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Israel-Palestine Conflict 101: Taking Off The Blinders In The U.S.

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  • Israel-Palestine Conflict 101: Taking Off The Blinders In The U.S.

    CounterCurrents.org
    March 12 2009


    Israel-Palestine Conflict 101:
    Taking Off The Blinders In The U.S.

    By A.M. Khan

    12 March, 2009
    Countercurrents.org

    `There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz but was
    that their [the Palestinians] fault? They only see one thing: We have
    come here and stolen their country.'
    --David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of Israel and the first Prime Minister

    Now that Israel's bombardment of Gaza is off the front page and the
    Gazans are left to deal with the aftermath outside of world media
    attention, it makes sense to step back and review how the
    Israel-Palestine conflict is depicted in U.S. mainstream media. This
    depiction shapes how the U.S. public views the recent events in
    Gaza. It also shapes how the public understands what constitutes a
    just resolution to the conflict.

    The nature of U.S. mainstream media coverage of events in Gaza and of
    the Israel-Palestine conflict renders Americans grossly
    misinformed. U.S. media representations are largely absent of
    historical context and omit the fact that for decades Israel has
    committed human rights violations against the Palestinian people and
    occupied their land. The media lens in mainstream U.S. coverage (print
    and television) obscures core issues and creates a false framework of
    the conflict. In the U.S., the Israel-Palestine conflict is framed as
    `a cycle of violence' between two adversaries of equal power engaged
    since millennia in a conflict based on religious and ethnic
    difference. Not a single element of this frame is true.

    Myth Number 1: The conflict has been ongoing since millennia.

    The conflict is less than 100 years old. Before 1900, Jews,
    Christians, and Muslims lived together in the Holy Land mostly
    peacefully in a quiet agrarian society. While some European Jews
    immigrated in the late 1800's to what was then Ottoman
    Empire-controlled Palestine, their numbers were small. In 1917, as
    World War I was coming to a close, the British government became the
    colonial power in control of historic Palestine (the area known today
    as Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip). With the 1918 `Balfour
    Declaration' the British made clear their support for a Jewish state
    in Palestine. After 1918, immigration of European Jews to Palestine
    escalated, increasing each year as time wore on. Many of these new
    immigrants were in flight from anti-Semitism in Europe.

    As the Nazis came to power in Germany in the early 1930's and began
    their oppression and later genocide of European Jews, the numbers of
    European Jewish immigrants to Palestine increased
    dramatically. Through these early decades of the 20th century, between
    the British commitment to creating a Jewish state in Palestine and as
    more European Jews flooded in, tensions between the European newcomers
    and the native Palestinian Arabs began and increased over time. After
    the genocide and near annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis
    during World War II, the movement to make a Jewish homeland in
    Historic Palestine found understandable sympathy. The fly in the
    ointment was the fact that another people already lived in that land.

    In 1948 the state of Israel was established by these European Jewish
    immigrants, adherents of an ideology called `Zionism.' There were
    different opinions among Zionist leaders as to how to deal with the
    native Palestinian Arabs. Some advocated peaceful co-existence and
    others advocated dispossession and expulsion. There were also
    positions in between. In the end, the more regressive positions
    prevailed. In their writings, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion,
    the first Prime Minister of Israel, were explicit and unapologetic
    about their aim to expel the native Palestinian Arabs and take their
    land.

    The 1948 nation building of Israel was premised on dispossession of
    the natives, including a premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing and
    massacre. In 1948, Zionist military forces expelled about 750,000
    Palestinians from 78% of Historic Palestine into the West Bank, Gaza
    Strip, and exile abroad. After statehood, these Zionist forces became
    the Israeli army. In 1967, again through military means, Israel took
    control of the remaining 22% of historic Palestine (i.e., the West
    Bank and Gaza Strip). The Palestinians driven into the West Bank and
    Gaza Strip in 1948 (as well as those already there) came under Israeli
    military occupation in 1967, where they remain today 41 years
    later. Thus, in 1948 Israel proper was created on 78% of historic
    Palestine and since 1967 Israel has occupied the remaining 22% of
    historic Palestine.

