Gaza: The Logic of Colonial Power

I have spent most of the Bush
administration's tenure reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon,
Somalia and other conflicts. I have been published by most major
publications. I have been interviewed by most major networks and I have even testified
before the senate foreign relations committee. The Bush administration
began its tenure with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with
Israel committing
one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying
Palestinian land. Bush's final visit to the country he chose to occupy
ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes
at him, expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its
dictators who have imprudently attached themselves to a hated American
regime.

Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned
population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans
live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli
action. Even some Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance
with the might of the Israeli military machine. And none of this is a
surprise. The Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public
relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining
the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt.

The international
community is directly guilty for this latest massacre. Will it remain
immune from the wrath of a desperate people? So far, there have been
large demonstrations in Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq.
The people of the Arab world will not forget. The Palestinians will not
forget. "All that you have done to our people is registered in our
notebooks," as the poet Mahmoud Darwish said.

I
have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck
with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America
should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world.
It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy
would be required that only a true revolution in the American
government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal
once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether
terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My
answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether
attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the
weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi
Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.

Terrorism
is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that
means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other
does, not what we do. The powerful - whether Israel, America, Russia or
China - will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but
the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the
slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation
of Iraq and Afghanistan - with the tens of thousands of civilians it
has killed ... these will never earn the title of terrorism, though
civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

Counterinsurgency,
now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the
suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation
are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.

Normative
rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine
what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions
to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal
by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used
normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the
oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually
undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international
institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the
powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to
preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their
occupation and colonialism.

Attacking civilians is the last, most
desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming
odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli
civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land
of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is
being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever
way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians
strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native
population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is
now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population
sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their
land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they
are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.

Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi,
a Palestinian man from Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers
at an intersection. "The terrorist", as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz
called him, was shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July,
Palestinians from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The
attackers were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian
men were also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes
to be demolished. In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a
Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye when she threw
acid n his face. "The terrorist was arrested by security forces," the
paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying soldier, and she
is the terrorist?

In September, Bush spoke at the United
Nations. No cause could justify the deliberate taking of human life, he
said. Yet the US has killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes on
populated areas. When you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there
will be some "collateral" civilian damage, but accepting it as worth
it, then it is deliberate. When you impose sanctions, as the US did on
Saddam era Iraq, that kill hundreds of thousands, and then say their deaths were worth it,
as secretary of state Albright did, then you are deliberately killing
people for a political goal. When you seek to "shock and awe", as
president Bush did, when he bombed Iraq, you are engaging in terrorism.

Just
as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans under
siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of
reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the
victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately
cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages
were destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists, who went on to
deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining
natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians
established around the world. Every day, more of Palestine is stolen,
more Palestinians are killed. To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to
engage in the dispossession of entire people. It is not that, qua
Palestinians, they have the right to use any means necessary, it is
because they are weak. The weak have much less power than the strong,
and can do much less damage. The Palestinians would not have ever
bombed cafes or used home-made missiles if they had tanks and
airplanes. It is only in the current context that their actions are
justified, and there are obvious limits.

It is impossible to make
a universal ethical claim or establish a Kantian principle justifying
any act to resist colonialism or domination by overwhelming power. And
there are other questions I have trouble answering. Can an Iraqi be
justified in attacking the United States? After all, his country was
attacked without provocation, and destroyed, with millions of refugees
created, hundreds of thousands of dead. And this, after 12 years of
bombings and sanctions, which killed many and destroyed the lives of
many others.

I could argue that all Americans are benefiting
from their country's exploits without having to pay the price, and
that, in today's world, the imperial machine is not merely the military
but a military-civilian network. And I could also say that Americans
elected the Bush administration twice and elected representatives who
did nothing to stop the war, and the American people themselves did
nothing. From the perspective of an American, or an Israeli, or other
powerful aggressors, if you are strong, everything you do is
justifiable, and nothing the weak do is legitimate. It's merely a
question of what side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of
the weak.

Israel and its allies in the west and in Arab regimes
such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have managed to corrupt the PLO
leadership, to suborn them with the promise of power at the expense of
liberty for their people, creating a first - a liberation movement that
collaborated with the occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and, as
usual, these elections are accompanied by war to bolster
the candidates. You cannot be prime minister of Israel without enough
Arab blood on your hands. An Israeli general has threatened to set Gaza
back decades, just as they threatened to set Lebanon back decades in
2006. As if strangling Gaza and denying its people fuel, power or food
had not set it back decades already.

The democratically elected
Hamas government was targeted for destruction from the day it won the
elections in 2006. The world told the Palestinians that they cannot
have democracy, as if the goal was to radicalise them further and as if
that would not have a consequence. Israel claims it is targeting Hamas's military forces. This is not true. It is targeting Palestinian police forces and killing them, including
some such as the chief of police, Tawfiq Jaber, who was actually a
former Fatah official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took
control of Gaza. What will happen to a society with no security forces?
What do the Israelis expect to happen when forces more radical than
Hamas gain power?

A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term
project and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation
barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There
can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades,
Israelis will be confronted with two options. Will they peacefully
transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the
same rights, a la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to
view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to
leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been
exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who
flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise
and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further
radicalise them?

Do not be deceived: the persistence of the
Palestine problem is the main motive for every anti-American militant
in the Arab world and beyond. But now the Bush administration has added
Iraq and Afghanistan as additional grievances. America has lost its
influence on the Arab masses, even if it can still apply pressure on
Arab regimes. But reformists and elites in the Arab world want nothing
to do with America.

A failed American administration departs,
the promise of a Palestinian state a lie, as more Palestinians are
murdered. A new president comes to power, but the people of the Middle
East have too much bitter experience of US administrations to have any
hope for change. President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden and
incoming secretary of state Hillary Clinton have not demonstrated that
their view of the Middle East is at all different from previous
administrations. As the world prepares to celebrate a new year, how
long before it is once again made to feel the pain of those whose
oppression it either ignores or supports?