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September 20,
2001
Occupation
and Resistance
By Carl Estabrook
[Note: This was written before
the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, but it deals with an
issue that is bound up with the attacks and with the war that
Washington seems about to loose upon the world. It occurs to
me to send it around now because of a report carried by Agence
France Presse last Friday, quoting an interview by Israeli Defense
Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer with the newspaper Yediot Aharonot.
He noted that "the international community has been silent
about the recent Israeli killing of Palestinians in the West
Bank" because of the attacks on the US. "It is a fact
that we have killed 14 Palestinians in Jenin, Kabatyeh and Tammun,
with the world remaining absolutely silent. It's a disaster for
Arafat," Ben Eliezer told the Yediot. It seems more important
now than it's been in a while for us to try to understand the
real situation in the US and it client states -- rejecting the
propaganda persistently propounded by pundit and professor.-CGE]
Each day the media bring us new accounts
of killings in the Middle East, described as the result of "fighting
between Israelis and Palestinians," and we wonder why these
people can't simply be reasonable, like us, and stop it. The
news reports rarely point out that on one side stands perhaps
the second-strongest military in the world, armed and supplied
by US money, and on the other a subject people with no army or
heavy weapons, but who do have the weapon of the powerless --
their willingness to die. And the media hardly ever point out
that the killing goes on in a region under military occupation
by Israel, a military occupation that is not only brutal, as
military occupations often are, but entirely illegal under international
law.
It could be argued that Israel's
military occupation of the "West Bank" (of the Jordan
River) and the "Gaza Strip" (a parcel of land at Israel's
southwest corner) are even more clearly illegal than, say, Germany's
military occupation of France in World War II. In June of 1940,
after a rapid invasion, the German army occupied three-fifths
of France and secured the collaboration of the French government
at Vichy that controlled the rest of the country. In June of
1967, after a rapid invasion, the Israeli army occupied the West
Bank and Gaza, and, with the Oslo Accords of 1993, secured the
collaboration of the Palestinian Authority that now controls
some parts of the occupied territories. But UN Security Council
Resolution 242 in 1967 demanded the complete withdrawal of Israel
from the occupied territories; instead, Israeli governments continued
the occupation and continued to establish settlements of its
citizens throughout the occupied region, settlements in violation
of international law as stated in the Fourth Geneva Convention
of 1949, which was designed precisely to make illegal what Germany
had done in the Second World War.
In France, to the dismay of
the Vichy government, a resistance movement (maquis) grew up
against the invaders almost immediately. In Palestine, the resistance
has been much more sporadic, in part because of the far tighter
control the Israeli army was able to exercise: in 1987 a resistance
movement (intifada) broke out in the Jebalia refugee camp in
Gaza, spread to the rest of the occupied Territories, and lasted
until 1993 -- a popular uprising, it came as a surprise to the
PLO, then in exile in Tunisia; and then a year ago, popular resistance
against occupation broke out again, out of the control of the
Palestinian
Authority.
We honor the French Resistance,
because it can hardly be doubted that there is a right to resist
illegal military occupation. The German rule in France was famously
brutal, especially after the Germans occupied the rest of the
country (as many American columnists are now advising the Israelis
to do). Thousands were said to have been killed by the occupying
forces in reprisals for attacks on members of the occupying army,
although of course many of the French collaborated with the invaders
as well.
Outside the area "served"
by the US media, the real situation today in the Middle East
is known to be similar. At a large meeting of NGOs ("non-governmental
organizations" -- service groups actually involved in alleviating
suffering around the world) parallel to the recent World Conference
against Racism in Durban, South Africa, 3,000 delegates from
44 regions agreed to a resolution referring to Israel as a "racist
apartheid state" guilty of "war crimes, acts of genocide
and ethnic cleansing."
At the racism conference itself,
the careful and diplomatic Secretary General of the UN, Kofi
Annan, made an important comment in his opening address. (He
has to be careful and diplomatic on these issues: his predecessor,
also an eminently careful and diplomatic man, was thrown out
of his UN job by the Clinton Administration because they deemed
his support for Israel tepid at the time the Israelis carried
out a massacre at Qana.) On the suggestion that anti-Semitism
somehow justifies Israel's crimes in the Middle East, Annan said,
"We cannot expect Palestinians to accept [the killing of
Jews in World War II] as a reason why the wrongs done to them
-- displacement, occupation, blockade, and now extra-judicial
killings -- should be ignored." (The "extra-judicial
killings" are the assassinations -- forbidden by international
law since 1907 -- that Israel carries out in the Occupied Territories,
as the Germans assassinated maquis.) It was the only line in
the address that prompted interruption by applause.
Some American progressives
say that the US approach to Israel and Palestine should be "even-handed,"
which of course it surely has not been. Since the 1967 war, the
US has regarded Israel as its cop on the block, guarding "our"
oil. A decade later the Carter Administration increased aid
to Israel to half of total US aid to the world as part of the
Camp David settlement (and used a good bit of the rest to buy
off Egypt, as we continue to do.) With the US money, Israel
was able to consolidate its occupation and launch an attack against
its northern neighbor. For the next 22 years, Israel also occupied
Southern Lebanon in violation of a Security Council resolution
and killed perhaps 45,000 people.
US support continues through
the current uprising, as Palestinian towns and neighborhoods
are attacked by the latest American helicopters, rushed to Israel
by the Clinton administration when the resistance began a year
ago. And the US and Israel are quite concerned that the rest
of the world be prevented from even knowing the extent of the
repression: at the end of August the US blocked proposals in
the UN Security Council that would have provided international
monitors (as the Palestinians have requested) for the region.
Neither the helicopters not the Security Council proposals were
discussed in the US media.
To the suggestion that US policy
should be "even-handed" in regard to Israel and the
Palestinians, we might ask, Should the US have been even-handed
between the German army and the French Resistance in 1941? CP
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