ISRAEL IN PALESTINE: A PRIMER

Criticism of Israel often leads to claims of anti-Semitism by apologists which are designed to deflect attention from the issues which merit discussion. They are as hateful in their determined intolerance and dishonesty as anti-Semitism itself.

If what Israel has just committed in Gaza had been done by any other nation without the acceptance of the United States, the whole world would be voicing its criticism.

In his Nobel Prize speech Harold Pinter stated: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them”. The same could be said about Israel. Certainly the New Zealand mainstream media are extremely hesitant in criticising Israel.

I have tried to take an interest in the Israel / Palestine situation for four decades, and I believe that I have reached a number of valid conclusions. None of them are controversial and I apologise for their obvious nature, but they appear bothersome because apparently we are meant to keep quiet.

The first of my conclusions is that Israel is a nation founded by terrorist activity. An increasingly aggressive settlement of Palestine from the 1880s leading to terrorism in the 20th century killed and drove from their homes and lands 750,000 Palestinians. Many of these people and their descendants now exist in Gaza. It is not acceptable for Jewish people, renowned for intellectual and artistic achievement, to use religion and its texts as an excuse for this terrorism. And although it is understandable, it is also both dishonest and unacceptable to use the holocaust as an excuse.

Israel is not a victim. Jewish people in World War Two were victims, but the contemporary state of Israel is a powerful military force, fully supported by the most powerful nation on earth. It is wrong for Israel to continue to convince itself and the world that it is always and essentially the victim.

Israel is a racist society. If you found a nation for one group of people, a Jewish nation, then it follows as a matter of fact that the foundation of your nation is racist. It also follows that another group of people, the Palestinians, previously and still living within this nation are unavoidably a negative problem. So long as Israel = Jewish nation the mindset of any Israeli government to the Palestinians will be inherently racist. This is completely at variance with social developments in Western countries, mistakenly said to share common values with Israel, which make efforts to forge multicultural societies.

Israel practices apartheid. It has chosen apartheid rather than multiculturalism because it must maintain Israel as a Jewish state. A growing, developing, educated and participating Palestinian population would be a threat to this. So Israel cannot allow peaceful coexistence where all individuals possess equal rights. Some elements of an apartheid state found in Israel include: complete control of all elements of the lives of a group of second class citizens; the need for ID cards in order to travel; the subjection to checkpoints for any movement; the requirement to live in defined areas; arbitrary arrest and detention without charge; the ability to kill without excuse or apology. Israel goes a step further than South Africa by building enormous walls and structures to encircle the defined areas. If the subject population threaten to get out of control, for example by electing the wrong party, then intervention occurs. Sometimes it just occurs anyway.

Israel has never negotiated in good faith. It has strung the Palestinians along for six decades. Negotiation is a game and an end in itself. There is always a reason not to do the right thing. There is always another condition to derail an agreement. There is always someone to blame. The blameworthy have included the PLO, then Fatah, and now Hamas – the very people you must talk to in order to find a just solution. If you demonise them then you do not have to be responsible for a solution, for any solution may mean that you have to relinquish power and control. Yet if Israel has an acceptable person with which to negotiate still nothing happens. Abbas, the Palestinian Fatah president, has been available for negotiation for some time now and Israel has given him nothing – except more checkpoints in the West Bank and more Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. When a person in his position feels the need to write in newspapers directly to the Israeli people for their understanding, this underlines the disdain with which the Israeli government is treating him. Israel need not negotiate with Palestinians when they are divided: Israel will not negotiate with Palestinians when they are united.

Israel has created and is creating the most enormous open prison system in the world. These prisons, given the relentless nature of Israeli policy and behaviour, are on their way via ghettoes to concentration camps. These prisons can be and are shut down at will at any time. This can be done in part or in whole whenever an excuse can be claimed, or it can be done quite arbitrarily. The imprisoned population can be subjected to lack of food, warmth, shelter and other basic necessities of life whenever the occupying power decides.

Israel is responsible for the Palestinian resistance. It is inevitable and a human right that when an occupying power mistreats its subjects they will resist. In films of World War Two we applaud the efforts of the Dutch and French resistance when they blow up the armaments and kill the soldiers of the occupying military force. The Palestinian resistance finds this difficult because they are so bottled up and the occupying force is so much more powerful. Because the Israeli military can mistreat the Palestinians from arm’s length the resistance has adopted the questionable tactic of firing rockets into the Israeli civilian population. Israel refuses to learn the right lesson from this, namely that it is unacceptable for any group to lose some of their people to military force. This tactic merely gives Israel the supreme excuse to blame and to kill further. Israel and “the West” refuse to acknowledge that it is the role of any resistance movement not to allow the occupying force to feel comfortable in its abusive power. In the current crisis, Israel speaks of seeking “peace and quiet” for itself, not ever of dialogue and justice.

Israel is completely self-centred. It appears to have a complete inability to empathise with others, to see their point of view, even to be interested in it. Its racism equates the death of one Israeli (even a soldier) to hundreds of Palestinians. If a human being is self-centred in this way we would say that his development is somewhere between a child and an adolescent with sociopathic tendencies. The USA, as parent of this unruly child, has overindulged and spoiled him all his life. As a result he is demanding, self-righteous, overbearing and out of control. If anyone in the neighbourhood dislikes his attitude and behaviour he will respond with some form of bullying aggression, knowing that Dad is always there to back him up. He becomes the neighbour from hell.

My final conclusion is that Israeli spokespersons lie to the media. Time and again they will, with a reasonable face, indicate what reasonable actions are being taken, only for the persistent media watcher to discover that Israel will not be doing those actions at all or are doing the exact opposite. It is the old story: pay no attention to what is said, but attend to what is done. Unfortunately, in “the West” it works the other way round for most people. When Israeli spokespeople speak to the media they do so from out of an attitude and national character which has created a militant, racist, apartheid society and all the trappings which go with this.

Some of these trappings include the stubborn assertion that Israel is always in the right, and also the inability to consider that a mistake or injustice has been committed, let alone a crime. This can lead to quite extraordinary statements: that because Hamas exists and because it lives among the Gazans it is responsible for the death of 400 children, not the Israeli military who fired missiles, shells and bullets at them. I assume that, in an individual, this severe inability to take responsibility for one’s actions would be recognised as some kind of mental or moral incapacity.

Norman Finkelstein, son of holocaust survivors, has said that if Israel does not wish to be likened to Nazis then it must stop behaving like Nazis. This is true not just for the war on Gaza, but for the war on all Palestinians for the last sixty years. Over this time Israeli policy has shown that it does not respect the Palestinians, it does not care about Palestinian civilians, and it does not want Palestinians to get too close. In the words of Peres it wishes the Palestinians would just disappear.

The only proper solution is integration. This happened in the US in the sixties and in South Africa in the nineties. De Klerk had the statesmanship to realise that apartheid could not continue, it was morally bankrupt. We cannot live in ethnically pure states and democracy cannot be based upon tribalism. There has to be a one-state solution. Part of the one-state solution requires compensation for the Palestinians. New Zealand has experience to offer in the manner in which crimes committed by an occupying people might be addressed by an integrated nation.

Imagine if New Zealand, which has the same kind of population numbers as Israel, were able to virtually dictate American foreign policy and thereby that of Europe? How weird. That one small country with such a small population could cause so much trouble in the world! It would surely go to our heads. We would probably come to believe that the United States was also our country.