By Dr. Habib
Siddiqui
August 10, 2014
On January 31, 1970, the great philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote
a message on the conflict in the Middle East, which was read on February
3, the day after his death, to an International Conference of Parliamentarians
meeting in Cairo.He wrote, “The development of the crisis in the Middle
East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded
by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to
“reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the
imperial power, because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what
it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of
the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the
previous aggression. The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not
only because no state has the right to annex foreign territory, but because
every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world
will tolerate.”
Israel obviously has perfected the art of negotiating from a
position of strength. The Western nations - all former colonial powers -
through their support of this rogue state have epitomized the art of double
standard! In their condemnation of the Palestinian resistance movement they
won’t tell us that the tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country
was “given” by a foreign power to another (European Jewish) people for the
creation of a new state (Israel) which resulted in expulsion of more than
700,000 innocent people who were made permanently homeless.They also don’t want us to know that
the then government of Great Britain had no authority to assign the land of
Palestine to anyone other than the people who were living there (i.e., the
Palestinians). They also don’t tell us that when the United Nations assigned a
portion of Palestine to the European Jewish immigrants in the so-called
Partition of Palestine in 1947, it violated its own Charter which stated that
it had no right to do so without obtaining the consent of the mandate
territory's population.
What happened in Palestine was classical Western colonialism,
which can sustain itself only via its superior military or economic resources
and by enforced occupation. As aptly noted by Peter Cohen, a retired
sociologist from the University of Amsterdam and a Jewish-Dutch World War II
survivor, in a recent article in the Huffington Post, superior strength,
however, does not create legitimacy. Israel has none. Cohen writes, “It is a
territory in the Middle East under Western occupation, which possesses no
political legitimacy now, nor can it ever acquire such legitimacy in the future
because it has no raison d'être and cannot create one.
Instead, Israel's policy has always been to create faits
accomplis, conquests that have been consolidated with the aid of its
constituent Western states in Europe and North America. To date, this policy
has never been effectively challenged, and so it continues in the same vein.
Israel can carry on creating more and more faits accomplis,
perpetuating its status as an ever-expanding occupation with vastly superior
military strength. But if it loses the West's support, it will no longer have
the means to defend itself, having nothing that could preserve its existence,
nor the raw materials to sustain itself. It could use atomic weapons, but this
does not in any sense bolster the legitimacy of the Western implant.”
Israel, as a colony, is a constant source of violence and
conflict. And it will
remain so unless the very colonial structure on which it is founded is brought
down - something that has happened in our time with apartheid South Africa.
With every new conflict since the birth of Israel the number of refugees has
grown. And the worst problem is: these refugees are safe nowhere, not even in
the UN compounds, schools, mosques and hospitals of Gaza. There are scores of
international laws that state that the refugees have every right to the
homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this fundamental right
is at the heart of the continuing conflict.
How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of
wanton cruelty of Israel? It is abundantly clear that no people anywhere in the
world would accept being bombed and expelled en masse from their own country.
How can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which
nobody else would tolerate? Will the Palestinian people be ever free? Will they
ever get justice for the crimes inflicted on them by the powerful against them?
I am beginning to doubt. I am very skeptical these days. True to
the words of Bertrand Russell, Israel as a colonial enterprise has been able to
abuse the process of negotiation to her advantage to extract further concession
towards expanding its control while curtailing everything for the vanquished,
occupied Palestinians. Every negotiation since the unholy birth of the state of
Israel has been a deception, a farce, a show for public consumption to not only
legitimize its illegitimate grab of the Palestinian land but also to
delegitimize Palestinian struggle and aspiration for freedom.
And the Israelis have partners in their crimes – and it is not the
USA, UK and western powers alone that dominate the UN and world bodies – but
our own criminals ruling some of the Muslim countries. These governments who
don’t allow any form of democracy – the kingdoms, sheikhdoms and military
dictators – are some of the worst enemies of the people of Palestine. Thus, not
a single bullet has been fired in defense of the violated Palestinians by these
regimes. And this, in spite of the fact that each of these Arab regimes spend
billions of dollars every year to buy arms and ammunitions from their western
patrons and beneficiaries! You wonder why they have all those deadly toys in
their arsenal if they are never going to use such for what is right and just!
Are those ‘toys’ supposed to be used against desert flies then?
A knowledgeable friend of mine said that he read somewhere that
some of the rich, anti-Brotherhood, anti-Hamas, and by default, anti-Qatari,
governments had actually bank-rolled Israel’s latest massacre in Gaza. I don’t
know the veracity of his claim. But I won’t be surprised if the story ever
turns out to be true.
