February 8, 2008

An Israeli missile strike on a school in the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday morning killed a Palestinian school teacher and wounded three students. Over the last seven years, thousands of Palestinian civilians, including hundreds of women and children, have been killed by the Israeli forces. The United States, Israel’s chief ally, has continued to turn a blind eye to these barbaric attacks and has vetoed all draft resolutions tabled by Arab states in the UN Security Council condemning the Zionist state for committing war crimes against the Palestinian people.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Thursday that Israel plans to step up military operations against Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. The attacks are bound to further increase the death toll of Palestinian civilians. How many more Palestinian children must die before the Zionist state’s bloodlust is slaked?

In another development, the security cabinet of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government on Thursday approved the construction of a border fence with Egypt. Israeli officials said that because of the mountainous terrain, the fence will not extend along the entire 220 km border, but will be supplemented by sensors.

Israel has also accelerated work on the construction of its totally illegal West Bank barrier, which is now nearing completion and has turned the Palestinian West Bank into a virtual concentration camp. The barrier – a fearsome structure bristling with watch towers and machine-gun emplacements – has divided the West Bank into a series of beleaguered enclaves and has had a disastrous effect on Palestine’s economy.

Israel claims that it is building the West Bank barrier (which has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in The Hague) to protect Israelis from "terrorist attacks." But who will protect the Palestinian people from Israel’s barbaric policies and repression?

More than six years after US President George W. Bush used the name "Palestine" for the first time in his speech to the United Nations on November 10, 2001 to supposedly "spur peace talks" between Israel and Palestine, peace in the region seems further away than ever.

In December 2002, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, also known as the "Butcher of Sabra, Shatilla and Jenin," spelt out his own proposals for a Palestinian state. But his concept of a fragmentary and unviable entity, covering only about 40% of the West Bank and 70% of the Gaza Strip, was a far cry from what would be acceptable to the Palestinians, and even a far cry from what Israel itself had agreed to earlier, at the time of the signing of the Oslo accord in 1993.

There is obfuscation afoot on the part of the Israelis. When the Israeli ambassador to the UN voiced Israel’s acceptance of two states "living side by side," Sharon’s aides slapped him down. And the Israeli army chief of staff was quick to deny in mid-December 2002 that he had told a Washington think-tank that most Israelis assume that most Jewish settlements in the West Bank will eventually be dismantled.

The establishment of more than a hundred illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, in contravention of UN resolutions, has reduced the West Bank to little more than a besieged enclave. The presence of thousands of Israeli troops in and around the West Bank, and the 450 km wall Israel is building along its border with the West Bank, have made the situation worse.

This example of Israeli intransigence came as no surprise. The people of Palestine have been at the receiving end of Israeli brutality ever since the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. At that time, Palestinian Arabs were in the majority in the territory, with 900,000 Arabs to 600,000 Jews. Israel makes a great show of being the "only democracy" in the Middle East. But if a free and fair referendum to decide the future of the territory had been held in 1948, in what was then British-controlled Palestine, it would have become a Palestinian state, not a Jewish one.

Following the creation of Israel, the Israeli government adopted a policy of forcibly expelling Palestinians from the land they had lived on for thousands of years. Palestinian farms were taken over by Jewish settlers. Palestinians were ejected from their homes. Thousands of Palestinian-owned houses were demolished (a policy still in vogue). Olive trees owned by Palestinians were cut down. Water channels that irrigated Palestinian farms were diverted to farms owned by Jews. And hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven out of their own country.

In all this, Israel had the backing of the powerful Jewish lobby in the United States and the unstinting tacit support of successive American governments. Israel became the world’s biggest recipient of American military and economic aid, currently running at about $ 4 billion a year (most of it in the form of outright grants).

Three foundational myths underlie Israeli culture to this day. These are the "negation of exile" (shelilat ha-galut, in Hebrew), the "return to the land of Israel" (ha-shiva le-Eretz Yisrael), and the "return to history" (ha-shiva la-historia). They are intertwined in the master-narrative of Zionism, the story that explains how the Jews "got to where they are and where they should go henceforth." The negation of exile established a continuity between an ancient past, in which there existed Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel, and a present that renews it in the resettlement of Palestine.

Between the two, in the Zionist view, lies no more than an "interminable interim." As Gabriel Piterberg notes in a recent article in the New Left Review, depreciation of the period of exile is shared by all Zionists, if with differing degrees of rigidity, and derives from what is, in their outlook, an "uncontestable" presupposition: "from time immemorial, the Jews constituted a territorial nation." It follows from this argument that "a non-territorial existence must be abnormal, incomplete and inauthentic."

It further follows from this that, "in and of itself, as a historical experience, exile is devoid of significance." Although it may have given rise to cultural achievements of moment, "exile," in this view, "could not by definition have been a wholesome realisation of the nation’s Geist."

Piterberg writes: "So long as they were condemned to it, Jews – whether as individuals or communities – could lead at best a partial and transitory existence, waiting for the redemption of 'ascent’ (aliyah) once again to the land of Israel, the only site on which the nation’s destiny could be fulfilled. Within this mythical framework, exilic Jews always live provisionally, as potential or proto-Zionists, longing 'to return’ to the land of Israel."

Here the second foundational myth complements the first. In Zionist terminology, the recovery by the people of their home promised to deliver the "normalisation" of Jewish existence; and the site designated for the reenactment of Exodus would be the territory of the Biblical story. Zionist ideology defined this land as "empty."

The best-known Zionist slogan, 'a land without a people to people without a land’, expressed a two-fold denial: of the historical experience both of the Jews in exile, and of Palestine without Jewish sovereignty."

Of course, since the land was not literally empty, its "recovery," in the Zionist view, writes Piterberg, "required the establishment of the equivalent of a colonial hierarchy – sanctioned by Biblical authority – of its historic custodians over such intruders as might remain after the return.

The third foundational myth, the "return to history," is based on the premise that the "natural and irreducible form of human collectivity is the nation."

Piterburg writes: "According to this logic, so long as they were exiles, the Jews remained a community outside history, within which all European nations dwelt." Metaphorically empty, factually inhabited by Arabs, how was Palestine "emptied" to enable the creation of Israel?

This obsessive question takes for granted that what matters is the framework of the perpetrators (the Israelis), not the perspective of the victims (the Palestinians) – an utterly unacceptable proposition under every canon of international law. The ouster of Palestininias from their own land is nothing except "ethnic cleansing" under cover of war.

But to Palestinians who lost their homes, their goods, their rights and identities, and who have had to live for more than fifty years with the tragic results, what matters is the fact of their dispossession and transformation into refugees. Israel has a great deal to answer for.