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Challenging History: Why the Oppressed Must Tell Their Own Story
By Ramzy Baroud – Palestine Chronicle
History is also shaped by collective movements and popular struggles
When American historian Howard Zinn passed away recently, he left behind a legacy that redefined our relationship to history altogether.
Professor Zinn dared to challenge the way history was told and written. In fact he went as far as to defy the conventional construction of historical discourses through the pen of victor or of elites who earned the right of narration though their might, power and affluence.
This kind of history might be considered accurate insofar as it reflects a self-seeking and self-righteous interpretation of the world by a very small number of people. But it is also highly inaccurate when taking into account the vast majority of peoples everywhere.
The oppressor is the one who often articulates his relationship to the oppressed, the colonialist to the colonized, and the slave-master to the slave. The readings of such relationships are fairly predictable.
Even valiant histories that most of us embrace and welcome, such as those celebrating the legacy of human rights, equality and freedom left behind by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela still tend to be selective at times. Martin Luther King’s vision might have prevailed, but some tend to limit their admiration to his ‘I have a dream’ speech. The civil rights hero was an ardent anti-war champion as well, but that is often relegated as non-essential history. Malcolm X is often dismissed altogether, despite the fact that his self-assertive words have reached the hearts and minds of millions of black people throughout the United States, and many more millions around the world. His speech was in fact so radical that it could not be ‘sanitized’ or reinterpreted in any controllable way. Mandela, the freedom fighter, is celebrated with endless accolades by the very foes that branded him a terrorist. Of course, his insistence on his people’s rights to armed struggle is not to be discussed. It is too flammable a subject to even mention at a time when anyone who dares wield a gun against the self-designated champions of ‘democracy’ gets automatically classified a terrorist.
Therefore, Zinn’s peoples’ histories of the United States and of the world have represented a milestone in historical narration.
As a Palestinian writer who is fond with such luminaries, I too felt the need to provide an alternative reading of history, in this case, Palestinian history. I envisioned, with much hesitation, a book that serves as a people’s history of Palestine. I felt that I have earned the right to present such a possible version of history, being the son of Palestinian refugees, who lost everything and were exiled to live dismal lives in a Gaza refugee camp. I am the descendant of ‘peasants’ – Fellahin – whose odyssey of pain, struggle, but also heroic resistance is constantly misrepresented, distorted, and at times overlooked altogether.
It was the death of my father (while under siege in Gaza) that finally compelled me to translate my yearning into a book. My Father was a Freedom Fighter, Gaza’s Untold Story offered a version of Palestinian history was not told by an Israeli narrator – sympathetic or otherwise – and neither was it an elitist account, as often presented by Palestinian writers. The idea was to give a human face to all the statistics, maps and figures.
History cannot be classified by good vs. bad, heroes vs. villains, moderates vs. extremists. No matter how wicked, bloody or despicable, history also tends to follow rational patterns, predictable courses. By understanding the rationale behind historical dialectics, one can achieve more than a simple understanding of what took place in the past; it also becomes possible to chart fairly reasonable understanding of what lies ahead.
Perhaps one of the worse aspects of today’s detached and alienating media is its production of history – and thus characterization of the present – as based on simple terminology. This gives the illusion of being informative, but actually manages to contribute very little to our understanding of the world at large.
Such oversimplifications are dangerous because they produce an erroneous understanding of the world, which in turn compels misguided actions.
For these reasons, it is incumbent upon us to try to discover alternative meanings and readings of history. To start, we could try offering historical perspectives which try to see the world from the viewpoint of the oppressed – the refugees, the fellahin who have been denied, amongst many rights, the right to tell their own story.
This view is not a sentimental one. Far from it. An elitist historical narrative is maybe the dominant one, but it is not always the elites who influence the course of history. History is also shaped by collective movements, actions and popular struggles. By denying this fact, one denies the ability of the collective to affect change. In the case of Palestinians, they are often presented as hapless multitudes, passive victims without a will of their own. This is of course a mistaken perception; the Palestinians’ conflict with Israel has lasted this long only because of their unwillingness to accept injustice, and their refusal to submit to oppression. Israel’s lethal weapons might have changed the landscape of Gaza and Palestine, but the will of Gazans and Palestinians are what have shaped the landscape of Palestine’s history.
Touring with My Father was a Freedom Fighter in South Africa, in a recent visit, was a most intense experience. It was in this country that freedom fighters once rose to fight oppression, challenging and eventually defeating Apartheid. My father, the refugee of Gaza has suddenly been accepted unconditionally by a people of a land thousands of miles away. The notion of ‘people’s history’ can be powerful because it extends beyond boundaries, and expands beyond ideologies and prejudices. In that narrative, Palestinians, South Africans, Native Americans and many others find themselves the sons and daughters of one collective history, one oppressive legacy, but also part of an active community of numerous freedom fighters, who dared to challenge and sometimes even change the face of history.
South Africa has; Palestine will.
USA and USSR: Accidental Parallels?
By M. Shahid Alam – Palestine Chronicle
We can begin by pointing out that USA is in exactly the same place, quite literally, where the USSR once was: Afghanistan
Is the question of parallels between the USA and the USSR idle, even mischievous? Perhaps, it is neither, but, on the contrary, deserves our serious consideration.
During the Cold War, the USA and USSR were arch rivals, each the antipodes of the other. For some four decades, they battled each other for ‘survival’ and global hegemony, staring down at each other with nuclear tipped missiles, ready at the push of a button to consummate mutually assured destruction. What parallels could there possibly exist between such irreconcilable antagonists?
