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US Secretary of
State Condi Rice visited refugee camps in Sudan and spoke of sanctions
and government complicity in creating such a human tragedy. She then
flew to Israel/Palestine and Lebanon but failed to visit a single
Palestinian refugee camp. Instead, she praised Ariel Sharon for his
“courage” in planning “disengagement” from the Gaza strip; a tiny desert
enclave with 1.3 million Palestinians, most of them refugees denied
their internationally recognized right of return. This was another
example of a US foreign policy that has gone haywire.
No one was allowed
to ask Rice about the statement by Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s right
hand man that “the significance of the disengagement plan is the
freezing of the peace process . . . Effectively, this whole package
called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed
indefinitely from our agenda . . . .All with a presidential blessing and
the ratification of both houses of Congress" (October 2004). And no one
seems to recall that Ariel Sharon stated clearly in 1988: “You don’t
simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away…I prefer to
advocate a positive policy, to create, in effect, a condition that in a
positive way will induce people to leave.” 150 countries and the
International Court of Justice agreed that that is precisely what is the
intention of the walls and fences being built on Palestinian lands and
surrounding the few remaining Palestinian areas. The daily killings,
land confiscations, economic strangulations, and misery of the natives
in the illegally occupied Palestinian areas was not on Ms. Rice’s
agenda.
As usual the US
media has ignored the Palestinian tragedy and focused on only a small
segment of the symptoms and instability associated with it (albeit
without drawing any linkages). Thus, there are the usual attacks on
anyone who, like the mayor of London, suggests that in addition to
combating terrorists, we should revaluate the policy of Anglo-American
support for colonial oppression and occupation.
State-sponsored
terrorism is rarely reported in US media but it is an organic and
natural part of colonization and settlement of native lands. The Israeli
colonization program over five decades left 5 million Palestinians as
refugees or displaced people and cornered those remaining into
bantustans/ghettos being surrounded by high walls and watchtowers. There
are individual acts of Palestinian terrorism, but one cannot ignore the
fact that over 530 Palestinian towns and villages were erased
completely. Residents were driven out by careful use of massacres (33
between 1947-1949 and dozens more since then), intimidation,
deprivation, land confiscation and outright expulsions.
The discrepancy in
reporting on individual terrorism and ignoring the more deadly state
terrorism is particularly troublesome because the American taxpayers
fund the ongoing atrocities while signing away their civil liberties in
the hysteria of government sponsored fear campaigns. If terrorists are
attacking us for our freedoms, is this why we are curtailing our
freedoms with such acts as the PATRIOT act? Is Switzerland a target for
terrorists? According to human rights organizations, four times more
Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces than Israelis killed
by Palestinians. These same human rights organizations (like Amnesty
International, B'tselem and Human Rights Watch) clearly showed that
Israeli forces do target civilians. Some 40,000 Iraqi civilians were
killed by US forces and there is no sign of an exit strategy as we
create more enemies bent on revenge for these killings.
It is not hard to
understand why most Europeans have identified that the route for peace
goes through Palestine. We can start by rejecting the request made by
Israel
for billions more in US taxpayer largesse and tying all aid to
Israel
to implementation of International law (including dismantling the
apartheid wall and allowing the return of refugees).
*
Dr. Qumsiyeh is author of “Sharing the
Land
of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli/Palestinian struggle” (Pluto)
and is president of the Association for One Democratic State in
Israel/Palestine |