    Myth Number 2: The conflict is a cycle of violence between adversaries
    of similar power

    The Israel-Palestine conflict is between two parties vastly unequal in
    power. Israel, the nuclear-armed occupier, has the fourth most
    powerful army in the world and cutting edge military weaponry. The
    Palestinians, an occupied and stateless people, are largely
    unarmed. The Palestinians have no army, no air force, no planes, no
    tanks, no gunships, and no nuclear weapons. This is why we see
    pictures of Palestinians throwing stones at tanks. If you possessed
    anything more powerful, would a stone really be your weapon of choice
    against a tank?

    Myth Number 3: The conflict is based on religious and ethnic
    differences

    The Israel-Palestine conflict is about possession and control of a
    small piece of land approximately the size of New Jersey. Israel
    believes itself entitled to all of the land because in the Bible God
    promised all of historic Palestine to the Jews. Since 1967, in
    violation of international law, Israel has moved 500,000 of its
    citizens into the West Bank. These settlers are connected to Israel
    through Jewish-only roads that crisscross the West Bank. Palestinians
    are not allowed to use these roads and must take circuitous routes on
    older roads in order to go around Israeli settlements, often adding
    hours to their journeys.

    Regarding the `peace process,' Israel's talk of making peace has been
    a rhetorical screen. Behind this screen each and every Israeli
    government since 1967,whether its flavor was left, right, or center,
    has continued the campaign begun in 1948, of land grab, human rights
    violations, and imprisonment of the Palestinians into multiple
    separate enclaves within the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and
    Gaza Strip. Since 1967 every Israeli government has continued a
    national construction project (based on a plan created in the late
    1960's by Labor Minister Yigal Allon)to separate, isolate, and enclose
    every Palestinian city and most towns and villages by surrounding them
    with Israeli settlements. Today, that project is essentially
    complete. In addition to the settlement building, Israel's
    construction of the Wall (86% of which is in the West Bank rather than
    along the 1967 border) and ongoing annexation of land and water
    resources have created facts on the ground establishing Israel's
    dominance over all of historic Palestine. Today, Israel's mission of
    total dominance is near completion.

    In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization (as representative of
    the Palestinian people) agreed to recognize Israel, forego claim to
    100% of historic Palestine, and accept a nation on 22% of their
    original land (i.e., on the West Bank and Gaza Strip). Israel has
    never agreed to this. Israel has made clear that it wants a future
    Palestinian state to be a version of 80% of 22% of 100%. Such a
    `state' would be a non-contiguous series of disconnected
    cantons. Israel's Wall cuts deep into the West Bank and incorporates
    into Israel West Bank settlements and aquifers. This is the desert
    after all, and water is treasure. The Wall and settlements segment the
    West Bank and make a contiguous Palestinian state unlikely, if not
    impossible. Israel also wants control over exit and entry from that
    80% of 22% of 100%. An analogy for this: imagine that in each of the
    rooms of your house you can do as you wish but that someone with guns
    controls all the hallways between the rooms. Is this a viable
    structure for life?

    What holds all this in place and allows it to continue is that Israel
    has the multibillion dollar per year financial support and diplomatic
    cover of the most powerful nation in history, the United States. The
    U.S. has agreed to provide Israel with $30 billion dollars in military
    aid over the next 10 years and has provided billions upon billions of
    dollars in aid to Israel in the past. For decades, Israel has been the
    largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid and receives one-third of the
    total U.S. foreign aid budget. The U.S., a veto-wielding member of the
    United Nations Security Council, has also vetoed each and every
    resolution put forward by the United Nations in response to Israel's
    multiple violations of international law. In each of the U.N. votes on
    these resolutions against Israeli government actions, year after year,
    the U.S. and Israel (and a few small Pacific Island nations) stand
    alone against the rest of the international community in siding with
    Israel against international law and world opinion.

