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July 13, 2002
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
July 12, 2002
Sean Donahue
The Other
Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia
Walt Brasch
Sin Tax
Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
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The Memphis Blues Again:
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The New Intifada:
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Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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Weekend
Edition
July 13, 2002
A Process of
Dehumanization
Raping the Palestinians
by M. Junaid Alam
"You can forgive the man who robs
you, but you can't forgive the man you rob-in his haggard features
you read your indictment and this makes his face so repulsive
that you must keep it under your heels where you cannot see it."
--Eugene Debs, American Socialist,
1904.
Massacre, theft, torture, destruction, and ethnic
cleansing: the Palestinian native is well aware of his history-not
an ancient history recalled through myths and symbols, but a
sharp, painful history reinforced decade upon decade, day upon
day, hour upon hour. It is not the history of the comforting
textbook held in one's hand, but of the dagger thrust into one's
side. The Palestinian cannot-no, dare not-forget it, not if he
wishes to stay alive at any rate. For if he fails to remember
that his home may come crashing over his head at the whim of
a bulldozer, that his crops may burn at the arrival of a settler,
that his life may be ended at the command of a soldier, he is
all but finished.
But this dreadful awareness has already
become almost automatic, reflexive: over fifty years of perpetual
terror have permanently tensed his muscles in preparation for
the all-too-familiar sound of the tank treads, the fighter jet,
the impending explosion. He is accustomed to the never-ending
series of strangling blockades, checkpoints, beatings, and fleeing.
The Israeli colonizer has seen to these tasks meticulously. So
far, nothing seems remarkable.
And then suddenly, the oppressive silence. Silence over the destruction
of hundreds of Palestinian villages. Silence over the forced
removal of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Silence over the
mass killings, the tortures, the suffocation, growing and intensifying
over a period of over a half-century. In a word, silence over
Palestinian suffering. But then-cup your ear-one can soon hear
faint murmurs, then clear voices, and finally a loud chorus:
it is not as expected. "Terrorists! Murderers! Savages!
Inhuman beasts!", cries the inflamed audience, pointing
squarely at the long-suffering, dispossessed native. A sole,
feeble voice inquires timidly, "What of the greater power,
the settler, the colonizer, the occupier?" As his voice
quivers and trails off the answer arrives like thunder: "Israel
is defending itself! Defending civilization! Defending democracy!
Surrounded by barbarians and irrational hatred!" Reality
and truth have been stood on their respective heads, and hatred
is pleased to have its feet set firmly on terra firma.
The complete castration of history has
gone hand in hand with the utter negation of Palestinian existence,
not to speak of Palestinian suffering. What has accompanied the
robbery of the native is the denial that it ever took place,
or better yet, the denial that the native even exists. And when
this fails, it is admitted that robbery has indeed taken place-with
the Palestinian as the culprit. Here we no longer have robbery
but rape: the total dehumanization and degradation of an entire
people, their history, experience, and story of suffering slandered
and maligned. This is more than confiscation of property, land,
or home; it is the confiscation of the dignity and humanity of
the chief victims of modern colonialism. Let us see then, in
its entirety, the false framework in which the Palestinians have
been framed up, and burst it open at the seams.
Origins
of Israel
Civilization had an odd way of
emerging in the Middle East (and by civilization, what else could
I mean but Israel?). Prior to 1948, there was no Israel. Since
the 7th century, which marked the ascendance of Islam in the
Middle East, the land later to be called British-mandated Palestine
was inhabited mostly by Muslim Arabs. Israeli "new historian"
Benny Morris, in his book Righteous Victims, puts population
figures in the region by 1881 as 400,000 Muslim, 42,000 Christian,
and 13,000 to 20,000 Jews-"a numerically insignificant minority".
Yet the foundations for the Jewish state were to be forged not
from this minority, but from European Jews under the movement
of Zionism.
A reaction to European anti-Semitism,
Zionism was founded by Theodore Herzl in the late 19th century,
who advocated the creation of a Jewish state because as he explains,
"I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which
I now began to understand historically and to pardonI realized
the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism".
Herzl had considered settling in a number of undeveloped countries,
but the Zionists decided on Palestine, to set up "a portion
of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization
as opposed to barbarism". Noting the existence of natives
in 1891, early Zionist Ahad Ha'am wrote, "We abroad are
used to believing that Eretz Yisrael is now almost totally desolate,
a desert that is not sowedBut in truth this is not the case.
Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are
not sowed." Herzl approached the problem of the native in
terms of "spirit[ing] the penniless population across the
border" through the "process of expropriation and removal
of the poor". The settlers viewed the native, Morris writes,
as "primitive, dishonest, fatalistic, lazy, savage."
They were no doubt furious at the Arab, who must have risen from
the sand spontaneously and queued up for the sole purpose of
denying the settler-living in Europe for the past two millennia-of
his "homeland". And what of the indigenous Jew, living
in Palestine alongside the Arab? He was not only unimpressed
with Zionism, but opposed it. Nevertheless, Ha'am saw among the
settlers "an inclination to despotism," lamenting,
"They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive
them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast
of these deeds" Civilization had arrived.
Creating a Jewish state where there were
only Arabs posed a unique problem. Israeli scholar Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
admits that "the basic problem of Zionism in Palestine was
to dispossess the natives and become the majority." In 1925,
Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Zionist and avid admirer of Il Duce, announced,
"Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either
be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native
population." In 1937 Joseph Weitz, heading the Jewish National
Fund spoke of "the transfer of the Arab population"
to both "diminish" it and "release [the land]
for the Jewish immigrants." And by 1938, Ben-Gurion himself
made clear in private: "I support compulsory transferI don't
see anything immoral in it." A splendid assessment.
In 1947 the United Nations proposed a
"partition plan" to create a Jewish state within British-mandated
Palestine. The Jewish settlers would carve out a home in an inhabited
foreign land. Better still, the plan offered the colonial population,
which accounted for 37% of Palestine and legally owned only 7%
of the land, a full 55% of the nation's territory. These figures
have been affirmed by Israel's "new historians". Thus
the Palestinian Arabs were to kindly slice themselves in half
for the betterment of the settlers. A moral authority no less
than Ghandi opposed the creation of the Jewish state: "What
is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral
code of conduct... I am not defending the Arab excesses But according
to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said
against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds."
Naturally, the partition plan caused
much despair and anxiety-among the Zionists. Avi Shlaim, another
Israeli "new historian", wrote of Ben-Gurion's real
designs in The Iron Wall: "he worked on the assumption
that this state would be not the end but only the beginning."(emphasis
added) Meanwhile Menachem Begin, then commander of Irgun militia,
warned, "The partition of Palestine is illegalEretz Israel
will be restored [!] to the people of Israel. All of it. And
for ever." We will presently see where this madness led.
The inevitable antagonism between the
settler and the native had reached its peak: the existence of
the Zionist depended directly on the non-existence of the Palestinian.
No one can really doubt this, least of all Ben-Gurion, who declared
that "who ever approaches the Zionist problem from a moral
aspect is not a Zionist." The destruction of the native
by the colonizer and the confiscation of his land and property,
defended always by racist and religious rhetoric, never depends
on a "moral" aspect, but a military one.
Shortly after the announcement of the
partition plan in 1947, the Jewish militia forces initiated an
aggressive campaign against the Palestinians, first on the Israeli
and then the Arab side of the partition. Listen carefully: "I
maintain that even before the establishment of the State, each
battle ended with a massacre. In all Israel's wars massacres
were committed but I have no doubt that the War of Independence
was the dirtiest of them all."1 Who is speaking? Israeli
military historian Uri Milstein.
Forcible expulsions occurred in dozens
of villages in this period. Israeli scholar Simha Flapan, in
addition to Morris and others, have compiled a partial list of
villages purged, plundered, and looted, among them Qisariya,
al-Rama, Danna, and Najd, all months before Israeli independence.
Psychological warfare was a key feature of this process, involving
false propaganda and wails sounded off from militia loudspeakers
in Palestinian villages. Not to be outdone by the rank and file,
key Zionist leaders generously pitched in for the "struggle"
against, or rather the strangling of, the Palestinians. Ben-Gurion
apparently had a fondness for economic strangulation, boasting,
"Deprived of transportation, food, and raw materialsthe
[Arab] urban communities underwent a process of disintegration,
chaos, and hunger."-and cited this as a "strategic
objective" of Jewish militia. The most effective form of-are
we permitted to say it?-Jewish terror, still before independence,
was massacre. On April 9, 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin,
Jewish militia groups massacred 254 Palestinians, "in cold
blood" according to the presiding Red Cross official, Jacques
de Reynier. A British official on the scene, Richard Catling,
noted that "Many young school girls were raped and later
slaughtered. Many infants were also butchered and killed."