Dismissively, the skeptic might retort that their similarities start and end with the first two letters in their names. The USA won and the USSR lost the Cold War. With all four of the letters in its name, the USSR is dead and gone. Its successor state, Russia, now ranks a distant second behind the USA in military power, a position it retains only by virtue of its nuclear arsenal. Measured in international dollars, the Russian economy ranked eighth in the world in 2009, trailing behind its former client, India.
On the other hand, the USA still believes it can ride roughshod over much of the world like a Colossus. It came close to doing this for a few years after the collapse of communism. In the years since its occupation of Iraq, that image has been deflated quite a bit. Haven’t the events of the last decade – the growing challenge to its hegemony in Latin America, the economic rise of India and China, and the recovery of Russia from its collapse of the previous decade – downsized the Colossus of the 1990s? Indeed, the near collapse of its economy in 2008 appears to have brought the Colossus down on its knees.
Coming back to the question of parallels, we can begin by pointing out that USA is in exactly the same place, quite literally, where the USSR once was. In Afghanistan. The USSR was in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989: the USA has been there since November 2001.
Isn’t this the oddest of coincidences? And a bit ominous too – since, only a year after it withdrew its 100,000 troops from Afghanistan, the USSR collapsed.
Of course, no one expects the USA to collapse, whether it leaves Afghanistan or stays there. Unlike the Soviets who left Afghanistan after ten years of a bruising occupation, the United States is not in a mood to leave anytime soon. If necessary, claim some American politicians and generals, their troops could stay there for decades.
What is it that has drawn great powers – three over the past two centuries – into Afghanistan, but makes it so hard for them to leave in dignity?
Britain, USSR and USA have gone to Afghanistan for different reasons. Britain went into Afghanistan repeatedly to create a buffer state, to distance its Indian colony from Russia. The Soviet troops entered to shore up a fraternal communist regime, but if things had gone well, they would have walk through Afghanistan into the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. It is hard to say why exactly the USA landed its troops in Afghanistan. Was it to kill or capture Osama bin Laden? Or was that only an excuse for stationing its troops in Iran’s backyard, close to the Caspian oil fields, just south of Russia and China, and looking into Pakistan with an eye to rolling back its nuclear program?
Vital questions, but answering them will take us away from the subject of this essay – the question of parallels between the USA and the USSR.
Afghanistan points us towards a more troubling parallel. Some people have argued that by ramping up the arms race, President Ronald Reagan accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union. Irresistibly, the Soviet leaders took the bait since their prestige depended on their ability to match the USA militarily. With a smaller economy, and a slowdown in growth that had started in the 1970s, the arms race made matters worse. As growth continued to decline, the ensuing stagnation in living standards bred popular discontent.
When economic reforms failed to spur growth, disillusionment infected the leadership of the communist party. Collapse came quick: the system had lost its defenders.
Is it outlandish to suggest that the USA has been traveling down a similar road since 2001? For sure, no one thinks that the United States is on the road to collapse.
Nevertheless, increasingly one gets the impression that its recent military adventurism is hastening its descent to the second spot – behind China – in the global hierarchy of economic and military power.
The dramatic collapse of the USSR in 1990 gave a new impetus to American ambitions. It encouraged feelings, not only on the right, that this unipolar moment in American history should be made irreversible. In particular, the neoconservatives argued more vigorously than before for a military build-up and a more muscular display of US military power everywhere, but especially in the Middle East.
Since the neoconservatives were embedded in the Republican Party, they had to cool their heels for eight years, from 1992 to 2000, during the presidency of Bill Clinton. When the Republicans returned to power in 2000, the neoconservatives quickly seized key positions in the administration of George W. Bush, especially in the office of the Vice-President and the Department of Defense.
In September 2000, the Neoconservatives had written that they would have to wait for ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’ to launch their unilateralist policies to deepen their global hegemony.[1] They did not have to wait long. On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaida, a small group of non-state actors – terrorists, in common parlance – obliged by attacking the Twin Towers and Pentagon, killing close to 3000 Americans.
At the press of a button, the well-laid neoconservative plans for endless war were put into motion. They called it the Global War On Terror.
The GWOT was insanely ambitious. It was launched with an ultimatum to all weaker non-Western nations: You are with us or against us. To execute this war, the US would mobilize, expand and use its global military forces to threaten, attack and invade ‘unfriendly’ countries. Neither international nor domestic laws would stand in its way.
Various US agencies would kidnap, imprison without trial, torture and assassinate anyone resisting or suspected of resisting its policies. The goal was to immobile resistance to American hegemony with fear – with state terror.
A comprehensive accounting of the costs to the USA of this reckless policy of unilateralism will not be available for a while, but we do have some partial and tentative estimates. At the end of 2008, the direct budgetary costs of the GWOT were expected to reach $758 billion.[2] In March 2008, Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the indirect budgetary costs of GWOT – of restoring depleted military hardware and materiel and support for veterans of the wars – would add up to $1.5 trillion. “All told,” they wrote, “the bill for the Iraq war is likely to top $3 trillion. And that is a conservative estimate.”[3] Add to that the rapidly escalating costs of the AfPak War that is being ramped up even now, nine years after the Afghan War was declared to be a success.
The US wars in the Islamicate impose other painful costs, perhaps more debilitating than the budgetary expenses. We are referring to the human toll of these wars, the erosion of liberties it has produced inside the United States, and the manner in which it is undermining the economic leadership of the United States. The United States military has kept its military deaths low, at 5340 in January 2010, with greatly improved body armor, armor plated troop carriers, and a war fought remotely from the air, which saves American lives by sacrificing those of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan Pakistan and Yemen.[4] In terms of the near-sighted calculus of US politicians, the low US military deaths make these wars attractive. They forget, however, that high civilian deaths in the countries they attack or invade make their wars unwinnable by fuelling resistance.
