Slaughterhouse province
by Jeremy Salt
[received from the author]
2 March 2008
In the past four days (February 27 – March 1),
Israeli soldiers have killed about 88 Palestinians* in the Gaza Strip,
many of them civilians, many of them children, including five boys playing
football, a six month old
baby and two sisters. In this time, one Israeli has been killed by a
Qassam rocket falling near the town of Sderot.
His was the first death by missile strike since last May, when hundreds of
Gazan Palestinians were
killed in Israeli attacks. On the basis of the missile reprisals from Gaza, Israel is now preparing to teach the Gazans a
lesson they will never forget at the hands of the most powerful army in the Middle East. A
large armored force has been positioned just north of the Gaza Strip, ready for
a full invasion and what a senior Israeli minister has described as a coming
‘shoah’ (holocaust) for the Palestinians. Three US warships have been positioned
off the Lebanese coast for reasons of ‘regional stability’ according to US
government spokesmen. In fact, there is little doubt that they are there to
bombard Hezbollah should it open a second front
in the north when Israel
attacks Gaza.
The people of Gaza
are practically defenseless in the face of Israel’s attacks. The
Israelis have everything a modern army could need, down to satellites and
nuclear weapons. For years they have been picking off the
Gazans with very little danger to themselves. They kill them with tank
fire, missiles fired from helicopters or unmanned drones and bullets fired by
long range snipers. They watch every movement of the Palestinians from their
satellites. They orchestrate their killings by computer. The Gazans have
light weapons, home made Qassam missiles and, if press reports are to be
believed, a small supply of old Soviet-made Grad missiles smuggled in from Iran.
Even if it was in Gaza that Samson brought the
temple down on his own head as well as the heads of his enemies, the contest
could hardly be more unequal.
The stage is now set for the repression of a Warsaw
Ghetto last stand by the Hamas government,
whose obliteration Israel, the US,
the EU and the ‘Quartet’ have actively pursued since its democratic
election in 2006. Condoleezza Rice and Hollywood actors alike are standing by the people of
Sderot but not the people of Gaza. This is fairly typical
of how America sees the Middle East and of how
grandstanding politicians and celebrities will jump on to any bandwagon that
promises to enhance their own image. They do not see or care that the
root cause of the problems being experienced by the people of Sderot is not the
Qassam missiles being fired in their direction and not even the
occupation of the past forty years but Israel’s theft sixty years
ago of a land belonging legally and morally to someone else.
The Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948
in one of the great crimes of the 20th century. Many ended up in
Gaza.
The dispossession was deliberate and accords with the definition laid
down in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. Close to 500 villages were
destroyed, with what was left of homes that were not destroyed being pillaged
down to the carpets and window frames. Millions of acres of land which
Palestinians had worked for generations were seized. This is the ‘right’
that Palestinians are expected to acknowledge.
There is no moral reason why the Palestinians should
accept what has been imposed on them. Israel
was not created by the UN General Assembly but by an American president
courting votes ahead of an election campaign. Through a campaign of
intimidation, Truman and his advisers compelled vulnerable UN
delegations to vote for a plan they would not otherwise have supported. Britain and the United States share responsibility along with
successive Israeli governments for the crimes that have been committed against
the Palestinians ever since Britain signed away the ‘right’
to Palestine
through the Balfour Declaration of 1917. They violate every single
human rights convention known to mankind, including the UN Charter.
Except for the six per cent bought by the zionists
every inch of Palestine
remains the legal property of the Palestinians. The passage of time does
not change this. Palestinians are the legal owners of the
bulk of land and property in west and east Jerusalem. The laws passed by a state
relating to a city that is still defined as occupied under international law
have no legal standing except as ‘laws’ that breach international
conventions. The Palestinians are under no obligation to accept the theft of
their property any more than someone whose house is burgled.
Morally Jerusalem is theirs as well,
the collective inheritance of those Muslim and Christian Palestinians who built
it stone by stone over more than a thousand years. This is not to say that
there is no room for compromise. On numerous occasions the Arab states
have offered more than generous terms for a settlement. So have the
Palestinians. Hamas has indicated
that it is ready to sign a long term truce with Israel as long as it stops
attacking Gaza.
All these offers have been rejected or ignored by successive Israeli
governments. Camp David was just one more attempt to impose a settlement
on the Palestinians and the Annapolis conference of last
November was worse than a waste of time. All it did was enable the US to maintain
the pretence that the ‘peace process’ was moving forward.
Israel’s refusal to comply with international law and its black record
of ethnic cleansing, massacres, wars and murder and its refusal to countenance
any settlement that gets in the way of zionist
ideology and
Israel’s
long term colonisation plans brings the region back to the basics. There
is now very little room for maneuver left. Israel’s
remains what it was at the beginning – a tribal, narcissistic state that has
been a ceaselessly moving engine of death, destruction and theft for six
decades. Backed by western support and understanding of its every
need, matched only by corresponding western indifference to the
suffering and
torment of the Palestinians, for which the so-called west is collectively
and ultimately responsible, Israel has set
up a catastrophic situation in the Middle East
for which the ‘international community’ will have to take full
responsibility. The slaughter of the Gazans by this thieving
bully state, in the full view of an uncaring west,
may well be the turning point from which there can be no return, a point
which future historians may recognise as the
beginning of the end of the Middle East as it was
created by the ‘west’.
*Aljazeera, http://english.
aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0C8EBD66-032E-4470-82FB-005D6A2B5186.htm
____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _________
Jeremy Salt is associate
professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at
Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
Previously, he taught at Bosporus
University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne
in the Departments of
Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has written
many articles on Middle East issues, particularly Palestine,
and was a
journalist for The Age newspaper when he lived in Melbourne.