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.
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.
Labels: British Foreign Policy, Israel/Palestine, US Imperialism
posted by David Wearing at 5:03 PM
3 Comments:
Yup - there's a reason why the Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 33) groups collective punishment with terrorism:
"Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited."
They're basically the same thing. The principal difference in this case is that Israel is terrorising the Palestinian population on a scale that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian militant groups could only dream about, and further that Israel is perpetrating violence in the furtherance of an illegal occupation, whereas Hamas - whatever one thinks of their actions - is acting in self-defence.
It is instructive, actually, to view the attempted justifications for the collective punishment of Gaza (and, to a slightly lesser extent, the West Bank) made by apologists for the occupation in the West. One fairly common refrain is that yes, it is a pity that Palestinians are suffering, but they can't really complain because they chose to elect a "terrorist group" for their government. This is essentially the same argument used by al-Qaeda to justify atrocities like the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre - the population as a whole is held responsible for the perceived crimes of its government, and this collective responsibility is then held to legitimise collective punishment.
Another interesting conclusion is that those who attempt to justify the Israeli terror being inflicted on the population of Gaza must, if they are to be minimally consistent, also come out in favour of Palestinian efforts to collectively punish Israelis, through means such as Qassam rocket attacks and suicide bombings. This analogy is quite unfair to the Palestinians, of course, since it equates Israel's collective punishment, carried out in the course of an illegal aggression, with Palestinian Qassams, fired in self-defence and completely dwarfed by the scale of Israeli terrorism. Still, the principle holds, and so anyone who argues in favour of Israel's collective punishment without arguing just as loudly in favour of Palestinian suicide bombings can, it seems to me, be dismissed out of hand as a racist fraud.
I'd reply at greater length but there's not much I can add to that. Couldn't have put it any better myself.
I didn't know the convention classed collective punishment together with terrorism. Can we therefore say that collective punishment is the legal as well as the moral equivalent of terrorism? Since collective punishment is openly declared Israeli state policy this is an important and powerful argument. More should be made of it.
Well, I'm sure there are all sorts of convoluted ins and outs and contrived legal disputes about the meaning of this or that word (you know how lawyers can be), but it certainly seems clear that the intent of the Convention was to classify "terrorism" and "collective penalties" together. Which makes sense, given that the two are essentially the same thing. I actually don't like the term "collective punishment", because it implies that the people being "punished" have done something wrong - 'terrorism' is a far more accurate description.
I agree that this argument has great force - it is very effective, particularly in the context of the current "war on terror" discourse, at exposing the hypocrisy of those who righteously denounce Palestinian terrorism while supporting and, in the case of the British government, actively cooperating with the far greater terrorism being perpetrated by the Israeli government.
Certainly, whenever I've used this argument in online debates with 'pro-Israel' advocates, they've either had to resort to claiming that there is no collective punishment going on (a claim that is embarrassingly easy to refute) or have simply not been able to offer a reply at all.
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