Palestine/Israel; 40 Years of Occupation, 59 Years of Catastrophe, and 125 Years of Colonization

(cross-posted on DailyKos.com)

Yes, June 5th is here, and with it ensuing marches, actions, articles, boycotts, speeches and much much more, regarding the ongoing struggle for freedom and liberation of the Palestinian people. Soon, I will be heading for Washington DC, for the march which ill hopefully call some attention to this issue in which all Americans are deeply involved, whether they know it or not.

Dates are funny things; they signify events, rationalize horrible creulty, and help us understand the events and realities that our lives are enveloped in and actively create. The date June 5th, 1967, can mean many things to many people, as does the year of 1948 and the Nakba (Catastrophe) which it represents for Palestinians. Some are able to analyze the conflict with reference only to the pivitol nature of 1967, whereas others are more than able to make the links to 1948, 1936, 1917, and 1882 as well. So let's look at a few of the articles I have noticed in the past week, and take a look at how these dates are managed and understood by the writers at hand.

First up, Chris Hedges at Alternet, whose article, Israel's 40 Years of Occupation: From Democratic State to Violent Oppressor, does a very good job of running through the human rights abuses and crimes of the occupation;

The Israeli abuses have been well documented, not only by international human rights organizations, but Israeli human rights groups such as B'Tselem. On June 4, 2007, Amnesty International released a new 45-page report called "Enduring Occupation: Palestinians Under Siege in the West Bank," which again illustrates the devastating impact of four decades of Israeli military occupation.

"Palestinians living in the West Bank are blocked at every turn. This is not simply an inconvenience -- it can be a matter of life or death. It is unacceptable that women in labor, sick children, or victims of accidents on their way to hospital should be forced to take long detours and face delays which can cost them their lives," said Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Program.

But let's back up a moment; what was that title again? Oh yes, "Israel's 40 Years of Occupation: From Democratic State to Violent Oppressor," now what does this tell us about the perspective of the writer and his understanding of 1967 and other relevant milestones in time; well...

As the occupation stretched over the decades, it transformed and deformed Israeli society. It led Israel to abandon the norms and practices of a democratic society until, in the name of national security, it began to routinely accept the brutal violence of occupation and open discrimination and abuse of Palestinians, including the torture of prisoners and collective reprisals for Palestinians attacks. Palestinian neighborhoods, olive groves and villages were, in the name of national security, bulldozed into the ground...Israel's image has shifted from that of a heroic, open society set amid a sea of despotic regimes to that of an international pariah.

So in this construction, Israel has gone frum a plucky little democracy, into an existence where the violence of the occupation has routinized itself and affected the state at large, leading to a widespread institutionalization of violence towards Palestinians and others as well. Essentially, it is the transformation of the Leon Uris Exodus version of the young, brave, David-like Israel, into the Israel of the nightly news, of stones and rifles, of suicide bombers, destroyed homes and assasinated leaders, a desperate and increasingly stubborn Goliath spiraling towards its worst fears and nightmares.

While there is some truth to this, in essence, it is a false consciousness; Israel has, since it's inception, in fact by definition of its creation as a Jewish state in a predominately non-Jewish area (in terms of pre-Zionist immigration to Palestine) which necessitated the disposession of Palestinians. The abuse and erasure of Palestinians from Palestine began long before 1967, and stretches back to the beginnings of Zionist immigration, secured by the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the resulting 59 years of Palestinians living as refugees throughout the world, while, for example, well-off Jewish Americans are able to acquire Israeli citizenship and live in Israel/Palestine with the utmost of ease. And let'a also not forget the Palestinian citizens of Israel that suffered under military rule from 1948 until 1966 and still live as 4th class citizens at best in Israel.