Reynier later remarked the scene reminded him of the German SS.
Menachem Begin, head of the militia, also had a description ready:
"a splendid act of conquest". Thus the Palestinian
exodus was initiated before Israel's establishment and
before Arab military intervention, which was prevented
by the British until May 14, 1948.2
Listen once again: "The time has
come to face the ocean of lies in which we were brought up. In
almost every conquered village in the War of Independence, acts
were committed, which are defined as war crimes, such as indiscriminate
killings, massacres and rapes"3 That is Israeli military
historian Aryeh Yitzakhi, Senior Lecturer at Bar Ilan University
and the IDF. He explains the fairy-tale of Palestinians leaving
'on Arab orders' as "an absolute fabrication", and
that after the declaration of Israel on May 14, 1948, "a
smell of massacre" emanated from the clashes. British-radio
interceptions during the war only found Arab leaders advising
the Palestinians to stay. But the terror tactics of the
colonizers-no longer Jewish terror to be sure, but after May
1948 official Israeli terror-made this impossible. One example
is the forced evacuation of 50,000 civilians from Lydda and Ramle
in July, during which many of the refugees died from the oppressive
heat-but not to worry. Fortunately, the Israelis had already
looted them of all their possessions beforehand, as reported
in the British Economist on August 21, 1948. This is but
one episode in a series of such actions, resulting in the ultimate
forced removal of over 800,000 Palestinian civilians. None of
them would return. More massacres from this period are being
unearthed even now. John Pilger in June 19th edition of The
New Statesman reported that top Israeli student Teddy Katz
from Haifa University has shed light on a May 1948 massacre in
Tantura: "According to the recorded testimony of 40 witnesses,
both Arab and Jewish, half the civilians were shot in a 'rampage'."
In a most democratic manner, he had his degree annulled. Another
"new historian", Ilan Pappe, who came to Katz's defense
and explained that his taping of eyewitness evidence included
accounts of "the killing of fathers in front of children,
of rape and torture", is also under administrative threat
at Haifa. One can at least congratulate the Israelis for their
consistency; today, almost half its citizens support the idea
of "transfer".
One salient feature of the Zionist campaign
was the wide-scale plundering and looting conducted by the world's
most 'moral' army. Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev
gives this due attention in his book 1949, The First Israelis.
He notes that during and after the war "plundering and looting
were very common", citing Ben-Gurion who said "the
mass robbery in which all portions of the population participated"
had "surprised him bitterly." Behor Shitrin, of the
Ministerial Committee for Abandoned Property, reported "From
Lydda alone, the army took out 1,800 truck-loads of property."
Let us recall that the entire community of this village had been
forced out by the army. And let us further note that, as Ilan
Pappe had explained to Pilger, over four hundred Palestinian
villages and hundreds of urban areas were destroyed by Jewish-Israeli
terror. Thus the amount of looting and theft, not to speak of
land confiscation, of almost one million Palestinians across
perhaps a half-thousand residencies can only expose, once
again and once and for all, the utter barbarity and savagery
not of the natives, not of the victims-but of the
rapacious colonizers. Of course, not all the colonizers were
heartless: we can take comfort in the touching words of one Israeli
Minister Cizling, cited by Segev, speaking when asked about a
convoy of spoils:
It's been said that there were cases of rape in Ramallah. I can
forgive rape, but I will not forgive other acts which seem to
me much worse. When they enter a town and forcibly remove rings
from the fingers and jewelry from someone's neck, that's a very
grave matter.
Has Western civilization ever before
witnessed so brave a defender of human rights?
The time for half-apologies, timidity,
and a thousand caveats on question of Israel's creation must
come to an end. The historical record, unearthed by Jewish Israeli
historians using declassified archives is decisive and damning.
Let us sum up the result: the State of Israel has was established
through ethnic cleansing, rape, robbery, and massacre-without
these atrocities, present-day Israel would not exist. The mass
expulsions, mass murders, and mass looting form the foundation
upon which the Israeli state rests.
How well do the fantasies and canards
conjured up by those who deny the basis of the Palestinian tragedy
stand, or rather limp, when exposed to the glare of history?
Self-defense does not even enter into the equation: the Zionist
descended upon the Palestinian from a foreign continent and expropriated
him. What was defended was the settler's crimes, conquests,
and advances, but what does this brand of 'defense' most resemble?