The figures for Americans wounded and traumatized by wars are much higher. As of July 2009, according to official statistics, 34,592 American soldiers were wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.[5] A much greater number of veterans of these wars are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder(PTSD). In November 2007, according to one official source, there were a “minimum of 300,000 psychological casualties” from the war in Iraq alone. The lifetime cost of treating them is estimated at $660 billion.[6]
The economic damage of the wars can be gauged by the speed with which China has been narrowing its lag behind, or even moving ahead of, the United States since 2001.
We can begin by pointing out that USA is in exactly the same place, quite literally, where the USSR once was: Afghanistan
During much of the last decade, the US has concentrated a huge portion of its resources, policy focus and media attention on fighting multiple wars; it has borrowed from China and Saudi Arabia to finance these wars; its economy suffered a near-collapse in 2008; and it has done little to repair its infrastructure, reduce its dependence on oil, or fix its expensive health-care system. During the same years, China, free form the burden of wars, has directed its policy focus and resources to developing its infrastructure, green energy, manufactures, exports, higher education, and securing access to raw materials globally.
The damage to America’s moral standing is not less worrisome. The United States stands accused before the world of engaging in a war of aggression against Iraq, waging an undeclared war against Pakistan, and sanctioning torture, kidnappings, assassinations, and imprisonment without trial. “Fifteen years ago,” writes Kishore Mahbubani, a former diplomat from Singapore, “if anyone had suggested that Western countries would endorse or allow the use of torture, they would have been dismissed out of hand.” After 2001, torture became routine. In 2005, Irene Khan, the head of Amnesty International, said, “Guantanamo is the gulag of our times.”[7] One year after he took office, Obama has not ended these human rights violations. Indeed, he has chosen assassinations as a major instrument of his war against the Taliban in Pakistan.
What did it cost al-Qaida to produce this avalanche of misdirected and self-damaging actions by the United States? The sum total of investments the leadership of al-Qaida made in its attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon is trifling, as these things go – the lives of 19 men and an investment of between $400,000 and $500,000 in flight training, airline tickets, lodging in Western capitals, box cutters, etc.[8] That is roughly equal to the cost of deploying one US soldier in Iraq for one year.[9]
Had the leaders of al-Qaida anticipated this dramatic payoff from their paltry investment? Was 9-11 part of a strategy to lure the world’s most powerful military machine to place their boots on Muslim lands, where the Jihadists would successively engage and defeat them, and eventually drive the United States out of the Islamicate? Indeed, this was the strategy al-Qaida adopted towards the end of the 1990s. Challenged by their failure to defeat the ‘near enemy,’ the Egyptian and Algerian governments allied to the United States, al-Qaida decided to carry its war to the United States, the ‘far enemy,’ which they saw as the ‘head of the serpent.’[10]
Recently, Eric Margolis offered a succinct account of al-Qaida’s strategy. Osama bin Laden, he writes, “would oust the modern ‘Crusaders’ by luring the US and its allies into a series of small, debilitating, hugely expensive wars to bleed and slowly bankrupt the US economy, which he called America’s Achilles’ heel.”[11]
If this had not been their strategy, al-Qaida would quickly appropriate it as its own, after watching America’s frenetic response to the attacks of 9-11. The neoconservatives had been waiting for the men with box cutters, ready to launch their well-laid plans to redraw the map of the Middle East. If the United States could so easily be provoked into invading Muslim countries, Osama bin Laden – not the US President – would decide when and where the United States would be fighting wars in the Islamicate.
Indeed, al-Qaida has provoked the United States into attacking an ever-lengthening list of Muslim countries.
Nine years after it had been ‘won,’ the United States is escalating its war in Afghanistan. Some eight years after its ‘cakewalk’ through Iraq, it is just beginning to draw down its forces there. In addition, different factions of the US military are “involved in combat operations in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, West Africa, North Africa and the Philippines.
A new US base at Djibouti is launching raids into Yemen, Somalia and northern Kenya. US forces aided the failed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006.”[12] If indeed, it was al-Qaida strategy to lure American troops into the Islamicate, who can deny that they have done quite well. Irresistibly, the US has walked into one al-Qaida trap after another.
While the US is engaged in the “sequential destruction of Muslim nations” – to borrow a troubling phrase from Liaquat Ali Khan – China is making economic gains in the very countries that US occupies, attacks or threatens to attack.[13] Over the past decade, China has continued to make economic gains in Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, Syria and Afghanistan, while the United States occupies, sanctions or launches military attacks against these countries.
Two years back, China acquired rights to one of the world’s largest deposits of copper in Afghanistan. In a report in the New York Times in December 2009, Michael Wines writes perceptively about the symbolism of this investment, “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”[14]
A similar picture emerges from Iraq. US oil companies are not getting the oil deals they wanted, production-sharing agreements instead of service contracts. In this area too, a partnership between a British and Chinese oil company walked away with a contract to develop Rumaila, one of the world’s largest oil fields. Two US companies signed contract for the much small oil field of West Qurna.[15]
Surely, the Chinese must be saying, al-Qaida is its best ally – although accidental and unacknowledged – in the contest to displace the United States from its leadership of the global economy. It is difficult at this stage to assess the long-term significance of al-Qaida for the Islamicate – its strategy has brought great suffering to Muslim populations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – but the gains it has brought to China are clear. The siren song of terrorism has lured the United States into one trap after another, to ramp up its military expenditure, to finance its escalating wars by borrowing from its chief economic rival, to deplete its moral capital in the international community, and to shred its own safeguards against state tyranny. China cannot acknowledge the gifts it has received from al-Qaida, but privately, perhaps, the Chinese leadership must be toasting these windfall gains.
