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April 18, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
Austin Cultural Limits:
Willie Nelson, Film and BBQ
April 17, 2002
Norman
Madarasz
Undoing
Chavez:
The View from South America
Brian Wood
Ruins and Body Parts inJenin
George
Monbiot
Chemical
Coup: The CIA's Attempt to Undermine the UN's Weapon Inspector
for Iraq
Robert Fisk
Fear and Learning in America
April 16, 2002
Todd May
US
Should End Aid to Israel
Gabriel Ash
The Oilman, the General
and the Coup that Failed
Ron Jacobs
Wake
Up Some Mornin',
Find Your Own Self Dead:
The Chavez Coup
Brian Wood
Inside Jenin: Rubble and Decomposing
Bodies
Jack McCarthy
Citizen
Coup: The Times,
The Post and the Coup Plotters
Dave Marsh
Hymns: How I Got Through
Last Week
April 15, 2002
Susi Abeles
A
Field Trip to Jenin
Breyten Breytenbach
A Letter to Ariel Sharon:
"You Won't Break Them"
Gregory
Wilpert
CounterCoup
in Venezuela
Kristen Schurr
Amid the Rubble of Nablus
Jordy
Cummings
An
Open Letter to Abe Foxman
Christopher Reilly
The Media, the CIA
and the Chavez Coup
James
T. Phillips
"Homicide"
Bombers
April 14, 2002
William Blum
The CIA and Venezuela
David
Vest
A
Good Old-Fashion "Incursion"
Ralph Nader
General Motors:
Stuck in Reverse
M. Junaid
Alam
From
the Ashes: Palestinian Struggle for Freedom
Sam Bahour
Palestinians and Americans
April 13, 2002
Beth Daoud
Life
in the Ruins of Nablus
Patrick Cockburn
Bulldozing History:
The End Nears for Stalin's
Most Monstrous Hotel
Gregory
Wilpert
The
Coup in Venezuela:
an Eye-Witness Account
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Thoughts on Our War
Against Terrorism
Anne Winkler-Morey
Why
I Didn't Organize
a Passover Seder This Year
April 12, 2002
Nancy Stohlman
Live from East Jerusalem:
International Nonviolence
Brian
J. Foley
Defeating
Evil
Olivier Audeoud
Did the US Break
the Laws of War?
Rep. Ron
Paul
The
Middle East Quagmire
Michael Colby
Republican Porn:
Oiling Up the Caribou
John Chuckman
Tom
Friedman's Fabrications
April 11, 2002
Patrick Cockburn
Battle of St. Petersburg Zoo
Jeff Halper
After
the Invasion:
Now What?
Falk / Krieger
Taming the Nuclear Monster
Steve
Perry
The
Good Life of
Nellie Stone Johnson
Nick Ring
Efficiency and Occupation:
Terrorism vs. Taylorism
Alexander
Cockburn
From
the West Bank to BBQ
to Old Sparky, And Beyond
April 10, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
Blaming the Victims:
Hating the Palestinians
George
Monbiot
World
Bank to West Bank
Fran Schor
US-Sponsored State Terror
David
Vest
Political
Color Schemes
Jack McCarthy
Florida State Radicals:
The Berkeley of the South
Rises Again
Doreen
Miller
A
Tale of Two Warring Tribes
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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April 18, 2002
A Colonizing Project Built on Lies
By M. Shahid Alam
It is not an easy life when it must be lived,
defended, justified everyday, every hour-before the world and
before the bar of one's own conscience-with lies, cover-ups,
deceptions and sophistry.
But this has been the particular burden
of Zionists as they conceived their plan for a colonial-settler
state in Palestine, as they went about executing this plan on
the backs of imperialists powers-with wars, massacres and ethnic
cleansing-and, later, as they have persisted in their plans to
dispossess the Palestinians of the last fragments of their rights
and legacy whose Canaanite roots were more ancient than Isaiah,
Ezekiel, David and Moses.
In the epoch of colonialism, when Europeans
were the master race, and by that unquestioned right colonized,
enslaved, exploited and 'improved' all the lesser breeds
of Asia and Africa, the Zionists had an easy time with their
narrative of lies. The Zionist goal was to possess Palestine,
where they could  establish an exclusive state for European
Jewry. In order to possess Palestine, they would have to dispossess
the Palestinians.
At the time, this was not a hard sell.
It is true that the Jews did not have membership in Europe's
master race, or if they did-through centuries of assimilation-this
was not conceded by the Europeans. Still, they were a biblical
people: it was from their chosen seed that Jesus had sprung.
