Only One Palestine, One Country Part III

Three days before the Obama inauguration on January 20, 2009, Israel announced a unilateral ceasefire and military withdrawal from Gaza. This lends credibility to the early speculation that bombardment and invasion of Gaza was more about crushing Hamas before President Bush left office than about security for the population in southern Israel. Other speculations about invasion motivations dealt with the February Israel elections and rebuilding the reputation of the Israel Defense Force(IDF)severely tarnished in the 2006 Lebanon debacle. Hamas("zeal" and an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement)now claims victory in Gaza as Hizbullah did in Lebanon! Few objective observers would refute the assessments. Hamas requires an end to the 18-month(and running)Israeli Gaza Strip Blockade. The siege was intended to bring down the freely and fairly elected Hamas regime. The late 2008 Gaza invasion has actually strengthened Hamas. Since the blockade had failed, Israel decided to destroy both Hamas and Gaza itself, and in a manner, stated Ali Abunimah, not seen since Guernica and the Warsaw Ghetto, and with full support of the United States. He goes on to say that Israel is massacring a captive population. The Palestinian casus belli behind the Kassam rocket launches against southern Israel are: 1) the Zionist conquest of Palestine in general and, 2) the 41-year-long occupation of Palestinian Territories, in particular. Gaza is still occupied even without the presence of Israeli settlements, by blockade and sanctions.Refuges comprise 80-percent of Gazan population! The Gaza Strip is probably the World's most densely populated space. Hamas emerged from the First Intifada; since winning the early 2006 elections it has been targeted by Israel and the United States, enlisting Mahmoud Abbas(Fatah) and creating a "Palestinian Contras" opposition to Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza. But, that scheme failed through swift Hamas preemptive measures. What dismays and bewilders this observer and political science student is Israel's success at defining situations and determining majority public opinion parameters!(The Israel lobby is skilled in controlling Congress, as well.)At the height of IDF atrocities in the Gaza Strip, the US Senate voted unanimously in favor of Israeli actions. Then, the House of Representatives voted 405-to-5, also in favor. And Secretary of State nominee, Senator Hillary Clinton has ruled out talks with Hamas. Although Obama once said he was open to low level talks with Hamas, he now mentions only the Palestinian Authority in the context of talks. There is one bright spot in the House of
Representatives: Dennis Kucinich D-Ohio, is an out spoken critic of the Gaza invasion, basing his negative vote on Israeli illegal use of US-supplied weaponry to attack Gazan civilians. Interestingly, he suggests that the insensitivity toward the Gaza massacre is conditioned by the protracted slaughter in Iraq. The US population is apparently gripped in a collective numbness toward the suffering of Palestinian Arabs; and this condition could have overtones of racism and religionism. There is condemnation arising from the United Nations: The Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockman of Nicaragua and, in a rare occurrence, a strong denunciation from UNICEF on behalf of the huge number of children killed and injured in the invasion of Gaza. Mainstream US media furthers the Israel claim that the assaults on Gaza Strip are in self-defense against Hamas rocket attacks; and, the print media devotes considerable coverage to Israeli justifications and rationale. But when placed in perspective with the dead and injured on each side, Israel spokespersons and apologists are seen for what they are: fabricators and spin doctors, to put it politely. With two major invasions in less than three years, against Lebanon and Gaza, Israel must be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity! The Palestinian National Committee for the Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions calls upon nations to levy these actions against Israel as was done to apartheid South Africa. Israel has been granted extraordinary impunity from the injurious consequences of its wide-ranging misconduct toward Palestinian Arabs over many decades. The Fourth Geneva Conventions, international humanitarian law, the Nuremberg Principles, United Nations resolutions can be violated and ignored because Israel has carte blanche support from all recent US administrations and congressional entities. This will not change to any significant degree in an Obama administration. He is on record honoring and steadfastly committed to continuing the special relationship between the two nations. By his silence on the Gaza invasion and his unwillingness to criticize the brutality exercised throughout the 22-day assault, he is condoning the operation. Why would he nominate Senator Clinton if he planned a new policy for the Middle East? His prolonged silence has been called "bizarre" by one commentator. The selective use of "one president at a time" when asked to comment on the invasion is a failure of nerve, and a troubling omen, perhaps, of grave portent for Palestinians and us all. No doubt, Obama's first major foreign policy debacle will be his handling of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. No US administration has been an honest broker in Middle East negotiations. Also, authoritarian Arab states(Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria)will tacitly side with the United States and Israel because they do not want a democratic state in the Middle East! It would encourage unrest among their populations, which are already restless. Barack Obama will exercise some hype and spin and claim peace in the Middle East. But the impasse will continue on until demographics resolves it. (drafted Jan. 19, 2009)

