"The involvement of each in the other, largely due to the aggressiveness with which the Israelis have entered Palestinian territory, and from the very beginning have invaded Palestinian space, suggests that some mode of arrangement has to be established that allows then to live together in some peaceable form. It is not going to be through separation. The South Africans in a country twenty times bigger couldn't for long maintain apartheid."
And neither could the United States. Legal structures of power and coercion that create, maintain and exploit sociopolitical differences in the interests of a dominant group are not just morally offensive and indefensible, but impractical.
For over 60 years Palestinians have been shackled by Israeli power, and the target of its genocidal intentions. In this material relationship of inequality, Israel occupies the position of superiority - militarily, economically and politically. Israel's military is among the world's leading five, and the Israeli state is the second largest recipient of US aid. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs writes that: "Total U.S. aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the American foreign-aid budget, even though Israel comprises just .001 percent of the world's population and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes."
Israel speaks the language of power, while Palestinians and their fractured authority (which hardly amounts to anything resembling a sovereign, effectual entity) remain stateless, and as Middle East expert Juan Cole argues, virtual slaves interned in open-air camps. This state of constant deprivation and debasement amounts to nothing less than slow-motion ethnic cleansing.
Israel is a Vulgarian State that has distorted and mocked the very existence of the Palestinian people in order to deliberately cleanse a people from their ancestral homeland. It is unwilling to confront the monstrosity of what it means to exist at the expense of another people, whom they have either killed, driven away or legally deprived of every civil, political and human right. The only solution to this apartheid, as with all others, is a solution predicated on equality, on the co-citizenship afforded only through the decolonization and reintegration of a violently partitioned land.
Palestinians and Israelis are invested in each other; their enemy is their only partner. However for any genuine partnership or negotiation to take root, both must occupy positions of equal strength. It cannot be the same tired equation of Israel the aggressor and Palestine the aggrieved. Nir Rosen describes this colonial dialect of domination and oppression, and the few options it permits:
A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and 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 two options. Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave. 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 seek one state for both people.
Zionism, the exclusive and totalizing ideology legitimating Israel's imperial aggressions in the region is a dangerous brand of ethnic nationalism that diminishes all hopes for a peaceful resolution.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's brand of Zionism is a form of ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism differs in important ways from civic nationalism. Civic nationalism is based not on ethnicity but on national ideals. The mainstream of French nationalism since 1789, for instance, has been civic, not ethnic. That is why a Senegalese African like Blaise Diagne could be elected to the French parliament in 1914. Senegal was a colony but a few districts were seen as French soil and so could send representatives to Paris. This would be as though in the same period Tanzanians could serve in the German parliament or Uzbeks in the Tsarist Russian Duma. Obviously, French society is made up of fallible human beings and there is practical discrimination against French of black African heritage, but it isn't legal discrimination.The latest and most gruesome super-blitz into Gaza has really been about dominating all of historical Palestine. The annexation wall and settlements continue to enfeeble the West Bank by carving up Palestinian communities into isolated, non-viable Bantustans, while the blockade of tiny Gaza continues to asphyxiate those who managed to survive Israel's latest turkey shoot - which wasn't about Hamas or makeshift rockets, but about permanently subjugating the Palestinian people and further entrenching Israeli control of Palestinian land, air and water.
If Israel is to flourish, it must recognize itself as a multi-ethnic, civic state. It already has 1.4 million Palestinian-Israelis, and at least 300,000 non-Jewish Russians, according to the 2008 census. It also has a growing population of Thai, Sudanese and other guest workers, who are not citizens but who may never go back home. (Germany's experience with the Turkish guest workers was that many became citizens in the end). Excluding guest workers condemns a capitalist society to demographic and economic stagnation. Where guest workers are already present, disallowing them citizenship creates enormous social problems. Israel will be a Jewish-majority state for some decades. But it can't remain that way in the long run without doing some very unpleasant things that will make its leaders really look like Milosevic. READ MORE
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Prof. Juan Cole describes the expanding boycotts of Israeli goods, an increasingly global trend as Israel continues to offend world-wide audiences with its wanton killing of Palestinian civilians:
Wholesale food distributors in Jordan, the UK and the Scandinavian countries are quietly imposing an informal boycott on Israeli fruit, according to Ynetnews, in response to the war on Gaza. My guess is that if the Apartheid situation in the Occupied Territories becomes formalized, such boycotts will spread.
