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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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July 13, 2002
A Process of
Dehumanization
Raping the Palestinians
by M. Junaid Alam
Part Two:
Brutalities of Colonial Occupation
Following the 1967 war Israel seized East Jerusalem,
forced out all of the 6,500 residing Palestinians, and bulldozed
their religious centers. The UN reported that by 1971, 48 Palestinian
villages were destroyed, and by 1974 the Red Cross counted almost
20,000 Palestinian homes crushed by Israeli bulldozers. The surviving
refugees joined their 1948 counterparts in squalid camps. Meanwhile,
Israeli leaders had come to a certain consensus about the nature
of their victims, namely that they were all animals. "Two-legged
beasts", "grasshoppers", "snakes", "drugged
insects", "cockroaches"-terms employed not by
random Israeli fanatics, but rather very well-placed ones, i.e.
prime ministers, defense ministers, and so forth-have been used
to describe, or rather dehumanize, Palestinians. One wonders
if Israeli leadership plans on erecting zoos across the country
to house the newly dispossessed 'Negroes': it would be a welcome
respite from the hovels and ghettoes that comprise much of the
Occupied Territories.
The remarks more importantly reflect
a deep-seated racist attitude that permeates Israeli society,
and play an important psychological role in the dehumanization
process. It would be inhuman to detain, torture, shoot and beat
fellow human beings, for the sight of a fellow man in chains
is appalling to the Western ethos. But once humans are described
in bestial terms-'animalized'-then the problem disappears; if
it is discovered that the hands in chains are in fact paws, that
the cries of the tortured are only howls, then it is safe to
cease idle talk of human rights and attend to other matters.
Yet it so happens that the colonizer's
projection of a bestial image upon his subject is not a one-sided
project, but a dialectical one. Sartre spoke of the settler taking
himself for "a horsewhip or a gun", an idea which a
radical African anti-imperialist of the 1950's, Aimé Césaire,
explained in A Discourse on Colonialism:
colonizationdehumanizes even the most civilized manthe colonizer,
who, in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing
the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating
him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself
into an animal.
The utter brutality to which the Palestinian
has been exposed under occupation, compounded by the most fantastic
exercises in denial and feigned ignorance by the occupier, can
only be explained in light of this deep and explosive dialectic.
Since it is in fact impossible for man to appoint himself judge,
jury, and executioner of an entire people without committing
grave crimes, a boomerang effect emerges. For the native seeks
to indict the settler with his own charges of injustice and brutality
and, lacking the ballots and bullets provided by imperialism,
pours his whole willpower into this gigantic effort. It is in
this context that the workings of colonial occupation and anti-colonial
resistance should be studied.
The key feature of Israeli military occupation
is its all-sidedness: every aspect of Palestinian life is made
disorderly, impossible, and chaotic by an injection of one or
another element of the occupation No daily established routine
of attending school, going to work, or enjoying leisure time
exists; in fact it in a sense it can be said that the occupation
imposes not disorder but a tyrannical order, whereby the native
is constantly trapped, tense, waiting, and essentially imprisoned
in his own homeland.
The restriction of movement is the most
striking feature of Palestinian life. Endless checkpoints, blockades,
and curfews enforce the paralysis. Haaretz on May 19 reported
that Palestinians now require-brace yourselves-'freedom-of-movement
permits' to travel. In order to move, one requires colonial permission:
simply another way of reinforcing native submission. All that
remains to be done now is issue 'freedom-to-live' permits-and
no doubt they will be in short supply. In an important article
in April 22 Haaretz Gideon Levy points out but a few cases
within the year illustrating that movement equals death. One-armed
Rada was selling shirts when a soldier informed him he would
"take off [his] other arm" if he dared to reappear;
six months later an Israeli soldier prevented his pregnant wife
through a roadblock despite his pleas. Levy observes, "On
his infant's grave I saw him weeping". Abdallah, a sick
child, was rushed to the hospital, but five hours and five taxies
later, the doctors told his parents that the delay, courtesy
of an Israeli siege, had cost their child his life. Rafaat, a
refugee of '48, was shot dead from a comfortable distance by
an Israeli soldier while on his daily work-related errands. Suleiman,
a premature baby, saw life for a mere hour as his desperate mother
spent twelve hours trying to get to a hospital despite the siege
in Jenin; Mohammed, another premature baby of the same town,
managed to live a full eight hours before his death. The soldier
manning the tank offered his heartfelt condolences: "I have
the right to kill you, but not to let you pass." And there
is Abed, a fisherman of 30 years ran into the Israeli Navy which
"made him undress and jump overboard, wearing only his underwear"
and then "shot live ammunition into the water around him
to frighten him", ultimately leaving him "naked and
blindfolded". Yes, even in the ocean, there is no respite
from Israeli terror.
I do not at all mean to imply, however,
that the Israelis focus on killing only moving Palestinians
in the Territories. This would be most selective and thus an
entirely undemocratic method of murder. Let us turn to Levy again.