Only One Palestine, One Country! Part I

Israel is unquestionably a military Juggernaut patterned after and hugely subsidized and supported by the United States. It seems to have a South African-styled apartheid mindset toward Palestinian Arabs. Israel is not a democracy; sadly, it acts more like a racist theocracy. Israel could neither have come into existence in 1948, without British and then United Nations support, nor have prospered after the Six-Day-War of 1967, without extensive US financial and military assistance. American Jewry has also played a significant and varied roll. Of many pro-Israel lobbies in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee(AIPAC)is the most powerful. The Israel Project and the Anti-Defamation League(ADL)are two other powerful voices. So commanding are lobbying efforts that few in Congress would dare criticize the occupation of the Palestinian Territories or address the concomitant oppressions. As a symbol of Israeli influence on American politics stands the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall.(I recall the struggle years ago for an indigenous American museum on the same mall.)Regrettably, there is no African-American museum or one dedicated to the consequences of the Colombian Conquest. Stranger still is the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles!(See:Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry.) The claim that the word "holocaust" is exclusively Jewish in reference and must be capitalized is "beyond chutzpah", to coin a Finkelstein title. (Deplorably, there have been many holocausts in human history. What may happen in the Gaza Strip currently is still open to speculation. Let us not forget the Roma, the disabled and disadvantaged, the Gay and the dissident Left in reporting on the Nazi holocaust!) The point is that Israeli public relations perpetuates self-serving fictions: Israel is a democracy and has biblical authority to "repossess" what has been the Palestinian homeland for many centuries. Also, Israel masterly blames the victim! For example: Hamas broke the ceasefire agreement which necessitated an Israeli counter-attack(of massive disproportionality!) It was Israel that violated the agreement, November 4, 2008.(See:Part II)The US public would, no doubt, place Israel after the United States, China and Russia, in terms of ranking international importance. Militarily it ranks fourth. This is an amazing feat for a country with less than six million people. It pays to lobby Congress and conduct perpetual public relations campaigns. By the way, Israel has at least 200 nuclear weapons.(How it acquired the know-how and materiel is a story yet to be told.) A breath-taking fiction initiated in the early years, the Zionists claimed that Palestine(within the Ottoman Empire until WW I)was uninhabited territory awaiting colonization by European Jewry. This enabled Britain to exclude Palestinian Arabs, the indigenous population, from forums on Mandated Palestine. Why complicate matters by including them? The British prevented Palestinians from even establishing a para-state structure as a preliminary step toward statehood. Palestinian Arabs did not constitute a bona -fide political entity, apparently, but European Jews did. Diverting, dividing and distracting Arab interests became the modi operandi. The elevation of the Grand Mufti of Palestine is an example of how these strategies were executed and how they succeeded.(In this vein, consider Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.)Much has been said about a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian Conflict; but this is another distraction and diversion. Israel has other plans! The two-state idea has been rendered moot by settlement expansions in recent years and by Israel's long-standing secret agenda(but not so secret anymore), expulsion of Palestinian Arabs. The refusal to relinquish confiscated lands acquired during the Six-Day-War is prima facie evidence. After all, occupation in this context represents preludial expulsion! Central to the on going conflict is the illegal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Until this basic issue is resolved there will be no lasting peace. The so-called "settlements" are occupying forces intended to drive out the historic inhabitants. Also, the settlements are positioned east and west(laterally)to prevent a "viable" north-south partition. Therefore, the two-state litany is a sham; for, neither Israel nor the Palestinians could ever agree on boundaries--and that's the way Israel wants it to remain. From day one, there has been a demographic problem for the Zionist movement and a Greater Israel: Palestinians, if not excluded in one way or another, will always outnumber European Jews, even with massive international recruitment strategies, including inducements of housing and financial subsidies. The 1948 War and its resultant flight and expulsion, Al-Nakba(The Catastrophe), of 800,000 Palestinians from the United Nations-determined State of Israel was also a means of obtaining a Jewish majority, hence, validating a theocratic polity. An irony of the Six-Day War was that it altered demographics. With the occupation of Palestinian Territories, the non-Jewish population become the majority. How could Israel be a Jewish democracy with such demographics? The easiest solution would have been not to occupy the ill-gotten territory; but, Israel with its agenda of expansion and vision of empire would never voluntarily relinquish what it had taken by military means. One reason Israel vacated settlements in the Gaza Strip was to exclude its l.5 million Palestinians from the population count--cooking the books to establish, at least for a time, a Jewish majority.(Israel still controls the land, but has no responsibility to its inhabitants. Pretty slick, huh?) Since the 1970s the Israeli strategy is to control territory but ignore its Palestinian population. This, too, is foretoken expulsion, in that it is a step toward that objective. In the meantime, Israel has security control over land and Palestinian have civil control, with a Palestinian Authority president as an Israeli proxy. The separation wall is another means to disembody Palestinian lands and prevent partition. It destroys West Bank and East Jerusalem contiguity and serves to dislocate Palestinians from Palestine itself. A partition is not something Palestinian Arabs would agree to voluntarily. Why would they give up what is already theirs?(Especially in what turns out to be a 78-percent-to-22-percent division favoring European Jews!) The Zionists knew land would have to be acquired by skulduggery, military force and eventually, expulsion of the indigenous population! The only way to break the impasse is to establish a single state, one country, comprised of both Arabs and Jews, each with civil, ethnic and religious rights.(See: Ali Abunimah, One Country.)