Cole also comments in more detail on Dr. Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, who's anguished, soul-churning laments were aired on the Israeli news station he regularly appeared on (the video is posted under "Aftermath," below this one):
Israel pursued its attacks on Friday and on Saturday morning, killing 55 Palestinians, including a houseful of girls, daughters and a niece of a physician working in Israel who was being interviewed on Israeli television when the news reached him. AFP writes:In the News:' At least 55 Palestinians were killed on Friday, including at least 10 people who died when a tank shell slammed into their house in Gaza City during a funeral wake, according to Palestinian medics . . . In the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the territory, three daughters and a niece of a Palestinian doctor working in Israel were killed in an Israeli air strike. "They were girls, only girls. I want to know why they have they killed them. Who gave the order to fire?" the children's sobbing father Ezzedine Abu Eish said on Israeli television. Palestinian militants meanwhile fired over 20 rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel on Friday, wounding five people, the Israeli military said. Over 700 such projectiles have been fired since the start of the war.'
The father of the dead little girls, Dr. Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, appears to have been a sort of an Arab "Dr. Sanjay Gupta" who came on Israeli television frequently. He was about to do an interview on Israeli television when the word reached him of the atrocity against his family. His wife had earlier died of cancer, so his children were all he had left. He commuted to Tel Aviv from Gaza and told the girls to sleep near the stone walls to stay safe in his absence.
The Israeli anchors put his anguished lamentations on the air for over 3 minutes, which I take to be their own little protest against Olmert's Butcher Shop. The physician is heard repeatedly crying out, "Ya Rabb, ya Allah" (O Lord, O God!) as the image of the mangles small bodies invades his mind.
Noam Chomsky lucidly paraphrases Israel's long-term intentions, and Hamas's willingness to accept a political solution:
. . . . There`s a theme that goes way back to the origins of Zionism. And it`s a very rational theme: `Let`s delay negotiations and diplomacy as long as possible, and meanwhile we`ll `build facts on the ground.`` So Israel will create the basis for what some eventual agreement will ratify, but the more they create, the more they construct, the better the agreement will be for their purposes. Those purposes are essentially to take over everything of value in the former Palestine and to undermine what`s left of the indigenous population.
I think one of the reasons for popular support for this in the United States is that it resonates very well with American history. How did the United States get established? The themes are similar.
(on Hamas accepting a two-state solution). . . . .That`s their official position taken by Haniya, the elected leader, and Khalid Mesh`al, their political leader who`s in exile in Syria, he`s written the same thing. And it`s over and over again. There`s no question about it but the West doesn`t want to hear it. So therefore it`s Hamas which is committed to the destruction of Israel.
In a sense they are, but if you went to a Native American reservation in the United States, I`m sure many would like to see the destruction of the United States. If you went to Mexico and took a poll, I`m sure they don`t recognize the right of the United States to exist sitting on half of Mexico, land conquered in war. And that`s true all over the world. But they`re willing to accept a political settlement. Israel isn`t willing to accept it and the United States isn`t willing to accept it. And they`re the lone hold-outs. Since it`s the United States that pretty much runs the world, it`s blocked. READ MORE
Israel bombs the University Teachers Association in Gaza. Oxford University academic Karma Nabulsi has termed Israel's vicious targeting of Gaza's academic institutions: `scholasticide,' Israel`s systematic and intentional destruction of Palestinian education centers:
In its current war on Gaza alone, Israel has bombed the ministry of education, the Islamic University of Gaza, and tens of schools, including at least 4 UNRWA schools, after having largely destroyed the infrastructure of teaching throughout the year and a half of its illegal and criminal siege of the densely populated Gaza Strip. READ MORE
-mr
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