Eight-year old Ubai stood in his bedroom before being felled
by soldiers' bullets. Brothers Yassr and Samr, 11 and 15, were
killed within forty days of one another for throwing stones at
soldiers and tanks. Yunis and Mohammed earned wages by building
Jewish settlements at Gush Etzion and Pisgat Ze'ev. The settlers
kindly thanked them by paralyzing one and blinding the other.
The reason? Levy answers: "No reason whatsoever".
I point out these few incidents of violence
and murder only in passing and only briefly to highlight but
one aspect of Palestinian life under occupation: death. If the
native moves, he dies; if the native remains still, he dies;
if the native exists, he dies. The words occasionally
brandished on the helmets of Israeli soldiers, "Born to
Kill", are fitting: the occupier is born to kill, and the
native is born to die.
There are other aspects of occupation which deserve our attention,
including economic suffocation. It is impossible to talk of a
national economy when we are examining not a nation but a set
of discontinuous, sliced up ghettoes. This is precisely the case
in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Theoretically, the Palestinian
Authority controls some territory, but in reality the constant
presence and invasions of Israeli military forces, bulldozers,
and settlers, put the actual land effectively in control of the
occupiers. Sara Roy notes in the book The New Intifada
that, "by December 1999, the Oslo agreements had created
227 separate West Bank enclaves under the full or partial control
of the PA," and that "88 percent of these areas are
less than two square kilometers in size." Two square kilometers?
Perhaps the Israelis are hoping to build mini-golf courses. The
economic situation in Palestine is bound up with its colonial
context, which involves, naturally, more Israeli theft and aggrandizement.
Roy further notes that "Between 1994 and 2,000, the Israeli
government confiscated approximately 35,000 acres of Arab land
in the West Bankworth more than $1 billion" and stole some
10,000 acres more after 1999. What does this mean on the ground?
Only that unemployment in the Territories hovers between 60%
to 70%, that half the Palestinian population lives under the
poverty rate, and that our friend Ben-Gurion, with his fondness
for Palestinian "disintegration, chaos and hunger,"
is cheering on from hell.
In essence the Palestinian economic situation
is dire, enough so that it is pointless to talk of GDP and inflation
given the most pressing economic concern of Palestinians: survival.
Soon after the initial rape of Jenin, the IDF blocked crucial
and sorely-needed (economic and medical) humanitarian aid. But
does anyone remember Jenin? This was the site of Israeli destruction
and terror so grave that it caused UN special envoy Roed-Larsen
to comment, "It is horrifying beyond belief", and even
prompted US envoy William Burns to admit it was "obvious
what happened here has caused enormous suffering for thousands
of Palestinian civilians". The Independent on April
21st reported that "The Israeli army refused to allow the
Red Cross and others into the camp for six days, well after most
of the fighting had ended," and cited a senior UN official
as saying "they kept out humanitarian aid for days and that
in itself is a war crime." The Scotsman on April
19th stated that the UN was "allowed access after 12 days
during which ambulances were turned away and scores of injured
bleed to death". Here we have a grave example of not just
economic but all-encompassing suffocation. Jenin is only worth
mentioning in this context because today the Israelis have imposed
these tight chains on the entire Territories. Peter Hansen, head
of the UN's Relief and Development Agency, recently cited the
month-long blockade on Gaza's ports as hindering humanitarian
aid, and added that often only 20-25% of his staff were active
because Israel refused to issue new permits, which "are
normally about to expire by the time they are issued".4
On July 4 according to BBC, a full thirty aid agencies
issued a joint statement condemning Israel for obstructing their
relief missions through harassment and delays. As Palestinians
starve and sell off assets simply to buy food, the colonizer
only smiles at his humiliation before straightening his face
and sternly citing "security concerns."
The most prominent and recognizable physical
feature of the colonial occupation are the settlements. Israeli
human rights group B'Tselem reported in May that over 40% of
the West Bank is controlled by settlers. Sharon alone is responsible
for the building of at least forty new settlements. Maps reveal
that the Territories are sliced up, separated, and isolated by
the perpetual construction of settlement roads and buildings.
In the Gaza Strip alone, a full one million Palestinians are
huddled onto 60% of the land-the other 40% is occupied by 3,000
colonists. 5
These numbers are only symbolic representations
of a violent life and death struggle being waged by the native
against land expropriators, bulldozers, and soldiers, against
the all-sided destruction and robbery which has never ceased
to haunt him. Some observations made by international volunteer
Justin Podur in a July 1st interview highlight this process.6
No sooner had he arrived he observed "an orange grove being
knocked down by Israeli bulldozers", and no sooner had he
started taking pictures did "nearby tanks fire into the
air". Returning a day later he discovered the army "shot
up [the] house and [the] water tank" of the grove-owners.
Citing the proximity of checkpoints to settlements, he explains,
"A few days ago, on June 28, a couplewere shotThe man had
gone out to hang up laundry. He was shot by Israeli soldiers.
His wife went outside to see what was happening and she was shot
as well." Security concerns, no doubt. Remarking on travel
discrimination, he added "Israelis have orange license plates.
