who are being 'anti-Israel'? When you oppose the will of the Israeli majority (let alone their interests) which Israel are you supporting?

Ex US President Jimmy Carter has made the impeccably 'pro-Israel' decision to meet with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal next week. Its a move that's to be applauded. Only dialogue is going to end the conflict. Israel and its supporters should know by now that the Palestinians can not be beaten with violence, starvation or any other blunt instrument. 60 years after the Deir Yassin massacre - the defining moment of the campaign of ethinic cleansing that brought Israel into existence - the Palestinians are still there, stubbornly insisting on their humanity in the face of all attempts to erase them. If not for the sake of basic morality then at least for the sake of cold-blooded imperial pragmatism, its time for the US and its client to face reality, talk to the Palestinians' respresentatives, and bring this squalid episode of history to a sensible conclusion.

See also on this, Tony Karon's "Jimmy Carter and the Art of Growing Up".