Instead of rising up to deal with the economic challenges stemming from the rapid rise of India, China and Brazil; instead of investing in programs to develop alternative energy; instead of developing a network of high-speed trains; instead of reversing the decline in its K-12 schooling; the Christian right and the neoconservative cabal pushed the United States into a vast quagmire, stretching from one end of the Islamicate to another. All this, while China has continued to challenge US dominance in a growing array of economic activities.
In the 1980s, the United States outspent the USSR into economic ruin. Since 2001, al-Qaida with its paltry investments in men and money has been drawing the United States into wars that are accelerating its economic decline. At least for now, China is the chief beneficiary of the perverse mechanism that forces the United States into embracing wars against the Islamicate as the panacea to its problems, when in fact they have been having the opposite effect.
It was Euripides who first wrote, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Is that what happens to the leaders of a country who doggedly follow a course – as the Soviets did during the 1980s and 1990s – that points in the direction of decline or worse, ruin. In principle, democracies have the capacity to replace such ruinous leadership. Yet, it would appear that the disastrous military policies inaugurated under President Bush are not going to be discarded under President Obama, his Democratic successor. Is it likely that both parties in the United States are captives of a political system that – at least on the question of Islam and the Islamicate – are dominated by a powerful conglomerate of pro-Israeli forces, led by Jewish Americans but with a strong following of Christian Zionists?
If Americans wish to see a reversal in their ruinous policy towards the Islamicate they will have to make some honest and courageous efforts to countervail the influence of the pro-Israeli forces in their body politic. The time for this too is running out. This will not happen by electing a candidate who dazzles them with his rhetoric of change. They will also have to elect a President and Congress with the spine to stand up to the pro-Israeli forces in the United States.
References
[1] Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s defenses (Washington DC: Project for the New American Century, September 2000): 63. <http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf>
[2] Anthony Cordesman, The uncertain costs of the global war on terror (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 2007). <http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080907_thecostsofwar.pdf>
[3] Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, “The Iraq war will cost us $3 trillion, and much more,” Washington Post (August 8, 2008). < http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702846.html>
[4] US Department of Defense, Defense casualty report, 2010. <http://www.defense.gov/NEWS/casualty.pdf>
[5] Anne Leland and Mary-Jana Oboroceanu, American war and military operations casualties: Lists and casualties (Congressional Research Service, September 2009):12. <http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf>
[6] Bob Roehr, “High rate of PTSD in returning Iraq war veterans,” Medscape Today (November 6, 2007). <http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/565407>
[7] Kishore Mahbubani, The new Asian hemisphere: The irresistible shift of global power to the East (Public Affairs Books, 2008): 165-66.
[8] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: Executive Summary. <http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Exec.htm>
[9] Tom Engelhardt, “What progress in Iraq really means,” The Nation (April 13, 2007). < http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/engelhardt>
[10] Fawaz Gerges, The far enemy: Why Jihad went global (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 21, 24-26.
[11] Eric Margolis, “Osama: 10. The US: 0,” LewRockwell.com (January 12, 2010). <http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis176.html>
[12] Eric Margolis.
[13] Liaquat Ali Khan, “Now Pakistan,” CounterPunch.Org (October 21, 2009). <http://www.counterpunch.org/alikhan10212009.html>
[14] Michael Wines, “China willing to spend big on Afghanistan commerce,” New York Times (December 30, 2009).
< http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/world/asia/30mine.html?_r=1&sq=copper china afghanistan&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print>
[15] Timothy Williams, “Oil Companies Look to the Future in Iraq,” The New York Times (November 30, 2009). <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/world/middleeast/01iraqoil.html?scp=1&sq=iraq+oil+contracts+%22united+states%22+china&st=nyt
Why Do They Hate Us?
By Bouthaina Shaaban – Daily Star Lebanon
News of what is happening to Arabs and Muslims in terms of injustice, imprisonment, starvation and torture have been prevented from reaching international conscience
The report of the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon caused a shock to all those concerned about justice and human rights. In his report to the UN General Assembly on February 5, 2010, on the Israeli war on Gaza, he says: “No determination can be made on the implementation of resolution 64/10 by the parties concerned,” pointing out that he has “called upon all of the parties to carry out credible domestic investigations into the conduct of the Gaza conflict.” Ban does not live on the moon, of course; and, unlike American officials, he visited Gaza and saw for himself the hundreds of homes and schools, some of which are UN schools, shelled by the missiles and phosphorus bombs fired by Israeli warplanes.
TV screens all over the world had shown the dead bodies of children, women and unarmed civilians killed by Israeli bombs. He saw for himself the smoke of white phosphorus in the sky over Gaza. In order to ascertain himself of the credibility of the Palestinian narrative, he only has to look at the disabled people who lost their limbs, eyes and members of their families. Putting the Israelis and the Palestinians in the same category implies a great deal of injustice; and ignoring the tragic conditions imposed on the Palestinians for 60 years as a result of occupation and blockade is an injustice and a shame that will haunt those who committed it and those who condone it.
