On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

There is another version, which is adopted only by the West, the US, and its allies, which is unilateral and says R2P permits “military intervention by regional organizations in the region of their authority without Security Council authorization.” Well, translating that into English, this means that it provides authorization for the US and NATO to use violence wherever they choose without Security Council authorization. That’s what’s called “responsibility to protect” in Western discourse. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be farcical.

The inability, or unwillingness, to act seems to be first and foremost an acceptance of the Israeli narrative and argumentation for the crisis in Gaza. Israel has developed a very clear narrative about the present carnage in Gaza: it is a tragedy caused by an unprovoked Hamas missile attack on the Jewish state, to which Israel had to react in self-defense.

the proportionality of the force used by Israel,

There it seems the condemnation of the Israeli action as a war crime is widespread and consensual.

And nowadays the vision is of an Israel stretching over almost the whole of historic Palestine where millions of Palestinians still live.

All the while it participated in a “peace process” charade to cover up or buy time for its unilateral colonization policies on the ground.

dialectical

The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers.

Those who commit atrocities in the Arab world against oppressed minorities and helpless communities, as well as the Israelis who commit these crimes against the Palestinian people, should all be judged by the same moral and ethical standards. They are all war criminals, though in the case of Palestine they have been at work longer than anyone else. It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists, or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way.

incremental genocide

??? Justify this

For the past fourteen years, the norm is that Israel kills more than two Palestinian children a week.

“The institutionalized disregard for Palestinian life in the West helps explain not only why Palestinians resort to violence,” Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani reports, “but also Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip.”

“At least 57 percent of Gaza households are food insecure and about 80 percent are now aid recipients,” Gilbert reports. “Food insecurity and rising poverty also mean that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while over 90 percent of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption,” a situation that is becoming even worse as Israel again attacks water and sewage systems, leaving 1.2 million people with even more severe disruption of the barest necessity of life.

In January 2006, Palestinians committed a major crime: they voted the wrong way in a carefully monitored free election, handing control of Parliament to Hamas. The media constantly intone that Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In reality, Hamas leaders have repeatedly made it clear that Hamas would accept a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by the United States and Israel for forty years. In contrast, Israel is dedicated to the destruction of Palestine, apart from some occasional meaningless words, and is implementing that commitment.

And for those who like to obsess about meaningless charters, the core component of Likud, Menachem Begin’s Herut, has yet to abandon its founding doctrine that the territory on both sides of the Jordan is part of the Land of Israel.

Though Israel maintained its siege, Hamas observed the ceasefire, as Israel concedes. Matters changed in April of this year when Fatah and Hamas forged a unity agreement that established a new government of technocrats unaffiliated with either party.

The unity agreement not only undercuts Israel’s claim that it cannot negotiate with a divided Palestine but also threatens the long-term goal of dividing Gaza from the West Bank and pursuing its destructive policies in both regions.

Something had to be done, and an occasion arose on June 12, when the three Israeli boys were murdered in the West Bank. Early on, the Netanyahu government knew that they were dead, but pretended otherwise, which provided the opportunity to launch a rampage in the West Bank, targeting Hamas. Prime Minister Netanyahu claimed to have certain knowledge that Hamas was responsible. That too was a lie.

One of Israel’s leading authorities on Hamas, Shlomi Eldar, reported almost at once that the killers very likely came from a dissident clan in Hebron that has long been a thorn in the side of Hamas. Eldar added, “I’m sure they didn’t get any green light from the leadership of Hamas, they just thought it was the right time to act.” The eighteen-day rampage after the kidnapping, however, succeeded in undermining the feared unity government, and sharply increasing Israeli repression. According to Israeli military sources, Israeli soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians, including 335 affiliated with Hamas, and killed six Palestinians, also searching thousands of locations and confiscating $350,000. Israel also conducted dozens of attacks in Gaza, killing five Hamas members on July 7. Hamas finally reacted with its first rockets in nineteen months, providing Israel with the pretext for Operation Protective Edge on July 8. By July 31, around 1,400 Palestinians had been killed, mostly civilians, including hundreds of women and children, and three Israeli civilians. By then, large areas of Gaza had been turned into rubble. During brief bombing pauses, relatives desperately sought shattered ...

Israeli officials laud the humanity of what it calls “the most moral army in the world,” which informs residents that their homes will be bombed. The practice is “sadism, sanctimoniously disguising itself as mercy,” in the words of Israeli journalist Amira Hass: “A recorded message demanding hundreds of thousands of people leave t...

Forty years ago Israel made the fateful decision to choose expansion over security, rejecting a full peace treaty offered by Egypt in return for evacuation from the occupied Egyptian Sinai, where Israel was initiating extensive settlement and development projects. It has adhered to that policy ever since, making essentially the same judgment as South Africa did in 1958.

US law requires that “no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Israel most certainly is guilty of this consistent pattern, and has been for many years.

Wadi Ara,

Revisionist Menachem Begin

As mentioned this government represented, as never before and never since, the widest possible Zionist consensus.

The first decision was not to ethnically cleanse the population despite the joy of expanding the Jewish state onto what many Israelis felt were the natural and historical borders of ancient Israel. The ministers played with the idea but eventually ruled it out. They doubted whether the army had the will and mentality to carry it out, as it was unclear whether the army had sufficient means for accomplishing

We need to start by correctly identifying the problem: expose Zionism as a colonialist movement and characterize Israel as an apartheid racist state.

Today we also witness the political separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Posing a new agenda, common to all sectors of the Palestinian people, is the beginning of the road toward a solution. Today’s technology can provide the basis for an open discussion across borders and checkpoints, forming a platform for more intense links and together designing the common path.

Rather than “mowing the lawn,” in Israeli parlance, the most recent was more accurately described as “removing the topsoil” by a senior US military officer, appalled by the practices of the self-described “most moral army in the world.”

Moshe Dayan,

For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can be no higher priority than working to change US policies, not an idle dream by any means.

US veto typically is a double veto: the veto, the resolution, is not implemented, and the event is vetoed from history, so you have to look hard to find the record, but it is there.

It’s taking shape before our eyes. It has so far worked very well. If it continues, Israel will not face a demographic problem. When these regions are integrated slowly into Israel, actually, the proportion of Jews in Greater Israel will increase. There are very few Palestinians there. Those who are there are being dispossessed, kicked out. That’s what’s taking shape before our eyes. I think that’s the realistic alternative to a two-state settlement. And there’s every reason to expect it to continue as long as the United States supports it.

Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine