Issue No.587
Opinion
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23 -29 May 2002 Issue No.587 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Back to beginnings
Recent events have revealed the true character of Israeli intentions towards the Palestinians, which are to mount a second Nakbah, writes Tikva Honig-Parnass
As the smoke from the battle begins to disperse and the haunting cries of the wounded and the bereaved gradually weaken, a clearer picture of the aims of the Israeli military assault emerges: the repression of Palestinian resistance and the annihilation of the Palestinian national movement, whose revival has been reflected in the Intifada.
However, Israel's condition for implementing this goal has not just been the demolition of the infrastructure of the resistance, nor has its main target been the government ministries of the Palestinian Authority that Sharon claims are leading the "terror." Rather, Israel has set out to crush the whole of Palestinian society, including its basic, collective and individual infrastructure, private and public organisations and non- governmental organisations dedicated to human rights and to other issues. Israel has sought to destroy these bodies' buildings, equipment and computer systems, which have served as the basis for organising some minimal social, economic, and cultural life.
Israel's decision to destroy Palestinian society and to turn it into a "human dust" of desperate, submissive individuals followed Israeli convictions that the Oslo solution, which had sought to bring about indirect Israeli rule over a Palestinian Bantustan state with the cooperation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), had failed. However, Israel's aspirations to do away with Arafat and the PA do not in themselves indicate a return to the pre-Oslo period, in terms of reviving the form of direct rule over the Occupied Territories that then applied.
The first Intifada, which was one of the reasons for the initiation of the Oslo process, had already proved the impossibility of the "enlightened occupation" that many in Israel believed could last forever. Sharon's plan now is far from being a return to that. This time, Israel will relinquish any responsibility for the people of the Occupied Territories that "direct rule" entails. Instead, it will "expropriate the security functions" from "Palestinians custody", shrinking PA jurisdiction to a few centralised services while removing most of them to the control of disconnected municipalities (Nahum Barnea, Yediot Ahronot, 26 April).
Moreover, it will attempt to create the circumstances in which it is able to exploit any future war, such as a war against Iraq, using this as a cover for the mass expulsion of the Palestinian population. In the meantime, the devastation of Palestinian society will continue. On the agenda is a further military onslaught, this time including Gaza, and this is likely to make what occurred in Jenin look like a picnic (military expert Dr Reuven Pdetzur, Ha'aretz, 1 May).
Doing away with the Palestinian national movement through the crushing of Palestinian society constitutes a return to the circumstances of the 1948 War and its aftermath in terms of completing the implementation of the aims underlining the Nakbah. This included mass expulsions, the handing over of the West Bank to Jordanian rule and the setting up of a military regime to govern those Palestinians who remained in what became Israel, this regime lasting until 1966.
The Palestinians are aware of Israel's return to its comprehensive goal of crushing Palestinian society that characterised the recent military onslaught and introduced the analogy of the 1948 Nakbah into public discourse. Thus, comparing the mass destruction of Jenin to the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948 points to a similarity in aims, the earlier massacre being pre- meditated and intended to create the panic needed to ease the expulsion of the Palestinians (Meron Benvenisti, Ha'aretz, 25 April).
Moreover, what has been brought to light by recent events is the foundation and essence of the historic conflict between Zionist colonialism and the Palestinian national movement, which has long been blurred by the variety of false attempted political solutions undertaken by Israel and by the US. The foundation and essence of the conflict for Israel, very evident in the latest episode, is a zero-sum battle launched against Palestinian nationalism, perceiving this to be a threat to Israel's "very existence" and therefore something to be annihilated.
Total war on the Palestinian national movement will necessarily be followed by the elimination of the buds of democratisation in Israeli society itself, which many believed would flourish in the era of peace ushered in by the Oslo Agreements. However, turning the occupation, which was believed by many to be temporary, into the systematic devastation of Palestinian society may increase the cracks in the wide consensus that successive Israeli governments in the past have enjoyed. This has been indicated by the few hundred Israeli reservists who have recently refused to serve in the Occupied Territories, threatening the consensus on Israeli policies in the Territories that has been in place since 1967.
Hence, there is now a need in Israel to mobilise every means of preserving this consensus intact. Indeed, as has been proven many times since the beginning of Operation Defensive Shield, the Israeli establishment has reacted by a tight closing of ranks, forbidding even the slightest opposition amongst its members.
What we are witnessing today is the growing development of "patriotic McCarthyism" in Israel, a development that has included wild attacks and condemnation of anyone daring to express even mild opposition to the atrocities committed in Jenin, or to raise doubts in regard to the aims of the "operation" from the vantage point of Israeli interests. Universities, which pretend to represent the values of freedom of expression, have forbidden meetings to debate the refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories. Those who have expressed "understanding" of the criticism of Israel raised by figures such as UN Special Envoy Terje Roed Larsen, or Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, have been presented as enemies of Israel and accused of supporting anti-Semitism.