Although human life is sacred and must not be subject to the litany of figures, it might be useful to remind Western politicians who ask idiotically “Why do they hate us?” that Gaza was destroyed a year ago, not by earthquake as in Haiti, but by a war launched by Israel that killed over 1,400 Palestinian civilians and wounded over 8,000 other civilians, most of them seriously. The war destroyed the infrastructure; agricultural land was flooded by sewage water; and Israel continues to use collective punishment and blockade on over 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza where over 300 civilians have died as a result of the blockade. Still, Western officials ignore this horrible tragedy. The same is done by the UN secretary general, who is supposed to represent international conscience. He equates Israeli generals with their unarmed civilian victims. He and Western officials ignore the testimony of Israeli soldiers who revealed that they were ordered not take any account of the life of Palestinian civilians. The Israeli organization “Breaking the Silence” has revealed new facts about Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza. So, why this cover up of the crimes of those generals and why equating criminals with their victims by politicians and journalists who repeat the question: “Why do they hate us?”
Ban’s report, which reveals the international community’s failure to condemn war criminals if they were not Muslim or African, came days after US President Barack Obama made the State of the Union address, in which he ignored the Middle East completely.
The fact is that hundreds of millions of Muslims all over the world have for decades been watching the reactions of Western leaders toward tragedies caused by their policies, particularly their support for the Israeli occupation, settlements and blockade. They see that international institutions dominated by the West do not care about the killing and displacement of their brothers and sisters and the deprivation of their freedoms and human rights. If anyone makes a move to insure that justice takes its course, the American veto is there to thwart this effort. After all this, Western politicians still ask: “Why do they hate us?”
Even news of what is happening to Arabs and Muslims in terms of injustice, imprisonment, starvation and torture have been prevented from reaching international conscience. Here is the US, which boasts about the freedom of the press, banning satellite TV stations en masse if they try to uncover the depth of the human suffering of a people under occupation, while the occupiers enjoy unprecedented international immunity. They commit war crimes, and no one has the right to demand that they should be deterred and punished, as if the lives of Arabs and Muslims are not equal to the lives of other humans in Western standards.
Indifference to human suffering caused by occupation, injustice and oppression increases indignation against this gap between this painful reality and the double standards of the powers which control international media and politics.
The enquiry involving former British Premier Tony Blair shows the fragility of the logic which turns the lives of millions into a daily tragedy. But if Blair, like the prime minister who did not notice the racial segregation wall which is destroying the life of the Palestinians because he does not care about them, cannot see the millions of orphans, widows and handicapped produced by the war on Iraq, how is he supposed to regret supporting that disastrous war on the whole Iraqi people? Such trials have no significance and are no longer able to polish the image of Western democracy which has revealed its reality through its stances regarding the events in the Middle East.
Violence is the result of using unjust force instead of trying to achieve justice in Palestine. And whether Western politicians understand that or not, Palestine, the cradle of Jesus Christ, is the bleeding wound which will never be healed until the US, Europe and international bodies take a just position which restores to the Palestinians their freedom, rights and dignity. These countries and bodies, by funding and arming Israel, are responsible for depriving the Palestinians of their freedom and human rights; and when they grant immunity to its war criminals, they become accomplices in Israeli wars and blockades. When the American administration, and with it Europe and the highest international body, ignore atrocious documented war crimes committed by the occupation forces, only because the war criminals are Israeli, and turn a blind eye to the cruelest forms of suffering imposed on a whole people, only because they are Muslim, there will always be Jews, Christians and Muslims in America, Europe and even in Israel who will support the oppressed against their oppressors.
The False Sacredness of the 1967 Border
By Hassan Abu Nimah – The Electronic Intifada
The 1967 border means very little while Israel continues to occupy Palestinian territory
When the United States abandoned its demand that Israel freeze settlement construction as a prelude to restarting stalled Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, the Obama administration urged both sides to move straight into discussions about a future Palestinian state “based on the 1967 borders.”
Setting the border first, it was hoped, would automatically “resolve” the issue of the settlements, and this is now the focus of the “indirect talks” that US envoy for the Middle East peace process George Mitchell is trying to broker.
Of course the settlements, built on occupied West Bank land in flagrant violation of international law, would not be removed. Rather, the border would simply be redrawn to annex the vast majority of settlers and their homes to Israel, and as if by magic, the whole issue of the settlements would disappear just like that. This charade would be covered up with a so-called “land swap” of which Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority often speak as a way to soften up the Palestinian public for a great surrender to Israeli diktat.
All this is based on the common, but false notion that the 4 June 1967 demarcation line separating Israel from the West Bank (then administered as part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), is the legitimate border of Israel and should therefore be the one along which the conflict is settled.
This assumption is wrong; the 1967 border has no legitimacy and should not be taken for granted.
UN General Assembly resolution 181 of 29 November 1947 called for the partition of Palestine into two entities: a state for the Jewish minority on 57 percent of the land, and a state for the overwhelming Arab majority on less than half the land. According to the 1947 partition, the population of the Jewish state would still have been 40 percent Arab. Jerusalem would have remained a separate international zone.
Rather than “resolve” the question of Palestine, partition made it worse: Palestinians rejected a partition they viewed as fundamentally unjust in principle and in practice, and the Zionist movement grudgingly accepted it but as a first step in an ongoing program of expansion and colonization.
Resolution 181, called for the two states to strictly guarantee equal rights for all their citizens, and to have a currency and customs union, joint railways and other aspects of shared sovereignty, and set out a specific mechanism for the states to come into being.
The resolution was never implemented, however. Immediately after it was passed, Zionist militias began their campaign to conquer territory beyond that which was allocated by the partition plan. Vastly outgunned Palestinian militias resisted as best as they could, until the belated intervention of Arab armies some six months after the war began. By that time it was too late — as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes. Israel, contrary to myth, was not brought into being by the UN, but by war and conquest.
