On Palestine (18 page)

The main difference between the two analyses (from above and from below) is the willingness of activists to study deeper and in a more profound way the ideological and historical context of the present Israeli action in Gaza. A historical evaluation and contextualization of the present Israeli assault on Gaza and that of the previous three since 2006 expose clearly the Israeli genocidal policy there. An incremental policy of massive killing that is less a product of a callous intention and more the inevitable outcome of Israel's overall strategy toward Palestine in general and the areas it occupied in 1967 in particular.

This context should be insisted upon, since the Israeli propaganda machine attempts again and again to narrate its policies as out of context and turns the pretext it found for every previous wave of destruction into the main justification for another spree of indiscriminate slaughter in the killing fields of Palestine.

The Zionist strategy of branding its brutal policies as an ad hoc response to this or that Palestinian action is as old as the Zionist presence in Palestine itself. It was used repeatedly as a justification for implementing the Zionist vision of a future Palestine that has in it very few, if any, native Palestinians.

The means for achieving this goal has changed over the years, but the formula has remained the same: whatever the Zionist vision of a Jewish state might be, it can only materialize without any significant number of Palestinians in it. And nowadays the vision is of an Israel stretching over almost the whole of historic Palestine where millions of Palestinians still live.

The present genocidal wave has, like all the previous ones, also a more immediate background. It has been born out of an attempt to foil the Palestinian decision to form a unity government that even the United States could not object to.

The collapse of US secretary of state John Kerry's desperate “peace” initiative legitimized the Palestinian appeal to international organizations to stop the occupation. At the same time, Palestinians gained wide international blessing for the cautious attempt represented by the unity government to strategize once again a coordinated policy among the various Palestinian groups and agendas.

Ever since June 1967, Israel has searched for a way to keep the territories it occupied that year without incorporating their indigenous Palestinian population into its rights-bearing citizenry. All the while it participated in a “peace process” charade to cover up or buy time for its unilateral colonization policies on the ground.

In the last few decades, Israel differentiated between areas it wished to control directly and those it would manage indirectly, with the aim in the long run of downsizing the Palestinian population to a minimum through, among other means, ethnic cleansing and economic and geographic strangulation. Thus the West Bank was in effect divided into “Jewish” and “Palestinian” zones—a reality most Israelis can live with provided the Palestinian bantustans' inhabitants are content with their incarceration within these mega-prisons. The geopolitical location of the West Bank creates the impression in Israel, at least, that it is possible to achieve this without anticipating a third uprising or too much international condemnation.

The Gaza Strip, due to its unique geopolitical location, did not lend itself that easily to such a strategy. Ever since 1994, and even more so when Ariel Sharon came to power as prime minister in the early 2000s, the strategy there has been to ghettoize Gaza and somehow hope that the people there—1.8 million as of today—would be dropped into eternal oblivion.

But the ghetto proved to be rebellious and unwilling to live under conditions of strangulation, isolation, starvation, and economic collapse. There was no way it would be annexed to Egypt, either in 1948 or in 2014. In 1948, Israel pushed into the Gaza area (before it became a strip) hundreds of thousands of refugees it expelled from the northern Naqab and southern coast who, so Israel hoped, would move even farther away from Palestine.

For a while after 1967, Israel wanted to keep the West Bank as a township which provided unskilled labor but without any human and civil rights. When the occupied people resisted the continued oppression in two intifadas, the West Bank was bisected into small bantustans encircled by Jewish colonies, but it did not work in the too-small and too-dense Gaza Strip. The Israelis were unable to “West Bank” the Strip, so to speak. So they cordoned it as a ghetto and when it resisted, the army was allowed to use its most formidable and lethal weapons to crush it. The inevitable result of an accumulative reaction of this kind was genocidal.

On May 15, Israeli forces killed two Palestinian youths in the West Bank town of Beitunia, their cold-blooded slayings by a sniper's bullet captured on video. Their names—Nadim Nuwara and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir—were added to a long list of such killings in recent months and years.

The killing of three Israeli teenagers, two of them minors, abducted in the occupied West Bank in June, was perhaps in reprisal for killings of Palestinian children. But for all the depredations of the oppressive occupation, it provided the pretext first and foremost for destroying the delicate unity in the West Bank, a unity that followed a decision by the Palestinian Authority to forsake the “peace process” and appeal to international organizations to judge Israel according to a human and civil rights' yardstick. Both developments were viewed as alarming in Israel.

The abductions also created the pretext for the implementation of the old dream of wiping out Hamas from Gaza so that the ghetto could be quiet again.

Since 1994, even before the rise of Hamas to power in the Gaza Strip, the very particular geopolitical location of the Strip has made it clear that any collective punitive action, such as the one inflicted now, could only be an operation of massive killings and destruction—in other words, of a continued genocide.

This recognition never inhibited the generals who give the orders to bomb the people from the air, the sea, and the ground. Downsizing the number of Palestinians all over historic Palestine is still the Zionist vision. In Gaza, its implementation takes its most inhuman form.

The particular timing of this genocidal wave is determined, as in the past, by additional considerations. The domestic social unrest of 2011 is still simmering and for a while there was a public demand to cut military expenditures and move money from the inflated “defense” budget to social services. The army branded this possibility as suicidal. There is nothing like a military operation to stifle any voices calling on the government to cut its military expenses.

