http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21398
Gaza has returned to its pre-massacre state of siege,
confronted with the usual, conspiratorial,
"international" indifference after 22 long days and dark
nights, during which its brave people were left alone to
face one of the strongest armies in the world -- an army
that has hundreds of nuclear warheads, thousands of
trigger-happy soldiers armed with Merkava tanks, F-16s,
Apache helicopters, naval gunships and phosphorous
bombs. Gaza
now does not make news. It's people die slowly, its
children malnourished, its water contaminated, its
nights dark, and yet it is deprived even of a word of
sympathy from the likes of Ban Ki Moon and the president
of "Change; Yes We Can."
Israel
could not have carried out its genocidal war, preceded
and followed by a medieval, hermetic siege, without a
green light from the international community. During the
massacre,
one
Israeli soldier commented: "That's what is so nice,
supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on
a road, walking along a path. He doesn't have to be with
a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything
and you can just shoot him."
When apartheid
Israel decided to attack the
northern part of the Gaza strip in late Feb., early March of 2008,
we were threatened with a greater shoah
(Holocaust) by the deputy minister of war, then, Matan
Vilnaii. Around 164 Palestinians, including 64 children
were killed. What was the reaction of the international
community? Absolutely nothing. In fact, the EU decided
to reward the oppressor by issuing declarations of
intentions to upgrade their trade agreements with
Israel, which, needless to say,
served as a green light for the current atrocities. On
Sunday 18 January,
Israel's Prime Minister
Olmert, a war criminal by all standards, expressed his
pleasure to six European leaders, over their
"extraordinary support for the state of Israel and their
concern about its security". In retrospect, the
upgrading of relations between the EU and
Israel in early December 2008 was a
green light for the larger Gaza massacre of 2009. In spite of the war
crimes committed by the IOF, and in spite of the obvious
fascist make-up of the current government, the EU will
continue to strengthen bilateral relations with Tel
Aviv.
Within this context, the anti-apartheid freedom fighter
Ronnie Kasrils says:
What [Hendrik] Verwoerd [the
architect of apartheid] admired too was the impunity
with which Israel exercised state violence and terror to
get its way, without hindrance from its Western allies,
increasingly key among them the USA. What Verwoerd and
his ilk came to admire in
Israel.., was the way the
Western powers permitted an imperialist Israel to use its unbridled military
with impunity in expanding its territory and holding
back the rising tide of Arab nationalism in its
neighborhood.
March 2008 was, then, a rehearsal for Gaza 2009. Israel knew that it could go on
committing war crimes fully equipped with an
international conspiracy of silence. The international
community did not react in March 2008: why would it do
otherwise in 2009? That was the Israeli logic, and so it
remains. Mind you,
Israel's fascist foreign
minister is of the opinion that Gaza should've been nuked. No wonder
Adolf Hitler once said:
"What luck for rulers that men do not think!"
For those who accuse us of subscribing to conspiracy
theories, we have this reminder: in 2004
the
Israeli Professor Arnon Soffer, Head of the IOF's
National Defense College, and an advisor to Ariel
Sharon, spelled out the desired results of Israel's
unilateral disengagement from Gaza in an interview with
the Jerusalem Post:
... when 1.5 million people live in a closed-off
Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people
will become even bigger animals than they are today,...
The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to
be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we
will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every
day...If we don't kill, we will cease to
exist...Unilateral separation doesn't guarantee "peace"
- it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an
overwhelming majority of Jews...
Then, there is the view bluntly expressed in 2002 by Israel's then chief of staff, General
Moshe Yaalon, and which I think sums up the objective of
the hermetic medieval siege and the massacre: "The
Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest
recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated
people".
Now, this is a total dehumanization of the Palestinians
of Gaza. And West Bankers, here is the message for you:
you'd better accept your fate as cockroaches, ready to
be crushed willingly under the boot of a zealot Israeli
soldier, or else.
The resemblance of Israel's campaign of tribalistic
racist hate both to that of apartheid SA and to Hitler's
murderous regime has recently been articulated by
Comrade Kasrils:
Certainly we South Africans can identify the
pathological cause, fuelling the hate, of
Israel's political-military elite and
public in general. Neither is this difficult for anyone
acquainted with colonial history to understand the way
in which deliberately cultivated race hate inculcates a
justification for the most atrocious and inhumane
actions against even defenseless civilians - women,
children, the elderly amongst them. In fact was this not
the pathological racist ideology that fuelled Hitler's
war lust and implementation of the Holocaust?
In actual fact, if there is something to learn from Gaza
2009, it is that the world was absolutely wrong to think
that Nazism was defeated in 1945. Nazism has won because
it has finally managed to Nazify the consciousness of
its own victims! Just think about the soldiers' T-shirts
episodes.
The courageous Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has
written that Israel today looks very much like
Germany in 1933.
But now the urgent question is how to hold Israel accountable to international
law and basic
principles of human rights in order to forestall the
imminent escalation?
The
most immediate and pressing questions within this
context are: what the nature of international solidarity
should be and how it can best support the Palestinian
struggle for self-determination.
The
South African apartheid regime came under repeated
pressure from the international community and
multilateral organizations such as the United Nations
Security Council which passed countless resolutions
against it because of its inhumane treatment of blacks.
This gave much-needed succor to the oppressed, while we
today are bereft of even this tiny comfort because the
United States continues to use its
veto to ensure that
Israel escapes censure from the world
body.