Only One Palestine, One Country Part II

As I write(December 27, 2008), Israeli forces have initiated massive air and sea bombardments of the Gaza Strip, and there is fear that a ground invasion is imminent as tanks assemble and 6,500 reservists have been called up. Israel claims that Hamas has broken a ceasefire agreement by launching rocket attacks on Southern Israel; but the allegation is unfounded. Israel had earlier entered Gaza and killed a number of Palestinians in an apparent attempt to provoke a Hamas military response. Sadly, the European Union and, of course, the United States perpetuate the Israeli public relations spin that Israel is only acting in self-defense(with a wildly disproportional counter-attack: the first body count is 340 Gazan dead-to-3 Israeli!) Most western media are quickly and decidedly pro-Israel and report that Israel will continue bombardments until Hamas stops the rocket launches. One wonders if this condition is offered as an amusement by Israeli leaders; for it presents a conundrum to the seriously minded observer. There are no quid pro quos when dealing with the Israel military(Ask Lebanon!). To stop the rocket attacks, which are more braggadocio or symbolic than lethal or efficient, would not necessarily solve anything; for Gazans would still be confined to the World's largest prison camp, and suffering the additional pains of a crippling and demoralizing blockade--an act of war in itself! Some interested parties tell Hamas to adopt a non-violent approach to Israeli "occupation" and dominion over Gaza. Mahatma Gandhi's grandson lectured Palestinians on the topic recently. What he and other commentators(gurus?)have ignored, or not understood, is that an Intifada(shaking off) is non-violent action against Israeli militarism and economic sanctions. Bitterly, the Israeli response to such action has been increased state terrorism, greater assaults on human rights, more carnage and stepped up confiscations of Palestinian land.(With the attack on Gaza, there is now a call for a Third Intifada.) Also overlooked, Hamas has never launched rockets from the West Bank! As bad as things are there, the situation is far worse in Gaza, in relative terms. And let us not forget, Hamas was democratically elected and rather convincingly so, in early 2006. Obviously, Israel and its underwriters, the United States in particular, do not respect the democratic process, even when international monitors call an election free and fair. Rulers in the Middle East have no love for Hamas or representative governments, in general. Although the Arab League might meet on the Gazan Crisis, will it act to support Palestinian self-determination or, will it tacitly side with Israel and the United States?(The Saudi royal family and Mubarak of Egypt are closely tied to US foreign policy interests. I would not bet on the Arab League!)Will Egypt dare to open its border to Gazans?(Remember what Israel did to Egypt in the Six-Day War in 1967?) With the current Gaza situation aside, I have some random reflections on the Israel-Palestine Conflict: Whenever a previously oppressed group becomes an oppressor, it is evidence that either Homo sapiens is a flawed species or it has not been around long enough to have become civilized. Where is the Jewish Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Dali Lama? Where is Amos when we need him most? We have Mordechai Vanunu, nuclear whistle-blower, but look at what Israel did to him. Some Israeli peace organizations are active; however, the vast majority of Israeli Jews support and praise the military assault on Gaza. The collective memory of deadly oppression should make every survivor and descendant a peace advocate and conscientious objector! It is inconceivable that a people with recent pogrom victimization would ever fashion a religious state on conquest and occupation, in this instance, the Palestinian homeland. The Zionist movement manipulated western powers long before events of WW II, as revealed with the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandated Palestine when France and Britain configured the Middle East . These seminal moments occurred in 1917. The Nazi holocaust was a factor in the United Nations decision to support the creation of a Jewish state in 1948. The latest repercussion of western involvement in Palestine is the current massacre in Gaza. Apartheid South Africa was closely allied with Israel, the latter an arms supplier(with US sponsorship)and the former, an advisor on race-based oppression strategies. It is altogether likely that a nuclear connection also existed. Israeli apartheid differs from the "Afrikaner" model--the Israeli version is even more severe, more deadly. What is happening in Gaza is a continuation of colonial and imperial strategies inherent in nineteenth century Zionist ideology. Apparently, the final solution in that context(and the issue was discussed among the founders)is the eventual and complete expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. But, today, such a policy would constitute "ethnic cleansing"! The European powers and the United States(under the new Obama administration, as did the previous George W. administration)provide Israel unqualified support.(resulting in the tail wagging the dog?) The obstacle is Palestinian resistance! Desperation runs deeply in the Arab world. In Palestine it has accumulated over generations. At this point, Palestinians(and Hamas)have nothing to loose! Most anything Israel does at this point can trigger major uprisings. This is a most dangerous moment for the entire Middle East.