That the violence erupted again, this time in regards to the Palestinians in the WB, Gaza and East Jerusalem who learned the lesson of 1948 and did not leave, is not surprising, but it has had a horrible effect on Israel/Palestine, one forseen by only a few back then. And such a construction by Hedges, while getting some things right, perpetuates this false consciousness, and allows the facts of Israel's creation and Palestine's subsequent erasure to go unnoticed; by overlooking the original sins of the state of Israel, it manages to legitimate and disappear the crimes of 1948. It's not very different than the view in the USA that the Vietnam War marked a sudden shift, from the 'good war' which was WWII to the role of victimizer and imperialist. In regards to that, here is the commentary of the great Langston Hughes (I don't have the link handy for the original poem, anyone have it?;

Columbia,
My dear girl,
You really haven't been a virgin for so long.
It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext.
You're terribly involved in world assignations
And everybody knows it.
You've slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you've taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows
In loincloths and cotton trousers.
When they've resisted,
You've yelled, "Rape,"

Being one of the world's big vampires,
Why don't you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power
Who've long since dropped their
Smoke screens of innocence
To sit frankly on a bed of bombs?
-Langston Hughes

Israel, too, has always been one of the "nymphomaniacs of power;" how else could Palestine become "Jewish in the same way that France is French and Britain is British." (One Palestine Complete, p. 117) It is how the West Was Won, after all...

Next up, is an excellent article by Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, For a Secular Democratic State, which first appeared in The Nation, 4 June 2007 as well as on ElectronicIntifada.net. Here's a few tid-bits, but suffice it to say, 1948 and 1967 are clearly two dates that are a part of the same historical process, and with only one viable, just and right way of resolving the situation;

There are, in short, two separate legal and administrative systems, maintained by the regular use of military force, for two populations -- settlers and natives -- unequally inhabiting the same piece of land: exactly as was the case in the colonial countries described by Fanon, or in South Africa under apartheid....All this has enabled Israel to transplant almost half a million of its own citizens into the occupied territories, at the expense of their Palestinian population, whose land is confiscated, whose homes are demolished, whose orchards and olive groves are razed or burned down, and whose social, economic, educational and family lives have been, in effect, all but suspended, precisely in order that their land may be made available for the use of another people.

Although some people claim there are fundamental differences between the disposition of the territories Israel captured in 1967 and the territories it captured during its creation in 1948 -- or even that there are important moral and political differences between Israel pre- and post-1967 -- such sentiments of entitlement, and the use of force that necessarily accompanies them, reveal the seamless continuity of the Zionist project in Palestine from 1948 to our own time....Israel's post-1967 occupation policies are demonstrably driven by the same dispossessive logic. If hundreds of thousands have not literally been forced into flight, their existence has been reduced to penury. Just as Israel could have come into being in 1948 only by sweeping aside hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Israel's ongoing colonization of Palestinian territory -- its imposition of itself and its desires on the land's indigenous population -- requires, and will always require, the use of force and the continual brutalization of an entire people.

For, having unified all of what used to be Palestine (albeit into one profoundly divided space) without having overcome the Palestinian people's will to resist, Zionism has run its course. And in so doing, it has terminated any possibility of a two-state solution. There remains but one possibility for peace with justice: truth, reconciliation -- and a single democratic and secular state, a state in which there will be no "natives" and "settlers" and all will be equal; a state for all its citizens irrespective of their religious affiliation. Such a state has always, by definition, been anathema for Zionism. But for the people of Israel and Palestine, it is the only way out.

It's hard to say more about that one, it pretty much says it all.

So, on to the next one, a little of the latest by Amira Hass of Haaretz;

Up until the start of the 1990s this was a basic experience that was taken for granted, and it played a part in empowering and reconstructing the Palestinian people after the catastrophe and the disintegration that was brought upon it by the establishment of the State of Israel. Only today, as this expanse is being butchered into dozens of separated and distanced enclaves in a process that is causing Palestinian society to crumble, is it possible to understand the importance of space during about a quarter of a century. In 1967 Israel learned from the "mistake" it made in 1948. It took care not to grant citizenship to the inhabitants of the occupied territories, not even the inhabitants of the 70 square kilometers it annexed to Jerusalem. But it made a new "mistake": It opened one expanse to both Jews and Palestinians. Of course the Jews had the hegemonic privilege to settle in the entire expanse, to take over Palestinian lands and precious water sources to build expansive settlements for themselves. This right is denied not only to the Palestinians in Hebron or to the Jaffa refugees, now living in the Jabalya refugee camp, but also to the inhabitants of Nazareth and Sakhnin, who are Israeli citizens.