Palestinians have green. At just about any checkpoint, you see
a long line of green license plates waiting for hours while the
orange ones zip right through." (An aside: there is, of
course, also a whole network of settlers-only roads that surround
Palestinians.) Podur further comments that "in southern
Gaza, an Israeli bulldozing operation left a broken, open sewer
that was becoming a serious public health concernWhen workers
tried to fix it, they were fired upon" The internationals
"formed a ring around the workers, and the workers fixed
the sewer"-an instance of both tremendous courage by the
internationals and remarkable barbarity by Israel.
The most barbaric feature of the settlements
is the settler himself. In a rare article by Jack Kelley of USA
Today in September 2001, we gain some insight of the settler's
psychology. Thirteen settlers of Hebron "grabbed their semiautomatic
rifles and headed toward Highway 60" to set up a barricade
to stop Palestinian taxis and, "Surround any taxi, 'open
fire' and kill as many of the 'blood-sucking Arab' passengers
as possible," as leader Avi Shapiro ordered. The aim outlined
by Shapiro is indeed noble: "to drive these sons of Arab
whores from the Land of Israel." We can perhaps forgive
him for such daring romanticism given his deep ancestral attachment
to the land: he is from Brooklyn. Citing Israeli and Palestinian
officials Kelley informs us, "Jewish settlers are shooting
and beating Palestinians, stealing and destroying their property
and poisoning and diverting their water supplies," in this
area comprising 450 Jews and at least 120,000 Palestinians. The
article goes on to cite one instance where men load their rifles,
women grab ammunition, and children gather up rocks, all to target
a Palestinian car. More recently, as reported by The Times
of India on April 22, a gang of twenty Jewish settlers in
Nablus "busted into a Palestinian goat farm" and shot
two Palestinians. They then proceeded to steal "some fifty
goats from the farm, ten of which they had shot." The Israeli
army arrived, and did nothing-it is but twelve dead animals to
them.
This should surprise no one: the settler's
existence forever depends upon the constant and unrelenting harassment,
humiliation, and destruction of the native.
The aggrandizement of 90% of Palestinian
water, daily construction of settler fences, daily destruction
of native homes, military outposts, apartheid roads, beatings,
thefts, and at least 126 killings (B'TSelem) can all be traced
back directly to the settler. And yet what is the settler-a racist
and a white supremacist by any account-but the modern, most current
representative of the Israelis of 1948, of 1967, and of the government
that supports him? Is he not merely a reflection of what Israel
has done to the Palestinians for the last fifty years? Indeed,
he is the vanguard element of Herzl's "outpost of civilization",
equipped with a rich history of beatings, killings, and theft.
Free samples of 'civilization' can be found at a settlement near
you.
As evidenced, it is difficult to separate
the physical paralysis, economic suffering, and offending settlements,
as the native often finds himself victim of all three elements
at once, in addition to others. Thus it is hard to classify certain
Israeli atrocities, such as the inclination to gun down ambulances
and medics. On April 20, Jordan Flaherty, an international speaking
from Bethlehem informed the world via e-mail that he and others
rode in ambulances because "Israeli soldiers continue to
target doctors and relief workers for assassination", and
spoke of a fifteen-year old Palestinian girl who volunteered
as a medic, "shaking and crying in fear, as we tried to
stop Israeli soldiers from seizing her." On May 18 The
Guardian issued a special report on the subject, citing the
bullet-holes of 75 ambulances, destruction of eight more, deaths
of two drivers and three medics, and fifteen injuries, all at
the hands of the IDF. Thirty-five more workers were "handcuffed,
blindfolded, and forced to strip." Is the world inclined
to re-examine its most 'moral' army, which has now taken to destroying
ambulances and beating medics? Then there are peripheral crimes
of the occupation: a June 15th Jerusalem Post article
explains that the Israeli government has refused to allow American
Jonathan Miles, head of a Christian humanitarian agency, from
re-entering the country. His crime was most heinous: "facilitating
the transfer of Palestinian babies to Israeli hospitals and bringing
medications into Gaza unavailable there." Like army, like
government.
Regardless of the impossibility of classifying
every Israeli atrocity, we can state steadfastly that they are
all bound together by one decisive feature: inhumanity.
The colonizer is duty-bound to steal land, hoard resources, and
expand constantly, he is duty-bound because nothing belongs to
him by right, and thus he must take everything by force.
To soothe his conscience the colonizer must convince himself
that the land is rightfully his and that it has always been his,
and to this end he must dehumanize the native and crush him.
For if the colonizer can strip the native of his humanity he
will no longer be guilty of stripping the native of his land,
but of saving it from the clutches of his unworthy claws.
But the land is not his, and never was his, and because of this
the colonizer becomes jealous of the native, whose very existence
is a constant reminder of this fact-yes, of course he can beat
and torture him to no end, but the fact remains that he not only
can but must; there is no escaping it, and he is in fact
condemned to this task, for regardless of his subjective illusions
to the contrary, the objective fact remains: he is a criminal.
The colonizer is in the constant process of committing one
crime to absolve himself of another. That is the self-fueling
contradiction of Israel's ongoing colonial occupation; that is
the crux of colonialism itself.
M. Junaid Alam's Raping the Palesitians
is continued in Part Three: Concerning
Violence.
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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