Israel resembles a failed state
Ali Abunimah,
The Electronic Intifada, 27 December 2009
One year has passed since the savage Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, but
for the people there time might as well have stood still.
Since Palestinians in Gaza buried their loved ones -- more than 1,400
persons, almost 400 of them children -- there has been little healing and
virtually no reconstruction.
According to international aid agencies, only 41 trucks of building supplies
have been allowed into Gaza during the year.
Promises of billions made at a donors' conference in Egypt last March
attended by luminaries of the so-called "international community" and the
Middle East peace process industry are unfulfilled, and the Israeli siege,
supported by the US, the European Union, Arab states, and tacitly by the
Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, continues.
Amid the endless, horrifying statistics a few stand out: of Gaza's 640
schools, 18 were completely destroyed and 280 damaged in Israeli attacks.
Two-hundred-and-fifty students and 15 teachers were killed.
Of 122 health facilities assessed by the World Health Organization, 48
percent were damaged or destroyed.
Ninety percent of households in Gaza still experience power cuts for four to
eight hours per day due to Israeli attacks on the power grid and degradation
caused by the blockade.
Forty-six percent of Gaza's once productive agricultural land is out of use
due to Israeli damage to farms and Israeli-declared free fire zones. Gaza's
exports of more than 130,000 tons per year of tomatoes, flowers,
strawberries and other fruit have fallen to zero.
That "much of Gaza still lies in ruins," a coalition of international aid
agencies stated recently, "is not an accident; it is a matter of policy."
This policy has been clear all along and it has nothing to do with Israeli
"security."
From 19 June 2008, to 4 November 2008, calm prevailed between Israel and
Gaza, as Hamas adhered strictly -- as even Israel has acknowledged -- to a
negotiated ceasefire.
That ceasefire collapsed when Israel launched a surprise attack on Gaza
killing six persons, after which Hamas and other resistance factions
retaliated.
Even so, Palestinian factions were still willing to renew the ceasefire, but
it was Israel that refused, choosing instead to launch a premeditated,
systematic attack on the foundations of civilized life in the Gaza Strip.
Operation Cast Lead, as Israel dubbed it, was an attempt to destroy once and
for all Palestinian resistance in general, and Hamas in particular, which
had won the 2006 election and survived the blockade and numerous
US-sponsored attempts to undermine and overthrow it in cooperation with
US-backed Palestinian militias.
Like the murderous sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s, the blockade of
Gaza was calculated to deprive civilians of basic necessities, rights and
dignity in the hope that their suffering might force their leadership to
surrender or collapse.
In many respects things may seem more dire than a year ago.
Barack Obama, the US president, whom many hoped would change the vicious
anti-Palestinian policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, has instead
entrenched them as even the pretense of a serious peace effort has vanished.
According to media reports, the US Army Corps of Engineers is assisting
Egypt in building an underground wall on its border with Gaza to block the
tunnels which act as a lifeline for the besieged territory (resources and
efforts that ought to go into rebuilding still hurricane-devastated New
Orleans), and American weapons continue to flow to West Bank militias
engaged in a US- and Israeli-sponsored civil war against Hamas and anyone
else who might resist Israeli occupation and colonization.
These facts are inescapable and bleak.
However, to focus on them alone would be to miss a much more dynamic
situation that suggests Israel's power and impunity are not as invulnerable
as they appear from this snapshot.
A year after Israel's attack and after more than two-and-a-half years of
blockade, the Palestinian people in Gaza have not surrendered. Instead they
have offered the world lessons in steadfastness and dignity, even at an
appalling, unimaginable cost.
It is true that the European Union leaders who came to occupied Jerusalem
last January to publicly embrace Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli prime
minister -- while white phosphorus seared the flesh of Gazan children and
bodies lay under the rubble -- still cower before their respective Israel
lobbies, as do American and Canadian politicians.
But the shift in public opinion is palpable as Israel's own actions
transform it into a pariah whose driving forces are not the liberal
democratic values with which it claims to identify, but ultra-nationalism,
racism, religious fanaticism, settler-colonialism and a Jewish supremacist
order maintained by frequent massacres.
