A year has passed and nothing has changed for the people of Gaza. The city is still under siege, sharp shooters kill more men than a hunter does his game while the world watches in silence. Well, actually they are too busy following the Daka rally, watching Manchester United get knocked out and hearing snippets of the Tiger Woods fiasco. People would think me, an expat based in the Middle East to obviously feel more for the suffering that the fellow Arab and Muslim Nations are facing. Last year the Obama syndrome played spoil sport to their woes and this year the Burj Khalifa cast its shadow over a highly deserved tribute to Gaza.
In the light of this, I happened to read an article by Edward S. Herman a professor at University of Wharton in Pennsylvania U.S.A. The following is an extract from his book titled Israeli Ethnic Cleansing And The Moral Instinct. I would prefer calling it the Ten Commandments with the first one being added as a Commandment by the writer for completeness.
1. The most interesting and perhaps most important case of an aborted “moral instinct” is that involving Israel, where the state has been engaged in a systematic policy of dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem for decades, not only without a meaningful response on the part of the Free World, but with steady support from the United States and spurts of approval and support from its democratic allies. The ability of the Western political leaders, media and humanitarian intellectuals to get enraged at approved villains like Arafat, Chavez, and Milosevic, while treating Begin, Netanyahu and Sharon kindly as statesmen deserving of economic and military aid and diplomatic support, is a small miracle of self-deception, advanced double standards, and moral turpitude. What makes it a miracle is that the basic premises as well as performance of the Israeli state fly in the face of the entire range of enlightenment values that supposedly underlie Western civilization.
2. It is a racist state as a matter of ideology and law. It is officially a Jewish state, 90 percent of the land in the state is reserved for Jews, Palestinians have been barred from leasing or buying state-owned lands that were seized in 1948 and later, and Jews from abroad have a right to immigrate and become citizens with privileges superior to those of indigenous non-Jews. This kind of ideology and law was unacceptable as regards the apartheid state of South Africa, although it is interesting that Reagan was “constructively engaged” with that state, Margaret Thatcher found it quite tolerable, and South African “anti-terror” operations were integrated with those of the Free World. [3] The Nazis treatment of the Jews in Germany even before the organization of the death camps was and still is considered outrageous; and the Soviet mistreatment of its Jewish population even led to punitive U.S. legislation (the Jackson-Vanik bill, still on the books). But the Israeli analogue of the Nuremberg laws and its construction of a state built on racial discrimination is acceptable to the enlightened West. The “chosen people” replace the “master race,” and that is not only acceptable, Israel is held up as a model democracy and “light unto the world” (Anthony Lewis). And by implication, Israel’s creation of a body of humans who are second class citizens by law (or of a still lesser class in the occupied territories), legally and politically “untermenschen,” is also acceptable. This is a unique system of “privileged racism.”
3. The Israeli state has been allowed to ignore numerous Security Council resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding its occupation of the West Bank, as well as the International Court of Justice ruling on its apartheid wall, and simply dispossess the Palestinians of a large fraction of their land and water, demolish thousands of their homes, cut down many thousands of their olive trees, destroy their infrastructure, and create a modern network of roads through the occupied West Bank for Jews only while imposing serious obstacles to Palestinian movement within the West Bank. This systematic ethnic cleansing has been implemented by an extremely well trained and well equipped army working over a virtually unarmed indigenous population, to make room for Jewish settlers – and in violation of international law on the proper behavior of an occupying power. This is a unique system of “privileged ethnic cleansing,” “privileged law violations,” and “privileged exceptions to Security Council and International Court rulings.”
4. Israel has periodically crossed its borders to make war on its neighbors- Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon-has engaged in supplementary bombing or acts of terrorism against those three countries plus Tunisia, and for many years maintained a terrorist proxy army in Lebanon while carrying out numerous terrorist raids there under its Iron Fist policy, inflicting heavy civilian casualties. While the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was proclaimed to be in response to terrorist attacks, in fact it was based on the absence of terrorist attacks (despite deliberate Israeli provocations) and the fear of having to negotiate with the Palestinians rather than continue to ethnically cleanse them. [6] There was of course no punishment or sanctions against Israel for these actions, as Israel benefits from a “privileged right to aggression, state terrorism, and sponsorship of terrorism,” which is not unique but which follows from the country’s status as a U.S. ally and client state.
5. Given its right to ethnically cleanse and terrorize in violation of Security Council resolutions and international law, its victims have no right to resist. They may be pushed off their land, their homes demolished, olive trees uprooted, and their people killed by IDF and settler violence, but forcible resistance on their part is unacceptable “terrorism,” to be deeply deplored. A thousand odd Palestinians were killed by the Israelis during their first and non-violent phase of resistance in the initial intifada (1987-1992), but their passive resistance had no effects on the illegal occupation, the international community did nothing to alleviate their distress, and Israel had a tacit understanding with the United States that it would be supported in its violent response to the intifada until that resistance was broken. The ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed in these years was 25 to 1 or higher, but given Israel’s privileged right to terrorize, it was the Palestinians still labelled the terrorists.
