View Point: Israeli aggression and Western hypocrisy

The casualty figures from the latest Israeli barbarity against the besieged Gaza Palestinians speak for themselves. Over 200 people killed in a week-long assault from the air, the sea and the ground. According to the UN, three quarters of the dead were civilians, one quarter of them children. Behind these cold statistics were real people, such as 18 members of a single family murdered by Israeli bombs in their home. Eight members of another family, including five children, also killed in their home. Nine young football fans were killed – three of them brothers – and another 15 wounded at a beach café while watching the World Cup semi-final between Argentina and the Netherlands. A home for the disabled wiped out along with most inmates. Hundreds of the wounded lay in hospitals fighting for their lives, like a 22-year-old fresh law graduate hit in his home, lying unconscious in a hospital bed with both legs amputated. A six-year-old girl, the only child born after five IVF processes, also comatose from shrapnel lodged in her head while helping her mother with some domestic chore. The home-made rockets Hamas has been firing into Israel killed not a single Israeli until Tuesday.

Yet such heart-wrenching human suffering fails to move the conscience of Western governments. Never tiring of lecturing China and Russia on human rights, they have shamelessly been equating the aggressor and the aggressed. Said US President Obama, “we are fully supportive of Israeli’s right to defend itself from missiles landing on people homes and workplace and potentially killing civilians.” Hamas has reportedly fired close to a thousand rockets at Israel. Almost everyone of these rockets proved to be potentially incapable of killing anyone on the other side because they are an unsophisticated weapon, and the other side is protected by the Iron Dome missile shield supplied by Obama’s country – just like the other deadly weapons Israel has been using to massacre Gaza’s hapless citizens. It matters little to Israel and its patrons that the collective punishment Israel is giving to the Palestinians living under occupation – modern history’s longest occupation – constitutes a flagrant violation of the international laws governing belligerent occupation under The Hague Regulations of 1907 and the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. What Israel has been doing are crimes against humanity.

The rudimentary rockets fired by Hamas are not meant to cause any casualties but to make a bigger point: that Palestinians will never give up fighting for their rights and dignity. And that the real issue is Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

Israel has no intention of ending the occupation. The latest aggression is part of a two-pronged strategy to make life unlivable for the Palestinians and to usurp more and more of their lands by expanding Jewish settlements on occupied lands. This is the third major attack on the Gaza Strip in six years. November 2012 air strikes left 171 Palestinians dead, while a 22-day-long military operation in 2008-09 claimed 1,400 Palestinian lives. The West Bank Palestinians have suffered similar, larger scale atrocities. There is a purpose to these crimes.

Putting Israel’s relentless aggression in its context, a well-known progressive Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, explains it is part of a policy to cleanse Israel of the native population through genocide. Describing the latest assault on Gaza as “incremental genocide”, he points out that “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 vision, he continues, “is of an Israel stretching over almost the whole of historic Palestine where millions of Palestinians still live.” No wonder the various rounds of peace talks and road maps, including Obama administration’s latest talks initiative, have failed. Tel Aviv has only been using these initiatives to buy time for building more and more illegal settlements on occupied lands and consolidating expansion.

As part of that policy Hamas is demonised with the support of Western countries. Notably, Hamas came to power in 2007 in Gaza through the 2006 legislative elections. Disregarding the group’s democratic credentials, the US and its European allies declared it a terrorist organisation – needless to say, at the behest of Israel- imposing crippling economic sanctions on the Gaza Strip’s 1.8 million population in tandem with a stringent Israeli blockade. Hamas’ survival despite economic strangulation and periodic bombings and military incursions, says a lot about the Palestinian people’s resolve to end occupation.

Odds are currently stacked against the Palestinians. The region’s governments, working hard by way of self-preservation to maintain the status quo, are least interested in helping the emergence of an independent, viable Palestinian state. In fact, they are happy to lend a helping hand (secretly, of course) to Israel, as did the new military backed president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Soon after assumption of office, he shut the Rafah border, the besieged Gaza citizens’ only lifeline, destroying also the tunnels they used to smuggle in other vital supplies. The pro-Palestinian Syrian government is fighting for its survival. Their other ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, is busy trying to save Bashar al-Assad’s government.

The situation being what it is, the Palestinians have no choice but to persist in resisting occupation. Considering Israel’s policy of ‘incremental genocide’ together with settlement construction activity, the two-state solution clearly is unworkable. Their best bet is to stop pursuing this option and go for on state in which Jews, Muslims and Christians can live side by side. The only civilised way forward is a secular, democratic state where all citizens have equal rights. Religious extremists dominating Israeli politics, of course, hate the idea of a pluralistic, democratic state- indeed, any dilution of the Jewishness of the state. But they cannot have it both ways. Time and the region’s changing political realities favour the Palestinian cause.

saida_fazal@yahoo.com