The 1949 Rhodes Armistice agreement, which ended the first ever Arab-Israeli war left Israel in control of 78 percent of historic Palestine and established a ceasefire with its neighbors Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Until the second round — in June 1967 — Arabs had been calling for the abolition of the “illegal Zionist entity” planted by colonial powers like a dagger in the heart of the Arab nation. They also waitied for the United Nations to implement its many resolutions redressing the gross injustices inflicted hitherto. The UN never tried to enforce the law or to exert serious efforts to resolve the conflict, which kept escalating.
Israel’s June 1967 blitzkrieg surprise attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan led to the devastating Arab defeat and to Israel tripling the area of the land it controlled. The parts of Palestine still controlled by Arabs — the West Bank including eastern Jerusalem and Gaza — as well as Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai fell into Israeli hands.
Defeated, demoralized and humiliated, the Arab states involved in the “setback”, as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser called it, accepted the painful compromise spelled out by Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967.
It ruled that the 4 June 1967 border would have to be the recognized border of Israel provided the latter evacuated the Arab lands it had occupied that year. In other words if the Arabs wanted to recover their lands lost in that war they had to end the “state of belligerency” with Israel — a small step short of recognition — and accept Israel’s actual existence within the pre-June 1967 borders. This eventually became the so-called “land for peace” formula.
Instead of withdrawing from land in exchange for recognition and peace, Israel proceeded to colonize all the newly occupied territories; it continues to do so 43 years later in the West Bank and Golan Heights. Meanwhile it has also become uncontested that Israel has a “right” to everything to the west of the 1967 border. The only question is how much more land will it get to keep to the east.
Astonishingly, Palestinian leaders, Arab states and the so-called international community have all submitted to the lopsided concept that Israel should have this right unconditionally without evacuating the illegally occupied Arab lands. The legitimacy of the 1967 border was tightly linked to Israeli withdrawal and should remain so.
An inherent contradiction in resolution 242 is that while it affirmed “the admissibility of the acquisition of the territory by war” it in fact legitimized Israel’s conquest of 1948, including the 21 percent of Palestine that was supposed to be part of the Arab state under the partition plan.
In other words, the UN granted Israel legitimate title to its previous conquests if it would give up its later conquests. This has set a disastrous precedent that aggression can lead to irreversible facts. Encouraged by this, Israel began its settlement project with the express intention of “creating facts” that would make withdrawal impossible and force international recognition of Israeli claims to the land.
It worked; in April 2004 the United States offered Israel a written guarantee that any peace agreement would have to recognize and accept the settlements as part of Israel. The rest of the “international community” as they always do, quietly followed the American line.
The Palestinian submission to the common demand that the large settlement blocs be annexed to Israel against a fictitious land swap is another vindication of the Israeli belief that facts created are facts accepted.
If and only if Israel adheres to all aspects of UN Security Council resolution 242 and others, could the 1967 line have any legitimacy. Until then, if Israel tells the Arabs that the West Bank settlements of Ariel and Maale Adumim are part of Israel, then the Arab position can be that Haifa, Jaffa and Acre are still part of Palestine. {RB note: We all know the Israelis will never agree to that but still even if they do it will never absolve their crimes or their theft of Palestine}
Israel: Military Investigations Fail Gaza War Victims
"An independent investigation is crucial to understand why so many civilians died and to bring justice for the victims of unlawful attacks"
Israel has failed to demonstrate that it will conduct thorough and impartial investigations into alleged laws-of-war violations by its forces during last year’s Gaza conflict, Human Rights Watch said today. An independent investigation is needed if perpetrators of abuse, including senior military and political officials who set policies that violated the laws of war, are to be held accountable, Human Rights Watch said.
On February 4, 2010, Human Rights Watch met with military lawyers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to discuss the investigations. While the military is conducting ongoing investigations, officials did not provide information showing that these will be thorough and impartial or that they will address the broader policy and command decisions that led to unlawful civilian deaths, Human Rights Watch said.
“Israel claims it is conducting credible and impartial investigations, but it has so far failed to make that case,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director for Human Rights Watch. “An independent investigation is crucial to understand why so many civilians died and to bring justice for the victims of unlawful attacks.”
In one case, a military investigation apparently missed an important piece of evidence: remains of an aerial bomb found in the al-Badr flour mill outside Jabalya. Israel denied targeting the mill from the air, as alleged by the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. However, video footage obtained by Human Rights Watch and released today shows the apparent remains of an Israeli MK-82 500-pound aerial bomb in the damaged mill, and UN de-miners say they defused the bomb.
More than 750 Palestinian civilians in Gaza were killed during the conflict, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. The UN has said that nearly 3,500 homes and 280 factories were completely destroyed.
Human Rights Watch documented 53 civilian deaths in 19 incidents in which Israeli forces appeared to have violated the laws of war. Six of these incidents involved the unlawful use of white phosphorus munitions; six were attacks by drone-launched missiles that killed civilians; and seven involved soldiers shooting civilians who were in groups holding white flags.
To date, Israeli military courts have convicted only one soldier of wartime abuse during the Gaza conflict, for theft of a credit card.
The Israeli military lawyers said the military was investigating all cases reported by Human Rights Watch. Seven of the cases are criminal investigations into the alleged shooting of civilians waving white flags, they said. The military had originally dismissed Human Rights Watch’s report on these cases as based on “unreliable witness reports.”
The Israeli military has thus far examined specific incidents but not broader policies that may have caused civilian casualties in violation of the laws of war, Human Rights Watch said.