Human-rights organisations have been depicted as "serving the enemy," with the Interdisciplinary Centre in Hertzelia, a university centre comprised of senior researchers from the social, academic, economic and security fields, having cancelled an invitation to the human rights group, B'tselem, which has supported the peace process. Artists who have made the slightest criticism have been banned from appearing, being branded as "traitors." And, in a development that is perhaps most indicative of the distinctiveness of the current situation when the boundaries of political legitimacy are being increasingly narrowed, even those Labour Party leaders who initiated and led the Oslo process are being sidelined.
Thus, a petition signed by 45 lecturers from Beer Sheba University called for cancelling the invitation extended to Knesset Member Yossi Beilin (Labour) to lecture there. Professor Zaritzki of Beer Sheba University justified the petition in the media by repeatedly accusing Beilin of "betrayal -- the punishment for which is death, or life imprisonment." The current slogan of bringing "the Oslo criminals to trial," heard across Israel, has not met with any real objection from the country's media, which has joined the establishment in a wild and unprecedented attack upon freedom of speech.
This process could not have happened without the political culture and social structure whose foundations were laid, and that were later sustained, by the Labour movement itself. This movement led the Zionist project before 1948, as it did for decades after the establishment of the Jewish-Zionist state on the ruins of the Palestinian people. The members of the generation responsible for the Nakbah in 1948, together with their sons and daughters, have provided the political, economic and social elites that emerged in the new state, their value system becoming its hegemonic ideology.
After all, only a value system that made human rights subservient to the "security" of the state could have sanctioned the atrocities that have occurred on a daily basis in the Occupied Territories over the past 35 years, atrocities that have continued with the support of the Israeli Supreme Court, media and public opinion.
The present neo-liberal view point that has been adopted by this new bourgeoisie, who are still depicted as being on the Left, has replaced the Zionist version of socialism adopted by their forefathers which itself sanctioned the subjugation of the interests of the population to the aims of establishing an exclusivist Jewish state. This political culture now leaves the great majority of Israeli society stripped of universal values with which to counter such developments, even though such values are now even more necessary than they were in 1948, in order to mobilise support for the total war that Israel is planning with the aim of liquidating the Palestinian national movement.
Returning to the essence of the conflict involves the redefinition of the Palestinian citizens of Israel as well, since war has been declared against the entire Palestinian people. The Palestinians in Israel have many times contradicted the assumptions that they would become nothing more than an atrophied limb torn from the Palestinian and Arab nation. Indeed, the strengthening of their national consciousness and solidarity with their brothers in the Occupied Territories, and in the refugee camps throughout the region, has taken place despite decades of physical separation, confronting the Zionist project with similar concerns to those at the root of the 1948 Nakbah.
From here arises the increased conviction in the Israeli establishment that these Palestinians in Israel constitute a "human time bomb" endangering the existence of the state. This position is shared by increasing parts of the Israeli public, whose adherence to the notion of the "Jewish State" has long lent legitimacy to the apartheid nature of the Israeli legal system, considered as preserving the "Jewish identity" of the state. The moral corruption of the society unified around this misleading concept cannot be described better than it is in the following paragraph by columnist B Michael in Yediot Ahronot on 24 April.
"This is a state," he wrote, "in which a person who is not racist enough is outside the consensus, a state in which whoever dares to demand full and equal rights for all its citizens is an 'enemy of Israel' and is depicted almost as a criminal and a candidate for being stripped of the law's defences, a state in which large parts of the elite explicitly support the mass expulsions [of Palestinians], and which promulgates laws regarding immigration, land and personal status which even Mr Le Pen in his wildest dreams would not have dared to demand."
Now, 50 years after the 1948 Nakbah, there is a real danger that history will be repeated. Expulsion is once again being perceived as a solution to the structural contradictions between Zionist colonialism and the Palestinian national movement, with some 45 per cent of Jews in Israel supporting the transfer of the Palestinian inhabitants of the Occupied Territories across the River Jordan, according to Israeli military historian, Martin Creveld. The vast majority of these people, even among Labour Party voters, also support the transfer of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, having been stripped of their lands, to the future Palestinian state. (Ephraim Yaiar and Tamar Harman, Ha'aretz, 1 April).
The adherence in Israel to the notion of an exclusivist Jewish state is responsible for the growth of undemocratic elements in Israeli political culture, though these elements have also accompanied the Zionist project since before 1948. Now, however, further growth is inevitable, since there is a need to gain the widest popular support among the Israeli public for the planned second Nakbah.
Yet, this growth is at a very high price, both for Palestinians and for the Jewish victims of Zionist colonialism. Indeed, the growing fascist character of Israeli society that we have witnessed in recent years, including the violation of human and political liberties and the abolition of the economic rights of a wide social strata, largely of Misrahim, only shows it is now in the best interests of both Israelis and Palestinians to do away with Zionist colonialism and with the apartheid regime currently in place across Palestine.
The writer is co-editor of the monthly English-language journal Between the Lines (www.between-lines.org).
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