The universalist cause of justice and liberation for Palestinians is gaining
adherents and momentum especially among the young. I witnessed it, for
example, among Malaysian students I met at a Palestine solidarity conference
held by the Union of NGOs of The Islamic World in Istanbul last May, and
again in November as hundreds of student organizers from across the US and
Canada converged to plan their participation in the global Palestinian-led
campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions modeled on the successful
struggle against South African apartheid in the 1980s.
This week, thousands of people from dozens of countries are attempting to
reach Gaza to break the siege and march alongside Palestinians who have been
organizing inside the territory.
Each of the individuals traveling with the Gaza Freedom March, Viva
Palestina, or other delegations represents perhaps hundreds of others who
could not make the journey in person, and who are marking the event with
demonstrations and commemorations, visits to their elected officials and
media campaigns.
Against this flowering of activism, Zionism is struggling to rejuvenate its
dwindling base of support. Multi-million dollar programs aimed at recruiting
and Zionizing young American Jews are struggling to compete against
organizations like the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, which run
not on money but principled commitment to human equality.
Increasingly, we see that Israel's hasbara (propaganda) efforts have no
positive message, offer no plausible case for maintaining a status quo of
unspeakable repression and violence, and rely instead on racist demonization
and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims to justify Israel's actions and even
its very existence.
Faced with growing global recognition and support for the courageous
nonviolent struggle against continued land theft in the West Bank, Israel is
escalating its violence and kidnapping of leaders of the movement in Bilin
and other villages (Mohammad Othman, Jamal Juma' and Abdallah Abu Rahmeh are
among the leaders of this movement recently arrested).
In acting this way, Israel increasingly resembles a bankrupt failed state,
not a regime confident about its legitimacy and longevity.
And despite the failed peace process industry's efforts to ridicule,
suppress and marginalize it, there is a growing debate among Palestinians
and even among Israelis about a shared future in Palestine/Israel based on
equality and decolonization, rather than ethno-national segregation and
forced repartition.
Last, but certainly not least, in the shadow of the Goldstone report,
Israeli leaders travel around the world fearing arrest for their crimes.
For now, they can rely on the impunity that high-level international
complicity and their inertial power and influence still afford them. But the
question for the real international community -- made up of people and
movements -- is whether we want to continue to see the still very incomplete
system of international law and justice painstakingly built since the
horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi holocaust dismantled and
corrupted all for the sake of one rogue state.
What we have done in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza and the
rest of Palestine is not yet enough. But our movement is growing, it cannot
be stopped, and we will reach our destination.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One
Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. He will be
among more than 1,300 persons from 42 countries traveling to Gaza with the
Gaza Freedom March this week. This essay was originally published by
Al-Jazeera and is republished with the author's permission.
***
*JUSTICE FOR GAZA
What : Silent Candlelight Vigil--Justice For Gaza
When: TODAY, Monday, December 28, 2009, 5:00 to 6:30 p.m
Where: In front of the Israeli Consulate, 6380 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles
90048
Please bring your own candle (or paper-covered flashlight). We will
maintain silence except for the designated speakers. Only one banner will
be displayed. For more info or to add your organization as a sponsor:
vtamoush@gmail.com or (714) 362-7676
***Sponsored by:
* LA Jews For Peace * FOR-LA (Fellowship of Reconcilliation)
* Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries * Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid,
* St. Anselm of Canterbury Episcopal Church * Islamic Shura Council
* Kinder USA * Friends of Sabeel Orange County * Los Amgeles Chapter -
National Lawyes Guild * Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid * Jews for Peace
Between Israelis and Palestinians * Women In Black - Los Angeles * Orange
County Peace & Freedom Party * Orange Ccounty KPFK Peace Support Group
* US Committee for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USCOM4ACBI)
* Anti-Racist Action - L.A./ People Against Racist Terror * Middle East
Fellowship of Southern California * Friends of SABEEL LOS ANGELES
* Muslims for Progressive Values * South and West Asia & North Africa
Collective/Radio Intifada/KPFK
* CODE PINK, * OOA, * Veterans For Peace
*AND THE LIST CONTINUES TO GROW!*
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