While listening to Morning Edition last week (when I wrote and should’ve posted this), I heard a rather disturbing story of a group of young Israelis who bought a building from an Arab man in Hebron, and shortly after moving in, began terrorizing the Palestinians in the area. Hebron is the largest city in the West Bank, located in the south, 30 kilometers south of Jerusalem. It is home to some 166,000 Palestinians, and over 500 Israeli settlers. Although Hebron continues to be the site of numerous acts of violence from both sides, a couple of things in this story stood out. The first being, if the situation were reversed, and it were Palestinians being required to evacuate the building, how quickly do you think they would be removed (and not by using water hoses and non-lethal stun grenades)? The second was the Israeli father who was rabidly overzealous in his use of the false argument that if you criticize absolutely anything Israel or Israelis do, you are an anti-Semitic Jew-hater (even though the reporter seemed purely neutral, I can only surmise the father thought that giving the oppressed Palestinians a voice put the reporter in this category). “The government refuses to recognize the right of Jews to own property in the land of Israel” the father said. Disgusting? Evil? Is this guy serious? After looking around on the internet for more on this situation, I came across another story that pointed out how widespread these attacks are. I then found this video on the BBC that shows one of these attacks taking place (Warning: you may find it disturbing). I ask you, who are the real terrorists? These settlements have become a symbol of the Israeli occupation, and are a tactic to incrementally rob the Palestinians of their land, while confining the 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank into what is fundamentally a concentration camp. Take the most recent story of the Libyan ship carrying 3,000 tons of aid that was turned back by the Israeli Navy. This, along with arbitrarily closing border crossings is collective punishment, a violation of the Geneva Conventions. This is a widely used tactic by Israel, as more broadly witnessed in the 2006 Lebanon War* when large parts of the Lebanese civilian infrastructure were destroyed, including 400 miles of roads, 73 bridges, and 31 other targets such as Beirut's Rafic Hariri International Airport, ports, water and sewage treatment plants, electrical facilities (the Israeli Air Force bombed the Jiyeh power station, 19 miles south of Beirut, resulting in the largest ever oil spill in the Mediterranean Sea), 25 fuel stations, 900 commercial structures, up to 350 schools, 2 hospitals, and 15,000 homes. Some 130,000 more homes were damaged, and over a million Lebanese were displaced. A 2007 Human Rights Watch report found that most of the civilian deaths in Lebanon resulted from "indiscriminate Israeli airstrikes," and found that Israeli aircraft targeted vehicles carrying fleeing civilians. In addition, the Israeli Navy imposed a naval blockade, ensuring that no aid would reach the civilians they had targeted and indescriminately (or perhaps a more concise term would be purposefully) killed, injured, and displaced.
I’ve spent a lot of time researching the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict" as it is called in the main stream media. Jimmy Carter, I believe, has a more realistic definition in his excellent and well-balanced book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. In an interview with Amazon.com, Carter explains the use of the term this way: “The book is about Palestine, the occupied territories, and not about Israel. Forced segregation in the West Bank and terrible oppression of the Palestinians create a situation accurately described by the word. I made it plain in the text that this abuse is not based on racism, but on the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land. This violates the basic humanitarian premises on which the nation of Israel was founded. My surprise is that most critics of the book have ignored the facts about Palestinian persecution and its proposals for future peace and resorted to personal attacks on the author. No one could visit the occupied territories and deny that the book is accurate.”
I, on the other hand, think apartheid is not the correct term. The Israeli action against the Palestinian people, in my opinion, is nothing short of genocide.
*I personally think calling this atrocity a “war” is incongruent with the facts. This unbridled agression by Israel was literally overkill as retribution for the Hezbollah attack on seven Israeli soldiers, killing three, injuring two, and kidnapping two.
Further reading: British politician George Galloway in the Monthly Review
2 comments:
Brutal, unjust, illegal, apartheid: yes. Genocide: hardly. Your post has prompted me to pick up Jimmy Carter's book, though.
I’ll be the first to admit I let my passions and obstinance get the best of me when I write about these things, but I still think the definition of genocide is apt. Although it’s not as graphic as the Holocaust or swift as Rwanda, I believe it is systematic and at the heart of the hard-liners’ agenda in Israel. By forcing Palestinian refugees to flee the occupied areas, the Israeli government is ensuring that future generations will be citizens of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. By denying the remaining population access to food, medicine, and a voice to the outside world while building settlements to encroach further and further into the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is slowly driving the Palestinian people to extinction. Richard Falk, the United Nations Human Rights Council special investigator on Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories, has gone so far as to call on the United Nations to, “implement the agreed norm of a ‘responsibility to protect’ a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity.” And I may have a copy of Carter’s book; I’ll dig through the bookshelves.
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