An independent investigation should examine the pre-operation decisions that led to civilian casualties, Human Rights Watch said. These include the decision to target Hamas’s political infrastructure; the use of heavy artillery and white phosphorus munitions in populated areas; attacks on Gaza police; and the apparently permissive rules of engagement for drone operators and ground forces.
“The Israeli investigations so far have looked mostly at soldiers who disobeyed orders or the rules of engagement, but failed to ask the crucial question about whether those orders and rules of engagement themselves violated the laws of war,” Stork said. “For those decisions and policies, senior military and political decision-makers should be held responsible.”
To date, Israeli military courts have convicted only one soldier of wartime abuse during the Gaza conflict, for theft of a credit card
Hamas is not known to have prosecuted anyone for firing hundreds of rockets indiscriminately into Israel. On January 27 it issued a news statement and report summary, saying that rockets from Palestinian armed groups had only targeted Israeli military objects and that civilian casualties were accidental – a conclusion that Human Rights Watch rejected as “legally and factually wrong.” Hamas released a full report about its conduct during the war on February 3 that Human Rights Watch is still reviewing.
In September 2009, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, determined that Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity and called on both parties to conduct impartial investigations within six months.
On November 5, the UN General Assembly endorsed the Goldstone report and asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for a progress report about domestic investigations. Ban gave his report on February 4, passing on documents provided to him by Israel and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, and reiterating his call for credible and impartial investigations by all sides.
“Secretary-General Ban merely passed on the parties’ claims, but he also reasserted the importance of credible investigations in conformity with international standards,” Stork said. “The pressure is still on Israel and Hamas to show that they will do it right.”
According to Israel, the military has conducted roughly 150 “investigations” of incidents in Gaza, but it has not provided a list of the cases. Nearly 90 of the 150 investigations are what the military calls an “operational debriefing” – tahkir mivza’i in Hebrew. These are after-action reports, not criminal investigations, in which an officer in the chain of command interviews the soldiers involved, with no testimony from victims or witnesses. Forty-five of these 90 cases have been closed.
The Israeli military says that military police have opened 36 criminal investigations, in which a military police investigator takes statements from soldiers and seeks testimony from outside sources. One resulted in the conviction for the credit card theft, incurring a seven and a half month prison sentence, and seven were closed due to lack of evidence or because the complainants were unwilling to testify. The remaining 28 are ongoing.
The military said it has disciplined four soldiers and officers for violating orders during the Gaza conflict. In one case, two commanders received notes of reprimand for firing high-explosive artillery shells that hit a UN compound where 700 civilians were taking shelter, despite dozens of phone calls from UN officials asking for the shelling to stop. During the same attack, artillery-fired white phosphorus set fire to a UN warehouse and injured three people in the compound. The military told Human Rights Watch that the white phosphorus aspect of the case is still under investigation and was not part of the reason for the reprimand. The only information the military has released about the other two disciplinary cases is that one resulted from an attack on UN property or personnel, and the other from an incident of property destruction.
The video Human Rights Watch released today of the al-Badr flour mill was filmed by the mill’s owners after it was damaged, on January 10, 2009. The UN fact-finding report said the Israeli military bombed the mill in a deliberate attempt to damage the civilian infrastructure of Gaza. Israel said its investigation found that the mill was a legitimate military target because of Hamas activity in the area and that it only fired a tank shell and did not bomb the mill from the air.
The UN told Human Rights Watch that de-miners visited the mill on February 11, 2009, and found the front half of a 500-pound Mk-82 aircraft bomb on an upper floor of the mill, corroborating the contents of the video.
The military lawyers told Human Rights Watch that, when provided with new evidence, they could reopen an investigation.
Israel has a poor record of military investigations into alleged violations against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Human Rights Watch said. The Israeli human rights group Yesh Din has documented the low levels of criminal investigations, prosecutions, and convictions of soldiers despite the large number of allegedly unlawful deaths.
A Wise Strategy by Obama
By Bouthaina Shaaban – CounterPunch
What is happening today is a clear disregard to the life and blood of Muslims
In President Obama’s remarks on strengthening aviation intelligence and security in the wake of the incomplete bomb attack on board of an American airplane on Christmas, he pointed out more than once that US intelligence had sufficient information that al-Qaeda-related elements in Yemen intended to strike at the US and they recruited elements to do that. The information was sufficient “to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list”. He then went on to talk about technical issues related to receiving information, analyzing it and then acting on the priorities, filling gaps and connecting lines from different directions.
In all that, Obama builds his remarks and treatments on two main premises whose veracity he did not question: the first is that somewhere, there are people who hate the United States and recruit people who hate it and plan to strike at its security; and those should be put on a no-fly list. The second remedy is intelligence in the seaports, airports and on the borders, and looking for more sophisticated devices and applying more strict measures against millions of travellers from 14 countries, who should be checked and screened in a manner close to humiliation in American airports.
The dangerous thing is that president Obama repeated president Bush’s words “we are at war with al-Qaeda”. I do not know if president Obama noticed that the number of countries has increased since the days of his predecessor. The war on Afghanistan was a war on al-Qaeda and the war on Iraq was a war on al-Qaeda, until they discovered that al-Qaeda has expanded to Pakistan. And today there is talk that it has expanded to Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria and may expand to other countries in the future.
Has the strategy declared by president Bush succeeded in reducing the threat of terrorism or has it spread it more widely? If it increased the spread of terrorism, as is clear from the number of the countries mentioned by the United States in its war with al-Qaeda, does that mean that there are other reasons preventing the success of this strategy, or is it the case that the strategy did not touch the core of the problem or provide the required remedy?
