You want to know how to go about re-victimizing the victim? Take him to court and accuse him of hurting you. In that regard, you should have followed the jury trial in Manhattan late last month that found the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority liable for “their role in knowingly supporting” six specific attacks by Palestinians in occupied Palestine between 2002 and 2004 in which four Jewish Americans were killed while visiting or living in Israel, and eight others “physically injured,” some left with “deep psychological scars.”
The civil case, which involved dozens of plaintiffs and was brought against the Palestinian groups under the so-called Anti-Terrorism Act, resulted in default judgments of $654 million. What is even more galling is that lawyers for these plaintiffs felt “confident” that they could seek court orders to have the defendants’ bank accounts and their property, including real estate, seized. The judgments could also be taken to other countries where the PLO and the PA have assets.
My, my! All this brouhaha over the death of four and the injury to eight. One wonders if the jury knew that this is how many Palestinians Israel kills and injures on a slow weekend.
It’s an outrage. In its long — unendurably long — occupation, the Israeli military has killed and maimed literally tens of thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. And the psychological scars it has left on children in Gaza alone, through its indiscriminate bombing of homes, schools and hospitals, are crippling.
But in the surrealistic world of the Israel-Palestine conflict, not to mention the convoluted world of how that conflict is perceived in the US, the victimizer can go to court, sue his victim and win a judgment against him. But the fact, passing largely unnoticed, is that since 1967, when Israel captured that small remnant left to Palestinians after the dismemberment of their patrimony 20 years earlier, Zionism’s intention was to both subdue and pauperize its victims by robbing them of their political rights and their precious land — and to do it through state terror.
And through that terror, the notion went; people would eventually be cowed into submission. But in the real world, it doesn't work out that way. The human spirit -- the essential repertoire of our consciousness, if you wish — will rebel against that condition, at whatever cost that rebellion may entail. Recall Patrick Henry’s outcry at the Virginian Convention In 1775: “Give me liberty or give me death.” We do not rebel on a whim. Rather we are programed, as it were, to rebel against the weariness of oppression that the oppressor never ceases to inflict on us daily.
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, whose focus was on the workings of a totalitarian state in 1984 (the book was released in 1948) that controls people’s lives through terror and harsh punishment, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is being tortured by Inner Party member O’Brien. “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on your face — forever,” he is told. Then O’Brien goes on to warn his victim that “the individual is only a cog, Winston, and the weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”
In the real world, I say, it doesn’t work out that way. So long as there is occupation there will be resistance and regression into violence. And so long as there is a central failure by human beings to find a dignified place for themselves in history, they will lash out. In short, if you can not choose the way you live, you will choose the way to die — by detonating a bomb in the streets of occupied Jerusalem, if need be, and take with you as many Israelis as you can. Not just as Palestinians, but as human beings everywhere, across cultures and eras, we all carry within us bits and pieces of this complex will-to-meaning, this drive to live free or die. Tell that to twelve jurors in New York.
It is doubtful that either the PLO or the PA were directly involved in these violent acts for which they were held liable in court, but even if they were, the perpetrators themselves would have been predisposed to commit them without the urging of others. Moreover, these plaintiffs are seeking well over half a billion dollars in damages from the PLO-PA. Well, all the power to them. The PA, the reincarnation of the PLO in the West Bank, is virtually broke these days, after Israel began two moths ago to withhold more than $100 in monthly tax revenue it collects on behalf of the Authority. In fact, the continued viability of that Authority is now in question, with the possibility that, as John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, claimed two weeks ago, it could “decide to disband as a result of their predicament, and that could happen in the near future.” (Truth be told, not too many Palestinians will cry crocodile tears over that outcome.)
And, yes, when will Israel pay reparations to the people of Palestine for all that suffering, death and destruction it has wreaked on them all these years? The time will come — and trust me on this one, it will — when it finds itself having to, because for every oppressor a day will come.