Many of the reactionary, anti-people regimes in the Middle East do
not tolerate anything that could destabilize their regimes. The popular
movements like the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood are perceived as existential
threats to these regimes. They did not like the Arab Spring a bit. What became
popular among the ordinary masses of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in northern
Africa were nightmares for the rulers in neighboring countries (and their
western patrons). They have done everything since the people’s revolution in
Tunisia and Egypt had succeeded in unseating the hated dictators to put the
genie back to the bottle where it belonged. Thus, the popularly elected
President Dr. Mohammad al-Morsi was soon toppled by their man – Sisi, the
neo-Pharaoh of Egypt. All the leaders of Muslim Brotherhood are now awaiting
death sentences or long prison terms. They wanted to put the death-nail on
Hamas, too, which had historical ties with Muslim Brotherhood.
Sadly, as the Gazans bled to death, and their homes and
businesses, mosques, schools, colleges, universities and hospitals were bombed
by Netanyahu’s criminal IDF, the Obama and Cameron governments of the USA and
the UK resupplied Israel with more arms and ammunitions during the current
conflict while hypocritically speaking about the need for de-escalation of the
war through negotiation. Are these western patrons oblivious of the magnitude
of their crimes? Don’t they know that their actions, which have resulted in the
death of thousands of innocent civilians, constitute war crimes? Will they pay
compensation for the Palestinian victims? Just the reconstruction of bombed out
facilities inside Gaza may cost ten billion US dollars! How about the dead and
the injured people?
Israel and her patrons are for ‘negotiations’ - those same old
parleys which have only endorsed Israeli aggression and dehumanized their
victims! Those ‘negotiations’ have become part of textbook case for Israeli
propaganda with the added impetus to extract further concessions, let alone requiring that the Palestinians
accept the lawfulness of their expulsion.
Was not it Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu's Foreign Minister, who
candidly explained what such negotiations meant for Israel? Four years ago when
speaking to the readership of the right-wing Makor Rishon paper, he said:
"I do not think there is anything to be expected from negotiations. Even
if lasting 16 years they will produce no agreement. But my travels around the
globe have shown me that the world is very interested in seeing peace talks
start, even if only for the sake of appearance. A willingness to talk and talk
is something we can give. Why not?" (Makor Rishon, April 30, 2010)
Moshe Feiglin, aspiring to push Netanyahu out of his job as Likud
leader and PM, was also heard saying in 2010, "We will win because we
represent what most Likud members really want -- a government which says loud
and clear that this country is ours and ours only. I definitely want to deprive
Arabs of civil rights, unless they prove their loyalty to the state, and give
them financial encouragement to emigrate from here. Any area from which Israel
is attacked should be conquered and its whole population expelled." (Yediot
Aharonot - April 23, 2010)
Dozens of Israeli leaders from top to bottom can be cited to show
that statehood of the Palestinians with a just peaceful settlement of the
crisis has never been the real intent of the Israeli leaders. Israel's laws make it clear that the
Palestinians are not only militarily incapacitated but have also been stripped
of all their legal rights.
Not surprisingly, we are told that Hamas is not falling for such
old tricks put forth by the joint Israeli-Egyptian teamwhere the Zionists set all the rules
of the game. They are demanding
opening up the Port of Gaza and easing of cross-border movement of goods. Upon
their arrival in Cairo, the Palestinians had been informed by Egyptian security
chiefs – speaking on behalf of Netanyahu – that the very issue of opening
Gaza’s sea port (and airport) is “not on the agenda”. How about easing of
conditions for the prison conditions under which a million and eight hundred
thousand Gazans are held in Gaza - world’s largest concentration camp by the
two closely colluding warders, Israeli and Egyptian, who control all their
access to the outside world? Fat chance!
We are told that this weekend missiles were fired from Gaza
killing none and that IDF had bombed inside Gaza destroying a mosque and some
homes, killing many Gazans. The death toll is now nearly 2,000.
Blame it all on Hamas for refusing to be duped again! And now
criminal Netanyahu’s government says that it will not negotiate under fire: the
‘deadly’, ‘Iron-door-shattering’ missiles fired by Hamas must cease in order to
make it possible to talk. To these neo-Nazis of Israel lying and deception come
very easily. They don’t want us to know that of the Palestinian victims almost
all were civilians, and that on the Israeli side only 3 civilians had died,
which included a Thai worker. Out of a total 66 Israeli dead, 64 were soldiers.
Thus, 97% of the dead Israelis were the IDF soldiers, and not civilians. And
yet, Netanyahu’s lies are parroted by the Obama administration and other
western governments and their yellow journalists.
It seems that Gazans would have to fight – and fight hard whether
or not Obama, Cameron, Sisi and other friends of Israel in the opposite camp
like it. Their struggle is for freedom and human dignity. And they
have a right for such values which we all take for granted without having to
die for.
In his last message Bertrand Russell said, “Justice requires that
the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the
territories occupied in June, 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help
bring justice to the long-suffering people of the Middle East.” That call,
sadly, remains unfulfilled. How long can the friends of Israel dupe us with
hypocritical negotiations that reward the aggressor while ignoring the real
issue which is Israeli colonialism?
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