    All of the facts above are available from easily accessible public
    sources. The facts are not in dispute. However, they have been
    obscured by a web of misinformation that hides the truth. Because the
    facts are what they are, when Israel is criticized, its proponents,
    who cannot rely on facts to support their cause, resort to personal
    attacks and charges of `anti-Semitism.' Their charges of anti-Semitism
    presuppose that all criticism of Israel as a state actor and all
    efforts to hold Israel, which is after all a nation state like any
    other, accountable for its actions are inherently anti-Semitic. When
    the truth cannot be bent to their narrative, proponents of Israeli
    government actions, no matter what those actions are, resort to the
    cudgel of anti-Semitism to silence and censor criticism of the actions
    of the state of Israel. So far, this method of silencing critics has
    proven highly effective in the U.S. Publicly criticizing Israel has
    cost academics their jobs and members of congress political
    office. These examples keep the rest of us in line as well.

    Decades of misinformation and a mythical story (i.e., a land without a
    people for a people without a land), as well as the daily falsehoods
    we continue to be fed, can make the situation in Israel-Palestine seem
    more murky, complicated, and relativistic than it actually is.

    When the American colonists were dispossessing the Native Americans,
    there was violent resistance. A people being dispossessed will
    resist. They resist because of their dispossession (not because they
    are crazy, evil, or filled with hate because of their religion). And,
    of course, violent native resistance hurts the occupier and harms
    innocents. However, when the occupier casts itself as the victim and
    says it is acting only in `self-defense' against native `attack', it
    has turned logic on its head. Israel's propaganda campaign over the
    last 41 years, casting itself as the only and perpetual victim, has
    been extremely successful in making this bizarre topsy-turvy spin seem
    logical and correct. It is yet another example of the effectiveness of
    saying the same thing over and over again until people start believing
    it is true.

    There are many situations in history where two opposing perspectives
    are not of equal moral weight. The colonial campaign China continues
    in Tibet, the former British Empire's actions around the globe, the
    apartheid system in South Africa, Belgium's enslavement and killing of
    10 million Congolese for natural resources, the genocide of the Jews
    by the Nazis, the genocide of the Armenians by Turkey all come to
    mind. The moral equation in Israel-Palestine is as simple and clear.

    While discussion of U.S. national interest and geopolitical strategy
    take up much space in newspapers and conversation among the pundit
    class, the dimension of morality, the concern with doing the right
    thing, rarely enters our public discourse. In the end, the situation
    in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank calls on our
    moral sense. It calls on our humanity, compassion, and sense of
    fairness. Our silence and complicity in Israel's dispossession of the
    Palestinians and its ongoing human rights abuses over decades is a
    moral lapse of huge proportion.

    Americans have a larger stake in this issue than citizens of other
    countries because we foot the bill to the tune of $8 million a day in
    aid to Israel. All of us who pay U.S. income taxes funded the recent
    atrocities in Gaza. We paid to drop white phosphorus on civilians. We
    paid to level homes, clinics, and schools. We paid to kill children
    and whole families as they slept in their beds. We are complicit in
    the bloodbath in Gaza. We are complicit in children starving to death
    laying next to their dead mothers buried in rubble as the
    International Red Cross documented in Gaza. We fund acts of state
    terror in which people watch their beloved daughter, son, father,
    mother be literally torn apart. We pay for a military machine that
    maims, kills, and holds captive an unarmed civilian population of men,
    women, and children, enclosing them in prison-like cantons within the
    West Bank and Gaza. For decades, we have been paying for the slow
    annihilation of a society and people who have done absolutely nothing
    to us.

    So what can we do as individual citizens? Call your congresspeople to
    demand an even-handed U.S. policy in Israel-Palestine. Call the Obama
    White House to do the same. Learn about the growing Boycott,
    Divestment, Sanctions campaign against Israel (modeled on the
    anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa). Don't buy Israeli
    products. Tell your local grocer you won't shop there until they stop
    carrying Israeli products. Educate your neighbor. Educate
    yourself. Watch the documentary film `Occupation 101.' Read `The
    Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. Read
    the writings of Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Rashid
    Khalidi. Go to www.endtheoccupation.org to find a political group in
    your area working for justice in Israel-Palestine. Most of all, do
    something. Do not be silent. Do not be complicit.

    A.M. Khan, Ph.D. is an Indian American neuropsychologist by day and an
    activist and beginning documentary filmmaker by night. She welcomes
    correspondence on her work and can be reached at: [email protected].

    http://www.countercurrents.o rg/khan120309.htm
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