Only the rationalization of the robber who, in the process of
stealing from one's home, brandishes a gun to ensure the victim
cannot resist. Surely, the robber is defending himself, and this
is self-defense, with the ever-so-minor qualification that the
"self" is the aggressor. If it can be proved
that the Palestinians settled another people's land, drew up
designs to confiscate it, set up terrorist militias, and committed
massive war crimes-in short, if it can be proven that the Palestinians
were Israelis-then the self-defense claim rings true. Then of
course there is the question of being "surrounded"
by Arabs. The proponent of this position may forgive us for prefacing
our response with a chuckle: when the Zionists of 1900, as members
of the European community for 2,000 years, decided to settle
Palestine, never mind "spirit the penniless population",
they were well aware that it was Arab land. Only a man who swims
halfway across the Atlantic, settles upon a tiny island, and
then complains he is "surrounded" by water could sympathize
with the colonizer on this point.
The claim that Moses granted the land
to the Jews is made not on the rational but the religious plane.
One strains to understand the 2,000 year delay for this remarkable
land deal, and is further flustered upon finding that the Bible
has not appointed prophets for the purpose of becoming real-estate
salesman. Putting forth the argument that Jews "have always
been there" is equally irrational. The small number of Jews
who were living alongside the Arabs never invented, and
in fact opposed, Zionism, which was created by Europeans and
holds all the trappings of European colonialist enterprises.
If everyone 'returned' to where one's supposed ancestors lived
millennia ago, American whites would ship themselves back to
Europe, and American blacks would set sail for Africa. One can
imagine the bemused smile forming on the face of the Native American
at this prospect.
The simple truth is that rational argument
has nothing to do with the defense of Israel's origins, for it
is not the power of logic, but the logic of power which
plays the decisive role in colonialist ventures. Thus it is with
the utmost confidence that Zionist leaders have attempted to
sound the death knell of the Palestinian people. Ben-Gurion said
after the war, "we have accomplished our settlement by transfer
of the [Palestinian] population" and "[their] old will
die and the young will forget"; his special advisor Uri
Lubrani gloated in 1960, "We shall reduce the Arab population
to a community of woodcutters and waitresses." A decade
later Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan told the Palestinians, "we
have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs."
We can even quote Israel's first president, Chaim Weizman, who
declared that the problem of "several hundred thousand Negroes"
in and around Israel "is a matter of no consequence".
Indeed, it would seem that all has been said and discovered,
that our examination has come to a sorrowful conclusion, and
we are left only to hang our heads.
But it turns out these fine gentlemen
were wrong. The "Palestinian population" has swelled
to over four million, and far from having "forgotten"
anything the young have achieved a level of anger and militancy
matched only by their numbers. The (Palestinian) Arab population
has not been "reduced" but has instead exploded and
forged among its numbers the most resilient and resolute men
and women of the modern era; the Israelis indeed "have no
solution", but the Palestinian masses have prepared one
for themselves, that is, constant struggle, defiance, and guerrilla
warfare. Weizmann's 'Palestinian Negroes' are not only "a
matter of consequence" for Israel but carry with them all
the permanent scars and lashes he and his fellow henchmen have
inflicted upon them, and "consequently" will never
rest without attaining the dignity and freedom of which they
have long been deprived. While the Zionist has stripped the native
of his land and property, he cannot rob him of his memory-and
that is a most dangerous truth. The words of Sartre which preface
The Wretched of the Earth, written by Marxist revolutionary
and fighter of French colonialism Frantz Fanon, are most appropriate
in describing the problem presently faced by the Zionist:
this imperious being, crazed by his absolute
power and by the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly
that he was once a man; he takes himself for a horsewhip or a
gun; he has come to believe that the domestication of the 'inferior
races' will come about by the conditioning of their reflexes.
But in this he leaves out of account the human memory and
the ineffaceable marks left upon it; and then, above all
there is something which perhaps he has never owned: we only
become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of
that which others have made of us. (emphasis added)
In essence, the modern-day Palestinian,
having suffered under thirty-five years of military occupation,
remembers his past because it sheds light upon the present, and
seeks to emancipate himself from the present in order to avenge
his past. Thus it is in our interest to examine the reality of
Palestinian life of the past few decades-that is, after the 1967
war, under Israeli military rule-to draw the necessary lessons,
and dismantle the myths surrounding the current period.
M. Junaid Alam's Raping the Palesitians
is continued in Part Two: the Brutalities
of Colonial Occupation.
M. Junaid Alam is
an undergraduate in political science at Northeastern University.
He can be reached at: alam.m@neu.edu
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