6. With full rights to ethnically cleanse and terrorize, and exempt from international law, the Israelis were also free to put in charge of the state a man responsible for a string of terrorist attacks on civilians and, at Sabra and Shatila, a massacre of somewhere between 800 and 3000 Palestinian civilians. Amusingly, the Yugoslav Tribunal argued that genocidal intent could be inferred from an action seeking to kill all the people of a given group in one area, even if not part of a plan to kill all them elsewhere, citing their own earlier decisions plus a UN Assembly resolution of 1982 that the slaughter of 800 at Sabra and Shatila was “an act of genocide.” But that kind of Tribunal judgment was applied only to target Serbs-it was not only not applied by the West to Sharon, it didn’t even interfere with his becoming an honored head of state.
7. With rights to ethnically cleanse and terrorize, such invidious words were made inapplicable to Israeli actions. They were applied with great indignation to Serb operations in Kosovo, which were features of a civil war (stoked from abroad) and were not, as in the Israeli case, designed to remove and replace an indigenous population in favor of a different ethnic group. Israel was not only exempt from charge of an extremely applicable pair of words, it has also been the beneficiary of privileged usage of the words “security” and “violence.” The Palestinians may be far more insecure than the Israelis and subject to a much higher and more sustained level of violence, but again it is the Palestinians who must reduce their resort to violence and the big issue is how Israel can be made more secure. Palestinian security is not an issue in the West, because their victimization is of no concern and because their insecurity is a result of their failure to accept the ethnic cleansing process and their resistance to that process. They are “unworthy victims,” by virtue of deep-seated political bias. The ethnic cleansing process, which involves wholesale terrorism, and is the causal force that has elicited a responsive Palestinian retail terrorism, is actually put forward (along with the wall), not as a deliberate program to “redeem the land” for the chosen people but as necessary for “Israel’s legitimate response to terrorism.” And the primary terrorists get away with this!
8. Israel is the only Middle Eastern state that has built up a stock of nuclear weapons, and it has been aided in this not only by the United States but also by France and Norway. This has happened despite the 39 years of ethnic cleansing, steady and record-breaking violations of Security Council demands and international law, and periodic invasions of Israel’s neighbors. This privileged right to nuclear weaponry and exemption from the jurisdiction of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Non-Proliferation Treaty flows from Israel’s other privileges noted earlier, and ultimately the protection and cover of U.S. power.
9. The Free World has been aghast at the possibility that Iran might be positioning itself to acquire nuclear weapons at some future date. Iran has of course been threatened with “regime change” and bombing and other attacks by both the United States and Israel, but Iran’s actions conflict with the regime of privilege in which only Israel (and its superpower underwriter) have a security problem and right of self defense; others, like the Palestinians on the West Bank, must accept a position of inferiority, acute insecurity, and ethnic cleansing and apartheid walls and policies. Still others, like Iran, must cope with the threat of attack and sanctions for engaging in legal actions and possibly seeking nuclear means of self-defense, without help from a Free World busily appeasing the United States and its Middle Eastern client. So Israel not only has a nuclear privilege, it is able to get the Free World to help it monopolize that privilege in the Middle East, which of course gives it greater freedom to ethnically cleanse.
10. The Free World has also been upset at the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian election of January 26, 2006. It is widely held that this may disturb the “peace process,” and George Bush is not prepared to negotiate with a group that employs “violence”! Violence, however, is the Bush and U.S. specialty, with three major aggressions in the last seven years and an openly announced program of domination based on military superiority; and Israel’s operations in Palestine are violent beyond anything the Palestinians have been able to muster, although in the ludicrously biased West “suicide bombing” is horrifying whereas “targeted assassinations” are not (although if the Palestinians had the capability of targeting Israeli officials who can doubt that this would horrify?). But just as “terrorism” cannot apply to the actions of the United States and its Israeli client, neither can an invidious word like “violence.” These states only “retaliate” and reluctantly use force in “self-defense” and with the best of intentions in service to their “security” and humanitarian ends-and the West buys this. Hamas has grown in popularity because Fatah and its leaders have failed to stop the ethnic cleansing process and have been unable to halt a steady increase in Palestinian misery, with Israel simply walking over Fatah’s leaders and making their tenure a complete failure. Hamas was actually funded by Israel years ago with the objective of splintering the Palestinians and weakening the secular Fatah. It succeeded in this, but now that an Islamic group has taken on power they and their patron will be able to find another reason to avoid any final negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, who have now voted in a party that does not eschew violence as Sharon and Bush have done! Hamas also refuses to disarm and insists on a right to defend its people against a ruthless ethnic cleansing occupation, but in the West this is unreasonable as only one side has the right to arms, self-defense and a concern over “security.” There is no right to resistance in this case of shriveled moral instincts.
The “peace process” is an ultimate Orwellism, which I defined years ago in a Doublespeak Dictionary as “Whatever the U.S. government happens to be doing or supporting in an area of conflict at the moment. It need not result in the termination of conflict or ongoing pacification operations in the short or long term.” So the “peace process” in Palestine, steadily accepted or actively supported by the U.S. government, has been characterized by intensified ethnic cleansing, the destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure, the settlement of some 450,000 Jews in the West Bank, the construction of an apartheid wall, and the Israeli takeover of much of East Jerusalem-in other words, the establishment by state terrorism of enough “facts on the ground” to make any kind of viable Palestinian state unthinkable. But for the propaganda organs of the Free World, there has been a meaningful “peace process” going on that the election of Hamas might halt!
THE END
Things have obviously moved on from this point. Hamas obviously won with an overwhelming majority which was an eye sore for the so called free world. So much for western backed democracy, pah!
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