The question which should be put here: why do some people target the United States and recruit others, who have no relation to terrorism, against it? If the prosperity of the United States is the cause, there are other countries competing to be number one in terms of economic growth. Why do not these countries feel targeted like the United States? Nothing in Islam promotes hatred of a certain country or a certain people.
While president Obama was addressing a potential threat, he did not say a word about a cold blooded crime committed on Christmas, when Israel killed six young Palestinians in Nablus and three in Gaza, some of them in front of their wives and children; and they were all unarmed. Neither did he condemn the crimes Israel committed last year in Gaza. He has not heard of the Holocaust survivor and the demonstrators in Western countries who came to support the besieged people of Gaza but were prevented from entering Gaza. Centuries ago, Arabs said that “Justice is the foundation of all government” because the feeling of injustice and humiliation and the disregard for life and dignity will certainly generate anger and discontent. The right approach should be to focus on lifting the injustice resulting from occupation, colonial settlement and war.
How would Muslims feel when they sees one and a half million civilians besieged without food and medicine in a humiliating prison called Gaza and shelled daily by American-made warplanes, prevented from dignified life by Israel with Western support and armament. When Israel’s rulers and generals face trouble because of their crimes, the American veto is used to protect them; and sometimes or laws are changed in order to protect war criminals.
What is happening today is a clear disregard to the life and blood of Muslims, to the extent that crimes committed against them are not covered in Western media; and consequently the West does not really know what is happening in the Arab and Muslim worlds, because its sources come either from those who commit the crimes against them or from their accomplices.
Between the beginning and the middle of the 20th century, the United States was, in the minds of Arabs and Muslims, the land of freedom, human rights, democracy and the free press. That image was the product of president Wilson’s stance when in 1918 he called for an end to colonialism, and of president Eisenhower’s position when he demanded an end to the tripartite aggression (including Britain, France and Israel) against Egypt in 1956, and that of president Kennedy who denounced the wall in Berlin. So, how would the present American presidents fare if compared with such positions?
If president Obama’s remarks assume that there are those who are born to resent the United States, this assumption is wrong. But everybody knows that the United States used its veto more than 36 times in support of Israel so that it continues its crimes against Arabs in Palestine, south Lebanon and Gaza.
Whether some people like it or not, al-Aqsa mosque is the first place Muslims turned to in their prayers, and that Muslims and Christians used to go to pilgrimage to Jerusalem before the Israeli occupation; and the faithful throughout the world have been yearning, for the past forty years, to liberate it from a racist and destructive occupation. Millions of Muslims also know for sure that the countries drumming up war against Iran for the possibility of possessing nuclear weapons are the same countries which provided Israel with nuclear weapons and gave it the knowhow, equipment and uranium to become a nuclear state without signing the none proliferation treaty.
The discrepancy in the position towards a nuclear Israel compared with an Iran aspiring to possess peaceful nuclear energy is actually an expression of the different ways in which the West looks at Muslims and non-Muslims. All the wronged people see, hear and understand but are incapable of correcting the wrongs, and expect the United States to turn to deeds in order to vindicate what president Obama said on January 7, 2010, that the United States is with those looking for justice and progress.
If the US is with those looking for justice, the Palestinian people should be top on the list. Standing with this wronged people will certainly root out Muslims’ frustration and hopelessness. The Baker report was correct when it said that justice in Palestine was at the heart of all causes; and that achieving justice there is less costly and more effective in fighting resentment, violence, anger and frustration.
What is required is strategic thinking in order to create hope in broken souls that the superpower has returned to the path of supporting those demanding justice, freedom and human dignity. The domino of violence and terrorism is moving from one country to another, and facing it does not happen through intelligence but through strategy, by adopting moral principles in support of human dignity and people’s right to live free of occupation, discrimination, oppression, or humiliation. This could be the most important indicator for the achievement of security and safety not only for the American people but for the whole world.
Turkey Slams Arab response to Gaza Plight
The governments have failed to display the reactions that the world's Muslims expected from them
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the leaders of the Arab states for their inadequate response to the Palestinian’s plight under the three-year Israeli blockade on Gaza.
Shortly before flying to the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, Erdogan denounced Arab leaders’ inadequate response to Palestinian suffering as “pitiful.”
“The governments have failed to display the reactions that the world’s Muslims expected from them. And this has been a pitiful aspect of the matter,” Erdogan said.
An outspoken critic of Israeli policies, Erdogan, left the country as Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak made a one-day visit to Ankara in an attempt to mend relations with Turkey, strained after a diplomatic row.
In a memorable outburst last year, Erdogan stormed out of a debate at the World Economic Forum, accusing Israel of “barbarian” acts and telling its President Shimon Peres, sitting next to him, that “you know well how to kill people.”
Barak’s trip was the highest-level bilateral visit since Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 war on the Gaza Strip prompted the criticism from Ankara.
Ankara, however, said relations with Tel Aviv will continue to suffer unless Israel ends “the humanitarian tragedy” in Gaza.
Tension between the two sides further escalated when Tel Aviv summoned Turkish Ambassador Ahmet Oguz Celikkol to reprimand him over a TV program that showed Israeli agents kidnapping children and shooting old men.
Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon reportedly ‘humiliated’ Ambassador Celikkol during the meeting prompting Ankara to call for an official apology from the Israeli side.
“Barak is an important figure in Israeli politics and both [Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet] Davutoglu and [Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi] Gonul will give the same message, ‘such kind of events should not happen again,’” a senior Turkish diplomat told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
He said Ankara will continue to press for an end to Tel Aviv’s blockade of the Gaza Strip and resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians during Barak’s visit.
