Israel is in denial. It has refused to take stock and own up to the fact that sooner or later the accounts will have to be balanced between it and the nation it plundered in 1948 and the people it has occupied since 1967. Israel, in other words, should confront not the Palestinians, but its own past, its denial of memory, and of how as it protected its own children, it has consistently humiliated, tormented and massacred other people’s children.
The atrocities that Israeli invading troops have committed in Palestinian towns over the last two weeks are legion: hundreds killed, hundreds more injured and left to die from unattended wounds, thousands arrested and tortured during interrogation, bodies strewn in the streets or buried in backyards or parking lots, ambulances and food trucks blocked, scores of homes and offices searched, government buildings trashed, roads ripped up, walls knocked over, doors blown open, Apache helicopters firing rockets at houses, commercial centers and refugee camps, and civilians left cowering in their homes without food or water.
In Bethlehem, now a totally devastated city, Rev. Mitri Raheb, a pastor and noted theologian, was quoted in the Washington Post on Monday as saying: “They are not searching for people or ammunition. They hate to see any sign of life in our town. They want to see us as dogs. They don’t want to see us as equal to them.” Then he added: “It’s this evil power of hatred. I think it’s hatred. They entered, and their aim was to destroy as much as possible.”
These people are truly the New Barbarians. Hyperbole aside, not since the Mongolian hordes who invaded the civilized world of the Middle East have there been such savagery, such cruelty, such wanton display of terror. No wonder that these actions have provoked a flood of outrage in the Arab world, the Islamic world and the European world.
Leaders of the Israeli entity have claimed that their war is aimed at “uprooting the terrorist infrastructure,” a shopworn cliche that they had taken with them to Lebanon when they invaded that country 20 years ago. Even were such an infrastructure to exist, it is made up of angry, frustrated young men and women who are the product of the very intolerable conditions that Israel, as a ruthless occupier, had foisted on them. If these youngsters are indeed the monsters they are made out to be, then let’s find Frankenstein first. Moreover, this anger and frustration will inevitably and predictably grow after Israel’s pitiless onslaught, as will the number of Palestinians who will seek revenge for the devastation wrought on their homeland.
Occupation breeds resistance, and resistance breeds repression, which breeds more resistance. And so it goes. How far can and will the Zionist entity take this? We know how far the Palestinians will take it. They will take it as far as Patrick Henry took it, when he told his fellow American patriots at the Virginia Convention in March, 1775: “Is life so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.”
You may not agree with the tactics an occupied people embrace to liberate themselves, but you have to agree with their right to fight their occupiers.
Yet another American secretary of state arrived in the region this week on a mediating mission. Or less than one, for on the eve of his departure last Sunday, he told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I am not going to come back with a peace treaty in hand. I may not even have a cease-fire in hand.” What is even more pathetic, not to mention mortifying for this emissary of the American government, a government that we have been told wields a lot of clout in Tel Aviv, is that Colin Powell, that same day, told reporters he would meet with the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, “if appropriate circumstances permit.”
Asked to define appropriate circumstances, Powell said, “accessibility, security issues and other circumstances,” indicating it would be contingent on Israel granting him permission for such a visit.
One, therefore, need not put much stock in the secretary’s trip, for he is there already handicapped with two hurdles. The one is that Israel’s war on the Palestinians is seen by the American administration as being in the same ballpark as America’s fight against terrorism, though it is clear to the entire world that what is happening in Palestine does not fit the Sept. 11 template, not by a long shot, and not by any stretch of the imagination. And the other is that the secretary is not prepared to tell Israelis to fold their tents and go back to the 1967 borders, taking with them all their messianic settlers and all their occupation soldiers.
That’s the least acceptable solution to the peoples of Palestine and the Arab world. (That notion, you will recall, was formalized at the recent Arab summit in Beirut.)
I say the “least acceptable” because, truth be told, the 1967 borders are not, strictly speaking, the internationally recognized borders of Israel. These would be the 1947 borders defined in the UN Partition Plan of that year. By agreeing to accept the 1967 borders, the Palestinians are in effect already accepting a mere 22 per cent of their ancestral patrimony as the terminus of their territorial claims.
No way on earth should Palestinians agree to quibble over that remnant of their homeland with the pied noires who inhabit the Zionist entity in Palestine.
Last Tuesday, April 9, marked the 54th commemoration of the massacre of Deir Yassein.
Menachem Begin, who was implicated in the killings there that took place in the two days of April 8-9, 1948, and who lived in a house overlooking the slopes on which this Palestinian village had been situated, is said to have spent the last year of his life in retirement sitting quietly on his porch contemplating the empty plot of land below. No doubt he remembered. And when he remembered, one wonders, what thoughts went through his head?
You deny memory, you deny truth. And to deny truth you deny justice. And without justice life is hollow, meaningless and alienating.
Regardless of how astute and determined American mediators are, they cannot bring peace to the Holy Land so long as Israelis continue to deny what they owe Palestinians, so long as they do not take stock and own up.
Or is it already too late? Have Israelis convinced themselves, in that brisk vulgarization of historical truth that has gone on for well over half-a-century in their society, that they are the victims? Has the mask they have worn all these years become one with the face?
Colin Powell could talk about the Mitchell Plan and the Whatever Plan till he’s blue in the face, till his eyeballs pop out, till the cows come home, but if Israel is hellbent on maintaining its status as an occupying power, we aren’t going anywhere. Palestinians have shown that they will take on any challenge, endure any hardship, sustain any loss of life, to be free. And they will do it without flinching. That’s the bottom line, Colonel. ([email protected])
