EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ROBERT FISK IN
THE INDEPENDENT
We will soon find out
what 'unity' really means for the Palestinians
Following the deal
between Fatah and Hamas, the real question is: does Israel want peace with its
neighbour?
"the real
question is: does Israel want peace with its neighbour?"
Yes, but that question is becoming very old, and when a
question goes unanswered decade after decade after decade, I think it
reasonable to conclude that the answer is "no."
Israel's starting attitudes were those of early Zionist
Jabotinsky, display an iron wall towards the natives of Palestine.
And it has only gone from bad to worse.
The 1967 War was a deliberately planned war of conquest, a
war aimed at realizing the dream of Greater Israel.
There was even some still-unknown American complicity in
that war by President Lyndon Johnson, judged from Johnson’s strange reaction, during
the war, to Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, an American spy ship. After
all, this was the man who gave us the Gulf of Tonkin Incident to start the
modern holocaust of the Vietnam War. This was also the man whose rise to power
involved documented vote fraud. Secrecy and underhandedness were stock in trade
with Johnson.
Complicity of some kind seems the only way to explain the
anger-prone and violent Texan’s silent and accepting reaction to Israel’s
deliberate (the ship was well-marked and Israel’s lead pilot recognized it as
American, checking home by radio about how he should proceed), long (more than
an hour), and extremely violent (planes and boats delivering torpedoes, bombs,
rockets, and napalm plus heavy cannon fire) attack on the Liberty. Every effort
was made to sink that ship with its entire crew. The ship proved tougher than
expected, but, as it was, 34 of the crew died.
Were it not the case that the 1967 War was a deliberate war
of conquest, there would be no reason why Israel still occupies millions of
people after half a century.
The winning general of 1967, Moshe Dayan, is on record as
saying if the Palestinians were made miserable enough, they would leave.
It is hard to see Israel's subsequent acts in any other
light. The giant concentration camp of Gaza. The massive walls with gun towers,
all built on another people's land. The regular open theft of other people's
property with “settlements” in the West Bank. The new level of brutality and
theft going on in East Jerusalem.
Yes, Israel wants a kind of peace, the peace of enjoying
other people's property without the people.
You know, defenders of Israel often say how different Israel
behaves than other regimes which either exterminate unwanted populations or
brutally ethnically-cleanse them.
But my response is that I simply do not see a great
distinction. More than half a century of holding millions of innocent people in
a kind of living death with no rights and no prospects supports no claim to
humane and decent behavior.
In the case of Gaza, the million and half or so are held in
almost inconceivable brutality. Automated gun towers. Patrol boats shooting
fishermen. Poisonous herbicides sprayed on large swathes of land. Human waste
water dumped on land in some areas. Deprivation of electricity. Refusal to
provide adequate medical assistance. A blockade which prevents the supplies to
rebuild what Israel destroyed. And now a metal underground wall to prevent
tunnels from delivering vital supplies from Sinai. All, to say nothing of
having bombed and shot about 4,000 people, 1,000 of whom were children.
Peace for Israel is just a word.
__________________
Response to another
comment about Palestinians being able to vote in their own elections:
Yours are manipulative words.
Palestinians can vote, yes, in a place which is not allowed
any kind of real authority, a place with no rights of any kind, a place without
even physical access to other places, and a place where even basic property
rights are violated regularly by an occupying force.
It is the vote, effectively, of prisoners, under the watch
of armed guards, for various small day-in, day-out arrangements in their maximum-security
prison.
That is not an exaggeration, not in the least.
Oh, and if they just happen to vote for the wrong choice,
they are treated as the people of Gaza have been treated.
Still further, selected leaders, for whom the people might
well have voted, are simply assassinated by Israel, with a long series of assassinations
going back for decades.
We've actually seen this done by an Israeli gang with stolen
or forged passports and poisonous injections, behavior impossible to
distinguish from that of North Korea. Several Western countries in the past,
including Canada and Australia, actually had to ask Israel to stop using their
passports for such killings. Dozens more Palestinian leaders have been killed
by missiles launched from planes or drones, blown apart in their own homes,
along with families or friends.
Arafat, Palestine’s most revered leader despite his nepotism
and favoritism, in his last days was made a close prisoner by Israel with tanks
sticking their gun barrels through his walls. He wasn’t even permitted to go to
the Christmas religious services he always attended. Later, he was assassinated
with radioactive poison.
That's some idea of the right to vote.
______________________________
Response to another
comment declaring Israel has peaceful relations with all of its neighbors
except the Palestinians:
Yes, Israel has "peaceful relations"… with tyrants
and kings.
The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, etc. - all are tyrants
or kings.
When any other kind of government shows up in the
neighborhood, Israel is ready to attack it, either overtly or covertly.
Egypt's first and only democratic president, Morsi, was
eliminated by an engineered coup. Yes, there was some popular discontent in
Egypt, but in what state isn't there, including very much the US and Israel?
Coups are not the typical result of popular discontent, particularly where the
United States is deeply involved as Israel’s protector and may easily warn off coup
forces, instead of encouraging them.
The Egyptians are stuck with still another tyrant-for-life,
but, my, we can be grateful because Israel gets along with him just fine.
You see, Israel, by its very nature, as something imposed by
force upon others, has almost no tolerance for democracy, not in any of its
neighbors and not among the Palestinians it has displaced.
There's a reason Israel is the Middle East's only
"democracy," and the reason is that Israel likes dealing with tyrants
who keep the natives, as it were, in line, and it very much makes its desires
felt everywhere around it.
And, of course, the United States is there, with all its
vast military and security resources, to assist in keeping the neighborhood the
way Israel likes it. The kings and tyrants who get along with Israel are put
under its protection and enjoy favorable treatment. Any leader, whether elected
or not, who does not get along with Israel is overthrown – just what we’ve seen
done horribly in Iraq and Libya and attempted at immense cost of life in Syria.
Even in the West Bank, the pathetic "president"
Israel supports, Abbas, hasn't faced an election in years. He is only supported
– “tolerated” would be a better word since he is permitted almost no authority
or initiative - because he’s the kind of accommodating, unchallenging
personality with which Israel likes to deal. He’s a stage prop Israel can roll
out, every once in a while, for the appearance of talks.
As far as Israel itself, what kind of democracy has only one
kind of people allowed to become citizens and vote? Or has established many theocratic
rules reflecting just one religious group?
Yes, there are a fair number of non-Jewish, Palestinian Israeli
citizens, but they were an accidental result of the 1948 conflict and waves of
terror. They were trapped in a location, much as the large group huddled into
Gaza was, and, short of going into the extermination business, there was
nothing just-created Israel could do about them. But they sure are not made to
feel welcome or equal, being often to this day harassed or threatened and not
receiving the same full measure of citizenship as Jewish Israelis.
But compared to the millions of Palestinians held against
their will in the occupied territories since the 1967 War, the Palestinian Israelis
created by accident in 1948, remain a relatively small group.
I think it fair to say the last time we saw similar arrangements
in a state styling itself a democracy was in Nationalist South Africa. And the
time before that was in the American Confederacy.
And remember, even if Israel really were a democracy in the
sense most people understand the term, it still is not organized to protect its
minorities. A permanent majority of any one group or interest or religion anywhere
puts the rights and freedoms of all others, not part of the majority group, in
constant jeopardy.
Power granted by a majority vote may be just as abusive or
unfair as the power of a dictatorship. Power is power, however granted, and
those not sharing in it must be protected against those wielding it.
That’s the whole reason for having a Bill or Charter of
Rights, to protect minorities from belligerent majorities. And Israel has no
Bill of Rights, nor can it ever have one, given the very nature of its society.