Centripetal vs Centrifugal: China, Tibet and the Dalai Lama

To understand the complicated Tibet Question one must separate what is "political Tibet"(a defined region)from "ethnographic Tibet"(a vast area where ethnic Tibetans historically reside). The Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism and the presumptive political leader of the Tibet Autonomous Region, believes that Tibet is actually the larger domain. To Beijing "Region" designates Tibet as an area within China. The conundrum deals with the heady debate over nationalism and whether political units should directly parallel ethnic units. Do a people have a right of self-determination and independence or does a state have the right to protect its historic territorial integrity by preventing secession? Lincoln decided to maintain the Union at all costs!The former Yugoslavia is a major case study. The Dalai Lama appears to be an opportunist, an expansionist with imperial or dictatorial propensities, who has relied on western anti-Beijing sentiments,stemming from the 1949 Communist Revolution, to further his agenda. On historical records alone China wins the debate, and the Dalai Lama is increasingly irrelevant in political affairs. But, he remains very popular in the US, among the misinformed and uninformed. Rank and file supporters are well-intended, but sadly duped by corporate media.Interestingly, the British invasion of Tibet in 1904, to force trade agreements upon Tibetan officials, muddied the waters for the Dalai Lama. When,ironically, Britain(the conquering power)obtained forced Tibetan concessions, it had to secure China's approval, which then and today confirms or reaffirms China's legitimate authority over its dependency, Tibet! Britain could make concessions because it had no interest in bringing Tibet into the British Empire. Maintaining good trade relations with China was more important to London. The US took interest in Tibet during WW ll and became heavily invested during the Cold War era(ostensibly to frustrate and embarrass Beijing). But the US,too, had to appease China to further trade ambitions. Time and again western powers, including the UN, turned their backs to the Dalai Lama's independence claims and appeals. Simply stated: the Dalai Lama and his advisers in Dharamsala thought they had the upper hand and could compel China to give away both political Tibet and a vast area beyond with an ethnic Tibetan population. They continually refused to negotiate in good faith with Beijing. I believe that short of secession or anything that might dilute de jure Chinese suzerainty over Tibet, Beijing was intent upon reaching a mutually agreeable Tibet Solution. The Dalai Lama's circumvention in the selection of the tenth Panchen Lama in 1995, was another miscalculation, and further proof to Chinese hardliners that the Dalai Lama was untrustworthy. The Chinese leadership continues to believe that the Dalai Lama would insist on political autonomy for Tibet, which China will not accept. The Dalai Lama is 73 years old(b.1935). Some believe that a solution will not happen until after his passing. Dharamsala seems to be sitting on its haunches, while Beijing is assertively transforming Tibet. The Dalai Lama's vision in too imperial and he has made too many diplomatic blunders. He has been too temporal and not spiritual enough. Tibet is but another example of competing political and ethnic movements: the centripetal and the centrifugal--peoples and nations coming together as one world or spinning off in fragments. At the very moment the world is coalescing, it is also splintering. If the latter prevails there will be no peace and no livable human habitat on the planet.