But it was only in the 24th year of the occupation that Israel began to "correct" the empowering "mistake" of 1967: If until then the occupation had been characterized by the theft of land (and water), it was now also characterized by the robbery of the Palestinian expanse. Starting in 1991, Israel has been creating two kinds of expanses between the Mediterranean and the Jordan: a superior, open, developed and improved space for the Jews, and a shattered space tainted by intentional de-development for the Palestinians.

This radical change began in January 1991, when Israel revoked the right of all Palestinians to freedom of movement in the whole country and established a regime of permits for limited amounts of time, doled out only to a minority. First the inhabitants of Gaza were cut off from the entire expanse. Then came the turn of the inhabitants of the West Bank. Later the accelerated construction of the Jewish settlements and the building of the bypass roads in the West Bank (all under the cover of "the peace process") cut the northern part of the West Bank off from its southern part and increasingly distanced villages from their lands and their provincial towns. Gradually, Israel also restricted the movement of the state's non-Jewish citizens in the expanse and denied their entrance into the Gaza Strip (from 1994 onward) and afterward into the West Bank as well (from 2000 onward). And this is how we arrived at the present: an archipelago of dozens of small and shrunk enclaves, cut off from one another, with the distance between them increasing.

Here's another date for us to consider, 1991, when the process of separation, as shown by Amira Hass, began well before the beginnings of organized violent resistance to the occupation (the first suicide bombing was in 1994 in response to the Hebron Massacre) and was done to undo the mistakes of those that thought Palestinians would be a stable, apolitical source of unskilled labor for the Israeli economy; instead, walls were/are built/being built, and unskilled labor was and still is being imported from Thailand to the Phillipines (kind of like a guest-worker program... sounds very neo-liberally familiar), and Palestinians are imprisoned, unemployed and malnourished in their very homeland.

Let's end with excerpts from George Bisharat, here we go!

Forty years ago this week, Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip, re-establishing a political system in which one sovereign ruled over all of former Palestine. Unnoticed by the world, this brought about a version of a "single state solution" to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict -- albeit one in which Palestinians and Jews do not have equal rights.

A comforting illusion has been fostered that if Palestinians and Israelis could only be coaxed back into negotiations, the elusive two-state solution would somehow materialize. The interests of leaders on all sides are served by this fiction, although for different reasons. For President Bush, an appearance of progress toward Palestinian-Israeli peace quells hostility toward the United States in the Middle East, and eases policy options elsewhere in the region, including Iraq. The PLO leadership, personified in the hapless Mahmoud Abbas, staked its entire political legitimacy in the Oslo accords and the endless "peace process" it inaugurated. Abandoning negotiations toward a two-state solution would constitute an admission that it had led the Palestinians into a terrible dead-end. Israel mollifies the United States by engaging in the negotiation charade, exploits the continuing indeterminacy to continue colonizing the West Bank, and advances its strategic objective of permanent control over most or all of former Palestine. Like the shimmering waters of a desert mirage, the two-state solution moves just out of reach with every apparent advancing step.

The number of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs living within the borders of former Palestine are now roughly equivalent, at just more than 5 million each. The question is: Will political power within this single political system continue to be exercised in what former ANC member and current South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils and others have described as an acute form of apartheid? Or will Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews enjoy equal rights and share power fairly in what is already a joint polity? For those who support peace, justice and respect for international law, the choice should be obvious.