|
Back to
Opinions Page
Israel
opened its raid into Gaza by bombarding power stations, the main water
pipeline and several major thoroughfares. If civilians in Gaza are the
source of terrorism, this is certainly their infrastructure. But the
real "infrastructure of terrorism" is not to be found in that
poverty-stricken collection of slums they call Gaza. The real
infrastructure of terrorism is the Israeli occupation and Israeli
occupation policy.
The purpose of the current Israeli assault on Gaza in not to
rescue one kidnapped Israeli soldier. He was just an excuse, applied
retroactively. Israel has made no bones about the fact that it regarded
harsh retaliation against Palestinian resistance operations a built-in
feature of its unilateral withdrawal plan from Gaza. Moreover, at least
two weeks ago Israeli military officials had already started to leak to
the press information regarding plans for a massive response to the
Qassam missiles that had been fired from Gaza into south Sedirot and
elsewhere, harming no one. It was intensely distressing and
nerve-racking to see the civil casualties from the Israeli raids on Gaza
during those weeks and then listen to Arab political analysts predicting
more extensive Israeli incursions after every raid. There was no
suggestion of a Palestinian response. Then the tunnel attack and
kidnapping caused even the most loquacious commentator to fall dumb.
Israel
acts as though its current behaviour is internationally justifiable on
the grounds of the unilateral disengagement. It points to its
non-presence in Gaza, even as it attacks from inside the Strip. The
subterfuge is possible because of the model solution Israel has invented
for Gaza and intends to apply to the West Bank: Palestinians locked up
behind walls, guarded by Palestinian security forces on the inside and
by the Israeli army on the outside. But the latter will strike hard and
fast into this concentration camp after every resistance operation
intended to remind Israel that it can't solve the Palestinian problem
and the problems of the Palestinians by leaving those overcrowded slums
and locking the doors behind it.
Regretfully, the international community, including the Arabs,
have colluded with this solution by effectively hailing the Israeli
disengagement as a withdrawal to recognised international boundaries, as
though Gaza were a separate occupied entity whose occupation ended with
the withdrawal instead of being part and parcel of the territories
Israel occupied in 1967. In lending themselves to this interpretation of
the disengagement, they have simultaneously helped furnish Israel with
pretexts for going on the rampage.
Therefore, when we say that the Israeli response in Gaza is
excessive compared to that bold act of resistance waged Monday against
Israeli terrorism, this is not a reflection on the value of the
kidnapped Israeli soldier, as Israel claims and some Arabs reiterate
like parrots, but rather on the nature of the Israeli solution.
Excessive violence against the slightest peep from the territories that
Israel "withdrew" from is part of the internationally applauded deal
that parades beneath the name of "disengagement".
In all events, the incursion is not about the superior value of
an Israeli life, but about Israeli superiority, to which the former
value is a corollary. The assertion of Israeli superiority is the answer
to anything that Israel regards as a precedent never to be repeated.
Contrary to the general belief, Israel perceives a greater danger from
attacks against its soldiers than attacks against civilians -- it does
not want the precedent to catch on. This is why it will respond much
more harshly to attacks against the military and why it attaches the
greatest importance to gauging its response and to gauging how the Arabs
react to this response. If anything, therefore, the incursion is about
the superiority of the value of the soldier over the value of the
ordinary human being.
Israel
knows that if military confrontation became the rule this would threaten
the unity of Israeli society. As long as civilians are at risk, Israelis
can tell themselves they are being attacked because they are Jews and
that they have no choice but to defend themselves, or that war is an
imperative. But attacks against soldiers are attacks mounted directly
against the occupation and the armed forces that embody the occupation.
States can choose their policies, unlike people on a bus or in a
restaurant. Soldiers who are killed are not said to have been murdered,
like civilians who happen to have been in the wrong restaurant or on the
wrong bus at the wrong time, but rather to have "died in the line of
duty". The Zionist establishment is also acutely sensitive to the fact
that the army, security and the military myth are fundamental to the
credibility and prestige of Zionism as a historic solution. No doubt,
too, selecting military targets would also alter the image of the
resister. He would become a formidable adversary who plans his
strategies and tactics in order to accomplish a certain agenda, instead
of just a mad suicide bomber driven by dreams of martyrdom or personal
revenge into blowing himself up in a marketplace so as to take reap the
greatest number of civilian casualties. The Zionist establishment does
not want anything to shake this carefully constructed and marketed image
of Palestinian otherness, because otherwise the Palestinian fighter
would become a legitimate party in a comprehensible struggle for
liberation.
Israelis do not know whether or not the recent Palestinian act of
resistance marks a turning point in the approach to resistance. By no
means do they want it to be. Apart from Israeli repression aimed at
quelling the resistance and forcing Palestinian society to pay the most
exorbitant price in the bargain, the foremost obstacle to such a turning
point is the intolerable number of parties that claim to plan, act and
speak on behalf of the Palestinians, let alone the lack of unity behind
a single political leadership. Indeed, it is currently impossible to
speak of a Palestinian approach, which implies perseverance in the use
of certain means towards the achievement of certain aims. Nor can there
be such a thing as a Palestinian approach without a unified leadership
to press towards these aims and without a common agenda to impose unity.