In Europe's hierarchy of races and peoples, this placed the Jews
well above the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. The Jews were Israelites,
children of Jacob, 'born of the spirit,' while the Arabs were
Ishmaelites, children of Hagar, an Egyptian slave. In the words
of John, the Hagarites were inferior: they were 'born of the
flesh.'
This is what determined the Zionist sales
pitch. They were a biblical people, an ancient people-the original
and only inhabitants of Palestine-who had preserved their traditions
and, more importantly, their racial purity through more than
two thousand years of sojourn in Europe. But they are a people
without a land: their sojourn in Europe was an exile from the
land promised to them by the God of Jews and Christians. Their
exile must now be ended by helping them to return to Palestine,
a land once flowing with milk and honey, but which had declined
since their departure into a wilderness-a desert now inhabited
by wild Bedouin tribes, nondescript aborigines of no account.
All this was cleverly captured in the
deceptive slogan, first coined by Israel Zangwill in 1897: "land
without a people for a people without a land." This became
the leading edge of Zionist propaganda. Unlike other colonialists,
who justified their conquests with their intentions to improve
the native population, the Zionist settlers would improve the
land, since there were no people in Palestine to be improved.
After the fact, Israel would justify itself with the claim that
it had made the deserts bloom. And those blooms were planted
where once Palestinian homes and villages had been.
When it was pointed out that Palestine
was not empty, that it had close to a million inhabitants, the
Zionists pressed two claims, one mythical and another secular,
making sure they left no loose ends. Palestine had been promised
to them by none other than their god. Since this
god, later, also turned out to be the God of the Christians,
this argument was guaranteed a favorable reception among those
who still retained a strong belief in biblical stories. This
had another advantage to the faithful. In the words of Henry
Cabot Lodge, a senator from Massachusetts during the 1920s, Turkish
control over the holy lands was "one of the great blots
on the face of civilization, which ought to be erased."
A modified version of this narrative
was offered to the secular-minded. The Jews had a historical
right to Palestine: the adjective 'historical' carries nearly
the same weight for the secular that 'divine' does for the faithful.
The logic was quaint. No one would ever dream of pressing this
claim in a court of law: that those who had once shared
title to a piece of land-and that too more than two thousand
years ago-have stronger claims over those who hold it now and
continuously for thousands of years. But logic did not matter.
In this case, those pressing the claims had an affinity with
the Europeans, and the opposite party was a barbarous, savage
race. Also, no one asked if those who wanted to 'return' were
in fact the descendants of those who had left.
When these weighty arguments were added
to their financial and political clout-and who can deny them
credit for this clout-the Zionists won the simultaneous support
of two imperialist powers. In 1917 Britain pledged to create
a national home for the Jews in Palestine, a pledge that also
had the blessings of United States. After this, the Palestinians
did not have a chance. The Zionist project could only have failed
if it did not find takers among the Jews. It appeared at first
that the Palestinians were in luck. Most Jewish emigrants from
Europe preferred greener pastures in the Americas over the first
Zionist settlements in Palestine.
Hitler changed all that. Once the Nazis
came to power, and they began their sweep across Europe, Jewish
immigration into Palestine, which had been a trickle during the
1920s, turned into a flood during the 1930s. When the Palestinians
resisted the colonization of their country, they were brutally
suppressed, and soon large tracts of Palestine passed into the
effective control of Jewish immigrants. In 1948, the United Nations-where
American pressure was used to garner the votes-stepped in with
a partition plan. It gave 55 percent of historic Palestine to
Israel, including most of the coastline and best agricultural
lands, though Jews made up only 31 percent of the population
and owned less than 7 percent of the land.
This led to war-or what goes under that
name. The Palestinian strength had already been crushed by the
British during 1935-39, while the Arab armies that opposed the
creation of Israel were poorly trained, poorly led, outnumbered-yes,
they were outnumbered-and without a joint command. As
a result, Israel came out of the war victorious, controlling
78 percent of historic Palestine, and having forced out 800,000
Palestinians from the areas they controlled. In the first Israeli-Arab
war, the Zionists had nearly achieved their goal. The remainder
of Palestine, consisting of the West Bank and Gaza-that had passed
into the control of Jordan and Egypt-would be conquered in 1967.
Once Israel had become a fact, it had
to be exonerated: it had to be distanced from the colonialist
methods that had gone into its creation. The truth about its
founding was cunningly inverted. A colonial settler-state that
was established on the backs of imperial powers, and whose founding
was premised on the dispossession of Palestinians, was now cast
as a newly liberated country, in the same class as India and
Indonesia, which had also won their independence from colonial
occupation. The Zionist struggle was all the more heroic because,
unlike India and Indonesia, they also had to fight off fanatical
Arab neighbors, unwilling to accept the existence of Israel.