Grassroots opposition to a brutal apartheid finally
forced the US and UK and other governments around the world to
isolate apartheid
South Africa. They
would not have done so without the pressure exerted on
them by their own people. Israel needs to be isolated in exactly the same
way as apartheid
South Africa. Today,
there is a growing mass-based struggle inside
Palestine, as well as other forms of
struggle, exactly as there was inside apartheid South Africa. An
intensified international solidarity movement with a
common agenda can make the struggle for Palestine resonate in every country in the
world, thus closing off the world to Israelis until they
open the world to Palestinians. Our goal now, as civil
society organizations, is to lift the deadly hermetic
siege imposed on Gaza
causing slow motion genocide; marching towards the six
gates of the Gaza prison has been tried
and must intensify. This is what many activists,
Palestinian and international, are planning to do. Our
BDS campaign modeled on the South African anti-apartheid
global campaign is gaining momentum
as a democratic movement
based on the struggle for human rights and
implementation of international law. Our struggle is NOT
religious, nor ethnic, nor racial, but rather
universalistic: one that guarantees the rehumanization
of our people in the face of a genocidal machine run by
what Moshe Dayan would have called " a mad dog."
The
Palestinians of Gaza have lost faith in the failed
"peace process" and the two-state solution; hence, the
desperate need for a new national program that can
mobilize the masses; a program that is necessarily
democratic in its nature; one that respects resistance
in its different forms and, ultimately, guarantees
peace with justice.
The new, much-needed program, however, must make
the necessary link between all Palestinian struggles:
the occupation of Gaza
and the West Bank, Israel's ethnically-based
discrimination and rights violations of more than one
million Palestinian citizens, as well as the 1948
externally displaced refugees
What
we are constantly told, is either accept Israeli
occupation in its ugliest form -- i.e. the ongoing
presence of the apartheid wall, colonies, checkpoints,
zigzag roads, color-coded number plates, house
demolitions and security coordination supervised by a
retired American general -- or have a hermetic medieval
siege imposed on us, but still die with dignity.
But,
the lesson we learn from Gaza 2009, exactly like
Sharpville 1960, is to harness all effort to fight the
outcome of the Oslo Accords, and to form a United Front
on a platform of resistance and reforms. This cannot be
achieved without realizing that ministries,
premierships, and presidencies in Gaza and Ramallah are a façade not unlike those
inauthentic structures in the South African Independent
Homelands. In a short story
by SA writer, Najbuolu Ndebel, a young black woman
comments on the generous offer given by the racist white
government : "That's how it is planned. That we be
given a little of everything, and so prize the little we
have that we forget about FREEDOM."
This is exactly what Steve Biko, the hero of
anti-apartheid struggle--who paid his life for the
freedom of all South .Africans-- meant when he said:
Not only have the whites been guilty of being on the
offensive, but by some skilful manoeuvres, they have
managed to control the responses of the blacks to the
provocation. Not only have they kicked the black, but
they have also told him how to react to the kick. For a
long time the black has been listening with patience to
the advice he has been receiving on how best to respond
to the kick. With painful slowness he is now beginning
to show signs that it is his right and duty to respond
to the kick in the way he sees fit.
And we, Palestinians, have decided to respond to the
Zionist kick in the way we see fit. In Ndebel's story
quoted earlier, a black intellectual makes it clear that
"[he'd] rather be a hungry dog that runs freely in
the streets , than a fat, chained dog burdened with
itself and the weight of the chain." These examples
used again and again in the anti-Apartheid literature
sum up the lessons we learn from Gaza
2009. In
a word it is resilience.
Archbishop Desmund Tutu of
South Africa
said, in a much quoted wisdom: "If you are neutral in
situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the
oppressor." And as I said in an earlier article, while
IOF were bombing my neighborhood, the UN, EU, Arab
League and the international community by and large have
remained silent in the face of atrocities committed by
Apartheid Israel. They are therefore on the
side of Israel. Hundreds of dead corpses of
children and women have failed to convince them to
intervene.
We
are, therefore, left with one option, an option that
does not wait for the United Nations Security Council or
Arab Summits: the option of people's power, as we have
been repeatedly saying. This remains the only power
capable of counteracting the massive power imbalance in
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The
horror of the racist apartheid regime in
South Africa was
challenged with a sustained campaign of boycott,
divestment and sanctions initiated in 1958 and given new
urgency in 1960 after the Sharpeville Massacre. This
campaign led ultimately to the collapse of white rule in
1994 and the establishment of a multi-racial, democratic
state.
Similarly, the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment
and sanctions has been gathering momentum since 2005.
Gaza 2009, like Sharpeville 1960, cannot be ignored: it
demands a response from all who believe in a common
humanity. Now is the time to boycott the apartheid
Israeli state, to divest and to impose sanctions against
it. This is the only way to ensure the creation of a
secular, democratic state for all in historic Palestine regardless of
race, sect and ethnicity. The Australian journalist
John Pilger has this to say:
"What
happens in Gaza is the defining
moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of
war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we
contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the
power to speak out."
Gaza
2009, with mass mobilization and international
solidarity, is, therefore, becoming the guiding torch,
not only for the Palestinian people, but also for the
Arab world, towards a new
Middle East, one that is, unlike Condoleezza
Rice's ME, characterized by democracy and freedom. This
is the least our resistance to religious exclusivism,
xenophobia, and tribalistic world view should lead to.
*Based on a speech delivered via video link at a panel
on "Promoting a Culture of Resistance" at the 4th
Bil'in International Conference on Grassroots Popular
Resistance.