Resistance is not an operation, or set of operations, that hits its
mark. It is a project, which entails an overall scheme that governs the
acts of resistance and which engages the indispensable qualities of
foresightedness, originality and boldness, as opposed to mere artfulness
at words. Sometimes it is possible for an act of resistance to hit its
mark and be morally justified yet for it to be politically wrong because
it fails to serve the agenda or the project of the resistance. If the
recent resistance operation is to be regarded as a turning point in the
resistance then it will have to be demonstrated that it falls within the
framework of certain criteria.
On the other hand, you would think that the international
community and the Arabs would at least draw a line between a resistance
operation mounted against an Israeli military target and other
operations that target civilians. But no, that is not the case. When it
comes to the Palestinians and Israelis, at least, such fundamental
distinctions have been gradually smudged and perverted over the past two
years. Consequently, a captured Israeli soldier has been transformed
into a kidnapped hostage, the attack on a military installation is
treated as though it were an assault on a café filled with elderly aunts
and a blown up tank is mourned as though it were an urban bus. Arab and
Western officials have raced to their microphones to issue appeals to
the "kidnappers" to release the soldier, yet none of these have issued a
serious appeal to Israel to release Palestinian women and children in
Israeli jails. Nothing could more unequivocally attest that the world
has fallen for Israeli propaganda hook, line and sinker.
There must be no backing down. Neither the pain nor the heroism
of the Palestinians should be held in such cheap regard. We must insist
on the distinction between the Palestinian resistance and Israeli
terrorism in this case. Some people chose to respond to the murder of
Palestinian civilians by attacking an Israeli military installation.
They made the hardest choice, and chose the difficult path. Those who
did not take this path, who did not make this sacrifice, or put their
courage to this test, or suffer the trembling nerves in the darkness of
the tunnel, yet who have some delicacy of feeling towards the pains of
the Palestinians could at least spare this operation the embarrassment
of tainting it as terrorist. It was not "terrorism" by any standard.
Israel and the US should be warned against the folly of treating it as
such and of marketing Damascus, for example, as a base for it, as Israel
is currently trying to do in a ridiculous parody of the way Bush handled
Osama Bin Laden in the wake of 11 September.
As one observes events on the Palestinian and Arab scene, one is
pursued by a thought that one dare not formulate fully for fear of
having to support the inevitable conclusions: whatever one might say
about Israeli behaviour, however closely one might scrutinise it, there
is no cure and no substitute for good intentions. These cannot remain
hidden for a long time, for if they are not exposed by one's outward
behaviour they will be betrayed by a mood, an attitude, by a
psychological disposition.
They say that in politics intentions don't count, that what
counts are actions and their results. The remark falls into that
category of quotes that seem wise, but only in hindsight. In fact there
is probably not an adage that is more deceptive and more stupid.
Intentions are another word for ends, albeit viewed from their origins,
and ends determine the actions of rational beings to a large extent. The
claim, therefore, that intentions don't count is meaningless.
Intentions don't count if the results prove contrary, or
different, to one's intentions for reasons outside the power of one's
will. Intentions don't count if one thinks it in one's interest to
conceal these intentions. But, in this case, they will reveal themselves
as soon as one's end is attained. But, even before that they are often
betrayed by a mood or an attitude that is too obvious to suppress.
Embracing Olmert at a time when a massacre is in progress in Gaza
and when Olmert insists on continuing the massacre is an expression of a
mood. We're talking here about Israel, whose political leaders and
ministers cancel their trips abroad whenever an Israeli is killed as the
result of the conflict. Just for reminders, the meeting where all that
embracing took place was not held to get the settlement ball rolling
again or to discuss Israeli behaviour in Gaza, but rather for purely
celebratory and back-patting purposes. Olmert's very presence at this
meeting, under the laws of the current mood, counts as a victory. And
what a lovely setting for it too: against the backdrop of the rosy
cliffs of Petra. Here were gathered a handful of Nobel Prize laureates
who had performed not a single service for humanity. None of these had
invented insulin or even aspirin, or produced great literature or made
peace anywhere in the world -- in fact, one of them had caused wars. It
was a collection of self-obsessed narcissists, caring only about how to
refine and polish their image. Prime among them was a mediocre novelist,
a self-promoting racist by the name of Elie Weisel, who, regretfully,
took the appalling tragedy of the death of millions of Jews in the
Holocaust and reduced it to a kiosk for selling anti- Arab hatred.
Another of these luminaries initiated the nuclear arms race in the
region, not to mention several massacres, the most famous being the
massacre of Qana in Lebanon. This was none other than Shimon Peres, who,
in the wake of the recent resistance operation, now leads the campaign
against Damascus and is sounding the drums of a new war.
Why should Israel be rewarded for the atrocities it perpetrates
and for its political intransigence?
Not that Israel cares about the answer to this, either way.
Rather, it prefers for the question to remain unanswered so that it can
bask in its rewards as it simultaneously exploits them to indulge itself
further in its policies of repression against the backdrop of an
international silence that amounts to more than a wink of approval.
How can Israeli belligerency be stopped and how can Israeli
leaders be brought to account for the crimes they are perpetrating when
they are being toasted by Arab leaders? There is only one way to prevent
the current blurring and perversion of distinctions from claiming a
final victory and this is for democratic and grassroots forces in the
Arab world to make their voice heard loud and clear.
|