It was not too hard for Israel to achieve
this makeover-from a belligerent to a victim-at least for Western
audiences that had been complicit in the Zionist enterprise.
This makeover was achieved and sustained through movies, media
and manipulation. It was directed from the United States, where
the Jewish community had grown to command considerable influence
over the media, the Congress and the Presidency. Ironically,
the Nazi terror had provided two vital inputs into the creation
of Israel. By fuelling Jewish emigration from Europe, it gave
Israel the population it needed to create an exclusive Jewish
state. A similar and simultaneous flow westward strengthened
the power of the Jewish community in United States-the new hegemon
whose resources and power would become Israel's most important
assets in its colonizing project.
The Zionists would make capital out of
the Holocaust in their campaign to shield Israel from critics.
As never before, the Holocaust had created a fund of sympathy
for the Jews, sympathy born of guilt. This Holocaust capital
was not only conserved through endless commemoration-in movies,
media, and museums-but, more importantly, it was deepened by
the claim that its horrors were unique in history. Never before
had a people been targeted for total extermination, and never
before had they faced death through incineration. As the survivors
of the greatest, most unique crime against humanity, the Jews
and Israel could claim several advantages, all of which would
be turned systematically against their victims: the Palestinians.
With predictable regularity, the Holocaust
capital was used to stifle any talk of Israeli injustice towards
Palestinians. The West had been complicit, directly and indirectly,
in the Holocaust, this most unique of all crimes. And since their
guilt and remorse over this crime was correspondingly deep, this
could be exploited to Israel's advantage. In the decades after
the second world war, there were few Westerner who dared to see
past their guilt; the movies and media made sure that time did
not diminish these feelings of guilt. And those who did were
quickly muzzled with charges of anti-Semitism.
The Holocaust capital was used to make
the Palestinian claims of victimization untenable. This became
a logical impossibility. The Jews-and, therefore, Israel-were
the super victims, who completely overshadowed all other victims.
How, then, could any people claim that they were the victims
of the Jews? It became a logical contradiction to claim that
you were the victims of the world's super victims. The Palestinians
did not have a prayer: their plaints would never be heard in
the court of Western opinion.
It was not enough that the Palestinians
should be denied victimhood: the power of the super victim was
used to denounce them. The Palestinians could not assert any
rights-to their land, their freedom, or dignity-if this went
against the interests or needs of the super victims. The Palestinians
had acted immorally in seeking to restrict the free immigration
of Jews, who were fleeing persecution, and whose flight was their
only alternative to Nazi death camps. By refusing to share their
land with the Jews, the Palestinians had actually contributed
to their extermination. In other words, the very existence of
the Palestinians-at least during the 1930s and 1940s-invited
charges of immorality.
When the occasion demanded, Israel's
victimhood would also be used to justify violence against the
Palestinians. After all, the Israelis argued, we are victims
of the greatest, most unique crime in history: nothing we
can do could even begin to equal that. Among others, this logic
was employed by Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel,
when protesting the West's muted concerns over the plight of
Palestinian refugees. The problem of Palestinian refugees, he
argued, was nothing compared to the murder of six million Jews.
Once the Palestinians had been chosen
to bear the burden of the Holocaust-they had contributed to it,
and would pay for it-the case against them was closed: at least
before the bar of Western reason, whose greatest thinkers have
nearly always been happy to defend the greatest crimes of their
societies. Western conquests, exterminations and enslavement
of entire peoples, the bloody wars they imposed on distant peoples,
the brutalization of entire continents: all were excused, whitewashed
in the name of civilization, Christianity, modernity, and revolution.
The Palestinians too had been chosen for extinction: they were
to be voided to make room for a people pursuing higher goals,
a chosen people, themselves the victims of other chosen races.
After this, the demonization of Palestinians
was easy. The right of return of Palestinians was first demolished
with a few bold hammer strokes. They had left because they had
been ordered to, in order to allow the Arab armies to move swiftly
against Jewish populated areas. Since they had left on their
own-they had forfeited their right to return, or compensation
for the property they had left behind. This concoction became
folklore, not only in Israel and among Jews, but also in United
States and much of Europe. No one asked if the Arab armies
had ever ordered the Palestinians to flee: no one asked because
such orders were never given. No one asked if any people would
abandon their homes, villages, and towns, if they did not face
terror. No one asked because that was the choice offered to them
by the Haganah, the Irgun and Stern Gang.