Typical hallmarks of the previous stages in this incremental genocide reappear in this wave as well. One can witness again consensual Israeli Jewish support for the massacre of civilians in the Gaza Strip without one significant voice of dissent. In Tel Aviv, the few who dared to demonstrate against it were beaten by Jewish hooligans, while the police stood by and watched.

Academia, as always, becomes part of the machinery. The prestigious private university, the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, has established a “civilian headquarters” where students volunteer to serve as mouthpieces in the propaganda campaign abroad. Various universities have offered the state their student bodies to help and battle for the Israeli narrative in cyberspace and the alternative media.

The Israeli media, as well, has toed loyally the government's line, showing no pictures of the human catastrophe Israel has wreaked and informing its public that this time, “The world understands us and is behind us.” That statement is valid to a point as the political elites in the West continue to provide the old immunity to the Jewish state. The recent appeal by Western governments to the prosecutor in the International Court of Justice in The Hague not to look into Israel's crimes in Gaza is a case in point. Wide sections of the Western media have followed suit and have justified by and large Israel's actions—including the French media, especially France 24, and the BBC, which continue to shamefully parrot Israeli propaganda. This is not surprising, since pro-Israel lobby groups continue to work tirelessly to press Israel's case in France and the rest of Europe as they do in the United States.

This distorted coverage is also fed by a sense among Western journalists that what happens in Gaza pales in comparison to the atrocities in Iraq and Syria. Comparisons like this are usually provided without a wider historical perspective. A longer view on the history of the Palestinians would be a much more appropriate way to evaluate their suffering vis-à-vis the carnage elsewhere.

But not only a historical view is needed for a better understanding of the massacre in Gaza; a dialectical approach that identifies the connection between Israel's immunity and the horrific developments elsewhere is required as well. The dehumanization in Iraq and Syria is widespread and terrifying, as it is in Gaza. But there is one crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality: the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved by the president of the United States, the leaders of the European Union, and Israel's other friends in the world.

Whether it is burning alive a Palestinian youth from Jerusalem, fatally shooting two others just for the fun of it in Beitunia, or slaying whole families in Gaza, these are all acts that can only be perpetrated if the victim is dehumanized. The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers.

Those who commit atrocities in the Arab world against oppressed minorities and helpless communities, as well as the Israelis who commit these crimes against the Palestinian people, should all be judged by the same moral and ethical standards. They are all war criminals, though in the case of Palestine they have been at work longer than anyone else. It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists, or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way.

A world that would stop employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes elsewhere in the world.

The cessation of the incremental genocide in Gaza and the restitution of the basic human and civil rights of Palestinians wherever they are, including the right of return, is the only way to open a new vista for a productive international intervention in the Middle East as a whole.

 

 

Adapted from “Israel's Incremental Genocide in the Gaza Ghetto,”
Electronic Intifada,
July 13, 2014, and “The
Historical Perspective of the 2014 Gaza Massacre,”
Information Clearing House,
August 23, 2014
.

Chapter Nine

Nightmare in Gaza

Noam Chomsky

Amid all the horrors unfolding in the latest Israeli offensive in Gaza, Israel's goal is simple: “quiet for quiet,” a return to the norm.

For the West Bank, the norm is that Israel continues its illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure so that it can integrate into Israel whatever might be of value, meanwhile consigning Palestinians to unviable cantons and subjecting them to repression and violence.

For Gaza, the norm is a miserable existence under a cruel and destructive siege that Israel administers to permit bare survival but nothing more.

For the past fourteen years, the norm is that Israel kills more than two Palestinian children a week.

The latest Israeli rampage was set off by the brutal murder of three Israeli boys from a settler community in the occupied West Bank. A month before, two Palestinian boys were shot dead in the West Bank city of Ramallah. That elicited little attention, which is understandable, since it is routine.

“The institutionalized disregard for Palestinian life in the West helps explain not only why Palestinians resort to violence,” Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani reports, “but also Israel's latest assault on the Gaza Strip.”

“Quiet for quiet” also enables Israel to carry forward its program of separating Gaza from the West Bank. That program has been pursued vigorously, always with US support, ever since the US and Israel accepted the Oslo Accords, which declare the two regions to be an inseparable territorial unity. A look at the map explains the rationale. Gaza provides Palestine's only access to the outside world, so once the two are separated, any autonomy that Israel might grant to Palestinians in the West Bank would leave them effectively imprisoned between hostile states, Israel and Jordan. The imprisonment will become even more severe as Israel continues its program of expelling Palestinians from the Jordan Valley and constructing Israeli settlements there.

The norm in Gaza was described in detail by the heroic Norwegian trauma surgeon Mads Gilbert, who has worked in Gaza's main hospital through Israel's most grotesque crimes and returned again for the current onslaught. In June 2014 he submitted a report on the Gaza health sector to the UNRWA, the UN agency that tries desperately, on a shoestring, to care for refugees.

“At least 57 percent of Gaza households are food insecure and about 80 percent are now aid recipients,” Gilbert reports. “Food insecurity and rising poverty also mean that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while over 90 percent of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption,” a situation that is becoming even worse as Israel again attacks water and sewage systems, leaving 1.2 million people with even more severe disruption of the barest necessity of life.