1 - 7 February 2001
Issue No.519
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 1 - 7 February 2001 Issue No.519 |
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Reflections
Freedom to oppress
By Hani Shukrallah
Settlements, the right of return, Arab East Jerusalem, the geographic contiguity of the fledgling Palestinian state, its people's "sovereignty" over its borders, economy, politics (including the provision of civil and human rights) and, last but not least, the rights of one million Palestinian citizens of the Jewish state: some of these are sticking points in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, others are tacitly glossed over, conceded a priori and/or altogether ignored. All of them, however, reveal that what we have before us is not peace but enslavement, and that Palestinian subjugation and dispossession are indispensable conditions for the perpetuation of Israel's Zionist character.
When Zionists outline (under the rubric of security) the conditions for the existence of "the Jewish state," which are automatically extended to signify the sheer physical existence of that state's four million Jews, what they are in fact saying is that colonial and racial mastery is necessary to Jewish survival in the land of Palestine; that Palestinian enslavement and Israeli imperial supremacy in the region are the Jews' only bulwark against another holocaust.
What is interesting is that this argument implicitly concedes the original sin of the founding of Israel at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs' dispossession, not in order to apologise for it, let alone rectify it, but to construct it as an existential, irrevocable dilemma. The Zionist bottom line is: kill or be killed.
Very little in this is very new. It is the kind of twisted self-awareness that has been common to all colonial masters since the Opium Wars and before, always constructed and justified in racist terms: the European quarter is constantly under threat by the fanatical natives, the hordes clamouring at the gate. The fact that the Jews themselves were for centuries the victims of the most heinous forms of racial oppression, peaking in the monstrosity that was the Nazi-perpetrated holocaust has, however, served both to disguise the conventionally colonial nature of Zionist ideology and practice, and to make them far more potent.
The region's sole nuclear power, a veritable Sparta, armed to the teeth and governed by generals, boasts one of the most effective fighting machines in the world. A culturally and technologically advanced slice of the developed industrial and post-industrial world, sitting pretty within one of the most Third Worldish of Third World regions, it is unequivocally backed by the world's sole superpower -- and yet there is no other state in the world that is as avowedly insecure about its future. Its mere existence as an entity and a populace is ever precarious, ever open to question, ever under dire threat. The original dispossession of the Palestinians can be maintained and protected only through its expanded reproduction. Israeli and Jewish security -- indeed, survival -- are posited in such terms as to make the subjugation and continued dispossession of the Palestinians their immutable conditions.
It is thus that the Palestinians should be content with less than 20 per cent of historical Palestine, concede the usurpation of the rest of Jerusalem and the effective strangulation and/or ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian residents, concede also that the little land they have should be dismembered into at least three parts with no territorial contiguity, with Jewish settlements, protected highways and byways sticking more like an iron fist than a sore thumb into its very heart -- while their own connecting roads should remain at the fickle mercy of the Israeli army and rampage-prone settlers.
They should renounce the right of return of millions of Palestinians whose tie to the land, when not direct, is one generation removed, while acknowledging that right for any Jew anywhere in the world, on the basis of a millennia-old Biblical connection -- and even (according to recent studies) to Christian Orthodox Russians on the make. They should grant that their "in-door" neighbour should possess one of the most advanced armed forces in the world, while they are kept disarmed, save for a Kalashnikov-bearing police force, which, moreover, is assigned the task of further protecting Israeli/Jewish security by systematically abusing the human and civil rights of its own people (in close coordination with the Israeli Mossad and the CIA), failing which all hell must break loose, as the past months have amply demonstrated. Nor is the fledgling Palestinian state to exercise any real measure of control over its economy, borders, foreign relations or domestic civil and political life (except again in similarly close "coordination"). Diaspora Palestinians should remain in the Diaspora, Israel's one-million-strong Palestinian population is to be content with subservience and the occasional pogrom, and Palestinians in the territories/state should agree to live under lock and key, bound and gagged. This, or another holocaust.
But was it not a Jew who said, a great many years ago, that a people cannot be free that oppresses another?
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