The Arab rejection of the partition of
Palestine was proof positive of their innate hostility towards
Jews. The Arabs had attacked Israel because they were murderers
and Muslim fanatics who hated Jews and Christians; they were
feudalistic and felt threatened by a society based on modern
foundations. It never occurred to anyone-in Israel, United States,
or Britain-that the Arabs had done what any people faced with
conquest have done-defend themselves. But this elemental right
was not granted to a people so dehumanized as the Arabs.
The presence of Palestinian in refugee
camps demonstrated Arab intransigence and, not to forget, perversity.
Wars have always created refugees, but the refugees do not linger
in refugee camps: they have been routinely absorbed by the host
countries. If the Palestinians still live in refugee camps-in
Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria-that is because these Arab countries
have used them as pawns in their campaign against Israel. The
Palestinians too have cooperated in this dastardly game-by refusing
to leave the camps.
The deception and irony in this argument
was lost on Western audiences. A million Palestinians had been
turned into refugees not because of wars: they were refugees
because they had been forced out of their homes under a program
of ethnic cleansing. No one was asking the Zionists if they
had any responsibility in perpetuating the problem of Palestinian
refugees-that they were rotting in refugee camps because they
had been denied the right, guaranteed under international law,
to return to their homes. The war that had caused them to flee
their homes was now over: why couldn't they return to their homes?
There was another, perhaps deeper irony.
The Zionists demanded that the problem of Palestinian refugees
should be solved by the Arab countries: they hosted them, so
they should absorb them. And yet the Zionists had not demanded
the same rights for European Jewry who had lived in Europe for
two thousand years and perhaps longer, and who were mostly of
European stock. Instead, they had argued that the Jewish communities-who
had lived for hundreds of years in Britain, Russia, Ukraine,
Spain, Greece and Bulgaria-were a distinct people who must have
a separate homeland. And that homeland-for a European people-was
not to be founded in Europe, but in Palestine.
When Arafat refused to accept the scraps
he was offered at Camp David in July 2000, a new lie was born:
the lie that Arafat had walked away from "an extremely generous
offer" that gave the Palestinians 90 percent of the West
Bank and Gaza. The offer made at Camp David was indeed very generous.
But it was generous to Israel, since Israel would retain control
over the borders of West Bank and Gaza, their water resources,
their air space, and nearly all of old Jerusalem. Israel would
also keep most of the settlements, together with road links to
Israel that Palestinians would need permits to cross. The Palestinians
were being asked to legalize their dependency-their bondage to
Israel-in a new system of apartheid sponsored and protected by
United States.
And yet American commentators have gnashed
their teeth at the stupidity that prompted Arafat to turn down
this 'very generous offer.' It was indeed a generous offer-the
most generous that Israel had ever made. And it was generous
precisely because Israel had offered nothing to the Palestinians
before: nothing other than occupation, violations of their rights,
seizure of their lands, demolition of their homes, arrests, tortures
and executions. This was not a lie. This was the most
generous offer Israel had ever made.
Once the second Intifada started, and
the Palestinians were back in the streets, throwing stones at
Israeli armor, the Israelis Defense Forces responded predictably.
Within the first week, they had killed more than a hundred Palestinians,
many of them children. However, this was no problem for the Israelis.
When the world took notice, this was expertly blamed on their
parents. They were sacrificing their children to gain some cheap
publicity. In no time, the American media too was parroting these
heinous charges.
And so the lies, deceptions and sophistry
employed to defeat the Palestinians have persisted. Indeed, they
have multiplied and metamorphosed to suit the changing circumstances,
the changing needs of an anachronistic colonizing project. As
soon as these lies are announced-by Israeli officials or Israeli
media-they are taken up by a thousand American experts, anchors,
reporters and columnists, taken up and circulated verbatim. They
rapidly enter into American public discourse, sanctified by op-ed
writers, bandied at Congressional hearings, and trumpeted by
Presidential hopefuls. The myths displace history.
Like the biblical narratives-of Cain's
murder, Ham's curse, Hagar's abandonment-that have supported
generations of murderous ideologies, the myths created by Zionist
colonizers has killed Arabs, Jews and a few Americans too. As
long as these myths are nurtured and propagated, as long as they
substitute for history, they will continue to kill. They may
well end up killing our dearest hope-the hope of a better world,
a single world, united, serving all humanity. These myths must
be opposed before they destroy our humanity, house by house,
camp by camp, city by city-as it does today, in Nablus, Tulkarm,
Qalqiliya, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jenin.
M. Shahid Alam
is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston.
His recent book, Poverty
from the Wealth of Nations was published by Palgrave
(2000). He can be reached at: m.alam@neu.edu
Copyright: M. Shahid Alam
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