The Israeli Government has now been ‘mowing the lawn’ — their analysts’ timeworn phrase for murdering Palestinians who dare to resist ethnic cleansing – for just over a week. There were two flashpoints for the current explosion of hatred. Firstly, there were the Israeli manoeuvres beginning around the 13th of April against the al-Aqsa mosque, which culminated on 7th May when, in the reporting of the New York Times, when ‘police officers armed with tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-tipped bullets burst into the mosque compound shortly after 8pm, setting off hours of clashes with stone-throwing protesters in which hundreds were injured’. Meanwhile, as the human rights lawyer Noura Erakat reported in The Washington Post last week, ‘Sheikh Jarrah is now practically a war zone as armed Israeli settlers, under the protection of Israeli police’ terrorize 40 Palestinians who are resisting ‘eviction’ from their homes.
The occupation has been a sore on humanity’s face for so many decades, it’s hard to think of anything new or incisive to say. But then, looking at the professional commentary and social media, there is little need to say anything new because too many people still cannot or will not understand what should have been obvious for decades.
A phrase that runs through the coverage like the name of a holiday resort through a stick of rock is ‘Israel has the right to defend itself.’ This proposition is rarely examined in British mainstream commentary or political discourse, especially not now that Corbynism has succumbed to Starmishness, and the Labour Party trots along in the Tories’ greasy shadow. The strongest criticism allowed is that Israel must be ‘proportionate’ in its use of violence but its ‘right’ to defend itself is unquestioned. This claim to self-defence neglects that the right has never been absolute. Yes, Israel may defend itself against the Palestinians, but where does this right begin and end? A mugger has the right to self-defence against his victim, but not until he has ceased trying to mug him. During the 1980s, the Soviet Union had some right of self-defence against the occupied people of Afghanistan, but what would have been the first piece of self-defence advice from the western intellectual class if not leave?
Since 1967, Israel has been illegally holding Palestinians prisoner, demolishing their homes, uprooting their crops, stealing their water and natural gas, building Jewish-only compounds and roads on their land, imposing checkpoints, destroying cultural, religious, and historical sites, humiliating them, and killing them. Even Israel’s ‘withdrawal’ from Gaza in 2005 still leaves them enforcing a ‘no-go’ buffer within, while controlling its borders, airspace, and access to the Mediterranean Sea. Meanwhile, we are told that Israel has a ‘security problem’ – another reversal of the truth apparent to anyone who sees enemy soldiers in their streets. We are told that Israel, with its nuclear arsenal, and high tech army is under ‘existential threat,’ while the Palestinians look on as their land is given to ‘settlers’ and their history is buried under concrete. We are sometimes told that Israel has ‘evicted’ some Palestinians from their homes, a verb that implies Israelis are the lords of a Palestinian tenancy.
The occupation is an ongoing attack – every single minute of every single day for 56 years – and so Israel’s right to ‘self-defence’ against their victim must be heavily qualified: it begins with meaningful withdrawal. You can’t legitimately defend yourself against someone you are unlawfully attacking. There is no ‘proportionate’ use of violence against hostages. All of this would be plain and uncontroversial, were we discussing theoretical countries X and Y; and it would be called daily from the minarets of every newspaper in Britain if we replaced Israel with China.
The Palestinian reprisals, the periodic flare-ups of rage and violence, are portrayed in the US and UK media as triggers for the inevitable, crushing response. ‘After Years of Quiet, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Exploded. Why Now?’ the New York Times lamented last week. This argument makes sense only if one defines military occupation, the siege of Gaza, the demolitions, the killings, the brutality, and the humiliation as ‘quiet.’ Journalists’ minds are occupied, and so adopt the Israeli definition: what is ‘quiet’ for them.
When the Palestinian violence comes, journalists and commentators who support Israel’s right to violently defend themselves from the people they are attacking demand that the attacked use only non-violence and diplomacy. They ignore the repeated attempts of the Palestinians to use legal and diplomatic means, all of which have been blocked or punished by Israel’s godfather at the UN. Diplomacy only works when both sides can offer something the other side wants, but Israel wants nothing from the Palestinians that they are not already taking, except for them to be somewhere else. It is not the situation that is ‘intractable,’ but the Israeli Government.
The history of Israel and Palestine is surely the biggest knot in the tangle of tribal politics, colonial hubris, religious dogma, grievance, and violence that is the history of the Middle East. Israel’s defenders exploit this complexity to promote hesitancy and timidity in onlookers. To observe that the Occupation is unjust is to invite demands to consider the events of 1948 or 1850 or, worse, to take seriously blood-stained parchments and a vengeful tribal god. To defend the Palestinian people is to be told, accurately enough, that there never was a Palestinian state, as if the absence of a state is synonymous with the absence of a people. The effect of this fog is to make people doubt themselves, to doubt their own perceptions of what is manifestly unjust and, by staying quiet, side with the oppressor. It’s like the strategy of the tobacco companies fifty years ago: not to win the argument, but to muddle the debate enough to prevent change. And, of course, it only works one way. One is asked to have no detailed knowledge of the history to side with the Israeli government, but to take up the cause of the Palestinians one must be Edward Said.
We must maintain our confidence to blow away the smoke and state simple truths: that nothing anyone did in 1948, 1848, or AD 48 excuses stealing a family’s land, razing their home, and burning their fields today. The abstractions of nation states and lines on maps never justify making real people refugees in their own land and it is antihuman to say that they do. States do not have rights, people do.
We must continue to apply pressure to our own government not to aid the aggressor. The public, via the BDS movement, must continue to sanction Apartheid Israel until western governments are shamed into doing it themselves. Above all, we must never turn away or lose the courage to call such industrial inhumanity a crime.
David Traynier 